Reading group: Duplicate Keys by Jane Smiley

 Warning: plot spoil. Our discussion of this book, suggested by Clare, centred on whether or not it works as a thriller, and therefore it was inevitable that right from the start we should talk about its workings, including the handling of revelation and the ending.

Since Jane Smiley is renowned as a literary and Pullitzer prizewinning chronicler of family relations, most of us expected this book, her only thriller, to be a superior literary and psychological example of the genre, but for all but two of our group it was a disappointment.

Set at the beginning of the eighties, it opens as early-thirties librarian Alice Ellis is interviewed by a detective about the horrific scene she has just discovered when visiting the flat of her friend Susan, absent in the Adirondacks, to water the plants: the bodies of Susan's partner Denny and Craig, Denny's adopted brother who lives with them, slumped in easy chairs and shot through the head. Denny and Craig are members of a once almost successful pop group with whom Alice and Susan moved from the Midwest to New York ten years earlier, old school and university friends seeking fame and fortune (and inevitably disappointed). Other members of the group eventually come under suspicion for the murder: Noah Mast, whose wife Rya, it will turn out, has been having an affair with Craig, and Ray Reschley who has sold the two men a large amount of cocaine but failed to get his money from them and is inevitably under pressure from his dealers. But then there are the unknown number of people to whom Susan and Denny lent the keys to their apartment and the unknown number of times they may have been copied...

A promising enough scenario, but for me it instantly failed to deliver, and by the time of the meeting I had managed to read only 50 pages, so tedious did I find the book (although I did force myself to finish it afterwards in order to write this up). The whole thing is seen through the eyes of the musing Alice, a clear authorial intention to make this thriller psychological, but she - along with all of the group - is so lacking in affect that right from the start I was unconvinced by the psychology and there was a consequent lack of tension to engage me in the plot. After her interview with the detective, Alice goes to Ray's apartment for dinner where Noah and Rya have also arrived, and is greeted at the door by Rya with, ' "Isn't it amazing?"

' "We're just shocked," said Rya, whose blond hair was wound on top of her head. If she unpinned it, it would fall down in a single shining mass, Alice knew. The only sense of expertise she ever got about Rya was when the other woman was arranging her hair or choosing clothes. "Just shocked, shocked. I can't express it."
"Astonished. Dumbfounded," suggested Noah.
"Noah is shocked, too. Believe me. He teases to cover up."
"Floored. Taken aback."
"Don't make us laugh, Noah." '

Ray arrives with takeout food which both the group and the author relish in a way I found unintentionally laughable in the situation, Rya 'moaning over the mo-shu pork, the oysters with straw mushrooms, the gong-bao chicken with charred red peppers and cashews, the sizzling rice soup, the shrimp toast.'

If this is intended, as the New York Times Reviewer would have it, as the affectless 'cool' cultivated by thirties-something New Yorkers, I simply don't buy it. The murder of members of a longtime friendship group is surely the very thing to break through that 'cool', however disaffected the members may have become with each other. And although Rya's behaviour is commented on by her husband Noah as 'odd',  it doesn't, in the hindsight allowed by the later knowledge that one of the murdered men was her (generally) secret lover, seem to me likely, however affected, or indeed much different from the almost indifferent behaviour of the others. (Alice has to wonder as they eat 'if the others were thinking constantly of Denny and Craig and Susan, as she was'). And if the general indifference (which makes for unlikeable characters I simply can't get interested in) is intended as an authorial manipulation to bring all of the characters under the reader's suspicion, it doesn't work for me, because only a few pages in I guessed correctly that Susan, Denny's partner, had committed the murder. Clare and Jenny, the two members of our group present who had liked the book, asked me how I had known. To begin with, Susan is glaringly significant as the only one not around, officially away when the murder takes place and therefore the only one who, if she did commit the murder, covered her tracks. Secondly, one of Susan's main characteristics is her neatness and organisation, and the murders are strikingly neat: both men sitting in their places and nothing in the room disturbed. Most importantly, when she returns and is told of the murder, although the one most likely in conventional terms to break down, she acts with the greatest cool and least affect of all.

Jenny objected that often in thrillers the most likely person turns out not to have done it, and I did briefly consider that this was a double-bluff on the part of the author, but there were other things that signalled to me that the author was simply not in command of the thriller mode. When Alice gets back after the meal to her flat she opens her bedroom door and is startled to find Susan, returned, in her bed (which indeed signals a kind of sneakiness and unpredictability on the part of Susan, and strongly links her, associatively and thematically, with the danger of duplicate keys - not to mention the giveaway fact of her having gone on her return to Alice's flat and not to her own where the murders have taken place). This means it must fall to (the unsuspecting) Alice, there and then, to tell her about the murder of her partner (though rather unconvincingly she puts it off for as long as possible). Alice gets into bed with Susan and snuggles up to her: 'And then, when Alice had her securely in her arms, she told her. After a minute or two, Susan disengaged herself and got up, went into the bathroom and closed the door.' During the subsequent silence from the bathroom, Alice falls asleep (which again doesn't seem all that likely: wouldn't she be on edge, wondering and worrying about her friend?), waking later to find Susan 'moving about like a mother in Alice's room', tidying up: 'Always well groomed, she was even more so now.' The narration presents this as unremarkable: 'If [Alice] expected wailing, she should not have, for Susan was not that way' and 'How typical of Susan, she thought, to face devastation with a cleanup.' However, this seemed to me a complete authorial fudge. The most significant moment - for both thriller and psychological mode - would be the moment of telling and those moments afterwards before Susan gets out of bed. How did she react in those moments? What expression was on her face? (The light isn't off.) What happened to her eyes? Did they widen? Her mouth? Did her face twitch? What about her breathing? Did she gasp? Did she make any sounds? In fact, she could have been made to have reactions that Alice and the reader could interpret as shock and horror but which in hindsight would turn out to be the guilt of a murderer, thus putting the reader off the scent. Instead, the author implies she had no facial reaction by telling us beforehand that Susan has a naturally calm and inexpressive face, an inadequate and psychologically unconvincing explanation for a blank reaction to such news, and then glosses the moment in which she is thus revealed as a cold bitch most likely to have committed the murder.

I stumbled too over a moment on the second page. The detective interviewing Alice asks her to confirm that while Susan was away she was watering the plants (which is how she came upon the murders). She replies, ' "I was supposed to. I told Susan I would come every three days." ' This supposed to immediately alerted me to the fact that she may not have done precisely as promised. This will eventually turn out to be the case, and there is a reason for her not having done so that will be the crucial clue incriminating Susan, and which, revealed in its true light at this stage, would give the game away from the start. However, it seemed to me unlikely that the detective wouldn't pick up on this very obvious hint that all was not as it was supposed to be, as indeed he fails to do, and since we are locked into the musing Alice's viewpoint, it seemed a glaring omission that we don't share knowledge of this reason. The clever thing for the author to have done would be to reveal the reason but find an alternative explanation for it that seems to let Susan off the hook, or indeed diverts attention away from her. Instead, the moment is glossed and left hanging, and it stuck out for me as a clumsily planted and inadequately smoothed-over clue.

