Poeticism and beauty blend with disdain and violence in Mark Bowles’s crystal clear debut, All My Precious Madness, published by Galley Beggar Press in September 2024. The novel is a linguistic whirlwind; a luminous yet unflinching portrayal of one man’s obsessions and the intensity of his point of view, as well as the places that have shaped him, executed with writing that frequently manages to be funny, angry, and moving all in the same sentence.
Bowles’s winding streets of prose lead alienated narrator Henry Nash through different places in his life, from his working class upbringing in Bradford to his loathed job in a London telesales office and his time breaking into an Oxford bookshop, but the narrative always returns to the Soho café where Nash’s one-sided rivalry with a businessman who he has named “Cahun” is playing out.
To Nash, he and Cahun are moral and ideological opposites. He himself is the proprietor of authentic, true experiences. He is stuck in England, but yearns for the idea of “Europe,” illustrated by Paris or Rome; symbols, in his mind, of cultural and intellectual greatness. Cahun, on the other hand, a man loudly parroting tech start-up jargon, failing to respect what Nash considers to be the sanctity of the café environment, comes to represent everything that he detests about the contemporary world.
In August, I talked with Mark via Zoom about some of these themes in the novel, the writing of Henry Nash, and the places that follow him and influence his work.
Leah Binns: Congratulations on the debut novel! I wondered if, to start with, you could talk a bit about how All My Precious Madness came about and whether there was an initial point of inspiration for you.
Mark Bowles: Thank you. There’s a couple of ways of answering that question. First of all, not so much now that I’ve got children, but I used to write in cafés a lot. I used to make sure, when I worked at a telesales office, that I always went into Soho and did some writing in a café before I went to work so that I’d reclaimed a bit of the day to myself. There was a character in the café that physically resembled Cahun in the book, which is to say that he looked as though he was from a different era, like he was from the 1930s or something. He was an intriguing figure, but he actually never spoke. There were also, in the morning, these quite annoying businessmen having Skype meetings and phone calls. I combined those two figures together.
The other thing, I think, is that it began as a kind of voice; in other words, the character of Henry Nash. I did bits and pieces of writing, and I realized that there was this voice that was emerging and this character that was emerging. This character, on the one hand, had lots of anger and rage and was dissatisfied with many aspects of contemporary existence, and on the other hand was striving for beauty and love and all these noble things. I wanted to combine these two things into one character. In some ways, his voice is an exaggerated version of aspects of me, but also something that was quite independent of me. I found it quite easy to assume that voice or to slip back into that voice when I was writing. Its rhythms, its characteristic turns of phrase.
Not that recently but still in my mind was the death of my father, and the aftermath of that. I think there was a lot there that needed to be unpacked and thought about, and so all these things came together to form All My Precious Madness. It’s a book where different things converge into one stream.
I’m interested in the process of drafting the book, through the idea of the voice as you just mentioned, and how that emerged. I feel like, of course, drafting and reworking a novel is always challenging, but this is particularly true when the rhythm of the character’s thoughts are so essential that they take precedence over a linear plot. It made me wonder whether the story changed a lot from the first draft, and what your relationship with plot is like.
It has been redrafted a number of times. In fact, the plot has also changed. Without giving too much away, in the first draft there’s an incident with the character of Tanner, who was Henry Nash’s school bully. In the draft that you’ve read, which is the final draft, this is a fantasy.
The actual plot has changed in that sense, but as you suggested what’s really important for me is the voice and the language and the rhythms and the particular words and the relish of language. Henry Nash has this incredibly digressive mind, and the book obviously reflects that. His mind keeps wandering. It keeps looping back into his past and coming into the present and then being reminded of things, and I needed to be able to do that but also make sure that I came back into the present often enough that it didn’t just become a different story. He’s always having to circle back to the present, and then go back into the past, and there had to be a shape to that somehow, so that just when you think he’s extravagantly strayed from his path, something brings him back.
I think what I try to do is to have things as motifs that keep appearing and disappearing and appearing and disappearing. Somehow, the character of Henry Nash holds all these things in a strange kind of balance. He has a mind that isn’t chronological or linear, and then I suppose what happens is that after all these digressions and sideways movements, it all converges on a final encounter at the end. It’s as though all these motifs are orbiting around him, then suddenly there’s the encounter, and then there’s a kind of peace and clarity that comes after.
I thought it was really interesting that the encounter with Tanner shifted from reality to fantasy. It reminded me of the novel’s press release, where you said you wanted the reader to feel like they were a witness to an uncommitted crime.
Thematically, that’s part of what I want to talk about as well. The relationship between fantasy and reality. Because you get the feeling that the fantasy about Tanner could quite easily have spilled over into reality had the opportunity arisen. Maybe for the reader, the book itself is like a substitute for a crime, or a certain kind of violence which might otherwise have been turned on the world somehow.
I think that there’s something about the writing of the book which was transgressive in the same way that he was transgressive. Henry Nash is a character who allows certain irritations to not be contained within himself, in his own mind.
Did you find it challenging to occupy his mind in that way? Is there anything that you read or any other tool you used to get into his brain somehow?
I found it worryingly easy to get into his mind. It is as if I took a magnifying glass to certain aspects of myself, then removed any sort of censorship mechanism, and just allowed it to be expressed.
I’m just thinking out loud here, but one of the themes of the book is the idea of expression, and what is expression, and so maybe there’s a way in which the book itself is an expression of rage. But then, it’s obviously not just rage. It’s lots of other things as well. Love, a desire for beauty and love, and happiness. They’re two sides of the same coin.
