The Boiled in Between

by Helen Marten

The Boiled in Between is the debut novel by Turner Prize-winning artist Helen Marten, an ambitious literary work full of beauty and sorrow. It is a novel told in the action of persistence and questioning: how the rhythms of a world built upon metaphor and symbolism can collide with relationships personal and domestic.

Spliced between three voices, the narrative is a project always in movement, its characters traversing the in-betweens. The psychic excitements of wind, dust and weather merge with alchemical interior voices, all of them indexes of the universe’s microscopic pornography, a fitful map of language and human systems. Philosophic and tactile, humorous and unrelenting, The Boiled in Between ignites new meaning for people and terms of living that have long ceased to astonish us.

Genres: Fiction

336 pages, Paperback

First published September 14, 2020

Reviews

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Boiled in Between is a unique read. At first it baffled me, in no way a bad thing, then when once I got it, the book just stuck with me. Saying that it is not an easy book to describe.

There are three narrative voices : The Messrs, Ethan and Patrice. The messrs provide the main narrative, they also fill in the plot gaps, or even provide a different viewpoint. At times they take a step back and just describe the setting of the various scenes. In between the messrs sections we see Ethan and Patrice’s relationship develop from lustful longings to childbirth all the way to old age and eventually death.

The Boiled in Between is not simply that. Each short chapter contains trivia and philosophical ruminations about any topic imaginable from the amount of bones one would find in an average family to gardening. Like Sebald, these topics seem random but they have their own part to play in the novel.

I saw the book as a meditation on time. The changing face of nature features a lot, old age and youth and what happens when death approaches – i.e. time stopping. In the beginning of the book Ethan is portrayed as a person who lives for fleshy pleasures only to lament the loss of that longing, Patrice herself is seen as the more practical one but even childbirth causes her to change. Technically we are all victims of time and Ethan and Patrice represent that.

Style-wise there’s a mix as well. There are many sensuous passages which can turn erotic at times. There are dashes of humor but on the whole the writing has an emotional clout which draws the reader into the story. As Helen Marten is an award winning artist who creates works by fusing found objects, there is the same type of approach in The Boiled in Between as well.

The Boiled in Between is a brave, daring book for people who want something different in their fiction. The language itself is not challenging but the format and concepts present the territories a story can go. Personally I thought it was pulled off excellently and will unveil more surprises with subsequent readings.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

A storm of words and printed somethings meaning nothing to me, meaning I would buy it all, meaning everything.

The Boiled in Between is the debut novel of the artist Helen Marten, winner, in 2016, of both the Turner Prize - the British award for the visual arts that was founded as a deliberate attempt to create an artistic equivalent to the Booker Prize, as well as the inaugural Hepworth Prize for Sculpture. (see e.g. https://youtu.be/xn98l78-vII)

And it is published by the exciting small independent publisher Prototype:

Creating new possibilities in the publishing of fiction and poetry through a flexible, interdisciplinary approach and the production of unique and beautiful books. Prototype is an independent publisher working across genres and disciplines, committed to discovering and sharing work that exists outside the mainstream. Each publication is unique in its form and presentation, and the aesthetic of each object is considered critical to its production. Prototype strives to increase audiences for experimental writing, as the home for writers and artists whose work requires a creative vision not offered by mainstream literary publishers.

As an article/interview in inews explained:

The Boiled in Between has no discernible plot and, as Marten says, “no character truly surrenders a clear idea of themselves”. She dislikes the idea that there is such a thing as an “artist’s novel”, but acknowledges that their perspectives are different from authors who are used to working exclusively in words. “Artists sabotage terrestrial laws,” she says. “They look at things from above, from behind.”

The novel is narrated by two characters, Ethan and Patrice, alongside a chorus, the Messrs:

We are the Messrs. The instruments of psychic observation. We are not the moral function of behaviour, neither analyst nor pulse. We are spectator, servant and clown. We are animal, vegetable, mineral. Our flight takes us everywhere. We are interested. We see broken men and women, and cast the spaces in between. We found these two, Ethan and Patrice, and bedded down to watch them squeal.

As Marten explained in another interview in Modern Matter:

As the Messrs. themselves suggest, they are instruments of psychic observation. I suppose they are something of all people – an audience, constructed always and forever by whomever and whenever, by time and spirit. I know that sounds impossibly enigmatic – a riddle! – but what I mean is that their presence is designed to be a simultaneity: as omnipotent as the cosmos and as evidence, more and more, that simplicity doesn’t exist. They are so many things: amazed conspirators; egos adjusted; staggering ghosts; feelings; admonishments. They are in and of many of the things they discuss: wind, weather, animal, blood.

The resulting book is as different from conventional 19th novels as that background might imply and makes for a read that I found simulatenously highly stimulating at the sentence level (e.g. a feeling like a sound, somewhere between the aloof delicacy of a snake cracking out of old skin and the gorgeous fractional blind spot when staring at the sun to squeeze out a sneeze). but hard, as someone who while reading relatively avant-garde novels is still a reader used to dealing exclusively in words (to rephrase the inews article) and novels which, even if non-linear, have a more logical framework.

We knew that weaving through the rocky diagram of living, above oozing noodles of worms and tree roots, under blown glass skies, just looking for where you came from, was only one part of the bitter progress. But we didn’t know the complications. That the where you came from and the where you belong might change with every limping day. All the moves in the world, forward and back, seemed told in a poor broken semaphore performed half from memory and the rest signed out with only mildly burning twigs so the general rhythm of instruction was first confused then ultimately collapsed. We lost our category.

Reaching for comparisons, Marten directly echoes authors including Pessoa and Joyce (and the Finnegans Wake Joyce at that), has a mutual admiration with Jenicek, who blurbed the book, and for me, of more recent English novels, had echoes of the prose of David Hayden and, particularly, that of another artist-writer, Ed Atkins's Old Food and brought to mind, as looking back on my review did Atkins's novels, the lyrics of At the Drive In (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgAkZ...). [My review of Old Food: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ]

Later there might be a postman’s knock and a letter or some careful aggregation of foam on my leg from bathing that in its complex fuzz would provide a better explanation of the day’s unfolding. How I would slip into bed with the dreamy cream of linen all about. And how I would remove the last black olive from its jar with the arm of my glasses and lie blindly in the light whilst the salts of its dark helmet roundness filled the whole of my mouth with a carefully cleaner sensation.

A book, to be entirely honest, that I admired more than was really capable of appreciating.

Reviews that do the novel more justice:

https://www.frieze.com/article/helen-...

https://nbmagazine.co.uk/the-boiled-i...

http://anglozine.com/review-helen-mar...

http://thisistomorrow.info/articles/h...

Interviews with the author (including those quoted above)

https://artreview.com/i-can-begin-to-...

https://inews.co.uk/culture/books/scu...

http://amodernmatter.com/article/the-...

[Luisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

As abstract as its title, The Boiled in Between is uniquely strange. One can tell that Helen Marten has spent a lifetime painting, rather than writing – her prose is hungry, (ravenous even) for words and rhythm, seeking and successfully finding poetry in every corner of the mundane.

If you read this book, do not approach it as a story (if you do, you will be very confused). Instead, read it like a game, accept the weirdness of the characters and embrace their voices as a form of divination; as a modern sense-making manual.

This may be a ridiculously high praise but this book provided me with a new way-of-seeing the world: full of adoration and fear, like a newborn would.

[Arthur · Rating 2 out of 5]

vatte Deleuze's assemblage te serieus op; avant-garde maar probeer maar es uw hoofd erbij te houden!