The Wish Dog let loose and a ride on a flying banquette

Today is publication day for The Wish Dog, a book of ghost stories by Welsh women which I'm delighted to say includes my story, 'A Matter of Light'. Very exciting, and in plenty of time for Halloween! Mine's a kind of strange reverse ghost story, and I wrote about my inspiration for it here. If, as I do, you like a spooky thrill, the book's available here.

If you don't know about Sharon Zink,  you really ought to, though maybe you have an excuse because she hasn't been writing all that long. She's the author of the sparky Welcome to Sharonville (Unthank Books), recently nominated as a Readers' Choice for the Guardian First Book award, and picked out by judge Richard Lea for special mention. Sharon's as sparky as her writing -  I met her at the Unthank event in June when Unthology 5 and Welcome to Sharonville were launched, and we both read. She runs a very witty series of interviews with writers, called The Book Diner, and she invited me then to be interviewed for it. I was delighted to accept. Her interview questions are, as I might have expected, both witty (they involve a flying Diner Banquette), and usefully to the point - Sharon has an entertaining habit of interspersing one's answers with her own thoughts. You can read my interview here.

Writing and Life

Sometimes life just gets in the way of writing. This summer, mainly due to family matters, I've done no writing whatsoever, and, having already neglected both of my blogs last winter through writing furiously, I have failed too to get back to them properly. Now summer is over, and I discover my head has been rearranged by all that has happened. Although at Easter I thought the manuscript I was working on was almost completed - I had sent it out to my first readers - it now seems all wrong. This so often happens, I find: if you don't properly complete a project before you have to leave it, it can seem to crumble away: either you come back to it wondering what the heck it was all about, or you find, as I'm doing at the moment, that though you're still obsessed with it, you want to rework it radically. Things have happened in the meantime to adjust your insights entirely. Life, eh? But then how could we have it any other way: what would we write about if we didn't write about life?

Anyway, I'm jumping back in the saddle now, and just as well, since things are kicking off again. Next Saturday I'll be reading at The Word, a one-day festival for writers which will take place at The Continental, Preston (above). I'll be taking part in one of the day's events, an Unthank session  at which publisher Robin Jones will talk, and Sarah Dobbs, author of the Unthank novel Killing Daniel, will also read. Unthank are an amazingly generous publisher - publishing new and established authors with little regard to anything but literary excellence (for their Unthology short-story series there are no fake and limiting restrictions on theme, word-count or style) - and I think any writer should jump at the chance of listening to Robin. (I'm very grateful that Unthank have published two of my stories, in Red Room and Unthology 5, and delighted to say that another will be in Unthology 7, to be published next summer.) The whole day looks very stimulating. Tickets (for the day, including lunch and refreshments), are £20 and you can buy them here. There'll be a book stall and authors attending the festival are invited to bring copies of their latest publication to sell.

Thursday (18th) is the day that The Wish Dog becomes available, a new anthology of ghost stories from Honno press, which includes my story, 'A Matter of Light' - the first proper ghost story I've ever written, I think! I do like a good ghost story (who doesn't?) and I'm very much looking forward to reading the other stories in the book.

And now to get back to that manuscript (and the critical work I've got lined up)...

New review of Unthology 5

There's a very nice new review of Unthology 5 from Thea Hawlin of The Siren.

She says, 'The editor’s introduction to this fifth edition of Unthology asks a simple question "Can I write?" The resounding answer is yes, you can write on anything and everything, the only rule is that you have to write it well, and the writers collected in this anthology exemplify this with verve. The range of voices and scenarios is impressive. If you’re looking for a simulating, unexpected and ultimately inspiring collection of short stories that will jolt you into seeing the world and the art of storytelling in a different way; read this collection and you won’t be disappointed.'

Of my story, 'Clarrie and You', she says that its use of the second person 'impresses with striking immediacy'.

Reading group: The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing

This 1950 novel, Doris Lessing's first, opens with a newspaper article entitled 'Murder Mystery' starkly reporting the murder of Rhodesian farmer's wife Mary Turner by her houseboy who has confessed to the crime. The first chapter then goes on to filter through the puzzled viewpoint of a putative outsider the hush-hush reaction of the local community to the event, before moving back to the hours in which the death was discovered and dealt with by the local Sergeant and, more directly, by the somewhat bullying neighbouring farmer, Charlie Slatter. Here the narration takes a more clearly - or apparently - omniscient stance, entering the mind of the Turners' young managerial farming assistant, Tony Marston, only recently employed and arrived from England, but, while authorially knowing in tone, continues to withhold from the reader the precise workings of the minds of the other two men. Thus we share Marston's puzzlement at the reaction of the other two men to Mary's corpse. He clearly knows that the murder has resulted from some unusual relation between Mary and her houseboy Moses (though the narrative also withholds precisely what he knows), but feels silenced about it and frustrated that they appear to insist on a more mundane explanation. Most of all he is shocked that they clearly regard Mary with hatred and distaste - '[an] almost hysterical look of hate and fear' - all their sympathies being for her husband, Dick. Finally, however, as the first chapter comes to a close, the narration spells out what we are told Marsden will come to understand after some time in Rhodesia, before he succumbs to the denial necessary for surviving as an accepted member of white South African society:

Mary Turner ... had let the side down. But even she, since she was dead, was no longer a problem. The one fact that remained still to be dealt with was the necessity for preserving appearances ... it was 'white civilization' fighting to defend itself that had been implicit in the attitude of Charlie Slatter and the Sergeant, 'white civilization' which will never, never admit that a white person, and most particularly, a white woman, can have a human relationship, whether for good or evil, with a black person. For once it admits that, it crashes, and nothing can save it. So, above all, it cannot afford failures, such as the Turners' failure.

