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Category: writing (Page 12 of 15)

Getting Out of There

October 24, 2013 /

If you were bored – and Hampson soon was – you could go up on to West Hill and stare out towards France. One lunchtime he went into the English Channel, a pub about a hundred yards back from the clifftop, and Beatrice was sitting there at the back. He bought a drink and went over. He asked if she minded him joining her, she asked him why she should mind. Unable to disentangle anything from that, he said:

“This is a weird place.”

“It’s a town of the dead,” she said.

“I meant the pub,” Hampson said.

 

This is a short extract from M. John Harrison’s brand new short story, ‘Getting Out of There’, just published as a standalone chapbook by Nightjar Press. It’s a limited edition – just 200 signed and numbered copies – so I’d advise you to get in there quick or they’ll all be gone.

It’s difficult to describe the effect this story had on me. It’s not just that the setting feels familiar – very familiar – it’s the sense that this character, Hampson, could so easily be Mick from Signs of Life, twenty years older and still trying to come to an accomodation with himself.

The story has a happy ending of sorts. All the time I was reading the second half I kept thinking of the ‘remembered Earth’ sections from Tarkovsky’s Solaris.

As a reader and as a writer, this story made me weep. It is immaculate.

‘Getting Out of There’ will keep you going until the – tentatively promised and eagerly awaited – publication of MJH’s next collection.

It will be the best £3.50 you ever spend.

cover photograph by Conrad Williams

A tail for the time being…

October 13, 2013 /

A road in SE4, October 2013

I heard Zadie Smith on Desert Island Discs the other weekend. I was particularly interested in what she said about her writing process, the way she invariably begins a novel by composing an opening scene and then going over and over that scene, deepening it, rewriting it, altering it, until finally the rest of the novel begins to fill itself in behind it.

I always find it reassuring to hear from writers who tend towards the method-in-the-madness approach to their work, rather than the rigorous plotting, can’t-begin-until-you-know-exactly-what’s-happening-in-every-chapter approach employed by others, if only because I myself remain an unreformed adherent of the write-it-and-see philosophy. I remember when I first began writing seriously, feeling daunted and inadequate in the face of all those instruction manuals that stressed the importance of detailed chapter breakdowns and character outlines. I could see the logic, but something about it didn’t seem right to me, or better, feel right for me. The epiphany came when I read Stephen King’s inimitable work manual, or toolbox, as he likes to call it, On Writing – if you’re only ever going to read one how-to book in your life, please make it this one. King writes about how he doesn’t so much plot a book as discover it – he likens the process to the work of an archaeologist excavating a fossil – that he doesn’t so much think about chapter progression as begin writing about his characters and seeing what happens to them. Reading this, I felt like jumping in the air and making a whooping noise. If King says this is an OK way to do it, then it must be, I thought. It was like being released from a cage.

Those who know me best will confirm that I’m almost pathologically routine-led when it comes to the outline mechanics of being a writer. I have to be writing, and if I don’t get that time at my desk I soon start to feel anxious, but when it comes to the work I actually do at my desk, I must sometimes appear to be the opposite of organized. As a writer, I am an inveterate discarder – I have several 30,000-word-plus sections of stymied novels on my hard drive, together with dozens of rag-ends and offcuts of stories I’ve begun to write and then found myself – for whatever reason – too dissatisfied with to feel they’re worth fighting for. At least for now.

As it turns out, these past few months have been all about discarding stuff. I’ve written a lot of words, but it’s often felt like writing in circles. You know that feeling of turning a roll of Sellotape round and round between your hands, trying to find the tag end so you can actually tear off some damn’ tape? Like that. I’ve got a whole file of notes and false starts on a book I now know won’t be this book, it’ll be the next book, which is good, I suppose, and exciting in its way (I love that book already and it doesn’t exist yet!) but still frustrating when it’s this book you’re trying to get a start on.

Well, earlier this week I finally did a King and just launched into it. I set aside all the outlines and bits-of-draft – so seductive when they include passages you feel wedded to, they can end up acting as millstones about the neck, dragging you down – and began again, right at the beginning, with a character I knew was central but had put off writing about because it ‘wasn’t time yet.’

Well actually it is time. Actually, it’s her book. So let’s stop fannying about and get on with it.

Thanks again, Steve.

“On YA”

September 16, 2013 /

I read a blog post by Adam Roberts over the weekend, in which he talked interestingly about the cultural significance of so-called Young Adult fiction and the challenge it presents to literary prizes like the Booker, which, as Adam would have it, ‘likes complex, challenging art’ but that which ‘never, ever rewards primitivist art.’

Adam wrote his post in response to an article on the OUP blog by a colleague of his at Royal Holloway, Robert Eaglestone, and a follow-up discussion on Twitter about the Booker shortlist. Eaglestone argues that said shortlist is diverse and innovative, Adam counters that in ignoring SF, crime, and YA, the Booker is deliberately avoiding engagement with three of the most culturally significant literary trends of the present time, thereby rendering itself irrelevant and parochial.

Familiar arguments then, and I’d say I’ve found myself on Adam’s side in those arguments far more frequently than not. I admire Adam’s literary criticism hugely – it combines erudition with a sharpness of wit that do not always make a natural pairing. His commentary on last year’s Booker was a tour de force and a joy to read. Why then, apart from the fact that I normally respect Adam so much as a critic, did I find myself becoming more and more uncomfortable with his post on YA? Why did I spend a significant amount of time over the weekend thinking about it, and coming finally to the decision that I had to reply?

Well, mostly because of this:

Imagine a music prize that has, through the 70s and 80s and up to the present, shortlisted only abstruse jazz, contemporary classical and Gentle-Giant-style prog rock concept albums. I love my prog rock, and partly I do so because it ticks all those aesthetic boxes I mention above—it is complex and challenging and intricate music. But I wouldn’t want to suggest that prog has had anything like the cultural impact or importance as pop, punk or rap. That would be silly. So how would you tell the judges picking those shortlists about the Ramones, the Pistols and the Clash? How would you persuade them that they’re missing out not just good music but actually the music that really matters?

