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The Writ of Years

December 31, 2013 /

“The burst of elated inspiration stretched on improbably, unbearably, as I wrote and wrote and wrote. The passion of it was a wave of the kind that drags swimmers out to sea to drown, helpless and alone.”

I came across this beautiful story by Brit Mandelo on tor.com this morning. ‘The Writ of Years’ is a dark fairy tale about the madness of art, about the foul temptations of plagiarism, about the curse of addiction. For me, it also has a distinctly end-of-year feel, so it seemed appropriate to share my pleasure in it here today.

If I had to name the essence of 2013, I’d say it’s been a year of transition, writing-wise. I spent much of December doing final edits, firstly on a new story that should be appearing sometime next year (more details as soon as I have them) and then on The Race. It was surprising and a little unnerving to me, just how much I found that needed doing, an ample demonstration if any were needed of the truth encapsulated in that da Vinci quote about art never being finished, only abandoned.

Well, I can report that I’ve abandoned The Race, hopefully for the final time. Looking at it now, more than a year after completing what I thought was the final draft, what I see is a book by a writer trying to work out what kind of book she wants to write next, where she wants to go with her writing generally. The stories in Stardust read like the end of a particular trajectory. The Race is the beginning of a new one. Allied, of course, but still new. My writing at the moment feels like a sounding-out of that territory, which is probably why progress over the past few months has seemed slow to me.

Today though I wrote a good big chunk of the new thing, and suddenly it begins to feel as if I might actually have an idea of where the book is going now.

Working title: The Colours of Evening. This may change, but it’s the title of the never-completed story this new one grew out of, so for the moment at least it feels right.

Happy New Year, everyone. Here’s to it.

Well, that was weird

December 26, 2013 /

I came here to post something about last night’s Doctor Who, only to find that my previous post had disappeared. Entirely. It wasn’t in the trash, it was nowhere. It was as if it had been sucked through that crack in the known universe people keep spreading rumours about.

I don’t know what I can read into this, other than that it might be some kind of retribution for the fact that I didn’t much care for The Time of the Doctor. For having the sneaking feeling, in fact, that it was a lazy piece of fan-service, something that was cobbled together in a hurry while everyone was still high on the success of the 50th anniversary episode The Day of the Doctor.

Yes, Doctor Who is a show that has come to be defined by its mythos and its season-long story arcs, and as a fan of intricate narratives I don’t have a problem with that, at all. But when an individual episode has no intrinsic worth as story, indeed when it makes no sense as story when taken in isolation, then what we have is lazy, lazy writing, and that’s what we were dished up with yesterday. The only ‘present tense’ narrative strand in The Time of the Doctor had to do with time travel as a novel method for getting your turkey roasted and I know it’s Christmas, but for goodness’ sake, surely there are better story ideas out there?

A sorry end to Matt Smith’s term as the Doctor, in my opinion, and further proof if any were needed that the programme is badly in need of some new blood in the showrunning department.

Still, all was not lost. Mark Gatiss’s documentary on M. R. James was a delight, as was his adaptation of ‘The Tractate Middoth’ immediately before it. A simple story, but effective, and beautifully retold. Perhaps Moffat needs to reacquaint himself with the masters…

I’ve now reinstated my post on what I read in 2013 – let’s hope it stays in place this time. I’ll be watching with interest to see if anything odd happens with this one.

In the meantime, I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas. Heartfelt thanks and good wishes to all those who stop by this blog every once in a while, and looking forward to more musings, rants and meanderings in the coming twelve months.

What I read in 2013

December 26, 2013 /

I read 42 novels this year – not so bad, given that I now get through books at roughly half the speed I did when I was a student, and that two of those novels (Richard House’s The Kills and Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries) were each around the 1,000pp mark. I still find myself vaguely dissatisfied though, not at the quantity but the quality. Looking down that list, I can’t help feeling – as I do most years, actually – that the books I picked out to read were mainly the wrong stuff. There’s no cohesion to my choices, no structure, no theme. It’s more of a random scattering, with a few stunning hits (the Catton and the House, both masterpieces, Nicholas Royle’s beautifully conciseFirst Novel, Helen Marshall’s deliciously accomplished debut collection Hair Side, Flesh Side, Caitlin R. Kiernan’s sublime The Drowning Girl, also a masterpiece) but with a far larger number of so-whats and not-quite-theres.

