Reading group: A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel spark

This will be a short report, as there was a unanimously positive verdict from our group (no argument to report), and it's a fairly light read which however we all enjoyed immensely.

It's the first-person retrospective account, given in the 80s (when the book was published), of a time in the 50s when narrator Nancy Hawkins was a young publisher's assistant living in Kensington lodgings alongside an assortment of odd-ball and interesting tenants. Although only twenty-eight years old at the time she is referred to as 'Mrs Hawkins' by everyone, due to her status as a war widow, her comfortable physique, her comfortingly straightforward attitude and her tendency to give wise advice. Partly due to her straightforwardness, however, and partly due to her decision, in the course of the novel, to rebel against this profile and lose weight, her home and work life become entangled, in a plot which takes on something of the whodunnit.

We all agreed that the plot (which it would be egregious to give away here) was quite preposterous, but none of us minded in the least, as the delight of the novel was in the voice and personality of the narrator (and, indeed the advice she gives), the wonderful elegance and economy of Spark's prose style (it's a shortish novel, and people marvelled at what she had managed to pack into its pages), Spark's wit, and the evocative portrayal of a world which has gone, some characteristics of which however linger on in modern publishing. (At one point a publisher interviewing Mrs Hawkins tells her: " 'Yes, many of our staff here are in fact fairly interested in books.' " )

Although we deemed the book to be light, we did note that among all of this drollery and outrageous plottery, Spark does touch on some serious issues: beyond the central theme - which is literary pretension - bubble McCarthyism, the status of Polish immigrants in Britain after the war, illegitimate pregnancy, and poverty and the impact of the welfare state and free education.

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

Reading group: Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker

Due to my second stinking cold of the winter, I was absent when this book was discussed by our group, which I was sorry to be, since I very much enjoyed the book - better, it seems, than most others in the group - and the discussion was clearly an interesting one. John has kindly written up the discussion, and I reproduce his report below, and I'll maybe add some comments of my own afterwards.

Perhaps first, though, I should say a bit about the book. Published in 1962, it opens as Berkeley University graduate student Cassandra sets out for home in the foot of the Sierra hills and the wedding of her identical twin, Judith. For Cassandra Judith is her alter ego, and it soon becomes clear that she is struggling psychologically with her sister's imminent marriage. The book is narrated chiefly by Cassandra, but a short yet not inconsequential section is narrated by Judith.

HERE'S JOHN'S REPORT:

Mark chose this book, and mentioned its solipsism when he put it forward.

Spoilers are required. The title gives the game away a little, it’s no surprise that someone gets married, but if you want to come fresh to this book don’t read this, or the blurb, or the biographical notes on the author.

At the meeting Mark introduced the book almost with an apology. He admitted he had tried to read it some years earlier. He had quite liked it, but had not reached past 20 or 30 pages. His attitude was that the first section of the book seemed very subtle.

However, the author was well known at the time of publication, 1962. And probably most people reading at the time did know a thing or two about the author, and perhaps came to the book with very different expectations than our own. In terms of events, the book was judged by the group in general to be slow moving, and retrospectively, at least in the first half, too subtle. There is a sense, if you don’t recognize the context, and the when and the why of the events, that not much is happening. Later, speaking for myself, I realized how much subtle information was being introduced. It was generally agreed that, in terms of its prose however, the book was an easy read, too easy in that it was a quick read, making it too easy to miss important information, and did not seem deep.

One of blurbs called the book tragicomic. There was agreement that there are some good one-liners, but it certainly isn’t hilarious.

Ann said, bluntly, that she found the book very dated. I suppose I agreed in a sense. It was to me about a strange distant world. There’s a grandmother figure with traditional values, and as someone said, to general agreement, the others are rebelling against her – but it’s a pretty ‘middle-class’ rebellion. The father is retired, an ineffectual intellectual, but who also owns what they call a ranch. If it is a ranch it’s presumably run and managed by someone else – but perhaps they just mean a ranch house. A couple (from over the border) are living in a gatehouse and function as servants. The main family seemed more English than American. The wife is dead, and he seems to be drifting, and likes an occasional drink. None of them relate to the people in their town, and are like English gentry in this way. Doug said he found all the characters very strange. Someone said one of the main characters is ‘nuts’ – but others pointed out that all the other characters know this person is nuts.

Doug said the writing was brilliant, but he didn’t like it. One member of the group didn’t finish it, but said they had wanted to, just didn’t have the time. Everyone agreed that this meant missing the best bit.

The book is in three sections, divided between the voices of identical twins Cassandra and Judith. It was agreed that Judith, who comes in late, has ‘a real voice’, a different more factual voice, and gets on with the story. Whereas Cassandra is self-involved, living in her own head.

There are two outsiders, both doctors, and both, in their own ways, more part of the ‘real world’, the world outside the family.

Significant things happen, but early on I didn’t know they were happening. I don’t know much about weddings. I got it that the bride had a white wedding dress, but (spoiler alert) I didn‘t know that other female guests weren’t supposed to wear white, and couldn’t see what the fuss was about. Another important event seems to be that a glass gets broken – I still don’t know what all that’s about. Perhaps they had a set of two dozen and with one broken they’ll have to throw them all away.

I imagine this book was well known at the time, and it’s useful to know the context. Dorothy Baker was well known, and could be said to be part of the Hollywood elite. She was married to a well-known poet. In 1938 she published Young Man with a Horn (about Bix Beiderbecke, a (real-life) jazz trumpeter, and one of the first famous early white jazz musicians.)  This was made into a film starring Kirk Douglas. In 1942 she published a book Trio, that proved too scandalous for the times, and a play based on it, produced by her and her husband, was quickly shut down because of protests. It is in this light, perhaps, that the subtlety of the present book should be viewed. The author was clearly a modern woman, had lived, and knew about the modern world but wrote the book in the early sixties, before the 60s really got started, and perhaps did not want to (again) create too much of a fuss. She died fairly young in 1968.

There was some agreement that the book was interesting, but not all that enjoyable. I said I thought the women in the group might have got more out of it, understood the mores better, but they didn’t seem to feel strongly about this.

The group in general liked the book in the end. I must admit I read the first half or so with some enjoyment, it did feel modern (considering the author was born in 1907) and interesting, but I started to wonder if anything much was ever going to happen. Plenty does happen; I just wasn’t alert to the clues.

