Book Review: This Isn't The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You by Jon McGregor

'You take a breath and swim, fiercely, lunging through the water, blinking against the salt sting, heaving for air, and there's a feeling running up and down the backs of your legs like muscles being stretched tight but you keep swimming because you'll be there soon, climbing out, pulling yourself back on to solid ground, and you keep swimming because there's a chance that the current has been pushing you away from the shore, and you keep swimming because this isn't the sort of thing that happens to someone like you, you're a good swimmer, you're young, and healthy, and the rocks aren't really all that far away and it shouldn't take long to get there and there isn't anything else you can do but now there's a pounding sensation in your head and a reddish blur in your eyes and a heavy pain in your chest as though the weight of all that water is pressing against your lungs and you can't take in enough air and so you stop again, for a moment, just to catch your breath.'
'We Wave And Call'

This Isn't The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You could be the title of any of Jon McGregor's four published books. He's a writer interested in moments that change lives and the legacy of these upon his characters. His debut, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, took this concept literally, fusing narratives charting the effects of a single incident and using them to create tension as another narrative built to that crescendo moment. Even the Dogs - his Dublin IMPAC Prize winning novel about a group of drug addicts watching the final journey of one of their own - is all about the after-effects of these single moments. McGregor is a master of writing voice, particularly those of the dispossessed. He captures the humanity, the universal, without romanticising. His characters narrate with the hesitant, repetitive, circuitry, unfinished speech we all use. And his prose is vibrant, playful, energetic, and alive.

The thirty stories collected in This Isn't The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You have been written over the last decade: its a summary of his career to date as he grows from a talented wordsmith and storyteller to one of our foremost writers (and, in his own words, 'Britain's second best short story writer' - a reference to 'If It Keeps On Raining' and 'Wires' finishing as runner up in the BBC National Short Story Competition for 2010 and 2011 respectively), challenging conventions and forms of storytelling, pushing boundaries all the time with how words on a page can be used to communicate something. McGregor has written of his appreciation of David Foster Wallace and you can feel his influence here. This Isn't The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You is funny, challenging, scary, affirming, and much more besides. It is very good indeed.

The things you don't see happening to someone like you begin with an older couple, arguing gently over the washing up. They aren't all dramatic. A man builds a tree house by the river, in preparation for a coming flood. A sugar beet crashes through the windscreen of a young woman. Fighter jets fly overhead as a war looms. Crime, political tensions, environmental Armageddon, accidents, stagnation in life. 

They are all set in the vast flat landscapes of the Fen's, where sky and horizons blend and long flat roads stretch into the distance. Its farming landscape, traditionally mined in literature for themes of memory and forgetting. These are stories that explore the psychology of life in a flat reclaimed landscape, stolen from the sea, and where one of the things we don't see coming may just be its return to the sea. All the while, these places - Upwell, Irby in the Marsh, Messingham, Lincoln etc - feel as if they are being inscribed into stone against the forgetting of the future.


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These stories are born of cycling the landscapes. Their settings correspond with their imaginings. The landscapes are both incidental and central to providing cohesion to the collection. These landscapes are perhaps best explored in 'In Winter the Sky' where a woman's poems about the colour and atmosphere of the sky are set alongside a story about burying the past in the soil, only for floodwaters to bring it back to the surface years later.

'People are not drawn here by the romantic sound of the place.
People don't much come here at all, and so the landscape
remains empty and
retains its beauty and

the beauty of this place is not in the names but the shapes
the flatness    /    hugeness    /    completeness of the landscape.
Only what is beneath the surface of the earth is hidden
(and sometimes not even that)
and everything else is made visible beneath the sky.'

One has a strange experience reading many of the stories here. McGregor experiments with different narrative styles - poetry alongside prose, stories told through a surveillance report or a redacted security document - and one goes into these with a slight sense of trepidation. Yet it is these stories that are some of the most rewarding. For they challenge ones sense of a story, of what a story is about, of why a story is told.

If there is a criticism, it is that there are perhaps a few too many stories here. The three experiments with form, the five or six most engaging stories - 'Wires' and 'If It Keeps On Raining', 'Which Reminded Her Later', 'We Wave and Call' - and a few of the shorter entries would have been more than enough. Between six and ten fewer stories would have made it one of the finest collections I have encountered.

Jon McGregor is my favourite contemporary British writer. It was delightful, therefore, to see this collection selected from a longlist of 116 books, to feature in the Summer Reads programme I run. Six great books selected by readers for readers. Books that inspire adventures and expand horizons. If you're looking for tried and tested books, these six come with a readers stamp of approval and a personal recommendation: we fell in love with these books and thought you might too.

www.summerreads.org.uk

For an extract from ‘Wires’ click here

For audio visual content of Jon McGregor reading and discussing his work, click here

And to see a fantastic event with Jon McGregor and Sarah Hall in Norwich in July, click here

This Isn't The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You was first published by Bloomsbury in 2012. The paperback edition, published in 2013 (ISBN: 9781408830383, 262pp) is available now.

I love reading because...

I love reading for many reasons. One is that reading is an act of empathy; through reading we inhabit other skins and see the world through other eyes. The value of this cannot be underestimated. Our ability to understand each other, and to look beyond our own surroundings in doing so, is one of the core aspects of humanity. 

Great art ‘opens the door of our bodies and allows our souls to step out into the world and make friends.’ (Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being). 

Great writing - indeed, great art - changes us from the inside out, and thus changes the world person by person. ‘Thanks to literature, to the consciousness it shapes, the desires and longings it inspires…civilisation is now less cruel than when storytellers began to humanise life with their fables.’ (Mario Vargas Llosa - Nobel Prize winning lecture).

Sunday Supplement: On Theatre (Inspired by Black Watch)

I've never felt entirely comfortable in the threatre. Its an uncompromisingly physical experience for me. Actors exert their physicality upon you with their voices, their movements, their projection of the self on a large scale. Even on a stage there's no hiding from the fact that they are human beings, embodied, impressive, incontrovertable. This creates in me a feeling of being attacked by things I can't control. My comfort zone is challenged, and even where that's a rewarding experience I'm left shaken up and uncertain for a while.