Even before the murder, the Turners are failing the 'white civilization'. This is spelled out early on in the chapter as the Turners are introduced to us. We will learn later that Dick is a failing farmer, and we are told at the outset that the Turners, in their crumbling shanty-like house, are too much like 'poor whites' for comfort:

'Why, some natives (though not many, thank heavens) had houses as good; and it would give them a bad impression to see white people living in such a way ... [The Turners] apparently did not recognise the need for esprit de corps; that, really, was why they were hated.'

The first chapter ends with an account of Marston's subsequent career, a low-key descent to the office work he left England to escape, its ending having the form and minor key of a completed sad story. The sadness is associated with Marston, and it appears at this point that the murder has been displaced and wiped away narratorially in just the way that the white Rhodesian community has done. Earlier, however, as Marston struggles with the manner and approach of the Sergeant and Slatter, he thinks: '...the important thing, the thing that really mattered ... was to understand the background, the circumstances, the characters of Dick and Mary, the pattern of their lives', and the second chapter begins what constitutes the bulk of the book: a retracing of Mary's trajectory from infanthood to her murder.

It's a tale of a childhood of hardship - a drunken railway-official father, the loss to dysentery of siblings, an embittered and grieving mother - replaced and indeed wiped away by the enjoyable and freeing experience of boarding school and then life as a working single woman in a small town. But although Mary with her ordered life and wide social circle now thinks of herself as happy, she is clearly damaged: she can't make close relationships, is repelled by sex and shows other signs of immaturity. By the age of thirty she is still wearing 'little-girl' style clothes and prolonging the experience of boarding school by living in the Girl's Club. In other words, she is a misfit, which (in the name of esprit de corps) she cannot be allowed to be, and indeed is afraid of being. Succumbing therefore to the inevitable pressures of her social circle, she hastily and unwisely marries Dick Turner, who takes her back to the rural isolation and hardship she once escaped. We then follow - for the greater bulk of the book - her descent into depression as her relationship with Dick proves arid and the farm fails and the couple sink further and further into poverty.

Ann, who had suggested the book, said that the main word that summed up her impression of it was 'relentless', and everyone murmured agreement. Mary's hardship on the farm, and her emotional deprivation and alienation, are of course relentless, and her sense of the relentlessness of the climate, the hot sun beating down on the uninsulated roof of the house, is vividly created. However, there was a sense too that everyone in the group had found the book itself - and the experience of reading it - relentless. People had also been left uncomfortable about its politics: although it is clearly meant as a criticism of apartheid, people felt that there were blind spots, perhaps inevitable since, as Ann said, Lessing was after all a product of the regime she was trying to critique. Jenny said she had wondered if the fact that Moses ends up murdering Mary was, in spite of the author's intentions to critique, a capitulation to the stereotype of the native espoused by the South African white community (ie natives just murder, rape and steal), and others had uncomfortably wondered this too.

