A Writer's Life

How y'all been?  Busy, I hope.

What have I been doing?  Well, today I sent my new novel out into the world, to find representation and love.  It's called 'Shadow of the Mountain', and it's a contemporary novel about love and faith, about what leads a young man from a small town in Wales to fighting a war in Afghanistan.  I'm incredibly proud of it.  I spent two years writing it, poured everything I had into it - and then some emotional reserves I didn't know I had besides - and the result is something I hope you, and many other future readers, will want to buy in the not too distant future.

It's hard work, writing a novel.  It's not something you can truly do just on weekends, around your other jobs and hobbies and social life.  I mean, I know many do - many even have success doing it his way - but you do have to make sacrifices.  For two years I've barely been out socialising.  I've spent most of my free time bent crooked over a writing pad, putting this feverish dream of a novel that was in my head down onto paper.  Okay, sometimes you go out, because you need a break away, for an evening or so, but in that time you won't escape that novel burning inside you.  If you're anything like me, you'll spend that outside time cornering some unfortunate friend in the corner of a pub and babbling incessantly about plot twists, character development and the themes of your novel.   But when it's all done - when it's out there, letting others read it, and for the first time in months your free of it... that's a great feeling, that rush of freedom bubbling through your veins.  You might even look at all those pages, the multiple drafts on your hard drive, the scribbled notes left behind, made on beer mats, and waiters dockets and scrap paper, and think: never again.  But you're a writer, this is who you are, and so...

I began writing the next novel yesterday, in the pause between finishing Shadow of the Mountain and sending it out.  It's been at the back of my mind for some time now, an idea growing, shaping itself in the subconscious, and now it is a life, ready to be transcribed onto the page.  Who knows what she'll be like in two years.  I can't wait to find out.  Such is the life of a writer.  Please don't think me as mad as this blog post has undoubtedly made me sound.  If I do happen to meet you out in a pub, I promise not to corner you and burble wildly.  Can't promise you won't start, though, because this writing lark: it's infectious.

The Insufferable Gaucho by Roberto Bolaño - a Review

Roberto Bolaño is a novelist whose work I return to frequently.  He has progenitors in Borges, Kafka etc, but feels distinctly separate from them as to become something unique.  Since his untimely death in 2003, Picador in the UK has slowly been releasing everything Bolaño wrote, it seems.  These releases have not come chronologically in Bolaño’s career, but from scattered times in his life, and there does seem to be something apt about that.  Their latest release is actually the last Bolaño worked on in his life – he was prepping it for publication when he died.  Called The Insufferable Gaucho, it is again translated by Chris Andrews into English (he has done sterling work on Bolaño in the past, and does so again here), and is five short stories and two essays.

The stories, for the most part, offer something of worth.

Jim, the opening piece, is brief.  Jim is a Vietnam vet now living a poet’s life in Mexico.  The little Bolaño tells us actually speaks volumes about the psychology of Jim, but ultimately the piece feels under-developed, almost like an offcut from The Savage Detectives.  I suppose this criticism is my way of saying, I liked Jim but wanted to know more about him, and that is a testament to Bolaño’s skill as a writer.

The title piece is much longer.  The Insufferable Gaucho is a retired judge, Manuel Pereda, who leaves the financial ruin of Buenos Aires and attempts to reconnect with the land at his ranch in the rural pampas.  Pereda is an interesting character too, another cool portrait drawn by Bolaño.  He is a man attempting to understand a world that changed inexplicably and suddenly around him.  Bolaño’s prose is taut here, and there are some wonderful lines.   “Police work’s about order, he said, while judges defend justice.”  These ideas of order and justice echo throughout The Insufferable Gaucho and the other stories.

Police Rat was the piece I cared least for.  It tells of a rat, Pepe, who is a police officer in the tunnels – man made and rat made – investigating a series of murders of other rats.  Its conceit – the anthropomorphisation of rats – allowed me no point of entry in which to care for Pepe or the problems of the rat world.  Consequently, Police Rat felt quite disposable.  However, something chimes in this story with something Bolaño was doing in his masterwork, 2666.   Police Rat shows a loner attempting to solve a series of murders – and a series of murders haunt the central section of 2666 in ‘The Part About the Crimes’.  I wondered later if Police Rat had been a way for Bolaño to discuss the Ciudad Juárez murders indirectly, metaphorically, or at least with a little distance, for they were clearly something that troubled his subconscious. 