One of the most rewarding reading experiences of my life was the six months I spent immersed in the work of Vladimir Nabokov in preparation for writing my postgraduate thesis. I started by reading his complete fiction – twice – and, once I’d done that, I went on to assimilate the majority of the critical commentary that was then (1989) available on it. I found this period of intensive concentration on one writer profoundly fulfilling,  not just because Nabokov is arguably the most achieved writer – certainly the most achieved stylist – of the 20th century, but equally because I gained a sense that I knew this writer’s work, properly and completely, in a way that allowed me a genuine insight into the story arc, if you like, of Nabokov’s career.

I was reminded of just how great this feels when I had a Roberto Bolano binge a couple of years ago, reading 2666, The Savage Detectives, Last Evenings on Earth, Amulet, Nazi Literature of the Americas and Distant Star all within a period of a few months. What you get when you undertake a project like that is a sense of being grounded and propelled at the same time, the feeling of constructing an edifice against which you might pit yourself.

That’s what I’ve been missing this year, and that’s what I know I need more of. I’m making an early New Year’s resolution to read in a more considered way next year, to fill in some gaps in my back catalogue, as it were (Lanark, Dhalgren), to read fewer writers, but in greater depth.

I know I’ll benefit from this, and that my writing will, too.

It’s been another weird year for SFF. There have been some highly promising debuts (Matt Hill’s The Folded Man, for example, really won my heart with its honesty and vigour, its flawlessly evoked sense of place) and new works from younger writers (James Smythe’s The Machine is a fine piece of work and solidly confirms Smythe’s status as a writer to watch) but aside from Chris Priest’s The Adjacent, where are the big beasts? As Adam Roberts notes in his insightful and fascinatingly interrogative review for Strange Horizons, Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam is just too frustratingly, well, insane in its future-world sections to be wholeheartedly recommendable. I suppose what I’m yearning for is for someone to write a beautiful whopping genius monster of a novel like The Luminaries, but with a driving speculative element at its core.

I’ll keep searching, and hoping. In the meantime, just to add that there are only four weeks left now for all you BSFA members out there to place your nominations for the BSFA Awards. The list of noms so far is here – but do remember that the appearance of a title on this list does not by any means guarantee that it is ‘safe’. The shortlist is decided on the number of nominations per item, so whether you see your favourite here or not, get nominating! You can nominate as many works per category as you like.

And while we’re on the subject, I would like to mention two ‘late tackles’ on my 2013 reading slate, both of which have raised my spirits and my optimism about SF considerably. The first is Kameron Hurley’s novel God’s War. This was originally published in the States two years ago, but its UK release by Del Rey earlier this year makes it eligible for BSFA nomination right now. I was aware of the great press this book received when it first came out, but I somehow never got round to reading it. I was therefore very pleased to receive a free copy in my goodie bag at WFC in October. I started reading it at the back end of last week and was impressed from the very first page. I adore the writing – that uniquely satisfying combination of sharp-edged and lyrical – and both the world and the characters Hurley creates have my intellect and my emotions fizzing with pleasure. What a wonderful book! This is exactly the kind of SF I want to be reading – humming with ideas yet character-led – and if the rest of God’s War is as good as what I’ve read so far I shall be devouring the rest of the series asap and drawing copious inspiration from it as I go. Nominate! Nominate now!

My second lucky discovery is in the short fiction category, China Mieville’s ‘The 9th Technique’, which he wrote as an ‘apology’ for not being able to MC World Fantasy as he’d been scheduled to do, and made available to the WFC membership in the form of a chapbook.

