I now believe enlightenment is a simple state: it is the ability to suffer what there is to suffer; it is the ability to enjoy what there is to enjoy. – Richard Morais, Buddhaland Brooklyn

Alan Spence’sNight Boat, which I reviewed a few weeks back, is a fictional book about Buddhism. Buddhaland Brooklyn is a book about fictionalised Buddhism. In the acknowledgements the author admits:

The writing between these two covers is purely an act of imagination and should in no way be taken as a doctrinal explanation of Buddhism. The Headwater Sect is invented, and while some readers knowledgeable of Buddhism might spot some similarities with Nichiren Shōshū… please know these similarities are superficial and meaningless.

So this is not a serious novel about religion but it still manages to say a few thoughtful things about family and culture albeit in its own light-hearted way. On the surface Buddhaland Brooklyn couldn’t be more different to Richard Morais’s first novel The Hundred Foot Journey (which I reviewed here) but actually they’re more similar than you might first imagine. In The Hundred Foot Journey an Indian boy winds up in France where he finds himself through the local cuisine. In Buddhaland Brooklyn a Japanese monk gets sent to New York where the locals help him reassess his beliefs. Both are novels of self-discovery and transformation.

In my review of The Hundred Foot Journey I wrote:

At the end of the day I’m not sure about this novel. I suspect that Morais’s ambitions for the book have been just beyond his reach but all credit to him for not simply writing a jolly book about food. The New York Times reviewer Ligaya Mishan called the book, with her tongue a little in her cheek I hope, “Slumdog Millionaire meets Ratatouille,” adding, “The novel’s charm lies in its improbability.” I think that’s a bit harsh but I can see where she’s coming from.

You could say much the same about Buddhaland Brooklyn. At its core we have an innocent thrown into a melting pot, stirred and left to simmer for a few months. The priest is an innocent alien and by that I don’t mean he’s an extra-terrestrial; I mean ‘alien’ as in ‘illegal alien’ only in his case his papers are all in order but he might as well be from outer space because New York is so different from the world he’s used to. That said, even in the Buddhist monastery he was the quiet one more interested in art and poetry than people. His inability and lack of desire to understand his peers prevented him from thriving. The other monks found him unapproachable, a man set in his ways. He even scurried along the paths behind the buildings in order to avoid running into any pilgrims, whom he viewed as inferior in their practices. Out of the blue, however, he’s ordered to get on a plane and take charge of the construction of an American temple. The job comes with a promotion—he’ll now be chief priest—but Seido Oda is the least ambitious man you can imagine; nothing about the job appeals to him. He acquiesces, reluctantly—on the condition that he’s replaced by a more suitable candidate as soon as practicable—and obediently heads off to the New World. Nothing could’ve prepared this quiet and unassuming man for what he encounters next:

After the long stillness of my life at the Temple of Everlasting Prayer, Brooklyn appeared through the haze of my jet lag as a singularly belligerent attack on my central nervous system.

“[Q]uiet and unassuming” is exactly how I describe Hassan in The Hundred Foot Journey by the way.)

We’ve seen it all before. He’s the country mouse , the naïve newcomer, the fish out of water. As TV Tropes puts it:

A character is placed in a situation completely unfamiliar to them. Humour and/or tension is created as the character adapts—or doesn't.

He’s probably more like Chance from Jerzy Kosinski'sBeing Therethan Mork if I’m being honest. At least at first. His parishioners—not sure if Buddhists have parishes—include some very wealthy people who (and this is not entirely their fault) have some very … let’s just go with American … ideas about what Buddhism is all about. Up until Oda’s arrival they’ve been happy to refer Buddhism for Dummies, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenanceand The Reader’s Digest Encyclopaedia of Religion for guidance:

“Buddhism for Dummies? I am not familiar…”

“Don’t let the title deceive you. Heavier than it sounds. Excellent text.”

Oda manages to keep his aghastness to himself. Just.

If I had to hear one more time from the Americans that “Buddhism is not really a religion but a philosophy”, I believe my samurai ancestors would have risen up from the dead and run them through with the point of a katana sword. The Americans seemed to believe … that praying for material benefits and receiving them somehow proved that our religion “worked”. Some did not address me respectfully as Reverend Oda but slapped me on the back and called me “Seido” or “Rev” or “Reverend O”, and I had no idea how I should respond to this inappropriate informality, for I had never experienced anything quite like this before.

He institutes a few immediate and sweeping changes—for one, the removal of all chairs during study-lectures (“We do not modify the formal practice of the Eternal Teaching simply because Americans are fat.”)—which his believers find hard to swallow but since most of them are actually sincere they go along with him. For a while.

The problem is Oda’s natural reserve stops him connecting with his flock (again another Christian expression—sorry); he goes about his duties … dutifully—attending meetings, praying, lecturing—but he never opens up to anyone. We, the readers, only know what we know about his past because Morais devotes the first few chapters to his backstory which is interesting but the book only really starts on page 81 when he steps off the plane at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport and it might’ve been better to jump straight there and dribble in details about his past as flashbacks. It might’ve been better if we got to meet him and judge him solely on his behaviour. Morais did the same with The Hundred Foot Journey, spent longer than I would’ve liked in India. But maybe that’s just me, in a rush to get where I’m going and not terribly interested in the journey.

There are other similarities between the protagonists in both books. I said of Hussain:

He starts off with nothing, next to nothing anyway, and ends up a success. I’m really not giving anything away by letting you know that things work out well for the young man. But he’s not a particularly interesting young man out of the kitchen. Kitchen work involves notoriously long hours and so Hassan doesn’t have much time to do anything bar hone his skills.

Oda starts off with next to nothing, spends thirty years honing his skills—most of that time, thankfully, we skip over—and he ends up enlightened (I’m being slightly facetious here) thanks to his involvement with the American Buddhists. He’s really not a very interesting person. The only thing of consequence that happens to him is as a young boy when his parents are killed in a fire that his depressive father may or may not have started deliberately. So, although he doesn’t really realise it, part of his quest is for family and that’s what he finds in America. You can choose your friends but not your family, so the saying goes. I guess that truism applies to spiritual families too.

When I talked about Hussain in The Hundred Foot Journey I remarked that he was not unlike Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The same is true here. The supporting cast are what save both books. The Americans are pretty much what you would expect, loud, opinionated, status conscious but friendly too. The girl who meets him off the plane, for example:

The woman waiting for me in the crowd was wearing a black T-shirt, jeans and flip-flops. She was in her late thirties, I guessed, with frost-tipped hair that stood up spikey and ragged. This could not possibly be my official greeting party, I thought, for her attire was entirely inappropriate for formally welcoming a Priest.

[…]

I bowed. The look of relief on the woman’s face was great, and she pushed her way through the crowd in my direction. I panicked, not sure if I should bow in a Japanese greeting or shake hands Western-style. The woman did neither. She threw her arms around me and hugged me tightly to her bosom.

I stood stiff as a winter cherry tree holding out frozen limbs, as the woman grappled me like a sumo wrestler. It took what seemed like an eternity before she was satisfied I was of flesh and bone…

And they’re all like that, larger than life, some more eccentric than others. And yet they are—for Americans—very, very patient with their new priest but not endlessly so. After several months one of Believers interrupts Oda who’s in the process of delivering one of his dry lectures expounding some technical feature of the priesthood:

“What’s enlightenment? No one ever tells me.”

So he stops what he’s doing and over the course of the next page instructs her. Her response?

“Reverend Oda,” said Mrs Symes, rummaging in her purse for chewing gum. “I can’t follow a word you’re saying. It’s like you’re talking Swahili.”

Eventually it all comes to a head. Jennifer, the woman who met him from the plane and who had been assigned to be his assistant but who eventually became his lover (apparently in this sect such things are not disallowed) addresses the problem head on:

“Who are you? Look, I know you have a real understanding of Buddhism and the world we live in, knowledge I am sure you are just dying to share with us. But the fact is you’re just not good at communicating your understanding of Buddhism. It’s not just the language barrier. Everything you say and do gives the impression you’re secretly sneering at us, like you think Americans are not really smart enough to understand Buddhism, that only the Japanese are sensitive enough to really get the subtle depths of this faith. It’s really incredibly insulting. And, when you think about it, actually slanders the teachings. It makes a mockery of the whole premise that we all have the Buddha nature.”

You tell him girl! The student has become the master. If only for a few minutes. Could it be that his mother’s contempt for Americans following the Second World War has affected him more than he might have imagined? Of course it all works out in the end but not before Oda learns a few more life lessons from these seemingly uncouth souls. It’s an old story. But it’s one that still needs to be told as long as people look down their noses at others. Oda is a flawed man. Literature is full of flawed men. We like flawed men. We like them to succeed despite their flaws. We like them to overcome their flaws, to turn them to their advantage if possible. And that’s what happens here. It’s not exactly a Hallmark moment but I’m sure if they bought the rights to the book they could turn it into one; all the building blocks are there.

If you’re keen to read a novel about Buddhism then go for Night Boat. If you want a light read with a spiritual edge then Buddhaland Brooklyn is a fine way to distract you during a long flight.

You can read an excerpt from the book here.

***

An American born in Portugal and raised in Switzerland, Richard Morais has lived most of his life overseas, returning to the States in late 2003. He was stationed in London for 17 years asForbes’ European Correspondent (1986 to 1989), Senior European Correspondent (1991 to 1998), and European Bureau Chief (1998 to 2003.) He wrote numerous cover stories for Forbes, from billionaire profiles to corporate dissections, but he was best known for unusual business stories on everything from the hashish entrepreneurs of Holland, to the ship breakers of India, to the human organ traders of China. Morais has won six nominations and three awards from the London-based Business Journalist of the Year Awards, the industry standard for international business coverage.

Morais started his career in New York as a news intern for the PBS TV program, The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, and eventually rose to selling freelance film features to The New York Times. While he was in the UK, he appeared regularly on Sky News, BBC News, ITV News, and various radio stations, including the influential Today show on the BBC’s Radio 4. In the United States, his work has led to an editorial credit on 60 Minutes, plus appearances on Ted Koppel’s Nightline, ABC, CNN, and various NPR radio stations.

Morais is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York with his wife and daughter.

As long as necessity is socially dreamed, dreaming will remain a social necessity. The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep. – Guy Debord,The Society of the Spectacle

How to read a book of poetry? I ask myself this every time I pick one up. Always I find myself looking for some kind of narrative. Why are the poems arranged in the particular order in which we find them? Where’s the poet leading me? Why’s the first poem the first poem? Why’s the last poem the last poem? Whether or not the poet put a great deal of thought or even any thought into the order I find myself still wanting to impose a sense of order on them. It helps if there is some common ground to the poems as is the case here. What follows is my reading of Everybody lie down and no one gets hurt. I have no doubt no one else will read it this way.

The first thing I noticed about this collection was the quality of the sound. I’ve known Colin for years and regularly read the poems he posts on his blog, Notes from a Glaswegian Immaturity—he has at times joked that I was his only reader—and his poems have never sounded bad although there has often been a roughness to them that I’m sure he would be the first to acknowledge although I expect he might prefer if I described it as an immediacy so let’s go with that. It always struck me that he was perhaps a little too keen to get his ideas down on paper without worrying much about the spit and polish. I know he admires Bukowski and so this isn’t a fault so much as an artistic decision and let’s be honest most of Bukowski’s poems are a bit on the rough side. There is, however, a sonorousness apparent here which I’m going to attribute to the fact Colin’s been a regular fixture at poetry readings in recent years and he’s clearly become acutely aware of the sound of his voice. Just look at the second stanza to the first poem in the collection:

Though there is sincerity in waiting,
stillness in the quiet of dark,
restless, peace soon settles
with the certainty of pulled curtains,
the warm seal of walls.
A room safe in darkness.

[‘The Drift and Special Ease’]

The number of internal rhymes and half rhymes (as in the case of ‘still’, ‘pull’ and ‘wall’) is striking as is the nice use of alliteration in the third line: “restless, peacesoon settles”. These are lines that feel good in the mouth.

What the poem is describing is something that every single person who picks up this poem knows about intimately: falling asleep. It’s not a nature poem or a religious poem or a political poem. It’s not a poem that people are going to squabble over because we all know what he’s talking about. But just because we know what he’s talking about doesn’t mean it’s all that easy to describe. How’s he done? Well, okay actually but who wants to read a poem about some bloke dozing off? Well I do as long as that’s not all he’s on about. The trick—which William Carlos Williams pulled off so well with poems like ‘This Is Just to Say’ and ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’—is to make us reflect on the ordinary. And with a few well-chosen expressions like “there is sincerity in waiting” and “the certainty of pulled curtains,” Colin makes us look again at the commonplace.

It’s a strong opening poem which immediately sets a reader at ease because, as I’ve said, we all know what he’s on about. It also lays the book’s recurring motif: sleep. The word ‘bed’ crops up in almost every poem which made me wonder about the title: Everybody lie down and no one gets hurt. It really refers to the sixth poem in the book ‘Eyes Closed, See Nothing’ which sounds like it might be about sleeping but it’s actually about a bank robbery.

The first poem is about falling asleep. The second is about waking up. Is the person who fell asleep in ‘The Drift and Special Ease’ the same person who’s crawling out of bed in ‘Waking Up To It’? It’s tempting to think so. It’s tempting to assume these are autobiographical pieces which is why when we see the narrator waking up “on a single bed” we have to wonder what exactly he’s waking up to. The language paints a stark picture: “[a]n arm stretches in surrender”, “the hard facts of a shower”, “bitter morning”. One can almost imagine his first thought on waking: Oh God. I’m still alive. Of course he’s only getting out of one bed and straight into another:

Morning breaks in on time in shifts,
in exchanges,
in obedience
to the entire absurd histrionics
of the worldly compulsion,
to actually get out of bed in the morning.

(bold mine)

Okay, we’ve gone to bed, slept, woken, got up: now what? The third poem is entitled ‘La Société du Spectacle’so it looks like we’re going to have to face the big bad world. The Society of the Spectacle is a work of philosophy and Marxist critical theory by Guy Debord first published in 1967 in France:

Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation: "All that once was directly lived has become mere representation." Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing." This condition, according to Debord, is the "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life."– Wikipedia

It reminds me of an old Steven Wright joke:

The other day somebody stole everything in my apartment and replaced it with an exact replica... When my roommate came home I said, “Roommate, someone stole everything in our apartment and replaced it with an exact replica.” He looked at me and said, “Do I know you?”

Colin’s poem begins:

The Revolution of everyday life
will begin with every one sleeping in.
Only when men and women
have slept in unexpectedly
will they experience
a momentary glimpse
of life outside of
spectacular society.

It sounds like some kind of manifesto. Who’ll be first against the wall after the revolution? They brush their teeth and rush to the barricades only to be informed by a friendly policeman:

‘Wrong era, folks.
Must have been a simulation.
Nostalgia from an old war film.
An idealist’s myth of gossip.
Memories of something better.
It happens to us all.
Good day.’

Debord writes in Society of the Spectacle:

The unavoidable biological limitations of the work force—evident both in its dependence on the natural cycle of sleeping and waking and in the debilitating effects of irreversible time over each individual’s lifetime—are treated by the modern production system as strictly secondary considerations. (from No.160)

Assuming this to be true then the first act of rebellion would have to be sleeping in. It would be best if people did it deliberately—and act of social unrest or would that be social continuing to rest? passive resistance—but sometimes it takes an accident to open our eyes to the reality of the world around us. Having read a lot of Colin’s work it’s no surprise to see some political comment here; after all he studied global politics at Caledonian University and he’s never been shy in getting things off his chest.

Religion is the next thing to be scrutinised by Colin in ‘The Forgotten Jesus’ written from the perspective of the resurrected Christ who moans, “I keep making people fall asleep.” He even imagines his father in his “Heavenly bed. / Dreaming of everyone and everything besides me.” If the Christian deities are either powerless or disinterested then who does that leave in charge?

I half expected an appearance from the Sandman, Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams, but, no, what get next is Somnus. In Greek mythology, Hypnos was the personification of (and god of) sleep; the Roman equivalent was known as Somnus. The day—another day in a long line of days—is over and here we are back in bed again. But maybe this is a different bed.

Somnus

Staring for hours at the wall
something keeps him wound.
How many nights go by like this?

Eyes pit-dark from digging
for what little light
is found in memory.

[…]

The clock weighs a lifetime.
He coughs, a cough of bronchitis.
How many years left?

Somnus has a brother, Mors, better known as Death. There was no revolution. We kept on working, kept on pretending. And now even sleep refuses to share our bed. Some nice imagery here too: “pit-dark” eyes and a “clock that weighs a lifetime”.

Now we get to that sixth poem, the bank robbery. Not much sleepy imagery here apart from:

Some hush fervent pleas
to be spared the dying end,
those who think themselves brave or bold
consider their move but do not move
and lie on like Sunday sleepers.

I’m going to say this is a dream. Sometimes we dream about reality and sometimes our dreams supply their own “dream reality” (to nick an expression from Bowie—‘Quicksand’ in case you wondered).

We’ve had the bad dream, now the good dream in ‘Bed is a Pleasant Country’:

Bed is a Utopian state ruled by fantasists.
A gentle tossing and turning
does not disturb the peaceful accord
between the tranquil snooze treaty.

Bed is a womb warm bliss of primal memory,
a protectorate that nourishes with its boundaries.
May bed reign a restful century,
asleep in its own satisfaction.

Bedtime is when we find ourselves pondering the imponderable. And that’s where we end up next in ‘Nocturnal Questions’ where we ask ourselves questions like:

When will the ghosts of eternity
clean my dishes, hang up my washing
and rake the dry leaves in the back garden?

If Colin’s poetry is typified by one thing (apart from forthrightness) I’d have to say it was humour and I’m glad to see it’s not missing from this collection:

Wake up; Wee Willie Winkie has been sent
to put future generation to bed early,
before they can realise a wide awake revolution.
Tenderly in cots they are hypnotised
by Mothercare’s
dangling dream catchers.

[from ‘The Sleeping Epidemic’]

The next poem appeared in The Scotsman so I’ll include it in full and say no more about it:

Soft Wings of Z

Exhausted, we must sleep.
Soft wings flutter
from miraculous sleepers
on temporary spiritual altars
were the mind beds,
nurtured by weightlessness,
rescued by its warm charge.

In sleep we are given
a glance at disappearing;
a restorative cooling of the actual.

Nightly tunnel, from the prison of awake,
tend them gently through your passage,
until day break.

Beds, of course, are not only about sleep. The narrator in ‘Waking Up To It’ may well have been alone but not everyone is. In ‘Regarding the Couple’ Colin considers a selection of those who don’t crawl into bed alone, like

…the couple who pour and pour and pour
warm water from jugs, from trophies,
from mouths, over their bodies
and take photos entitled ‘Landscapes’.

[…]

Or the couple who undress each other
then redress then undress then redress
then undress until the pressure has burst
and they fall into bed hot and ravenous
for love, for hot sweating, bestial love.

One of the longer poems in the collection I can well imagine this is a good one to present before a crowd.

A short prose poem follows which didn’t do much for me. Not a great lover of prose poetry, me, especially poems that include lines like “O giant milky button’. Sorry, Colin. Read it here and make your own mind up.

In ‘Whitewash’ we’re back on track. This one I remember from before. I’m not sure the fear of nuclear annihilation is nearly as strong as it was when I was a kid but it’s still a possibility. This would be the ultimate big sleep, everyone asleep. The poem’s an injunction to everyone, everywhere to prepare in advance, to swaddle their babies in white linen, to spray-paint their cars white, to decorate every tree with white flowers so that…

When the enemies of sleep
come to put us to bed permanently
they will see clouds of white citizens in robes of Jesus,
in a City, for once, the colour of an ideal.

It’s a strong, evocative and downright poetic image. It might have been good to even finish the collection with this one but we have one more, a kind of coda:

Your voice melts a fist to sleep.

Your voice polishes stone
upon the warm pull of a pillow.
Your whisper is a white flag.
Your voice calls a truce,
slides a sheet over a world,

[from ‘Listen, Softly’]

And who doesn’t like to get tucked in at night? Or have we ended in defeat? Perhaps. We give in to sleep. Or perhaps I’m reading too much into this.

At this point I thought a short Q+A might be in order:

I’m curious about the title. I can see where you got it but as a title for the whole collection It’s not one I would’ve gone with it. Your reasons?

Where do you think I got it from? The title captures the spirit of the collection. It is at once an aggressive statement (of a bank robber), but considered closely, it is actually calm statement, a call to peace and equanimity. I was more interested in the last connotation, to be honest. The title affirms the tone of 'an increase in equanimity' yet there is ambiguity because the statement is normally used and a highly aggressive, violent manner. I quite like titles that are short poems in themselves.

I only recognise one of these poems from the past—that would be ‘Whitewash’—and I get the feeling that you sat down and deliberately worked on poems around a theme. Am I right? If not, how come you write about beds so much?

There are quite a few poems in here from Riddled With Errors that have been completely re-written.

The collection became deliberately focused loosely on the subject of sleep, but many, if not all the poems, were written long before the idea for the collection came about, and they were slowly collated together. Many other poems were taken out. I was quite scrupulous not to include 'just anything' like Riddled.

I write about sleep so much because we are all exhausted from time to time, aren't we? Bed is a neutral place we share in common, at least as 'sleeping beings'. I calmed down a lot the previous year—quit alcohol, got serious, got focused, harnessed the drive, etc. This is the result of it. A calmer, more focused (arguably pretentious) bed ridden yawn in praise of sleep and bed, yet also a warning against 'political sleep of unawareness and social control and domination'.

As I worked my way through this collection I tried to establish a narrative. I don’t think I did too bad a job—you’ll have to judge for yourself when you read the review—but I’m curious how you came to lay out the poems the way you did, indeed how you came to choose some of the poems.

Why did you try to establish a narrative? This is not a novel. That said, there is a deliberate layout to the structure. I will not explain that deliberate layout. From the personal to the general. Then from the general to the particular by the end. Shh. I find it hard to hold my tongue.

I see quite an improvement in this collection from your first one—and I’m not just talking about typos—but I’m curious if you put down the improvement to the fact that you’re reading your poems aloud at public venues and, I would imagine, writing with a physical audience in mind.

There are only three or four typos that I noticed that remain in this collection and they will be fixed when the next batch is printed. They were not intentional, as with riddled with errors (which became a kind of intention). Quite simply, I am more focused, less chaotic and the poems reflect this. I don't write with a physical audience in mind. Though quite a few poems work as performance pieces.

The perceived improvement is not because of performance but simply my intention to write more coherently, more deliberately.

I didn’t read the blurb before I reviewed your collection. Having now read it it feels very… blurby and not at all how I felt about the grouping. What did you have in mind when you organised the collection? What do you expect the reader to take away from it?

I agree. Both blurbs emphasis my performance yet this collection is one of the quietest and least performance based reads you will have from McGuire; in that sense perhaps the blurbs are misleading.

I hope the book is seen largely as a positive collection. Resecting calmness and quiet. Yet there are some warnings and fearful tidings in there too.

I hope the insomniacs can get to sleep. The sleepers can revel in the warmth of bed. The political activists can wake us up. The book is idealistic in many ways. Take back our lives. Grow your own veg. Don't take part in the entire 'spectacle' of 'mediated reality'. But perhaps less, grandiose, the book hopes to remind us that there is a lot to be said for going to bed, curling up cosy and being gentle to each other.

How did it feel to have a poem in The Scotsman?

A small glory for a fleeting individual. How many people may have read it? How many went to bed early because of it? (None of course, I am being ridiculous.) Thing is, I didn't know exactly when the poem would feature and missed it, only discovering a few days after publication that it was in it. I am grateful to Colin Waters for getting it into the paper. My words? Shared at large? Great opportunity.

What’s next for McGuire?

McGuire will be reading, reading , reading… I am performing at StAnza in March [at the Poetry Café on 6th March at 1pm] which I am balled over by and can't wait. Then there is my second collection coming out in June with Red Squirrel Press. A larger collection, combining short stories and poetry. It is a much darker, sinister, wilder book. More on than to come.

Thank you for taking the time to take the time to consider my chapbook, Jim. Appreciated.

“Colin McGuire’s new book is the most exciting thing to happen to Scottish poetry since Colin McGuire’s last book.” So said Claire Askew on her site One Night Stanzas. She hadn’t actually read the book at this point but I have to say it’s certainly better than his last book. As I’ve said before I’ve known Colin for years. We’re friends in that Internety way people make friends these days. That doesn’t mean I’m going to sit here and praise him into the ground and I can tell you for a fact he was scared shitless I was going tear his poetry book a new one. And if I didn’t like what he’d produced… well, I wouldn’t’ve done that. I would’ve dropped him a friendly e-mail offering him a few helpful pointers and apologising for not having the time yada yada yada. There are too many books being produced right now to waste our time on rubbish. This is not rubbish. This is a solid, well-written, thought provoking collection and apart from the one prose poem which I didn’t like it stands up very well as a body of work. Obviously some poems are better than others but none—apart from the prose poem (Yes, Jim, we know you didn’t like the prose poem)—let the side down.

Everybody lie down and no one gets hurt is available from Red Squirrel Press. At time of writing I couldn’t see a link on the publisher’s website but there is one on Colin’s blog, in the right hand column. The striking cover, by the way, is by Kirsty Whiten and comes from her Monkey Relic Series. You can read an interview with her here.

I’ve leave you with a wee video of Colin on stage. Not one of the poems from this collection but that’s neither here nor there:

***

McGuire is a 31-year-old thin Glaswegian man who’s settled into Edinburgh's literary scene quietly but comfortably, touch giddy in the head, sometimes poet of mangled form and dirty prose, sporadic drummer, drunk grammarian, waffler, painter using crayons, lover, hater, learner, teacher, pedestrian, provocateur, wanderer, confronter of shadows, irritating whiner. You can read my review of his first collection, Riddled With Errors, here. He was a finalist in the BBC Fringe Festival Slam 2013, and performs widely in and around Scotland and the UK. He currently hosts the monthly Talking Heids in the living-room comfort of Sofi’s Bar in Edinburgh.

You can listen to a rather good interview with him over on the Scottish Poetry Library website. And, oh, I know the cover says ‘sit’ and not ‘lie’. I was working from an old PDF. The cover has now been changed.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. – Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

If you’ve read The Tiny Wife I imagine you’re scratching your head wondering why I would open my review to this delightful little book with a quote from Kafka because on the surface this is really the least Kafkaesque book I’ve read in a long time—it owes far more to the likes of Richard Brautigan or Tom Robbins (I was not surprised to hear Kaufman list In Watermelon Sugaras one of his guilty pleasures)—but as soon as I read the following I started to think a little differently about the book:

Chapter Fourteen

Eight days after the robbery, Grace Gainsfield, who had given the thief a small pressed flower that she used as a bookmark, had woken up in cold wet sheets and discovered that her husband had turned into a snowman. Getting out of bed, she stepped in a puddle on the floor. She looked back at her husband. His head was melting faster than the rest of his body; the left side of his face was lopsided, its mouth and eye sockets grotesquely elongated and droopy. The phone rang and, in shock, she answered it.
       “Hello?”
       “Did I call too early?” her mother-in-law asked.
       “No, no. I was up.”
       “Can I speak to Daniel?”
       “Um. He isn’t here.”
       “Where is he?”
       “Work.”
       “At 6.30?”

What does Gregor’s family do when they learn he’s been transformed into a gigantic insect? What they don’t do is bat an eye. With characteristic Czechoslovakian stoicism they deal with it. When the chief clerk comes to see where Gregor is the family cover up for him:

"He's not well," said his mother to the visitor, while his father was still speaking through the door, "he's not well, sir, believe me. What else would make him miss a train! The boy thinks about nothing but his work.

You can see the similarities. In the real world, even in the Fringe or X-Files universes, anyone else would be in hysterics but this wife takes it in her stride, drags her husband down to the freezer in the basement and preserves him as best she can.

Kafkaesque situations are characterised by social alienation, the victimisation by anonymous bureaucratic institutions, the irrational terror of metaphysical powers, or the conflict between a weak son and an overbearing father figure, which lead to the individual's overwhelming sense of anxiety and hopelessness and are often expressed by rhetorical strategies like paradox irony, or sudden reversals in action. – Richard T Gray, The Franz Kafka Encyclopaedia, p. 156

Now that doesn’t really fit this book but there’s another literary term that gets associated with Kafka: magic realism. It can be argued that he invented the genre although that specific claim to fame tends to get overshadowed by those elements listed in the definition above. His story ‘The Metamorphosis’, however, does tick the most important box: a character breaks the rules of the natural world and people simply accept it. There is only one fantastic element in ‘The Metamorphosis’, the transformation of Gregor’s body—his mind stays intact— and yet the real metamorphosis is of his family, most notably his father, who changes both physically and mentally.

Was this still his father? Was this the same man who in old days used to lie wearily buried in bed when Gregor left on a business trip; who greeted him on his return in the evening sitting in his bathrobe in the armchair, who actually had difficulty getting to his feet but as a sign of joy lifted only his arms; and who on the rare occasions when the family went out for a walk on a few Sundays in June and on the major holidays, used to shuffle along with great effort between Gregor and his mother, who were slow walkers themselves, always a little more slowly than they, wrapped in his old overcoat, always carefully planting down his crutch-handled cane, and, when he wanted to say something nearly always stood still and assembled his escort around him. Now, however, he was holding himself very erect, dressed in a tight fitting blue uniform. – Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, pp.27, 28

In The Tiny Wife there are thirteen instances of magic realism, many involving transformations, but I’ve got a bit ahead of myself. My apologies for beginning this review in media res. Let’s go back to the beginning and see what this is all about:

Chapter One

The robbery was not without consequences. The consequences were the point of the robbery. It was never about money. The thief didn’t even ask for any. That it happened in a bank was incidental. It could have just as easily happened in a train station or a high school or the Musee d’Orsay. It has in the past and it will in the future, and shortly after 3 p.m. on Wednesday 21st February it happened inside Branch #117 of the British Bank of North America.
       The bank was located at the corner of Christie and Dupont in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. There were thirteen people inside when the thief entered: two tellers, the assistant manager, and ten customers waiting in line. The thief wore a flamboyant purple hat and brandished a handgun. Having a flair for drama, he fired a single shot into the ceiling.