Susan's motive for the murder is over-signalled throughout and yet psychologically obscure, pummelled at the reader in long speechy conversations between her and Alice over more relished exotic food, and amounting to nothing more than the fact that she couldn't bear any longer to go on living with the overriding obsession of two men obsessed with the stardom they never managed to grasp and can't believe they never will. ' "You've got to understand what it's like hearing the same conversations over and over for years... It hurt me. It literally made my skin prickle and my heart pound." ' If we are to accept that this emotional state was intense enough to drive her to murder we need a better, more dynamic insight into it, but as it is we need to take Susan's word for it. It seems to me that part of the reason the author fails to tackle this dimension is that she has set Susan up as so self-contained that such extremity in her is unlikely - not to mention the fact that crimes of passion don't tend to involve the kind of cold-blooded forward planning in which Susan turns out to have engaged: obtaining the gun, learning how to use it and planning her alibi. If, as in a conventional thriller, we are not to need to be convinced on such a psychological level, then Susan needs to have some more obvious and easily graspable motive.

So the chief problem for me is that though this purports to be a psychological thriller, the psychology of the characters is unconvincing or impossible to grasp, conveyed as it is through 'talky' speeches and narratorial 'telling' rather than properly dramatised interaction - though I should say that neither Clare nor Jenny had a problem with this. Since Susan is portrayed as so affectless, I found it impossible to understand why Alice has always been needy for her friendship (and is now guiltily glad of the opportunity the murder gives her to spend more time with her). It's not enough for the narrator to tell me, on behalf of Alice, that 'No one was like Susan, after all, no one thought about things as Susan did. Some quality of her mind was unique, attractive but indefinable, inaccessible' since Susan never came across to me as attractively mysterious but tediously blank. Immediately after finding the bodies, Alice meets a man with whom she becomes involved, a relationship involving a certain (if ambivalent) passion, and I found it psychologically unconvincing that she can't tell him about the murders, as did John. (Alice's musing rationale - 'Henry entering her present circle [would be] a complication of cruel proportions' - seemed to me merely authorial rationalisation for avoiding narrative complications.) 

As for the thriller/plot element, Alice seems to come to the realisation that Susan is the murderer instinctually (rather than through the obvious clue planted at the start that should have told her the truth all along), and, on the psychological level, her continuing attachment to Susan after this realisation - and indeed even greater sense of satisfaction in the new closeness she imagines - seems unrealistic. When Susan eventually stalks Alice with a gun, there has been nothing planted beforehand to make us feel that this was inevitable or psychologically realistic: it seems merely a manipulated plot twist, and Alice's escape through a window and along a high ledge clinging to the building seems highly unlikely and smacks of nothing more than the insertion of a cliched cinema trope for the sake of a possible film version.

Once again, on the thriller/plot level: John thought it highly unlikely that only one detective should be involved in a double murder, as is the case, or that he should not make more effort to protect Alice from Susan if, as turns out, he suspected Susan all along (the lame excuse he gives is lack of manpower). Even Jenny and Clare, the book's defenders, found it laughable that, after being told by him to get her locks changed, Alice ends up abandoned by the locksmith and alone at night without a lock on her door or even the obvious emergency expedient of a bolt.

Ann summed up the book succinctly: that normally in a thriller you can in retrospect trace a pattern of clues as they were systematically planted, but that that wasn't possible with this novel, and that it didn't really work as either a thriller or a psychological novel.

Jenny however found the theme of faded dreams in this book socially realistic and compelling: she thought that there had been a real social phenomenon in the seventies of people moving to the city expecting to find fame and fortune and by the eighties becoming disillusioned.

The meeting had been sparsely attended, all of the men except John absent. Afterwards, I bumped into Trevor and Mark separately, and both said they felt as I did about the book, Mark having managed only 100 pages, and both had guessed from very near the beginning that Susan had committed the murders.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Catching up on recent literary events:

On Sunday I went to Carol Ann Duffy's 'Shore to Shore' tour of poets at Caernarfon's Galeri, a really wonderful event attended by hordes, which I've written about on my other blog. It was a horrible rainy night, as horrible as rainy nights can be in this part of North Wales (I'm looking out at the trees whipping around and the rain batting on my window just now), but nothing could damp this event, and it was a bright and heartening two hours in the midst of our depressing political situation.
Information about the tour can be found here.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at the launch in Southport for Carys Bray's new novel, The Museum of You. After a walk on the immense beach, which I had never been to before - the sea so far away you could hardly see it - I turned up at Broadhurst's bookshop with beach mud on my shoes and splashed on my trousers. The event was lovely. The Museum of You is the story of a young girl who knows nothing about her dead mother since her grieving father won't talk about her, and who tries to piece together her mother's life in a 'museum' of objects stored in the spare room. The book sounds wonderful and Carys made the evening even more special with little gift bags containing objects featured in the novel, and cakes decorated with their shapes. Broadhurst's Bookshop also did an impressive and apt window display.

At the beginning of June I was in London at another launch, that of my long-time colleague Jane Rogers for her new novel, Conrad and Eleanor. Another lovely evening, this time in Hatchard's in Piccadilly: it was a hot evening and there was prosecco (my favourite!) and a super reading from what looks like a really very impressive novel about the effects of time on a marriage.

Really looking forward to reading both books.

Reading group: A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Our main reaction to this, Hemingway's now classic second novel (suggested by Ann), was that it was difficult to know how to read it from our present-day perspective. Famously based on Hemingway's own experience as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in WW1, it is the first-person narration of Frederic Henry, an American in the Italian army overseeing ambulances on the Italian-Austrian front. Henry recounts his journey from his posting in a sleepy Italian town where the action, though advancing, is heard only distantly in the hills, and where he meets and falls in love with an English nurse Catherine Barkley, to his embroilment in direct action; his serious wounding and hospitalisation in Milan, nursed by Catherine (who happens to be posted to the same hospital); his return to the front and experience of the retreat of the Italian army; his escape from execution as a retreating officer and consequent gruelling undercover journey back to the pregnant Catherine; and their flight to Switzerland, a triumph cut short by personal tragedy.

There was immediate agreement in the group that this book fell into two different stories - the war story and the love story - which didn't really fit together. Everyone agreed that the war sequences were brilliantly executed in Hemingway's famously spare and telling prose, but everyone hated the episodes concerning the relationship with Catherine, which were chiefly conducted in dialogue and  shockingly flabby and coy in comparison - or, as John pointed out, in comparison to Hemingway's short stories - and which certainly don't withstand a feminist reading (which Hemingway's short story Cat in the Rain, for instance, does). This is the exchange (much cut by me) when Catherine has asked Henry about his experience with prostitutes:

... "When a man stays with a girl ... she just says what he wants her to? ... I will. I'll say just what you wish and I'll do what you wish and then you'll never want any other girls, will you?" She looked at me very happily. "I'll do what you want and say what you want and then I'll be a great success, won't I?"
"Yes ... You're so lovely."
"I'm afraid I'm not very good at it yet."
"You're lovely."
"I want what you want. There isn't any me any more. Just what you want."

John said it was perhaps therefore necessary to read the novel historically, that is, as a period piece. Ann found the book of great historical interest, dealing as it does with an aspect of the First World War usually overlooked, attention tending to be concentrated on the Somme. She said she felt that she almost wished that the love story had been left out as the war story was so searing and vivid.

