Author Archives: sfeay

26th March 2018 · 11:04 am

Puritans, wit and magic at the Oxford Literary Festival

I made four visits this week to the Oxford Lit Fest, chairing four remarkable authors. This meant a lot of rushing up and down from Paddington, memorising the route: Slough (where I always think ‘Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough / It isn’t fit for humans now’ – gosh, the power of a great couplet!), Reading, Didcot Parkway, Oxford… and back again.

My first event on Saturday 17 was with Frances Hardinge, about her new YA novel ‘A Skinful of Shadows’ (Macmillan £12.99), set during the Civil War. Accordingly our discussion ranged across Puritans, Oxford when it was King Charles’s HQ, witches, spies, trepanning and other 17th century medical procedures. Children ask such great questions. I enjoyed the the plaintive ‘Do you like animals?’ and whether the homicidal goose in Frances’s debut ‘Fly Away Home’ was ‘based on a real goose’? Quite wonderfully, the answer is yes!

The Spring Equinox was an appropriate time to be talking to Joanne Harris about her eerie  fairytale ‘A Pocketful of Crows’ (Gollancz, £12.99), which sees a nameless nature spirit, the carefree brown girl, fall in love with the young lord in the castle, who names and tames her. He’s a fickle blond who’s about to pay dearly for his dalliance. Joanne talked fascinatingly about the roots of the story: an old almanac she picked up in a second-hand bookshop, and a series of ancient ballads which may well provide the inspiration for more works to come. Perrault and the Brothers Grimm also made an appearance in our chat.

On Wednesday I was intrigued to meet super-bestseller Sophie Kinsella, who arrived at the green room with husband and son (now studying at Oxford) in tow. She confessed to be awed at actually giving a talk in the Sheldonian, being an alumna herself (she read PPE at New College). As anyone who’s read her novels would imagine, it was a laugh-filled evening, with Sophie reading brilliantly from her latest novel ‘Surprise Me’ (Bantam, £18.99). As I pointed out, underneath the jokes her heroines frequently have moments of real anguish and despair – in the latest, protagonist Sylvie struggles to come to terms with the death of her father. We talked about Sophie’s time at Oxford and work as a financial journalist that led directly to the ‘Shopaholic’ series. She was fabulous, witty company.

Finally, what can you say about the extraordinary Ben Okri? Other than he always brings a surprise or two. In the corridor as we waited for the audience to be seated, he asked whether I’d help him read a few passages from ‘The Magic Lamp: Dreams of our age’ (Apollo, £16.99), his new book, a collaboration with artist Rosemary Clunie. We ended up reading alternate paragraphs of several of the riddling tales in the book, which certainly kept me on my toes. For these paintings Clunie seems to have used chance and the subconscious in her mark-making, which suited Okri’s somewhat mystical approach to storytelling perfectly. He led the audience into a discussion of Malevich’s painting the Black Square – he recommends looking at it for 15 and a half (or was it 16 and a half?) minutes for it to reveal its wonders. You don’t really interview Okri, you just go with him wherever he wants to go – he’s a true magician.

 

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1st May 2017 · 8:42 pm

Being Kind in Bhutan

I have a particular fondness for yoga transformation stories so a quick look at Emma Slade’s Set Free: A life-changing journey from banking to Buddhism in Bhutan (Summersdale £9.99) immediately appealed. Slade worked in banking as an analyst, living in Hong Kong, flying around the Far East attending high-powered meetings and offering her expertise. (I didn’t understand this bit.) Then one evening in Jakarta everything changed, when she was held hostage at gunpoint in her hotel room. Once freed by the hotel security, as well as suffering from PTSD, she began to feel overwhelmed with pity about the man who’d menaced her.