The thief is not there to rob the bank. Money is of no interest to him. Instead he wants something personal from each of the thirteen people. He makes them form an orderly queue—he has a British accent and we do love our queues—and then lets them know what he wants:

I demand only one thing from each of you and it is this: the item currently in your possession which holds the most sentimental value.

So, David Bishop, the first person in the queue, hands over “a cheap-looking wristwatch … ‘My mother gave it to me – years ago, when I left for university. I’ve just gotten it fixed and started wearing it again;’ the next in line, Jenna Jacob, parts with “two wrinkled photographs” of her children; next again, the narrator’s wife (the narrator was not, however, in the bank himself), gives the thief a calculator and so the man works his way through the small group:

Daniel James gave him his wife’s parents’ wedding photo, which he’d been taking to get restored. Jennifer Layone gave him a dog-eared copy of The Stranger by Albert Camus. Sam Livingstone, the assistant manager, who’d stood last in line, handed over the paystub from his recent promotion.

All thirteen items in his possession the thief prepares to make his escape but before he does he turns and addresses his victims:

       “It has come to my attention that the vast majority of you, if you even believe you have a soul, believe it sits inside you like a brick of gold.
       “But I’m here to tell you that nothing could be further from the truth. Your soul is a living, breathing, organic thing. No different than your heart or your legs. And just like your heart keeps your blood oxygenated and your legs keep you moving around, your soul gives you the ability to do amazing, beautiful things.
       “But it’s a strange machine, constantly needing to be rejuvenated. Normally, this happens simply by the doing of these things, like a car battery recharging by driving.”
       The thief stopped, put his arm into his sleeve, and sneezed. “Excuse me,” he said. He looked at his watch. “I’m really using a lot of metaphors today. Listen, I’m in a bit of a rush, so let me conclude. When I leave here, I will be taking 51 percent of your souls with me. This will have strange and bizarre consequences in your lives. But more importantly, and I mean this quite literally, learn how to grow them back, or you will die.”

Shortly thereafter each of the thirteen finds out just exactly what “strange and bizarre” thing is going to happen to them or, as in the case of Grace Gainsfield, a loved one. Bearing in mind the book is called The Tiny Wife it will come as no surprise to you to learn that the narrator’s wife begins to shrink. Theirs is the only story we witness in any detail. All the others’ stories take over the course of a few paragraphs—like Sandra Morrison who becomes convinced that her heart is a bomb that will go off in ten minutes or Jennifer Layone (she’s the one who handed over the copy of The Stranger) who finds God under her couch—and a whole (short) chapter like Grace Gainsfield or Timothy Blaker, who’d stood seventh in line and who’d handed the thief an engagement ring; he gets his heart ripped out of his chest by his ex-girlfriend but doesn’t die (you can see why people reference fairy tales when they talk about this book) but don’t worry, he gets it back.

Some of the customers’ stories have been published separately. You can read two of them online

• Jenna’s story
• 98 mothers

The blurb for the book says in part:

Stacey Hinterland discovers that she’s shrinking, a little every day, and there is seemingly nothing that she or her husband can do to reverse the process. Can Stacey and the other victims find a solution before it is too late? The Tiny Wife is a weird and wonderful modern fable. Small, but perfectly formed, it will charm, delight and unnerve in equal measure.

Okay, so is this a kind of And Then There Were Nonesituation? Well, yes, in a way it is; not everyone dies but one by one they are eliminated. The group arrange to meet in the basement of St Matthew’s United Church but even their first meeting is not fully attended. Needless to say Stacey is there at the bitter end. By this time she’s calculated (remember she handed over the calculator) she has one day left before she vanishes completely. Will an answer come in time? Now, that would be telling.

Looking back on the story there are more quintessentially Kafkaesque elements there (albeit this would be Kafka-ultralite): Stacey feels increasingly alienated as time goes on although the thief is far from gone—he makes a habit of calling up his victims for wee chats. Instead of Stacey though he gets her husband:

       “Who do you think you are?” I started. “You fucking, goddamn – ”
       “Hey, hey, hey,” he interrupted. His voice was calm and reassuring. “Listen, maybe you should just, you know, listen, for once. Your wife tells me you’re not so good at that.”
       “What are you talking about?”
       “Calm down. Relax. I’ll quit baiting you. Ask me anything you want and I’ll answer.”
       I did not feel like talking to this thief, and I certainly didn’t feel like seeking his wisdom, but what choice did I have?
       “Why did you do this?” I asked.
       “Because it had to be done.”

So he plays the role of the faceless bureaucrat who doesn’t really answer anything (shades of The Trial there). Hopelessness is something most of the group have to face up to but especially Stacey who has more time than the rest to contemplate her fate. Her solution is: business as usual and her husband and kid buy into this. Now maybe in Kafka’s day they would’ve been happy to hide their dirty little secret away in their house but when Scott Carey, the protagonist in The Incredible Shrinking Man, begins to shrink the first thing he does is head off to the doctor who reassures him that he’s in perfect health and that "people just don't get shorter." When George Walterby who had stood twelfth in line and gave the thief his daughter’s pacifier learns that his baby’s started to shit money they still go to the doctor so what’s wrong with Stacey’s husband? I found his simple acceptance of things, although in keeping with the basic tenets of magic realism, unrealistic. What does he think’s going to happen? That’s my opinion. This Amazon reviewer disagrees:

This reminded me of the children's book Flat Stanley. In this, the wife is shrinking and there isn't panic and hysterics and tears but rather resignation and continuing as normal with an added obstacle to daily life. In Flat Stanley, Stanley's flatness is an inconvenience rather than a cause for wonder and panic as you would expect. I love this style, it is very fairy-tale esque, with a hidden message at the centre which you just have to dig a little to discover. – Anna Clare

Actually Dawn is the one to bring things to a halt—she’s been chased by a lion for several days (a tattoo that comes to life)—and appears a few times throughout the book trailed by her lion but we never find out any answers. Yes, you can have a solution without an answer. That’s okay in a fifties science fiction film—the thing gets killed and we never know for sure what it’s aims were although any fool can see it was there to obliterate all humankind—but I felt a bit cheated at the end of The Tiny Wife. I’m not the only one. Here’s what a few reviewers had to say:

I did feel that there was something, something I personally sought, missing - I don't know what, but for as much as I loved this, it holds me back from really loving it. – Shannon, 4 stars

It would have gotten five stars had the ending not been so abrupt, and maybe over time I'll learn to appreciate that more, that the ending was perfect, but I guess I didn't want it to end. – Craig, 4 stars

Had the end been elaborate and had the end explained anything about why the robbery occurred in the first place, it would have been one TERRIFIC helluva story. However, because it was abrupt and gave me the feel that perhaps the author was bored with the concept himself, I docked off two stars. – Shriya, 3 stars

Part modern fairy tale, part magical realism, I enjoyed this little fable and lost myself in the quirky tales of how the different characters were affected by the robbery. It is immensely imaginative and thoroughly charming. However as I came to the end I had a niggling feeling that something of the moral of the story had passed me by. Marie, 4 stars

I guess I wasn’t the only one to miss the hidden message. Still at only 88 pages I could easily sit down and read it again and probably will.

Looking at the seven basic plots it’s hard to say where this one lies. I’d probably go with Rebirth—where our protagonists are supposed to realise the error of their ways before it's too late—because that’s really the challenge the thief sets for them although, obviously, not all succeed. If the book has a moral it’s that you probably shouldn’t take life for granted but without any real backstory for these characters it’s hard to know if they truly deserve what happens to them, unlike, for example, in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; Augustus, Violet, Veruca and Mike are really horrible brats. Dahl’s name crops up a few times in reviews and I can see why but, like Brautigan and Kafka, the only person Kaufman’s really like is himself.

The term ‘flawed masterpiece’ gets tossed around a bit too often, as does the expression ‘cult hit’ but this is the kind of book where both probably apply. If you are going to buy a copy—and despite my reservations I think you should—do try and find a copy of the hardback. It’s quite lovely. I can’t see the Kindle edition having the artwork and it is a nice addition. This is the second book by Kaufman I’ve read—I really loved All My Friends are Superheroes—and I will be reading this guy again. He says The Waterproof Bible is his best book. We’ll see. Let me leave you with the book trailer:

***

Andrew Kaufman was born in the town of Wingham, Ontario. This is the same town that Alice Munro was born in, making him the second best writer from a town of 3000. Descending from a long line of librarians and accountants, his first published work was All My Friends Are Superheroes, a story following the adventures of a man turned invisible only to his wife. This novella, first published by Coach House Books in Canada, has also been published in the UK and translated into Italian, French, Norwegian, German, Korean, Spanish and Turkish. He has since published The Waterproof Bible, The Tiny Wife, Selected Business Correspondence and Born Weird. He is also an accomplished screenwriter for film and television, and has completed a Directors Residence at the Canadian Film Centre. He lives in East Oz district of downtown Toronto with his wife, the film editor Marlo Miazga, and their two children, Phoenix and Frida.

Computers didn't kill privacy.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn't kill privacy.
So who killed privacy? We all did, of course. Accidentally, perhaps.
Or maybe, like the fairies in Peter Pan, privacy only lived as long as we continued to believe in it.
—Simon Chesterman– Dean of the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law

In the 1700’s, people would see symbolic and associated meanings in objects that the modern person finds completely neutral. For example, putting a letter into one’s pocket was at the time a very intimate gesture, which was a way of feeling and showing great affection. Since pockets were so close to the body—on the skin, actually, since underwear was not common—they usually caught the scent of their owner. Furthermore, reaching for a woman’s pocket meant that the hand was to be put under the slits of the skirt and close to her pelvic area. Therefore accessing them was thought very intimate, even when performed by the woman herself. – Pockets and (female) privacy: the 18th century compared with today, I Am No Pickpocket

It’s noteworthy that only a hundred years earlier when the US Bill of Rights was drafted the only mention of anything like privacy was in the Fourth Amendment which explicitly affirms 'the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures'. Anything other than that wasn’t obviously thought to be worth legislating against. It wasn’t until the UN Charter of 1948 that the word ‘privacy’ started to get the kind of attention it deserves with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks. – Article 12

1. solitude: the state of being free from observation of others
2. intimacy: the state of being with another person but free from the outside world
3. anonymity: the state of being unknown even in a crowd
4. reserve: the state in which a person employs psychological barriers to control unwanted intrusion

According to Altman, if we effectively control the openness and closedness of self to others (i.e., make ourselves more or less available to others) in response to our desire and the environment, we can function better in society than those who cannot. In order to regulate our privacy (i.e., social interaction) successfully, we need to use a variety of behavioural mechanisms such as verbal, paraverbal and non-verbal behaviour, environmental mechanisms of territoriality and personal space, etc. By combining these behavioural mechanisms (i.e., techniques), we can effectively express our desired privacy level to others in order to achieve the optimum level of privacy. – Wikipedia

b1. intimacy with family

b2. intimacy with friends

e. isolation (as a way of life to differentiate it from temporary solitude)

Among examples of modern devaluations in privacy, Noble and Noble noted that until the late twentieth century, diaries, letters and biographies were regarded as private legacy bequeathed by the deceased to family, and chart the growth of straight autobiography as distinct from the novel as fictionalized autobiography. They deplore compulsive self-disclosure (glamorised as candour) and over-disclosure, not only because it becomes boring, but also because it looks for sympathy as against creating intimacy or developing self-awareness. Reticence, on the other hand, encourages limited or protected communication, while privacy keeps emotions and acts from being trivialised: What is important is kept private (for example, lovemaking)...

Noble and Noble emphasized the link between privacy and power: Privacy allows or asserts power, and power confers privacy. Privacy in modern America has become a luxury, indicating status; lack of privacy among the poor and in the workplace leads to stress, and lack of assertiveness means that important boundaries cannot be established. Privacy is resisted by calling it "selfishness"; shyness in modern America is regarded as synonymous with worthlessness but can be seen instead as sensitivity and perceptiveness.[3]

The right of the individual to decide what information about himself should be communicated to others and under what circumstances.[5]

− Solitude: control over one’s interpersonal interactions with other people.

− Confidentiality: control over other people’s access to information about oneself.

− Autonomy: control over what one does, i.e., freedom of will.

1. information about oneself,
2. access to oneself, both physical and mental, and
3. one's ability to make important decisions about family and lifestyle in order to be self-expressive and to develop varied relationships

These three interests are related because in each of the three contexts threats of information leaks, threats of control over our bodies, and threats to our power to make our own choices about our lifestyles and activities all make us vulnerable and fearful that we are being scrutinized, pressured or taken advantage of by others. Privacy has moral value because it shields us in all three contexts by providing certain freedom and independence — freedom from scrutiny, prejudice, pressure to conform, exploitation, and the judgment of others.[7]

1. the right to be let alone — Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’ famous formulation of the right to privacy;
2. limited access to the self — the ability to shield oneself from unwanted access by others;
3. secrecy — the concealment of certain matters from others;
4. control over personal information — the ability to exercise control over information about oneself;
5. personhood — the protection of one’s personality, individuality, and dignity; and
6. intimacy — control over, or limited access to, one’s intimate relationships or aspects of life.[8]

Things have moved on quite a bit since Westin’s original conception of privacy appeared in print. There was no Internet and nothing like the degree of surveillance that there is today. Words like ‘dataveillance’ never existed—Roger Clarke coined that one in the 1980s—and GPS meant “Got It, Played It, Sent It” as well as seventy-one other things that have nothing to do with tracking people. Technology has changed everyone’s focus. Echelon is a covert global satellite network said to have the ability to intercept all phone, fax, and e-mail messages in the world. That’s scary. I walked down the town yesterday. Christ knows how many security cameras I appeared on. Personally I don’t get too uptight about them and as far as the Internet goes I still retain a high level of control about what people get to know about me. The bottom line is that I don’t have to go online if I don’t choose to and I don’t have to leave the privacy of my flat if I don’t want to. I have that freedom still. When I’m walking outside I’m not being ‘me’ though. Even now I’m not being ‘me’. I’m wearing a social mask, a persona to use Jung’s term (‘persona’ means ‘dramatic character’ or ‘mask’). In Race and CultureRobert Park said:

It is probably no mere historical accident that the word person, in its first meaning, is a mask. It is rather recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role… It is in these roles that we know each other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves.

Conclusion

Privacy is dead, get over it – Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems in 2001

It is my thesis that privacy is not just one possible means among others to insure some other value, but that it is necessarily related to ends and relations of the most fundamental sort: respect, love, friendship and trust. Privacy is not merely a good technique for furthering these fundamental relations; rather without privacy they are simply inconceivable. They require a context of privacy or the possibility of privacy for their existence.[10]

Writing is rewriting. A writer must learn to deepen characters, trim writing, intensify scenes. To fall in love with the first draft to the point where one cannot change it is to greatly enhance the prospects of never publishing. – Richard North Patterson

I’ve nothing against editors. Let’s get that out of the road right away. But there’s editing and there’s editing. How many editors get name checked on the cover of a novel? Maybe in the acknowledgements buried in a list of names that doesn’t usually make it clear who’s done what. It’s the same with films. I can name the directors of a dozen great films but I’d be struggling to think of the scriptwriters’ names for any of them and if things go belly-up it’s usually the director who gets the blame. It should be the same with a book: the person whose name is in the biggest print should stand up and be counted. I wrote a book called Living with the Truth. My name is on the cover. The half-a-dozen typos that slipped through in the first printing are my fault and no one else’s.

And, before you ask, that book was professionally edited when I first sent it out looking for a publisher and, more recently, copy edited and proofread by someone apart from me; in fact three other people examined the proofs and found things to fix—clearly not all that was needed, but then it wasn’t their book, it was mine. The buck stops here. I won’t make that mistake again—in fact, my goal is to have my editors hand the work back with a “Hey, I couldn’t find anything to change—great job!”

Let me tell you what I hate. I hate artists who have assistants. I love watching documentaries about art but I hate it when you see inside an artist’s studio—Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst jump to mind but this is nothing new—and there’s a team of other artists working for them, literally painting their paintings and I’m not saying they don’t get paid for their work but whose signature goes on the work of art? Who gets the big bucks? Whose name goes down in art history? Okay, fair’s fair, I’m not saying that Hirst didn’t need a bit of help getting his shark cut in half and into its tanks but one does have to wonder how much work Hirst actually did. His was the idea and a great idea it was, too, but did he even make the tanks or were they just ordered and built to his specifications? He didn’t make the shark. He probably never even helped to cut the thing in half. He should be called a designer, at least in this instance. His design was great and it works as art, yes, but is he the artist?

But back to the topic in hand. There are good reasons why an author shouldn’t self-edit. Top of the list is that you’re too close to the work and I would agree. Which is why you should leave a long time between writing and editing. And by ‘long time’ I don’t mean a couple of weeks. I mean a long time. Of course it all depends what you mean by editing. Does rewriting count as editing?

Editing is polishing. By the time most of the things we get to polish appear on the scene all we need to do is give them a skoosh of Mr Sheen and a wipe down with a cloth, but there are levels of ‘polishing’:

When an unpolished surface is magnified thousands of times, it usually looks like mountains and valleys. By repeated abrasion, those "mountains" are worn down until they are flat or just small "hills." The process of polishing with abrasives starts with coarse ones and graduates to fine ones. – Wikipedia

Ever wondered what happened to Sisyphus?

It’s simple physics really. Over time the boulder was worn down by the constant rolling and even the hill stopped being quite so steep. After a while, albeit a very long while, he could carry what was little more than a rock in his hand without breaking a sweat. – Exit Interview

The four main types of editing are developmental editing, line editing, copy editing, and proofreading. So what the heck is the difference? And who’s responsible?

At the developmental stage you’re getting in there with a chisel and a hammer. This where you’re looking for the big stuff like plot holes and bloopers and this is where alpha and beta readers come in because at this stage you’re probably in one of two states: you think this is the best thing you’ve ever written or the last thing you’ll ever write. When my wife, who gets to read everything I’ve written before anyone else, read Exit Interview she mentioned that the protagonist knew a lot about the Bible and yet came from a family who had no interest in religion. She thought that might need some explanation and she’s probably right. Easily fixed. Doesn’t change the story. But is that editing? Or is it simply her offering her opinion? A book is a collaborative enterprise. It needs a reader to make it work and, just as with a tool, not all readers know what to do with a book when they get their hands on it. Maybe the next dozen readers won’t think twice about that, Maybe she’ll be the only person ever to think that needs clarifying—she’s my alpha reader, not my co-author—but I’ll keep what she said in mind.

Line editing focuses on the sentence or paragraph level, rather than the broad story-scope of your novel. I do more of this than anything else, what Philip Roth referred to, so beautifully, as “turning around sentences”:

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. . . . Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I'm frantic with boredom and a sense of waste. . . . And I ask myself, Why is there no way but this for me to fill my hours? – Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer

I spend more time doing this that I do writing the story. I do it whilst writing the story. I’ll have barely written a sentence then I’m in there turning it around. I love this bit. Thinking up stuff to write about and then writing about it is the hard stuff but playing with words on a page is something I could do all day long! What could be more fun than that? So before my wife gets her hands on my book at the developmental stage it’s already been line edited and partly copy edited. These stages aren’t necessarily chronological.

Copy editing is about grammar, punctuation, and proper word usage. This bit I don’t like so much. This is where you need to do global searches of your text looking for the word ‘that’ or extra spaces. This is where you look at every comma and question every adverb. This is grunt work but it’s still writing. This is what artists like Koons and Hirst delegate to others. I think they’re wrong. It doesn’t matter that they could’ve done this stuff; they should’ve done it and then signed their work with pride knowing it was all their own work.

Proofreading is the final step in the editing process and results in the final don’t-touch-it-again draft. This is where you are supposed to catch spelling mistakes, typos, missing words, isolated punctuation errors and the like. This is the hardest part because by this time you’ve read the text so many times that you’re no longer reading it, you’re remembering it. Also, the brain has this knack of being able to ‘fix’ typos while you read. Try reading this:

I cnduo't bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht I was rdnaieg. Unisg the icndeblire pweor of the hmuan mnid, aocdcrnig to rseecrah at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mttaer in waht oderr the lterets in a wrod are, the olny irpoamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rhgit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whoutit a pboerlm. Tihs is bucseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey ltteer by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Aaznmig, huh? Yaeh and I awlyas tghhuot slelinpg was ipmorantt! See if yuor fdreins can raed tihs too.

This is the easy one with just the inner letters mixed. Click here for the next two levels. I was amazed how much of the first one I could read.

Spelling is irrelevant to comprehension. I reread Making Sense twenty times from cover to cover and on the last read I still found a typo. Can you believe that? No one’s informed me of any mistakes in the final copy but I wouldn’t break down and sob if there was one or two because proofreading is very hard. It’s hard, too, if you’ve never read the book before because you get caught up in the story and forget why you’re there.

The Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld is a man after my own heart:

[H]e deplores the way contemporary authors 'cover us with words'. He hides each finished manuscript in a drawer for two or three years, before returning to prune it further. The results are tightly packed sentences like this: 'In the ghetto, children and madmen were friends', sentences loaded with magical, terrible potential.

[…]

'I don't write easily,' he explains. 'Writing is always taking out a piece of yourself; it's a mixture of pain and pleasure.'– Hephzibah Anderson, ‘One man's road to freedom’, The Observer, 21 August 2005 (bold mine)

Can you imagine finishing your book and then sticking it in a drawer for two or three years before even looking at it again? Nowadays, especially since the advent of the ebook, books are … let’s just go with ‘finished’ … and uploaded within days and so it’s no wonder that many look down on them. And I’m not saying that these books weren’t edited and often by a third party and for cash but I still think that’s too quick. I was telling a friend about Exit Interview and he was asking me when he might see it in print. I told him probably about 2019, maybe 2020, if my book releases go according to schedule. I intend to start editing The More Things Change in about six months—when I’ve finished the main marketing on Making Sense­—a book I ‘finished’ in March 2003. I can’t imagine spending less than six months on it. At least it’s not in nineteen different voices; editing those short stories was hard.

My wife has a phrase she’s very fond of—“Close enough for government work”—although she used it long before she ever worked for the government. I get the phrase and understand it—I also worked for the government for many years—but it’s not a phrase I identify with because I wasn’t that government worker; I held myself to a higher standard. I’ve never been one for getting away with things. I’ve never cheated in an exam. I’ve never seen the point. Stuff like that invariably comes back to bite you on the bum.

When I sat down to look at my short stories, the ones collected in Making Sense, it had been about thirteen years—yes, years—since they were first written and I’d barely glanced at them in the intervening period. Some had been published but I hadn’t tried especially hard to get them into print. That’s a long time. It was like coming to these stories afresh and I was disappointed to see how much work they needed to bring them up to spec. The basic stories were fine—I never changed a thing there—but they were sloppily-written. So I started editing. I began with the first sentence in the first story which I read, thought about and fixed. Then I moved onto the second and so on until I got to the end and then I started again. Not every sentence needed fixing this time but an awful lot did and so I fixed them a bit more and then I started again. Then I sent the manuscript to my beta reader who made a few comments which interested me—he noted how interconnected the stories were (even more so than I’d realised)—and so I started refining them, grafting in a bit here and there to underline their interconnectedness. Then back to line editing. Six months later, having now been though the book eighteen times, I passed it onto my wife (who is an editor) to copy edit. What was left for her to fix? A few commas, a couple of typos and spelling mistakes, nothing much and that, to my mind, is how it should be. But even then I still went through the book another two times proofreading it myself before I passed it back to her to ready the PDF for the printer.

So, I don’t write alone but … I don’t know—what percentage shall we put on it? … maybe 95% of the work was done by me and no one else. My name on the cover. My responsibility.

I like to edit my sentences as I write them. I rearrange a sentence many times before moving on to the next one. For me, that editing process feels like a form of play, like a puzzle that needs solving, and it's one of the most satisfying parts of writing. – Karen Thompson Walker

I edit as I write—I agree completely with Karen Thompson Walker here. Some writers don’t. They breenge through to the end and then go back and fix the mess which is fine if that’s the way you prefer to work; there is no right way to write a novel. I can’t do that. I’ve barely written a sentence and I’m already fiddling with it. I reread constantly, often from the start of the book to where I’ve left off. I also, on occasion, read the prose aloud and nothing reveals badly-written prose quicker than reading it aloud. I don’t need to physically read the words out loud as much as I used to because I ‘hear’ them in my head but it’s still not bad practice, especially if, like me, you have a tendency to write longish sentences.

Editing is writing. I’m a writer ergo I must be an editor. I’m a better writer than an editor but then I’m a better editor than I am a marketer and that’s also a part of most writers’ job descriptions these days. Let me leave you with a final thought from Michael Morpurgo:

With all editing, no matter how sensitive –and I've been very lucky here—I react sulkily at first, but then I settle down and get on with it, and a year later I have my book in my hand.

‘Sulkily’, eh? Who says all adverbs should be cut? Some damn editor I suppose.

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees. –

Who is Roger Price? That’s the question that hangs over this novel like the sword of Damocles. We do know some things about Roger Price. He’s Australian. He has a brother called Samuel and a sister called Constance. At one time he was a university professor. He’s had relationships with three women (that we know of). Initially he was married to Eleanor, a paediatric surgeon, with whom he had a daughter, Ivy, who has grown up and become a depressed archaeologist with a slight case of nymphomania, now settled in Seattle following a divorce and where she’s working as a waitress. Eventually Roger cheated on Eleanor with one of his students, Ailish, “[a] stunningly petite freckled redhead with the vocabulary of a well-educated eighty-year old” who is now a repressed English literature professor. They didn’t marry but Ailish also bore him a daughter, Kit, who, at the start of the book we learn is a twenty-five-year-old archaeology undergraduate who doesn’t like to get her hands dirty. Kit and Ivy are surprisingly close for half-sisters. Roger then moved onto Beth—now an alcoholic although probably not one when he married her (his fault?)—with whom he had a third daughter before vanishing from everyone’s lives and the general consensus is that that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Or so the girls have been told. But then Kit decides she’d like to see for herself and that’s when we, the readers, start to realise this is a family riddled with secrets. Why’s Eleanor sending Samuel money? How come everyone knows about Beth’s daughter apart from Kit? All families have secrets but most aren’t much to write home about. This is not the case here. So, yes, on one level we know who Roger Price is but we do we really know who Roger Price is?

At its core this is a mystery novel. And I couldn’t help but think of Agatha Christie as I read through it. Roger’s not dead, admittedly, but he may as well be. And one of the first things a detective will want to know when he’s assigned a case is: Who is the victim? Why did someone see fit to end their life? And since he or she’s not around to question he has to interrogate all available suspects to try to worm out the truth. The problem is none of them ever reveals the whole truth, at least not up front, because everyone seems to feel they’ve the right to withhold certain key pieces of incriminating (or at least humiliating) evidence. Desperately they try to reveal as little as possible:

[P]eople feel more in control if they have secrets, independent from the world’s demands.

In Bitter Like Orange Peel our quasi-detective (and quite possibly a victim herself) is Kit. But a victim of what crime? In an Agatha Christie we know the crime—it’s invariably murder—and we know the victim but we don’t know the perpetrator or his motive. We know some of Roger’s crimes—he’s been unfaithful at least twice and abandoned his children—but is that all? In Christie’s day adultery was a big thing but not nowadays. There has to be more going on here but no one, especially Kit’s mother (perhaps understandably), is very keen to point her in the right direction:

Getting acquainted with Roger is not going to define who you are. You don’t need your father to shine. You are already you.

This is, for me, the key paragraph in the book. Since there are so many women in this book it’s tempting to ignore the elephant in the room. Roger is like Big Brother. He’s virtually omnipresent. There are lots of books about people with daddy issues—Goodreads has a whole list—and the simple fact is that the life of every woman in the book has been affected by Roger, his presence but especially his absence.

When we get to the denouement in an Agatha Christie either Poirot or Miss Marple will go round the drawing room and reveal the particular truths about each one in attendance and it’s rare that there’s anyone there who has nothing to be embarrassed about. Okay, only one or two are the murderers but the rest are usually exposed as embezzlers or liars or cheats or drunks or something like that; they’re always a bit of a disappointment when you really get to know them well and that’s pretty much the case here. No one’s a murderer but they’ve all been keeping secrets and telling themselves it was for the best of reasons. But then in real life there aren’t very many heroes and those heroes there are we’re told not to seek out because they’ll find some way to let us down.

Jessica’s approach to tackling her subject is a brave one but not one that always succeeds. She writes in the present tense but shifts perspective so that one chapter will be from Ivy’s point of view and the next from Kat’s and then one from Eleanor’s and so on but she still retains an omniscient narrator rather than have each character tell their own story. It’s tempting to think that this would’ve worked better but I suspect this would’ve thrown up its own problems. There are times when I would’ve liked to jump from head to head in the one scene but we can’t do that. This means that at the end we get a run of very short chapters barely a page long but it is an imaginative approach and what I particularly appreciated was her use of italics to indicate a character’s internal monologues although usually they’re just asides; you’ll hear them say one thing and then think the complete opposite.

Ivy walks toward the empty stool. It looks like Brian. It is Brian. Shit. I look like shit. Shit! She contemplates turning around and walking home in the rain, but he notices her too soon.

Of course it’s a contrivance because in the heat of conversation we don’t generally articulate the words but it works and works well.

