Books, Time, and Silence

Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels in quotes

2011-12-26T15:11:00.002Z

I'm writing a review of Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels today, and thought I'd share some of the raw passages that most caught my eye. It is a wonderful book, full of beautiful prose and wise insight.

Enjoy!

When I woke, my anguish was specific: the possibility that it was as painful for them to be remembered as it was for me to remember them; that I was haunting my parents and Bella with my calling, startling them awake in their black beds.

It’s no metaphor to feel the influence of the dead in the world, just as it’s no metaphor to hear the radiocarbon chronometer, the Geiger counter amplifying the faint breathing of rock, fifty thousand years old.

At sunrise the Parthenon is flesh. In moonlight it is bones.

Nothing is sudden. Not an explosion – planned, timed, wired carefully – not the burst door. Just as the earth invisibly prepares its cataclysms, so history is the gradual instant.

I already knew the power of language to destroy, to omit, to obliterate. But poetry, the power of language to restore: this was what both Athos and Kostas were trying to teach me.

While walking through the city, they discovered that they shared the same ideas about geography and pacifism, the belief that science must be used as a peace measure, what Taylor came to call his “geopacificsm.”

Does it matter if they were from Kielce or Brno or Grodno or Brody or Lvov or Turin or Berlin? Or that the silverware or one linen tablecloth or the chipped enamel pot – the one with the red stripe, handed down by a mother to her daughter – were later used by a neighbour or by someone they never knew? Or if one went first or last; or whether they were separated getting on the rain or off the train; or whether they were taken from Athens or Amsterdam or Radom, from Paris or Bordeaux, Rome or Trieste, from Parczew or Bialystok or Salonike. Whether they were ripped from their dinning-room tables or hospital beds or from the foest? Whether wedding rings were pried off their fingers or fillings from their mouths? None of that obsessed me; but – were they silent of did they speak? Were their eyes open or closed?
I couldn’t turn my anguish from the precise moment of death. I was focused on that historical split second: the tableau of the haunting trinity – perpetrator, victim, witness.
But at what moment does wood become stone, peat become coal, limestone become marble? The gradual instant.

To be proved true, violence need only occur once. But good is proved true by repetition.

Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can also learn to love another.

There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.

Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.

I'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances.

In Michaela's favourite restaurant, I lift my glass and cutlery spills onto the expensive tiled floor. The sound crashes high as the skylight. Looking at me, Michaela pushes her own silverware over the edge. I fell in love amid the clattering of spoons....

Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.

Reading a poem in translation," wrote Bialek, "is like kissing a woman through a veil"; and reading Greek poems, with a mixture of katharevousa and the demotic, is like kissing two women. Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what's between the lines, the mysterious implications.

When my parents were liberated, four years before I was born, they found that the ordinary world outside the camp had been eradicated. There was no more simple meal, no thing was less than extraordinary: a fork, a mattress, a clean shirt, a book. Not to mention such things that can make one weep: an orange, meat and vegetables, hot water. There was no ordinariness to return to, no refuge from the blinding potency of things, an apple screaming its sweet juice.

The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.

Sunday Supplement (on Tuesday...)

2011-12-13T10:18:00.004Z

I thought I had posted this on Sunday but it turns out I pressed save instead - never get a man to do a monkeys job... - so here is my slightly late contribution to the debate around the TS Eliot Prize.

When Alice Oswald and John Kinsella withdrew from the shortlist of the TS Eliot prize last week, citing a moral objection to the sponsorship by hedge fund firm Aurum, I instinctively supported their decisions. It may be easy to be cynical and say that Oswald particularly has gained more publicity having done so than she ever could have had she won the prize, but that is too glib an answer. Following one's moral convictions is never easy and acting upon them is vital to healthy debate accross society. We each have metaphorical lines in the sand that, when transgressed, we must oppose. And at the moment, I suspect their is lots of sympathy with the anti-investment bank and hedge fund stance they have taken. I'm personally uncomfortable with the fact that my football team, Totttenham Hotspur, are currently sponsored by two investment banks.

And yet. The more I have thought about it the less convinced I am of the value of Oswald and Kinsella's actions. Corporations are guilty of conducting many practices with which I disagee, and investment banks are one of those. They are a major step down from international arms traders who do only bring about destruction - at least investment banks have contributed to increasing wealth in the past, albeit in a morally questionable way - and, as such, in my books not as clear a target for protest, but there is little question that opposition to their actions can be justified on anti-capitalist lines. They are lines I support. And the Occupy action around the world targeted them effectively.

The problem I have is that Oswald and Kinsella's process will fall on deaf ears because it in no way hurts Aurum. It only hurts the Poetry Book Society - organisers of the award - at a time when the removal of Arts Council funding has already hit them hard. And in hurting PBS, this action also hurts the arts in general.

With a few limited exceptions, the arts in the UK are not financially sustainable without public funds or private sponsorship. Patronage is the only way many important programmes can exist. It is not ideal, but it is a reality and society is better for these programmes existing. The arts a major source of income for the UK, directly or indirectly we all benefit from investment in them. So to protest against patronage of the arts is both counter productive and to fight on the wrong terms. If our qualm with business is their socially irresponsible quest for profit over all else, then shouldn't we suppport sponsorship as a positive and socially resonsible practice and encourage more of it, rather than throwing it back in their faces?

Protest against Aurum. Protest against the inhumanity of the capitalist money-mindset, but if you are going to do so, do so in a way that hurts them. Take to the streets, protest for laws to prevent irresponsible investment practices. Or protest against cuts to arts budgets UK wide. But don't make an already difficult situation more difficult for the PBS. In doing so, they may turn other organisations away from a sponsorship that allows great art to happen.

Sunday Supplement - On the power of great art

2011-11-27T22:57:00.001Z

This morning I sat down to write my first Sunday Supplement fora few weeks. But as I was typing I heard the terrible news of the apparentsuicide of Gary Speed and talking cerebrally about literature lost its importance.I put the computer down and shed a tear as the Swanseaand Villa players marked their minute’s silence.

It is strange that the loss of a man I never met, who neverplayed for my team or directly impacted on my life, could leave me so utterlyshocked. But his has. Gary Speed was one of those consummate professionals thathave formed the bedrock of football over the last 20 years. Whether depressionis a cause here or not is still to be identified, but the fear is that thesilent killer has ensnared another person without anyone knowing. Loss of lifeis always tragic, when it is at your own hands it is even more so.

I have a tendency to over-identify with music. This eveninghas been one of those occasions. I’m WideAwake It’s Morning by Bright Eyes is an album I often turn to and itcaptures much of what I’m feeling today. That post-socialising dissolution whereyou fearfully remember every dumb thing you might have said and long forcompany to keep the fears at bay. The exhaustion that comes with a little toomuch alcohol, the Sunday morning pillow-day need for comfort and warmth. Andmost of all the shock of a life ended too soon.

Bright Eyes is a rare and brilliant poet-songwriter. Atheart he’s a beat poet, the spirit of Kerouac for a new millennium with a heartthat feels too much and wants from the world something it cannot give. Yetdisappointment never blunts his optimism for too long. There’s some Bob Dylanin him, too, and many others. Listening to this sublime album reminds me ofwonder of music.

I’m not like Bright Eyes. I’m a quiet and insular person andgenerally plough a pretty steady field. That’s what I love about art. Great artputs you in the body of another person and lets you see the world through theireyes and your eyes at the same time. Great art lets you be someone you are notand feel what it is like to be them.

Come tomorrow I’ll wake up excited to start the week. ButGary Speed will not. I’m not sure what the point of this blog is. Perhaps it is42.

Like life, sometimes things are just what they are.

Book Lovers' Quiz - November 2011

2011-11-22T17:25:00.001Z

I regularly team up with fellow blogger and all round bibliophilic good egg Norfolk Bookworm to host a book quiz at the Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library.

For those who can't be there, those who just like testing their quizzing acumen, and those wanting to test the water before booking, here are the questions. (Answers are in white below the question: highlight the - apparently - blank space to see them)

Enjoy! And good luck.

Round 1: ‘All theWorld is a birthday cake – so take a piece but not too much.’

George Harrison

1) At thestart of which book is the main character about to celebrate his eleventyfirst birthday?

A: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

2) “Doestthou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?” arelines from which Shakespeare play?

A: Twelth Night

3) WhichPulitzer Prize winning poet said “a diplomat is a man who always remembers awoman’s birthday but never remembers her age?

A: Robert Frost

4) WhichAustralian outlaw is the narrator of Peter Carey’s 2001 Book Prize winningnovel?

A: Ned Kelly

5)Geraldine Brooks’ 2001 novel Year ofWonder is about which devastating epidemic?

A: The 1665/66 Plague

6) Whichliterary bear entertains his guests at his own party with a series of magictricks – all of which go horribly wrong?

A: Paddington

7) Which2001 novel by UEA alumni Ian McEwen ends at the main characters 77^thbirthday party?

A: Atonement

8) Whichtelevision quiz show does the plot of David Nicholl’s 2003 book Starter for 10 revolve around?

A: University Challenge

9) Whichauthor’s novel And Then There Were Noneoriginally had a far more controversial title?

A: Agatha Christie

10) Whichplayright premiered his play The BirthdayParty in Cambridgein 1958?