If you’ve read this account I don’t know whether you might, or might not want to read the book. It is about women’s lives. The two women are very different. These women could exist today, though, as someone said, the characters reactions, and their society in general, would have been very different.

One member, Jenny, said she thought it was clear from very early on what was going to happen – quite the opposite of my own reaction. This certainly isn’t a gentle book in the end. When the new husband comes in towards the end there are some very dramatic and peculiar goings on...

END OF JOHN'S REPORT.


EB: I have to say that I do agree with the rest of the group that the book (perhaps, as John says, because of the author's previous troubles) may be too subtle for its own good. I too missed some of the clues early on in the novel as to what was propelling Cassandra, thus missing some of the subtext, so that conversations and events seemed more mundane than I could see in retrospect they were meant to be, and nothing much seemed to be happening. I missed a crucial clue on the second page when Cassandra says that the bridge she can see from her Berkeley window 'took on the appeal of a bright exit sign in an auditorium that is crowded and airless'. Since up to this point she has talked, in a zippy, witty tone, only about leaving early for her sister's wedding, I took this to mean she just wants to get out of Berkeley to the wedding as soon as possible, and even though in the next few lines she says 'my guide assures me I'm not a jumper; it's not my sort of thing', it didn't occur to me that she is suicidal. The realisation only came to me later, and when it did her behaviour seemed much more explicable, and she seemed a more sympathetic character. (I don't think this is plot-spoiling, as I'm sure the author intended us to realise this from the start.) In this context, the deliberate (and dangerous) smashing of the glass by Cassandra that John mentions is understandable, and the fallout of the incident indicative of the push-me-pull-you relationship between the sisters that is at the heart of the book. With reference to this last, I disagree with John that the book is about anything so anodyne as 'women's lives'. As I see it, it is rather about the more unusual symbiotic relationship between a particular pair of biologically identical yet psychologically different twins, and their difficulty in achieving individuation in adult life.

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

Story in The Lonely Crowd

I mentioned in my post of January 8th that I was about to write a story that, unlike others I've written recently, wouldn't touch on any overt political issues, but would be about the difficulties of communication in personal relationships (and its potentially devastating long-lasting consequences). That story has now been taken by The Lonely Crowd (and only two days after I sent it to the editor, John Lanvin!), a newish literary journal based in Wales that has quickly established a significant presence in British literature, publishing literary heavyweights such as Niall Griffiths and Toby Litt. Needless to say, I'm thrilled to bits to be published in its pages. It's made me ponder the way we sometimes judge our own stories. In fact, after I had finished the story I hesitated to send it somewhere so prestigious, thinking it lightweight in comparison to my recent others. It just goes to show...

Issue 11 of The Lonely Crowd is due out on 25th March. (My story won't appear until Issue 12 later this year.)  You can preorder Issue 11 here.

'Bitter, Horned' in Litro Online

My story 'Bitter, Horned' can now be read on Litro Online. The picture (credit Sandrine Rouja) shows Creeping Wood Sorrel, the Latin name for which, Oxalis Corniculata, means precisely that: bitter and horned (it's edible but tastes very bitter, and it has funny little seed capsules like horns). This plant, an invasive weed, plays a pivotal part in the story which concerns a newly appointed young gardener with a dodgy past he's trying to overcome and an old lady with a problem with her lawn, but it's also very much a symbol of both of their fears, real and existential, involving issues of homelessness and domestic violence, and indeed their fear of each other. Litro have provided a link so that you can read about the plant, and although I did research it in order to make sure I didn't make any mistakes, I made a point of extracting the information that would best fit the story, and for me it operates chiefly as a symbol serving those themes.

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

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.

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.

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...

Reading Group: Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Jenny's suggestion, this very short novel has been a runaway hit in its author's native Japan, and in translation worldwide. It's the first-person narration of Keiko, a thirty-six-year-old single woman who failed to fit into society as either a child or an adult, but then at the age of eighteen found her metier in the brightly-lit, regimented and sterile world of a convenience store, where, to the dismay of her family, she still works and which is her whole life. 'Even when I'm far away,' she tells us, 'the convenience store and I are connected', and 'When I think that my body is entirely made up of food from this store, I feel I'm as much part of the store as the magazine racks or the coffee machine'.

Keiko's existence is disrupted however by the advent of a new young male recruit Shiraha who feels no such allegiance to the store, constantly found to be slacking and openly and repeatedly questioning its world and the conventional structures of Japanese society to which Keiko's family and friends keep trying to get her to conform. Very soon he is sacked, and Keiko comes up with a solution for them both: if he comes and lives in her flat and is kept by her, he will not need to work and will be able to hide away from the world he so despises, and her family will assume a sexual relationship and will finally leave her alone.

Everyone present said that they had found the book a fascinating, even compelling read, with its light but deadpan and repetitive prose (codifying the world of the store and its workings), but were left unmoved. Clare said she had found it slight, and others agreed, and most people ended up not knowing quite what to make of it. Mainly, people didn't know what to make of Keiko herself. Jenny said she assumed she was autistic. She lacks the moral and emotional sense of most other people: as a child she stopped an argument between two boys by hitting one over the head with a spade and was then puzzled by people's horrified reactions; while all the other children peered with empathy and sorrow at a pretty dead bird, she suggested taking it home and cooking it. Later, she turned to her younger sister for instructions on how to behave, and still does so, and consciously mimics the behaviour, speech patterns and clothes of others - 'My present self is formed almost completely of the people around me' - which John, a psychologist, said is a recently acknowledged stratagem in female autism. When Shiraha treats her badly, demanding and then despising the food she provides and taking to sitting all day in her bath so that she has to go out and use a public one, her only reaction is fascination. However, Clare, also a psychologist, said that she didn't find it particularly useful to try to pin a specific label on Keiko: it was more satisfying just to accept her as odd.

I said, But isn't part of the point of the book that it's not just Keiko who is odd, but the society around her? Surely the convenience store itself into which she fits so snugly - 'a cog in society' as she puts it, 'the only way I can be a normal person' - and which, apparently is such a huge aspect of Japanese society, is also odd, with its dehumanising automatic regimes?  And isn't there a fundamental oddness in the 'normal' societal attitudes of her friends and family, who it seems would prefer her to have any sort of relationship, even an unhappy one, than to be single and happy? Mark had expressed amazement that this book could have become such an international bestseller, but some of us had read that the reason it had become such a success in Japan (and in consequence elsewhere) was that it had hit a particular nerve there, homing in on a development in Japanese society whereby young people are rejecting relationships and turning to singledom and celibacy, and young men like Shiraha turning their backs on the world and incarcerating themselves in their homes.

