On Bibliodiversity and A Light Song of Light

I was delighted to be asked by Carcanet Press to write a short piece about Summer Reads. The following appeared first at www.carcanetblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/sam-ruddock-bibliodiversity.html where it is accompanied by the largest picture of me I've ever seen.Apologies for that!


Bibliodiversity. What a mouthful of a word.

‘…a Maroon / of a word and a word so silent / it is the opposite of song.’ So Kei Miller describes another word in ‘Twelve Notes for a Light Song of Light’, the title poem in his third collection A Light Song of Light. If there is a central focus of that book, it is that poetry should communicate with the directness and universality of a song, and carry a similar emotional resonance.

And yet when I first heard this word used last month – unwieldy as it is - it had the feel of poetry. It was one of those moments where all of my beliefs about reading fell into place.

Say it with me: Bibliodiversity.

Reading is more than a hobby; it is active participation in the art of literature and should be supported as such. I believe that reading broadly is more important than the specific books we actually read. That by reading across forms and genres we expand our horizons, break down the barriers that constrain our thinking, and avoid the supermarket ‘pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap’ sort of bookselling that increasingly determines how readers discover new books. In its own way, I think bibliodiversity is as important to a healthy literature as biodiversity is to a healthy environment. And I’m fascinated by the idea that a reading revolution centred around bibliodiversity could have as much of an impact on the way we write, publish, sell, buy, read, and talk about books, as Fairtrade has on how we shop.

Readers love discovery and readers deserve as much support in developing the craft of reading as writers have to develop their writing. Given a little support readers – me included! – regularly surprise ourselves with the sorts of books we enjoy. Tearing down the barriers that make us uncertain about our capacity to engage with a particular book or genre can be a wonderfully enabling process.

It is these thoughts that led Writers’ Centre Norwich – a literature development organisation interested in both the artistic and social impact of creative reading and writing – to launch Summer Reads. Each year we gather a group of keen readers together to work through a longlist of over 100 titles and select 6 books to feature in a reading campaign throughout the summer. Summer Reads acts as a guide to some of the most exhilarating writing and storytelling from around the world and a focal point around which to create networks of bold, confident, and adventurous readers.

This year the six books we are promoting include A Light Song of Light by Kei Miller as well as works of fiction, non-fiction, short stories, novellas, work in translation, and uncategorisable mash-ups of all the above. It is a veritable feast! Whatever your usual fare, why not head over to www.summerreads.org.uk and discover something new.

Book Review: The Lessons by Naomi Alderman

Read: April 2010

The Lessons in one Tweet-sized chunk:
An uncomfrotably familiar tale of youth, and how the lessons in life often come too late. 

“We could, you know, hara-kiri, right here in the kitchen.”…

“Why would we do that?”…

“Because our lives are over, James. This is it. The end. We will never have a time like this again.”

These words, spoken by the erratic Mark Winters as his university course draws to a close, sum up one of the attitudes Naomi Alderman seeks to dispel in The Lessons: the pervasive and destructive notion that one’s university years constitute ‘the best days of your life.’ That saying, and all that it encompasses, is the raven perched perpetually upon a chamber door screeching “never more” at the characters, and as its words grow louder, so the desperate mania drives them on, tension building, towards something ominous.

James is a first year student at one of Oxford’s illustrious colleges. His older sister has told him how to get the most from Oxford but now that he is there he feels isolated and falling behind the pack. And when he injures his knee slipping on a patch of ice he finds that he can no longer keep up. Oxford, it seems, has broken him in one semester.

But things change for James when he meets Jess, a warm and generous girl who seems to like him. She introduces him to the wealthy and charismatic Mark Winters and his bright world of decadence, parties and love affairs quashes the blankness enveloping James. Together with Jess and a few others, James moves out of the college dorm and into Mark’s crumbling Georgian mansion, to share his charmed life. There they reside, a small group of close friends living on food delivered from Fortnum and Mason. But no matter how hard they seek to hide from it in the sequestered grandeur of that hidden house, life eventually catches up and when university ends they find that all their studying and parties have not prepared them for the difficulties of adult life.

The Lessons begins with a wonderfully vivid image of waste and excess, in which a feast has been cast into a swimming pool, with the greens and reds of a panettone’s crystilised fruit dissolving in the water. And throughout, there is a feeling that something terrible is going to happen, that all the wealth and excess, all the stretched taut tensions will result in tragedy. Without being particularly sexual, it is full of with desire laden undercurrents that make it intensely erotic, and keep the reader turning the page compulsively.
There is a sense that Naomi Alderman, who received her first degree from Oxford, has experiences to exorcise from her time there, delusions about Oxford to challenge, and this comes through into the prose.