Which is all well and good – once again, I agree with Adam. The problem is that the analogy he is presenting seems utterly false, because the literary equivalents of The Ramones, The Sex Pistols and The Clash (and Kristin Hersh and Siouxie and Patti Smith) are not Suzanne Collins, J. K Rowling and Stephenie Meyer, as Adam would have them here, but Charles Bukowski, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Sarah Kane, Janice Galloway and (much though he pisses me off a lot of the time) Bret Easton Ellis. In terms of sophistication, formal achievement, and the way their product is received by its intended audience, Meyer et al are actually closer to the manufactured boy- and girl-bands that (like Meyer, Rowling and Collins) started coming to prominence in the nineties and noughties. Both are a cultural phenomenon, yes – but in terms of what one might call the Ongoing Literary Project (and the Booker Prize is expressly about the Ongoing Literary Project) their status is negligible. Complaining that Booker will never reward the ‘artistic primitivism’ of Breaking Dawn is like complaining that the jury will never award the prize to Fifty Shades of Grey.

There is another crucial point here that Adam never addresses. The punk and alternative bands of the 1970s (and continuing into the present day) were and are themselves made up of (necessarily slightly older) young adults, making music for themselves, for their peers, in the way that best expresses their view of the world and their fears for its future. Commercial YA fiction is (in the vast majority of cases) written by adults, for consumption by readers younger than they are, or to call it by its proper name, for the young adult market. Moreover, the market certainly and in many cases the books Adam names in his blog post are not progressive, as he suggests, but didactic. The Twilight series certainly is, and both his books and his many interviews make it impossible to forget that Philip Pullman was a teacher before he ever became a full time writer.

Mass market YA is not representative of some kind of social revolution, nor is it even properly zeitgeisty. Adam talks about the Harry Potter novels as ‘one of the great representations of school in Western culture,’ yet how many kids in Britain today could realistically compare their own schooldays with Harry’s time at Hogwarts, and I’m not just talking about the magic? Adam lauds the way sex is characterised in the Twilight books as ‘something simultaneously compelling and alarming, that draws you on and scares you away in equal measure’ – well, if that’s how you want to describe the bizarre and (to me) seriously dodgy amalgam of titillation and partisan prudery that is the strongest characteristic of these narratives, then OK.  If you don’t, then you’ll be bound to admit that most of the most popular YA series are – like the manufactured pop that dates even as you download it – anodyne and half baked even in cultural terms, let alone in literary terms.

Let me make myself clear: it is not YA as such that I’m objecting to (much though I personally dislike the rather pointless label that has been slapped on it) but Adam’s (devil’s advocate? can he really be serious?) insistence on the lowest common denominator, on his confusion here of the popular with the excellent or culturally significant.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with young adults reading, enjoying, discussing, role playing or writing fan fiction about Harry Potter or Twilight. There’s no doubt that the power of story that exists in these books is considerable, and marvellous, and that the authors can and should be congratulated and rewarded for helping to instil in younger people an enjoyment of reading and perhaps also of writing that will often continue into adulthood. There’s nothing inherently wrong with adults reading and enjoying this kind of popular YA either, so long as they acknowledge it for what it is, which is literary comfort food. But what Adam seems to be doing in his article is the equivalent of demanding that Star Trek novelisations should be placed on a level playing field, in literary prize terms, with seriously intended and formally accomplished works of speculative fiction such as those produced by M. John Harrison or Liz Jensen or Simon Ings or even Adam himself. Bollocks, is what I say to that. If we want YA to be taken seriously, shouldn’t we be pointing readers – and critics, and the judges of literary prizes – away from the sludge at the bottom of the literary barrel and towards those books and writers that genuinely do represent excellence, and cultural significance, and literary innovation in their writing for young adults? I’m sure that’s what Adam would do if he were arguing a similar case for SF, so why not here? Because (as with SF, as with crime) there are a wealth of books that fit into the young adult bracket that are also worth reading as literature. Natasha Carthew’s Winter Damage, Sally Gardner’s Maggot Moon, Helen Grant’s The Glass Demon and Rachel Hartman’s Serafina to name but four recent examples, the fiction of Melvyn Burgess and Frank Cottrell Boyce and Frances Hardinge and wonderful Margo Lanagan. As with science fiction itself, the list is extensive.

Nor is it correct to assume that YA will ‘never’ be rewarded or even acknowledged by the likes of the Booker. YA is already making its way on to the shortlists of the major ‘adult’ speculative fiction prizes – see Patrick Ness’s Monsters of Men in 2011, Rachel Hartman’s Serafina earlier this year. Jenni Fagan’s YA-friendly The Panopticon, also a finalist for this year’s Kitschies, has been widely praised in the literary mainstream and Fagan was herself named as one of 2013’s Granta Best of Young British Novelists. There was plenty of discussion, both before and after it won the Clarke Award in 2012, as to whether Jane Rogers’s The Testament of Jessie Lamb should be classified as YA – and yes, there it was on the Booker longlist. These books have been recognised by prize juries because they are good books – that is, demonstrating significant accomplishment in terms of style, use of language and literary form. Whether they are YA or not (or SF or not, or crime or not) is of secondary importance.

Adam complains that the Booker never rewards ‘primitive’ art. I’m not sure if he’s wanting to categorise the whole of SF as primitive art along with mass market YA – I know I wouldn’t (just read Light) – but the central question here is: do we want it to? What could possibly be gained by a panel of Booker Prize judges deciding to give the nod to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? This surely is not what the Booker – or the Clarke, come to that – is for. The way mass consumables work in the marketplace should never be confused with what literature does, which is to be sceptical, to question, to call to arms, to stretch the imagination and the intellect, to further the possibilities of what printed words on a piece of paper can accomplish. One could argue, perhaps rightly, that reaching a lot of people is in and of itself a significant literary achievement. But The Daily Mail reaches a lot of people and I don’t see Adam arguing that the Mail – that most perniciously conservative of daily rags – should be held up as an icon of the zeitgeist.