Its only theatre - and possibly live popular misoc - that do this to me. TV and Cinema have that difference of fixed distance between audience and performance. Classical music, ballet, dance, opera, sport: all happen in a specific place, but somehow feel less immediate. Perhaps because there's so little speech involved, which means that communication between performers and audience is indirect, translated through movement or instruments. When reading, you not only have some level of control over your physical surroundings, but more than any other artform reading invites you to collaborate in creating the art, you as reader choose consciously or subconsciously how to conjur those words on the page. Books as a safe space, a protected space. In the words of Edward P Morgan, 'a book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an expolosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy.' It is this that attracts me to reading more than anything else.

On the other hand, as a child and teenager, the confrontation of theatre scared me. Indeed, it still does today. Yet when younger I wasn't emotionally strong enough to understand that being made uncomfortable could be the purpose of great art. That a response - any response - was preferable to nothing. Great art is valuable because it creates experiences outside the norm that enable us to understand ourselves, other people, and our environements anew.

All of which brings me to Black Watch, the National Theatre of Scotland play that has been wowing audiences and critics for the last 7 years. Moving between a bar in Fife and the front line during the Iraq war, it is based on interviews with former members of the legendary Scottish regiment. We see the experiences through their eyes, and it is accompanied with a powerful and inventive use of movement, music, and song to create a visceral, complex and urgent piece of theatre.

I loved it. The soldiers repeated assertion that they had signed up to defend their country, not attack others, was a powerful summery of all wrong with that foolish Iraq invasion. But it was about more than that. I shared its essential tennets that the boredom of war breeds a craving for violence, for anything to fill the void. But it was about more than that, too. It was about humanising soldiers, something I often need reminding of. As a pacifist, I often find it hard to rationalise a belief that violence can never be worth the destruction it causes, with the contribution that army training and identity can make to a society. Black Watch made both points effectively, dramatised the tragedies of war at its human legacy on those prosecuting it. But also regretting the disolution of the Black Watch regiment. One of the most powerful scenes involves a recreation of the history of the Black Watch, from a hired brigaid in the seventeenth century through nearly every war the UK has fought in the last 200 years. As the uniforms evolve, the wars pile up: Napoleonic, Crimean, Boer, World Wars, Korea, The Gulf, Kosovo. Relatively few defensive wars, a great number about expansion, empire, exerting will upon others.

The production itself is energetic, lively, full of swearing and practical jokes, and young men with more bravado than sense. The staging, placed in between two stands of seats facing each other, enables you to watch the reaction of other people, enables you to see the emotions it brings out in you reflected on the faces of others. 

If it felt slightly dated, if the historical argument about the value of invading Iraq largely determined, then it is probably art like this that has got us there. Black Watch says nothing new about the Iraq. But it documents those arguments, and will remain worth watching because it is ultimately about people and ideas. And because it is exceptional.

Black Watch is just short of 2 hours of moving, powerful, skilfully choreographed, well written and acted, theatre.I felt uncomfortable throughout. Yet that is the power of theatre. And I'm now strong enough to enjoy that.

Book Review: Black Vodka by Deborah Levy

'Have you ever had that weird feeling in an airport when you panic and don't know what to do? One screen says Departures and another screen says Arrivals and for a moment you don't know which one you are. You think, am I an arrival or am I a departure.'
From 'Pillow Talk' 

A sense of displacement and atomisation dominate the ten stories collected in Black Vodka. They feature characters in limbo: in foreign lands or stuck between who they are and who they want to be. They believe in love as the means of self perfection and yearn for sex and madness and the chance to lose themselves in others. Yet they pull away from that which they most crave, afraid of the uncertain ground that intimacy entails.

It's classic atomised society, and Levy composes her stories well. They are slight, unembelished, and often largely plotless. These are character shorts that create a unspecific feeling of uneasiness and loss. Deborah Levy's writing is crisp and simple, quite different from the lyrical fireworks that made her Booker shortlisted novel Swimming Home such a electrifying read. Yet she suits this territory well, her style creating transitory stories, perfect reads for reclaimed moments in busy lives.

Levy is purposefully calling to attention a range of authors, from Murakami to Sofia Coppola's film Lost in Translation. But she doesn't just reflect this listless atomisation of life, she also demands that it be noticed and reinforces it. When expressing their aloneness, she gives her characters rare eloquence: they turn to the metaphoric, the awe-inducing, conjuring a sense of wonder in the vast magnificence of the universe and an image of unfathomable depth in the people they are with. Characters talk of air molecules 'forged in the furnace of a star,', a woman seeks a sex change opperation to turn herself into the woman she wants to be, a man becomes an imposter in his bosses history. Levy turns the characters into romantically enigmatic visions of perfectly imperfect people, people we yearn to be and people we yearn to be with. But they are also people we can never be worthy of, people we can never be. And in that, she creates in the reader those same feelings of atomisation that her stories reflect.

Some of the stories are slight to a fault. Others, the slightly longer ones, such as 'Black Vodka', 'Stardust Nation', 'Cave Girl', and 'Simon Tagala's Heart in 12 Parts' - are fantastic snippets flashes of life in transition. Black Vodka is a quiet and subtle book of encounters and possibility. Its difficult to pin down and this is both rewarding and, at times, frustrating. Overall, it lacks the sparkle that made Swimming Home one of my books of 2012, but its a swift, affecting, and, at its best, brilliant.

'There is do much of the world to record and classify, it's hard to know how to find a language for it. So I am going to start exactly where I am now. Life is beautiful! Vodka is black! Pears are naked! Rain is horizontal! Moths are ghosts. Only some of this is true, but you should know that this does not scare me as much as the promise of love.'

On Leadership

There's is something incredibly empowering about having a label conferred upon you that you'd never dared take for yourself. In my day job at Writers' Centre Norwich we run a programme called Escalator that provides mentoring and development for talented emerging writers. While the chance to work with professional writers is of huge benefit, the feedback we receive is that often the most important part of the programme is the moment when they are selected and we start to call them 'writers'. Just that simple moniker makes a huge psychological difference to how they see themselves, and how they see the work they produce. Just that word makes them a better writer.