Alvaro Rousselot’s Journey, the third story, tells of an Argentinian writer who travels to France to locate a filmmaker who has turned his novels into films without credit.  His journey – as all literary journeys tend to – reveal to Alvaro more about himself than he expected and alter his perspective on the world.  This is a somewhat tired formula, but Bolaño at least finds an interesting avenue into it, and has fun along the way.

Two Catholic Tales, the final story here is, as its title suggests, two stories: The Vocation and Chance.  The presentation of these stories is the most unconventional.  They seem to be one long paragraph, but are separated by numbers.  The contents 1. The Vocation and a young man is considering the priesthood, and as he waits for his calling, discusses films and muses on the martyrdom of St. Vincent and 2. Chance, in which an inmate in a mental hospital remembers his youth and makes an escape into a madder city.  This literary diptych contains more than it initially seems too, and I feel requires a second reading to be properly considered.

Finally, the two essays.  The first, Literature + Illness = Illness, seems to offer its conclusion in its title, and Bolaño goes out his way to prove it, discussing his own illness (he of course knew he was dying), French poetry (particularly Mallarmé’s "Brise Marine" and Baudelaire’s “The Voyage,”), and the responsibility of art.  Its tone is peripatetic, and perhaps not always clear, but there are nuggets of gold here.  If you have read any of Between Parentheses, a previous collection of essays from Bolaño, you know what to expect.

The same is true of the final essay, The Myths of Cthulhu.  This time Bolaño discusses Latin American fiction – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Octavio Paz, and Mario Vargas Llosa amongst them – and though this essay feels underdeveloped beside Literature + Illness = Illness, it is not wholly without merit, and when Bolaño is firing on all cylinders, and he does a few times here, he is exceptional.

The Insufferable Gaucho is, then, an interesting addition to Bolaño’s collection of works in English.  It is not a starting point for the new reader, but to those already familiar with his body of work.  They are written with his distinctive voice, with his passion and humour.  They are, as all his works are, full of heart, and written in the face of tragedy.  Always worthwhile.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt - a Review

Donna Tartt announced herself brightly in the literary firmament with her debut novel, The Secret History, in 1992.  That novel bought oodles of critical acclaim and enormous pressure for her to produce a follow-up.  What followed seemed a Salinger-like silence, until, finally, a decade later, she produced The Little Friend.  That novel again bought much critical acclaim to her door, and unfortunately for her fans, another decade plus silence, eleven years this time.  The Goldfinch, the novel born from that silence, was published in 2013, and rather unsurprisingly now, to more rapturous critical acclaim.  When the critics of the future come back to look at late 20^th century, early 21^st century fiction, it is certain Tartt’s name will figure highly in their estimation.

Tartt’s fiction has always been concerned with young people coming of age, of their exploration of sexuality and identity, from the six students in The Secret History, to Harriet in the The Little Friend.  The protagonist here, Theo Decker, is cut of similar cloth.  The novel opens with a bang, metaphorical and physical – Theo loses his mother in a terrorist action committed in an art gallery.  Waking in the rubble in the aftermath, a dying man seems to exhort him to rescue a small painting by the Dutch artist, Carel Fabritius (The Goldfinch of the title), and gives him a ring.   These actions send Theo on a quest, an action he is willing to undertake because, before the explosion, he had seen a red-haired girl, Pippa, with the old man, and wanted to meet her.  This quest brings him into rich Manhattan society, friendship with an elderly furniture restorer, Hobie, before seeing him whisked away by his absent father to Las Vegas where he befriends a Russian émigré and school boy, Boris.  As his life begins to spiral out of control – drink, drugs, art fraud – he retains hold of the one permanent thing in his life – the Fabritius painting stolen on the night of the bombing and his love for the little red-haired girl he hopes one day might love him back.