For most of us, however, there seemed something of a conundrum. Is Keiko at odds with society, or is she one of its 'cogs'? The book seemed to want it both ways. I suppose you could draw the conclusion that a constrained social system creates constrained individuals, but it did seem hard to get your head around what seemed like a lack of thematic logic. Some reviewers seem to have taken the book as a satire, but in this way it lacked the logic of satire, and no one in our group found the book funny in the ways reviewers have suggested it is.

Our discussion didn't last very long - there didn't seem a great deal to say - and we soon dissolved into discussions about supermarkets, forgetting the book altogether.

Doug had failed to turn up, having forgotten the meeting, and wrote afterwards that it was perhaps something to do with the fact that he hadn't liked the book at all.


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

New Publication: "Kiss' on MIR Online

I'm very pleased to say that my story, 'Kiss', which was longlisted in the Short Fiction Journal Prize in the Spring, has been chosen by editor Toby Litt for publication on the Mechanics Institute Review Online, and is now up and can be read. This is one of the stories I wrote about in my post on research in writing fiction. Many thanks to Toby Litt and to publisher and copyeditor Peter Coles.

Young Writer Award: The Reading Cure by Laura Freeman and KIngs of the Yukon by Adam Weymouth

Looks like I am going to manage to achieve my aim and finish reading the shortlisted books before the announcement of the winner on Thursday. Not much else has got done, apart from the editing of my short story, 'Kiss', which was longlisted in the Short Fiction Journal Prize in the Spring and has now been chosen by Toby Litt for publication on the Mechanics' Institute Review Online (which, unusually for a literary magazine, provides professional copyediting.)

Sitting reading all day long for a whole week and doing nothing much else besides is something I haven't done since I was a child, so there was a certain comforting nostalgia about it all, and it was an experience strangely echoed in Laura Freeman's shortlisted The Reading Cure: How Books Restored my Appetite. This is a bravely frank book in which Laura describes how she stopped eating at the age of thirteen, was diagnosed anorexic and prescribed bed rest, and having always been 'a bookish person', spent two years working her way through book after book - a book a day: it's quite clear she is a faster reader than I! - and she does say at one point that books were her gluttony. With the help of her mother, she managed to control the illness enough to go to university and hold down a job as a journalist on a national newspaper, but still had difficulties with food. However, reading Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of a Hunting Man, and its descriptions of hunting trips 'fortified' by breakfasts of boiled eggs and cocoa, marked the beginning of a change for Laura in her attitude to food which developed throughout her subsequent reading. She reads the whole of Dickens (in just over a year!) with its vivid depictions of characters' relationships to food (through from starvation to relish to gluttony), the travel writings of Patrick Leigh Fermor and Laurie Lee, the diaries of Virginia Woolf (who had her own difficult relationship with food) and a food-obsessed eighteenth century parson, the cookery writers M F K Fisher and Elizabeth David, and a good deal more (there are 169 books referenced in the bibliography).

My feeling of nostalgia was reinforced by the fact that much of this reading is Victorian or early-twentieth-century, and there's a fair amount of jolly upper-class 'munching' and so on which Laura wittily mimics and which took me back to the world that the books of my childhood introduced me to. (I began to wonder if contemporary writers don't write much about food, and the only two I can recall doing so with relish and sensuality are Michelle Roberts and Helen Simpson.) In addition, Laura also returned to her childhood reading, most of which was indeed my own: The Wind in the Willows, T H White, Little Women, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Pooh Bear, the Katy books and so on, though Harry Potter was way after my time. Laura rekindled for me the feeling of sitting on my bed with my tastebuds titillated as I read about the picnic feast in The Wind in the Willows, but I have to say that some of the lists of rich, buttery, creamy or syrup-drenched foods that she creates as she extracts them from her reading did make me feel queasy at times. In spite of the book's title, Laura is quite open about the fact that she is not absolutely cured, and makes clear that this is no self-help book, but simply a description of what she feels has worked for her. It's a brave book in its self-revelation, and is a testament to the restorative power of literature and reading.

And now from the sedentary pursuit of reading to sweeping down a river and over rapids, canoeing in the opposite direction to spawning salmon: Adam Weymouth's Kings of the Yukon: An Alaskan River Journey. I was gripped from the start by the explanation of the life cycle of the king salmon, and now I am involved in the lives of those whose people have lived for generations alongside the river and whose livelihoods are being destroyed by the drop in fish numbers and, ultimately I guess, climate change. An important book, I can see already.

Young Writer Award: The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar

Well, here's another quite amazing debut novel - a dazzling almost-500-pager set in the eighteenth century, the story of a widowed merchant seaman and a courtesan whose fortunes come together over a 'mermaid' with which the ship's captain returns from a voyage, having sold the vessel to obtain it. This sets in train a breathtaking and involving story in which characters battle the desires, longings and fears the mermaid stands for, and women in particular try to steer a course between the only options apart from lady's companion available to any genteel woman without means at that point in history: that of wife or courtesan. Taking place in the high-class brothel and the shipping worlds of eighteenth-century London, the book is rich in characters, each delineated with great insight and humanity, and in vivid historical detail. In many ways the novel adopts the mode and ethos of the true eighteenth-century novel - there is the same wry but humane irony of tone one finds in Fielding, the same third-person objectivity of narration, a picaresque feel to the plot, and an admirable, indeed enviable, authenticity of language. However, the novel also slyly undercuts that historical form, most obviously by concentrating on the lives and predicaments of eighteenth-century women (revealing in the process little-aired facts about their personal and sexual hygiene), and by concerning itself deeply with the psychology and interiority of the characters - all lent psychological immediacy and intimacy by the contemporary mode of present-tense narration. And it's very moving.

It's no wonder that this book has been shortlisted for so many prizes.

