Category: Uncategorized (Page 4 of 5)

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

Interacting with people en masse does not not come easily or naturally to me, and so I tend to find events like Eastercon a little overwhelming. It’s always worth that initial anxiety though, as Olympus 2012 proved so wonderfully well.

Perhaps the most special part of Eastercon is being able to put some faces to some names, to meet people I’ve previously known only online. At every con I’ve attended I’ve had the privilege of being able to do just that, to speak personally to some of those writers and critics whose work in the field is so important and brings me so much pleasure and inspiration. My only regret – and this is my perennial complaint about mass gatherings – is not being able to spend as much quality time with those people as I would like. There is so much constantly happening that it is difficult to find the quiet space – physical or mental – that is needed for an unhindered and extended exchange of views, ideas and enthusiasms. Nonetheless, it’s just lovely to be able to say ‘hi’ to people, to leave with that sense of having met, of a marker having been put down for future conversations.

Conversely, there were some friends present at this year’s Eastercon that I’d been looking forward to seeing and catching up with that I never so much as laid eyes on for the entire weekend, others that I glimpsed for a brief moment but who – owing perhaps to the bizarrely Escherian logistics of the Radison Edwardian’s corridor layout – were thereafter lost to me forever. This grieved me greatly – but then these near-misses leave me looking forward with optimism to the next con, when such non-encounters might be made whole.

So many of the panels (I always enjoy panels) highlighted topics that were thought provoking and involving. Inevitably there were clashes, and I was particularly sorry to miss Paul Kincaid’s panel on SF post-9/11 (I hope someone will write that one up) but by way of compensation I was able to enjoy a high spirited and stimulating ‘Not the Clarke Award’, expertly moderated by Graham Sleight and with the audience fully absorbed in the discussion. Niall Harrison’s ‘Fantasy Clarke Award’ was equally excellent and should definitely become a regular feature of the programme. Personally, I was delighted to see Jane Rogers’s The Testament of Jessie Lamb triumph in the Clarke debate, and to see Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr Fox make such a great impression over on the Fantasy panel. These were certainly two of my favourite novels from 2011, and it thrills me to see writing of this stripe and standard leading the way in genre discussions.

It probably isn’t fair to single out individuals for particular commendation – Eastercon, after all, is about the whole SF community – but I would like to thank Paul McAuley, Jaine Fenn and Graham Sleight for making my first ever panel appearance such a worthwhile and (almost) non-scary experience, and also to offer a huge personal thank you to Tricia Sullivan for being such an outstanding GoH. Trish is an inspirational person on so many levels and her contributions to panels – articulate, radical, intelligent and always entertaining – were among the best of the weekend. Her GoH interview with Farah Mendleson was satisfying to a degree that one rarely experiences at such events. I regret only that it couldn’t have gone on longer.

Most of all though, thanks to everyone who worked so hard, as always, to make Eastercon happen. We had a wonderful weekend and a truly memorable one. Thank you.

I’ve just found a CD on my shelf that I’d completely forgotten I owned, a marvellous recording of the Schnittke piano quintet and Shostakovich’s String Quartet 15, performed by the Keller Quartet with Alexei Lyubimov on piano for the Schnittke.

It’s an amazing disc – that rapturous ECM sound – but I’m even more pleased about finding it than I might normally be because it ties in so perfectly with something I’m planning to write, something that’s been taking up all my spare thoughts this weekend.

My non-spare thoughts have all been fully occupied with the novel. I’m hoping to finish the first draft of the first section tomorrow, which will have me on about 54,000 words so far. I’m guessing I’m about half way through, perhaps a little more.

The book is so different now from my original conception of it. It’s constantly evolving, which feels very natural for me. I can’t imagine being the sort of writer who plans everything in advance, chapter by chapter.

We saw a remarkable film on Monday, Sean Durkin’s tensely understated Martha Marcy May Marlene. It’s been described as a thriller, but for me the very use of that word implies the presence of certain generic tropes (hooks, twists, cliffhangers). MMMM is (mercifully) free of all of these, yet still manages to be one of the most powerfully disturbing films I have seen in some while. I came out of it with my hands bunched into fists and my nerves jumping – a side effect not entirely due to the three insanely strong cups of coffee we’d managed to rack up prior to entering the cinema.

It kills me that masterful pieces like this don’t get more coverage. I’m now looking forward to seeing Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, and Pawel Pawlikowski’s new movie The Woman in the Fifth. I’ve loved Pawlikowski’s films to date. This new one looks great.

