I often want to recommend a novel by the British writer Jonathan Buckley but struggle to choose. His books are small-scale, a touch eccentric. They are discreetly experimental but also unfashionably traditional in their dedication to inhabiting other consciousnesses. They do not style themselves as showstoppers. Which one of these subtle, touching novels is guaranteed to live up to my ardent report?

Buckley’s most recent book is on the face of it his humblest yet. Even its oracular title, One Boat, gives off an air of bathos. It is narrated by Teresa, a contract lawyer in her forties who has come to a small town on the Greek coast for a solo holiday. Her father has just died; she is here to accomplish what she calls, in her wooden way, some “thought-ordering.” Teresa is, by her own account, not a natural raconteur. The “suboptimally passionate” daughter of a mathematics prodigy, she is “an exam-passer par excellence” who “followed the straight path”—an “analyst, not a performer,” with an “underpowered” imagination. “Lord, no,” she replies when a neighboring diner asks whether she is a writer. She chose the town because it is an ordinary backwater—not “too neatly picturesque” or touristy—and her diary, which makes up the book, is accordingly not what one might call action packed. She sits in the café on the tree-shaded square, gazes at the enormous bay, reads on the beach, walks along the harbor, climbs up to the ruined fortress, makes the acquaintance of a few locals.

We quickly realize that Teresa is up to something more complicated, however: she is not just on holiday but repeating a holiday; she has come back to compare notes. Her peculiar, faintly comic manner—“The mood was one of eventfulness, and sex was about to be added to the tale”—is partly a reflection of her rational cast of mind but partly also of her ironic self-awareness about the act of dramatization in which she is engaged. It has been nine years since her first visit. Then, she was reeling from the death of her mother, as well as from the betrayal of her husband, “seduced by a woman of greater dazzle.” One Boat is thus not just a holiday diary but, typical of Buckley’s novels, intricately layered and self-reflexive. Teresa notes how things have changed, including herself: the hotel has had a bland sprucing; the waterfront restaurants are sleeker; Niko, a handsome diving instructor with whom she had a fling, now has a baby; the beauty of Xanthe, a waitress, has deepened; Petros, a taciturn mechanic, has a different dog and a mysterious new scar on his scalp. Teresa’s notebook spirals outward, as she puts it at one point, her observations of the town giving way to philosophical ruminations about the “inconstancy” of identity over time, staggered memories—of her last visit, her marriage, her parents, her childhood—and, since she is rereading her old notebook as well as adding to it, memories of memories and of dreams.

Despite the novel’s slight dimensions—166 pages—there are impish hints that something more ambitious is afoot. Teresa is reading the Iliad, and One Boat contains echoes of Homer’s epic. (The nine years that have elapsed since Teresa’s last visit to Greece correspond to the length of the Trojan War when the Iliad opens; a fellow tourist, John, reveals he is plotting to avenge the killing of his nephew.) Perhaps even the title One Boat is an allusion to the Iliad’s famous catalog of ships. “A potential exercise presented itself to me: one could write an account—a catalogue—of this locality in the course of a day, the entirety of it, one episode per hour,” Teresa reflects at the end.

It is implied that John’s violent mission might have something to do with Petros’s scar—at least in Teresa’s imagination; it becomes clear that she may be writing, or preparing to write, something closer to fiction. In the final scene, she is back in England, listening to her new partner, Patrick, himself the author of a “longlisted” novel, patronizingly dispense conventional feedback on her notebook. He is fluent in creative writing argot: he “talks about increasing the ‘narrative torque,’” going “deeper into the minds of your three principals,” spinning “some tighter stories” from the material. Teresa stands her literary ground, recording his advice rather than heeding it. Patrick the complacent professional is contrasted with Petros the unambitious amateur, who, as well as working in a garage, has self-published a book of spare, enigmatic Greek poems (“staggered typing,” in Patrick’s disparaging verdict: “In some cases, you know, less really is less”). Patrick has a “remarkable” ability to praise his own book “as though it were the work of someone else.” Petros is remarkably detached in a contrasting way: when Teresa buys a copy of his book, his reaction is “negligible, as though I’d informed him I’d bought a sun hat.”

