The Quincunx - Charles Palliser

Note: This review first appeared on Vulpes Libris where I am delighted to announce I have just been made a fully fledged Book Fox.

Read: December/January 2007

Picture the scene: it is early December, Christmas lights blink at you as you walk through throngs of shoppers, laden down with presents for your loved ones. The air feels charged with an electric buzz. Across the cold tarmac the sweet sound of carollers makes you yearn for peace, quiet and a glass of mulled wine. Your shoulders ache, feet are sore. Then, just as you think the shopping is finally finished you are reminded of the one person you always forget, that person you really should buy something for. That person you never know what to buy for. Well never fear, for I have the perfect solution to all your woes.

The Quincunx is absolutely, positively, the perfect book for winter reading. Weighty as a draft excluder, thick as treacle, enticing as an open fire, you pluck it from the shelf a devour it. No book I have read provides such indulgent enjoyment. Fast-paced and exhilarating, it lures you in and takes you on a tour of early-nineteenth century England, with a conspiracy so enthralling it will keep you guessing long into the night – because once you get into the plot, there will be no putting it down until you are finished and the mysteries have finally been solved.  It is one of those novels that could keep you company all winter, packed as it is with a horde of devious, dastardly, lovable, and mysterious characters. But despite its 1200 pages, you'll probably be finished in a couple of weeks.

Whenever anyone asks me to recommend a book, this is what I suggest. The Quincunx is a proper story: epic in scope, with companionable characters, and a suitable dose of stimulation for the grey matter.  I have never met anyone who had a bad word to say about it.

The plot follows Johnnie Huffam as he battles to stave off hidden conspiracies and outmanoeuvre his relatives in order to obtain the inheritance that is rightfully his. But in the meantime there is the small matter of just trying to stay alive...

It all comes down to a scrap of paper: the codicil the codicil to a will written half a century earlier, a will which has provoked greed, hatred, murder, and lunacy since before it was written. As enemies circle and the fate of the inheritance moves steadily towards resolution in Chancery, Johnnie must find out who he is, and his place in the wider familial quincunx, before it is too late.

If you like epic fiction you'll love it. Although its setting makes it ideally suited to winter reading (why is it that when we think of the nineteenth century we think almost exclusively of cold grey streets, fog, thick overcoats, and families huddling around the fire? Is it a because Christmas as we know it is such a nineteenth century invention, characterised so clearly in Dickens's Christmas Carol? Or perhaps the smog of the Industrial Revolution has settled on the collective imagination?) it is really a novel for any time or place in which you want to lose yourself entirely in a great story.

But The Quincunx is not just a riotous plot-driven adventure - though that, surely is more than enough. It is a pastiche of the mid-nineteenth century novel, the kind made famous by the likes of Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens. Indeed John Huffam, takes his name from Charles John Huffam Dickens middle names, and the namesakes also share the same date of birth. However, these references are just the tip of the iceberg. The pastiche is there in almost everything from the characters, to the settings, to the central concept of the book itself: a debate between the concepts of law and equity, that is between what is written in law and what is deemed equitable or fair.

It is this pastiche that is most often discussed in regard to The Quincunx. But the term doesn't really do the book justice. Far from simply paraphrasing and satirising classic authors, Palliser takes the skills, interests and characteristics of the mid-nineteenth century novel and perfects them, distils them, concentrates them, creating a novel which is more Dickensian than Dickens, more Collins than Collins ever was. It is everything you could want in a Victorian novel: episodic, all encompassing, and packed with denouements at every turn.

Added to this nineteenth century focus, Palliser uses a host of modernist devices including an unreliable narrator, inconclusive ending, and concealed structure to make the mystery all the more deceptive. There is a whole hidden structure which revolves around the number five, the quin of the title. There are five related families over five generations, whose five crests form a quincunx, an arrangement of five objects with one in each corner of a square and one at the centre. The novel itself is divided into five parts, and each part is divided into five books and then five chapters. In a review, this may seem irrelevant, but within this carefully designed mathematical structure are held many of the fundamental mysteries of The Quincunx. It is one of those books you could study for years and still not grasp fully. The amazing extent of this planning is made particularly clear in Palliser's fascinating, if a little self congratulatory, Afterword to the current Penguin edition.

When I started reading The Quincunx on Boxing Day a few years ago, I thought I was in for a long period of concerted reading. I was anxious, uncertain, and wary due to the amazing length of it. Yet only six days later, about an hour into the new year it was finished. In the intervening days I barely got out of bed for anything, let alone to welcome in the New Year. And when I had finished, I found myself sad and lonely as at the passing of a friend. Even at 1200 pages The Quincunx is nowhere near long enough. I love every single word of it. And that is in spite it containing three of the things I most dislike in a book: small print, long paragraphs of text, and chapters which start on the same page as the previous one finished. Were it not for the engaging plot, it would be one of those dispiriting books in which just turning a page feels like a great achievement. But as it is the pages fly by as unnoticed as the minutes turning to hours.

For some the often lengthy discussions about law and equity could prove hard work, but I found them illuminating. At times Johnnie's narration is a little mature and astute for such a young boy, but then what most exemplifies The Quincunx is a need to question everything, including Johnnie himself. This is particularly evident as Johnnie grows closer to his goal, and begins to realise that neither good nor bad can be taken at face value, and that trust is a dangerous emotion to give in to. And in the end, despite being focused on the absurdity of familial inheritance in a closed hierarchical society, the reader is left unsure as to the moral fortitude of its hero. After all he has seen, will his life simply offer yet more evidence for the selfishness of man?

You'll just have to read it to find out.
           
So let's return to where we were at the beginning of this review: it is December, you are out late and just need to find one more present before you can go home. Now you know exactly what to do: make a beeline for the nearest bookshop and place an order for The Quincunx (ISBN: 9780140177626). Who knows, if it is a good bookshop they might even have one in stock. That done you can return home invigorated, feeling somehow that the mood of winter has been captured in a series of black marks on cream paper.

And who said anything about giving it as a present?

10 out of 10

53 Books You'll Want to Read in 2010

This post is inspired by the excellent list produced on Bookmunch. I have always been frustrated by how difficult it can be to cobble together a list of books released in the future so am delighted that someone has already done the hard work and saved me the hassle! I have simply added three additional titles, and some comment to the ones I am particularly excited about. 

1. The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall
2. The Stars in the Bright Sky by Alan Warner
3. Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor
   
   
   
   
   Sounds like classic McGregor territory: the search for truth about the past in the objects and people of today. His first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things was a beautiful snapshot image of life on one street, and although the Booker longlisted follow-up wasn't quite as good, he remains an incredibly talented and powerful writer. One to look out for.
   
   
   
4. The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman
   Philip Pullman does my head in at times, with his endless hatred of C.S. Lewis and his militant hit-you-over-the-head-with-it atheism. But he remains a wonderful storyteller and any new book from him promises a wonderful adventure. Billed as being particularly aimed at those who know their gospels (which I don't!), I'm nonetheless looking forward to learning something more about a subject (theology) which I find endlessly fascinating but can easily become dense and dull. Basically, Pullman is doing what I wish everyone would do: putting non-fiction into fiction, so that my impatient brain can take it in and enjoy the process at the same time.
   Bring on April!
   
   
5. Naming the Bones by Louise Walsh
6. Known to Evil by Walter Mosley
7. Monster 1959 by David Maine
8. Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon
9. It Feels So Good When I Stop by Joe Pernice
10. Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
11. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
12. Nemesis by Philip Roth
13. Wild Child by TC Boyle 
14. Three Days Before the Shooting by Ralph Ellison
15. Solar by Ian McEwan
    I was lucky enough to hear Ian McEwan reading from this in June of this year, and it is genuinely very funny. I was in a horrible mood going into the talk, but somewhere in the almost campus-novel comedy of his reading, my perception of Ian McEewan as a 'serious' writer was blown completely out of the water. An early tip for Booker success next year, I think.
    
    
16. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell
17. Point Omega by Don DeLillo
18. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
19. The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis
20. Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey
21. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
    
    
    
    
    When 1Q84 was published in Japan earlier this year it led to a rush of interest akin to that which greeted the release of Dan Brown's new book. The print run was raised from  100,000 to 480,000 and with the plot kept completly secret bookstores were inundated with pre-orders and queues on the day of release. The first of a two volume novel, 1Q84 is described as 'classic Murakami - a "complex and surreal narrative" that "shifts back and forth between tales of two characters, a man and a woman, who are searching for each other".
    No author reminds me why I love reading quite as well as Murakami.
    
    
    
    
22. The Man From Beijing by Henning Mankell
23. This Party’s Got to Stop by Rupert Thomson
24. Beatrice & Virgil by Yann Martel
    Well, it's Martel's first novel since the 2002 Booker winning phenomenon that was Life of Pi. Promising another mix of fable, fantasy, and theology this is a book that will attract huge public attention whenever it is released in 2010
    
    
25. All That Follows by Jim Crace
26. The Dead Republic by Roddy Doyle
27. Little Hands Clapping by Dan Rhodes
28. Lean On Pete by Willy Vlautin
29. The Ask by Sam Lipsyte
30. Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
31. Castle J Robert Lennon
32. Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis
33. The Canal by Lee Rourke
34. Canada by Richard Ford
35. The Leaping by Tom Fletcher
36. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
    
    
    
    
    Already published in the U.S. where it has attracted a massive controversy and no little praise, Eating Animals sees Jonathan Safran Foer's on the verge of fatherhood and facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child's behalf. His investigations into the meet industry ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong.
    Not published here until Spring 2010, I am hoping that one of the many lovely people I know in the states might see fit to send it to me for Christmas this year (hint hint, wink wink!)
    
    
    
37. King Death by Toby Litt
38. Light Boxes by Shane Jones
39. The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris
40. The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Simm by Jonathan Coe
41. The News Where You Are by Catherine O’Flynn
42. The Greek Affair by Simon Van Booy
43. Nazi Literature in the Americas – Roberto Bolano
44. Rupture by Simon Lelic
45. The Art of Pho by Julian Hanshaw
46. George Sprott by Seth
47. Taurus by Joseph Smith (author of The Wolf)
48. The Widow’s Tale by Mick Jackson
    
    
    
    
    Mick Jackson is an author who never ceases to surprise. From the charming madness of Underground Man, to the fabricated beastiary in Bears of England he never quite gives you what you expect and his work is all the better because of it. What you can be sure is that The Widow's Tale will be an enjoyable read, full of humanity, warmth, and a little dollop of the unexpected to boot.
    
    
    
49. The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of his Friend Marilyn Monroe by Andrew O’Hagan
50. In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut
51. Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie
    The Sequal to Haround and the Sea of Stories, Luka promises another fable on the power of stories, and a life-affirming quest for life and passion. Published in October 2010 by Jonathan Cape, CCV publisher Dan Franklin has described it as “brilliant... as good as [Philip Pullman’s] Northern Lights”. I'm a huge Rushdie fan, next October can't come soon enough for me now.
    
    
52. Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness
    
    
    
    
    
    The final part of Patrick Ness's excuisite Chaos Walking trilogy, Monsters of Men promises another morally nuanced and occasionally disturbing tale of Todd and Viola, not to mention the very fate of New World itself.
    The Knife of Never Letting Go is the most exciting and thrilling young adult novel I have read in many years and The Ask and the Answer was a worthy sequal. Told in a gritty acerbic voice, and shot through with moments of utter beauty, Chaos Walking will be a classic trilogy read for many many years to come.
    
    
    
53. Ellipsis by Nikki Dudley
    
    
    
    
    Last but by no means least is this thrilling debut from London poet and novelist Nikki Dudley. Exciting, phsychologically complex, and disconcerting, it is a powerful tale of two misfits trying to uncover long hidden secrets about themselves and their pasts'. Dudley has an often startling eye for description and her simple poetic prose will delight readers looking for something slilghtly different in the crime thriller genre.
    
    

How Lazy Headlines Killed Journalism

This post is in response to an article published on Guardian Books today entitled 'How Waterstone's Killed Bookselling'

Today the Guardian posted an article by Stuart Jeffries in which he tracked some of the most important changes in the world of books and traced their impact on the changing landscape of bookselling. Through viewing the evolution of Waterstone's within the wider context of the past 25 years, it is clear that for all the negatives attributed to it, Waterstone's is as much a product of the climate it has developed within, as the lead protagonist in creating it.

But all of this is thoroughly degraded by a sensationalist headline which neither reflects the character of the article or any reasonable person's perspective on Waterstone's. It is easy journalism at its worst, unexpected and unnecessary from a reputable source such as The Guardian. In no way does it contribute to an improved understanding of the complex situation that Waterstone's and all other booksellers find themselves in.

For what it is worth, my view is that Waterstone's is a big corporate business which has made some mistakes and taken some depressingly corporate roads over recent years which have alienated some of its most passionate customers. Sometimes in its quest to be all things for all people it has forgotten what it does best which is, and continues to be, and always has been , having the biggest stock of backlist books you will find in any bookshop in the UK. It also has some of the most exceptionally knowledgeable and passionate staff of any retailer in the country. Every year it does plenty of interesting and market leading promotions, encouraging its booksellers and customers to promote the books they really love. These are big achievements which are sometimes drowned in the waves of press that follow each and every controversial policy announcement.