Something had to give, and it was the elite lifestyle. I imagined either a wealthy background or a large amount of savings provided a (meditation) cushion, because she discovered yoga via a number of idyllic-sounding international trips. Long and lean, she fitted enviably into the poses, yet after a while the yoga lifestyle didn’t quite do it for her either. She split up with her boyfriend and immediately discovered she was pregnant, went back to banking and finally found what she was looking for in Bhutan, a land she had longed to visit. She began to teach yoga there, then to study Buddhism seriously with a lama she providentially encountered. Now she splits her time between being a nun in Bhutan with being a mum in Kent, albeit one with a shaven head and monastic clothing.

It’s an amazing story and what’s most remarkable about it is the personality of Slade herself. She is an exceptional individual who never seems to think of herself as such. Clearly one of the awkward squad, she writes movingly and unselfconsciously about her personal struggles. She just doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere she goes (while obviously being very high-functioning). That is until she sits down in a Bhutanese shrine room and sinks into deep inner peace. Not that the training sounds anything but gruelling.

Appealingly, she says that Buddhism is ‘Kindhism, really’ and reveals that she just wanted to learn to be a kinder person. Touched by the simplicity of life in rural Bhutan, but appalled by some of its privations, she set up a charity to help special needs children (details at www.openingyourhearttobhutan.com). Funds from the sale of the book go to help them. Beyond that, it’s simply a great read.

 

 

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15th February 2017 · 8:05 pm

My Literary Valentine

In the past for my annual evening of Valentine-inspired readings, I’ve featured Anti-Valentines (enjoyably bilious) and Legendary Lovers (Abelard and Heloise, Ovid, Elizabeth and Leicester). But if I was pushed to explain the theme this year, perhaps I’d have to call it ‘It’s complicated…’ All the speakers showcased work expressing the pains, paradoxes, problems and precarious joys of emotional life.

I began by reading a story, ‘Survivors of Ben’ about a disparate group of women who get together to plot revenge on a perfidious ex. A couple of people said afterwards, ‘That would be a great premise for a film.’ I said before beginning that I hoped nobody would identify too much, either with the shamelessly manipulative ex or the various girlfriends, stuck fast in rage and hurt. But it seemed to strike a chord with some listeners…

Next I invited poet Hannah Stone to read from her first collection lodestone and to preview her follow-up, Missing Miles, out later this year. Her poems match emotional weight with intellectual poise and a certain critical distance; they are finely crafted and nuanced, yet always accessible. She also talked a little about the lively-sounding Leeds poetry scene, and her academic work in the field of eastern Christian spirituality, which informs some of her poetry.

The wonderful Paul Burston was next, reading from his latest novel The Black Path, a crime novel with a female protagonist and thus something of a departure from previous novels such as Shameless and The Gay Divorcee. He spoke about his research about life in the military (part of the novel is set in Camp Bastion), which ended up profoundly shaping the plot. We had a bit of a laugh at the irony of him being nominated for Welsh Book of the Month, given the irreverent treatment of his hometown Bridgend. And the reading, from a section where a married, straight soldier finds a younger squaddie catching his eye… well, let’s just say it’s complicated.

After the break we were lucky to have a brace of Feinsteins; first Adam Feinstein, talking about his recently updated and reissued biography of that most romantic of poets, Pablo Neruda. We like to think we’ve had a few colourful characters in the club over the years, as related in Writers, Lovers, Soldiers, Spies, our recently published ‘History of the Authors Club of London, 1891-2016’. But we have nothing on Neruda, friend of Picasso and Lorca, diplomat, poet, ardent but not always successful lover, man of action and even fugitive, once escaping over the Andes on horseback. Wow! Adam gave a terrific introduction to the man and his work, and read, thrillingly, a poem in the original Spanish.

And on to our headliner, the legendary poet, translator, biographer and novelist Elaine Feinstein, reading from her new book The Clinic, Memory: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet). Had she ever written a true Valentine’s poem, she mused? Her elegant pieces ranged over love, marriage, resignation, wry acceptance and heartbreaking loss, with a lovely poem looking back at her time as an undergraduate in Cambridge with its fondly remembered (raise of the eyebrow) extra-curricular activities. It’s a rarity for this mother and son to read at the same event, so it was a delight to have them both on the bill, reminding us – she a Russian specialist, he a noted Hispanist – how much our literature feeds off other cultures and how diminished we all are when international doors begin to close one by one.

