Right, I don’t know, grab a pinch of Piranesi, a dash of Lanark, a speck of Luckenbooth, a smidgeon of Neuromancer, then chuck ‘em all into an AI Lit Mixer & Novel Writer (available at all good retailers) and you’ll come up with something like Joelle Taylor’s brilliant The Night Alphabet. Well, you won’t, but hopefully, you get what I mean. Protagonist Jones, a time traveller (disputed) a life traveller (maybe), remembering and interrogating past, present and future with a host of stories deftly linked to the ink on her body, each tattoo a door into revelations about her life, other people’s lives and the unending thread linking mothers and daughters, “Each woman connected to the thread was both mother and daughter, an eternal cycle of feeding and fed”. Backwards and forwards, born, unborn, rememberings gathering, truths coalescing. Meeting and sometimes becoming The Furies, Quiet Men and Gutter Girls, among others, along the way. The endless fight for survival amid broken men breaking things, the power of female resilience, the disappointment of male cowardice, the present a future nightmare, “The children in the overlooking tower blocks might not be able to afford the daily entrance fee to the playground, but they still catch the artificial breezes from it for free, gathered in blue plastic bags”. The present where alt culture in all its myriad forms has been stolen and (expensively) sold back, “Digitisation brought the digital tattoo, ten times as fast and twice as safe. You know things are bad when even skin is gentrified”. The present (or a projection of the future) an old-style tattoo parlour where Jones’ remembers her first tattoo, the lemniscate, a symbol for infinity, and as her stories finally unfurl states, “All I know is that if you upturn the symbol for infinity, it becomes the symbol of a woman, leaning against a wall, waiting”. Praying to herself. As her most recent (poetry) collection won the 2021 TS Eliot Prize and the 2022 Polari Book Prize for LGBT authors, Joelle Taylor is, unsurprisingly, a seriously elite stylist and The Night Alphabet the kind of novel that is a very rare beast, strange, lyrical, and compelling (and, as I’ve demonstrated, full of brilliant lines). I can’t recommend The Night Alphabet enough.

The Night Alphabet – Joelle Taylor

published by riverrun - £10.99

Steven Long