And yes, quite often these policy announcements deserve all the bad press they get. The arrogant and condescending communication between head office and stores is a clear example of those without bookselling experience trying to tell those who know their job how to do it. The flagrant attacks on experienced staff over the past 3 or 4 years have been damaging for all concerned. And Waterstone's as a company has rightly taken flack for them. Add to that the reduction in opportunities for booksellers to use their extensive knowledge of their local readership and wider literary trends to determine the character of the store in favour of selling window space to the highest bidder, and it is no surprise they are one of the least popular employers in the UK right now.

But how on earth does anyone think Waterstone's is going to be encouraged to shift its focus towards a more traditional form of bookselling if everyone who wants such a shift spends their whole time clambering over each other to complain about how awful they are? Creating an 'us against the world' siege mentality in the upper echelons of the Waterstone's head office management is not likely to win friends or influence anything.

Indeed, it is likely to encourage them to continue down the path which has won so much popularity with the casual book buyer over recent years. For even the most traditional book enthusiast would struggle to argue that the plethora of changes have met with an impenetrable wall of opposition. Quite simply, they haven't.

What is needed is for people to focus on what Waterstone's does best, re-affirming that they can continue to do traditional bookselling well, even in a modern marketplace. That means booksellers, (a volatile, highly educated and under paid group unrepresentative of the rest of the retail world) must stop reacting negatively to every change, and try to see things from the perspective of the head office once in a while. There have been times in recent years when staff have reacted negatively out of instinct without stopping to think about the wider picture, and that has only harmed their cause.

Similarly journalists need to stop bashing Waterstone's for the sake of easy headlines and remember that without it, Ottakers would have gone under anyway, and Amazon and the supermarkets might have an unshakable monopoly on bookselling. That is not something anyone wants to see.

(In the interests of full disclosure, I used to a bookseller at Waterstone's and left just before the recent hub-inspired changes and staff cuts took place.)

Working with China

Note: I first wrote this for the Writers' Centre Norwich  blog but am posting it here too.

Following on from my last post about China, I wanted to try and offer something a little more productive than the socio-political reminiscences of a part-time tourist. What follows therefore is an attempt to bring some of the conversations and experiences I had there together into a set of very brief hints and contacts should anyone wish to engage in any international partnership work with people in China. I am calling it ‘Sam’s ludicrously lightweight guide to arts and community work with China’. SLLWGTAACWWC for short.

Enjoy.

Theatre/Drama/writing organisations
The most productive dialogue I had with anyone in China came with a gentleman by the name of Nick Rongjun Yu. Nick is a Playwright, Producer, and Director of Programming at Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre and one of the best communicators I have ever come across. Three hours sat in a conference room with twenty five people can rarely have been as enjoyable and productive as the time we spent with him. He has toured and studied in the UK on several occasions, including performing at the Edinburgh Fringe a few years ago and running workshops as part of touring parties. He is keen to continue dialogue and work with the UK and would be a fantastic participant for an international conference.

If anyone is interested in working with him, please email me and I will provide his direct email address. And no, I am not his agent…though after this I may be asking for commission on future earnings!

Schools
If you work at a school in Norfolk which would like to find a partner school in China, then British Council Shanghai can help you out. In fact, if you work in a school anywhere and would like to find a partner school in China then the British Council can help. But Norfolk is paired with a district in Shanghai which means that any school arrangement would go through the Shanghai office and they would be only too glad to help. One of the fellow delegates who works with a school in Norwich had a very productive conversation with their Director, the upshot of which is the beginning of a process of pairing the school with one in Shanghai.
Further information on general school pairing can be found here:


 Creative Entrepreneurs
I’m not exactly sure what a creative entrepreneur is, but if you think you are one then this  looks like an interesting way of developing cross-cultural dialogue and contacts. I have no idea whether it is particularly effective but it does look interesting, particularly for those interested in the artistic development of physical spaces such as cities. And at the very least there is an interesting list of Government bodies and initiatives which you can check out.
Closer to home, the British Council also run an interesting looking cultural leadership programme which began earlier this year.  Although the pilot year places have all been filled, you can join the mailing list and they will notify you when the 2010/11 programme is launched.
 

Well, that’s about it! Apologies if it was even less comprehensive than you expected. If I hear of anything else, I will endeavour to share it. Until then…

Red Dust - Ma Jian

This review first appeared on Vulpes Libris where I write a guest review on the first wednesday of every month.

Read: September/October 2009

The essence of good travel writing lies in duality: in the balance between the external journey through a physical landscape and the personal journey which takes place alongside it. It is not enough simply to travel through a country meeting people and visiting places, then recounting anecdotes so as to shed light on the nature and culture of that society. To do so is to forever remain an outsider looking in. Rather the best travel writing interrelates the landscapes, cultures and people to the parallel emotional journey of the writer so that the terrain of one moulds, shifts, and reacts with that of the other.

So it is with Red Dust, a book subtitled ‘A Path Through China’ but as much a tale of Ma Jian’s quest to find himself as an artist and a man as anything else. Because of this, his panoramic, three year tour of China provides a wonderful insight into the nature of that vast country and the people who live there. Through it all, from the emotional highs and moments of tranquillity surrounded by outstanding natural beauty to the lonely lows, near death experiences and horrendous acts of barbarism, he retains a clear perspective and reports what he sees and feels in a remarkably impartial manner. He is honest about his faults and those of his country, unapologetic about their successes. His is a search for answers to three specific questions: who is Ma Jian? what is China? And how do they relate to each other.

It all begins in 1983 as Ma turns thirty. Recently divorced, his ex-wife is now seeking custody of their daughter; his current girlfriend is sleeping with another man. By day he works in the Foreign Propaganda Department in Beijing, photographing the country in order to create books of images which will be presented to foreign diplomats. At night he moves in an artistic milieu of painters and poets whose gatherings have to take place quietly under cover of darkness to avoid detection by the police. These gatherings consist of lots of impotent jokes – a kid asks his dad, “Dad, why do we have a picture of Chairman Mao but no picture of the Communist Party?” And his dad says, “Because the Communist Party isn’t human” –poetry recitals, camaraderie, and life drawing exercises. All of which means that despite his best efforts Ma is very much on the state radar. With his long hair, gregarious lifestyle and denim jeans he does not fit the standards expected of a healthy young socialist. Economic development may be beginning to open up the country but with the newly launched Campaign Against Spiritual Pollution he can feel the authorities breathing down his neck.

"Everything is starting to change. China feels like an old tin of beans that having lain in the dark for forty years, is beginning to burst at the seems…Six years have passed since the death of Mao Zedong and the end of the cultural revolution. Deng Xiaoping is back in power, calling for ‘Four Modernisations’, private enterprise and foreign investment. He has liberated the economy, but continues to clamp down on all forms of dissent. When the activist Wei Jingsheng said the Four Modernisations were meaningless without the Fifth – democracy – he was arrested, put on trial and sentenced to fifteen years in jail."

Despite artistic promise he does not have the political astuteness that is required of someone in his line of work. He causes a furore when failing to notice a patch of flaking paint in the foreground of a photo of Yangzi Bridge in Nanjing. He receives a heated ticking off when he chooses a yellow font on the front cover of a magazine. “You are trying to suggest that we are a federation of pornographic trade unions!” exclaims the irate section head of his work unit. It is all told with straight faced satire, an absurd situation which would be hilarious if it wasn’t so terrible.

Creatively stagnant, restless, and fearing arrest any day, he resigns his job and spends most of his money on a train ticket to the westernmost border of China. It is a journey which requires some forgery but which would have been near impossible only a few years earlier. And so begins his three year shoestring budget, 13,000mile plus tour of China. He survives thanks to the kindness of those he meets, and by making a bit of money by selling short stories and poems, or doing odd jobs in cities he passes through. Much of the time he walks vast distances alone. Sometimes he goes days without eating, or months without washing. He is absurdly ill-prepared for the journeys he takes, and seems unwilling to learn that it is not wise to set off across a desert at night with only a compass, small back pack and a couple of bottles of water. He treats his escapades with almost flippant disregard, yet his survival instinct and slippery loner tendencies demonstrate a man of rare tenacity. He is a man existing for existences sake, travelling for the sake of travelling, searching for himself everywhere he goes without a plan of where to go next. He is an engaging, amazing, enthralling character.

Most travelogues are written by foreigners travelling the country with a purpose in mind, usually to uncover the hidden heart of a place so as to advance understanding of it. It is so refreshing to view China from the inside, from a native who has spent their whole life there and yet still finds shocks and surprises on an almost daily basis. Ma Jian has the cultural understanding of a native but the wide eyed amazement of an outsider: he is both. He gives us an insight into how an educated Han is perceived in different areas of the country, from indigenous tribes of the Burmese border to the intellectuals he meets along the way. And because he is travelling in a country where people do not travel, he remains perpetually on the outside of life, viewed with amazement, welcome and distrust wherever he goes.

It is not a criticism per se, but it is his footloose approach to his travels which I found most difficult about Red Dust. It is not the most purposeful of books to read, there is no narrative arc or sense of where it is going at all. While it is subtitled ‘A Path Through China’ Red Dust would perhaps be better conceived as ‘Paths around and around China.’ It sat by my bedside for almost a month as I read five or ten pages per night before bed without ever becoming fully engaged. It reads as an endless series of encounters set within a greater spiritual journey but which has no discernable sense of progress. He is in search of Buddhist enlightenment and dreams of travelling to Tibet but never seems to make much effort to get there. His wanderings are captured in an anecdote he recounts when visiting a village in remote South Western China. There they tell him about an American pilot who landed there in the 1940s and was kept as a slave by the local tribe for 9 years before finally escaping and going home.

"The American pilot was able to stay here all those years because he had a goal in life: he wanted to go home. I have no such goal, so I must keep walking."

So it is. The lack of purpose is the greatest strength and most awkward weakness of this fascinating, though not always easy to read, book. There is an occasional tension between past and present tenses which irritated me and provided another barrier to a smooth reading experience. But in the end, he does learn something of himself. At last, after nearly three years of travelling and an enthrallingly terrifying journey through the borderlands of Burma he reaches Tibet. There he seeks Buddhist enlightenment only to find disappointment. Buddhism, he concludes, cannot solve the problems of man. “From now on I will hold to no faith. I can only strive to save myself. Man is beyond salvation.” The answers he has sought throughout his travels do not exist. It is the most enthralling, poignant and rewarding part of the book. It rectifies any flaws in the structure and leaves you with a cathartic sense of culmination, or the start of a new passage in his life. His journey has come full circle. The answer to the great myth of life has taken the form of another question. And all he can do is hope.

"In the middle of the night I lie awake on the metal bed under two thin quilts, shivering with cold. A wind howls through the rain and snow outside. This stinking body no longer belongs to me, my mind is as empty as a plastic bag caught in the high wind. Suddenly, I think of Beijing, and realise that although it is crammed with police, at least there is a bed and pillow waiting for me there. I came to Tibet hoping to find answers to all my unasked questions, but I have discovered that even when the questions are clear, there are no clear answers. I am sick of travelling. I need to hold onto something familiar, even if it is just a tea cup. I cannot survive in the wilds – nature is infinite but my life has bounds. I need to live in big cities that have hospitals, bookshops and women. I left Beijing because I wanted to be alone and to forge my own path, but I know now that no path is solitary, we all tread across other people’s beginnings and ends. I have stopped here, not because the Himalayas stand in the way, but because my inward journey has reached its end. In fact, we all tread a path – the gold-digger, the coil-remover, Myima who left her turquoise behind and rose to the sky. We are just travelling in different directions, that’s all."

7 out of 10

Understanding China - challenging and substantiating stereotypes

Note: I first wrote this for Writers' Centre Norwich blog but am posting it here as a companion post to the ludicrously long one earlier and since it is such a long time since I updated.

In September my colleague Laura and I were invited to take part in a British Council trip to China. Over 10 days we joined 84 other young (under 30) artists and arts professionals on a whistle-stop tour of various cultural and heritage organisations. Some of the trips offered fruitful opportunities to engage in dialogue on a wide range of themes with those engaged in writing, producing, and performing arts, others were little more than PR opportunities to spread a positive message about how great China is. But by the end of the trip, my view of China had changed dramatically from the one I left with.

You see, I had all sorts of preconceptions about the sort of country China would be, and to be perfectly honest very few of them were positive. The briefing session we attended before the trip focused on the need to be careful in China: what not to wear, how to avoid causing offence when handing over a business card or sitting with your legs crossed in a meeting, how not to draw the omniscient eye of the state. All this presented a distinctly intimidating view of China. And when added to the censorship, Human Rights abuse, pollution, social coercion, the bizarre meshing of supposedly communist politics with free-market economics, etc that we hear about all the time, it is no wonder I boarded the plane anticipating a journey to a distinctly ‘other’ type of place.

Yet my experience of China was not like this at all. That great ‘other’ I had heard so much about turned out to be as familiar as many places around the world. Shanghai, where we spent much of the time, is a global financial centre much like many major western cities. The airport, the hotel , skyline, inflections, intonations, body language, weather, colour of the sky, brand advertisements, roads…everything about Shanghai felt like the sort of major international conurbation I have been visiting my whole life. Even the language felt no greater barrier than it would in, say, Italy or Spain.