A: Harold Pinter

Round 2: AnythingYou Can Do, I Kazoo Better

In this round, we read lines of dialogue from plays or film adaptations of books. However to make it harder the lines I read were replaced with a kazoo.

Identify the book and author for each of the following

SARAH: First principles,Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it initself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?

SAM:
SARAH: No. That isincidental. What is the first and principal thing he does? What needsdoes he serve by killing?

SAM:

SARAH: No! He covets. Thatis his nature. And how do we begin to covet, Clarice? Dowe seek out things to covet? Make an effort to answer now.

SAM:
SARAH: No. We begin bycoveting what we see every day. Don't you feel eyes moving over your body, Clarice?And don't your eyes seek out the things you want?

A: The Silence of the Lambs byThomas Harris

SARAH She's a replicant, isn't she?
SAM

SARAH          I don't get it, Tyrell.
SAM
SARAH          Twenty,thirty, cross-referenced.
SAM
SARAH          [realizingRachael believes she's human] She doesn't know.
SAM
SARAH          Suspect?How can it not know what it is?
A: Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep– Philip K Dick

SARAH I could have got moreout. I could have got more. I don't know. If I'djust... I could have got more.

SAM

SARAH If I'd made moremoney... I threw away so much money. You

have no idea. IfI'd just...

SAM
SARAH          I didn't do enough!
SAM               You did so much.

A: Schindler’s Arc by ThomasKeneally

SAM

SARAH Magic Mirror: Famed is thy beauty, Majesty. Buthold, a lovely maid I see. Rags cannot hide her gentle grace. Alas,she is more fair than thee.

SAM
SARAH          Magic Mirror: Lips red as the rose. Hair blackas ebony. Skin white as snow.
SAM

A: Snow White and the Seven Dwarvesby Brothers Grimm

SAM

SARAH I do bite my thumb, sir.

SAM

SARAH [Aside to GREGORY] Is the law of our side, if I say ay?

GUEST No.

SARAH No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir.

GUEST Do you quarrel, sir?

SAM

SARAH If you do, sir, I am for you: I serve as good a man as you.

A: Romeo and Juliet by WilliamShakespeare

Round 3: AmericanLiterature

1. Q: In which of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novels doesthe heroine Hester Prynne appear?

A: The Scarlet Letter

2. Q: Who wrote the classic anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin?

A: Harriet Beecher Stowe

3. Q: Which prolific American poet was perhaps bestknown for her dark novel The Bell Jar?

A: Sylvia Plath

4. Q: Who wrote the words, “Take thy beak from out myheart, and take thy form from off my door!' Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'”

A: Edgar Allan Poe

5. Q: Which author of A Moveable Feast and The SunAlso Rises was also an accomplished boxer?

A: Ernest Hemingway

6. Q: Which Jazz Age novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald endswith the lines: “And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne backceaselessly into the past.”

A: The Great Gatsby

7. Q: Which Cormac McCarthy novel won the 2007Pulitzer Prize for fiction?

A: The Road

8. Q: Who wrote the story of Holly Go-Lightly and herglamorous escapades in Breakfast at Tiffany’s?

A: Truman Capote

9. Q: What is the titular name of the protagonist inJohn Updike’s famous quartet of novels?

A: “Rabbit”

10. Q: WhichUpton Sinclair book is an exposé of themeat packing industry?

A: The Jungle

Round 4: Autumn

1) Whosepoem entitled ’To Autumn’ starts with the line: “season of mists and mellowfruitfulness””

A: John Keats

2) WhichEdith Wharton novel opens at Grand Central Station in September? (It was afairly recent film with Gillian Anderson)

A: Edith Wharton

3) ToveJansson’s autumn book about the Moomins is set in which month?

A:November

4) Whichcomic book series follows the story of a resurrected Guy Fawkes?

A: V for Vendetta

5) Whoor what is Fawkes in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series?

A: A phoenix

6) Whichauthor, who wrote the award winning GraveyardBook, celebrates his birthday today?

A: Neil Gaiman

7) WhichFirst World War poet wrote ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’?

A: Wilfred Owen

8) Lifeis defined as “a spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay” in whichdictionary?

A: The Devil’s Dictionary

9) TheHunt for Red October was released in cinemas in April 1990, but who wrote thebook it is loosely based on?

A: Tom Clancy

10) Which American author more famousfor his dystopian and science fiction novels wrote The Halloween Tree – achildren’s fantasy tale where 8 friends travel through time and spaceexperiencing Halloween in different times and cultures as they try to rescuetheir friend?

A: Ray Bradury

Table Round 1(total of 20 points)

Only ConnectConnecting Wall

(based on thepopular BBC4 quiz)

ThisConnecting Walls consist of 16 clues.

Youmust:

1– Sort the 16 clues into four connected groups of four

2– State what connects each of those four groups

Althoughsome groups might appear to have more than four possible answers, there is onlyone configuration that allows all clues to be sorted into four groups of four.This is what you are looking for.

Scoring:

3points for each correctly solved group

(1point for three identified from any individual group)

2points for each correctly identified connection

Arthur C Clarke	Ted Hughes	Lewis Carroll	Samuel Johnson
Margaret Mitchell	Ellis Bell	Harper Lee	Carol Ann Duffy
Stephen King	George Orwell	Mark Twain	Arundhiti Roy
Andrew Motion	Emily Bronte	John Betjeman	Roald Dahl

Poet Laureates –John Betjeman, Carol Ann Duffy, Ted Hughes, Andrew Motion

Female authors whoonly wrote one novel – Emily Bronte, Harper Lee, Margaret Mitchell, ArundhitiRoy

Authors who gavetheir names to Book Prizes – Arthur C Clarke (Sci Fi), Roald Dahl (Children’sfunny books), Samuel Johnson (BBC Non-Fiction), George Orwell(Journalism/Politics)

Pseudonyms – Ellis Bell, Lewis Carroll, StephenKing, Mark Twain

Table Round 2

Sound and Vision

1. Whois this?

A: Frank Zappa

(1point)

2. Namethe five James Bond films which have a one word title.

A: Goldfinger,Thunderball, Moonraker, Octopussy, Goldeneye

(5 pointstotal, one point for each correct answer)

3. Whatfilm does this poster refer to?

A: The ShakshankRedemption

The film isbased on a short story by which author?

A: Stephern King

(2 pointstotal, one point for each correct answer)

4. Who is this?

A: Pete Best

For whichband was he drummer?

A: The Beatles

Whoreplaced him as drummer of this band?

A: Ringo Starr

(3 pointstotal, one point for each correct answer)

5. Whatfilm is this image from?

A: Pulp Fiction

(1 point)

6. Name the artist and title of this album

Artist: Pink Floyd

Album Title: Meddle

(2points total, one point for each correct answer)

7. Name the artist and title ofthis album

Artist: The Rolling Stones

Album Title: Exile on Main Street

(2points total, one point for each correct answer)

8. Whosedebut album No Angel was the biggest selling release of 2001?

A: Dido

(1point)

9. Whichtwo epic novels/series had their first instalments released in 2001?

A: Harry Potter andthe Philosopher’s Stone

A: The Lord of theRings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Which ofthese is the highest grossing film series of all time?

A: Harry Potter

(3points total, one point for each correct answer)

Book Review: The Great Night by Chris Adrian

2011-11-18T09:26:00.001Z

The Great Night is one of those rare books that I’m impossibly grateful to have found. A modern reworking of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is conceptually daring, stylistically exciting and presents a view of humanity that is stark and powerful and unlike anything I’ve read before.

It is Midsummer’s Eve in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park, where Oberon, Titania and their faerie kingdom have set up court. But the Great Night celebrations do not go quite as planned. Unable to deal with the all-too human feelings of grief and loss that have assailed her on the death of their adopted son and subsequent failing of her marriage, Titania sets free an ancient menace that threatens to bring an end mortal and immortal life alike.

It is on this night, just after dark, that Henry, Molly, and Will separately walk into that same park and find themselves utterly lost. Like Titania, they are each struggling (and failing) to overcome romantic losses. Henry, kidnapped as a child and now paralysingly obsessive-compulsive has driven away Bobby, the one person he’s ever loved . Molly is rebelling against her extreme upbringing but unable to escape the suicide of her boyfriend nearly two years earlier. And Will, a tree-surgeon, is desperate to patch up his relationship with Carolina, who discovered his infidelity and left him. All three have encountered magic before, but nothing like the faerie magic they are about to be caught up in tonight.

Such an introduction inevitably sounds bleaker than the book is. The Great Night is often laugh-out-loud funny and utterly absurd. Puck is given a new, ominous role, and the Mechanicals make an appearance in the guise of a group of homeless people who believe they can bring down the mayor and stop his evil plot by staging a musical production of Soylent Green.

Simultaneously, The Great Night is existentially mundane and magically extravagant. It charts the luminal space between dreams and reality. Through magic, Adrian presents the profound realities of mortal life, through humour, the unremitting sadness of loss. It is a book of opposites, “at the same time one of the strangest and most ordinary things” I’ve ever read.