I've had a similar experience this last week, having been selected for and attended a Clore Leadership residential course. Over six days and along with 17 other impressive, talented, and generous people who work across the cultural sector, I've started to think of myself as someone who can lead, and who already does lead. Although the days were crammed with practical sessions, learning practical skills, and inspiring life stories from cultural leaders, the further I get from those heady few days, the more I start to think that actually it is this shift in thinking about myself that will have the most lasting effect.

I can't express enough how magnificent the course was. Clore Leadership is an organisation set up to provide training for cultural leaders. Over the past decade they've helped an amazing array of people reach their potential and do truly brilliant work. It is an organisation that helps people do things they didn't know they could do. The environment that was created for this course, and the people selected to be part of it, made for fertile ground where I was challenged, tested, and supported in understanding my natural aptitudes and weaknesses. I was pushed when I needed pushing, with opportunities for reflective learning and supporting that of others.

I have returned to work this week with a sense of belief in myself. I no longer feel embarrassed to think of myself as a cultural leader, and I know that I already possess a range of skills that can be utilised in being as effective as I can be. I've thought a lot about the leadership in Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, about the relationship between bringing out the best in people, bringing out the best in yourself, and pushing boundaries that haven't been pushed before. I've thought about the leader I am and the leader I want to be. On top of that, I have a slightly fuller toolkit of approaches I can use to make the most of situations. All of this I'm still processing. I'm not sure what will come next. But I feel confident it can be brilliant.

While that processing is going on, I wanted to share five of the things that stood out from the week: things that inspired me or helped me think anew about that which is so familiar.

1 - The power of listening
'The greatest need of a human being is psychological survival - to be understood, to be affirmed, to be validated, to be appreciated. Listening provides this...for it provides psychological air.'
Stephen Covey

The greatest function of the course was in placing me in the midst of a group of amazing people and asking us to be responsible for each others' learning and development. It was amazingly empowering to leave the practicalities of my life and work at the door and to have other people concentrating only on who I am and what I can be. I was blown away by the generosity and incisiveness of my colleagues on the course, their willingness to listen intently to what I was saying, and to make me feel as though I was worth listening to.

In a session on Coaching, I came to understand that I am not always a particularly good listener. I have a tendency to need to find solutions to problems rather than listening to what the person actually needs. I had been told this many times, but not really taken it on board before. Yet I now realise that this sort of behavior has the effect of trivialising the problem, and belittling the person talking.

Being properly listened to during the course did give me psychological air. Of all the skills I learned over the week, it is active listening, and helping others find their own route through situations, that I intend to make most use of in my personal and professional life.


2 - Technology might be antithetical to art
'Technology is the prosthetic both human nature and society needs to be its best'
Patrick Hussey


I've long struggled with a practical understanding of the relationship between technology and art. Massive amounts of money are being invested in exploring the digital frontiers of art. Some are successful, some less so. As a platform for providing access to art, digital technologies have done some amazing things, but as a means of creating art and literature, I have yet to be enthused by anything I've seen.

One of the most thought-provoking talks of the week came from Patrick Hussey, a technology commentator, on the scope of ambition that some technology companies have, and their belief that they can cure many of the worlds ills through effective use of data. This envisioned 'techtopia', or 'technohumanism', means that Google believes it can use data and algorithms to cure diseases and prevent recession. There's no doubt about it, computers are getting bigger, better, and artificial intelligence is not far from a reality. If, indeed, it isn't here already.

But sitting there listening to the talk - which inspired part awe in the vision people have, part fear for what it could become - I couldn't help thinking that data - the power behind technology; the input that Johny 5 so craved - with its general focus and homogonising effect, might be antithetical to art. Great art is, for me, about the personal. It is about stepping out of my body and engaging directly with the mind and experiences and foibles and perspectives of someone else. It is about the exceptional rather than the expected, individual rather than the census. A great book teaches me about myself and my world by giving me insight into someone else, and their world.

Does that then mean that art is the exception and should step away from technology and concentrate on what it does best? I don't know. I don't think art should ignore technology. But I do wonder whether art needs to take some time to actively consider whether technology is of benefit to great art, before rushing in with a sense that digital is a panacea for everything.

I remain skeptical about the digital. But now I have a better framework to understand my skepticism. It no longer feels arbitrary.


3 - Understanding who you are and where you've come from
Sir John Tusa - former Director of The Barbican and BBC World Service - and now Chair of Clore Leadership, talked about the many different aspects of his background that have gone into making him who he is. I liked the way he did this. It expanded him into a range of characteristics, some contradictory, that he has utilised in his career. So borrowing shamelessly from him, this is me...

By education I am an historian
By profession I am an arts administrator
By experience I am a deliverer of projects
By inclination I am a consumer of stories
By outlook I am an idealist


4 - It can be empowering to be specific and to the point
Another of the weaknesses that became apparent during the week, was that am not very good at being specific and to the point. I don't know whether this is because I am inspired by theories and objectives rather than practicalities, or I don't know my messages in advance of speaking, or because I wrap specifics up in generalities in order to sound more friendly. Or none of the above. But as this long article shows, I am not very good at being direct.

Like the active listening discovery, I was confronted for the first time with someone telling me how frustrating this can be. I shrivelled inside for a moment. But this was no time for avoiding difficult truths. And the more I think about it, the more I realise that if I want to bring all sorts of people along with me, I need to understand that different people need different things. To be an effectively leader, I need to know when to talk in ideas, and when to talk in specifics, and to identify the most productive approach for each.

We talked a lot of courageous conversations during the week, of being brave and explicit about what we need and what we can do. Over the coming weeks, I aim to have courageous conversations in which I am specific and to the point with at least two people. It'll be a real test of how the course has inspired me.


5 - Ambition inspires
'Surprise people with the scale of your ambition and the speed with which you deliver'
Sonita Alleyne

Of all the advice given throughout the week, it is this that has stuck with me so far. I keep seeing its truth all around me. The people who have excelled are those who thought bigger than anyone else. It is true with tech companies such as Google and it is true with arts organisations and festivals. I've realised that ambition always felt like something I had to tone down in order to be realistic. But I'm no longer sure that's the case.

Watch this space, people...

With thanks to all who contributed to making the week so special. Including Sara Robinson and Bev Morton who led the week so capably, and to the Cloreclaw who made it what it was - I love you all.

