Isabel Waidner’s We Are Made of Diamond Stuff came highly recommended from a friend, with the caveat that it was “quite weird”. I wasn’t disappointed.
Waidner’s protagonist — the unnamed 36 year old lookalike of Eleven from Stranger Things — and their friend Shae are both migrant workers struggling to survive in a characteristically grim off-season seaside town on the Isle of Wight. Their world stubbornly refuses to cohere into a single reality. Images of polar bears bleed from Shae’s jumper into the real world, Reebok classics transform into their animal namesake and start running around, and a character from BS Johnson appears in the form of their corrupt and tyrannical boss. (There’s a strong intertextual relationship with the novel House Mother Normal by the experimental writer BS Johnson, but you don’t need to have read it to understand what’s going on.)
Waidner’s absurd, darkly comic prose unflinchingly tackles the harsh reality of life for queer migrants pushed to the edges by Brexit Britain. The phrase “hostile environment” has never felt more apt. They also construct and incisive and sorely-needed critique of queer culture in UK, its co-opting by right wing movements and the impact of respectability politics. Diamond Stuff marks out the battle-lines in our increasingly confused and violent culture wars. In the face of all of this, its characters keep fighting.
No other novel I’ve read has so sharply captured the strangeness of our current political moment. The narrative refuses to resolve itself — there are no resolutions for the mess we’ve put ourselves in. Furiously preoccupied with the now, We Are Made of Diamond Stuff is set to be one of the defining novels of the Brexit era. Essential reading.
We Are Made of Diamond Stuff is published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe. You can buy the book here.
If you want to find out more I recommend listening to this great round-table discussion at the London Review Bookshop featuring Isabel Waidner.
Book, Bell & Candle 