Life Buoys and Skin Tags

Robert Kiely reviews Timothy Thornton’s “Candles and Water.”

By Robert KielySeptember 9, 2024

• Poetry

• Gender & Sexuality

TIMOTHY THORNTON’S Candles and Water (2024) is a haunting and intricate work that grasps tentatively at the edges of a new literary form while tracing the tidal drift to which all words are subject. Thornton is known in the UK for his prolific poetry career as well as his contributions to the Penguin Modern Poets series; his latest offering, published by the fine Pilot Press, is a 347-page mosaic of dreams, diary entries, ghost stories, lists, poems, and autobiographical reflections. This collection revives the ancient Japanese form of the pillow book—a literary mode inaugurated around a thousand years ago by Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book—with a distinctly contemporary and absurdist twist. For anyone interested in explorations of addiction and experimental narrative in general, Candles and Water is an essential read.

Each section of Candles and Water stands as a snapshot, a complete and distinct image. Fluctuating in length, some sections are short stories, some are prose poetry, and some are nonsense. Some sections are grammatically clear and some are riven with anacoluthon, sentences that change tack at the drop of a hat. Some address you chummily as a reader, some admonish you, and some are like a crystal, indifferent to your presence. But however much the sections vary, the images they offer blur and merge as you read. In the second section, “A Very Short Introduction to Ghosts,” Thornton asks us “Have you ever seen a ghost?” He goes on to correct any reader who might think “a ghost is somebody who has died,” but this “is just a lie.” In fact, Thornton states, “ghosts are people who remind people of nobody.” We are in Thornton’s book, where ghosts are something different from our usual understanding. It is a testament to Thornton’s prose that these redefinitions feel so convincing. Ghosts come up again and again, with “ghost cats,” “geese ghosts” (a.k.a. “gheests”), and ghosts at sea. What might at first seem like a stand-alone piece becomes integral to the whole.

Each snapshot unfurls at a fern leaf’s pace. There’s a patient, writerly tenacity to the thinking, a muscularity which won’t let go of any thought until it has been pulled to its absolute breaking-point. This becomes quite literal in one section. Someone pulls at some skin and it keeps coming off, as if along a little zip line, as if it could keep going forever:

beginning with a tiny tag of spare, dry, proud skin at the top of his lower lip, on his left side, he peeled off downward a strip about a millimetre wide and a centimetre tall (or however tall a lower lip is). I’ve never known whether there is a name for the edge below which a lip is no longer a lip, and the millimetre-wide strip is continuing to peel down, or off, or both, into an area which in a centimetre or so will be unambiguously designated “chin.”

We oscillate between clarity and vagueness; precise measurements are hedged by a follow-up such as “or however tall a lower lip is.” Four pages later, Thornton is still tugging on the same image:

The raw, one-millimetre stripe left behind, from what he’d already torn off—going from his lip, his chin, the area where it travelled over his Adam’s apple, then round some further neck, curving toward his shoulder, then back upward until it hit his hair—that was a constant sluice of blood now. Unsettlingly bright, not a deep red.

It’s disturbing and evocative, exploring a compulsion that might resonate with addiction while illustrating the way Thornton’s sections proceed with an irresistible yet abject inevitability. Like the man pulling at his skin tag, we can’t help reading on. Like the man pulling at his skin tag, Thronton has to write this even if it hurts.

Thornton’s writing is hallucinogenic, introspective, and terrifying; it’s also extremely funny. Humor is delivered with such deadpan precision that you might just miss it. Take, for instance, the whimsical descriptions of birds, reminiscent of famous clips from Peter Serafinowicz’s television series Look Around You, like this one about “gear-gulls”: “These are adolescent gulls which in their youthful exuberance solve a version of the three-gear problem, perhaps only once in their lives and certainly never in adulthood.” The survey continues:

MAGPIES: These birds—for birds they are—have always been phenomenally dangerous, but we have known since antiquity that protection against them is possible. The “one for sorrow” technique still used today is to count aloud, up to and including the number of magpies present, attaching a word to each, making sure (1) that every odd number and every even number are paired opposites; (2) that all even numbers rhyme.