The task of literature – and that includes our YA literature – is not to reflect mass trends, but to buck them. The task of the Booker Prize, surely – and of the Clarke, and the Kitschies – is to recognise writers who are genuinely striving to do that.

Nina’s Crime Blog #3

September 10, 2013 /

The Kills, by Richard House (2013)

We’re still only in September, and I have The Luminaries and The Goldfinch still to read, but I am going to be pretty gobsmacked if anything supersedes The Kills as my book of the year.

Book 1: Sutler

“Although no one has seen him they have managed to bump into him twice? That is quite a coincidence. Mr Parson, how is your knowledge of the American Civil War?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Do you read historical fiction? Have you heard of a sutler? It’s a military term.” Bastian’s face pinched with a teacher’s concentration. “A sutler is someone who follows the military, they sell provisions, clothes, uniforms, food…”

“I’m sorry?”

“Sutler. Sutler. S.U.T.L.E.R. It’s from the Dutch. It means someone who does the dirty work.” (pp171-2)

We follow a fugitive from the Iraqi desert to Grenoble, where he disappears again, perhaps forever. A huge amount of money has gone missing. A man calling himself Stephen Lawrence Sutler is the obvious suspect, but who is playing him, and to what purpose? A team of film makers who encounter Sutler in Turkey become entangled in his affairs with disastrous repercussions for them all.

Book 2: The Massive

Even now the work bothers him in ways he can’t describe. Too much junk, too much dust, broken concrete, stuffed shopping bags, too much crap to properly know what’s being hidden. These buildings, he shakes his head. They clear them out, knock them down, and then build these superhighways right through them. A superhighway crashing right through some mediaeval sunscorched slum. (p283)

In a direct prequel to the events of Book 1, we meet the men of Camp Liberty. Rem Gunnersen’s hand-picked team of security and ex-servicemen have been charged with disposing of the vast acreages of dangerous garbage that is the ultimate undisclosed product of the Iraq war. The money is good, and they’re removed from the more obvious perils of the combat zone, but as the men gradually discover more about the dangers of the work they are engaged in, and the identity of the person who put them in their situation, relations between them begin to unravel. Meanwhile, at home in the States, Cathy Gunnersen begins an investigation of her own.

Book 3: The Kill

OK, there was the whole absurdity of it, obviously, it’s a crazy idea, but an appealing idea also, who doesn’t like the idea of two men, tourists, who kill, and take their instructions from a pulp novel. The very randomness of it. They come and go, and no one is ever caught – it’s morbidly satisfying, knowing you’ll never know. (p700)

Back in Book 1, a certain recent bestseller is passed around between various characters, a novel depicting a true crime investigation into a case whereby the author of a popular crime novel has disappeared in circumstances similar to those described in his own fiction. The novel is set in Naples, as is the fictional factual story that supposedly inspired it. It’s meant to be bad luck to say the title aloud. The person who originally owned the book in Book 1 has already disappeared.

Book 4: The Hit

“There was a murder.” The word was too ridiculous, spoken out in the sunlight, stupidly implausible. She can’t quite believe it, but doesn’t know what it would take to make such an event credible. Falling buildings, burning planes, deserts on fire, more plausible because of the scale. “They never found the victim.” (p891)

And in Book 4, the events of the novel that is Book 3 appear to be playing themselves out again, this time for real, in a different place and time and with a new cast of characters. Or is someone simply playing games with an urban myth? Some key characters from Book 1 reappear, still on the trail of Sutler, but there are now three Sutlers instead of just the one. We pick up their stories eagerly – but are we ever going to get the answers we’ve been looking for?

In her excellent recent review of Helene Wecker’s novel The Golem and the Jinni for Strange Horizons, Abigail Nussbaum makes reference to an article written for The Guardian by novelist Edward Docx in which he posits the over-familiar argument that novels employing genre materials will automatically prove inferior to the mainstream:

“It’s worth dealing with the difference again, since everyone seems to have forgotten it or become chary of the articulation. Mainly this: that even good genre (not Larsson or Brown) is by definition a constrained form of writing. There are conventions and these limit the material. That’s the way writing works and lots of people who don’t write novels don’t seem to get this: if you need a detective, if you need your hero to shoot the badass CIA chief, if you need faux-feminist shopping jokes, then great; but the correlative of these decisions is a curtailment in other areas. If you are following conventions, then a significant percentage of the thinking and imagining has been taken out of the exercise. Lots of decisions are already made.”

This argument is a nonsense based on a fallacy, namely the idea that a novel featuring an honest cop and a corrupt CIA chief, for example, must by its very nature find itself constrained within well-worn genre stereotypes, whereas a novel featuring a group of university students say, or TV execs wife-swapping in Hampstead, or a journalist facing dismissal because of phone hacking, will by its very nature offer a more rounded and psychologically realistic portrait of human interaction. It goes without saying that by-the-numbers fiction exists in all corners of the literary landscape – but to suggest that certain character or subject choices are intrinsically more prone to cliche or repetition or just plain bad writing has to be a false conceit. Either all writing exists on a level playing field – i.e, the success, failure, originality or otherwise of any given narrative is down to the skill and imagination of the writer, rather than the subject area in which he or she operates – or none of it does.

It would seem to me that the genre wars, as Nussbaum dubs them in her article, continue unchecked precisely because of a failure by both sides to acknowledge the simple and self evident fact that the use or non-use of speculative or thriller elements is in and of itself not a determining factor of literary quality.

It doesn’t help Docx’s cause that in spite what he says in the paragraph quoted above,  much of his argument is based around the sub-standard output of hack writers such as Dan Brown, Stieg Larsson and Lee Child. (Child has to be one of the worst prose ‘stylists’ working today. I wish to God someone would call his bluff on that boast of his that he could write a creditable literary novel in three weeks – the results would make for grand entertainment indeed.) Docx is also seen to perform that neat trick so beloved of mainstream critics in hastily claiming those speculative or crime novels that disprove his argument (in this case Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment) for the literary mainstream. Thus critics like Docx bang on incessantly about the poor literary quality of works by Heinlein, Asimov, Campbell and Clarke, whilst insisting that Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, Ballard’s Crash, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Kuzuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go aren’t actually SF at all because they’re too well written. This kind of double standard is not just tiresome, it’s ridiculous.

