Miss Emily by Nuala O'Connor. Blog tour Stop #2

Today I am delighted to be hosting the second stop on the virtual tour for Miss Emily, the latest riveting and beautifully written novel by Nuala O'Connor (who also writes as Nuala Ní Chonchúir).

Published this month by Penguin USA, Penguin Canada and UK Sandstone Press, it is a story of the friendship between the nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson and a fictional Irish maid. It begins as the Dickinson family of Amherst, Massachusetts bemoan the loss of their previous maid, which has meant that Emily and her sister Vinnie have had to take on the household chores, occasioning burnt potatoes at the table and the loss of Emily's jealously guarded writing time. Meanwhile the feisty seventeen-year-old Ada Concannon, having been demoted as a maid in an Irish baronet's house for turning up at work bedraggled after swimming in the Liffey, decides there's more to life than this and sets sail to join her aunt and uncle and their family in Amherst, soon to fill the gap at the Homestead, the Dickinson household, and thus become the poet's saviour. Told in the voices of the two women, in alternating chapters throughout the book, the novel charts the growing friendship between the down-to-earth but sharp-minded Ada and the reclusive older Emily, sparked in the beginning through their shared love of baking, and culminating in a drama in which Ada's reputation is violated, and Emily must stand up for her against her beloved family.

As always with a book by Nuala, the mesmeric prose draws you straight into the psyches and emotions of the characters with a vivid and sensuous conjuring of atmosphere and scene. As always, there is both a lushness and a toughness, polarised here in the different linguistic registers of the two women, which are acutely handled.

Here's Emily looking around in the garden:

...everything is floral and abundant, while the apple maggots and cabbageworm do their best to undo it all. I sit under a pine, listening to the sounds of the earth, the turn of the beetle and the bone-song of the crickets;

and here's Ada cheerfully taking her to task:

'Now, Miss Emily,' Ada says, 'are you going to sit there like a clump of muck, or are you going to do something useful?'

The descriptions of baking are mouthwatering, there are acute insights into poet Emily's psychology and creative process, Ada's eventual trial is searing, and the drama that finally overtakes the two women is nail-biting.

It's a novel about female friendship across the generations and classes, about two women fighting the different class restrictions of their gender (Emily can write while Ada must toil; Ada can go to the circus while Emily can do nothing so unseemly), forging in the process an unlikely friendship. It's quite simply a wonderful and immersive read.

You don't at all need to know Emily Dickinson's poetry or anything of her life to fully enjoy this novel. Satisfyingly for those who do, though, Nuala has clearly researched her in depth, and the novel dispels a few myths. In an interesting article on the Huffington Post, Who is Emily Dickinson? Nuala talks about those myths and the real Emily, shown in this novel to be more characterful and active than she is often portrayed.

For anyone in Dublin tomorrow night, the book will be launched at the Gutter bookshop, Cow's Lane, Tel. (00353) 1 6799206, info@gutterbookshop.com .

Read the previous tour stop, at Shauna Gilligan's blog, where Nuala is interviewed about the book, here. You can follow the rest of the tour, and discover lots more details about the book and Nuala's work from her blog, Women Rule Writer.

Nuala O'Connor was born in Dublin, Ireland, she lives in East Galway. Already well-known under the name Nuala Ní Chonchúir, she has published four short story collections, the most recent Mother America appeared from New Island in 2012. Her third poetry collection The Juno Charm was published by Salmon Poetry in 2011 and Nuala’s critically acclaimed second novel The Closet of Savage Mementos appeared April 2014, also from New Island; it was shortlisted for the Kerry Irish Novel of the Year Award 2015. In summer 2015, Penguin USA, Penguin Canada and Sandstone (UK) publish Nuala’s third novel, Miss Emily, about the poet Emily Dickinson and her Irish maid. www.nualanoconnor.com

New Unthology 7 review

There's a very nice review of Unthology 7 on the Where the Roads are Rivers blog. All of the stories are appreciated and praised, and I'm especially delighted that mine, 'Looking for the Castle', is one of four picked out as favourites "for their evocative settings (Delhi, Barcelona,  Serbia (& California), and, in Looking for the Castle the ‘…knot of tanneries and terraced houses in a curve above the wide watery spaces where the Mersey joins the Manchester Ship Canal…’); I loved them for the voices employed, the pictures they painted, their phrasing and music, the underlying or overt yearning, their understated epiphanies and restraint (and occasional lack of restraint). And for some, perhaps unidentifiable, magic that lies beyond my ability, or indeed my wish, to describe."

Reading group: Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas

Another book (suggested by Ann) which tended to prompt discussion of the history on which it centres - in this case the Spanish Civil War - rather than of its treatment of those issues or the book as a literary artefact. However, the unusual structure of this book is of great interest both politically and aesthetically.

It is constructed in three parts, the central one taking a different form and voice from those of the two sandwiching it. In the first part, titled 'Forest Friends', the first-person present-day narrator, who has the same name as the author, disarmingly and wittily recounts his own failures as both a fiction writer and husband, and relates how, in an attempt to resurrect his earlier career as a journalist, he ended up interviewing a writer and lecturer who happened to be the son of the deceased fascist and writer Rafael Sanchez Mazas, a founder of the original Falangist movement that first whipped up agitation against the Spanish Republican government in the 1930s. During the interview, Cercas relates, the son mentioned the fact that in January 1938, as the Republican troops were advancing near the French border, his father faced a firing squad at Collell but escaped the bullets and fled into the woods, hounded by Republican militiamen. As he cowered in a gulley, a Republican militiaman came upon him, but called to the others that there was no one there, and turned away, thus saving his life. Subsequently Mazas was given succour by a group of deserted Republicans, 'the forest friends'.

Cercas relates how, intrigued by this, he became curious about Sanchez Mazas and about the Civil War and its 'horrific stories' which 'till then I'd considered excuses for old men's nostalgia and fuel for the imagination of unimaginative novelists' - the pain of the Spanish Civil War, as Ann said, having since been largely buried in Spanish public consciousness. Cercas then relates how he followed up a series of connections and contacts resulting from a newspaper article in which he had recounted the incident of the firing squad, ending up speaking to some of those involved, including a son of one of the 'forest friends'. He came, he says, to understand that the story of the firing squad was well known after the war, when the louche, aristocratic Mazas lived off it as a famous personality and (inactive) politician. The question that then came to obsess Cercas was whether or not the story was true, and he reached a point where he knew he had to write a book about it, not a novel, but a 'true tale, a tale cut from the cloth of reality, concocted out of true events and characters'.

