By W. J. Davies.
Guillermo Stitch, The Coast of Everything (Sagging Meniscus, 2026)
‘You must choose’, Samuel Beckett wrote in his novel Molloy, ‘between the things not worth mentioning and those even less so. For if you set out to mention everything you would never be done.’ For Beckett as a young author, James Joyce was the writer of ‘everything’ whose intoxicating maximalism compelled him to go in a direction that eventually led to the sequence of novels which began with Molloy and, by The Unnamable, had distilled to a babbling voice trying to say ‘I’. Despite all appearances, from title and length to its sprawling narrative, rampant intertextuality and everyman heroes, Guillermo Stitch’s The Coast of Everything – a captivating, sometimes maddening novels-within-a-novel about the future of fiction – is not the Joycean Gesamtkunstwerk it seems. It is a Beckettian book, one that knows storytelling is an incessant need and that narrative shape is pure artifice.
The Coast of Everything is told by Clara, a girl travelling up a mountain in a litter carried by two young friends to see what a mysterious local entrepreneur has built. The setting is reminiscent of Stitch’s first novel, Lake of Urine, a dark fairytale in which the author honed a strange, bracing wit that is balanced in The Coast of Everything with a more poetic impulse. Take the opening, in which we learn Clara is unable to walk and spends much of her time looking up: ‘Ceilings. Skies. Clara was something of an authority. Ceilings, especially, were the pages of her atlas. On them, she could map worlds.’
To keep her party going on their journey, Clara tells four ‘tales’, each containing the next. Together, they form a larger narrative in which fiction becomes increasingly heretical. First it is banned, then declared an act of terrorism. In a cosmic future, stories are punishable by death and the destruction of whole civilisations. As someone who relies on stories to expand her horizons, Clara’s worst fear would be their disappearance.
Stitch is a versatile writer, from the dystopia of ‘The Tale of the Enchanted Road’ and Hunter S. Thompson-esque ‘Tale of the Porter and the Gin’ to the Dickensian sci-fi in ‘The Tale of the Isle of Truth’ and crunchy noir of ‘The Tale of the Three Voyages’. Once ‘Three Voyages’ ends, we move back out, passing through each tale’s ending before rejoining the frame story about Clara’s journey up the mountain. This sequential storytelling is modelled on the Arabian Nights, referenced explicitly throughout ‘Three Voyages’, in which the young bride Scheherazade puts off her execution by telling a paranoid king stories so enrapturing he begs to hear more. While the Nights moves from day to night, The Coast of Everything travels downward, through each story into another. It is a heady experience trying to map it all. Clara falls quiet after each tale, mirroring Scheherazade who ‘lapsed into silence’ as she waits for the king’s response. The silence does not last long for either narrator. Scheherazade must continue to put off her death; Clara must stop her companions giving in to exhaustion.
Although ‘The Tale of the Three Voyages’, about luckless detective Liam Téad searching for a tech billionaire’s daughter, forms the centre of the novel, ‘The Tale of the Porter and the Gin’ is the most representative of the cultural atmosphere Stitch’s book conjures, in which literary totems are simultaneously held up and demolished by a hostile society opposed to art yet obsessed by content. In this tale, Vinny, a hotel porter and secret novelist in a time when most writers are enemies of the state, is visited by the ghost of Charles Dickens. Vinny is thrilled to speak to one of the architects of the modern novel, but Dickens himself thwarts the opportunity by spending most of his time in a boozy stupor. When Vinny finally shares his manuscript, Dickens dismisses it, eager instead to announce that his creative spark has returned. ‘Wait a minute,’ exclaims Vinny, ‘you’re not completing The Mystery of Edwin Drood? That would be incred—’. ‘Drood schmood, dude,’ Dickens snorts. ‘Shit is so stale.’ Dickens may be less Muse in novelist form and more literary Tyler Durden. Dickens then hands Vinny his own manuscript, ‘The Tale of the Isle of Truth’, the futuristic portion of the overarching story, about an island community charged with archiving the records of an intergalactic crusade against fiction. Vinny realises all too late that his ‘paltry efforts had been but a prompt’ for the next story. This can feel like a description of the book as a whole: one prompt after the other, each story a springboard for the next. Perhaps that is Stitch’s point, that stories breed stories and resolutions are rarely tidy.
With its Russian doll structure, the logic of The Coast of Everything is of narrators narrating narrators narrating; it is the unreliable storyteller turned up to the max. The novel therefore requires patience and attention, some of which is tested – the central ‘tale’ plods on occasion with slightly mundane observations about technology and social media – but is mostly rewarded, not least at the sentence level (Stitch is wonderful on colours and shades). There are occasions where the ideas risk seeming greater than the execution, perhaps an inevitability given the density of the material. This again occurs most often in the ‘Three Voyages’, its direct dialogue with the Arabian Nights ultimately yielding little that is not achieved elsewhere in the book by more interesting and subtle means. Even in these moments, though, the ambitious, provocative nature of a book happily out of step with the plain-style trend of contemporary fiction is refreshing.
The Coast of Everything is an immense novel about stories in their infinite variety and their capacity to shape the world. Stories now seem to have become the primary force in political and corporate life. Browse most brands’ websites and they will have ‘our story’, an attempt to shape and humanise what remains, large or small, a business that wants your money. Politics is no longer about principles or data but ‘controlling the narrative’. It has always been so, though now done more brazenly and as often by those who claim to represent liberal democracies as those who oppose them. The future will be dictated by these stories. Stitch reminds us that storytelling is an act of persuasion which gives shape to the flotsam of existence. Beckett remained suspicious of narrative for this very reason – not least in political contexts – and so tried to dispose of stories altogether. ‘A story is not compulsory, just a life’, he wrote in Texts for Nothing. It is hard to shake off stories, though, and Beckett never quite managed it. Morsels always remain. Clara and her author know this, telling her tales to keep her companions moving. ‘The stories she had told, their aftereffects, must now be enough’, Stitch writes, ‘All she had was hope.’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
W. J. Davies’s writing has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Exacting Clam, Slightly Foxed, Poetry Birmingham and various online journals including Review 31 and minor literature[s].