Michael Kelly has just posted the cover art for issue 3 of his speculative fiction anthology Shadows and Tall Trees. The rather wonderful cover image is by Eric Lacombe, and the ToC will include my story ‘The Elephant Girl’. I had the idea for this piece a year or so back but it remained just a sketch until fairly recently. I’m very happy to have completed it – I hate those bits that float around on your hard drive demanding attention.

It’s odd, too, because the story’s themes kind of link back to what I was saying at the start here about my lost-and-found CD. Everything seems to be about music at the moment.

I started reading the new Stephen King last night. It’s early days – only another 700 pages to go – but right there on page 11 I came upon a paragraph that’s been hogging my attention for most of the day. The narrator Jake Epping is an English teacher. Here at the start of the book we find him marking student compositions:

The spelling in the honors essays was mostly correct, and the diction was clear (although my cautious college-bound don’t-take-a-chancers had an irritating tendency to fall back on the passive voice) but the writing was pallid. Boring. My honors kids were juniors – Mac Steadman, the department head, awarded the seniors to himself – but they wrote like little old men and little old ladies, all pursey-mouthed and ooo, don’t slip on that icy patch, Mildred.  In spite of his grammatical lapses and painstaking cursive, Harry Dunning had written like a hero. On one occasion, at least.

Epping then goes on to talk about ‘the difference between offensive and defensive writing,’ and now I find I can’t stop thinking about precisely those categories, about Mildred and the icy patch, about how easy it is to fall into a way of writing that takes no risks. Or that doesn’t take enough risks, anyway. The pressure on writers to ‘succeed’ is so immense now. It’s easy to lose sight of what you were wanting to write about in the first place.

We should be writing like heroes. I think it’s good to keep that in mind.

Today is the 70th anniversary of that Radio 4 hardy perennial Desert Island Discs. I’ve been following the programme for at least half that time (scary) and in spite of the odd hiccup (was Michael Parkinson in the driving seat at one point or did I just dream that?) it’s still a marvellous institution, pandering one-hundred percent to my geekish love of lists as well as my fascination with other people’s musical tastes.

For breadth of intellect and musical depth it’s hard to outclass the choices of Vladimir Ashkenazy and Berthold Goldschmidt, while the prize for most misunderstood castaway must go to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who famously chose eight of her own (sublime) recordings to take with her to the mythical island. Entertaining to recall though her blunder is, I’ve always believed she made it through a simple misunderstanding of the rules.

Shameful though it is, I have to admit that I am one of those people whose previously good opinion of a castaway can be permanently cancelled out by a poor choice of music. The one person who has so far managed to conquer my prejudice in this regard was the late and very great J. G. Ballard, who appeared to flaunt his musical apathy as a virtue. I have continued to worship him anyway.

I think everyone in Britain must have played this game at some point, and although my choices might shift and change from week to week I’d like to celebrate the programme today by posting my current line-up. So (in no particular order) here goes:

Brahms Piano Concerto 2 Ashkenazy Wiener PO/Haitink

Dvorak Cello Concerto Du Pre Chicago SO/Barenboim

Mahler Symphony 6 Berlin PO/Karajan

Henze Undine L. Sinf/Knussen

Beethoven Violin Concerto (cadenza by Alfred Schnittke) Kremer COE/Harnoncourt

Bach Cantata: Ich habe genug Hotter Philh/Bernard

Bob Dylan Blonde on Blonde

Sandy Denny Gold Dust: The Last Concert

And (in the words of Roy Plomley) if all of the eight discs were to be washed away and I could save only one, it would have to be the Beethoven, a clever choice really because with the Schnittke cadenza it captures the genius of two heroes on the one record. And with Gidon Kremer (whose playing I could listen to until the crack of doom) that makes three.

If you’ve not heard the Schnittke cadenza, I urge you to try it – it reimagines Beethoven for the 20th century, and like all of Schnittke’s music it is inspiration straight from the jugular.

I thought choosing these discs would be fun, but in fact it was agony. I couldn’t possibly go to the island with no Shostakovich, no Scriabin, no Elgar Dream of Gerontius, no Tchaikovsky, no Bruckner, no Peter Maxwell Davies, godammit. It’s a hopeless task. I hate lists. I give up.

The book’s a tricky one – of course – and I would have to insist on taking two: Christopher Priest’s The Affirmation and Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters.

For my luxury I’d take the ever-popular endless supply of pens and paper. I considered opting for a solar-powered laptop instead, but on balance thought this would be unwise as it would almost certainly get buggered up by sand influx after a year or two. And having to write with a pen again might help return my handwriting to the edge of legibility.