Part Two is different in mode. The confessional mode is dropped, and the section, titled 'Soldiers of Salamis' - a reference to the outnumbered Greeks who routed the invading Persian fleet in 480 BC, and the title of the book that Sanchez Mazas had told the 'forest friends' he would write about his time with them, but didn't - takes the conventional academic mode of a history. Beginning with an incident after the war that was related to Cercas by a son of one of the forest friends, in which Mazas intercedes on behalf of his imprisoned former forest companions, and hinging on the whole firing-squad and forest-friends episode, it is an account of the life and career of Sanchez Mazas, an anatomisation of the muddled politics and loyalties of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, and a meditation on the involvement with a violent movement of a cowardly and aesthetically conservative mind.

Part Three reverts to the mode of Part One. Here Cercas relates wryly how he wrote his book about Sanchez Mazas in a heat of inspiration, and then realised it was rubbish: it was missing something important he couldn't identify. (By now we have realised that Part Two is indeed the book in question.) Despairing, Cercas returns to his newspaper once more. Once again, a chance interview he is conducting, this time with the famous and exiled Chilean writer, Roberto Bolano, leads to an unexpected link with Sanchez Mazas and the firing squad incident: it becomes clear that an old friend of Bolano's could have been one of the Republican soldiers who took part in the firing squad, a man called Miralles who, unlike the effete Mazas who evaded military action in the war he helped to agitate, spent the entire war fighting on one front or another. A link with something Cercas was told earlier about the soldier who saved Mazas's life makes him think, and hope, that this is the very man - and that this is the element that is missing from his book - and he sets out to find him in his retirement home. But the old man won't admit that he is the same man, and the whole book must thus end on uncertainty. Yet Cercas is happy: now the otherwise forgotten Miralles, a true 'soldier of Salamis', and his companions, will 'still be alive in some way'.

Introducing the book, Ann said that she had enjoyed the first part, but when she got to the second part, with its dry historical account and lists of names unknown to us English readers, she nearly gave up. However, she was very glad she hadn't, as the final section of the book, which was very moving, redeemed it. Most people nodded agreement, and people commented on the contrast: the lightness of touch of much of the first and last sections, and the wryly-portrayed relationship between Cercas and his down-to-earth TV fortune-teller girlfriend who must listen to his writerly woes. (' "Shit!" said Conchi. "Didn't I tell you not to write about a fascist? Those people fuck up everything they touch!" ') Ann, a historian, was very impressed by the book's central message: that history is always just a construct built on hearsay and myth and opinion, that the truth is always muddled, or indeed unattainable. I strongly agreed, since this is my own main obsession as a writer, and felt that the structure of the book makes an important literary point about the contingency of storytelling - of which, as Ann said, history is just one form, often, as in this case, a desiccated form. Also impressive is its questioning of what makes a hero - Sanchez Mazas makes a surviving hero of himself after the war by telling the firing-squad story, but is the hero really the man who let him live, and the ordinary man who has to fight in the war? Are those whom history holds up as heroes the real heroes? It's impossible, though, to know why the soldier let Mazas live, and as Cercas and Bolano discuss, is a hero someone who makes a conscious choice in acting bravely, or someone who does so by instinct? In recording the known facts of history you can't in fact impute motives, and thus can only ever tell a partial story.

The book has been a major success in Spain, and, Ann said, it must of course have had far more resonance for those familiar with the names of political figures and historical events. (In fact, so divorced were we as a group from Spanish history and Spanish-language culture, that several people had not heard of Bolano, and for them Cercas's meeting with Bolano inevitably had less resonance than for those who had heard of or read him). Ann made the point that the book is of course striking, as Conchi's speech indicates, in focussing on a fascist at a time when Spain's fascist history has been largely buried. It is also remarkable for its depiction of the political ambiguities of the war, and it was noted that one reviewer commented that it made Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls 'look like play-acting'.

The discussion was then opened out to the room, and Doug and Trevor immediately began an argument about the facts of the Spanish Civil War, to which the rest of us had to object in order to bring focus back to the book. Doug challenged me on my statement that the structure of the book, its switching of modes, made an important and resonant literary point. Although he could see what I meant, he said that surely Cercas could have made the historical section more entertaining, and that, although he absolutely agreed about the bits with Conchi, which he really enjoyed, and that the end of the book concerning Miralles was very moving, in the middle section he was frankly bored shitless. Jenny said that it wasn't just the middle section she found difficult and boring - there was the long section in Part One when Cercas is contacting all those people in order to try and find out the truth about Sanchez Mazas - all those similar-sounding unfamiliar Spanish names; she kept getting muddled between them all - and that section in Part Three when Bolano recounts to Cercas at great length Miralles' experience of the campaigns of the war. People generally agreed, and someone said that their impression while reading Part Two was that the story they had already read about (the firing-squad story) was merely being repeated in a more boring way. (In fact, we encounter the telling of the story several times, as in Part One we read in full the article in which Cercas repeats it, and Cercas ponders the variations in the different subsequent tellings he hears from others.) John, having read the book on a Kindle, made the interesting point that he might have had a better experience of it if he had read a print copy: he would then have had a better overview of its structure and would have known better where things might be leading as he read. People also commented on the difficulty of the very long sentences in the non-dramatised sections (contrasting strongly with the prose and dialogue of the more personal dramatised sections). There was also the fact that the book is not divided into chapters. I feel that this is a pretty normal convention for a book divided into parts, but most people found it unusual and that, along with a general lack of paragraphing, it made the book a difficult read. There was speculation - taking into account Don Quixote and the enormous length of Bolano's books pointed to by John - that lengthiness may be a general characteristic of Spanish-language writing. We all agreed, however, that the language of this book (which is not long) was nevertheless beautifully wry and incisive, and the contemporary dialogue in the personal sections very telling of character and mood, and we were not surprised that the translator, Anne McLean, had won a prize for the translation.