It is plain where Buckley’s loyalties lie. His novels are suffused with a similar egolessness. He has published thirteen, one every couple of years or so since 1997, and all could loosely be described as character studies. Many are portraits of artists or performers of some kind, charismatic, larger-than-life, usually somewhat elusive figures, but Buckley’s narrators tend to be plain, even stolid. (Several could be described as “suboptimally passionate.”) Contact (2010), for example, is narrated by a furniture shop owner named Dominic Pattison, whose blandly affluent suburban life with his accountant wife is threatened by the appearance of an erratic twentysomething named Sam claiming to be his son, the offspring of a repressed affair. Nostalgia (2013) revolves around a domineering, flamboyant, slightly buffoonish painter named Gideon Westfall, who has made his home in the Umbrian hamlet of Castelluccio; the novel recounts a visit from his estranged niece, Claire Yardley, a teacher whose sturdy name bespeaks her sturdy temperament. The Great Concert of the Night (2018) is narrated by David, the mild-mannered curator at a provincial museum who is reflecting on an old relationship with a beguiling actress named Imogen, who starred in erotic French films. Live; live; live (2020) is narrated by the fastidious Joshua, who is recalling his relationship with a magnetic, somewhat affected medium named Lucas Judd. The subject of Tell (2024) is a self-made art collector named Curtis who has disappeared, but our guide is the garrulous gardener on his Scottish estate, who is being interviewed for a film.

Buckley’s narrators are often skeptical of characters whose performances seem “too studied” or “actorly”; they are drawn instead to those who have a “characteristic style, but a style that didn’t seem to be something created consciously to make an impression.” The latter is a good description of Buckley’s best fiction, which is refreshingly free of self-regard: lovingly crafted but out of devotion to his characters rather than to exhibit his technical gifts. This may have something to do with the fact that he began publishing novels relatively late, in his early forties, after a career editing and writing Rough Guides (to Italy primarily but also to music). Buckley’s guidebooks are beautifully written but, in keeping with the form, not interferingly so. His novels embody an idea of writing as self-effacing transmission. They share the traits of a “brilliant conversationalist” described in his debut, The Biography of Thomas Lang (1997): “relaxed, curious, modest and unpredictable.”

The Biography of Thomas Lang is perhaps Buckley’s flashiest and most exuberant work. Thomas was a celebrated concert pianist who died in a mysterious car accident. The book is composed of the fizzing correspondence between his cantankerous brother Christopher and Thomas’s would-be biographer, Michael Dessauer. Out of “compassion” for Dessauer’s “profound and resolute ignorance,” Christopher agrees to help, though his assistance largely takes the form of derisive faultfinding: “You are to be congratulated on your achievement in selecting, out of a field of dozens, the most obtuse extant observer of my brother’s school days.” Christopher is clearly enjoying himself, administering impractical if astute advice about the treacherous nature of biographical writing: “Remind yourself from time to time that what you’re doing is tracing faces in the clouds.” Thanks to the epistolary form we are entertained by his mordant eloquence without feeling hassled to applaud it as writing.

Buckley followed The Biography of Thomas Lang with a trio of novels written in the third person: Xerxes (1999), about an aspiring architect living in early-nineteenth-century Munich; Ghost MacIndoe (2001), which spans the life of Alexander, a dreamy boy born in London during World War II; and Invisible (2004), set in a fading bucolic hotel due to be shuttered at the end of the summer and rotating among a small cast of its remaining staff and guests, principally a blind translator named Edward Morton. Invisible in particular is tenderly imagined. But each of these early novels lacks some of the sparkle—and levity—of Buckley’s debut. After Invisible he embraced the first person—or rather resumed it, shorn of the epistolary architecture—and it was then that he really hit his stride.

So He Takes the Dog (2006) opens with the discovery of a washed-up corpse. It is ostensibly a murder mystery narrated by one of the detectives on the case, John Donohue, but the question of how “Henry, the hobo,” died is gradually overtaken by the mystery of who he was—and who Donohue is. Like Dominic Pattison, he is a seemingly dependable, levelheaded figure who embarks on an affair (in Donohue’s case with a witness). What begins as a crime novel becomes diluted or derailed.

