Bookshops I love: Waterstone's Deansgate (yet again!)

Today I had one of those moments that can make an author's entire week. Last time I went into Waterstone's Deansgate they had four copies of The Birth Machine. I went in today and they had ten, (stacked face outwards - see pic!). What did it mean? Had they ordered more, or just got some out of the storeroom? I plucked up courage and asked, and the assistant told me that they keep reordering it because it's selling, adding, 'Well, it's such a good book. I've read it myself and it's a really good book.'

Not sure I can convey quite how chuffed that made me! Thank you so much, the fiction staff at Deansgate!

An article and two readings

Here's a laugh: last week I had an article on The View from Here in which I said that when I'm really immersed in my writing I can forget even to talk to my children. And then, although I'd intended to mention it on here, because I am currently so immersed in my writing, I forgot.

Another thing I meant to mention and forgot is the event I'm taking part in next Thursday at Crystal Peaks Library in Sheffield for World Book Day and the Save Our Libraries campaign. There are events all day, and I'm on at 2 pm, reading from my work and talking about the role libraries have played in my life as a reader and a writer.

2 pm Thursday 3rd March 2011
Crystal Peaks Library
1-3 Peak Square, Sheffield, South Yorkshire S20 7PH 0114 203 0612 FREE.


I'm also excited to be reading later in the month at the Spitalfields Wisewords Festival with some really great writers :

Jay Merill presents Jay LIVE (Salt Publishing) with authors Elizabeth Baines, Tania Hershman, Susannah Rickards, Sarah Salway and Catherine Smith Wednesday 16  March 2011, 6.30pm FREE
The Luxe Spitalfields 020 7101 1751
109 Commercial Street, E1 6BG Liverpool St tube
One of the Wisewords Bookclub series of events and part of the Wisewords Festival

Reading group: Waterland by Graham Swift

Ann suggested this book in which a history teacher narrator, Tom Crick, due to lose his post for traumatic personal reasons, relates - both to a class of London teenagers and, in parallel, to himself - his own personal story and his family history, along with the history of the Fens out of which they emerged. The family story is one of isolation, hauntings, death, delayed development, murder, abortion and madness, and with incest at its heart.

Ann was attracted by the book's reputation as an evocative depiction of the Fens landscape which she often travels through, and the moment she suggested it, Doug, who grew up in Lincolnshire, immediately said that he knew the book and had loved it for that reason.

Everyone in the group agreed that it was indeed a vivid evocation of that flat, fluid landscape, and its mournful, uncertain atmosphere. However, Ann said that she found it hard to take the long and detailed historical digressions, those dealing with actual history - the French Revolution which Crick is supposed to be teaching (rather than telling stories), and the history of the drainage of the fens and its brewing industry - as well as the fictional history of Crick's brewing ancestors. (They are couched self-consciously in the mode of essays or lectures in a way that slows down the pace of the novel, making it leisurely, indeed ponderous, and are titled as such: 'About the Rise of the Atkinsons', 'About the Ouse'.)  Jo and John and Jenny agreed that the brewing and drainage bits were boring (though later Doug - who arrived very late - insisted that, to someone brought up in Lincolnshire, drainage was fascinating!). Ann said that after a while, however, she began to see a reason in the novel's style and structure, and then found it easier to accept: ie, with its digressions and the constant loopings back in the action, it was specifically structured like a river (the fictional river, indeed, the Leem, on which the story takes place). I agreed with this, and I said that I thought that likewise the prose, with its constant subordinate clauses, its often ponderous sentences interrupting themselves and looping back to earlier clauses, was intended to mimic the looping of a river over flat land and indeed the constant draining and silting of the land itself to which the novel refers early on. The novel deals in uncertainty, the uncertainty of the landscape and indeed the uncertainty of history, and while Ann could see that this is why it's often not clear what exactly happened at various points in the story, or what the motives of the characters were precisely, she found that lack of clarity very unsatisfying. On the whole, she thought that at times the novel worked really well, but that at other times it didn't, and she didn't like or care about any of the characters.

Jenny then said that one thing she thinks is great about our reading group is that it forces her to persevere with books she would otherwise have given up on, only to find that she enjoys them after all, and so it was with this book: for the first 150 of its 350 pages she was very bored but after that began to be engaged. Trevor said that the first time he read the book he hadn't thought much of it, but that this time he'd rather enjoyed it: he felt that once you knew the story you had more patience with the digressions and could enjoy them for themselves. Clare said that, like Doug, she had very much liked the book.

John and Jo were perhaps the most negative. While the story-telling theme and the mode in which it's conveyed seemed to me very clever (and were fascinating enough to me to keep me reading in spite of some doubts), John thought the book clever in a cold, manipulative way, and Ann, I think, agreed with him that it was 'too clever'.  He said he agreed with Ann that the characters and their relationships were unbelievable, and once he'd said it, there was general agreement about this, even from those who liked the book. There is a whole thirty years in the life of Crick and his wife Mary which is simply glossed over, and so you couldn't understand what had happened to their relationship, or therefore know on any deep psychological level the reasons for Mary's behaviour and madness which precipitate Tom Crick out of his teaching career. John thought the depiction itself of the sex etc was sordid - there is even a chapter titled, seemingly without irony, 'About Holes and Things' - and again everyone nodded.

As for the incest in the novel, Jenny, a sociologist, pointed out that incest happens more frequently than we tend to assume, especially in lonely and isolated places (and Ann said that a social worker had told her the same). I said that although I accepted this absolutely as sociological fact, I didn't think it was conveyed believably in the novel, especially from the point of the view of the daughter, and everyone agreed. Ann and I then discussed why this was so. This episode is self-consciously told in fairytale mode, and while we could see that this authorial choice would be based on the fact that fairytales can make the most grotesque seem matter-of-fact, we felt that it simply didn't work: we needed the depiction to be more psychological. At this point things got very confusing, as some people were muddled between the two couples in the story, indeed, just about everyone had been so at points  during the reading. John thought that was ridiculous, that you should have to keep checking back to sort out the different couples in the reading, but Clare thought it was an authorial intention - the idea that all these people's lives flowed into each other like the river. John said, getting back to the lack of psychological portrayal, a whole problem with the book was that none of the women are portrayed in any depth whatever; he came away with the distinct notion that the author didn't understand women: what did the women in the group think? Jo and I agreed, but Jenny said none of the characters were portrayed in any psychological depth, and Clare said they weren't meant to be psychologically realistic, they were symbols.