John commented on the narrative mode of the book, which is very much 'tell not show'. He felt it was more of an essay than a novel: Mary's situation and psychology are explained to us, with little dramatisation, ie without dialogue and action. (He pointed to one rare moment of dramatisation in the impersonal and objective account of Mary's progress and downfall, when Mary has vented her fury against Dick for his farming failure and has ended up weeping, and Dick 'looked at her for a long time as she sat there, sobbing; and then said sardonically, "OK boss." ' The author goes on to comment: 'Mary did not like it at all; for his sarcastic remark said more about their marriage than she had ever allowed herself to think', and John suggested that that final comment - that the remark said more - could be almost a half-conscious realisation on the part of Lessing of the need for dramatisation that in general the novel failed to achieve.) The psychologies of Dick, Charlie Slatter and Tony Marston are also made plain via explicit narrative statement, and the attitudes of all of them are authorially commented on in relation to their social and political significance. Yet although the narrative in this respect has an air of omniscience, it does not enter the mind of Moses: he remains as alien and 'other' to the reader as he does to Mary - more so, since Mary becomes emotionally entangled with Moses in a way that is left unclear to the reader. Certainly our group were unclear about it. Mary's first encounter with Moses occurs when she takes charge of the farm while Dick is suffering a bout of malaria (a consequence, in Charlie's eyes, of his bad farming). Moses, at that time one of the farm workers, is challenging towards Mary, and, imbued with conventional hatred towards the natives, her response is fury and vengeance: she whips him across the face with a sjambok, leaving a permanent scar. Later he becomes the houseboy, and finding her broken down and weeping, he brings her a drink of water. However, we didn't agree with the blurb on the back of Jenny's paperback edition that 'lonely and frightened, Mary turns to Moses, the black cook, for kindness and understanding'. Moses' apparent kindness here is fraught with irony: the initial incident that had resulted in her whipping him had concerned his request for a drink of water which Mary had refused, and although we can infer that Mary is now touched by his attention, there is something of pressure in the way he makes her drink, and of a conscious demonstration of a shifting of power, which leaves her fearful and resentful. Mary's attitude to Moses continues to be ambivalent, and Moses' towards her seems contradictory, both solicitous and resentful. Finally, the day before the murder, Tony Marston discovers them in a situation of physical intimacy - Moses is dressing Mary and Mary's gestures are those of a woman either flattered or sexually satisfied (even this remains unclear; we see it only through Marston's shocked and wondering perspective) - and Mary, trying in the corrective presence of the white man 'to get back the command she had lost', uses Marston to expel Moses (now standing with a 'malevolent stare') from the house. It is presumably this betrayal that prompts Moses to murder Mary in the early hours of the next day, in revenge. However, Ann said that she still didn't grasp, on a psychological level, why (apart from racist stereotyping) Moses should actually murder her, or why, in the following hours, Mary knows he will come back to do so, and waits, frightened but eventually passively resigned, for her fate. Everyone in the group felt the same. I said that although the murder might not seem to work on a psychological level - and might appear to our present-day eyes to reinforce racial stereotypes - it was intended as symbolic: both Mary and Moses disrupt and threaten the status quo by their misfit status and their behaviour - as John pointed out, Moses, as a missionary boy, educated and prepared to challenge, steps outside the bounds allowed him - and, according to the dictates of that status quo, both must be destroyed for its preservation. They are both symbolic, too, of the fact that the status quo is in fact destructive to both sides. Everyone felt that this was right. We felt it an irony, however, that, in spite of the fundamental explanatory mode of the novel, we were left with a sense of not knowing the precise nature of the relationship between the two.

I commented that I had read an article suggesting that there was another racist stereotyping in the way that Moses appears to be identified, indeed conflated, with the bush and with nature red in tooth and claw. The narrative places him as a threatening presence in the bush while he waits in the night to kill Mary (and sends him back there afterwards), a bush which to Mary is unknown, unknowable and frightening, and with which the darkness merges him. As he strikes her with his knife, 'the bush avenged itself: that was her last thought. The trees advanced in a rush, like beasts, and the thunder was the noise of their coming.' I had also read a critique of the book that found racism in the narrative comment perjoratively opposing Charlie Slatter's slash-and-burn farming methods to Dick's nature-respecting (though unsuccessful) mode, since in passing it equates Slatter's method with that of the natives (which, as the group commented, is small-scale and therefore not destructive in the way Slatter's factory-type farming is). Finally, Doug and I both said we had been deeply unsettled by the final narrative comment on Moses as he walks off into the bush to wait for his capture, which is also part of the closing narrative comment of the book:

...what thoughts of regret, or pity, or perhaps even wounded human affection were compounded with the satisfaction of his completed revenge, it is impossible to say.

It is as if the narration, and the author, are colluding with the white settlers' view of a native's mind as impenetrable, and indeed, of no significance or interest. Yet it is quite clear that the book is intended as a condemnation of the attitudes and structures of apartheid, and our general conclusion on the evening of the discussion was a reiteration of the notion that the book was of its time.

However, looking back at it now in order to write this, I feel that Lessing was far more conscious in her method than appeared to us (and some other commentators). Having looked again at the first chapter with its very explicit and ironically critical comments on the white settlers' attitudes, I now find it impossible not to see this final statement as also deeply ironical. In addition, while on the evening of the discussion we considered Lessing's explanatory and largely non-dramatic mode to be simply old-fashioned story-telling with drawbacks of non-engagement for the reader, it seems to me now that Lessing is consciously manipulating omniscience, and subjectivity and objectivity, to make a political statement. As I outlined at the outset, the narrative of the first chapter moves from the total impersonality of a brief newspaper report through the puzzling perspective of an outsider, in towards the perspective of the locals, and finally (partially) into the mind of Tony Marston, all underpinned by an ironically knowing authorial tone that signals deliberate authorial manipulation. This constitutes a formal (ironical) enactment and then subversion of the callous objectification by the white settlers of the natives. While the novel in general adopts the 'tell not show' mode, as it moves towards the crisis and Mary waits to be killed, it closely adopts her tortured interiority, and in fact the conflation of Moses with the bush is Mary's, not the author's. ('...the bush avenged itself; that was her last thought [my italics]). And, as we had observed, in spite of the overall instructive authorial tone, the narration is not in fact omniscient. It seems to me now that the fact that both Moses' interiority and the precise nature of the ultimate relationship between Mary and Moses remain unexplored is a political authorial choice. What threatens the status quo of apartheid, and of any repressive system, is blurring of the lines, any subversion and uncertainty. The precise nature of the relationship is kept deliberately blurred and uncertain by the author as a formal playing out of that subversion: it subverts the otherwise knowing narrative mode.

