Jonathan Lee – Joy

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Book Review, Jonathan Lee, Joy, Reading

The Square Mile : a Circle of Hell unravelling

Having been impressed by Jonathan Lee’s most recent novel, High Dive, published in 2015, about the Brighton bombing of the Metropole in 1984, I was interested to read this earlier novel of his, (2012) set in a successful City corporate law firm

Lee lifts the lid off a fiercely competitive, cynical world of high flyers, most of whom have taken a step away from living according to any rules except the pursuit of empty pleasure, driven by ambition and materialism

Joy Stephens is one of the brittle, successful lawyers, presently fighting the corner for a corrupt fast food company, whose Poutry Products (McNuggetKentucky type things) are being challenged by radicals, concerned about the environment, animal welfare and human health.

Sometimes Joy looks up at the big flat screens that hang in braces outside each Hanger, Slyde & Stein employee coffee pod, installed during the credit crunch to better monitor the markets, and thinks that the twenty-first century is no more than a vast structureless datastream. Oil up. Copper down. Gold holding. Somehow the white spaces on the graphs, cracked by ragged red lines, seem to breathe a kind of sadness. And what would it mean, exactly, to be one of the people both in and out of this datastream, everywhere and nowhere, waiting to be identified or found?

Stephens is about to get one of the golden prizes, and be made up to partner. However, (as is made clear in the blurb, so no spoilers) her life is seriously unravelling, for reasons which the reader will discover, and she is planning a dramatic suicide on the day of her promotion.

The structure of the book inter-cuts the events, within a time frame, of what Joy has planned to be her last day on earth. Joy’s day is described in third person narration.

Intercut with this are four other voices, who narrate their stories first person to an unnamed trauma counsellor, who has been hired by the legal firm to offer support to people affected by seeing Joy fall forty feet and land on a marble floor, whilst they were gathered to celebrate and toast her public promotion. The firm were planning a glitzy party and she was meant to be the golden one of the hour, not a a public splatter of blood and bone on the party floor.

The four voices, all impeccably and believably spoken are Dennis, Joy’s husband, an academic with more than a few shameful secrets, Peter, the other high flying lawyer from Joy’s trainee intake, whom she has pipped to the partnership prize, Barbara, Joy’s well past retirement PA, cynical and long suffering, who after 40 years work for the firm, knows most secrets and respects few of the firm’s leading lights, and, finally Samir, son of an immigrant from Bangladesh, who is a lowly physical trainer/washroom attendant and general dogsbody in the firm’s fitness suite. Barbara and Samir are both pretty trapped, and have little freedom of manoeuvre. They have some undoubted problems, but are the voices most likely to gain the reader’s sympathy and compassion. Joy, Dennis and Peter are all, in their ways, brittle, corrupt and culpable, and the unpleasant choices they made were driven by greed, aggression, a thirst for power and pleasure without considering others.

Where Lee really scores is that, however unpleasant these three are – and however much the reader will be likely to judge and condemn them – Lee recognises their suffering humanity, and we are taken into some kind of appalled understanding, condemning the actions, but seeing into human pain, even the pain of the seemingly unworthy.

Reading this, I was reminded of the writing of Bret Easton Ellis, who has also explored the lives of the self-obsessed, rich and wilful. But Ellis merely sneers, and invites his readers to also to comfortably sneer contemptuously at his shallow group. By contrast, Lee has heart, his characters are far more than just ‘types’ and we do get to walk a little way in their shoes, and may be get to see where we and they might, at places, touch.

I wasn’t quite as admiring of this as of High Dive, there are moments when I think the demands of plot create a few events which don’t feel completely credible – particularly how a specific event at Wimbledon which sets in motion Joy’s unravelling, practically happened, so the completely seamless weaving of character and circumstance driving plot is not always there, but, nonetheless, I strongly recommend this. It is a page-turning read, well-written, with a lot more going on to think and feel about underneath the drive of plot and revelation.

Joy Amazon UK
Joy Amazon USA

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Drum roll for the top 10…11….10….11 of 15

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Book Review, Books of The Year, Reading, Soapbox

Another terrific year of reading, and a hard choice to get it down to 10 + 1. In the end, the criteria for inclusion came down to the fact that all these books continued to make me think about them and talk about them and be not quite ready to let them go and start something else. Book nags, the lot of them!