Laughing in the Dark: a snapshot from the Lahore Literary Festival

The British Council recently enabled me to travel to Pakistan to visit the first Lahore Literary Festival. The festival itself and the opportunity to glimpse Pakistan behind the news headlines provided an enlightening, refreshing experience, and one that will remain with me a long time. The following is a set of reflections on what I saw and the thoughts it inspired in me. For an excellent insight into the social impact of the festival, I recommend an article from the Indian Express entitled ‘Literature and Longing in Lahore’.


I discovered literature through attending festivals.

Although much of my childhood was spent with my head in a book and as I grew up it was in relation to characters in books that I increasingly understood my own identity and ambitions, it was only with attending literary festivals in my early-twenties that I encountered literature as a social, communal experience and started to engage with the world of literature beyond that contained within a book. Being read to, meeting authors, the buzz of an excited audience discussing big ideas, feeling involved in something bigger than one person sitting in a chair with a book: it was all this I fell in love with and that transformed me from a compulsive reader into someone who wanted to make a career in literature. Nothing can replace the private experience of reading a book, but for provocation and immersing yourself in literature and the world, there is nowhere like a festival.

That I’m talking so idealistically about festivals is due in no small part to my experience in Lahore. I had not realised how inadvertently blasé I had become about festivals – there’s one almost every week in the UK and authors are reeling under the expectation to promote a book at every conceivable opportunity – until surrounded with the energy of a new festival in a city recently starved of cultural opportunity.

Imagine living in a society where cinemas have closed down having been targeted by terrorists, sports teams no longer visit, and even the fabled kite flying Basant that heralds the coming of spring and covers the city in a brightly coloured blanket each February has been cancelled. And now imagine that into this desert comes a literary festival, complete with authors from around the world, high profile Pakistani writers, discussions on themes such as ‘Literature and Resistance’ and ‘The Globalisation of Pakistan’s Literature’, and the chance to discuss political troubles in a secular public space.

In such circumstances, the raucous, almost bawdy yet respectful atmosphere that was like nothing I’ve ever experienced at a festival starts to make sense. The very existence of the festival was an act of social defiance that said things like this can happen safely in modern Pakistan. That it passed off so positively may mark a watershed for the city.

Had it not been with British Council, I never would have thought to visit Pakistan. In fact, I’d have been terrified to. Yet three days there showed me how narrow such a viewpoint would have been. The Lahore I encountered was populated with friendly, warm, engaged, intelligent, liberal people. We were safe walking the streets both around the festival and the old city centre, were welcomed as tourists into Mosques, and saw nearly nobody wearing the burqa. It was a city I felt comfortable in.

‘I feel like our generation has been deprived of so much this city has to offer’, wrote @azafark on Twitter as the early Spring sunshine appeared in the sky above Lahore for the second day of the festival. Crowds bulged. If the auditoriums of the Alhamra Art Centre were two-thirds full at 9am on the first day, they were bursting at the seems and spilling into the aisles by the second. The festival concluded with a conversation between William Dalrymple and Ahmed Rashid on ‘Cultures in Conflict’. Outside the queue of those who couldn’t get in snaked around the paths of the centre. I quickly abandoned any hope of attending and settled into people watching as they crowds enthusiastically discussed what they had seen and heard during the day.

In total, more than 15,000 people came through the festival over the two days. The audiences were made up of an even split between men and women, and ranged in age from teenagers through to those in their late eighties. If a theme emerged from the festival it was the state of Pakistan: its difficulties, challenges, and international standing. There was no shying away from recent troubles, but a pragmatic approach to the future abounded. ‘Yes we have challenges. But that is not who we are,’ said Nadeem Aslam, whose recently published fourth novel, The Blind Man’s Garden is both a metaphor for, and exploration of, life in Pakistan over the past decade. Reading from the book he treated the audience to the first chapter, where the main character, Rohan, recalls a conversation he had when his son was a child. On finding Jeo distressed by a story, ‘Rohan had given a small laugh to comfort him and asked,
    ‘But have you ever heard a story in which the evil person triumphs at the end?’
    The boy thought for a while before replying.
    ‘No,’ he said, ‘but before they lose, they harm the good people. That is what I am afraid of.’'

It was a passage that resonated with me and, I suspect, the entire audience. At other points in the weekend, a range of other writers responded to the challenges of the day. Lahore born prominent left-wing academic Tariq Ali echoed the sentiments of Rudyard Kipling a century earlier in calling for the teaching of history through stories and narratives so as to keep it alive and prevent aberrations such as the Taliban occurring. Discussing satire, Mohammed Hanif and Moni Mohsin argued that in difficult times ‘you have to laugh in the dark,’ especially when ‘the darkness keeps getting darker…and the lightness more hysterical.’

Elsewhere passionate debates about national identities and self determination brought anger towards the behavior of both Pakistan and India in Kashmir, and dismay at the utter breakdown in political relations between the two. And yet conversation returned time and again to the question of whether literature can actually change anything. There’s a dichotomy in literature between the quiet, private artform we all fall in love with, and how that then impacts on the world itself. No author involved was able or willing to categorically suggest that either writing or festivals alone can change the world. Yet there was a sense that, in ‘building self resistance’ (Selma Dabbagh) and ‘letting you live’ (Basharat Peer) they can change people. And how else is the world changed?

‘Now that it's over,’ writes Komail Aijazuddin in the Indian Express, ‘the energy and intensity conjured over the last few days have nowhere to go. I am anxious, but for once it is because of something we've gained, not lost.’ I had expected my experiences in Pakistan to be somewhat different to the Pakistan of the news. But what I encountered was a as far from that which we see as it is possible to get. The country has its significant problems to overcome. They were openly discussed and will take time and concerted effort to resolve. Yet the people I met convinced me that better times lie ahead for the people of Lahore. They certainly deserve it. And in the meantime, they now have a literary festival that can only go from strength to strength.

Book Review: Gone to the Forest by Katie Kitamura

‘The country was in turmoil. And there was besides: sickness and growing and dying. How could they do anything but give in, to what was obvious, rather than what was good? In the face of that accumulation.’

