a pile of leaves

The World in Studio D ... Doctor Who: The Sixties, by Howe, Stammers and Walker

2012-02-16T11:08:00.009Z

It’s a ‘brand’ and a ‘franchise’ now, but when I was a child in the 80s and 90s, Doctor Who was just part of the wallpaper, part of the texture of the world. It was even, I think, part of an approved series of cultural progressions: so you outgrew Doctor Who and saw it as camp kiddy sci-fi, then outgrew Top of the Pops and then the soaps, and then hopefully at some point you would find yourself sitting in a theatre, watching some Pinter. I bypassed some of this process because Doctor Who scared me when I was five or six and then was axed (for not being scary enough). Because I bypassed it, of course I had to go into it later and screw up the whole of my cultural development.

When I was eleven, I picked up a scriptbook for the earliest Doctor Who story, expecting to find it a laugh (along the lines of Victoria Wood’s spoof of the show: ‘Slow down, Doctor – I’m not very bright and my stockings are rubbing together!’). But it wasn’t, and instead I got hooked. Whoops.

That first story opens with two teachers following their unearthly pupil, Susan, home to a junkyard; in the fog they lose her. Then an old man arrives, looking as if he will unlock a blue box stowed amidst the rubbish. Electric light spills from its door…

Whilst I love everything that followed - the sheer invention required to refresh and subvert that central story, all the nonsense, monsters and jokes: the MaWhoBharata - these early stories are special. Here, the Doctor is a oddity: a grandfather (though his children are never mentioned, he travels with their daughter), he’s a genius but also a child, unable to steer his infinitely powerful Ship home, arguing with his fellow travellers and tricking them into doing what he wants.

I suppose because he’s so physically unimpressive (he faints quite often) there is an emphasis on his powers of rhetoric and invention – something that goes right back through Trickster myths to lame old Loki.

The stories themselves are long (often running six or seven episodes), and there’s a melancholy edge to them: all the leads are unwilling adventurers, all a long way from home. But the feel of the stories also depends on its production, which was bizarre and frenetic and ambitious beyond its means. I’m re-watching these stories – partly because Jon will be away a bit for his new job – and I'm re-reading, bit by bit, a fabulous book from the 1990s about the making of all this.

Although the series had a long gestation period – with all sorts of focus groups and redrafting of core concepts – once it was being broadcast, Doctor Who quickly slipped out of control, as if it had a life of its own. The producer and director were unhappy with the scripts for the very first story, but there wasn’t money to have them rewritten - something similar happened with the Tardis set. At this point the production team didn’t even have an office – they were based in a caravan on Wood Green, like some bizarre camping holiday.

Yesterday I found out that the Radiophonic Workshop – which produced the theme tune and sound effects by physically recording, slicing and sticky-taping together a mass of distorted electronic sounds – worked in a converted ice rink, with plaster falling off the walls. Meanwhile, scripts were being ditched or written in a weekend, actors taking holiday or forgetting their lines; stories were recorded in as few takes as possible, because there was no video editing: it was nail scissors and sellotape.

And they were recorded, without any location filming at all, in Studio D at Lime Grove studios in Shepherds Bush. On a budget of a few thousand pounds, the production team turned that space into an East London junkyard, a prehistoric landscape of deserts and caves, a nightmare world of stone forest and mutant-haunted cities, Marco Polo’s encampment in the Himalayas, a medieval court at Peking, and the planet Marinus with seas of acid, screaming jungles, men of rubber. And that’s in the first six stories alone. To me, that’s really quite beautiful.