In no particular order, but more or less the order I read the books in, though two of the books I found were in, out, in, out with each other, and by the time Ginger finished a final decision was not forthcoming, which would seem to make them joint 10, as none of the others budged a millimeter from inclusion. 4 of these books are non-fiction, the rest fiction. Books by dead Americans loomed large this year.

Links to original reviews within the text.

C.J Sansom’s Lamentation was the first of two books in my list this year which gave me certain nightmares about what it might have been like to live in the reign of that much-marrying man Henry VIIIth. A terrific book, a proper page-turner, and one which had me worrying intensely for the central character and his friends, as much as if I was back in the day, and Sansom’s characters were real. This was a book which made me cry, lots, and also terrified me, was instructive, and gave much exercise to the heart too

Helen MacDonald’s extraordinary book, H is for Hawk, winner of the Samuel Johnson prize was a clear and unforgettable inclusion in my list. Written in searingly powerful prose, MacDonald’s book encompasses grief at the loss of her father, a transcendental exploration of the natural world, an assessment of T.H. White, and, most of all a kind of intensity about what it means to be human through engaging as searchingly as possible in attempting to inhabit the being of a non-human living creature.

Patrick Hamilton was described by J.B Priestley as one of the best minor novelists writing in the interwar (and beyond) years. That sounds like being damned with faint praise, though I don’t believe it was meant in that way. I think, over time, his stock has risen, and that perhaps his difficult personal history may have prevented his peers from seeing quite how good his writing is. He is particularly fine in being able to give authentic voice to ‘little people’ – and, especially, to women. The Slaves of Solitude, set in 1943 is wonderfully funny, as well as making the reader wince with true empathy and recognition, often in the same moment. A light touch writer

American author Dorothy B. Hughes 1963 Golden Age Crime Thriller The Expendable Man makes my list for similar reasons to the three other American books. Not just a well-crafted book, and a strong narrative, but a book which lays bare much of how society, in specific times and places, is faring. Novels, creating the imaginary lives of imaginary individuals, can really bring home, powerfully, something which statistical analyses of information about attitudes from questionnaires and studies, fail to do. I can’t say too much about Hughes book. There’s a journey the reader needs to make for themselves with it, but I do recommend it highly. The fact that it was re-published by the excellent Persephone Press is also a recommendation!

Sean Michael’s Us Conductors was a delight. Canadian Michael’s between the two world wars and beyond, USA and Russian set novel, won Canada’s Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s Man Booker equivalent. It is a kind of fictionalised biography of Leon Termen, a scientist and inventor who invented the teremin, an electronic musical instrument played by the performer’s hands between the circuits of two oscillators. The book, like the instrument, and like Termen’s life, is a weirdly wonderful thing. This was another book which was instructive, as well as being beautifully written, thoughtful and engaging. It was one of two books I had my in/out tussles with. I couldn’t bear to drop it, nor could I bear to drop the other which was as equally needing inclusion. Published 2015 in the UK

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath , a flawed, raging, book about the exploitation of migrants, the disenfranchised, an impassioned polemic for the righteousness of socialist politics, and against the putting of profits above fair pay and working conditions, was always going to be high on my list. Published in 1939, as war began to provide a terrible solution to the stock market crash of the late 20s, this is another book which uncomfortably drags the reader to the mirror, making us examine ourselves, and the society we live in. Steinbeck pulls no punches, and his writing is sometimes sublime and sometimes punches the reader round the head to ensure he gets his point across. It’s a far from comfortable, far from easy read, but good heavens, it is an awakening one

And I’m staying Stateside with Richard Yates Revolutionary Road. Originally published in 1961 Yates’ book is a portrait of a suburban marriage, and of corporate America, the American Dream and its underbelly. It is set in the mid-50s, in Connecticut. Though it was made into a fine film, directed by Sam Mendes, with Kate Winslet and Leonardo di Caprio, which at some point I mean to positively review, what the film can’t do (outside using dialogue taken from the book) is to do justice to Yates’ stunning use of language, and the way something which is described in the book, like the building of a rockery path in a garden, encapsulates, in a very unforced way, metaphors as well as close description. In this, there is a kind of poetic sensibility in his writing, which is full of layers, whilst being absolutely accessible