There’s a passage that I felt summed up his worldview really well. Henry Nash is talking about his romanticized view of Oxford, particularly as a space for intellectual activity. He’s aware that it’s flawed, but he says that he “cleaves to it regardless, for it plays a necessary role in [his] mental life and the topography of [his] soul.”
There are certain places throughout the book that represent this kind of cultural and intellectual ideal for him, such as Oxford and the Radcliffe Camera and Paris and Rome and cafés. I wondered if you could talk a bit about the “topography of [his] soul,” how that defines the character of Henry Nash throughout, where that came from, and why he, or you, were particularly occupied with those places?
That passage that you picked out—I could maybe just talk about that for a second. I think there’s a way in which, as you suggested, he willfully clings to the idea of Oxford, despite knowing that it’s an idealization. There’s a way in which he does cling to and invest in certain illusions, or things that he doesn’t quite know if they’re illusory or not, because they make him feel a certain way or because it’s part of his soul, or because it’s part of what makes life worth living. For example, there’s a certain idea of Europe that he has which is also doubtless a romanticization, of sitting around in cafés and drinking espressos and having intellectual conversations. At some level, he knows that Europe is not just that, but we all have these illusions that we cling to.
I think he knows it’s idealized; he knows that if he goes back to Oxford and goes to the Radcliffe Camera, it’s probably all been provided with computers, and he knows that Oxford is predicated on outrageous privilege and social inequality. It’s a difference between the level at which you know things and the level at which you want to be invested in them, and he wants to be invested in this idea of Oxford.
Personally, this is what I think. Over time the places and people that have really meant something to us almost do become symbolic. They become symbols. And so in his mind Oxford is the place of a certain cerebral and intellectual community where people genuinely are passionate about ideas. Similarly, Bradford represents a whole bunch of things for him that he doesn’t want to return to. Rome is very much about his relationship with Julia. So in all of these places, memory turns them into symbols, into representations of certain moods, certain emotions, certain ideals. Maybe at some level you think, well, is it an accurate representation or not? I don’t really care. I think that’s another thing about Henry Nash, that often he doesn’t really care whether something is true or not. It’s about how it makes him feel.
In terms of topography, I think that, if you have crossed between different places, a different aspect of you has been revealed in each of those places. There is a way in which you’re spread out between them all. When I go back to Bradford, I’m probably a slightly different person than when I go to Rome. Each place somehow resonates in a different way, and I think that’s why he talks about this “topography of [your] soul,” because depending on where he is, from his point of view, he’s a slightly different person.
There are many ways in which the differences between Henry Nash and his kind of rival Cahun manifest, but one that I was drawn to was the linguistic difference, the way they use language differently. This is particularly evident in Cahun’s use of tech start-up jargon. I remember that in one passage, Cahun is talking loudly on a video call in a café, and he says, “I’ll reach out to Scott and see if he has a window,” and Henry Nash replies under his breath, “I’ll push you out of a window.” It’s funny, but it’s also quite revealing that Cahun uses the word window abstracted from itself and repurposed, whereas Henry Nash uses window very literally.
I wonder if you could talk a bit about how you use language as a character tool, and a way to narrate the differences between two people?
Yeah. I think, certainly from Nash’s perspective, Cahun is an abuser of language. He’s someone who uses jargon to dress something up in a certain way to make it sound scientific or objective or technical. Nash finds it quite repellent. In that particular example, I think that’s his slightly down-to-earth Northern self that was like, “Oh yeah, ‘window’, I’ll throw you out of the fucking window.” He’s got an antipathy towards business as such and the way in which business is held up as the benchmark of everything. In a general election, for example, it’s always about what’s good for business, what’s not good for business. Cahun is this quintessential businessman.
The language that Cahun uses is, I must say, by and large actual words that I heard spoken in the café. I didn’t really have to do much work. My wife knows a couple of people that are in tech, so I ran it past them, asked whether anything stood out as a bit odd or that they wouldn’t use, and then they gave me a few suggestions. I didn’t want it to be like a complete parody. I wanted it to sound like the language that the owner of a digital start-up may well use. I didn’t want Cahun to be just a completely cardboard one-dimensional individual whose language was just a parodic rendering of that, but at the same time I wanted the reader to find it quite annoying.
I also wanted it to be physically separate on the page, as though it’s this foreign body. From Henry’s point of view, it’s almost like a foreign substance that’s entered his world and is threatening to corrupt or invade it. Cahun is the vehicle of that. Reading through what Cahun says, even now it sounds slightly antiquated. In 2014 or 2015, everybody was talking about the digital revolution, and digital this digital that, and it already sounds like quite old fashioned language. It’s kind of funny.
Henry Nash thinks of himself as a kind of custodian of language, or thinks that those who violate language are doing something that’s really abhorrent. Even though he does something which is arguably more abhorrent.
What’s next?
Well, I have written another novel. It’s called, provisionally, How Do People Stay the Same? and it is a reverse chronology piece in a series of snapshots, over a period of about forty years, of a particular individual. From his own experiential point of view, he doesn’t think that he stays the same over time. He thinks that he is inconsistent over time, that he’s the same person from his point of view.
The voice is not entirely dissimilar from Henry Nash, but it’s sufficiently dissimilar. I think it’s not as angry. He’s not as full of rage. I don’t know if that’s gonna be published or not.
And then I’m kind of working on a book with my eight-year-old son, but I’m not sure I have that much to say about that. I’m really fascinated by children’s relationship to language and how they use language in a way that’s fresh. I’ve not really worked that one out yet. I think that lots of the preoccupations that come over in All My Precious Madness, they’re kind of elaborated on in the new book.
Leah Binns is a writer based in Liverpool. She has an MSt from the University of Oxford, and her writing has been published in Full Stop, Corridor8, The Oxonian Review, and elsewhere.
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