Urban China appeared relaxed. Despite being there just over a week before the People’s Republic of China celebrated its 60th anniversary, there were neither masses of flags, nor rampant propaganda images, and no sign of any sort of pre-celebration clean-up operation. Walking the streets was similarly relaxed. Those police officers we saw were utterly uninterested in us: I felt less watched and controlled than I do walking around London. It is meant to be illegal to congregate in a large group outdoors yet I saw many occasions when gatherings of between fifty and one hundred people were taking place in very public places without any sense of panic on the part of the police.

It all felt very, well, relaxed. And though the sky was perpetually grey with a kind of humid haze which stretched down to street level, and sometimes stuck to the skin uncomfortably, the air was not noticeably more polluted than other cities of comparable size.

And what was most surprising was to find a couple of organisations willing to discuss censorship openly and (it appeared) honestly. One of these, the Hunan Morning Herald (imagine a regional newspaper with the circulation of The Guardian in a Province with a population the size of the UK) was particularly interesting, acknowledging that while censorship does exist, most notably in the areas of politics and international relations, little by little it is being eroded away as media organisations grow more powerful and China engages with the Western world. China, it appears, is changing fast. It was notable that many of those we met with had travelled to and worked with people from around the world.

In his 1983 book Red Dust, Ma Jian wrote that “China feels like an old tin of beans that having lain in the dark for forty years, is beginning to burst at the seems.” Twenty-six years later, to the eyes of a passing visitor, China felt like a shiny steel can of beans with a flashy logo which can be bought in supermarkets around the world. To think of it as ‘other’ in any way is to miss the point completely. While there is no doubt that most of the experiences in China were organised and interpreted by the All China Youth Federation, a central pillar of the communist state, and that everything must therefore be taken with a pinch of salt, it is equally impossible to discount the preconception-destroying experience of being there. By the same token, I am by no means arguing that everything you hear and read about China is wrong. But perhaps it doesn’t tell the whole story. After all, every writer knows that the easiest trap to fall into is the one that others have dug already.

Since returning home I have been reading lots of books on China and trying to get some sort of fixed idea of the country in my head so that I can write coherently about it. But, as usual, books don’t have answers, just many more questions. What seems clear is that China, like most countries, is far too big and diverse to sum up or understand in a glib blog post. The truth about China, if there is one, probably lies in the gaps between words, rather than the words themselves.

And the same is true for much of literature.

EDP-Jarrold East Anglian Book Awards

Note: I first wrote this for Writers' Centre Norwich blog but am also posting it here since it is such a long time since I updated!

I came to East Anglia from London eight years ago to go to university. I don’t know why I chose Norwich specifically, even at the time it wasn’t something I could rationalise, just a deep seated feeling that this was the place for me. And I was right. There is an innate quality to life here which defies easy explanation.

Perhaps that is why writing is so prominent in this region: it helps us understand things which cannot be easily understood. We have a fantastically vibrant literary scene here that warrants honouring from time to time.

All of this is a long and rather self-obsessed way of introducing the EDP-Jarrold East Anglian Book Awards that took place last week. Set up in 2008 to celebrate the best in new East Anglian writing, this year saw Orange Prize winning author Rose Tremain presenting the awards to the six lucky category winners, as well as the overall winner, Matthew Rice for Building Norfolk . Special WCN congratulations go to Tim Clare who scooped the Biography award for We Can’t All Be Astronauts, a book about having one last shot at your dreams. Tim was one of the 2008/9 Escalator winners and Astronauts partly focuses on the journey he took during that programme, touring the country and visiting open mic nights. It is always great to see Escalatees go on to bigger and better things.

On a more general note, what was wonderful about all the shortlisted books was that they seemed to capture something of the experience of life in this region: from the architecture of Norfolk; the amazing story of Duleep Sing, the Indian Maharajah who made his home in Elvedon; to the Suffolk artists such as Constable and Gainsborough whose work has become synonymous with our landscape.

Sitting there, what I realised above all else was just how little I still know about this region, and how much I would like to know. I am going to go away and read more about the place I live and the people who have made it what it is.

Until next time...

Bears of England - Mick Jackson

This review first appeared on Vulpes Libris where I write a guest review on the first wednesday of every month.

Read: September 2009

Bears of England in one Tweet-sized chunk:
Bears of England is a feast of fabricated mythology, 8 quirky tales of England and the maligned bears who lived alongside (and sometimes underneath) it.

“In the days before electric light and oil lamps the night imposed its own abysmal tyranny, and daylight’s surrender was measured out in strict division. Sunset gave way to Twilight, just as Evening preceded Candle-Time. Bedtime was hope’s last bastion. Beyond that, there was nothing but Dead of Night…

Filled to the brim with every sort of ignorance and superstition, no Englishman would dare venture out at Dead of Night, for fear of being swallowed up by it. Every door was locked and bolted, and remained so right through those awful hours, until deliverance finally arrived at first cock-crow. Prior to that, every scratch and scrape, every rattle of leaf was thought to be the work of some demon, some twisted malevolence out among the trees. And in the villagers’ imagination that evil found its more common incarnation in the form of Spirit Bears.”

Bears of England is a veritable feast of fabricated mythological history. It is about the England we all imagine to have once existed, (full of warm ale pubs and windy moors, mysterious happenings and small village communities) and the maligned beasts who lived along-side – and sometimes underneath – it. The relationship begins with the Spirit Bears of the above passage, whose nocturnal escapades so terrify villagers that they resort to offering a living sacrifice to placate them. And in subsequent chapters this fear leads to short lived idolisation, followed swiftly by vilification, mistreatment, persecution, and slavery. There are the Sin Eating Bears of Early English life who “partake of bread and ale before a house in mourning, and in so doing, take on the sins of the departed prior to their Judgement Day.” Then we have the baited bears and circus bears kept hostage and forced to perform for the enjoyment of their human masters; the Civilian Bears who manage to live unnoticed alongside us; the Sewer Bears imprisoned under Victorian London to keep the excrement flowing out into the Thames. It is no wonder that one by one they escape the drudgery for years of deep hibernation. And then the rousing finale…which you will have to read for yourself!

Indeed, rather than read what I think of this wonderfully strange imaginary bestiary, why not make up your own mind instead? You can listen to Mick Jackson reading from the second chapter, Sin Eating Bears, at Guardian Books. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio/2009/jun/26/bears-of-england-mick-jackson)? It’s a far better use of the next fifteen minutes than reading my prattle.

(But for those who have already listened to it, I will continue…)

I first came across Mick Jackson about eighteen months ago, and he has since become one of my very favourite authors. His debut novel, Underground Man ranks right up there with Waterland by Graham Swift in the pantheon of great short-listed titles not to have gone on to win the Booker Prize. It is a charmingly eccentric tale of an ageing English aristocrat obsessed with his own mortality and his slow slide into madness. Subsequent novel, Five Boys, and collection of short stories, Ten Sorry Tales, have confirmed his cult status as the most enjoyably peculiar writers around.

Bears of England is no different. It is a veritable cornucopia of delightful one-liners and playfully dark imagery. Reading it is like looking at life in a cracked mirror: everything is there but nothing feels quite real. It is familiar though, as though these are half forgotten folk tales passed down through the ages. They have the essence of Victorian ghost stories read around a fire in a cold living room in the depths of winter. You know it is all fictional yet cannot help believing every word.

This is partly due to the beautiful illustrations by David Roberts which really bring the stories to life. His bears are giant beasts with long sharp claws and small uncertain eyes which seem to remember all that has happened before and await with resignation whatever is to come next. There is a fabulous two page spread towards the end, which sees hundreds of these bears crossing the landscape in the dead of night. It is really quite beautiful.

The only possible criticism that can be levelled at is is that Bears of England is a little too short. It is the canapé of the literary world: very enjoyable, very moreish, but you can’t help wish there was a little more of it. Just five or six more stories to flesh it out, so that you could enjoy reading a little longer. £12.99 is quite expensive too, for so short a book.

Yet it is equally possible that it is this brevity which makes Bears of England so enjoyable. The fact that you can read one or two of the stories on a twenty minute bus ride and still have time to look out of the window is refreshing. They are snippets, little more than quirky anecdotes really. Yet they are rewarding and enjoyable to read. Enticing even. I spent months eagerly awaiting its release, and a further month while Amazon traced my lost shipment, but when finally it arrived, it lived up to all my expectations. I love Mick Jackson, I loved this book, and I’m sure you will too.

7.5 out of 10

Uk-China 400 - Creativity and Cultural Innovation: an exchange of future leaders

Last June I applied through work to go on a British Council youth exchange trip to China. Over the past weeks I joined 85 other young creative and cultural innovators on a diplomatic visit to Shanghai and some of the Provinces. UK-China 400 was a fascinating experience, and this article is an attempt to clarify my thinking and make sense of the many disparate sights, thoughts, and emotions along the way. Part travelogue, part social commentary, part personal development exercise, what follows is, at best, a chronicle of the thoughts and feelings inspired by ten days spent living the life of luxury in China or, at worst, a self-indulgent pile of words of no use to anyone. But it is something I need to do to make sense of the trip, and what else are blogs for if not as a forum for self-indulgent pith?

In his 1983 travel biography Red Dust the Chinese author and painter Ma Jian wrote about the changes taking place in China:

“Everything is starting to change. China feels like an old tin of beans that having lain in the dark for forty years, is beginning to burst at the seems.”

Twenty five years later 'change' remains the buzzword around China. When I boarded the plane at Heathrow Terminal 3 early on Sunday 13^th September, I carried with me a host of expectations and pre-conceptions about the nation I was to visit, all couched within this word 'change'. They encompassed not only the type of nation China is becoming, but the type of place it once was. I had read articles criticising China's Human Rights record and freedom of speech/information abuses. I had seen shows on Chinese economic development and listened to talks by the likes of Will Hutton on the impossibility of sustained long term growth. I had watched discussions surrounding the Olympics, been to talks by PEN on persecution of Chinese writers, and even had some experience of the difficulty in getting a visa for a Chinese author to attend our Worlds festival in Norwich last June. And all of this talk centred around the prevailing notion of progress, improvement, change. And yet, as soon as I landed at Shanghai Pudong Airport I realised that despite all of this I knew absolutely nothing of China for myself. I was intrigued by the dichotomy between China's Communist single party politics and its free-market economy but had no idea what that meant in practice. The briefing I attended before the trip presented China as a strict society where the slightest transgression of etiquette could have terrible repercussions, whether in causing great offence, or attracting unwanted police attention. We were told it would be unwise to go out on our own, or in groups of more than 5 as it would attract attention, were taught how to present a business card or gift, instructed not to sit with out legs crossed and foot pointing at anyone, reminded of the strict dress code. It was all very prescriptive. And rife with the impression of China as completely alien to anywhere I had been before.

How strange it was, therefore, to step off the plane in Shanghai and find myself in a place that felt entirely familiar. That is one of the strange things about flying to a far flung land – you step off the plane into an airport which is almost identical to the one you boarded the plane from 11 hours earlier. But it wasn't just the airport, the drive to the hotel, the hotel itself, the city skyline, the coach, the inflections, intonations and body language of the Chinese people welcoming us, the weather, colour of the sky, brand advertisements, roads...everything about Shanghai felt like the sort of major international conurbation I have been visiting my whole life. Even the language felt no greater barrier than it would in, say, Italy or Spain. There was neither a heavy police presence on the streets, nor political propaganda to be seen. Indeed, I have felt more closely scrutinised, watched and controlled in most major European and North American cities I have visited in the last 5 years than I did in Shanghai. Later in the trip, when we asked some of the university student volunteers about the customs we had been told to observe, their reaction verged on disdain. “It doesn't matter what you do,” was the typical response. Of course, these were young members of an increasingly socially mobile and confident generation and such groups are not generally prone to care for the finer points of social etiquette, but their reaction did convey something, I think, if only the scale of one kind of change taking place.

Shanghai itself is a city which has been almost entirely (re)constructed in the last ten years. Its population of more than 20 million people makes it the largest city in China and it already boasts more than 2000 buildings over eighteen stories high. Although its economic might remains on about one-seventh that of Hong Kong, the aim is to bridge the gap by 2020 and although this may be a little ambitious, there is little doubt that Shanghai will be one of the worlds foremost financial hubs in the future. It already is. The skyline is certainly already impressive. Three of the top twenty tallest buildings in the world are located in the new area of Pudong, and the Shanghai Tower which has just begun construction is slated to be the second tallest building in the world on completion. Just next door, the Jin Mao Tower, standing at 421 metres already contains one of the worlds highest hotels which begins on floor 54, and contains the world's highest swimming pool (floor 57) and the highest bar, aptly named Cloud 9, on floor 58. Shanghai also boasts an intriguingly designed road network with main highways raised off the ground and local roads running underneath. But before this turns into a tourist guide repetition of quantitative facts and figures (something the Chinese proved tremendously keen on) lets return to the personal experience itself.