However, I have to say that none of this was clear to any of us on a first reading of the novel, and I think perhaps that the impersonal, explanatory nature of the bulk of it did make for the lack of engagement that John discussed - a lack of emotional engagement leading to a lack of engagement of our attention - as well as perhaps contributing to our sense of the novel as 'relentless.'

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: another striking window display at Palas Print, Caernarfon

Look at this amazing effect. It's just about impossible to photograph this window display without getting the reflection of the opposite side of the street where seagulls perch on the castle battlements and fly around. But these beautifully-made seagulls are inside the window, and the resultant effect is a magical and dynamic blurring between the display of sea- and seaside-connected books and the seaside world of the town....

Bare Fiction Magazine Review of Best British Short Stories 2014

There's a new review of Best British Short Stories 2014 in Bare Fiction Magazine. Lucy Jeynes notes that 'when an anthology limits itself to a particular vintage, you hope it’s a good year', and, having read the book, she comes to the conclusion that 2014 must have been a strong one, and that 'this collection forms the ideal starting point for a wider range of reading.' Taking the subtitle of my included story - 'How Stories Do or Don't Get Told' - as the title for her review,  Jeynes ponders the essence of the short story as well as the varieties of ways in which it can be tackled, and the way in which this anthology illustrates both, and she quotes at fair length from several of the stories. 

Reading time

After weeks of short-story events that have taken me to London, Norwich and Vienna I'm finally having time to relax and do some proper reading. I can't believe that it was actually May when Faber sent me All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews. I have only just got around to reading it and posting my thoughts (here on Fictionbitch). I absolutely loved it, and it's an object lesson in how to write about the most painful things (in this case the suicides of a father and sister), with warmth and generosity as well as biting humour. Go to the link and find out how I thought it was done, and why it's currently one of my best novels of all time.

I've also been reading the other stories in Best British Short Stories 2014 (Salt) (which includes my story 'Tides'), and I thoroughly recommend it. Grab it here. I've even managed to read the reading-group book well in time for our next meeting, rather than up against the wire as usual. (It's Doris Lessing's first novel The Grass is Singing.) (My report of our last discussion, Ironweed by William Kennedy, which I also finally got around to writing, is here).

Reading group: Ironweed by William Kennedy

Doug suggested this book, written in the late seventies but set in thirties Albany (one of a trilogy, 'the Albany cycle'). It features down-and-out Francis Phelan, who, many years ago, ran away from his wife and family after dropping and killing his baby son while probably drunk, and the various characters from his past, many dead, some by his own violent hand, whom he hallucinates and converses with as he tries to come to terms with his life and seek redemption.

At the time of reading the book I thought it was brilliant, but now I come to write about it I find it hard to recall, and at this point my recollection of our discussion is hazy, too. I think this may not be simply because I have been very busy, but also something to do with the novel itself and a chief conclusion about it that I do remember we came to.

I think everyone agreed with Doug that the depiction of the underside of Albany life under the Great Depression was wonderful - searing and vivid - and that the narrative voice, lyrical but sharp - 'gray clouds that looked like two flying piles of dirty socks' - was superb. We spent, I remember, a fair bit of time talking about this, and about Francis's character and motives at various points in the action - his violence and his kindness, his innate wit, his guilt and his need for atonement and redemption. But then I posed the question, What was the novel supposed to be about? I wasn't sure of the answer, and I had noticed that in none of the contemporary reviews I'd read had the question been answered either, with one or two reviewers giving what I thought undue significance to minor incidents, as if they were at sea with the meaning of the book. Doug had to think for a moment, but then said, Well, that, redemption, that was what it was about. It's true that this is a big preoccupation of the book, but it didn't seem entirely satisfactory as a summing up of its theme. At one moment in the action, after all these years Francis returns to his wife and family for an evening, and this indeed is Francis's chief way of finding redemption. A thought that occurs to me now, however, is that since he doesn't stay, and since the final section in which he returns and stays for good is, we decided, only a dream, any redemption is in fact somewhat shaky. Later in the discussion Ann would say that in fact she didn't find Francis's brief return to his family very believable, and now that everyone thought about this, they didn't either. I said that one strong idea in the book was that it's so easy to fall through the cracks in society - Francis was once the head of a respectable household and Helen, his companion, was once an upper-middle-class girl with a sparkling future as a musician ahead of her - though again this didn't seem to serve as a unifying theme. (I and others said we were moved to tears by the final, tragic scene concerning Helen, as well as other moments, but Jenny said she hadn't been moved to tears at all.) Someone said that they thought the point of the book was to depict the Irish-American society of Albany, which also seemed true.