Katie Kitamura’s debut novel, The Longshot, was one of the unexpected delights that come along only too rarely. The story of the final fight by a not-quite brilliant Mixed Martial Arts fighter, it managed to recreate the computer game feeling of having an opponent reach into my chest, pluck my heart out, and holding it aloft, gently squeezing it, from first sentence to final image. It revealed Kitamura as a brilliant writer in her own right; and an air to the minimalist legacy of Hemingway, McCarthy and Coertzee.

Gone to the Forest (The Clerkenwell Press, 2013) confirms such comparisons as entirely appropriate. With sharp, slashing prose and perfectly balanced storytelling, Kitamura explores the death throes of colonialism in a nameless nation.

Tom and his father live on a large rural farm. Ever since he came to the country, the old man has bent everything to him. His unremitting desire, big personality, and ruthless control ensure the farm has been successful, all those around him reliant on him for their safe orbit. But now disruption and native rebellion in the country threatens all he has built, and ill health begins to catch up with him. Tom, cowering in his father’s shadow, has eyes only for the land. It is all he has known. Other farmers circle, danger looms. And when a woman named Carine arrives, the future – whatever it holds – begins to bear down upon them.

In a chapter of pounding intensity, Kitamura brings these man-made tensions together in the midst of a massive volcanic eruption. Fire and brimstone filling the sky. Blocking out the sun. Then covering the land in ash that falls relentlessly. Sending animals wild and driving people to recklessness. It’s a powerful metaphor, the earth purging itself of colonial rule. The cataclysm that births a new age. Identities are questioned, relationships strained.

There’s much Coetzee here, a sort of mix of the wild frontiers of Waiting for the Barbarians and the search for peace away from troubled times of Life and Times ofMichael K. What is particularly clever is the way that Kitamura subtly questions notions of affinity with a landscape. Where much literature associates native peoples with affinity for the land, here it the character of Tom – slow, passive, uncertain; Michael K with privilege – who longs for nothing other than to escape people and live in peace with the landscape. But he is less resourceful than Michael K. Where Coetzee’s character bends a spoon to a natural well and drinks a thimble full at a time – ‘in that way, one can live’ – one does not have the feeling Tom would survive long. And his father’s health is rapidly failing.

On the other hand, the natives here ‘do not believe in property until it is theirs’, at which point they subject it entirely to their will. Cut it up into little pieces. This is the story of the colonialists, but that is not to say that this is a pro-colonial book. It is not pro-anything. Merely presents a series of characters in a fresh light, and the tragedies of upheaval.

Gone to the Forest is a tense, expertly controlled novel. One to read in one sitting. It is short, and the prose races along at a pace not even change can keep up with. Katie Kitamura is one of the most exciting voices in contemporary writing, and this is a marvellous addition to the already heaving realms of colonial/post colonial literature. If writers made swords, Kitamura would be the sort fabled in a Tarantino film. You will not find sharper, finer minimalist prose anywhere. 

Book Review: The Last Hunters: The Crab Fishermen of Cromer by Candy Whittome with photography by David Morris

Winner of the Best Book at the 2012 East Anglian Book Awards

The Last Hunters is a pitch-perfect study of the lives of Cromer's crab fishermen. Told in their own words, as well as those of their families’ and the people closest to them, it offers the reader a unexpectedly intimate view behind the often hard facades of these men of action. The result is an engagingly human and incredibly readable insight into people whose love of their work and life at sea is tempered only by awareness of its inherent danger and uncertain future. These men’s stories – of their careers and family lives, of boats heaving with catch and long winter months without, of long days and emotional strains – are a testament to extraordinary lives lived in conversation with the natural world.

Candy Whittome’s prose enables each voice to sing its own melody, yet builds these individual voices together to create a sum that is greater than that of its parts. Oral history can sometimes become a little repetitive as those interviewed repeat each other. That doesn't happen here and it is to the authors credit that the last story is read as eagerly as the first. David Morris’s portrait photography compliments their stories without dominating our perceptions of the protagonists, adding an extra dimension to the people and their work. Full Circle Editions produce beautiful books, and this is a wonderful book to have and to hold, to read and to look at. So effectively did Candy Whittome engage me in the stories of these fishermen that I came away keen to visit Cromer and spend a couple of hours watching them at work.

These fishermen mourn the dying of their trade without sentimentality, yet their lives are a fight to preserve the way of life against apparently insurmountable odds. The Last Hunters will transform perceptions of Cromer's crab fishermen and their trade and feels like a book that will be referenced in years to come; it is a freeze-frame of a rapidly fading history that sings out, poignant and powerful, against the fading of the light.


The Last Hunters: The Crab Fishermen of Cromer was published by Full Circle Editions in 2012. ISBN: 9780957152809, 214pp

The Man Booker Prize 2012 - My thoughts

The winner of the 2012 MAN Booker Prize is announced this evening. I'm excited, nervous, and slightly baffled as to why that is the case. I mean, the Booker doesn't mean anything to me personally, and I have rather mixed feelings about literary prizes in general. There will be five losers tonight and one winner. That winner will have been chosen by a small group of (admittedly eminent) judges by an unspecific process. This is not sport, there is not an objective winner - the fastest, the strongest etc - only a range of historically developed but largely subjective literary criteria used to offer some insight into the qualities of the novel. I'm resisting using the word arbitrary, but there is a certain element of the arbitrary in whoever wins.

And yet, not only have the judges been widely acclaimed for their selections so far this year, but I am always swept up into the excitement of the Booker Prize. If I were to go on Mastermind, I might make it my Specialty Subject, if only as an excuse to re-read some the amazing winners. There is something about the fervored excitement it generates and the celebration of literature it engenders that I adore. Prominent broadcast networks host coverage and discussion of the books. Independent Publishers (these last couple of years, at least) receive deserved attention. Readers talk about their favourites with passion that borders on the absurd. There is so much to love about this day!

And so I'm going to join my voice to the many others, and share my thoughts about the books on the Shortlist. I've only read three of them - so my view is even further from objective than it would be had I read them all - but I've enjoyed all three, and two have been the strongest books I've read for a long time. Intriguingly - for Mrs Bookstimeandsilence thinks I only read books by male authors - they are the three female authored books, Swimming Home, Bring Up The Bodies, and The Lighthouse.

