Best Novella - We Are Made of Diamond Stuff by Isabel Waidner

Publisher – Dostoyevsky Wannabe

Price - £4.00 paperback

a…novel taking issue with the dream of national belonging. Set on the Isle of Wight, a small island off the coast of England, it collides literary aesthetics with contemporary working class cultures and attitudes (BS Johnson and Reebok classics), works with themes of empire, embodiment and resistance, and interrogates autobiographical material including the queer migrant experience

The ridiculous can make a huge point about life. Gulliver’s Travels satirises the issues of Swift’s time; Oh What A Lovely War had things to say about Britain’s military adventures. Humour allows us to poke and explore the body of society. In this novella nominee Isabel Waidner creates a huge surreal version of Britain to explore the world the UK is now entering. Its dangerous and murky but humour is in the eye of the beholder.

Here we meet our narrator on the Isle of Wight a thirty something economic migrant trying to get their UK citizenship and find a job. They have started work in a dodgy boarding house with their friend Shae and the polar bears are worried that another creature is eating the guests. It may be a jaguar – the army is threatening to descend, and local gangs are looking unpleasantly at people.

This is a novel that wants to be an immersive trip into weirdness. Pop culture and ancient culture is thrown at the reader from the off ranging from the tv show Stranger Things to literary poems and old movies. This is an Isle of Wight where t-shirt icons come alive and devour people and clothes. Where the tests of citizenship are both incredibly hard and easily passed. It’s a trip into nonsense and tries to throw a lot of points at the reader but for me missing its targets.

I’m a big believer that when a book fails to engage me that’s the reader’s issue not mine. My tolerance of surreal nonsense trips versus satire is low. I like a little more structure and point not an avalanche of ideas thrown at the page and ran through without any order. It is very ambitious trying to pull this together but doesn’t really land anything very well for me to get my teeth into. Stylistically very consistent over a 100 or so pages but I found its approach wearing down nearly three quarters through. A feast of obscure literary in-jokes (that it needs to explain to the reader) for me means any point about the modern world gets lost in translation. It reminds me of Bank’s The Wasp Factory for that free moving weirdness and strong narrator voice but lacks the humour and bite to land its punches. Instead it feels very self-indulgent

I think safe to say this one is not my cup of tea. It is surprising and a test of reading something different but for me bit too messy and grating. It is not one I think I can really recommend.