We talked about the prose in those war sections. People were immensely impressed by Hemingway's ability to show rather than tell, to pick out telling details that obviate the need for distancing narratorial statements or explanations. Ann pointed to the horrific moment when Henry is carried wounded in an ambulance, dripped on by blood from the wound of the man above him. The blood suddenly stops dripping, and so Henry and the reader know that the man's heart has stopped pumping: he has died. Hemingway refrains from actually stating this last, but through that one detail allows Henry and the reader to think and experience it for themselves. Ann wondered if people still write like that, however. John and I commented that 'show not tell' is in fact the great creative writing mantra of the present day - people call on the legacy of Hemingway all the time - but that we felt it's often misinterpreted or badly done, with authors focusing solely on the most boring and mundane details that actually don't tell you anything about the inner lives of characters or the dynamics of situations and indeed mask them.

John said he felt there was a bit of that going on in this book, actually. Several of the chapters end with something strangely inconsequential and quotidian, such as 'We all got up and left the table' or 'I was terrifically hungry'(after the escaped Henry jumps a freight train to find it full of guns). I said I thought that perhaps this was a deliberate illustration of the lack of significance, or alienation from significance, occasioned by war, although I did agree that it often resulted in a disconcerting lack of resonance. Someone suggested that this, and indeed the whole prose style with its distanced spareness (but which paradoxically can create a lack of distance, as seen above), was a deliberate illustration of the narrating Henry's shell shock. Ann said that there is a school of thought that it is rather a result of Hemingway's own shell shock, with which I tended to agree. There was some demurring at this which was taken as a suggestion of lack of narrative control on Hemingway's part, but I pointed out that you can have both: writers can write instinctually out of their own psyches and then become aware of how it's serving their artistic purpose and consequently work consciously on honing the style (in fact, I'd say that that's fundamentally how the greatest writing is done).

I said that the passage that really struck me in the book occurs in the chapter where Henry is hiding in the train wagon surrounded by guns:

My knee was stiff but it had been very satisfactory. Valentini [the doctor who had operated on him] had done a fine job. I had done half the retreat on foot and swum part of the Tagliamento with his knee. It was his knee all right. The other knee was mine. Doctors did things to you and then it was not your body any more. The head was mine, the inside of the belly. It was very hungry in there. I could feel it turn over on itself. The head was mine, but not to use, not to think with, only to remember and not too much to remember.

It was at this point that the meaning of the novel fell into place for me: it's about the loss and fragmentation of self created by war. In this context, the schism between the two stories of the book can be seen as artistically apt: those two sides of Henry's experience are in fact irreconcilable. Indeed, the passage above goes on, in a prose that mimics with elisions his distressed state of mind:

I could remember Catherine but I knew I would get crazy if I thought about her when I was not sure yet I would see her, so I would not think about her, only about her a little, only about her with the car going slowly and clickingly, and some light through the canvas and my lying with Catherine on the floor of the car. Hard as the floor of the car to lie not thinking only feeling, having been away too long, the clothes wet and the floor moving only a little each time and lonesome inside and alone with wet clothing and hard floor for a wife.

However, it's true that on the whole, throughout the terrible things that happen to him, Henry does retain a single-minded and obsessive romantic passion for Catherine, and someone in the group suggested that this wasn't actually very psychologically realistic - would he have the emotional space? Ann added that it's absent from most depictions of men's experience of active service in war, illustrating the alienation from such emotions created by active service. John wondered if it could be the result of the injection of autobiographical material into Henry's story: Hemingway was famously a passionate romantic when it came to women, and, although wounded, was less involved in active service than Henry. It was very clear, however, that the scene in which Henry is hit by a shell came from direct experience - no one in the group was in any doubt about that.

Still, people in the group went on musing about the necessity of the love story, which, in fact, takes over completely once Henry and Catherine are safely escaped to Switzerland. I think it was Mark who suggested it was there because Henry has to be a Knight in Shining Armour - there's a lot of macho humblebrag concerning Henry's decoration, like Hemingway's own, for bravery when wounded (oh, he doesn't think he did anything brave, but all the others insist he has to get a medal) - and of course a woman is essential to this heroic package. Some of the men in the group then also said they had wondered about the likelihood of the heroic journey that Henry makes with Catherine in a small rowing boat in the dark up Lake Maggiore to freedom in Switzerland - another instance, they thought, of dubious heroic posturing.

Everyone thought however that there was a very different tone to the ending, all heroics gone, when Catherine undergoes a horrific Caesarean section which Henry is allowed to watch from the operating theatre viewing gallery - once again, there was no doubt that this was drawn from real-life experience. The tragic outcome had moved group members to tears, and John commented that it's interesting that none of the book before this creates this effect, as if in formal enactment of the emotional numbing of war before this final, intensely personal moment.

He then added, however, that he thought it was significant that Catherine dies in childbirth. Although one of Hemingway's wives did undergo a Caesarean section, she did not die, but the marriage eventually failed due to his unfaithfulness (as did two of his other marriages) (and the real-life nurse on whom Catherine is based left him before they could be married). Looking at the relationship between Henry and Catherine, John said, it was clear that it would never have lasted, based as it was on romantic and narcissistic obsession - the heavily pregnant Catherine says to Henry of the coming baby as they walk in the Swiss woods: "She won't come between us, will she? The little brat" - and by killing off Catherine and the baby, Hemingway can preserve Henry's status as a (faithful) tragic hero while setting him free.

We all laughed at this, and agreed it was true, in spite of our having found the ending so sad. Once again Ann wondered how people might have read this at the time of publication. It seemed to me that such an irony would be unlikely to have occurred to them - we were looking at the book very much through a post-feminist perspective - and once again we came back to our major problem of clashing perspectives through which to view the book.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Domain name working again

My domain name is working again, thank goodness. It's now possible to get through again on elizabethbaines.com

Accessing my website

I've discovered that my web domain has been down for about a week, so anyone trying to access my site through elizabethbaines.com won't have got through. (Apparently the domain owners have sold on their business; the new owners are saying that my domain has expired - although it's paid for - and are insisting that I need to sort it out with the previous owners who are unobtainable and, it seems, no longer even exist!) I don't know how long it's going to take to sort it out, but in the meantime my website can be accessed via the basic url:

www.e.baines.zen.co.uk

Reading group: The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

Warning: plot spoil.

This short 1978 novel, set in 1959-60, about a widow who opens a bookshop in the fictional East Anglian seaside town of Hardborough where she has lived for the past eight years, and the obstructions she encounters from the local population, was greatly admired by most in our group. Mark said he had suggested the book because when he read it some years ago he was stunned by the economy and elegance of the prose (for which Fitzgerald is so known) - an admiration shared by everyone else in the group - although, he said, he wasn't sure what it was about.

He was probably going to go on to elaborate on this, but I jumped in and said, surely it's about small-town politics and the kind of fascistic pressure that can be brought to bear in such small communities on those who don't conform to the wishes of those with power. Frances Green wants to buy The Old House, a house on the foreshore with its own (damp) warehouse, a former oyster house, for her bookshop. However, Mrs Gamart, wife of a retired general, has plans for the place as an Arts Centre - a bid to situate herself at the cultural centre of Hardborough (and in the process inveigle herself with the remaining representative of the old gentry, Mr Brundish, by whom she has so far been ignored). Mrs Gamart gets straight to work on Frances by inviting her to a soiree. However, Frances, unaware at the start of such motives and machinations, and certainly unaware of where they must inevitably lead, is undeterred and goes ahead with her bookshop, only to encounter obstructions so underhand that they can hardly be named, with even her own solicitor party to the social pressure against her, so that in the end she is undone. Ann said that the book is thus about the impossibility for an outsider of negotiating the unspoken rules of such a community (although Frances has been there eight years, she is in effect a blow-in). John commented that the plot indeed amounts to a witch hunt conducted on the most genteel terms.