I then said that my main problem with the book was the voice: quite frankly, as an ex-secondary school teacher I found that Crick's relationship with his pupils and the way he spoke to them made me uncomfortable. In real life he'd have been laughed out of the classroom. While there were aspects of the book I liked, it's so framed by and saturated in this voice, that I found it hard to get past. John too thought that the way the pupils accepted Crick's attitude and mode of address was psychologically unrealistic, and Ann agreed with me that the way the main troublesome pupil ended up as Crick's champion, smelled embarrassingly of authorial ex-schoolteacher's wishful thinking. Jenny and Trevor said they didn't have a problem with any of this. John said that while Crick makes clear that he doesn't actually call the class 'children' to their faces, and also while John understood that Crick's calling them that 'silently' throughout the text was something to do with Tom and Mary's own childlessness, the very fact that he does this last simply creates - along with his pompous diction - a sense of a history teacher dustily out of touch and thus impossible to empathise with.

John now quoted a sentence which he thought was ridiculously long, pompous and convoluted with its sub-sub clauses:

And while this determined policy on the part of the parents might have expressed the simple recognition that their first-born was, after all, irreclaimable, this did not account for the rigour with which it was pursued: for that moment, for example, when the younger son, thinking it only right to impart to his less fortunate brother some of his, albeit frugal, learning, embarked (the future teacher in the making) on a programme of secret tuition; and, being found out, was not only stopped short in his scheme of enlightenment but was roundly told by the provoked father (who was not a man, it was true, easily roused to great temper or severity, especially since the death of his sad wife): 'Don't educate him! Don't learn 'im to read!' 

But Doug said that prose was great, and Clare said, Lovely stuff!

People now talked about the things they hadn't understood or thought weren't clear in the novel. Was Tom's brother Dick really not mentally slow after all, but had simply been held back? Did Tom's father know the secret concerning Dick? (The above-quoted sentence seems to imply an affirmative to both questions, but people had doubts.) Who was really supposed to be the father of the teenage Mary's baby? Were we meant to believe what Mary said about it, or not? Was there a hint of incest between Mary and her father, or not? Why did Dick commit his final act? Was he drunk, or not? What was the point of the bottles of special beer in the trunk? (People generally agreed that they had the fairytale role of a magic potion, and the trunk was a kind of Pandora's box). What was the thematic point of Dick's being designated a saviour of the world by a grandfather descended into madness? Everyone shrugged, and nobody knew. (In retrospect, I'd say this last was an illustration of the madness of trying to take control of the ebb and flow of the world.)

Ann posed the question as to why the French Revolution had been chosen by the author as the historical moment constantly referred to. It's another instance of people trying to control the ebb and flow of history, and Clare pointed to Crick's speech in which he says that revolution does not necessarily mean change (as people tend to think of it), since a revolving wheel returns to its previous point  - just as, I'd add, the Fens constantly return to water, and the rivers, like the Leem after the 1947 floods, silt up and return to land.

All however agreed that the chapter 'About the Eel', with its revelation that the life cycle of the eel is still unknown, was fascinating - even Jo, and a grudging John since it was so very symbolic of the theme of the book, though he said if he'd wanted that much detail he'd have gone to a bloody encyclopaedia. He said that if you took away all the pompous digressions which seemed to give the book dignity and boiled it down to the direct personal action, it would take up about twelve pages and make a pretty sordid little story.

Finally, he asked, 'What's the point of this book? What's it saying?' No one really answered - they laughed and groaned, taking his question as rhetorical - but I'd say that the book is an exploration of uncertainty, the uncertainty of history and of storytelling and the ultimately unfathomable nature of the motives of others. It's especially interesting because the novel borrows from, and thus ironises, the mode and language of the Victorian sensation novel which, while it similarly deals with secrets and corruption and breakdown of the social order, was underpinned by authorial certainty.  Like Ann, I'm not sure that the deliberate uncertainties of this book make for an ultimately satisfying novel, but even John had to admit that it was a fascinating experiment.


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

The perils of writing an 'issue' book

When I set out to write The Birth Machine, was my chief aim to address the issue of hi-tech childbirth and to set the profession of Obstetrics to rights? Of course not. The Birth Machine was simply the next in a series of stories I wanted to tell simply because once they'd hatched in my brain they moved and obsessed me enough to want to explore them and get them down on paper. (Previously all my pieces had been short stories). My main impulse always is to explore and convey the feeling and ideas that any situation and story suggest to me.

But then of course certain situations inevitably carry with them specific issues, and in this particular case the issue - hi-tech childbirth - has been highly politicised. And naturally, in exploring the situation, while my chief concerns were the wider issues (and my constant themes) of power and language and story-telling, the novel was bound to make comment on the more specific issue. And personally, I did feel that there were issues about hi-tech childbirth that needed to be addressed, and that was bound to find expression in the novel. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that, yes, I'd have liked it if Obstetricians had read the book and it made them think...  But it's those wider issues, and in particular the mode of telling, that were my chief concern, and while the book's first publisher (The Women's Press) was certainly political (and indeed edited the book for political purposes) they nevertheless pushed the book not simply as a polemic but as a literary work - for the writing.

Still, actually, nowadays you'd be crazy, wouldn't you, to ignore the marketing possibilities of an issue - the fact that an issue can widen your market beyond the usual literary one? So when the book was reissued recently, I and my publisher Salt set about contacting birth groups (which didn't in fact exist, even, when the book was first published) and, lo and behold, we had a fantastic interested response.