By now we felt a bit lost, and the discussion was tailing off, Ann saying somewhat conclusively that she felt the book was somehow better in the sum of the parts than in the whole. John, not wanting however to abandon the novel, commented that the narrative voice - and Francis's hallucinations - made it very psychological: the interest is in Francis's state of mind, and in the state of mind of Helen whose point of view we take at one point - and that that's what makes it so dynamic as a social commentary: we share the emotional experience of those at the brunt of the Depression. John said that he thought this was a great feat for an author, Kennedy, who had trained as a journalist: unlike Hemingway, for instance, he was able to shift from objective social commentary to that deeply psychological dimension. The point John was leading up to then occurred to others of us simultaneously: that, in spite of this very psychological dimension, the book was nevertheless an essentially journalistic project - Kennedy is indeed on record as having said he wanted to map in his novels the stratum of Albany society hitherto ignored - and that this is why for us it lacked the unifying thrust and lasting emotional effect of a novel.

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

Short Story Conference in Vienna.

I've now written on Fictionbitch about my impression of the 13th International Conference on the Short Story which has just taken place in Vienna, and about some of the panels and readings I attended. Also there's an anthology of stories by writers participating in the conference, edited by conference director Maurice A Lee, and which includes a new story of mine, 'Where the Starlings Fly', available here.

It was was my first-ever time in Vienna, and although there wasn't a lot of time left over, I did do a little bit of sightseeing, and here are some pics of moments snatched away from the conference.

Wide roads and imperial buildings:

Baroque doorways:

Freud's house in Berggasse:

Rachel Whiteread's Holocaust memorial in the Judenplatz:

Cafe Central, where Freud, Trotsky and other famous figures once played chess:

And a group of us having lunch there. Ailsa Cox, Stef Pixner, Zoe Gilbert, me, Vanessa Gebbie, Tania Hershman, Alison Lock and Catherine McNamara:

Lunch in a historic beer garden, once the garden of a monastery. With Felicity Skelton (left), Ailsa Cox (centre) and Allan Weiss:

Farewell dinner at the Heurigen. First, Moy McCrory, Ailsa Cox, Jim Grady, Nuala Ni Chonchuir and Kath Mckay:

And Adnan Mahmutovic, Vanessa Gebbie and Tania Hershman:

And drinks afterwards:

Egon Schiele in the Leopold Museum on the final morning before my plane:

The Secession building containing Klimt's Beethoven Frieze (which you're not allowed to photograph):

Tim Love writes about my work

I'm back from the 13th International Conference on the Short Story in English, held last week in Vienna. It was a pretty amazing experience, a fascinating and stimulating insight into the latest thinking about the short story, which I know has given a boost to my practice. I'm still digesting it all, and hope to blog about it soon.

While I was in Vienna I had an email from Tim Love, who has been devoting himself for some time now to thinking seriously and blogging about the short story, telling me that he had posted a blog about my work. It's an attentive piece in which he very much puts his finger on the kind of thing I'm trying to do in my writing - it's so wonderful when that happens. I'm especially touched that he includes a photo of the page in an exercise book where as a schoolboy he copied out one of my stories, 'Cautionary Tale'  - in fact, one of the first I had published (he's written and told me this before). (It's not one in my collection Balancing.) I thank him for his thoughtfulness and insight.

Inspirations: 'Clarrie and You'

I've written a post for the Unthology blog about the inspirations behind my Unthology 5 story, 'Clarrie and You', which can be read here.

Unthank also asked me to look for an image that connected with my story, and I found this amazing painting (above), Sisters of Rural Quebec by Prudence Heward. I love it for itself, but also can't believe how well it sums up the relationship between the two sisters in my story. Not only is it the right era - the era in which the two sisters of my story are children (a past which the story revolves around in the attempt to uncover the reasons for the present-day tensions between them) - but also it beautifully sums up the ambivalence of their lifelong tensions and connection. The way the sisters in the picture are turned from each other yet jammed together by the composition echoes precisely the situation between my two sisters, the preoccupied yet somehow painfully involved expressions of their faces, the light of one and the dark of the other, the greater but perhaps more quotidian stress of the one who looks the elder, and the more closed-off and potentially secretive expression of the other. The ambiguity of their positions: the elder higher, but backgrounded. And all the sharp angles that surround them, the daggers of the leaves, the uncompromising squares of the doors, and the triangle of the composition that plunges them together in their separateness.

Reading group: Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Warning: spoiler.

Last month, just before the death of the author Daniel Keyes, we happened to read this, his 1966 novel, much-adapted winner of science-fiction awards and now accepted as a science fiction classic. However, John, who recommended it, said that when he read it years ago he didn't in fact take it as science fiction so much as a psychological study, psychology being a major interest in general in Keyes' work.