Mark, Trevor, Clare and Jenny raved unreservedly about the book, in particular its depiction of the subtlety of the viciousness deployed against Frances. The stunning opening image, symbolic of the tussle between that viciousness and Frances's oblivion and determination was remarked on:

She had once seen a heron flying across the estuary and trying, while it was on the wing, to swallow an eel which it had caught. The eel, in turn, was struggling to escape from the gullet of the heron and appeared a quarter, a half, or occasionally three-quarters of the way out. The indecision expressed by both creatures was pitiable. They had taken on too much.

Later, the narrative will comment about Frances: 'She blinded herself, in short, by pretending for a while that human beings are not divided into exterminators and exterminatees, with the former, at any given moment, predominating.'

We all thought that the descriptions of the environs were evocative, and beautifully symbolic of the forces surrounding Frances and the sadness of her fate:

The North Sea emitted a brutal salt smell, at once clean and rotten. The tide was running out fast, pausing at the submerged rocks and spreading into yellowish foam, as though deliberating what to throw up next or leave behind, how many wrecks of ships and men, how many plastic bottles.

There was some dispute about Frances's character. Clare saw her chiefly as ingenuous, and someone pointed in corroboration to the early description of her: 'She was in appearance small, wispy and wiry, somewhat insignificant from the front view and totally so from the back.' However, that early description is only - and no doubt narratorially deliberately only - of her outward appearance. Others of us countered that she was feisty, in the early pages hanging on to a horse's tongue while its teeth are filed and later responding to her solicitor who is failing to back her with a single-word letter: 'Coward!' In fact ingenuousness and feistiness are not mutually exclusive; it is indeed that combination in Frances that is central to the plot. It is interesting, though, that we had this dispute, and it is is perhaps relevant to subsequent points we discussed.

I said that although I found the prose elegant and the observations of people acute, I did actually find the narration emotionally flat, with which Doug, Ann and John agreed. Doug said he suspected it was imbued with the psyche of the author, whose life was indeed hard, the events of this novel echoing an episode of her own. Clare said that on the contrary she saw the tone of the prose as a reflection of the state of mind of protagonist Frances. However, as had been pointed out, Frances's psyche is fundamentally feisty, and I said that even if it weren't, then there's no need for the prose itself to be affectively flat, since the novel is a third-person omniscient narration.

We four felt that the flatness of the prose didn't do justice to the viciousness of the situation being depicted, but the others countered that it was precisely this contrast that made the viciousness so telling, and this was a strong disagreement in the group.

I said too that I felt that the characters were stereotypes, and once again Doug, Ann and John agreed, John strongly so. I was conceding to the rest that in such small towns in the fifties and sixties there were stereotypes - the retired general, his social-climbing wife, the ageing representative of old money, the louche commuting BBC employee, the more salt-of-the earth working-class characters, all of which appear here - when John made a point that perhaps explained some of our disagreements.

There is no interiority in the piece, he pointed out. Everyone, including Frances, is seen very much from the outside. At most we are told what Frances's emotions are. The book, as Ann said, is in the narrative tradition of writers such as Trollope, Edith Wharton and Barbara Pym, operating chiefly as social commentary rather than psychological exploration, and taking a rational objective view of all of the characters including the main protagonist. We are not made, as we are in the more modern literary mode of interiority, to share the protagonist's emotional experience, but have to take on trust the narrative judgement of her. The reader's way of apprehending her is thus in turn directed to be rational rather than experiential - which perhaps led to our differing reasoning about Frances. With regard to the other characters: although I had conceded that people do in life act in stereotype roles, it is also true that no one in life is truly a stereotype: there is always a complicating interiority. This novel eschews that interiority, leaving its more peripheral characters perilously grounded in the shallows of stereotype.

An aspect of the book that almost everyone felt unsure about was the poltergeist that inhabits the Old House, the 'rapper' as it is locally called. The locals take it for granted, which Frances herself does, and for a while after she moves in it seems to settle down as a low-key presence, but then later becomes more obstructive, refusing to let her open her own door then letting go and sending her flying, and making wild and vicious noises. Because this is such a realist novel, some of us in the group had wondered as we read if the rapper were really the locals trying to hound Frances from the house, but as everyone agreed, no evidence whatever emerged to suggest this. It seemed that we were meant to accept its presence as a fact and symbolic only of the social pressures on Frances, initially subtle but finally overt.

Everyone agreed that the ending of the novel is stunning. Here the objective observational narrative mode works to brilliant effect, formally enacting the exclusion of Frances as we watch her leave with an emotion she has been made unjustly to feel:

As the train drew out of the station she sat with her head bowed in shame...

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Review of Used to be in the Short Review

I'm having a nice couple of days: hot on the heels of the review in Confingo, here's another really great review of Used to Be, this time in the inestimable Short Review. Reviewer Cath Barton discusses several of the stories in depth, and concludes:

Life is a series of might-have-beens, near-misses and what ifs. This is a tremendous collection of stories. They do not seek to be didactic, but may nonetheless give many of us who read them cause to reflect on the choices we have made in our own lives, and to be more mindful of the options which open in front of us every day.

Review of Used to Be in Confingo

There'a a lovely review of Used to Be in the new issue of the Manchester-based magazine Confingo. Confingo is an extremely smartly-produced publication, with stunning artwork and photography and high-standard fiction and poetry. This issue also carried an interview with David Gaffney. I thoroughly recommend it as a magazine worth subscribing to.

Of Used to Be, reviewer Emma Bosworth says: 'The writing is is vivid, buoyant, incisive ... vibrant evocation of time and place - and the power of the human mind to transcend both.'

Reading group: Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton

Warning: plot spoil.

This 1941 novel, Trevor's suggestion, features thirty-four-year-old George Harvey Bone who is in the grip of an infatuation with Netta Longdon, an out-of-work minor actress at the centre of a group of idlers who hang around London's Earl's Court all day drinking, or indeed, blagging drinks from others, chiefly from George. The novel opens, however, when George, staying with his aunt on the Norfolk coast for Christmas, suffers one of the mental lapses to which he is increasingly prone, in which he momentarily forgets where he is and is then overtaken by a purpose which at other times he entirely forgets: to kill Netta. Netta and her cohorts treat George cruelly, blatantly and even tauntingly using his infatuation with her to exploit him and going so far as to trick him, but so great is his obsession with her that in his 'sane' moments, he entirely forgets his desire to kill her and once more simply longs to be admitted into her affections.

Introducing the book, Trevor said he had found it hard to get to grips with these mental shifts, by which I think he meant he couldn't understand them on a psychological level. Although there is some implication that they are fuelled, or at least exacerbated, by excessive drinking, the book is epigraphed with a now outdated definition of schizophrenia: SCHIZOPHRENIA: A cleavage of the mental functions, associated with assumption by the affected person of a second
personality. However, George's lapses are in fact more akin to what we might now call a fugue state, a state of forgetting, dissociation and escape. It also seemed to some so very alien to George's somewhat passive and put-upon character that he should have such an impulse in even a dissociated state.

