Endless Reads Review: Burnt Island by Alice Thompson

I went out to buy Burnt Island at the urging of a review by John Self in the Guardian – you can read his take here, if you like. It’s a toothsome take on the novel, summing it up on a quick heel-turn.

 

In short, because you might have taken my advice and gone off to read Self’s review (thank you for returning, by the way) Burnt Island is a weird, unsettling shard of satire, specifically on the writing life. The protagonist, Max Long, a long-term writer low on grand successes, wins a place on the mysterious, other-Atlantic Burnt Island.This is to afford him three months writing time, in which he plans to embark on shoving aside his literary principles and creating the ultimate horror best seller. Of course, the crumbling begins right away with Long encountering the warm, suspiciously welcoming recluse-author James Fairfax. and is beautifully done.

 

But where is the line to be drawn, between Long’s fictional reality and his fictional design?  Little acidic drips referencing The Shining fall early and with a Jack Nicholsonesq wink, as do echoes of many other film and literary horrors. The levels of rooms, the seabound setting of The Bloody Chamber. Though not strictly horror, Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, as Self mentions. And The Wicker Man, with the isolated setting and slightly off-kilter locals. But why is Thompson signaling these parallels? When odd sights – or are they delusions? – start to plague Long, is this par for the course for a writer on the edge, or are we the readers submitting to the self-aware tugs of authorial intent? And why? The ground is tricky, but a tricky we can navigate, like a bog made of raincoats and signs pointing the way. The text remains slippery.

 

Yet Thompson rolls her tiny, dry sentences at us like circles of bone, all white and hard with marrow inside. Often with a dark, urbane humour. After Max is attacked by Skuas, he takes a visit to the doctor, who dabs the cuts on his scalp some TCP. The sting seems to hurt him worse than the earlier Hitchcockian incident:

 

He felt he had never known such pain since his agent, on reading his recent manuscript, asked him where the rest of it was.

 

The self-pitying writer is both willing and unwilling victim of his actions – as writer, as failed husband, as failure at faking his way to a blockbuster, as possible dupe – just as the police officer from The Wicker Man condemns himself by his investigations, and cold blind piety. And we await with puzzled glee the unraveling, in all its ambiguities. Receptive in the way of large, wheeling sea birds, above the jut of a stony, sinister coastline.

 

 

On the isle

 

 

This is the isle of Arran seen from the town of Troon. Out of order, as D and I went first to the island and then the town. But I wanted to start with this image of hazy beauty, and from there draw nearer.

 

 

 

The Caledonian MacBrayne ferry left from the mainland at Ardrossan Harbour. A rough crossing; earlier ferries had been cancelled, and the one that took us arrived with some  drama. As it took the narrow pass between the harbour walls, it started to lurch to one side in the swells. A gasp went up from the Cal Mac waiting room as it looked for a moment as if the boat would tip too far and slap into the water.

 

Thankfully, the captain manage to right things, and our crossing was a lot calmer than we had expected. D bought a nip of whisky as a palliative,  though I am of the opinion that it would have made matters worse. The crossing lasted 55 minutes and landed at one of the largest villages on Arran, Brodick.

 

 

 

Again, this photo is out of sequence, but the weather was the same: sun and gusts and flecks of rain.

 

D and I took a walk before picking up the later bus to our youth hostel in the North of the island. On our wanderings, we were mobbed by hungry ducks and geese, which we fed from a 50p bag of oats and other duck-appropriate snacks at the side of a woody path.

 

Along the roadside grew a profusion of this plant – raspberries, we thought. But like none we had seen before:

 

 

 

 

 

They did not taste as pungent as their red cousins, nor as sweet. Still, they were good with the Arran cheddar, Creeler’s hot smoked salmon and smoked salmon pate we bought at from shops at Queens Court.

 

But now to our youth hostel in Lochranza – the picture I shared yesterday was taken at the loch shore.