After which, the talk veered unstoppably back onto the issues, and on to the connected but general subject of false memory, and on from that to child abuse, and on...

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

Dan Powell interviews me about 'Looking for the Castle'.

There's an interview with me over on the Unthology Blog, in which Dan Powell, fellow contributor to Unthology 7, quizzes me about my story 'Looking for the Castle' and other writing issues. In particular he asks me about my use of the second person, which I would never at one time have used, seeing it as a bit of fashionable tic, but then got interested in, and in which this story and my previous Unthology story, 'Clarrie and You' (Unthology 5) are cast.

Reading group: In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason

Another book (Mark's suggestion) that everyone liked, but one of those novels that tend to prompt discussion of the issues on which they hinge, and it was hard to keep the focus on the book as a book. Published in 1985, it takes the third-person viewpoint of seventeen-year-old Sam Hughes, living in a small Kentucky town with her gentle uncle Emmett who is traumatised by the Vietnam war - her father, whom she never knew, having been killed in Vietnam, and her mother having later married and moved away, Sam refusing to go with her. The novel opens with a short section in which Sam and Emmett, accompanied by Sam's paternal grandmother, set out on a road trip to Washington with a mission not identified, or at least not spelled out, until the end of the novel, and then moves back to the summer that Emmett came back from Vietnam and her father didn't, going on to chart the events in between. Not that the life that Sam and Emmett have led together is eventful. In a delightful sisterly-brotherly relationship that everyone in the reading group loved, they jog along in a seemingly ordinary way, Sam going to school and working at the Burger Boy, Emmett initially doing odd jobs but eventually stopping working altogether and unaccountably dropping his girlfriend, sitting around the house with his beloved cat or watching out for a rare bird at the local swamp into which a man once slipped and was lost. In the evenings Sam and Emmett sit around joshing and listening to golden oldie music and watching TV with Sam's boyfriend Lonnie, in particular the TV drama series M.A.S.H which follows the fortunes of a medical corps in the Korean war. This last is of course an indication of the unaddressed issue of the damage inflicted by the Vietnam war on Emmett and his peers. Sam becomes increasingly aware of it, increasingly aware of her own father's fate and increasingly worried that Emmett's bad acne and headaches mean that he is affected by Agent Orange. Her worries come to a head when she falls in love with an 'older man', Tom, another Vietnam vet, and discovers him to be impotent, and comes to wonder if this may be Emmet's problem, too, and a general problem for men returned from Vietnam.

Introducing the book, Mark pointed out that this was an anti-Vietnam war book written before any of the eighties films about the war - a point he had made when we discussed Jayne Ann Phillips' Machine Dreams, published the previous year in 1984. Others commented that the films, such as Apocalypse Now, glorified the role of the soldiers, whereas this showed its damaging effects. This was the point in the meeting (basically, immediately) that people started talking about the war. It was noted that the Vietnam war was the first war in which the damaging human effects of war could be publicly seen on newsreels, which prompted anti-war feeling; on the other hand, as the book illustrates, and as Emmett's veteran friends complain, the damage to the men was never properly acknowledged by the American government, or understood by the societies to which they returned.

We had to keep consciously bringing the discussion back to the book, and its treatment of the issues, and so our consideration of it consisted of random comments rather than a developed argument. I said that I felt that the voice of the book was more mature than that of Machine Dreams - the narrator is more wryly objective about Sam than the young female Donner of Machine Dreams can be about herself as a first-person narrator - and it was noted that Bobbie Ann Mason was an older writer than Jayne Ann Phillips. (I had met Mark in the street one day beforehand, and we had both said we felt that this was the better book, and wondered if the fact that Machine Dreams made a greater splash were down to the fact of Phillips' youth and looks in a cynical market-obsessed literary industry.) This prompted John to say that he thought that Sam seemed a little too mature and insightful for a seventeen-year-old, but I disagreed, feeling that a mature and intelligent seventeen-year-old could have all of the thoughts and make all of the inferences that Sam does.

Everyone loved the relationship between Sam and Emmett, finding it really touching, and we all thought they were both great characters, the gentle, kooky and troubled Emmett being especially engaging. We thought the prose excellent, and the dialogue vivid and telling. I said I thought the central point of the book - that macho war in fact emasculates - extremely powerful, and everyone agreed. Mark said strongly that he thought it a feminist book, which baffled everyone for a moment, since feminist issues are not directly addressed in it, but then people could see that viewing the war from the domestic arena and a female viewpoint could be said to be feminist. Mark argued that giving Sam an active role in addressing the issues and trying to do something about them, does make it fundamentally - and, he thought, importantly - feminist. John said he found very arresting Sam's realisation that these men she considers older - Tom and Emmett and their vet contemporaries - were in fact only boys when they returned from Vietnam. People did agree that in fact the book, having started dynamically with an action-filled road trip, did then slump somewhat in the middle without much of a narrative arc - some people said that they began to feel that the book was going nowhere - but that it was redeemed by the very moving ending.

Finally, we wondered how relevant and important the book seems today, especially to young people. As we had noted, and as the book illustrates, there's a collective amnesia about Vietnam, America's greatest military failure, and Mark said that when he studied this book as a mature university student a few years ago, his younger fellow students didn't have the background and the novel had been of little interest to them. In particular a main motif of the book, the TV series M.A.S.H, which is referenced in detail in a way that both makes political points and throws light on Emmett's situation and psychological state, meant nothing at all to them (a warning, I'd say, to those writers who subscribe to the current fashion for including contemporary popular cultural references for the sake of mere contemporaneity and a superficial air of coolness!). We all thought it a shame, as we felt that this was, both politically and aesthetically, an important book.

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

Too Many Magpies as book group choice on Hubpages

Chuffed that Andrea Jackson has chosen to recommend Too Many Magpies as a reading group choice on Hubpages. It's flattering, but to be honest I'd rather not think too hard about people pulling my books apart in the cruel way we do our reading group even with the greats! Andrea proposes some very astute questions to consider in a discussion, which show a gratifying understanding of my aims in the book, but I can't help cringing at some of the possible answers!

Many thanks to Andrea for her thoughtfulness and attention.