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19th September 2016 · 1:39 pm

Shorelines – Estuary Festival 2016

I spent the weekend at an arts festival in an extraordinary venue – the imposing Tilbury Cruise Terminal on the north bank of the Thames, where the Windrush docked in 1948. Shorelines, the two-day offshoot of Estuary 2016, which runs to 2 October, also had one of the most fun approaches to any festival, with many choosing to arrive via the jaunty little ferry across the Thames from Dartford.

I was going to Rachel Lichtenstein’s book launch on the Saturday afternoon but arrived early to catch some other events and installations. The whole thing was so enjoyable that I returned on the Sunday (the ferry was laid on specially). The first thing most visitors came across (apart from the constantly clanging crossing bell, an art installation much enjoyed by kids) was John Akomfrah’s magisterial 2010 film Mnemosyne, playing in the vast, haunted space of the Old Railway Station. An anonymous figure trudges across a snowy landscape, intercut with scenes of the early experiences of the Windrush generation in Britain, and quotes from Milton, Pound and other poets. It’s hard to convey how powerful – and beautiful – this immensely dignified piece is.

In the Departures Hall, with its brick pillars and vaulted ceilings like an Renaissance exercise in perspective, Rachel chaired a talk about the bizarre-looking sea forts which dot the estuary. On the panel were Dartford artist Stephen Turner, who lived alone on one of the rusting structures for six weeks, Chloe Dewe Mathews, who makes art films about them, and the hugely entertaining Prince Michael of Sealand, with his ruffianly tales of being armed to the teeth, repelling boarders to his family’s pirate radio station. He needs to design himself an official uniform though, with gold braid and a bicorne hat.

Professor Patrick Wright gave a virtuoso talk on the East German writer Uwe Johnson who settled on the Isle of Sheppey and became obsessed with the wreck of the Richard Montgomery, a wartime ship stuffed with bombs which would obliterate Sheerness if it ever went up. The tale of the Estuary is filled with mystics, eccentrics and artists. Then Rachel read from her new book Estuary, many of whose interviewees formed part of the festival programme, and the evening ended with rousing sea shanties to the accompaniment of a glass of Prosecco.

I would have loved hear Syd Moore’s talk on ‘Seawitches and Sirens’, about Estuary myths, but didn’t arrive in time on the Sunday morning. But I did catch Travis Elborough’s talk about the history of the Garden City – Gravesend was apparently once going to be developed into an elegant resort town and he had the slides to prove it. I bumped into Rachel who told me Deborah Levy had cancelled (she had been going to give a talk on To The Lighthouse). Normally this would be a disappointment but my immediate response was, ‘Great, I can go on a boat trip then.’ (Free Thames Clipper tours were a terrific feature of the festival.)

Poet Philip Terry read from his unnervingly stripped down Estuary ‘Quennets’, a conceptual ‘join-the-dots’ form eschewing simile and metaphor, moving on to evoke the Berlin Wall in more of these curious list poems. His upbeat delivery helped a lot. I popped into Anne Lydiat’s barge Rock moored on the lower landing stage to find myself right in the friendly artist’s living room.

An absolute stand-out was the talk by Horatio Clare and Rose George on ‘Inside the Invisible World of Shipping’. Maersk, the company which hosted both of them (separately) on epic journeys, is apparently as big as Microsoft but nowhere near as well known. They read enthrallingly from their books, George about sailing through the piracy zone near Somalia, Clare more poetically about the enigmatic character of the sea. Intriguingly they had very different experiences due to gender; while Clare felt his boat had a professional cameraderie where sexuality was put on hold for the duration, George evidently felt more tension and ambiguity aboard.