 

 

 

The staff at the youth hostel were so friendly (though D tells me, hard to get hold of when he was secretly arranging things). The rooms basic but scrupulously clean, and the views, of the rhododendron-blanketed back garden, or the loch-facing kitchens, were as gorgeous as any hostel I’ve stayed in. I hesitate to recommend this place as I’d rather it remain quiet for the next time we make it there, but really – it was lovely. A half minute stroll away was this:

 

 

 

The river meeting Loch Ranza, loch of the seals. An estuarine environment where the peereep call of Oyster Catchers stitches the air above the gentle hish of the waters over pebbles. The smell of salt and rotting seaweed fills your head. I associate the smell of the sea with healthiness, though it’s based on nothing at all. It never fails to make me feel better.

 

Further along from the hostel, the preserved ruined castle of the Macsweens sits on a spit of land.

 

 

 

Here’s a very short video I took on my camera of the panorama, taken from the very edge of the castle lands:

 

 

 

We walked on to explore Lochranza, and found this swing set:

 

 

If these are not the swings with the best view in the world, then I would like to know which are.

 

 

 

The next morning we went back, because a thirtieth birthday should definitely include swinging on the best swings in the world.

 

 

What else is there to say of my birthday? Well, there was cake in the morning, and this present from my parents:

 

 

 

 

I’ve only just started playing with it, but I’m amazed with how well it works. This same camera was the one my father used to take (I think) the first picture of me, at a few hours old, in the hospital. Here’s one taken 30 years on from that day at the harbour in Lochranza:

 

 

 

 

We left the island for Troon, which as you saw in the first image in this post sits on the West coast looking out at the island. Our hotel was a step up from the hostel (though sadly not as good as it should have been for a 4 star place). The beach stretched on for miles under the mild high sun. But if I had my way, I’d be on Arran still, exploring the lanes and shoreside. We had such a fleeting visit we missed out on the standing stones and had no time  climb Goat Fell, whose shard-like edges and stories of murder add a menacing edge to the island’s profile. For another week, for another adventure, Arran will be waiting.

 

 

 

A taste of travel

 

 

I turned 30 on the 16th of June and this Saturday, D whisked us off to the isle of Arran in the Firth of Clyde, where neither of us had ever been. The picture above was taken on the 15th at Lochranza, or loch of the seals. A great breath in of salt dusk air – and midgies, but they seemed especially sluggish and easily out-maneuvered.

 

Come back here tomorrow for strange berries, ruins, and of course stories and pictures of those deep and changeable Atlantic/Firth waters.

Endless Reads Review: Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

 

You are born – hopefully not too strenuous a process for you. You grow up – living through various trials and joys and books and exams and pains of all sorts. You near the end, though you may not be old when the end comes – and you die. Again, hopefully not too strenuous a process for you.

 

But plenty of people believe the end is not the end. That you get a second chance; reincarnation. In the case with the life of Ursula Todd, the protagonist of Life After Life, reincarnation means a re-fleshing into the same life (small note for spoilers ahead).

 

Ursula, the ‘little bear’ is born countless times on a snowy February in 1910. She grows up in a charming English home called Fox Corner, plays with her variously boisterous and sweet and confiding siblings, lives through both World War One (though it has less impact on her) and World War Two (which has – several times – a literal impact on her), and, at some point along the way she dies. Over and over again. Sometimes with drama, such as her first death at her moment of birth. Sometimes the going is peaceful. Sometimes harrowing – London in the Blitz. Germany too. After each death comes the black bat of darkness, followed by an image of the snow that fell on her very first birthday.

 

There is reference made to the ouroboros. But throughout these reiterations of life, there is not the sense of smoothness implied in the image of the snake that eats its tail. At least not for the solidly enduring Ursula: she is not privy to the full story. She has only snippets, dreams, omens, to guide her. She makes mistakes. Lives that shatter and fragment too early. Cruelties relived when they could be avoided.  I started to wonder if the ouroboros referred not to her fate, but to that of the reader, rotating at a remove through all the lives lived. Though, of course, all books must end and none infinite, so maybe my analogy falls apart.