I read this story just an hour or two ago, and it is stunning. I’m fascinated to note a certain shift in Mieville’s use of language, away from the baroque word-building we are used to from him and towards a slightly more pared-down, harder-edged style, which I like enormously. There’s a rigour to this story, an edge of bleakness that suits the subject matter (weird – very weird – goings-on in the temporal and moral hinterland of the Iraq war) perfectly. It’s impossible not to start wondering if Mieville might perhaps be planning something of this kind at novel-length..? All I know is that if he were, I’d be standing in line to read it.

For now, I just hope that this story will soon be made available to a wider readership, because this is the kind of work that reminds us what great SF writing is all about – that drive, that assured technique, that punch-to-the-gut excitement – and it deserves to be read.

“When I like a story it’s because it does something.”

December 11, 2013 /

The most inspiring thing I’ve read this week is Lisa Allardice’s interview with Alice Munro for The Guardian. I remember the day Munro won the Nobel because I was just able to catch the live result before we went to collect John Clute from the station – he was here for lunch. As a Canadian, John was delighted by the news, and we spent some time discussing exactly what it is that makes Munro so special.

For me, it’s the deftness of her sentences (never showy but always rich, always perfectly finished) combined with the hyper-reality that characterises all of her stories. It would be wrong to call Munro a magical realist – her use of the fantastic is not so overt as that – but there is something about the world she creates, nonetheless, a particular way of seeing that seems tinged with a constant awareness of the un-usual.

She writes about ordinary people, people who are often trapped within lives that seem too small for them, yet they are made extraordinary by their gifts of perception.

It seems clear that in this respect at least all of Munro’s characters are versions of Munro herself. Reading about her life difficulties filled me with that odd mixture of anger and gladness that always overcomes me when I hear about writers – often women, but not always – who have faced a disproportionate struggle to be heard.

With hindsight, it seems inevitable that a talent such as Munro’s would be recognised. But for her, at the time, her isolation was a source of genuine despair.

Reading about her writing process – “…everything by hand just the way it comes to me and then I rearrange, and rewrite and rewrite. It might take me six months at least. It might even take me a year. I will be going over it and over it.” – is just massively helpful and inspiring. To know that the apparent spontaneity of these perfect stories, their intrinsic rightness, is something that even Munro has to pick away at – I find that greatly comforting.

I’m still working on the final edits for The Race. The edits Ian suggested are very light indeed, so it’s not his fault – but as usual I’m finding dozens and dozens of things I want to change, and so the process is taking longer than I thought it would. I’m seeing this less as a problem and more as a god-sent opportunity to get the manuscript exactly how I want it.

It’s fascinating, reading the book again after almost seven months of not looking at it at all. I hope it’s now better than it was when I sent it in. And the first responses have been so generous, which is hugely encouraging.

Meanwhile, work on the new book continues. Chris finally let me read the first section of his new one earlier in the week. I think it might be the most exciting thing he’s yet written.

Not helped by having two cats more or less permanently in residence on top of his printer.

 

E.J. Swift on The Race

December 3, 2013 /

I’m working on the final edits for The Race at the moment, and so it’s particularly exciting to be able to post a first reaction to the book from E. J. Swift, who read it in manuscript recently and delivered her generous and positive verdict at her blog:

“The directness of the writing cuts right to the emotional heart of the characters, but it is also the details, the sensory descriptions, which linger. Allan’s work always reveals a strong affinity with the natural world, and in this case the novel is a damning indictment of the environmental consequences of fracking on the Sussex countryside; an engagement with place at once lyrical and political. Evocative and compelling, this is an irresistible read.”

At this stage, with some months still to go before the novel is published, and with only a handful of people having read it, it’s really very gratifying and cheering to get this kind of reaction, and I’m looking forward to posting more snippets of news about The Race in the near future.

Joel Lane

November 26, 2013 /

I had a bad shock earlier this evening, when I learned that Joel Lane has died.