I said however that I didn't think this was meant to be a psychologically realist novel, and Ann agreed, saying that the mental shifts were more of a device, used in my view for a political rather than a psychological purpose. The novel begins very explicitly and indeed self-consciously at the start of 1939 and the run-up to war. As he walks the Norfolk cliff, George wonders when he should kill Netta: 'January the first? That seemed a good idea - starting the New Year - 1939.' Netta and the group around her approve of the Munich appeasement which troubles George; Netta is attracted to fascism for all the most decadent reasons:

She was supposed to dislike fascism, to laugh at it, but actually she liked it enormously. In secret she liked pictures of marching, regimented men, in secret she was physically attracted by Hitler. She did not really think that Mussolini looked like a funny burglar. She liked the uniform, the guns, the breeches, the boots, the swastikas, the shirts. She was, probably, sexually stimulated by these things in the same way as she might have been sexually stimulated by a bull-fight

and the unpleasant Peter, with whom George is devastated to find Netta is sexually involved, and who has been in jail, once for what he calls 'a minor spot of homicide with a motor-car', (and whose brutality is another source of attraction for Netta) is a Nazi sympathiser, if not an out-and-out Moseleyite.

In my view George's obsession with Netta, mired in the unthinking alcohol-soaked stasis of an idle life, is intended to stand for the dreamlike British psyche in the run-up to the war; it is George's fugue-like states which are the true sanity: the moments in which he sees evil for what it is and recognises that it must be destroyed, however contrary that runs to his nature.

Ann said she felt there was also a class theme operating. Netta and Peter and co are social climbers and they tolerate George not simply for what they can get out of him materially, but for the association with the kind of social background including a minor public school education that is George's. Indeed, in discussing Netta's attraction to fascism, the narration comments: 'And somehow she was dimly aware of the class content of all this: she connected it with her own secret social aspirations'. John noted the similarity in atmosphere and situation to that of Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark, published seven years earlier and which we discussed previously: a book set in a similar alcohol-soaked social milieu in the run up to the earlier war, with a similar sense of social breakdown and uncertain future - though, as we all noted, Rhys's book is much more psychologically internal (and thus to my mind more modern).

Jenny said she had read this book more simply as a depiction of a man manipulated by cruel people and unable to withstand them due to his amenable nature, and had found it very moving indeed. Everyone agreed that the book did work powerfully on that level, but whether this mix of modes works is perhaps questionable. Because George's character and emotional state are so richly portrayed, I found it difficult to believe that he would ever kill Netta. Others reported being very engaged by the question of whether he would, and the tension created as the narration led towards the possibility. John had said he thought the 'schizophrenia' device was a clever way of engaging your sympathies with him when he finally does so, but people experienced surprise, even shock, while some, including me, rather lost sympathy with George at this point - or rather, I found myself jerked out of the emotional engagement induced by the psychological realism and forced back to the detachment created by a more political allegory.

On the whole, I think people found the book thus slightly problematic, but everyone was agreed that it is a striking book, steeped in atmosphere and social-historical details that everyone relished, and rendered in acute prose beautifully exemplified in this description of Peter from George's point of view: 'And he laughed in his nasty, moustachy way.'

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Wales Arts Review reviews Used to BE

Here's a great new review of Used to Be in the Wales Arts Review - very insightful in terms of my basic themes and preoccupations. I didn't see it for a while, as I've not been on social media much - coming to the end of a big writing project means spending any spare time catching up in the garden, cleaning the sadly neglected house and spending hours and hours fiddling about with the manuscript - I've edited it twice now, but every time I look at the damn thing I see something that needs changing, and then I have to redo it and print out the changed pages again for my beta readers, who prefer hard copy.

The review, by Frances Spurrier, comments on the way some of the stories touch on technology, which I hadn't thought of myself - I tend to think I've left behind my obsession with technology, as worked out in The Birth Machine and some of my earlier stories, having become more interested in storytelling and memory, but I guess those things are intertwined, all feeding into my underlying theme of power which I made most explicit in Balancing on the Edge of the World.

I'm pretty chuffed by Frances Spurrier's comment:

 'While it may be easy enough to have existential anxieties, to ask what is real and what is not, to question the reliability of memory – it is not at all easy to ask big questions in this most difficult of writing forms, the short story, and using such lucid and poetic prose as the author here uses.'

Off to London today, to the launch of Isobel Dixon's new poetry collection Bearings - can't wait, I love her poetry!

Edge Hill Prize long list

It's that time of year again - the longlist is announced for the Edge Hill prize for a single-author collection of stories. This year my own book Used to Be, is on the list - a massive list, and there's huge competition, with some big hitters in the short-story world there, including Colum McCann and Kate Clanchy, two of my favourite writers. And a good proportion of Irish and Scottish writers.

Crossposted to Fictionbitch

Reading group: The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe

John suggested this novel set in an Irish border town in the early 60s, which begins, 'When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago...' Thus Francie Brady establishes himself as a severely unreliable narrator before embarking on a tale of the small-town ostracisation of his family for the drunkenness of his father Benny and the unstable mental state of his mother and the resulting squalor of their life, and his own reaction and resistance to the ostracisation, which ends in horrific violence and incarceration.

John said there were various questions that could be asked about this book. Is it a depiction of how to create a psychopath, or is it more simply a portrayal of the brutal lives that some people still led in Ireland in the early 60s? Or is it an exploration of the effects of English colonisation of Ireland and of Anglo-American culture on Irish small-town life? Francie's main enemies, the Nugents, are strongly anglicised: they have lived in England and their son Phillip once attended an English private school, turning up at first in his pristine uniform which marks him out as different, superior and privileged. Along with the Purcells, the parents of Francie's friend Joe, they aspire to an English middle-class lifestyle, with over-neat houses and dinner parties. The trouble between Francie and the Nugents begins when Mrs Nugent calls Francie's family pigs, a historic English insult for the Irish.

I said that I thought the book was about Irish identity and the ambivalence and confusion of realities created by the imposition of English culture on an older, more rural Ireland, and I thought it therefore significant that the novel is set in a southern Irish town near the border with Northern Ireland. Francie permanently longs for a lost past located in old-fashioned romantic love and family and preserved in his mother's romanticised tales of his parents' honeymoon - tales which will turn out to contrast starkly with the reality - and struggles always, in spite of the reality, to regard himself and his parents in this light. Yet he is deeply colonised by Anglo-American culture. His mental landscape is peopled by characters from English comics and American films, and his acts of transgression and violence do indeed have a horrifically comic-book character. It is significant that the anglicised Phillip Nugent is the possessor of a large collection of such comics, all of them preserved in a pristine state, which Francie envies and tricks out of him, the act which precipitates all the trouble between himself and the Nugents. His aggression towards the Nugents is clearly based in part in envy: he has unbidden and ambivalent fantasies in which they tell him they know he wants to belong to them and in which, to his disgust, Mrs Nugent breastfeeds him. He shares in the small-town admiration of his Uncle Alo, who has left for England and is supposed to have done so well there, and the unmasking of Alo is one of the precipitating factors in Francie's downward spiral. He has his own snobbery about traditional country people. He notes that 'a tractor went farting off home to the mountains with a trailer of muck', a derisory image contrasting sharply with a similar but romanticised image of 'an ass and cart going off into the green mountains', by which Francie is seduced, on the cover of Phillip Nugent's music book, nostalgically titled Emerald Gems of Ireland. It is significant too that it is Phillip, identified with appropriating colonisers, who, while possessing a library of Anglo-American comic culture, is also the possessor of this repository of Irish traditional ballads, including the one that Francie poignantly identifies with his mother. Francie holds particular scorn for Mrs Nugent's country-living brother, 'carrot-head Buttsy ... in a cottage that stank of turfsmoke and horsedung'. Buttsy's violent and uncouth pursuit of Francie gives the lie to the civilisation of the Nugents, the ambiguity of which is already established in their having to have returned to Ireland - a failure paralleling that of Francie's Uncle Alo. Yet the hypocrisies of the new society are more than matched by those of the older Ireland, so widely romanticised yet a seat of devastating damage: the damage to Francie's family is rooted in the trauma of his father's childhood in a Catholic Belfast orphanage, a pattern that will be repeated when Francie is sent in turn to a children's home and is interfered with by a priest.