Chris Adrian, named in the New Yorker as one of the 20 best writers under 40 years old, certainly lives up to that billing. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and now a fellow in paediatric haematology-ongcology, he marries literary craft with a visceral understanding of the human body to create one of the most explicitly embodied books I’ve read. The Great Night is psychologically explicit, mortally explicit, sexually explicit. His prose is unassuming and easy-to-read, a coherent medium through which to convey his unique view of the world.

I read The Great Night on the back of two stunning reviews in The Independent and The Guardian. It is a beautiful book to hold and to read and the praise on the jacket fizzes and pops with effervescent exuberance*. Yet just as there are those who think that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about as comic as experimental pile surgery, The Great Night is likely to divide opinion. From such a brilliant premise, the plot sometimes gets indulgently lost and the back stories of Henry, Molly and Will can feel a little forced at times. For some, it will feel a little too like a male sex fantasy in faerie land.

But for all who hate The Great Night there will be those who love it. I’ll certainly be exploring Chris Adrian’s back catalogue further and looking forward to future books from him. This is an intriguing work from a writer who, in a world where too many books feel like they were written from a ‘how to write fiction’ guide, offers a fresh view of the world. He’s a storyteller with an almost unbounded imagination, and he routes his story in the very human lives of his characters. This is exactly what modern fiction can and should be.

The Great Night was published in the UK by Granta Books. Edition shown is the hardback edition, published 2011. ISBN: 9781847081865, 292pp
* The praise listed on the back of The Great Night is some of the most effusive I have ever encountered:

‘Chris Adrian's life is a dedicated exploration of the things that matter most, and his writing is his companion and interlocutor, his guide and interpreter, as he travels a landscape not before seen by other eyes. And every report he makes of that world enriches and enlarges our own sense of the world.’
Marilynne Robinson

‘Chris Adrian is truly brilliant. I simply believe him to be a person with a unique way of processing the world around him and the ability to communicate that vision back to us in what is often a startlingly beautiful manner.’
Nathan Englander

‘Chris Adrian is a novelist, a doctor, a philosopher, a literary explorer, the humble clear-eyed prophet of our time. He is an eloquent anatomist of loss, naming and labeling the bones and sinews of grief; he is a comedian dressed in sackcloth, a winking Virgil leading us through the circles of our own earthly hell. But he is ultimately a healer; the genius of his writing lies in its compassion, its ability to make what is broken whole again. To read him is to be understood: to know you are not alone in your misery, your self-doubt, your sins of pride, your wild joys, your insomnia, your madness, your desire.’
Julie Orringer

More on The Great Night:
Patrick Ness in The Guardian
The Independent
The New York Times
Review and Interview with Chris Adrian in the Wall Street Journal
Listen to Chris Adrian talk about The Great Night on NPR

Book Review: 1Q84 (Book Three) by Haruki Murakami

2011-10-29T14:38:00.000+01:00

Translated by Philip Gabriel

Human beings are, by design, not objective. Everything we do, from how we view the colour of the sky to whether we like or don’t like a film, is influenced by a conflation of factors that go together to make us who we are.

Our problem with objectivity is that our expectations of what something will be like tend to influence how we perceive it. There have been many names and studies given to this sort of tendency, perhaps the most notable being the placebo effect. If an individual expects a pill to relieve their headache, they are more likely to report a lessening of the headache whether the pill has anything in it or not. A review of studies on cough medicine recently concluded that around 85% of their effectiveness related to the placebo and only 15% to the active ingredient itself. Indeed, a doctor once told me that the majority of a doctor’s job is to convey an impression of capability while letting nature takes its course and makes the patient better.

I find the problem of expectations influencing my perception is most clearly displayed in reviewing books. What I take into a reading experience doesn’t necessarily determine whether I like a book or not, but it plays a considerable role in how I feel about it afterwards.

I went into 1Q84 (Book One and Book Two) expecting to love it. Murakami has, for years, been my go to author, the writer I pick up after a boring reading experience, the one who reminds me just why I love reading. Add in the media-hype surrounding this release and the privilege of receiving a pre-publication proof and I couldn’t wait to get started. Yet those who read my review of the first two books might have noticed that no matter how I tried to dress it up with analysis of the sociological issues it raised, I really didn’t enjoy the book. The level of disappointment I felt was directly related to the excitement I took with me into the book.

And this in turn carried over into my expectations for 1Q84 (Book Three). Whereas I took a level of excitement with me into Book One and Book Two, I approached Book Three almost entirely unenthused by the prospect. And I still didn’t enjoy the book. Yet as the excitement with which I approached Book One and Book Two influenced how I subsequently wrote about it, the boredom with which I approached 1Q84 (Book Three) has similarly influenced my this review.

Looking as objectively as I am capable of being (still subjective, I know) 1Q84 is a poor novel. Book Three has a new translator (Philip Gabriel this time), but it is the same tired, bland, repetitive prose. There are chapters where first one character thinks things through in a way that tells the reader exactly what they had already surmised, only for another character to do exactly the same in the next chapter. It’s tedious. I would go as far as to say that every single passage of reflection in the entire book – they are easily distinguished by being italicised and in the first person – could have been cut. They add nothing whatsoever.

There are other developments in Book Three: a new character, a detective named Ushikawa, joins the narrative cast and injects some life into the plot for a while, but cannot rescue the sinking ship. Supporting characters also come into their own, particularly Tamaru who by virtue of not having passages of rumination is one of the most interesting and likable. Otherwise the plot drifts onwards, apparently rudderless, and towards an entirely predictable conclusion.

In an interview with The Guardian in 2009, Murakami said he started writing 1Q84 with two thoughts in his mind: that the book would be about a man and woman searching for each other, and that he’d make “this simple story as long and complicated as possible”.

It rather seems that, in striving for the novel to be as long and complicated as possible, Murakami forgot to consider mundane factors such as the narrative arc, character development, or whether there is any point to it being long and complicated. Proust often appears in conversations, as though Murakami wishes to counter people who criticise 1Q84 for being too long, but it is a false comparison. This is not Proustian prose.

And on the other end of the scale, the book within a book, Air Chrysalis, is often described as a short novel, perfectly formed and lyrically written. In that sense it is like the best of Murakami’s works. 1Q84 is the antithesis of this. It groans under all its unnecessary weight, and the reader does likewise.

It is a conversation in Book One to which I return to sum it all up. When discussing Air Chrysalis, the editor says to Tengo: “People are left in a pool of mysterious question marks…Readers are likely to take this lack of clarification as a sign of ‘authorial laziness’.” Tengo promptly replies that, “If an author succeeded in writing a story ‘put together in an exceptionally interesting way’ that ‘carries the reader along to the very end’ who could possibly call such a writer ‘lazy’.”

I entirely agree with Tengo’s reply. But 1Q84 does not leave the reader with question marks. It answers everything at every step of the way and bores the reader by doing so. Nor is it put together in an exceptionally interesting way – it alternates between two and then three characters viewpoints as they don’t really try to solve a mystery – and neither does it carry the reader along to the very end. It is long and complicated. I had to force myself to keep turning the pages, less out of excitement than need for the closure of completing the journey.

1Q84 (Book Three) was first published in the UK by Harvill Secker on 25th October 2011. 368pp, ISBN: 9781846554056
1Q84 (Book One and Book Two) were published in the UK by Harvill Secker on 18th October 2011. 624pp, ISBN: 9781846554070.

Book Review: 1Q84 (Book One and Book Two) by Haruki Murakami

2011-10-18T12:17:00.000+01:00

Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin

When 1Q84 was published in Japan in 2009, bookshops all but sold out within a day. More than 1 million copies were sold in that first month alone. Ever since, English language readers have eagerly awaited its release. In an effort to expedite publication, Murakami’s US publishers Knopf took the unusual step of commissioning his two regular translators, Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel, to simultaneously work on different parts of the book. Rubin translated Book One and Book Two, published together here, Gabriel, Book Three which is published next week.

The tactic appears to have worked. Expectation has built steadily over the past two years, pre-orders have gone through the roof, and bookshops even opened at midnight to satisfy the demand of Murakami’s dedicated fans. Like the Harry Potter phenomenon, this hype has inspired people to have fun with books which is never a bad thing in my book. But away from all this Murakami-mania to which I and the entire media has whole-heartedly subscribed, the question of whether it is any good remains largely unanswered. Quite honestly, the answer is no. And yes. I cannot decide. Is 1Q84 the Magnum Opus that sums up Murakami’s worldview? Or an experiment with narrative that badly backfires? Very possibly it is both at the same time.

It is a long book – some 600 pages in Book One and Book Two alone, a further 350 in Book Three. The story is a familiar one: twenty-something drifters have their lives thrown into question by a series of unusual events over which they have little control. All the familiar Murakami tropes are there: Jazz, classical music, and 1960s rock provides the soundtrack to a novel essentially about disaffection, free will, love, and loneliness. Along the way, alternative worlds, cats, and cult religion ensnare the characters, forcing them to reappraise themselves and the world around them.

One departure from the familiar comes with the choice of a female protagonist. We meet Aomame as she sits in the back of a taxi that is stuck in stationary traffic on the Tokyo expressway. She is on her way to an important engagement that she cannot miss. So when her driver tells her of a hidden emergency staircase that she can use to get back to the city below, she grabs the opportunity with both hands. But beware, the driver warns, “things might look different to you down there.” They certainly do. Aomame finds herself in a subtly different world to the 1984 Tokyo she left behind. She names it 1Q84, the Q being a big question mark over what is going on, and continues on to her appointment.