Tan Twan Eng - The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon Books)
I have this but have not yet read it. The premise is attractive and feels like an early Kazuo Ishiguro novel, so I'm intrigued to see how it stands up.

Verdict: Can't comment on it's worthiness, but I'd be surprised if it takes the prize tonight. Myrmidon has received the least publicity of the three indipendent publishers shortlisted, and there aren't many passionately advocating its success.

Deborah Levy - Swimming Home (And Other Stories/Faber & Faber)
A firework spectacular for lovers of arresting, unsettling, witty prose. Reading Swimming Home is a full body experience. You feel the words, engage with them emotionally and sensually as well as intellectually. They rise around you, come alive in your mind, transport you to new and unexpected places. Deborah Levy creates a hallucinatory dreamscape of colours and symbols and metaphors, a psychoanalysts playground where every word, image, and object is significant and post-Freudian ideas of sex and death drive the plot forward.


Liminality dominates. Swimming Home is perilous, teetering on the brink of dream and wakefulness, of metaphor and literal, of medicated health and unmedicated madness, of childhood and adulthood, of life and death. Water is both a refuge and a prison. Dive in, submerge yourself, and feel the words surround you.

Verdict: A very worthy winner. The bookies have this as the rank outsider, but it could be in with a shout.

Hilary Mantel - Bring Up the Bodies (Fourth Estate)
I'm not sure there are words to describe the astounding feat that Hilary Mantel has already achieved in her Thomas Cromwell series. Wolf Hall was one of the best, and most commercially successful Booker winners of recent years and, if it is possible, Bring Up The Bodies might be even better. Never have I witnessed a writer more at home in her material. Her characters are fully realised, fleshy, complex, disastrous, cunning, lovable, striving creations, her control of the political and sexual intrigue of Henry's court a wonder to behold. One has the feeling of being a crow, or a ghost, unnoticed in the corner of the room, watching the famous events take place before your eyes. The historical imagination Mantel shows in filling in the gaps between what is known and unknown is pulled off with aplomb. This is not the only version of events at the time. But it is a version of events: convincing, well presented, consistent. Novels do not have to achieve the same standards of historical accuracy as non-fiction, and because of this they can offer far more holistic views of the people and events of the time.

Married to all of this is an unusually fluid third person singular narrative that occasionally drops into the second person with the effect of conveying a confident, authoritative, accusatory, uncertain, atmosphere that keeps the pages turning, keeps the reader uncertain as to how it will end. We know, it is there in the annuls of history. And yet Mantel's skill is in placing the reader so effectively into the time that we lose hindsight, see only the complexity and danger of the games being played.


Verdict: To win for consecutive books in a trilogy would be a fittingly unique achievement for a fittingly unique book. If this were not the second in a trilogy, it would be runaway favourite to win. I cannot imagine there is a more impressive, delicious book on the shortlist than this. My choice, but I suspect the same injustices will be visited on it, that the Lord of the Rings films suffered at the Oscars.

Alison Moore - The Lighthouse (Salt)
I read The Lighthouse in a day, on the train down to London, and then the return back. It is a very readable novel, with a plot that is set out early and slowly built through tension and premonitions of tragedy. Futh, a middle-aged, emotionally frail man, takes a walking holiday to Germany in an effort to get over the break-down of his marriage. The holiday is a mirror of one he took as a child with his father following her walking out on them for a new life in New York. Futh has never recovered from that loss, and now as he walks Germany he thinks back on his childhood, his marriage, his friends and most of all his mother. But there are events conspiring to the side of the stage, a man he meets on the ferry asks him if he ever has 'a bad feeling about something that's going to happen' and tensions between the husband and wife of the hotel he must return to make it increasingly apparent that something dreadful may befall poor Futh.

Smells dominate - the lighthouse of the title is a perfume bottle that once belonged to Futh's mother, -  and a sense of utterly unavoidable sadness hangs over the book. The Lighthouse has a Sebaldian theme, but commentators have been quick to identify it as the 'genre' book on the list. This is presumable because it has a clear sense of narrative development and impending doom, but doesn't hold true for me. Rather, The Lighthouse is a well written, effective tale of sadness told through a helpless character who cannot understand the impact that emotional trauma has had on his life. I personally found Futh too bleak to engage with, but those who identify with him clearly love this book.

Verdict: I didn't love it. I wouldn't chose it as a winner. But it is a good book and many have it as the dark horse for the prize.

Will Self - Umbrella (Bloomsbury)
I have never had any interest in reading a book by Will Self. I'm not sure why. Realising this, I will have to read a book by him soon so as to make up my mind. This might be the place to start.

Verdict: The favourite. But I'm not convinced. If it doesn't go to Mantel, I think it'll be one of the other women on the shortlist.





Jeet Thayil - Narcopolis (Faber & Faber)

Again, I haven't read it. The Booker has a habit of overly leaning towards books from India. There have been acusations of orientalist attitudes to books from that region of the world, though some of the finest Booker winners of all time have also come from there. I wasn't particularly inspired to pick this up.

Verdict: Not my pick. But you never know. An outside chance, I think. 







And the winner is...
Well, for me it has to be Hilary Mantel for Bring up The Bodies to set up the most pressure possible on the final book in her amazing trilogy. It would take something special to win, as a middle book of three, and this is a special book.

However, if it doesn't, I'll cast a supporting vote for Deborah Levy for a book that takes familiar attributes and weaves them into a stunningly physical reading experience.

I have no history of picking the Booker winner. Just to demonstrate this fully, watch the last of my selections carry it off tomorrow. It happened in 2010 with Howard Jacobson, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see it happen again.

Selections, in order of chance of winning in my humble opinion.
Bring Up the Bodies
The Lighthouse
Umbrella
Swimming Home
Narcopolis
The Garden of Evening Mists

But whoever takes home the cheque tonight, when literature receives such attention and involvement from readers, everyone wins.

Book Review: Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

Original jacket

'When Kitty Finch took her hand off the steering wheel and told him she loved him, he no longer knew if she was threatening him or having a conversation.'