After checking into the hotel and an amazing lunch, we went up the Pearl Tower for a panoramic view of the sprawling city, and paid a whistle-stop visit to the Shanghai Museum. All this through a haze of jet-lag. In the evening, growing ever less coherent, we attended a formal dinner in which people spoke of friendship and mutual understanding, themes which I always enjoy hearing in almost any context. Then it was free drinks in a wild west themed bar in the hotel, a ride on a Bucking Bronco and finally to bed for some much needed sleep.

The following days began to fall into a pattern: wake up at 7.15, breakfast at 8:00 before a quick email home. Sadly Facebook, Twitter, and Blogger were all inaccessible so travel updates in any form proved impossible, but at least BBC News was available so I was able to keep up to date with goings on across the world. Coaches departed the hotel at exactly 9:00am. The day would then consist of one visit in the morning, followed by a banquet lunch, then another in the afternoon followed by a banquet dinner. By the second or third day people were heaving from the weight of food and letting belts out a notch or two. Well, all but the vegetarians who were consigned to a 'Vegan Feast' table in the corner, and forced to watch meat dishes be laid one after the other on the table, all beautifully presented and utterly unwanted. We came to subsist primarily on steamed green vegetables, with the occasional soup or morsel of tofu. Often there wasn’t even rice or noodles at most meals, due, I presume, to the association of them with everyday peasant food rather than the fancy official banquet style of cuisine we were treated to. The only vegan on the trip subsisted those first few days on little but watermelon and little yellow bean-like things which turned out to be mountain yams. After a while we were all dreaming of carbohydrate and protein.

Still the visits were fascinating, even if sometimes they amounted to little more than a brief tour followed by a lecture on the virtues and successes of the institution in question. We visited the Shanghai Institute of Visual Art, saw the students sculpting and drawing, and were amazed by the vast greenhouse which they tended as part of their studies. We visited a former abattoir which has been transformed into a Creative Industry Centre and walked the winding concrete walkways, reminded all the while of the impossible art of M.C. Escher and the artistic beauty which can lurk in the most unlikely places. At the Shanghai Dramatic Art Centre we engaged in an enthralling discussion with the Assistant General Manager, Nick Yu, who was a producer, director and a playwright too, and whose social skills and open warmth kept us entertained for more than two hours. Through that discussion we learnt much about the prevailing climate in which theatre remains a minority art form but which, due to the rapidly increasing wealth of the country, is finding a new audience among young professionals. We also learned that street theatre is only possible with a permit which is difficult to get due to state dislike of people congregating in groups in public. (However, through the rest of the trip I saw at least two occasions in which a crowd of people was happily and safely gathered around watching a public performance. Perhaps this is another example of those changes which have been taking place in China over recent years, which have not yet been reflected in a change of law.)

This is pure speculation. One of the ways in which my political and social thinking has evolved over the past ten years is that I now recognise the vast distinction which must be made between the government of a country and the people themselves. Failure to recognise this distinction caused me to make some pretty banal comments about the United States prior to meeting Megan, and it is important to keep this in mind throughout this article. Ours was in no way a political trip – we neither met any politicians of any kind, nor discussed politics with our guests – and therefore any comments I pass on societal changes must be taken as personal viewpoints of what I observed, rather than any factual statements. Nor did I visit any rural areas, so again cannot comment on what life is like there. What this article seeks to do, essentially, is to present China as a country in which whatever political ills have and continue to be committed by the state, they are not ever present in the lives of the urban populations.

An example which comes to mind was recounted by those who visited Fujian Province on the south east coast of China. On returning they reported numerous examples when local people referred to warm trading and social relations with Taiwan which is situated less than 100 miles off the coast. While political rivalry may exist between the Communist Party of China and Taiwan, the distinction is perhaps not so significant to the average person on the street who owes his livelihood to trade with Taiwan.

After three days in Shanghai with all 85 delegates we then separated into four smaller groups and headed to different Provinces. My group went to Hunan Province, and the capital Changsha. Hunan has a population and area just above that of the United Kingdom, while Changsha's population of over 6 million makes it more than three times the size of the entire Birmingham conurbation. This is important context when trying to understand the profile and size of the different organisations we visited.

It was a great relief to break out of such an unwieldy and awkwardly big group and get to know people on a more personal level. Despite the incredible humidity in Changsha (over 80% on the first three days) our group gelled quickly, and looking back the times there rank as the most rewarding, both personally and professionally of the entire trip. On the first evening we went to a bar in the heart of Changsha, which turned out to be a massive neon wilderness akin to Piccadilly Circus if it extended for miles in every direction, Yet somehow, sitting outside a bar only metres from a very busy road in the evening warmth, we felt a million miles away from the hectic pressure of the first few days. Ordering drinks proved challenging with the menu all in Chinese so that the only way we could decode that we were on the cocktails page was because there was a B52 shooter listed just below. I decided to chose based on what the Chinese characters seemed to denote, so went for one which contained a skyscraper, cable car and someone playing snooker! It turned out to be a Long Island Green Tea which was very pleasant and as we sipped our cocktails and chatted serenely I began to relax for the first time on the trip, found my confidence increasing so that come the next day I was ready and eager to engage more actively in our visits.

The collegiate mood continued. The next morning began with a trip to the Sunchime Cartoon Group, a massive studio with more than five hundred employees where they designed and made educational cartoons for children. The vibrant colours of the cartoons was an early morning tonic and set the tone for another positive day. At a dialogue session on Creativity and Cultural Innovation later that afternoon I volunteered to give one of four presentations from the UK group. With only half an hour to write and prepare the ten minute presentation on the work of Writers' Centre Norwich and my own ideas on culture it was a frantic and terrifying proposition, and I was thankful to the provision of wet towels to help control my sweaty palms as I frantically sought to write and rewrite the speech, taking into consideration the need to build in pauses for translation and an urge to say something different to what we had already heard on the trip. I wanted to really promote the idea of art and creative thinking as valuable in and of themselves, rather than primarily as a tool for the advancement and development of creative industry. I toyed with the idea of paraphrasing Virginia Wolf, tried to remember the her actual words, and decided that no-one would know if I got it wrong.

All the stress paid off. Halfway through I had that moment of clarity where I knew I was conveying exactly what I wanted. The subsequent reaction from members of our group was incredibly positive. I was able to display my creative side as a writer in a way I hadn't previously been able to, and the warm reaction to this has definitely increased my determination to get back down to writing. It even turned out that one of the Chinese speakers was a published writer, and he generously gave me two of his books as a present. I can’t read them, but they will look beautiful on my bookshelves regardless. All in all it was an incredibly positive experience.

The day culminated in a shopping expedition through the bright lights of central Changsha. One of the student volunteers, whose ‘English name’ was Sweet, spent three hours accompanying myself and three others around shops in search of some jade jewellery to bring home. Her assistance with the language, generosity of spirit, and genuine enjoyment of our company was one of the highlights of the entire trip.

Since arriving in Changsha opportunities to contact the outside world had all but disappeared and so by this stage I was feeling a little homesick and guilty for not being in contact with Megan. Attempts to rectify the problem by purchasing a China Mobile SIM card proved futile and in the end I resorted to borrowing a fellow delegates phone and asking Megan to phone me back at the hotel. It was wonderful speaking to her after a week apart, particularly given our history of time zone separation. It felt like returning to the very beginning of our relationship, when I would stay up half the night talking on the phone, sometimes even falling asleep halfway through a conversation. It was lovely, comforting, and just what I needed.

But back to the trip. Everything we did on this trip was organised by the All China Youth Federation, one of the main pillars of the Chinese state. Our translator and sometime guide, the dedicated and talented Wang Yi, was a Program Officer at the ACYF, and in that sense much of what we did went through a potentially unreliable intermediary. It was also noticeable that the Dialogue on Youth Creativity and Cultural Innovation was chaired by the Vice President of the Hunan Provincial Youth Federation and that he personally answered the one question which bordered on the political, when someone touched on the individual versus society in artistic provision. The only actual visit he accompanied us on personally was to the Hunan Morning Herald, the biggest newspaper in Hunan. This was also the case in at least one other province. However, while this seemed at first sight like a subtle act of political pressure, his manner throughout denoted a man very happy to sit and listen, without any need to get involved. Even when we posed seemingly difficult questions on censorship of news and the media he sat and listened without any sign of undue fear, at one stage even leaving the room to answer a phone call. Indeed the Youth Federation involvement was further negated by the fact that the discussion was translated not by Wang Yi, but by the Deputy Editor of the newspaper, who spoke good English, supported Liverpool, and had once been the Sports Editor at the paper. The Editor in Chief answered all the questions openly, displaying what appeared to be genuine interest for discussion and debate. His answer to the question of censorship was also fascinating in its apparent frankness and I reproduce it here, largely verbatim though only as remembered later in the day.

'This is the question I am asked most frequently,’ he began. ‘Outside the political realm we can report whatever we like. There is no censorship. When it comes to politics there are some issues. We are not entirely free. However these are issues which cannot be overcome with dialogue and a positive attitude. Increasingly big media organisations in China are winning greater freedoms and change.'

That buzzword once again: ‘change’. The answer was clearly satisfactory to the HPYF as the Editor was later invited to join us for dinner.

Perhaps what this episode most demonstrates was our quiet distrust of everything which was taking place. On leaving the UK there had been a lot of delegates who were very wary of any form of engagement with China and such distrust remained, posing unanswerable questions about exactly what we were and weren’t being allowed to see. Whether this was valid or not, I cannot say. Certainly despite all the seeming openness of the Chinese, I am not so naïve as to believe everything was as smooth as it was presented to us. As befits the traditionally undemonstrative Chinese psyche, a lot of control is surely wrought through silent and insidious social pressure rather than over censorship and control. An example of this came in a discussion with a university lecturer during our family visit the next day in which she explained how the Family Planning Policy (one child policy) is enforced in practice. With her husband she already had one son, a twelve year old boy who enjoyed playing on-line computer games. Were they subsequently to have another she informed us that she would lose her job at the university and that everyone else in her department would have their wages cut. You can't really oppose that sort of interconnected social pressure. On the other side, we later came to the practical difficulty of the situation. When visiting the son’s school he told us that he shared classes with 56 other students and his mum added that twenty years ago it would have been in the late seventies. Such numbers really brought home the difficult population problem China faces.

A further, and I think reflective, anecdote about the subtle nature of Chinese society was reported by a fellow delegate from Norwich who stopped at a bookshop in X'ian and found an interesting picture book entitled The Little Zebra. Although he couldn't read the actual words, the gist of the pictures was clearly that of a zebra who didn't like being black and white and wanted to look like the red horses instead. So he dressed in a cape and distanced himself from the rest of the herd. But when a lion attacks, the little zebra stands out from the herd while everyone else is camouflaged. His uncle comes to persuade him to take off his cape which he does and is saved. The moral of the story clearly being that straying from the flock and being different is dangerous, it is safer just to fit in. I found this a fascinating anecdote, contrasting so much from the dominant western picture book idea of celebrating difference. Here, a character once maligned by society is often shown to save or help society in some way through their very difference. You can see this in films like Happy Feet, books like Tacky the Penguin and Mr. Big, and countless other examples across out media. It is such apparently minor distinctions which perhaps provide the most effective insight into China. Being in a supposedly communist country inspired lots of interesting debates on the nature of society, both their and at home, and one of the interesting aspects of the trip was in demonstrating the range of sympathies which existed for some of the perceived characteristics of Chinese society. The above is just one example of this.

After five days in Changsha we made our way back to Shanghai. The trip was coming to an end and we had just one day left for evaluation and a bit of free time. However, in the evaluation things came out which brought to light certain developments which I had not fully been aware of and which questioned my experience of the trip. Whether it was because I was already reticent about returning to Shanghai, or just emotionally drained from the long trip, these revelations hurt me quite deeply, and I spent an evening uncertainly trying to work out whether any of the friendships I had developed were as I had previously perceived them to be. The next day things sorted themselves out and that final day was taken up as much with relief as enjoyment. We walked for hours in search of gifts to bring home, enjoyed a wonderfully relaxing massage in a small spa next to the hotel (for only £8!), and spent the final evening drinking expensive cocktails high above Shanghai in Cloud 9, the bar on the 87^th floor of the Jin Mao tower. It was a great way to wrap the trip up.

In hindsight, what the evaluation episode did for me was to provide an opportunity to learn something about myself, and going into it, that is what I expected this trip to be primarily about. Spending ten days away from home in a strange environment with a large group of strangers taught me a great deal about the person I am and have become. I am generally not very self aware so when these lessons come to me I really need to take note of them to ensure that I can improve myself in the future. What is perhaps most apparent is that I need to spend more time cultivating friends. It is not something I do naturally and when I am confronted with a situation big group such as this, it leaves me a little lacking in the requisite people skills to be the person I want to be. I tend to keep people at arms length, for they inspire strong emotions – uncertainty, vulnerability, self-questioning - which I prefer not to deal with. I am too uncertain around people, too fearful to commit myself for fear of rejection, or even worse, compelling people to accept my company out of politeness. I have also become quite emotionally needy in a way I had not realised before. I believed I was pretty independent and good at getting on with life on my own but perhaps a result of being married and spending so much time with one person is an inevitable reliance upon their company. I did not realise how much I would miss the safety and security of a cuddle in the evening, Megan’s smiling face in the morning.

