“The spiral is a spiritualised circle,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov in his autobiography Speak, Memory. “In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.” Patterns – their beauty, individuality, ubiquity – lay at the heart of Nabokov’s work, but he was perhaps more interested, obsessed even, by how they could be broken, knocked out of sequence, and in the artistic fruits these ruptures could yield. “I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another,” he adds. “This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain.” In simpler terms, experimentation, modification, variation – this is the path to a higher place.
Ecstasy is a word I’d happily associate with Patrick Langley’s lyrical and looping novel The Variations, a work with a similarly thrilling Nabokovian intrigue in the relationship between patterning, form and meaning. This is Langley’s second novel, and like his first, Arkady – a tender, smog-ridden story of two brothers in an apocalyptic Britain – it takes place in a world that looks very much like our own but feels alien and strange, as if brushed by the supernatural. In The Variations, reality is ever so slightly askew.