But. Today on Goodreads I discovered that a member involved in natural childbirth and drawn to the book for its 'issue', and whose usual fiction tastes clearly run to very different kinds of books such as Harry Potter, says that while she's sympathetic to the book's ideas, she found the story too chaotic and 'undone' to make any sense, and gives it one star only (which means 'I didn't like it') and says roundly that she will not be recommending it to her students (I presume they are childbirth students, but a casual glancer might assume otherwise). Clearly, the book was never meant for this reader and vice versa. But now that one star is out there to influence others (and it's also on Google!). Hm.

Would we have been better in our marketing to stick to a more 'literary' constituency, do you think?

Save Our Libraries Day and a review

I know I don't need to enumerate here for my lovely blog readers the reasons we need to save our libraries from the government slashfest, but it I'd just like to mark Save Our Libraries Day here.

And if you will permit me a little wander down memory lane... Those Saturday mornings when I escaped from the house and entered those oases (we lived in several different places) smelling of wood and paper and, oh, centuries of wisdom and dreams which in turn could transport you to a possibility-filled future... In the library you were no longer the eleven-, thirteen-year-old daughter of, sister of, pupil of... You felt part, however novice, of a vast intellectual and creative community. It gave me a sense of my right to belong to that community which otherwise, in spite of my parents' encouragement, I may never have had...

To turn to writing news: Many thanks to Womagwriter for reviewing The Birth Machine. Interestingly, unlike others she feels that she may have preferred the earlier published edition, and feels that in any case the book still reads as 'a plea for natural childbirth, and minimum intervention' (I say in my Author's Note that people took the first edition as a plea for natural childbirth rather than as a plea for logical thinking). Well, I guess when it comes down to it the book does argue for minimum intervention (as minimum as possible in each case) as a result of logical thinking (though to me that's not the same thing at all as as an argument for natural childbirth), and it's interesting to see how one's work ends up striking other people, whatever one's intentions.

What's the point of Creative Writing?

Prompted by the Faber Academy discussion about Creative Writing on Fictionbitch, here's my own (ambivalent) take on one particular aspect, the teaching of the subject. It's my first post as a contributor to the online version of the excellent literary magazine The View From Here.

Reading group: Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut

Trevor suggested this 1952 novel, Vonnegut's first, which takes place in an America where, after another war, machines have taken over from not only labourers but non-manual workers too, and the only people in full and certain employment are a small elite of engineers, the designers of the machines. Most people live mod-con-aided but unfulfilled lives and work for the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps (the Reeks and Wrecks), devised to provide them with fake manual jobs, or join the Army where they train with wooden rifles, since it is machines now that win wars and indeed led to the recent victory. The novel's protagonist is Paul Proteus, son of the influential engineer, the late George Proteus, in whose footsteps he is following until he becomes involved with rebellious elements. The novel charts his deepening entanglement in the revolutionary movement and a final rebellion, but spends a good deal of space along the way describing the society that Vonnegut imagines.

Introducing the novel, Trevor spoke of the ways in which its predictions were accurate, chiefly the fact that technology has indeed taken over our lives while we have descended into mass unemployment. People immediately said however that, from a present-day perspective, the vision of the details of the predicted world seems naif, the so-called sophisticated machines being run by tape-recorders and valves, and the computers huge rather than tiny, filling whole underground caves. That's perhaps the danger with science fiction, they said, that it dates - especially, John pointed out, novels written in the realistic style of this one. He said, if you considered Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5, written eleven years later and which we discussed previously, there was just no comparison: that book is surreal and so doesn't suffer from the same problem.

I said, but also Slaughterhouse 5  is so much better written. (In fact of course Slaughterhouse 5 is about the past rather than the future and breaks the bounds of the science-fiction genre.) Didn't anyone else find this novel utterly plodding? I asked. (I found the prose airlessly pedestrian, lacking the demotic energy of the voice of Slaughterhouse 5, and there was a lot of telling and explaining rather than showing, so the book lacked vividness for me. Here, for instance, is Paul reacting to his wife during a crucial, indeed relationship-changing episode: 'Paul had expected that reaction, and remained patient in the face of it' - note that formal 'remained'.) Hadn't anyone else found it a really tedious read? Jo and Ann immediately said yes they had, in fact neither of them had managed to finish it. All those long sections describing the machines and people's lives in such plodding detail...  And, I added, the awkward dialogue. Jenny said that she hadn't engaged much with the book at the start, but the further she'd read the more she'd liked it. She and Doug said they hadn't found it badly written: surely, they said, to agreement from Trevor, it was nicely satirical? I couldn't agree: I found the attempts at satire rather self-conscious and forced, even a bit amateur; I thought this was really obviously a first novel. Well, said Jenny and Doug, what about the phone conversations between Paul and his wife Anita that always ended in the same way, with Anita saying 'I love you,' and Paul replying, 'I love you':  Jenny and Doug had really enjoyed that - a pattern which Jenny pointed out was reversed once Anita started cheating on Paul. I must say I hadn't noticed this reversal, as I had found the repetition so overdone I had stopped paying attention to it by then. John said he hadn't found the novel as tedious as we three had, but even Trevor, the book's champion, said it certainly wasn't one of Vonnegut's best-written books. And he agreed with John that one thing the book had failed to envisage was the increasing status of women: its doctorate-qualified women work only as secretaries (and are being gradually replaced by machines), and even the rebels hope to return to a society where men do proper men's work and women do women's. The ambitious Anita is only ambitious for Paul's career and comes over as a kind of Lady Macbeth figure.

Then Jenny said, Ah yes, but one thing the book did accurately predict was the corporate wife! Jo and Ann and I said, But surely in 1952 the corporate wife already existed, though Jenny argued that after that there was a rise in the corporate wife as a significant social phenomenon. She and Doug and Trevor also very much appreciated the satirical portrayal of a corporate morale-boosting, male-bonding weekend, which Doug found amazingly accurate as an account of such events to this day. However, I found it tediously overdone, with nothing of the light touch you find in Slaughterhouse 5.