Despite the cramped quarters, the loneliness and the boredom, it was clear neither would have missed the experience for the world. ‘If you have a couple of grand to spare and a couple of weeks, go to Panama on a container ship,’ enthused Clare – with George pointing out that the famous canal is just ‘a ditch in the desert’.

Novelists Roma Tearne and Alison MacLeod read brilliantly from their novels, Tearne’s The Last Pier being set in a fictional seaside town, and MacLeod’s Unexploded in wartime Brighton. Tearne’s novel was prompted by the freakish coincidence of finding old photographs of the same family in two junk shops in different towns, and wondering what had happened to them in between. An informative Thames Clipper ride around the Port of Tilbury meant I had to miss Lavinia Greenlaw’s talk, but that’s just as it should be – a good festival has far too many gems for one person to take in. I haven’t even mentioned the various films, artworks, walks, boats and kids’ activities.

A final ferry trip took me back to Dartford where I just had time to pop into the bright scarlet Lightship LV21 temporarily moored there. It’s a fascinating vessel to explore, with a film about Pocahontas (who had links with Dartford) showing in the very bowels.

I only had one criticism of the festival overall – it needs more CAKE. Lots more cake. Just what you want after a heavy afternoon of artistic saturation. At least there was a beer stall…

 

 

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3rd August 2016 · 11:06 am

Dirty, Pretty Girls

Emma Cline’s debut The Girls has created a stir this year, having gained a huge advance, a film option and high-level praise. The reviews, while appreciative, were somewhat muted and having read the book (no, devoured it) I can understand why.

‘She’s a better writer than Donna Tartt,’ a publishing friend said, adding that the story itself only merited a ‘so what’. I feel a tinge of regret that such a high-level literary style is married to such grungy subject matter, even though that very disjoint is no doubt the intended effect.

Cline has transposed the story of the Manson family to a fictional cultish commune, moving the location to the hills outside San Francisco. The Manson figure is the enigmatic (rather too enigmatic – he is underdrawn) Russell, and standing in for Dennis Wilson, the Beach Boy who briefly befriended Manson before backing away, is the unappealing Mitch Lewis, bloated and befuddled.

As the title indicates, Cline’s main focus is ‘the girls’, those endlessly puzzling, grinning, hand-holding murderesses whose breezy court demeanour appalled the world. In the months before going to boarding school, the 14-year-old protagonist, Evie, becomes embroiled in the cult, initially enthralled by Suzanne, one of Russell’s acolytes. Evie’s background is firmly and finely drawn: the wealthy divorced parents with too much going on in their own lives but who genuinely if uselessly seek to provide the unhappy girl with some structure and life skills. It’s a nice touch in a novel filled with unappetising men that her mother’s new boyfriend is a good guy.

The story is told from the perspective of Evie in middle age, now a drifting, unfulfilled person, still wistful about the big dreams that led her to follow the mad hippie guru in the first place. Prurient new acquaintances are slightly disappointed that she is relatively taintless of the group’s despicable crimes, even as they look down on her as a moral pygmy. Not much has changed in the years since the murders – men are still awful. The undercurrent of the book is Evie’s rage at the predicament of teenage girls in a masculine world, even as she acknowledges that being drawn/coerced into sex acts with Russell was not entirely unpleasant.

The trouble with even such slight attempts at mitigation, though, is a basic moral truth. Many, perhaps most teenage girls will suffer like Evie: the slights, the frights, the gropes, the creepy guys, the sad recognition that the world was never made with them in mind. But they don’t go on to commit or condone mass murder.

Also, although standards of hygiene were probably a little different in the Sixties to now, the description of the state of Russell’s ranch is so queasy-making that it gives the odd impression that a greater sensitivity to filth might just have inoculated Evie against the evil she embraces so gleefully.

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5th May 2016 · 6:40 pm

Dread in Venice

I love occult-themed novels and novels set in Venice, so it’s amazing I’ve had Amanda Prantera’s The Cabalist (Bloomsbury) kicking about for so long. Prantera is due a renaissance – it happened to the wonderful Deborah Levy so why not her?