Joel was just fifty years old. He never enjoyed the best of health, and he’d been under some strain recently because his mother has not been well, but his tragically early death is something no one could have anticipated, never in a million years. It’s truly awful. I can still scarcely take in the news.

Joel’s name first became known to me in the late 1990s, when I started reading The Third Alternative and many of the Year’s Best fantasy and horror anthologies. Joel rapidly became one of my favourite new writers. I identified with his style at once – his anxiety at being, ingrained awareness of the numinous and the rock solid sense of place that was always a prominent characteristic of his work sang out to me, the weird, dark music of a comrade in arms, and I began to actively seek out his stories.

I read his first novel, From Blue to Black, with grateful astonishment as one of the finest pieces of writing about music I have ever encountered. How this work is not better known is an absolute mystery to me, and I know was a source of disappointment to him. The novel that followed it, The Blue Mask, was very nearly as fine. I read him with delighted envy as a core inspiration, recognising him as someone I wanted to emulate.

I first became acquainted with Joel personally at a book launch in 2007, and was thrilled when he later invited me to submit a story to the anthology he edited with Allyson Bird, Never Again, stories against tyranny in aid of the Sophie Lancaster Foundation. I was delighted to meet up with Joel again properly at the Nottingham FantasyCon in 2010, where the book was launched. We corresponded regularly after that, and met up many times at various events. I found him to be the most gentle of men, a self deprecating, wryly humorous presence. He always had a story to tell, he was always generous with his time, and with himself. I remember we especially enjoyed sitting on the ghost story panel together at last year’s FantasyCon – two Aickmanites against the Jamesians, we loved every moment.

One of the highlights of this year’s World Fantasy Convention was hearing Joel’s name read out as winner of the World Fantasy Award for his most recent collection, Where Furnaces Burn. Not only is it a beautiful collection, but the award was so well deserved, so much the right choice, it was a fitting moment. Sadly Joel could not be there to collect the award as his mother was in hospital, but I wrote to him about it afterwards and I know he was thrilled.

Joel and I last exchanged emails just a few days ago. I was eager to know when the second part of the extended essay he was writing on Robert Aickman was going to be ready for me to read – Joel’s knowledge of and passion for weird fiction was incredibly extensive, and more insightful than I can easily describe. I loved his non-fiction almost as much as I loved his fiction, and I was looking forward to that essay with genuine excitement. He told me he’d been sleeping better, and presented me with a short and gritty poem he’d recently written on the passing of Margaret Thatcher. He also said something that now seems eerily prescient, and I’m sure he wouldn’t mind me sharing these words, which sum up Joel and his attitude to life with a wonderful perfection:

“A crude, dogmatic pessimism has now become so prevalent on the internet that I’m becoming more focused on a sort of critical optimism, a sense of ‘seize the day before ithe night comes back’, that I think has always been my core attitude, and that’s helping me a lot at the moment.”

A treasured friend and colleague, a beautiful writer, a special person. I am already missing him very much.

EDIT 30/11/13: read heartfelt tributes to Joel from Simon Bestwick, Lynda Rucker, and Conrad Williams, among many others.

Fifty years. Who’d have thought it?

November 24, 2013 /

Yes, it’s true. If I were writing a story about the Doctor I’d make him more of an explorer and less (much less) of a superhero. I’d forbid him from towing planets with the TARDIS, or penetrating the lower atmosphere on a motorbike (whose idea was that, exactly??) I’d swap fantasy for proper science fiction. I’d bring back the cliffhanger, or at the very least introduce ninety-minute episodes that could explore deeper concepts on a broader canvas and thus removing the irksome necessity of having everything resolved (too often preposterously) in the last five minutes. I would love to write a companion with a life of his or her own, desires and ambitions that did not centre directly around the Doctor, decisions to make other than which bloke they most wanted to spend their life with.

