Ursula K Le Guin had her Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction; I have my comfy cardigan theory. What Le Guin proposed is that human culture, novels included, didn’t begin with technologies of harm, such as flints and spears, but with items of collection and care, such as the wicker basket or, nowadays, the carrier bag. And so, if we make them that way, novels can be gatherings rather than battles.
Tom Cox’s third novel fashions an escape from the dangerous outside world into something soft, comforting and unfashionable. It might once have been a Neanderthal’s armpit, but now it’s more likely to be a cosy cardigan. Or a deeply comforting story.
This shambling but intricate yarn of friendship, loyalty, alienation and record collecting features a depressed nature writer called Billy Stackpole, who bears a parodic resemblance to such woodcut-on-the-cover authors as Robert Macfarlane and Tom Cox. His debut was called Will the Stone Circle Be Unbroken: A Journey Around Britain Through Deep Time. Billy is sitting around his hand-forged firebowl when he utters the woeful/hopeful plea: “This sounds weird but I’ve never had a big sloppy cardigan and I wish I did … Just something you can throw on, at a time like this. Maybe in a nice earthy green, a bit mossy.”
As far as Billy knows, he’s speaking to a group of eight human beings. However, also listening in, incognito, is the novel’s cosiest and most unusual character. How you react now is probably a good indication of whether you’ll like Cox’s affable, quirk-heavy brand of literary knitwear. Because also within earshot of Billy is a long-nosed, sleek-haired magical sea creature with 24 fingers who is capable of passing for a large brown dog, but also of hoovering, gardening, reading Barbara Kingsolver novels, speaking six languages, giving wise life advice, and most excellent knitting. Meet Carl – who, because he’s nice, will secretly knit Billy a cardigan.
Carl is one half of a charming odd couple along with Liverpudlian record dealer Eric. Eric and Carl live peripatetically, though they’ve ended up in rural Dorset; and everywhere they go, and whatever mild scrapes they get into, they meet furiously nice people. Everything Will Swallow You is the story of Eric’s life, without and then with his supernatural companion. But it’s also a materially hopeful “state of England” novel. Our social fabric may be fraying, but we’re still warm and woolly, most of the time.
Eric’s vocation is nicely chosen. Over the years, his personal fortunes follow those of the long-playing record, and we see it become an index for values of decency and kindness. When vinyl is prized, not just priced, things look up in society. The cynical mid-1990s were a low point, but with gen Z’s fond infatuation with analogue, things have been getting better.
One way of reading Cox’s work, from his Stackpolish nature writing in 21st Century Yokel to his recent novels, Villager and 1983, is as a counter to cartoonish Brexitshire views of the countryside. Look beyond the M25, and there’s folklore, nature, history, yes, but most important of all there are nice people; even if increasingly they spend most of their time looking at phone screens and getting angry with one another. His country, he insists, can still be a loving and lovable place.
Like vinyl records, England may go through periods of neglect, but as a nation, as a folk-nature-history-haunted land, there’s still something warm and ultimately dependable about us. As Eric writes in his notebook, and his words equally apply to comfy-cardigan fiction such as Everything Will Swallow You: “Records never did a lot of what I thought they’d do for me. They didn’t make me cooler or more handsome or help me solve the secret of the universe. But they helped get me through some hard times and taught me that magic is real.”