Writing from a number of different perspectives is hard. Two of the characters talk with an Australian dialect so they’re very distinctive as is the gay best friend who veers towards the caricature but I’m sure that was deliberate. (I couldn’t read a thing by him without thinking of the foster brother on Orphan Black.) It took me a while before I could separate Ivy and Kat from each other especially since both of them start new sexual relationships at the same time, Ivy with Brian, Kat with Sein. The same with their mothers and I kept forgetting whose mother was whose and needed to check my scribbled dramatis personae. More authors should consider using these. Seriously, they’re a great help.

Jessica’s a poet—I’ve reviewed both of her poetry books—and you would expect a poet to provide some arresting and vivid descriptions and she does but my main issue with her style is that she insists on describing too much. One of the reviewers on Goodreads said she felt as if she’d experienced “a metaphor and simile overdose” and I do get where she’s coming from. The only writer I can commend who can pile one metaphor on top of another and pull it off is William McIlvanney. I felt there were simply too many adjectives in this book. And too many unnecessary uses of the word ‘orange’. There are a lot of repetitive expressions, arms folded under breasts, tops of backs patted, hair fiddled with, furry teeth run over with tongues:

Kit focuses on the sound of Ailish’s clunky cork platforms clop on the wooden stairs. She runs her tongue across her furry teeth, gets up, and opens the blinds.

One of the passages that particularly bothered me was this one:

Brian steps foot into the international departures area at Sea-Tac. His eyes dart left and right searching for the Emirates logo and the correct flight number above the check-in desks. His breaths bounce up and down his throat like Ping-Pong balls. He ran from the cab, which was at a standstill in a bottleneck not far from the train line to the airport. He’s still in his tracksuit, unshaven, his finger throbbing where the splinter of Christmas decoration stabbed him. Toe’s still damn itchy and now inside a sweaty sneaker. Not much he can do about it except flex his toes in an attempt at slight relief.

This is a guy rushing into an airport with no time for anything. There are simply too many words here. We don’t need the bit about the flight numbers. We don’t need the bit about the table tennis balls. We don’t need the exact location of the taxi. We don’t need all that stuff about the Christmas decoration because we only read about it a couple of pages back. In her review of the book Ellis Henrika has this to say about one of the many similes in the book: “‘small pieces fall under her tongue like misplaced emotions seeking refuge.’ She's just eating a cookie, damn it. It's not the end of the world.” It’s a fair point. Books don’t have soundtracks and that’s what a lot of the writing feels like, like we’re being told what to feel rather than being allowed to draw our own conclusions. Might want to avoid reading that review because there are major spoilers in it. A good one to look at afterwards though to see if you agree with her.

This doesn’t mean that every simile Jessica uses is cringeworthy because they’re not:

• This dial tone sounds like a nauseated robot.
• Ivy coughs up a convulsive laugh a bit like a backward gasp.
• Harold puts his hands in his pockets and smiles like a psychiatrist.
• …jumping up and down on the spot like a child who won a trip to the fair.

The big reveal is left to the very end. And it’s a doozy. Did not see it coming. Should have because there’re crumbs throughout the book but that’s how good mystery writers do it. Afterwards—it comes right at the end of a chapter—we have two flashback chapters (the first in the book) which present two different perspectives on the same situation. We, the readers, get to find out the truth but no one in the room does which is very odd for a mystery and I can’t decide if I liked it. It’s one of those situations where there were only two people present—only two that remember anything—and so it’s a he said versus she said standoff and who’s going to believe someone like Roger when he says he’s innocent no matter what he’s being accused of? And that’s where we’re left hanging with a final coda tagged on showing us where the third daughter is while all hell is breaking loose. I’d love to explain more but if you’re going to read the book it’d spoil it and I’d rather not do that. The thing is that even if Roger is innocent of what he’s being accused that doesn’t suddenly turn him into a decent bloke. Even habitual liars occasionally tell the truth.

What I didn’t get was why the big reveal was left to the last minute. Once Ailish realises the showdown is unavoidable surely it would’ve been better tackling the matter quietly with those involved. Had they known the truth—albeit her truth—about Roger then they probably wouldn’t have wanted to see him at all.

The Midwest Book Review had this to say about the book:

A riveting reading experience from first page to last, Bitter Like Orange Peel clearly documents author Jessica Bell's impressive storytelling talents. Vividly crafted and memorable characters embedded in a complex, and constantly surprising, narrative, Bitter Like Orange Peel is solid entertainment and highly recommended for personal reading lists and community library contemporary fiction collections.

It doesn’t, however, say anything more. And that’s quite often the case when it comes to positive reviews. It’s so easy to provide examples of what’s wrong with a book. Not always so easy to say what’s right about it. I wonder why that is? I’ve read two novels and a novella by her and Jessica’s strength lies in her characterisations. Novels do tend to be either character driven or plot driven. Jessica does character better than plot. This doesn’t mean that Bitter Like Orange Peel is badly plotted because it’s not but it feels plotted. This won’t worry most people. It’s not something I like seeing because it reminds me that I’m reading a fiction. I like to forget that as much as possible. Good characters distract me and the better the characters the less I notice any structure. On the whole the people in this book came across as realistic—some were more real than others—but all avoided being archetypes or stereotypes even (surprisingly) the most cliché-ridden character of them all, the gay best friend. He’s also probably the most likeable character in the book too. And that will be a problem for some readers—none of the characters in this book have many redeeming qualities—but not this one.

If I’m looking to buy a book and a reviewer talks about it as being entertaining I treat that as a black mark. I don’t read to be entertained or distracted. I want a reader to make me think and preferably about stuff I’ve never thought about before. This Jessica managed. Even “entertainments” can be thought-provoking. Just look at Graham Greene’sBrighton Rock.

The cover’s very pretty; quite eye-catching which is its job. My only gripe—and others have commented on it too—is that it doesn’t seem to have much to do with the book’s content.

Reviews online are all over the place—as low as one, as high as five—and that’s not a bad thing. I’m always intrigued by books that divide an audience. The Road was like that, a real love-it-or-loathe-it book. I’ve read most of the reviews of Jessica’s book on Goodreads and they all make valid points. Richard Hartwell (who gives the book five stars) says, “it IS filled with perfect metaphors, uniquely-fitted and thought-provoking,” which contrasts completely with Ellis above whereas Sarah (who give it three) I think hits the nail on the head when she says in her review, “I get the feeling that Bell might have been trying a bit too hard when it came to her use of literary devices.” The book made Miranda Mowbray mad (she gave it two stars, upped from a measly one because “most of it was really well written”) and talks at some length about what she hated about the book. Luca Marchiori waxes lyrical about why it deserves five. In particular I liked his comment, “Many people have criticized Jessica Bell for making every one of her characters so irredeemably unsympathetic, but for me, this was the master stroke. It compelled me on to the end of the book, in order to see how each of these monsters would achieve their comeuppance.” Heather Truett was simply torn (three stars): “She made me vacillate between eye rolling annoyance and head banging frustration.”

Why such diverse reactions? I found myself lying in bed this morning wondering about this and other books that have such a mixed bag of reviews. Then I started to think about how one would classify this particular novel and I think the two are connected. It’s a mystery, yes, but not a neat one; there are relationships but it’s not a romance; it’s set mostly in Australia which for most of us is a foreign country but it’s not really a foreign novel even though it was written in Greece; most of its themes are adult in nature and there is a bit of sex but I imagine it pales compared to the likes of Fifty Shades of Grey although I seem to remember someone mentioning that book in a review. In Amazon it’s listed under Thrillers, Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction, Women’s Literary Fiction and Women’s Popular Fiction and this is probably its problem. It’s not an easy book to classify and you can listen to Jessica discussing the problems of pigeonholing in a podcast with Cath Murphy over on Lit Reactor; it’s a good interview. Personally I’m against classification. It raises expectations and invariably leads to disappointment. I suspect what most negative reviewers haven’t liked are the more literary aspects to the book. These are the very reasons I think you should read it even though I admit she isn’t always as successful as she might be. If we chose only to read masterpieces we’d be done in a month.

I don’t give stars. At least not here. I’m basically opposed to them because I don’t think any book can be reduced to a single number; books are too complex for that and readers are too diverse. I can, and will, say that I liked this book. To put that into context let me just say that the book I read straight before writing this review was The Appointmentby Herta Müller (who won the Nobel Prize in 2009) and I liked it too. I didn’t love either of them. I loved bits about both of them. I disliked bits in both of them. I probably won’t read either of these books again but I will read both authors again. All of which underlines how careful you have to be when reading reviews. Do I think you should read Jessica’s book? Yes. Do I think you’ll like it too? Christ knows.

You can read excerpts from the book here and here.

I’ll leave you with an interview she did with ConnecticutStyle:

***

The Australian-native contemporary fiction author and poet, Jessica Bell, also makes a living as an editor and writer for global ELT publishers (English Language Teaching), such as Pearson Education, HarperCollins, Macmillan Education, Education First and Cengage Learning. You can read reviews of her other books on my blog by clicking on the following links:

• String Bridge
• The Book
• Fabric
• Twisted Velvet Chains

(I’m not sure there’s another author out there who’s had five book reviews from me, at least not on this blog—I reviewed five novellas by Philip Roth on Goodreads only last year—so a word of explanation is probably due. I have a lot of time for Jessica. Like many other writers out there who have an online presence we’re friendly but the reason that friendship developed is the fact she is uncompromising in her writing. She may bend somewhat in the marketing (when she submitted her book to Lit Reactor she requested a female review it) but we have to use common sense there and the simple fact is, rightly or wrongly, a book featuring six women is going to appeal more to women than men. There’re very few literary novelists out there who are making it work and she is. And more power to her elbow. Which is why I’m willing to promote her work. The first sparkly vampire I find in one of her books, though, and we’re done.)

She is the Co-Publishing Editor of Vine Leaves Literary Journal, and co-hosts the Homeric Writers’ Retreat & Workshop on the Greek Isle of Ithaca, with Chuck Sambuchino of Writer’s Digest. She’s also written a growing series of pocket guides where she provides advice on writing. So far there are three: The Six Senses in a Nutshell, Adverbs and Clichés in a Nutshell and Show and Tell in a Nutshell. Her next novel will be called White Lady. “It's set in Melbourne Australia and is about a young woman named Mia who is fighting fat with white ladies,” says Jessica. Oh, and she does a bit of singing in her spare time.

George was eight, and at eight the definition of normal is whatever is happening in front of you. – Patrick Ness, The Crane Wife

As I was going through this book I highlighted only a single passage:

Stories do not explain. They seem to, but all they provide is a starting point. A story never ends at the end. There is always after. And even within itself, even by saying that this version is the right one, it suggests other versions, versions that exist in parallel. No, a story is not an explanation, it is a net, a net through which the truth flows. The net catches some of the truth, but not all, never all, only enough so that we can live with the extraordinary without it killing us.

It’s an important passage. The book, as did another I read recently, reminded me of The Owl Service by Alan Garner. In Garner’s novel an old story is being constantly re-enacted (a story from the Welsh Mabinogion, specifically portions of the story of Math) and that’s pretty much what we have in The Crane Wife, a reliving of the Japanese folktale, ‘Tsuru no Ongaeshi’ (lit. crane's return of a favour):

There are only (arguably) only seven plots but look how many variations of those exist! Stories, of course, are lies and fibbing is generally frowned upon in the real world but for some reason writers can get away with it again and again. The truth—the facts, if you like—is not important because the reader decides what any book’s truth is for him or her. In The Crane Wife, for example, George tells us about a car accident when he was eight-year-old boy living in America:

When George told this part of the story, he invariably found himself saying ‘This actually happened’ and ‘I’m not making this up’ because it seemed too cruel that the car that had run the red light and knocked into Roy and the bike and him should have been driven by an eighty-three-year-old lady who could barely see over the steering wheel.

Sadly, it was the truth. If George had ever learned her name, he’d long forgotten it, but he’d remembered that she was eighty-three, that she was barely taller than him or Roy, and that the words she kept repeating afterwards were, ‘Please don’t sue me. Please don’t sue me.’ For the dignity of old ladies everywhere, George often wished this part of the story hadn’t happened, but there you were, sometimes life didn’t oblige with appropriate variation.

He relates the story as he remembers it, from his perspective, having no other, but what he’s come to realise as he’s grown up is that that’s not the only version of the story available. He has his version of events. Everyone who was there on that day will have their equally valid version:

Did it matter? George thought perhaps it did, and not in terms of finding the truth or of any hope of discovering what really happened at any given moment. There were as many truths – overlapping, stewed together – as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than the story’s life. A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew.

Many years later in a garden in England George is provided with an opportunity to enter someone else’s story. It’s an old story (see the Wikipedia entry) but it gets replayed centuries later as always a little differently but at its core it remains the same. It begins in exactly the same manner as the original: a crane appears in his garden in need of assistance:

[T]here it stood. Alone in the middle of the modest stretch of grass that made up the modest back garden of his modest detached home.

A great white bird, as tall as he was, taller, willowy as a reed.

A reed made of stars, he thought.

Then, ‘A reed made of stars’? Where the hell did that come from?

The bird was illuminated only by the moon in the cold, clear winter sky, shades of white, grey and dark against the shadows of his lawn standing there regarding him, its eye a small, golden glint of blinking wet, level with his own, its body as long as he’d been when he was at his teenage gangliest. It looked somehow, he stupidly thought, as if it was on the verge of speaking, as if it would open its pointed, clipped bill and tell him something of vital importance that could only be learnt in a dream and forgotten on the instant of waking.

The bird’s been injured, shot through with an arrow, which George extracts from its wing somehow and the next thing he knows it’s flown off into the night.

Ness’s method of storytelling is an interesting one—he jumps back and forth in time and changes perspective (when George’s daughter appeared immediately after Kumiko wanders into George’s shop I wondered what the hell was happening) but it’s a good way to hold the reader’s attention and to help him reassess what he thought he understood. At one point, for example, there’s a fire and Ness provides five different ways in which the fire could’ve started. My assumption is that the last one was what really happened but it doesn’t really matter; in alternate realities any of the five could’ve happened and the result would’ve been the same. I wrote in a poem once that I didn’t believe in destiny but I did in inevitability. I think that’s what we have a case of here: the set-up is similar, the people are similar and so the outcome will be similar. Close enough for government work as my wife is fond of saying.

One of the problems with folktales is that the characters are archetypes and there’s not much depth to them. Well art found its third dimension—just think of how flat the cave drawings were and even the clever Egyptians’ art still had no depth—and the same has happened with literature. We regard folk stories and fairy tales as primitive forms of storytelling. Nowadays we want character development. Just look at the recent films based on fairy tales. Bad though many of them have been they’re on the right track. And so is this book. George, his daughter, his grandson, their friends, families and exes are all real. The only really two-dimensional character is Kumiko. Because she’s straight out of a story. Not so different to Arnold Schwarzenegger bursting off the screen in Last Action Hero.

That Kumiko is the embodiment of the crane George rescues at the start of the book is no big surprise. That she might come with baggage was. Granted her back story is a folktale but it’s still her back story, a love affair with a volcano of all things. Of course the real world ending explains everything away as hallucinations; they’re easier to cope with than the fact magic might exist.

George is a nice guy. Literature is full of nice, decent blokes, the Arthur Dents of this world, who get caught up in extraordinary events and just get on with it in a very British sort of way (even if, as is the case here, they’re not actually British). They’re also really annoying. Not that George is perfect—we learn enough along the way to realise that George is human—but (and I recall this being true of the comedian Tony Hancock) people forgive him rather too easily. George’s assistant expresses this perfectly when he says:

‘It’s because you inspire loyalty. No one wants to let you down. Which, frankly, makes them all vaguely irritated with you most of the time – I know it does me – but they stick around because they want to be sure you’re all right.’ Mehmet shrugged. ‘You’re likeable. And if you like them, well, that means they’re really worth liking, doesn’t it?’

I think I might’ve liked George if he’d been just a bit more flawed. In that respect his foul-mouthed daughter is a far better character.
Not a hard read by any means but very much a story. You want to get to the end, you want to see what happens to everyone but if you forgot to read a couple of paragraphs on a page then you didn’t feel like you were missing anything really important. To dismiss the book as a beach read would be to do it a disservice; it’s better than that, but it could’ve been even better. I came away from it dissatisfied. It reminded me of numerous Star Trek episodes where a guest star appears to play someone’s love interest and they do fall in love, big time but for some mysterious reason they can’t be together. That always bugged the hell out of me. And the same here. There was no reason why things had to end the way they did. Stories can change. Romeo and Juliet don’t have to commit suicide at the end of the play.

***

Patrick Ness was born on Fort Belvoir army base, near Alexandria, Virginia in the United States where his father was a drill sergeant in the US Army. He then moved to Hawaii where he lived until he was six, then spent the next ten years in Washington State before moving to Los Angeles where he studied English Literature at the University of Southern California.

After graduating he worked as corporate writer for a cable company. He published his first story in Genre magazine in 1997 and was working on his first novel when he moved to London in 1999. Since then he’s published three children’s books, two adult novels and a collection of short stories. The Knife of Never Letting Go, his first novel for children, won numerous awards, including the Booktrust Teenage Prize, the Guardian Award, and the 2008 James Tiptree, Jr. Award. In January 2010 he won the 2009 Costa Book Award for the category children's book for The Ask and the Answer. Monsters of Men won the CILIP Carnegie Medal and was shortlisted for the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke Award.

He taught creative writing at Oxford University and has written and reviewed for The Daily Telegraph, The Times Literary Supplement, The Sunday Telegraph and The Guardian.

He has been a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund and is currently first Writer in Residence for Booktrust.

“I am inclined to think— ” said I.
“I should do so,” Sherlock Holmes remarked impatiently.
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Valley of Fear

I have to be careful what I say here because Watsonian thinkers like me and—unless you’re Sherlock Holmes—you will be prone to jump to the all the wrong conclusions. Is it sunny where you are? Or raining? Have you just been for a long walk in the country or had a bath? It all counts you know. If there’s one single thing I came away with from this book is that we’re incredibly untrustworthy creatures. Even when we’ve seen things with our own eyes. Do you realise just how little your eyes actually see? “Strange how the brain controls the brain!” mused Holmes in the short story 'The Adventure of the Dying Detective'.

I suppose I should’ve applied the Holmesian method when approaching reading this book but I’m afraid I made up my mind about it within a few seconds. Some of my initial impressions proved to be right but I’ve no reason to pat myself on the back; even lucky guesses can be right every now and again. My initial opinions were heavily influenced by Canongate’s marketing and art departments. They presented a book to me that had a cartoon on the cover and a fun title. It wasn’t called something like Grounding Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language and Thinking (yes, it’s a real book); it was called Mastermind. The author graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, where she studied psychology, creative writing, and government but there are no letters after her name or the cover, perhaps to make her seem more approachable. The real clincher was the subtitle because surely no one would write a heavyweight treatise around a fictional detective. This was popular science, science for the rest of us, probably of more appeal to the Holmes fan than anyone with a serious interest in the human mind. I wouldn’t have been surprised to discover—which I did later on—that the book began life as a series of blogs for Big Think.

On reading the book I was proved right. The book’s heavy on the Holmes, not so heavy on the science, and, rather than use Holmes to illustrate the science, it does tend to use the science to explain how Holmes works (and Watson doesn’t), all of which makes it a very entertaining read, although the author can actually be (bearing in mind the book’s only about 250 pages long) a bit long-winded at times; she tends to make her point and then underscore it a couple of times when once would suffice. Some of the material was familiar to me and as I don’t read a great many nonfiction books I can only assume that it was from my recent reading of Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer. The book is, however, under no delusions it’s more than what it is and at the end of the book there’s a Recommended Reading List where those whose interests have been piqued can shoot off and bury their heads in weightier tomes.

Holmes was not real. Just saying. I’m sure there’re people out there who think he was. And that King Arthur was too. Holmes was, however, based on a real person, two actually according to Konnikova:

Holmes’s very name speaks at once of an intent beyond a simple detective of the old-fashioned sort: it is very likely that Conan Doyle chose it as a deliberate tribute to one of his childhood idols, the philosopher-doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., a figure known as much for his writing as for his contributions to medical practice. The detective’s character, in turn, was modelled after another mentor, Dr. Joseph Bell, a surgeon known for his powers of close observation. It was said that Dr. Bell could tell from a single glance that a patient was a recently discharged noncommissioned officer in a Highland regiment, who had just returned from service in Barbados, and that he tested routinely his students’ own powers of perception with methods that included self-experimentation with various noxious substances.

And, of course, we shouldn’t discount Doyle himself who applied similar deductive reasoning in real life to secure the release of George Edalji who’d been sentenced to seven years of hard labour for supposedly mutilating a pony. Holmes is an ideal, a freak even, and as the author points out a man who has trained himself over decades to think in a decidedly unnatural way. Like everyone else he was born a Watson but chose to transform himself into a Holmes. (Not actually sure where Mycroft—Sherlock’s smarter brother—fits into any of this because he’s never mentioned.)

On checking James O’Brien’s book The Scientific Sherlock Holmes it does seem, however, that there were others who also may have been an influence like Sir Henry Littlejohn who was one of Doyle’s medical school instructors. In addition to lecturing at the medical school, he was Police Surgeon in Edinburgh. A forensic expert, he frequently served as an expert witness at trials. And one mustn’t forget the writer Edgar Allan Poe:

[W]hile Doyle may have wanted to compliment his old mentors Bell and Littlejohn by naming them as models for Sherlock, it was Poe who influenced Doyle most when he took up his pen to become a writer. – James O’Brien, The Scientific Sherlock Holmes, p.15 (the link contains a lengthy excerpt from the book)

O’Brien provides several examples to substantiate his claim. I cite this only to show that Konnikova isn’t always as thorough as she might be in providing evidence to back up her claims.

[O]ur minds aren’t meant to think like Holmes by default. But on the other hand, new thought habits can be learned and applied. Our brains are remarkably adept at learning new ways of thinking—and our neural connections are remarkably flexible, even into old age.

I’m not actually sure I’d want to become a Holmes but I think it is helpful to understand what it means to be a Watson. In this respect the book provides us with some surprising—and disappointing—truths about ourselves. For example:

When we think as a matter of course, our minds are preset to accept whatever it is that comes to them. First we believe, and only then do we question. Put differently, it’s like our brains initially see the world as a true/false exam where the default answer is always true. And while it takes no effort whatsoever to remain in true mode, a switch of answer to false requires vigilance, time, and energy.

Why is it so hard to pay attention?

[O]ur minds are made to wander. That is their resting state. Anything more requires an act of conscious will.

And as for multi-tasking?

The modern emphasis on multitasking plays into our natural tendencies quite well, often in frustrating ways. Every new input, every new demand that we place on our attention is like a possible predator: Oooh, says the brain. Maybe I should pay attention to that instead. And then along comes something else. We can feed our mind wandering ad infinitum. The result? We pay attention to everything and nothing as a matter of course. 

How’s your eyesight? Fine, you say. Think again:

Our vision is highly selective as is—the retina normally captures about ten billion bits per second of visual information, but only ten thousand bits actually make it to the first layer of the visual cortex, and, to top it off, only 10 percent of the area’s synapses is dedicated to incoming visual information at all. Or, to put it differently, our brains are bombarded by something like eleven million pieces of data—that is, items in our surroundings that come at all of our senses—at once. Of that, we are able to consciously process only about forty. 

I could go on. And, indeed, the book does. Plenty of scientists are referred to along the way. To illustrate that first point about us always believing the first thing we hear (which my wife insists she does not) the author references Daniel Gilbert a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University:

Psychologist Daniel Gilbert describes it this way: our brains must believe something in order to process it, if only for a split second. Imagine I tell you to think of pink elephants. You obviously know that pink elephants don’t actually exist. But when you read the phrase, you just for a moment had to picture a pink elephant in your head. In order to realize that it couldn’t exist, you had to believe for a second that it did exist.

I’m not saying she’s wrong but I couldn’t find out exactly where Gilbert makes this assertion. But, of course, we Watsons don’t mind. If she says it’s true then it will be. People don’t make up stuff, do they? (Actually Jonah Lehrer did but none of the scientific reviewers I’ve read have suggested such a thing with regards to Konnikova.)

Holmes’s technique is an approach born out of the scientific method so a more serious consideration of the material might’ve been entitled How to Think Like a Scientist (Author Chad Orzel is currently writing such a book) and Konnikova does take us through what would be required of us to modify our thinking in that way. On ScienceBlogs Orzel explains the scientific method as follows:

Stripped to its essentials, science is a four-step process: you look at something interesting in the world, you think about why it might work that way, you test your idea with further observations and experiments, and you tell everybody you know what you found.

Holmes no doubt would chide him for that loose definition. To take the first point: we look at things all the time but do we truly observe them? It’s not enough to look; we have to look with intent:

        The steps to 221B Baker Street. How many were there? It’s the question Holmes brought before Watson in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia…’ As Holmes and Watson sit in their matching armchairs, the detective instructs the doctor on the difference between seeing and observing. Watson is baffled. And then, all at once everything becomes crystal clear.
         “When I hear you give your reasons,” [Watson] remarked, “the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously simple that I could easily do it myself, though at each successive instance of your reasoning, I am baffled until you explain your process. And yet I believe that my eyes are as good as yours.”
         “Quite so,” [Holmes] answered, lighting a cigarette, and throwing himself down into an armchair. “You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear. For example, you have frequently seen the steps which lead up from the hall to this room.”
         “Frequently.”
         “How often?”
         “Well, some hundreds of times.”
         “Then how many are there?”
         “How many? I don’t know.”
         “Quite so! You have not observed. And yet you have seen. That is just my point. Now, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have both seen and observed.”

Of course only being able to see forty bits of information per second doesn’t help. Or am I making excuses for Watson? (This from the man who lived in a flat for several years and never noticed there were butterflies on his curtains.)

Really what Konnikova does in this book—and does reasonably well—is take all the advice that Holmes gives Watson and backs it up with science. She explains why Watson—our reliable proxy—is the way he is and how far he/we would have to go to shake off what’s become second nature to us. There’s precious little advice on how to stop being who we’ve been for decades and are very comfortable being. It’s not that kind of book and so in that respect the title is a little misleading but we don’t care; we were entertained for a few hours and we’re happy with that plus we’ve learned that we’re prone to priming, stereotyping, confirmation bias, the conjunction fallacy, probabilistic incoherence and the default effect… to name just a few. It’s scary really. In layman’s terms we need to think twice before doing anything basically. Including, apparently, thinking. And do look twice before you cross the road.

I particularly enjoyed the chapter on the Cottingley Fairies. Today we see these photos for exactly what they are but what’s so amazing is how easily Doyle was duped. The answer is a simple enough one: he wanted them to be true. When our brains have that obstacle to overcome no amount of evidence will even be enough and to be fair to Doyle he did try to be scientific.

And have we come that much further today? In the United States, as of 2004, 78 percent of people believed in angels.

Oddly enough I don’t find it so odd that people might believe in angels—no doubt my religious upbringing has much to do with that—but fairies? Nah.

I’ll leave you with a wee video where Konnikova talks about the book and covers all the stuff I never got round to talking about above. Actually she does a pretty good job of summarising the whole book in nineteen minutes:

***

Maria Konnikova is a writer living in New York City, where she works on an assortment of non-fiction and fiction. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, where she studied psychology, creative writing, and government, and is currently a doctoral candidate in Psychology at Columbia University. Before returning to school, she worked as a producer for the Charlie Rose show on PBS. Her writing has appeared online and in print in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The Wall Street Journal, Salon, The Boston Globe, The Observer, Scientific American MIND, WIRED, and Scientific American, among numerous other publications. Maria blogs regularly for The New Yorker and formerly wrote the Literally Psyched column for Scientific American and the popular psychology blog Artful Choice for Big Think. 

Most mornings, Maria can be found in a yoga studio. Most afternoons, she can be found writing, reading, or conducting definitive explorations into the workings of the human mind. She lives in the West Village with her husband. Her second book, on the psychology of the con, is scheduled for publication by Viking/Penguin in the winter.

Say what you have to say and get off the page – Me.

I’ve been writing for forty years. Longer actually. That’s a long time. I could tote up how many novels, novellas, short stories, flash fictions, poems, plays, children’s books, songs, blogs and essays I’ve written and if I did—I’m not going to—it would not be a figure to be embarrassed about. It would be more than a great many great writers. In fact I’m often taken aback when I look up such-and-such and find he’s only published, I dunno, three novels or something. What’s he been doing with his life? I don’t write a lot these days. Last year I only completed eight poems and (surprisingly) a novella but that was it. So far this year I’ve written a single poem. It’s a good poem. But it’s still only one poem. Maybe by the time I get round to posting this I’ll have written a second.

And then I go online and listen to what everyone else is doing and people are doing SO MUCH STUFF and it’s… well, it’s depressing. That I’m easily depressed doesn’t help but that’s life. And that’s the thing about depression, being around happy people is, well… it actually can drag one down even further. For the record I’m not depressed. At least I’m not depressed-with-a-capital-d. Not at the moment. But I have been. And it is not fun. Some people run hot, some cold. Most people looking at me would think I’m a bit down in the dumps but I’m not. I’m normal for me. But I do wish that people wouldn’t go on so much about what and how they’re doing.

I’ve mixed feelings about the Internet. In principle I’m in favour of it. It has many positive and time-saving features. I can write an article and have it out there for the world to see in minutes. Scary really. I don’t work that way. I write my articles, send them to my wife to edit them in case I’ve said something politically incorrect (which I have nearly done on several occasions)—“Jimmy, you can’t say that?” “Why not? It’s true.” “You just can’t say that. Not that way.”—and I’m grateful to her plus she fixes my many (sometimes many, many) typos and brain farts. And then I usually sit on the damn thing for weeks so that by the time I get round to posting it I’ve forgotten what the hell I was on about in the first place. That’s the good thing about the Internet.