Edge Hill awards

So Kirsty Gunn won the Edge Hill award for her superb, moving and technically brilliant collection of stories, Infidelities. After having read and loved her book, I was chuffed to meet her at the awards ceremony last week, as well as to meet again Madeleine D'Arcy, whom I'd briefly met last year at the Vienna short story conference, and who won the student readers' prize for a story in her sizzling collection, Waiting for the Bullet (sorry the photo is blurred):

 I would hate to have been a judge of the shortlist, though: the other four books, by Carys Davies (The Redemption of Galen Pike), Annaliese Mackintosh (Any Other Mouth), Toby Litt (Life-Like) and Rose Tremain (the American Lover) were all wonderful, as I said here. It was lovely too to meet Annaliese and Toby, and to see Carys again, whom, as a fellow Salt writer, I have known for some time (and whose book I reviewed here.) I always love this event - a celebration of the short story, and a rare chance to meet up with some of the best story writers of our time. Kudos to short-story expert and writer Ailsa Cox for founding and administrating the prize!

Writers travelling: wear dark specs unless you're looking for a story

What a wonderful time I had at the Unthology 7 launch in Norwich - great readings from Dan Powell, Elaine Chiew, Adrian Cross, Gary Budden and Debz Hobbs-Wyatt, and great craic in the pub afterwards with fellow contributors Barney Walsh and Amanda Oosthuizen. But what an eventful journey there. When I stepped on the train at Stockport, chaos was reigning: the carriages turned out to have fewer seats than had been reserved, and the stocky bouncy sixtyish guy in the seat next to mine was taking charge, promptly ousting the poor woman who had perched on my seat in the hope, presumably, that I wouldn't turn up, and finding her another elsewhere, and generally looking out for everyone. 'Isn't he a kind man?' said an old lady to me, as, instructed by him, she sat in his seat while he looked for another for her. Yes, he was kind, and really likeable, and tremendously gregarious, and that was the trouble for the next four-and-a half hours of the journey, which I had intended to spend re-reading the stories in Unthology 7 and looking at the scenery of Lincolnshire and Norfolk. As things calmed down he began explaining it all to me: how the seat numbers only went up to 54 (my seat), but the reservations went up to 60-odd, and how the guard had explained that the wrong carriages had ended up on the train, and that that poor old dear there had a reservation for seat number 63! I got out my book and he asked what I was doing. I said I had things to read before I got to Norwich. He said, 'Oh, I'd better leave you to do your homework!'  I put my head in Unthology. Two minutes later he nudged me, and started telling me more. Then he told me why he was travelling, and all about the job he'd done on the oil rigs, and how now he was retired he really missed it and had to find ways to fill his time, and he'd decided to have a new way of living and had given up drinking during the week and was eating healthy foods, and he didn't really know many people in the place he had moved to, but it was great, and he had two budgies to keep him company, and he always had these trips to his relatives (and luckily, one friend to look after the budgies; and how he lets the budgies out to fly round the room and perch on the curtain rail, and no, they don't shit on the curtains because he rigs up a towel in this special way I couldn't follow because he had a very strong Liverpool accent and seemed not have his teeth in and had a way of talking with his head turned away so I had lean forward and strain to listen). And he'd given up driving, he'd done so much driving for his job - he'd been away so much, it had just put too much strain on the marriage and his wife had just got fed up - and it was so nice just to relax and take the train everywhere, and, by the way, he really liked my double denim.

Well, how could any writer resist? He was such a great character: there was such a subtext of loneliness and loss, yet he was so well-meaning and determinedly cheerful. Finally he said, nudging me again, 'Hey you get on with your homework!' so I turned to the book again. But as soon as I looked up from it to see the Pennines he took the opportunity and started saying it all again. And so it went on, all the way to Norwich, for four and a half hours. Every time I looked up from the book he pounced, so in the end I didn't dare look up, and missed the Lincolnshire and Norfolk countryside altogether, but he pounced anyway, even while my nose was in the pages, and in the end I gave up and was treated to all the photos of his siblings and kids and grandkids on his camera. As Elaine Chiew said to me when I got to The Library Restaurant that evening in Norwich for the launch and told her, 'That's the kind of time to slip on the dark glasses!'

So I didn't get to read the stories again that day, but I really didn't need to: they are all so vivid still in my mind from the first reading, Elaine's language-busting and gut-wrenching tale of paedophile grooming, Dan Powell's eerie and unsettling portrayal of a marriage in danger, Garry Budden's haunting story of a return to the place of one's youth, Debz Hobbs-Wyatt's evocative depiction of the loss of a childhood friend, Adrian Cross's creepily impressive account of murder by homeopathy, Amanda Oosthuizen's story in which a past trauma creeps unsettlingly into the present, and Barney Walsh's stunning first-person account, 'My Lobotomy'. And all of the others. Do read them: you won't be disappointed. The book is available here.

Unthology: first review and launch party

The first review of Unthology 7 comes from Valerie O'Riordan at Bookmunch, famously strict in their considerations. Unthology's USP is that it's a platform for a wide range of writing styles and genres, which, as I've said before, is a hugely important provision in a literary marketplace crowded with thematic publications and stylistically partisan editors which can straitjacket authors and often leaves little room for certain types of writing. As Valerie points out, however, with characteristic frankness, it's unlikely that every story in a diverse anthology will appeal to every reader, and so inevitably she was going to like some of the stories more than others. I'm lucky that my story, 'Looking for the Castle', is one of those she likes, and which she says 'manages to evoke the confused bewilderment of returning to one’s childhood town, and the weird task of grappling with the altered scale of the geography and the unexpected slippages of memory, without ever edging into melancholia; her story is also notable for its refreshing economy – nothing’s over-explained here.'

Two days now to the launch party in the Library Restaurant in Norwich - I'm very much looking forward to it!

Ruminating and germinating

While I've been pondering my next project and at times being unable even to get to my desk due to the roofing work, I've been doing a bit of proper gardening, ie sowing seeds and watching them grow, something I've rarely had the time to do in my life but which my Welsh grandfather did every year. Of course, he grew from seed enough flowers and vegetables to fill a whole big garden, and produced enough vegetables to feed a family most of the year round, and my efforts have been decidedly punier (I don't have a greenhouse, for a start), but I'm finding it very satisfying, and a kind of physical parallel to the creative germination and growth going on in my head.