I have a lot of sympathy with Docx’s frustration over the general crapness of much commercial fiction, but his lordly pronouncements on speculative fiction per se seem to be based far more around personal prejudice than on logic. Fyodor Dostoevsky proved again and again that a real writer can do anything he damn well likes with a basic thriller plot. Margaret Atwood, Patricia Highsmith, Joyce Carol Oates, Christopher Priest, Mike Harrison, Michael Swanwick and James Ellroy have all used genre materials to create literary masterpieces, and I could easily name dozens more who have done likewise. But for now I’m going to concentrate on naming Richard House.

Because House’s thriller-in-four-thrillers The Kills is a literary masterpiece. No amount of summarizing could adequately convey the power, complexity, literary elegance, and intellectual reach of this remarkable book. House has openly stated his admiration for Bolano’s great novel-in-five-novels, 2666 – a tough act to follow for anyone, but with The Kills, House has produced a work that is consummately worthy of its inspiration.

One of the things I dislike most about commercial thrillers is the way character motivation is so often twisted to fit the plot – characters do things not because they really would, but because the author needs them to. Nothing feels real, and because nothing feels real, nothing matters. The events that drive The Kills are strange, dark, frightening and mysterious – but not one thing that happens feels false, trite, predictable or unlikely. The plot – or should I say plots – seem to unfold with a flawless and inexorable logic from actions and decisions taken by characters who at every point in the story feel wholly three dimensional and real.

And this book is genuinely thrilling. As you might expect with a novel of this length (for those who don’t already know it’s 1,000 pages) its complexities take time to unfold and there is work to be done by the reader. You must come prepared to immerse yourself in this narrative, to devote yourself to it mentally for the time it takes you to read it. There will be moments of discomfiture – especially at the beginning – while you try to work out exactly where House is taking you, and for what purpose. But that is part of the joy of this book, and believe me when I tell you that every ounce of effort you put in will be repaid. There were moments in all four of the books when the hairs on the back of my neck literally stood on end as my eyes were opened to some new revelation or resonance, where I found myself racing through the pages, the pleasures of the prose now coming secondary to the simple and urgent need to know what was going to happen. This novel is long, but only exactly as long as it needs to be. I read a fascinating interview with Eleanor Catton at the weekend in which she compared long novels with DVD box sets in the way they offer the possibility of longer and more complex story arcs, of stories within stories and properly realised subplots. This is certainly true of The Kills. There are a lot of words here, but not one of them feels superfluous to requirements.

In matters of form, the book is a significant accomplishment. The four books are not so much linked together as enfolded in one another like origami. Resonances between them abound – not just going forward, but looking backward also. Even yesterday as I finished the book, I found myself cheering ‘oh YES!’ to a suddenly obvious parallel between Books 3 and 1 that I hadn’t noticed at all until that moment. There is a metafictional layering of narrative that – like the film of the book of the book in Books 1, 3 and 4 – results in what I can only describe as a millefeuille of storytelling, simultaneously singular and plural. In his review for The Telegraph, Jake Kerridge compares The Kills to ‘a dance that has been minutely choreographed’, a simile that feels particularly apt.

Kerridge’s favourite of the four Books would appear to be Book 2, The Massive, and if I were pushed to name my own favourite I think I might be inclined to agree with him. This damning indictment of Western actions in Iraq, the ignorance and greed that lay at the heart of the push towards so-called regime change and the thousand-and-one cock-ups in the wake of that, has the strength of purpose of the best kind of investigative journalism, with all the twists and turns (and horrific pay-offs) of a five-star political thriller. At the same time it is a deeply, deeply affecting literary novel about people. I’ll never forget Gunnersen’s men and I’ll never forget Cathy Gunnersen either. The Massive is less circuitous, less complex as narrative than the other three Books – its complexity lies in the way it interacts with the other novels – but this is perhaps where its strength resides. As a piece of political fiction it is a must-read. The Massive is an important book in its own right, by any standards.

It’s no surprise that much of the commentary on The Kills has tended to focus on the form it takes. But I wouldn’t want to end this review without talking about the novel’s language, which to me feels sublimely fit for purpose and in many, many places simply sublime. There isn’t a single bad sentence in The Kills. The novel’s pared-down, factualizing and dispassionate style has a documentary quality, a purity and a deceptive simplicity that is beauty in its most refined state, a kind of literary invisibility that had me in envy of this author’s brilliance on every page. That House loves words, the English language and the act of trasmitting thought and emotion through the act of writing is everywhere, everywhere in this novel, and I would like to close with a passage that, for me, summarizes not only The Kills itself, but the state of being a writer:

And this was gone. The precise description of the decor along a mantelpiece, Krawiec’s mother’s house, the petiteness of it, sullen and ordinary, of Lvov at night, how capsule-like the city seemed, of the people seated facing the windows at the respite home in Lvov, the women on buses, the silent trains and trams. Everything lost: the airport and how coming into it pitched through a layer of fog – fog so you knew you were in the heart of Eastern Europe, right on the edge of another period entirely – how this worked as an image of what he would and would not find – coming through fog, OK, not great, but apt. The petrochemical works, the roadways, the fields and fields shaved of produce, and the intensity of it all, that one man could come from this flat monochrome to a city so bumpy and opposite and butcher two people. (p714 – and don’t be deceived by that line about Krawiec butchering two people – like everything in The Kills, it doesn’t turn out the way you think it will… )

I was hoping to have this piece written and posted before the announcement of the Booker Prize shortlist this morning, but events, as they say, intervened, and the list was actually revealed about an hour ago, while I was still buggering about trying to get this finished. I’m not going to comment on the Booker shortlist at the moment, except to say that I feel devastated for House that The Kills isn’t on it. This doesn’t entirely surprise me – I said in an email to a friend recently that I doubted the judges would have the courage to include it (because of its length, because it’s a crime novel, because, because because) – but it does seem to me to be a criminal oversight. The Kills is a major novel, a major thriller, a major contribution to literature. I would urge you to read it.