The novel consists of the diary entries of Charlie Gordon, a man of 32 with a low IQ who is chosen to take part in an experiment to improve the intellect, involving removal of part of the brain, an operation already carried out with spectacular success on the laboratory mouse Algernon, turning him into a mouse with superb intelligence, able to find his way swiftly through the most complicated maze. The operation on Charlie is successful too, and as the novel proceeds, the diary entries, begun as naive, awkwardly written and badly spelled, become gradually literate and insightful. Charlie's intellectual development, however, reveals the world to him in a different, more jaundiced light: he comes to realise that his bakery workmates have been laughing at him rather than with him, that they were not after all his friends, and as he overtakes them in intellect they begin to resent him, and through this he loses the job he has loved. Eventually he becomes a genius, able quickly to learn many languages and grasp complicated scientific concepts that even the doctors and academics in charge of the experiment don't understand, but his emotional development fails to keep pace, which results in his distress. It is at this point, when Charlie is intellectually lonely (and despising those considered experts) that the mouse Algernon's newly sophisticated faculties begin to falter, and it becomes clear to Charlie that a similar reversal is in store for him. He then devotes himself to investigating the flaws in the experiment before his intellect fails, which it does rapidly, the diary entries quickly returning to their former naivety and lack of literacy.

Most people in the group enjoyed reading the book but it didn't generate any deep discussion. Mark hadn't actually had time to read beyond the early diary entries, but said he really admired the way the author captured the semi-literate voice - 'Dr Strauss says I shoud rite down what I think and remembir and evrey thing that happins to me from now on' - and the gradual way in which the prose style and Charlie's consciousness develop. The chief question the book seemed to be posing, people said, was whether intelligence makes you happy (or whether, as Thomas Gray put it, 'where ignorance is bliss 'tis folly to be wise'), which was considered an unoriginal point, Doug being pretty scathing about it, in fact. Someone pointed out that it was also about whether we should value intellectual intelligence over emotional intelligence as we do, a more subtle and important point, and the question of what it is to be human. John said that it was in addition about the morality of using science and technology to interfere with someone's personality - another important and prescient point. He pointed to the memories that Charlie begins to retrieve about his mother, and Charlie's gradual realisation that she rejected him out of an inability to accept his disabilities. The book thus, by implication, questions a similar prejudice and desire for perfection motivating much medical research. The choice of the diary form perhaps points to a concern with the extent to which attention is or isn't paid to the subjective experience of human subjects in clinical trials. In the book, John pointed out, the only people with real empathy with those with disability are those with disabilities themselves. (On the other hand, John, a child psychologist, told us a very interesting fact. We discover in passing that Charlie's condition is phenylketonuria, a congenital metabolic deficiency which if left untreated in infancy causes mental developmental difficulties, but for which, John explained, there is now a diet treatment which is in effect a cure, since patients treated in infancy and childhood no longer in adulthood suffer the metabolic deficiency with which they were born and are therefore no longer in danger of the same mental disintegration.)

Since the ending of the book is not happy, John said, it serves as a warning, but we all felt that the same effect could have been achieved without actually taking us through the reversal in Charlie's intelligence, which is predictable and thus boring. Indeed, John suggested, the book would have been better, and more emotionally affecting for the reader, if it had ended at the point where the highly intelligent and emotional Charlie is facing his doomed fate, rather than descending with him into affectlessness and lack of awareness or concern about anything much.


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

Short Fiction Prize, Edge Hill Prize, and another Unthology 5 review

My short-story-filled summer continues apace. I am staggered to hear that my story, 'Looking for the Castle' is the runner up in this year's International Short Fiction Journal Prize. I'm particularly thrilled that this story has done so well, as it was one of the most difficult and complex I've written, a story about the complexities and uncertainties of memory, and the resultant fragmentation of self - themes I've been concerned with recently in my longer work, but which proved more tricky in the short form. It took a long time to get right; I kept having to mull it and realise it wasn't quite working and go back and make tweaks that might not have seemed much but were, in the end, all-important. My huge congratulations to the winner, Graham Mort, and to the shortlistees Catherine McNamara and Geoffrey Miller, and the longlistees who included my writing colleagues Tania Hershman and Sara Mae Tuson, and my great thanks to the judge, Gerard Donovan. Thanks are also due to my good friend, writer and editor Charles Lambert, who gave me faith in the story when I was beginning to doubt it.

Graham Mort was the winner of the Edge Hill Prize two or three years back, and this year's awards night was held in London's Free word Centre on Thursday, John Burnside winning for his collection Something Like Happy and Rachel Tresize winning the Readers' Choice prize for her collection Cosmic Latte. It's a night I always look forward to, and it didn't disappoint, though one sorry note was the absence due to illness of Ailsa Cox who founded and administrates the prize. I always look forward to a catch-up with my co-editor on the former short-story mag, metropolitan, so that was disappointing. My photo isn't very good, I'm afraid, but on the right at the back are the Salt contingent, representing David Rose whose collection Posthumous Stories was shortlisted, publisher Jen Hamilton Emery far right and editor Nick Royle second from right. On the far left are, second from left, Jackie McCarrick, shortlisted for her collection The Scattering, and fourth from left her editor at Seren Books, Penny Thomas (whom I was thrilled to meet, as she is editing the forthcoming Honno ghost anthology The Wish Dog which includes my story 'A Matter of Light'). In the centre at the back (second from right of the small gap) is Rachel Tresize. Here's John accepting his prize:

As for Unthology 5, it keeps buzzing. There's yet another very positive review, this time by Cath Barton on Sabotage Reviews. 'Excellent writing, and not a little in the stories to surprise and sometimes unsettle the reader.' She praises the diversity, but notes too that several of the stories are about disturbing secrets, including my own, 'Clarrie and You', in which she says 'the secrets carry great sadness.' 