On a positive note I found out that once again I can respond when put under pressure and express myself clearly and coherently. People's positive reactions to the presentation I gave provided a real personal highlight of the trip and has given me great confidence that public speaking is something I would like to do more of in the future. The support and positive reactions people gave me about my writing too has inspired me to really crack on again. Yes, I know I have these periods of inspiration at least twice a year and it probably wont last, but I think that sort of inspiration is probably good in and of itself, regardless of endurance.

Overall, the trip to China was an incredibly positive one, from which I have emerged with new friends whom I hope to keep in touch with, increased confidence in my professional capabilities, and a view of China not at all in keeping with the one I left with. If being treated like royalty for ten days has resulted in an embarrassing inability to cook any more, and a vague yearning to eat everything with chopsticks then so be it.

The stress I perceived to lie between communist dictatorial politics and free market economics did not appear to exist since the communist politics has been completely subsumed to the free market. One delegate reported an exchange with a member of the All China Youth Federation in which the later referred to a constituent youth organisation as 'a bit communist.' Gavin Anderson the Director of British Council in Shanghai summed it up well in his view of China as an autocracy, but one in which the leaders were not interested in feathering their own nest but rather their prime, or possible even sole interest, lay in making China great. This explanation made sense to me.

Despite its status as a hub of global manufacturing, China is not a cheap country. Indeed, with the exception of taxi fares, massage and some street food, many things seemed to be on the pricey side of average, even compared with inflated London prices. I visited only urban areas, but neither in any sense fitted the requisite of a developing country. Driving around them I saw no more poverty than I would driving through any urban area. It made me question the nature of how we classify the relative relationship between nations, and wonder when the last time a nation moved from the status of developing category to join the developed nations. How do such slippery concepts really reflect on the ground? Are they just learned concepts which ensure the continuance of a two-tiered international system, or do they have some relevance of which I am not aware? Clearly I don't know the answer to these complex questions, but this visit certainly posed them.

To anyone interested in working with any Chinese organisations or individuals I highly advise you to go for it. From my experience they were open, receptive, incredibly warm and very eager for dialogue. The students who volunteered to assist us were some of the most generous and friendly I have ever encountered. Whether China is the future of the world I don't know and don't really care. Whether Ma Jian's observation of change remains as relevant today again I don't know. To my eyes, twenty five years of change have led to a China which feels like a shiny steel can of beans with a flashy logo which is being sold in supermarkets around the world. What is inside that can I am not really sure. And of course I am in no way comparing my 10 day tourist visit to China with the experience of someone living there. More than most other countries I am certain that the real character of China is one which reveals itself covertly, in subtle nuances utterly imperceptible to the visiting eye. What I do know is that while in China we encountered adverts for a major new film celebrating the 60^th anniversary of the People's Republic of China called Founding of the Republic. Since returning home I discovered coverage of its premier on NPR radio in the U.S. which describes it simultaneously as a propaganda epic for the MTV generation and a film which, at its core, is about democracy. These contradictions clearly remain at the heart of China and only time will tell whether it marks a clear indication that President Hu Jintao or other influential figures are pushing for more democracy inside the Communist Party or not. Change has already happened within China, every learned commentator around the world agrees with that. What it will mean for the future I really don’t know.

(Over the next few weeks, it is likely that I will edit and develop some strands of this post into further articles which I shall also post here. But for now, I hope this is some small insight into the amazing Chinese experience.)

The Knife of Never Letting Go - Patrick Ness

This review first appeared on Vulpes Libris where I write a guest review on the first wednesday of every month.

Read: July 2009

The Knife of Never Letting Go in one Tweet-sized chunk:
The Knife of Never Letting Go is a frantic, hair-raising, terrifying, complex, heartbreaking, exhilarating, novel.

“But a knife ain’t just a thing, is it? It’s a choice, it’s something you do. A knife says yes or no, cut or not, die or don’t. A knife takes a decision out of your hand and puts it in the world and it never goes back again.”

Public Health Warning:
This book contains probably the most horrific event I have ever read. Having swept through the first two thirds in a frenzy of enjoyment I was so traumatised that I threw the book across the room and had to be persuaded like a petulant toddler to pick it back up and finish.

Additional Public Health Warning:
Read this book. Health is about so much more than simply avoiding trauma and ill health. It is about promoting good health and that comes in many forms. The Knife of Never Letting Go may have cut me to the quick at times, but I still came away from it hungry for more. Everything about it, even those parts I really wished weren’t there, contributed to one of the most rewarding and exciting reads I have had in months.

But on to the book itself.

Todd Hewitt is the last boy in Prentisstown. But Prentisstown is a town like no other. There are no women, only men. And everyone can hear everything that everyone else is thinking in a constant and never-ending stream of Noise. There is no such thing as silence. No such thing as privacy. And until he becomes a man there are secrets which the rest of the town is keeping from him.

It is no wonder he is a so pissed off.

Then one day Todd and his dog Manchee stumble upon a hole in the Noise, a spot of absolute silence. The silence of a girl.

But that is impossible. There are no women left on New World. Unless everyone has been lying to him. And if that is the case, he is in danger. While Todd, Manchee, and the girl flee across New World in search of safety and answers, the men of Prentisstown are preparing for war...

The Knife of Never Letting Go is a frantic, hair-raising, terrifying, complex, heartbreaking, exhilarating, novel. It combines the pace and excitement of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games, the invention, intelligence of quality of writing of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, and the moral ambiguity of Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines. It is a great book.

It is always difficult to write a good review of a book you love – the tendency to overuse hyperbole, bore the reader with irrelevance, or fail to view it all with a critical eye – but when that book is as multi faceted as The Knife of Never Letting Go it becomes doubly so. It would be so easy to compile a long bullet point list of all the diverse things I love about it, yet drawing them together as Patrick Ness does is far harder. His skill is in telling a poignant and intellectually rewarding tale which remains utterly unputdownable. The Chaos Walking trilogy, of which this is the first book, is packed with political intrigue, social commentary and thoughtful set pieces. Above all, it is about growing up and finding your place in a world which is nothing like you have been told it was. Gender relations are a good example of this. Because only men's thoughts are audible in Noise, New World is racked by pretty horrendous inter gender tensions. But instead of the usual sloppy journalistic stereotyping of the 'Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus' brigade, Patrick Ness actually explores what it is like to try and get to know someone whose background and communication style is different to your own. It takes time, and is a far cry from the fantasies he has grown up with, but as Todd gets to gets to know Viola, he comes to understand that despite the apparent differences, men and women are really not much different. There is a profound moment towards the end when this realisation hits him.

“And there, in that morning, in that new sunrise, I realize something.
I realize something important...
I know what she’s thinking...
I can read her Noise even tho she ain’t got none.
I know who she is.
I know Viola Eade.”

The Knife of Never Letting Go is crammed with similar Eureka passages where frenetic reading grinds to a halt as you stop and consider just how special it is to capture something so simply and with such little pretence. There is a whole secondary subtext to the plot itself which adds great depth to what is already a powerful work of imaginative fiction. Another glorious moment comes right at the heart of the novel, when they stumble into a sea of giant cows all thinking the same single word of Noise together, singing it to each other at different pitches so that it becomes a melody.

“They're singing Here. Calling it from one to another in their Noise.
Here I am.
Here we are.
Here we go.
Here is all that matters.
Here.
“It's-
Can I say?
It's like the song of a family where everything's always all right, it's a song of belonging that makes you belong just by hearing it, it's a song that'll always take care of you and never leave you. If you have a heart, it breaks, if you have a heart that’s broken, it fixes.”

That is what this book is all about: multiplicity, uncertainty, the absence of a simple truth. The struggles always just around the corner, and the beauty which can be found in the simplest of moments. If you are looking for a book to get a teenage boy reading this might be it. Todd is a very strong and engaging male lead. His mindset is that of many teenagers, his reactions to his world familiar. In the course of the journey he is forced to think long and hard about such things as the dangers of carrying a knife, how to interact with women, how to control his emotions. The narrative is written from his point of view, in his own vernacular style which is easy to get into and fits his caustic yet kind persona perfectly. This is not a 'boy's book' though, any more than it is a book solely for teenagers. It is another great example of the crossover literature which is in such a healthy state at the moment. The Knife of Never Letting Go is a book which I struggle to imagine anyone not liking.

And the tragic event which gave rise to my Public Health Warning at the outset of this review is the moment that really makes it. It may be painful, almost unbearably so, but at that moment you know that this is no light fairy tale in which everything will turn out okay. Here is a novelist who has no qualms about testing his readers. At any moment he may kill off your favourite character, or make them do something thoroughly horrible. There is no good and evil, no black and white, just a whole lot of moral ambiguity and painful mistakes. That uncertainty makes for an unpredictable read in which nothing ever turns out quite as you expect it to.

And just when you think safety and comfort are within Todd's grasp they are snatched away and the book ends on a precipice. Chaos Walking is a trilogy to really get your teeth into. The Ask and the Answer is a fitting and even more ambiguous sequel and I can't wait until Monsters of Men, the final part in the Chaos Walking trilogy, is published in May 2010. 240 days and counting...

9 out of 10

Late night reading

Clearly my reading marathons on the train to and from Edinburgh have had an effect on me. Last night I couldn't help reading on and on, as the hours ticked by. I never thought i would get around to reading this but I did and I'm glad I did. In the past months I have been remembering exactly why I enjoy exciting young adult fiction so much. It is readable, enjoyable, and escapist. All the best things in fiction.

I read the whole thing, finishing sometime just before 4am. So now I am tired.

Oh well, nevermind. I have Coke in the fridge to keep me going...

Edinburgh International Book Festival

Last night, as the clock crept towards midnight, my train pulled back into Norwich. It is a 6 hour train journey from Edinburgh and you may think it strange but I enjoyed every minute of it – with the possible exception of the twenty minutes sitting in the drizzle on Peterborough station! To me, you see, long transport journeys are like being given a magic device which allows me to freeze time. Of course, I can’t do much except sit there and read, but without any distractions just doing that uninterrupted for hours on end is a joy. On the way up there (on the way up on Monday at 6am!) I was able to read Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer from cover to cover and on the way back it was the turn of Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell.

These long train journeys/read-a-thons were a perfect way to bookend four exciting days at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Thanks to the fantastic Arts Council, East project East to Edinburgh which provided excellent accommodation right in the city centre, I was able to experience the sights, sounds, and general ambiance of Edinburgh in August. It is no exaggeration to say I have never been anywhere like it. You cannot walk down the street without encountering a Fringe venue and an army of flierers, or have a meal out in the evening without being startled by the flyby aeroplanes and fireworks of the military tattoo.

And then, right in the midst of it all, there is this haven of literary adventure which takes place in a park on a roundabout just off Princes Street. Even with the traffic droning all about you and the occasional gust of wind or lashing of rain buffeting at the very fabric of the tent you are in, it is a relaxing, thought provoking place to be. Over the course of the festival I believe somewhere in the region of seven hundred events take place. While I was there I managed to catch twelve of them, seeing nineteen different writers sharing their excellent work. I had not seen any of them before and came away wondering exactly how we could programme them all into our next year or so of events. Particular highlights included:

· The eclectic and entertaining ‘reading’ given by French rock star Mathias Malzieu on his new book, The Boy with the Cuckoo Clock Heart.

· Hearing two readings from Emily Ballou’s enthralling new collection. The Darwin Poems manages to tell a story about Darwin and his family which is well characterised, funny and thought provoking at the same time.

· New Writing Ventures winner Eleanor Thom reading from her debut novel, The Tin Kin, which including some enthralling passages being read by members of her family.

· Newly appointed UEA Writing Fellow Jeremy Page reading alongside Joseph Boyden. They seemed almost as impressed with each other as the audience was with their work.

· Kate Summerscale in conversation about her hugely successful and thoroughly exciting work of creative non-fiction, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher.

I had to remain constantly vigilant to stop myself going into the Bookshop tent after every reading and splashing out on another big pile of books. But the great thing about visiting Edinburgh is that it is not just the authors and their books which allow you to enter different worlds. The city itself is like no other I have been to. You can be walking along cobbled streets around the castle one minute, with fairy tale houses rising high on either side and the smell of yeast wafting in from the breweries. Then you turn a corner and suddenly, rearing up in front of you so close you feel you could reach out and touch it, there is a vast cliff face. Around another corner you come across a sweeping vista across the Firth of Forth. It is a beautiful land to visit, where aged buildings rise up from the landscape itself, as though they are each a part of the a great timeless story. You can see why few cities have inspired such a preponderance of top writers. It will be an honour and a delight if Norwich is able to join Edinburgh as an UNESCO City of Literature soon.

But back to there (recently) here and now. It rained during much of my time there, but even wet shoes couldn’t dampen the mood. I met old friends and former colleagues, wondered aimlessly for hours on end, and even found the time to visit some Fringe events as well. A big thanks to Luke Wright whose show, The Petty Concerns of Luke Wright, is attracting rave reviews from all who see it, myself included. He even took time off from a busy schedule to join me for lunch and provide a personal guide to the Edinburgh Fringe while pushing a buggy through the busy streets of the Royal Mile.

