Departure

 

I am off to the wedding of my friends A and M, down in the English Peak District. Things will be quiet, but I hope to take advantage of the (presumably) lovely scenery and take a lot of photos – snow is predicted. Which I would be excited about, but it’s March, and March snow is always a little wearying.

 

Happy International Women’s Day and World Book Night (for yesterday). I shall be merging the two holidays by reading a book by a woman on the long train journey down – The Secret History by Donna Tartt.  So if the landscapes going by the train are gloomy and misted like the picture of the Meadows above, I shall have something to keep my mind off of it.

 

Wishing you a good weekend, and that if you are in the frozen Northern Hemisphere, that you stay as toasty as you please.

 

Endless reads review: Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter

 

Suitably grainy I hope, for this book – the story of end-of-the-19th-century aerialiste Sophie Fevvers, the ‘Cockney Venus’ and a woman apparently endowed with six-foot wings. A freak or a con artist – Jack Walser, all-American reporter, is out to uncover the sordid truth. Call it ‘Interview with the Valkyrie’. Nights at the Circus was recently named best ever winner of the James Tait Award – the oldest literary prize in the UK. The book came out in 1984, making it slightly younger than me, but the prose has an exuberant, antique style that will be familiar to you if you’ve ever read The Bloody Chamber (my review on Goodreads here).

 

It can be a little irritating at first to slip on Carter’s cloak of furs and whalebone – all those adverbs, and exclamation marks, and the word ‘surmise’ every few pages or so. She breaks about every writing rule on any of the fine puritan lists there are out there. She throws big words at you like confetti, allusions to philosophy and politics and feminism and theories of language bubble up through the velvet soup.

 

So too, do the biases of empire (this is very much a book of old empire, of the magic of acquisition, manor-houses, the dreamy, rotten, lost glamour of pre-revolutionary St Petersburg, the Shamanic Siberian wastes of a richly English imagination. Native Americans are alluded to as scalp-stealing barbarians. People of Mongolian heritage and Chinese-made automata alike are ‘inscrutable’. The Kentucky Colonel ringmaster is straight out a child’s colouring book of stereotypes.

 

But for all these faults, this is one of those books that attempts to both tell a story and truly bewitch you. Invites you in and will, if you let it, sweep you into a magical world that might just be frayed tapestry and candlelight and incense – but with the curtains shut tight, and your eyes locked in to the rhythm, it seems churlish to reject it altogether. Nights at the Circus is, in this way, a perfect book for Winter, for reading over hot chocolate, as the wind howls or the snow falls, and midnight strikes three times in one night, just for you.

 

 

Looking for Dr Livingstone + interview news

 

Today D and I made our way back to the National Museum of Scotland with the aim of walking through the exhibit on Dr David Livingstone, explorer, missionary and abolitionist. True to his reputation, he was a little hard to find. The exhibit was tucked away on the third floor of the new part of the museum. It was interesting, if a bit piecemeal.

 

Livingstone was born into a cotton mill worker family, and worked at the mill from the age of 10. An exceedingly bright boy, he was taught to read and write, then taught himself Latin. He saved up enough money to go to University in Glasgow, but to save a penny on the cart fare, had to make his way on foot up the river clyde from Blantyre every morning. Good training for his later rambles around Malawi and southern Africa. There was a video, filmed in Malawi, talking to residents there in the Malawian town of Blantyre – they seemed happy with his legacy there, of his pacts with local tribe leaders to end the East African-Indian Ocean slave trade.

 

But I am suspicious of heroes, particularly of strong men of the British Empire who, regardless of whether they were doing good themselves, went into ‘the dark continent’ with the aim of opening it up to Europe.  There wasn’t a lot of analysis, and only one dissenting voice was lightly mentioned, that of John Kirk, the botanist who traveled on one of Livingstone’s expeditions. Livingstone was, it seemed, a hard leader. And then there was that famous meeting with Stanley, where the presumed Dr Livingstone refused to come back to Britain, and later died in a village in Malawi of a nasty combination of Malaria and Dysentery.

 

Well, whoever he was (D wants to read his journals now), we saw his little navy cap and his nice sketch of a fish from Lake Malawai.

 

I enjoy visiting the museum, which has free entry, and it’s a good thing too. Coming in the new year, after I’ve finished this second ms (May at the latest, I hope), I will be going there a lot. And to the grand Central Library on George IV bridge. Research for novel number 3. It is going to be about a strong, egotistic leader and her followers, and set in the wastes of Edinburgh. I’ll not reveal too much more before I have an outline in place. As you can see from the picture above, there’s a certain atmosphere to the city in winter – a soft harshness – which I want to learn and replicate for my postapocalyptic version.  Anyway, that’s enough for now.