Having spent quite a lot of time on fictions set earlier in the twentieth century this year, it became time for two non-fiction books about history to occupy my ‘best books’ slot. Alison Weir’s The Lady In The Tower connects back to my first read book of my top reads, the C.J. Sansom. Weir explores the last few month’s of Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn. This is history, not historical fiction, and she uses the book to also explain what historians can and cannot do with their research. As well as piecing together documentary evidence she also explores how the thinking of the times in which a later historian is writing, will influence interpretations of meaning. So history has changed its view of the principal players, over time

And then there is the wonderful children’s history book, A Little History of the World, written by the art historian E.H. Gombrich in the 30s, which follows ‘history’ right from prehistoric times with a wide-angled view of the world. It has been updated to end with the fall of the Berlin Wall in the recent translation into English. Less about a view of an individual country across the millenia, there’s a global view of ideas, dreams and nightmares of attempts at world domination. It’s like the historical version of the evolution of mankind. Gombrich may have written it for children, but it proves to be a book of immense interest and edification for adults

I returned to Stateside reading in the first book in my ‘Reading the Twentieth’ Challenge. And what a book Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie turned out to be. Dreiser was looking at concerns which would come to dominate again, later in the century – how women (and men) are exploited by capital, the hypocrisy of society towards women’s sexuality, how much we can be said to have free choice, given the power of the unconscious, and the need for peer acceptance, toeing the line, fitting in: the influence of the thinking of the times upon us. A great, rich, weighty tome of a book. I’m keen to engage with Dreiser further, if I can ever penetrate further into the century!

And my final book, one published this year, was also the other one of the in/out tussle. Sara Taylor’s assured debut novel The Shore is a collection of interweaving stories about a community within the geography of islands off the Virginia Coast. Told in distinct voices, and in a back and forth timespan between 1876 and 2143 this is a strange and powerful book. Violent at times, it is never gratuitous, though punches are not pulled. I found myself quite amazed at the strength and assurance of the writing. Taylor is certainly a writer to watch; this is a first novel of great finesse, brutal and beautiful all at once

It only remains to wish you all a very happy 2016, and may your TBR’s grow ever more unwieldy, as magnificent books demand to be added!

On the Challenges of Challenges

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2015 Challenge, Bits and Bobs, Bits and Pieces, Books, Other Stuff, PopSugar Challenge, Reading, Reading Challenges

Having embarked on the 2015 PopSugar challenge, I’m unlikely, I hope, ever again to try a challenge which is ‘random’, in terms of categories without a clear literary focus – for example, the randomness of ‘a book with a one word title’ ‘a book written by an author with your initials’ and the like. I must admit, although I started well, reading exactly what I would normally read, and then seeing if it fitted into categories, pretty quickly the bizarre/’fun’ nature of this challenge began, I’m afraid, to irritate this rather serious reader.

Those wanting to see the categories can re-route to the post where I said I was going to do it.

It meant 100 books – not a problem, I’m normally reading a couple of books a week, depending on length and intensity. But categories such as ‘a book with a colour in the title’ began to lose appeal, very quickly.

Paperback, hardback, eread, the books kept arriving and mysteriously downloading…..

However……………..I doubt if the long term challenge I’ve set myself would have materialised without the PopSugar, as doing it let me see that this year there have been some big gaps in my reading:

I was a little shocked to see, for example, that until the idea of MY challenge presented, I had read no books in 2015 which were more than 100 years old. My reading of books in translation and non-fiction were a bit under-represented.