“What is Oxford? It is like a magician, dazzling viewers with bustle and glitter, misdirecting our attention. What was it for me? Indifferent tuition, uncomfortable accommodation, uninterested pastoral care. It has style: the gowns, cobbled streets, domed libraries and sixteenth-century portraits. It is old and it is beautiful and it is grand. And it is unfair and it is narrow and it is cold. Walking in Oxford, one catches a glimpse through each college doorway, a flash of tended green lawn and ancient courtyards. But the doorways are guarded and the guardians are suspicious and hostile.”

Oxford does not fare well. Yet one of Alderman’s greatest achievements in The Lessons is that even with the very vivid descriptions that bring Oxford to life, she manages to convey a more universal depiction of university. The student’s attitudes, the mentality of newly won freedom clung to lest it evaporate in thin air. At times I felt that she was writing the words I had felt but not articulated, and this was incredibly powerful.
Just as Oxford’s spires loom large over the characters, two celebrated novels dominate The Lessons: Brideshead Revisited which has become almost a caricature of Oxford, and The Secret History, a tale of power and self-destruction in a similar closely knit group of students. With the former, there are a number of close plot and character resemblances.  James and Mark are essentially Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte, and their homosexual undertone is brought into the foreground. Like Charles, James is a passive character, drawn to the powerful Flyte-like Mark, a troubled character for whom a wealthy and privileged upbringing has resulted in a dangerous lack of self control. His Catholicism, which he clings to fervently, has given him a world view of glorious suffering, of saviour and sacrifice which is reflected in his relationships with the surrogate family he gathers around him.

It is this surrogate family that most recalls Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. The characters of Jess, Emmanuella, Fran, Simon, James and Mark bear resemblance to those in The Secret History as does the texture of their interaction. Their group dynamics are familiar; there is an atmosphere in which independence and freedom are careering dangerously out of control. And, just as in The Secret History, the narrator is driven by an obsession with beauty. “Beauty is a lie, but it is so hard to spot,” mentions James, as he thinks back not only to Oxford, but the lustre of wealth that so beguiled him. Like Richard in The Secret History, his fatal flaw is “a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs” and each of them, drawn to a picturesque, emotive world they never dreamed of belonging to, sacrifices much of their selves in the process.

Yet while the resemblance to both Brideshead Revisited and The Secret History is apparent, the latter is a slightly false one, for the characters in The Lessons pale in comparison to The Secret History. Emmanuella, particularly, seems lost to plot and narrative, but Fran, Simon and most frustratingly of all, Jess, lack a voice of their own. Of course, to a certain extent this is due to James’s obsession with Mark which prevents him seeing anyone else as a real person, but it is frustrating, nonetheless. They are massively undercooked, cardboard cut-outs to stand in the sidelines and tell us something about Mark and James, rather than fully rounded characters. James is a blank slate who seeks out a strong personality in whose reflection he can define himself. He’s similar, in many ways, to Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, with Mark playing the life of the party Gatsby-esque hero. But neither fully convinces. James is too blank, and Mark’s appeal is not always clear to the reader. Most of the time he comes across as a foolish rich boy without respect for anyone around him.

Similarly, while the roughly fifteen year scope of The Lessons is a virtue that allows it to introduce wider themes of university and life, the plot is not dense enough to surround the reader within it, and the narrative too short so that the tension and austere sense of place that builds up within the first half at Oxford gradually dissipates thereafter.

For this reason The Lessons is inherently flawed. The weak characters let it down and I felt it tailed off towards the end. It’s one of those novels that flatters to deceive, and as such doesn’t quite achieve all that it sets out to. Yet despite this, there is an ominous sense of impending doom which, combined with a well judged portrayal of the expectations of life which are contained within universities, make it a compelling and readable novel in which the lesson, in the end, is one of self discovery.

“What is it that one learns from life? I had always supposed that I would accumulate some wisdom as my life progressed. That, as in my progress through Oxford, some knowledge would inevitably adhere to me. I suppose I hoped that love would teach me.
But the very question is redundant. It is ridiculous to think we can learn anything from so arbitrary an experience as life. It forms no kind of curriculum and its gifts and punishments are bestowed too arbitrarily to constitute a mark scheme. There is only one subject on which the lessons are in any way informative.
The man in the mirror is me, I thought. For good or ill, that’s me.”

7 out of 10

Viking, April 2010, 9780670916290, 280pp

This book is one of six Summer Reads chosen by Writers’ Centre Norwich this summer. For more information see www.summerreads.org.uk

Author Interview: In Conversation With Simmone Howell

In the third of my interviews this summer I've chatted summer camp, chocolate and movies with Australian author Simmone Howell. 

