Jonathan Buckley was born in Birmingham in 1956 and grew up in Dudley. He studied English at Sussex University, then at King’s College London, where he specialised in the work of the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay. Buckley is the author of 12 novels and is drawn, as he puts it, to the “polyphonic, multi-faceted, episodic, fragmentary form”. His first, The Biography of Thomas Lang, published in 1997, was told in the form of letters between Lang’s brother and his would-be biographer.
His latest novel, Tell – winner of the Fitzcarraldo Novel Prize in 2022 and now shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize – is a fictionalised, fitful biography of sorts too. It tells the absorbing, complex story of Curtis Doyle, a successful businessman and art collector, who has gone missing from his Scottish estate. His life up to his disappearance – his adoption as a child, the death of his wife, a life-changing car crash in Cambodia – is told from the intriguing perspective, at once intimate and distant, of Curtis’s gardener, who is being interviewed, ostensibly as research for a film about her employer. The novel is composed entirely of her garrulous, perceptive responses (the questions are omitted) and she turns out to be a highly engaging and companionable raconteur. Her reflections – a mixture of observation, deduction, speculation, hearsay, digression and self-reflexive attempts to marshal and define the story she is telling (“This isn’t a TV thriller. There’s not going to be any great revelation”) – make for a vivid, enigmatic and quietly thrilling tale, the more for its mysteries remaining elusive.
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