Such moments reveal a playfully sharp wit (“for birds they are”), seen again in Thornton’s whimsical advice for finding poems: “simply look for them in your pond just around sunset using a torch.” The same section defines poetry as “the act of apprehending and taking a person into custody.” In a book that questions how meaning accrues and drifts, these moments allow us some moments of respite from pain, sorrow, and loss.

At its heart, Candles and Water is a narrative about recovery from alcoholism, though this story is anything but linear. The title itself is deeply symbolic, with candles and water recurring throughout the book as motifs of both comfort and destruction. Candles, used to create intimate surroundings with friends or lovers, contrast with the sea, which is both an aspiration (Thornton wants to live by the sea) and a source of destruction, breaking up what we deign to build. The book is divided into sections named “FLOTSAM,” “JETSAM,” “LAGAN,” and “DERELICT”—terms that Thornton explains midway through the text: flotsam and jetsam are wreckage, floating bits of ships, while lagan and derelict are larger pieces, often sunken underwater. These headings, along with the symbol for the “voiceless labial–velar fricative” (an upside-down w) that marks internal section breaks, gradually reveal themselves to be essential to the book’s underlying coherence. Wreckage, haunting, and survival pervade the text and build a whole that acknowledges its fragmented parts the same way a mind that has suffered addiction pieces itself back together but is forever shaped by the fissures.

The past 13 years in the UK were marked by repeated Conservative governments and relentless austerity measures. The impact of these policies on addiction services is keenly felt in Candles and Water, where Thornton reflects on the difficulties of seeking help for alcoholism via an underfunded National Health Service. The Health and Social Care Act of 2012, which led to drastic cuts in funding for addiction services, looms large over the text, forming a backdrop of neglect and abandonment against which Thornton and others struggle for survival. These cuts led to increased drug-related deaths (an 87 percent rise from 2012 to 2021), higher hospital admissions, and more drug use among young people. The reduction in local authority budgets and a lack of dedicated funding have resulted in understaffed and undertrained addiction services. It is with full awareness of this that Thornton describes what it is like to be refused help as an alcoholic:

Please, don’t think I don’t appreciate how overworked the people at an addiction hub must be, and how nasty and unpleasant their job must be sometimes. Their role in this situation was evidently to refuse me the detox I was asking for, unless I somehow proved myself worthy of it—by doing something I already knew I couldn’t do, and which would in any case have rendered the detox unnecessary—but they went so far beyond that refusal, talking to me as if I was a spoiled child, as to be by far the rudest professional in this context that I’ve ever encountered.

Reading Candles and Water, I wonder if addiction is a form of mourning, if any poetry is anything but an artifact of mourning. Iain Sinclair describes Thornton’s earlier book Nothing Worked (2021) as “haunting,” and David Hayden uses the same term for Candles and Water, as do I at the start of this review. The word fits eerily well, not just for the book’s content but also for its lingering effect on the reader. There’s something in the certainty of Thornton’s writing, despite its fragmentary and dreamlike form, that makes the reading experience unshakable.

Topics like ghosts and the sea become refrains, accumulating incredible emotional intensity. These patterned repetitions are central to the book’s exploration of language, particularly the private language shared between lovers. In The Waves (1931), Virginia Woolf writes: “I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry.” In a letter to Richard Porter of Pilot Press, and echoing Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Thornton discusses “that little language,” concentrating on how it is lost when a relationship ends. We catch glimpses of these lost vocabularies throughout the book—an example is “crilt” as a term for the dregs of crisps (or “chips” in the US). This little language is a reminder of the intimate connections that are easily shattered but never entirely forgotten. In picking up such vocabularies and redeploying them, this book brings us through the mountain range between private and public language and allows us to mourn the word “crilt.” It is a beautifully patterned exploration of what it means to survive, because if we, too, are adrift alone, here Thornton brings us together in collective wreckage and asks us to join him in lovingly turning that wreckage over.