 

The other piece of news I have is that Smokelong Quarterly is coming out next week. In it will be my Edinburgh-based flash, ‘Boy Cyclops’, and an interview with me (first ever interview!), facilitated by the excellent writer Casey Hannan. (Casey’s book, Mother Ghost, is available on pre-order from Tiny Hardcore Press. His writing is really beautiful and weird and compelling, and I’ll be picking it up when I can).  When Smokelong goes live I’ll link to it here, and you will have lots to read, should you wish.

 

Finally! Don’t forget to submit your photograph for my competition! The deadline is the 31st of this month.

 

Endless Reads Review: 1Q84

 

 

I have reached the end of nearly a thousand pages of Murakami’s three-volume work and have sat letting my thoughts marinade for a while and finally, finally, I think I’m ready to write about it and move on.

 

Was it a slog? Was it an intellectually-challenging book which kept me furrowing my brow over the complexities and playfulness of language? No.

 

Was it a total piece of fluff – I’m inclined to say yes, but others might disagree with me.

 

I described 1Q84 a few posts ago as a big souffle with jelly beans in it, and I still hold that view. Souffles are notoriously difficult, and Murakami does not quite pull this one off, though it almost looks as if he might. There are little bits of egg in the mix, little doughy bits of flour. So, the plot of the novel is too long for me to delve into here, and further, recounting it would probably just make reading it unnecessary – it’s one of those ‘the story is the story’ pieces. But for me, the twists and turns of plot felt mostly arbitrary – a few threads the author had chosen to weave together, to no discernible purpose.

 

In the end, most of the main tensions of the novel are not so much not resolved (which can be tantalising, leaving room for the reader to go exploring on their own) as dropped. Main characters wander off, the mystery is explained away as fiction, the ‘Little People’  – the sinister multiverse-shifting baddies of the novel, and the novel within the novel – snuffed out with no satisfying, or even unsatisfying encounter. ‘oh well, it was all an alternative reality’ doesn’t add much. If the language had been exciting, that might have helped paper over the cracks. But it was fairly straightforward, even turgid at times.

 

Also of note: number of references to the breasts of female characters, either from themselves (worrying about size) or from male observers thinking how perfect they are (uh huh). It started to wash over me after a while, because it happened so frequently. Other motifs: what people are wearing, each step of how they cook their dinners, Jehovah’s Witnesses are a cruel cult, the magic of hand-holding, Oedipal fantasy stuff that was poorly developed.

 

Despite these irritations, 1Q84 is fun and engaging, and mostly hurries on at a good pace. It’s as easy to read as pringles and jaffa cakes are to eat, and about as remarkable, for all its superficial colourfulness and weight. Some of the chapters which follow Tengo (the male lead character) and his strained relationship with the man who may or may not be his father, are quite moving, as are those in which Aomame (the female lead character) meets with a wealthy but lonely and vengeful dowager (another of the bit-players who disappears off the map). I think 1Q84, at its heart, is  an Ideal Romance, and Ideal Romances, as you may know, are inherently static. They merely give the appearance of action – of separation, risk, danger, excitement. At their centre they hold steady around a solid, immutable love. If you know that, going in, perhaps you’ll be happier to excuse all that stuff whizzing round your head.

December reads

 

I know that lots of literary sites and blogs are putting up their Best Of 2012 lists about now but I am in resistance! The year is not over til those bells chime on Hogmanay. With that resolution in heart, Endless Reads 2012 continues into December. So far I have read Somewhere (which I will review shortly) and I’m closing in on 1Q84. After that, the titles above, so thoughtfully complimentary coloured:

 

The Missing Shade of Blue by Jennie Erdal, a philosophical mystery published by Abacus – the title comes from a philosophical problem posed by David Hume regarding the conception of a colour you have never seen (it’s a bit complicated to explain so here’s the wiki). It’s set in Edinburgh, which makes it I think the only first-read of the year set in my own city (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was a welcome re-read).

 

The Light and The Dark by Mikhail Shishkin (Quercus) is a book that has not yet been released and that I have acquired through the generosity of Blackwell’s on South Bridge’s Christmas Book Quiz. D and I inadvertently showed up when the quiz was starting, and decided to join in, though D was there  do some preparatory work for an interview and is not overly interested in contemporary fiction. Our team, Book Shaped Heart, came 8th out of 11, which was not too shabby considering the difficulty level. Because it was Christmas, everyone who participated had the chance to choose a book from a few boxes set up in the back and this was my choice – from the blurb on the back it seems to be a kind of Russian literary version of the film The Lakehouse. Which I haven’t seen because Romantic films aren’t really my thing. But! The book might be anything, really.