They also appreciated the device of the visiting Shah of Bratphur, who views the supposedly advanced society with an uncomprehending and usefully fresh eye, significantly unable to distinguish the Reeks and Wrecks workers from slaves, although Doug said he was disappointed that the Shah wasn't more radically worked into the development of the plot.

I said that to me the book didn't actually feel very original, even for 1952, but because I've read so little science fiction I couldn't support my case. Others agreed, but Trevor said I may as well accuse Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four of being derivative - which in fact it was, he said, being actually a rewrite of We, the novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin, which Orwell had actually previously reviewed. All of these books have similar predictions, anyway, he said. I answered that if a book is not particularly well written, which I didn't think this one was, and if it sets out merely to predict the future without much further theme or subtext or much deep insight into the human condition - another way in which I think this book fails - then it better be damned original in its predictions. However on reflection since, I have decided that the reason I felt that the book lacked originality was that its intent, like that of much science fiction, was not so much to make predictions as to satirise social trends already in motion at the time of writing, and I suppose whether you think the book succeeds depends on whether you think the satire is successful, which I don't.

This discussion didn't last very long, and we very soon ended up talking instead about the issues it had raised...


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

Bookshops I love: Waterstone's Deansgate (again)

Well, the top floor of Waterstone's Deansgate in Manchester may now be mainly a restaurant, and its ground floor half given over to Paperchase, but look at this lovely sight I came across in the first floor fiction section this afternoon - all of my books in a row! - and on the ground floor there's a section of local authors right next to the main door! Pretty good, eh: supporting local authors and small presses, with everything Waterstone's is facing?

Getting radical about the question Why Write?

Today on the Faber blog, Faber Academy's Ian Ellard takes up the debate - Why write? - at its most radical level, with an historical and extremely thoughtful exploration of why on earth we actually do it. I urge you to click on over and read.

Meanwhile, it's still possible to leave any questions you may have for previous posters on Fictionbitch, Sue Gee and Marcel Theroux. You can leave them on the comments thread here.

Also join in on Twitter  #whywrite? #whynot

No thanks

There's one thing that really gets me. Every so often I get an email from someone writing about writers - the writing life, writers and publishing, that sort of thing - and they'd like me to answer some questions to help them with their surveys and essays. These requests can come from right across the board, from schoolchildren, from undergrads, from people writing theses for PhDs. In the first instance the senders are invariably polite, they nearly always express awareness of the hugeness of the request and the demand on my time.  Well, it's nice to be helpful, and good to engage with readers, so I look at the questions, and if they're sensible and literate, which they usually are (though I've had one or two crazy semi-literate corkers!), I take the trouble to think about them and send answers. And know what? Having got my answers, those students hardly ever reply, leave alone say thanks!

It really makes me consider ignoring all such requests. What do others think?

Sharing and not sharing

They say, with good reason, that you should never take any notice of what your close relatives say about your writing. Now that the flu bug has receded from our family, John and I nipped over to Notts on Friday for a belated Christmas reunion, and I was able to give out my family copies of the new edition of The Birth Machine. Today my mum rang me to say that she is 7 chapters in. And she wanted to tell me that this new version is much, much better! Now, she said, with the new, or rather original, structure, it's a story about 'what people do to each other', whereas previously it was more of a one-sided, 'fighting' kind of book, and not nearly as good! But did she say that last when the first edition came out? You bet she didn't....

To turn to less personal matters, the Faber Academy discussion of creative writing on Fictionbitch, which has turned out to be a pretty busy debate, continues with a chance to leave questions for FA tutors Sue Gee and Marcel Theroux.

And, in a not unconnected matter, I'm grateful to Tania Hershman for a link to a Huffington Post  article by Anis Shivani, which provocatively suggests that writers shun all media and social aspects of the writing industry and by implication such things as creative writing classes and workshops....

Reading group: Carry Me Down by M J Hyland

Because I have been so busy lately with promotion for The Birth Machine, Ann has kindly written up our November reading group discussion of this book. Here is her report:

Carry Me Down, by M.J. Hyland, was John’s choice for the book group to read.  He had heard the author talk about her major influence, Peter Handke’s novella The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, which employs a plain, factual mode of storytelling, and was curious to read this novel.  The book is written in the first person and relates a period, (about a year?), in the life of eleven-year-old John Egan and is set in 1970’s Ireland, although this time period is not made explicit.  When the story opens, John and his parents are living with his paternal grandmother in Gorey, a rural town in County Wexford.  The family have been exiled from Dublin for lack of funds, with his father ostensibly studying for the entrance exams for Trinity while his mother works in a local shop and makes puppets.  It is clear from the beginning that John Egan is a child who feels ‘out of place’ and a ‘misfit’ both at home and at school – he is tall for his age, is obsessed with the Guinness Book of Records and becomes convinced that he is able to detect lies, recording all those told him in The Gol of Seil.  The unravelling events of the story form a narrative circle by which family relationships drive them back to Dublin into a council flat in an out-of-town multi-story block of flats and then back again to Gorey at the end.  The first person narrative implies that we are meant to view this circle of events through John Egan’s eyes.

John introduced it as a novel with a beginning, middle and end, with an over-long middle – the section in Dublin - and was not too sure what to make of it, asking the question -was the ending happy or not?  John and Elizabeth felt that it was a deliberately symbolic happy ending – implying closure for the family and allowing it to move forwards.  Doug and I disagreed, feeling that the ending was very ambivalent, while Jo took the implication of the ending further, suggesting that the sequel to the novel would be more interesting as, for her, John (the book’s protagonist) was clearly still troubled and his behaviour would get worse.  This led to a general feeling that there was little plot to the book – a theme introduced by Trevor – it merely related a series of unfolding events, but we wondered where the plot (as such) was going, leading or saying.  Or was nothing meant to happen and the whole piece created as a symbolic circle?  Doors and openings were touched on – were they symbols of future happenings and sequels? Many events in the book being related through closed doors – such as John and his grandmother discussing his father while the latter is behind the door.  Then we all began to wonder if we were all trying to read scenarios into the story that simply were not there?  Were we looking for symbols when in fact there were none?

