This reading group guide for Delphi includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Clare Pollard. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

Introduction

In this distinctive debut novel, COVID-19 has descended on London, and a Classics professor immersed in her next academic publication becomes obsessed with divining the future—as her own future, and the future of her family, begins to slip out of her grasp completely. She is working on a book about prophecies in the ancient world and so, as her husband drinks, her son withdraws, and Trump tweets, she turns to psychics, oneiromancy (prophecy by dreams), cleromancy (prophecy by random numbers), and even the language of angels to cope with the increasingly suffocating pandemic. A proxy for us all, Clare Pollard’s unnamed narrator is searching for certainty in an increasingly unpredictable world only to have the present rear its ugly head when she’s least expecting it. Darkly funny, cerebral, and bold, Delphi asks what is lost and gained when we confront the abyss, and how we will all transform when we emerge on the other side.

Topics & Questions for Discussion

1. Choosing a few chapters at random, find the connection between the “prophecy by X” titles and the content of the respective chapters—which were easier to parse, and which were more of a metaphorical leap for you? Which was your favorite, and why?

2. What is the role of motherhood in Delphi?

3. In Greek mythology, Jason is Medea’s husband and the leader of the Argonauts; in Delphi, Jason is the narrator’s husband. How does the latter diverge from the former, and how might they be similar?

4. How does the narrator wield humor? What are some lines that made you chuckle?

5. First appearing in the Anne Carson epigraph, brackets pop up when the narrator checks WhatsApp on her phone, has sex with Jay, and finds Xander in the cupboard. What function does this device have?

6. Out of all the ways of fortune-telling the narrator turns to, which did you find the most compelling?

7. Brainstorm some adjectives you would use to describe the narrator, Jason, and Xander. Do they share any words in common? What aspects of their identities create the biggest rifts between them?

8. Delphi ends with the narrator telling Xander the story of the Sibylline Books and Tarquin the Proud. How does the fact that we read a slightly different version of this lore earlier in the novel affect how the story lands now? Of all the stories to tell a recuperating Xander, why do you think the narrator chose this one? And, of all the ways to conclude the book, why do you think Clare chose this scene?

9. Clare is a poet, and she published five collections before Delphi. How do you think this informs her prose in Delphi? Are there any lines that feel especially lyrical to you?

10. Reflecting back to your own experience of the early pandemic, in what ways do you identify with the narrator? Do you think Delphi captures that era well? How so?

Enhance Your Book Club

1. From The Devil’s Advocate to The Uninhabitable Earth to Altarpiece, Clare sprinkles literary and cultural references throughout Delphi. Write down a list of as many as you can find and split up into groups to look them up online. Can you find any connections to the novel and the themes within it? You could also come up with a list of other unmentioned works of first-person narration, contemporary womanhood, and characters dealing with crises, and discuss how these selections differ from or are similar to Delphi.

2. The past haunts the narrator, but we only get a few snippets that hint to her history, such as her miscarriage and her father’s alcoholism and death. Imagine what the narrator might be like in a non-pandemic timeline. What would she write about?

3. Clare is also a playwright. Reimagine Delphi as a play: choose your top picks for the main roles, and make a case to the larger group about who would best embody each character.

A Conversation with Clare Pollard

You are a writer of poetry, plays, and now novels. How does your experience in these different genres influence the writing in Delphi? Considering this particular story, why did you decide that a novel was the best vehicle?

Delphi is meant to read like a book of creative nonfiction about prophecies and fortune tellers. I wanted it to have that texture. But then I decided it also needed to have the structure of a Greek tragedy, and my life isn’t a tragedy I’m pleased to say! So I realized that, although I was going to draw on my experiences of the pandemic and my research, I was also going to fictionalize things, and I found that very liberating.

I think Delphi could easily be a play too, with social media as the chorus, but my speaker is someone who is not just locked down in her house, but in her head. She’s this incredibly brilliant, clever woman who has no one to share all her thoughts and fears with—she’s very lonely—and I felt a novel was the best way of showing that interiority.

In researching for Delphi, what was the most fascinating thing you learned?