 

The Last title is Another Country by Anjali Joseph (Fourth Estate). This was sent to me by a friend, and the author is a friend of his. It’s about a woman in her twenties living in Paris, London and Bombay. I have high hopes – it was savaged in The Telegraph for being (shock horror) more about character than plot, and seems to focus on un-belonging and rootlessness which I think I will enjoy.

 

Whether I will get through all of these titles before the bells remains to be seen, but I’m going to have a good time trying. They’re all newly published (or in the case of the second, unpublished) so I’m still keeping to my promise of reading new, vibrant things. What will Endless Reads 2013 bring? I haven’t decided yet. Should I have a theme? Would that be too artificial? What would you like to see?

 

Mundane bones livid heart

 

Editing yesterday, and trying to disassociate myself from the words, which have become hard like soap, and tasteless. I feel like a discount Midas right now. But a good tactic I’ve found is to pick up an author, not necessarily one I am overly fond of, and to read a few pages before turning to my own. Someone who writes and thinks very differently from me is helpful. Murakami’s 1Q84, which I’ve been shaking my head over (so explain-y, so repetitive, so addicted to the cliffhanger chapter ending)  but also hoovering up – it is enough to jolt me out of my usual tendencies, and therefore my usual mistakes. It clears the text a little, reminding me that I do, perhaps sometimes, need to set out what is happening and why, rather than always making the reader act as archeologist brushing at my dust.

 

Here is the other side of being a writer, I tell myself. We cannot read Proust all the time (though I haven’t read my Proust in quite a while. Too many other more urgent, exciting books in the way). The thing is, I have always been a huge snob when it comes to reading. I find it very hard not to be. This only applies to fiction, not books of theory (which I struggle with and give up on far more than someone with a PhD in English Lit should really admit to). I only want to read the best, that is, the most ambitious and enchanting and devastating novels. I want to get lost in swamps of words and carry those perfect, glassy iceblocks of prose around to wonder at – but. I also have to learn to write clearer myself, thinner, if need be.

 

If I want to acquire more techniques, I need to be able to learn from multiple sources. And not just books that strive in different ways (1Q84 a kind of giant jellybean souffle that I would never normally want to imitate). I need to drink cups of artificially flavoured hazelnut coffee and remember the punch of coffee from roadside gas stations as D and I drove through the American heartlands. I need to sip weird combinations of teas. Take risks on picking up unusual things as well as the usual, the popular, that I often discard. This does not mean I’m going to start watching Strictly Come Dancing. There are limits. I just need to listen to how people really speak, or how they speak when they are bad actors. I need to watch silly TV dramas and eavesdrop more. I need to sit in company.

 

I went to see Alasdair Gray reading from his collection, All the Short Stories, and was startled to find how direct and simple and yet effective his works were. I need to learn these sorts of skills. To be brave is also to approach the everyday without the defenses of dismissal. Frightening stuff. If I can learn to refine, then that will not mean I must always take something out of my words. That I must always dispel the pretty mist that hangs about them. I can make the choice to keep it in. But it might mean that, sometimes. The acquisition of a sharper, less precious eye. It might mean mundane bones and cheap fabrics. If that’s what’s needed to set the semi-magical, semi-flesh heart beating.

The smallness of what we can gather

 

Do you have a quote you can bring to mind, or have found recently – I won’t ask for a favourite – but something that you find incredibly precise or beautiful in its attention to language? Or where the ideas stir you and seem the best articulation of something you’d perhaps never thought to think?

 

I want to quote here from Heroines. Specifically, towards the close of the book, where she utters part rallying cry, part acknowledgement to the community of writers online, part kick, part song to being thin skinned and writing despite lack of recognition.

 

I want just to say, I felt it all.

 

 

“I’m tired of trying to hurl my girl-body against the great unfeeling fortress of academia and old-guard literary publishing”

and

“In a way this subculture of literary blogs, fluid, amorphous, non-hierarchical, functions as a community of solidarity, privately and publically – fighting against feelings of illegitimacy and invisibility, of feeling like ghosts in the physical world”

and

“We cannot wait around to be discovered. If you can’t write masterpieces, why write? the doctors said to Zelda [Fitzgerald].”

 

I would quote it all. I can’t. But I think of light, when I put this down.

How the internet is light broken up and reformed, broadcast in pixels, in beams. How the internet is a trembling net of light across the world.  Marvel. How words on the internet and in books are tiny darknesses printed on white. Of the smallness of words that have traveled a long way, visible, invisible, here and now, gone, shared. And I am thankful for how much good writing there is still left to transmit and cheer, from one place to another.