My criminal bloggage

July 30, 2013 /

I don’t know the crime genre nearly well enough, and that has started to bug me. I’ve never read Henning Mankell, for example, or David Peace, Joseph Wambaugh or Kerstin Ekman, George Pelecanos or Karin Alvtegen. Crime fiction has presented us with some of literature’s most instantly compelling stories and many of its most enduring characters, but these are not the only reasons why I personally find it fascinating. What I love most about the idea of crime fiction is its forensic nature – the presentation and unravelling, in whatever form or style the writer chooses to present this, of a number of clues, or happenings, or incidents, and the way a story will arise almost inevitably out of this arrangement of disparate pieces. Every crime novel is, to a greater or lesser extent, an essay in the uncovering of something hidden, a key factor that has been deliberately concealed from the reader, often in plain sight, a mystery that the reader, for maximum enjoyment, feels compelled to solve.

I think it’s likely that a good part of the reason crime fiction is so popular lies precisely in this work of joint imagining, the way the writer invites the reader inside, to work with them, almost, in a work of joint creation.

I read all of Dorothy L. Sayers while I was at university, at least in part because of Harriet Vane’s Oxford connection. I continued to read a fair amount of crime fiction into my twenties, and there are a number of authors whose work I know pretty well. I devoured every book Ruth Rendell wrote as Barbara Vine (The Brimstone Wedding remains my favourite), and I read a lot of ‘core’ Rendells too, though I’ve always tended to prefer her non-Wexfords, wonderful books like Lake of Darkness, Going Wrong, A Judgement in Stone (turned into a marvellous movie by Claude Chabrol, La Ceremonie – go, go rent it now!) and my personal favourite The Bridesmaid (Chabrol made a movie of that, too – it’s pretty good, but not as good as the book) to the series novels. I read most of PD James (her standalone non-Dalgliesh book, Innocent Blood, was far and away my favourite) I developed an enduring obsession with the fiction of Patricia Highsmith. What I loved most about her work was the way you’d frequently get a crime novel without a murder in it, or else the murder plot would be subverted somehow, or take a completely unexpected turning. Her characters were nuanced, compelling and above all weird, and it is the effortless weirdness of her storytelling that continues to amaze me. Her ‘how to’ book on writing suspense fiction is a genuine treat.

I suppose that given the emotional ambiguity of a lot of my own fiction, it’s hardly surprising that the crime stories I tend to prefer are those that shirk the business of solving the mystery at their heart. Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel is a standout novel, a wonderful, joyously dark read that gives more with each subsequent reading at least partly because we never discover if Rachel ‘did it’ or not. The way du Maurier manages to get away with this inconclusive ending whilst at the same time making the novel a thrilling experience for the reader is a masterclass in genius-level storytelling.

More recently I’ve loved Roberto Bolano’s The Third Reich, in which Bolano subverts the generic crime novel beautifully by having the central action of the story – a character’s disappearance in mysterious circumstances – play itself out just beyond the main thrust of the narrative as it is presented to us, and also Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn & Child, firstly for its incredible London writing and secondly for its obstinate refusal to tell a traditional crime story at all. I was struck especially by something Ridgway said in an e-interview with John Self about the problem of the conclusive narrative:

I enjoy crime fiction a great deal. Or two thirds of it. By which I mean the first two thirds of each book. The last third of a crime book usually pisses me off. I love the exposition, getting everything set up and into position, and then the cranking out of the mechanics that are going to get the thing to dance. But in the last third it seems to always end up in a sort of badly choreographed dogfight and the pacing goes haywire and there’s so much chasing after loose ends that it ceases to have anything to do with our experienced world and becomes more a sort of fantasy of resolution, a kind of neurotic tidying of life’s mess, like sport.

These words sum up my own problem with the more conventional type of thriller pretty much exactly. (The same is true of way too many horror novels also – an amazing setup ruined by a downhill gallop towards a denouement that seems so stuffed full with cliches it’s enough to make you want to kill everyone involved in it.) Perhaps this is even why I seemed to fall out of love with the genre at some point. I feel now that I’ve been missing out, and that rejecting a genre because I don’t care for its bland centre ground would be the same as refusing to read science fiction because I no longer care for the work of Isaac Asimov. The trick – as with SF, as with horror – is to seek out the work at the edges, novels and writers whose concerns extend beyond the merely generic and into the personal exploration of defining obsessions.

I’ve read a fair amount of very good True Crime recently – Richard Lloyd Parry’s scintillating People Who Eat Darkness, Janet Malcolm’s excellent Iphigenia in Forest Hills, John Follain’s flawed but fascinating Death in Perugia, and Gordon Burn’s Capote-inspired Happy Like Murderers. (Burn is an achingly good writer, his premature death a genuine loss to literature.) Once again, what I’ve loved most about these books has been the construction of story through the examination of facts, the painstaking exhumation of salient details. I’ve seen more than one critic point to an obsession with detail as a defining characteristic of my own stories, so it seems likely that my excited response to this in the work of others is wholly to be expected.

I haven’t written much crime fiction myself, mainly because I’m terrified of cocking it up, but I have written some. My linked pieces ‘Wilkolak’ (first published in Crimewave #11 and reprinted in Maxim Jakobowski’s Mammoth Book of Best British Crime #10) and ‘The Tiger’ (published earlier this summer in Paul Finch’s anthology for Gray Friar, Terror Tales of London) are both psychological crime stories with a slight supernatural element. More recently, my novella Vivian Guppy and the Brighton Belle, my contribution to Eibonvale Press’s railway anthology Rustblind and Silverbright, makes a feature of precisely the investigative, forensic style of writing I’ve been talking about here. It’s not a crime story so much as a mystery – a ‘where is it’ rather than a ‘whodunit’. The story’s protagonist, Marian, could definitely be described as a detective – though it’s not criminals she’s trying to unearth but model trains. When I delivered this story I said to David Rix of Eibonvale that what defined Vivian Guppy for me most of all was what tremendous fun it was to write (and believe me when I say that this is not always a given), and I was recently surprised and very delighted to see Des Lewis describe the story in his real-time review of Rustblind as ‘a veritable page-turner’.