There is just so much to discover. And the Book Festival isn’t the only scene of literary adventure. The Edinburgh Book Fringe takes place at a small independent bookshop on West Nicholson Street. I picked up a brochure and saw that there was a launch event for the new Scottish Writers’ Centre, an exciting young organisation with big ambitions for the future of writing in Scotland. I went along and had a mutually beneficial discussion with them which gave me a host of ideas to consider for the future. Then there is Utter!, a daily selection of words in a small bar just off George Street. The night I went to was on the theme of Political writing with three poets offering their take on politics, literature, and pretty much everything in between. I was particularly impressed by poet Jenny Lindsay who stood out and appears to have lots of potential indeed. Check her our if you get the chance.

All in all it was a wonderful week. I just wish I could have stayed a few days more! But in case you are planning an jaunt to Edinburgh in the next week or so, here are my top tips for getting the most out of your trip.

1. Go to the free Ten @ Ten readings each morning and follow them up with Wake up With Words in the Spiegeltent. Although the latter is pricey at £9 you get complimentary coffee and as many cinnamon buns you can eat. The readings aren’t bad either.

2. Go to The Bookshop after 3pm one day and treat yourself to an individual pecan pie. In the immortal words of William Carlos Williams (as referenced in Hannah Walker’s Escalator Showcase) “they were delicious”.

3. Collect a free copy of The Times in the entrance pavilion each morning and read it sat around the statue while soaking up the atmosphere. Maybe the sun will even shine if you are lucky.

4. Chat to the person next to you. I met some fascinating people while waiting for talks to start.

5. Pick up a leaflet and check out The Edinburgh Book Fringe.

6. Take a walk up Arthur’s Seat. It takes about an hour but the views are stunning.

7. And remember, the great thing about Edinburgh in August is that there are five concurrent festivals taking place. Check them all out. To quote Mr. Elton John: ‘there is more to see than can ever be seen, more to do than can ever be done.’

I think I’ll leave it there…

Summertime - J.M. Coetzee

This review first appeared on Vulpes Libris where I write a guest review on the first wednesday of every month.

Read: August 2009

Summertime in one tweet-sized chunk:
Summertime is an engaging and illuminating book that spans the boundary between fiction and biography. Coetzee's best since Youth.

"31 May 1975

South Africa is not formally in a state of war, but it might as well be. As resistance has grown, the rule of law has step by step been suspended. The police and the people who run the police (as hunters run packs of dogs) are by now more or less unconstrained. In the guise of news, radio and television relay the official lies. Yet over the whole sorry, murderous show there hangs an air of staleness. The old rallying cries – Uphold white Christian civilization! Honour the sacrifices of the forefathers! – lack all force. We, or they, or we and they both, have moved into the endgame, and everyone knows it."

Summertime is the third of John Coetzee's fictionalised autobiographies, taking up its story ten years after Youth. Following the premature end to his six years in America, John has returned to South Africa to live in a dilapidated shack on the outskirts of Cape Town with his father. He is chastened by his experiences abroad, embarrassed by the country he has had to return to. It may be titled Summertime, but this is no tale of a man in the prime of his life. The Coetzee we meet here is lonely and frustrated, uncomfortable with almost everything about who he is and where he lives. The decade since Youth seems not to have changed him much, save that perhaps the hint of optimism which illuminated the ending of that work seems now to be thoroughly extinguished.

The biggest change from Boyhood and Youth, is in the structure of this work. Whereas they followed a straight forward linear narrative told through an incisive third person singular voice, Summertime sees a more stylistically adventurous approach. It is narrated by a young biographer who is writing a biography of the late John Coetzee. He decides to focus on the period between 1972 and 1977 when, he suspects, Coetzee was finding himself as a writer. In order to get an idea of the man he was, the biographer embarks upon a series of interviews with people who were significant to him at this time, whether they knew themselves to be or not. Through their stories emerges an impression of a less than ordinary man, an eternal outsider: shy, recalcitrant, uncomfortable in his own skin, his family, and his country. He takes up dancing to try to woo a women only to make a fool of himself; he is regarded with mistrust by his family; he struggles valiantly (though ineffectively) to assuage the guilt he feels about the society around him. We see him engaging in manual labour as penitence for his countries long history of “making other people do our work for us while we sit in the shade and watch.” He mends his own car, badly, leading to an awkward and cold night alone in the middle of nowhere with his cousin Margot. He takes up brickwork to protect the house from rainwater. His love of the Coetzee family estate in the Karoo remains as passionate as ever it was in Boyhood but everywhere else he is lost. South Africa has become a “loud angry place.”

Yet the problem is he does not belong anywhere. He has tried England and struggled, been rejected citizenship in the United States. For better or worse South Africa seems to be the only place that will have him. So he channels his frustrations, fears, and tentative hopes into his writing. While we do not get much of a view of Coetzee the writer, his passion occasionally pokes its way through his flaccid persona. At one point he tells a women with whom he is having a passionless affair: “There is always something or other I am working on...If I yielded to the seduction of not working what would I do with myself? What would there be to live for? I would have to shoot myself.” At another he describes books as a “gesture of refusal in the face of time. A bid for immortality.” Yet despite this there seems little evidence of the writer he will become. As one of the women states: “How can you be a great writer if you are just an ordinary little man?”

Summertime is a fascinating portrait of life, and like most lives it is full of contradiction and dichotomy. It is biographical in most of its content yet largely fictional in the manner of its telling. It is meant to be about one man, but spends more time being about other people. The story is largely told by women who he felt were significant in his life, yet there is no passion there whatsoever. Then there is the contradictory title itself. But far from spoiling the portrait, the result of all this dichotomy is a stunning character study which manages to present a compelling and vivid account of a man stuck in a rut, struggling to find his place in a society in which he doesn't want to fit in. Through the eyes of the other characters we get fascinating little insights into his character. One of the most enthralling pieces comes from a former colleague at the University of Cape Town who reflects upon his political standpoint, shedding light on the always present basis of his fiction.

“'He thought that politics bought out the worst in people. It brought out the worst in people and also brought to the surface the worst types in society. He preferred to have nothing to do with it...'”

“What would have been Utopian enough for him?” the interviewer persists.

“'The closing down of the mines. The ploughing under of the vine-yards. The disbanding of the armed forces. The abolition of the automobile. Universal vegetarianism, Poetry in the streets. That sort of thing...'

'In other words, poetry and the horse-drawn cart and vegetarianism are worth fighting for, but not liberation from apartheid?'

Nothing is worth fighting for...because fighting only prolongs the cycle of aggression and retaliation.”

It is a wonderful passage, reminiscent of that beautiful phrase towards the beginning of Waiting for the Barbarians in which his narrator reflects: “I believe in peace, perhaps even peace at any price.” It is this sort of simple-yet-laden-with-significance phrase which has marked Coetzee's career. He has that uncanny Hemingway-esque knack of striping things to their very essence and presenting them clearly, functionally, yet poetically.

That is why Coetzee's recent experimentation with complicated structure do not suit his work. As in Diary of a Bad Year the style serves only to hamper his fluent and poignant prose. The shifts in narration jar the reader. The most evocative and enjoyable passages are those annotated diary entries which make up the beginning and end of the book. Through them we travel back in time to a South Africa present in much of his fiction, a South Africa in which social atrocity is reflected in individual guilt, where things change yet everything seems to stay the same.

Most of all Summertime recounts the plateau in John Coetzee's life, before literary success transformed everything. It is a period in which he seems to be living the fate he always felt destined to live: “with an ageing parent in a house in the white suburbs with a leaky roof.” There is no sense that anything at all is about to change. And with his father just diagnosed with cancer, the book ends with the probability of many further years of struggle:

“It used to be that he, John, had too little employment. Now that is about to change. Now he will have as much employment as he can handle, as much and more. He is going to have to abandon some of his personal projects and be a nurse. Alternatively, if he will not be a nurse, he must announce to his father: I cannot face the prospect of ministering to you day and night. I am going to abandon you. Goodbye. One of the other: there is no third way.”

Summertime is over. Coetzee is about to achieve his first mainstream success with In the Heart of the Country. It is all beautifully set up for volume four of these wonderful fictionalised autobiographies. Summertime is the best book Coetzee has written since Youth was published seven years ago. It does not matter that there are big gaps which do not fit the reality of his biography. An entire marriage may have been wiped from the record books, as it was in Youth, but that only serves to make the blurring of fact and fiction more poignant. In style and character, one gets the feeling that this portrayal is true to the man Coetzee feels himself to be. It is this self aware honesty which has made his autobiographies such a joy to read. They take the ability to convey what it is like to be alive which is prevalent in all the best fiction and match it with a clarity of thought and analysis derived from biography and mesh them together. The result is a thoroughly readable account of the life of one of our greatest contemporary writers. I just hope a fourth volume is not too long coming.

7.5 out of 10

The Black Prince - Iris Murdoch

This review first appeared on Vulpes Libris where I write a guest review on the first wednesday of every month.

Read: July 2009

The Black Prince in one Tweet sized chunk:
There is a period in the middle when The Black Prince is one of the most romantic works I have read.

“Art is not cosy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.”

So concludes The Black Prince, Iris Murdoch's fifteenth novel which many consider her best. It is a fascinatingly strange novel, slippery and difficult to put down. Part metaphysical enquiry into the nature of art and truth, part romantic liaison, part psychological thriller. You read it engrossed, though at times wonder why. The characters are often unappealing: petty middle class middle age creatures driven by duplicity and jealousy. Yet they are comprehensively drawn and engaging. Murdoch masterfully constructs her plot to rework aspects of Hamlet and bookends it with forewords and postscripts by the characters which counterpoint, clarify, and question what has taken place. The prose is smooth and natural, and the imagery wonderfully symbolic.

Yet it starts out slowly. Murdoch never allowed anyone to edit her work and at times this results in awkwardly paced, idiosyncratically phrased works. The first two hundred pages amble along as Bradley Pearson, recently retired from a career as an Inspector of Taxes, dreams of retreating to the country to write his magnum opus. Yet at every turn he is beset by complications. He bickers with his 'protégé' Arnold Baffin about approaches to writing, is drawn into a strange passionless affair by Arnold's wife Rachel, and tutors their daughter Julian. He is pursued by his ex-wife Christian and her sycophantic brother Frances, and has his depressed sister turns up on his door having left her husband. Poor Bradley, it would be enough to make anyone feel sorry for him. But he is self-absorbed, fastidious, and pompous. He deals with it all in a distracted, unsympathetic and distant manner. He seems to care not a jot for the suffering of others. He is not the most endearing of characters.

And then, just as you are beginning to wonder whether the plot is actually going anywhere, Eros appears with his little bow and arrow and hits old Bradley square in the middle of his heart. He is transformed: softened by love, perfected by love, inspired by love. The apple of his eye is the twenty-year-old Julian Baffin and although at first he proudly determines to maintain their purity by keeping his feelings to himself, it soon turns out that she feels the same way. After a wonderfully demonstrative scene outside the Royal Opera House where each lays their soul on the line they engage in a whirlwind romance. They are like teenagers, effusively professing the never before experienced wonder of total love. Theirs is a romance to change the world, heal wounds, produce great works of art. The Black Prince becomes one of the most romantic works of literature I have read. Their mutual craving for each other takes the breath away, the hesitant heat between them is hard to resist. Bradley subtitles his memoir 'A Celebration of Love' and that is exactly what it is. He ruminates long on the nature of love, is as passionate and erudite as Nabakov at his best.

“When sexual desire is also love it connects us with the whole world and becomes a new mode of experience. Sex then reveals itself as the great connective principle whereby we overcome duality, the force which made separateness as an aspect of oneness at some moment of bliss in the mind of God. I yearned absolutely, yet I had never felt more relaxed in my life.”

These are wonderful passages which convey a great deal yet seem not a dent in the wider luminescence of their love. Julian, in her youthful eagerness reciprocates this all and more. She is the driving force and initiator for all that takes place. Their conversations are filled with uncertainty, hopefulness, disbelief. It all conforms to such a perfect romantic fantasy that one cannot help but wonder if it is not a figment of Bradley's imagination.

The unreliable narrator features in much of Iris Murdoch’s work. Indeed, Bradley’s first line marks him out as inherently unreliable:

“Although several years have now passed since the events recorded in this fable, I shall in telling it adopt the modern technique of narration, allowing the narrating consciousness to pass like a light along its series of present moments, aware of the past, unaware of what is to come...So for example I shall say, 'I am fifty-eight years old', as I then was. And I shall judge people, inadequately, perhaps even unjustly, as I then judged them, and not in the light of any later wisdom.”

Throughout what follows these words combine with Murdoch's reputation to leave the reader eternally unsure as to whether everything, or indeed anything, that Bradley Pearson recounts is correct. You read on, heart beating wildly, worried that these emotions you have inscribed the characters with might not turn out to be tangible. Worse still, you fear that something horrible might be about to happen at any moment, that if he is deluding himself it might all suddenly crash down with tragic repercussions.