 

While I was disappointed with the lack of philosophical depth and the occasionally obvious turns – World War Two+what is effectively time travel = you guessed it: Let’s Kill Hitler – the story was so seamlessly put together that it was hard to object too much. All in all, Life After Life was in many ways the perfect book for my Hamilton-Edinburgh commute. Non-nonsense, fast-paced and written, in the way all of Atkinson’s books seem to be written, with an eye to the reader and a competent grip on the story, like a person driving with one hand on the wheel, another on the dog that is lolling its head out of the window gazing at the fascinating scenery, threatening to tumble out.

 

 

Sojourn

 

 

D and I are staying with our friend A in Hamilton while we wait to take up the lease in our new flat in Edinburgh. On Sunday we took an 8-mile walk around the loch above, in Strathclyde Country park. It’s an artificial loch, and somewhere beneath it is the rubble of a village and coal mine (I believe the same colliery that sank Hamilton Palace, displacing the dukes and duchesses forever more).

 

 

 

 

Under blue skies, Lanarkshire is in a different country entirely. What was this odd building? Something belonging to the council, mysteriously cordoned off to all but the birds.

 

 

 

 

Another feature of the loch’s artificiality, this overflow weir, feeding into the narrow river Clyde just across the road. The rhythmic surge made it quite hypnotic, while the pedalos added accents of rubber-duck yellow as their riders chased the birds.

 

 

 

 

The forested rim of the loch provided a break from the rare scorching heat ‘Taps aff’ weather, as people have started to call it. That’s weather that results in men taking their t-shirts off. Generally anything above 16C will lead to this in Scotland. Many women – white women, at any rate – by contrast turn orange overnight, either through tan beds or sunshine from the bottle. In the picture above you can see the opposite phenomenon – the forest floor turning fluffy-white with seed puffs scattered from some tree I don’t know the name of.

 

 

 

We also had a relaxing moment with some of these tadpoles – which always remind me of my childhood on Skye. In summer we would go and scoop up frogspawn to put in our repurposed paddling pool. Then peer over them, watching them grow from day to day.

 

 

I’m happily posting these pictures, though they give a slightly distorted impression of what our stay will be like. I have work through in Edinburgh, and a long commute of about an hour and a half (as opposed to my usual 25 minutes on foot). Most of the time we all be too tired to head out on adventures like this one. Though at the end of the week, something special -  I turn 30 on the 16th of June. And D is in charge of events. I suspect a small adventure might occur then.

 

For the rest of the week I shall be digging into books on the long train journey. My friend P gave me a gorgeous hardback of Life After Life by Kate Atkinson in return for my battered ARC copy of the heart-wrenching The Light and the Dark by Mikhail Shishkin. I have been flying through it, as I do with Atkinson’s fiction – I think I’ve devoured just about every one of her novels, aside  from the detective stories (crime fiction and I are not on speaking terms, generally). I hope to have a review for you of this absorbing slab of fiction in a few days time.

 

Until then – reading, working, living in A’s flat, and little writing at all until the move once again into a room of one’s own.

 

Endless Reads Review: NW by Zadie Smith

 

 

In the midst of moving out of our flat and into our friend A’s place, I sit in a chaos of belongings, writing this review. It seems fitting for this novel – the idea of fragments strewn everywhere, or neat in bags, waiting to be zipped up to some conclusion.

 

I first began NW on a sleeper train to London, having got the book at its first availability at the Edinburgh Book Festival in August last year. My copy is signed by Smith, and I wrote about the talk she delivered here. Why the long wait between then and now? I lent the book to G, in London and two weeks ago we met up in Glasgow and she gave it back to me. It is a well-traveled object.

 

As for the book itself, I started back mid-stream, finding that I could remember much of what had happened to the characters. The multitude was engaging and fresh. One of Smith’s great skills is dialogue, and in fact I felt that this whole thing could be made into a radio play quite easily. Londoner phrases I’d never heard and some I knew from my friends, like to ‘bell you’ for phone, ‘gotta chip’ for have to leave now, sprung out. The differences in accents and grammar across different social classes and immigrant groups were also smartly recorded and subtly held up to the reader’s eye, though I have to admit I didn’t get it all – London being its own country, threaded and intersected in complex ways by all these Englishes. Smith, however, gets it.