All of this ambiguity is carried by the fact that Francie constantly slips into immature fantasies which in the end he turns into horrific reality. It is a shock to the reader to realise, when he returns from the reform school wanting to take up again his childish games with Joe, that Joe has gone on to secondary school and has outgrown such things, and to register Francie's arrested development  - signalled in the opening 'When I was a lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago' (which also prefigures the book's theme of confused history). I saw Francie's immaturity as representing the infantilisation of a people by both colonisation and religion, and it was noted in the group that Francie's name for his abuser in the reform school is 'Tiddly', neatly encapsulating the immaturity of a (historically all-powerful) Catholic priesthood.

After John's first question, Jenny had jumped in and said strongly that she didn't think that Francie is a psychopath - she thought that his behaviour is induced by circumstances and the way he is treated - and indeed his nostalgic longings and attachment to natural beauty, such as the single snowdrop that grows in the alleyway, militate against such an interpretation. However it was clear that Jenny had read the book as a psychological study. Others, in particular Clare, subscribed to this reading, and I agreed that the book did work beautifully on a psychological level as well as the political. Everyone agreed that the voice was exceptionally acute, that the book was in fact a tour de force of voice and prose style.

One question of John's that we didn't perhaps explore in enough depth was that of Francie's verbal charm, which he uses to manipulate people. Group members felt that the idea that he charms them is just another of Francie's fantasies, and that in reality they patronise or are frightened of him. I feel it's more complicated than that, but was unable to articulate why in the meeting. Francie's verbal wit is indeed quaint and acute. He comes upon some gossipy housewives in the grocery store: 'What's this? I says, the woman with three heads? When I said that they weren't so bad. Flick - back come the smiles.' I thought there was an implication that people were indeed momentarily disarmed by him, creating a cognitive dissonance (for both the characters and the reader) which in itself induces fear in others. In other words, Francie uses quaint Irish charm as a threatening weapon against his oppressors. John said that when he first read the book, several years ago, he was indeed charmed and saw Francie's actions as schoolboy pranks until they turn horrifically violent, a view that is reflected in reviews of the time. This time, he said, knowing the ending, he found all of it much more horrific.

Trevor noted that, unusually for Irish Catholics, none of the families, even the Bradys, has more than one child, and it was agreed that this is because this is not a social-realist novel, but one in which each character is some kind of representation.

Doug said that he was very impressed by the novel, but he could hardly say he enjoyed it as he found it so horrific, a view that was shared - interestingly enough, particularly among the men.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Reading Group: Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser.

It's a long time since we held the discussion of this book, Jenny's choice, and in the meantime my head has been stuffed with my WIP (I've been a long way away, psychologically), so my memory of it is rather hazy.

The book, first published in 1997, winner of a Pullitzer prize, and more recently brought back to attention, is a kind of fable set in New York at the end of the 19th century, when a frenzy of building development was spreading upwards and outwards to create the metropolis we know. It concerns the son of a tobacconist who from humble beginnings as a hotel clerk becomes an entrepreneur, developing first a series of coffee bars and then moving into the business of building hotels, each successive one larger, more luxurious, and finally more fantastical than the last.

We all liked the book, I think, though as far as I remember Hans wasn't so sure about the unusual tension in the book between realism and non-realism. The book begins in the mode of a fairytale, using fairytale idiom and summing up the whole story to follow: 'There once lived a man named Martin Dressler, a shopkeeper's son, who rose from modest beginnings to a height of dreamlike good fortune.' There's also a surreal episode near the beginning in which, before he becomes a clerk, Martin is taken to the top floor of the hotel and witnesses strange scenes amongst a troupe of actors staying there. However, the novel then quickly moves into a realist mode, with a measured, slightly old-fashioned prose very suited to the era portrayed, and a plethora of fascinating (and clearly deeply researched) historical details (which everyone loved). However, embedded within this realism is the motor of the novel: Martin Dressler's own psychic development from inspired but realist business sense to ambition, dreams, and finally fantasies that overreach themselves. As a result the novel ends in surreality, with Martin's final hotel a place that could not possibly exist in reality, with whole replicated worlds encompassed on its endless floors, including features such as real boating lakes.

Personally, I like this narrative tension a lot as a statement of the disastrous lack of realism at the heart of so many real-life capitalist projects, and indeed of our capitalist mentality and society, and Trevor in particular wholeheartedly agreed. There was some discussion as to how far in any case the ending of the book was a fantasy, those who had been to LA saying that projects there equal Martin's in their reliance on fantasy if not in impossible physicality.

Everyone was very taken with the ending, in which, recalling the early surreal scene involving actors, once Martin's final dream hotel is failing he employs actors to act as guests. In order to do so, they (for a time) become real-life inhabitants, the fantasy thus melding into reality. Finally, Martin walks by the river 'woken from his dream of stone', but unbowed, because it wasn't the particular dream that was important, but the dream impulse itself. In other words, realism can't win: the capitalist fantasy won't die.

Introducing the book, Jenny found central Martin's relationship with the two sisters he meets in a hotel where he lives before starting his own: he marries the dreamy but cool and ungiving Caroline, but takes into his confidence and business the lively and practical and less good-looking Emmeline. Jenny saw this as a depiction of the cultural (sexist) paradox in which women are required to fulfil incompatible male fantasies and be both beautifully fey and yet practical. I saw the two women (and his relations with them) rather as personifications of Martin's own psychic paradox - his initial practicality, and the dreaminess that overtakes it and leads to his downfall.

There was comment on the fact that there is a lot of repetition - especially in the depiction of these two women and their chaperoning mother. One early description of Caroline -  '...her pale hair pulled tightly back, so that it seemed to pull painfully against the skin of her temples' - is repeated several times. This is another rhetorical and rhythmic fairytale technique, and Ann pointed to the similarity with Homer's repetition of 'the wine-dark sea', noting also that it was a kind of labelling or signalling (of themes, tropes etc). A labelling technique seems indeed apt for the Victorian setting. However the repetitions here weren't exactly snappy, yet were repeated verbatim and so didn't work for several members of our group. Some people indeed found the book on the whole very wordy, though I hadn't found it unaptly so myself, and they did concede that the prose style was very suited to the era of the story.