Prantera’s writing has a flavour all its own: intellectual, playful and distinctively creepy with its investigations into the darker sides of the psyche. In The Cabalist, Joseph Kestler, the nature of whose life-obsession is only gradually revealed, has returned to Venice to die. Terminally ill, he is seeking a fit custodian for his magical researches, but also fears a final showdown with his magical nemesis, the horrific Catcher. Can Kestler deposit his manuscript in some archive before the Catcher takes advantage of his weakened state to steal and destroy it?

The Catcher’s room overlooks Kestler’s, so the bedevilled occultist can see how he tempts Venice’s wild cat population with bait on hooks let down from his window.  But what happens to the poor animals in the darkened room Kestler can’t quite see into? Since our glimpses of the Catcher reveal him to be a child, is Joseph mad and deluded, or has a diminutive demon really taken up residence in the palazzo across the canal?

Like the Catcher with his prey, Prantera taunts us for some time with various interpretations of the events, mostly seen through Kestler’s subjectivity. Can he really control animals via whispered cabalistic formulae? Is he mad, or a true magus? Does the Catcher even exist? Prantera wraps up her elegant entertainment with a brilliant flourish which satisfies even as it hints at the unknowable gap between what we think we know and what we only imagine. The arch, Fay Weldon-ish addresses to the reader, drawing attention to narrative tricks, are the only aspects which date the book slightly (it was published in 1985).

The only other novel of Prantera’s I’ve read is Capri File, another dark tale of an outsider struggling to penetrate Italy’s mysteries. An Englishwoman married to an Italian aristocrat strikes up an epistolary friendship with a rare book dealer in London, while confessing to him her suspicions about a local boy whom she thinks has been murdered. And her estranged husband might have something to do with it…

Also on the shelf is the irresistibly titled Conversations With Lord Byron On Perversion, 163 Years After His Lordship’s Death. Missing manuscripts, old libraries, rare books and forbidden knowledge seem to be her themes. She’s well worth a look for connoisseurs of such tales.

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25th April 2016 · 10:12 am

Authors Club Best First Novel Award 2016: The Shortlist

At a lunch last week, members of the Authors Club met to debate the shortlist of this year’s award – always a lively occasion. This year’s discussion was brisk and amicable. Some titles could be discarded quickly, having just squeaked on to the longlist in the first place. Others died harder. Here’s the list, with some commentary to follow.

THE SHORTLIST

Jakob’s Colours by Lindsay Hawdon (Hodder)

The Last Pilot by Benjamin Johncock (Myriad Editions)

The Good Son by Paul McVeigh (Salt)

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley (Bloomsbury Circus)

Belonging by Umi Sinha (Myriad Editions)

Rawblood by Catriona Ward (Weidenfeld)

 

And here’s the longlist:

 

Jakob’s Colours by Lindsay Hawdon (Hodder)

The Loney by Andrew Hurley (John Murray)

The Last Pilot by Benjamin Johncock (Myriad Editions)

The Speaker’s Wife by Quentin Letts (Constable)

The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan (Harvill Secker)

The Good Son by Paul McVeigh (Salt)

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley (Bloomsbury Circus)

The House at the Edge of the World by Julia Rochester (Viking)

The Last Days of Disco by David F Ross (Orenda)

Belonging by Umi Sinha (Myriad Editions)

Mainlander by Will Smith (4th Estate)

Rawblood by Catriona Ward (Weidenfeld)

 

Throughout the year-long judging process, Belonging was the title that most appealed to our members, although on the day there was a dissenting voice (there’s always one!). In one of those weird conjunctions which often occur in prize judging, the hugely impressive The Loney ended up duelling with Rawblood (I liked both). Perhaps the biggest shock was the sudden crash of The Speaker’s Wife, up to then one of the most debated and enjoyed titles. A passionate intervention inspired a sudden reallocation of loyalties. The Good Son and Watchmaker started strong and remained so, garnering a range of positive reports. Jakob’s Colours was the stealth title that crept up and stubbornly refused to be dismissed.