The bad thing is all the other people. I don’t really get this social thing. I’m on Facebook and Twitter and I do endeavour to participate but I don’t really get them. My personal view of them is that their core function (for me at least) is a way of reminding people I’m not dead. Because I don’t have much to say and what I do have to say I tend to reserve for blogs like this or if it’s really important then I’ll write a book or something. I don’t find there’s that much important going on right now. Not to me. I listen to the news on the good ol’ BBC and I know there’s stuff going on that matters, that should matter but I find I don’t have anything to add that wouldn’t get lost in the morass of comment that already exists and then again who cares what I have to say?

My opinions on the things I care about are known. Most other things I don’t pay enough attention to to have an opinion. Most of what I’ll ever have to say has been said already. If not by me then by people cleverer and far more articulate than I’ll ever be. I have bits and pieces lying all over the flat, half-finished poems and beginnings to novels (I’ve got three of those at least) but I can usually tell pretty quickly that they don’t need to be finished. Mostly I can tell before things need to be started. Which makes me wonder: What’s all this stuff that other people feel they desperately need to say? I wonder how many other writers ask themselves that question before they put pen to paper or open up a new Word document. In 2012, according to The Booksellers Association—the last year figures are available for—there were 75,000 paperbacks published and 58,000 e-books in the UK alone—and I really would like to know how many of those books needed to be written. No, let me correct that. How many needed to be published. People write books for all sorts of reasons and then they do the right thing and stick them in a drawer and forget about them.

I’m wondering now if I need to write this. I’m not saying anything radical. We all know there’re not enough hours in the day to do the things we have to do including read the books we want to read let alone write the books we need to write. Maybe now I’ve got this out of my system I’ll just delete this file and go and watch some mindless TV. But I won’t. Even as I’m typing this I know I’m going to post it. I need to post it. I’m expected to post it. I committed to posting regularly. People would worry if I didn’t post. Because Jimmy always posts on schedule. Because that’s the kind of bloke he is. They’d start dropping me e-mails asking if Carrie was poorly.

(Just as an aside that’s what happened the day my dad had his first heart attack. One of his workmates—Dad only worked over the hill—walked over, knocked on the kitchen door and said, and I remember his words so clearly, “Jimmy, your dad’s not at work. Is your mum all right?” My dad was like me—well, the other way round—he was dependable and I take pride in being too.)

But do I need to post this? We’re all about being green these days. Click on this link. Go on. It’s a link to a site called worldometers. And you can watch, live, how many blogs are being posted this very second. Around the world an estimated 2.73 million posts are written every day on average. I doubt that much litter’s dropped in a day. (Actually I checked: 2.25 million pieces of litter are dropped in the UK alone! So I’m way off. But you get my point.)

Talking about being green, you might’ve heard of Earth Hour. Earth Hour’s a worldwide grass-roots movement for the planet organized by the World Wide Fund. The event’s held worldwide towards the end of March annually encouraging individuals, communities, households and businesses to turn off their non-essential lights for one hour as a symbol for their commitment to the planet. Does it make a difference? The Earth Hour Global FAQ page states:

Earth Hour does not purport to be an energy/carbon reduction exercise, it is a symbolic action. Therefore, we do not engage in the measurement of energy/carbon reduction levels for the hour itself. Earth Hour is an initiative to encourage individuals, businesses and governments around the world to take accountability for their ecological footprint and engage in dialogue and resource exchange that provides real solutions to our environmental challenges. Participation in Earth Hour symbolises a commitment to change beyond the hour.

What do you think would happen if we all boycotted Facebook for a day or skipped one blog a year? Probably nothing. It’s probably way too late anyway for empty gestures anyway.

There used to be a TV programme back in the seventies (although, on checking, it seems it ran right through to 1995) called Why Don't You Just Switch Off Your Television Set and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead? Do I really need to explain what the premise of the show? Someone should start a podcast: Why Don’t You Just Switch Off Your Computer and Go and Do Something Meaningful Instead? I wish I could. I wish I could do more meaningful things. It’s not enough to do less boring things. It shouldn’t be enough anyway.

Of course I’m oversimplifying. But it’s something to think about. And I think it was worth writing about too.

They always say that you shouldn’t tell lies, but without lies I’d already be in an orphanage – Marina Mander, The First True Lie

I’ve a problem with books narrated by young children and I’ve read a few now: I never truly believe that it’s a child that’s talking even when, as Mander does, the author goes out of his or her way to point out that their narrator is intelligent. In Luca’s case we have the word of his mother:

Mama says it’s because I was born at seven months, and seven-month babies are more intelligent.

and his teacher:

Luca displays self-confidence and a lively disposition. He is endowed with considerable intelligence and a sense of responsibility. The pupil succeeds in all subjects. He consistently applies himself, and the results are excellent. He has demonstrated a good deal of interest and ability in artistic activities and a notable interest in science and history. Kindhearted and generous, he does all he can for his classmates and is full of initiative.

We’re never told exactly how old he is but from the way other adults treat him and his physical limitations—“I’ve never been able to reach so high, above the fridge, except with the chair”—I don’t think he’s older than seven:

On the kitchen door frame you can still see the notches where Mama marked how much I’d grown: two years, three years, six years…She always makes me stand against the same wall and act serious, while she puckers her lips in a stern, professional way.

Luca lives with his mother—his father vanished years ago (he thinks of himself as a “half orphan”)—and their cat, Blue; “We called him Blue because of his breed and also because Mama loves the blues.” His mother is lonely, always on the lookout for a man but never seems to find the right one and can’t hang on to those she does manage to hook up with. She clearly loves her son but he does appear to be a handful. He’s clever, possibly precocious, but he’s still a little boy and all little boys are handfuls:

        Adults like to use words like in-laws, power steering, expenses, colleague, mortgage, sciatica, and nostalgia, and especially words that end in gy, like psychology, energy, strategy, and allergy.
        Mama suffers from all the gys put together.
        She says that psychology’s no use to her, that no matter how much she sleeps she has no energy, that she has nostalgia for a time when a man was a man but all the same you need a strategy to find him or else to make more money, that with the pollen every year her allergies just explode, and that the vaccines aren’t worth a damn.
        As for me, I’m vaccinated against all this.
        Mama complains constantly, and sometimes it’s sad. But what’s strange is that when she’s truly sad, she stops complaining. She just drifts around the apartment, superslow and without saying a word, like a pouty angel.

She sounds depressed. She probably is depressed. She takes pills to help her sleep:

        When Mama has nightmares, she says it’s not even possible to sleep in peace in this world, and that’s what I think too. Other times she says the pills have stolen her dreams, that sleep is just an inky-black nothingness, and she wakes up confused and doesn’t know which way is up. Sometimes she makes coffee without putting in the water, or else the coffee.
         “Don’t talk to me, don’t ask me for anything. I don’t know anything about anything this morning.”

And then one winter’s morning she doesn’t wake up. So what does Luca decide to do? Such is his phobia of becoming a fully-fledged orphan—being “a half orphan” is bad enough—he decides (using a child’s logic, of course)—that the best thing he can do is continue as normal. He gets dressed and goes to school. He feeds himself and the cat. He even bathes. At first he’s not a hundred percent certain that she is dead (although he’s pretty certain even from the very start) but when he comes home that first night and finds her still where he left her it’s pretty obvious but for the next couple of days he clings onto the hope that she might still recover from whatever has stricken her. Once, however, she begins to smell he has to resign himself to the inevitable. Which is him living on his own with the cat and taking care of himself. He knows where to find the code to her cash card and how to keep under the radar—little boys can become invisible when they set their minds to it—and that seems to solve most of his problems. Until the clean clothes start running out.

Children left to their own devices following the death of a parent has been dealt with before—Ian McEwan’sThe Cement Garden (although the children were older) jumps to mind—but having Luca fend for himself (he doesn’t even confide in a schoolmate) does provide an interesting perspective. He’s a thoughtful and insightful wee boy although I wasn’t convinced that the scope of his knowledge could be as broad as it comes across no matter how clever he is. He’s bright but no genius. His world experiences feel a bit too wide, his vocabulary a tad too expansive and his insights a little too deep. And then he lets the side down and pees himself. A lot of what happens to Luca is believable. That his mother’s best friend, Giulia, just happens to phone up and say she’s going on vacation for a few weeks is terribly convenient but what the heck. Stranger things have happened at sea.

Manders is not the first author to have a very young child as a first-person narrator. The book most people will think of in this regard is Emma Donoghue’sRoom although there are others—In Search of Adam by Caroline Smailes and What I Did by Christopher Wakling (both have six-year-old narrators)—but the book I was most familiar with was The Way the Family Got Away by Michael Kimball who has two very young children as the narrators; no ages are mentioned but I would guess five and three and the action mostly takes place in the back of a car. Most recently I read Jessica Bell’s novella The Book and in my review I talked at length about the problems facing authors who choose to have very young characters take centre stage in their novels. None of these succeed completely in my opinion, not that I think I could do better. Far from it. And that perhaps is part of my problem here in that I’m almost fifty years removed from being a six-year-old boy. I really can’t remember what concepts I had a firm grasp of back then and I was a bright kid. I recently listened to some reel-to-reel tapes my dad recorded in the sixties and I have to say I was shocked to hear how childish I came across as at six and, as I’ve said, I was not a stupid child. But I clearly was still very much a child.

Fear can be a powerful motivator though and really at its core that’s what this novella is about, more than loss or grief or blame: Luca’s paralysing fear of being sent to an orphanage:

        If Mama is dead, I can’t tell anyone. If I tell, they’ll take me to the orphanage.
        This is terrible.
        I don’t want to go.
        I don’t want to be a complete orphan.
        Anything else would be better.
        Better to say that Mama’s left.
        Or else say nothing and act like it doesn’t matter.
        Better to find a way to make do. It can’t be that difficult. Better to try to survive.
        Better to keep it a secret and smile.

Of course we know he won’t be able to keep it up forever although he manages longer than I expected. And then a knock comes on the door. And the book ends. This was a big problem with a number of reviewers. We don’t find out what happens to Luca. Does he get sent to an orphanage? Does he end up in foster care or even adopted? Leaving things on a cliffhanger is an okay way to end things but even a short coda set six months or a year or two later would’ve clearly been appreciated by some. In her defence Lord of the Fliesjust ends. Adults arrive on the island and we realise the boys are going to be rescued and some of them will probably be in therapy for years but Lord of the Flies is not real life; it’s a novel and novels have to end somewhere even though there will always be more to tell. That’s why we have sequels and Luca’s an interesting enough character to tempt an author into writing a sequel but I suspect she’ll be wise enough to leave him where she leaves him. Of what there is to the book, though, I have to say I was kept entertained. Luca’s a wee charmer and it’s impossible not to root for him. Not quite sure in what way I wanted him to succeed—surely not to get away with his subterfuge for years on end—but we Brits do have a soft spot for underdogs.

Despite my reservations there’s a lot good about this book. The boy works hard to keep his mother alive in his memories whilst struggling with… I suppose you’d call it survivor’s guilt; if only he’d made her happier none of this would’ve happened. I would’ve liked to know exactly how old Luca is supposed to be because I did get hung up on that and I wasn’t the only one. A couple of reviewers said he’s a ten-year-old—but I can find nothing to back that up—and then one still says, “I just could not accept that a ten yr. old (and I have a very bright ten yr. old grandson) would act or figure out a few of the things he did.” To my mind you need to put that to the side. He’s realistic. He doesn’t need to be real. We get the idea. In that respect the character of Luca is not a child, he’s a child-shaped vehicle for adults to inhabit for a hundred and fifty pages or so and by making him brighter and more insightful than he probably would’ve been in real life he becomes a more comfortable proxy for us.

The book is sad though—how could it not be sad? I defy anyone not to get even a little choked up when Luca celebrates his mother’s birthday—but I didn’t find it depressing like some, harrowing or jarring. Luca’s a survivor. Maybe that’s why we really don’t need to know where he ends up because we know whatever life throws at him after this he’ll survive it. Even an orphanage.

You can read an excerpt from the book here.

***

Marina Mander was born in Trieste in 1962 and received a degree in contemporary literature at the University of Venice. Today she lives in Milan and works with a number of magazines and newspapers including Il Piccolo. Her books include the story collection Manuale d'ipocondria fantastic (A Fantastical Manual of Hypochondria) and Catalog degli addii (A Catalogue of Farewells) illustrated with drawings by Beppe Giacobbe. The First True Lie is her first book to be translated into English. Her new Italian novel is entitled Nessundorma.

Words are all we have – Samuel Beckett

"A lot of internet communication is written speech, or transliterated speech," says Tony Thorne, a language consultant at King's College London. "Social media is all about nudging and poking. It's a more amplified conversation."

Ultimately, finding written ways to express the visual—like shrugging—is a key component of internet communication and social networks, says Mr Thorne. "People introduce these light hearted conversational things which normally you only find in speech," he says.

In that way, he suggests, "hey-ho" could just be the new emoticon. – Laura Schocker, ‘Why has “hey-ho” made a comeback?’, BBC News Magazine, 1 September 2009

Evolution is all about the survival of the fittest and the fact is that some words are no longer fit for purpose and have been replaced. Is that such a bad thing? The English language still has more words available to us than any of us use. Does it matter that the days of words like ‘aerodrome’ and ‘charabanc’ are numbered? Just like the Yangtze Finless Porpoise and the Humphead Wrasse are on the World Wildlife Fund’s Endangered Species List so likewise ‘aerodrome’ and ‘charabanc’ are on Collins Dictionary’s endangered words list. As a kid I thought ‘charabanc’ was ‘charabang’ because that’s how my dad pronounced it. It was one of his ambitions—sadly, never fulfilled—to drive one. So it’s a word I’ll take to the grave with me but I wonder how long it’ll survive after that. Should we let it die a natural death or try to preserve it? Does it deserve our protection? What if some pop star called their next album Charabanc? Would that guarantee it respite for another generation?

This book was first bought for me when I was twelve. It changed my life. Better than a thesaurus, more comprehensive and easier to use, it expanded my vocabulary and was the foundation for the love of language I have never lost.

I am thrilled to see that it is still available. All budding rappers, poets, school kids and their teachers should possess this book!

Safia Shah—now Safia Thomas—is a British writer, editor and television news producer. She was born in London in 1966 and, for several years, ran a respected traditional delicatessen, A. Gold in London, specializing in entirely British fare. She now lives close to Casablanca in Morocco which explains, perhaps, why her latest book, Carnaby Street’s Great Uninvited – Around the World in 80 Years, is set there despite the rather British-sounding title. The title is misleading. Carnaby Street is a person, a young girl—she looks about seventeen—and the book’s narrator; her fez-wearing younger brother is called Oxford. Odd names in children’s books are not uncommon—Arrietty in The Borrowers, Hermione in the Harry Potternovels (the name’s popularity was at an all-time low in 2010 and now’s at an all-time high) or Horton from the Dr Seuss book which despite the film adaptation has still not proved that popular with parents)—but, perhaps because I’m a Scot, I didn’t much care for Carnaby Street as a name. On my first read I actually thought it was the boy—for some reason I expected the boy to be the narrator—and wondered why Safia didn’t call him Barnaby. We don’t learn what their parents’ first names are but we are introduced to a number of their relatives—the great uninvited of the title—such as Florence May Street-Macadam and the rather Harry-Potter-looking Carter Able-Street-Macadam sometimes called ‘Chasm’ “as that’s his initials.” The Streets have a number of pets: Martin the cat who, on page eight, abandons them to train as a milkman; ten unnamed tortoises, one of whom “fell off the roof, in what can only be described as ‘highly suspicious circumstances’” and an aardvark called Alice whose real name apparently is ‘Orycteropus’ which, we’re told, means ‘aardvark’.

In your copy of the book, you will find a bookmark with squillions of fantastic endangered words and a pocket magnifier. Use the magnifier to reveal some cunningly hidden, mind-boggling new words. Coloured text on the page is your clue that a definition is hidden nearby. Be warned: some are harder to find than others!

There are somewhere between 150,000 and a quarter of a million words sloshing around in the English language but we routinely get through our day using as few as 7,000 of them.

In the glorious age of the text and the tweet, some 20 percent of our endangered words may be slipping from usage; a sobering statistic for anyone with a love of language that extends beyond the telephone keypad.

Here at Carnaby’s Great Uninvited, we’re calling upon anyone interested in saving some of these dear, wise, elderly and enfeebled words to help us breathe new life into old. Let’s snatch begrumpled from the brink of obscurity, jazz up jargogle and massage poor sick kedge-belly back to life. We want to open our wink-a-peeps and with your help, champion their cause.

We called Great Aunt Amelia ‘Gr- AAH’, which began as her names and somehow ended in the exclamation we made as she introduced us to her pet, Josie Shranks [a snake]. Globetrotting companions for almost half a century, they had little good to say of one another. 

[Graah says,] “I don’t much care for her but she has been with me for a very long time.” 

Graah had seen most of the world and had the baggage to prove it. 

We gave her the best room in the house because she’d come all the way from Matabeleland. And we were unaware that she was just the first of many guests to arrive. 

If only there had been some sort of a sign that so many more relatives were on their way. [A drawing of the cat holding a postcard suggests why.] 

Graah’s arrival caused the tortoises to momentarily consider a change in domicile. But the greatest strain was felt by Alice. Who had no fondness for reptiles. And who would have preferred that relatives and their reptilian pets refrained from coming to live with us. 

Being a python, Josie Shranks made Alice zigzag. That’s what aardvarks do when they see a predator– they zigzag.

As far as content goes there’s not really much of a story here. Aunt Sylvia and her family arrive followed by Great Aunt Amelia who “seamlessly replaced our regular cook”, as Carnaby puts it. Like we all have cooks that can get so easily replaced. Reminded me of Enid Blyton’s worldview as Amelia cooks a meal made entirely out of different coloured potatoes (one of which manages to look and taste like chicken), shows a slideshow of her travels, has a knitting competition with Carnaby’s mum before heading off to bed with stories still to tell and we’re left—this is the age of the sequel—wondering which relatives will turn up next. Like I said, not much of a story. We are told at the end, however, that this is to be “the first of a series of books that will centre on Carnaby Street and her madcap relatives.”

Now back to the illustrator, Mark Reeve. From his agency’s website [a few illustrations are available here too]:

Mark has been a commercial artist for twenty years. 

His first drawing was of a red elephant aged 5 and an intensive study of Marvel and DC Comics ensued, and Art college beckoned. First he attended Great Yarmouth College of Art and, in his own words, ‘achieved the rare distinction of failing the course and obtaining a confidential report so bad no other place would touch him’. Eventually however, he got his degree in Graphics at Kingston Art College and he has since produced a plethora of work, his folio comprising everything from DC comics, book covers, storyboards and film visuals, animation, political cartoons (he was political cartoonist on the Mail On Sunday for three and a half years and was awarded the Gillray Cup by The Political Cartoon Society 2004), sculpting and drawing the heads for Spitting Image and more recently, designing some sixty characters for ITV1′s satirical animated show Headcases (2008).

His comic book art’s not on a par with Bernie Wrightson or Joe Kubert or anything but there are nods. It’s obvious the man knows how to draw. But can he draw for kids? [NB: I do distinguish between comic book art and book illustration; they are far from being the same thing.] He does okay actually. What I especially liked was his careful use of colour. None of the illustrations are entirely in colour and so draw your eye to the important bits—exactly like highlighting in text. And there’s a mix of style—some are comic-booky (I’m think more Beano and Dandy comics here) whereas others (the father in particular) veer towards caricatures of real people (one of the many things Reeve does for a living—see here). The artwork here isn’t lush like the likes of Anthony Browne—Voices in the Park­ was one of the books I remember buying for one of Carrie’s grandkids—it veers more towards the cartoony style of Quentin Blake and there’s definitely a touch of Ronald Searle in the little girl and a bit of Charles Addams in their cat—it’s the eyes—or maybe Edward Gorey. There’s a lot on most of the pages to keep a kid’s interest over repeated viewings and, as I indicated above, the storytelling is not restricted to the words which is good because it feels more like a collaborative venture that way.

My biggest problem with the book is all to do with age. I’m really not sure what age range it’s aimed at. The language involved would need an older child to get to grips with it but he or she might feel they’re a bit old for a storybook. Then again I personally can’t imagine sitting a reading this to a child at the end of the day. There’s simply not enough meat to the words. So it’s a tough call. All parents know their own kids so they’d be best placed to decide what their children might appreciate. I had a look at some reading evaluation tests online and I reckon you’d need to be about eight or nine to cope comfortably with the level of comprehension needed here.

Mulder: They're here, aren't they?
Deep Throat: Mr. Mulder, they've been here for a long long time.

I should’ve read this book a long time ago. I knew of it but didn’t know much about it. I didn’t know what it was about and really that’s the best way to approach this book so, if you’re willing to trust me, then read no further; find yourself a copy and read it before you even think about seeing the film. (I’ve just watched the trailer and as much as I admire Scarlett Johansson, this looks as if Jonathan Glazer's loose adaptation has about as much in common with Faber’s book as I, Robothad with Asimov’s short stories.) If, however, you’ve already had the surprise spoiled—as happened to me by accident—this is no reason not to read the book. I can’t imagine many people have sat down to watch Planet of the Apes and not had a pretty good idea what they were in for even if it was nothing like the book; scriptwriters can occasionally improve on the source material.

The first I heard about the novel was when Canongate brought out its run of Canons with their minimal covers (the film tie-in reprint has just been published). The blurb intrigued me:

Isserley spends most of her time driving along empty, winding Highland roads in her red Toyota. She is interested in hitchhikers—so long as they are male, well-muscled and alone. But once she has coaxed them into her car, what she does to them is truly astonishing. Meeting Isserley is only the beginning of their journey, and a gateway to a new world.

Cutting across different genres, Under the Skin is a wildly inventive, bold and beautifully written book that launched Michel Faber's international career and was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Book Award. And in Isserley, Faber created one of the most memorable and singular heroines of modern times.

but as I recall at the time I was spoiled for choice; I picked two others, The People of the Sea and Chronicle in Stone and pretty much forgot about Under the Skin. The next I heard of Faber was a television adaptation of his 2002 novel The Crimson Petal and the White which my wife and I watched but to be honest I wasn’t a huge fan and I’m glad the book never came my way; it would’ve been a chore to read. Looking at the reviews on Goodreads and Amazon of Under the Skin I see a lot of one-star reviews and a few of them state the reason was it wasn’t The Crimson Petal and the White and for those who loved that book I can see why Under the Skin might be a huge disappointment. All I can say is all credit to the man that he can pull off two such different books with aplomb because there are a lot of people who loved Under the Skin and I was one of them.

It’s not perfect. I know I say that a lot in reviews but if we only sought out perfect books we’d probably have them all read in a month and then what would we do? What it manages to be—despite the fact that it is derivative at times—is original. Some have likened this book to Animal Farm whilst others have objected strongly to the comparison but I can see both sides of the coin: just as Animal Farm is not a fairy tale, Under the Skin is not a science fiction novel but like Animal Farm it uses one story to tell another. Faber could’ve written a Scottish My Year of Meatsto make his point with a lot less subtlety. Instead he wrote Under the Skin.

For me the book is fundamentally about understanding or the lack of and it’s not a new one. Blacks, gays, Jews, women, the mentally disabled: all these have (and continue to be) discriminated against as not fully human. I remember reading something in Clare Dudman’s98 Reasons for Being how it was once believed that the mad couldn’t feel the cold and workers in asylums would think nothing of dumping their charges into ice-cold baths completely insensitive to their protestations. There are those who also believe that lobsters don’t feel anything when boiled alive despite the evidence to the contrary.

There’s a scene in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe where the diners are introduced (literally!) to the Dish of the Day:

"Good evening," it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches, "I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body?" It harrumphed and gurgled a bit, wriggled its hind quarters into a more comfortable position and gazed peacefully at them. […] "Something off the shoulder perhaps?" suggested the animal, "Braised in a white wine sauce?"

How would we feel if our food was sentient and could communicate directly with us? Cannibals appear to have no problems with this but the rest of us do. The idea of eating another human being is completely alien to us which is why in science fiction one of the things aliens do is eat people. And mostly we view this literally but science fiction wasn’t always so literal. Look at what was produced in the fifties, all those Cold War stories. Just like fairy stories filled with anthropomorphic animals, science fiction novels packed with bug-eyed monsters are the perfect medium for getting us to look at things with fresh eyes. Which is why the cute variety of aliens are also effective, like Mork or ALF or Uncle Martin (from My Favourite Martian), all of whom see themselves as superior (at the very least technologically) to the humans they find themselves living amongst.

In science fiction humans come from Earth. Aliens sometimes call them Earthlings just as we might call the indigenous population of Mars Martians but what would the Martians call themselves? Would they regard themselves as humans and the inhabitants of Earth as aliens? What exactly does it mean to be human? Isserley certainly regards herself as human. She looks human, a short human female of slight build with thin arms and disproportionately-large breasts, breasts certainly large enough to distract the attention of the exclusively male hitchhikers she routinely stops for along the A90; if they looked a little closer at her they might start to think that maybe she wasn’t quite as perfect as she first appeared:

He could not see her face when she was looking ahead, which was a pity. It had been very remarkable. She wore the thickest corrective lenses he had ever seen. In Germany, he doubted that a person with such severe visual impairment would be approved for a driver’s licence. Her posture was, in his opinion, suggestive of some spinal problem. Her hands were large and yet unusually narrow. The skin on the edge of her hand, along her pinkie and down to the wrist, had a horny smoothness that was texturally quite different from the rest, suggesting scar tissue following surgery. Her breasts were perfect, flawless; perhaps they, too, were the product of surgery.

She was turning towards him now. Mouth-breathing, as if her perfectly sculpted little nose had indeed been sculpted by a plastic surgeon and had proved to be too small for her needs. Her magnified eyes were a little bloodshot with tiredness, but startlingly beautiful, in his opinion. The irises were hazel and green, glowing like … like illuminated microscope slides of some exotic bacterial culture.

[…]

She was tough, that was for sure. Probably had been through hell, growing up funny-looking in one of those little seaboard villages. Balintore. Hilton. Rockfield. No, not Rockfield. He knew every single person in Rockfield.

How old was she? Eighteen, maybe. Her hands were forty. She drove like she was pulling a wonky trailer-load of hay over a narrow bridge. Sat like she had a rod up her arse. Any shorter and she’d need a couple of pillows on the seat. Maybe he’d suggest that to her—maybe she’d bite his head off if he did.

In science fiction terms the core of Under the Skin has been done before: V, Quatermass(the 1979 serial), Torchwood: Children of Earth, Daybreakers—humans as product. Of course if you look at these four examples they’re all different and so is Under the Skin. To say more would spoil the book but we’re faced here with us being the aliens: virtually the whole book is written from the perspective of the … well, we never find out what they call themselves other than ‘human’ because, as far as they’re concerned, they’re the humans; they call the indigenous population vodsels.

In the fifties all aliens are evil and out to destroy us. Well, apart from maybe Klaatu. Later on the notion of aliens with principles started to find an audience and that’s what we have here. More than any other of her kind Isserley has the most direct contact with the vodsels; she has to interact with them, buy petrol from them, offer them lifts and make conversation with them because not every hitchhiker is suitable for their purposes. She’s like a serial killer—in fact for a while one might be forgiven for thinking that’s exactly what she is but that’s Faber doing his best to misdirect his readership in the early pages of the book—she’s very selective and often will abandon the men at the agreed upon drop-off point rather than risk doing anything that might draw the authorities’ attention to her true purpose.

She spends hours and hours driving every day:

Isserley had been doing this for years. Scarcely a day went by when she didn’t drive her battered red Toyota Corolla to the A9 and start cruising. Even when she’d had a run of successful encounters and her self-esteem was high, she’d worry that the last hitcher she’d picked up might prove, with hindsight, to be her last truly satisfactory one: perhaps no-one in the future would measure up.

In truth, there was for Isserley an addictive thrill about the challenge. She could have some magnificent brute sitting in her car, right next to her, knowing for sure that he was coming home with her, and she could already be thinking ahead to the next one. Even while she was admiring him, following the curves of his brawny shoulders or the swell of his chest under his T-shirt, savouring the thought of how superb he’d be once he was naked, she would keep one eye on the roadside, just in case an even better prospect was beckoning to her out there.

[…]

She tried to project herself forward in time, visualizing herself already parked somewhere with a hunky young hitch-hiker sitting next to her; she imagined herself breathing heavily against him as she smoothed his hair and grasped him round the waist to ease him into position.

Maybe it’s all about sex. She like a praying mantis. (Did you catch the ‘biting his head off’ reference?) Maybe that’s why she’s only interested in the males—she’s ‘cruising’ (definite double-meaning there) and imagining men naked—and this wouldn’t be the first science fiction story where the aliens have come to earth to have sex with us although it’s usually the males who want our women (e.g. Mars Needs Women).

Of course Faber drip-feeds us clues and within a couple of chapters you’ll be dismissing some of your early ideas. And by the time you’re a third way through the book you’ll definitely know what’s what. So what’re we in store for in the rest of the book? Are the police going to close in? Is some secret government alien hunter going to appear and go all Schwarzenegger on them? Actually, no. What happens is the boss’s son, Amlis Vess, appears and it turns out he’s a bit of a tree-hugger, at least that’s what he might’ve been on his home planet if the trees were worth hugging. At one point he says:

‘[E]ven though it was pitch dark, I saw … what looked like … trees, except absolutely enormous, taller than this building.’ His plummy accent was pitiable now; he was like a child, trying to sum up the grandeur of the universe in the stilted language of the playpen.

He doesn’t much approve of the family business and sets his sights on Isserley. Maybe he doesn’t have enough clout to close down the mine but maybe he can blunt the drill bit at the coalface.

Isserley is a bit of a loner though although she’s not entirely immune to his charms. Her job demands it and her job is her life. What life she once had has been sacrificed to enable her to do her job so she might as well glean what satisfaction she can from it. There’s no going back. Would she even want to go back? She’d been saved from a life in the Estates. Tough choice. Of course picking up hitchhikers can be problematic especially if you’re a single female and the men whose company you prefer could snap you in half like a twig. But needs must. And rationalisation is a terrible thing:

The thing about vodsels was, people who knew nothing whatsoever about them were apt to misunderstand them terribly. There was always the tendency to anthropomorphize. A vodsel might do something which resembled a human action; it might make a sound analogous with human distress, or make a gesture analogous with human supplication, and that made the ignorant observer jump to conclusions.