Abandoned books hope…all ye who enter here. Dante’s Inferno illustration from Mapsinchoate, Pinterest

Regrettably, there were a lot of books in the category ‘books you didn’t finish’. Only ONE of these made the ‘books read in 2015’ total, as it was a book which originally I didn’t finish, only because I’d started it at the wrong time and headspace, and it was seriously a-lurking on the TBR for that better time. So it properly earned it’s place in that particular PopSugar niche as it turned out to be one of my Top Ten of this year. The 7 or 8 other ‘books you didn’t finish’ represent books so not to my taste that abandonment was achieved quite rapidly, and without qualms

There were a couple of unfilled categories – what a voracious reader I have always been – I must confess there was NO book which I ‘should have read in high school, but didn’t’ – I did think about stretching it to include the COMPLETE Canterbury Tales, Prologue and All Tales, which I SHOULD have read for my Chaucer Paper whilst at University, and, quite frankly, had a huge aversion to – the original Middle English, don’t you know. But, well, it wasn’t in the category of ‘high school’ and seemed to be too much of a dreadful punishment now.

I also ploughed ‘an author with my initials’ – curiously, there do not appear to be any who have books reasonably accessible, there is one with the same first initial and last name, but he inserts another middle name, so it isn’t quite a match anyway. He at least is an author who I might be interested in reading, and might be able to get hold of a book by, but it won’t be before the end of the challenge

So, failures for high school, and failures for initial

Anyway…………….pertinent to blog world, for the category ‘a book recommended by a friend’ it’s perhaps unsurprising that bloggers have been more responsible for reccs than ‘real’ friends – certainly, a couple of bloggers have pressed me numerically into more reccs than the one or two reads specific ‘reallies’ did

Top reccer of the year honours are shared, equally, by Fiction Fan and Jane, now blogging at Beyond Eden Rock. 6 a-piece. Well done both.

I suspect next year that the challenge for ‘most tempting blogger of the year on Lady Fancifull’s TBR’ will be quite fiercely contested in 2016, as I started following three bloggers late this year who are rapidly looking like making inroads on 2016’s TBR, particularly as they read a lot of classics, often from other countries (it’s all going to serve my Reading the Twentieth) Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings, Shoshi’s Book Blog and JacquiWine look like giving me RSI of the 1-Click finger

And, more thanks due to Jane. Looking at those endlessly fascinating (to the blog author, if to no-one else) stats I see that she has soared ahead of others in driving her readers to pop over to look at my site. Thanks, Jane, for the great books and the helpful posted diversion signs!

And thanks to PopSugar for pointing up where I want to be heading in my reading over the next several years, and into making me design a seriously exciting as well as alarming little project for myself.

I shall keep a weather eye out for people doing odd challenges like ‘1924’ ‘German reading month’ etc, as some of these sound interesting little ideas for a book or two, every now and again, but with my own Everest of a challenge, I take myself out of commission from anyone else’s!

As far as categories which I WAS interested in (as they had some literary point, for me)

I read 117* books Not all of which were reviewed, and some of this year’s reads will be reviewed next year, for various reasons

Of these:
38 books published this year
53 books written by women
2 books of short stories (fewer than normal, it illustrates that I’m not really drawn to short stories, which seems to be the preface to every book of short stories I DO read and review!)
62 books set in a different country – perhaps predictably, the bulk of these were American or European, and this is something I want to redress, and roam a little wider next year
18 non-fiction – pretty woeful!
4 books more than 100 years old (see what I mean, my challenge will improve that one, for sure)
55 books by an author I had never read before
9 books originally written in another language (woeful, again my challenge will include this)

Okay………time to refine the nominations for books of 2015 before all you bloggers mass your ranks and get serious on building my 2016 TBR pile

*Number might be a little more than that, as I may well finish another one or two between the posting of this and the end of the year

A little previous, but books of my year……………

Tags

Book Review, Books of The Year, Reading, Soapbox

Someone in my on-line book club suggested we compile a Top Ten list of the fiction, and the non-fiction books we read this year – and re-reads counted too, if the re-read was this year. This gave me much happy thinking time, though I was pleased that we were satisfied with just the two lists, rather than ranking WITHIN those lists, else the arguments with myself and the shufflings up and down could have taken me into daffodil time next year. All, being books I loved, were reviewed on here, follow the links for those gushy, enthusing reviews

So, in no particular preference order but more or less the ‘as I read and reviewed’ order here are, Ta Daa………..The Fictions

1) The Wall. Marlen Haushofer. This has nothing to do with Pink Floyd, though it was also made into a film!