 

Or almost all: The scenes with Annie, the ballet dancer aristocratic junkie stood out as a little tin thread amongst the seamlessness of the whole. She sounded like someone who only existed in a play, and only then a monologue, and only then a monologue at some basement showing during the Edinburgh festival, put on to an audience of three.

 

But that was the only off part about dialogue, at least, as far as it was apparent to a non-Londoner like me. There was maybe too much of it, but since it was so good, and since Smith’s writing doesn’t favour scenic descriptions (leaving the city ‘grey’ to me, a lot of the time – a system of tube stops and street names) it added a vividness that would otherwise have been missing.

 

So I swooped through this book, once I had it again, and was greatly enjoying it. Until the din of voices calmed to that of predominantly a single character, Natasha Blake. Who was in her own right not as interesting as I’d have hoped. A character can be unlikeable as anything, or as charmingly good as Bit Stone in Arcadia. But to be boring is a crime. She was dully married, dully seeking affairs online, dully wrecked everything, wondered if she had a self and felt dryly at a loss when the answer she judged was no. The last part of the novel, in which she walks away from all devastation and ‘becomes walking’, and brushes with a suicidal impulse, was also dull. It felt like the writer taking the plot out for one last walk before bed. I know that impulse myself, but if it had been new, or if Smith had been able to make the London Blake travels through come alive, then I would have devoured it like I had the rest.

 

Instead I read to read, to be done. There was a lot to love and admire in this – the effortless weaving of so many voices, the clever scattered pieces here and there – but in the end NW was not enough of a destination, too much a cul-de-sac street.

Endless Reads Review at PANK: Errantry: Strange Stories by Elizabeth Hand

Looking for weird, compelling tales? My review of this collection is up at PANK:

 

There’s a sense of wholeness to Errantry: Strange Stories which makes it appear, at first, easy to discuss. The subheading is ‘Strange Stories’ and strange they are. Ten stories make up this collection, ten distinct but obviously blood-related kin. Each populated by wonderstruck onlookers or sinister, eccentric figures. Each set in places – Woodlands, coast, mountains, cityscapes – that are uncertain grounds, warped by mysterious forces, but rich in realistic detail. There is a sense of accrual in each story. But what is being accrued is a sense of long lasting dis-ease. An enthrallment that is hard to shake or find out the edges of.

 

Read more…

Supernatural, sunshine and a tweet-up

 

First of all – thank you to all of you for the support and congratulations you flooded me with yesterday! It was very heartening. As those of you who write will know, the end days of the (sort-of) final draft can feel like the last days of a war. I mean, from back when wars wrapped up. There are lots of limping figures inside canonballed buildings, raising pathetic white flags, while the din is still ongoing – anyway, truce has been declared.

 

My next essay on Supernatural is up on The Female Gaze:

 

Are you sitting comfortably? I have someone I’d like you to meet. His name is Castiel, and he is an angel of the lord and an all-round badass in a beige trench coat. He appears in the very first episode in season four, ‘Lazarus Rising’ in one of the best character introductions I can call to mind: the unwary get their eyes burned out, light bulbs flicker and smash, knives have no effect, nor do hurried incantations or devil’s traps – yes, Castiel is an angel and he fights hard for Heaven’s side. But I don’t want to talk about his magnificent entrance, or his various forays into action in the first half of the season. I want to talk, instead, about vulnerabilities, influence, and family. And for once, not the Winchester family in all their toils.

 

Read More…

 

Rather unexpectedly last night I went out (I had forgotten what ‘going out’ was like), to a literary ‘tweet up’. If you don’t know what that is, it is when people who are on twitter peel themselves away from social media and talk to each other in a charming setting, over wine and snacks. It was organised by the Edinburgh City of Literature, and the charming setting was Looking Glass Books, an elegant fishtank of a bookshop in the new Quartermile development of the city.