I started in an even smaller way last year with cultivated primroses, which flowered this year. (Since I took the photos they've suffered a bit with the scaffolders stomping over the bed I put them in, and you can see in the second picture that the slugs were already having a go!)

The plants I'm most proud of this year are the hollyhocks above, which I've grown from the seeds of the one hollyhock I already have in my garden. (The slugs always get the ones that come up in the ground as soon as they appear, so I gathered the seeds last autumn and started them off in a cold frame in the spring.) They're much bigger now and I've already put them in the ground. They won't flower this year but next, I believe, and I'm excited to see how they turn out then, if I can get them to survive the winter and the slugs: the parent plant had pink double flowers, but of course you never know what plants the flowers were pollinated with, so they could turn out anyhow - the way that one of my sons has quite the opposite colouring to me: dark curly hair and brown eyes! The gardening books always tell you to buy new seeds, so you can be sure of the outcome, but I much prefer this mixup pot-luck thing, which is why I love the mad variable columbines in my garden (below) that seed themselves profusely (they're resistant to slugs), and which feels more to me like the creative process of writing, where the words and sentences can take you to scenarios and notions you had never expected.

In a similar way, I'm growing some Oriental poppies, also from the one already in my garden - which is perhaps just as well, as when the scaffolders dismantled the scaffolding they plonked a huge barrel right on top of it, which they proceeded to throw heavy metal joints into from high up, and I don't think the plant has survived.

Having got the appetite for it all, I did go and buy some seeds. I've always longed for a country-cottage style garden like my grandfather had, so I took a walk up to the garden centre and came back with packets of seeds of sweet pea, larkspur and garden poppies, and even some sage. The sweet peas are now halfway up the wall, and the rest are ready for potting on or putting in the ground. They just need to survive my being so busy at the moment with literary events away from the garden...

Oh, and I can't resist showing you one of the tulips that came up after my gruelling two afternoons planting bulbs last autumn:

Cold but eventful

I'm still not getting much writing done, not on the page or the laptop anyway. The roof is finished at long last - I no longer feel as if I have people clonking about all over my scalp! - but I'm dashing about at the moment between cities and the countryside: all very exciting and stimulating when you spend most of your time at a desk, and of course, all grist to the mill while everything's churning over subconsciously.

Last weekend I was in London and spent a really lovely afternoon at a reception to celebrate the life and work of the Maigret novelist Georges Simenon. I hadn't read him before but spent the days beforehand making up the lack and becoming fascinated - by both the writing and the life: Maigret wrote almost 400 novels as well as short stories, at one point being contracted to produce a novel a month, yet the Maigrets are not by any means pulp fiction: written in a plain, economical prose, they're atmospheric with an important psychological dimension, and his romans durs, his 'hard novels', which I haven't tackled yet, are reported to be superior. As part of a resurgence of interest in Simenon, Penguin, publishers of Maigret since the fifties, are in the process of publishing new translations of every single one of his novels. I blogged about it all on Fictionbitch here.

In all of the Maigret novels I read, the weather was an important aspect of the atmosphere - hard frost, or incessant rain - so it seemed entirely appropriate that the weather was bitter, as it so often has been this June. Optimistically stepping out in a linen dress and jacket last Saturday morning in Manchester, since London was forecast to be warm, I encountered a driving cold rain and rushed back for a cardi to get me to balmy London, where I'd surely be taking it off. Some hope - I was freezing the whole weekend, and had to borrow a woollen coat from my host!

It seems that it's been warmer in London since, but it's stayed cold up north and in North Wales where John and I were by Thursday, so once again the weather seemed appropriate when American debut novelist and literary sensation Rebecca Dinerstein came to Caernarfon on her British book tour to read in the lovely Palas Print Bookshop garden from The Sunlit Night, her novel set in chilly north Norway. Although a new novelist, Rebecca is an expert and very charming performer (she's also an award-winning poet), and the sections she read were engaging and very well written. And there was amazing food thematically connected with the book, provided by Oren chef Gert Vos: Jewish sourdough bialys, blueberry and cardamom cake and Norwegian Jarlsberg cheesecake. 

Here's Rebecca after her reading:

And here's some of the food, already well and truly attacked:

Next week, of course, I'm off to Norwich to read along with other contributors to Unthology 7 - hope it warms up a bit by then!

Publication day for Unthology 7

The day has arrived! Unthology 7, which includes my Short-Fiction-Prize-winning story 'Looking for the Castle', is unveiled to coincide with an event at the London Short Story Festival this afternoon, when editors Ashley Stokes and Robin Jones will be talking all things Unthology. If you're in London, get down there - I would! - before it's sold out (the Gatekeepers event this morning was sold out, apparently). Waterstones, Piccadilly, Lower Ground floor, 3.pm. Today it's possible to buy copies of Unthology 7, and they can be bought from the Unthank website.

Next Thursday (25th) will be the official launch of the book in Norwich, and I'll be reading along with fellow contributors Gary Budden, Debz Hobbs-Wyatt, Elaine Chiew, Dan Powell and Adrian Cross. 7.30pm, upstairs at The Library restaurant, 4A Guildhall Hill, Norwich, NR2 1JH, FREE. Can't wait for that - off on a train down the east of the country to lovely Norwich and to meet all those talented writers and our editors!

Nightjar Press at Verbose

Verbose is a live literature night held on the fourth Monday of every month at Fallow Cafe in Fallowfield, South Manchester. Reappearing in a new incarnation in January with host Sarah-Clare Conlon, it showcases literary collectives and independent publishers along with open mic sessions, and is proving to be a significant literary hang-out event, packed to the gills each time I've been there, with people standing, and even sitting on the stairs up to the room where the event is held. May's event featured Nicholas Royle's Nightjar Press through which he publishes an impressive series of single-story chapbooks, a vibrant evening when the readers were Nick himself, Nightjar contributor and Booker-shortlisted Alison Moore, and poet and short-story writer Kate Woodward. As the editor also of the Best British Short Stories series (Salt) and a university teacher, Nick is concerned with a wide range of short-story writing, but the focus of Nightjar is the uncanny, the unnerving and the surreal, which the evening splendidly provided. Nick read one of his signature bird-themed stories in which a new relationship turns distinctly sinister; Alison Moore read a story from her Salt collection, The Pre-War House and Other Stories, in which a second-person, present-tense narration which seems at first to be the thoughts of a lone woman running turns out to be something much more horrifying; and Kate Woodward read a story which made everyone laugh, but whose narrator, it is gradually revealed, is by no means in a happy situation or indeed of this world. The open mic was pretty good, too.