Meanwhile, Tengo is an aspiring writer who agrees to rework a remarkable though poorly written novel to help it scoop a literary prize. The book, Air Chrysalis, is the work of a seventeen-year-old girl named Eriko Fukada, and seems to be based on her own experiences. With Tengo’s help it not only takes the prize but rapidly becomes a bestseller. But as the publishers work to prevent the truth about who wrote Air Chrysalis from getting out, Tengo finds Eriko’s world permeating every part of him and is drawn into the dangerous reality of Air Chrysalis, where two moons hang next to each other in the night sky, and the Little People emerge from the carcass of dead goat.

Amidst all that Aoomame and Tengo begin to realise how much they mean to each other, even though their last contact was a brief clutch of hands between two lonely outcasts in a school classroom when they were ten-years-old. Yet as each of their stories influence the other it comes to feel as though they are matryoshka dolls stacked inside each other. What is real? What is story? Chekhov’s gun hangs on the wall, but whether it is used or not depends, ultimately, on whether this is a story or real life.

Like most of Murakami’s novels, 1Q84 is, at its heart, a love story. Only a love story in which other things keep getting in the way. “It’s like the Tibetan Wheel of Passions. As the wheel turns, the values and feelings on the outer rim rise and fall, shining or sinking into darkness. But true love stays fastened to the axle and doesn’t move.”

Nearly everything that I love about Murakami is present here. The plot carried me along. At times it was almost un-put-downable. The smoky urban landscape simmers along with an after-hours feel. However, the biggest problem comes in the way in which it is narrated. In 1Q84, Murakami has switched for the first time from his reliable first person style to a moving third person viewpoint. It turns out that his familiar conversational style does not translate will to this new voice. Where in the first person he successfully elucidates the quirky lives of his various protagonists, drawing the reader into their small everyday lives, in the third person his prose becomes inelegant and cliché ridden.

The result is a stylistically ugly experience that prevents the reader ever fully engaging with the characters. Through them, Murakami presents thoughtful insights, not least the subjugation of women in Japanese society, but because neither Tengo nor Aomame really work as characters in their own right, they feel like merely vehicles for the plot to move around, and through which to explore these issues, rather than people to engage with. For an author whose reputation has been built on character driven works, this is a major disappointment. For me, 1Q84 cannot recover from this narrative weakness. It seeps into everything. There are long flabby passages of italicised first person rumination that only make everything worse, and in the end, quite honestly I was glad to finish it.

And yet.

There is one area in which 1Q84 succeeds. Critics have so far been rather scathing of the Orwellian metaphor that the title conjures, but to me it works spectacularly well. Although the dialogue around Nineteen Eighty-Four is somewhat dull, the metaphor Murakami creates serves as a comment not only on his entire body of work, but half a century of social change as well. Where Nineteen Eighty-Four is a book about the dreaded future as the 1940s feared it, with homogenising political forces using ideology to cement their power, 1Q84 is that same time period as it would be written now. Politics is almost entirely absent from the lives of the characters. Even a formerly ideologically driven commune has morphed into a pseudo religious cult, and citizens couldn’t care less whether Big Brother – in the form of the State, or God, or a mysterious group known only as the Little People – is watching them. Like Winston Smith, Aomame and Tengo are drawn into a dangerous game of cat and mouse with forces more powerful than they, but unlike Winston, they care only about emerging unscathed, and finding each other while the rest of the world gets on with life as it chooses.

By placing these two competing visions of 1984 alongside each other, Murakami demonstrates the changing social and political climates of the past fifty years effectively. He has spent his career writing about urban alienation and the world as it has become. His entire opus has been a statement about the importance of the micro over the macro. The importance of love, and music, and literature, and food, and all those sort of things, over and above politics. His work captures the spirit of the age, the sense that politics has failed, but nothing other than empty technology has stepped into replace it. In this globalised world, Murakami speaks to an audience about loneliness, boredom and powerlessness just as effectively as Orwell spoke about the tendencies of communism and fascism. And like Orwell did more than sixty years ago, it perhaps says more about the world we live in that we really want to accept.

For all the narrative doesn’t work, this makes 1Q84 a thought-provoking read. There are successful, even fascinating aspects, but the overall reading experience is a convoluted one. By the end I was exhausted.

But beware, with Book Three still to come, it is unclear how things may evolve. There are questions that remain unanswered: a crow keeps appearing, just what happened to the NKH subscription collector who stabbed a client, and will Aomame and Tengo ever manage to find each other. In typical Murakami fashion, he places a warning about judging the book before the end on the very first page where Aomame ruminates on Janicek’s Sinfonietta, considers its relationship to the following years in Czech history, and ultimately comes to the conclusion that the most important proposition that history teaches us is this: “At the time, no one knew what was coming.”

1Q84 (Book One and Book Two) was first published in the UK by Harvill Secker on 18th October 2011. 624pp, ISBN: 9781846554070
1Q84 (Book Three) is published by Harvill Secker on 25th October 2011. 368pp, ISBN: 9781846554056

Sunday Supplement: On reviews as short stories

2011-10-09T13:27:00.000+01:00

Almost a year ago I decided to try a new approach to book reviewing. I was tired with the same old way I talked about books, and bored of writing reviews. I still wanted to have the end product to look back on and revisit as an aide memoir, but I didn't want to write them. And so, the book review as a short story was born, a way to share the experience of reading rather than the technical qualities of the book; to celebrate the effect of a book, without sounding glib or too heartfelt.

I wrote two. One, on In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut I felt was a general success, the second, The Finkler Question, less so. And then I hit a wall and didn't write another for 10 months. Or rather, I intermittently played around with one, trying to find a way to chisel out a finished piece from a quarry.

I had great hopes for another review, of Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage. It was a perfect fit, a review about the experience of reading a book about the experience of writing a book. It was to be a sort of manifesto for the style of review I wanted to develop. There was a metaphor I came up with, as I walked home one day, that summed it all up. I promised I'd remember it but then lost my train of thought and spent months failing to to recapture it.

And with those failures I lost the impetus. I fell back into

Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I completed the review of Rain that had taken months to write. And I was delighted and amazed by the response. So now I'm right back in the mix, keen and committed to develop the idea further. But that also means I'm right back in the quagmire of where to go next. The Geoff Dyer is half written, but without that metaphor I've lost it feels unfinished.

And there's a structural problem I can't resolve that is holding me back. Writing a review in the form of short story is all very well when I have a strong response to a book, or when the experience of reading it is significant and story worthy. But there are only certain books that are like that. What I need to work out is how to use the story format, which is all about experience, to write about books where the experience is less than amazing. I just can't find a way to do it.

If anyone out there has any ideas or advice, I'd really appreciate it. In the meantime, I think I'll work on the Geoff Dyer one some more.

As they say...if at first you don't succeed...

Book Review: Rain by Don Paterson

2011-09-20T09:30:00.001+01:00

This book response is written in the form of a short story. For a discussion of why I am trailing this approach to writing about books see the Reviewed a Short Stories page, here.

It started in The Gambia. Or came to a head, there, anyway. One or the other.

Walking along a dusty road overlooking the ocean and discussing poetry. From shanty town to boutique hotel like the evocations of privilege they were.

“I don’t get it,” she said.

A disappointed scoff from her companion. “I’m sick of hearing people say that,” the poet replied tersely. “People are scared of poetry and I don’t understand why.”

She could give no adequate response. So she closed her mouth and changed the subject. She didn’t read poetry. She read novels. How could she explain why one form of marks on a page made sense and another didn’t? How could she explain that she was scared of poetry; that it seemed to require a higher plane of comprehension than she possessed? They changed the subject and walked on. Tension wilting under the sun that scorched white their combating views.

Back in the UK she started a new job. Working in literature; still not ‘getting’ poetry. She attended readings, programmed poets, sometimes even introduced them, too. But never read any. Poetry was West Berlin in the 1950s, walled off from the rest of literature surrounding it. It made sense, somehow, to assign these labels, despite her otherwise conciliatory nature. It was one of those hypocrisies of character she didn’t think to question.

This is a story of the crumbling of that wall. But there was no storming or smashing; no momentous moment to witness. No gatekeeper received an order to lift the barrier and allow the inevitable to pass peacefully. This wall crumbled without resistance, gradually, over the course of months.

The catalyst for change was money. A grant for the development of a programme to improve the teaching of poetry in schools. Teachers were recruited. They amassed and sat around a table. A poet – a cross between a soldier and missionary and yet nothing like either - entered. He said that poetry was like running. Both were things we did in childhood, and lost interest in as we grew older. That school had a stultifying way of making both seem difficult; more like work than play. Focusing on what they said, rather than the feelings they engendered.

“Poetry,” the poet declared and she paraphrased, is a personal thing. “A work either speaks to you or it doesn’t. If it does, and you enjoy it, then it is good. If it does not, then move on to something else.” She nods some more and goes home. Permission. Something inside has shifted. Her head as yet unaware what it means. She has always been inordinately influenced by what people say.

Later, she hears a quote from Samuel Johnson and assimilates it. “The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it”.

Yes, she thinks. That is what the poet meant.