I’ve always felt immensely attracted though somewhat daunted by the prospect of trying to write a crime novel, but something Joel Lane said to me recently, that crime fiction ‘is just a matter of finding a crime or a criminal to write about’, clarified matters for me enormously. In placing the emphasis firmly on description, on the forensic examination of a given situation, rather than on the mechanical kind of plotting that led me to shy away from crime fiction in the first place, he gave me a means to analyse what matters to me most in this kind of writing, and the sense that I might even be able to produce some.

In the meantime though, I’ve decided it’s high time I got to know the genre a little better. To this end I’m going to try and prioritize crime fiction in my reading over the coming months, and blog about each novel I read, sharing my thoughts and findings and my conclusions at this blog. Hopefully I’ll start to build my own personal canon of crime writing as we go. So, with no further ado…

Nina’s Crime Blog #1: The False Inspector Dew, by Peter Lovesey (1972)

This might seem an odd place for me to start. Peter Lovesey writes crime fiction in the ‘golden age’ tradition: intricately worked mysteries with surprising plot twists and often within an historical setting. Classic detective fiction has few equals for sheer readability when it is done well, but the emphasis lies first and foremost with the building of a firm overall structure in which every happening is created expressly to move the plot forward. There is little room for digression in this type of story, and the characters tend to adhere fairly rigidly to their role as plot dictates it, rather than wandering off all over the place or messing things up with their complex psychologies. The False Inspector Dew is no exception to this. But what lifts it above the average and makes it a delight is Lovesey’s clear love for and knowledge of his chosen strand of detective fiction, a love that articulates itself in the blissful and knowing ironies that make The False Inspector Dew so funny as well as so clever.

It’s 1921 and Walter Baranov has a problem. He’s a dentist, and he likes being a dentist – but his wife Lydia, a failing actress, has other plans for him. She wants them to sail for America in the hope of making it big in motion pictures. Walter sees only disaster ahead – but unfortunately for him it’s Lydia who has control of the purse strings, and she’s threatening to sell his dental practice to finance their voyage. Help arrives in the form of Alma, a patient of Walter’s whose passion for him is such that she’s prepared for them to try anything – even murder – to be rid of Lydia and free to pursue a life together. Things seem to go well for them at first – but an unforseen calamity soon reverses the tide of their fortunes, and Walter finds himself in the unenviable position of acting as detective to solve the crime he himself would seem to have committed…

The plot is beautifully worked – Ruth Rendell herself defied anyone to predict the outcome and I duly found myself outwitted at each new turn. But it’s Lovesey’s prose that makes all this happen in such fine style. His writing is of the kind that is so fit for purpose it is invisible – elegant, correct, unadorned, created solely for the pleasure of telling its story in the deftest manner possible, this is what I’d call Just Good English, and it would be well if more of Lovesey’s would-be imitators were to take a lesson from him in how to write as well as what kind of stories to tell. Each character is drawn with economy and great clarity. The humour is wonderful – the kind of sardonic wit that is either part of a writer’s God-given armoury or it is not.

I chose The False Inspector Dew to kick off my crime blog mainly because this novel has always been a favourite of Chris’s and I was curious to see how I liked it. What strikes me most about it is that it’s a whodunit in the proper old-school sense of the word. The crimes against good plotting in contemporary TV cop dramas are legion and tiresome. We recently caught up with ITV’s Broadchurch, for example, and although we enjoyed ourselves watching it, and were able to work out who the killer was through a process of elimination, we felt cheated in that there was nothing in the script to prefigure motive, nothing whatsoever. For a screenwriter to rely on a shock revelation – ‘ooh, X is a secret paedophile!’ – that occurs less than twenty minutes from the end of an eight-hour drama is lazy writing, simple as that, and to be deplored, especially when you have great actors like Olivia Colman and David Tennant working for you, who deserve better.

Lovesey takes no such shortcuts. Everything is there on the page, right from the beginning. The reader can either choose to try and solve the mystery independently as s/he goes, or simply sit back and enjoy the feeling of being confounded.

What all this adds up to is traditional detective fiction of the highest order. I probably wouldn’t choose to read this particular stripe of crime fiction terribly often, if only because it is so far from my own style and species of ability that it leaves me little room to be directly inspired. But do I admire it? Yes I do. And did I enjoy it? Yes I did – and plenty.

Next up: The Kills, by Richard House (I may be some time… )

Paris in the Spring

June 21, 2013 /

We’ve just returned from Paris, where I’ve spent the last couple of days meeting the press and having my photo taken as part of the run-up to the publication of the French edition of The Silver Wind at the end of August. I’ve just this morning received my author copies of the book – entitled Complications in French – and I for one think it looks fantastic. The cover design couldn’t be more beautiful or more appropriate!

And the initial response to the book has been overwhelming. I gave four in-depth interviews to four highly competent journalists – Christine Marcandier of Mediapart, Macha Sery of Le Monde, Frederique Roussel of Liberation, and Clementine Godszal of Les Inrockuptibles – all of whom had not only read the book very closely, but had interesting and insightful things to say and ask about it, too. I was blown away by their natural enthusiasm for speculative fiction in general and for Complications in particular. The experience of meeting and talking to them was deeply energizing.

Complications is being published by Editions Tristram, an independent imprint founded in 1988 by Jean-Hubert Gailliot under the slogan: ‘What changes literature is literature itself’. The people who run Tristram are in love with books and with ideas. They quite clearly see it as their mission to seek out and promote the work of writers who come at things from a different angle, who work at the boundaries of genre, who produce work that is an individual expression of an original or contrary worldview. To say that I am thrilled to be associated with them is an understatement, and when you look at their catalogue – which includes work by J. G. Ballard, Joyce Carol Oates, Arno Schmidt, Pierre Bourgeade and Patti Smith – you will very quickly understand why.