Marlen Haushofer was an Austrian author who wrote this rather extraordinary post-apocalypse book in the 60s, later made into an equally wonderful movie, prompting the welcome reissue of the book.  It has been mis-described as an eco-feminist Utopian novel. Eco-feminist it may well be, but some people have a remarkable idea of Utopia, is all I can say!

2) Dark Matter by Michelle Paver. This is a chiller/thriller set in the far far North. And how I love books with a setting in the freezing cold of Nordic isolation. Beautifully written, Madness, class and utter isolation and things which can’t be named, set in the 30s. Genuinely terrifying, a one for the short days as long as there isn’t a power failure!

3) Night Film Marisha Pessl What to say! Donna Tartt’s michievous younger sister (not really, but that is what her writing is like) She has Tartt’s intelligence, but is infinitely more playful. Here are noir god games and solving a mystery all hooked in with indie film making

4) Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See is a beautifully written book, with some ‘magical realism’ touches, set in the second world war in Paris and Berlin The central character is a young blind French girl, and a rather gentle young boy in Germany who is swept up by the Nazi machine, into being part of the invading army. The story is told in alternate chapters by the two protagonists, and is wondrous, heart wrenching and stunning

5) The Magus John Fowles I have been reading and re-reading this every 5 or 10 years. This year was one of those years, as reading the Pessl sent me enjoyably back to it. Iconic book, hugely influential. A literary page-turner, I recognised its influence in the Pessl book. Yes it has the flaws of the time, a rather patriarchal elitism but Fowles a novelist who was absolutely extending the literary form, whilst creating a page turner. This was also made into a film. A dreadful one.

6) Bodies of Light Sarah Moss. I’d read her earlier Night Waking, with some reservations, but she had fallen off my radar, till a book club member  raved about this one. Which grabbed me without any reservations. Indeed it sent me on to further Moss reads. Stunning. Feminism and much more 1850s-1880s and the fierce women who fought for us to get education

7) The Visitors Rebecca Mascull This might almost be my favourite of the year because it took me so by surprise. Nearly missed it as the dust-jacket makes it look a bit marshmallow. Anything but. Set mainly in Kent and South Africa, at the time of the Boer war, the central character is a wonderfully fierce deaf-blind girl, and how. I’m chomping at the bit for Mascull’s second book to come out in 2015. With this book, she joins the ranks of writers whom I find myself on literary crusade for. I was so impressed by Mascull that offered the chance to interview her by the publsiher, I jumped

8) The Bone Clocks David Mitchell Not his best, but I can never pass a Mitchell book by, and he always leaves me thinking hard. Some real pyrotechnics, a mash-up of times, places, genres and some absolutely stonking writing A writer who seems to have a whole army of voices inside him. A huge novel in scope, style and genre-bending. Some of the sections miss the mark, but others are extraordinary. He hits the bulls-eye so unerringly that the fact that sometimes he clumsily breaks things is forgiveable

9) The Narrow Road To The Deep North Richard Flanagan The Booker this year, and one of those lacerating reads about war – this time Australian POWs in Japanese camps, and the building of the Burma railway, but there is much more to it than that, despite the real horror there is a huge sense of humanity and tenderness rolling through it. Curiously, though I have no stomach at all for the inventions of gore, I continue compelled to read books about the evidence of our atrocities. Writers making us look into the mirror of who we are, for good and ill.

10) This is Life Dan Rhodes As a complete break to my preferred diet of heavy lit fic, this is a delightful bubble, set in the art and performance world in Paris. it’s some kind of romantic fantasy, fabulously written, audacious, utterly joyful and good-humoured and I grinned, smiled and laughed my way through it, which makes a change from weeping my way through a book!