Young Writer Award: Elmet by Fiona Mozley

Next Thursday, a week today, the winner of the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser and Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award will be announced. I've been too busy in the last ten days or so to blog or even do much reading - mainly I've been working on an essay for a textbook of essays by second-generation Irish writers, which has needed huge contemplation and the deep scouring of my memory and so has taken up most of my mental capacity. However, having got that and other stuff out of the way, I'm now intending to finish reading the shortlist before that date. (Wish me luck: I still have three of them to read, including Imogen Hermes Gowar's 500-page whopper The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock!)

I have read Fiona Mozley's Elmet, however. There are books you can think good but which basically you can take or leave, and there are books that take you, grab you by the scruff of the neck and refuse to let go until the final page, leaving you drained yet filled, adrenalin-drained but filled with huge emotion, and with wonder, and a different view of the world. Fiona's book is one of the latter. The story of Daniel, who lives with his father and sister in a house they have built in a Yorkshire wood, the remains of the Celtic Kingdom of Elmet, it deals with an aspect of society that you don't see much in fiction - a world of drifters existing on the edges of society, and the violence that erupts when the two come into conflict over land and property. When such people do appear in fiction, they are usually held in the stranglehold of an author's middle-class voice (which always makes me feel weary!), but that is by no means the case here. I don't know how Fiona has done it - she seems such a nice young woman! - but she has tapped right into the ethos and psychology of that world with an earthy yet lyrical register that seems entirely authentic. I was coming towards the end of this book one afternoon when I needed to go shopping for food for visitors arriving that evening, but I just couldn't move. Darkness came down outside, but I couldn't even make myself get up to switch on the overhead light, and as I sat beside the fire coming to the violent end of the story, my heart was pounding with excitement and dread and my eyes were filled with tears of both joy and despair. I don't think the book's entirely perfect - I would say that sometimes the sensibility and articulacy are too sophisticated for its narrator Daniel - but I forgive it that utterly for its insight, its language, its bravery, and the experience it gave me, and quite frankly, for a debut it's amazing.

Shortlistees for the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser and Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award

I had a very good time yesterday at an event for bloggers, meeting the four authors shortlisted for the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser and Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award.

All the shortlisted books this year are debuts, and two this year are non-fiction. Laura Freeman's The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite, part memoir and part literary appreciation, charts how the enticing descriptions of food and meals in literature cured her of her anorexia, and Adam Weymouth, a journalist with an interest in the environment, recounts in Kings of the Yukon a journey he made with his partner down that river in a small boat, and explores the impact of modernity on the progress of its King Salmon. The two novels, both written by historians, come already garnered with prizes. Fiona Mozley's Elmet won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Polari Prize, and has picked up several prestigious short- and long-listings including a short-listing for the Man Booker and a long-listing for the Women's Prize. Told in a lyrical yet tough language often recalling older dialect, the novel is the narration of Daniel, who has lived in the woods on the edge of society with his father and sister, but now something terrible has happened... Imogen Hermes Gowar's The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock, a historical novel featuring the real-life eighteenth-century 'mermaid' in the British Museum where Imogen was working, won the Mslexia First Novel Competition and was shortlisted for the Women's Fiction Prize among others.

Interestingly, this year only one of the shortlisted authors, Imogen, had done an MA in novel writing, and even Imogen agreed with the others that she likes best to work alone, to finish the entire first draft of a novel before showing it to anyone (I would agree!), and that she wrote The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock 'as an escape' from the novel she was writing for her MA.

I have to say that the authors were all lovely - entirely open and unaffected in spite of their success. This year I hadn't read any of the books beforehand, and I'm looking forward to them all. On the train back I started with Fiona's Elmet and was so engrossed I had no idea that the two hours between London and Stockport had passed, and I almost missed getting my things together and getting off in time.

l-r in the pic above: Adaam Weymouth, Fiona Mozley, Sunday Times Literary Editor Andrew Holgate, Imogen Hermes Gowar and Laura Freeman.

Reading group: Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan

Warning: some plot spoilers.

I suggested this French novella which all of us (apart from John) had not read but were glad to do so, understanding it as a classic and knowing that on its publication in the fifties it had been considered scandalous for its apparently explicit sex scenes - excised for the British translation of the time - and the amoral way of life it depicted. It had also been a sensation for the youth of its author, only eighteen when it was published, and the contrast of her apparently bourgeois background.

After such expectations, in the event I wasn't quite sure what to make of the book, and it turned out that everyone present for the meeting felt the same. It's the first-person narration of Cecile, looking back on the previous summer when she was seventeen. Cecile has been living a sophisticated but shallow Parisian life (involving fast cars and lavish dances and dinners and drink) with her somewhat philandering father - she writes of 'our fondness for entertainment and frivolity'. Now they have rented a villa for the summer on the Mediterranean, accompanied by her father's current, and young, girlfriend Elsa whose presence does not trouble Cecile since she is 'very sweet, rather dim and quite unpretentious', while Cecile, untroubled also by the fact that she has failed her exams at the Sorbonne, begins exploring her own sexuality with a student she meets on the beach, Cyril. However, very near the start of the book this sensual idyll is disrupted for Cecile by her father's announcement that he has invited to join them Anne Larson, a fashion designer and old friend of Cecile's dead mother, to whom Cecile's father 'packed her off' 'having no idea what to do with me' when she left boarding school two years earlier. Cecile's attitude to Anne is conflicted: she admires yet resents Anne's more serious, intellectual outlook and is pleased but, more, unsettled by her arrival. It is not long before Cecile - and Elsa - realise that Cecile's father is attracted to Anne, and, once Elsa has fled the household, they announce that they want to get married. After a brief moment of relief - 'it would be a life suddenly brought into balance by Anne's intelligence and refinement' - Cecile's resentment comes to the fore, especially when, challenging the popular interpretation of Existentialism Cecile espouses - basically that one should please oneself and give in to one's desires - Anne decides to take her in hand and make her study and stop seeing Cyril. Cecile then formulates a plot to get rid of Anne, a plot involving Elsa and Cyril intended to provoke her father's sexual pride and jealousy, and which will end in tragedy.