The genre echoes across the rest of Buckley’s work. Just about every novel has a character with a scar. Scars are the sort of literary device of which Buckley is fond: primitive but effective—instant importers of menace and mystery. They are superficial but also deep; after all, to have a scar is to have suffered something. (They are “marks of life,” as one character puts it.) Almost every novel contains an episode of violence, often incongruous. Most open after a death or a disappearance, or with the knowledge of an impending one, and they often feature a breakup, too, usually the result of adultery. Although these deaths are not murders (bar Henry’s), the novels retain the air of mysteries. Like detective stories, they are efforts to piece something together, though what’s being pieced together is not a crime but a character.

That kind of mystery is not susceptible to resolution, of course, and Buckley’s books do not drive toward a denouement. The “action” in which these plotless novels specialize is the piecemeal revelation of a character whose death has rendered them a permanent enigma. In this sense The Biography of Thomas Lang laid the template. Over the course of the novel we see Thomas from various angles: he is capable of pomposity and generosity, cruelty and integrity. His sensitivity cuts both ways: he insults a piano tuner (“the etiolated little twerp”) but is also awestruck by landscapes. Toward the very end we glimpse the torments (“awash with a feeling of regret,” “assailed by the Furies”) that his brother seems intent on dismissing. Indeed Christopher’s admonishments about the futility of biography begin to seem like a defense against facing painful truths. In his brisk English way, he never admits to any feelings about the loss of his brother, despite the accumulating indications of their closeness, and is obstinately incurious about why Thomas’s car came off the road. Beneath the spirited surface, as the mystery of Thomas’s death wanes, its tragedy dawns.

At one point Christopher fabricates letters from his brother to teach Dessauer a lesson. We are taken in, too, of course, and when, in “penance” for his “prank,” Christopher produces “three examples of His Master’s Voice, all a hundred per cent pure,” the possibility occurs to us that these are made up as well—which of course they are, like everything else in the book, a “biography” of an imaginary person. It’s as though we experience a version of Christopher’s bereavement: we are confronted with the fact that Thomas is not alive, even though he seems so on the page. Yet this also reminds us that real people can endure as fictions , too.

Perhaps the most painfully explicit case of this dynamic—growing intimacy and dawning tragedy—is Telescope (2010), which is presented as the journal of a man named Daniel Brennan, who is dying of a disfiguring genetic condition. Daniel barely leaves the house because he doesn’t want to be seen. He turns out to be a wonderful vicarious narrator, regaling us not with his own stories—“the highs, the lows, the women I have known,” as he jokes at one point—but with those of his family. Like almost all Buckley’s novels, Telescope is a kind of matryoshka doll, stories nested within other stories, memories within memories; one finds oneself, for instance, absorbed in an anecdote about Daniel’s father’s friends’ parents’ parents. This layering gives the books, and their characters, an extraordinary sense of depth.

The doctor who recommends that Daniel keep a diary is dismayed that he is not writing about himself. But “all these sentences had been written by me, therefore I was what she was seeing. These pages were full of me,” Daniel insists, and he is right—his is an indelible, original voice we come to know and love. “I know how my story ends,” Daniel says early on. “No,” replies his beloved carer, Ellen. “If someone is thinking of you, it hasn’t ended.” The dead may be condemned to become characters—faces traced in the clouds—but characters, though they don’t exist, also don’t “end.” Daniel and Thomas are there on the page, in “the perpetual present of the sentence,” as Buckley writes in the final words of The Great Concert of the Night, “where nobody is alive and nobody dead.”

Daniel elides his decline, leaving us to infer it from the way his formerly energetic descriptions—“an operatic dawn to welcome me”—become increasingly clipped: “Brief waft of complicated stink: silage and wet soil, with an undernote of diesel. Too tired to get upstairs; sleep on sofa.” Buckley has a knack for turning abbreviation into forceful, vivid prose. Writing in character appears to have freed him from any temptation to indulge. To gauge the distance traveled, consider this passage from his early third-person novel Ghost MacIndoe:

Angled under the clouds, a cold sunlight, like a halogen beam, made everything in Alexander’s vision appear distinct and urgent, and stamped it all into his memory. Curds of translucent beige grease were lit up around a junction, with particles of sand embedded in them. A long crust of dirt under the lip of the live rail reminded him of the soot that used to fatten on the chimney-breast in his parents’ house. Ragwort was sprouting in a cone of ballast by a corrugated iron shed, and in a nearby garden the wet outer leaves of a young maple glowed like a mesh of small electric lights.