 The night was also the first outing for Nightjar's two new releases: a new story by Alison, and another by Tom Fletcher, also a previous Nightjar contributor. Tom Fletcher's 'The Home' is a nightmarish dream state in which a man helplessly watches his wife on a TV screen stumbling and lost in a barren moon-like landscape and pursued by a terrifying but unknown being, a story steeped in Fletcher's characteristic atmosphere of unease and longing and dread. Alison Moore's 'The Harvestman' has a contrasting tone. Told in her measured and lucidly imagistic stye, it concerns a lone young lad who has newly left home for a seaside town, and is a story about fear, and the way that fear can pull danger down towards itself - which, in spite of the coolness of the style, imbues the story with impending doom.

Next month's Verbose is on 22nd June, and features the Manchester-based experimental poetry reading series, The Other Room, with James Davies, Tom Jenks and Scott Thurston. 7.30 - but get there early if you want a seat! Visit the Verbose website to sign up for the open mic.

Nightjar chapbooks are published in signed, limited editions. They are available here.

Reading group: The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh

Trevor suggested this early-50s novel, a satirical treatment of post-war Los Angeles. Dennis Barlow, a young English poet and scriptwriter whose contract at Megalopolitan Studios has expired, has taken work in a pets' funeral parlour, thus letting down the Hollywood English side which exists on an ethos (sometimes illusory, sometimes real) of old-world aristocratic privilege.

Sir Ambrose wore dark grey flannels, and Eton Rambler tie, an I Zingari ribbon in his boater hat. This was his invariable dress on sunny days; whenever the weather allowed it he wore a deerstalker cap and an Inverness cape. 

The (real) aristocrat and once-chief script writer Sir Francis Hinsley, with whom Dennis is living, also pushed out by the increasing bureaucratisation and 'modernisation' of the studio, commits suicide. Dennis becomes perforce involved in the world of Whispering Glades, the Los Angeles funeral parlour and burial 'Park' on which the pets' funeral parlour, The Happier Hunting Ground, is modelled with hopeless lack of success. Devised and owned by 'The Dreamer', Whispering Glades is a place more steeped in illusion and sentimentality and cynical commerce than Hollywood itself, where every utterance is wordy overblown euphemism, with hilarious slippages: having given Dennis a po-faced list of the available 'means of disposal'  - 'inhumement, entombment, inurnment, or immurement, but many people just lately prefer sarcophagusment' - the 'Mortuary Hostess' reassures Dennis that they will be able to make the hanged Sir Francis presentable by referring to a long-drowned man they worked on: ' ''We fixed that stiff" '. The dead are referred to as the 'Loved Ones', and grieving relatives and friends, referred to as 'Waiting Ones', are led into the 'Slumber Room' to view the bodies, which, in keeping with the general denial of the reality of death, are decked up to look alive:

...a little room, brightly furnished and papered. It might have been part of a luxurious modern country club in all its features save one. Bowls of flowers stood disposed about a chintz sofa and on the sofa lay what seemed to be the wax effigy of an elderly woman dressed as though for an evening party. Her white gloved hands held a bouquet and on her nose glittered a pair of rimless pince-nez.

While Dennis is arranging Sir Francis's funeral, the Hostess tries to interest him for himself in their 'Before Need Provision'.

Dennis is a searingly satirical observer of all this, and mouthpiece for Waugh, but his own behaviour is not spared the burn of Waugh's satire as he takes up with the somewhat stupid mortuary cosmetician, Aimee Thanatogenos (her name means, of course, 'death-birth'), operating his own deception by wooing her with famous poems he passes off as his own (and which, uneducated and naive, she doesn't recognise), and as he becomes entangled in a love triangle with Aimee and Mr Joyboy, a whizz mortician revealed, in yet another peeling away of illusion, to be in private both unglamorously downtrodden and selfish.

All of our group enjoyed reading this short novel, relishing above all the verbal satire. There was no argument, and people simply noted that the book was a sharp skewering of a world of commercial illusion - prefiguring, as Trevor noted, the illusions and glosses of our present-day commercial culture - and picked out moments and phrases they had particularly enjoyed. The characters were mere ciphers, we noted, as is common in satire, although I did think that Dennis underwent something of a personality transplant in the latter half of the book when his relationship with Aimee sours, becoming rather more callous than his earlier mere pragmatism might have led us to expect. John said that this made him think that Waugh simply didn't understand love, which I reminded him was exactly what he had said when we read Waugh's Scoop, and this led on to a discussion of Waugh's personality and life. Trevor thought The Loved One was a better book than Scoop, but most others disagreed, feeling that while it was a sharper and more consistent satire in technical terms (we had thought Scoop wavered unevenly between satire and farce), its themes were shallower and its targets easier. Ann said that, short as the book was, it would have been even sharper if it had been shorter, and that it would have worked best as a short story, and most people agreed.

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

Why writing is on hold

I can't write at the moment, and here's why. The room in which I like to write is an attic room, under the sloping ceiling with no space between me and the actual roof. As I work I can hear the pigeons trotting across the slates just above me, and their cooing is a soothing background soundtrack. I feel so at peace there, so removed from the hum-drum world down below and free to sink into other worlds. I know it's a cliche, the writer in the garrett, and it's often presented as a writer's hardship (having to live in a garret, which is traditionally associated with poverty), but our garret is an extra, and I know I'm lucky to be able to work there. However, since it's directly under the roof it's been vulnerable to leaks, and I have often also sat writing with water dripping - and more recently pouring - into a bucket. So now the roof is being mended, the view from the window is blocked by scaffolding, John is working on the window frame, since it went rotten while we didn't consider it worth decorating up there, and everything's covered with drapes. I feel bereft: I had to abandon the desk hastily, because the roofers began earlier than I had expected, and it's a struggle to get back up there to get things I need for writing but had forgotten, as, on the stairway just outside, the old skylight is being replaced and the stairwell is blocked with tarpaulins. And anyway I can't write.