What’s given me a thrill, in the last few weeks, is realising that Lime Grove Studios used to stand directly opposite one of the art colleges I do administration for, in the street called Lime Grove. Studio D, along with the rest, were bulldozed in the 1980s – impractical now, I suppose, belonging to another age. So now there’s housing on the site. I took a picture, look:

So nothing remains of the place where these extraordinary worlds were conjured up by people out of papier mache and sticky-backed plastic. But presumably, when William Hartnell, William Russell, Jacqueline Hill and Carole-Ann Ford had handed in their costumes and wigs and said goodnight to the Daleks, they would walked out the door and seen the building that I know so well. As they disappeared into the everyday…

Through the mist ... Steps Out of Time, by Eric Houghton

2012-02-14T14:52:00.005Z

Here’s a book I was given for Christmas, a time slip fantasy, slipping through from the 1970s into this bitter, wintry week. And it’s November in Eric Houghton’s novel, and the mists are coming in off the sea as Jonathan walks home – to his new home, in a new town, without his mum – but now and then, when things are at their most bleak, there is another house waiting for him behind his front door, where the family is bigger and the air outside is bright with summer sunshine…

I’m not ashamed to admit that when I was a boy, I often wished for mist and longed for fog. In one story I had read in one of Enid Blyton’s numberless collections (I haven’t talked on this blog, really, about my years as an Enid fiend) a girl is lost in a fog, finds her way to a mysterious house with a little old man in it – which the next day is gone. I’ve never forgotten the exciting prospect of the world blanked out with warning, and where you might end up if you were caught up in it.

Fogs and smogs belong to London’s past: it rolls down the streets in Dickens, and Holmes and Dracula and Mr Hyde are wandering about in it, masters of disguise in a city made unrecognisable. Then there’s the smog of the 1930s: The Tiger in the Smoke describes this sulfurous cloud lolling suggestively in at a taxi window. I suppose in a sense fog has always returned us to the past, to a state of infancy and even pre-civilisation, because suddenly we’re powerless and because the world becomes a blank, an empty page.

Fog can be physical, too. I loved Jon’s Mum’s story of walking through the fog in London in the sixties, and having to wipe this green dirt off your coat. And I thrilled to an email from my friend Daniel, who’s living in Italy these days, and told me: ‘There is a thick thick fog here called ‘la nebbia’ which is almost like a living creature. It’s almost completely opaque, ice cold and coats everything in an inch of snow…’ It’s nebulous but it’s tangible – it creeps after you through the streets. It holds you, chills you, stops you in your tracks.

The mists of Eric Houghton’s book are like the chimes of the clock in Tom’s Midnight Garden, and like Tom, Jonathan goes through a long period of trying to figure out what this otherworldly existence is. He’d be forgiven for thinking it’s one big wishful fantasy, although interestingly his life at home with his Dad is not unhappy: it’s school where he has difficulties, suffers bullying, and a lack of self confidence. Like these mists, his identity at the new school is nebulous and undefined: he doesn’t have a particular strength or hobby at school, can’t articulate a response to the attacks he gets – some of which, I think, Houghton presents as playful, testing.

Jonathan isn't necessarily under attack or victimised - he's just lost, soft-edged. Though, by necessity, a practical boy, depended upon by his father, he's more of an observer when he's on his own. He likes watching the mists too, and deliberately goes out in them to lose himself. But this isn't something he can feel defined by, not like the 'hobbies' his teacher tries, quite heavy-handedly, to promote.

The boy that Jonathan finds himself possessed by or possessing is always busy, rowing with his sister, climbing a dangerous cliff, swimming. He verges on being a bit insufferable, to be honest – but luckily Jonathan, who’s a very likable and sympathetic character, is never exactly in awe of him. He’s swept along by him, literally. Initially I regretted Houghton's decision to have Jonathan inhabit this other boy physically, still being conscious (reminiscent of The Victorian Chaise-Longue): I suppose it felt over-safe for him to be ‘carried’ in the person of this confident, happy boy. But Peter takes Jonathan out of his depth, and then we have some lovely moments, of Peter climbing boldly or diving into deep water, and Jonathan experiencing complete terror, and from this, catharsis.