SR: First up, can you tell us a bit about Everything Beautiful?
SH: Everything Beautiful is about Riley Rose, a sixteen-year-old plus-size drama queen who is sentenced to a Christian holiday camp for bad-behaviour. Riley is atheist with a chip on her shoulder. She is appalled by the happy campers and sets out to escape in a dune buggy across the Little Desert. It’s a comedy drama romance.


SR: What inspired you to write it?
SH: I think I always had a Christian camp story in me. I went to several holiday camps as a teenager and I don’t remember any of the parables, I only remember mean girls with whopping great cans of hairspray. I wanted to write about a teenager who doesn’t really think she’s looking for answers but ends up asking lots of questions.

SR: Riley is a colourful character. Her language is full of expletives, she openly drinks and talks about sex. Some reviewers have questioned whether this is appropriate in a Young Adult novel. What do you say to this?
SH: My favourite back-handed compliment review said “this book is perfect for girls who drink, smoke, sleep around and read.” Riley’s experiences aren’t representative of all teenagers but they feel very real to me.

SR: Riley is overweight and proud of it. Yet, like modelling, plus-size girls rarely feature in literature. Why do you think this is?
SH: There is this idea that the reader wants to identify with the heroine – we read the kind of characters we wish we were. All the signs of the mainstream world tell you that there is no greater sin than being fat. But I was sick of reading about girls who kept food diaries. I imagined Riley like Beth Ditto, the singer from the Gossip, with the idea that her weight is only an issue to the people around her; to her, it’s just part of who she is.

SR: There have been a lot of strong female protagonists in Young Adult literature over the last decade. From Lyra in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials to Katniss in The Hunger Games, Sabriel and Lirael in Garth Nix Old Kingdom trilogy and many more. What has inspired this arse-kicking revolution?
SH: I’m not sure but I am glad to be part of it!

SR: One of the few things that remains unchanged between Riley’s manifesto at the beginning of the book, and her updated one at the end, is a love of chocolate. What are your favourite chocolate bars?
SH:
Cadburys Dairy Milk
Toblerone (dark)
Old Gold rum’n’raison
Black & Greens white chocolate
I could go on.
(This was the easiest question to answer.)

SR: What is the significance of Riley’s reading of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia?

SH: I wanted Riley to start imagining worlds. She goes from one imperfect world to another. She’s trying to find a place where she feels happy all the time and it’s not possible, just as the only utopias are failed utopias. Perfection only exists as an idea … Something like that. Oh, okay. I was just trying to be clever.

SR: Your books are littered with film references. What is it about movies that appeals to you?
SH: Well, I’m always imagining worlds too.

SR: And what are your favourite movies of all time?
SH:
Ghost World
How to Marry a Millionaire
Night of the Hunter
To Sir with Love
Valley Girl
Harold and Maude
Midnight Cowboy
North by Northwest


SR: Have you always wanted to be a writer?
SH: Yes.

SR: What do you like most about being a writer?
SH: Setting my own clock.

SR: Are your characters extensions of yourself or do you try to write about totally different people?
SH: A bit of both.

SR: Where and when do you do most of your writing?
SH: At home at night in bed. Or in my office which was once the panning room of the old Castlemaine Hospital. (Sometimes it smells weird.)

SR: What do you write on/with?
SH: Laptop and notebooks

SR: Are you working on anything at the moment? What is your next project?
SH: I am just finishing my third novel, another YA called Girl Defective about a record shop girl in modern day St Kilda who solves a crime … kind of.

SR: What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
SH: Read, read, read and write, write, write! Good writing takes time. Grow a thick skin. Keep some things just for yourself.

SR: What books do you remember reading while growing up?
SH: My teenage reads:  Sweet Dreams books, Sweet Valley High, John Steinbeck, Jackie Collins, Judy Blume, Virginia Andrews, To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, S. E Hinton, RobertCormier, Paul Zindel, Stephen King

SR: Which writers do you admire?
SH: Barry Gifford, John Fante, T.C Boyle, Megan Abbot, Charles Willeford, Denis Johnson, Joyce Carol Oates, Gavin Lambert, Nathaneal West

SR: Are there any up-and-coming writers you are particularly excited about?
SH: I am a bit hopeless with new writers but I really loved the book Hollywood Ending by Australian author Kathy Charles. It’s about Hollywood Death Hags and it’s lovely.

SR: What are your five favourite books?
SH:
The Goodbye People, Gavin Lambert
Ask the Dust, John Fante
In the Night Café, Joyce Johnson
The Razor’s Edge – W. Somerset Maugham
I Should have Stayed Home – Horace McCoy

SR: Simmone Howell, thank you for taking the time to talk to us. We look forward to reading more from you in the future.