Narrator Cecile never remarks on her own motherlessness except briefly from her father's point of view: she writes that he had been a widower for fifteen years. It is easy from a contemporary perspective to see that the seventeen-year-old Cecile's conflicted feelings towards Anne are rooted in a need for the mothering she offers (a need of which Cecile herself is unaware, or denies) and sexual jealousy. Early on in the book, in considering Cyril (for whom she is making an exception), she muses: 'I did not like young people. I much preferred my father's friends, men of forty, who spoke to me with courtesy and affection and treated me with the gentleness of a father or lover'. This equation of 'father' and 'lover' underpins her whole relationship with her father with whom it is clear she often takes the role of companion on social occasions. Elsa, as a passing fling, is no threat - his feelings for such women, Cecile says, 'were transient' - but Anne is something else.

What was unclear to me was how conscious Cecile, as narrator, is of these issues. I felt for a lot of the time that she had to be, as protagonist Cecile herself is amazingly aware for a seventeen-year-old of her own torn emotional state, and articulate about it, delineating clearly her switches of attitude, her moments of not knowing what to feel, and even summing up cleverly at one point: 'that was what I held against Anne: she prevented me from liking myself'. However, the lack of any overt signalling of the Freudian psychological implications of those emotional convolutions made me wonder, and I wasn't clear how ironically the narration was intended. There is an admirable objectivity about the life Cecile and her father have been leading - 'the people we spent time with were noisy and insatiable - all that my father asked of them was that they be good-looking or amusing' - and there were sentences that I felt must surely be read as ironical: 'For, after all, what was our aim in life, if not to be attractive to others?'; 'A cynical idea ... occurred to me, and I was pleased by it, as I was by all my cynical ideas. Bolstered by a sort of confidence and a sense of colluding with myself that was quite intoxicating...' This last is surely self-irony. On the other hand, the narrator tells us, apparently without irony: 'I am still not ashamed of enjoying those shallow pleasures, and anyway I only call them shallow because I've heard people say they are.'

Others in the reading group hadn't seen irony at all in the prose. I said, Well, what about this sentence, near the beginning, describing Cecile's father on the beach: 'My father worked through various complicated leg exercises with the aim of getting rid of a small paunch that did not suit his image as a lady-killer.' ? The slightly ridiculous picture of the father conjured here - the paunch, the complicated  leg exercises - juxtaposed with his glamorous aspirations and the word 'lady-killer', must surely be ironic. However, Jenny didn't see that sentence as ironic, and no one else backed me up.

Basically, people were all a little baffled by the book's reputation and success. John said that as well as being amazingly insightful about Cecile's emotions, it was brilliant on the level of prose - economical, getting right on with the story straight away, and vivid - someone, Jenny or Clare, commented that the descriptions of the Mediterranean setting made her feel hot - and everyone agreed. (Though someone said that it was hard to read the book without the acute consciousness that it had been written by someone of only seventeen or eighteen and feel amazed at the achievement for someone so young and then afterwards wonder if you were giving it special allowance). However, all also agreed that they couldn't engage with the characters - they seemed stereotypes - and therefore with their emotional dilemmas, and that the plot did seem a little forced and even silly - John said, something of a soap plot cliche. The ending, too, which I won't give away here, seemed melodramatic, with someone acting quite out of character, and Cecile's interpretation of what actually happened both unrealistic and self-dramatising. Clare noted that there is no explanation for Cecile's departure from her boarding school at fifteen into the care of a father who at the time she hardly knew and who 'didn't know what to do with her'. She had read that Sagan herself had been expelled from her boarding school for bad behaviour, which makes this an autobiographical detail that remains unaddressed in the novel, leaving a gap, and which perhaps reinforces the notion that Sagan was also unable to address the Freudian implications of what she was writing.

On the whole, in view of our discussion, I felt that yes, the book was very clever for its author's age, and that there was indeed a level of irony but, because of the author's age, it was not sustained throughout the book. We had all read a modern edition in which all of the text is restored, and people noted with amusement that the so-called sex scenes were extremely modest and implicit by present-day standards, but we did appreciate that in its depiction of an amoral, hedonistic lifestyle the book must have seemed pretty shocking in the fifties.

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

Longlisted for V S Pritchett Prize

One reason I haven't blogged since I supposedly started again is that I came down with a horrendous fluey-type cold. (There have been other reasons: my mother has been seriously ill, for one thing - though I'm glad to say she's much better now.) While I was sitting in front of the fire shivering and sneezing and mopping up the drips from my nose, and generally wishing I could just lose consciousness and wake up and find it all over (I couldn't sleep I was in such discomfort), I happened to click on my phone and discovered an email from the Royal Society of Literature - I had been longlisted for the V S Pritchett Short story Prize! (V S Pritchett pictured left.)

To be frank, I simply didn't believe it, I thought I must be hallucinating with the fever. It was a story I had written very quickly during the summer while we were in Wales, prompted, out of the blue, by a real-life incident someone related to me, one of those things that just take hold of you, so move you that you have to write it down forthwith, and since I wrote it right up to the deadline for the competition and had to bung it in in a great hurry, I considered it more or less a first draft, and really expected to get nowhere. (And I had even forgotten about it when I talked about my summer's writing in my Sept 3rd blog post.)

The next day - with my fever abated - there was the email still on my phone, but I still didn't believe I could have been longlisted, especially as the mail was addressed, 'Dear Prize Entrant': I thought someone must surely have pressed a wrong button, and the email should really have gone to someone else. And there was an embargo on the news, the whole thing was still shrouded in secrecy, which added to the sense of its lack of substance. A few days later, another email followed, inviting me to the award event, but once again my name was not in the mail - it was presumably a form mail sent to all short- and longlisted entrants - and I continued with the horrible sense that it was all a mistake. Finally, though, came a reply to my mail confirming that I'd attend, and at last I was addressed by name, 'Dear Elizabeth', and I had to believe it after all.

Anyway, I am of course very pleased. It's so funny how different stories work out, though: the story I mentioned previously, inspired by the transgender/intersex issues, and conceived well before the V S Pritchett story, is still undergoing rewrites, still struggling out from under the research I did (and my struggling obsession with it is another reason there has been no space in my head for blogging). It's not always the case, but sometimes the things you do most swiftly and intuitively turn out to be the most successful...

Reading group: Moonglow by Michael Chabon.

Doug suggested this book - all 400-and-something packed and small-print pages of it - since we were having a long summer break, and because he had really loved it.

