Wednesday, January 30, 2019

Reading group: Amongst Women by John McGahern

John suggested this 1990 novel which opens as 'once-powerful' ex-IRA commander Moran is declining towards death, and his three adult daughters try to rally him by returning to the farmhouse for 'Monaghan Day', the day of the year when his former IRA lieutenant would once visit after attending the nearby yearly cattle fair, and the two would recount their former republican army glory. The novel then retrospectively charts the years from those times, when the motherless daughters of the house would attend the table, through Moran's courtship of and marriage to a second wife Rose and Rose's saving absorption into the family, the growing and moving away of the daughters, and a serious rift with his youngest child, Michael, who runs away to Dublin and then England to escape a severe beating, a repetition of what had happened with an older son, Luke, before the events being retrospectively related.

Introducing the book, John said he felt it was about the violence of traditional rural Irish lives under the oppression of religion and English colonisation, and the need of young people to escape it (either to Dublin or London). It was also, he said, a study of male attitudes under these conditions. Moran is a broody man with a temper. When Rose joins the household, she notices his children are stilled when he enters a room, watching him for his mood 'like the weather', and if the girls break a piece of crockery they are seriously afraid of his wrath and hide the pieces so he will not know. Rose herself quickly learns that he must be appeased, and takes on the role of pourer of oil on troubled waters, keeping determinedly cheerful for the sake of the children as well as her own. For these reasons, John said he felt that the book was ultimately about war and its dehumanising effects on men.

Ann said she thought it was rather about families, or a specific family. I didn't think there was a real discrepancy here: surely what the book is showing is the chain effect of those outward political circumstances on the families of those men, their invasion into the privacy of the home and the lives of children. This is brilliantly codified by the opening of the novel, in which Moran's daughters, who love him in spite of everything, are actively trying to revive for him his former IRA glory. Moran does indeed bring his mode of military command into the home along with the oppressive aspect of the Catholic Church: although not a church-goer, he will interrupt any household activity by commanding the whole family to drop to its knees and say the rosary.

I commented that there isn't really much of a dramatic story arc in this novel - it really simply traces a now mundane life from middle-aged virility to death - yet somehow it was extremely engrossing. Everyone else agreed - they had all really loved the book, and thought it beautifully written. John noted that the style is in fact very traditional, with a lot of telling rather than showing, which he thought was perhaps why, although he and I had read the book years ago, we hadn't really remembered it - there was perhaps a lack of vividness. This time around I did note a brilliant moment right at the beginning where the narrator bothers to call the yew tree in the garden 'poisonous' - a vivid hint of the poison in Moran's relationship with his family - but I didn't note any other such symbolic moments as I read. John said he felt there was actually a (subsidiary) story arc concerning the progress of Michael, which slightly skews the more generally democratic focus of the novel, and he found Michael more vivid than the rest of the characters. He wondered therefore if the novel were autobiographical and Michael a veiled portrait of the author. He also noted that there is a huge gap in the novel: the narration gives no sense of the dead wife and mother, whereas we all felt that there ought naturally to be, since the novel deals with the feelings and attitudes of all the characters - the elder girls who have taken on her role in the household would surely have a constant memory of her. The much younger Michael is likely to have less memory of her - she must have disappeared from his life at a much earlier age - (and he is the one child who takes to Rose as a mother figure, the older girls treating her more as a sister), and this perhaps reflects the fact that McGahern's own mother died when he was very young, reinforcing the notion that Michael is to some extent a self-portrait.

One point that was made was that this was a world that no longer exists, that with the weakening of the power of the church and membership of the European Union, Ireland is now very different (though John wasn't sure of this). Nevertheless, we all still found the novel politically and emotionally resonant, indeed impressive, and we had all been very moved.

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

Thursday, January 17, 2019

Confingo magazine, and online versus print publication.