One can feel Buckley luxuriating in the texture of the words themselves, and as a result the description is cluttered, less conspiring with our imagination than overwhelming it. Contrast that impasto with Teresa’s no-nonsense sparsity in One Boat:

The room can be described. It was perfectly memorable because perfectly plain: white walls, white bed, a bare wooden table, a wardrobe, a single shelf of books, a single framed photo (Santorini, dusk). No distractions from the matter in hand.

In So He Takes the Dog an amateur painting is admired for the economy of its illusionism: the “swell of a calf is captured with a tiny tick of grey, an almost invisible stroke shows the crease below a shoulder blade.” Buckley’s prose has become deftly frugal, too, leaving us something to imagine (“Santorini, dusk”). Inside the hotel in Invisible is a mural whose meticulousness is monotonous, except for a boy who “has been painted less fussily than the principal players, with dashes for eyebrows and sketchy folds in the fabric of his shirt.” Buckley’s style has likewise become looser and bolder. His metaphors are often functional, almost colloquial, making amusing use of everyday objects: a thin woman’s collarbones look like “the rim of a bucket,” “a powerful little man” has “biceps like coconuts,” a pompous art teacher’s ruddy cheeks are “slabs of bacon,” a man’s forearms are “thick as loaves,” an aggressive character “never dipped her headlights.” Like Buckley’s scars, these images are rudimentary and unsubtle but instantly evocative.

At the end of One Boat, Patrick says Teresa’s notes are “good” but “maybe not yet the finished item.” He is both right and wrong. For what makes One Boat good is precisely that it appears to be Teresa’s raw notebook. Yet as with the arresting music of Daniel’s abbreviations—“brief waft of complicated stink”—Buckley inserts poetry into Teresa’s seemingly businesslike jottings: “Out in the bay, a single boat was moving—a ruby on the flat black water.”

Buckley’s more recent books are not straight character studies so much as diaristic accretions of the materials for one. They are written not just from the perspective of the narrator but from the “moment of phrase-making,” as Teresa puts it. It is this that accounts for their beguiling combination of mellowness and intricacy, their relaxed unpredictability. The Great Concert of the Night and Live; live; live have a soft, intuitive feel; they are composed of memories, drifting backward and forward in time according to the order in which things come to mind. (Buckley describes himself as “an episodic rather than a narrativist writer.”) “I think I have an image of Lucas as he first appeared to me, but the image is as insubstantial as a figure remembered from a dream of many nights ago,” Joshua says near the beginning of Live; live; live. Such qualifications put distance between us and the character, but they also create proximity with the narrator: Buckley is putting storyteller and reader on the same intimate plane, setting out on a joint quest to imagine someone.

A character in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s novel The Wolves of Eternity (2021) describes starting a new book as being confronted with “a glass wall” through which one has “to make an effort to smash.” Buckley seems to acknowledge that glass barrier—to press our noses up against it—and help us move through it. Reading his fiction can make you wonder why anyone would bother fiddling with the creaking machinery of a premeditated plot—the hassle of moving a character from A to B, or getting through a necessary scene, or smuggling in some exposition—when you can simply go where your imagination and curiosity take you.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given his experience writing guidebooks, most of Buckley’s novels feature holidays in Europe—those artificial interludes during which we make a point of savoring and remembering things. “After I had made sense of the page about a white boat,” Teresa says of reading Petros’s poems,

I looked out over the bay, and there was a white boat, on the dark blue water, and what I had read made me look at it for longer, with more care. It wasn’t that I saw it differently—I just gave it more time. I had lingered. And maybe that’s what he’d had in mind—to make the reader pause. The poem was like a tuning fork, I said—the image had just occurred to me.

