Salt Spring offer- 70% off selected books!

My wonderful publisher Salt is running an amazing Spring offer - an unbelievable 70% off selected books! My own novel The Birth Machine is included, so if you haven't already got one, now's your chance! Go to the page, it's like a huge platter of jewels - even if you have Kindle editions of some of those books, my guess is you'll be tempted by their beautiful and striking covers and Salt's famously smart typesetting and design - I know I am! Among the many books on offer are the amazing stories by Carys Bray (Sweet Home), David Gaffney (More Sawn-Off Tales), Tony Williams (All the Bananas I've Never Eaten), Alison Moore's Booker shortlisted The Lighthouse and also her stories, the acclaimed Best British Short Stories edited by Nicholas Royle (2011 and 2013), poetry including Chris Emery's The Departure and all three volumes of Best British Poetry, even the much sought after Short Circuit guide to writing short stories edited by Vanessa Gebbie and much, much more. Do take a look!

Things you see from your writing desk.

It's not every day you look up from your writing desk and see a heron in the top of the tree just outside!

So this is Spring....

Well, you can't accuse me of being big-headed. At least, my head simply wasn't big enough to accommodate much beside my recent writing project plus the various crit jobs I've done - not big enough to accommodate any thoughts about cleaning the house (you should see it! Or maybe not), or anything more than the headlines of the news; no space in there to think deeply about the things that have piqued my attention literary-news-wise, or indeed to compose blog posts. And I haven't been out much. When I first looked down to my desk the world was barren with post-Christmas winter, and I've looked up again finally and it's full of flowers and birds bustling about with nesting material in their beaks (and huge dust-balls all over the floors!). Crikey, I've been missing life!

It's odd, this writing lark. To be a writer you really need to be watching, observing, taking note, yet sometimes you need these periods where you just have to go away inside your (small) head - well, I do, anyway. If I'm not obsessive with a long project, I lose it, the whole thing just falls apart, and I really do envy those who can write while juggling lots of other stuff. As I think I wrote here earlier this spring, I felt tense and raddled when I had to leave off to read and to write reports, and exhausted afterwards. Split personality, moi? (Come to think of it, that's one of the things I've been writing about, fragmented personality...)

Reading group: Dark Water by Joyce Carol Oates

I suggested this novella, a fictional parallel of the well-known incident of July 1969 when Senator Edward Kennedy, driving home from a party on Chappaquiddick Island, accidentally drove his car off a bridge into a tidal marsh creek, an accident from which Kennedy escaped, but in which his passenger, 28-year-old political campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne, died. Subsequent investigations failed to explain certain aspects of the incident, in particular the fact that having left the scene of the accident, Kennedy did not report it for nine hours, a fact that ultimately blighted Kennedy's political career. The novella updates the scenario to the late eighties - early nineties, replacing Kennedy with the physically and politically similar but unnamed Senator, and Mary Jo Kopechne with the slightly younger Elizabeth Anne 'Kelly' Kelleher, its incident set on the resonant date of July 4th.

Aptly for a book borrowing from an incident the outcome of which is well known, the novel adopts a structure based on hindsight, and its primary interest is not in what happens but in unpicking the sexual and political power structures that have led to a situation that is already in place. The book begins when the car is already in the water and Kelly alone and trapped in it, the Senator having swum free, and the central narrative is her struggle to free herself over the next few hours before the car finally fills with water. Meanwhile, however, chiefly (though not entirely) through Kelly's consciousness (via an intimate third person narration), we chart back through the hurried drive for the ferry in the dark on a disused back road, the party beforehand at which Kelly and the Senator met, Kelly's personal history of passionate political campaigning, a painful and potentially abusive sexual relationship and a childhood that has left her with low self-esteem, and the Senator's political background. Since Kelly is of course panicking in the car, all of this comes to us in a fragmented and repetitive form, the scenes lapping in repetitive waves like the water into the vehicle, each time they return bringing new insights, and as they become more jumbled paradoxically creating more meaningful connections. The drowning is thus both structurally and politically the central point from which a whole world of personal and political drama both spreads (like the ripples around the submerging car) and comes meaningfully together. However, there is still a strong narrative thrust due to the prose style which in my view brilliantly recreates the psychology of the trapped woman - breathless with minimal punctuation, obsessive with repetition and alarmed with pulsing rhythms (Ann would say later she found the book emotionally torturous, and found herself metaphorically lifting her head like Kelly to escape the rising water. I had said that if there was any problem with the breathless style, it was that I tended to read the book too quickly, with the feeling that I was missing things, but Ann said that she had found it all so agonising that she had to read it slowly, taking it in bits.)

When I had finished introducing the book to the group along these lines, Ann said she thought the book 'brilliant', and John and Mark agreed. Doug, who was unable to make the meeting, had written beforehand to say that he had found it a 'fabulous' book and didn't imagine there would be much discussion as he couldn't imagine anyone disagreeing. However, up until this point in the meeting Trevor, Jenny and Clare had been very quiet, and Trevor (who has tended to be positive about most books) now said that he was afraid he couldn't agree with us. He said that the book 'got on his nerves'. He said he got the point right from the start and the rest was just over-insistent repetition, and he couldn't stand the prose style, finding it insistent and bullying. He said it was an old story, too familiar to need to be told again, ie the story of a silly young girl having her head turned by an older man when she ought to know better. This led to a chorus of protest, that just because a story is old doesn't mean it can't be told again with a new perspective, that you don't have to be stupid to be seduced by charisma (that's one of the points: that modern politics is fatally based on charisma), that Kelly isn't stupid, she is actually clever and seriously academic and political, she just has low self-esteem (as Jenny pointed out), and, most importantly that the novel isn't just about that sexual scenario, but much more importantly about the last gasps of a moribund political system. This last point was made by Mark; the updating in the novel, he pointed out, reflects the fact that the political rot and the loss of the Democratic vision which had set in at the time of the real-life incident, and of which the whole incident is symbolic, was deeper and more evident by the time in which the novella is set and was published.

Ann and Mark pointed astutely to symbols of rot and breakdown in the novel: the swamp itself, 'a powerful brackish marshland odor, the odor of damp, and decay, and black earth, black water'; the fact that in the car headlights it looks like broken mirrors; the dead trees that Kelly worries might be dead from pollution, the dumped rubbish including the resonant image of a headless doll; the old disused road that the Senator takes instead of the new modern road (a route leading to disaster); the diminishing air bubble in the car (the last gasp); the fact that the car here is a Toyota (unlike Kennedy's Oldsmobile) and thus a symbol of the loss of American economic power. The seven-foot rushes in the marsh are described as being 'like human figures grotesque without faces', thus symbolising the lack of humanity in both the Senator's ultimate treatment of Kelly and of capitalist politics in general. Mark said in strong disagreement with Trevor that everything in the novel was symbolic or significant in some way, everything in it mattered and nothing was superfluous.