A gender divide emerged, with the men in the group noting the total absence of adolescent hormones that they felt totally unconvincing.  This was something missing in a portrait of an adolescent boy, making it unrealistic. Trevor and Mark considered this particularly disconcerting as they both felt themes of Oedipal sex were implicit throughout.  Alternatively, Elizabeth and Jo, both mothers of boys, felt that that one aspect of adolescent change, where affection and distance co-exist and alternate, was realistic.  Was the (quite gruesomely described) killing of the kittens at the beginning of the novel a symbol of this withdrawal, indecision and ambivalent parent-child relationship?  I think an indication of our uncertainty about this was the subsequent discussion on whether the kitten killing was realistic – were kittens really killed like that?  I suspect that this discussion would not have occurred if the narrative and characters had convinced us.  Our lack of conviction here revived the question of whether we were trying to read too much into the novel.  Were signs really being positioned along route, while the easy prose enabled a fast read so we missed the signs? Why did we think there should be signs and symbols and should there be any if the story is in fact being related by an eleven-year-old?

Most of the group appreciated that a sense of menace was skilfully created, but that it often promised more than the actual event that subsequently occurred – such as towards the end when John Egan attacks his mother.  I was so convinced by the prose leading up to the attack I thought he would murder her, and thus make the story more dramatic – harking back to Jo’s conviction that the sequel would be more interesting.  Nobody, however, found the novel a difficult read, the prose being far easier and far less dense than that of The Leopard, our previous read, but we remained divided.  Most felt the book was too long, but Mark and Trevor voted for it, with Doug and Hans disliking it.  Jo and I remained ambivalent.  One issue that all (as I recall) felt was that John Egan was such a non-engaging protagonist.  Did he suffer from autism or Asperger’s syndrome or not?  As Mark Haddon has shown in A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, (read previously by the group), this should not affect a writer’s ability to engage the reader with characters.  Hyland’s character was repellent, and none felt we believed him or would want to support him. 

This indecisiveness meant that we took to asking questions about what was absent in the book.  Where was the local priest and the role of the Church?  This was 1970’s rural Ireland – and Hyland includes a single nun as a minor character?  Why was John Egan an only child?  Was the creepy teacher Mr Roche a potential abuser or was he a saviour?  Would social services and the psychologist really behave like that?  That we ended up asking all these questions suggests that we were so unconvinced by the characters and their lives, that we ended up looking for what we felt should have been there instead.  Clare had not finished the book and our discussion, sadly, did not convince her to so.

The more lively and passionate discussion of the evening was the one that segued from Carry Me Down – which involved Samuel Beckett and Waiting for Godot.  I cannot remember the content here – as everyone started talking at once ……!

This report was written by Ann. 

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

Faber Academy discussion hots up

The Faber Academy discussion on Creative Writing continues today with a more controversial post from Marcel Theroux, co-leader of the upcoming FA course Getting Started.

Several threads have emerged in the discussion, and Marcel is now asking the hard questions. Do pop over and take part - your views and questions are more than welcome, and in a later post Sue and Marcel will tackle the issues raised. You can also discuss the issues on Twitter on #whywrite.

Bits of news

I dipped my toe in the water of my new draft this morning, and I'm pleased to report that it felt just fine. Was a bit too scared to wade out very far, though. Feel I need this afternoon and evening to sit on the bank a bit and view the lake, and then maybe tomorrow I'll dare to dive in...

Meanwhile, the Thursday Faber Academy discussion re creative writing on Fictionbitch really went with a bang. I'm not sure we've got to the heart of the matter yet, though, and there's a provocative post by Marcel Theroux coming up on Monday.

In other news, I'm delighted to say that I've been asked to join the blogging team for the online version of the wonderful literary journal, The View From Here. It's a very impressive publication, and I'm honoured to have been asked.

Faber Academy discussion on writing begins

What's the point of writing? Or teaching writing? Novelist Sue Gee kicks off the Faber Academy discussion on Fictionbitch. Your comments on the issues are most welcome, and in another post Sue will answer questions raised in the comments thread. You can also discuss the issues on Twitter on #whywrite.

Beginning tomorrow: Faber Academy discussion on creative writing

I'm delighted to say that beginning tomorrow my Fictionbitch blog will host a Faber Academy discussion on the radical question, 'What's the point of creative writing?'

As many of you will know, the Faber Academy, a series of writing courses run by the publisher and which started only in October 2008, is now a very busy concern, running several courses a year. Here's the Academy's Ian Ellard on its aims:

People come to us at lots of different stages of their writing, looking for practical help... The emphasis is on nurturing rather than churning, on the personal, not the proscriptive.

Longtime readers of this blog may remember that I attended the very first Faber Academy course at the famous Shakespeare and Company bookshop on the Left Bank in Paris, tutored by the meticulous and thoughtful Tobias Hill. On that occasion several of us were fairly experienced writers, there to take stock and refresh our palates, and we had a most enjoyable and stimulating weekend, with two characterisically inspiring talks from Jeanette Winterson. (Posts about it here - scroll down a bit.)

Many of the Faber Academy courses are inevitably for beginners, since, as Ian Ellard says, many potential writers have ambition but are 'waiting to be encouraged and nurtured.' However, he points out: 'There’s one question that, somewhere along the line, they would need to answer: What’s the point?' and this is what the upcoming discussion will focus on. Central to the discussion will be the directors and tutors of a four-month course for emerging writers, Getting Started, which begins on 21st February: novelists Sue Gee and Marcel Theroux. Tomorrow Sue Gee will kick off by contributing her thoughts on the whole subject, and later Marcel Theroux will add his. Both will be prepared to answer any ensuing questions.