 

I had never been in Looking Glass Books before, as it’s slightly out of the way, but it really is a beautiful place, with a nice-looking cafe and very tempting layout. Given that I’m moving there was no chance to buy any books, though a canvas bag with a quote from Orlando really caught my eye. I resisted. I hope they hold more events there – a reading night would be amazing. Anyway, it was lovely to finally meet and chat with Subtlemelodrama, a twitter friend whose reviews I follow and who has a book coming out soonish. And more of this going out thing soon, I hope.

 

As for sunshine? It has been glorious here and I have been in hiding during almost all of it. So now, aspirational sunshine. A wish for walking in balmy weather. Aiming for fluffy clouded skies. And maybe an ice lolly? I’m full of ambitions, you see.

Milestone

 

The title and epigraph of this novel of mine. Finished. At least for now (the Anne Carson quote is just so fitting. And Anne Carson! Anne Carson forever, of course)

 

I sent Flesh of the Peach off to my agent this morning. More edits are likely on the horizon. But for now, it’s done. Began in 2010. In Queens, New York, in a flat full of bedbugs. Worked on in Manhattan, then in Edinburgh. It is an international book in origin and in content. Now I can rest a little. Just a little, and D and I can work on finding ourselves a place to live and other trivial tasks and adventures.

 

Marking your little white milestones, I think, is a good thing to do when you are traveling without a road.

Endless reads review: Arcadia by Lauren Groff

source: http://www.laurengroff.com/books/arcadia/ Because I love the US cover far more than the UK.

 

Some books find you at the wrong time. You’re harried by winter weather and stresses at work. You pick up a book in which the characters are depressed, living in worlds of grey slump. You put the book down after reading – because it might be a good book, you thrash through to the end – but feel so weary. There is a sticky film of gloom now on you that can be days to shift.  At another time in your life you might be in the right frame to deal with this. But too late, the book has already got to you.

 

Not so with Arcadia. I picked this book up at just the perfect moment, and basked in it. D and I were in an uncertain place – moving flat soon, but unsure of where we would be going (D’s job will keep us in Edinburgh, we know now). I was and am still battering into novel edits, which leaves me too tired to deal with book of existential crises and brutal honesty. I wanted something that was well-written and would be a comfort. In the bookshop I came across Arcadia and knew from the first page it was what I was searching for.

 

The women in the river, singing.

This is Bit’s first memory, although he hadn’t been born when it happened. Still, the road winding through the mountains is clear to him, the rest stop with the yellow flowers that closed under the children’s touch. It was dusk when the Caravan saw the river greening around the bend and stopped there for the night. It was a blue spring evening, and cold.

 

A gentle sigh. Vivid richness. A story of an idyllic childhood in less than easy surroundings – Bit Stone is the first child born to the commune of what will become Arcadia, a benign collective based in a sprawling semi-wilderness of woodlands in America. The novel follows him in his fifth year, his early teens, and then skips forward twenty years to his life after the dream of Arcadia is over, and onward still from that, into our future.  It’s a quiet pacing. My favourite parts of the novel were the earliest parts, steeped in nostalgia that strangely works with the present tense  Groff uses – I think because childhood is nearly always immediate?

 

It’s a novel full of woodsmoke and humanity. The delicate wide-eyed kindess of Little Bit. The giant figures of Bit’s mother Hannah and father Abe, the smells of bread making, the clatter of work as the people of the commune fix up, plant, chop, serve food. It’s a novel to fall into on a dim dank day when other matters press into your headspace. It clears a space.

 

In the latter sections, in New York City and in the future  where the world appears, briefly, near crumbling in the face of medical and environmental disasters, I was not so charmed as in the first, but the novel still held together well, and there were some gentle surprises in the plot. The adult Bit is so obviously the good man, the sympathetic character that it might become jarring in less skilled hands. I like characters who might occasionally do the worst thing, lash out, make a mess. But Bit is always calm, artistic, gravely attesting to the best in all around him. I wanted more spite, but at the same time as I read, I couldn’t begrudge the choices the author had made. Not while the prose felt like a cool hand against my forehead, a walk in the wild woods where the birds are sweetly calling and nothing, for the moment of reading, can ever be wrong.