Christine Lai’s 2023 novel Landscapes is an elegiac and deftly crafted hybrid novel set in the near future, where the world has been pushed to the brink by climate catastrophe. Penelope and Aidan live in Mornington, a crumbling English manor house, which also serves as a home for those seeking refuge. They have been forced to sell the property and the novel charts the final days of their occupancy, in which, despite everything, Penelope continues to catalogue the estate’s vast art collection. Each object she encounters triggers memories of her time at Mornington and of a traumatic and violent relationship she had with Aidan’s brother Julian. Penelope’s diaries are interspersed with archival notes, snippets of art history and criticism, as well as sections of prose from Julian’s point of view.
This is an ekphrastic novel that explores the fine line between preservation and possession, our personal relationship to art and the importance of memory and objects in a disappearing world.
Christine holds a PhD in English Literature from University College London and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge. She currently lives in Vancouver, Canada.
Rebecca Summerling: Thanks so much for taking the time to speak to us Christine! I was wondering if you would be able to tell us about what sparked the idea for Landscapes?
Christine Lai: Thank you for all these thought-provoking questions!
At the start of the writing process, I only had a single image in my mind: that of a woman in a dilapidated house. The book was never planned in full, and ideas emerged gradually through the research process. The manor house in Landscapes was primarily inspired by the ruinous estates in the novels of W. G. Sebald, who remains one of my lodestars. Sebald addresses the costs of building these great houses, which included the removal of woodland and villages, and the subsequent displacement of peasants. The idyllic arcadia was thus inscribed with a history of destruction and class divide, and that inherent contradiction was what drew me to the country house as a setting.
Later in the research process, I was struck by John Berger’s analysis, in Ways of Seeing, of Gainsborough’s Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, which portrays the landowners against the backdrop of their estate. The landscape, Berger argues, is not merely something to be enjoyed visually, it is also property, just as the painting itself is another significant form of capital. From there, I started thinking about both the country estate and the work of art as signifiers of power, and that led me to readings on art history, and from there, the novel gradually took shape.
I think it is a powerful thing when a writer acknowledges the grief of living in a collapsing world. Perhaps it is more of an issue faced in speculative fiction, but I think it is particularly condescending when authors are expected to provide hope or solutions to such an existential threat. Do you think that literary fiction allows a writer more space to explore our personal relationship with climate catastrophe?
This is such an interesting question. I agree that, at times, the expectations are there, for a novel to provide hope or solutions. Perhaps literary fiction allows more room for ambiguity or opacity when it comes to the possibility of survival or resolution. There are certainly no solutions in Landscapes. For me, this is a novel partly about what it means to bear witness to catastrophe. I also wanted to explore questions related to artmaking in the age of disaster: what does it mean to write, to make any kind of art, while the climate catastrophe ravages the world? Can artistic gestures ever make a difference? I don’t have any answers, as these are questions with which I am still grappling. I always return to Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, a book that is also outwardly about disaster, but on a deeper level, it is about the need to think beyond the self, about dwelling within loss. There is hope in that book, in its portrayal of the daily care of animals, of the compulsion to care for something in order to continue living together; that is the hope that I am trying to hold onto.
I am such a big fan of novels that include reading lists and notes at the end! This is such an extensively researched book and I was delighted to see that you shared some of the texts that informed it. I was wondering if you came across any works of art or historical objects during your research that really stuck with you?
Many of the artworks I encountered during the writing process continue to linger in my mind. Looking back, Louis Bourgeois’s works really stood out, particularly her Cells series, which could be read as three-dimensional representations of the artist’s memories and thoughts. The way Bourgeois was able to translate her personal experiences into art while simultaneously transcending the autobiographical seemed to me to be an apt model for all artmaking. Doris Salcedo likewise continues to influence my thinking. Her sculptures manage to convey violence without showing the figurative body in pain, and from her, as from Sebald, I learned the importance of omission, of a certain obliqueness, concerning the representation of violence or catastrophe.
The work of JMW Turner plays a huge role in this book. Why was Turner important to this story?
I studied Turner’s works in graduate school, so his paintings have been a part of my thinking for some time. Turner lived through a period of great change in England, and he witnessed the start of the Industrial Revolution. Many of his works engage with the concept of change, of impermanence. There is new scholarly evidence suggesting that the light Turner painted was in fact the result of smog scattering sunlight; so he was recording atmospheric changes and responding to the climate, bearing witness, I suppose, to return to your earlier question. I find it fascinating that he allowed the rain and soot of London to fall through the cracks in his studio ceiling onto the paintings themselves; these works of art were taking in the environment in both a literal and a figurative way. Turner’s works suggest that art is porous, always in the process of absorbing the outside world. And while I’m skeptical of the idea that art (which includes writing) can change the world, I think that through this porousness, this process of taking in the world, art can render visible that which had been imperceptible.
Penelope cherishes art and cares deeply about its preservation. But the book also draws parallels between Penelope’s assault and the veneration of violence in the history of western art. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about that juxtaposition and how we view works of art in the context of the time in which they were made?
The subject of sexual violence emerged through my encounter with Turner’s Rape of Proserpine, which led me to consider the correspondence between architectural ruins (in the form of a crumbling castle in the background of the painting), the ruination of nature (represented by a barren tree), and the metaphoric ruination of a person (in the figure of Proserpine). From there, my research led me to seminal works by feminist art historians, such as Mary Ann Caws and Catherine McCormack, who examined the problematic ways in which sexual violence and the female body have been represented throughout the history of Western art. These academic studies were eye-opening and indispensable to me. They led me to reflect on what it means to consume certain images, and I’m intrigued by the process by which we as spectators have collectively accepted such problematic images as beautiful. Much like how country estates continue to be associated with glamour and leisure, the violent subject of certain paintings is often elided in discussions on colours or the mastery of techniques. But I think dismantling these preconceived notions of beauty and questioning our own sense of reverence towards the Old Masters actually revitalizes the artworks and makes them relevant to the context of our own time. We can interrogate the politics of these artworks while simultaneously acknowledging their vital contributions to art history.
I found the chapters from Julian’s perspective extremely chilling from the smallest acts of cruelty to the terrible assault he perpetrates against Penelope. Toward the end of the book Aidan says of him “He destroys things in his path, so nothing can touch him.” How did you approach writing a character like that? Was it difficult being in his interior world?
It was a challenge I set for myself, to write from the perspective of someone so utterly unlike myself or anyone I know. Julian’s character is one that I have only encountered through television, film, and literature, through the many representations of monstrosity that exist out there. Novels such as Teju Cole’s Open City (told from the perspective of a predator) and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace were indispensable for the imagining of Julian’s disturbed interior world. Like the narrator in Open City, Julian wanders through cities in order to avoid facing his past, and his drifting is meant to be an act of evasion. I also consulted other books that depict a subjectivity in crisis or characters who lack a stable sense of self (though they are not necessarily predators). Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge was important in this regard, and the way in which the character in that novel longs for wholeness, the way that his movements through an alienating city hurls him into memories, were used to mould the character of Julian.
While much of this book is spent in the isolated Mornington estate, this also feels like a story about cities (perhaps this is my own bias as I live in London!) and I loved the references to specific art galleries. Do you have a favourite art gallery, in London or elsewhere, or one that you always recommend?
It is very difficult to choose just one! I love the Photographer’s Gallery in London. And the Hayward Gallery. I also enjoy going to the Soane Museum, especially during one of their candlelit evenings; it is such a singular space and contains an impressive sculpture gallery.
Can you share anything of what you’re working on at the moment?
I have just completed the manuscript of my second novel, which is about a photographer in contemporary Tokyo, and takes the form of a series of vignettes. It is a novel of memories and flânerie, and a meditation on photography, art, and friendship. I am planning to start an essay collection on the representation of cities in literature and film (which goes back to your previous question!), while simultaneously working on a third novel, about cinema.