It promises to be a very interesting discussion. Do go over there tomorrow and contribute or leave any questions you have for Sue and Marcel.

Adrenalin is what you need

It's a funny thing, talking about your work on the radio. The first time I went on Andrew Edwards' ALL FM Artbeat programme was when I was producing my play The Processing Room for the 24:7 Theatre Festival. Rachael Carnegie, who played my celestial nurse, and I went on and read a jokey little advert for the play I'd written. It went fine - Andrew seemed to think so - though hearing it back afterwards I thought I sounded a bit too arch, and I guess that was a problem with the thing having been scripted (Rachael, the professional actor, was great: she sounded really natural). Then last autumn Andrew invited me to go and talk about Too Many Magpies which had just come out, and I think the interview went well (you can hear it here).

Both those times I had that edge of nervousness that comes from being about to be publicly on show in a situation which is basically unknown to you, especially the second time, when I didn't know what questions I'd be asked. This November, when Andrew invited me in to talk about The Birth Machine, I went along with a different attitude: by now I was familiar with the converted house on the corner in Levenshulme with its higgledy little backroom, and with the people who were just coming off the previous show. And I had met Andrew on a more social occasion in the meantime, so I felt I was beginning to know him. I relaxed.

And what happened? I opened my mouth to answer Andrew's first question, and I hesitated, just the way you often hesitate when someone asks you a question in the pub, thinking it through, weighing up the possible answers. Ridiculous, because if anything I have marshalled what I need to say about The Birth Machine better, probably, than I have done with any piece of work previously (as I've got more experienced at promotion). Realising what was happening, and how it must sound, I panicked, the adrenalin kicked in, and as a result I got into my stride. Mad, eh? Seems nervousness is what you need to sound not nervous on radio. Or maybe sounding good on radio is just a very special art, and my admiration goes out to those who do it professionally.... (The Birth Machine interview here: it starts about a third of the way into the podcast.)

Reading group: The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West and Play it as it Lays by Joan Didion

Mark suggested comparing these two novels which deal with the American Dream as experienced by the players at its Hollywood heart, the West dealing with Hollywood's very early days and the Didion with a period, the late 60s, when it had become characterised by emptiness and ennui.

This was a large meeting (very cosy under Mark's huge Christmas tree and candle-lit mantelpiece), but it turned out that only four of us had managed to get hold of the Didion, so the communal discussion focused on West's The Day of the Locust. First published in 1939, it concerns Tod Hackett, an artist who has been headhunted as a Hollywood set and costume designer, but who retains an objective eye on the illusions and pretensions of the place and its inhabitants, and plans a huge Biblical-type painting in which the hordes fly from a Hollywood on fire. To this end, he 'collects' characters to include in the painting - the would-be starlet and prostitute Faye (after whom, while understanding her shallowness, he lusts), her ex-music-hall-entertainer and now bit-player father Harry, the depraved wheeling-dealing dwarf Abe Kusich, the cowboy extra, the insufferable child actor and his unpleasantly pushy mother, and Homer Simpson, the awkward outsider who becomes unsuitably entangled with the rest of them, and thus, although sent there by his doctor for his health, one of those who in Tod's view (and that of the third-person narration) have 'come here to die'. The novel consists largely of a series of tableaux or set-pieces in which each of these specific Hollywood types reveals his or her situation and personality, but culminates in a stampede fueled by mass disappointment and resentment, echoing the concept of Tod's painting, and ending indeed in a death.

Those present were unanimous in liking the book. While it was clearly of mainly historical interest, depicting a very specific moment in Hollywood's history - a time when the countryside was still nearby and Hollywood still a place of hope, however illusory - the book was also prescient in envisioning its future. Everyone relished the vivid depiction of the characters, and the satirical narrative viewpoint. People spent some time recounting what they'd liked: the descriptions of people constantly dressed as if playing parts, the houses designed like fairytale film sets, the fact that Faye and Harry never stopped acting - Harry acting and putting on a show even as he is dying, a moment that Trevor really relished.

There were one or two criticisms: several people found boring a long cock-fighting scene, and couldn't see the point of it (someone suggested that the injured bird constantly flinging itself into the path of its aggressor was symbolic of the Hollywood hopefuls). Ann pointed out that the third-person narrative is a little uncertain: initially it is established in Tod's viewpoint, but it switches suddenly to that of Homer and then back again, at least twice. Trevor said he thought this was fine, but Ann, John, Mark and I felt that it wasn't done in a way that seemed entirely controlled. It was generally agreed that while enjoyable and notable for its comment on the Hollywood of the time, the novel lacked the linguistic and structural integrity of its contemporary, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (which we discussed previously).

The four of us who'd read Joan Didion's Play it as it Lays - Ann, Mark, John and I - then talked to the group about it. It concerns Maria, a beautiful Hollywood actress married to the once-promising film director who gave her her first break (a film in which, significantly, she played the victim of a gang rape). The book begins with her ruminations in the psychiatric hospital where she is now a patient and then switches back to the events that led her there. It's a story of drugs, alcohol and wife-swapping, and an amorphous sense of failure: at its start Maria's marriage to Carter is in trouble, though in no clear-cut way - the summer she left Carter (the summer Carter left her...) - and their small daughter Kate is incarcerated in some kind of hospital for an unspecified neural condition. Maria is now finding it hard to get work: ...trouble was something no one in the city liked to be near. Grieving Carter who has absented himself filming in the arid Nevada desert, and conducting a secret affair with the married and thus rarely accessible Les Goodwin, Maria is already unhinged, spending her days endlessly driving the Los Angeles freeways. The crunch point comes when she discovers she is pregnant and the child could be Les Goodwin's. Carter issues an ultimatum: unless she has an abortion he will take custody of Kate. From this point on Maria becomes an impotent puppet in other people's plans, as the horrific abortion is arranged for her yet Carter drifts further away, and as Les Goodwin drifts away too, preserving his marriage.

