Ashon, Will (November 2018). Chamber Music: Enter the Wu-Tang (in 36 Pieces). Granta Books. ISBN 9781783784035. So I stopped. Instead, I started taping other people and making monologues of their words, crunching them up against other people’s words, simulating conversations or building representations or intersubjective testimonials . I called it direct reported speech, a phrase I was sure I’d seen somewhere, though I couldn’t for the life of me find out where. And what I meant by that was that it felt as if the people who I wrote up in this way were talking directly to the reader with my role that of ghostly ectoplasm, barely visible between the two, every last one of them saying I to you. Ashon’s gloriously polyphonic book scales the heights. A deeply felt and humane portrait of where we are.’ It looks like it’s wobbly. The ground looks like it’s shaking or something. Because the pieces don’t quite fit, so it looks like it’s wobbly. The person might be wobbling. It looks like an optical illusion, because she’s standing but it looks like she’s sitting down at the same time. I think he took a picture and then maybe split the picture into pieces, like maybe gradually cut it and then fixed it together. It looks like it is one thing but then you realise it’s lots of little pieces. Like, this would be one country, that would be another country, that would be a different country. It would look like it’s one picture, but it would be lots of different pictures. Then you can kind of tell a story, cos there’ll be lots of ideas. Otherwise if you actually know what’s happening, it’s not that interesting. There’s so much room for projection. You can read anything into anything. Sometimes when I’m sad I’ll text my boyfriend and then, whatever he replies it will read as unsympathetic. You know what I mean? It doesn’t really matter what it says because you’re in that headspace.

A nation's psyche comes to the surface. The Passengers is not just an oral history of the contemporary moment but, drenched in mood and texture, renders the country itself as a sonic collage.' A spectacularly enjoyable and compelling reading experience . . . funny, moving, surprising and thought-provoking. It humanises literature in this toxic moment.’ It’s almost like a puzzle. You have to construct in your head what’s going on. Which can be different things, depending on what you see. You don’t know what’s going on and it’s like this is a message for you. This is the note that tells you what’s going on and you need to understand it but then you can’t really read it. It’s like a message in a bottle. It doesn’t say something about a particular time in history but it’s like a construction of that period instead. Engrossing...The variety of voices collected here reminds us of the uniqueness of every individual's perspective...It is an artful addition to the oral history genre." ― Financial Times The closest thing to Ashon’s methodology in contemporary writing is the form of oral history pioneered by Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievitch. Like the Belarusian’s histories of Soviet and post-Soviet life, Passengers is formed from other people’s words, edited and arranged. Unlike Alexievitch, though, Ashon is not creating a history of a particular moment or phenomenon, but a record of the unfocused normal in all its randomness.I believe that there are people in life who you meet for a certain reason – and people can bring out certain aspectsof your character that maybe you didn’t know were there. You’ve met them for a reason and they’re beneficial to whoever you become or whoever you’re destined to become. At school we moved classes, so I got split up from my friends, but actually it turned out to be one of the best things that could’ve happened. I met so many new people who I feel really changed my life. People come into your life for a reason, because of fate. A renowned New York street photographer, Mermelstein’s latest book consisted only of images he took of people writing, conversing, texting on their phones—except the pictures aren’t of the people so much as their screens. The fragments of conversations, somewhat queasily snatched from over his subjects’ shoulders, add up to a story of a city. Quite an odd story, admittedly, but then it is New York… The Passengers by Will Ashon,shortlisted for this year’s Rathbones Folio Prize, is a portrait of contemporary Britain told through a patchwork of voices, collected by Ashon over a period of three years. This extract, taken from the beginning of the book, gives a glimpse of the extraordinary collective portrait woven from these disparate, anonymous voices. Will Ashon (born 1969) is an English writer and novelist, former music journalist and founder of the Big Dada imprint of Ninja Tune records. [1]

We stopped next to these fir trees and my daughter said, What’s that noise? What’s going on? We’re looking around for this strange buzzing sound, for this noise. And eventually we looked up and the trees were covered, literally covered, in bees.

This marvel of a book has found a form for all of us.

From October 2018 to March 2021, the English novelist and nonfiction writer Will Ashon spent 30 months in a state of deep listening. He spoke to 100 people from across the UK by phone, online, or while hitchhiking. Like the men and women sporting cardboard confessions in a Gillian Wearing photograph, they told him secrets. They dug up half-forgotten memories, revealed hopes and dreams. He filleted those testimonies for vivid details, and juxtaposed them to hint at strange echoes and shared frequencies. Each is presented anonymously – no headings, no timestamps, no coordinates. In this way a nation’s psyche comes to the surface. The Passengers is not just an oral history of the contemporary moment but, drenched in mood and texture, renders the country itself as a sonic collage. I’m not sure I’m self-aware enough to answer this question. In terms of writing, I was very influenced by Georges Perec’s lifelong attempt to try to create as many different forms of text as possible. And hip hop culture has probably done as much to shape my outlook and attitude towards art, broadly conceived, as anything else.

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Will Ashon is the author of two novels and two works of non-fiction, Strange Labyrinth and Chamber Music: About the Wu-Tang (in 36 Pieces). Ashon also founded the independent record label Big Dada, which he ran for over 15 years. He lives in London. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. Seemingly simple yet so deeply profound, The Passengers is an absorbing insight into the lives and minds of so-called ordinary people: their hopes and fears and idiosyncrasies at a specific moment in time.'