Of the overall submissions, I’d like to highlight two: the exquisite Weathering by Lucy Wood (Bloomsbury), and The Flight of Sarah Battle by Alix Nathan (Parthian). The latter, set in 1790s London and Philadelphia, is that rarity, a historical novel which deals exclusively with those at the lower end of the social order – in this case London radicals ardently seeking political reform, with a particular focus on women throwing off the shackles of conventional marriage, a la Mary Wollstonecraft.

As always it’s a pleasure to read through the submissions and see how many impressive debuts are published each year, although that doesn’t make judging any easier. But our task is complete – it’s over to Anthony Quinn, this year’s guest adjudicator and himself a former BFNA winner, to make the final decision, announced on 7 June.

 

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14th April 2016 · 4:25 pm

A Frankenstein breakfast… and lunch… and tea

Pretty much every month from now on till April 2024 marks the anniversary of something significant in the lives of those hectic, high-achieving younger Romantics. But this summer’s anniversary is special even by their standards. From May to July 1816 Lord Byron took up residence in the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva. On 27 May he met the poet Shelley for the first time, accompanied by Mary Godwin. He had already become intimately acquainted with Mary’s stepsister Claire, who facilitated the introductions.

The Shelley party moved next door and the two poets procured a boat for excursions on the lake (one perilous outing almost caused the death of Shelley; but the Fates dictated he was not to drown until 1822). However, the rain was so incessant and the skies so dark that many days and evenings were spent around the fire at Diodati. The friends talked of galvanism and new scientific theories; then they all tried to spook each other with a ghost story competition. The result, famously, was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Yesterday John Murray’s legendary premises in Albemarle St opened for a one-off exhibition of letters, drafts and original reviews connected with Frankenstein and its slighter sibling, The Vampyre, a novella by Byron’s doctor, Polidori. In addition, a specially commissioned performance, ‘One Evening in Summer’ allowed visitors a peek into the gloomy, candlelit salon of Diodati. Jay Villiers was a saturnine, brooding Byron; Richard Goulding a tense, febrile Shelley; Nicholas Rowe charmed as the poignantly eager Polidori; and the poet Pele Cox, director and deviser of the piece, played a cool and playful Mary.

The celebrations began over croissants and coffee with readings from Frankenstein by Damian Lewis as a savage yet poignantly needy monster, and Helen McCrory as a chilly, intense Mary/Frankenstein. In the audience I spotted some old friends, chatting to Miranda Seymour, author of a wonderful biography of Mary, and talking about Romantic science and ballooning with Richard Holmes, author of Shelley: The Pursuit and The Age of Wonder. It was also good to see Giuseppe Albano, curator at Keats-Shelley House in Rome, who hosted two previous Pele Cox productions, ‘Unbound’ and ‘Lift Me Up, I Am Dying’, the latter an evocation of Keats’s last days, supported by his artist friend Joseph Severn – brilliantly played by Rowe, again.

Cox’s short drama played out four times in all, and I had volunteered to set the scene with an introduction to each performance. I decided to focus on a different aspect of the story each time rather than repeat the same speech, stressing the piecemeal evidence we have for what actually happened on those wild, wet nights, and what each person’s role might have been in the psychodramas that ensued.

Then it was over to the actors. The protagonists sat around a rumpled table in candlelight, mulling over their wine as though they’d long finished dinner but were loth to go to bed. Although I must have heard the piece seven or eight times now, including rehearsals, the text, taken almost entirely from the diaries, letters, prose and poetry of the protagonists, cast its spell every time. Subtle differences and nuances developed as the day went on. ‘Did you like my grape work?’ laughed Jay in the green room.

As first Byron, then Polidori, then Shelley left, Mary remained at the table alone, mourning the loss of everything she loved. That was the reality, she affirmed; all the rest of her life proved to be the dream.