Jenny now said that her problem with the novella was that, unlike us, she didn't find it psychologically realistic: she found on the contrary a lack of urgency; she thought that Kelly would be panicking far more than she found the novel gave an impression of her doing. Also she didn't agree with me that the memories of the preceding and past events recurred with added insight or information, an observation that left us staggered and speechless. It seems to me that although certain moments are repeated and thus dwelt on, the memory-flashbacks do follow a narrative trajectory, showing the development of Kelly's involvement with the Senator at the party and her changing attitudes towards him (she is initially politically suspicious of him, but becomes charmed). Those moments that are obsessively dwelt on do to my mind re-emerge with added insight. The Senator first appears as attractive and attentive: 'big, gregarious ... playful' 'how tall he was, how physical his presence,' then with a hint of attractive vulnerability: 'And his grin wavered, just perceptibly. As if, for that moment, he was doubting himself: his manly power'; slowly however hindsight reveals him as domineering and selfish: 'The Senator was in the habit of making queries that were in fact statements'; 'that tongue thick enough to choke you' when he kisses Kelly; speaking to her 'as if speaking to a very young child,' and insulting her by telling her she's too young to understand. After the initial impression of vigour come hints of lack of wholesomeness: 'an exhausted middle-aged man beginning to go soft in the gut', his sports shirt 'damp with perspiration' and 'his seersucker trousers ... rumpled at the rear.' Then towards the end there is the self-regard revealed in the curiously repulsive image of the Senator eating 'ravenously, yet fastidiously, wiping his mouth with a paper napkin after every bite' and the resulting 'catsup on his napkin like smears of lipstick' with their inevitable connotations of blood. Towards half-way through the book the initial impression of generosity and gregariousness is cut across by this memory: 'Actually, the first thing the Senator did after greeting his hostess was to draw Ray Annick [his lawyer friend] off to confer with him, out of earshot of the others', and by the end of the novel two ominous memories have surfaced: Kelly's friend Buffy saying to her as she leaves with the Senator for the fateful car ride: ' "Don't forget, he voted to give aid to the Contras' ', and, as Kelly passes through the party kitchen, Ray Annick on the phone: 'speaking in a low, angry voice, the words asshole, fuck, fucking punctuating his customarily fastidious speech ... so unlike the genial smiling man ... courteously and sweetly attentive to Kelly Kelleher... His  eyes ... followed her as she passed ... as a cat's eyes follow movement with an instinctive impersonal predatory interest, yet as soon as she passed beyond his immediate field of vision he ceased to see her, ceased to register her existence'. This last of course prefigures the terrible end in which, in order to save the Senator from scandal and damage to his political career, Ray Annick will try to help the Senator to dissociate from the accident so that Kelly will be left in the car to die. However, none of this was enough to prevent Trevor and Jenny from experiencing the book as repetitive and static.

Ann said she wondered a bit about a fairly lengthy interjection towards the end of a treatise on capital punishment. This is the substance of the article that Kelly has written for the left-wing paper she works for, which discusses the role of the state in the matter (state-sanctioned or indeed -operated murder), and which at first the Senator gives the impression of having read, but hindsight makes clear he probably hadn't. John thought this was very important, not only as an illustration of Kelly's intelligence, acuity and left-wing passions, but as a comment on the fact that of course Kelly Kelleher is in effect murdered by the state, as was indeed the real-life Mary-Jo Kopechne.

Clare had been quiet for most of the meeting but she now said that like Trevor she hadn't liked the prose and as a result, like Trevor and to some extent Jenny she had been unable to engage with the book.

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

Unthology 5 Cover

Here's the striking and intriguing cover of Unthology 5, due out in June from Unthank Books, and which I'm thrilled to say includes my story, 'Clarrie and You' about two sisters and the long-term corrosive effects on their relationship of secrets imposed by the prejudices of society.

Arresting, isn't it?

Reading group: Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

Clare suggested this 2012 Booker-shortlisted novel in which a group holidaying in a villa near Nice (poet and philanderer Joe Jacobs, his war correspondent wife Isabel, their fourteen-year-old daughter Nina and their two friends Laura and Mitchell) is disrupted by the unexpected arrival of a stranger, come to seek out Joe whose poems she is obsessed with, the mysterious and unbalanced twenty-three-year-old Kitty Finch, a fey-seeming (but devastatingly disruptive) creature with long red hair and green-painted fingernails, appearing first swimming naked in their pool.

However, we know before the narration of this moment that Kitty and Joe end up having sex, as the opening section has them driving back together from the hotel where they have done so, a scene that will keep recurring through the book, and which is steeped in an air of loss and doom.

The book is strikingly imagistic, and we were all agreed that it created rich pictures in the mind of the reader, but in her introduction Clare said that she felt at too much of a distance from the characters, and there was something about the imagery and the very conscious patterning of symbols that seemed somehow superficial and left her cold, and most people agreed.

Symbols recur throughout the text: when Kitty is first sighted in the water she is seen as a body - a prefiguring of death or tragedy that then hangs over the book - and Joe jokingly asks if it's a bear, a point that is laboured in dialogue between the characters and a symbol that will recur at the devastating end of the book. John pointed out the recurring image of hairballs - someone choking on one, hair getting caught in the pool filter system - and there are frequent references to mice including sugar mice which appear twice in an unsettling chronology for the reader, first in a dream of Nina's (which she doesn't communicate to anyone else) and then in a later incident when Joe and Kitty are walking away from the hotel and Kitty buys one. There's also frequent flagging of the antique guns that Mitchell, a trader in such artefacts, has bought, and of his love of guns and shooting. John pointed out the symbolism of Kitty Finch's name, the cat and bird references indicating a woman both at war with herself and of ambiguous significance to the others.

Thus while the novel is predicated on a familiar setup of the realist novel of middle-class mores and also displays some of the characteristics of the whodunnit, it is yet a novel with a strong and intricate symbolic system that draws attention to itself in a non-realist, and indeed postmodern way.