Somewhere amidst these words she understands something she had not before. It was the word ‘poetry’ she struggled with, not the form. The word ‘poetry’ that had skulked around inside her, distorting her impressions of what it was. A red blanket cast over a genre, designating it other; making trust difficult.

How preposterous, she now thinks. How judgemental. She is embarrassed and confused at her readiness to categorise.

Almost at once, it is as though that wall rolls over onto its side, vast slabs of concrete chromatically shifting from grey to yellow brick.

Months later she leaves work and walks the cold streets with a collection of poetry in hand. It is winter. The sun sunk hours ago. The bar she settles in has a Victorian feel. Lamps ensconced on walls, red candles dripping lava down old wine bottles. Upstairs, there’s a sense that a séance may begin at any minute. The lights are dim, almost too dark to read. She unfurls in a corner.

And she reads. The words stand up to greet her, images like shadows moving around, whispering to her.

We talk, make love, we sleep in the same bed –

But no matter what we do, you can’t be me.

We only dream this place up in one head.

‘The Day’

Gulping, she marks passage after passage. She reads as she would read prose: confidently, taking each word as it comes, unfussed by line breaks or meter. Experiencing them. Nothing more or less. They make her laugh, sometimes. Cry, sometimes. Other times she merely smiles at the Robin Hood accuracy of an observation.

If we never left this room

The wind would be a ghost to us.

‘Motive’

When other people arrive for the book club, she resents their intrusion. They discuss, academically at times. She listens. They slice open the words; revealing shades inside that expand her understanding. She listens and enjoys the explanations, technical comprehension that causes her head to bob in agreement. But nothing touches her experience of the words. When the confronted her in the corner and made her feel things. She loved the book for how it enabled her to feel, the images it conjures for her. The rest is pleasant white noise.

That was a second beginning, of sorts. From there she reads other collections, enjoying some more than others. That evening and that collection stands out amidst them, a union of setting and text and emotion that shapes every positive reading experience she has had. Like the time she read The Great Gatsby on a train back from London. Or The Ground Beneath Her Feet in an apartment in Barcelona. Or Even the Dogs on a bus in Kentish Town. Or, now, Rain in a low ceilinged bar in Norwich. Times, like this, when she unfurled within and divisions came to seem painfully arbitrary.

The poet said something else too.

“Poetry works in tandem with its environment and that environment includes the reader. Just as the sensation of running is strongly linked to the world around the runner, so the experience of a poem is linked to the world around the reader. It is so important to remember that.”

Yes. Experience, she thinks. That is what reading is all about.

Rain was published by Faber and Faber in 2009. 80pp, ISBN: 9780571249572

Book Review: Ignorance by Milan Kundera

2011-09-14T11:24:00.001+01:00

Translated by Linda Asher.

There was a time in my early twenties when I consumed Milan Kundera novels. The infatuation began at the end of my first year of university, on holiday in Menorca reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Kundera expanded my horizons of what was possible in a novel: I think I was a little overawed. When I got back I typed up a passage and blue-tacked it to my wall.

"He considered music a liberating force. It liberated him from loneliness, introversion, the dust of the library. It opened the door of his body and allowed his soul to step out into the world and make friends."

Nearly a decade later I still know this quote word for word. It hung for years next to one from Nelson Mandela and another by someone else I can not now remember. Kundera offered everything I wanted at the time in a novel: lyrical prose, Eastern European communist settings, intellectual fodder. The flow of words, images poking through the prose, invocation of emotions I, in my youth, found impossibly romantic. All suited me.

From there I progressed quickly. Through The Book of Laughter and Forgetting with its stunning first page and a half anecdote about the capacity for history to forget those who once stood centre stage, and Immortality with its post-modern concept of the creation of a character. Then came Ignorance and finally Life is Elsewhere and Xavier. Xavier seemed like a stroke of genius, at once liberating the protagonist, Jaromil, from his earthly station and allowing the novel to float across borders and under curtains. Xavier the exquisite metaphor for the majesty of freedom: freedom to drift from one story to another, one reality dissolving into the next. And Jaromil, full of romantic suffering, allowing Kundera to discuss the shape death gives life.

Kundera is a young mans’ novelist. And I loved him for it. But towards the end of these the familiar style grew a little repetitive. At the same time a vast array of other authors were unfurling before my eyes and I moved on to new territory.

I hadn’t read another Kundera in at least 5 years. So when the one of the book clubs I’m in – incidentally led by someone currently writing his PhD on Kundera – decided to read Ignorance, I was excited. And yet I almost didn’t re-read it. I was afraid, I think, deep down, that I had outgrown Kundera, that his work would no longer have the same impact on me as it once did.

By the end of page five these fears had been dispelled. The smooth prose once more captivated me, with psychology, philosophy, linguistics and more entwining around and through the story, explaining and advancing it, Where some novelists seem to use fiction only as a sounding board for their musings, Kundera knits his into the fabric of the story, enlightening and entertaining alongside a worthwhile plot.

The genesis of Ignorance is an interesting one. Having published just one novel, The Joke, in 1967, Kundera left Czechoslovakia in 1975, to settle in France. For many years he published his most famous novels from abroad. Then, in the late 1990s, while others were returning to their homelands, Kundera chose to stay in France, and switched from writing in Czech to French. His three French novels, to which Ignorance belongs, are shorter than his Czech novels. Of them, Ignorance is perhaps the most biographically similar to Kundera’s own life, a response to the Diaspora that left Communist Block countries in the 50s, 60s and 70s to settle in Western Europe. It is a love story for home. But what home is, and whether it can change as one’s life does, is not certain. It’s a love story for memory and nostalgia and all the complex emotions precipitated by emigration. Guilt and jealousy and superiority and happiness and sadness and longing.

Having emigrated in the 1970s, Irena settled in Paris with her husband and young family. Though life proved difficult after her husband died, she battled through, and feels strong and independent for it. Josef left Czechoslovakia and found love and happiness in Denmark. When they meet, by chance, on a long put off homecoming, they pick up the shreds of a love that was abandoned years earlier, before it had chance to blossom. Each adrift in their homeland, culturally disconnected from their former peers and with the language sounding strange to their ears, they find solace in each other, connected by memories of who they were and uncertainty about who they have become. But memory is unreliable: do they remember the past in the same way? And what of Milada, a lonely woman scarred by a traumatic event in her teens? As their stories and experiences converge, Kundera poses the major question of the book: what of identity and memory when we are ignorant of our true selves?

Interspersed with this story, Kundera muses on Homer’s Odyssey and Odysseus’s experience of homecoming, drawing parallels with those of Irena and Josef. One of the great things about Kundera is that he eschews glib answers in favour of mess and uncertainty. There are no simple truths, only a mishmash of contradiction. My copies often end up full of notes on passages that I underline to return to:

“All predictions are wrong, that’s one of the few certainties granted to mankind. But though predictions may be wrong, they are right about the people who voice them, not about the future but about their experience of the present moment.”

Nostalgia is a concern Kundera returns to regularly. Jonathan Safran Foer took the title of his debut, Everything is Illuminated from a quote about nostalgia from The Unbearable Lightness of Being – “in the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine”. This quote could almost act as a summery for Ignorance. What if, on returning home, you find your nostalgic memories of the past have become wrong? What if nostalgia has been deceiving you all along?

Kundera critiques his characters, explores them in a way that is more akin to psychoanalysis than fiction. It’s hard not to use hackneyed phrases such as tour-de-force when describing his approach to storytelling. However, something that struck me on this reading that I hadn’t fully voiced before, was the flaw in his understanding of human beings. He intellectualises rather than empathises, and as a result discounts the influence that compassion, generosity and kindness play as impulses to human behaviour. As a result his characters feel cold and unapproachable. As separate individuals, they are fine, but as a fictional landscape populated by invented characters, they do not convince.

Returning to Milan Kundera after a few years off was a wonderful experience, though it probably had less effect on my now than it once did. But then, I’m not sure how many books there are that have as great an impact on my now as when I was younger. Everyone should read Kundera at some point in the life, preferably when their young. All authors have the weaknesses, but few possess as many knockout strengths as he.

Ignorance was first published by Faber and Faber in 2003. ISBN: 9780571215515. 208pp

Sunday Supplement: On a significant anniversary

2011-09-11T22:48:00.000+01:00

September 11th 2001 was a day like any other that summer. I was 19 and bored; in eight days I would be going to University. I probably should have been out working to earn the extra pennies that could have offset the inevitable debt university would accrue, but instead, like most of my friends, I was at home watching the lunchtime screening of Neighbours.

It ended at 14.05 BST and instead of going into whatever should have followed - probably Flying Doctors or Diagnosis: Murder. Instead, in an act of forethought that still amazes me, the BBC patched straight through to New York to report on a plane having hitting a building. (When I was 12 or 13 the IRA bombed Canary Wharf, the force of the blast shaking our windows a mile or two away. That day it took 56 minutes until we heard the first news report on the radio.) All that afternoon I sat in front of the television, transfixed by what was happening. To be there at a significant moment, was, I confess, exciting. In those days, I held strong anti-capitalist views, and couldn't help but see this as a possible first strike in a backlash against rampant global capitalism.

