About me

Comment | Reviews | Recommended Reading

Jai Clare I have been a child, a daughter, an obnoxious teenager, an adult who should know better! All are me. I find details of biography give only the merest glimpse of what makes up a person. A flavour - how you mix it decides what you taste.

I am a Capricorn, I light candles to write by - am I a witch? I like paintings but can't draw. I like music but can barely play. Born in South Africa in late sixties in a December summer to working class parents but we left when I was nine months old. Came to Worcestershire, UK.

Very fond of my lane view of the Malvern Hills, those dragon-shaped anomalies heaped over the Severn Plain. The river Severn a beautiful river, the hills a beautiful and strange place. I walked them once with Elgar on my stereo - I thought if Ken Russell can, so can I!

I went to a good comprehensive school where of course I was the outsider, bullied etc. Heard Hong Kong Garden by Siouxsie and the Banshees in '78 and everything changed. I was the only punk in my school! (Country bumpkins).

Parents poor despite the family having won a small amount on the pools in 1969! Enough to buy a small cottage. Mother always wanted me to enter 'management' and earn good money. Got decent exams but left home at 18 soon as I had some dole money and went underground for 5 years, in a Goth band called 'Incaged Together'! We were very bad. Used to live at night, sleep in the day. Got into all sorts of scrapes. None involving vampires though.

I have taught adults in Cornwall, south London, Hastings, East Sussex, Kent, University of Sussex, Birkbeck College. Literature and creative writing. I have one of those MA thingies that don't mean a lot. My ideal place to live would be Soho - so I could step out into the street and be right in the middle of things- occasionally, and the country, right in the middle of nowhere. I'm sort of split into town and country.

I love France, Greece, Italy, mad about art history, history, I have wide eclectic musical taste. Cinema, ballet - I used to do jazz dance and just wish I'd done ballet - and being warm. I am always cold. I was a vegetarian for 23 years until last year. But now I have returned to it after a year's aberration.

I hate small-minded ungenerous people, people who don't respect you, who take you for granted, and drivers who piddle about at 35 in a 60 mph limit… I love being fit, I run and do the gym and am very competitive at everything. Now what does that make me?

Comment

'Jai Clare's Dark Romanticism' by Chris Walmsley, PhD, contributing writer to the forthcoming Criticism & Theory: An Oxford Guide (Waugh, P. ed) OUP.

Synonymous with the postmodern condition is a collapse of standards and judgement. Genres are promiscuously cross-pollinated and the reality effect is undercut through a neo-Nietzschean rebuttal of truth. The Cartesian subject, which guarantees the autonomy of the individual, is reduced to little more than a fractured conduit through which various localised discourses flow. Experimentation is valorised for its newness, whilst any concept of tradition or authority is opposed - frequently on the grounds that because it already exists it is somehow complicit with the dominant power structures. It is always exciting, therefore, when one comes across a writer who is open to innovation and experimentation without being blind to the verities of traditional storytelling. Jai Clare is such a writer.

A post-Romantic searching for beauty in the darkness, Jai Clare has been published in Agni, London Magazine, Barcelona Review, Cadenza, and her work has quietly been attracting admirers for some time. Her prose style is, at times, brutal, and terse yet, paradoxically, remaining lyrical and evocative. The tensions between despair and hope which provide the moral foundation of her work, are never fully resolved but, at the same time, she never takes the easy option of open-ended ambiguity favoured by many of today's pseudo-novelists. Her work is as controlled structured as a lawyer's argument whilst her use of language, imagery and metaphor evokes a poetic licentiousness that leaves the reader reeling and breathless. The only effective to introduction to her work is to read it and there is plenty to choose from.