In the end, though, vodsels couldn’t do any of the things that really defined a human being. They couldn’t siuwil, they couldn’t mesnishtil, they had no concept of slan. In their brutishness, they’d never evolved to use hunshur; their communities were so rudimentary that hississins did not exist; nor did these creatures seem to see any need for chail, or even chailsinn.

And, when you looked into their glazed little eyes, you could understand why.

She could be an explorer in deepest Africa or the Amazon talking about some tribe: the Pirahã have no concept of a supreme spirit or god; the Amondawa people have no concept of time or age; the Nukak have no concept of money, of property, of the role of government, or even of the existence of a country called Colombia. Or she could be a Nazi talking about the Untermenschen—the sub-human Jews. Maybe the inhabitants of planet Earth are primitive compared to Isserley’s people. Does that mean they have no rights? Does that mean they’re not also human?

So is Under the Skin an allegory, a satire, a darkly comic sci-fi or a work of metaphysics? There’s no reason why it can’t be all of these but asking a book to succeed at all of these is a tall order and it does run out of steam a bit towards the ending which was probably inevitable even if by the end of the book I’d completely forgotten about the aviir, whatever the hell aviir is. Oddly enough as I write this I’m reminded of Never Let Me Go where, again, the issue is the nature of humanity: Do clones have souls? Are they real humans? It’s also a book that refuses to fall neatly into a single genre and has a fairly inevitable ending.

Is it a bit preachy? Without a doubt. That said some people still drag themselves out of bed of a Sunday morning and deliberately go to a building to get preached at. Preachy isn’t necessarily bad. And the best kind of preachers are those whose message is one that many people in different situations can apply to themselves. Faber’s sermonising’s not new. We’ve lived on this planet long enough that someone at some time has come up with every moral that could possibly end any story but the trick for modern day evangelists (or didactic novelists) is to reinvent the wheel, to make the blindingly-obvious seem like something new. And Faber has a good crack at that.

I will watch the film when it comes out. I never saw Sexy Beast but I quite enjoyed Birth and I do appreciate a filmmaker who takes his time over projects. You can read a review of it here which also includes the trailer and an interview with Johansson.

You can read an excerpt from the book here.

Once you’ve read the book might I also suggest having a look at 'It is a Question of Words, Therefore': Becoming-Animal in Michel Faber's Under the Skin by Sarah Dillon (Science Fiction Studies 38:1 (2011), 134-54)?

***

MICHEL FABER has written several other books, including the highly acclaimed The Crimson Petal and the White and The Fahrenheit Twins . The Apple, based on characters in The Crimson Petal and the White, was published in 2006. He has also written two novellas, The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps (2001) and The Courage Consort (2002), and has won several short-story awards, including the Neil Gunn, Ian St James and Macallan. Born in Holland, brought up in Australia, he now lives in the Scottish Highlands.

You can read an interview with him here.

.

Yes. This really happened. – The Battle of Midway

One thing I can say about Mark Harris with regard to his book Five Came Back—which is basically a study of how the American film industry was changed forever by World War II—is that he’s done his homework and I have little doubt that when he handed it in he got a gold star. This is a thoroughly-researched book that contains over sixty pages of end matter. It is easily readable and surprisingly entertaining. The man clearly did a lot of reading in researching his topic. And he’s managed to do what the five men highlighted in this book—John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, George Stevens, and Frank Capra—all managed to do, take a huge amount of material from multiple sources and whittle it down to its essence. At 444 pages it’s still not a quick read (and I’m not including the end matter here) but, to be fair, he does cover a lot of ground.

The book begins in March 1938 and takes us through to February 1947, so we get a rounded picture of where Hollywood started out and where it ended up. In 1938 these five directors, four of whom were too old to be drafted and chose to enlist, were working on projects like Stagecoach(Ford), Gunga Din (Stevens) and You Can’t Take It With You(Capra). People were aware there was a war on but it was the European War. Nothing to do with them. They didn’t avoid mentioning the war in their films but they did so with care:

The stern eye of the Production Code as well as the studios’ collective fear of giving offense meant that controversial material was systematically weeded out of scripts before the cameras ever rolled. It also meant that even the most highly praised and successful studio directors were treated as star employees rather than artists entitled to shape their own creative visions.

[…]

The idea of pursuing a more socially or politically committed cinema, was … futile; no film with a strong political perspective would be able to surmount the studios’ fear of being labelled interventionists, or the antipathy of the censors…

What you have to remember is that most of the studios were owned by Jews and they were scared that people would accuse them of having an agenda but as things began to escalate in Germany some decided they simply couldn’t sit on the side-lines any longer and in 1939 Warner Bros produced the then controversial Confessions of a Nazi Spy. Its title alone was shocking and they fully expected the filmed to “be banned in many European countries (which it was) and might also face serious opposition from state and municipal censorship boards (which it did). But the studio stood by its conviction that the country was ready for the movie.” The problem was that “most studios maintained a strong financial interest in the German market and continued to do business with Hitler and his deputies.” Privately they may have held strong opinions but they were determined that “they would not allow their feelings, or anyone else’s, about what was happening in Germany to play out onscreen.” Stevens had it right when years later he said, talking to Leni Riefenstahl, “I think all film is propaganda.” Saying nothing is as bad as saying the wrong thing.

Everything changed in 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour. “Any trepidation the studios felt about making war movies vanished within weeks.” What also vanished was some of their best talent. The armed forces didn’t exactly open its arms to embrace Hollywood’s finest—“some … were astounded, and affronted that directors who had until recently been guiding Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers across a dance floor or teaching John Wayne to look heroic on a horse would now be entrusted with educating servicemen”—but the simple, undeniable fact was that even if these “[f]ilm-makers could not win the war … [they] had already shown that they could win the people.”

Naïve and inexperienced as they were—some couldn’t even salute properly—it was going to be a steep learning curve and take them away from their careers and families for far longer than any of them imagined. It would also change them permanently none more so that Stevens who was one of the first cameramen to film inside Nordhausen, a sub-camp of the concentration camp Dora-Mittelbau, which did little to prepare his for what he witnessed at Dachau. His work resulted in two films, The Nazi Planand Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps which were only intended for the eyes of those involved in the Nuremberg Trials.

The Nazi Plan

All the other film-makers were producing work to educate the soldiers but their eyes, even in wartime (much to my surprise), were on awards; some, admittedly, more than others.

The book has a long way to go before we get to this point and it lists chronologically the major documentary films produced throughout and just after the war and what was involved in their creation. Between them these five men were on the scene for almost every major moment of America’s war and in every branch of the service—army, navy and air force; Atlantic and Pacific; from Midway to North Africa, from Normandy to the fall of Paris and the liberation of the death camps. A lot of it involved bravery, some stupidity, way too much bureaucracy and more reconstruction and out-and-out fakery than I ever expected to read about. For example “[a]lthough [John Huston’s] San Pietro was presented to the movie going public as a wartime documentary, all the film’s combat scenes were staged.” The reasons for at least some staging becomes obvious especially once you’ve viewed one of the earliest films produced, John Ford’s The Battle of Midway, but this took things to a whole new level.

The Battle of Midway

Ford's footage of the Battle of Midway has an amateurish feel to it but Wikipedia’s wrong when it says the filming was impromptu; they knew they were going to be attacked and the director had stationed himself on the roof of the main island’s power station in readiness. “They were equipped with Eyemo and Bell & Howell 16-millimetre cameras and hundreds of feet of Kodachrome colour film.” At the end of the battle they’d amassed “four hours of silent film—about five hard-won minutes of which showed explicit combat”—but when Ford returned to Los Angeles he had a problem (and this is a problem that faced all the directors in this book): observe Navy (in his case) protocol or follow his instincts as a director. He chose to do the latter knowing full well that if he handed over his reels “the best shots would be indiscriminately parcelled out to newsreel companies by a War Department that was more eager to share visual evidence of an American triumph as quickly as possible than to wait for the movie that he believed could have exponentially greater impact.” On the surface that sounds commendable and in this instance everything worked out fine and he ended up winning an Oscar for the thing to boot but not every director’s films were as well received when handed in and cuts were commonplace. Ford hated the word ‘propaganda’ but semantics aside what he produced was the first propaganda film of the war and not his last. But the film was not without its issues:

Ford’s decision to keep the Japanese faceless and undefined in The Battle of Midway was less a matter of caution or sensitivity on his part than a reflection of the propaganda policy that by the summer of 1942 was hopelessly muddled and conflicted about what America’s enemy should look like on movie screens.

Who was the bad guy here? Hirohito? Since the general consensus was that he would remain in power after the end of hostilities some thought it would be “wiser to use General Tojo as the face of Japan’s lust for conquest.” Others wanted to point the finger at Japanese ideology. The danger, however, in castigating the common people was that it would cause problems for the thousands of Japanese Americans in the future who many already viewed as “a vast army of volunteer spies.” Internees were already being scattered across the country “to prevent them from clustering and conspiring.”

One of the projects that Frank Capra was asked to work on was series of films entitled Why We Fight. One of this series was entitled Know Your Enemy: Japan but it took years to get the film finished because of general ignorance about Japan and its motives, an unwillingness on the part of the U.S. government to determine what exactly the foreign policy towards Japan should be and disagreements between writers (he went through four sets) and director. Even as late as January 1945 the film had to undergo a series of final revisions to remedy an issue pointed out by the Pentagon: the film had “too much sympathy for the Jap people.” The film was released in its final form August 9th 1945, the day Nagasaki was bombed.

Know Your Enemy: Japan

This was a problem for everyone, not just Capra. The world of ad hoc documentary film-making was a far cry from what they were used to. Probably one of the biggest problems the directors faced was, perversely, a lack of direction. With the studios, like it or lump it, they knew what they were expected to produce and what they could reasonably get away with but the military didn’t really seem to know what to do with these guys. And so, feeling they had more scope than they’d been allowed before, they began imposing more of their personal visions on their work.

William Wyler’s probably best known in this context for his documentary Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress but the better film is one he produced after the war: The Best Years of Our Lives was the story of the homecoming of three veterans from World War II that dramatized the problems of returning veterans in their adjustment back to civilian life. It’s not a documentary but it drew heavily on Wyler's own experience returning home to his family after three years on the front. It ended up winning seven Oscars including best director. The film is especially noteworthy because of the casting of a non-actor, Harold Russell, to play the part of Homer Parrish who loses both hands; obviously finding a professional actor was going to be a problem.

Aircraft Graveyard scene from The Best Years of Our Lives

Many of the films produced over this period were ground-breaking both in technique and approach. A good example of the latter is another in Capra’s Why We Fight series, this one entitled The Negro Soldier. Up until this time coloured people in films were poorly represented, caricatures really and so when the film was first shown to the public no doubt they expected more of the same.

Richard Wright, whose novel Native Son had been published a few years earlier, attended the Harlem screening and told a reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle that before the picture started, he had written down thirteen offensive stereotypes on the back of his program—Excessive Singing, Indolence and Crap Shooting among them— and intended to make a mark next to each one as it appeared onscreen. He didn’t check off a single box and told the reporter that he found the movie “a pleasant surprise.” Langston Hughes called the picture “distinctly and thrillingly worthwhile,” and New York’s black paper the Amsterdam News marvelled, “Who could have thought such a thing could be done so accurately … without sugar-coating and … jackass clowning?”

The Negro Soldier

Not all the films produced during this time were serious. There was also a place for humour as in the Private SNAFU cartoons created by Frank Capra, by far the most popular training films made for servicemen during the war.

[SNAFU – an acronym for ‘Situation Normal: All Fucked Up’ was] a grumbling, naïve, incompetent GI who would be featured in an ongoing run of short black-and-white cartoons in which—usually by catastrophically negative example that more than once ended with him being blown to bits—he would inform young enlistees about issues like the importance of keeping secrets and the need for mail censorship, as well as the hazards or malaria, venereal disease, laziness, gossip, booby traps, and poison gas.

Voiced by Mel Blanc and with early scripts by Theodor Geisel—‘Dr Seuss’ to you and I—it’s easy to see why they were popular.

Private SNAFU – ‘Spies’

As a historical document Harris’s book ticks all the boxes. His facts have obviously been checked and rechecked. But what’s especially good about his book is that it draws on the personal correspondence of the directors and reminiscences of those who knew them to flesh them out. Some wrote diaries, others letters. It’s a warts and all portrayal of the subject and his subjects; the egos, the drinking, the womanising, the award- and medal-chasing, the revisionism (Ford was especially guilty of misremembering the past), the stresses, the strains, the losses. These were very human men. And they made very human films. The films aren’t perfect either but they did make a difference. I enjoyed the honesty of this book. It opened my eyes.

***

Mark Harris graduated from Yale University in 1985 with a degree in English. In 1989, he joined the staff of Entertainment Weekly, a magazine published by Time Inc. covering movies, television, music, video and books. Mark worked on the staff of the magazine, first as a writer and eventually as the editor overseeing all movie coverage, from its launch in early 1990 until 2006. He now writes a column for the magazine called The Final Cut. In 2008, Harris published Scenes at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, an examination of how the American film industry changed with the 1960s. Harris is married to the playwright Tony Kushner.

If you think people in your life are normal, then you undoubtedly have not spent any time getting to know the abnormal side of them. ― Shannon L. Alder

Stigma—or, more specifically, social stigma was defined by Erving Goffman, one of the most influential sociologists of the twentieth century, as “The phenomenon whereby an individual with an attribute is deeply discredited by his/her society is rejected as a result of the attribute. Stigma is a process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity.”[1] It’s not the only definition but I think it’s a good one. (In another context, by the way, the plural of stigma is stigmata and clearly not all stigmata are viewed as bad at least not among certain Christians.) When I started researching this article I was immediately drawn to Goffman’s 1963 text because of the title: Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. The book’s still in print and required reading—the last edition I could find was 2009 and it’s even available for the Kindle—so he clearly got a lot right. It was the ‘spoiled identity’ that jumped out at me because the verb ‘to spoil’ is one that has specific associations for me. It was years before I realise that ‘spoil’ was something that could happen to food but I’ve never quite got my head around how spoils can be treasures. In my head ‘spoil’ is something one person does that affects others detrimentally: they talk over something the other person’s trying to listen to or they won’t play a game by the agreed upon rules or they tell you how the book you’re reading ends. I can still hear my mum: “Jimmy! Don’t spoil it for him,” ‘him’ being my brother. Spoiling something for someone is “plain selfishness” (another of my mother’s expressions) and I was, to be fair, a pretty selfish wee boy. I was most definitely the centre of my own universe.

Stigma is a Greek word that in its origins referred to a type of marking or tattoo that was cut or burned into the skin of criminals, slaves, or traitors in order to visibly identify them as blemished or morally polluted persons. These individuals were to be avoided or shunned, particularly in public places. – Wikipedia

The mark of Cain is the earliest example I can think of of someone being stigmatised. Whether he received a physical mark or not is open to debate—the Hebrew word translated ‘mark’ is 'owth and refers to a mark, sign, or token and is most frequently translated as ‘sign’—but the fact is he was ostracized because of antisocial behaviour, the murder of his brother. This was long before “Thou shalt not kill” was set in stone but it was pretty obvious to everyone back then, I’m sure, that murdering someone was not ‘normal’ behaviour. And that’s what stigmas are all about. They separate the normal from the abnormal, the stereotypical from the atypical. Goffman’s book opens with a sad letter which I’ll quote in full since its short:

Dear Miss Lonelyhearts

I am sixteen years old now and I dont know what to do and would appreciate it if you could tell me what to do. When I was a little girl it was not so bad because I got used to the kids on the block makeing fun of me, but now I would like to have boy friends like the other girls and go out on Saturday nites, but no boy will take me because I was born without a nose—although I am a good dancer and have a nice shape and my father buys me pretty clothes.

I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people even myself so I cant blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. My mother loves me, but she crys terrible when she looks at me.

What did I do to deserve such a terrible bad fate? Even if I did do some bad things I didn't do any before I was a year old and I was born this way. I asked Papa and he says he doesn't know, but that maybe I did something in the other world before I was born or that maybe I was being punished for his sins. I dont believe that because he is a very nice man. Ought I commit suicide?

It’s not a real letter although, of course, there will be girls out there who could easily have written it. It’s an excerpt from the novel Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West which was first published in 1962. Imagine though having no nose! That’s not normal. And at sixteen especially there’s nothing worse than not being normal.

Normal’s an odd word. Normal isn’t identical. Ideally it would mean that, if we were all clones. But we’re not. And although the thesaurus would have you believe that ‘average’ is an appropriate synonym for ‘normal’ I’m not so sure that most teenagers would agree with that. No one wants to be average. Average is not normal. Normal is accepted. Normal is often a fashion statement.

What prompted me to write this post was a comment made on Facebook by author George Straatman. In part he relates:

It is likely that in every novel ever written, one of the primary characters experiences that moment of epiphany…or crystalline, pristine insight in which everything resolves into an instant of perfect understanding. Real life seldom has the occasion to deliver such moments, but this past week I had mine. A person, whom I had just met for the first time, upon learning that I had written six novels, asked me if A REAL WRITER had ever read one of my novels. After re-hinging my lower mandible, I asked how they defined a real writer.

The response was…someone with the proper education and publishing pedigree.

[…]

This intransigent prejudice is very probably insurmountable and this is the sad reality confronting independent artists of every stripe…but none more so than independent writers.

To add nuance to this episode…the individual who opened my eyes…is a high school drop-out.

He’s saying nothing I’ve not read a dozen times or more. If you hang around with self-published authors it inevitably crops up: the stigma of self-publishing.

Is a ghostwriter a REAL WRITER then? They get looked down on too. Or what about session musicians? Or the bloke who sets up his easel alongside the Seine and paints portraits all summer long? Is he not a REAL ARTIST?

What is ‘real’ anyway? Reality is a matter of perception. We act like it’s something more solid, something fixed but it’s not. What’s real to you will probably not be as real—or it may be more real—to me. The person George met had formed a concept in his mind of what a ‘real writer’ should be. What he perceived in George didn’t match that ergo George was not a real writer. Of course George disagreed. As would I. As would thousands of others. But just because we say something’s so doesn’t necessarily make it so. Only when it comes to norms it actually does. When I was about fifteen it became the norm at my school not to wear a shirt. Jumpers were fine but no shirt underneath. One day it was cool to wear shirts and the next it wasn’t. Just like that. One day recording an album in your kitchen with your mum on backing vocals was roughing it, the next thing ‘indie’ music was a thing and a few years later is became an acceptable thing.

In 1999 a then-unknown singer called Kathryn Williams recorded her debut album Dog Leap Stairs for the now-legendary sum of £80 and released it on her own record label Caw Records. Her follow-up, Little Black Numbers, went on to receive a Mercury Prize nomination. She sold 40,000 records from her bedroom and landed a three album deal with Warner Brothers label East West. Is that when she became a REAL MUSICIAN?

I could waffle on and on about the humble beginnings of various creative types who are now household names—Van Gogh probably tops the list there—but it likely wouldn’t change George’s friend’s opinion. Society’s opinions do change. It takes time but it happens. Sometimes it’s impossible to gauge when things that were verboten when we were kids stop being frowned upon and switch to becoming not only the accepted but expected mode of behaviour. Other times, as we see with the recent very public protests over the rights of homosexuals, it’s easier to identify history’s bullet points. In the fifties dads were always screaming at the kids to get off the phone. A change in technology and landlines the world over are suddenly free and kids, who once only communicated verbally, spend more time texting each other. What’s normal? We never even had a phone until after my dad’s first heart attack in 1971—my mum had to knock a neighbour up to call the ambulance—and that was the only reason we got one and even then it was a shared line.

Is blogging normal? Tell someone you were a blogger in 2003 and most people wouldn’t’ve known what you were on about. Not so nowadays. Now some of those blogs have been running for ten years and have developed reputations and not all of them bad. The Huffington Post, for example, is at its core still a blog and no different to the blog you’re reading right now:

The history of political blogging might usefully be divided into the periods pre- and post-Huffington. Before the millionaire socialite Arianna Huffington decided to get in on the act, bloggers operated in a spirit of underdog solidarity. They hated the mainstream media - and the feeling was mutual.

Bloggers saw themselves as gadflies, pricking the arrogance of established elites from their home computers, in their pyjamas, late into the night. So when, in 2005, Huffington decided to mobilise her fortune and media connections to create, from scratch, a flagship liberal blog she was roundly derided. Who, spluttered the original bloggerati, did she think she was?[2]

Respect has to be earned. I’m not suggesting for one moment that that’s not the case. And trust takes time to establish. I bought my first self-published book in 2000. It was called Dancing with Patience by Jonathan Dyer. I’d been thinking about using iUniverse back then and bought the first thing that half-appealed to me to see what the standard was. I wasn’t terribly impressed. The book was actually okay—a poor man’s Catcher in the Rye—and it was the first book I’d read from cover to cover in ages; I still have it. What let the book down was a crappy cover, poor editing and not-great printing. It looks like something a POD machine sneezed out, not a REAL BOOK. That’s not the case nowadays. The printer I use is the one Alma Books uses. There’s no difference between their books and mine apart from the content.

When you look in a mirror what do you see? I see a writer. Nah, who am I kidding? I’d like to see a writer but I’m not actually sure what ‘a writer’ looks like. I don’t look like Stephen King or Virginia Woolf or, well, pretty much any REAL WRITER I can think of. I’ve written novels, stories, plays, poems and I’ve even been paid on occasion (albeit not a living wage) but none of that helps. This bit in the Goffman’s book struck me:

When I got up at last . . . and had learned to walk again, one day I took a hand glass and went to a long mirror to look at myself, and I went alone. I didn't want anyone . . . to know how I felt when I saw myself for the first time. But there was no noise, no outcry; I didn't scream with rage when I saw myself. I just felt numb. That person in the mirror couldn't be me. I felt inside like a healthy, ordinary, lucky person - oh, not like the one in the mirror! Yet when I turned my face to the mirror there were my own eyes looking back, hot with shame . . . when I did not cry or make any sound, it became impossible that I should speak of it to anyone, and the confusion and the panic of my discovery were locked inside me then and there, to be faced alone, for a very long time to come.

Over and over I forgot what I had seen in the mirror. It could not penetrate into the interior of my mind and become an integral part of me. I felt as if it had nothing-to do with me; it was only a disguise. But it was not the kind of disguise which is put on voluntarily by the person who wears it, and which is intended to confuse other people as to one's identity. My disguise had been put on me without my consent or knowledge like the ones in fairy tales, and it was I myself who was confused by it, as to my own identity. I looked in the mirror, and was horror-struck because I did not recognize myself. In the place where I was standing, with that persistent romantic elation in me, as if I were a favoured fortunate person, to whom everything was possible, I saw a stranger, a little, pitiable, hideous figure, and a face that became, as I stared at it, painful and blushing with shame. It was only a disguise, but it was on me, for life. It was there, it was there, it was real. Every one of those encounters was like a blow on the head.[3]

Writers have notoriously fragile egos, so many of us that you’d almost think it a requirement for the job. And REAL WRITERS safeguard that ego with all the books they’ve published. I doubt there’s much Stephen King could even hear as he cowers behind his pile of books. They are his defence. They are his proof. They are his shield. And yet when you read in between the lines of On Writing what do you see? I saw a wee boy going, “I am a real writer. I am. I am. I am.” I don’t think it ever goes away. It’s not a matter of being self-published or traditionally published. It’s simply being a writer. Normal people aren’t writers. I never met another writer until I was a grown man. When you’re the only one of anything it’s easy to feel different because you are different. Normal people don’t write books. They like to pretend they’ve all got a book inside them but most of them haven’t. They do normal stuff instead, stuff everyone else is doing.

People don’t like different. Actually that’s not true. They’re intrigued by different. As long as it’s not too different. Chocolate-coated coffee beans are a possibility. Chocolate-covered crickets maybe not so much: too big a leap from Maltesers and Revels. It’s all about comfort zones. Books are paper things with words on. They have a certain feel and smell and, after a few years, that can be not such a pleasant smell. They’re not pixels on a screen. That’s not a book, at least not a REAL BOOK. Even if a REAL WRITER wrote it it’s still not a REAL BOOK. It’s pretending to be a book. We’re creatures of habit. We don’t like to come home and find our wife’s rearranged the living room. We like our chair to be where we left it.

So when someone comes along and tells you they’re a self-published writer of course they’re not a REAL WRITER. A real writer never feels the need to say when asked what he does for a living, “Oh, I’m a real writer.” He’s just a writer, end of story. I rarely mention how my books get out into the real world. In absolute strictness I’m not self-published. I write the books and my wife does pretty much everything else. But I still don’t feel like a REAL WRITER.

Of course it’s not just individuals that get stigmatised. Entire nations can be—perfect example, the Jews—or whole races—i.e. the Blacks—and yet within those groups there will be some who insist on stigmatising others: Orthodox Jews consider themselves true Jews but then so do the Hasidic Jews and the Masorti Jews and the Reform Jews and the Humanistic Jews and the Jewish Scientists. You’d think being a part of a stigmatised group people would bond together. Yeah, right. In a comment on the Mystery Writing is Murder blog author Perry Wilson writes:

I work on multiple books each year, aiming to publish 4 - 7. I find one of the hardest things to deal with is overlapping tasks. I am usually outlining one book in a series, drafting a book in another series and revising/polishing a book in my third series.[4]

I wonder if she thinks of herself as a REAL WRITER. She probably thinks I’m bone-idle because it’s taken me twenty years to write five and a half novels. I know of a lot of writers who regularly aim to churn out a book every three or four months. I don’t think they’re REAL WRITERS; REAL WRITERS need to suffer for their art and the only thing you’ll have time to suffer from if you’re churning out books like that is repetitive strain injury and probably back problems. They don’t think I’m a REAL WRITER because I don’t put the hours in. George’s friend wouldn’t think any of us were REAL WRITERS.

A multiple sclerotic noted:

Both healthy minds and healthy bodies may be crippled. The fact that `normal' people can get around, can see, can hear, doesn't mean that they are seeing or hearing. They can be very blind to the things that spoil their happiness, very deaf to the pleas of others for kindness; when I think of them I do not feel any more crippled or disabled than they.[5]

I think this is George’s friend’s problem. His vision, his perception and conception of what one needs to be in order to be thought of as a REAL WRITER is skew-whiff. He doesn’t recognise a REAL WRITER when he sees one. And that’s life. The world wouldn’t be the world it is without a few narrow-minded bigots thrown into the mix to keep things interesting.

Stigma is a process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity. If you’ve been reading me for a while you’ll have heard my definition of a writer: A person whose natural response to life is to write about it. Writing is natural for me. It didn’t make me a good writer but it gave me a leg up. It made writing pleasurable. It made me want to write. And once I saw what I could do with my writing it made me want to write better. I identify with fellow writers. I don’t always get why they insist on writing zombie novels but if that’s what excites their writing … buds I suppose is as good a word as any … then get on with it. Just don’t hang around waiting on me writing one. I don’t think it’s wrong to write zombie novels. I just don’t get why anyone would want to. The same goes for being gay. I don’t get it. I don’t see why they don’t see what I see in women and I certainly don’t see what they see in men but I do understand the need for human intimacy. I just choose not to be intimate with another bloke or dressed up in rubber or in the changing rooms in GAP. How many gay men have been made to feel that what they were doing was wrong, shameful but were unable to stop doing what, to them, came naturally? People have spoiled being them for them. If there’s nothing else in the world worth living for at least a person should be able to enjoy simply being themselves without being made to feel bad about it. The problem is when something spoiled it’s spoiled. You can’t rescue milk when it’s gone off. And the crap thing, the really crap thing, is that you can’t rescue people either.

Individuals get shunned but what about groups? They get segregated:

Stigma heightens our senses to the notion of difference and creates a tension within the self in relation to the context in which the stigmatised person is perceived. In healthcare settings these perceptions of difference may become professionalised, and thus to some degree legitimated, as they occur within a medical framework. That is, in this context treating someone differently becomes accepted because they are deemed to be in some way ‘dis-ordered’. However, outside of the illness context the stigmata are often viewed as blemishes, and for some this legitimates ridicule, avoidance, fear or disgust. For example, while the professional may accept the noise uttered by an autistic child in a residential home, some members of society are generally reluctant to accept such disturbance in the supermarket.[6](bold mine)

Be Jewish if you have to but if you could do it in that nice ghetto over there we’d be very grateful. There’s a danger that this is what will happen with self-published authors. We’re already excluded from submitting our work to many magazines and competitions: Fine, self-publish if you have to but go and play over there with all the others like you. Of course there’s good reason why those who’ve decided to go it alone have been ridiculed in the past. Just have a wee read at this article (actually it’s more of a rant): Why Indie Authors Still Suck. And here’s the comment I left on the Facebook thread where a number of indie authors were venting on the subject:

The answer to this guy is very simple: prove him wrong. He has a case. It’s our fault. When I was a kid in the seventies we used to tell jokes about Skodas: What do you call a Skoda with a sun roof? A skip. Skoda’s answer? It made better cars. In 2010 it was voted best manufacturer in the 2010 What Car? Readers Awards, with Porsche second and Daihatsu third.[7] That didn’t happen overnight nor can we expect self-publishing to stop being a joke overnight. It will take time. A bad reputation doesn’t go away overnight but people’s memories are short. They do forget unless we keep reminding them.