It becomes obvious, in hindsight, that Theo Decker’s life became frozen in the glare of the bomb blast.  Though he ages – the novel covers at least a decade – he seems to lose nothing of the child-like possessiveness that governed him as a child.  He cannot let go.  He will not relinquish the painting, though he knows the authorities are looking for it.  He will not let another into his heart until Pippa loves him (with the exception of Boris, who steals a place in his heart, and proves again how strong Tartt is on platonic relationships between same-sex couples).  He will not give up his criminal actions until he feels he has repaid the massive debt he owes Hobie for his protection, education and friendship.  And, ultimately, he will not give up his grief, and refuses to dream of his mother until, finally, he has let go of all those other things, whilst in Amsterdam (seen as the novel opens) as he tells us in the opening line, “While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years.”

This telling of the reader of the novels solution at its opening is not new to Tartt.  She did the same thing in The Secret History, leading to one critic labelling that novel “a murder mystery in reverse.”  It is only through reading of the novel that the reader understands why these events have occurred.  It was true of the murder committed by the six friends in The Secret History, and it is true of Theo Decker dreaming of his mother here.

As I read The Goldfinch a number of points of comparison came to mind.  The most frequent mental image that chimed was that of Great Expectations.  Here is Theo, taken from his family like Pip in that novel, and granted a somewhat mysterious benefactor.  There is a girl – Pippa here, Estella there – with whom the narrator is captivated but who remains cold towards him.  It is testament to Tartt’s skill as a novelist that these mental echoes at no point destabilise her narrative.

And what skill!  She proves equally skilled at providing lessons on how to spot fake antiques (without slipping into authorial teacher mode), and at detailing the friendships between men, as she is in showing what it is like to be off your head on prescription medication.  Alongside musings on Russian masters of art, there are thriller elements that would not be out of place in the latest commercial action film.  Then there is the core of the novel, the friendship between Theo and Boris, a comic double act that might surely take its place in the pantheon of the great literary double acts, Vladimir and Estragon or Mason and Dixon, crossed with a touch of Laurel and Hardy.  Their interactions are always the highlight of the novel.  In lesser hands these tonal shifts – comic to thriller, romantic to nightmarish - might have created an off-kilter narrative, but Tartt retains great control of her material, and even at its weakest moments, The Goldfinch sings beautifully.  We just have to hope we readers don’t have to wait until 2025 for her next novel!

The Good, The Bad and the Multiplex by Mark Kermode, a review

I can still remember the moment I fell in love with this thing called cinema.  Doctor Alan Grant, striding into a field, and looking out over the plains and seeing dinosaurs.  Living, breathing up-there-in-all-their-glory dino-fricking-saurs!  I didn’t know how Steven Spielberg had done it – but that summer in 1993, I sat entranced in my local flea-pit cinema (one screen, sticky floor, but with ushers, projectionists, chocolate raisins at the food counter; a cinema that didn’t seem to have changed since the 1930s and one I hoped never would: That old cinema is a Wetherspoons pub now.)  So anyway, Jurassic Park was the first time I fell in love with the medium.  I’d seen films before (Timothy Dalton as Bond in The Living Daylights in 1987, in the same flea-pit cinema… how I miss her!  I’d been terrified by Spock as they Searched for him in 1984 and I was 5), seen many more on home video (I cherished those days when Mum used to bring home something from the video shop (remember them?), be it the latest Karate Kid, or Bond, or even some dodgy ninja knock-off), but Jurassic Park was the moment I fell in love.  It wasn’t just the film, but the experience, my first time alone, in the dark, facing my fears.

I go to the cinema a lot less these days.  It’s overpriced for the experience you get, an experience Mark Kermode so rightly rails against in his frothy, insightful and often very funny book, ‘The Good, The Bad and the Multiplex: What’s Wrong with Modern Movies?’, an experience not worth paying for.  I’ve had my fair share of digital freezes (in a medium that supposedly cannot freeze), badly projected films (I remember watching Johnny Depp in something once and half his face was missing, spilling out over the ceiling!), and in cinemas where the staff don’t care that its patrons are being short-changed by all their poor work.  I complained once that a film was badly projected, and received a risible snort from a manager, a comment that it was being shown how it should and reluctant offer of my money back.  As Kermode shows in his book, such experiences are now common place in the British multiplex, a place in which anybody with knowledge of cinema is considered a snob.