Tainted With Signs is a beautiful tale of self alienation, the fragility of our self construction as autonomous beings and the insidious effects of religion whilst Touching is a brutal, brilliant and searing psychological investigation of emotional abuse and dependence. This latter theme reoccurs in Mad Angels, an uncompromisingly honest tale in which sex and violence connect at their most pointless and most meaningless moment. There is a visceral rawness to the writing which blurs the boundaries between fiction and lived experience as Ms Clare skilfully exploits the convergence of form and function. The events of 911 inspired Balloons, a haunting, subtle fable of survival and loss. Considering the range and scope of her work, picking a favorite is an almost impossible task akin to picking the best bar of gold in the vaults of Fort Knox. Yet the urge to do so is irresistible, and the jewel in Jai Clare's crown, the one I re-read most frequently is the haunting Throwing Up Over Buttercups.

Throwing Up Over Buttercups is an open text, one in which the reader is forced to think through the images and actively engage with the writing on several levels. It eschews a passive exegesis for a more dynamic reader-text relationship, exerting a peculiar haunting fascination for those who attempt to penetrate its opaque surfaces. The title Throwing Up Over Buttercups has a double function. The physical act of vomiting over the buttercups whilst being touched up by her father, but also the slang term (buttercup = homosexual) can be brought into play. Once this second option is open it is possible to read this story as an account of denial, repression and a refusal to accept one's sexual identity. The story exposes itself like a kaleidoscope, patterns emerging out of nowhere, making perfect sense for a moment before leaving the reader with a sense of vertiginous displacement. The ending, abrupt, brutal and unexpected is jarring and creates a sense of serious confusion and estrangement. This ambiguity challenges the reader to question the fragments of information at their disposal. The assumption that Simon is the Boyfriend In Harrogate is automatic, and yet, because Mia seems to recognise her assailant this is brought into doubt. Is Simon in fact a recent pick-up, a hitch-hiker straight from Thelma and Louise? Obviously not, but once the question raises its head it is hard to feel comfortable about Simon any more. And that is the success of the story in my opinion - it generates a feeling of paranoia in the reader. Nothing is as it seems, nothing and no-one can be trusted. The style of writing, an urgent stream of consciousness, so sharply focused that it misses almost everything as it fastens compulsively on the particular, also allows us to read the assault as symbolic. This is a woman who is having serious problems. About to visit the father who molested her she is reliving the trauma again and again, losing herself in phantasy and the idea that the shadow is imaginary, that she bumps her head during an hysterical flashback is also a legitimate reading.

Exciting, enigmatic, versatile and always thought-provoking, Jai Clare is the real thing and the perfect antidote to the manufactured, ersatz offerings of those writers who eschew depth for surface, image for intent and sound-bite for substance.

Reviews & Quotes

Jim Crace

Jim read sections from my Paradoxa manuscript and said my work was:

"like Paul Auster/Milan Kundera meets Angela Carter."

He admired the overall ambition of the novel along with the quality of the writing.

David Veronese, Author of Jana, Serpent's Tail, 1994:

"Jai: just read Liberation, This Is. it's bloody fucking brilliant, i loved it deep down in my heart and everywhere else. I'll search out more of your stash as the need arises--viva internet! viva words!..."

Forrest Aguirre, writer, editor of Leviathan 3 & 4:

"Jeez, Mad Angels is something else - intense! Ruthless! The story left me reeling. I like "Aftermath" for entirely different reasons. There's a strong tinge of surreality to the whole thing, I think because of the sparse prose. The writing is exquisite in its sparseness and jumpiness, kind of like the bleak beauty of crows as they hop around a bloodied carcass. Reminds me of Burroughs, in some ways. I love the atmosphere, the whole crow imagery works really well with the sense of ominous anonymity that I get from it, like the world's a big place and we are such small things in it, though our vision is filled with ourselves, our egos. Really great stuff here, Jai!"

Review of Bone on Bone in London Magazine by Iain Emsley

"The absolute gem in this issue is Jai Clare's Bone on Bone, a love story where the narrator falls in love with a jazz pianist. Clare has written a wonderfully inventive tale that reads as it is jazz tune itself, repeating various phrases and improvising round its central theme. A gentle and romantic tune, it has the atmosphere of a small, smoky jazz club and the variety of moods that the music encompasses. A wonderful little story."