Category: books (Page 22 of 23)

One of the problems with Christmas is that it’s so ripe for subversion. As the end of December approaches, you cannot escape the feeling that you’re being ordered to have a good time, and speaking for myself I have always naturally mistrusted the behaviour of crowds.

There are of course things to be enjoyed. The Doctor Who Christmas Special, for one. M. R James’s ghost stories of course. Last year my pre-Christmas Christmas treat turnd out to be the deliciously off-the-wall Finnish movie Rare Exports, additionally memorable for me because I slipped and fell badly on the ice outside Blackheath station while on my way to see it. Not to be cheated of my evening’s entertainment I continued on my journey, and limped into the cinema just in time for the opening credits. My fallen-on hip stiffened painfully during the film and getting home afterwards was a bit tricky but the film was so worth the effort of getting there. In taking the complete piss out of Christmas, it somehow reinvigorated its magic. I mean, because of that film I now smile each time I walk past one of those glittery Santa’s Grotto things, and anything that can do that for me has to contain at least a modicum of magical power.

And today I’ve been rereading ‘Cold Snap’ by Robert Shearman. This was one of the first stories by Rob I read, the opener of his most recent collection, Everyone’s Just So So Special, and one of the most original and frightening visions of Christmas I have ever come across. It has plenty in common with Rare Exports, not just the reappraisal, shall we say, of the benificent nature of good old St Nick, but also the delicate and often difficult relationships between fathers and children. I started out reading ‘Cold Snap’ feeling wryly amused by this coal-black Christmas tale, and professionally admiring (as always) of its author’s skill with the English language and gift for original ideas. (Talk about deals with the devil…..!) I finished it in tears. The story has a poignancy and emotional truth that reaches far beyond the goal of mere entertainment, something that could be said of everything Robert Shearman writes.

Stephen King has said more than once that in writing horror fiction the trick is not to make a big deal in dffierentiating what is real from what is fantastic, to sew the seam between the two so fine that the reader will not initially be aware that he has crossed over. Rob’s skill in fantasy writing lies precisely here; in fact he doesn’t seem to differentiate between the fantastic and the quotidian at all. So it is that getting lost in fog leads perfectly naturally to a fatal encounter with killer angels. Inviting your gran round for Christmas lunch ends with…. well. zombies, what else? Rob’s great gift is for understanding people, their inner agonies and secret motivations, and you can’t read a story by him without being reminded of his ten-year stint working with the great theatre director and playwright Alan Ayckbourn. Both men have a searing talent for dialogue – Shearman’s prose writing has a dramatic quality that makes each and every story a piece of theatre – and it’s essential to remember that every now and again we see in Ayckbourn’s plays touches of the dark fantastic (I’m thinking Way Upstream, Haunting Julia) that make it clear that Ayckbourn’s writerly ambitions have always been about more than the suburban marital farces for which the great British public love him. I’m sure Ayckbourn learned as much from Shearman as the other way around.

Rob Shearman always writes with the intensity of someone who has an urgent message to deliver. The stories that make up Everyone’s Just So So Special are deeply expressive of both the English propensity for understatement and that particular national difficulty we find in properly expressing what we feel. Rob’s fantasy is not about breaking rules, it is about disregarding them entirely. I guess that’s something all writers would benefit from doing more often, and not just at Christmas.

One Christmas present come early: my novella ‘The Silver Wind’ (first published in Interzone 233) has been selected as part of the line-up for Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2012. An honour of course, and with stories by Margo Lanagan, Kelly Link, Neil Gaiman, Theodora Goss and Jonathan Carroll in the mix I personally can’t wait to get my hands on this one.

Meanwhile, Chris has just given me the DVD box set of The KIlling 1 – another early present. So that’s me incommunicado for the next three days at least. Happy Christmas, everyone.

Last night, Chris drew my attention to a wonderful article in the local paper that gave a brief survey, with photographs, of some of the ‘lost pubs’ of Hastings and St Leonards. To me, lost pubs are like the ghost stations of the London underground: fascinating, poignant, sealed time capsules of our recent past. I was shocked and saddened to see how many have gone, but as someone interested in the history of pub names I was amused to see that one of these now defunct was called the Brahms and Liszt.

Of course, where one pub is lost another might conceivably be found. The old West St Leonards Primary School on the Bulverhythe Road between St Leonards and Bexhill was demolished more than a decade ago to make way for a new out-of-town supermarket. The historic school buildings and a number of older private houses were levelled, only for Asda to discover that local people were not as enthusiastic about the project as they might have liked. Planning permission for the store was refused, the project was abandoned, and the site remains uselessly vacant till this day. But I am happy to report that it did eventually became the home of The White Dragon, the pub that features so centrally in Chris’s novel The Extremes….

Speaking of Brahms though, BBC4s current series charting the development of the classical symphony didn’t give me nearly enough of him. For all his Beethoven-envy, Brahms did every bit as much as his hero to develop the harmonic language of symphonic writing, yet the programme designers at the BBC chose to dispense with his achievement in a little under ten minutes. If Beethoven’s music has its architectural equivalent in the soaring spires of Koln cathedral, Brahms’s always sounds to me like a wet November afternoon on Hamburg docks, but that doesn’t mean I love it any the less. Brahms makes me ache. With my Karajan recordings of the Brahms symphonies still stuck in the bottom of a box somewhere, I’ve been listening to Marek Janowski conducting the RLPO in the fourth. My story ‘Chaconne’ (currently available to read at the Featured Story page of this website) was written partly as an appreciation of this symphony.

I’m finally getting around to reading The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale, which won the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction in 2008. Loving it so far, and especially in the light of the massive disappointment I suffered on Saturday night when I sat down to watch the first episodes of the much-anticipated second series of the Danish detective series The Killing. I’d heard nothing but good things about it. From what I understood, this was a crime series that put the emphasis firmly on character, and 9pm saw me all ready with cup of cocoa in hand and my mind-to-murder sensors fully engaged. As it turned out, I think I would have enjoyed the first series a lot more than this new one. Love Sarah Lund, love the woolly jumper. Love the muted colours and noirish Eurocrime cinematography. But who in God’s name passed the script?? A largely incompetent and totally unconvincing mish-mash of people running around in combat fatigues blathering on about possibly-non-existent terrorist cells, I found this attempt by the writers to make their story ‘current’ by foisting on it the trappings of contemporary news stories not only to be politically simplistic (an understatement) but also to be emotionally unaffecting. It’s all action, no talk, which from my reading and understanding would seem to be the diametric opposite of the first series. The crime writer – indeed any writer – has to make his characters either sympathetic or interesting (preferably both, and this includes murderers); apart from Lund herself the characters in these first two hours of The Killing 2 are neither.

I’m still undecided as to whether I’m going to brave another hour of it next Saturday (I do kind of want to know what Raben is going to do now that he’s escaped from the hospital) but I lament the misguided decisions taken by the scriptwriter and presumably by the programming team in steering the show away from the cerebral and towards the incoherent.

What a relief then to pick up Mr Whicher, and discover in the first two chapters all the fascinating personal minutiae I’d been hoping for in The Killing. Ordinary lives laid bare are always extraordinary (perhaps one of the central tenets of my own writing) and in the story of Constance Kent we have madness, violence, ambiguity, tragedy all within the walls of one family home. What we also have is the story of the birth of detective fiction. Jonathan Whicher, it transpires, was one of the first British detectives as we would today understand the word, and a figure of mystery and glamour. I was intrigued to learn from Kate Summerscale’s introduction to her book that no pictoral record of Whicher survives, that he was elusive to the end and even now.

That’s the kind of story I like. The kind you might chew over at leisure in the old Brahms and Liszt, and no combat gear required.

On Monday I took the train across to Rye, where I visited an exhibition at the Rye Art Gallery of the works of Jane Lewis, a marvellous painter working in the tradition of British surrealism. She was a new discovery for me, and made the trip worthwhile all on her own, but then you don’t really need a specific reason to visit Rye. I’m enchanted and exhilarated by my almost daily discoveries about the literary and artistic heritage of East Sussex, a wild and roguish county and so different from the more manicured West Sussex, where I grew up. I already knew that Henry James lived in Rye for some years, but it wasn’t until last week that I found out that Joan Aiken, John Christopher and Rumer Godden lived there too.  The Tripods was filmed in Rye! Sheer delight.

So I was wandering the cobbled streets, poking around the irresistible antique shops and taking photos of Lamb House, the beautiful eighteenth-century building that was home to both Henry James and Rumer Godden, and thinking for a lot of the time about Lionel Shriver.  I’ve often enjoyed Shriver’s journalism for its decisive voice, but never got drawn into the debate surrounding We Need to Talk About Kevin for the simple reason that I hadn’t read it.  I tend to mistrust books that become overnight bestsellers. My fear, I suppose, is that there will be something lacking about them, something too easy. Indeed, my main reason for wanting to catch up with Kevin now was that Lynne Ramsey had made a film of it. Both her Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar are important films for me, and any film with Tilda Swinton in it goes straight on my ‘to see’ list in any case.

