The work of the fictional installation artist Sigismunda Conrad lies at the centre of this novel, although the nature of her art is mysterious and the focus difficult to locate. We Live Here Now is a bundle of intertwined stories about art dealers, cultural theorists, actors and techno producers who all intersect in some way with Conrad’s work, and with one another. The novel’s ultimate shape, like the foggy landscapes of South Uist, the Outer Hebridean island around which it seemingly orbits, can be hard to discern.
The fifth book by the Mancunian author CD Rose, We Live Here Now was awarded the Goldsmiths prize earlier this month. It rewards mould-breaking fiction, and Rose is certainly doing his own thing. But triangulate his signal and what pings back is the work of Tom McCarthy, M John Harrison and Robert Aickman. Rose combines McCarthy’s interest in systems and theory with Harrison’s blend of the mundane and arcane, and Aickman’s subtle way with the eerie and strange.
In Rose’s telling, the modern art market, and its circulation of works around the world in shipping crates – ISO 6346 intermodal containers, “the greatest work of art of the 20th century”, as one character calls them – is shown to be a compellingly surreal practice. The nested ownerships of freighters, the labyrinthine networks of shell companies, and the void-like, tax-exempt freeports around the world into which so much art disappears, prove to be fertile ground for a writer as attuned to the uncanny as Rose.
Like the protagonists of a ghost story – the form that the chameleonic We Live Here Now most closely resembles – most of the book’s characters are in the process of discovering the nature of their fate. They wander buildings that defy the laws of physics; their recording equipment picks up impossible noises; they encounter doppelgängers and are followed by shadowy figures.
In CD Rose’s telling, the modern art market is shown to be a compellingly surreal practice
Rose can be very funny; he is able to acknowledge absurdity without puncturing the novel’s menacing atmosphere. The chapter in which a woman tries to apply for an art commission is an excellent comedic portrait of procrastination. But not all his stabs at humour find their mark. When at one point a car is described as an Audi Persecutor, I thought the term belonged to that chapter’s art broker protagonist. But later in the novel, from other points of view, we hear of BMW Intimidators, Mercedes Threateners, Range Rover Oppressors and more. It’s an ill-advised riff, drawing attention to the writer at his desk rather than the world he’s created.
I won’t spoil what the book eventually reveals, but I’m also not sure I could. At its climax the individual voices that characterised its earlier chapters are replaced by the first-person plural: “We finally arrive at a place we do not recognise though we know we have been here before. It’s where we began.” The voices ask themselves if they have learned anything, then wonder: “Is that even important?” It feels like the weakest part of We Live Here Now to me, but also true to its form. At one point, Rose describes the difference between mayday and pan-pan calls at sea, the latter signifying “an urgent situation that has not yet become an emergency”. This book lives in the pan-pan zone, although it’s hard to tell if we’re in the prelude to a catastrophe or its aftermath. As with the object Sigi Conrad’s comeback show is named after, the Klein bottle – a so-called non-orientable surface with no distinct inside or outside (mathematically but not physically possible) – to be drawn into Rose’s novel is also, by design, to be propelled out of it.
Perhaps a book about a work of art that swallows those who experience it can only really live up to its promise if it does the same to its readers. When I think about it, though, I realise that sometimes, lost in its fitfully brilliant pages, that’s exactly what happened to me.
We Live Here Now by CD Rose is published by Melville House (£14.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £13.49. Delivery charges may apply
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Author portrait courtesy of the Goldmiths prize