But isn’t that the glory of Doctor Who? That you can imagine, or re-imagine it for yourself? That the nature of the story actively invites you to do so? That the concept at the story’s core is that simple and that personal? A traveller in space and time, the places he goes and the people he meets and the things that happen. There’s nothing new in this and that’s its beauty. The idea of the Eternal Wanderer is as old as story. What makes it new is – you.

When I came upstairs yesterday evening after watching The Day of the Doctor, I found an email from my dad, asking if I was still hiding behind the sofa after all these years and telling me he was thinking of me. And to think that millions of similar emails, messages, tweets were being exchanged by millions of others in that same moment, all over the world – that alone would make the show something special.

I started watching Doctor Who when I was six years old. I was passionately committed to it from that first unbelieving encounter right up until I left home for university. I have never entirely shaken off the secret belief that the programme was created especially for me. There are good episodes and there are bad episodes (oh, and then some), but it was Doctor Who that first opened my imagination to the realms of the fantastic and for this reason alone I could never not love it.

I thought The Day of the Doctor was a true classic, a worthy and joyful celebration of these past fifty years in the TARDIS. It was funny, moving, knowing, it looked gorgeous, and most importantly of all it was beautifully scripted. (Any script for Doctor Who that gets the Priestian seal of approval – ‘Yes, there were some bits that were really quite good’ – can’t be half bad!) I thought John Hurt was marvellous, a Doctor to die for, and it’s just a pity he can’t stay on for a season or two, or ten…

Tom Baker’s cameo brought real tears to my eyes. The quiet dignity of it, the very physical reminder of thirty years passing, that this is what time does, to all of us.

Good job.

It’s been a wonderful weekend of celebration, which deserves a huge and heartfelt thanks to everyone involved, past, present and future. As our own contribution, here’s a little missing fragment of Whovian history, a hint at what might have been, what might still be..? Yes, those two scripts still exist, I’ve read them, they’re good. Imagine on that.

 

 

Nina’s Crime Blog #5

November 19, 2013 /

The Lighthouse by P.D. James

I’ve just returned from a long weekend in Cornwall, visiting my mother and doing the kind of things I always look forward to during those visits – touring around the Lizard and Penwith peninsulas, checking out the latest art exhibitions. We were lucky with the weather and it was an invigorating, inspiring few days all round. Something else I look forward to when I visit Cornwall is the train journey. It takes eight hours, pretty much, door to door, which makes it a bit of a long haul. The upside, of course, is that there’s nothing else to do during those hours but read.

I took two new SF novels with me. Both have been enthusiastically received, both look set to feature on awards shortlists in 2014. I found myself crushingly disappointed with both. I’ll have more specific things to say around Clarke time, no doubt, but for now I’ll summarize by saying that I found the first of these novels to be an accomplished and committed piece of work but not nearly as original as it thought it was. In the end, for me, it proved too shallow for its subject matter, all shiny surfaces and no characterisation. The second, whilst straining hard for Le Guinian reach and strength of purpose, struggled to come even close to Le Guin’s achievement, stylistically or intellectually. Reading it felt to me like being trapped inside one of the more interminable episodes of original Star Trek. One long infodump, once again zero characterisation, and tedious with it.

Have we lived and fought in vain, I grumbled to myself as The Cornishman finally pulled into Truro station. But the horror was not over. I looked forward to selecting something more inspiring to read from my mother’s shelves, but here also I would find myself thwarted. My mother is an eclectic and avid reader, but unlike me she is a convert to the Kindle. As she now does most of her novel-reading onscreen, the space given over to fiction on her bookshelves is decreasing. I couldn’t face Anita Brookner and I’d read all the E. M. Forsters, and so it was that I ended up choosing a 2005 novel by P. D. James, The Lighthouse. I could cover it for my crime blog, I thought, and by happy coincidence it turned out to be set in Cornwall.

