Category: Uncategorized (Page 3 of 4)

“What the west sadly lacks is the humility to accept that it’s actually not in our power to sort out immensely complicated problems in the world. The only thing that we have the power to do, given that we lack a political class of wisdom and grace, is to make the situation worse by destroying infrastructure, by killing and maiming the citizens of a country that we don’t understand in the least, and radicalising and angering people more than they are already.”

Michel Faber, on sending The Book of Strange New Things to David Cameron to help with the war effort.

I have so many things on the go at the moment that once again I’ve not had time to put together anything substantial for the blog, though hopefully this situation will be put to rights before too long. In the meantime, I can tell you that in terms of non-fiction writing I’m already preparing some posts for the weird fiction reading project/challenge/whatever I’m planning for 2016 (more on that soon), plus this week alone I’ve been drafting another review for Strange Horizons, as well as my Time Pieces column for the January issue of Interzone.

What is it about the end-of-year that always leaves me feeling as if I need a thirteenth month to get everything finished?

Work on The Rift is…exciting. It’s interesting and strange, that moment when a piece of writing begins to feel like a thing in its own right, something that exists apart from you and with its own agenda. There’s still enough new stuff happening in this draft to make it feel risky though, and surprising, to me most of all. Bizarrely, I seem to be enjoying myself.  The third draft is at the halfway mark, give or take a thousand words or so.

Listening to: Joanna Newsom, all the albums including the new one but especially my absolute favourite Ys, which I think may be one of the greatest song-sets ever written. It won’t come as any surprise to anyone, I’m sure, to learn how much I adore Newsom’s sprawling lyrics, which appear loose and anarchic but which are in fact supremely disciplined, supremely composed. Open-ended but intentionally so.

That’s how you write short stories…

J’ai cueilli ce brin de bruyère
L’automne est morte souviens-t’en
Nous ne nous verrons plus sur terre
Odeur du temps Brin de bruyère
Et souviens-toi que je t’attends

(Guillaume Apollinaire)

,,,red campion, fool’s parsley, hogweed, rough chervil, common evening primrose, foxglove (winding down now), convolvulus (first of the season), tufted vetch, meadow buttercup, leopard’s bane, broad-leaved willowherb…

These are all super-common native plant species of the kind most people call weeds, but for me there are few more thrilling avenues to explore in natural history than these widespread British wildflowers. Of course there are many more spectacular and scientifically interesting species found elsewhere in the world, but none that better define the landscapes I write about, the landscapes I grew up in and that trigger my most immediate, honest response as a writer and as a human being.

The sight of red campion in the hedgerow (at its peak, a couple of weeks ago, it was breathtaking in its profusion) can set my heart racing. The Devon hedgerows themselves, which this spring I’ve been able to watch daily as they’ve thickened and quickened, are so bounteous, so diverse in composition, so vast you could spend most of a day just looking at one small stretch of one, identifying, photographing and cataloguing the plants on display. These hedgerows and the fields beyond form what can rightly be called a Fowlesian landscape, a landscape that is somehow so deeply rooted in many of us Britons that it is instantly recognisable at a level that has more to do with the gut than with the eye, instantly home, even for those who live in the city.

On Tuesday I wandered down a lane that led to a bridleway that led to a meadow bursting with clover and singing with bees. SO many bees here, bees all around us, up first thing in the morning and already about their business.

In that same meadow a pheasant broke cover just yards from my feet. At the end of last week I spotted on one of our garden shrubs a bronze shield bug. Haven’t seen one in years. These things too I find thrilling.

Although my bookshelves contain an ever increasing number of books on natural history (bear in mind that this is someone who requested – and received – W. S. Bristowe’s The World of Spiders for her twelfth birthday and still has that same copy) and though I rejoice in the current upsurge in popularity of nature writing by the likes of Robert Macfarlane and Helen Macdonald and Melissa Harrison, Marianne Taylor, Richard Kerridge, Patrick Barkham and Dave Goulson, I find it practically impossible to write about these landscapes except through fiction. The experience is too intimate, too revealing of self. There is the ever-present danger of slipping into a mode of expression that sounds like sentimentality, when what one wants to express is fierceness. Fierceness and passion and urgent necessity.

I’ve probably just inadvertently listed another ten reasons why I love Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border so much. I could say sorry for harping on this book all the time, but I’m not going to.

The oak tree that stands at the centre of our village is more than four hundred years old. It is a magnificent tree. Standing beside it gives you the most extraordinary feeling of being just the very latest point in an ongoing time continuum. I’ve read that the village oak was mentioned in certain accounts of the English Civil War. The tree is a living story, a powerful organic presence a single human being at a single moment in time can only dimly grasp the meaning of.

