David Wheatley, Stretto, CB Editions, 2022
Stretto is both a story of travel and migration, moving between Ireland, England and Scotland over a twenty-year period, and an exploration of the nature of self and reality. A stained-glass window in a country church offers a portal of light in the darkness, and the narrator follows wherever it leads. Reconnecting with the modernist energies of Joyce and Beckett, Stretto is a radical and audacious debut novel.
‘David Wheatley has composed a text so intricately figured, made out of the tones and notes and embellishments of family life and of work and the many-faceted elements of the imagination, that it reflects precisely the impetus and forward motion of the musical movement its title describes. Each section is a bar of poetry both fitted within and overlaying the prose that describes it; each page and a half is measured to sing out exactly in the key and time signature to which it has been set. Wondrous.’– Kirsty Gunn
‘A notable poet, David Wheatley has filled his first novel, Stretto, with music and light. It opens with the speaker contemplating a Harry Clarke stained glass Virgin Mary, whose body “gives way to ... jewels”. Stretto itself is a kaleidoscope of Ciaran Carsonesque intellectual gems, fascinating in themselves but also reflecting on his whole project. Stretto divides into page-and-a-half “bars” rather than chapters: its many interlacing motifs include migrant experience such as Wheatley’s own in these islands, encountering their quirky histories. Time shifts, moving “now fast, now slowly, sometimes both at once” he observes regarding Bach’s stretto technique. Similar patterning replaces conventional narrative in the novel. Wheatley’s autism theme, though, proves vital to a text illuminated by “the flare of neurodivergence burning through my own thought processes”. A brilliant debut.’– Ian Duhig, Irish Times
‘There’s no plot to speak of; this is, rather, the record of a consciousness, one that proceeds by a kind of meditative free association. Each section resonates with others through cross-reference and repetition, while the endnotes, or “Vectors”, with which the text concludes suggest another layer of cultural and intellectual reference points. And so we are treated to glimpses from the life of the author-protagonist, who both is and isn’t David Wheatley, in something of the same way a poem may present a voice that both is and isn’t that of the poet. Like Wheatley, this notetaker has left Ireland to work abroad, first in the north of England, then in northeast Scotland, where he teaches poetry to university students, reads, thinks, raises his children and writes. Along the way he muses on Bach, on the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, on his cat, on bagpipe music, on children’s games, on university bureaucracy and on church windows. The result is a kind of intellectual inquiry that takes its bearings less from the novel than from the philosophical discipline of phenomenology ... this is also a book of luminous detail and careful attention to the texture of everyday life.’ – James Pardon, Literary Review
Oltermann has caught a curious thread of the Cold War culture war in this tiny page-turner, with a dive into the “Working Group of Writing Chekists”, a creative writing class organised in East Germany by the Stasi (the GDR’s secret police). A Red Poets Society, if you will. He does a good job fitting pieces together for an engaging narrative, tracking down most of the group (I enjoyed the delicious irony of his using social media to form a person’s identity). It’s a diverting footnote in Cold War history; a book feels a stretch, though. I did hope for some unintentional, absurdist hilarity from such a subject. But typical totalitarian bastards, dry to the end. One Communist love poem is a treasure, however: “I hope you never be nationalised”. NJ McGarrigle
When the history of the pandemic we’re living through is written the truest moments will be revealed in the smallest of stories. Emily Edwards’s new novel is not set during the pandemic but it brings the questions the past few years have raised about individual choice, collective responsibility and social solidarity to the fore by placing them at the core of a small story. Elizabeth and Bryony are the best of friends, despite their differences. But their divergence on the issue of vaccinating their children results in consequences neither could have imagined. Edwards has, perhaps bravely, chosen to set her challenging and thought-provoking novel in the most intimate of domestic spaces – a relationship between two mothers who each see the world in a fundamentally different way. Luckily, for the reader the emotional depth of her writing withstands the intensity of the story she deftly tells. - Becky Long
The boom in prose writing by contemporary poets has been one of the most surprising and welcome recent developments in literature. There’s nothing new about poets venturing out of verse, of course, whether as writers of prose poems or as moonlighting novelists. But there does seem to be something distinctive in this body of recent work, which makes a virtue of its generic hybridity and plays freely, if self-consciously, with the conventions of fiction, criticism and memoir. Notable examples include the fiction of Ben Lerner (whose success as a novelist could be credited with kick-starting the trend), as well as prose works by Sam Riviere, Oli Hazzard, Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Rosa Campbell.
Into this company comes David Wheatley, whose beguiling Stretto announces itself, in the cover copy, as a novel. This proves something of a flag of convenience, however. ‘Notes’ is the term that keeps cropping up in the body of the text, and that seems both more accurate and more suggestive, not least because the ambiguity keeps in view Stretto’s double themes of music and memory. Stretto, Wheatley explains, is a technique used in fugue composition, in which ‘the melody – the subject – is repeated in another voice … before the statement of the original subject has finished’. (Think, if musical theory is not your thing, of how ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ can be sung in a round.) In a fugue, stretto can produce a sense of acceleration or heightening intensity, as the music begins to tumble over itself, but it could also be thought of as a kind of layering, with each new iteration of a sequence of notes superimposed in counterpoint on the previous one. - James Purdon
https://literaryreview.co.uk/songs-in-the-key-of-life
David Wheatley was born in Dublin and is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently The President of Planet Earth (Carcanet). His other publications include a critical study, Contemporary British Poetry (Palgrave), and, as co-editor with Ailbhe Darcy, The Cambridge History of Irish Women’s Poetry. He has written for London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Literary Review and Poetry Review. He lives with his family in rural Aberdeenshire. Stretto is his first novel.
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