The way that Jonathan’s skill with drawing evolves, after being ‘shown’ how it feels (not how it’s done, exactly) by Peter, feels appropriate. In these creative acts, often you do just need the confidence to explore. The ending is nicely understated (well, apart from a bolt of lightning hitting the house in Jonathan’s other life – but this serves a purpose of its own), no happy endings exactly, but optimism, friendship, openness. I like the way that even the ‘hobbies exhibition’, which for most of the book forces Jonathan into a sense of worthlessness, because he doesn’t have ‘a hobby’ (I was terrified by the idea of ‘hobbies’ as a child – it always seemed to be the sort of thing contestants on Masterchef Junior had), is amended, and becomes about teamwork, while Jonathan’s new skill with a paintbrush becomes more private, more personal, less a badge – and the focus comes wholly onto friendship.

This was a lovely, thoughtful, melancholy read on Sunday, as the evening darkened outside, and I thought of time slips, of others who might have read Houghton (my copy was an ex-school library book, the kind I love) and of where the future begins exactly…

Long nightshift in the underworld ... Memorial, by Alice Oswald

2012-02-10T14:41:00.002Z

On Wednesday night I made a rare foray into town with my friend Ben and saw the poet Alice Oswald reading her new work, Memorial, at the South Bank Centre. I absolutely love the South Bank – for me, that part of London is one of the happiest and busiest, with all these plays and orchestral recitals and daring new works of art, sometimes coming right out of the gallery in the form of giant straw foxes or marooned shipping vessels, staring out across the buses coming in and out of town (it’s on just the edge of South London too, just the brink of the unfashionable realm). It’s a place where you can promenade by the riverside – even in the chill of winter in a glow of lights. I know I’ve been there throughout my life with more friends than in any other place, having happy or tough conversations.

And at the South Bank Centre I’ve seen Jeanette Winterson speak and Marianne Faithful perform, I’ve seen Sarah Waters interviewed. It’s such a social patch that there’s a special magic to coming in, turning down the lights, and paying close attention to somebody. Not a rarefied space – in fact I always think the toilets have more grandeur, with their 1950s aesthetic, stone floors and heavy doors. The performance spaces are light and airy – but they dimmed the lights for Oswald. She stood in a little spotlight for the hour and a half – and her audience were sunk in an atmosphere of drama, appropriate to her subject matter.

Memorial is described as a new translation of the Iliad, and it is, but a tightly focused, selective translation – a list of the war dead, specifically, coming in like a relentless black tide. ‘Like a’, ‘like the’, ‘like when’ ripples throughout the poem, Oswald/Homer’s voice rocking back and forth between obituary and simile and riding on the current generated by this strange friction, this zig zag of the mind.

I looked for a corresponding section in Jon’s copy of the ‘original’ and can’t find anything particular, so I imagine it’s a drawing together of references that forms this ably sustained, bitter oration on mortality and the human waste of war. It was amazing to hear – an electric energy built up by masses of poignant, quotidian detail and these images of the rural landscape, images of shepherds and farmers in peacetime, the shifts and shocks of weather.

It was hard to look at Oswald to begin with, the shift in light making my eyes hurt; I had to close my eyes and listen in the dark; and Oswald did give us to permission to drift off, before she began – not that sleep was likely, but other sorts of meditation were unavoidable in the hypnotic roll of the performance. When my eyes adjusted, I thought: ‘It’s funny – the angle of her head, it’s as if she isn’t reading at all.’ But it was startling when Ben confirmed that yes, she had it by heart. Imagine! What was that, an hour and a half, holding us in her spell? Memorialising these shadowy figures, of a war that might have taken place in some form, and stood for so much more – but never became indistinct, never blurred into archetype: distinguishing, by telling details, and dignifying them, so that their loss is felt.

And it was resolved in Oswaldian style, in the natural world, split and scattered by the spare, sun scoured language of that other time, the Greek poetry fetishized by Woolf and Pound. It reminded me of something that’s gone out of my life – the work of Aeschylus and Euripides and Sappho that I studied and read with savour as a teenager. I said on Monday, didn’t I, that we are open to stranger things in adolescence, so long as human feeling is at the bottom of it.