Tension builds. I will not concede how it ends, though unseen and delightfully symmetrical twists occur. The greatest achievement of The Black Prince is in the fact that Murdoch plays with the reader’s expectations, intuits them, and replies with a second level of uncertainty and unreliability. The main plot of the novel is followed by four brief postscripts which allow the main characters a chance to respond to the events recounted by Bradley. On the surface it would seem that they might serve only to clarify Bradley’s unreliability, but in the way they are presented, the hard-nosed, broker no argument tone of voice, there are enough holes to make their version of events at least as dubious as Bradley’s own narrative. The result is that the reader comes away wondering whether perhaps, despite everything, his narration might be more accurate than we previously suspected. It all comes back to the quote at the beginning: Bradley’s truth, by being turned into literature, becomes the only truth that matters.

The Black Prince is a very fine work of psychological fiction by one of the most daring writers of the twentieth century. It fuses philosophical discussion with structural creativity. The pitching of the narration is faultless. At its heart it is about the transforming quality of love, its power to change, not only life, but consciousness too. It is a strange feeling at once to dislike yet love the characters. The book is at least as infuriating as it is delightful and it is this which makes it so rewarding. Somehow the faults become positives and the lasting impression is of a book which, in spite itself, warms the cockles of the heart.

8.5 out of 10

Norwich North By-election - an attempt to make sense of the noise

The Norwich North by-election is tomorrow and the flyers have been flooding in. So, in the interest of making sense of this barrage of information I have decided to take a brief break from discussing books to try and condense these flyers into more manageable, bitesize chunks.

Here is my utterly pointless guide to the candidates and Party’s competing in this by-election.

Total number of Party Political fliers found in my bin as of Tuesday 21st July, 2009. Otherwise known as the 'most profligate paper wasting party of the past week' competition.
In reverse order:
None of the Above – 1
Libertarian – 1
UKIP – 2
BNP – 2
Greens – 2
Craig Murray-Put an Honest Man in Parliament – 2 (including a DVD)
Labour – 4
Conservatives – 5
Liberal Democrats – 7

Ah but the important question – what are they saying? Well, it seems to be a largely negative campaign again. But to help me make up my mind, and perhaps help you make up your mind too (Well, a blogger has to dream, doesn’t he?) here they are, simplified and presented in the above order.


None of the Above:
Website: http://www.noneoftheaboveparty.org.uk/
Style of communique: Accusatory of current democratic system. Proposal for reform
Central Message: Get ‘None of the Above’ included on each ballot paper.

Policies:
The opportunity to vote for 'None of the Above' in an election should be a fundamental aspect of healthy democracy. It would separate apathy from antipathy in a quantifiable manner. Voters would decide the fate of political parties' choices instead of the parties themselves deciding the voters choices. All legitimate consent requires the ability to withhold consent 'None Of The Above' gives the voter the ballot option to withhold consent from an election to office.

Additional notes:
Leaflet includes a poem entitled 'The Honourable Shysters'. It is not very good, (apparently 'risk' rhymes with 'mick') but at least it is an attempt at creativity.

All in all:
I agree with the issue and would like to see None of the Above on the ballot paper. It turns negative apathy into a positive reflection of someone's political standpoint. However, that is no reason to vote for them at the polling booth.


Libertarian
Website: www.lpuk.org
Style of communique: Conversational.
Central Message: Inherited debt: no thanks

Policies: Reduction in government intrusion on individual lives through:
• Healthcare. Reducing bureaucracy in the NHS to give doctors, nurses etc more time caring for patients.
• Education. Create a system in which parents can decide which schools are desirable, rather than the Local Education Authority.
• Freedoms: Repeal the invasive legislation that undermines Common Law and the right to privacy.

Additional Notes:
The candidate, Thomas Burridge is eighteen years old and identifies himself as from the Debt Generation.

All in all:
While I agree that recent years have seen an increasingly worrying invasion of civil liberties, I do not believe that reducing government will do anything other than leave the most vulnerable members of society worse off.


UKIP
Website: www.ukip.org
Style of communique: The candidate, Glenn Tingle, is a good person - businessman, charity worker, former army medic.
Central Message: Vote Glenn Tingle for a Clean Start
Policies:
Reverse the decline in society by:
• Controlling EU immigration. Anti-racist but believes that 1000 new arrivals every day is unacceptable.
• A fair deal for pensioners. UK should stop paying £40million a day to the EU and start helping our hard-hit pensioners with a non-means tested and non-taxable weekly Citizens' Pension.
• Help for working people. Tax cute for all low earners and no tax for those earning less than £10,000. Complicated forms and tax credits scrapped. British workers to have a fair crack at British job opportunities.
• Less EU control of our lives. Only UKIP will say no to allowing 75% of our laws to come from the EU.
• A clean start on MP's expenses. Glenn Tingle is a 'real person' rather than a 'career politician'. If elected he will NOT buy a second home and will donate 10% of his gross salary to local charities.

Additional notes:
The flyers are an eye catching, though garish bright purple and yellow colour.

All in all:
The large billboards just down the road have had 'anti-Nazi' graffiti scrawled across them. I do not like UKIP, and would never vote for them. But whether it is a gimmick or not, the offer to donate 10% of salary to charities is an honourable policy.


British National Party
Website: www.bnp.org.uk
Style of communique: Friendly nationalism.
Central Message: “Because it's not racist to oppose mass immigration and political correctness – it's common sense.”
Policies:
• Housing local people first. Against the Gateway Protection Programme which sends asylum seekers granted refugee status to Norwich. Norwich already has “150 Africans”(!) housed in Norwich while local people are on housing waiting lists.
• More Police on the Street. Remove 'politically correct' and bureaucratic handcuffs from the police to let them spend more time 'on the beat'.
• No To Asylum Seekers. Asylum seekers come 'here' and get everything handed to them on a plate. 'Enough is Enough', it's time to put British people first.
• Reduce the Tax Burden. Those earning less than £15,000 a year to be exempt from income tax. Halt any future increase in Council Tax.
• Protect our countryside. Stop the destruction of our precious countryside and preserve the Greenbelt.
• Lets Build a Better NHS. Increase the pay for British nurses and cut the expensive layers of middle management.
• Clamp down on Anti-Social Yobs. Police action to make the streets safe.

Additional notes:
Reverend Robert West is a former Conservative district councillor, soldier, and lecturer on Religion and Society.

All in all:
The detestable face of the BNP, which seems not to understand (or thinks the population is too stupid to know) the difference between immigrants and asylum seekers. Inherently racist in the language it uses and the policies it promotes, divisive, and making use of meaningless catchphrases such as “political correctness” and “common sense”, this is a muddled and vile proposal for the future of Norwich.


Green Party
Website: www.rupertread.net www.standup.uk.com
Style of communique: Serious, impassioned.
Central Message: Standing up for what’s right.
Policies:
• Reforming Parliament. Expenses system that cannot be abused. Controls on lobbying of politicians by big business. MP’s who are focused on representing their constituents, not on perusing second careers.
• Creating jobs in green industries. Investment in green industries such as home insulation, renewable energy and public transport to create ‘green jobs’. A greener economy would “save people money, create new jobs and help prevent dangerous climate change.”
• Stopping privatisation of the NHS and schools. Stop more privatisation and ensure we have high quality services available in every local community.

Additional notes:
The most impressive and comprehensive list of cross party support of any candidate, including Vicky Hopkins, former Lib Dem Councillor for Mousehold, and Andy Panes, former Labour Councillor for Mile Cross.

All in all:
A pretty bland and uninspiring flyer, and one which makes a lot of the expenses scandal to score cheap points. But I did receive a more interesting flier earlier in the campaign which contained other promises, including I believe free insulation to all households. Rupert Read is an intelligent and thoughtful person and his performance on the televised debate was the most impressive of the lot. I will be voting Green, as I now often tend to. I have friends who are passionate abut the Green cause and I think Rupert would be a good MP.
That said, just because the Greens may be the most left-wing of the centre-left options in this election, they are by no means left wing. It would be nice to have a little more choice.


Craig Murray
Website: n/a
Style of communique: Big, brash, eye catching, and multimedia.
Central Message: Put an honest man into Parliament
Policies:
• I will protect the environment. Opposing the Government’s shameful decision to abandon much of Norfolk’s coastline. Developing a green economy with potential in Norfolk for wind, wave, tidal, current, and solar power, all of which can generate jobs as well as energy.
• I will not vote for illegal wars. I resigned as a British Ambassador over the false intelligence which led to the war in Iraq. If I am elected I will never vote to invade another country that is not attacking us. It is such behaviour that leads to an increase in international hostility to the UK and thus makes us less safe.
• I will work for you, and only you. As a British Ambassador I was well known for helping individuals who were suffering problems and injustice. I am not a politician, I will be open and honest with you and intervene with the authorities to help you.
• I will support good public services. The private sector should be free to make money and the public sector should provide first class services. Gordon Brown’s crazy attempts to mix the two are disastrous. We need a streamlined and strengthened public sector delivering efficient public services, including a reintegrated Post Office and Royal Mail, and a re-unified rail system.
• I will support jobs and low tax. High taxes damage economic activity and destroy job opportunities. I would abolish company taxes for the first five years for all new companies employing more than five people and make the basic rate of income tax 20% on the first £20,000 of income. I would slash hundreds of billions of pounds from Government spending by cancelling Trident, the ID cards scheme, and the Private Finance Initiative.

Additional notes:
Craig Murray has had the most visible campaign and I applaud his commitment to debate by holding a series of public meetings over the past few weeks. Other Party’s may also have done this, but I haven’t heard of them.

All in all:
I thoroughly agree with some of his policies, particularly the cancelling of Trident and the ID cards scheme, his opposition to all aggressive wars, and his tax policies. His fliers provide the most comprehensive discussion of his beliefs and policies. However, I dislike his ‘honest man’ moniker which is tacky, reactionary, and appeals to the lowest common denominator.


Labour
Website: http://www.labour.org.uk/
Style of communique: Friendly, approachable
Central Message: Standing up for a better Norwich North
Policies:
I honestly do not know. His flyers are all about what he has done in the past rather than what he will do in the future. They celebrate what Labour and Ian Gibson have done in power, and scare-monger against the Conservatives. So, in place of policies, here is a selection of things his fliers mention:
• Tackling anti-social behaviour. Chris brought Justice Secretary Jack Straw to visit a local bar which is doing its bit with a zero-tolerance approach to drugs and giving young people more to do.
• Supporting the NHS. Thanks to Labour, in the last year 64 GP practices in Norfolk have started to offer evening and weekend opening and the number of doctors has almost doubled since 1997.
• Helping the elderly. Labour has done a lot for pensioners, for example the £60 cash boost which has benefitted over 20,000 pensioners here in Norwich North but was opposed by the Tories.
• Sure Start. Labour has opened seven Sure Start Children’s Centres in Norwich which are under threat from a Conservative victory.
• Protecting jobs in Norwich in the global economic downturn.
• Protecting our environment. Chris brought Environment Secretary Hilary Benn to Norwich to meet with local people.


Additional notes:
Poor Chris seems to have contracted Swine Flu at just the wrong time. However, Labour’s publicity is entirely negative and doesn’t offer one iota of inspiration or any policy to get behind.

All in all:
So uninspiring there is not much else to say really. Labour want to appear the only serious opportunity to stop the Conservatives winning and as such do a good job of discrediting Chloe Smith. But politics should be about positive voting for what you believe rather than to prevent someone else winning, and this is the most uninspired campaign of them all.


Conservatives
Website: www.chloesmith,org,uk http://www.conservatives.com/
Style of communique: Critical of Labour failures, friendly, willing to listen.
Central Message:
Policies:
As with Labour I am not entirely sure. However, it is clear what they are NOT going to do. Contrary to popular claims they will not:
• Cut spending where Labour would not.
• Close Sure Start centres
• Cut pensions, pension credits, free TV licences, winter fuel allowances and free bus passes for the elderly
• Cut police numbers

One area they do have policies in is helping in the recession where they would:
• Create a simple National Loan Guarantee Scheme to help get credit flowing again and save jobs.
• Freeze council tax for two years, worth £233 for a typical family in Norwich.
• Offer tax breaks to companies which create new jobs, and cuts in National Insurance and corporation tax for all small companies.
• Offer up to £6500 worth of energy efficiency improvements for every household, saving energy and reducing bills.
• Abolish stamp duty for nine out of ten first-time home buyers

Additional notes:
I was very impressed that one flyer included a survey of issues and ideas. Whether this is a gimmick or not I don’t know, but it is the sort of positive canvassing of opinions which I value and which I wish other parties had done more of.

All in all:
The Conservatives have sought to argue that they alone are running a positive campaign in this election but that is not exactly true. While other party’s have certainly sought to attack Chloe Smith personally for her background and relationship to Norwich, she has hardly run a positive campaign herself. One flier is completely focused on Labour’s failings, whilst they are keen to present this as a straight battle with Labour. This belittling of the smaller parties chances is unhelpful and unwarranted.
The Conservatives have done a good job in presenting themselves as inclusive and friendly. They have managed to appear open to discussion in a way that the other main party’s have not. They are likely to win. But I wont be voting for them.


Liberal Democrats
Website:
Style of communique: Personality based. April Pond as an animal loving local women with Norwich’s interests at heart. The Greens can’t win. Only the Liberal Democrats can stop the Conservatives winning.
Central Message: From Norwich for Norwich – Only April Pond has the real experience to deliver real change.