This interview was conducted on behalf of Writers’ Centre Norwich as part of the Summer Reads programme launching in June. For more information, please see www.writerscentrenorwich.org.uk

Austerlitz - W.G. Sebald

Read: October 2008

Austerlitz in one tweet sized chunk:
For me, Austerlitz is too distant, difficult to pin down and insular. Yet there is ethereal beauty which intrigues, and has me wanting more


It is impossible to study and work at UEA for seven years and not develop almost mythical reverence for the life and work of W.G. Sebald. The Assistant Manager at Waterstone’s, who has been there twenty-five years and seems to know absolutely everyone, has never read any of his work and yet talks about him in hushed tones, calling him Max, and never forgetting to mention what a thoroughly likeable guy he was. Visiting authors, on spotting a Sebald novel at their signings, are often besieged by lecturers and customers wishing to discuss his unique and enthralling prose, his contribution to the university, or his untimely death, tragically killed in a traffic accident in the midst of his prime. It is often noted that at the time of his death he was rumoured to have been on a shortlist of three for a Nobel Prize for Literature.

So, for many years I have felt my reading experience to have a gaping Sebald shaped hole in its midst. It is impossible for such talk not to rub off on you, and I had the notion that I would love him if I ever got around to it. But too much expectation can be a dangerous thing to carry into a reading experience, and I was wary to try.

In the end, though, one should not allow vague preconceptions to govern what one thinks about an author or their work. It was largely an accident which led me to begin my Sebaldian adventure with his last book, published shortly before his death and very different to the rest of his work. It was included in a Waterstone's ‘Prize Winners’ promotion and I got a TPR (Title Page Returned – when a book arrives at a bookshop damaged and has its title page removed and returned to the publishers in order to claim credit,) and that was that.

Austerlitz is a strange book, unlike anything I have read. No, that is too easy a cliché. It echoes lots of things I have read, and has been echoed by other authors too. It does, however, have a style and atmosphere which is all Sebald’s own. It is a story of memory and forgetting, of rediscovering history long after it has taken place and made you who you are. Jacques Austerlitz is now in his late middle age, a successful architectural historian. But the past has begin to haunt him: there are truths which have eluded him, an entire history wiped from his mind as a young child. And now, intermittently, during a series of chance encounters with our unnamed narrator, he recounts the story of his life: from a secret childhood in Czechoslovakia in the 1930's, to flight across Europe and a Calvinist upbringing with foster parents in Wales. Over the course of these meetings Austerlitz and the narrator strike up a friendship, and between them they filter and redraw Austerlitz's entire life.

Austerlitz is a dense novel, full of ethereal ponderings and misty uncertainty. It is un-paragraphed, with long sentences and interspersed with Sebald's own photographs, which don't so much contribute to the plot as help build the general atmosphere of the prose. There is a real sense of place, whether it is the opening in a railway station in Belgium, or walking quietly around Mile End Cemetery in east London. There is a particularly perceptive passage describing the after-work drinkers around Liverpool Street station which I appreciated,

“I had for a good while been watching the toilers in the City gold-mines as they came to meet at their usual watering hole early in the evening, all of them identical in their dark-blue suits, striped shirts and gaudy ties, and as I tried to grasp the mysterious habits of the members of this species, which is not to be found in any bestiary – their preference for crowding close together, their semi-gregarious, semi-aggressive demeanour, the way they put their throats back in emptying their glasses, the increasingly excitable babble of their voices, the sudden hasty departure f one or other of them – as I was watching all of this I suddenly noticed a solitary figure on the edge of the agitated crowd, a figure which could only be Austerlitz, whom I realised at that moment I had not seen for nearly twenty years."

This is how many of the stories begin, or merge, or grow from each other. There is a wonderfully esoteric sense of distant poetry and hidden knowledge that runs through the prose. Reading Austerlitz is almost like walking through a vast ancient library: you have the dust that covers everything; the faded curtains; the patrons desperately searching for something which will transform their life and work; the sense that the knowledge is calling out to you, drawing you in. It is an odd, unsettling experience.

I cannot say I loved Austerlitz. It is too distant, too difficult to pin down, too insular. While the prose is good, it did not surround me and draw me into the action, but rather seeks to keep the reader eternally at arms length. In some ways it is like early Ishiguro in its quiet complexity, the way it resounds with more than it ever needs to say. The power is in the gaps between the words. In Sebald's work, it is often in the haunting pictures.

Since finishing Austerlitz I have been told that this is not the best place to start a discovery of Sebald, that he is a taste which grows upon the reader gradually, over the course of his work. I am about to read The Rings of Saturn hoping to augment my reading of Sebald, to research a Sebald trip for Writers’ Centre Norwich’s Worlds writers (try saying that quickly) this summer, to learn about the quiet nature which surrounds us here in Norfolk.

In the mean time I am glad few people around here actually read this blog. If they did, I think my life might be in danger for daring to question the godlike genius of W.G. Sebald.

6.5 out of 10