As a writer I’m really interested in the ways psychics or fortune tellers manipulate language. There’s this “acceptance phenomenon,” which means humans tend to accept almost any personality feedback. So psychics use things called “Barnum statements” (named after the showman) that sound personal but actually apply to everyone, like: “you have a great need for other people to like you” or “you tend to be critical of yourself,” and everyone nods along. “Yes, that’s me!!”

Is there a minor character in Delphi who is of special interest to you, one who you might have explored further if you had the time or space within the world of the novel? If so, why?

I deliberately kept the cast very small, like that of a Greek tragedy. I think the only person I’d like to spend more time with would be the Pythia—the Delphic Oracle—herself. I’m really interested that on one level she’s the most powerful person in the Ancient World, with leaders and kings hanging on her every word. But from another angle she’s completely powerless—just a drugged vessel through whom men channel their propaganda. Which was she really? In the novel I leave it open, but obviously those feminist retellings of Greek myth books are doing very well at the moment, and she’s definitely someone who could be explored further!

Why did you include images?

I’m primarily a poet, and poetry is a visual medium as well as an aural one. We get very hung up about how things look on the page. I’ve always loved novels that use images—I read a lot of graphic novels, and love W. G. Sebald’s use of photography, and the surrealist André Breton’s novel Nadja. I wanted the reader to turn the page and see the tarot card—the Nine of Swords—and have that same lurch in the stomach as the speaker does when the card is turned over. Before you start interpreting it into words there’s something about the image that just chills your soul!

How do you think fear and hope interact in the context of the narrator’s worldview?

It’s very much a midlife crisis novel, and so in many ways it’s about that. As a woman, your narrative is supposed to be about getting married or starting a family, making a home. But what if you have that and you’re not happy? What are you supposed to want next? What are you meant to hope for? When you’re young you go to fortune tellers hoping to hear about romance and fame, but recently I’d found myself avoiding the tarot pack—like, what do I think I’ll see there now I’m in my forties? Illness? Death? And I’m obviously terrified about climate change.

I think we need to hang on to hope though. I always love that Rebecca Solnit quote: “Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.” We mustn’t let fear of the future poison our present and make us give up. Perhaps letting go of some of our obsession with the future might help us be more appreciative of what we have here, now. I think that’s something the narrator learns.

Is there a moment, sentence, or section in Delphi that you find especially beautiful?

My genre is definitely tragicomedy. A lot of my favorite lines are the ones that made me laugh out loud when I thought of them. There’s a kind of beauty in truth! I’m proud of that description of the speaker trying to get a drunken Jason to bed: “And I kind of push Jason up the first steep step and then he trips up the set of them like a sacrificial goat up to the altar.”

As you were developing and writing Delphi, did you turn to any other books or media to inspire you? If so, what are they and how did they influence you?

I was inspired by Olivia Laing’s Crudo, Jenny Offill, Ali Smith—the way they all create that sense that they’re writing the novel in real time, incorporating the randomness of world events. Anne Carson too, obviously; her translations of Sappho were a big influence.

But to be honest, it was lockdown; like most people I was just watching enormous amounts of TV. The dialogue in Succession is as good as any ever written, I think. And I love The Boys too, how far they push things on that show. I wanted this to be a book about a middle-aged woman, but also to have some edge to it. To have the nerve to say the quiet bits loud.

If you could guarantee that readers think more deeply about one idea or concept in your book, what would it be and why?

I think the line: “If to be good is not to harm others, then I live within a system that has made goodness impossible.” Capitalism loves to make us think everything is about individual choices, and I’ve spent a lot of time feeling guilty about every single item in my supermarket trolley. But I’m starting to realize it shouldn’t all be on the shoulders of an ordinary mum who’s just trying to buy breakfast for her kids. We have to direct our anger at the system itself, which has made goodness so difficult.

On page 103, you include a reference to yourself as “the poet Clare Pollard.” Why?

Oh, when I was a teenager I loved all the flashy male writers—Amis, Auster, and Vonnegut all appear in their own books. Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park is great fun. I love a bit of playful metafiction! I love Charlie Kaufman films. So it was just a little fun nod to those guys, and a way of underscoring that the book is fiction and I am not the speaker. (Also, quoting my own translation of Ovid’s Heroides saved me having to pay for permissions).

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio (August 2, 2022)
• Runtime: 4 hours and 11 minutes
• ISBN13: 9781797145402

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