Many thanks to John Murray VII and his wife Virginia for their generous and jolly hospitality during the day, and to the performers for allowing me to be part of this thrilling and memorable experience.

 

 

 

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31st December 2015 · 5:57 pm

Best and Worst of 2015

Festivals:

People have been telling me to go to Port Eliot for ages; this is the year I finally made it. Everyone was right; it is blissful. I was chairing a few events but as ever the best festival moments involved chance encounters with friends and sitting on the grass with pints of beer. The weather was gracious, the setting astonishingly beautiful, the vibe laid back. The writer Rachel Lichtenstein guided me to a marvellous audio event featuring the vanished sounds of London, including the last recorded street cry, a man selling lavender in (if memory serves) Leadenhall Market. Utterly haunting. I also thoroughly enjoyed Will Hodgkinson’s event honouring Sandy Denny and listening to Port Eliot’s noble seigneur, Perry Eliot, describing having bohemian poet Heathcote Williams as a decade-long house-guest. Give him an inch and he’ll take over a wing of your house, apparently. During my event with Owen Sheers, the heavens opened and the sizeable crowd all made a dive for the shelter of the stage, turning it into a cosy literary teepee, brimming with shared warmth. Nothing will ever dislodge the Althorp Literary Festival from my heart but Port Eliot (memorably described to me as ‘Althorp with cigarette burns’) certainly charmed me.

Speaking of Althorp, my ‘I’m not worthy’ moment of the year was interviewing Sir Tom Stoppard on stage. We had had several lengthy phone conversations in advance, after which I usually had to lie down with smelling salts. The theme of the event was the books in his life; it turned out he only really wanted to talk about Le Grand Meaulnes, which made for a tough hour, but he was stunningly charismatic and remarkably self-deprecating.

Events:

My Halloween and Valentine’s evenings are a relatively new tradition in the Authors Club calendar. For Valentine’s I rounded up some poet cronies – Pele Cox, Heather Wells, Max Wallis – for an examination of the dark side of love: obsession, unrequited passion, break-ups, heartbreak, anger and resentment, all delivered with wit and aplomb. Halloween was an all-star line-up with Neil Spring (the TV adaptation of his debut novel The Ghost Hunters has just aired); Jeff Norton, the creator of a hilarious YA zombie series; Syd Moore, illuminating on the topic of Essex witches; Treadwell Bookshop’s Livia Filotico on the anthropological roots of Samhain, and the great Christopher Fowler with not one but three unsettling tales. Plus, a haunted house story from me. There’s nothing like the thrill of spinning a ghostly yarn and watching people blanch.

Worst launch party:

I really should know better, but it looked like fun: a ‘speakeasy’ party to celebrate the launch of a YA novel. Secret location, hidden bar, access via a password – all of that. When I finally found the venue it was littered with mirrors and dress-up props – feather boas, masks – and hashtags were prominently displayed, along with invitations to tweet selfies. What, am I ten years old? (Excited bloggers were doing just that.) The two cocktails on offer were disgusting. When I’d finished coughing I asked what was in them. They both featured VINEGAR. Who on earth thought that was a good idea? Nobody from the publishing company bothered to mingle or say hello; I made my excuses and left.

Best launch party:

The Dennis Severs House in Spitalfields is another place I’ve been meaning to go to for years. Fortunately Brian Selznick helped me out by launching his fantastical graphaganza The Marvels (Scholastic) there. This intricate, gorgeous book is a paean to the last lingering bits of old London. Heartwarming speeches, oodles of champagne, and then we were let loose to explore this magical and eerie time-warp house by candlelight (and meet the house cat, dozing on a four-poster). My companion was Katy Guest, Lit Ed of the Independent on Sunday – we had a thrilling time, but worried a bit about whose job it was to do all the dusting.