It’s not normal to self-publish—at least up until recently it hasn’t been. What’s ‘normal’—and by ‘normal’ I mean socially acceptable—changes. Gays have long been stigmatised. Now they have rights. They’re not fully-integrated into society—just look at the recent fuss over the 2014 Winter Olympics—and it’s still a little odd to see two guys holding hands walking down Sauchiehall Street—actually I’ve never seen two guys holding hands walking down Sauchiehall Street—but they’re getting there. They still have a way to go and so do the self-published. Homosexuals have been tolerated for centuries but as long as they were content to stick to their clubs and cottages people turned a blind eye. Indie authors write indie books which are read by other indie authors: all very incestuous. I remember after the public found out that the writer Alan Bennett was gay—which they’d suspected for years—they subsequently learned he’d also been having an affair with a woman and you could sense they were a bit put out because he wasn’t a REAL GAY. There’s no pleasing some people.

I don’t much care for hip hop but its origins are noteworthy:

The origin of the culture stems from the block parties of the Ghetto Brothers when they would plug the amps for their instruments and speakers into the lampposts on 163rd Street and Prospect Avenue and DJ Kool Herc at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, where Herc Herc would mix samples of existing records with his own shouts to the crowd and dancers..– Wikipedia

It began in some bloke’s house and then it spread to the local area, then the borough and then the city, the country and finally the whole world. Love it or loathe it everyone knows what hip hop is. And, as with everything else, there is good hip hop and bad. And there always will be.

There will always be crappy self-published books out there for all the reasons stated in the article I linked to. It takes time for anything to find its feet, be it an artistic movement, a culture or a lifestyle. At first it feels unnatural and that unnaturalness can hang around for a long while. I drank coffee with two sugars and milk up until a couple of years ago. Now I drink it black sans sugar sans milk sans caffeine and it’s beginning to feel natural. Beginning. Give me another twenty years and we’ll see.

Ask me about self-publishing in another twenty years. And we’ll see.

REFERENCES

[1]Labspace (and others) says that this quote is from Goffman’s book but I couldn’t find it, at least not word for word. It is, however, a perfect summary of what he does say.

[2]‘The world's 50 most powerful blogs’, The Observer, 9 March 2008

[3] K. B. Hathaway, The Little Locksmith, p. 157 quoted in Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, pp.8,9

[4] Elizabeth S. Craig, ‘What Happens After Writing 3 or 4 Books a Year’, Mystery Writing is Murder, 25 May 2012

[5] Erving Goffman ‘Stigma and Social Identity’ in Lee Rainwater (ed.), Deviance and Liberty: Social Problems and Public Policy, p.28

[6] Elizabeth Whitehead, Tom Mason, Caroline Carlisle and Caroline Watkinsp, ‘The changing dynamic of

Stigma’ in Stigma and Social Exclusion in Healthcare, p.29

[7]‘Skoda named best motor company by What Car?’, The Telegraph, 18 November 2010

A Million Ways to Die in the West reads like a novelisation of a Bob Hope film which is odd because it’s actually a novelisation of a Seth MacFarlane film. Seriously though if this film had been made in the 1950’s there would’ve been only one actor up for consideration for the lead: Bob Hope. No comedian has ever got as much mileage out of playing the coward. His signature heroic coward starred in film after film like The Princess and the Pirate, Casanova's Big Night and The Paleface wisecracking his way out of every tight situation until he’s eventually backed into a corner and forced to draw off the bravery that’s been buried within him all the time, at which point he gets the girl and the film’s pretty much over. It’s predictable. But there can be fun in predictability. It’s like on TV when the guest star walks on stage with a cream pie in his hand. You know it’s going to go in someone’s face. You just don’t know how exactly it’s going to play out. But you would be disappointed if someone didn’t get a pie in the face.

This is how A Million Ways to Die in the West opens:

Albert Stark was a coward. Not a quivering, jittery, weak-kneed sort of a coward, but the kind who viewed his cowardice as an act of sensibility: a coward in the name of pragmatism. To Albert, his cowardice functioned as a shield that existed to service the very sensible goal of self-preservation. In the West, brave men got killed. Cowards stayed alive.

It’s not true that only the brave die out West. Lots of people die in this book. It’s the running gag the book’s built on because no matter what situation someone finds themself in there’s always a chance it’ll prove fatal. You don’t have to get shot. As Albert puts it:

Everything that’s not you wants you dead. Outlaws, Indians, angry gamblers, disgruntled prostitutes, wild animals, the weather, disease—hell, even a trip to the dentist means taking your fucking life in your hands.

He forgot to mention giant blocks of ice. Watch out for the big block of ice. Oh, and flash photography. And wet socks. That’s what had it in for the blacksmith apparently.

So when the book begins with our unlikely hero standing in the middle of the street about to engage in a gunfight you know he’s going to wangle his way out of it—which he does—and I pretty much knew at that point that the book would reach its climax with Albert having to man-up on exactly the same street only this time with the meanest son of a bitch out there. I didn’t realise he’d be called Clinch Leatherwood—now who could MacFarlane possibly be sending up there?—but since he doesn’t appear until halfway through the book how could I?

I’m a big fan of Seth MacFarlane. His humour’s always been a bit hit and miss—I still watch Family Guy faithfully and American Dad!but The Cleveland Show never really held my interest and I’ve given up on it—although I have to say I was very curious to see how he’d come across without the visuals to lean on. At least there’d be no vomiting to watch; even cartoon vomiting turns my stomach I’m afraid. I didn’t actually realise when the book was offered to me that there was a film coming. To be honest I was a bit disappointed by that; I’d expected it to be a standalone work. I have read novelisations before—Alan Dean Foster’s three Alien novels are actually pretty decent affairs—but never before seeing the film. So this was a first. I have read novels before seeing the film adaptations but they’re usually completely different beasts—look at the recent adaptation of Under the Skin, for example. Anyway I was good. I didn’t look up the film online. I didn’t watch the trailer. And do you know what? The book was actually all right. Dostoyevsky it is not—not too many laughs in Dostoyevsky—but it kept my attention and it kept me amused.

The humour is exactly what I’ve come to expect from MacFarlane. This is not a criticism. When I watch a Woody Allen film—another guy who specialises in timorous heroes—I know the kind of things to expect when the ‘Woody’ character is onscreen in the same way as I know what to expect from Stewie or Peter Griffin. The cultural references which are common in his other work are still here in the novel but MacFarlane wisely keeps these to either film references—the sheriff’s called Arness, for example (no doubt after the American actor, best known for portraying Marshal Matt Dillon in the television series Gunsmoke)—or mainly contemporary cultural commentary—e.g. how insane would it be if someone smiled in a photograph?

Anna turned to him. “Y’know, supposedly there’s some guy in Texas who smiled one time while he was getting his picture taken.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Albert blurted with excitement. “I was just talking about that the other day.”

“I think. I mean, I heard it somewhere. I dunno if it’s true.”

Colourful innuendo was often incorporated into Bob Hope’s act but there’s little left to the imagination in a Seth MacFarlane script and if book’s had certificates this would definitely be an 18. I have to say all the swearing felt a bit forced and unnatural. Perhaps because MacFarlane’s so obviously lampooning Hollywood westerns and about the only cusswords you ever hear in films of that ilk that are old-cootisms like ‘shoot’, ‘dang’, ‘tarnation’ or ‘dagnabbit’ which was probably unrealistic too.

The novel’s second running gag concerns Albert’s best friend Edward Phelps and his girlfriend, Ruth. Edward repairs shoes; Ruth services men for a living. When we first meet them Albert’s sitting downstairs in the Old Stump Saloon waiting on the love of his life finishing work:

In his hand he held a lovely late-spring bouquet of daisies, lilacs, and daffodils. From upstairs the raucous sounds of sexual intercourse could be heard as Edward’s girlfriend, Ruth, was fucked wildly by a dirty cowboy.

“Oh, yes. YES!!” she screamed, her voice reverberating throughout the saloon.

“Yeah, you like me fuckin’ you, don’t you?” bellowed the cowboy.

“Yes! Yes, it’s really terrific!” she shouted back between moans of ecstasy.

“I got dirt on my dick from workin’ outside all day!”

“I know! I love the scratchy feeling inside me!”

“Yeah, you like the dirt on my dick, don’t you?!”

“I do! I really do! It’s such a treat.”

Ruth’s sex talk had always been a bit clumsy, but her heart was in the right place, and as a prostitute she was exemplary: always on time for her shift, freshly bathed after every fifth customer, and willing to accommodate all types of fetishes. Edward admired her worth ethic. The seriousness with which a person took professional obligations said a lot about their character. He was lucky to be with such a woman.

“Stick your finger in my asshole!” shouted the dirty cowboy.

“I’m excited to!” Ruth answered.

Of course, because she’s a Christian, she won’t sleep with Edward until they’re married. It’s preposterous, but that’s the joke. She keeps talking about the crude things she’s been asked to do—I had no idea that such a thing as a blumpkin existed and I don’t mind admitting it—and Edward tries to empathise saying that his job sucks too. That’s about as close to innuendo as MacFarlane gets. But that’s fine.

If you’ve never heard of MacFarlane, never watched an episode of Family Guy but have read every Louis L'Amour out there and are looking for something else then you will be embarrassed, shocked and probably offended by this book which reminds me of the time my first wife and I went to watch Blake Edwards’S.O.B. and happened to notice two old biddies who’d decided to give it a go because they saw Julie Andrews was in it. They didn’t know where to look when she ripped her top off.

My main reservation is pretty much the same one I have about all novelisations: why? Having at this point of the review now watched the trailer (which was pretty much what I expected apart from the bull—do not recall a bull in the book—and the fact that Liam Neeson plays the bad guy—too handsome to be the same bad guy as described in the book)—I cannot see that the book adds anything to the experience; why not wait a few months and pick up the DVD for a fiver? If anything hearing visual gags described takes away from them and the moustache song is reduced to bad poetry. Had MacFarlane spent more time talking about what the characters were thinking—there is some but not an awful lot—I might feel better about the book but it feels like I’m reading a film script that’s been tidied up and turned into a novel and not a thing in itself. There were only a couple of other reviews available online when I was writing this but Chris Swanson on Amazon puts it well when he writes:

I'm docking a star because while MacFarlane is a great TV writer, he still needs to learn a bit about writing novels. It really seems like a screenplay where he basically cut and paste the lines into his word processor and the added "he said" when needed. Which I think is basically the case.

I agree. Alan Dean Foster’s three Alien novels have stayed with me. Even some twenty years after reading them I can remember especially the openings to each book where he talks about sleepers. That stuff was not in the films. The same goes for Thomas M. Disch’s novel The Prisoner (based on the sixties TV series). It was very much its own thing.

Probably the weakest section of the book is the ten pages devoted to a drug trip Albert goes on. While fleeing for his life he finds himself in the company of Cochise and a band of Apaches who encourage him to go on a vision quest:

Albert reluctantly submitted to the peer pressure. “Okay, fine!” He downed the rest of the liquid.

Almost instantly the Apaches’ taunting expressions shifted to shock and alarm. “He drank the whole bowl!”

Albert froze in panic. “What?”

“You drank the whole bowl!”

“Oh, shit! Oh, shit, is that bad?”

“That was for the entire tribe!” said Cochise. “You’re totally gonna freak out and probably die. Good luck.”

Albert’s jaw hung open in terror as the world around him dissolved into a distorted hellscape….

I’m pretty sure the film will do a much better job of what follows. There are things that books do well and things that films do well and hellscapes is one of them.

The bottom line then is that I’m not sure who this book is aimed at. I’ll watch the film when it comes out but then I was always going to watch the film. If anything, having read the book beforehand has spoiled the film for me because now I know how Albert manages to survive that final showdown. It’s a clever solution which I did not see coming. He doesn’t exactly talk his way out of it but he does use that particular talent to manipulate the satiation to his advantage. Nuff said.

The film opens on 30th May in the States and 6th June in the UK. I’ll leave you with the trailer:

All the leaves were gone and they stood, reaching out their branches, like empty arms – Anne Donovan, Gone are the Leaves

I agreed to review this book having had a quick scan of Anne Donovan’s first novel Buddha Da, the story of a working-class Glaswegian man who discovers Buddhism, that was short-listed for the Orange Prize and nominated for the Whitbread First Novel Award; always keen to support a fellow Scot. I didn’t actually know what Gone are the Leaves was about and so when I started reading about Lairds and Ladies and castles narrated in an ancient Scottish dialect that I couldn’t quite put my finger on—Glaswegian it was not—I have to say I groaned inside: this was going to be—and I apologise for my thoughts in advance but they often have a mind of their own—a woman’s book. Set in Medieval times with a sassy wee seamstress as its heroine, what was I going to get out of this? When I look at my shelves books by men vastly outnumber books by women although very few of them could be described as men’s books—tales of adventure, spies, wars, sports, fast cars, loose women simply do not appeal—but then virtually none of the books I own by female authors could be described as women’s fiction either; they’re mainly literary novelists but the same goes for the books I own written by men. The only historical fiction I own are books I’ve been sent to review. Just so we know where we stand.

Of course the expression ‘women’s book’ isn’t a particularly helpful one. So, before we start perhaps we need to ask the question: What exactly is women’s fiction and is it the same as a romance novel?

RWA-WF defines women's fiction as, a commercial novel about a woman on the brink of life change and personal growth. Her journey details emotional reflection and action that transforms her and her relationships with others, and includes a hopeful/upbeat ending with regard to her romantic relationship. – Women’s Fiction Chapter of the Romance Writers of America

Two basic elements comprise every romance novel: a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending.

A Central Love Story: The main plot centres around individuals falling in love and struggling to make the relationship work. A writer can include as many subplots as he/she wants as long as the love story is the main focus of the novel.

AnEmotionally Satisfying and Optimistic Ending: In a romance, the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love. – Romance Writers of America

Deidre is a young Scottish lass—she’s thirteen at the start of the book and isn’t an awful lot older by its end—who works as a seamstress alongside her mother for a woman we only ever get to know as ‘My Lady’, the wife of the local Laird who also remains unnamed. We never find out exactly where in Scotland his castle is—although it’s within reasonable travelling distance of Stirling—nor when precisely these events unfold but it seems reasonable to assume it’s within the Medieval period (so that could be any time between the 5th and the 15th century) but when you have a closer look at some of the words used (see below) we can pin it down to sometime between 1488 and 1603; since the Scots use ‘ken’ rather than ‘know’ and a Scottish king is still on the throne my guess is that they’re maybe located in the south-east corner (maybe Lothian?) in the early 1500’s not that it matters. The same goes for the events on the continent when the action moves there. We know they pass through France but not exactly where they end up other than it’s near France. My guess would be Italy because of the references to a remarkable inventor who sounds suspiciously like Leonardo da Vinci which is where I got the 1488 because that’s roughly when he was drawing flying machines; yes, there’s a flying machine in the book. So there’s a general—and clearly intentional—fuzziness to the novel which is fine because the specifics don’t really matter and authors have a tendency to do stuff like that to give the book a more universal feel reducing everything to archetypes. And that’s pretty much what we have here: girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl and boy find each other again, not that they were looking.

So it is a love story but a surprisingly passionless one. Romeo and Juliet they’re not. Only they are. For starters Deidre is the same age as Juliet. When we were told at school we were going to be studying Romeo and Juliet we all moaned: Not a love story! God, no. And yet that’s not really what I took away from the play. It was all about politics and intrigue, bickering families and far more bloodshed than I ever expected. I remember the balcony scene—but only because it’s been lampooned so often on TV—but that’s about it.

Deidre’s beau is Feilamort and Deidre is the first person he has any contact with when he arrives at the castle although it’s not exactly love at first sight:

Froths of hair trail frae the cowl; grey-brown silk glisks in the weak November sun. The fabric of his cloak was raugh and coorse: edges frayed, the warp and weft were like tracks in a ploughed field. Bitter needles of cauld must have penetrated his soft skin on the journey; his airms pricked wi gooseflesh when I helped him doon frae the pony. ‘Merci,’ he whispered. I mind his een that day, feartness drownt in the brown, grummlin their beauty.

He’s one amongst five boys relocated from France, the Lady’s homeland. Deidre says she’s “three-four year aulder” than them. They’re here to serve as pages but although at first Feilamort comes across as the runt of the litter—the first thing Deidre tells us about him is that he’s “the colour of a dead leaf”—he stands out in one respect:

Last nicht he sang and the sound of angels rang through the great hall, like flocht of siller birds swooping and diving. Lintie and throstle, feltie and laverock, cheetle and chirm and chirpie. He seemed transparent, as though you could see through his skin: he and the voice as one. Silence was the only fit response.

It becomes immediately clear that he’s patently unsuited to the life of a page and the Lady takes him under her wing. A music teacher is hired, one Signor Carlo, who sees great things in Feilamort and a ticket to the good life for himself through Feilamort. He’s not a selfish man or manipulative but he is a pragmatist and life’s few opportunities need to be grabbed by the neck and straddled as they try to scurry past.

As a part of the boy’s daily routine he’s permitted some fresh air and exercise. Deirdre—conveniently (why would a seamstress be assigned this task?)—winds up being the one to accompany him on his walks and this is how their friendship develops. And it is a friendship rather than a romance. What pushes things on faster than nature might have preferred left to its own devices is the intervention of the unnatural. Feilamort’s body is changing and we all know what happens to boys with angelic voices when they hit puberty. Unless something radical is done about it. Surprisingly he’s given a say in his future: let nature takes its course or submit to a certain procedure which would enable him to have a long—and hopefully rewarding for all concerned—career as a boy-soprano. The term used in the book was a new one on me: evirato (which literally means ‘emasculated’) rather than castrato; the operation they describe only involves the crushing as opposed to the physical removal of the testes. Either way he’ll never be able to father children afterwards. (The first male soprano employed in the pontifical chapel was actually not until 1644 but the practices of castration and emasculation—there is a difference—date back centuries and the various methods employed make uncomfortable reading.) Perhaps not unsurprisingly, before he allows himself to be mutilated, he has a request and Deidre requires very little persuasion. Her only precondition is that they handfast: maybe not a marriage in the eyes of God but good enough to salve the young girl’s conscience. Of course it wouldn’t be much of a story if she didn’t fall pregnant. Problem is by this time Feilamort’s off on his travels in the Continent and Deidre’s been packed off to a nunnery. She acquiesces for much the same reason as Feilamort makes his choice. As her mother says to her, “It would be a good life for you. You would be safe there.” Thus ends the first act: boy meets girl, boy loses girl… and other things.

In the book’s second section we’re introduced to a new character, Father Anthony. He’s not in Scotland, he knows nothing about the existence of this young couple but he does learn of a somewhat similar situation:

There was a beautiful, virtuous and learned young woman who travelled far across the water to be betrothed to a young man. Though many were charged with protecting the young woman, the young man seduced her. On her journey back through France, she discovered that she was with child. She stopped at the convent, where word came to her that the father of the child had died and the shock caused her to go into labour. The child was not of full term but perfectly formed and lusty nevertheless; the young woman died a few days afterwards of a fever brought on by childbirth.

The child, we soon realise, will grow up to be Feilamort and Father Anthony sets out to find out what’s become of him. It turns out the boy’s grandfather is still alive. He’s wealthy but also eccentric. And, of course, just to complicate matters, is related to the wife of the Scottish Laird. By the time Father Anthony reaches Scotland the boy’s long gone. But Deidre is not. Father Anthony learns of their relationship, makes the connection and aims to reunite all parties. He becomes Deirdre’s protector but tells her nothing of what he knows of the boy’s lineage. Weeks later, after little or no explanation, she’s carted off to somewhere near France—at least that’s where she’s told she is—and finds herself in a castle having delivered her baby and still none the wiser as to why all of this has happened to her. Feilamort in the meantime has been entertaining the rich friends and relatives of his Lady. He does as he’s told, seems resigned to his fate and doesn’t spend an awful lot of time pining for Deidre.

Now you would think that the grandfather would be overjoyed to learn he had both a living grandson and a great-grandson but, as I’ve said, he’s eccentric and so a simple reunion is not what takes place and the rest of the book is devoted to tying up a considerable number of loose ends because it doesn’t suit everyone for there to be anyone else in the picture when it comes to inheriting the Master’s fortune. You can see where this is going. It’s turning into a novel of intrigue and there’s really not an awful lot of romancing going on. To pay for her bed and board Deidre gets tasked with some embroidery when she’s not looking after baby and Feilamort sings for his supper most nights when he’s not tucked up in bed in case he catches a cold.

All of which makes me wonder what kind of book this is turning out to be. Is there a central love story? Well, technically, yes. But our two lovers seem perfectly content to let fate—and comfort—dictate their futures. It’s not until a third party gets involved that they have even the slightest chance of getting back together. They do, of course, meet again. How could they not meet again? They are after all the pawns that may very well be promoted any day soon. The imagery is a deliberate choice because neither of the ‘lovers’ feels like a player. The grownups are very much in charge:

I was pushed out of the back and awa doon the stair, Sister Agnes shoving me frae behind, half hauding me up. Outside there was a cart waiting for us and she hid me under some blankets in the back, the bairn safely cooried in beside me.

I was sobbing and girning and wailing, but she grabbed my airm and pinched me and said, ‘Lass, haud your wheest. Ye maun compose yersel if we are tae get awa. God is merciful, God is looking after us all. Ye must do His will. And for the next wee while ye maun do mine or there will be trouble for us all.’

[…]

‘Are we really going hame?’

‘The less ye ken the better,’ she said.

‘I am sick of being kept in the dark.’

‘I am protecting you. If you ken nothing ye can say nothing.’

So what about the emotionally satisfying ending? Well, I’m not going to give the ending away but Romeo and Juliet risked all and struggled to be with each other and look how Fate rewarded them. The thing about risk, to my mind, for it to be worth anything then the person must appreciate its value: there must be something to be gained, yes, but—and perhaps more importantly—something to be lost. The risks here are mainly taken by the adults. They’re the ones who would suffer the most if this all goes pear-shaped. What the kids have to do is trust them. Trust, of course, involves certain risks but it’s not on the same par with what the adults are risking. So I think those who enjoy historical romances might feel a bit let down by this one. Not enough passion.

Was I right at the start? Is this ‘women’s fiction’? Woman on the brink of life change and personal growth. Check. Nothing more life-changing than motherhood. Her journey details emotional reflection and action that transforms her and her relationships. Yes, I think this fits. She’s a first person narrator so we get to see inside her head in a way we don’t with the others especially Feilamort. She does grow as a character but not much to be honest. She has a child and her maternal instincts kick in to protect that child but she’s still in thrall to the power figures around her and rather than taking action she permits action to be taken on her behalf allowing “God’s will” to take place. If anything the adults go out of their way so that the couple doesn’t change, isn’t sullied by contact with unscrupulous and selfish individuals. Every effort goes into ensuring a happy ending. So, yes, check the hopeful/upbeat ending with regard to her romantic relationship box. Not that a happy ending is guaranteed. Not all loose ends are tied up by the book’s ending and things could unravel quite easily. But that’s true to life.

A word or two needs to be written about the use of dialect in this book. There’ll be no reader who isn’t conversant with Medieval Scots who will be able to sit down and read this book without stumbling over at least a few words. Most you’ll be able to guess from the context—“Elinor was stirring a big pot of parritch (porridge). She paused at each cair (stir) of the spartle (porridge stick) tae tell me the next part of the story”—but not always. Here’s one that stumped me:

Mortfundyit, -fundeit, -fundit, ppl. a.  [Mortadv. b; Fundyitppl. a. But cf. also late ME. and e.m.E. (c 1410–18th c.) morefounde, -fonde, v., to take a chill, be benumbed with cold, F. morfondre to affect (a horse) with catarrh, to chill (one) through, f. F. morve mucus, catarrh, and fondre to melt.] Deadly cold. —  And scharp hailstanys, mortfundeit [Sm. -it, R. -yit] of kynd; Doug. vii. Prol. 136. – Dictonary of the Scots Language

When Deidre uses the word it’s to describe a woman who’s distant, emotionally cold. It’s a great word but I’m not sure about its correct usage and I really can’t afford to spend half an hour researching every word I come across. I say that because the first couple of sites I used to check ‘spartle’ only listed it as a verb and not a noun. You have to be careful. The ARC I received did not have a glossary or any footnotes. If Anne was simply writing in Glaswegian I wouldn’t have too much of a problem. But this different. This is like slipping in an aside in Greek and not bothering with a translation for the rest of us. What, for example, does this mean?

Then he gied a cry and danced off again, pavie and snell.

Here’s a link to the Dictionary of the Scots Language. You can look them up.

As a story goes it’s not an especially complex one. Perhaps, like Romeo and Juliet, more than being a romance it’s actually a cautionary story about what happens when parents fail their children. The key player in all of this is the mysterious grandfather, the appropriately-named Master, and he has a plan. My main problem was trying to relate to him; his priorities would certainly not be mine. It’s why I’m not a big fan of history. I’m not saying we can’t learn from it but sometimes the only lesson we need take away is: Thank Christ we don’t live in world like that nowadays. We get to see things from Deidre’s point of view mainly but there are also sections devoted to Father Anthony (the only one written in the third person), Sister Agnes and Signor Carlo but oddly not Feilamort which keeps him at arm’s length; we only see him through the eyes of others. The bad guys too are kept at a distance. One of the pleasures of a series like The White Queen was witnessing the baddies scheming but there’s none of that here so the book feels a little one-sided. Something was missing. I’d read her again but only something contemporary.

***

Anne Donovan is the author of the prize-winning novel Buddha Da, the short-story collection Hieroglyphics and Being Emily. Buddha Da was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Scottish Book of the Year Award, and was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. It received a Scottish Arts Council Award and won the Le Prince Maurice Award in Mauritius in 2004. She has also written for radio and the stage and has been working on the screenplay for the film of Buddha Da. She lives in Glasgow.

You mark my words, Georgie, total victory is in sight – Guy Fraser-Sampson, Au Reservoir

As the title suggests this is a goodbye novel. It’s Guy Fraser-Sampson’s third and final crack at recreating the world of Mapp and Lucia and he goes out in style. All of his three novels, Major Benjy, Lucia on Holidayand now Au Reservoir—au reservoir being the customary farewell proffered by residents of Tilling—are stylish affairs that relish verbal felicities in the same manner as Major Benjy would savour a chota peg of whisky or George Pillson might admire a white waistcoat with onyx buttons. This is a world where etiquette, decorum, good form, taste and propriety not only all still mean something but mean everything. The worst thing one can be seen to do is behave improperly. Or at least to get caught out behaving that way. Much impropriety takes place in this final battle of wills between Emmeline Pillson—affectionately known as Lucia (and, on occasions even more affectionately, as Lulu)—and her arch-rival Elizabeth Mapp-Flint. It is a battle royal that has raged across six novels by their creator, E.F. Benson, a further two by Tom Holt and now a final three by Fraser-Sampson. Mostly Lucia comes out on top but not always.

The events presented in these novels take place in an idealised and sanitised version of England, the kind of England you expect to find in books by Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse and G.K. Chesterton. The characters are all larger than life at best veering at times towards out-and-out caricatures: the Vicar, for example, The Rev Kenneth Bartlett, is a kindly man always ready to jump to someone’s defence in the kind of Scottish accent they only speak in Brigadoon despite the fact he hails from Birmingham; the blusterous Major Benjy—Benjamin Mapp-Flint, Major Retd.—is exactly what you would expect from an old campaigner, a Miles Gloriosus whose life effectively stopped when he was demobbed and he now subsists on increasingly-fictional nostalgia, whiskies and soda and rounds of golf and then, of course, there’s Irene Coles, universally known as ‘Quaint’ Irene, a knickerbocker-clad lesbian, Germanophile and volatile socialist who paints naked women wrestlers, smokes a sailor’s pipe, and speaks her mind in a fruity bellow. I could go on but you get the idea. Any one of them could wander into a Jeeves and Wooster or a Father Brown and blend in parfectly (no, that wasn’t a typo).

Apparently there’s not in all England a town so blatantly picturesque as Tilling; it is the archetypal small English town. When Tillingites meet on the street the accepted and expected greeting is, “Any news?” but only news concerning Tilling or its inhabitants is considered real news; tittle-tattle is the only currency worth anything. For long and weary Mapp presided over this insular little world. That is until Lucia, who had been doyenne of the social scene of her home village of Riseholme, arrived and over the course of the novels gradually shifted the balance of power. By the time we get to Au Reservoir Lucia is now widely regarded as the richest woman in England (not sure if that includes royalty) and reigns supreme (if only in Tilling). But she’s getting on—even she recognises she’s getting on—and it’s time to start considering her legacy and not simply a museum celebrating all the famous mayors in Tilling’s proud history (which would, of course, feature her good self) and which she was considering in the last book. It would be so nice too, she muses, to leave this world as Dame Lucia. Mapp also realises that opportunities to bring Lucia to her knees are becoming thin on the ground and so decides it’s time to bring out the big guns. Somehow, however, in her enthusiasm she always manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

As with all these books what’s at stake is never anything on any real consequence. Mostly it’s the principle of the thing, e.g. can someone be banned from a bridge club before said club has been formed?

The crux of this particular novel revolves around a singular question: Does Lucia in fact know Noël Coward? Well, of course, she knows him—everyone in the country knows him—but does she know him know him? Well, no, she doesn’t but it’s not for want of trying. She has written to him—and also his friend John Gielgud—frequently; she is one of the country’s great letter writers but alas not one of its great reply receivers. Certainly not from the likes of Messrs Coward and Gielgud or indeed the various sovereigns and prime ministers who she’s seen fit to enter into unilateral correspondences with. Mapp, knowing full well that Lucia’s oft commented on friendship with Noël Coward is nothing but a fabrication of her imagination, is never averse to introducing the topic into conversation in the hope Lucia might trip herself up. We have an example of one their typical exchanges in the opening chapter of the book:

          ‘Perhaps Mr Georgie will be seeing that nice Noël Coward, as he is such a good friend of yours?’ [Mapp] enquired innocently. ‘Goodness, now I come to think of it what a pity that you’ve never invited him to stay at Mallards. Why, I can just imagine the two of you sitting there at the piano playing Mozartino duets.’
           ‘Dear Noël,’ Lucia said dreamily. ‘Such a great talent and yet what a lovely man – so unaffected, you know.’
           ‘Such a shame, then, dear one, that you haven’t been able to entice him down for the weekend,’ Mapp pushed on, sensing victory.
           ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ Lucia cried. ‘It would indeed be wonderful, as you say, Elizabeth, but sadly the poor man is so busy he hardly knows what day of the week it is most of the time. Why, he told me as much in his last letter.’
          There came the hiss of a collective sharp intake of breath. The story of Noël Coward’s curt dismissal had of course been widely disseminated (Elizabeth had felt it no less than her duty, painful though it was to suggest that Lulu might not be entirely truthful).
           ‘His letter?’ Elizabeth echoed. ‘Was that the one in which he told you to leave him alone?’
           Lucia gave one of her little silvery laughs.
           ‘Elizabeth, dear,’ she said, elongating the name playfully. ‘You really must learn to read other people’s letters more thoroughly.’
          There was another group gasp.
           ‘Darling Noël is so temperamental that he has spats with all his friends on a regular basis. Why he wrote to me a few days later to apologise most charmingly and say that he was so taken up with writing his new play that he sometimes forgot to whom he was writing halfway through a letter. “But I just put it in the envelope, send it anyway and hope for the best,” he said. So like him, don’t you think?’
           ‘No idea, I’m sure, dear,’ Elizabeth said venomously. ‘After all, we don’t know him as well as you do, do we?’

How to force the issue? That is the problem and one Mapp has given a considerable amount of thought to. And then an opportunity arises: the upcoming fête at Tenterden. But before we get to that I should probably introduce Olga Bracely since she’s to prove a key player in this little drama. Olga Bracely is in fact the stage and maiden name of Mrs Olga Shuttleworth a famous prima donna of the opera and an unusual friend of the Pillsons—of Lucia’s anyway—since, as Olga put it herself in Queen Lucia,she came out of an orphan school in Brixton but would much have preferred the gutter. Not quite common as muck but lacking some of the airs and graces one would expect considering the position she has risen to and although not quite the voice of reason she does occasionally put the posturings and pretences of her neighbours into perspective. Actually she’s more Georgie’s friend than Lucia’s although Lucia appreciates the fact that she’s a distraction that keeps her husband’s attentions away from her. In this respect Lucia’s relationship with Georgie is not dissimilar to Mapp’s with Major Benjy; the role of the husband in a marriage is probably one of the few things they do agree on:

The possibility of physical infidelity worried [Lucia] not at all, for she was well aware that Georgie was as blissfully free from such tedious urges as had been Pepino [her first husband]; had she not been very sure of that fact, she would never have consented to marry him in the first place. More worrisome was that periodically, as Georgie was drawn back into Olga’s orbit, he would begin to exhibit troubling signs of gratuitous enjoyment of life, such as dancing to gramophone records, partying the night away

It may be true that Lucia has not, despite her best efforts, managed to become a familiar of Noël Coward but Olga is and it just so happens that while dining out in London with Georgie who should they run into if not Noël Coward but also John Gielgud? And to top things off photographic evidence appears the following day’s papers, a rather satisfying one on the society page of the Daily Telegraph— ‘Miss Olga Bracely, fresh from her triumph at the Royal Opera House, relaxes with Mr Noël Coward, Mr John Gielgud and Mr George Pillson’—and a slightly more salacious one in the Daily Mirror:

Covering half the front page was a photograph of Olga and Georgie locked in what appeared to be a passionate embrace in the bar at Sheekey’s. As he over-balanced on his stool, Georgie must have put out a hand for support and he now saw that it had come to rest, quite inadvertently, on what could only be described as Olga’s thigh.

Whatever way one looked at it the evidence certainly pointed to the fact that at least one of the Pillsons was known to Messrs Coward and Gielgud making their continued non-appearances harder to explain or excuse than ever. Mapp decides the time is ripe and phones Lucia:

          ‘Isn’t it wonderful that you and Noel Coward are such close friends?’ Mapp enthused. ‘You see, there’s the teensiest favour I’d like to ask you.’
          Too late, Lucia smelt danger.
          ‘The Bartletts popped in a little while ago,’ Mapp purred, ‘asking for me to help with some fête thing over at Tenterden in three weeks’ time. Don’t know why really, after all everyone knows that sort of thing is much more in your line, dear worship. Why your tableaux vivants are the talk of East Sussex.’
           ‘I trust,’ Lucia broke in, ‘that you haven’t volunteered me for performing anything without consulting me first. Cattiva Elizabeth – you know how full my diary is. Anyway, I’m afraid it would be quite out of the question at such short notice. The preparations are extensive, dear, though of course I was forgetting – you’ve never actually featured in my tableaux, have you?’

Needless to say that’s not what’s being suggested:

          ‘And that’s when I had my little brainwave,’ Mapp said brightly. ‘I said to the Padre, “But why don’t you ask Lucia to invite her dear, dear friend Noël Coward down for the weekend and he can motor over to Tenterden with Cadman and open the fête?” And the Padre said, “What a bonny idea, Mistress Mapp,” and rang his friend the vicar at Tenterden, and he thought it was wonderful idea too. And then I positively clapped my little hands and thought how lovely it would all be.’
          In Lucia’s mind, the gearwheels were spinning wildly but somehow she could not quite slip the clutch and engage them. What to say? What to do?

Well, the solution should be simple. Ask Olga to intercede. They try that but Noël’s having none of it. Is Mapp finally going to get one over on Lucia? Probably not. But even if she does there’s always the new bridge club to do battle over and if that fails Mapp’s got her Joker ready to play in the unassuming, bank-managerly shape of Mr Chesworth (who’s not a bank manager or connected in any way to a bank or any similar financial institution).

I’ve enjoyed all three of Guy’s novels but I think this one is possibly the best and who doesn’t want to go out on a high? The plot is carefully constructed with every i dotted and t crossed. Guy does has a tendency to tell rather than show—the whole shenanigans of the bridge tournament are relayed in a conversation following the event and the same with the fête although we do get to see a bit of the action first-hand (the farce concerning the coaches)—but Shakespeare got away with stuff like that all the time. As with Shakespeare the real pleasure is to be found here mainly in the verbal parrying but also in our being privy to the agonising thoughts that go on behind the masks, none more so than poor henpecked Major Benjy:

          ‘So what’s the answer?’ she enquired, staring at him intently.
          The Major’s initial intention was to say, ‘Blowed if I know, old girl,’ and enquire what was for dinner, but he wisely refrained. He had an instinct that should he do so his wife might deploy a wide array of counter-attacking weaponry, ranging from accusations of gross insensitivity to foaming at the mouth and driving her knitting needles into his thigh. There was also of course the possibility that she might caustically enquire why it was, given that he’d been turning the matter over in his mind, that his prodigious intelligence had entirely failed to arrive at a helpful conclusion. Since his instinct on this occasion was to some extent sound, the recently strained marital relationship of the Mapp-Flints was happily not to be further tested that evening.
           ‘Why not just press ahead anyway?’ he ventured. ‘After all, we can’t get our deposit back, and we’ve got no other way of getting to Tenterden ourselves. Not unless you are planning to accept Lucia’s offer, and I can’t see you being inclined to do that.’
           ‘Oh, don’t be silly, Benjy,’ she said brusquely. ‘If we do that then everyone will simply say that we are copying Lucia.’
          The Major noted silently that whenever his wife’s plans went awry they underwent a subtle but significant transformation from being ‘her’ plans to ‘their’ plans.

To add a level of finality to the book Guy appends a coda—actually Uno Piccolo Codettino—a Deadly Distant Finale in which we find out what Fate has in store for everyone; John Irving did the same in The World According to Garp. He literally kills off everyone (even Shakespeare never thought to try that) but as he pointed out in an e-mail to me, “I comfort myself with the thought that there are still huge gaps in the chronology should any subsequent books want to extend the series (which I very much hope they will).”

Before the coda Guy still has to wrap up his storyline and I have to say I was a little surprised with how he chose to end things. Yes, there is a clear winner. But as with his ending to Lucia on Holiday Guy introduces some pathos that leaves us thinking of these inventions as real people if only for a few pages. A fitting end to his innings then. Wonder who’ll be out to bat next?

***

Guy Fraser-Sampson originally qualified as a lawyer and became an equity partner in a City of London law firm at the age of 26, having already been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a member of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, and a member of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators. In 1986 he left the law and has since gained over twenty-five years’ experience in the investment arena, particularly in the fields of private equity funds, investment strategy and asset allocation.

Guy is well known as a provider of keynote addresses. He is also a prolific writer, supplying articles for every one of Europe's English language pension publications as well as numerous hedge fund and other investment titles, including his influential monthly column in Real Deals, which is read by the private equity community worldwide. He is also in regular demand for media interviews in various countries. In the UK, he has featured on both Sky and BBC television as well as Radio 4's Today programme. Links to some video interviews can be found here.

In addition to his Mapp and Lucia novels Guy also writes books on finance and investment and history. His first book on the Plantagenets (working title A Family at War) has been nominated for a Royal Society of Literature award. Cricket at the Crossroads: Colour, Class and Controversy 1967-1977 was published in September 2011. He also apparently writes detective fiction under a pseudonym which remains a closely guarded secret.

There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth publishing, to find honest men to publish it, and to find sensible men to read it. – Charles Caleb Colton

I think it’s time someone put things into perspective. A while ago I had a poem rejected because it appeared in a comment I made to someone online. Okay, in the strictest sense, it is now in the public domain (which is how they found it) but seriously since when does that count as published? How many people bar the blog’s owner will have been bothered to read down through all the comments and seen my wee poem? And let’s say that this webzine, the webzine that just rejected my poem, hadn’t been as diligent and had gone ahead and published my poem in a couple of months’ time what are the odds of someone coming along and saying, “Hey, I think I saw that poem in the comments of a blog I read a couple of years back.”

Sites differ on what they consider ‘published’:

• Poetry: We cannot consider anything that has been previously published or accepted for publication, anywhere, in any form. Work that has appeared online is considered to have been previously published and should not be submitted.
• Rattle does not accept work that has been previously published, in print or online (we do not consider self-publishing to personal blogs or Facebook as publication).
• Qarrtsiluni does not consider written work or video that has been previously published in online or print journals, books or anthologies. We do, however, consider work that has only been posted on an author’s blog, personal website, or personal channel on a video upload site such as YouTube or Vimeo, because we think such online sharing constitutes a vital part of the creative process for a growing number of writers and filmmakers, and we want to encourage that.
• Sentinel Poetry Quarterly: Generally we discourage submissions of previously published work. If we feel strongly about a previously published work we may solicit it. If your work has been published elsewhere and you feel it has not been given the exposure it deserves, and you feel strongly about it, by all means submit it, but please mention where and when it was first published.

Of course they’re under no obligation to publish anything. They can and do make up the rules as they go along. Some sites only publish poems under a certain length, some want nothing but religious poetry whereas others are particularly interested in poetry written in traditional forms. None of that is wrong. People are free to publish what they want and if they don’t want to publish what they consider “previously published” then so be it. All I’m saying is that we need to be realistic about all of this. There are millions upon millions of websites out there. God alone knows how many of them publish poetry but there will be thousands and, as was always the case with small press print journals, most won’t survive more than a few issues and are lucky if more than a handful of people look at the magazine who aren’t in the magazine themselves or related to or friends of someone whose work has appeared therein. There are sites where my poems have appeared and presumably (by that I mean ‘hopefully’) been read by more than just the site’s owner and me and now they’re gone. Ask yourself: when was the last time you trawled through an archive of poetry looking for the hidden gem?

I had five poems published in writers bloc back in 2011. The site’s no longer there and so your chance to read those poems has gone. Pfft! I can’t offer them to most sites because they’re been “previously published” and so that’s that. I tried using WayBack Machine but I got a message: Page cannot be crawled or displayed due to robots.txt. I can access their robots.txt file but who cares; the poems are gone. So, what’s to stop me offering them elsewhere and maintaining they’re never been published?

Here’s a poem that has been published online by Gloom Cupboard:

As Is

This is a
used poem.
It is in
good condition,
is complete and
undamaged.

No words are missing and
though they have
all been read before
the previous owner
was careful not to
read too much into them.

The poem will make sense
but it must
be said it doesn't
quite mean what it used to
and it may require
some reader attention.

What you see
is what you
get but what
you end up with
is completely
up to you.


16th February 2008

Poems don’t go off. No matter how many people have read them before you get to them they’re as fresh as the day the poet completed them. That a poem can be found using a search engine is neither here nor there. No one’s going to look for it. It’s been read by the only dozen or hundred people who are ever going to read it and it’ll never be looked at again. And that’s just wrong. Imagine if Radio One played a record once and that was your lot; you never got to hear that track again unless you had the foresight to tape that broadcast. I, personally, don’t see anything wrong with an author trying to get as many people to read his or her work. I’ve a box full of old print magazines going back to the seventies full of perfectly serviceable poems, poems that deserve to be read again. Quite a few were published more than once because back in the day I didn’t have a clue and just kept sending out the same stuff. I got a letter once, responding to a submission, from the editor of Trends telling me that he’d seen one of the poems I’d sent him in another journal which took me aback; I was so struck by the fact someone had read one of my poems and remembered it. But he took the poem anyway.

Okay let’s play devil’s advocate here. Let’s say one of my poems has appeared in one of my blog posts. Has it been published, I mean really published? Or has it been self­-published? There are those who say that self-publishing’s not real publishing because there’s no gatekeeper and if that’s the case then why are they making such a fuss about it? Just saying.

Eileen Tabios, publisher of Meritage Press and editor/publisher of the review Galatea Resurrects, had this to say over on the Poetry Foundation site in an article appropriately entitled Just Get the Poems Out There:

One of the healthiest elements about poetry blogging is how poetry blogland more accurately mirrors the nature of Poetry than has traditional canon-making poetic machinery. There have always been more poets and poems than those marble-ized in Norton anthologies, “best of” anthologies, et al. . . . There is no centre—or there are many centres—in poetry.

I have a number of friends who are poets and they’re usually friends with a bunch of other poets who are in turn friends with some more poets and many of them are friends with me. Considering the huge number of poets out there I don’t actually feel that I’m in contact with more than a handful, not exactly a clique but there’s a lot of common ground; for one thing most are British. I would also guess that most of us are maxed-out when it comes to online friends. We can’t follow all the ones we’ve subscribed to and their Twitter feeds just pour by. No one’s looking for more to do than they already have to do. We like it when new stuff comes our way but it usually comes our way via one of our existing friends and so, yes, the group expands but that expansion is offset by those who’ve decided they’ve had their fill with the blogosphere and have gone off to give real life another go.

So here’s all I’m saying: Let common sense prevail. If you’re happy simply to see your poem in print and whoever reads it is whoever reads it then fine—I guess any reader who isn’t you is a bonus—but if you’ve written a good poem (hell, it might even be a great poem)—then doesn’t it hurt to know that that’s it, the only other time it might see the light of day is if you include it in a collection and how many people are going to be champing at the bit to read that? Probably the only ones will be the ones who read the poem when it was first published anyway. Such is the state of modern poetry.

There’s a very interesting article here concerning print runs. Everyone knows that poetry doesn’t sell. A print run of 200-300 from a traditional publisher appears to be about the norm unless you’re Billy Collins. That’s nothing. So what if another two or three hundred get to read it online as well. That’s still nothing. And if there happens to be an overlap, maybe a couple of those who bought the book, do you honestly think they’d feel cheated to encounter the selfsame poem online? Might they not think: Hm, I’ve seen this poem before. If some other editor thought it was worth publishing maybe it’s a better poem than I first thought. Maybe I should read it again a bit more carefully. It’s not like a painting. Two or three hundred people already own a copy of that poem. That’s the nature of poetry.

The whole copyright thing is all fine and well when you’re being paid for permission to use your work. I can understand a magazine being a wee bit fussy if they’re forking out cash even if the only other people to read that poem beforehand might’ve been a couple of dozen Brits three or four years earlier. But most online magazines don’t pay. Yes, it’s still technically publishing but why not think about it as promoting? A poem is like a review. It demonstrates what that poet can do and is an encouragement to readers to seek out more and maybe fork out a few quid on a chapbook or something.

If you run a magazine all I’m asking is that you think about revising your submission guidelines. Maybe refuse any pre-published within a set time frame, say six months or a year. The face of the Internet changes constantly. Hell, a week on it’s barely recognisable. And we only read what’s in front of our faces because that’s all we have time for. Give poets a second chance, that’s all I’m saying.

My wife, happening upon my journal, said:
“Writers are crueller than normal people.”
—Joseph Hutchison, ‘March 10: “From an Unmailed Letter”’

W.S. Merwin opens his 1968 essay, ‘On Open Form’ with the following statement:

What is called its form may simply be that part of the poem that has directly to do with time: the time of the poem, the time in which it was written, and the sense of recurrence in which the unique moment of vision is set.

Reading that essay prompted Joseph Hutchison to write his own, ‘Aspects of Time in Poetry’ in which he draws a distinction between three kinds of time: empirical time, subjective time, and duration. It’s a thought-provoking article. Time, of course, is linear. Our perception of it may not always be accurate but tempis fugits on regardless. Memory handles time in its own perverse ways. As Joe puts it in ‘This Day’:

                                                   All
that time scatters, memory gathers up—
keepsakes, relics, talismans.

This is what makes his 1995 collection Bed of Coals (which has just been brought back into print by FutureCycle Press) such an interesting—by ‘interesting’ I mean ‘challenging’—read.

Unlike many poetry collections Bed of Coals has a storyline. It’s a multi-layered, discontiguous and spare one and one I struggled with at first; sadly—and masculinely—I’m a terribly linear person. In an author’s note at the start of the book Joe tries to explain the book’s structure:

Two different voices tell the following story. One belongs to an anonymous narrator, whose poems include my main character’s name—Vander Meer—in their titles. The second voice is Vander Meer’s own, and it surfaces in poems drawn from his “blue notebook” and in others written at a later date; the titles of these works are set in italics to differentiate them from the narrator’s. Vander Meer’s “blue notebook” entries, dated from March 22 of one year to March 21 of the next, are presented in the order Vander Meer himself chooses to read them. Readers who prefer plot to character are free to reconstruct the progress of Vander Meer’s crisis by reading the “blue notebook” poems in chronological order.

On reading through the collection I wondered about the third set of poems though—I couldn’t quite see how they fitted into the sequence—and so asked Joe to clarify how these were to be interpreted:

The other poems written by Vander Meer are—so my conceit goes—written as he contemplates the blue notebook poems. He is in dialogue with them, and with the person he was when in that downward spiral. These poems flesh out more of his story.

So, to clarify, we have Vander Meer’s story narrated from the outside (what I’m going to call ‘the objective poems’), his own thoughts as he’s immersed in the events recorded in a blue notebook (the subjective poems) and a third set where he looks back from having survived said events (the reflective poems); at least that’s my reading of them. I’ve no issues with any author providing instructions on how to read his or her book—perhaps more should—but once we have them we’re on our own for better or worse. This multi-layered approach is certainly different but it does screw with your general perception of time since the poems aren’t presented chronologically in terms of the events they describe or chronologically as they were written. I tried to work my way through the collection sequentially but lost the thread and so decided to read the poems in three blocks since I couldn’t work out how the objective and subjective timelines crossed.

As I was describing this organisation to my wife she reminded me of Doris Lessing’sThe Golden Notebook and its structure. From the novel’s blurb:

Divorced with a young child, and fearful of going mad, Anna records her experiences in four coloured notebooks: black for her writing life, red for political views, yellow for emotions, blue for everyday events. But it is a fifth notebook—the golden notebook—that finally pulls these wayward strands of her life together.

Lessing in the book’s preface claimed that the most important theme in the novel is fragmentation; the mental breakdown that Anna suffers, perhaps from the compartmentalization of her life reflected in the division of the four notebooks, but also reflecting the fragmentation of society.

The objective poems

There are thirteen poems in this group and although undated they appear to be presented in chronological order.

This isn’t prose and so we have to get by on scraps of biographical information and attempt to build up a picture. Vander Meer is a copy editor who aspires to be “an auteur”. As a child he struggled learning how to swim but did manage to learn how to float. It’s a strong and simple metaphor for a man whose life is going nowhere. He doesn’t even drive himself to work at this point; he gets the bus and when he gets off he struggles through the masses in much the same way he struggled through the water when trying to do the breast stroke. This is where we meet him in the opening poem of Bed of Coals musing to himself, “every skill /becomes second nature.” I suppose there’s some truth to that. They say you never forget how to ride a bike but when I swim nowadays I have to think about it; I’m not a natural swimmer and I, too, like Vander Meer, nurse some painful memories of learning to swim which I never did until I was about twelve and I only ever mastered the breast stroke.

Vander Meer’s colleagues say he’s not himself.
His clear, blue sky prose is all fog lately:
“Couldn’t sell steaks to a starving man!”

[from ‘VANDER MEER’S WEARINESS’]

We’re into the second poem now. He’s distracted; his mind’s not on the job. Perhaps a leave of absence would help although we’re still none the wiser regarding what’s up with him. The third poem takes us into one of his dreams; dreams, mostly bad, form a major part of this collection (twenty-six poems if I counted right). He knows he’s dreaming because he’s found himself replacing Cary Grant in North by Northwest. This poem does set the time frame because when he wakes he finds there’s “a second-rate actor / in the White House” which means we’re talking the eighties. (Ronald Reagan was in office from January 20, 1981 – January 20, 1989.) The eighties was the Me! Me! Me! generation. It saw the rise of the yuppie. Binge buying and credit became a way of life. Labels were everything. Tom Wolfe dubbed the baby-boomers as the ‘splurge generation.’ It was a bad time to be seen as anything other than successful.

This dream itself is not as significant as the one we hear about in the next poem ‘VANDER MEER IN TRANSIT’ in which, on the bus again, he overhears a couple talking:

“I took a night course on dreaming,”
she said. “If you dream it once,
it’s not prophetic. It’s just working out
anxieties....”
                    “And what if you dream
the dream more than once?”
                                          “Then,”
she nodded, “it’s time to pay attention.”

This reminds him of a recurring dream in which his genitals are ripped off in the shower, a dream he first had “two years before his marriage failed.” He decides to call in sick.

In the next poem ‘ORPHIC VANDER MEER’ Vander Meer’s back in bed dreaming. This time it’s about having sex with someone whose marriage is collapsing. And also her faith it seems. Who is this person? Clearly not his wife.

In ‘VANDER MEER’S REVISION’ we’re at the halfway point, August—the sequence runs from March to March remember—and he’s alone during a heat wave. It’s a year on from when his wife told him:

“You want her? Your little bitch? Go
to her! Go to your bitch!”

And yet it’s not as simple as that:

                                 So he left,
not explaining he was leaving for no one.
How could he speak that unreasonable truth?

What’s going on here? He’s cheated on his wife but he’s not leaving her for this other woman? It also suggests that it took a year for their marriage to get to this point, that it failed a full year earlier but something—momentum? habit?—kept things running.

In ‘VANDER MEER HOLDING ON’ he now has a car, a “new / used Ford” and is sitting outside what used to be the family home watching his daughter on her swing, the growing distance between him and his family symbolised by the last two line of the final stanza:

But his daughter, sailing higher, shrieks
with joy...and he grips the wheel—
white-knuckled Vander Meer! Shutting his eyes,
hearing his wife laugh and call, “Hold on!
Honey, hold on tight!” Her every push
pushing him farther out....

Notice the pun? Pushing father out? This distance is tackled again in the next poem, ‘VANDER MEER CRYING FOWL’:

               Thus, her voice

on the phone—its hunger repressed
uneasily into choice etiquette: a proper
knife-and-fork tenderness.

Assuming this is his wife we’re talking about here. I’ll come back to this.

More dream imagery in ‘SAINT VANDER MEER AND THE DRAGON’:

                      Oh, he fears
sleep! For she comes to him in sleep.
“What I must do I will do,” she whispers.

Things are starting to get to Vander Meer in ‘VANDER MEER AT SUNDOWN’:

Thinks Vander Meer, All light’s
receding from me like the galaxies.

In ‘VANDER MEER AT SEA’ it’s still August. Which August though? A year after the break up? He happens on “a note / in her firm cursive,” directions he’s given her over the phone at some point. But who is the “her”? No, I think this is before the breakup of his marriage. I think this is him with the other woman and she’s the one breaking up with him. So maybe the voice on the phone a few poems back was his lover. Hard to be sure. In the bio on his blog Joe writes:

In the all the years of my writing life, I've responded to and aspired to a quality in poetry that I can only call "clarity." Not that I'm interested in clarity at the expense of honest complexity; I despise those bland accounts of near-death sailing "into the Light." Light is not always benign: it blinds as often as it offers revelation, as anyone who's grown up in my part of the world would know. That contradiction, if it is one (it could be that contradiction exists only in the mind), fascinates me continually.

Light’s a major theme in this collection. It feels like hardly a poem fails to mention it at least in passing: moonlight, “broken light”, “the grey TV light”, “shallow light”, daylight, “the effects of light”, “town lights”, lightning, twilight, “morning light”, “cloudlight”, “festive lights”, “windowlight”, “ripples of light”, “headlights”. It’s something I’ve noted in my own poetry, light as a metaphor for truth. I think it’s a good metaphor even if it is a bit obvious. Sometimes it’s very clear what’s going on with Vander Meer but at other times not as much; not every poem is equally illuminated. The problem is, by ‘clarity’ Joe doesn’t mean ‘transparency’. In an interview he expanded on the above:

[C]larity isn’t accessibility. (I’m not sure what accessibility means, because what’s accessible to one reader may not be accessible to another. So when we talk about accessibility, we’re getting into statistics: what percentage of readers understand this poem on first reading? On second? On third? Etc. It’s a useless term.) Clarity is also not an absence of ambiguity. Blake is notoriously ambiguous, but no poet writes with more clarity.

So—I’ve said what clarity isn’t but not what it is. I would say that my sense of clarity goes back to the medieval meaning of the word—“glory” or “divine splendour.” … Moments of clarity come through the senses but carry us beyond them.

So, perhaps rather than ‘clarity’ what he’s looking for in his poems—and therefore what we should be looking for—are insights, little epiphanies, flashes. Of course when Joe reads these poems he knows exactly what they’re about but as much as he’s trying to allow us inside his head he doesn’t always manage it. And, oddly enough, neither does the omniscient narrator. But here what’s going on seems reasonably clear:

“I can’t,” she said. It was simple—
like a blunt gaff to the chest. “I just
can’t.... Not right now. Not yet,”
she said. And he said he felt the same:
“It’s my kid,” he lied, thinking—
I am going to die....

In ‘VANDER MEER AT BOTTOM’ we can see him beginning to fall apart. For once he’s lying in bed and not dreaming:

Sunken like a river rock, Vander Meer reads
the ripples of light that passing cars
scrawl across his bedroom wall. No
breathing beside him...no child’s
next door.

Here’s probably as good a place as any to ask: Why Vander Meer? It’s an odd name. Why not Smith or Jones? In an e-mail Joe explained:

[T]he character’s last name is Vander Meer; I give him no first name. The name itself means “from the lake (or sea)”—an underwater man. I didn’t know this when I named him, though; the name just surfaced (!) one day in what became the eponymous first poem. I think I was influenced by Louis Simpson, whose poems I was reading at the time; he has a harrowing one called 'Vandergast and the Girl', and in the original edition I included lines from that poem as an epigraph from that poem: “What do definitions and divorce-court proceedings / have to do with the breathless reality?”

“Sunken like a river rock”—this really struck me because I have a whole series of poems I refer to as The Drowning Man Poems which revolve around a man who’s submerged in emotions, who feels like he’s drowning but never actually drowns. The word ‘drown’ appears four times in this collection and there are eighteen references to water as well as numerous references to seas, waves, floods, rivers, lakes and streams.

It’s on nights like this he pours himself into his blue notebook:

                                           Nights
of wandering mindlessness...images
gushing forth, lovely and terrible
by turns....

This has to end somewhere. And it does in ‘VANDER MEER’S DUPLICITY’:

Vander Meer at the mirror, mouth
propped wide with a gun barrel
index finger, thinking:
“easeful death”...playing
homo ludens to the hilt. Who was it
said, a good poem always takes
the top of one’s head off?

Emily Dickinson said, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry,” in case you wondered. Homo Ludens or Man the Player is a book written in 1938 by Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga. It discusses the importance of the play element of culture and society. Is Vander Meer a player? It depends what you mean by ‘player’. He’s not a player as in a powerful participant in some major concern, a man to be reckoned with. Nor do I think the definition in the Urban Dictionary fits here either:

A male who is skilled at manipulating ("playing") others, and especially at seducing women by pretending to care about them, when in reality they are only interested in sex. Possibly derived from the phrases "play him for a fool", or "play him like a violin". The term was popularized by hip-hop culture, but was commonly recognized among urban American blacks by the 1970s.

But he is still playing. What Huizinga says at the start of his book is noteworthy though:

In play there is something "at play" which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action. All play means something. If we call the active principle that makes up the essence of play "instinct", we explain nothing; if we call it "mind" or "will" we say too much.

There are numerous theories about play but any man who’s having an affair is playing with fire. You tell me one kid who doesn’t like to play with fire though. Games have rules, even the games kids play where they make them up as they go along, and what’s the point of a game if there’s not a winner? And if there’s a winner there have to be losers.

It turns out though that the blue notebook is not the only thing Vander Meer’s been writing since he found himself alone; there’s also, apparently, “a cracked memoir he calls Bed of Coals”.

And so ends what I’m calling the ‘objective poems’. They’re bullet points really. They bring us to an ending but endings are only convenient stopping points for storytellers; there’s always more to tell. Maybe when we read the poems from the blue notebook things will become clearer.