Non-Fiction
I was fairly shocked to see that I hadn’t read that much non fiction this year – and a lot of the books I had read (or re-read) were biographies or autobiographies, particularly – most of which were written by fiction writers. Even so, I did have to work hard to whittle down to 10 specials. I think the autobio subject matter reflects the fact that I am inveterately curious about individual stories, and the way one life can illuminate many. I need to be grabbed by the warmth and immediacy of heart, and the felt sense of in-the-gut truth, as well as the wrestles and weighings up and judgement of mind. So, reflections and stories written by writers, about aspects of their own lives are more likely to engage me than a more academic and distanced study. It also probably illustrates that though i have been through academia, I lack the intellectual rigour of academia, and remain greedy for the subjectivity of individual story

1) To The River Olivia Laing A combination of nature writing (which I love) and writing about literature (which I also love!) Laing walked the length of the River Ouse (where Virginia Woolf drowned herself) there is a lot about Woolf, and other writers and artists with a connection to the area, but also the history, geography and culture of those connected to where the river runs. And as with my love of the immediate story of the author within the subject (providing you resonate to the authorial voice) I like Laing’s relationship to her subjects

2 A Spy Among Friends Ben Macintyre This is the closest I get, in this list, to conventional biography, where the author does not engage in relationship with his subject matter but tells a story (Kim Philby’s) via traditional journalistic research, whilst standing outside the subject (which of course we can never completely do, as the writer/researcher of course arranges material and writes from their own subjectivity

3) Foreign Correspondence Geraldine Brooks Brooks is an Australian author who sets out to discover the penpals she had corresponded with from the 60s, some 30 years later. Lots about history and culture across the world. Its a bit of a detective investigation into her own past, and the lives of those penpals. Full of individual life stories.

5) My Salinger Year Joanne Smith Rakoff. Rakoff worked in an old fashioned literary agent’s – Salinger’s agent and this is a lovely meander around the changing face of publishing, a great book for someone who loves reading about writing, publishing, and all things bookie.

6) Listening to Scent – An Olfactory Journey Jennifer Peace Rhind Okay, a brilliant book about an area I specialise in, lots of stuff about chemistry and developing olfactory skills. I was delighted to find a book which taught me a huge amount of new information in an area I think I know quite a lot about! Probably not so compelling for wider audiences though

7) The Spirit In Aromatherapy Gill Farrar-Halls. Another ‘with my professional hat on’ This time, it’s actually more about the nature of the therapeutic relationship than anything else, even though the title says its about the oils. She’s been a Buddhist most of her life, and there’s a lot of very pertinent stuff about how that has profound effects on how the client/therapist relationship cab be handled. I do like books written from a Buddhist perspective which are not overtly ‘about’ Buddhism

8) Limonov Emmanuel Carrere Back to the territory I normally keep for fiction – disturbing ambiguity. Limonov is an extremely complex,Russian political activist, criminal and writer, often deeply unattractive in some of his actions and ideologies. Carrere is a campaigning French journalist, of Russian ancestry, and uses Limonov’s life to explore Russia in the twentieth century – and also approaches his subject matter from a Buddhist perspective. It’s not a traditional biography, since the writer inserts his own autobiography into the mix

9) How to be a Heroine Samantha Ellis Wonderfully witty account by Ellis, a playwright, of the fictional women who shaped her. It’s another book about reading, the power of literature and would make a great book club read, as you can’t help arguing with Ellis about YOUR favourite heroines which she missed out!

10) Cider With Rosie – Laurie Lee (this was a re-read) In some ways reading the Olivia Laing sent me back to Lee, who also later set out on an epic walk, this is about the Gloucestershire he left, and is one of those wonderful books where the connection to ‘what it means to be English’ is passionate and beautiful, a sense of landscape and culture, a recording of ways of life and community  which were already dying when Lee recorded them, in the 30s. A pride and ownership of the roots to time and place, without jingoism

So…………did any of these make your ‘best reads of the year’ lists? And, as pertinently, will any of them have a chance of making your 2015 lists!

Protesting The Rights of Abused Fictional Characters!

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Reading, Soapbox, Writing, Writing on Reading

As some may know, I recently read a book which I felt was exceptionally poor. I don’t get pleasure out of ripping a not very good book to shreds, and normally would have abandoned it within a few pages and therefore never have bothered to review it anyway

But as this was an ARC, and the trade-off for the freebie WAS to write a review, I persisted (getting crosser and crosser) till I felt sure I had enough good reasons to explain my dislike of the book

But interestingly, that very poor book, in its own way has served a useful purpose – it has given me as much food for thought as a very good book – and probably more than a pleasantly okay book, about various aspects of the writing of fiction

ozjimbob’s photostream; Flicr Commons

Something I found offended me deeply was the using of a character like a pawn, to be whisked round here there and everywhere and made to do all sorts of things to serve the author’s purpose. Well, of course all characters in a novel, or a play, or a story, MUST serve a purpose – but the best writers seem to create characters that you feel have almost become a little bit alchemical, and seem to exist outside the writer’s mind. Who is writing whom? Many writers talk of a sense of a character taking on its own life. They started with one idea of the character, but somewhere along the line it gets to feel as if maybe the writer got possessed, and manipulated, by his or her creation.

