The Inclination
Tom McPherson constructs each scene as a pressure system: at the centre, something that cannot be named, around it each character’s method of avoidance. In West Berlin, 1972, permission operates as pressure.
305 pages · 2026 – Circle Line Press
Permission without neutrality
Tom McPherson’s The Inclination is a novel organised around what its characters cannot say to each other and will not say to themselves. Set in a Kreuzberg flat, autumn 1972, it follows a group assembling a theatre production that will never reach a proper stage, and a narrator who arrives in Berlin seeking proximity to other people’s intensity, finds instead a role as witness and recorder, and for most of the book mistakes that role for an ethical position. Each scene is structured around what cannot be said, and every character’s protective method builds from that centre. The reader carries what neither the characters nor the sentences will deliver directly.
The pressure extends beyond the psychological. West Berlin in the early seventies was not a place of overt repression. Art was permitted. Permission is not neutrality. It is a climate. The city existed in permanent qualification, everything provisional, everything observed. The group in the flat never faced censorship. They faced something more corrosive: the slow internalisation of scrutiny, the drift from risk toward legibility. The withholding in the prose belongs to the city’s own logic, a structure shared with Napalm in the Heart, where the event remains without stabilising cause and the narrative holds without converting it into motive.
At the book’s structural centre is an absence. Sam, collaborator, counterweight, the name Arnold invokes constantly as ballast and authority, never appears. The references are intimate rather than professional, the dependency clear, the loss unnamed even to Arnold himself. The narrator occupies a parallel position: present throughout, never declared, shaping everything through the act of record. Both are absent presences around which the book’s pressure organises. Neither fully arrives.
McPherson’s primary instrument is objects. A cork from a Spanish wine bottle rolls across the floor in the prologue, releasing the atmosphere of a room. The same cork rolls in the epilogue, settles in afternoon light, and is left where it is. The distance between those two moments carries the book.
The record player tracks the same logic across four chapters. Michael tends it throughout rehearsals as social management, music as ritual that closes a working evening. After Charlie’s discarded page solves the production’s central problem by outflanking it rather than facing it, Michael reaches for the record sleeve out of habit and stops. The silence no longer needs care. On the night of the performance’s collapse it stands untouched. The morning after, Michael passes it twice, his hand never moving toward it. Music would suggest a permission for feeling where none existed.
Charlie’s page is the book’s central transaction. Found in the fireplace, it bypasses the line carrying Olivia’s real grief rather than finding a way through it. What vanished in the adoption was not difficulty but ownership. When the page is adopted Charlie adds only: and boring. A solution that solves everything is the wrong solution. The play that collapses on its opening night is the smoothed, efficient version. The friction traded for ease was precisely what might have found a foothold in the chaos.
The performance fails not through hostility but through indifference. The structure does not collapse in a roar. It simply ceases to proceed. Arnold turns to his left, the automatic gesture of a decade’s collaboration, expecting a shoulder, a returned glance. There is none. Sam was not there. He says the name under his breath. The word carries no echo, no answer. It was just a sound he made. Absence is not confirmed. Presence is disproved. Indifference is terminal in a way hostility never is, a condition that recalls Disgrace, where what goes unspoken in the hearing determines more than what the testimony establishes. Contempt can be galvanising, but misrecognition as irrelevant leaves nothing to push against.
Where Arnold’s failure is public and total, the narrator’s is structural and concealed. The witness function, seeing without naming and absorbing the group’s avoidance into the record, defers their own exposure indefinitely. Returning to their rooms after the flat is struck, they find the endemic paralysis unchanged, not loosened by proximity to other people’s intensity, but displaced by it. Arnold asserted himself against the void and failed visibly. The narrator never asserted at all. Their failure remains hypothetical, and therefore infinite. To observe accurately without intervention was the refusal to console or exaggerate, the refusal to grant the story a meaning it did not earn. Witness as the only honest position available.
The epilogue returns to the cork. The narrator leaves it where it is. At the window, a reflection appears briefly in the glass, faint, unstable, unable to compete with the brighter light outside. The eye adjusts.
Advance copy provided by NetGalley and Circle Line Press