For lovers of witty, arresting, unsettling prose – prose that reads like the best poetry - Swimming Home is a rare delight. The marriage of unashamedly literary and eminently readable books has become a hallmark of And Other Stories (the independent publishers of this novel) and Swimming Home is another masterpiece. From this first sentence, which introduces the feel of lives running out of control, of impending danger and lust and transformation, Deborah Levy produces a short page-turning cliff-hanger of rare brilliance.

On the surface, Swimming Home is riddled with clichés in both characters and plot – it is essentially a family drama populated by wealthy, artistically inclined characters whose lives are falling apart until the arrival of a mysterious stranger who throws everything into chaos – yet Levy takes these familiar elements and crafts them into something new. There is barely a sentence that didn’t produce some physical reaction in me as I read it. The writing is a firework spectacular. You feel the words, engage with them emotionally and sensually as well as intellectually. They rise around you, come alive in your mind, transport you to new and unexpected places. Deborah Levy creates a hallucinatory dreamscape of colours and symbols and metaphors, a psychoanalysts playground where every word, image, and object is significant and post-Freudian ideas of sex and death drive the plot forward. Swimming Home is a concentrated study of psychological states, of perceptions of depression and the impact diagnosis and medication can have on lives.

The Jacobs – celebrated poet Joe, war-correspondent Isobel, and their 14 year-old daughter only-daughter Nina – are holidaying in the south of France with Isobel’s friend Laura and her husband Mitchell. The atmosphere is taught and competitive, barely buried marital strife, infidelity, financial concerns, and work-life inequalities rife amongst the adults. It looks like being a long summer, particularly for Nina. That is, until they wake one morning to find Kitty Finch floating naked in their pool, red hair and green nails, arms pointing ahead like a starfish, like a superhero. Marshall mistakes her for a bear. She has confused her booking dates. Isobel invites her to stay. The mermaid steps out of the water to disrupt their plans and guide them through their summer. She is a poet and she is quirky, fun, psychologically unstable. She quickly becomes the centrifugal force around whom the other characters circle.

'Standing next to Kitty Finch was like being near a cork that had just popped out of a bottle. The first pop when gasses seem to escape and everything is sprinkled for one second with something intoxicating.'

Yet Kitty is no femme fatal; she is as vulnerable as they are, entranced by the poet she has read and the words he has given her. She and Joe are united by their experience of depression and antidepressants. ‘Give me your history and I will give you something to take it away’, he has written about his experiences of medication as a teenager. There is a theme here, between knowledge and forgetting; the amnesia that Joe and Kitty resent is contrasted with longing to forget that Isobel as a war-correspondent exposed to knowledge of the bleakest things in life dreams of. The reader quickly realises that there will be things learned on this holiday that will change things for everyone.

Levy borrows a technique from Emily Bronte in telling a tale about women through the façade of a male central character. The women are not always likeable, but they are powerful, compelling and determine their own stories, act in their own ways, without translation by male sensibility. Gender roles aren’t simple. On the surface, Joe is a typically serially unfaithful bipolar poet, yet he also plays the role of sole parent to Nina when Isobel is away. The women are enigmatic, the scope of behaviours available to them broader than in many novels.

Readers will feel all sorts of artistic spirits in the background – Ali Smith’s The Accidental, Arthur Miller plays, van Gogh paintings, Wuthering Heights, Rebecca were just some of those that arose for me – but Swimming Home owes its compelling brilliance to the fearsome intellect and lyrical prowess of its author.  There is little to criticise here. That it was turned down by a host of mainstream publishers for being too literary for a tough economic climate says much about the uncertain, fearful, artistically confused publishing world of the moment, and their – sometimes - lack of faith in readers. I'm delighted that the Booker Prize has reflected the rise of exciting small publishers in its shortlist for 2012.

Swimming Home is an elliptical novel. Time shifts and disorientates, narrative focus moves between characters. Scenes and motifs repeat and evolve. ‘Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll all get home safely,’ Kitty says on multiple occasions. ‘But you did not get home safely. You did not get home at all.’

Liminality dominates. Swimming Home is perilous, teetering on the brink of dream and wakefulness, of metaphor and literal, of medicated health and unmedicated madness, of childhood and adulthood, of life and death. Water is both a refuge and a prison. Dive in, submerge yourself, and feel it surround you.

Swimming Home was originally published by And Other Stories in October 2011. ISBN 9781908276025. 
Since Booker longlisting, it has been republished to meet demand by And Other Stories and Faber & Faber. ISBN 9780571299607, 176pp.

Sunday Supplement: On Imagined Communities

I was born in London, in a country called England, in a union called the United Kingdom, in a landmass known as Europe. Yet despite this preponderance of possible identities, the first 30 years of my life were characterised by affinity with none of them. Sure, there were moments I cheered England on in the football, or sang the anthem to tease my parents. But they were teenage experiments with identity. I spoke a humanist, internationalist, multicultural language that was uneasy with the notion of nationhood. Nationality felt a dangerous allegiance that could be manipulated for nefarious means and offered only  a means of controlling populations.

The songs I loved as an impressionable teenager were those that ridiculed nationality: With God On Our Side among many by Bob Dylan, and Imagine by John Lennon particularly. When I got to university it was the theories of Benedict Anderson that struck a closest chord. In his seminal work, 'Imagined Communities', he argued that nations were best explained not as geographies where people shared a natural affinity, but communities socially constructed, imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group. The problem, I started to realise, was not nationalism per se, but that the stories that my country told about itself were not ones that I valued or identified with. Monarchy, tradition, military, green rolling fields, progress, and all those other tales wrapped up in Empire. None of this struck a chime with me and never will. The United Kingdom is not a homogeneous community, and these aren't the only stories that have been told by people who live here. But these are the stories that generally receive national sanction.

Yet this Olympic and Paralympic summer I have, for the first time, started to hear stories told on a mass scale about the country I live in, with which I feel affinity. The sport was always going to be amazing. Put great athletes together and sport will provide drama and human tales of courage and determination that you can barely believe are possible. Sport is objective in a way little else in life is, but in the pursuit of those objectives it is full of narrative and characterisation and space for the viewer to imagine how things might turn out.