Although everyone in our group enjoyed reading the book, no one found the combination satisfactory. One chief complaint was that, as Clare had indicated, it was impossible to like or care about the characters, since they are very much viewed from outside, and their motives are, for the most part, unclear. John noted that the characters are placed, puppet-like, in scenes like tableaux - the family by the pool, the family around the dinner table, Kitty and Joe in the orchard, various couples on the beach, retired doctor Madeleine watching them all from her balcony etc - and I said that since there was a gun placed at various moments, including under a bed, it also had echoes of the game of Cluedo, which I take to be deliberate. Trevor (without knowing that Levy had been a playwright), said he thought the novel was thus really a play. I wasn't sure that it was that simple, since the concerns of most plays (realist ones anyway) are indeed motivation, character and dialogue - all things that this novel eschews (much of the dialogue seeming non-realistic, and to many in our group unconvincing). I pointed out that a postmodern novel is intended precisely to disrupt and disturb and even alienate the reader, rather than to reassure and immerse, and that the concern of this novel is the fluidity of personality and identity (eg the sugar mice of Nina's undisclosed dream entering the real-life experience of Kitty and Joe, Kitty's ability to challenge and break down Joe's carefully-honed middle-class-English persona and to bring to the fore his searing past as a child refugee who had been hidden in the woods from the Nazis, and her conviction that the child Joe had entered her mind). People readily accepted this as a principle, but they didn't think it worked here.

Some suggested that the problem was that the middle-class-realist novel setup of a moneyed family taken from their normal environment and thus vulnerable to disruption, led you into a realist reading which then in turn left you dissatisfied with the postmodern elements. The discussion showed that people were indeed wedded to a realist reading of the book, as there was much pondering of the characters' motives and a huge argument over what had really happened in the tragic moment towards the end, with people indeed wanting the clear-cut explanation you get with a murder mystery. The notion that we were not meant to know exactly what happened, that it was indeed muddled, seemed not have occurred to anyone, nor was acceptable to them. There were also objections to elements that are unconvincing on a social-realist level: what poet can live on his royalties as Joe does? and how was Mitchell supposed to get the guns he had bought there out of the country? Do pebbles really get holes worn in them in the mildly lapping Mediterranean? And why isn't Kitty's background filled in when she's such a disruptive force?

I felt that the middle-class-novel paradigm had been deliberately set up to be subverted: Joe's urbane middle-class Englishman's veneer masks a tragic past and ongoing emotional damage, Mitchell's gourmet interests and impulse to hire an expensive car hide the fact that he's about to go bankrupt, and the whole apparently concrete and vivid middle-class setup is haunted by an existential uncertainty. I wondered if the problem was the imagery itself, and the way it's employed. Having had my attention drawn so acutely to the symbolism (Ann said you almost thought of charting it all out on a spreadsheet), I personally felt the need both to understand its meanings on an intellectual level as well as to be influenced by it emotionally, but as Clare had indicated in her introduction, I often did neither, and often what an image brought to my attention to was not the themes and ideas so much as an author creating an artefact.

Why, for instance, the bear image, (rather than that of any other wild and dangerous animal)?  In fact, it seems an inappropriate image: one has to stretch one's mind to imagine how a very thin girl swimming naked looks like a dead bear, in spite of her long red hair (not to mention the fact that bears aren't endemic to the countryside around Nice), and the association does not in fact spring organically from the scene, but stems from Joseph's head. It is explained that the previous day an article had appeared in the newspaper about a bear stumbling into a Los Angeles garden and swimming in the pool, and that Joe had wondered then whether the tranquillised bear had found its way home (so he has bears on his mind). This plants the central theme of exile and home, but by being located in the consciousness of a man whose consciousness is largely shrouded, the image is essentially divorced from the scene. This may be deliberate - Levy may be making a point about consciousness - but the effect for me is to give the image an academic quality, which in turn made me think of the author imposing it on her text, and ultimately gave me a sense of artificiality and interfered with my engagement with the book. I felt the same about much of the rest of the imagery. I still don't know, having thought about the book, what the sugar mice signify specifically, and although I could perhaps work it out intellectually if I thought about it further, the point is that in the process of reading it didn't impress anything on me emotionally apart from bafflement. At one point, caught fish are described, in Joe's consciousness, as having failed to 'swim home' and although this metaphor is potentially more organic (we know by now about Joe's background of exile and emotional damage), the over-exact verbal echoing of the title of the book seems forced and draws one's attention to the author and her manipulations rather than to any world of meaning she is creating.

The overall viewpoint appears omniscient in that for much of the time the characters are seen from outside, viewpoints are constantly shifted - in the introductory scene by the pool from paragraph to paragraph - and the whole thing has a watching, observational air. However, this seemingly external viewpoint is only partial: we don't know everything about the characters' thoughts, and we often share the characters' lack of understanding of each other and their motives. John suggested, rightly, I think, that the overall viewpoint is intended to be that of Nina, at the time a bystander to the adult dramas yet affected by them, looking back and trying to piece it all together from the standpoint of the very final section.

This final section is strikingly different from the rest of the book. Narrated in the first person by Nina several years later, it lacks the glittering imagistic quality of the rest of the book, but throbs with a rhythm and felt emotion seemingly withheld until this moment. While everything up to this point has seemed to happen indeed through the vivid and glittering distortions of water, this last section feels utterly real. It's a hymn of grief (restrained but all the more affecting for being so) that brings retrospectively into shocking focus the importance and significance of the tragedy underlying that past summer's events. It had me in floods of tears, but when I pointed all this out to the group they looked rather blank, and if they had already found it noteworthy that the section was tonally and narratorially different, they gave no indication, in which case the author's strategy hadn't worked on them. As for me, although I'm aware of the possibility that that last section depends to some extent for such an effect on the very contrast, I can't help wishing that the rest of the book had been more like it.

Doug, who didn't make the meeting, sent a note to say that he had found the setup and characters cliched a la Miss Marple, but that he had in fact very much enjoyed the imagery, found that there was some tension generated, and that the book 'cantered towards the denouement with the gusto of a frisky pony. What's not to like?'

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

Hill, Royle and Gaffney at Blackwell's, and why I haven't been blogging

So I have something to blog about! I went to this really interesting event at Manchester Blackwell's on Friday night, more of which in a moment. 'Where have you been?' everyone kept asking me, which is a question my blog readers may well be asking. 'You've been hiding again!'

Not hiding so much as transported, dear Readers, into a different time and place, the time and place of my work in progress - for most hours of the day and even the night. It's one of those things that's really huge to keep in your head, but fortunately it's gripped me entirely: I've been dreaming about it; it's been my first waking thought; even when I've not been at my desk it's filled my head, making new connections, forming new scenes and sentences, so that I've often forgotten to finish brushing my teeth, or have put things back in the wrong cupboards. And when I've had to work - I've had reading to do and reports to write - it's been such a mental wrench that I have been left feeling utterly exhausted. There simply hasn't been time in the day for blogging, but in any case all my creative and intellectual energy has already been used up. And needless to say I haven't been out much.