I lived in Exeter for the better part of twenty years. Throughout that period I worked as a music buyer for an independent chain of record stores, and three or four times each year I would take the Tarka Line train up to Barnstaple to do a stock check at the North Devon branch. I would always gaze out at the stations towards the middle of the route – Morchard Road, Eggesford, King’s Nympton – and think how wonderful it would be to leave the train at one of them, to step out into that landscape of forests and fields and farming hamlets and have somewhere to go.

Travelling home from Exeter after lunch with a friend, this is now exactly what I do. One of the profoundest and most fortuitous instances of deja vu I have ever experienced.

And this is where I go running:

It is remarkable, how swiftly and how entirely we have adapted.

Churchyard, Lydd, March 2012

Farm buildings, Lydd, March 2012

Lydd is a small town in Kent, positioned more or less exactly at the centre of the Romney Marshes. There are no major roads that go near it. Its railway station, Lydd Town, was closed to passenger traffic in 1967.

There is an airport at Lydd, named somewhat bizarrely as London Ashford, that operates scheduled weekend flights to Le Touquet. Cottages backing on to the churchyard and in the High Street date from the 15th century. The church tower is one of the tallest in Kent.

It’s a beautiful little town, precisely because it’s miles from anywhere with no through roads. It is a place I loved on sight, a place I instinctively felt was special to me. It came therefore as both a shock and not a shock to learn that I narrowly missed growing up there.

When I described my enthusiasm for Lydd to my mother, soon after my first visit there in 2007, she told me that she and my father very nearly bought a house there, back when we moved south from the Midlands in the early 1970s. ‘We were both very keen to buy it,’ she said. ‘Only in the end we decided it would mean too much driving for your dad because the place was so isolated.’ My father was on the road six days a week then, repping for Bovril and Marlboro and then Domecq Sherry. He would have had to drive the best part of an hour from Lydd, simply to get to where he needed to be to start covering his area. We moved into a house in Ashington, West Sussex, instead.

So Lydd was lost to me, but now feels doubly special. I can never know, but still like to think of what my alternate childhood might have been like: those cottages around the churchyard, those unchanging, narrow lanes, the endless marshes.

It feels right. Perhaps that’s why the place worms its way ever more insistently into my fictions.

The novel has been undergoing a sea change – literally. No doubt I’ll be writing about this in more detail at some point but for now let’s just say I’ve dumped a lot of words and am in the process of writing new ones. Likewise, this feels right, and not unconnected.

Listening to: Schnittke’s piano quintet.

Just about to start reading: Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn. I have his new book of essays to read as well. I loved The Disappointment Artist.

David Hebblethwaite has been playing a fun game over at Follow the Thread today: pick a favourite book for every letter of the alphabet. Irresistible for list junkies like myself, and his post made me smile especially because I have been using this game (and its many variants) for years as my personal cure for insomnia. I’m not a good sleeper, never have been, but when I find myself lying awake at 3 am, I’ve discovered that challenging myself to name three SF novels – or writers – for every letter of the alphabet can work wonders. I usually make it to around ‘m’ before I lose consciousness. Pieces of classical music for every key signature is another good one.

Anyway, here’s my list of books, A-Z, and employing my own particular rule that no author can be named more than once.  Like David, I’ve named favourites as opposed to definitive favourites (which can change daily), but unlike him I haven’t managed to fill every spot. I have nothing for ‘x’ or ‘z’. If I were doing this in Russian (another variant – guaranteed to send you into a coma after about six letters) I could elect Yuri Olesha’s bizarre and unique novel Zavist’, but that’s ‘e’ for Envy in English and so would be cheating. I’ve cheated a bit in any case: Pavane is my favourite novel by Keith Roberts, but I needed something for ‘k’ and so Kite World usurped it. Similarly my favourite Iris Murdoch is The Sea, The Sea, but I can’t not have a book by Bolano, and so I plumped for A Word Child instead.

It occurs to me that The Sea, The Sea might be one of those books where the ‘the’ is properly part of the title in any case. How these things are fraught with issues. The list goes on….

The Affirmation – Christopher Priest

Bellefleur – Joyce Carol Oates

The Course of the Heart – M. John Harrison

Darkmans – Nicola Barker

Eustace and Hilda – L. P. Hartley

From Blue to Black – Joel Lane

Ghost Story – Peter Straub

Hearts in Atlantis – Stephen King

The Iron Dragon’s Daughter – Michael Swanwick

Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

Kite World – Keith Roberts

Look at the Harlequins – Vladimir Nabokov

Martin Dressler – Stephen Millhauser

The Newton Letter – John Banville

Oracle Night – Paul Auster

Picnic at Hanging Rock – Joan Lindsay

The Queen’s Gambit – Walter Tevis

Roadside Picnic – Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

The Savage Detectives – Roberto Bolano

The Talented Mr Ripley – Patricia Highsmith

Up Above the World – Paul Bowles

The Voices of Time – J. G. Ballard

A Word Child – Iris Murdoch

The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion