Just when you thought the wave of Covid novels had passed, along comes a new variant. Examples so far have ranged from Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat, which succeeded because it looked sideways at the pandemic and created something rich and strange from it, to Sarah Moss’s The Fell, which didn’t because it was too faithful a rendition of an immediate past we all wanted to forget.
But it’s the immediate past that colours our expectations of the future, and in Clare Pollard’s funny and sharp debut novel, Delphi, the unnamed narrator is “sick of the future. Up to here with the future.” It’s 2020 and she is battered by predictions of further epidemics and AI extinction and civilisational collapse. “No one used to have to deal with this much future.”
Our woman – a teacher of classics, translator and mother – shuttles between the past, represented by the myths of classical civilisations, and the future, represented by her fears for her son, who’s isolated by remote learning and “watches these YouTube videos by idiot men-children”.
And when she’s not frightened, she’s bored: “bored of being in my head, or of gazing at books or screens, which is being inside someone else’s head”. But some heads are more interesting than others, and Delphi is ripe with references and allusions, from the oracle at Delphi to Cassandra, the daughter of Troy who was cursed by Apollo always to be disbelieved.
Yet Delphi is not just a novel about Covid; it’s also about how a given historical moment such as the pandemic can connect us to the past and to the universal. The lines that Pollard draws between then and now are not always subtle (“Domestic violence is on the rise. Did you know Hercules actually killed his family?”), but if you don’t like that one, there’ll be another along in a minute. This is a hungry book, looking everywhere and seeing everything, jumping from Hilma af Klint’s Altarpiece No 1 to Lizzo’s Juice in consecutive sentences.
One theme is seeing the future: how we have always wanted to know what happens next, and how the need becomes greater the more frightened of it we are. The narrator sees a clairvoyant for life advice, even though she knows she’s just “pay[ing] some shitty freelance actress [to] make it seem like destiny”. She reads the I Ching, but “I don’t need a Ouija board, I just touch my fingers gently to the Twitter timeline and see what it can say that makes the hairs on my neck stand up”.
Which leads to a second theme: the world as witness to our lives. The internet, she says, has “filled the void left by the decline of religion”. Who needs God watching you when now we have the world keeping an eye? “No evil tweet will go unread and unpunished.”
Books too are witnesses to our lives and times. Some go for the universal, others for the contemporary: Delphi straddles both. Sometimes the hyper-specific time-stamped content – such as Donald Trump’s church photo opp – made me wonder whether a book like this has built-in obsolescence, and how it will read in a few years’ time. But does that matter now? After all, as the book tells us, quoting for once not true classical sources but the movie blockbuster Troy: “We will never be here again.”
• Delphi by Clare Pollard is published by Fig Tree (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