It's a book that plays excitingly with the concepts of reality and fiction, told in the mode of a memoir in which the narrator shares the name of the author, and with very much the feel of authentic autobiography, but prefaced right from the start with this statement:

In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to facts except where facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it. Wherever liberties have been taken with names, dates, places, events, and conversations, or with the identities, motivations, and interrelationships of family members and historical personages, the reader is assured that they have been taken with due abandon.

The book consists of the story of the narrator's grandfather's life, as told to him from his deathbed. It's a story of a somewhat wild urban Jewish childhood in thirties Philadelphia, post-war marriage to the narrator's grandmother, a French Jewess and single mother rescued by nuns from a fate under the Nazis, his lifetime project to cushion her from her consequent bouts of depression, and a engineering career founded in an early-planted obsession with travel to the moon and the V-2 rocket designed by Germany during the war.

The story emerges piecemeal, in a non-linear fashion, as it is related over days to the narrator, and is interspersed with the narrator's own non-linear childhood memories of his grandparents. There is, however, a grounding linearity in the narrative frame, that of Chabon being told the story and sitting listening.

Everyone loved this book - except for John, who had basically been unable to read it, which flabbergasted Doug. The book begins with an episode in 1957, when Chabon's grandfather has been working as a travelling salesman of 'fancy barrettes' in a break from his engineering career which we will later discover has been made necessary by the need to pay for his wife's psychiatric treatment. He has however been pushed out at Feathercombs by nepotism and, in blind fury, bursts into the president's office brandishing a broken-off telephone cord which he will pull around his neck.  Like the whole of this book, the incident is related in a cool, wry and almost urbane tone:

For his part, the president of Feathercombs was astonished to discover that he had approved the firing of a maniac. 'What's this about?' he said.
It was a pointless question, and my grandfather disdained to answer it; he was opposed to stating the obvious.

John said that he found the tone too light and objective for the situation and the obvious distress of the protagonist; the wit and urbanity of the narrator was foregrounded over the emotional state of the protagonist. It put him off the rest of the book and he stopped reading. None of the rest of us, however, had this reaction - we felt there was deep empathy behind the measured and witty tone, and something that Ann would later say was that the book had great humanity: all of the characters were flawed, yet all were treated with understanding and made sympathetic - in this way she found a similarity with Jon McGregor's Reservoir 13, which we discussed here.

Everyone was very impressed by the way the story of the grandfather's engineering career unravelled the Nazi link with the American postwar space programme, and the moral ambiguities involved. Ann pointed out the contrast with McEwan, who tends to insert research-based lectures into his narratives; here everything was organically embedded in the story and the psyche of the protagonist.

Jenny said she had really liked the book but it was 'too long'. However, she compared it to Dickens and said that she had looked forward to reading it in bed each night. I got the impression that she had read it over time and rather as an episodic picaresque, and there were comments that implied that this was how others saw the book. Someone said that they couldn't really see the point of a very early episode in which the pre-pubescent grandfather comes upon an intersex woman seemingly imprisoned in a shack, and people also found a little strange the fact that as a child he threw a cat out of a high window, which seemed out of character. Unlike the rest, I had been remiss enough to leave reading the book until the last minute, and so was forced to read it much more as a single whole. As a result, for me the book had a clearer overall narrative arc than I guess might seem from episodic reading. The episode with the intersex woman was highly symbolic, totemic of the trajectory of the rest of the grandfather's life. Steeped in a comic-book fantasy of rescuing a young woman by taking her to the far side of the moon, his impulse is to rescue the 'hermaphrodite', and when she won't be rescued, he is left with this impulse unfulfilled, later to be fed by his obsession with gravity-escaping rockets and the rescue of first his wife, the narrator's grandmother, and then, in widowed old age, another woman. The way he tries, even in a retirement home, to be this last woman's hero, is to save her cat which has run off into a python-infested wasteland, which brings his life full circle back to the cat-throwing incident in an act of redemption.

I said I had one problem with the book. Years after his grandfather's death, narrator Chabon conducts some research and uncovers a very different story about his grandmother's origins, which, if true, she kept hidden from her husband, Chabon's grandfather, and her daughter, Chabon's mother, and of course Chabon himself, for the whole of their lives with her. In the light of this new (and fairly shocking) information, narrator Chabon tells us, he needed to reassess everything his grandfather had told him on his deathbed. He had been trying to turn it all into a novel, but he now decided he needed to write it as a memoir in order to 'get my story straight'. I wished that once he had done so he had gone one step further and shared with us that reassessment by actually revisiting and reassessing episodes for the reader (a form that is more usual in novels), since what had gone before was so lengthy and meandering that I found it impossible to do this for myself. One revelation is that before his grandmother met his grandfather she had adopted someone else's name, and it occurred to me at this point that I did not know by which name she was known in the family - whether it had been her adopted name or her own; I had no recollection of her having been given any name at all. However, I felt unable to sift back through the wealth of material to find out. Ann said something similar. It turned out that the deceptiveness involved had been missed by one or two people in our group, which perhaps adds weight to the notion that the book could have done with a more pared down and novelistically elliptical structure.

Someone, I think Jenny, added that the explicit sex scenes between the grandfather and grandmother made her feel uncomfortable, and others agreed - it always seems something of an intrusion to envisage one's parents' or grandparents' sexuality in graphic detail -  which is another problem that could have been overcome by a more wholeheartedly fictive presentation.

Nevertheless, we very much enjoyed and admired the book, and all Doug could do was shake his head at John.

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

Research for fiction

So, picking up on the thoughts of A L Kennedy referred to in my last post, and the question of 'writing what you know' and research:

As Kennedy implies, these two things are not necessarily opposed: you need to research in such a way that your research becomes not just a body of facts 'out there', but deep, almost somatic  knowledge that is now part of you and will emerge in a honest and convincing way in your fiction.

Very rarely when I write a story do I start out with research as a priority. Perhaps one exception is 'The Next Stop Will be Didsbury Village', published this Spring in Confingo, but first commissioned for the 2017 performance Re/plac(ed), in which initial research was a stated prompt, and we commissioned writers sat around a table choosing sites in Didsbury to research and then write stories about. Even so, I knew already that I wanted to write about Didsbury railway/tram station because it had already been vivid for many years in my mental landscape, a resonant feature of my own life and past, and its history and changing character chimed strongly with my abiding themes of fluidity and memory and exile. Looking at old photos and maps and reading some of the history of Didsbury - and hanging around on the site and letting my imagination run in the light of them - served to make more vivid and concrete the sense I already had of it all, and locked my psyche into it more strongly.