All four of us were completely bowled over by this book, by its evocation of a cultural ethos and of Maria's state of mind via spare, rhythmic prose and short sections providing vivid and telling filmic glimpses. As Ann said, there's so much white space on the pages and what Didion doesn't say is as important as what she does. To the surprise of the others, we four said that we found it the far superior book.

One of the great ways that this book differs from the West is in its internal, psychological nature. It's an anatomisation of the deeply psychological effects of a world in which amorality rules, and where there is no acknowledgment of consequence and cause and effect. Nothing applies, says Maria at the start of the novel: To look for "reasons" is beside the point. One may as well simply accept the chips where they fall, 'play it as it lays'. It is an attitude she has been forced to adopt, but, ironically, she goes on - only because she has been asked to by her carers, she says - to describe a childhood and background steeped in a loss likely to induce the kind of yearning that Hollywood famously encourages yet thwarts. Two significant moments in the novel indicate the depth of the sense of loss and consequence she is forced to repress. Post abortion, Maria and Les Goodwin manage a rendezvous, but it is pervaded by a sadness signaling the end of their liaison. On the drive back they convince themselves that the causes were circumstantial: They mentioned everything but one thing: that she had left the point [her aborted child] in a bedroom in Encino. Towards the end of the novel Maria is told by BZ, the husband of her friend Helene, that Carter is sleeping with Helene. Presumably in response to Maria's facial expression, BZ comments that she's 'faking herself' if she cares, if it makes a difference who is sleeping with whom. Eventually Maria assents, but not before she has confessed: 'It makes a difference to me.' And subsequent events - the events that will end in Maria's institutionalisation - indicate that BZ too is more affected than he will admit.

In his introduction to the American edition we all had, David Thomson suggests that there is a flaw in the novel, taking his cue from a Paris Review interview in which Didion confessed to a prior indecision about whether to tell the story in the first or third person, finally plumping for first person for the present-day frame and an intimate third person for the backstory. He suggests that the more insightful institutionalised first-person Maria is closer to the author than the passive Maria of the third-person backstory, and sees in this a discrepancy. Personally, I disagree that this is a discrepancy (and think this shows the dangers of writers talking publicly about the trials of their process). It seems to me that the Maria of the first-person frame is in the process of freeing herself from the psychology of the backstory. She is no longer drugged; she is putting that past behind her: she refuses to see those past players when they visit her. And, while she denies the usefulness of looking back on the past for 'reasons', glance back at that past she does, at which it unfurls in all its cause-and-effect vividness. Insightfully, Thomson points out that the novel opens up the nature of film narrative and what the concentration on exteriors does in the way of Novocain-ing internal things. I would add that it is also paradoxically an enactment of the potential healing power of story.

The four of us were so enthusiastic about this book that others immediately wanted to borrow it, but when I asked for my copy back from Jenny in order to write this report, she said that it hadn't grabbed her: she'd enjoyed what she'd read (about half of it) but hadn't felt compelled to go on with it and had fancied reading 'something trashy', the latest Le Carre, instead.

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

Reading group: The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

I've been so busy working on promotion for The Birth Machine and, for a time at least, trying to keep going with my WIP, that I just haven't been keeping up with the book group reports, and Ann has kindly offered to take over reporting for the November discussion (when we looked at M J Hyland's Carry Me Down). However, it's still down to me to report on our October discussion of The Leopard, and I'll do what I can, though I'm afraid that by now my memory of the meeting is sketchy.

Written in the nineteen-fifties by a minor Sicilian prince, the book is set in Sicily and primarily in the two years following Garibaldi's May 1860 landing on Sicily's south coast, which kick-started a revolution in the south and strengthened the Risorgimento, the movement for the unification of Italy and the destruction of the feudal system. The novel concerns Fabrizio Corbera, Sicilian Prince of Salina, who must come to terms with these social changes, and towards its end moves forward to 1883 and his death and finally to 1910 and the fate of his children. I hadn't had time to read the book by the meeting, and it may have been me, but I came away from the meeting with the impression that this was essentially the story of a love affair and a marriage: Don Fabrizio's daughter Concetta is in love with his orphaned and favoured nephew, the charming and wily Tancredi, and for a time Tancredi appears to be returning her affection. However, once he claps eyes on the beautiful and nouveau-riche Angelica, he decides to marry her instead. By the end of the novel and 1910, however, Angelica is a widow, and in their old age the two women have become friends, something which Jenny said she really relished, and where she felt the novel, which she had found rather hard-going, became more interesting and enjoyable.

In fact, when I came to find time to read the book I discovered that the story of Concetta, Tancredi and Angelica is an aspect and consequence of a much wider story, that of the ways, both politically and psychologically, Prince Salina handles or fails to handle the social changes taking place around him.

Opinion in the group was divided. Jo, who had suggested the book, and Doug both loved it, mostly for its vivid descriptions of the oppressive Sicilian climate and the plush and faded palaces. Clare agreed about the descriptions and was impressed by the symbolism - she mentioned in particular the precious grafted peaches which Don Fabrizio's gardener has grown and which Tancredi, without asking permission, has ceremoniously delivered to Angelica - but Clare was sorry, she just couldn't stand Don Fabrizio himself, she thought he was just an awful person, so sexist and bossy, which made her dislike the book. As far as I remember, Jenny and Ann found the book heavy going with its old-fashioned prose, though Ann was interested to find out about the politics of the period. I don't think Mark was keen, though as far as I remember Trevor liked it, and John was divided between the two groups, having found the book heavily historical without being very enlightening if you didn't already know the history, though he too found the symbolism interesting, mentioning the broken legs of the Salina heraldic leopard on a keystone.

