Cover, "Massive Massive Oil Slick". Courtesy Sean Ashton
To anyone who has never tried to write one, novels might seem like they are conceived whole: a glittering prize that the author just had to reach out and grasp. In reality, it’s more like starting fire with a flint.
A novel can be sparked by a tiny detail: a remark overheard on a train, the wording of a public announcement.
Massive Massive Oil Slick is the second of what will eventually be a trilogy of novels written to constraints. The first was Living in a Land (2017), a fictional memoir written in sentences constructed only in the negative.
Massive Massive Oil Slick consists entirely of sentences that begin with the verbs “expect”, “suppose” or “avoid”. It first took shape when I was coming down the motorway and saw this electronic sign:
EXPECT DELAYS
Something I’d seen a hundred times suddenly glowed with literary potential. I pictured a string of scenarios, all conveyed in the same imperative mood:
EXPECT DELAYS
Expect major delays and minor delays: three-mile tailbacks, slow-moving traffic,
temporary lights on the outskirts of Norwich.
Expect an accident,
an accident approaching Welwyn Garden City,
a chemical spillage over all three lanes, speed restrictions between junctions seven and twelve.
In theory, you could programme that electronic sign to say anything.
I imagined what might happen if a fiction writer was at the helm, spewing out thoughts to passing motorists:
Expect anger.
Expect joy, joy interspersed with anger,
anger with joy,
anger and joy in equal proportions,
till joy is eclipsed by anger, or anger by joy.
Expect decline.
Expect steady and sudden decline,
in fortune and wellbeing,
a decline in wellbeing in places as far afield as Corby and Inverness,
London, Manchester, and Yorkshire.
I found I’d segued directly from traffic to human emotion, as though they were part of the same spectrum.
I continued, broaching social unrest, love, relationships, weather, all in a generic, automated voice that had now become unaccountably human. To accentuate the voice’s authority, I moved the ‘action’ to an institutional setting, a seminar room called ‘411B’, addressing my audience in a continuous monologue that was beginning to sound like a prophecy.
How the audience got there, why they came, is a mystery. All I know is that the reader of Massive Massive Oil Slick is one among them.
At some point, the voice became less generic. I started hearing the words in a Liverpool accent. A female voice, tangy, strident, like disinfectant cutting through grease.
It was Josie Jones’s voice.
Josie Jones was one half of the band Big Hard Excellent Fish, best known for their 1990 song Imperfect List, in which she narrates a litany of her and bandmate Pete Wylie’s most hated things:
Fucking bastard Thatcher…the Poll Tax…the sending off of Len Shackleton…
Scouse impersonator…massive, massive oil slick ...
“Massive, massive oil slick” seemed to describe the torrent of mind fluid that my “expect" constraint had let loose, so I chose it as a title for whatever it was I was doing.
Oil slicks on Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela. The image’s water and land components were processed and stretched separately then “stitched” back together into one image. On land, the red colour indicates vegetated areas, the bluish areas show paved surfaces and the browns are bare land. Image courtesy NASA Earth Observatory
Josie Jones’s voice would cut in only now and then, like an intercepted transmission. I heard it when I got angry and welcomed it as a counterpoint to my own somewhat guarded delivery. That voice must have lain buried in my subconscious for 30 years, dormant until I embarked on a project that had a paratactic affinity with Imperfect List.
When the verb “expect” got too monotonous, I introduced “suppose”, a milder imperative that was perfect for smuggling in non sequiturs:
Suppose
there is no more snow.
Suppose
there is no snow at all
but a substantial increase in misogyny…or
a decrease in misogyny
and an increase in violence.
“Avoid” came later.
Avoid
cider
was the first injunction.
Avoid
artichokes
was another.
Why “expect”, “suppose” or “avoid”?
I wonder if it’s because these three verbs comprise the basic overture that all novels make to the reader?
A novel raises our expectations by setting a scene. But suppose these expectations aren’t met? Why has the author avoided them? Probably in order to tell a different story from the one that first seemed to be unfolding.
Massive Massive Oil Slick has no plot. Not in the sense of a sequence of events that happen to people.
But things do happen – just not to any characters.
In the absence of characters, the reader becomes the protagonist, invited to participate in various imagined scenarios, thought experiments that encompass themes both profound and mundane: homelessness, drug trials, extra-terrestrial intelligence, Brazil nuts, carveries, social exclusion…
As with Living in a Land, the first novel in the trilogy, the intention of Massive Massive Oil Slick is to portray how a mind gets from one thing to another. The more idiosyncratic the moves, the more tenacious the logic.
This second novel’s tropes are borrowed from stand-up: call-backs, repetition, the rule of three, and – above all – the observational comic’s tendency to appoint themselves official investigators of social phenomena.
But Massive Massive Oil Slick is only intermittently funny. Much of the time it is menacing.
And the entity doing the monologue – part-official, part absurd; part-automated, part-human – doesn’t know when it is being funny and when it is being menacing. It cannot read the crowd. It barely looks up at them.
Except when someone arrives late to 411B.
_________
“Massive Massive Oil Slick” (ISBN 978-1-7385079-5-5) is the second in poet and novelist Sean Ashton’s projected trilogy of novels "written to constraints”. Published by Ma Bibliothèque, it is now available on-line. An official launch of the book will held at South London Gallery on 23 July 2025. Other recent works by Ashton include “The Way to Work” (2023) and “Sampler” (2020).
Earlier “The Best American Poetry” essays on literary creation by Sean Ashton include “Performance art meets literary étrangeté: Lina Lapelytè’s “The Mutes” makes my uncanny familiar” and “On the ideal novel: Latent in every sentence is an alternative”. Sean Ashton lives in London.