CRITIC’S CHOICE

Ice cream vans, birdsong, rainfall and traffic – the sounds of Wester Hailes in Edinburgh are brought to distinctive life through the creative collaboration of residents, composers and an artist in this new installation by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. It is a culmination of many months’ work by a diverse range of local people, all of whom responded to a call from the SCO, currently midway through a three-year Wester Hailes residency, to make an audio-visual exploration of their area.

Kirsteen Davidson-Kelly, creative learning director at the SCO, was delighted at the response. The group ranged from newcomers to people who had lived in the area for 50 years. Composer and artistic collaborator Emma Smith ran workshops for participants with composer Suzanne Parry, which ranged from humming and singing to percussion work and sharing stories. SCO musicians came in to work with the group, then everyone decamped uptown for the Tacita Dean exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery last September and the SCO’s season opener at the Usher Hall.

“The main thing that happened was that a large sheet of paper was put up on the wall of the workshop space with a 24-hour timeline,” says Davidson-Kelly. “Each person was represented and over the weeks a picture of the sounds and images that people were noticing around Wester

Hailes were put in.” It looked, says Davidson-Kelly, like a huge graphic score.

And indeed, that is what has resulted, the sounds of Wester Hailes reimagined into a film installation, surrounded by photographs and soundboxes which play miniatures from the score.

Incredible Distance, Whale Arts, 30 Westburn Grove, Wester Hailes,

Edinburgh, 0131 458 3267,

www.whalearts.co.uk, Jan 22 to Feb 9, and the Fruitmarket Gallery, Market

Street, Edinburgh, 0131 225 2383,

www.fruitmarket.co.uk, Feb 12-16

press of people on each other in that sense of a kind of competitive maelstrom of modern capitalist life in a big city, people’s aspirations squeezing against each other, is different from the tone of this. I have been thinking, however, of different kinds of anxiety and fear lately while writing short stories.” (As well as picking up where he left off on the abandoned novel, Lanchester, who writes in his garden shed, is working on a ghost story collection after The New Yorker published, to his immense pleasure, his unsettling, contemporary ghost story Signal – his first attempt at the genre – in March 2017.)

He pauses for a while then says thoughtfully: “One of the important distinctions between a general sort of anxiety and apprehension is the fact that with anxiety you think that something bad is going to happen. I think the world of this book is about a sense of apprehension when you feel that the next piece of news is not going to be good news whatever it is. Yes, indeed, it’s the times we live in.

“I was talking to a bilingual friend about this and he said there is oddly no German word for dread -- there is angst, which is just fear. But that is different from the thing coming that you are specifically dreading. I have been thinking about this a lot lately.

“There is a difference between

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feeling antsy and ill-at-ease in your skin in the way that a lot of people in the City perhaps do all the time. So I think The Wall is an apprehensive book.”

I ask Lanchester about his own anxiety levels since he has written in his touching Family Romance: A Memoir (2007) of how he grew up in a family with secrets and began to suffer panic attacks after his father’s early death at the age of 57. Lanchester’s Irish mother had been a nun and committed identity fraud in order to marry his father, facts which her son discovered only after her death. He relates in the memoir how his own problems spiralled into agoraphobia.

“Worry is anxiety with an agenda,” he writes. “I am much, much less anxious now,” he says cheerfully, adding that he had years of therapy but a happy marriage brought his panic attacks under control. “A very, very happy marriage has certainly helped,” he says. “Good riddance to anxiety, although having a new book coming out can often induce it!”

Born in Hamburg and brought up in Hong Kong -- the setting for his 2002 novel Fragrant Harbour -- he was educated at boarding school in Norfolk and Oxford University. Now a consulting editor at the London Review of Books, he writes on everything that fascinates him, from

style actually make very acute sense of the subject.

He is intensely aware that Hesse is one of those literary enthusiasms that educated people are inclined to dismiss in later life as an aberration of youth. It is very hard to read Der Steppenwolf or Journey to the East (his mother was born in India) or Siddhartha with comfort and without a whiff of patchouli and dope coming off the page, but then it’s unfair to reduce Hesse to his hippy fanbase.

His own philosophical journey, which involved a sublimation of the writing process itself, led him to create in The Glass Bead Game of 1943 – fiddling while Europe burned? – a philosophical treatise rather than a novel and one that proposes nothing more than a radical approach to reading which doesn’t so much reflect the hedonistic eclecticism of the 1960s (“whatever makes you feel good, is good”) as sums up the whole

John Lanchester says of his new novel: ‘Trump’s wall may have been there subliminally but this book began with a dream’