An interview, a new Unthology 5 review and Short Fiction shortlisting

There's an interview with me about the inspiration behind my Unthology 5 story, 'Clarrie and You' - and about short stories generally - on the Unthank website. My interviewer was Mark Mayes, whose unsettling surreal story 'The Regular' also appears in the book. We interviewed each other, so my interview with him will appear soon.

There's also another extremely positive review of the book, this time by The Mole on Our Books Reviews: 'Another brilliant collection compiled by Ashley Stokes and Robin Jones that will add a seriously new dimension to commuting or coffee time.' Of 'Clarrie and You' he notes the 'secrets kept instead of honesty shared, but it's something you will have seen and maybe have been complicit in'. 

Oh, and I am thrilled that my story 'Looking for the Castle' has made the short list of the Short Fiction Journal prize, along with those of Catherine McNamara, Geoffrey Miller and Graham Mort.

Unthology 5 launched, and some reviews.

Today is the official launch day of Unthology 5 - it's live now, and available from Waterstones and all good booksellers, Book Depository and Central Books for £9.99.

For £3.99, it's available to download for your Kindle and iPod, iPad or iPhone. 

On Wednesday we had the physical launch at the Garden House in Norwich, a fabulous evening at the centre of a four-day holiday for John and me (well, two of them were mainly spent driving!) - we had never been to Norwich before, or the Norfolk coast, and we took this opportunity to do so. (We almost went there once before, but didn't quite manage it. We had gone to interview the novelist and short-story writer Scott Bradfield for metropolitan magazine, but he turned out to live not quite in Norwich, but this side of it, and we only arrived in the late afternoon and then spent the evening with him, and had to rush back early next day). I must say that I loved Norwich - in spite of all the history, I had never quite imagined it to be as obviously steeped in it as it is, and our time there could be blog in itself if only time allowed. (And it's such a writers' place: every pub or cafe we went into seemed to host writers' events.)

It was great to be introduced to the phenomenon that is Project U, Unthank's series of events, to Ashley Stokes, our indefatigable editor, and to the other two contributors who read, Maggie Ling and Sharon Zink - it was also the launch for Sharon's amazing-sounding novel Welcome to Sharonville. (I read from my story in Red Room, too.) The room was filled with a really thoughtful and friendly audience, many of them writers themselves, and apparently a good few books were sold - I know I signed a fair few - and there were delicious cakes, made by Unthank's Lily Bradic!

Here are some photos John managed to take with my (by now pretty ropey) camera:

Maggie reading:

Sharon reading:

Signing books:

Chatting afterwards with Tommy Collin, designer of Unthology 5's striking cover:

Already Unthology 5 is getting rave reviews. To add to the first, which described it as 'flawless', there are now two more: a customer review on Amazon by Lander Hawes and a review by The Workshy Fop who  says 'Unthology is quietly becoming a reliable guide to the state of the modern short story, a companion to Nicholas Royle’s annual Best of British Short Stories anthology'. I'm chuffed that he calls my story, 'Clarrie and You', 'a well-told subtle piece', although he considers it to be about ageing, which I don't - actually, it's about something quite different, to my mind - but then, as Dan Powell said at the London Short Story Festival, you can't legislate about how people take your stories; once they're out there they're other people's to take as they want.

London Short Story Festival

A feast of short stories this weekend: on Friday evening and on Saturday I was at the London Short Story Festival, at Waterstone's Piccadilly. The festival opened with the launch of Best British Short Stories, in which my story 'Tides' is included. Three of the contributors - Louise Palfreyman, Sian Melangell Dafydd and Stuart Evers - read, and our publisher Jen Hamilton Emery was on hand. After the readings there was a discussion in which festival organiser Paul McVeigh quizzed the three contributors on the ways in which their stories were chosen for the book, and their reactions to having them chosen, and Jen on the evolution of the book and the series. There were several other contributors present, and it was great to meet up with them. I had taken my camera, but I was so engrossed in the proceedings and in talking that I mostly forgot to take photos. Here are the two I did take: first, Stuart reading, with Sian in the background

then Louise and Paul pondering a serious point:

I was a bit more systematic with my camera next morning, at the event 'The Weird and Wonderful World of Short Stories', though not entirely. Tania Hershman introduced the three readers, Adam Marek, Dan Powell and Robert Shearman, by throwing out some questions about the nature of the surreal literature - often called 'weird' - which all three write (as Tania said, in their different ways), and after the readings chaired a discussion. 

I managed to get shots of Adam and Dan reading, remembering only just in time because I was so involved in their readings:

but then forgot altogether as Robert held us spellbound.