While writing this I’ve been listening to Anne Sofie von Otter’s recording of Kurt Weill songs. Another irreplaceable classic, and my sudden compulsion to hear it undoubtedly something to do with the odd (very odd) piece I’ve been working on these past three days……

Alfred Schnittke by Reginald Gray

Anyone who is or who thinks they might be a writer should read this piece by AL Kennedy in today’s Guardian. Coming upon it made me want to jump up and down and shout hallelujah. Because this – ‘putting everything into writing’, as AL puts it – is what it’s all about.

The joy and fear and work involved in writing have to be real and full to have meaning and to achieve anything.

That’s it, precisely. And the joy of reading Kennedy’s essay lies in knowing she has the talent and the tenacity to put her money where her mouth is. Her fiction – sometimes thorny, sometimes abstruse, always felt, always meant, always intelligent – reads like a battle fought and won. She’s someone who stakes her life on her work. In other words, the real deal.

Above all, the pure act of writing – the truth that it is still there for you and you for it – is a wonder. And it need have nothing to do with the details of your life. Within it, you can be away from everything and saying out new dreams, just because you can, because human beings do sing for other human beings and make unnecessary beauties. Onwards.

Perhaps it is because certain sections of the literary establishment seem actively to fear fiction that takes risks that Kennedy’s most recent novel The Blue Book didn’t even make the longlist for last year’s Booker. It makes me clench my fists and grind my teeth to see our bravest writers so ill-served. Read Michael Bywater getting stuck into this groove here.

It’s ‘lit. fic.’ that has difficulties. Only a few, like Christopher Priest and Hilary Mantel, have the narrative genius to do it straight from the shoulder. The rest drift hopelessly into pink-embossed chick-lit or yet more nervous adultery in north London. With good reason. These are prissy times.

Great article. We’re not doomed yet.

Work on the new book is going well, even if the word ‘well’ has to let itself be defined in my own peculiar fashion. About ten days before Christmas I realised that the 20,000 words of draft I’d written to open the novel was not what I wanted. At all. So I dumped the lot. Today I got back to where I was and reached the 20,000-word mark (again) and this time it feels much more like it.

Just thinking about this year makes me dizzy. 2011 has been the most eventful twelve months of my life since I left home for university in the autumn of 1984. Bits and pieces of things have already found their way into some of the stories I’ve written this year, but obliquely. I’m the kind of writer who must write, who insists upon it as a right, no matter what else intervenes, and as the year comes to an end I find I can map it in stories, that the stories will be forever associated with certain events and a certain time, even when the narrative itself does no more than hint at it.

Among many other items of good news, I am happy to report that I have written a novel’s-length of stories this year. All of these should be appearing next year in various publications, to include Undertow Press’s biannual anthology Shadows and Tall Trees, the new NewCon anthology Dark Currents, Arkham House’s The Arkham Garland, Kelly Link’s fabulous zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and one or two others that I’m not at liberty to mention yet. All the pieces I’ve worked on this year represent significant steps forward for me, and I’m greatly looking forward to them being out in the world. More news on all of these as and when I have it.

Parts of the year still feel strange and painful, leaving London on the night the riots broke out, for instance. This is something I won’t talk about, because there’s a story here I want to write, and it’s still maturing, but the memories of that first hot week of August remain intense. Other memories are intensely happy, most of all the publication of Chris’s wonderful twelfth novel The Islanders, and seeing him launch himself into the new book immediately afterwards.  (The Adjacent is progressing brilliantly, even as we speak.)

The work of other artists is as always an encouragement, an inspiration and a pledge. Highlights of 2011 must include the Coen brothers’ magnificent film True Grit, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, Ben Wheatley’s Kill List, Kingsley and Sharp’s Black Pond and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. (2011 saw us having a bit of a Woody Allen binge, actually. The man is a magician, a born writer sans pareil, and I worship him.)

Films are often easier for me to codify than books, because I don’t make them, and then there’s this awful greed-reading to contend with – there are seldom fewer than five books by my bed at any one time and usually more – but I do know I began and ended the year with exceptional reads (David Vann’s Caribou Island and Sarah Hall’s The Beautiful Indifference respectively) and that somewhere in the middle I had the privilege of discovering Lila Zanganeh’s joyous book about Nabokov The Enchanter. Older works discovered or rediscovered have included Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Tim Krabbe’s The Vanishing and Peter Stamm’s In Strange Gardens.

My own new book is coming on.

I want to end this post by saying thank you to everyone who drops in on this blog, and to the many people who have offered their support and appreciation for my work. Having readers is a privilege, one I hope I shall continue to earn.

Happy New Year, everyone. Have a good one. Glenfiddich time fast approaching…..