Yesterday, though, I got to the end of a section, and today for the first time I have had the space in my head, and the focus, to work out why the dishwasher isn't rinsing properly, and to actually put some clothes in the washing machine! And on Friday night, knowing I was coming to a pause - and anyway, because I wouldn't miss it, all three writers being people I know, either in person or via the web - I went to this event where Charlie Hill, Nicholas Royle and David Gaffney read from their latest books and took part in a lively and edifying discussion.

Nicholas Royle kicked off, reading from his latest (and seventh) very clever novel, First Novel (Cape), about a Creative Writing Lecturer living in Manchester. He read out one of the sections that features yours truly (a minor character), and it was a strange but not unpleasant experience to be sitting there not only as myself but as a character in a novel! (As if I haven't had enough recently of being transported from reality!)  Though I have to say that only one person turned round and stared at me, as far as I know, so really on the whole the Elizabeth Baines of the novel remained exactly that, a character in a novel and separate from me. Novels are always a curious mix of fact and fiction, though, and Nick talked about how he's exploring that in his writing: if one is writing a fiction set in Manchester, he said, then one would quite naturally mention real-life buildings and businesses and brands, so why not mention a real-life novelist who lives in Didsbury? (So there you are, I'm a brand, which we writers are all being encouraged to be nowadays!)

David Gaffney then read from his new micro fiction collection, More Sawn-Off Tales (Salt). David  is an absolute master of this form: his pieces are not only far funnier than most you ever read, but also often extremely moving, which is a hard thing to achieve in such a short space. The secret, of course, is that he is a master of language, and especially of pace and timing. It was very interesting to hear about his process, in which he often writes at greater length but then works to see how far he can pare a piece down. One result is subtlety, and he did seem to say that often people aren't sure what some of his stories are about, or rather, what they mean. I asked him if he minded if people took a meaning from one of his stories that he hadn't intended, and he said that he didn't.

There was a certain metafictional link between Nick's book and that of Charlie Hill. Charlie's book, Books (Tindal Street), is inspired by his time as a bookseller in Birmingham Waterstone's: it's a thriller, a murder mystery, that is also a satire on literary culture. Charlie's writing has great energy and wit, and the sections he read out had me hounding to the front to buy the book the minute the discussion was finished. In answer to questions about his process, Charlie made a strong point about the benefits of an editor - an important point to make in these times when the role of the editor seems to be in danger.

Afterwards we repaired to Trough at the Deaf Institute (my first mingle in weeks, if not months!) and was great too to meet up again with writers Sarah-Clare Conlon and Neil Campbell, author of two wonderful short-story collections from Salt.

Reading group: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick

Trevor suggested this book, the novel on which the acclaimed film Blade Runner was based, speculatively set twenty-four years after the book's 1968 publication in a 1992 when the ecosystem has been destroyed by an apocalyptic war and humans have consequently begun to colonise other planets, served in the project by android slaves. Development of the androids has become so sophisticated, and the latest models so intelligent, that they can be detected only by the use of the 'Voight-Kampff' psychological test for empathy. The plot concerns Rick Deckard, a 'bounty hunter' working for the police, whose job it is to hunt down androids escaped to earth, and who is briefed to track down a particularly dangerous and intelligent group of six - six of the latest, most sophisticated 'Nexus-6' types - one of whom has already badly injured Deckard's boss, chief bounty hunter Dave Holden. In the process Rick falls in love with a Nexus-6 android, Rachael Rosen.

Our discussion about it is difficult to report, as it generated an excitement that seemed to cause the room constantly to break up into multiple simultaneous discussions, and I'm not sure that we each always understood what others were saying.

Trevor began quite clearly by saying he was nervous about our reaction to the book, since we had been so down on Kurt Vonnegut's Piano Player which had badly misfired in terms of predicting the technological future, and there are certain similarities here: for instance, while personal vehicles are airborne and people speak on vidphones (one thing Dick did get right), the notes on Deckard's quarry that he carries around with him are 'smudged' carbons. People immediately jumped in and said that in this novel it didn't matter: its chief concern was not in speculating on the concrete particulars of the technological future, but in, as Jenny said, the question of what it is to be human, most particularly what it is to be human in a situation of developing technology, and indeed what is reality. As Doug put in, it's not really about the technological future, but like all interesting science fiction it's about humanity now.

Everything in the novel is called into question or overturned: android Rachael Rosen almost passes the Voight-Kampff empathy test; she is human enough in the accepted terms for Deckard to fall in love with her. Conversely, right from the start the autonomous humanity of Deckard is questioned by his dependence on technology: he and his wife Iran begin their day programming their moods on 'mood machines'. His empathy - the quality at the heart of the state religion, Mercerism - is also under question: he is of course a killer, and in a domestic squabble his wife calls him a 'murderer', referring to 'those poor andys [androids]' And, as John said, what are the androids after all but slaves rising up against their oppressors? The book ends with some stunning revelations about the society the precepts of which people, including Deckard, have been living their lives by. The Voight-Kampff test questions are interesting: they are designed to test empathy with animals (many animals being now extinct, and animals thus valued, and pets prized as status symbols); passing the test requires the subject to feel horror at the portrayal of mistreatment of animals. Yet many of the examples of 'ill treatment' are things that in fact pass without comment in our own society - a calfskin purse, the eating of oysters, a mounted stag's head - which seems like a metafictional prod of the reader by Dick.

Trevor, beaming, was greatly relieved by our reaction and said that this was probably the best novel he had ever read, it was 'brilliant, brilliant.' Now Mark spoke up. He said that, after having really admired the film he had expected a lot of the book, but was sorely disappointed as it was so badly written. Others of us agreed that this was a fault of the book, the writing. However, Clare said that she had been so engrossed by the story and the ideas that she hadn't even noticed that it wasn't well written. For this reason, she said, she felt that it didn't matter, and she was backed up by Jenny who said she didn't think books had to be well written to be enjoyable or engrossing. Someone - Mark or Doug - said, But there was no tension: an android got killed and it was just flat, you just went on to the next thing. Jenny and Clare said they didn't think that mattered because the ideas, and the way you didn't know what was what, pushed you on. Clare did agree, however, that it was hard to care much about any of the characters, that you didn't get involved with them, and at that point she said she understood what we meant by tension - dramatic tension - and agreed after all that it was lacking. Ann said (I think; things were getting a bit excitable!) that it was a pity, because good ideas are best expressed through good prose, and I added that it wouldn't have mattered so much if the ideas were just mumbo jumbo as in Dan Brown, at which Jenny, who enjoys Dan Brown, asked me if I'd read it, and I had to say no, and she said I couldn't judge it then, and my plea that I'd tried but couldn't read it because the prose and sensibility were so bad was drowned out by the next interruption. As I say, things got excitable!