I read a lot of P. D. James in my twenties, and enjoyed her a lot. In my memory, those novels of hers I liked best – Devices and Desires, The Black Tower, A Taste for Death, The Skull Beneath the Skin and especially the non-series Innocent Blood – had been meaty psychological studies tending towards weirdness and satisfyingly heavy on sense of place. I was curious to see how I might find her now. It had been well over a decade since I last picked up a PDJ, and I read differently now in any case. Everything I read, I read as a writer. I am looking for different things. I am definitely more critical, less easily satisfied.

The God of Bad Books clearly had it in for me this weekend, because reading The Lighthouse was not an edifying experience. The story, as in all country house murder mysteries and their many variants, is a simple one and none the worse for that: a famous writer, Nathan Oliver, goes missing on the exclusive Cornish island-retreat of Combe. Shortly afterwards he is found dead. Is it suicide, or murder? Inspector Adam Dalgleish and two more junior officers are summoned to find out. The small cast of suspects are introduced and questioned in the traditional way. More trouble ensues as old eminities are uncovered and the case is further complicated when Dalgleish suddenly goes down with SARS. This plot development in particular comes across as contrived and banal – three guesses which ‘superbug’ was hitting the headlines when James was writing this one. Rifling current news stories is always a risk for a writer – one wrong move and your book will appear catastrophically dated almost before it is published. P. D. James’s SARS subplot falls harder than a lead balloon. Sadly this is not the only problem with this novel.

As I recall it was PDJ herself who compared the country house murder mystery with the poetic form of the sonnet: far from being restrictive, having to adhere to a recognised plot structure is actually freeing and no bar to originality, no matter how many other writers have been there before you. I have no problem with that idea – you only have to consider the infinite possible variations of a 12-bar blues to see the truth in it.

But when a writer gets lazy, problems begin. James does not so much create a variation upon a theme as present us with another tired repetition of that theme,  using masses of extraneous detail as a mask for clunky writing. We go along with it because we love the idea of the story and because we want to know what happens. Even when PDJ presented me with a completely redundant 30-page prologue (in which Dalgleish and his officers are (re)introduced and the scene set, all information I would encounter again in the following pages) I still wanted to know what happened. Two hundred pages and many needless repetitions, embarrassing passages of dialogue and teeth-grittingly out-of-touch social observations later I felt angry with and embarrassed for the writer and desperate to get the whole thing over with as soon as possible.

I had a similar experience recently when reading Barbara Vine’s The Minotaur, coincidentally also first published in 2005. I love Vine’s earlier novels – they’re richly observed, compelling, suspenseful, enviably fine work. But this one just seemed… half cock. The crises seemed false, the characters misjudged, and the moral climate inextricably and inappropriately immured in the 1950s. Thus in The Lighthouse we have PDJ attempting to bring her narrative up to date in small and largely insignificant ways – Dalgleish writes his reports on a laptop, people communicate using mobile phones – whilst failing utterly in terms of the overall ambience. Characters make reference to contemporary novels and television programmes, the author is not shy of dating her narrative specifically in the early 2000s – and yet this is still a world of butlers, boarding schools and housekeepers, of burning shame over illegitimate parentage, of adult offspring unconvincingly in thrall to despotic fathers. James speaks of ‘the race warriors’ and ‘the animal rights people’ in bland and occasionally offensive terms of received opinion rather than personal passion and one cannot escape the feeling that these were subjects she thought she ‘ought’ to include rather than issues she actually wanted to write about. I don’t even want to talk about her cringe-inducing characterisation of Emma Lavenham’s (lesbian) college friend, and I found her attempts to convey street vernacular particularly horrible. Here’s eighteen-year-old Millie, a runaway from Peckham who is treated by the rest of the assembled cast as if she were still in nappies, vehemently countering insinuations that the murder victim might have been interested in her sexually:

“That’s disgusting. Course he didn’t. He’s old. He’s older than Mr Maycroft. It’s gross. It wasn’t like that. He never touched me. You saying he was a perv or something? You saying he was a paedo?” (p235)

This might not be so bad, were it not for the fact that Millie alone is presumed to speak in this way, while everyone else, regardless of age or gender, continues to hold forth in the same pompous brand of BBC English like characters from Brief Encounter. Dalgleish’s deputy Kate Miskin is not that much older than Millie, yet her dialogue makes her sound like the headmistress of a pre-war girls’ grammar school:

“The vestments when finished must be heavy and valuable. How do you get them to the recipients?” (p312)

I don’t think I’d be alone in finding something of a credibility gap here.