Personally, although I would say the book was not an easy read with its dense prose and ponderous pace, I loved it for the delicious irony with which all of the characters and the political situation are portrayed. A direct literary descendant of Machiavelli's Prince, Don Fabrizio is an arch pragmatist - he deeply regrets the breakdown of the old order but sees the necessity of accommodating and absorbing the new, developing the philosophy that 'everything must change in order to stay the same'. He grieves the dilution of his aristocratic line but sees the inevitability of his penniless nephew's marriage into the bourgeoisie and thus works to enable it. Aptly he's an amateur astronomer with a wide view of that large picture, the heavens. But unlike Machiavelli, di Lampedusa ironises that pragmatism. A big man respected and feared by all including his family, Don Fabrizio is yet a touchingly ridiculous figure. He's so big he inadvertently breaks things; he performs mental acrobatics to convince himself that he's in charge of situations, nowhere more comically than the scene in which the priest, Father Pirrone, inadvertently enters for an audience as he is emerging naked from the bath:

...he hurried to leave the bath expecting to get into his bathrobe before the Jesuit entered; but he did not succeed, and Father Pirrone came in at the very moment when, no longer veiled by soapy water, not yet shrouded by his bath sheet, he was emerging quite naked, like the Farnese Hercules, and steaming as well, while water flowed in streams from neck, arms, stomach and legs, like the Rhone, the Rhine, the Danube and the Adige crossing and watering Alpine ranges... [Father Pirrone] stuttered an excuse and made to back out, but Don Fabrizio, annoyed at not having time to cover himself, naturally turned his irritation against the priest. "Now, Father, don't be silly; hand me that bath-robe, will you, and help me to dry, if you don't mind... And take my advice, Father, have a bath yourself." Satisfied at being able to give advice on hygiene to one who so often gave it to him on morals, he felt soothed... When the peaks and slopes of the mountain were dry ... the Jesuit sat down and [Don Fabrizio] began some more intimate moppings of his own.

Pragmatic he may be, but the Prince's aristocracy is doomed, and right from the beginning the prose signals this sense of doom: cicadas make a 'lament' that is like a 'death-rattle', a drinking well is also a 'cemetery' for corpses, the oppressive sun of the Sicilian summer is 'a deep gloom'; the ladies' ballgowns arrive from the dressmakers in cases 'like coffins'. Tancredi, the main agent of change for the family, is 'black and slim as an adder'. Ironically, however, the revolutionary spirit is also diluted: Tancredi begins as a follower of Garibaldi, but ends up an officer in the Piedmontese army despising the rebels. In one non-ironic moment Don Fabrizio explains the political inertia as a result of centuries of invasion and the oppressive climate:

Sleep, that is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them... our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death...

The novel is ultimately despairing, I found: the truce, indeed loving friendship, between Angelica and Concetta is founded on a pragmatic repression of the past, but that past is briefly revived and Concetta must face the fact that she has lived with a personal legacy of emptiness echoing the wider political impotence that the novel portrays.

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

Christmas catch-up

Season's Greetings to you all! I hope you've had a good holiday period, though I know a lot of people have been and are ill and I wish a speedy recovery to those of you who are suffering. Because of illness, we've had to cancel our usual family day over the Pennines this year, and I was saving my family copies of The Birth Machine to hand around then, so my mum and sister haven't even seen the book yet! (Ever get that Jekyll and Hyde feeling that comes from the fact that the thing by which you define yourself is not exactly the point about you for your family?)

I envisaged spending Christmas tucked up with my TBR pile, but I've been too busy cooking, pouring drinks, tidying up wrapping paper and dirty dishes etc (that's our Christmas pud above) - too busy even to report on a couple of end-of-year things I'll mention now. Firstly, I was delighted that The Birth Machine was one of Angela Topping's choices in the end-of-year recommendations by Horizon Review contributors. There are some smashing choices there, and books I'm thrilled to have mine alongside. Secondly, on the other side of the fence, I was asked to contribute my cultural highlight of the year to the Faber blog, and it was a foregone conclusion that I'd choose The Unit, a dystopian Brave-New-World type novel, though also unique, by Swede Ninni Holmqvist (Oneworld Publications). I was asked to endorse it earlier in the year and it impressed and moved me so much that I really couldn't praise it enough - read it, I do urge you.

Before Christmas, I attended some enjoyable literary events. At the end of November John and I drove on a misty afternoon into Derbyshire to the very nice launch of Insignificant Gestures, a debut collection of short stories by Jo Cannon - stories strikingly informed by her profession as a GP. There she is, below, signing copies of her book.
We also went to the stunning new Anthony Burgess Centre in Manchester for the launch of Hidden Gem, a new publishing company owned and run by Sherry and Brian Ashworth. Their first publication, in June, will be the debut novel of Emma Unsworth, and Emma read its vivid beginning and was supported by readings from Zoe Lambert and Claire Wallace. Just before Christmas we went to hear Mike Barlow, a wonderful poet, read at Chorlton's Manky poets:

As for my WIP: well, after the 2-month break I took to promote The Birth Machine, the thing I'd dreaded happened, and which I guess I'd known in my heart of hearts would happen: I'd lost the thread, the pulse of it. I churned away at it for a month or so, but really the whole thing was dead under my hands, and I got to the point one day when I looked at it and decided, This is just a pile of sh**! Now, before you all feel sorry for me, the very same day I suddenly saw a new way to do it (yet another new way - this story has not been the easiest to decide how to tell!), a way which simplifies the story and structure even further without ditching any of the complexities (I'd rather just write it than explain), so after all the break was a blessing in disguise. It's back to the drawing board once more, which may seem horrendous, but the last part-draft was useful - just a stage on the way - and I don't feel I've wasted time. Best of all, I feel a real new excitement about the book, and in my experience no piece of writing is ever really successful without that essential ingredient, excitement.

So that's basically what's lined up for me in the new year - immersion in the novel and not much else whatsoever! There will be one other event I'm really looking forward to, however: starting on 6th Jan, over on my other blog Fictionbitch I'll be working with the Faber Academy to host a discussion on the crucial subject, Why Creative Writing? Writers Sue Gee and Marcel Theroux, directors of an upcoming Faber Academy course for beginners, will contribute their views and answer any questions. It should be a must for anyone involved with Creative Writing!