In the Cafe Les Editeurs, with Sylvie Martigny and Jean-Hubert Gailliot of Editions Tristram

While in Paris, Chris and I had the additional thrill of staying in the hotel La Louisiane on the Rue de Seine. Situated just a minute’s walk from the Boulevard Saint-Germain, this historic building has played host to many artists, musicians and writers – John Coltrane and Miles Davis, de Beauvoir and Sartre, Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller to name just a few. (How amazing is that?? I’m still having difficulty taking it all in, to be honest. I was particularly thrilled to discover that in more recent times the hotel has also been the preferred Parisian overnight resting place of Quentin Tarantino… )

Finally though, I really must say a few words about my amazing translator, Bernard Sigaud. With translations of works by J. G. Ballard, M. John Harrison and Paul McAuley (among many others) in his portfolio, Bernard is no stranger to the world of British science fiction. His first encounter with my work came through reading my story ‘Microcosmos’ in Interzone, and it was Bernard who brought The Silver Wind to the attention of Editions Tristram in the first place. Without Bernard and his tireless enthusiasm for speculative fiction, this project would not be happening, and I owe him an enormous debt of gratitude. French readers might notice also that Complications has more pages than The Silver Wind, and this is because it contains an extra story. Here again it was Bernard who became interested in the peculiar sideways connections between my story ‘Darkroom’, first published in Elastic Press’s Subtle Edens anthology, and the stories that make up the original English edition of The Silver Wind.  When he emailed and asked me if ‘Darkroom’ might be included in the French edition I was happy enough to agree, but also surprised. It is true that I wrote ‘Darkroom’ while I was working on the other ‘Martin stories’, so I knew some material was likely to have seeped across. But it was only this last week, when I reread all the stories in preparation for the Paris trip, that I fully appreciated the wisdom and happy insight of Bernard’s idea. The connections between the stories are tight, and strange, and illuminating. I’m delighted to see ‘Chambre Noire’ lead off this wonderful venture, and pleased with the thought that future French readers of my work will be getting something a little different, something new.

With Clementine Godszal, Cafe de Flore

'Say cheese..!' Having my photo taken in Cafe de Flore

How time flies at Cafe Les Editeurs - all photos by Chris Priest

The Folded Man

June 16, 2013 /

The Folded Man is the debut novel of Matt Hill, a writer currently based in London but born in Manchester, and it’s clearly Manchester his heart is closest to, because it is Manchester that provides the backbone, the ambience, the gritty alternate reality of this extraordinary story.

It’s 2018, and things in near-future Britain are not looking good. The action of the novel takes place against a backdrop of racist vigilante violence, terrorist insurgence and police brutality. Mass outbreaks of rioting have laid waste to the urban environment. The civilian population is under curfew, and both petty and not-so-petty crime runs more or less unchecked.

Our unlikely hero is Brian Meredith, an unemployed drug addict and wheelchair user who believes he is a mermaid. Brian suffers from the rare genetic condition sirenomelia – his legs are fused together, giving them the appearance of a fish’s tail. As most people born with sirenomelia seldom live more than a couple of days, Brian is something of a miracle. He should not be alive – and yet he is. Hill’s vital and unflinching portrayal of this extraordinary character is very nearly as rare a miracle as Brian himself.

Brian begins the novel in a state of numb passivity. His main protector, his mother, is dead. His city is being smashed to ruins before his eyes. It is as much as Brian can do to keep himself alive and in coke. Then, half bullied and half persuaded by his friend Noah, he finds himself caught up in a series of events that make even the fact of his extraordinary existence pale to ordinariness by comparison. What follows is part thriller, part chiller, part X Files conspiracy. Brian is deceived, used, abused, confused – but doggedly refuses to take on the role of victim.  That he is able to survive at all in such a hostile environment is noteworthy. That he is able to finally be master of his destiny is – that word again – miraculous.

This is a science fiction novel that manages – just – to keep its science fictional rationale where lesser novels of the urban slipstream have crashed and burned. I spent the final thirty pages of this book on the edge of my seat – not so much in suspense over the outcome (much as I loved it) but on tenterhooks as to whether Hill would be able to hold the story together. He does, and I cheered inwardly at his achievement. It would be impossible to write many words about The Folded Man without also passing comment on the narrative style, a kind of broken stream of consciousness, a window into Brian-world, an unblinking, unshrinking grasping-of-the-nettle from Brian’s perspective. I loved this too – all the more so in retrospect, because of the way it grew on me. I have to confess I didn’t warm to Brian all that much at first – he kind of pissed me off – but by the end of the book I was wholly with him, protective of him but inspired by him too: rejoicing in his tenacity, his fuck-you attitude to the indignities that constantly threaten to overwhelm him, mesmerised by his very particular, very nearly insane brand of personal courage.

If there is hope in this novel – and I think there is – it lies in the resilience of Manchester and its people – people like Brian – in their refusal to have others run their lives for them. The one thing Brian will not let go of is his love for Manchester, and from time to time, through his eyes, we glimpse moments of a future in which the broken city he calls his home will rise from its ashes.

I understand that Matt Hill is currently working on a second novel. I truly hope that it will be a speculative one. The British fantastic needs him. An outstanding debut.

The marvellous Mr Hill

May 29, 2013 /

I first encountered Joe Hill’s fiction through a PS Publishing sampler – I’m pretty sure it was in a FantasyCon goodie bag – that featured his story ‘Best New Horror’. I read it more from curiosity than anything. This was just around the time that Joe was ‘outed’ as Stephen King’s son, and of course there was a lot of talk of the kind you might expect from those who don’t really know or understand the writing business, about how having a famous father would probably make things easier for Hill to get on in the world. I could hardly think of anything worse, personally. To be the child of the greatest and most successful horror writer in many generations – and then to have it dawn on you that you yourself wanted to be a horror writer? I couldn’t even begin to imagine the pressure that might exert.