How are we meant to take stories in which surreal things happen, such as people turning into tables? Tania wondered. Are we meant to see it as metaphor or actual? For her own part, she said, she was happy to take it as actual, and Dan and Adam agreed, though I got the impression that Robert saw his own work as metaphorical. Dan said he didn't mind, though, if people took his work as metaphorical: once a story was out there, it belonged to readers to interpret as they saw fit. Asked why he writes surreal short stories, Robert talked about the liberty compared to the restrictions of writing for stage and TV: no one to say, 'Oh can you take that out because it wouldn't really happen'. Adam talked of coming across Kafka's 'Metamorphosis' before he started writing, and how it blew him away with its mode of taking a very ordinary situation and inserting into it something strange. It made him want to write, and it made him want to write like that. All three writers talked about the playful nature of it all. An audience member asked how you retain that playfulness, and Adam talked about the ability to keep that childlike lack of a sense of boundaries (children haven't yet learned to 'box up the world' as he put it). Robert, concurring, spoke of the need to accept and allow your own 'silliness'. Adam also spoke of openness, of the need to be open to your subconscious. He never rejects an idea out of hand, and so always keeps a notebook: some ideas fail, but you've got to try them out. What about the business of knowing where a story is going to go before you start? Dan said that he very rarely did: he usually starts with an image and waits to see where it will take him. Only at the end of a first draft will he know what a story's about, and then subsequent drafts will be honing the story in the light of this.

Now an audience member stated that she thought quite a lot of surreal writing was written out of anger and alienation, and did they recognise that? Adam and Dan strongly said no. Adam said that although he felt that a certain sense of alienation was germane to all writers, anger wasn't part of his emotional spectrum. He wouldn't write as catharsis or simply for himself, and he reiterated that writing for him was play and fun and that his project was to entertain. Dan said that he too didn't write from a position of anger, and in fact he thought writing stemming from anger wouldn't be good to read; writing weird stories was, rather, a way of explaining the world. Robert said that, far from anger, what he felt on approaching a story was a sense of excitement. In fact, he said he didn't believe in nihilistic writing: the act of writing itself is a form of optimism, and all writing involves the experience of joy - which I think is right. Earlier, however, when asked whether he was ever surprised where the weirdness of his stories sometimes takes him, he said yes, he was often surprised by where a story takes things emotionally. My feeling is that the very joy of writing is the joy of overcoming, processing and distilling emotions such as anger, so that the questioner and the panel weren't as far at odds as may have seemed.

Someone now asked about the balance between form and content. As the content of stories gets weirder, is it harder to create meaning? All three conceded that this was so, and Adam referred back to Kafka's grounding technique of having just one weird thing happen in a mundane context. Dan strongly stated the undesirability of weirdness for weirdness' sake, and Robert agreed: the story has to be saying something true and genuine about the world, and there has to be a recognisable reason behind it.

And here are all three signing books:

A quick lunch, and then it was the panel discussion on short-story 'gatekeepers', which I'll blog about another time - if I get a space in the coming days.

Short-story summer

 I have a busy time coming up, and it's all to do with the buzz around short stories this summer. Tomorrow I'm off to the London Short Story Festival. The first event, tomorrow evening, is the launch of Best British Short Stories (Salt), edited by Nick Royle (in which I'm delighted to say my story, 'Tides, or How Stories Do or Don't Get Told' is included), followed by a reading by Jackie Kay.  Saturday lunchtime there's a very interesting-looking panel discussion on short-story 'gatekeepers' with editors and an agent, chaired by my writing friend Vanessa Gebbie, to which I'm going, and I can't miss the morning session, The Weird and Wonderful World of Short Stories, not least because the chair, Tania Hershman, and two of the readers, Adam Marek and Robert Shearman, are my very good writing friends, and I have been looking forward for ages to meeting the third reader, my online writing colleague, Dan Powell. The three readers are billed as 'surreal writers', and although I'd agree that they write surreal stories, I have to say they're anything but surreal in person, but very real and warm! All LSSF events take place at Waterstone's Piccadilly. You can book here.

I'm really sorry that as a result, I'll miss the Southport launch of the debut novel of another superb short-story writer, Carys Bray - I just won't make it back in time for the 5 pm start on Saturday. Carys's Sweet Home (Salt), with which she won the Scott Prize, is one of my favourite story collections - she has the most superb linguistic control along with a tough yet humane sensibility - and A Song For Issy Bradley, her novel about the effect on a Mormon family of the death of one of the children, is already receiving huge attention and praise, which I'm sure it deserves, with newspaper profiles, posters on the underground and an appearance by Carys on tonight's Radio 4 Front Row. I believe that all are welcome at Cary's launch, so if you're in the Southport vicinity on Saturday at 5pm, you could drop in to Broadhurst's Bookshop and help her celebrate and get yourself a truly rewarding read.

Next week I'm off to Norwich for Project U, to read at Unthank Books' Wednesday launch of Welcome to Sharonville, a novel by Sharon Zink, and of Unthology 5, the latest in their series of short-story anthologies, in which my story 'Clarrie and You' appears. All welcome to that, too. Then the following week it's the Edge Hill awards to which I'm lucky enough to be invited again, and later in July the 13th International Short Story Festival in Vienna (which I'll hope to blog about on my Fictionbitch blog).

No rest for the lucky!