I remember even trying to make my own translation of the Oresteia when I was eighteen – pretentious, yes, but who cares? That’s openness to strange and amazing stuff and I suddenly missed it, keenly, on Wednesday. It was amazing to be reminded of its energy.

Have a lovely weekend, everyone.

In your mind there is a North ... Soonchild, by Russell Hoban

2012-02-05T12:46:00.005Z

On Saturday before the snow, I sat in the café by the library and finished reading Russell Hoban’s last novel, Soonchild. One of my old English teachers was in there, by coincidence, though he didn’t recognise me as he passed: I had tears in my eyes at that moment (though I probably didn’t have long hair and a beard the last time we met either).

He wasn’t that star of an English teacher, Mr Grant, the man who was always getting carried away: using banned substances on set for his school production of Lorca, flouting copyright to give us the novels he wanted to teach, a performer and transmitter of enthusiastic energy. If it had been him, I might have stopped him to talk, and thank him for that energy, which I needed.

Soonchild is a graphic novel for Young Adults – Hoban’s unmistakably strange and salty prose dancing with the smokily fine charcoal work of Alexis Deacon – and I think it’s a huge testament to Walker Books that they are commissioning works like this (another that springs to mind is David Almond’s collaboration with Dave McKean, The Savage). These are bold, unique works. They fly in the face of anxieties about ‘the future of the book,’ and about that readership too.

The idea that novels for teenagers need to be about ‘real life’ underestimates a young person’s receptiveness to the richness of real fiction. Walker are providing them with heady, beautiful artworks. The Guardian published James Dawson’s top ten of novels for ‘getting through high school’. I was glad to see a couple of favourites on there: Malorie Blackman, whose novels I read as a child (and who I wrote to a few times); Roald Dahl’s Matilda (‘Nothing got me through school more,’ says Dawson, ‘than the glimmer of hope that I might one day develop telekinetic powers and kill everyone’); and Paul Magrs’ beautiful Strange Boy, of course, which will hopefully be back in print soon on the back of tributes like these. We are more receptive in adolescence to these more intoxicating works, if we feel in them human emotion in its purest forms, and underlying to all of these, a searching of identity, a yearning to question.

Hoban’s always worked with this questioning spirit; The Mouse and his Child wondering whether they can become self-winding, Ridley Walker asking what instinct exists to drive the human toward the sublime and death, and a whole cast of characters who wonder about where exactly their ideas come from. Can you go there? Can you meet other people there? Can an idea come out and have a conversation with you? Maybe, as in his last novel for an adult audience, it can come out and become your lover – the genius of Hoban being that all his ideas about mysticism, philosophy, art are nothing without all the interactions we have with other people: our friendships, our responsibilities, our consolations, celebrations and sex.

And although it’s a novel for younger readers, Soonchild isn’t its hero – she’s still to be born, and she won’t come out. It’s her father, John, who has a lot to go through – once the local shaman, he’s now the ‘shamed man’, sitting at home drinking Coca Cola and, we infer, sliding into depression. John has to dream the Big Dream and put his unborn daughter in touch with the World Songs – that song we risk being born for, the song that comes before the idea, a song with ‘the taste of starlight on the tongue, the sound of the raven’s blackness, and the memory of ancient rains that filled the oceans.’ This isn’t a cute story about getting in touch with yourself – as a character, Nanuq, says: ‘When you boil up a Big-Dream Brew, you better be ready to drink to the bottom of the cup,’ and what John undergoes is nothing short of apocalyptic.

But Hoban writes his voyage into deeper orders of things with a voice that is somehow belongs to both modern life and folktale. Perhaps his smartest move is understatement: when you have these huge ideas, these mythic actions, this terror that strikes right at the core of the self, and when you have illustrations as resonantly bleak as Deacon’s, a cool, laconic tone is the purest distillation of earthly humanity. It holds together an amazing, outlandish work with a subtlety that isn’t softly-softly: it’s deftness instead. The charcoal of Deacon’s illustrations is the ideal medium for this work – there is something about its fine marks and its smudges which matches the atmosphere of the story, billowing with snow against the darkness. And there is something about John the shamed man in the charcoal too, something about redemption or survival – the material transmuted by extremes into something completely different, frangible as soot, and suited to new and unexpected purposes.

