Interview by Nell Whittaker
Portrait by G Lori Millon

NW  The novel reminded me of one of the first things I read that you’d written. It quotes from the promotional material of one of these vast towers, where the developer says his favourite thing about it is that you can look down into the yard of Strangeways prison and see the guards unloading new inmates. This strangely jovial, institutional sadism permeates Ghost Driver.

NO  It’s interesting that you mention that. It was a commission for a project that Helen Charman ran at MAP called Tenancy, and I co-wrote it with Jazz Linklater and Hilary White. We walked around this area called Spinningfields, a flagship financial district, which contains most of Manchester’s privatised public space. We used a lot of their PR material verbatim in the piece, including an interview with a developer: “We were looking at … what this building should be. We decided to make it a flattened factory with uber-resilience within the building; very liquid, and we thought people might occupy it more densely than they’d occupied in the past.” It just seemed absolutely psychotic. There is a violently bland opacity that structures this public realm and the bodies that move through it. The fact that the prisoner loading bay for the Crown Court could be seen behind the glass wall is advertised as an exciting feature of this corporatised space. Ghost Driver isn’t set in any specific place, but this research acted as the template for what I wanted to capture: a lot of the rapid changes taking place in the civic sphere, the death of municipal England, and an inertial sense of things happening around us.

NW  In Manchester, the development in the city centre is being orchestrated by the university, at the same time that higher education is becoming a strange, endless hallway of weirdness and ambiguity. The novel’s protagonist, Malory, works at a place called The Institution. 

NO  It’s an amorphous corporate space, and I had in my mind the parts of universities involved in the development of luxury student flats and the investment in arms production. In 2017, I moved to Manchester to do a PhD and I left in 2022. During that time, there was a restructuring of the city, shaped by capital, property and unregulated greed. This real topography was definitely present in the atmosphere I was trying to create.

NW  Was it hard to sit in this sense of dread, ambiguity and nothingness?

NO  When I was writing, I had in my mind the novel Ice by Anna Kavan as inspiration, which is a really disturbing book that she wrote in 1967 about a man compulsively chasing a small, fragile, white, semi-human girl, in an apocalyptically frozen landscape. She keeps getting killed or maimed in various horrible ways that he’s erotically fascinated by. This mode of destabilisation was very much in my mind, even though what came out in the end was quite comic, almost jaunty. The book came after a period of ill health, and when I developed an autoimmune disease. The sickness, and sense of loss and grief, was me processing issues related to my health and altered lifestyle. But I also wanted to create a world where everyone was really porous and irrational, beyond the fantasies of more traditional literary realism.

NW  Malory has an unspecified or undiagnosable chronic illness, which reminded me of literature where illness defines the culture that produced it. The sanatorium of anxious pre-war Europe, or the psychiatric asylum in 1950s American fiction. Malory’s illness also feels closely related to our age’s hostility to illness and vulnerability.

NO  Within The Institution, there’s an emphasis on neoliberal self-management: you have to take responsibility for yourself and function in a seamless, independent, autonomous way. Illness exposes our dependency and finitude, which causes problems within the world of the novel. The protagonist keeps describing her own pain as “mercurial”,  which can’t be evidenced by doctors, so it becomes a form of internalised shame that further isolates her. In the book, there’s a gothic ambivalence about what lives inside and outside, and how porous we are as subjects. Living with cognitive dissonance is really bad for us – the world of the novel is sick, and it makes you sick to live in this world if you can’t adapt to its sick demands. 

NW  This is a spoiler – but the ultimate charge that’s levelled against her at the end of the novel is “institutional antisociality”. She fails to adapt to this specific sociality that the world requires, but this world itself is deeply hostile to what constitutes the social.

NO  The Institution needs her to be a gregarious, happy, easy-going person. Malory is crumbling from an attempt to function like this, and experiencing an embodied resentment-fuelled refusalism. I was influenced by Hamja Ahsan’s 2017 book Shy Radicals: The Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert, a satirical take on the idea that the extroverts are oppressing the introverts, which speaks to the idea that you have to do personhood in the correct way to achieve political recognition.

NW  The novel is partly described as a horror story, but there’s something alien and sci-fi about it, too.  Are you interested in genre?

NO  I love horror, I’m really macabre. Perhaps, like Malory, I wish I wasn’t. I love what Patricia Highsmith does with genre, in terms of revealing the horrors of masculinity. I was partly interested in the fantasies that underpin our feminist imaginations, especially our neoliberal imaginations. For example, Malory often feels like she might be being stalked or pursued by shadowy male figures. That men kill women is born out in statistical data, of course, but I think the more you imagine the world as a hostile place, that fear plays into this wounded or threatened femininity, and that can translate into building walls around your residential area, policing toilet users, etcetera. We consume so many cultural forms about men who ritualistically murder women. My PhD research was partly about the emergence of second-wave feminism into a more mainstream public realm, and how this idea of the patriarchy entailed this new conceptualisation of a hostile totality around us. They’re very much paranoid readings. The novel was also an attempt to reflect the state of feminism, or feminisms, and the ways I don’t see them as a particularly capacious form of politics at the moment. .