If you love cinema as deeply and widely as I do (you’ve no problem with subtitles, and have seen rather more subtitled cinema than Hollywood cinema in an actual cinema in the last decade) then many of the arguments Kermode projects will be nothing new.  But I suspect his book isn’t aimed at the true cineaste, but rather at the average punter who doesn’t know the difference between Antonioni and Tom Arnold.  His blokey, jokey banter that fills most of this book, before he launches into his explanation of what is wrong with modern movies, is clearly aimed at the average punter.  And if his book takes at least one person to a cinema showing a subtitled movie, or makes them track down Spoorloos over The Vanishing, or Låt den rätte komma in over Let Me In, then he’s doing his job.

The Good, The Bad and the Multiplex is an admirable book, though sometimes I found the banter that fills its pages less funny than Kermode seems to think it is.  The arguments he makes could easily have been told over a fifty pages – but I think presented so, they’d have come across as a lecture and he’d have reached less people.  Its current format, jokes and all, make his book accessible.  This is the intelligent article remade for stupid people, just like those intelligent art-house films are remade for those who can’t be bothered concentrating.  This isn’t a criticism as such: you have to reach the people somehow.  It just means it’s not quite the book for me – though he did make me laugh a few times – and didn’t say anything I hadn’t already thought.  But I read a lot about film, I think a lot about film.  And I agree that Saw 3D is rubbish.  So I’m already a convert to the message Kermode is preaching.

There is a lot that is currently wrong with the British cinema experience – the solutions Mark Kermode presents here might go some way to correcting it.  If only those with money would listen to the people who pay for their product, rather than to the money kerchinging in their coffers.

Man Booker Prize Shortlist Predictions

The longlist for the 2013 Man Booker Prize seems a diverse one.  There are works that range from 100 pages to 1,000.  They are a set of works that cross continents and set in different historical periods, from the dark ages to present day.  They are works that deal with the Iraq conflict, the fallout from the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, the enclosure of British land, a pioneering flight and the effects of the 2008 economic crash on two very different countries.

Yet despite such differences, there are common links between some of the works.  Two novels deal with the economic crash (The Spinning Heart, Five Star Billionaire).  Two novels mention Virginia Woolf (Unexploded, in which Woolf appears).  A number of the novels deal with foreigners adrift in the United States (We Need New Names, The Lowland, TransAtlantic).  There are novels that deal with motherhood (The Testament of Mary and The Lowland) and novels that deal with children growing up (We Need New Names, The Marrying of Chani Kaufman, Almost English, A Tale for the Time Being).  Yet more deal with how the past is more relevant than we might think and remain thrilling for their historic setting (The Luminaries, Harvest, The Testament of Mary).  All of them remain uniformly excellent.

I’ve read all 13 longlisted novels and spent some time considering what might make the shortlist.  There were some novels that leapt out immediately as potential shortlist candidates, others accrued their place slowly in my mind but now seem impossible not to shortlist.  If I’m honest, there are 8 novels battling it out for those coveted six spots in my mind.  But I have to choose six.

So here is my final six:

Donal Ryan - The Spinning Heart / Colm Toibin - The Testament of Mary / Jim Crace - Harvest

Colum McCann - Transatlantic / Tash Aw - Five Star Billionaire / Eleanor Catton - The Luminaries

Even when I scan my final choice, I think: perhaps there is too much history in there, and they’ll choose We Need New Names over The Luminaries say, or The Lowland over The Testament of Mary.  It’s what makes the Man Booker so interesting, and so difficult to call.  Those are my six up there, though, and I’m sticking with them.

It is worth stating that I have felt that this year’s longlist has been great examples of the novel, with no novel making me doubt its place.  Chair Robert Macfarlane, and Judges Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Stuart Kelly, Natalie Haynes and Martha Kearney have chosen a fascinating range of novels, and I suspect their selection process for the final six has been heated and hotly contested.

The shortlist is announced tomorrow (10 September) and the winner announced on the 15 October.