It was a complete surprise to read Soonchild before it came out – I’ve been looking forward to it for what seems like a year. It seemed like something out of a dream to be able to read it on February 4th, Hoban’s birthday, and a day when the snow came at dusk and changed the world, just long enough, as Hoban’s works did.

Frost and fire ... Ride the Wind, by John Gordon, and random mutterings

2012-02-03T22:15:00.003Z

I’m writing this facing a cruel January weekend, possibility of snow and all. I’m listening to New York Tendaberry by Laura Nyro which is the kind of music to make you feel it’s past midnight even when it isn’t, but it’s also uncannily still here with Jon out of the house. He’s off out again tomorrow as well, off walking with a friend: I hope they don’t get lost in a blizzard as they wend their way in Bristol or wherever. I’m not invited along and I don’t want to go out anyway – I want to stay in and drink tea and get into things.

I’m reading The Midwinter Watch by John Gordon which, like his The Giant Under the Snow, is a children’s novel of mysterious magic in the days leading up to Christmas. He uses the season very cleverly, I think – his trio of plucky youngsters (boy-girl-boy in both) are drawn together conspiratorially in the wrinkle of their story, just as the rest of the world seems united in their making merry. It’s not a feeling you’ll never experience, either, to be unhappy or anxious at Christmas and that sharpened sense of apartness is rather poignant – the temptation to retreat into that warmth and light, and deny the call of that other story.

The Midwinter Watch isn’t quite as evocative as The Giant Under the Snow, but it is heaped with winter weather and thin shadows after dark. There is a lovely device of the abandoned railway line, and the night trains you can catch if you use the enspelled timepiece of the title – trains of another time, which move easily through the dark, while the snows of, erm, today-year, return in its wake, submerging the unwary.

Last week I read the 1980s sequel to The Giant Under the Snow – Gordon, in case you haven’t guessed, is due to play a large part in my thesis. He’s a wonderful writer and a prolific one, but serially unacknowledged I think – he needs talking up; I think his time will come again. Ride the Wind, like other Gordon novels, pulses with the slow realisation of first love and adolescent sexuality. Jonk and Bill, always slightly apart from their friend Arf in The Giant, are a world away from him in this one. He’s totally in denial about the events of that novel – the battle against dark magical forces, the eccentric earth goddess figure Elizabeth Goodenough, and especially the children’s ecstatic flight on the winter winds (a particular highlight of the earlier novel). But the lovers remember, and yearn to fly again…

Gordon’s prose is unflashy but sensual, and Ride the Wind is a bit jerky compared with his other work but still an entertaining sequel. Like the first book, it takes flight when its characters do – Jonk and Bill becoming insubstantial as smoke, and travelling on breezes and the tail-lights of unsuspecting cyclists, a nice enough image but brilliantly evoked – we really experience the exultancy of dancing across rooftops. The story itself could have done with some more complexity – a third act, maybe. It has a very clever and mysterious idea at its heart, but spends more time on teen romance.

When I finish The Midwinter Watch – soon, probably – I have a ghost story by Gordon which I found on Amazon’s Kindle pages for free – a Halloween series. I presume it’s the same John G, because the introduction says Diane Duane is another author involved. That was a surprise of a find, thanks to the internet – but then I found John G online in the first place, in a message board post about Jamesian novels (as in Montague Rhodes, not Henry) (or Alice, I suppose – or … no, I can’t think of any other writers called James).