Trevor, however, could not agree that this novel was in any way badly written. Mark and I objected that it was full of prose errors: malapropisms and ineptnesses such as 'a potpourri' of arias, a 'fragrance of happiness', a facial expression described as 'turgid'. Trevor, said, But he makes up words! and John, agreeing, remembered the example, 'disemelevatored'. We conceded this (although I'd say 'disemelevatored is not as witty as it seems word-construction wise, since one doesn't 'emelevator' as one 'embarks'). However, there are ugly constructions - 'stiltedly', an 'indistinct, glimpsed darkly impression' - a tendency to use archaic pomposities such as 'thereupon', and downright grammatical errors (the pompous and erroneous misuse of pronouns: 'we' for and 'us'), and frequent use of the kind of lazy, tautologous phrase that any GCSE student would be marked down for writing: 'he said to himself,' and even, 'he inquired of himself'. There are also gaps and inconsistencies in the story (ironed out in the film): At one point another android introduces herself as Rachael Rosen, which is never explained, and one gets the impression of an author not entirely in charge of his story and failing to edit.

We were also in disagreement about the tone of the book. As an example of a howler which had me laughing out loud, I quoted the following which occurs at a point when Deckard is seriously angry with his wife: 'Damn her, he said to himself. What good does it do? She doesn't care whether we own an ostrich or not.' Others said that they had laughed too, but they had thought it intentionally funny. However, John said that he hadn't been able to decide whether it was intentional or not, and had specifically wondered as he read it, and since the overall tone of the book isn't comic (on the contrary) one wonders whether there is a lack of control over tone as well.

John now said that he thought all of the apparent carelessness was in a way deliberate, as Dick was strongly anti-academic, but Mark and I were were not convinced that, in order to stick one to the academic establishment, Dick would have purposefully made the kind of errors that, for us at any rate, reduce our sense of his authority over his story.

In the end we had to agree to differ over this matter, but all of us thought Dick's ideas were prescient and remain important.

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

Reading group: Moon Tiger by Penelope LIvely

Warning: plot spoil.

This Booker-winning novel, Ann's suggestion, concerns historian and ex-war reporter Claudia Hampton who, slowly dying in her seventies in a hospital bed, decides to write in her head a history of the world pinned around the story of her own life, a life in which the central, defining event was the loss of a lover, Tom, whom she met while in Egypt covering the Rommel campaign of 1942, a soldier killed in action.

Ann said that the first time she read the book, when it was first published, the thing that impressed itself on her was that central story, but this time around she was more taken by other aspects of the novel: the highly original mode of telling and the thematic preoccupations it conveys.

The novel is told in a variety of voices and perspectives: first person address by Claudia to the reader and third person reminiscences both from Claudia's point of view and those of others, providing contrasting versions of the same incidents, all framed by an omniscient present-day narration that watches Claudia on her hospital bed. As Claudia says unequivocally, 'The voice of history is of course composite. Many voices; all the voices that have managed to get themselves heard.' And also: 'The lives of others slot into my own life'. There's a linked preoccupation with identity: 'I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water.' Everyone enthusiastically agreed that they had found all of this exciting and satisfying and psychologically true. We also agreed with Ann that a real feat of the book was to make Claudia, a potentially unengaging character (pushy, opinionated, aware of her own physical beauty and happy to use it cynically, horrible to her somewhat simple sister-in-law and unable to love her own child), entirely riveting and sympathetic, by virtue of her wit, wisdom and insight, and the energy of her voice. (Jenny said that Claudia was the sort of person she would want to like her.) I did point out later that even the abrasive nature of Claudia's personality is under question: it is after all the version of herself she is presenting (even when she presents other people's perspectives), and late in the book, when she characterises herself in a bad light to one of her hospital visitors, he protests that she is not at all like that, but 'brilliant.' Jenny said she found moving the portrait of emotional damage that the book gave: the effect of Claudia's loss on her ability to form later relationships, with the father of her child and the child herself.

While characterised by Claudia's voice - tough, ironic, sometimes sarcastic - the book is also vividly imagistic. The Moon Tiger of the title - 'Moon Tiger' is the brand-name of the mosquito coil that burns beside the bed as she lies with her lover Tom - is a potent symbol of the vivid and concrete-seeming present crumbling into the uncertainty of history, its 'red eye', 'dropping away into lengths of grey ash', finally becoming, the next morning, a 'green spiral mirrored by a grey ash spiral in the saucer.'

Mark in particular thought the book was stunning. He said it was like a William Boyd (one of his favourite writers) but much, much better in terms of the writing, the thematic preoccupations and the insights. The book describes in detail the conditions in the desert (burnt-out tanks and bodies) that the intrepid Claudia insists on experiencing, and Mark said it was clear that Lively had done a fantastic amount of military research, and research into all the historical periods on which Claudia makes frequent wry comment, yet unlike McEwan, Lively never gives you a lecture, everything she includes is absolutely necessary to the story and the theme. Everyone agreed with this, and Jenny said that she has a habit of skipping when she reads books, but this is one book where she wanted to read every single sentence. Indeed, she savoured it and read it slowly. Mark thought the revelation of the incestuous relationship between Claudia and her brother was particularly well handled: the revelation is gradual so that it seems inevitable.

Now there came a voice of dissent. John spoke up and said that he felt like this about the beginning of the book, but became disappointed in it. Partly this was because he couldn't identify with upper-class characters - which stunned the rest of us: we felt that the book overcame any such prejudices - and partly because, due to the effect of the war on his own father, he always finds it difficult to read books set in the second world war. He said though that he found that in the war sections the novel became more conventionally narrative, and he found them boring, particularly the long italicised section towards the end, which is the lover Tom's diary of his experiences after his last meeting with Claudia and up to his death. This made people think and they began to remember they too had had something of the same feeling about the diary. I said that it didn't tell you much more about Tom's war experience than he had told Claudia in person more briefly. Jenny said that the one significant thing it did show was that Tom had gone on thinking about Claudia, indeed that she had been central to his thoughts, which is true. However everyone now agreed that it was too long. Then it occurred to someone, I think Jenny, that the time Claudia spends travelling with the the army in the desert - before they break down and she consequently meets Tom - takes up more of the book than her time with Tom. I suggested that perhaps this is one way in which the book is actually skewed by the weight of research, and, after thought, people agreed that that was probably true.

This didn't prevent a final judgement that the book was wonderful (unanimous apart from John). This is a tough book, tough in tone and subject matter and unflinching in the face of tough truths. Unbelievably it has been dismissed by critics as a 'women's book' (and apparently its Booker win attracted a lot of criticism for that reason), and we were roundly agreed that this was a case of the outrageous tendency to judge the author rather than the book.