The words of the translator Edward Morton have a similar effect. In the morning “everything was blurred and smeared and drab,” but after listening to him, a character sees that “each leaf is its own shape and its own shade of green.” Reading Buckley’s prose—imagining perceiving what he describes—feels as if it sharpens actual perception, and even suggests that imagining is part of what perception is.

One cannot be on holiday all the time, of course, and Buckley makes room for our dull moods, too. His characters frequently fail to have the transporting experience they’re supposed to be having. The second time Teresa hikes up to the ruin, it is naturally an anticlimax: she is conscious “of forcing significance from the situation.” In a beautiful Italian church, Daniel’s sister, Celia, feels as though it “were some sort of gigantic exhibit with a label that read A Beautiful Church.” A character in Invisible knows the hotel “is beautiful, but it is as though she were reporting the fact to herself.” Yet the moral of Buckley’s contagious curiosity is that the more we take an interest in the world—the longer and more carefully we look—the more it will prove to be of interest. “If you are receptive,” Cinzia, Castelluccio’s now deceased unofficial tour guide once said, “the world is richer.’’

In Live; live; live a potter named Kathleen, another departed source of wisdom, describes the game of Go. It is difficult not to feel that Buckley is making a seductive case for his kind of book:

She placed [a single white stone] on the board, and smiled at me, and at the soft click of the little stone against the wood.
This tiny sound was an aspect of the pleasure of go, Kathleen told me, as were the fragrance of the wood, its grain, its weight and density, the color of it, the colors of the stones. With chess there was no such satisfaction in the materials of the game. Chess was hand-to-hand combat….
You begin with the two armies facing each other; here, however, you begin with emptiness, and the potential for any number of games….
“You play not so much to win as to learn, to become a better player,” said Kathleen. “You endeavour to create an interesting thing, with your opponent….” In go every stone is equal. There are no hierarchies of kings and queens and foot soldiers….
There’s no focal point—the whole board is alive.

Buckley’s boards are alive right up to their edges, roaming among the memories of peripheral characters and following the stories of those who are usually overlooked: Daniel’s carer, Ellen, who is in the midst of leaving her disagreeable husband, Roy; Eloni, an undocumented immigrant from Albania working at the hotel in Invisible and “concussed by misery” at her prospects once it closes. Such attentiveness may be traditional, what the novel was built to do, but it can feel radical.

On almost the final page of Invisible, Mr. Morton’s Italian girlfriend, Claudia, with whom he has been having difficulties, sends him an email describing her parents’ antics on the beach, her mother “out in the sun all of the day, with her magazine and her six bottles of tanning lotion” and “her two pairs of Dolce e Gabbana sunglasses,” her father sitting on his “director’s chair” under a parasol “in his big straw hat and long-sleeved shirt and long trousers,” reading “the book with the skull on the cover—it is his Melancholy book.” Eventually they argue:

She threw her magazine in the sand and told him he is crazy. Look, look, she says, waving at the beautiful sky, the beautiful sea, the beautiful beach. You sit there, all wrapped up, reading about misery, she shouts…. What is the point of coming here? Why can’t you enjoy this place? I am enjoying this place, he says, then he goes back to his big fat book of misery and mother turns over on the sunbed, like in bed at home. But in the afternoon, like every afternoon, they went for a walk together, to the end of the beach and over the rocks. I saw them far away, paddling in the shallow water, walking very close together, almost like they are young again.

Such delightfully gratuitous details convince me that the qualities a chess player like Patrick in One Boat prizes—“narrative torque,” “keeping the destination in sight, at all times”—are not necessary and that in the right hands our pleasures can be both simpler and more complicated. The criteria may be closer to a character’s verdict on a classical music concert in Nostalgia: “I enjoyed it. It held my attention. It surprised me.” Nothing much happens in these books, but their precision is gripping. “Savoring the scents of the air,” Teresa writes, “I listed the ingredients—seawater, coffee, warmed wood, exhaust fumes (diesel on top), a thin whiff of fish, deodorant & perfume/aftershave (Sauvage + unknowns) cigarettes, lemon, cooking oil.” This doesn’t look like polished prose, but it cues us to imagine with sensuous richness. Reading the interesting things Buckley has created, we take satisfaction in “the totality of what could be seen,” as Teresa writes: “nothing astounding, but everything beautiful.”