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.