Doug, who missed the meeting, wrote later to say that he had loved the book too, and echoed many of our positive comments. He said that he 'loved the way Lively explored the idea that we carry the history of the world / a museum around with us in our heads'. He did find some of the characters beside Claudia rather two-dimensional, but he thought the book beautifully written.


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

Signing for Red Room

Signings are notoriously unpredictable, if you're not utterly famous, and I sometimes wonder why bookshops bother to hold them at all. You're not offering a reading, or any sort of entertainment  apart from a bit of individual chat, and it's up to people to make the effort to leave their browsing and come and see what you're all about (and many people seem too scared to do that!). I've known of many signings where the author sits there for two hours and not a single person approaches, and not a single book is sold! However, York Waterstone's stuck their necks out and last Saturday hosted a signing session for Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontes, which I, fellow contributor Bill Broady and editor A J Ashworth attended.

At a Christmas meeting of writers, author Helen Cadbury had aired the notion of getting actors to dress up appropriately and hand out leaflets in the street beforehand. I was determined to make a go of the signing if we could, so I took up the idea: since Bill and I were taking turns to sign, and Bill was going first,  I dressed myself up - with a little trepidation - in a long black seventies cloak and a Victorian bonnet and parked myself outside the bookshop while he signed, handing out leaflets our publisher Unthank had had printed.

Well, it certainly attracted attention! First of all, a tiny dog on a lead took one look at me and jumped away, yelping in fright (my bonnet was black, too), and I began to wonder if, rather than attracting people, I must be scaring them off! But then a little sixty-ish woman made a determined beeline towards me. I said my piece, telling her briefly what we were all about, and she began: 'This is what I'm coming to the shop for! The thing is, I'm an utter Bronte fan!' My heart swelled: success! She went on: 'You see, I've read every single book by the Brontes, and I've read them over and over again! And I've read all the biographies!' I thought: a sure sale! And then she said, 'That's why I'm coming here, because the last one I read I got from the library, and I want to get hold of a copy of my own!' My mouth fell open, but I had my wits about me: 'Oh great, I said, and I'm sure you'd love this book of Bronte-inspired stories too -' She cut me off. She said, becoming very intent, 'This is what I want to know, dear: whether you're likely to have it?'  'Well, I don't work in the bookshop, you'd have to ask at the counter. I'm just here for the signing, it's a book of really great stories -' She cut me off again: 'My favourite one of all is Wuthering Heights!' I jumped in quickly: 'Oh, my story is based on Wuthering Heights! It's about a girl who bases her life too much -' 'And I've seen all the films of it. And would you believe it, dear, how different they are?' 'Oh yes,' I said quickly, 'that's one of the points of my story: the films forget about the second generation! But the second generation is the point!' 'The best one's the second BBC one, but when I went to get it - well! It costs so much!  Do you know, there's one film where they even have Heathcliff dying by falling off his horse!' She stopped, utterly indignant, and I got in, 'Well, there's even a piece at the back of the book where I discuss these issues.'

She seemed to hear me suddenly. She took a step back and looked at me properly. 'What did you say you were here for, dear?' 'For a book signing. It's a book I think you'd really enjoy, a book of new stories inspired by the Brontes.' 'Oh no, dear, I'm sorry, I don't have time!' And she turned on her heel and walked off, not into the bookshop, but away in the opposite direction altogether.

But people did take leaflets, and they did take them up to our desk in the shop, and we did sell several books!

Thank you to Waterstone's, and to the lovely staff present who kept bringing us cups of tea!

Some nice comments

I'm thrilled to have come across a lovely new review of Too Many Magpies, by Michelle Bailat-Jones.
Here are some quotes from it that are still making me glow:

"Without a doubt the story and the questions Baines poses are compelling, unique even. But her writing is what makes this short book exceptional ... The book involves this wonderful tension between ideas of science and more romantic and felt explanations for what happens in everyday life. The narrator is curious about how deeply we want to believe in magic, yet she is aware of how dangerous and beautiful those beliefs can be. But also, on the other side, how very shocked and disappointed we may feel when science fails us in some way. It is really well done—complicated and with no real attempt to do more than question and examine and highlight these tendencies. I love the ambiguity in that."

And in the same week  Dan Powell, author of the Scott Prize winning collection of stories, A Storm in a Teacup, has commented thus on my story, 'Tides, or How Stories Do or Don't Get Told', published on The View From Here: ‘I bloody love this. Part life story, part love story, part memoir, part exploration of the nature of stories. Brilliant. Brilliant.’

It's so easy to lose confidence as a writer - to some extent it's part of the job description: you need constantly to be reappraising what you write and striving to get better, which last inevitably involves a sense of dissatisfaction with what you've so far achieved. But such affirmation can send you floating up to Cloud 9!

Story on East of the Web

'Falling', my story which was shortlisted and Highly Commended in the Sean O'Faolain competition, can now be read online at East of the Web. It's another of my less conventional stories: it deliberately plays on the 'and then she woke and it was all a dream' convention, turning it on its head and exploring the notion of the unreliability of consciousness. When I posted about East of the Web recently and the story's acceptance, I forgot to mention that one great thing about East of the Web is that they allow comments on the stories, which I don't think many online magazines do. It's a two-edged sword, of course: it's really great to get the reactions of general readers to your work, but also you need a thick skin: a couple of the commenters so far don't think much of 'Falling' at all!

Reading group: The Book of Daniel by E L Doctorow

It was the beginning of December when we discussed this 1971 novel, recommended by Mark, and I've been so preoccupied in the meantime, not simply with Christmas, but with furious writing, that at this moment all I remember of the discussion is that the five of us present agreed that we had found the book wonderful, if not mind-blowing.

The book is based on the real-life case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who in 1953 were the first Americans to be executed for spying, accused of passing the secret of the atom bomb to the Soviet Union. Doctorow creates their fictional counterparts, Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, replacing their two orphaned sons with a fictional son and daughter, Daniel and Susan Lewin. The book is related by Daniel who, some fifteen years later, against the background of the Vietnam war and sixties leftwing protest, is seeking to understand the circumstances of the death of his parents and their earlier leftwing politics, and trying to deal with the personal emotional legacy: Susan's current emotional disintegration and his own destructive tendencies and inability to cherish his wife and child.

Although the book does allow for some doubt, its general thrust - motored by Daniel's perspective - is towards a notion of the Isaacsons' innocence. After its publication papers would emerge indicating that Joshua Rosenberg, at least, had been involved in spying, but we all agreed that this made no difference to the impact of the book (see, some of what we said is coming back to me!) since it concentrates on the human cost in terms of the effect on the children and on the barbarism of a system that would impose the death penalty without proper evidence, thus giving the lie to claims of American rationality and political freedom. It is the human dimension of the situation with which Doctorow is concerned, and Ann noted that the flaws and complexity of Daniel's character deepen rather than detract from this, and we all agreed. Similarly, Doctorow shows the Isaacsons as complex: politically passionate but poor and thus less than autonomous, their leftwing politics conservative, Paul politically naive with a blind faith in the justice of the American system.