Very often, however, you begin with something entirely personal and you still end up needing to do research. Last year two of my close relatives were involved in the Borough Market terrorist attack - neither of them physically hurt, thank goodness, though needless to say they were traumatised - and so there was no way I was not going to write about a terrorist attack at some time. Yet I hesitated: important as the subject was to me and my family, I felt that such a story needed to encompass a greater breadth than one family's particular perspective. I wanted to show wider circles of repercussion through society, and to touch on some of the causes. Finally, earlier this year, I wrote it, 'Kiss' (which was longlisted in this year's Short Fiction Prize, though is yet to be published). This was one story therefore where I dared to enter the heads of BAME characters - a young black man and the young Asian terrorist. I had in fact at one time done some research (for a proposal for a radio drama that never in fact saw the light of day) into the causes of radicalisation among Asian youth in the UK, but on the whole I had to rely on my own powers of empathy and understanding, and I hope they were up to it. However, the whole story revolves around the idea of touch/contact/kiss/detonation, and although when I started I thought I knew how bombs work, I soon found that I needed to check this out, and spent several days on bomb-making websites (and risking leaving a digital trail that could implicate me as a terrorist myself!)

In my first blog post back recently, I said that I had done little writing this summer, but I did write one story, and in fact I spent several weeks on research for it - more, perhaps, than I have ever spent for a short story. As I say in my last post, the idea of fixed identity has always been anathema to me - indeed feels threatening - so I've been very taken up by the recent debate concerning gender and gender transition. Transgender having only in recent years come to wide public debate, initially I felt pretty ignorant, and I read a lot, mainly personal testimonies. At this point I couldn't imagine writing a story about it (although Virginia Woolf's Orlando was always at the back of my mind): in the current social climate, I just felt it wasn't my place. But then my reading led me on to the subject of intersex (the condition of not being entirely female or entirely male, a condition which some scientists calculate exists in some form, often very subtle, in one in a hundred people), and this struck a real spark for me, and the urge to write about it arose. From there I was led off to the subject of embryology, and was off down a rabbit hole - utterly fascinated and absorbed, and it was all beginning to resonate for me in a way that felt entirely personal, relevant to me. It took a long time for me to be able to actually write a story - to absorb the research and make it mine, and then to find a form that didn't amount to cultural appropriation, and I had several failed attempts. I'm still not sure it's finished: I have put it aside to 'gel' before returning to it again. But the 'research' no longer feels like research: it feels part of my psyche and my life.

Cultural appropriation in fiction

* I recently came across writing advice from A L Kennedy (I'm sorry, I can't find it on the web just now to provide a link) in which she insisted on that maxim, 'Write what you know', which often puzzles people: how does that not leave writers with only their own usually boring, humdrum lives at the desk to write about? Kennedy went on to clarify. You don't have to stick to your own life - how boring that would be, if writers only ever did that! - but what you have to do is immerse yourself so thoroughly in whatever you want to write about, that you do know it, emotionally and psychologically as well as merely factually, and it becomes thus part of you. It is only this way that you will write something honest, and humble, which for A L Kennedy are the two essentials in writing, and over which I strongly agree with her.

This is relevant of course to the recent debate about cultural appropriation. Two years ago, Lionel Shriver was castigated for bemoaning identity politics in her keynote address to the Brisbane Literature Festival, objecting to the notion that BAME people's stories are theirs alone to tell and that white writers writing them are guilty of 'cultural appropriation'. BAME writers responded in dismay and anger to what they saw as Shriver's expression of annoyance at the threat to the historical privilege of white people to speak for all. One of the writers critical of Shriver was Kit de Waal, but her response was more nuanced than that of others. For me one of the great political virtues of fiction is the ability to create empathy, and one essential, in the service of that, is an ability in the writer to wear other people's shoes', to 'become the other'. However, de Waal warned in a speech to the International Writers' Festival in Dublin, 'When we become the other we need always to act with respect and recognise the value of what we discover, show by our attitudes and our acknowledgements that we aren't just appropriating but are seeking to understand.'

This is the crux. I feel very strongly about the experiences of people who are discriminated against, and have a strong urge to write about it. This is mainly, I think, because I have suffered discriminations of my own - for being female and, when I was younger, for being perceived either or both as working class and Welsh. In fact I never felt entirely any of these things; things were much more complicated than they seemed. Later I would suffer reverse prejudice - for not being female (or feminine) enough; by the time I went to university I had moved with my parents to England and had lost my Welsh accent, and at my Welsh university I felt resentment from Welsh-speaking students for being 'Saes' (English) (and once a Welsh publisher turned me down because she had no proof, until I gave it, that I was Welsh, a condition of her publishing house); later, my working-class in-laws and the children I taught in a Glasgow comprehensive would mock and resent me as 'middle class'. But I also want to write about discrimination because of its history in the various branches of my family, which has seen the 'passing' of pogrom-exiled Jews as Roman Catholic, the vain attempt of my father, arriving from Ireland to wartime anti-Irish prejudice, to hide his Irishness, the gradual 'whitening' of generations originating from ancestors in a southern port who from old Victorian photos were clearly to me partly black (I must do some family history research when I get time!), and the exiling of members for interracial marriage, along with their mixed-race children.

For these reasons I do react almost with horror to the notion of fixed identity - it's just not my experience that identity is fixed in any way, and probably the fundamental reason I write fiction is to explore this. And I do have an almost somatic sense - like a crawling on my skin - of the feeling of being judged for who you are by people who don't actually know who you are.