And I won’t be sticking to Gordon all the long weekend, as the frost creeps across the window pane and the chocolate digestives steadily run out. February the 4th is Russell Hoban’s birthday – his readers will, as ever, be celebrating him by distributing quotations from his work around town. I’m quite excited because I turned up a proof copy of his newest work, Soonchild, in a charity shop in Forest Hill. What are the chances of finding a proof of a book you’re looking forward to, before the book is actually out? So I’ve started that, and it’s set in the North – the frozen, polar North of shamans and their spirits.

Perfect for this weekend with the heating up and the slippers on.

And I might not read much of this one this week, but I had to show you the cover to this book I got in a charity shop in the Walworth Road right at the beginning of the month. Isn’t it brilliant? From the title down to the lit windows… I’ve a feeling the contents are going to be a let down, but for 30p I won’t ask the world.

That was the shop where I had to explain to the lady at the counter the difference between a hardback and a softback, and they had a motion sensitive monkey to mind things when no-one was at the till. And there was a woman who’d nearly bought two left wellington boots – and a full size Tardis for sale down the road! They had the door in the window. But maybe all these things are little time machines of printed paper...

Furious and Curious: Alice's in Wonderland through others' eyes

2012-02-01T10:59:00.006Z

Speaking as somebody who has, erm, walked a solitary path in terms of taste and favourites for most of his life, I do get excited when I find someone who shares my love for something, or follows a recommendation. It’s not a straightforward excitement – like other kinds of love, it’s bewildering: we see things through a new set of eyes, we see ourselves in another light. It’s almost worse than when we meet someone who hates our favourite thing. ‘Of course you don’t like it,’ we say, ‘That’s my special thing – how could somebody like YOU like that?’ somebody like you = someone who’s not me. The reverse of this is stranger: ‘You like x like I like x? But how can somebody who isn’t me have something so much in common…?’ and so on.

Yes, maybe I ought not to worry about it.

It was fantastic last week for a friend to say she had read The Proof of Love, the winner of 2011’s Green Carnation Prize. If you’re going to get excited about making recommendations, you might as well go all the way – draw up a longlist, cut it down to a shortlist, and finish with an overall book of the year, and Catherine Hall’s novel was so disquietingly beautiful and sad. I wasn’t surprised that Nessa loved it too – it was a consensus decision after all, we had all fallen for it in one way or another. But what a thrill to know Nessa had followed those characters into that green-gold summer in the Lakes, gone through Catherine’s and Spencer’s and Alice’s eyes into the mystery and agony of that story.

I was more thrown this week when Jon finally – after seven years (eight in March, in fact) of nagging at him – finally read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He bought it on Kindle for a ha’penny or something, and last Sunday started reading it – and loving it.

My love of Alice goes too far back for me to quantify – it’s just something I’ve always known, probably because it’s like a mutating flu virus: the story breeds other versions of itself and has its own ancestors. I loved the Disney cartoon first (when I was about three, ITV had a Disney Christmas and we taped loads of their movies for constant rewatching – Alice and Dumbo on the same tape, irresistibly swathed in cheesy adverts). I’ve still got my first copy of the books, a pair of miniaturised hardbacks [pictured above!] in a cardboard slipcase – and I remember Dad enjoying telling me about the real Alice Liddell, the sort of detail which makes a story endlessly fascinating. One holiday, we visited her grave in Lyme Regis – never underestimate the Campbell fascination with mortality.

There is even Dodgson’s manuscript version, of course, a love letter in longhand, the hand-drawn picture behind the cameo photograph. Which forms that naïve excitement that behind any story there is something ‘real’. I believed, of course, in the antic power of the text itself, with its dream gardens and satiric surrealism. I thought its main strength was its strangeness and trace of melancholy (this is stronger in the Looking-Glass) – but Jon surprised me.

He thought it was hilarious. I heard him laughing aloud at the Pig and Pepper chapter, and then he read aloud Alice’s first conversation with the Cheshire Cat – and I was surprised to find he was right. After watching Alice wrestle with a giant piece of tinned tongue in Jan Svankmajer’s version, and all those serious looking images of Alice Liddell dressed as beggar girl, I had forgotten how laconic Carroll’s dialogue can be, how Alice reacts to extreme flights of surrealism either with laughter of her own or with down-to-earth practicality.