One of the vulnerabilities that most ideologically driven people exhibit is a tendency to put ideas before people. That is why communism went wrong, why the French Revolution led to bloodshed, why revolutions of the head scare me. Looking back, I'm ashamed that I did not see 9/11 as the crime against human life that it was. Where violence happens, and people suffer, political association doesn't matter. That stands for all the violence those events ten years ago precipitated, too. (I read an article in The Observer today in which Jimmy Carter claimed the thing he is most proud of in his premiership is that he did not commit to any wars. If only Bush had reacted with as much common sense to 9/11 as Carter did to Iran, though I am aware they are not directly correlated events.)

But I must avoid the temptation to get political. 9/11 was a significant day in my life. But not as significant as it was for Megan, who then worked for a Congressman on Capitol Hill in Washington DC and genuinely didn't know whether there was another plain coming for the. (United 93 was probably on course either for the White House or the Capitol). 9/11 and all that followed - ideologically polarisation, militarisation, anthrax and so on - led Megan to lose interest in politics and increased her determination to leave the US. For all those effected by 9/11, both then and in the decade since, I hope today provides a suitable memorial and that we can begin to move on from its aftereffects.

There's a passage of dialogue in Don Delillo's Falling Man that I'd like to end with.

“He said, “It still looks like an accident, the first one. Even from this distance, way outside the thing, how many days later, I’m standing here thinking it’s an accident.”
“Because it has to be.”
“It has to be,” he said.
“The way the camera sort of shows surprise.”
“But only the first one.”
“Only the first,” she said.
“The second plane, by the time the second plane appears,” he said, “we’re all a little older and wiser.”

Sunday Supplement: On Reading and Writing

2011-09-04T19:21:00.000+01:00

I don't think I could ever be a novelist. Not a good one, not the sort I'd want to be, at least. For all my fandom makes me dream of vaulting the divide and becoming a creator, as well as consumer, of stories, I grow increasingly aware that I lack what I consider the most important in a novelist. Literature may have moved away somewhat from the notion that a novel is first and foremost about stories and characters, but if I had to chose (and thankfully I don't!), I'd take a solid character driven story from a Bronte (any of them, really!), or Daphne du Maurier, or Salman Rushdie or Haruki Murakami or Jeffrey Eugenides etc over clever post-modern narrative or lyrical prose or fabulous dreamscape description any day.They are my heroes of literature, the writers who take me out of my skin and place me in another, who let me see the world through another pair of eyes, or show me worlds I'm never likely to see. Yes, that's right, when I read I value escapism over all else. And that shouldn't be a dirty word.

Why couldn't I write that sort of fiction? I consider myself a capable wordsmith, and sometimes I even come up with ideas that I think could make good plots. (Sometimes, I even start to write them down - shhhh.)
But where I come up short is in basic human empathy. The simple truth is that I seem to lack empathy and self awareness and social awareness. That doesn't mean I don't have huge amounts of caring and sympathy for myself and others, simply that I don't know myself very well, and even more so I don't know other people. I find it impossible to put myself in another person's shoes. In writing, this results in weak, two dimensional characters that I fail to engage with. Ironically - is this ironic? I've never quite got to grips with the concept of irony and still misuse it regularly - I think I could possibly write the sort of idea heavy fiction, or even biography disguised loosely as fiction. Not very well, mind you! But I don't want to. I don't want to write something I wouldn't particularly want to read.

So, that is a long rambling overly confessional way of saying that I love reading fiction because it gives me something I don't have in my everyday life. I've been reading The Great Night by Chris Adrian this week and above all else I'm hugely impressed with his compassion, his understanding without judgement of human nature, his basic goodness. For a re-writing of A Midsummer Nights Dream - and therefore a book full of fairies - it is amazingly down to earth, a veritable feast of the mundane. Its not so much magical realism, as realist magic, using the mundane to explain our need for a sense of magic, rather than magic as a way of comprehending the everyday. It is a tour de force that every bit lives up to the praise that has been heaped upon it, one of those books I turned page after page after page compulsively, to find out what would happen to our portfolio of characters, and through them to learn more about myself and the world around me. For that is the great thing about escapism - like immigration - : we take with us some of our experiences and knowledge and discover new things that become part of us, expanding our horizons in ways we could not otherwise have dreamed. To be a bit hyperbolic (something I'm often guilty of!), I think fiction both entertains and makes me a better human being. Why would I chose to add mediocre work to the mounds already written, when I can wallow for years in the great work that others have slaved over? It is a lot better for me, that is for sure.

In Conversation with: John Boyne

2011-08-31T15:28:00.001+01:00

Back in June I sat down with John Boyne to talk about his latest novel, The Absolutist, why he chose to set it in Norwich, and why the first world war continues to draw writers and readers to it.

Book Review: The Absolutist by John Boyne

2011-08-30T20:55:00.000+01:00

The Magistrate, protagonist of JM Coetzee’s finest novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, is one of my favourite characters in literature. Idealistic, yet in an untested sort of way, solitary and in search of a peaceful, easy life, he reminds me a little bit of me. He is a flawed character forced by circumstance into an act of quixotic rebellion for which he pays a high price. But it is his idealism that I return to time and time again. Early on, almost guiltily and without embellishment or drama, he offers a statement that increasingly resonates with me. “I believe in peace, perhaps even peace at any price.”

Many in this world believe in peace as an ultimate aim. But peace at any price? Peace is a means as well as an end? Peace if it costs you everything? It is this idea, that physical force is never in our long term interests, either as individuals or humanity as a whole, that forms the backdrop of John Boyne’s seventh novel, The Absolutist. It is an emotionally caustic and visceral exploration of the extreme actions to which war drives people, and an intimate portrayal of the lives these actions leave behind.

The novel opens as Tristan Sadler, damaged by war and with a guilty secret gnawing away at him, travels from London to Norwich to return some letters to Marian Bancroft, the sister of one of the men he fought alongside in the trenches. Will was Tristan’s best friend, but in 1917 he laid down his guns and declared himself an Absolutist – one not willing to play any part in the war effort -, and was shot as a deserter. As Tristan and Marian walk the streets of Norwich, seeking solace and understanding in each other, they discuss post-war England, their struggles, and the opportunities beginning to appear. Interspersed with this narrative, we relive Tristan’s experiences of the war, first at Aldershot Military Barracks, then the trenches of Northern France. The plot alternates between these two times, from one emotionally taut situation to another, with little to break the sombre mood.

That said, the narrative is led by dialogue and this, combined with the first person confessional style makes for a smooth read. There is an old fashioned feel to the formal language the characters use, and like a Beryl Bainbridge novel, one feels carried along with what happens even while not quite understanding how one has been so ensnared. It is well paced and there is always a sense of moving forward, of characters and situations unraveling towards something significant.

Tristan is a complex and sympathetic narrator: kicked out and ostracised by his father following an unfortunate incident aged sixteen, he joins the army a year later, already hardened by disappointments of life, and moves through the war as though in a daze, unable to believe his life is meant for anything else. This is starkly at odds with Will who, despite being the same age, seems younger, more innocent, and who responds with passion and fury to every situation. He’s a pacifist but a fighter for it, Tristan can’t see anything worth fighting for, except maybe that innate desire to preserve one’s own life. As Will says at one point: the irony is “that I am to be short as a coward while you get to live as one.”

The fact is, neither is a coward. One shows bravery and conviction of belief, the other at times seems brave simply to have got that far in life. Tristan’s homosexuality is a key theme, and one feels the difficulties that this causes Tristan, the sidelining effect it has on him. The Absolutist is certainly not the first book to feature homosexuality between serving soldiers, though it is more understated here than in Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy. Tristan’s narrative cuts away before intercourse takes place, reflecting perhaps the shame that society has nurtured in him over his young life. It is hard not to be moved by Tristan’s struggles; he is a tragic character, but one who faces his struggles with a stiff upper lip.

It would be easy to accuse John Boyne of wearing his heart too proudly on his sleeve, or that his direct approach to the subject is a little in your face. Personally I found this clarity of purpose refreshing and made it a rewarding read. The debate around pacifism is handled capably, with both sides explored and no sense of preaching one view or the other. There is a sense that perhaps his presentation of war adds little to our understanding thereof, but then it is difficult to be fresh on such a well explored subject. And because it is so intimately told, The Absolutist enables the reader to experience the war and post-war through one character’s eyes, and do so in an embodied way.

Many writers have meditated on the collision between conscientious individuals and monolithic regimes. Kafka did it in The Trial, Camus in The Outsider, Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley in Brave New World, and the list goes on and on. If there is an identifiable twentieth century literary concern then it is probably this. However, despite there being a period in the aftermath of the industrial slaughter of World War One, where pacifism was widely popular, relatively little has been written about the conflict between individual conscience and conscription. Few records exist of conscripted soldiers turned conscientious objectors or Absolutists, few novels have featured them. Yet their treatment – usually execution as deserters – remains one of the many unobserved tragedies of the Great War. Names are still not permitted on memorials of the War dead, for instance. In this way The Absolutist both stands alongside the greats of twentieth century literature, and opens up another dimension to their concerns.