The thing that really struck and impressed me about the book (apart from the stunning prose) was Doctorow's brilliant device for portraying Daniel's divided sense of self - a constant shifting between first and third person, as well as self-conscious commentary on the difficulties and traps of telling the tale.  Mark agreed, noting that Doctorow does these things so well that he never once loses you, the reader, and we all agreed that on the contrary, we found the effect extremely moving. We all found the whole book moving: several people picked out the scene in which Rochelle is called in for questioning never to return, a picture of her departing figure from the viewpoint of her watching son, which is repeated in the way it would clearly be re-run in his memory.

She was wearing her black coat that was almost down to her ankles in the fashion of that day. She had let the hem down to make it longer. She was wearing her blue dress with the white high-necked collar. She wore her tiny wrist-watch that my father gave her before they were married. She was wearing on the back of her head a little black hat she called a pillbox.

She was last seen in her black cloth coat with the hem let down and a black pillbox hat. My mother was last seen with her tiny watch on her wrist, a fine thin wrist with a prominent wristbone and lovely thin blue veins. She left behind a clean house, and in the icebox a peanut butter sandwich and an apple for lunch. In the afternoon I had my milk and cookies. And she never came home.

My mother left me in her long, black coat, and although she never wore hats, she wore a hat that day, also black, and almost invisible in her thick, curly black hair.

Trevor said that one aspect of the novel he didn't like so much was the insertion of sections outlining American foreign policy of the fifties, which he didn't find very novelistic. Mark pointed out that at the time of the publication of the novel, little was known about it, so it had been a necessary contextualisation. I said that in fact it's acceptable from a novelistic point of view, as these sections form part of Daniel's researches and the doctoral thesis he is writing.

It was, however, a minor grouse on Trevor's part, but some weeks later, at our reading group Christmas dinner, two members who hadn't been present at the meeting, Doug and Clare, said that these sections had put them right off the book, which they had found altogether too much of a history lesson - much to the amazement of the rest of us, who had been frankly wowed.

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

Happy New Year

Happy New Year to everyone! It's not a day for a New Year walk here in Manchester: it's wild and wet and dark, even in late morning, so I'm sitting here by the fire and taking stock of the year that's just gone.

It's been a year in which I'm afraid my blogs have been somewhat neglected, especially my other
blog Fictionbitch, which, as a critical blog, takes a fair amount of thought and time. Mainly this is because it's been an eventful year for me on the family front, with lots of family issues to occupy me, some joyful, such as my discovery of my long-lost Irish cousin and her family, and others, like my mother's house move, pretty stressful, as is the way with these family matters. Partly it's been because I spent most of the spring and summer in Wales without broadband, coupled with the fact that my laptop is basically dying and very slow, so for a lot of the time getting online was impossible. One of my New Year resolutions has to be to get a new laptop, although I have to say that, as income for writers goes down and down and we are expected to contribute more and more for free, I can't really afford one. Reinstalling the operating system has made little difference, and the thing is basically on the way to being kaput. I guess it's had a lot of stick. My techie advisor was shocked when he saw it. 'You must do a lot of typing!' he cried, when he saw that the a, e, and s keys have worn to invisibility. Ironically, it's all forced me to take my own advice  to ration my social networking activity (advice I doled out in April on the Salt London Book Fair Panel on Social Networking, and in the new edition of the Creative Writing companion, The Road to Somewhere [Palgrave Macmillan]), with the result that in spite of other distractions I've been able to concentrate on writing more than I have for a good while.

There's a popular notion that short stories are the mode for our rushed sound-bitey times, but personally, I take the opposite view: a worthwhile short story is something distilled that requires stillness, both to read and to write. Over the past few years, while I've been spending a lot of time online, I really haven't found the right stillness for short-story writing, but this year thankfully I have found it again at last. I wrote several, now published or about to be. One short-story highlight in the latter part of the year was of course the publication of Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontes (Unthank Books), for which my story 'That Turbulent Stillness' was commissioned, and our editor A (Andrea) J Ashworth organised great reading events, two of which I took part in, in Manchester and Blackburn. (Three of us - Andrea, fellow contributor Bill Broady and me - will be doing a signing at York Waterstone's on Saturday 18th January [12 am - 3 pm] ). In late summer-early autumn I managed a novella in nine-and-a-half short weeks (sitting up in bed at the back of  a mountainside cottage in Wales where the internet was inaccessible on the dongle!). I have also finally had the peace to come to realise that the longer novel I've been struggling for ages - years now - to make more acceptably commercial is never going to work unless I damn well write it the way it needs to be written, and hang the consequences in terms of anything but artistic integrity!

A peaceful and successful 2014 to you all!

New Review of Red Room

I was in the city centre yesterday afternoon - in Primark, actually, getting socks and marvelling at others buying reindeer-printed knickers and pink-spotted onesies - when a notice came through on my phone of a new, really enthusiastic review of Red Room. Kathryn Eastman of the Nut Press blog finds the book a 'strong collection' and seems to love every story in it, assuring her readers that 'once you finish, you'll want to dip back in again.'

Too Many Magpies and The Birth Machine now on Kindle.

From time to time people have written to me and asked whether my books are on Kindle, and I'm delighted now to announce that two of my Salt books are.

For those who don't know, Too Many Magpies is a short novel about our sense that the world is a newly dangerous place, and in which a young mother married to a scientist and putting her faith in rationality is suddenly swept off her feet by a mysterious stranger with a very different view of the world. It's a question really (in the book) of how we look at things: do we believe in magic or do we put our faith in science? It's not a simple question, of course, because although true science is based on rationality and empiricism, a lot of so-called scientific practice has been based in faith, often replacing hypothesis with untested certainty. (Funnily enough,  I came into the room last night in the middle of a TV programme John was watching, about the truly lethal character of much in the Victorian environment - including clothing, household goods and even food additives, some of them thought at the time to be health-giving, and advertised as 'pure'.)

The Birth Machine is even more directly concerned with the tendency of applied scientists to base their calculations in leaps of faith and to leave unknown factors out of the equation. The focus here is on the practice of obstetrics - the protagonist, Zelda, is about to give birth -  but also on wider issues of who owns the right to knowledge and the power of language (the language of science, the language of fairy tales etc) to shape our reality and thus our fates, and as Zelda sinks under the influence of drugs, dark secrets are dragged up from her past.