When a baby turns into a pig in her arms, and runs off into the bushes, Alice gives the Victorian equivalent of a shrug and a Miranda-style look to camera: ‘It probably would have grown up into quite an ugly child anyway – but it makes quite a fine pig.’ It seems to have helped that Jon pictured her as his five year-old niece, Tilly.

And now he’s made me see her differently – not as a disconcerting literary device or mouthpiece for Carroll’s suppressed self, but a well observed young girl who somehow remains self-assured, despite not knowing who her self really is (not necessarily a trick Alice Liddell would have been without).

Laughter comes from her ease in the company of adult-figures who strain to impress their authority and dignity upon her, to the point of making themselves little boys once more, needy, petulant and angry. Jon tells me the words ‘curious’ and ‘furious’ occur with surprising frequency: these are the Wonderland adjectives, but they don’t scare Alice. Even nightmare can’t cut her down: she has the benefit of perspective.

What a treat to see an old love afresh, to realise it’s as curious and furious as you remember, and has more in it still to find…

Night owls ... The Owl Service, by Alan Garner

2012-01-31T13:10:00.002Z

When I read Alan Garner's Owl Service the other week, rattling home from the fern rusted, valley washed landscape of the novel, it must have been the third time that I'd read it, and still I couldn’t quite follow its ideas and gauge exactly what was happening. Not even with whole scenes of characters explaining the situation to one another. There are few scenes without a conversation of some kind: the book's full of chatter and precise body language, but meaning is patchy, understanding is rare, even and especially between speakers in the same language. All this communication does is show us, the reader, how little is being said – the difficulty of communication.

So of course it’s a rather unhappy, even anguished novel, full of jagged edges. We’re in an old house where the air is thick with disdain. The family on holiday are a bad fit, and the mother and son brought back to the house as serving staff only antagonise one another. Being reunited with a figure from the past is traumatic for the boy's mother; a spark of romance between son and holidaying daughter is smothered by hers; their atmosphere of conspiracy is wrecked by her step-brother’s contempt.

And out of this friction builds a wild energy, and the energy finds a form – but what form it takes has a history, has several stories, stories about stories and about creation – and the responsibilities of creation, even of parenthood.

And then there’s the giant owl...

Perhaps what surprised me again, what always surprises me, is that this piercingly sharp novel of class conflict, inheritance, adolescent sexuality and the life of myth is never as subtle as I expect. I go into it each time thinking the force that possesses Alison, as she sketches obsessively at an old pattern on a plate, the force that whips up a storm, is so unnameable and elusive that it might be explained by some atmospherics and a strong imagination. But there is definite enchantment in this novel, something unearthly and frightening. It might not actually be a giant owl, but something is on the attack – and Huw the Flitch knows far more about it than I’ve realised before.

So perhaps I should find it easier to understand the nature of that gathering energy, the form it takes. There is a complex idea about possession to The Owl Service, a beautiful idea – which is something to do with being possessed by our own fascinations, our own reading. When Alison is sitting out on the lawn with a copy of The Mabinogion, what is happening? What is drawing her to the text, and what is she drawing from it? Is it altering the way she reads, this translated text? Is it translating her into a new edition of itself: a living force seeking an appropriate language?

Three readings in, I wonder whether Garner might not have bitten off more than he could chew – not that he doesn’t chew it, but the result is perhaps over-rich, over-complex, and Alison’s catastrophic act of reading is given less attention than the overall dissonance of the house. It needn’t have been such a novel of ideas, I suppose.

It is still a thrilling, fascinating read, and I love the fact that it’s short enough for us to give it the rereading it deserves. A read to be wary of, if Alison’s experience is anything to go by. What happens if you write too many academic papers about a novel like The Owl Service? Do you get cut down by winging copies of Weirdstone of Brisingamen? The Puffin Service...?