The London writeup part three

Onwards, to Camden!

 

 

 

I’d tired myself out walking, so thought I’d give a rest to my legs and take the way of the future – the underground!

 

 

Camden at lunchtime was colourful and bustled with hungry young people. The markets on Inverness St stuffed with hundreds of tee shirts printed with the ubiquitous ‘Keep calm do X’ slogans, Camden High Street lined with knock off headphones and heart shaped sunglasses.

 

 

 

Unfortunately, I was going the wrong way – I had taken the wrong spoke of the roads that cross the canal. An easy thing to do, my friend G later told me. Camden is tricky if you don’t know the lay of the streets.

 

 

 

But if I hadn’t got lost, I wouldn’t have seen how lovely it was in the sunshine.

 

 

 

Eventually I turned around, and worked out where I was to meet my agent. After a coffee underneath an overhead tube line (possibly a bad idea, shaking me every few minutes) and another read of NW, this time actually in an NW postal code area, I headed to the pub for our meeting.

 

 

 

And what news did I hear there? Well, the future for Kilea is uncertain. Drea is still supporting it, and had some suggestions. I am so grateful to her for her dedication and hard work with my quiet literary novel. It slinks like seagull above the clouds, keeering. Cross your fingers that one day it will find the right place to roost.

 

However! Progress with the second novel, Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts is underway, with two extracts of it out or forthcoming in online literary journals, and submissions planned later, when more work has been done on it. That shall be the effort of the next few months – editing the novel, deepening it, firming it up. The best sort of hard work, and with Drea’s support (and that of D, my first reader),  I hope to produce something that will be watertight and compelling, that will, crucially, find its way into the wider world.

 

I feel touched too to have readers, here, who are following my progress. It’s been a long year of hoping and struggling along, and nothing is ever certain. Some days are spent burrowing down into the work, others in combing my emails for news, for some breakthrough. Your comments are like fairy lights, warming in the dark.

 

I know other writers are right now, at various stages in their careers, chipping away at the same coalface. Pushing their skills forward, trying to be ambitious in their writing, though their life circumstances are not always the most favourable for fostering imaginary worlds or the careful construction of sentences. For art, for storytelling.

 

Solidarity has helped me along. Excellent role models are everywhere. You know who you are, and that you have my admiration, my love for your words and your painstaking skill with them, and your honesty and necessary lies that illuminate the truth.

 

And to the rest of my day in London? Spent in meeting friends – fellow writers, storytellers too: C, G and J, in that order. A trip to the Barbican building with C, to stare out at the fountains in the lowering dark, discussing C’s adventures past and present. Out for Vietnamese food in Shoreditch with G, who is fighting the man and planning her novel, which I’ve had the privilege of reading in early draft – when things happen there, I shall direct you to her site, with her permission.  A drink of juice in a pub with J, to whom strange and unbelievable things happen as a matter of course.

 

And then to the tube station, and then to Euston, and the sleeper. My tiny berth with only me in it (the other passenger lost somewhere in the big city), and me falling into an exhausted semi-sleep, dreaming my way North again.

 

Dream logic

 

How does time pass in dreams? How has the month of September gone for you? Slow or fast. Some impossible mixture of sluggishly quick. In dreams you are mute – every voice you ever use only ever spoken in your head. Nothing you can do in dreams affects the world in any stable, lasting way. You can yell as loudly as you want and no one in the street is any the wiser. Are there any people out there? A gale blows leaves through the dream, scattering any traveler, bustling them out of sight. Pressing the leaves on a slicked black pavement as in a precious Victorian scrapbook. They say you cannot write or read in dreams, but I know this is not so. A single word, here or there, blurring as you look at it. A leaf, peeling at the corners, you suddenly know to lift and see the message in the skeleton veins, held up to a golden light. The colours are rich or not in dreams. Movements barely recorded. That’s September.

 

Or, rather, a little better on the writing front, though I have been fighting off a lingering illness, a cold that never burgeons. The second novel progresses, the world doesn’t turn in the old ways – the equinox hit, and now it’s so dark in the mornings it’s like walking to work still in the haar of a dream.

 

Where are you, October, I now ask. Plaintive for some day to be full awake to me, and I to it.

Book Christmas

 

 

I received all these books today (after a few days of missed connections) – all three volumes of 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead, Restoration by Rose Tremain, The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright and The Man Who Smiled by Henning Mankell.  And a little slip that reads ‘Vintage Books – with compliments’. Spectacular. Thanks so much to the lovely people @vintagebooks (who tweet delightfully). Endless Reads 2012 continues finely apace.