The fact that Hill had broken through entirely anonymously, as it were, that he’d sent his stuff off to magazines just like any other beginning writer, that he’d been determined to make his name entirely on his own merits – this act of bravery signalled his seriousness and commitment right from the outset and earned him my immediate respect. But what of the writing? Did he have the chops? Could it be even remotely possible that Joe Hill could be anywhere near as good as his dad?

I respected him, but I was afraid for him, too.

I loved ‘Best New Horror’. I can still remember the sensation of delight that began seeping through me as I read it (I think it might have been on the train on the way back from that very convention), that feeling of ‘yes!’ that always rises up, like a shout, when I read something I know is good, a feeling of triumph almost, of solidarity with that writer. I loved ‘Best New Horror’ because it read like a dream, with that easy, swinging rhythm, that facility with dialogue common to the best American writing that I love all the more because I know I can never emulate it. There was more to ‘Best New Horror’ than pure reading pleasure, though. It was also a damn good horror story that knew about damn good horror stories. The way Hill played with the tropes, the way he had a ball with them – that story had me laughing out loud with pleasure at its nudge-wink self-awareness every bit as much as it held me in suspense. It was clever, it was artful, it was beautifully written. It showed skill, and pleasure in skill’s exercise. Most of all it showed that here was a writer who knew his own mind and had his own voice. I was so impressed by ‘Best New Horror’ that I immediately went out and bought Twentieth Century Ghosts, the collection that launched Hill’s career, published by PS long before anyone had a clue who Joe’s dad was.

And bugger me if the 14 other stories in there weren’t just as good! They showed a remarkable variation in tone colour, too. Magical realism, touches of SF, straight horror, weird horror, ghost stories – all demonstrating both a hand-on-heart love of the genre and a technical understanding of it that went way beyond the ordinary. My favourite? Probably the novelette ‘Voluntary Committal’, but ‘My Father’s Mask’ is amazing too, and I would be happy to see ‘Best New Horror’ re-anthologized from here into the next century.

Anyway, yesterday evening I had the pleasure of attending an event at Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road to celebrate the launch of Joe’s new novel N0S4R2. Joe gave a reading from the book, followed by an interview and Q&A in which he showed himself to be as comfortable and generous with an audience as his father. (Perhaps having writing as your ‘family business’ does at least offer some help in dealing with the public aspects of the job.) He was great fun to be with, and I think the audience would have happily sat there and listened to him read for most of the night. Best of all though, he knew what he was talking about. Anyone still curious about the secret of Hill’s success need look no further than his insightful and hardworking attitude to both the art and craft of writing.

I was very pleased to report back to Chris (who sadly couldn’t be there last night because of a previous commitment) that ‘this man writes proper second drafts!’ (And third drafts, and fourth drafts.) When you hear a writer explaining how even work that might have seemed good to him first time round usually needs to be completely rewritten, you know he means business. I was especially impressed by Hill’s attitude to his early rejections, how he believed that his prentice manuscripts were ‘rejected for the right reasons’, and that it was those very rejections that helped him learn how to ‘finally write a book that other people would be excited about publishing.’

His acknowledgement that inspiration is only the start.

It was a marvellous evening, and one to remember. I am very much looking forward to reading N0S4R2.

B-Side

May 27, 2013 /

For anyone who’d like a free taste of Stardust, PS Publishing have generously posted the first story in the collection, ‘B-Side’, as the latest in their regular ‘Something for the Weekend’ feature at their website. The story will be free to read online all this week.

‘B-Side’ had an interesting genesis. It started life as a much shorter story, and the ending was starkly eliptical, even for me. I was never entirely satisfied with it, and when I eventually showed it to Chris he said he felt the ending came out of nowhere and that I’d have to do something about it. I remember the discussion well (we were stuck in a traffic jam on the M25 at the time, so not the best venue for a reasoned exchange) – knowing there was more than a sackful of sense in what Chris was saying, yet at the same time feeling protective of my story and not wanting to lose the threatening sense of mystery I knew it should contain.

I did the best thing I could think of in the circumstances – I left the story entirely alone and did not return to it until I felt I could see it objectively, without any of the attendant baggage of who had been ‘right’ about that ending. Letting work ‘rest’ in this way always has the constructive advantage of dissociation – as if it’s someone else’s work you’re reading, and therefore much easier to criticise honestly – and when a few months later I did read ‘B-Side’ through again it seemed immediately obvious to me that what I had was the bones of a story, the beginnings of a longer piece awaiting completion. Once I had that clear in my mind it was a matter of great satisfaction to me to excavate the full story that lay waiting beneath the visible surface.

And what lay waiting was bigger even than I realised at first, because ‘B-Side’ turned out to be not just a longer story in its own right, but the beginning of my idea of Stardust as a whole. I knew right away that ‘B-Side’ and ‘The Lammas Worm’ were linked through the travelling players, and that the young chess player in ‘B-Side’ had a counterpoint in an unfinished but closely treasured fragment called ‘Stardust’ that I had written and then laid aside about a year before. As these things became apparent, I knew I had a book on my hands. I won’t say that the other stories wrote themselves – ‘Wreck of the Julia’ especially took a long time to get right – but I did at least know where they belonged, and that they belonged together.

Chris always refers to ‘B-Side’ as ‘the highwayman story’, in remembrance of that rather robust discussion we had about the ending. The highwayman he refers to appears in the story now but fleetingly, a mention only – but in a very real sense the collection would not exist without him.

Perhaps a second dedication is in order!

Thought for the day

May 11, 2013 /

“Cultures change and the ceaseless churn builds empires just as easily as it razes kingdoms. There is always some part of a culture that is dead, dying or lying dormant in wait for the right person to come along with the right set of ideas and the right type of audience. Complaints about the exhaustion of the field have always been with us and will hopefully always be with us as they are a sign that the world of written SF is still complex and vibrant enough to contain multiple factions with different ideas about what SF ought to be doing. The only time people should really start to worry about the exhaustion of SF is when people stop complaining about it as that means that people have stopped disagreeing and when people stop disagreeing it’s generally a sign that people have also stopped caring.”

(Jonathan McCalmont, ‘Cycles of Exhaustion’)

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