The first fifty pages of Kevin impressed me a great deal. A recent article compared Lionel Shriver, with her strict Christian upbringing and her deep interest in social morality, with George Eliot. I wouldn’t disagree for a moment, but with her elegant, circumlocutory sentences, her clear fascination not only for what is said but how it is phrased, it was Henry James I thought of first, and so perhaps it’s no surprise that Lionel Shriver and Rye became bundled together in my thoughts.

And the writing was brave! Early on, when Eva is still trying to decide whether to take the plunge and start a family, there were pages that knocked me sideways with the truth in them:

I disappointed myself by finding our perfectly pleasant lunch with perfectly pleasant people inadequate. Why would I have preferred a fight? Weren’t those two girls captivating as could be, so what did it matter that they were eternally interrupting and I had not for the whole afternoon been able to finish a thought? Wasn’t I married to a man I loved, so why did something wicked in me wish that Brian had slipped his hand up my skirt when I helped him bring in bowls of Haagen-Daas from the kitchen?

I held my tongue. You would have had no time for my nit-picking about how wasn’t the luncheon a little bland, didn’t you have the feeling like, what’s the point, isn’t there something flat and plain and doughy about the whole Father-Knows-Best routine when Brian was once such a hellraiser? They were good people and they had been good to us and we had therefore had a good time. To conclude otherwise was frightening, raising the spectre of some unnamable quantity without which we could not abide, but which we could not summon on demand, least of all by pretending in virtuous accordance with an established formula.

I was so happy to think I’d been proved wrong, to have found a bestselling mainstream novel that was also an elegant work of literature and with a radical message. Over the following 350 pages I was slowly to have that pleasure eroded. Kevin caused a lot of controversy when it first came out. First of all, Shriver’s long-time agent refused to handle it, saying she hated the book so much she couldn’t take it on. Then, thirty publishers rejected it outright, leaving it to a small American indie to take the risk with a book the more established firms seemed to regard as the Satanic Verses of rampant feminism. Readers seemed equally divided. Some called Shriver a childless child-hater, others hailed her as the mothers’ true champion. But controversy as so often bred huge success. The book won the Orange Prize and was the book of book group choice for many months and years following publication.

I see it as an opportunity lost. It’s funny, sharp and well written, and where so many books this popular are bland and trite that has to be a wonderful thing. It also raises hugely important questions about women and family and the creative life. For me, it’s a tragedy that it raises these questions only to chicken out of the debate by presenting the reader with a portrait of motherhood and family life that is so monstrous, so exaggerated, so unbelievable that in the end that reader is reassured rather than radicalized. There’s no way it’s going to be like this, so why should I worry?

Kevin as a character is unbelievable on so many levels. Even if you take into account the idea that there are children born who are ‘bad to the bone,’ whose socio- and psychopathic behaviour is not the result of familial abuse but of some innate wrongness, he’s unbelievable. There’s plenty of documentary evidence to show that even such  ‘junior psychos’ are conflicted in and confused by their own behaviours; Kevin is far more Damien Omen 2 than he is John Venables.

The kind of existential denial that Shriver suggests Kevin Khatchadourian suffers from was brilliantly portrayed by Dostoevsky in the person of Nicolai Stavrogin, the ice-hearted anti-hero of his novel The Devils. Yet even Stavrogin is conflicted – that’s what makes him interesting as a character. Are we meant to believe that Kevin is supernaturally bad? If so, then isn’t this the ultimate get-out clause? There are plenty of risks involved in starting a family, but giving birth to the son of Satan must rank pretty low on the list of considerations.

Had Shriver chosen to stick with the less easily definable, more insidiously pervasive issues of the first part of this novel, then I believe Kevin would be what it clearly set out to become: a modern classic. As it is, it’s a cop-out and a huge disappointment, a betrayal even. On p347 I was smashed in the face by the following:

From a young age there was only one thing I had always wanted, along with getting out of Racine, Wisconsin. And that was a good man who loved me and would stay true. Anything else was ancillary, a bonus, like frequent-flier miles. I could have lived without children. I couldn’t live without you.

OMG! Words fail me. And this – more Jane Austen than Dostoevsky – was supposed to be a feminist text???

I’m still looking forward to Lynne Ramsey’s film. I just wish people would start asking better questions about the book it was based on.

Lamb House, West Street, Rye