Yet I have often hesitated to try to write my way into the heads of BAME characters, since I haven't personally suffered that particular direct discrimination: for the colour of my skin. I'm always aware that there is something in that direct and specific experience that I could miss. I have even hesitated to include BAME characters at all, afraid that I would give them inauthentic things to say and actions to make. Yet not to include them would often mean seriously misrepresenting the society I'm trying to write about - and indeed render BAME people invisible. When I came to write a comedy series for Radio 4 about a baby-sitting circle, the chief interest of which was that it provided a cross-section of an inner city suburb, it would have been almost criminal to leave out BAME characters, and at least in drama you don't have to tackle the interiority as you do in a novel, you can rely on your (empathic) observation. (And not only that, here was a chance to create roles for BAME actors.) Yet there was one really awkward moment during recording, when the black actor playing the young lad, about to read his one-word greeting ''Spect!' turned to me and asked me if I knew what that meant. 'Respect,' I replied, and he nodded and carried on, but I was left with the feeling that I had been suspected of simply parroting a stereotypical notion of black idiom I didn't even understand (in fact it was a word I was hearing young people, black and white, using to greet each other all the time), indeed of failing to show racial respect. Or maybe he simply saw me as an adult woman appropriating the speech of the young - or maybe he meant neither of these things, and I was just being fearful: in any case, I did feel the chill of identity politics in that moment, and that fear of treading on other people's toes rather than standing in their shoes.

In her Guardian response to Shriver, Yassmin Abdel Magied says:

It’s not always OK if a white guy writes the story of a Nigerian woman because the actual Nigerian woman can’t get published or reviewed to begin with. It’s not always OK if a straight white woman writes the story of a queer Indigenous man, because when was the last time you heard a queer Indigenous man tell his own story? How is it that said straight white woman will profit from an experience that is not hers, and those with the actual experience never be provided the opportunity?

This is the same argument that was employed by feminists in the eighties objecting to men writing about women's experience. Basically, it's an argument that sees fiction simply as expression (the expression of an author's experience), rather than the exploration that Kit de Waal mentions, or the (political) exercise of empathy I have always held so important. It is not the right, this argument goes, of the group with power - the men, the white middle-class writers like Shriver - to speak for those whose experiences they do not share: it should be left to those with the experience to change the minds of others through testimony. You could counter that what matters is the text, not the author (as I have so often argued in my objection to the cult of personality in our literary culture): does it feel truthful, honest and authentic to the reader most likely to identify with the situation portrayed? But I suspect that in arguments like those of Abdul Magied there is an underlying assumption that no writer of privilege could ever portray the experience of the underprivileged as well as an underprivileged writer could. I'm not sure about this notion (I've read plenty of stories by women published as part of projects to 'create women's space' that fail to represent my experience as well as does some writing by some men). But as I say, it's what sometimes makes me nervous about writing black characters. And I do think we should seriously consider the possibility that in a white-dominated publishing world, in a publishing choice between a well-written fiction about black experience written by a white writer and a similar well-written fiction by a black writer, the fiction by the white writer is likely to win. Perhaps the key is in Abdel Magied's last words, in the provision of the opportunity. Perhaps it's not a question of making authors, black or white, stay for their writing in the categories to which society has designated them personally, but of creating better equality in society, and, in particular, greater diversity in the publishing industry, so that those with authentic stories to tell can indeed be heard.

Well, I started out this post intending to talk about a story I've been writing and for which I've had to do a lot of research rather than simply rely on what I already know, but as you can see I've been sidetracked, and that will have to be for another day...

*This post has been edited as I have developed my thoughts, tentative and exploratory as they are!

Return to blogging

Well - if anyone is out there reading this - I can't tell you how strange it is to be writing this blog again today. Apart from the monthly reports of our reading group I see that I haven't in fact written a post for going on for two years (and even those reports I've sometimes struggled to achieve). The reasons are several: I was working very hard on fiction that left little space in my head, or time in the day, for any other sort of writing, and there was personal stuff that made me want to pull in my horns and sit quiet and private for a while (but which is superb grist for the mill, of course!). I suppose also there was the sense that attention had moved on from blogs and the fact that a blog, which takes time to create, provides far less reward in terms of tangible interaction with readers than Facebook and Twitter.

Yet here I am, after a summer away from my desk - a summer completely taken up with trips and visitors and family, so that I have hardly written at all - with a yen to blog again (and yet with that initial awkwardness you experience when you've not seen someone for a good long time), to be able to contemplate things at greater leisure and with more permanence than the noisy, fleeting Facebook and Twitter allow. I realise too now that writing here about developments concerning my own writing provides a permanent record of publications, dates etc that can otherwise so easily get forgotten.

As for this last, this summer has seen the publication of two new stories, and a third, 'Kiss', was longlisted in the Short Fiction Journal Prize.

'The Meadow' appears in Words for the Wild, an anthology of poetry and prose fiction 'rooted in the countryside', edited by Amanda Oosthuizen and Louise Taylor. It's my first ever 'flash' and was first commissioned by Amanda for the Words for the Wild website, which was set up to support a campaign against development plans for executive-style housing on precious green space. 'The Meadow' tackles this situation directly and ponders the clashing issues involved (and is pretty autobiographical!). (I met Amanda in June 2015 at the Norwich launch of Unthology 7, in which we each had a story - we had a great time afterwards in the pub!).

'The Next Stop Will Be Didsbury Village' was published in the Spring 2018 issue of the literary journal Confingo. This story was originally commissioned for another project. Last summer (2017), the writer Sarah-Clare Conlon produced a performance for Didsbury Arts Festival, Re/Place(d), for which several of us - Sarah Butler, Adrian Slatcher, David Gaffney, Nicholas Royle, I and Sarah-Clare herself - wrote and performed stories inspired by various sites around Didsbury. I chose Didsbury tram station, which is on the site (more or less) of the old Victorian railway station, inspired by the sense it always gives me of people's comings and goings through time, and the shifts and yet permanences through the centuries. I don't usually write site-specific stories - or, at least, if I do I work hard on making them universal rather than specific (sometimes not even naming the place or changing its name): it seems to me that if you don't you risk making readers who don't know a place feel excluded. But I did find this a great project to do, and really enjoyed trawling through old photos of the station and taking photos of my own, and the way they formed ideas and a story in my head.

We read in the great atmosphere of Didsbury's Parsonage (which is supposed to be haunted) and old footage of Didsbury showed on a screen as we read. It was a great evening with a packed house. Confingo editor Tim Shearer was in the audience and afterwards asked to see my story with a view to publishing it. Here I am chatting afterwards with him (centre) and Nicholas Royle:

Well, it's taken me some time to write this blog - to provide the links and upload the photos etc, which reminds me why I found it so hard to keep going while working so solidly at other writing. Perhaps I won't achieve what I used to - I used to blog every day, or most days - but I do hope now to keep in touch with it.