Then we start to hear not just the AUTHOR’s voice – but the character’s clear and true voice.

The author needs to in some way to surrender to his or her characters, allowing them to breathe for themselves

THAT book was the absolute reverse. Characters served some fixed and sloppy idea the writer had – and were made to do things which were totally implausible and totally wrong. I felt angry on the character’s behalf. Or, more properly, not THE character, as I had no sense of empathy with any character, but was angry on behalf of truthfulness of time, place, culture and character itself.

The book was set in Victorian England, and virtually every major female character, including the unmarried middle class ones, were casually having sex. This felt utterly disrespectful of truth. Of COURSE I’m not saying that people at that time did not depart from ‘approved morality’ – but if you do step outside society’s norms, there is bound to be some sort of internal struggle or conflict between flouting upbringing and received ideas. Sure, ONE character might challenge norms because of who they are individually, but if everyone is doing it, the writer has not properly inhabited time or place. His or her failure is a severe failure of imagination. And what is being imagined, when time, place and character are created. Why – it’s an act of some sort of empathy. Can I imagine how THIS person might feel, being themselves, in this time, this place?

And of course, that act of empathetic imagination doesn’t necessarily just end up confined to human beings in real times and places. It’s JUST as important when new worlds and creatures who don’t ‘really’ exist are created.

I remember, very fondly, a book from childhood, one of Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll series, Finn Family Moomintroll. What made this work so magnificent was the reality of the characters. The vaguely hippo looking Moomins and Snorks, the earthwormish Hattifatteners and the rest never existed, but, oh my, they were true to themselves and their nature.

Of COURSE outlandish words can escape from a dictionary, once placed in a waste-paper basket which is not really a waste-paper basket at all – but, heavens, a magician’s lost hat. And you WOULD end up clearing the words from crevices and the floor for WEEKS, wouldn’t you?

I still remember (and can inhabit) Moomintroll’s pain that the solitary and self-sufficient Snufkin (a happy introvert) will need to go off on his own exploring for 6 months. And Moomintroll (and I) will miss him and be listening out for the returning sounds of ‘All small creatures have bows in their tails’ I learned a lot about loss and enduring it from Finn Family Moomintroll. AND the part of me that is forever Snufkin as well as Moomintroll!

And then…………from the worst, there are the best, who perform that act of imagination and empathy so well, that they can force you to see the world through the eyes of the very worst of people. They can make you inhabit those who make horrific choices, without excusing or condoning those people in any way.

I’m still (more than 6 weeks on) unable to let go of Patrick Flanery’s Fallen Land, and the extraordinary ability he had to write a monstrous character from the inside, without ‘commenting on him’ so that whilst knowing from the off that we had someone ‘evil’, I understood from inside the drives that had created that evil, how what was good and even noble turned bad.

As in performance, so in writing. Actors may play villains (or saints), or writers write villains (or saints) but the best performers or writers do this without commenting. We make sense of ourselves TO ourselves and so, I expect, do the villainous.

It’s why, much as I love Dickens, he sets my teeth on edge with his ‘sainted’ female characters. Dora and Agnes in David Copperfield feel much more stuck inside an unreal sugar picture of women on a Victorian pedestal (an illusion) than an act of imagination by an author writing from the inside of their real lives. A painting of the surface, by an author at a distance, rather than an inside looking out.
Perhaps, at the time, it was a myth everyone longed to believe in. Our own time almost seems to function in reverse; we find it easier to understand the shadow side, and search out the flaws. But that is another story……………

Drowning in indigestible sliced white print

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Publishing, Reading, Reviewing, Soapbox, Writing, Writing on Reading

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I was talking with a friend recently about the overwhelming number of books (not to mention digital books) on offer, and the impossibility of keeping on top of what is out there, and what, from the huge pile, one might actually want to read.