There is a perfectly good story hidden at the heart of The Lighthouse, but the novel as it stands is not it. It’s careless, misjudged, cumbersome, and stuffed with unnecessary padding. It’s awful to see James struggling to make her work appear more socially ‘relevant’. Literary ventriloquism of this kind is invariably a mistake – James would do far better taking the time and trouble to write in her own voice, on subjects and about characters that genuinely inspire her.

It’s disturbing to note that if this were a first novel by an unknown writer, such bum notes would see it laughed out of court. (See Martin Amis’s Lionel Asbo for a still more egregious example of unearned approbation.) No writer should rest on her laurels, no matter how verdant. I admire P. D. James greatly for the determination she demonstrated in becoming a writer in the first place, for her tenacity and commitment, for the continuing pleasure she clearly takes in what she does. I only wish I could admire her actual writing more than I do.

The Bowl of Cthulhu, by Monica Allan

Cottages, St Just

The Pier, Porthleven

Buildings, St Keverne

Nina’s Crime Blog #4

November 13, 2013 /

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton


Devlin came closer. He felt overcome – though by what kind of sentiment, he did not exactly know. George Shepard’s whisky had warmed his chest and stomach – there was a blurry tightness in his skull, a blurry heat behind his eyes – but the gaoler’s story had made him feel wretched, even chilled. Perhaps he was about to weep. It would feel good to weep. What a day it had been. His heart was heavy, his limbs exhausted. He looked down at Anna and Emery, their mirrored bodies, facing in. They were breathing in tandem.

So they are lovers, he thought looking down at them. So they are lovers, after all. He knew it from the way that they were sleeping. (The Luminaries, p622)

“It is complex in its design, yet accessible in its narrative and prose. Its plot is engrossing in own right, but an awareness of the structure working behind it deepens one’s pleasure and absorption. As a satisfying murder mystery, it wears its colours proudly, yet it is not afraid to subvert and critique the traditions and conventions of its genre. Best of all, while maintaining a wry self-awareness about its borrowings and constructions, it is never a cynical novel. At times, it can be unapologetically romantic, in both its narrative content and its attitude towards the literary tradition it emulates. It is a novel that can be appreciated on many different levels, but which builds into a consistent and harmonious whole.” (Julian Novitz in the Sydney Review of Books. A superb review – read it.)

A man walks into a bar. His name is Walter Moody and he has just arrived in the New Zealand goldmining town of Hokitika. He’s seeking rest, sustenance and a little peace and quiet after a harrowing sea voyage. The first two are what The Crown hotel’s business is all about, the third seems less immediately attainable as Moody is pitched almost at once into a mystery that will take some months and not a little bloodshed to be fully resolved. And even then there are some mysteries that even the most adroit of detectives – for everyone in this novel is to some extent his or her own detective – cannot fully explain.

The twelve men previously gathered in the bar of The Crown elect Moody as their confidante. He is newly arrived, he knows none of them, any advice or worldly wisdom he might have to offer must surely be objective. But Moody himself has a story to tell, a tale of terror that will finally reveal him to be connected to the men in the bar in ways that could never have been remotely guessed at when first he happened to enter upon the stage.

You won’t see The Luminaries advertised as a crime novel. But at its most basic level that’s precisely what it is: a rollicking great belter of a murder mystery that will keep you entertained and in suspense until the final page. In its massive story arc, its picture perfect character studies, its punctilious and awe inspiring attention to detail, it does in many ways bear kinship with the best of the ‘box set’ TV series Catton has said she admires.