Finally, Jenny and Clare both expressed appreciation of the fact that, in spite of this, the novel is composed of (more modernist) short sections, which made it easier to read in the short bursts occasioned by modern life. All in all, we thought it an excellent and engaging allegory of the capitalist urge, and thus indeed of present-day society.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

End of a draft

At last I reached the end of the latest draft of my wip - the typing up of it, that is. (I now have to read through the typescript and edit it). Here was my desk on the 2nd January when I started: five and a bit hand-written A4 Pukka pads, and beneath them two earlier typed-up drafts put ready for reference. And last Friday, after six weeks of sitting there at my window with the rain slashing down outside, and the sun, when it did come out, slowly creeping around so that towards the end I had to draw down the blind to see the screen, I typed the last word. Since then I have been immersed in the horror of cleaning a neglected house, the pleasanter and more therapeutic work of pruning a neglected garden, frantically catching up with my overdue reading, and basically re-learning to engage with the world around me!

The WIP trap

WIP progress report: I have been sitting still for so long now that I have a sore knee - argh! And because of that, and because I'm so near the end and tying things up, I hardly slept a wink last night. Other consequences are: a filthy house, an absolutely messy garden, my social life in utter abeyance and my awareness of the cultural events around me - theatre, film etc - at a minimum.

I do NOT recommend this working method, but I just can't help it myself: if I try to stop, I just sit there thinking about it but not doing it, and unable to put my mind to a single other thing, apart from Killer Soduko (numbers are such a great relief from words!).

Helen Walters reviews Used to Be

Another review of Used to Be to bring me back to my blog in spite of the demands of the WIP. Helen Walters writes a lovely response to the book on her blog, Fiction is Stranger than Fact.

She says:

One of the most appealing things about this collection is that, although all the individual stories are very different and cover different subjects, there is a real unity of theme to the book,

goes on to explain that

All the stories look at alternative explanations and viewpoints on things that have happened or are happening. They examine the nature of memory, the complexities of interpretation and the possibilities of alternate reality. The y also put the microscope on the art of storytelling itself,

picks out her three favourite stories, and concludes:

All in all, an enjoyable collection of well-chosen stories with a fascinating linking theme. Recommended.

WIP bulletin (for those the slightest bit interested): woke at 3.35 and couldn't get back to sleep for thinking about it, so overslept and lost an hour's working time this morning. Stopped for lunch, a walk in the park and a coffee in Nero's and then rushed back to it. Have just finished at 7 pm, and this page keeps blurring!

Review of Used to Be on Our Book Reviews Online

Still stuck like glue to my manuscript, so still not blogging properly, but in the meantime here's another nice review for Used to Be, this time by The Mole on Our Book Reviews Online. He concludes:

A really great collection that you will enjoy, identify with, wish that worm hadn't got into your head - and each of these in equal measure.

Whole review here.

You may or may not be interested to know that I am typing and rewriting so hard and for such long hours that my back aches and my sight keeps getting blurred, which is about all the other writing news I have at the moment. The thrills of the writer's life, eh?

Bookmuse reviews Used to Be

Pretty thrilled with this review of Used to Be on Book Muse. It's short, but then it's not how much you say but what you say:

Baines reminds me of a scratch DJ, taking a conventional format and messing with it, expertly, to give the audience a whole new experience... 

...Highly readable, thought-provoking and with beautiful use of language, this collection is a rich and unexpected delight.

Read the whole review here.

I haven't managed to blog much since the New Year, in spite of my hopes. As I said, I'm typing up a draft of something long, and I thought that this would give me more headspace than I had during the actual writing, but I'm so obsessed with it that I just type and type (and edit) all day, right into the evening when I'm too whacked to do anything else. Soon be finished, I hope!

Tim Love reviews Used to Be

Tim Love's review of Used to Be, based on his previous blog notes, is on Everybody's Reviewing.

He begins:

The Mandaeans of southern Iraq had a demon called Dinanukht, half man and half book, who "sits by the waters between the worlds, reading himself". This demon could be the patron saint of Bainesland, where characters interpret symbols that seem to belong to the external world, but turn out being part of the character's past.

I'm gratified by his grasp of what I'm trying to do in these stories. 'Explicitly or otherwise,' he says, 'the characters are story-makers, reassembling their life-arc from stirred memories.'  He discusses three of the stories in particular, and lists as his favourites three stories earlier versions of which happen to be online: the title story 'Used to Be', 'Falling' and 'Tides, or How Stories Do or Don't get Told'.

An interview in the Didsbury Community Index

Before Christmas, on the publication of Used to Be, Deborah Grace came to interview me for the Didsbury Community Index magazine. She asked me about the themes of the book, which include memory, and got me spilling some very early memories of my own. Read the interview here.

Review of Used to Be on A Life in Books

The New Year (well, the working New Year) kicks off for me with a great review of Used to Be on the A Life in Books blog. The poet Gillian Allnutt once said to me, 'It's so wonderful when people understand what you're trying to do', and that's just my reaction this review by Susan Osborne, in which she says that the collection 'niftily overturn[s] apparent certainties, often in a series of small revelations and delivering the occasional killer punch.' After considering several of the stories, she concludes:

There are several quotations I could have picked in which Baines neatly sums up her theme but here’s my favourite:  ‘your life might go one way, or a completely different other’. Most of us like the idea of certainty – it makes us feel safe – but as this thoughtful collection reminds us there’s precious little of it in life, although sometimes – as in fiction – that makes it more interesting.

New chapbooks from Nightjar

It's a while now since I was delighted to receive from Nicholas Royle the latest production of his Nightjar short story imprint, and at long last I have the time to write about it here. Two beautifully produced chapbooks, as ever, smartly typeset and printed on lovely silky paper, in limited signed editions, this latest pair sporting jackets in differing tones of lush purple. Nightjar is of course dedicated to the weird or strange, and neither of these stories disappoints on that score, although they each, in their individual ways, differ in tone from most of the books in the series which tend toward the spooky. John Rutter's 'Last Christmas' has indeed something of a Punch-and-Judy feel: set at an eye-opening family Christmas dinner, it's a metaphoric treatment of ageism and the notion that the younger we are the bigger the space and attention we take up, and the older the less. Leone Ross's 'The Woman Who Lived in a Restaurant' is a kind of fairytale that is also a love story, and has a lushly haunting quality.

If you collect these editions - and I know many people do - then better rush and order these two before they sell out, as several in the series already have.

I'm thrilled to be involved with this project, a collaboration between Galley Beggar Press and Salt, intended to provide refuge for those in need. It's a collection of short stories on the subject of Refuge by such wonderful writers as Marina Warner, Toby Litt, Stella Duffy, Nicholas Royle and others, and I'm proud that my little piece 'Home' (which previously appeared in Fragments from the Dark, a book produced by Hafan, the Swansea Asylum seekers support group) rounds off the collection. Do please download it: you'll get a wonderful read as well as be supporting those so sadly in need.