What I didn't expect was for art to provide pitch-perfect context for these sporting stories to be told in. Inclusion, human rights, equality, trust in each other, belief in the inherent goodness of people, the National Health Service, libraries, knowledge, self-criticism. These stories and more have been told through the opening and closing ceremonies. Similarly, Channel Four's Paralympics adverts and shows have presented a fresh view of disability as enabling.

In the Paralympic Opening Ceremony, Sir Ian McKellen described books as "the engines of change, windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, guardians of the treasures of the mind." I agree. But more than this, I believe it is stories that are the engines of change and windows on the world.

This Olympic summer has changed the discourse about Britain. We have identified shared values and told new stories to explain them. I hope they take route, for its the first time I've ever identified with the incidental country of my birth. There are many challenges we face, and these have not gone away while the sport has distracted us. But I hope these new stories will help us protect the UK from the social cuts of this vile government and the encroachment of big business into everything. I hope the new stories we have told will help us protest Atos and the cuts in disability provision, will fortify the NHS against privatisation and prevent the cuts to sporting opportunities for all. I hope that faith in each other with carry over into the coming winter.

I haven't changed my feelings about nationalism or internationalism. I still value humans over nations. But I have learnt that imagining our communities can be an act of creation and idealism. I've loved this Olympic summer for many reasons, and I hope the legacies last long. 

You may say I'm a dreamer. But this summer, I've learnt for the first time, that I'm not the only one.

Edinburgh World Writers Conference: Should Literature be Political?

Today I was fortunate to be in the audience for the renaissance of the Edinburgh World Writers' Conference.  Following a session that looked at the legacy of that original conference (and mostly demonstrated the incredible capacity with which we mythologise the past!), the first full session began. The question to be examined: Should Literature be Political?

Sitting in the audience, I was deeply impressed with the quality of chairing from Elif Shafak, and presentation by Ahdaf Soueif, and afterwards drawn into a wide-ranging dialogue that caused me to repeatedly nod my head, clap, and/or take notes as the various participant authors debated around the subject, most notably around whether literature in itself is political, and whether writers have a duty to participate in the politics of their society or not. Ben Okri, particularly, stood out with his statement that literature can only be political if it is first literature, and that the author who sets out to write politics is unlikely to succeed in writing literature.

So wide-ranging were the points being raised, that I even found my hand waving in the air to add to the discussion. Despite a fantastic summery from Owen Sheers, the debate was losing its way amid an orchestra of different voices. I was terrified to speak my mind, and yet felt compelled to do so. And yet...no matter how hard it waved, my hand was never called on to join the debate.

So now, dear blog, I commend to you the words I was to add in that setting. They feel important to add, even now, hours later, on a blog that few read. That is a sign of what an inspiring first discussion it was.

'I've sat here for the past 90 minutes, and I've agreed with much of what has been said by the authors in the room. Particularly the statements of Ben Okri on literature needing to be literature first and foremost, and the provocation of Ahdaf Soueif on the impossibility of not being political. Yet I'd like to add my own tuppence-worth, from the perspective of a reader and someone who works to promote and develop literature.

Fellow literature enthusiasts, we need to trust our writers.

Sitting here, I've been impressed by the variety of fascinating arguments that come across as well considered and well conveyed by those participating here. We must let writers speak with their own voice and write with their own pens. To answer the question of whether literature should be political or not for anyone other than ourselves would be an act of censorship as grave as any other. It would be a tragic world were any writer to feel compelled to be anything they are not. Our writers are valuable and valued idea-smiths precisely because they do not follow the direction of anyone but themselves. The challenge for the literary world is in making Ben Okri's statement true, in ensuring that it is the quality of the work that determines its success, rather than the politics it may or may not wear.

Yet it is not so easy, I am aware. We must celebrate that a writer like Chika Unigwe feels compelled to write from a politically aware stance, yet afford her no higher opportunity to reach a readership than a writer who does not feel so compelled. We must ensure that Ewan Morrison can stand and declaim as he does so eloquently, yet judge his work by its literary merit rather than its politics, just as we might with Louise Mensch.

In short, we must not ask our writers to be anything other than who they are. We must trust our writers to be the writers they must be. And then we must ensure that the best of them find readerships with whom they can converse.'

On Discovering William Stafford

This morning I woke to a bright blue sky. I rose, dressed, and walked to work with the intention of watching the London 2012 Olympics. Instead, I stumbled upon an NPR interview with the American poet William Stafford from the exceptional All Things Considered series.

On such incidents are lives enhanced.

William Stafford was born in Kansas in 1914, and grew into a pacifist - one, he said, of the "quiet of the land" - and a plainspoken poet. As a pacifist, he spent the years 1942-46 working in outdoor camps and projects for conscientious objectors in Arkansas, California and Illinois.His poetry, from what I've read, is reflective, gentle, and unassuming yet with a startling, simple poignancy. It focuses on the natural world, its rhythms and flows and on quietly turning the tables on common perceptions of life around us. Ultimately, a strong pacifism run throughout.

I've since spent an hour reading his work and am blown away. I've found a new friend who I hope will remain a friend for life.

Here are some of those that have particularly struck a chord. I hope you enjoy them.



'For the Unknown Enemy'
By William Stafford

This monument is for the unknown
good in our enemies. Like a picture
their life began to appear: they
gathered at home in the evening
and sang. Above their fields they saw
a new sky. A holiday came
and they carried the baby to the park
for a party. Sunlight surrounded them.

Here we glimpse what our minds long turned
away from. The great mutual
blindness darkened that sunlight in the park,
and the sky that was new, and the holidays.
This monument says that one afternoon
we stood here letting a part of our minds
escape. They came back, but different.
Enemy: one day we glimpsed your life.

This monument is for you.



'At the Bomb Testing Site'
By William E. Stafford

At noon in the desert a panting lizard  
waited for history, its elbows tense,  
watching the curve of a particular road  
as if something might happen.

It was looking at something farther off  
than people could see, an important scene  
acted in stone for little selves
at the flute end of consequences.

There was just a continent without much on it  
under a sky that never cared less.  
Ready for a change, the elbows waited.  
The hands gripped hard on the desert.




'At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border'
By William E. Stafford

This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.

Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed—or were killed—on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.

You can read more poems by William Stafford at the William Stafford Reader: www.williamstaffordreader.com/poems/topic