Best YA novel:

I was blown away by Philip Reeve’s Railhead (Oxford), an  exhilarating space adventure about Zen, a teenage thief who falls in with a Machiavellian freedom fighter and a resourceful female robot. Reeve creates a world brimming with sensory overload: Zen’s encounter with creatures called ‘hive monks’ beats any Ant’n’Dec Jungle challenge (or vinegar cocktail) for the retch-factor. Archaic remnants of our time float about in the shimmering Datasea; hence space-trains with names such as ‘The Thought Fox’ and ‘Gentlemen Take Polaroids’.

Best Novels:

The ones I like best tend to be uncategorisable. God bless the publishers for bringing us such out-there fare as Scarlett Thomas‘s brilliant The Seed Collectors (Canongate) and Steve Toltz‘s Quicksand (Sceptre). Both are very funny and very peculiar; the latter is likely to be the most hilarious book I’ll ever read about emotional dysfunction, failure and the death wish. Thomas’s sexy-strange horticultural family saga reads like an Iris Murdoch reboot. Oh, and David Mitchell‘s Slade House (Sceptre) is a terrific horror yarn, both genre-playful yet recognisably Mitchellian.

Worst novel:

Bit mean, that. Let’s say, most of a struggle. The accolade goes to Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (Picador), which meant ten days of mostly unrewarding trudge through extremes of abuse counteracted with absurdly gilded privilege. I got so tired of pathetic protagonist Jude St Francis that every time he recommenced self-harming I wanted to beat him repeatedly over the head with a … Oh! I see what she did there. Good trick! Reminiscent of Sade’s Justine in its setting of an innocent cipher against a nightmarish universe of torture and abuse, A Little Life becomes almost comical in its determination to heap degradation on its hero. Just once couldn’t there be a nice priest? I’m glad I made it to the end, if only on the Everest-climbing principle that once you’ve got so far you might as well make it to the summit. Not sure the view was worth it though.

 

 

 

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21st December 2015 · 1:10 pm

Learning to fly

Having heard actor and author William Parker read at the Polari Literary Salon at the South Bank, and chatted with him a couple of times there, I was intrigued enough to take a look at his novel The House Martin. It begins dramatically. We first encounter Ben Teasdale, the protagonist, blind drunk and falling down the steps of Charing Cross station. I liked the voice immediately; not just the immediate yelp of ‘Oh fuckandbolloxandpissandshit!’ but also the waspish note that his ruined suit is from ‘Marks and Spencer’s Italian Collection actually’.

Ben has just been scoping out a gay bar, when a dimly familiar face looms into view. The sight of Val Lorrimer triggers a Madeleine moment for Ben – memories begin to flood back of their time together at a small prep school in Wales. The bulk of the novel relates to his difficult time there. The young boy’s voice allows the adult reader both to inhabit his fears and anxieties and to see beyond them to the real story that Teasdale (the boys are always called by their surnames) is too naive to understand.

His father is a shadowy figure, unwilling or unable to reach out to his son. The boy’s main emotional focus is his glamorous mother, Pamela, whom he both longs for and dreads, for she invariably turns up at the school drunk. A little detail of them both drinking sherry out of teacups before departing for the new term tells us all we need to know about the source of adult Ben’s problems.

Courtlands School is no better and no worse than most – Parker resists any tendency to melodramatise. It’s no Dotheboys Hall. There are some bullies, but some kind boys, some odd masters, some watchful and percipient ones. Teasdale is profoundly ashamed of his bed-wetting (again, we as readers have more compassion for him than he has for himself). He constantly feels the need to protect and cover for his wayward mother, and the pressure builds until he’s forced to take dramatic action.

The other boys are well characterised in all their cheek, cruelty and, sometimes, their surprising compassion. Despite a rather troubling friendship with a male teacher, Teasdale’s closest relationship is with his teddy, Jollo – these scenes are truly heartrending. The birds of the title nest under the eaves of the dormitory and feature in a telling incident, both realistic and highly symbolic. Though the overriding ambience is elegiac and melancholy, some rays of humour peek through the clouds. A lovely read.

The House Martin by William Parker, Eirini Press

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