I don't think it's just the sound of hammering above, and battens being thrown down all around; it's also to do with my displacement from my nook. I've puzzled about why, since I've written in so many other places: I've lived in so many other places, for a start, and I've written in basements and shared bedrooms; I've written in other places in this house, on the table I'm sitting at now in our living room, and on the landing, even, with all the doors shut, when I've needed insulation from the sound of other people's roofs and building work being done. I've often written very successfully while travelling alone on trains, usually with the excitement of a brand-new idea, and I think that's a clue, travelling alone being not only stimulation but a kind of mental insulation: a removal from the day-to-day, and a throwing back of oneself onto one's own resources and insights. It's a question, in the main, I've found, of carving out a kind of physical-mental space, a corner of the room, say, where these particular thoughts and inspirations happen. So why can't I do it now? After all, the roofers aren't here at weekends, or when it's raining, as it is at this very moment, and anyway I could take my writing pad and laptop off to a quiet cafe and work there.

I think it's to do with the particular work I want to tackle next, and it makes me realise something about the process of writing, at least as it works for me, as well as having implications, I think, for the kind of fiction our distracting culture makes difficult. What I want to tackle next is a story of very deep emotional turmoil and betrayal, and I know I can't do it - not properly, not with justice - unless I feel utterly calm and sorted and on top of everything. I know that, if I'm not, the story could overwhelm me, and I could fail to achieve a light enough touch for the story not to be overwhelming for the reader. I'm too locked on to it now to turn in the meantime to anything less complex or shorter, but I can't start it in odd moments of peace, as I know it's going to need an immersive and uninterrupted effort.

Seems to me, then, you need to be untroubled to write tragedy well, and you need peace to write of turmoil - not to mention the private income or decent remuneration that can provide them.

Crossposted to Fictionbitch

Unthology 7 arrives

Today I received my contributor's copy of Unthology 7 (Unthank), soon to be officially published, which includes my story, 'Looking for the Castle'. The book looks every bit as good as in the photos we've seen beforehand (and feels lovely: all silky-matt!). Very exciting. Nicely typeset, too.

It's pretty great being in Unthology. Editors Ashley Stokes and Robin Jones have received much praise for their aplomb in creating a series of eclectic high-standard anthologies which Sabotage Magazine has called 'a beacon of promise for the short story genre'. Here's the editors' mouth-watering press release for the new issue:

WONDERFUL AND FRIGHTENING SHORT FICTION FROM NEW AND ESTABLISHED WRITERS

 Flinch at the things that twitch in the windows a mile up from the city streets. Let text messages lead you towards a man that you already know is going to mess with your head. Find the meaning of life in your own lobotomy. Now, the ghost of Gaudi whispers in your ear, urging you to get yourself another lover, insisting it’s all going to be smooth and comfortable this time. Ruin yourself and drift towards the haunted shores of your youth. Then find yourself back there, returned to the low-down slums of a city in a country that no longer exists, that UNTHOLOGY 7 documented and mapped out for you, and you alone, a long, long time ago. 

Elizabeth Baines, Roelof Bakker, Adrian Cross, George Djuric, Debz Hobbs-Wyatt, Sonal Kohli, Amanda Oosthuizen, Dan Powell, Gary Budden, Ken Edwards, Elaine Chiew, and Charlie Hill

Unthology 7 will make its first appearance at an Unthank event at the London Short Story Festival on June 20th, and the official launch will take place at Project U in Norwich on the 25th. I'll be reading at the Norwich event along with other contributors including Dan Powell. (Excited to be going to Norwich again - last year, when I went to read at the Unthology 5 launch, I made my first ever visit there.) Dan and I will be interviewing each other for the Unthology blog, and I'll provide links when the interviews appear. The book can be preordered here and here. Previous Unthologies can be ordered here, and you can read about the Unthology project on the Unthank website.

Goodnight Ophelia by Penelope Farmer

Over on Fictionbitch, there's a guest post by Penelope Farmer, famous for her classic children's novel Charlotte Sometimes. Penelope discusses the forces in present-day publishing squeezing writers like herself with long and respected careers, and the solution her agent found in helping to bring to public attention her sweeping new novel, Goodnight Ophelia.

Reading group: Stoner by John Williams

Another book very much liked and admired by everyone present at the meeting. Suggested by John, this novel, published in America in 1965 to only moderate sales and soon falling out of print, was revived in 2003 and has since become a bestseller across Europe - a surprise bestseller, since it deals with the quietest of subjects, the life of a university teacher of English stoically suffering obstructions in his academic career and an unhappy marriage.

John said that he had found the book as riveting and compulsive in spite of his subject matter as has been generally reported, and we all agreed. Firstly, the prose is so clean and spare and acute, and the insight into protagonist Stoner's stoical personality is deeply moving. John was very impressed by the control of the material and the finely-tuned selection of significant events and characters in the depiction of a whole life, a point later reiterated by Clare. Both John and Hans had been reading it for the second time, and both said that they had enjoyed it even more a second time around, and had got even more out of it. Clare said she would definitely like to read it again, a feeling that I believe was general. John commented that the book is in fact traditional in style - realist, linear in structure and measured in tone - and wondered if its publication in the same era as Jack Kerouac and the Beats had caused it at the time to be dismissed as merely old-fashioned (as well as unexciting). In fact, the book is hugely prescient in its study of the beginnings of the breakdown of the academy, the squeezing by more sinister worldly forces of the intellectual integrity that Stoner personifies, the failure of sincerity, as well as prefiguring the potential pitfalls of political correctness. Stoner's ability to keep steady through vicissitudes both professional and personal his own moral compass and his faith in the life of the mind and of literature, is perhaps heartening in an age when, as Julian Barnes puts it in his own article about the book, the inner space of the individual is assailed and monitored on all sides. In fact, the book has still not taken off in America in the way it has in Europe, and John suggested that, in its controlled, contemplative tone and its insistence on the life of the mind, it is in fact more European in flavour than American.