I was always likely to respond favourably to The Absolutist. I am incontinently idealistic when it comes to pacifism –I believe it above all else – and the Norwich setting is prominent and recognisable to all who know the city. Among the places we visit are Tombland, the Cathedral, Prince of Wales Road, Timber Hill, and The Murderers pub. The ubiquitous Norwich conversation about the insufferable frustrations of the London to Norwich train makes an appearance too. Interestingly though, these familiar details also allow the partial Norwich setting to be incidental, a mere backdrop to the dramatic and horrific events in the trenches where themes of loyalty, bravery and friendship dominate and the daily battles are against lice, rats and liquid mud as much as the German trenches.

The Absolutist is a tender and engaging novel. It is fraught with tension and tragedy but told in such a clear voice that it is a pleasurable read, and one that will remain with readers for a long time.

The Absolutist was published by Doubleday in May 2011. ISBN: 978035616041

Sunday Supplement: 3 days in Edinburgh

2011-08-28T16:56:00.000+01:00

One of the biggest privileges of a job that corresponds with my passions is that work trips become a little bit like holidays. It is work, and I work hard - there's no sitting by a pool drinking cocktails and having affairs as is the way of literature (I've just read Something Happened by Joseph Heller, which is almost exclusively about work enabled misdemeanors) - but work done in the pursuit of passion is no different from pleasure.

I came across a quote scrawled across the side of the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh that captures what excites me about working in literature. "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation." said Alasdair Gray (pictured right), though he in turn attributes it to Canadian poet Dennis Lee. The early days of a better nation, a time when humanity takes a step forward, must be the most hope-fueled times, when all come together and anyone may make a difference. To work amid such an atmosphere must be inspirational.

These are not the early days of a better nation - the UK I live in is old and tired and wracked with embarrassments of social inequality that inspire in me little more than despair at those who set the tone of our national dialogues - but we cannot determine the times we live in. What we can do is follow our passions and contribute. When I get back to work on Tuesday, the first thing I'll do is type that quote up and stick it above my computer screen to remind and drive myself forward.

But enough pocket self help, it's the beautiful city of Edinburgh in its August pomp that I want to talk about. I arrived late on Tuesday evening, emerging into a cool bright evening that almost took my breathe away. I've been to Edinburgh three or four times now, but no amount of memory prepared me for the cityscape that emerged as I walked up the ramp out of Waverley station. With the castle lit, glowing atop its volcanic mound, and other grand stone building scattered about and illuminated in soft yellow light, it was a little like entering an impossible fantasy city.

Edinburgh is by far my favourite city in the UK, rivaled only by Barcelona of those worldwide cities I've visited. When I first properly visited Edinburgh, aged 20 or so, I remember sitting on the train as it pulled out of Edinburgh, cramming my neck to get a last look, then scribbling wildly a piece of florid description. I've just dug it out in an old notebook, and despite its rather overblown language, I am rather pleased to see that my thoughts still stand:
"Edinburgh is a formidable city. Gazing at its rising Old City capped with the castle at it it's fore, is like staring at an ancient knight. The knight sits atop his steed while behind and around him, the buildings line up like foot soldiers. They would be a formidable army, but somehow a feeling of calm drifts across the valley. A sense that this bastille of the ancients has seen too much for battle, is too old and wise and strong to need to resort to violence. This is why Edinburgh is formidable: it is architecturally and historically beautiful and powerful so as to crush the soul. But it doesn't. It wont. It stands and watches and like a mighty oak reminds us of our transience, our weakness; that in the grand scheme of things we are but momentary blips in a majestic and mighty world."

Whatever the many festivals offer, it is nothing compared to the physical landscape that underpins it. That is saying a lot, given how much the festivals offer. I was there primarily to take in the International Book Festival, but also some live literature at the Fringe and over 2 and a half days managed to see twelve events, play a literary game, win a Five Dials quiz (though I contributed nothing to the win!), meet inspiring people from Edinburgh City of Literature and holding their new book sculpture, visit museums, and even sing along with a rosy cheeked folk singer in the basement of a pub! Busy times.

I saw some fantastic authors reading from their work and discussing writing and literature. Particular standouts included James Robertson reading from his epic work of Scottish history, And the Land Lay Still, Gerrard Woodward from Nourishment, Elias Khoury and Tahar Ben Jelloun in conversation, and an Amnesty celebration of the works of Aung San Suu Kyi with readings from four authors including Jackie Kay, Naomi Wood, and Kevin Crossley-Holland.

There were some fascinating comments within these and other events. Namita Gokhale, Indian writer and director of the Jaipur Literature Festival, made me laugh with a throwaway phrase from her latest book: "age is no defense against anything. It doesn't even cure you of youth!" Chan Koonchung (left), a Chinese author talked eloquently about changing Chinese mentalities and whether citizens would choose a 'good hell' or a 'counterfeit paradise' , another Chinese writer and winner of the MAN Asia Prize, Bi Faiyu offered a wonderful metaphor of publication and translation being like pouring water from a big jug into different glasses for different people to drink. But it was Elias Khoury and Tahar Ben Jelloun who had the most interesting things to say. I particularly liked Elias Khoury's thoughts on influence, and belief that stories don't so much reflect real life as they do other stories, that they are shaped by what came before and after, and that for this reason the 1001 Arabian Nights is the ultimate book.

It must be difficult to be an author of Arab descent at the moment. It doesn't really matter what you say about books or literature, how interesting you are on these subjects or how convincing your reading, the Arab Spring overshadows all. It is all any interviewer or audience member wants to ask about. They had interesting comments, of course, and the scrutiny was on every word they said on this subject, but they were far more interesting on writing. A quick look at the Twitter #EdBookFest hashtag will show you what I mean.

That said, Twitter really helps bring events and readings alive, enabling audience members to talk to each other about interesting aspects of events. For those attending events alone as I was, this social aspect made a huge difference.

One of the most enjoyable events of all was Unbound, a nightly evening of literature and entertainment in the Spiegeltent. I went to one hosted by Five Dials, one of the most interesting and experimental literary journals out there. Hosted by its editor Craig Taylor, the evening included readings from Catherine O'Flynn, Ross Raisin and a lascivious biographical description of Colm Toibin's youth in Barcelona. There was also a great idea for a fun quiz and lots of free whiskey!

At the Fringe I took part in Hinterland, a playable poem in which you seek conversations with strangers in order to generate and contribute to the development of a series of cantos. Having made an avatar at a playschool-esque table of paints and pipe cleaners, I was given a little red book and sent out into Edinburgh to seek a French speaking person with whom to converse. Having found said person, we discussed the sky and things we don't like, phoned the answers through to an operator, and, a little while later received the first canto. At this point I returned to get the second volume. Sadly, time prevented me progressing further, to canto three or four, but it was an enjoyable experience, an interesting attempt at combining place specific gaming with poetry, and something I'll keep an eye on with interest. You can listen to the four cantos here.

Add in a number of useful meetings, the creative milieu of the city, and a couple of museum trips, I had a very useful few days. I've taken away lots of ideas for future events and programmes, encountered a number of authors I didn't previously know and some others I knew but had not seen read. I can't wait to get to work on Tuesday and start putting this all into practice.

Sunday Supplement 1: New books and immanent trips

2011-08-21T13:46:00.001+01:00

I've never quite got the hang of this blogging business. Too retiring, perhaps, to share much of myself here. But I'd like to try. Having watched Julie and Julia a couple of week's ago, I'm inspired by - and a little enraptured with - the idea of emotional honesty in blogs, of using them as a journal of experience. Schmaltzy movies always get to me; they tend to feature characters that I want to be more like.

There's so much more to reading than simply reviewing, and that is what I wish to capture here. The joy of discovery, random thoughts that drift through one's mind while reading, how where and when one reads a book impacts on the response to it.

It was my Birthday a couple of weeks ago and I got a few books I'd been hoping for. From Megan, I got The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, which I discovered through reading Jonathan Safran Foer's die-cut Tree of Codes, and because it was then recommended in The Book Hive, the premier independent bookshop in Norwich, by acclaimed poet George Szirtes. I haven't yet read it, but I will get there soon. Also unwrapped was a signed copy of A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness, that I borrowed from the library and read earlier this year but wanted a copy of my own to keep . It is a beautifully produced book, one I could flick through for hours just looking at the illustrations. Like the art of Shaun Tan, it would be suited to enlarging and framing and hanging from the wall. Well, if it weren't so dark and foreboding, anyway.

From my parents I also received the latest Andrey Kurkov novel to be translated into English, The Milkman in the Night, and a work of sociology that my mum mentioned reading when she was a student and which had an impact on her thinking. Written in the 1970s, it is called The Gift Relationship and looks at the value altruism plays in a healthy society, considering specifically blood donation. With David Cameron's supposedly radical Big Society in the news at the moment, I was interested in looking back at what altruism can offer and how it can be harnessed for the good of society, rather than coerced for small government ideological reasons. I don't read many academic studies, so I don't know whether I'll get around to reading this or not, but much of book buying, for me at least, is aspirational, reflecting the person I want to be rather than the person I am.

As if that wasn't enough books to keep me busy, on returning to work I found a mound of books that I had requested from publishers. Forthcoming and recently published books by the likes of Joe Dunthorne, Dalgit Nagra, Hari Kunzru, Anna Funder, Esi Edugyan, Erin Morgenstern, and more. It was like having my birthday all over again, and when I came to the last pile I couldn't believe my luck. There, on the bottom of the pile, were proofs of Murakami's forthcoming 1Q84. I hadn't expected there to be proofs, much less that I would be sent one!