Reading group: The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

I'm afraid this 1965 book didn't manage to compete with Christmas for our group. We met to discuss it in the pub just before our Christmas dinner, and it turned out that only three of us had read all of it. Ann, Clare, Mark and John had found that it just didn't engage them enough to encourage them to put aside for it the myriad of seasonal things they had to do, and Jenny hadn't even tried. I was one of those who read it to the end, but I found it a struggle, and had a singular experience: when Doug first suggested the book I said I had read it previously - and I believe I had even written about it at some time - but when I came to read it again for the group I recognised nothing whatever about it, which has never ever happened to me before on a reread. I was convinced I had been mistaken about having read it until I started to come across pencilled notes in the margin in my own handwriting. Further, I moaned to John that I still had to finish it, before remembering that I had actually finished it the evening before as we sat in a cafe. That was just how unmemorable the book was for me.

Hans and Doug, however, were more positive, Doug announcing that this was perhaps the seventh time he had read it, that he still wasn't entirely sure what it was about, but that he really loved and admired it. It's the story of a young woman, Oedipa Maas, who one afternoon returns to her California home from a Tupperware party to find she has been made the unlikely executor of the will of a past lover, real estate mogul Pierce Inverarity. If indeed story is a word that can be applied to the off-beat and sometimes seemingly disconnected events that follow as she drives south to carry out this duty, becoming involved with ex-child-actor lawyers, a larky pop group recalling the Beatles or the Monkees, and the mystery of a medieval postal system with the sign of a muted horn, still apparently existing in an underground form and somehow implicated in Inverarity's vast and complicated estate. Or is it? Inverarity (note the echoes of verity/truth in the name) has left behind a postage stamp collection which at the end of the book will become an item in an auction (Lot 49), and appears to hold clues to this, but how can Oedipa be sure that it isn't all a huge practical joke on Inverarity's part?

There are comic disconnected dialogues and madcap scenes reminiscent of a certain kind of film popular at the time, the sixties, and characteristic of that era's popular larky view of itself. It's clear that these are intended, paradoxically, to illustrate the serious theme of the book, that of the difficulties of communication and the impossibility of ever knowing the true significance of things in a culture in which the social and moral barriers are breaking down. Unfortunately, however, I think it was this fragmented nature that made the book unmemorable for me, and some in the group found the events silly rather than funny, in particular John, and Mark who was the most critical of all. The serious purpose is evident in the language, the satirical naming and magnificent long, convoluted sentences which Doug in particular admired. He said that if he himself had managed to write something as good as the riff early in the book on the former car-sales career of Oedipa's husband Mucho, then he would die happy:

Yet at least he had believed in the cars. Maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful trade-ins: motorized, mechanical extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopelessly of children, supermarket booze, two, sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust - [This single sentence continues for another half-page.]

Everyone agreed that the passage was extremely well written, but some pointed out that its subject was never picked up on again, was just left dangling and seemed to be there just for its own clever sake - which may have been the thematic point, but was unsatisfying. There are other sentences that are less easy to read and people expressed irritation at having constantly to go back and read them over and over again, and that on the whole they had lacked the necessary patience - and I have to say that I found, particularly in the latter half of the book, that some of the sentences overreached themselves and resulted in clumsiness. (There is in fact a certain imprecision in the middle of the sentence quoted above, although, as John has said to me, that is perhaps acceptable for the laid-back, 'psychedelic' literary style of the time.)

Which is all that I can remember was said before we dropped the subject of the book, left it dangling, and larkily went off to our Christmas dinner in Aladdin's over the road.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Season's greetings, recap of the year and a nice bit of news

Happy festive season! 

Well, it's been a very busy year for me, and as a result I haven't blogged much, in spite of periodic resolutions to get back to it. Since January I've radically redrafted two novels I've had on the stocks, and struggled with a commission for a contribution to a book on writing - one of the most difficult things I've ever had to write, and it's not right yet! - and of course there's been the publication of Used to Be. (Plus we had our house re-roofed, which was naturally very disruptive.) When I went to get the Christmas decorations out, it seemed to me that I'd only just put them away after Christmas 2014!

When you're that short of time it's so much easier to post your news and share your thoughts about writing on Facebook or Twitter, but I have missed the chance to mull things over in the more contemplative way that blogs allow, and I hope that in the next year I'll have more time for that. Come the New Year, I'll be working on typing up and revising the longer of the two novels I worked on last year (I rewrote it in longhand, which for me, is the best way to feel the rhythms of the story and get into the dream-like state I need to imagine it: as I reported earlier, the reason I had to rewrite the other, shorter novel was that I had tried to write it directly onto the laptop, and it just didn't have those rhythms and juice) and of course I'll be trying to finish the ruddy commission. But both of these will be basically polishing jobs, so I'm hoping I'll have more headspace from now on.

That headspace thing is so important - I've constantly felt that I've had nothing to blog about, but of course it's not true, I've had loads of thoughts about writing, but it's all gone into the other things, the commission and the novels. It is also true, however, that being so cocooned inside the creative process, I've done less in the outside world, so have had fewer events to report. (That's the see-saw of writing, particularly with novels: you need the time shut away in order to do it, but then you need to be in the outside world to gather the material!)

As it happens, this morning does bring me some nice writing news to report: Scott Pack highlights a story from Used to Be on his 'Me and My Short Stories' page and gives it four stars. The story he picks out is 'The Choice Chamber' (which Katy Lumsden previously picked out as a favourite in her review), in which a woman thinks back to her younger self and the alternative possible futures she had then. Scott likes the fact that although this might seem to be a familiar situation, there's a 'killer last line' that turns it all on its head. Which, needless to say, leaves me feeling pretty chuffed!

Chrissie Gittins and Tessa Hadley

On Friday evening Chrissie Gittins launched her wonderful new collection of stories, Between Here and Knitwear (Unthank), a lovely event upstairs in the cosy central-London Rugby Tavern. I first met Chrissie when she came to read at Manchester Central Library with her then newly published first collection, Family Connections, and when my own first collection, Balancing on the Edge of the World, was forthcoming from the same publisher, so of course we got chatting and have kept in touch ever since. And so of course on Friday I jumped on the train for the launch of the new book.

It's a series of linked stories that chart the life of one woman, Christine, from early childhood to middle age, and the shifts in her relationship with her parents as she grows and then as her parents become vulnerable and aged. The stories are steeped in the kind of physical detail and psychologically acute observations that will have readers exclaiming with recognition, and Chrissie has a beautifully subtle and dry wit.

I loved Mrs Marshall. We all did. We wanted to be her. We wanted to be married to her husband and donate our wedding trousseaus to the school play. We wanted a weekend cottage in Troutbeck, and to start our teaching careers in Wales.

Chrissie read beautifully, and we were all entranced. I read the book all the way back on the train, looking up only once, at Stoke-on-Trent, to see that, without my noticing, it had been snowing. It's a book you'll want to read in one sitting.

Two days earlier I was at Edge Hill University, hearing Tessa Hadley read and talk. She read an early short story and an extract from her latest novel, The Past, and talked very interestingly about the difference between novels and short stories, and the different strategies and mindsets needed for each. She didn't think there was any point in getting indignant about the way short stories don't sell, she said: the fact is that short stories are a 'strenuous' read, requiring a particular kind of focus of attention, and people prefer the immersive experience that novels can provide. Nevertheless, she said, stories are a joy to read and write, and for the writer a wonderful medium in which to hone your linguistic skills. Afterwards I reminded Tessa that we had met in Cardiff at the launch of Power, an anthology published by Honno, in which we both had stories, and she told me that that had been her very first short story - she's come a long way since!