It is 2024. In a city known simply as “the international capital”, writer Corey Fah’s life has taken a swerve. At a public online event, they have been declared the £10,000 winner of the Fictionalisation of Social Evils award for their “MIND-BENDING” debut novel. Sitting with their partner in a one-bed flat on a 1960s social housing estate that is overrun with knotweed and boasts a single shop selling stationery, toiletries, guns and meat, Corey can hardly believe it. “I’d not won an award before, and neither had anybody I knew.”
In 2021 at a public online event, Isabel Waidner was announced the winner of the Goldsmiths prize for their third novel, Sterling Karat Gold. One of the judges congratulated Waidner for their ability to combine “the real and the mythic, the beautiful and the grotesque, to mind-bending effect”. Because of lockdown, however, the Goldsmiths art department was closed, so no one was able to make the usual customised trophy. Waidner received the £10,000 prize money on its own. Corey Fah is less fortunate. They will only get the money if they can track down the missing trophy themselves. “Do it quickly,” the prize coordinator says, “before the judges change their minds.”
Since their debut novel, Gaudy Bauble, in 2017, Waidner’s writing has been admired for its remarkable innovation, unflinching political vision, vivid language and, frankly, hilarious charm. Corey Fah Does Social Mobility shares many of the characteristics of the first three books, challenging the injustices of class, race, sexual, gender and national identity through an eclectic cast of humans and non-humans in a familiar but fantastical world.
In the first sentence we are confronted with a vast “neon beige” flying object swiftly followed by a freakish quasi-Walt Disney deer, with a spider’s legs and eyes, dubbed Bambi Pavok. This all happens in Koszmar Circus, “an ornamental mount” overshadowed by huge apartment blocks in the bushy edgelands to the east of the city. Corey is here searching for the trophy, “a physical representation of the cultural capital I’d just acquired”. It all feels pretty weird and, when you work out that koszmar means nightmare in Polish, rather sinister too.
One of the ways Waidner pries open our minds to such surreal visions is by ignoring certain grammatical rules. Conjunctions, definite and indefinite articles are regularly omitted, while foreign words are employed – largely untranslated – with a fluidity that is refreshing to read. Another way Waidner disarms readers’ potential resistance is with humour, often slapstick. Riffing on a current meme – “if ur sex organs were named after the last tv show u watched” – Corey confesses, “Curb Your Enthusiasm, I’m not even joking.”
Corey’s partner, Drew Szumski, is obsessed with a live TV show called St Orton Gets to the Bottom of It. Guests are invited on to discuss their experiences of červí díra (that’s Czech for wormhole) – tunnels through space and time. The show’s white working-class host, Sean St Orton, claims to have escaped from his violent male lover by diving down a červí díra in 1967. Readers will spot the nod to British playwright Joe Orton, who was murdered by his partner that same year. That Waidner risks incorporating the raw biographical detail of Orton’s death into the text, with Bambi Pavok playing a key role beneath the floorboards, is testament to their literary daring: “He wielded the object, bringing it down, not once, not twice, but nine times in total, bludgeoing his lover, so-called, in a psychotic frenzy.” This description might have felt voyeuristic, even indulgent, but Waidner’s commitment to their material is never in doubt. For all the comedy in this book, it insists on facing the violent truths of our world.
The narrative twists and sprouts in unexpected ways, and it can feel as if multiple plots are mushrooming on the page. Suffice to say, Waidner has absolute command, leaping from venison burgers being flipped by a false widow spider to “killer fawn” Bambi Pavok regurgitating a rabbit’s abdomen during a live broadcast. Just as Corey is invited to host their own TV series with a “skeletal script, fleshed out by improv”, the speed and fluency in Waidner’s sentences feels improvised and alive. As well as clever metaphors we are treated to acute takedowns of contemporary political hypocrisies: “people thought nothing of exposing their babies to highly heterosexualised content – like Bambi – while supporting legislation against the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality to minors in all its variable historical guises”.
It is tempting to predict that this book, which gives a whole new dimension to the idea of the zeitgeist – combining spacetime travel, multiple languages, manipulative TV, migration and deportation, sexualised, gendered, racialised and class othering, fascism and fashion, not to forget the pretensions of the British literary world – will see Waidner step on to the podium once more. Maybe this time they’ll get a trophy too.
• Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner is published by Hamish Hamilton (£12.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