Expecting to get something I've put on my birthday list, lets me anticipate it, get used to the idea of wanting it, and plan when to read it. I love it. But presents are best of all when they anticipate what you most want, and give you a complete surprise. Nothing could have beaten the excitement I felt on finding the Murakami proofs.

I'm off to Edinburgh this week, to check out some authors at the International Book Festival, and play an ingenious place specific poetry game at the Fringe Festival. Run by Cambridge poet Ross Sutherland and social games entrepreneurs Hide and Seek, Hinterland is, according to their website, "about the space that appears when we speak languages that aren’t our mother tongue. And maybe also a bit about how rubbish so many of us tend to be at speaking languages other than English." I don't fully understand it, as yet, but it sounds intriguing, and the collage poem Ross created as a result of their last collaboration recreated the atmosphere or walking alone through an urban night, and is well worth a listen.

I'll let you know what it's like, and which authors caught my eye, next week. In the meantime I have twelve hours or train journey's ahead of me in which to read some of the books I haven't had a chance to yet this year. I'm definitely taking Naomi Wood's The Godless Boys, and probably The Echo Chamber by Luke Williams. But what else I haven't yet decided. Could go for highly rated The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, or possibly The Street of Crocodiles. I'm saving 1Q84 for a luxuriant treat when I get back home.

Happy reading!

Book Lovers' Quiz - July 2011

2011-07-29T16:43:00.002+01:00

I regularly team up with fellow blogger and all round bibliophilic good egg Norfolk Bookworm to host a book quiz at the Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library.

Enjoy! And good luck.

Round 1: Over the Rainbow

1) Which author, best known for creating the character Jack Ryan, wrote Rainbow Six?

A: Tom Clancy

2) Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City are set in which city?

A: San Fransisco

3) Which doubting scientist wrote “Unweaving the Rainbow”?

A: Richard Dawkins

4) Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories form the basis of which famous musical?

A: Caberet

5) D H Lawrence wrote the novel The Rainbow in 1915, but what do the initials D H stand for?

A: David Herbert

6) What is not the only fruit?

A: Oranges

7) The daughter of which Irish Prime Minsiter wrote Where Rainbows End and PS I Love You?

A: Bertie Ahern

8) The Oscar winning film Brokeback Mountain was originally short story by which author?

A: Annie Proulx

9) Gravity’s Rainbow has been summarised as a “a blizzard of references to science, history, high culture and the lowest of jokes” Who wrote it?

A: Thomas Pynchon

10) Who wrote the poem that starts “My Heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky”

A: Wordsworth

Round 2: Here, There, and Everywhere

1 – What is the name of Sebastian Flyte’s palatial home in Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel?

A: Brideshead

2 - Which two places connect Dickens Tale of Two Cities with Orwell’s Down and Out?

A: London and Paris

3 – In which city is the first of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brody Case Histories novels set?

A: Cambridge

4 – Bruce Chatwin’s 1980s bestseller, The Songlines, is about which country?

A: Australia

5 – From where do the pilgrims depart in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales?

A: Southwark

6 - What is the capital of hell as described in John Milton’s ’Paradise Lost’?

A: Pandaemonium

7 - In the first Winnie the Pooh book Christopher Robin leads an expedition (or expotition as he puts it) to find which well-known geographical location?

A: The North Pole

8: Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer prize winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is partially set in which Caribbean country, whose history is paralleled with that of Middle Earth?

A: Dominican Republic

9. What is the name of the other house in the Wuthering Heights estate, formerly the home of the Linton family?

A: Thrushcross Grange

10 - Which author wrote about the fictional region of Wessex?

A: Thomas Hardy

Round 3: Trees

1 - What tree do Harry and Ron fly a Ford Anglia into in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets?

A: Whomping willow

2 - In which New York suburb does a tree grow according to the author Betty Smith?

A: Brooklyn

3 - Where do Moonface, Silky, dame Washalot and the Saucepan-Man live?

A: The Magic Farway Tree

4 - According to the Arabian legend which tree was plucked up by the devil who then thrust its branches into the earth and left its roots in the air?

A: The Baobab

5 - The dryads were the nymphs of the forest according to Greek mythology but which Goddess were they the companions of?

A: Artmeis

6 - Which fruit tree orchard features in the title of a play by Chekhov?

A: The Cherry

7 - Which play is set in the imaginary village of Llareggub?

A: Under Milk Wood

8 - What are the sentient trees known as in Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings?

A: Ents

9 - When the Greenwoods Laugh is the 4^th book featuring the Larkin family by which author?

A: H.E Bates

10 - Who had a Little House in the Big Woods?

A: Laura Ingalls Wilder

Round 4: Sport

1 – Which French author, who played goalkeeper for Racing Universitaire d’Alger Junior Team in the 1920’s, later said:

“After many years during which I saw many things, what I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to sport.”

A: Albert Camus

2 – Joseph O’Neill’s Richard and Judy selected book Netherland features attempts to introduce which sport back to America?

A: Cricket

3 - In his 1975 biography, what did Muhammed Ali claim he did with the Gold Medal he won at the 1960 Rome Olympics?
A: Throw it in a river

4 – What blight on sport is satirised in the 12^th Asterix comic, Asterix at the Olympic Games ?

A: The use of performance enhancing drugs

5 – David Peace’s novel, The Damned Utd, recently made into a film staring Michael Sheen, is about which famous football manager

A: Brian Clough

6 – Which athletic pursuit unites books by Alan Sillitoe and Haruki Murakami?

A: (Long distance) Running

7 – David Storey’s masterful novel This Sporting Life, is about which ball game?

A: Rugby League (half a point for Rugby)

8 – Obsession with which football team does Nick Hornby chronicle in Fever Pitch?

A: Arsenal

9 – Which year was the last Olympic Games that awarded medals for art competitions including literature?

A: 1948 - London

10 - In which of Shakespeare's plays does the Dauphin taunt the king of England with a gift of tennis balls, intended to suggest the king's idleness and youth?

A: King Henry V

Table Round 1

Double Acts

Can you name the main character (1/2 point) and the author who created them (1/2 point) for all the below

Eg.

---------- Juliet -----------

would be

Romeo – Juliet – William Shakespeare

1) Sherlock Holmes Doctor Watson Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

2) Vladamir Estragon Samuel Beckett

3) Rosencrantz Guildenstern William Shakespeare/Tom Stoppard

4) Don Quixote Sancho Panza Miguel de Cervantes

5) Mr Pickwick Sam Weller Charles Dickens

6) Hercule Poirot Arthur Hastings Agatha Christie

7) Bambi Thumper Felix Saltern

8) Charlie Brown Snoopy Charles M Schulz

9) Andrew Dalziel Peter Pascoe Reginald Hill

10) Dorothy Gale Toto L Frank Baum

11) Bertie Wooster Reginald Jeeves PG Wodehouse

12) Endeavour Morse Robbie Lewis Colin Dexter

13) Tarzan (or GreystokeJane Porter Edgar Rice Burrows

14) Beatrice Benedick William Shakespeare

15) Scarlett O’Hara Rhett Butler Margaret Mitchell

16) Anne Shirley Gilbert Blythe LM Montgomery

17) Santiago Manalo Ernest Hemingway

18) Arthur Dent Ford Prefect Douglas Adams

19) Tintin Snowy Herge

20) Calvin Hobbes Bill Watterson

Book Title: The Hobbit

Author: JRR Tolkein

Book Title: Treasure Island

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

Book/Series Title: Oz

Author: Frank L Baum

Book Title: Gulliver’s Travels

Author: Jonathan Swift

Book Title: Nineteen Eighty-Four

Author: George Orwell

Book Title: The Handmaid’s Tale

Author: Margaret Atwood

Series Title: The Hunger Games

Author: Suzanne Collins

Book Title: The Odyssey

Author: Homer

Book Title: The Lord of the Flies

Author: William Golding

10)

Book Title: Candide

Author: Voltaire

11)

Series Title: Thomas the Tank Engine

Author(s): Rev W Awdry and his son, Christopher (either scores the point)

12)

Series Title: Harry Potter

Author(s): JK Rowling

13)

Book Title: Utopia

Author: Thomas More

14)

Series Title: A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones accepted)

Author: George R R Martin

15)

Book Title: Around the World in Eighty Days

Author: Jules Verne

16)

Book Title: Swallows and Amazons

Author: Arthur Ransome

17)

Series Title: Narnia

Author: CS Lewis

18)

Book Title: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Author: Mark Twain

19)

Series Title: Discworld

Author: Terry Pratchett

20)

The Dreamlands feature in a number of books by this author, but there is no single series title. So for this final question you need name only the author:

HP Lovecraft

In Conversation with: Joseph O'Connor

2011-07-29T13:37:00.001+01:00

When Joseph O'Connor came to Norwich earlier this year, I was lucky enough to get the chance to chat with him about his latest novel, Ghost Light, and the Irish literary history that inspired it. He's a great interviewee - you feed him a question and he tells you an anecdote - and a wonderful storyteller.

Interview conducted on behalf of Writers' Centre Norwich as part of the Summer Reads programme that I manage.