The subjective poems (the poems from the blue notebook)

There are twenty-three of these beginning with one dated March 22nd. The tone here is quite, quite different. For example here’s the first poem in its entirety:

Stop Slaughtering Baby Seals or No More Nukes—
pathos of loving what we can’t love enough.
“When they split up,” some voice at the office,
“he joined The Alliance to Protect Snail Darters.
She worked door-to-door for Z.P.G.” Today,
following a night of smashed glasses
and food-slopped floors, our three-year-old
stared down my bitter breakfast silence:
“You’re not screaming now.” My eyes burned wet
as an oil-slicked dolphin’s.... Where are you,
Committee to Preserve Self-Devouring Spouses?
Yet I have kissed her mouth most tenderly—
mouth, breasts, curve of belly...cavorting
in a surf of sheets. And later, breathing
to sleep in the depths, I’ve dreamed in slogans:
No More Nukes! Stop the Slaughter! Save the Whales!

Quite the rant and confusing as hell. The people at the office are talking about a breakup in the past tense and yet Vander Meer’s still having breakfast with his kid in the morning (who we now know is about three) after what looks like a serious row with his wife the night before. So clearly—okay, maybe not so clearly—his work colleagues are talking about some other couple.

On June 20th Vander Meer’s clearly still at home with his wife. A poem entitled ‘Lifting My Daughter’ provides the evidence:

As I leave for work she holds out her arms, and I
bend to lift her...always heavier than I remember,
because in my mind she is still that seedling bough
I used to cradle in one elbow. Her hug is honest,
fierce, forgiving.

On June 21st he writes a poem called ‘Long Distance Call’. Since no one is named in these poems and the rest of the players are all women—his wife, his daughter, his lover—you really do have to pay attention to the context to work out who the ‘shes’ and ‘hers’ are. I’m assuming here he’s talking about his lover because he talks about one breath…

drawing us into a room
where we lie moving

slowly at first
tongue to tongue
in the house of longing

They’re still there three weeks later:

July 9

            from the Blue Notebook

In bed we listened
to sleepwalking rain
drawn to the window
by your wetness

And they’re still at it on the 15th:

Too treble for ears, a gracenote’s summons
feathered through our brains, piped us
to the pied guestbed quilt. Spreading towels
against stain, she baptized my bald homage
in water holy past pun or punishment. Our method—
pure rhythm; as a rosined bow thrills the gut
to gladden the soul, so the lingua franca,
pentecostal stammering of our hearts
renewed us.

They know what they’re doing. They know other people will be affected—“[s]pouses, friends, hurt families”—but now is not the time to think about all that; they’re caught up in The Game (hard not to think about Cocteau’sLes Enfants Terribleshere). It’s noteworthy that they adopt the rhythm method of birth control even though she sounds like a lapsed Catholic. It’s perhaps worth mentioning that in Joe’s ordering of the collection these poems are presented in reverse order, from the height of the affair reading back to its beginning.

By August 8th the passion seems to have died down:

Yet our words are clinical,
sobering. We’ve sworn off love,
taken the cure...and toast
ourselves with chilled mineral water—

The affair would appear to have lasted a month which is backed up by what we learn later in one of the reflective poems, ‘Snapshots’:

That month’s like a peach cut in half
Even the deep ragged wound is sweet

although in ‘Fullness’ he talks about five weeks:

Living on beer and coffee, we
burned off ten pounds each in half
as many weeks (in love, the body
grows lean to feed the heart).

We know from the objective poems that the breakup happens sometime in August but none of the dated poems from the blue notebook of that period deal with it although from what I remember of my own first breakup that’s not that surprising; real life issues get in the way. By September 23rd the reality of his situation is starting to hit home though:

September 23

            from the Blue Notebook

Cinching my belt to the fourth
notch—and still it’s loose!
(How many weeks now
since I’ve touched you?)

These early poems are quite detached. The reality of what’s happened has hit him but only on an intellectual level. By December 22nd he’s starting to wallow; it is the Christmas period after all and a hard time for the newly separated and divorced:

                            I’d like to breathe,
but can’t. My jaw goes stone at the hinge.
Say what I feel? All words are trash
in my throat’s choked swash;
emotion’s current will not flow—

By January he’s starting to become self-pitying. And his Valentine’s Day poem is dark:

Sworn vows gone into the ground with your love;
from us the world inherits nothing but dust.

Indeed February’s a bad month. No less than four poems. As March comes round he’s starting to realise how useless his poetry is:

                                      Am I cruel,
then? Draining our lives into language
where even joy is suffering...? My love,
I suffer words for the normal joy they redeem—
and therefore hope they’ll make you suffer:
you, kinder than my heart can stand.

The poems in this section are a mixture of lyrical and narrative. Only their dates really provide any context. We have roughly six months before the breakup and six months afterwards. Yes, they do fill in some of the details but it’s hard to be sure.

The reflective poems

There are twenty-seven poems in this section and it’s impossible to know in what order they were written. The first ‘Fighting Grief’ is helpful. It tells us that his lover was married at the time of the affair. I’d misread the January 29th poem, assuming when Vander Meer referred to “her husband” he was referring to himself in the third person. This is what was so confusing, not knowing which woman was being referred to but I don’t suppose it’s unreasonable for him to miss both his wife and his mistress. What is curious in this poem is that he says he’s fighting not guilt as one might’ve expected but “grief”. What is he grieving? The end of his marriage?

‘Lethe’ provides some clarification. It’s describing something that happens in April, so a couple of months before the affair:

“You pulled back,” said his wife. “You
were passionate, then—just gone.”
The sky curved above their house like a tree,
ash or willow, thick-leaved, many-branched.
She said, “Is there something wrong?”

[…]

He thought, What could be wrong?

By the time he responds his wife’s dozed off. He’s been reprieved. In Greek mythology, Lethe was one of the five rivers of Hades It flowed around the cave of Hypnos and through the Underworld, where all those who drank from it experienced complete forgetfulness. Lethe was also the name of the Greek spirit of forgetfulness and oblivion, with whom the river was often identified.

The poems in this section are more level-headed than those in the blue notebook. They’re not, however, detached reportage as in the objective poems. One of the most moving is this one:

Pausing Outside My Apartment

Sun must be filling the room.
One thin ray is streaming
from the peephole.

Daylight and dust.

You can feel the earth
turning under you at times.
The roundness of anguish.

Daylight and dust.

It’s like a dream.
The key turns my hand.
I open my life and go in.

This poem more than any other in this collection struck a chord with me. Although I wasn’t to blame for the breakup of my own first marriage there was a point before we split up that the reality of my situation hit me. This was how I expressed it at the time:

A MARRIAGE

One day he tried too hard and broke it.
He patched it up
and it still worked,
though not as well.

The wheels still went round.

No one noticed any change
till one day it fell to pieces
and they all wondered why.


27 June 1982 – 23 September 1982

The first date is when I wrote the poem. The second was the day my wife left me. I believe very strongly that all poetry is completed by its readers. There will be some people who’re reading this just now who have never been married and have never even broken up with a girl or boyfriend. They’ve never experienced a pivotal moment like this. Reading on I came across ‘Detour’, a prose poem I suppose although I’ve never been good at differentiating between flash fiction and prose poetry, which I also related to. Vander Meer’s driven miles to sit outside this woman’s house. He’s listening to the radio or trying to:

The radio’s garbled music crackles in and out of its channel. No use twisting the knob: something inside is loose—a broken connection....

“Love,” he said, “is a way of being. It includes emotions. Attitudes. Values. It includes ideas. This is why we can’t repress love. It absorbs the repression, which changes the relationship but doesn’t destroy it.”

I click off the radio…

After he gets to the woman’s house—we learned in the June 3rd entry in the blue notebook that it’s a long drive, “a hundred miles [from] what’s left of home”—all is dark so he leaves a note and as he’s driving away he thinks (presumably about his wife and not this other woman): Something inside is loose. … Something inside is broken. This is exactly how I felt with my first marriage. Actually when I read this piece the first time I misread the last line. I read “Something inside love is loose. Something is broken.” That’s how I felt.

Just as I wrote my marriage poem months before the actual official breakup Vander Meer starts making entries in his notebook. In the poem ‘On Opening the Blue Notebook’ he writes:

When I picture you, I hear
such gears engage—as if thought
were a kind of wheelwork, routinely
spinning dreams into images,
love into dreams....

Interesting that both Joe and I would compare a marriage to a machine, and one that can break down.

Of course looking back it’s easy to misremember things. We see that in ‘Recalling the Solstice’ when he writes:

Grass and junipers grey with frost
just before dawn. The dark grey too,
with a mist drifted off the river.
(In language it seems symbolic,
but out my window it was only cold
cloudiness turned up hauntingly

over night.)

and also in ‘A Box of Snapshots’. As he looks at a photo of him standing in the shadow of a willow tree he thinks:

[I]t’s me as I am
in the willow tree’s shadow, me
in the shade of my parent’s house—
but lit by a knowledge so bright
I have to shut my eyes to see.

One might think when we reflect we become more level-headed and indeed the poems in this group are calmer and more reflective but there’s also a danger that the imagination will take over. I’m no brain scientist but the evidence is building: memories and imaginings are two sides to the same mental function whatever you want to call it, cognition I suppose. If we’re not careful we attribute meaning to things that essentially were meaningless acts in the first place which is not to suggest they were not emotive acts.

The title poem comes next, ‘Bed of Coals’, which is also, remember, the title of his “cracked memoir”. It’s set in June and in it he’s a carny; he runs The Calypso:

                                                            thirty cars held to a hub
by hydraulic spokes whose festive lights flash
as the motor drives it all around.

It’s a place full of activity and noise and yet he describes it as the eye of the storm, an oasis in all this chaos where he starts “to hear her breathing beyond the noise”. This is similar imagery to that used in ‘Drunk Again in the Dark Grass’ where he writes:

For once I want to listen
past the waves. To fall silent,
let moonlight soak me to the bone!

He’s not a carny, he’s a copy editor. For once this is not a dream because he tells us right at the very start that he can’t sleep; he’s tossing “like a flame on [a] bed of coals.” Obviously this isn’t the memoir. Perhaps, however, this is where he got the title for the memoir.

‘Fullness’ is an interesting poem since clearly Vander Meer’s lost much getting to this point. The second half reads:

                           I keep
trying to swallow the fishbone
moments of the past—as if
I could live on loss.
Yet it isn’t loss,
but fullness recalled
to fullness again: my heart
no starveling, though it hurts—
aches like a bulging net
I strain to raise: memories
hauled up over and over, quick
and seething in the drowning air.

I have to say I’ve read these few lines over and over again. I feel they may well be pivotal but I’m not sure I get them. It’s an awkward sentence which doesn’t help. Try reading it parsed as prose:

Yet it isn’t loss, but fullness recalled to fullness again: my heart no starveling, though it hurts—aches like a bulging net I strain to raise: memories hauled up over and over, quick and seething in the drowning air.

‘Beyond Sorrow’ was another poem that reminded me of one mine. Joe writes:

In the crowd a girl’s face
not yours but eyes
like yours

[…]

enough now
to love you in other faces
and feel my heart silently rise
inside me

I wrote:

When we broke up
I wondered where he'd go:

He went to look for me
in other women.

I think it’s not unlike what happens when your wife falls pregnant. Suddenly there are these pregnant women everywhere as if it’s a fashion thing and your wife’s the trend-setter. When you no longer have access to a loved one, can no longer touch her on a whim or see her naked suddenly that’s what you want and that’s what you look for, more of the same. You forget all the reasons why things didn’t work out with her. You want to press RESET and do it all over again and maybe this time it’ll work out.

‘The Voice of Reason’ tries to be heard:

The error, of course, is thinking
there’s a way to live your life,
as one might “drive a car.” Life
is what drives you. Such a stinking

shame...having so little control!
And yet all the time resisting it—

September comes round in ‘This Day’, the final poem in this group and the final poem in the collection and where do we find Vander Meer?

On the corner, anachronistic in mid-September,
a girl in jogging shorts...tanned legs
glistening with sparse, honey-pale down,
her thighs strong, smooth as buttered rum.

How to keep from staring through her to find you?

September when? Not the September following the August when his wife told him to go. No, this is the September after that most likely. A year and a bit on. His life has fallen to pieces. He’s played the game and lost. He’s hit bedrock. He’s stuck a gun in his mouth and now he’s ready to get back on the bike again. Too many of us define ourselves through other people, through our parents, our spouses, our heroes. Is history going to repeat itself?

The collection as a whole

After having chopped up this collection to suit my ends—albeit with the approval of the author—I then went back and reread it from the beginning in the order he had chosen. It all boils down to a single word: intent. How do you read a single Joe Hutchison poem let alone an entire book of them?

Joe has a few things to say on this subject of intention. From his blog:

There may be many other good reasons to read, but I don't see how any reader can pretend that the author's intentions are irrelevant. They are always the substance and the structuring motive behind the work. – A Conversation in Progress II

Surely the primary purpose of reading any work is to understand its author’s intention (again, broadly conceived), in the hope of better understanding our own. – A Conversation in Progress

[W]e owe the authors we care about the duty of intentional engagement. If they’re going to speak to us, we have to bring them our questions: we have to inquire about their intentions and look to their texts, their lives, and their historical periods — and, of course, our own honest responses to their work — for help. Otherwise it’s all just a frivolous game. – A Conversation in Progress

So what’s Joe’s intent here? In his essay ‘I Have Seen the Future and It Is Prose’ Joe writes that he believes that “poetry … exists in order to express those complex areas of the individual psyche that ordinary prose … is not designed to express” and in this interview:

Mindfulness is another word for love. It’s passionate and purposeful. It engages. If we think about what it’s like to fall in love, we’ll notice that it disarranges our lives. All the old habits and routines break down!

[…]

Mindfulness is what poetry is all about, of course. Poetry is the result of the poet reclaiming awareness from habit and routine and putting the result in words that can help a reader do the same thing. The poet’s long dead, but through engagement with the mindful poem, the living reader can reclaim awareness in his or her own life. Poetry is a kind of sympathetic magic.

And in 'Fists and Flashing Eyes':

[A]n authentic reading of an authentic poem influences the reader’s idea of reality …Reading it is a dangerous activity. For if each new poem, each new imaginatively structured byte of language, influences our experience of the program — why, individuals might actually come to believe that their subjective experience of the world is more real than the one the information society’s selling.

Intent is clearly not a simple thing. The problem is made clear in the first quote when he uses the adjective ‘complex’. Complex things are, by their very nature, hard to express is simple terms or when they are they lose much in the translation, e.g. E = mc². Human emotions can be similarly reduced— fear, joy, love, sadness, surprise, anger—but these simplifications are just as unhelpful. Emotions have to be experienced. And even then they can be hard to pin down. I’m almost fifty-five and I still don’t understand why I’ve done half the things in my life. So why should Joe (or his proxy Vander Meer) be any different?

I only had one question when I first opened this book. It was a rather vulgar one: What’s the heck’s this all about? I refined it quickly enough and soon I had a whole ... what is the collective noun for questions? ‘shitload’ I think … some of which I’ve managed to answer above. But one I haven’t been able to answer is: What was Joe’s intent? I sat down with the intention of understanding as much of this text as I could. What I discovered was that I was not alone in thinking the way I do. Joe—assuming there is some autobiographical element to this collection—and I have been in some of the same places or similar enough. I’ve never put a gun in my mouth but I have hit rock bottom.

In his essay ‘Plains Light’ Joe puts forth the proposition that all writers are influenced by their sense of place with the possible exception of Ezra Pound—“[t]here’s no trace of Idaho in Pound’s poetry”—but Glasgow’s a million miles away from Denver (actually it’s 4375 miles) and I have to say I imposed my own environment on the poems. Never, not for one second, did they make me think of anywhere but an abstract here—mentions of “Oregon’s coastal pines”, “a shaggy pasture / in Nebraska” or “the Pacific breeze” slipped past me and it wasn’t until I went back through the book specifically looking for them that I gave the notion of place a second thought—although I think that’s to their advantage. Marriage is a universal concept and there won’t be a country on the planet where someone’s not cheating on their spouse right this minute.

Memory is collagelike. Mine’s a dog’s breakfast if I’m being honest. But an honest recollection is never going to be neat. It’s going to be kluged together from misremembrances and imaginings with the odd bone fide fact thrown in for good measure like the fact that his wife’s iron’s a Sunbeam (there’s got to be something about light going on there). Of course the things we forget to remember are trivialities (to us) like what we looked like at the time. Vander Meer’s description of himself is “passably human, almost alert” and that’s it. There’s a lot we don’t ever find out about Vander Meer, we know he’s “no Christian” but basic stuff like how old he is is bypassed; we learn that he once owned a VCR and has seen Victor Victoria but he never sees fit to mention his daughter’s name. This is, of course, typical of most poetry but I would’ve liked just a bit more exposition here. What, for example, are we to make from his “80 proof adolescence”?

On the whole though the poetry here is very accessible—I’m talking about individual poems here, many of which have already been published on their own—and there’s a lot to enjoy in this collection although it does require time spent on it which most readers won’t be willing to do. Their loss you might say and perhaps but I don’t think the ordering of the poems will help many. Since I’d agreed to write about the collection I was committed to getting to the bottom of it. Few readers will be as driven. But that doesn’t mean you’ll waste your time with this book. Far from it. And just because the poetry is accessible does not mean it’s superficial. The Syrian poet Adonis has reportedly said, “Real poetry requires effort because it requires the reader to become, like the poet, a creator. Reading is not reception.” This chimes with something Joe’s old English teacher told him and which he’s clearly taken on board:

She insisted that poetry, if read with intense imagination instead of simply being registered and sorted like data in a well programmed computer, changes the way we experience the world. Themes, symbols, the techniques of prosody, all are secondary to the fact of the poem as a structured experience. “The reader’s responsibility,” said Mrs. Van, her flashing eyes taking in the whole classroom full of college-bound faces, “your responsibility is to live through that poem with as much imagination as you can muster.”

Readers with some imagination and the right baggage will find much here they can relate to. And if, like me, only one poem really calls out to you I don’t think Joe will be unduly disappointed.

You can read a selection of poems from the book here.

***

Bed of Coals is Joseph Hutchison’s third full-length collection and was originally published in 1995 by the University of Colorado Press. It was selected by Wanda Coleman as the winner of the 1994 Colorado Poetry Award. The cover art was created by California artist John C. Ransom and it’s from his site I’ve borrowed the illustrations for this essay; they are not a part of the book. 

In total Joe has published some fifteen collections of poems, including Marked Men, Thread of the Real and The Earth-Boat. He co-edited, with Andrea L. Watson, the FutureCycle Press anthology Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai, proceeds of which benefit the Malala Fund to support girls’ education. He makes his living as a commercial writer and as an adjunct professor of graduate-level writing and literature at the University of Denver’s University College. He and his wife, yoga instructor Melody Madonna, live in the mountains southwest of Denver, in fact he’s lived nearly all his life “on the western margin of the plains, between the gnarled wall of the Rockies and the Colorado flatlands.”

You want your crime to be greater than it is so you can excuse yourself from redeeming yourself. Excuse yourself from the hard work of getting on with your life. – Luke Brown, My Biggest Lie

The first (and, admittedly, only) time I’ve heard one-time-editor-turned-writer Luke Brown speak he was being interviewed by Nick Higham on the BBC programme Meet the Author. My wife said he sounded nervous. He did. Perhaps he was. Perhaps that’s just the way he talks. Suffice to say by this point I’d only got fifty pages into his debut novel My Biggest Lie and could see why he might have cause to be nervous since he—or at least the book’s protagonist (must try and remember these don’t necessary hold the same views)—had gone out of his way to offend and upset many of his fellow authors plus any members of the publishing industry he might’ve needed somewhere down the line to get his novel into print. I could only imagine at this juncture what he might’ve said further into the book about members of the press and the book-buying public but probably nothing good. If he had, good-natured Higham took no offence.

A taster then—editors’ apparent opinion of writers:

[W]riters [are a]wful people. Scavengers. Needy little vultures, picking around in creative writing classes, sending in expenses for dinners they had eaten on different dates and in different cities to the events they had not turned up for. Fine artists, the lot of them, experts in cover art. Parasites. Imperiously rude and/or sleazy to editorial assistants. Lazy readers of their own work. Hungry bastards. Reviewers of their friends. Reviewers of their rivals. Making young women cry. Making them sick, Making advances. Not earning advances. Making them pregnant. Making line graphs of Amazon rankings. Sending you these line graphs. Seeking plot and motive in them instead of their own flimsy storylines and characters. Accidentally ccing you into correspondence berating you to another needy little vulture. Being ‘glad in some way, that this mistake happened’. Never more than a metre away from the booze table at a book party. Obsequious chairs of literary events until the sixth drink in the follow-up dinner. Quoters of Goethe and Schiller. Owners of The Mammoth Book of German Aphorisms. Twitterers. Shitheads. Carrion-pickers. Slobs. Sociopaths. Laptop-dogs. Wolfes. Woolfs. Carvers. Lushes. Lishs. Gougers. Hacks. Mice. Lice. Writers, they were the worst, the most awful, we pitied them but loathed them more; because if it wasn’t for them, the job really would be a pleasure.

It says something about how little Liam thinks about himself that he would feel eligible to seek membership of this band of reprobates. The book he ends up writing, when he’s not busy working on the longest love letter in recorded history (mercifully we only get to read a short excerpt), is called My Biggest Lie which is also (confusingly) the title of Luke Brown’s book. Lying plays a major part in Luke’s book whereas Liam’s book ends up being one big lie but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The odd thing about Luke’s alter ego is not that he’s an incorrigible liar but that he tries to be so honest with his readers. I suppose every liar needs his father confessor, someone he can let down his hair with and that’s what I felt like. The question was: Was I going to let him off light with ten Hail Marys and five How’s Your Fathers? Not. Bloody. Likely.

All writers are liars. I’m a liar. I’m lying right now: I wasn’t on page fifty when I watched that TV programme; couldn’t tell you rightly what page I was on but as his wee rants about publishers and authors fall between pages 47 and 50 it had to be somewhere around that mark. I can’t help myself. The truth’s too ragged for my tastes. Lies have neat, straight edges and ‘page fifty’ had the right ring to it. People who say lies are messy don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re probably just bad liars.

Liam Wilson, for all he’s fibbed, fabricated and falsified frequently over the years, is not actually that good a liar. He lies because it’s expedient, accepted—even expected—behaviour, but his heart’s not really into it. I suppose this is the problem all writers have. We write to get to or express some kind of truth but we insist on trying to get there through the process of lying through our teeth. When we first encounter Liam his life’s in a mess. Had he been a better liar he might still have his girl, his friends and his career or maybe he would’ve been in prison rather than Buenos Aires. He’s there because Liam is actually a decent sort deep down who’s perfectly willing to accept the consequences of his actions (if caught out) and in his mind he deserves to be in exile. He cheated on the love of his life and was to some extent responsible for the death of his firm’s prize commodity, the Booker Prize-winning novelist Craig Bennett. While it is true he did cheat on his girlfriend he did not kill Craig Bennett. A heart attack killed Craig Bennett although the copious amounts of drugs and alcohol the man ingested in the hours prior to that attack certainly nudged things along. Now whether Liam could’ve prevented Craig having a heart attack (at least that night) is another matter entirely. And the answer to that question is probably: Yes. He was put in charge of him—although how ‘in charge’ one man can be expected to be of another is another matter entirely—and didn’t do a bang-up job of it. Clearly. Of course the only reason he wound up with such a prestigious client in the first place is because his boss, James Cockburn, managed to get himself defenestrated the day before, quite possibly—accounts differ widely—with the assistance of said client and is recuperating in hospital. So he’s not exactly a shining example.

“There is nothing so undignified as an editor who writes,” notes Liam but since Luke was an editor in a previous life one can’t help but think he’s also wagging a metafictional finger at himself; I imagine most novelists get to that point somewhere around the middle of their first novel when they wonder if they’re deluding themselves. Whether former editors feel it worse than the rest of us I can only imagine, but there’s clearly some of Luke in Liam and probably more than he’d like to admit, but then that goes for the rest of us too. “All fiction is autobiography, no matter how remote from the author's experience the tale seems to be.” So wrote the critic Millicent Bell in reference to A Farewell to Arms which is another one of those books where people can’t agree on the ratio of autobiographical to non-autobiographical content. I doubt, however, if Luke Brown has been (of felt he was) responsible for the demise of any (in)famous authors recently but like most of us he’ll have been through a life-numbing breakup or two; a period of days, weeks or even months where your life’s lost its way and you’ve no idea if you’re coming or going. This started me thinking about Saul Bellow’sDangling Man which led me neatly to Turgenev’sThe Diary of a Superfluous Man. In Exile: The Sense of Alienation in Modern Russian Letters, David Patterson describes the recurring character of the superfluous man in Russian Literature as “a paradigm of a person who has lost a point, a place, and a presence in life: the superfluous man is the homeless man.” He goes on to quote from The Superfluous Man in Russian Letters where the authors list the typical characteristics of the superfluous man as being “weariness, boredom, indolence, self-orientation, self-pity and fear.” It’s the twenty-first century and not Russia so this is how Liam from Lancashire puts it:

Amid the agony of accepting and refusing to accept what I had always known was going to happen [i.e. his girlfriend’s going to dump him], I suspect I quite liked the portrayal of me here, the compartmentalised, enigmatic, multi-man. It is a sort of fun being a dickhead, that’s why there are so many of us. It wasn’t unique to me—did other people really reveal themselves truly to others? Were they better than me or did they just make a better job of pretending to be? I didn’t believe I was the only man who was so hungry, so weak.

Aleksandr Pushkin introduced the type in Eugene Onegin, the story of a Byronic youth who wastes his life, allows the girl who loves him to marry another and lets himself be drawn into a duel in which he kills his best friend. Not a million miles away from our Liam, eh?

Why Buenos Aires then? Because Bennett once lived there. Let’s be clear here, Liam and Craig weren’t livelong BFF’s or anything. They met the night Craig died and so literally only knew each other for a few hours but Liam has daddy issues and a connection was made:

Ten hours, whatever others might say, is long enough to come to love a man. In Buenos Aires, where he had written his first novel, I hoped I could wrap myself in his experiences and write mine. It was the only plot I could come up with, an escape and a penance rolled into one…

[…]

[U]nless I tell you otherwise, assume I am always crying.

It feels like most of the novel takes place in bars. It doesn’t. But it feels that way. I imagined, learning the book was set mainly in Argentina, that that would be the culture I would struggle to get but what I found hardest to relate to was the writer in the book. He’s not as bad as his earlier description but he is somewhere in there. I didn’t get him and I didn’t like him. I didn’t like his colleagues. I didn’t much care for any of the other writers in the book. Nor did I take to any of the friends Liam made whilst off finding himself or whatever he imagined he was doing. And believe you me, a character—even one who’s almost constantly stoned or drunk—has to work hard not to squeeze even a little bit of empathy out of me.

Grief and loss I get and I get that even dickheads feel grief and loss. That their being a dickhead is the cause of much of that grief and loss is neither here or there: pain is pain. By the end of the book Liam’s period of mourning looks as if it’s coming to an end; he’s turned the corner at least. Has he learned anything from it all? That I’m not so sure. Being a dickhead’s a hard thing to shake off. Just look at Craig Bennett. He was a dickhead until the day he died and James Cockburn, who continues to fill the role of Liam’s father figure, leaves a lot to be desired in that regard. Liam manages—by questionable means it has to be said—to find his way back home, even if it isn’t quite the home he left, but his associates are the same motley crew so I don’t see him not being a dickhead for long.

Fiction is full of loveable losers; affable chumps; the Charlie Browns of this world who never quite get the breaks they deserve and if Liam had been like that I might’ve had more time for him. As I said earlier, there is a decent bloke inside Liam and maybe if he’d stayed in Birmingham and not moved to London he might’ve hung onto that:

I’d arrived in London from a small press in Birmingham with a reputation of frugality, integrity and luck. Everyone loves a plucky indie. It made people at the conglomerates trying to poach our successful authors feel good about themselves knowing that we existed, that there was room for us. I was embraced at book parties. Have you met my mate Liam? People thought that I was a nice guy. I cared about writers. Well I always had a lot of compassion but outside of work it mostly overflowed in the wrong directions, to the people who least needed it. To the people who exhibited moral failings, by which I mean the people with the option to. The carnal people, the libertines, the charmers. The lookers, the liars, the reckless. The success went to my head. That’s the point of success. I was drawn to the promiscuous and the criminal, like my mentor and the other JC, and who knew London publishing would be such a fine place to find these two qualities?

Was who he was in Birmingham the real Liam or, as he starts to believe, a lie?

It was acid, the taste of the slow digestion of the person I’d pretended to be while the other person grew inside me, eating me at the same time as I was emulating his voice, his turn of phrase, laughing at his jokes. The more lies I told, the more that man grew familiar. He was no longer eating me alive. I was eating him.

In some respect this is a coming of age novel despite the fact the protagonist’s turned thirty. Not everyone makes the transition at seventeen and I suspect most of us hang onto our youth for longer than is seemly. Luke tries hard to be funny but I found Liam more funny-sad than anything else. I felt let down by him and by those who aided and abetted him. Fake it until you make it, they say. Easier said than done. You’re supposed to learn from your mistakes. I’m not certain Liam has or ever will. For a book that tries hard to be funny—and manages it some of the time—I came away from it rather sad and disappointed. Not in Luke Brown—he acquits himself well enough—but in humanity and let’s face it if there’s a way people can let you down they usually will. Isn’t that the truth of it?

***

Not much biographical data available for Luke. He grew up near Blackpool, Lancashire, and now lives in London. He was a former senior editor at Birmingham’s Tindal Street Press and still does freelance work. His Facebook page reveals little other than the fact he can play both the guitar and football although I suspect not at the same time. Either that or he likes sitting around holding guitars and hanging around football pitches. My Biggest Lie—which Canongate wittily chose to publish on National Tell a Lie Day—is his first novel. You can follow him on Twitter here.