Significantly, Stoner's origins are simple and rural, embedded in the straightforward and the essential. A farm boy sent to agricultural college in order to learn techniques for the revival of his parents' spent land, he takes a compulsory literature course and falls in love with literature, after which he embarks on a literary academic career. Naive and inexperienced, however, he is soon doomed to marriage to a self-centred and manipulative wife. Potential happiness is constantly thwarted: a close relationship with his only child, a daughter, is spoilt when his wife decides to come between them; the daughter's life is subsequently blighted by the tensions and barrenness of her upbringing, and Stoner's wife engineers an estrangement from their grandson. The one sexually passionate relationship of Stoner's life, with a female fellow academic, founders on the quite evil machinations that already blight his academic life.

We discussed the fact that many people thus see Stoner's life as sad, and the book as a sad book, but none of us present felt it was that simple. We felt there was redemption, indeed something quite uplifting, in the way that through all of these troubles, literature remains a constant consolation to Stoner; as Williams himself said in an interview (quoted in John McGahern's Introduction to the Vintage edition), he has the satisfaction of continuing to do the one thing he loves most, study literature - not in fact caring for the professional advancement his enemies seek for themselves - and he never once loses his moral integrity. Stoner's professional enemy, the disabled Hollis Lomax, uses not only his own disability against Stoner, but a similarly disabled student Charles Walker, sending Walker to attend Stoner's tutorials where he is disruptive and fails to complete the academic tasks. Stoner fails Walker, and Lomax calls for a viva. When in the viva Walker appears to know his subject thoroughly, thus seeming to prove Stoner unjust, Stoner, rather than being sorry that he is apparently proved wrong and is thus falling into Lomax's hands, is glad - for the sake of the student, and for the sake of literature and the intellect; when, later in the interview, further questions show that in fact Walker knows little and, prepared for the viva by Lomax, has been merely parroting him, Stoner is disappointed rather than triumphant. There is redemption too for the reader in the uplifting quality of the prose.

John puzzled a little about the fact that it didn't seem on the surface a psychological novel: it is written in an objective third person, and although we take Stoner's perspective - apart from one or two occasions when we take that of his wife Edith - we do constantly see Stoner, as well as all the other characters, entirely objectively. We don't share his interiority, as Clare pointed out; at the most we are told Stoner's reactions and emotions, but most often often not even that: they are left unstated. We can however always infer them, and their causes, and, as Ann said, this book is a classic and supreme example of 'show not tell.'

There was now a lot of relishing of the events of the novel and discussion of the characters and their motives, situations and emotions. (Some people could see Edith's pampered yet restrictive female upbringing as creating her character, and thus felt some sympathy, but Clare said she was simply 'evil'.) John then wondered about the political correctness of making the disabled Lomax and Walker so evil. I said that I thought that the point was that Lomax and Walker used their disability precisely to manipulate by taking advantage of others', and in particular Stoner's, wariness of acting prejudicially towards them - in other words, it was an abuse of what we now call political correctness. Ann pointed out that Lomax and Walker are direct literary descendants of Shakespeare's Richard III, and that this was a conscious authorial reference: they even look the way the Richard III has frequently been depicted, and indeed Lomax is said by the narration to have the face of a 'matinee idol'. Trevor said he thought that the disability was a specific metaphor for race: Lomax and Walker stood for the black lecturers who he said could not have existed in white American universities at the time the novel is set (Stoner begins university in 1910 and retires in 1956), though no one else could subscribe to this or follow its logic. John pointed out that if Williams had been concerned with race he would have raised issues around the black worker whom Stoner's parents take on when Stoner does not return to the farm, but he does not do so, and Clare objected that black academics would have been outsiders and quite unable to insinuate themselves into positions of power within the white establishment as Lomax and Walker do.

One person, I think Jenny, said that one thing she did find missing in the book was a sense for the reader of the joy of literature that Stoner experiences. When the rest of us thought about it, we agreed (as fiction lovers ourselves, we had taken the joy of literature for granted), and John said that he had been surprised to be not much impressed by the Shakespeare sonnet that gives Stoner his road-to-Damascus revelation about literature: it was a sonnet he hadn't known, and thought it was perhaps not one of the best. Personally, I find poems very hard to read in the middle of novels: I think they require a different kind of reading and it's very hard to adjust to them in middle of the flow of prose, and the blank reaction of everyone else to John's comment perhaps means that others were similarly unable to give it the right attention.

After the meeting, Doug, who had been unable to attend, sent his comments, and he turned out to be one of those people who find the book too sad. Having started out enjoying the book with its initial story of 'a life seemingly preordained becoming suddenly full of unexpected possibilities', Doug began to be 'overwhelmed' by the many setbacks and what he saw as the pessimism of the novel: '...the sadness of the book seeped into me - that's not a good thing.'

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

Writing and gardening

A couple of afternoons late last November I planted these daffodils and a whole load more. Earlier, in October, John had come back from B&Q with a great sackful, which was nice of him, but I have to say I found it pretty daunting (I'm the flower gardener - on the odd occasions when I get time! - and John sticks to pruning trees and spreading compost and things - when he gets time!). According to the gardening books, by late November I was cutting it fine and would miss the window if I didn't soon get out there, so one afternoon I pulled on my coat and hat and gardening gloves and went out with the sack of bulbs and the trowel. It was cold, a dull grey afternoon with the light already fading, and I can tell you I didn't feel like it in the least. And the ground was so hard, and there were so many roots, it was such ruddy physical hard work. Each of the two afternoons I really had to make myself keep going, and not give up before it got too dark to see the ground and I had to anyway.

And now here they are, all over the garden, and it was so worth gritting my teeth those two days and making the effort. And it struck me, when all the flowers started unfolding, how much it was like the experience that writing can sometimes be: the sheer grimness when what you want to say is too complex or subtle to come easily, and the need to keep going to find the way to say it, revise and rewrite, not give up. And then the joy when after all it all comes together and looks as though it sprouted all on its own, and wasn't difficult at all.

Unthology 7

Here's the great cover of the latest Unthology, the series which has been said to be 'quietly becoming a reliable guide to the modern short story' (The Workshy Fop). Edited as usual by Ashley Stokes and Unthank director Robin Jones, Unthology 7, due out this summer, includes my story 'Looking for the Castle' which was runner-up in last year's Short Fiction competition. I love the retro vibe of the cover - which incidentally it shares with the cover of my forthcoming collection, Used to Be (it's a bit of a thing at the moment, isn't it?) - as well as the communication-media theme - and it's a great design.