I don't know about you, but I'm finding my relationship with the electronic side of books changing all the time. To begin with, I didn't even use my Kindle very often, but I've come to find it indispensable for travelling and for when I really just can't wait two or three days to get a book - or indeed to get a book while I'm away from home without a nearby bookshop and won't be back for a while to get my post. And talking of magic: there really is nothing like suddenly wanting to read a book and simply pressing a button or two and having it right there in less than a minute!

And as for writing: as I said a few posts ago, while I've always banged on in the past about my need to write a first draft by hand, I'm now finding I'm writing more and more straight to the computer...

East of the Web

I'm delighted that another of my stories is to be published in the online magazine, East of the Web. If you don't already know East of the Web I recommend that you pay a visit: it's a fount of stories. Everything they've ever published is there online, easily accessible, and there's an amazing variety, something to suit every taste, while the standard is consistently high. It's definitely a place one is proud to place a story. I've got two stories proudly on there already: 'Compass and Torch' and 'A Glossary of Bread' (both now collected in Balancing on the Edge of the World). They were both stories I'd previously found hard to place: I think the problem with 'Glossary' was that it's a bit off the wall in its form (it's structured around definitions of bread), but I'm not quite sure what the problem was with 'Compass and Torch' which I see as a pretty traditional piece. In any case, East of the Web believed in them both, different as they are, and were vindicated: 'Glossary' was afterwards published again in the prestigious lit mag Stand, and 'Compass and Torch' was picked off the site for an English school textbook, and by the AQA examining board, whose GCSE syllabus it ended up on. That's how significant East of the Web is. Among the most recent publications there is a story by Ailsa Cox, my one-time co-editor on Metropolitan short-story magazine.

My new story, 'Falling,' was shortlisted and Highly Commended in the Sean O'Faolain competition.

Lancashire launch of Red Room

Across the moorland from Bolton to Blackburn last night, very appropriate for the Lancashire launch of Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontes. We thought we weren't going to get there in time (John drove me): we'd allowed an hour and three-quarters (thinking we'd have a coffee beforehand) but the motorway up to Bolton was jammed and at a crawl. Arriving also by the skin of their teeth were the other two readers, Carys Davies and Sarah Dobbs. Our waiting editor, A (Andrea) J Ashworth must have been having kittens! The library ladies were waiting too with very welcome tea and chocolate biscuits.  A lovely warm crowd had come to hear us read, and to hear Andrea talk about the book, many of them Bronte enthusiasts, including someone in a Wuthering Heights T-shirt, though there were people there too whose interest in the Brontes was newly rekindled. Two people told Andrea afterwards that they had been prompted by the event to re-read Jane Eyre beforehand. We had some wonderful photos taken by Derren Lee Poole, and with his kind permission I include a few below.

Here's Andrea introducing the evening and explaining how she suggested the idea of an anthology to the Bronte Birthplace Trust, and was then asked to edit it:

Sarah read from her moving story, 'Behind All the Closed Doors', about a young boy whose mother has died and who finds comfort in books in the way the Brontes did. She left us all moved and thoughtful (as I think you can see from my face in the pic!).

Carys then read her poignant story, 'Bonnet', about an imagined visit by Charlotte Bronte to her London publisher with whom she is known to have been in love, and concerning real-life letters that did pass between them. I think it must have been hard for Carys to read it without crying and many of us were choked up, I think.

Before she read Carys said that she thought Bronte aficionados tend to fall into two different camps, the Charlotte camp and the Emily camp. Here I am about to read and telling her that in fact I loved both when I was young, though maybe I did incline a little more towards Emily, as my story, which is inspired by Wuthering Heights, perhaps shows:

Lots of books were bought and signed. Thank you so much to the lovely audience, to the library staff, to Andrea, to Carys and Sarah and to Derren.

Red Room is available here.

Know where your venue is

Last night we had a lovely Red Room evening at the Portico Library with its original Victorian shelves of leather-backed 'Polite Literature' and founded if I remember correctly by Elizabeth Gaskell's husband William - so apt for readings from a book of stories inspired by the Brontes. Our editor, A (Andrea) J Ashworth, whose brilliant idea the book was, introduced the five contributors who read: Bill Broady, Felicity Skelton, Rowena Macdonald, Vanessa Gebbie and me. A fair crowd turned up to listen, including another contributor to the collection, Sarah Dobbs, and the library staff  hosted us all handsomely, putting on a welcome spread of nibbles.

Only one blip, beforehand: I couldn't find the place! No-one would think that I'd been numerous times to the Portico for other readings, and that once I even went there regularly for meetings when I was a judge of the Portico Prize: walking along Moseley Street from Piccadilly I went straight past it and was almost at St Peter's Square before I realised. Worse: poor Vanessa was dragged along with me: we'd met three hours earlier only just up the road in Piccadilly Gardens, to chat and catch up, so expected to be at the venue in plenty of time. In the end, because of my error, we were hardly early at all! Partly this is because we were still chatting so hard I wasn't concentrating, and partly because the entrance is round the corner in Charlotte Street - and pretty modest, too: it really is like going through a secret door and up a tunnelling staircase which then opens out onto a magic world, the glowing lamplit library. Anyway, all was well in the end, and it was a great evening.

Photography was quite hard with my (by current standards) rather rudimentary camera, since, rather than creating an overall brightness, the library has retained the cosy, peaceful Victorian mode of spots of light for reading by, but John (who joined us) managed to take some pics with it.

First Bill Broady read his story 'Heathcliff versus Sherlock Holmes' which features a couple on a first date arguing comically about the merits of those two characters.

Next up was Felicity Skelton, whose story 'The Curate's Wife - a Fantasy' is about an imagined meeting on the lonely darkening moor between Charlotte Bronte and a famous figure from history (I won't reveal who!):

Then Rowena Macdonald read extracts from her longer 'A Child of Pleasure,' a story of two modern characters based on two from Charlotte Bronte's Villette. I followed with an extract from 'That Turbulent Stillness', my story of a girl who models herself too closely on Bronte heroines, and finally Vanessa read her hilarious feminist re-writing of the famous chapter in Jane Eyre, which begins, 'Reader, I married him.' Here are  Sarah Dobbs (left), me (centre) and Vanessa talking afterwards.

Thanks so much to the Portico Library staff, to Andrea and to the other contributors for their great readings, and to everyone who came to listen.

On Wednesday I'll be taking part in another reading for the book at Blackburn Library (7 pm), along with Sarah Dobbs and Carys Davies. (No advance booking: just turn up.) I don't actually know Blackburn, so if I fail at first to find the venue, at least this time it won't be through overconfidence that I know where it is!

Red Room is available from Amazon, The Book Depository, etc, and direct from the publisher, Unthank Books.