I know this is not in any way an original thought, but there are times when the choice between 100 brands of breakfast cereal, (or 100 equally garishly packaged books all brandishing equally gushing by-lines to their excellence and life-changing quality) is just too much.

Sometimes it would be rather restful to be able to identify that what you really want is a wholesome packet of perfectly ordinary oats, unenhanced, doing what you expect oats to do, not claiming to change your life, be better than any other oats, or, even worse, claiming to be box of diamonds, rather than the oats they so obviously are

I’ve been burned too many times now, particularly by hyped marketing, often from ‘quality’ papers on how this or that book is the beautifully written heaven of my dreams, life will never be the same without reading it, and how it rivals (insert name of excellently written book on particular subject matter, genre or setting) and (insert name of second highly lauded book on aforementioned particular subject matter, genre or setting) in its particular splendour.

Excitedly I embark upon the new golden wonder book – only to find that what lies within will, if I’m lucky, be average or competent – but may equally well be toe-curlingly BAD.

The Victorian writer George Gissing identified an ‘I’ll say good things about your book if you say good things about mine’ clique in professional reviewing well over a hundred years ago. i don’t suppose things have improved much

It strikes me that the factory production line of books cannot be kept up with by any professional reader with a life to live, not to mention their own novel to write. What goes on must surely be skimming and the turning out of adulatory phrases in a ‘hope for kind payback’ kind of way.

And that’s just the books that succeed in getting a publisher.

Having recently struggled with reading an ARC of a book which shall remain nameless in terms of the appalling crimes it committed against sense, veracities of time, place, plot and characterisation – not to mention coherent language and dialogue, I feel heartily disinclined to want to read those who are self-publishing. The rationale being ‘if a book THAT bad got a publisher, what does it say about the one’s which DON’T’ (Apologies to those who deserve to get the publisher they cannot, as yet, find)

Lest this all sound like resentful sour grapes from an unpublished writer – I state my interest:

I do NOT have a burning desire to be a writer (if I wrote, it would be about a particular area of expertise/skill which I have some knowledge of – i.e. it would not be fiction)

I do not have a novel/play/book of poetry languishing in my cupboard waiting to be polished up and sent to editors, agents and publishers. Such a thing does not even exist in my head.

I am, though, a lifelong, excited, enthusiastic, thoughtful, immersive appreciator of literature and in awe of good writing and good writers – of pretty well all sorts.

Time was when I could browse the bookshop, or read the broadsheets arts pages, and generally  know that if a book was described as having the qualities I was looking for, there would be truth in the claims.

That time is long gone. Moonshine made of potato peelings gets put in a shiny bottle and sold as champagne. Gallons of the stuff

I stopped relying on professional reviewers a long while ago (other than certain writers I value, if THEY say good things about another writer, I’m half-inclined to listen)

I began to trust ‘ordinary reviewers’  like me, on Amazon, liking some of the same stuff and disliking some of the same stuff for similar reasons.

However, the moving in big time of shill reviewers who only review one book – the particular potato peeling variety which is released and instantly gets a handful of 5 star rave reviews – often poorly written, plus the various shenanigans and jostlings and foulings which go on in Amazon’s ‘Top Reviewers’ ranking battles, means I trust that avenue less and less. If a reviewer gets appreciative of their own ranking, they know that to give something a negative review is to court the attentions of the shillers, so it seems to me honesty is declining fast in that area.

IS there light at the end of the tunnel? – well, I must say I HAVE started to look very carefully at what bloggers, not selling anything, might be reading, and finding books which people are carefully reviewing, judiciously saying why they do or do not like the book, and following particular readers and their recommendations.

But having (by just such a route) been steered towards a couple of properly brilliant writers, new to me, I’m sad that the trumpeting publicity and promotion machine seems to not be serving those particular writers well. They languish unread and un-bought.

Meanwhile, I continue to shake my head in disbelief to see writing commended as beautiful when it would not pass muster in a high school essay.

I’m (almost) becoming afraid of taking a chance on new writers. It may be time to revisit writers long turned to dust, who understood the craft