I’ve thought a great deal about how to describe the experience of reading this book, and the best I can come up with is to liken it to completing one of those maddeningly complex 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles your gran used to keep on top of her wardrobe: at first there seem to be so many disparate elements you despair at ever making sense of it, but the more you stick with it, nibbling away at the edges, the more pieces fit into place until suddenly, there you are, whacking those odd-shaped little chunks of wood into their spaces as if they were pixels, flowing seamlessly together to make a lustrous, singular and inexorable whole.

I find myself utterly bemused by those critics who have dismissed this novel as Victorian pastiche. As with Catton’s debut The Rehearsal, I have seldom come across a book more self-aware, more clearly and keenly intent on its purpose. That Catton is able to sing her way into the rhythms and cadences of nineteenth century realism with such adroit and pleasing technical accomplishment is just one of the many talents this writer has put on display. In her use of irony – social, literary, historical – and her delightfully dextrous (for she wears her huge ability so lightly) manipulation of her subject matter I can think of few to better her and in a second novel even fewer. Catton has blown the curse of the ‘difficult second novel’ out of the water.

When this year’s Booker longlist was announced, the two novels that immediately interested me the most were Richard House’s The Kills (because I loved the idea of it from the outset) and Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (because I thought her first novel was outstanding and I was eager to find out what she’d done next). Now that I’ve read both, I can say with confidence that they are equally worth your time. As crime novels they are both vast in ambition, superlative in achievement, and bloody exciting into the bargain. As contributions to the ongoing project of The Novel, they are both brave, inspiring and yes, bloody exciting. They are also both so wonderfully different from each other. Although my first instinct would have declared The Kills to be more immediately relevant, more  harrowing, more gripping even, as I waded deeper and deeper into The Luminaries I found myself obliged to reconsider. Catton’s novel is equally gripping and harrowing (when I discovered the truth about how Anna came to be in the situation in which we find her at the beginning of the novel I experienced a depth of rage as potent as any I felt while reading The Kills, not least because much the same thing is happening to vulnerable young women on the streets of our cities at this very moment) – it just has a different way of speaking.

You will need stamina to read The Luminaries. You will need to invest both your time and your patience as you pick your way through the intricate pathways of the novel’s long and complex opening section. But it will be a wise investment with a significant return, as you glean from it the truest and best pleasure that reading has to offer: the sense of personal discovery and growth that is almost invariably the product of intimate and prolonged contact with a diverse, original and practised imagination.

I loved this book. Bravo.

John Tavener R.I.P.

November 12, 2013 /

So sad to hear that the composer John Tavener has died, at just 69 years of age.

I was listening to him only yesterday on Radio 4’s Start the Week, together with Jeanette Winterson, Andrew Marr and John Drury in a most fascinating discussion on the subject of art and faith.

The sense he had, of living on borrowed time after coming ‘back from the dead’ following a series of unexplained heart attacks, reminded me of another favourite composer, Alfred Schnittke, who died still more prematurely at the age of 64.

I just found this wonderful interview Tavener gave to Tom Service at the Manchester International Music Festival in July:

His physical burdens seem to disappear the moment he starts talking about music, though: his face beams as he tells me about the epiphanies he had while listening to Mozart and Stravinsky at the age of 12. “They made me want to write music,” he says.

As an artist, Tavener has much in common with composers such as Gorecki, Kancheli and Silvestrov, who began their careers as modernists but later found expression in a looser, more overtly expressive style that might be described as ‘lyrical minimalism’. It’s so interesting to read how he was beginning to find renewed inspiration in the more intellectually rigorous late works of Beethoven and Elliot Carter.

Britain has been blessed with whole generations of incredibly gifted composers throughout the twentieth century. Tavener’s special gift lay in touching so many who previously believed they couldn’t understand or find a way into contemporary music.

Sleep well, John. And thank you, so much.

John Tavener in 2005 phoyo by Clestu

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