Policies:
I have 7 different flyers/letters/newspapers from the Liberal Democrats and none of them explain what they are standing for. Ah, that is not entirely true, hidden in the middle of a letter, they offer these few general policy ideas:
• A million new green jobs created to help us out of the recession
• Help for small shops on our high streets
• To make homes greener and improve public transport
• 100% of UK’s electricity sources come from renewable energy
• Tax cuts to help local families
• Dualling of the A11 and better transport links to rebuild our local economy.
However, most of these are vague hopes rather than actual policies. So in place of policies, I will share some of the reasons presented for why we should vote for the Liberal Democrats
• From Norwich for Norwich. April Pond grew up in Norwich and has raised her own family here. She has un many successful small businesses in the City.
• April has a record of campaigning for our local health services.
• April will work to clean up politics. She will help mend our broken political system and clean up politics.
• Strong local champion for local jobs and our environment.


Additional notes:
By far and a way the most persistent of all the party’s, the Liberal Democrats have been phoning local residents, dropping a seemingly never ending stream of flyers and newspapers and letters through letter boxes and generally campaigning hard for this seat.
Of the main Party’s, the Liberal Democrats have been most focused on the capabilities of their candidate, April Pond, more than others. There has been virtually nothing about wider Liberal Democrat policies as far as I can tell.

All in all:
Probably the most negative of all the campaigns, the Liberal Democrats hope to win with a mixture of anti-Conservative scare-mongering, playing down the Green challenge, and presenting April Pond as the only local candidate with a chance of winning. Although I like her love of animals, that is not nearly enough reason to vote for someone.


So there we have it. A load of posturing mumbo jumbo about MPs expenses and bickering about irrelevant negative issues such as where someone is from. This has been a largely negative campaign which suffers from a lack of left wing alternative. However, there are few places in the UK in which a fourth party could challenge the main Party’s as hard as the Green’s will in Norwich North. The there major Party’s are scared of this challenge, that is why they are so clearly putting them down.

However, having written all that, however, I am still uncertain about who I shall vote for. Craig Murray or the Green Party. I will decide tonight.

My Reading Mojo

This was written as a response to an article on Vulpes Libris charting the evolution of someone's reading habits over the years. I found it fascinating and decided to do the same...

Up until about age 14 I read all the time. It started with reading with my dad at bedtime to practice my reading but soon I had proved that I could read and got to sit back while he read to me. We read all sorts of environmentally friendly children's adventure books: the likes of Michael Morpurgo, the Greenwatch series, books about whaling by someone with the surname Smith. I remember regularly reading late into the night, particularly Matilda by Roald Dahl which I must have read 4 or 5 times. I read to escape, not because my childhood was hard but because the other worlds in those books were so fantastically exciting. The books helped me understand the world, learn what it was I most valued, and ultimately have a mighty great time doing it.

My big Eureka! moment also came with Lord of the Rings when I was 10 or 11. I had started it with my dad but soon the one chapter a night got too slow for me so I began taking it to school and reading on wet lunch breaks and the like. I flew though the last 400 pages or so and loved every single minute of it.

This sort of thing continued for the first year or two of secondary school before being overtaken by computer games (football management games proved the death of reading for me) and staring inanely at sport on the TV. I wasn't a particularly sociable teenager so it wasn't girls or alcohol which was responsible for this, probably just the overriding sense that reading wasn't the cool thing to be doing. Still, I had a 25 minute train journey to school every morning which had to be filled with something and I occasionally read during this (Christian Jacques Ramses series and a few others) but reading was more to fill time than anything else.

During GCSE's and A-Levels revision I read my set texts again and again. I must have read Lord of the Flies and Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence 4 or 5 times so that come the exams I loved them in an intellectual sense even if I didn't in an emotional sense. And all this enforced reading took its toll. When it came to university I didn't want to be told to read any more classics so I applied to study history.

A month before I started university I was sitting around home quite bored and decided to give Harry Potter a go. 6 days later I had read the first 4 books in a haze of adventurous excitement and for the next year or two everything I read was overshadowed by love of those books. Not that I remember successfully reading much else, other than a complete re-reading of Lord of the Rings, that is. I had a tough time personally and remember going to the campus bookshop one morning when I hadn't been able to sleep all night and buying the boxset which I then went back to my room and read one after the other again in about 8 days. I would read fansites and get breathlessly excited just discussing what might happen next, watched the movies slightly obsessively, and even used to buy the candy. (Yes, I was 19 or 20 at the time!)

That summer I had the reading, and life experience (I met the wonderful woman who later became my wife), which changed me. Having found another amazing fantasy world through Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials I read Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being and found intellectual, post-modernist, adult fiction which made my mind swim with ideas.

I would talk with Megan about the books we liked for hours. She had been a complete bibliophile as a child and read all the classics which I hadn't so she was like a beacon of the person I wanted to become. She opened my mind to all sorts of new reading possibilities and I hungrily devoured them. But as university got closer to the end, and then through my masters, I found that I was reading too many history texts to think about fiction. The longer this went on, the more I looked forward to finishing with education so that I could read for pleasure once more. For about 6 months I spent my time planning what I would read when I had free choice once more.

And then, the day I handed in my masters dissertation I sat in the union bar and looked out the window to see that Waterstone's was seeking temporary booksellers. I applied, was interviewed, was not chosen. Not at first anyway. But after the first, second, and possibly third candidates turned it down they offered it to me and I jumped at the opportunity.

The 4 years I spent at Waterstone's were a veritable roller-coaster of literary discovery. Being surrounded everyday by so many wonderful books is an experience I shall never forget. But it ended in February of this year when I got a new office job and since then my reading mojo has definitely taken a downturn. This saddens me greatly, but I don't know to get it back.

Whether at the very heart of my life or simmering quietly on the back burner, reading has always been at the heart of my life and it is something I am incredibly grateful for.

The Knife of Never Letting Go

Really enjoying it.

Enough said.

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

Read: May 2009

I seem to spend a lot of my time praising novels for aspects like their ingenuity, their intelligence, their sheer descriptive prowess. And these are all important qualities in a book. But what I like best is a good story. A good story which surrounds me so completely that the action becomes more vivid than the physical world around me. I like to be inundated by the words in such an immediate sense that I feel their breeze against my skin and believe that I am an unseen ghostly presence hovering somewhere between the full stop and the start of the next sentence.

What I like about each of the Bronte novels I have read so far – Jane Eyre and now Wuthering Heights – is that they are just this: stories. And proper thick as warm porridge drenched in honey stories too. Stories to listen to enraptured around a camp fire, stories to read huddled with a torch under the duvet at 3am because you cannot sleep for thinking about what is going to happen next. Everything that is great about each of them lies in the quality of the story, in the beguiling narrative and engaging characters. It seems to me that cut off as they were from the literary milieu of London the Bronte's wrote stories to entertain themselves rather than demonstrate their worth as writers, wild flights of fancy as adventurous and exciting as any Don Quixote type epic adventure could ever be.

Wuthering Heights is the story of two deeply flawed individuals, Catherine and Heathcliff, of their mutual obsession and the destruction it wreaks upon all who know them. I don't know who it was that first advanced the idea of theirs being a great love story but I doubt they had ever actually read the book. And if they had, and this is their idea of love, then I am glad I wasn't anywhere near them. The story of Catherine and Heathcliff is one of two wilful people who seem unable either to live either with or without each other. As Cathy explains early on, "...he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same...I AM Heathcliff." They love and hate each other as they do themselves. At times they can barely stand to be together and at others they claw and scratch at each other as though trying to find a way to actually open up their bodies and climb inside each other. I think Kate Bush captures this odd relationship best:

“Out on the wily, windy moors
Wed roll and fall in green.
You had a temper like my jealousy:
Too hot, too greedy.
How could you leave me,
When I needed to possess you?
I hated you. I loved you, too.”

Wuthering Heights is a brooding psychological obsession/revenge/ghost story set against the domineering backdrop of the North York Moors. Plot, setting, and characters all have a sense of windswept wilderness to them. Heathcliff is the sort of libertine-esque highwayman who does what he likes in life knowing that no-one is going to stop him. The cold and calculating manner in which he enacts his vengeance makes for disturbing and uncomfortable reading. He is the bad man who gets away with it without remorse or shame. This lack of moral ambiguity makes him an enthralling character. And in her own histrionic, selfish, and spoiled way Catherine is just as bad. Wuthering Heights is the book I always wanted to read as a child, where roles are reversed and events don't follow the usual pattern of stories. The baddies not only capture the hero, but hang him mercilessly before escaping to hatch their next dastardly plan.

Emily Bronte doesn't care whether the reader likes her characters or not, makes no effort to justify or smooth their actions. The tale is merely placed on paper and left for the reader to make of it what they will. It is a masterpiece of controlled atmospheric storytelling and caustic characterisation. It is a wonderful read which I highly recommend to everyone.

9 out of 10

(There are many great reviews of Wuthering Heights out there. One of my favourites can be found here.)

A specific incident.

Of course I have always been aware that everything you write on the internet can be found with a simple Google search, but sometimes it takes a specific incident to really bring it home.

A specific incident like this.

I don't know what comes as more of a surprise: that someone out there actually read my blog, or that the passage of the review quoted actually sounds quite good. Since when were my thoughts that coherent?

But that makes me sound flippant and I do not feel flippant at all...

I hate that I may have been, in whatever tiny little way, responsible for making someone scared of fiction. I hate that I may have been, in whatever tiny little way, responsible for damaging the confidence of a writer.

That is not what I want.

That is not what I want at all.

It seems that the fiction I like is very different to the fiction Chris Killen likes. That is what this boils down to. Perhaps that and my blabbermouth inability to censor my opinions.

After all, what right do I have to knock the work of anyone who has actually managed to write and publish a novel?

Theoretically I have every right. But I havn't earned it.

Chris Killen warrants respect. I'm not sure I do.

I write reviews because it is easier, safer, and more manageable than sitting down to work on my own novel. I write reviews because they let me pretend to know what I am talking about. I write reviews because they help me fill the gaping chasms in my literary knowledge.

I write reviews for myself. I publish them here on the off chance someone may stop by and say 'oh my, this person is very talented: lets ask him to write for us.'

Silly, isn't it?

Goodnight ever watching eye of the internet.

And goodnight to the people sitting at their computers surfing through these ever increasing pages of noise. Sometimes it is easy to forget you are there.

The Call of the Wild and White Fang - Jack London

Read: January 2009

"It filled him with a great unrest and strange desires. It caused him to feel a vague, sweet gladness, and he was aware of wild yearnings and stirrings for he knew not what."

I had been intending to read Jack London for months before I actually got around to doing so. I can't remember exactly when he became the author I was most intrigued in, most wanted to read, but it was probably around the time I read Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild. Then Chris Stevens (the enigmatic DJ, artist and philosopher on the fantastic American drama show Northern Exposure) dedicated an entire episode to reading from 'The Call of the Wild' and 'White Fang' and I pretty much went straight out and bought it.

There is something about the tough, uncompromising wild which fascinates and inspires me. In my head the Alaskan wilds hold all sorts of romantic connotations and juvenile ideas of freedom, escape, and total peace. Perhaps because that sort of hard life is so completely alien to me, I feel it calling me in a way which is difficult to refuse. And this is only heightened having read these fantastically powerful depictions of life in the wild.

'The Call of the Wild' tells the story of Buck, a comfortable pet from California who is sold into the life of a pack dog in the frozen landscapes of Alaska. But after a tough few weeks Buck finds that he is in his element in that harsh cold climate and that the work tones his body, and fine tunes his entire system to function at peak physical condition. Up there in the wilds he can feel the ancestry of all the dogs who have come before him and as the call of the wild grows stronger he takes off on his own to join a pack of wolves.

'White Fang' shows the other side of the coin, following the life of a ferocious wolf who comes away from the wild to find safety in the employ of humans. Never tamed he remains a vicious and unbeatable fighter until a strange human shows him kindness and he finds companionship and peace. From pet to wild animal, wild animal to something approaching tame, Jack London uses the journey of these two tough but loveable animals to hold a mirror up to the wild side of human nature.

The skill with which he is able to get into the head of the animals and see life through their eyes is mind boggling. He doesn't personify them with human thoughts and emotions but gets inside their heads and looks at life as it might be like for them, with its own imperatives for life and intrinsic rules to be learned. Buck and White Fang and all the other dogs are proud and determined, adaptable and yet driven by a primordial force inside them, willing to relinquish control of their lives to the humans they view as gods, but only while it suits them. Never before have I seen the mind of an animal more fantastically interpreted than by Jack London in these two novellas.

They are a joy to read: beautifully described, excitingly plotted and providing fascinatingly savage insight into both the wildness and love which make up human nature. Although 'The Call of the Wild' probably has the more memorable passages and intrepid insight into the human condition, it is 'White Fang' which I enjoyed more. He is a character it is impossible not to love, even in the midst of his most vicious and terrifying moments. They are not cuddly, fuzzy, domesticated animals (these are no children's stories!) but with their independence of nature and strong will they remain thoroughly attractive, both as symbols of competing sides of human nature and characters in their own right.

"In this manner had fought forgotten ancestors. They quickened the old life within him, the old tricks which they had stamped into the heredity of the breed were his tricks... And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him."

8.5 out of 10