I'm delighted to say that another of my stories has been accepted by the excellent Confingo Magazine. It's yet another of the stories I've been writing recently that touch on particularly contemporary issues - though, as I say, the real heart of these stories for me is the particular personal dilemmas for their protagonists. Publication won't be until October, as the forthcoming Spring issue is now more or less decided. In the days before online magazines this was the norm with story submissions - a good wait between acceptance and publication, but recently I've been experiencing the more quick-fire publishing schedules of online magazines. My story 'Kiss' was published in MIR Online in December within two or three weeks of acceptance and, 'Bitter, Horned', accepted only last week, will appear on Litro on 10th February. It would be easy, in view of this, to get impatient with the slow process of print publication, but there are pros and cons. For one thing, there's really nothing like having a print copy of something you've written, and online magazines can disappear and along with them their stories. Salt's Online Magazine, Horizon Review, on which I had had three stories published, 'The Choice Chamber', 'What Do You Do If' and 'Possibility', was deleted from their site. Luckily they had been captured by the WayBack Machine web archive, so I was able to provide links to that, but when I discovered recently that the defunct online magazine The View From Here had disappeared altogether I was quite unable to retrieve the story of mine they'd published, 'Tides: How Stories Do or Don't Get Told': not a single one of the snapshots the WayBack Machine had taken of the magazine included its page. It's just fortunate that that story (along with the three others) is included in my Salt collection, Used to Be (and, before that, in Best British Short Stories 2014). Print publications, after all, last forever, and Confingo is indeed a classy publication (with beautiful artwork) that you'd want to keep.

Tuesday, January 08, 2019

The waywardness of stories

The New Year is going well: yesterday I was delighted to hear that a new story, 'Bitter, Horned', will be published on Litro Online next month. It's one of several stories I've written recently that deal with some pressing current issues I've been getting exercised about.  While 'Kiss' (MIR Online) concerns terrorism, this story concerns the triple issues of housing and the threat of homelessness, environmental pollution and domestic violence. However, the real trigger for writing about anything for me is always deeply personal: some human situation I've experienced or observed and which has deeply moved me, and it just so happens that the human dilemmas in these particular stories are embedded in these social and political issues. I was beginning to feel that this was my new schtick in storywriting, but then of course a story pops up that doesn't fit the pattern - I have now been moved to write a story divorced from any current political issue but based in one of my abiding themes, the difficulty of communication in personal relationships - as indeed was my recently V S Pritchett longlisted story. Stories - in some ways you just can't control them, and I guess that's the exciting thing.

Wednesday, January 02, 2019

Dramatic and quiet stories. 'Kiss' chosen for Best British Short Stories 2019

Happy New Year!

I have started the new year on a bit of a high, as my story 'Kiss' which early last year was longlisted in the Short Fiction Journal prize and was recently published on MIR online, has been chosen by editor Nicholas Royle for inclusion in Best British Short Stories 2019, to be published by Salt later this year. This is the second time I've had a story in this great series - in 2014 my story 'Tides, Or How Stories Do or Don't Get Told', made it (interestingly, that had also been previously published online) - and it's a huge thrill to have a published story receive this further - and prestigious - acknowledgement. ('Kiss' is the story I wrote about in my post on research for fiction.)

I've had three strikes with this story, basically, and pretty quickly (it did get two blanks, with two other competitions), but as far as I can remember 'Tides' suffered a few rejections before being accepted for publication and finally receiving critical praise in reviews of Best British Short Stories. It's made me ponder the mystery of why some stories make it easily and quickly, and others take some time to get acceptance even though they may do well in the end. Perhaps to some extent it's subject matter: as a story concerning terrorism, 'Kiss' involves an urgent current topic and a dramatic situation. There's also the question of the form of a story: the urgency of the situation in 'Kiss' is reflected in a deliberately rushed, breathless prose. 'Tides', on the other hand, is consciously contemplative both in subject matter and style - I guess you could say it was a 'quiet' story. And 'Kiss' involves sexuality, including a new and youthful relationship, whereas 'Tides' concentrates on the quieter poignancy of a long-term relationship. Yet to me these two stories are equally dynamic in terms of their themes and the issues they raise. (I'm afraid 'Tides' is no longer online, but it can be read in my latest story collection, Used to Be [Salt].)

It makes me wonder: are 'quieter' stories less likely to catch the eye of competition judges and magazine editors overwhelmed with material and inevitably to some extent scanning on first sight? Is there such a thing as a 'competition story', as I have long suspected? It would be a great pity if quieter, more contemplative, but no less accomplished and thematically important stories were to be squeezed from our culture...