Competition Time: The Sea Egg, and secret magic…

2012-01-26T21:33:00.008Z

Back in the blog, where I belong. But it’s been such a busy week! Last weekend I was staying with Rosie in her lovely house, overlooking Caernarfon and the Isle of Anglesey. Falling asleep on their sofa I felt transported to a higher realm – geography and distance meant nothing, but I felt way above wretched city life on their green hill.

I’m a town mouse, I think – much as I can revel in the peace and power of a mountaintop, I’ve always dreamt of losing myself in city streets. I was reading about town and country temperaments during my stay, in the rather naffly titled The Magic Stone by Penelope Farmer, better known for Charlotte Sometimes.

It’s a tale of the changing landscape of the 1960s. A new housing estate brings an East End girl into the life of one who only knows the countryside. Their brothers battle ever violently, but the girls are drawn together by a small stone that may or may not be the one Arthur first pulled his sword out of. They argue and envy one another in fairly naturalistic fashion, but they also share moments of ecstatically heightened sensation which unite them. Later, we see that the stone has helped the incoming girl adjust to her new surroundings – when they visit London, it does the same for the other. But it’s a subtle, ambiguous magic, and the ending is downbeat.

On the way home, I re-read The Owl Service, a novel deserving a proper blog all to itself. In fact it’s part of a plan I’m hatching with my friend Rosie, but more of that then. But goodness, what a novel: so intricate, so terse, so demanding, so strange.

Last week I told you about the Lady Stardust competition, and decided I wanted a competition of my own. Well, it’s maybe a bit ambitious, but I’m taking my inspiration from Puffin Post, the club magazine for Puffin fans of the 60s and 70s. That’s full of competitions, set by people like Yehudi Menuhin’s wife, Diana, or Peter Dickinson, where you have to compose sea shanties or cautionary tales.

The prize this month is a copy of The Sea Egg by Lucy M Boston. After my birthday last year, I found myself with an extra copy of this little children’s novel, and wondered what I should do with it. It’s an American edition from 1967.

I read my birthday copy of The Sea Egg in Budapest last August and didn’t tell you about it, but it’s a beautiful and odd story about a merboy found by two boys during their summer holiday in Cornwall. Beautiful because of its effortless way with atmosphere: her Children of Green Knowe has to be one of my favourite books in the world, and The Sea Egg evokes a similar spirit of fascination with place – the feeling that a place can hold us, so that our attentiveness and our wondering at it are inseparable from it. There isn’t a history and then us, or a natural history and then us studying it: there is just ongoing story, and the magic of it (particularly the occupation of a place, the charging of it with human experience) is ours too, though hard to share.

Well, you can win my other copy (the American edition) but here’s what you have to do: write me something with the title Secret Magic. That’s what The Sea Egg (and so many of my favourite books) is about. Keep it short - less than half a side of A4 – but make it whatever you like: story, poem, confession, invention. It should be, ideally, something you’ve never told anyone before. Please send your secret magic, with an assumed name (just because) to me – by February 25th: nicholas dot m dot campbell at gmail dot com! Give it a go!

Have a lovely weekend, folks!

Spot-The-Bowie Competition...

2012-01-19T10:46:00.004Z

Look up! Obverse Books are running a competition this week, and it’s all to do with that picture, Paul Hanley’s wraparound (rather sumptuous) artwork for the forthcoming short story collection, Lady Stardust. As you will see, the world of transtemporal adventuress Iris Wildthyme has been mixed in with that of astral troubadour and arch genrebender David Bowie, this being the theme of Lady Stardust, which involves Iris in a series of adventures prompted by songs such as 'Cracked Actor' and 'The Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family'.

The question is, how many Bowie references can you identify in Paul’s artwork? Stuart Douglas says: ‘Some of them are very obscure and some a bit tenuous (so list everything you think might be a reference!)’. The prize is a copy of Lady Stardust itself, which promises to be quite something I think, especially with George Mann and Iris’ creator, Paul Magrs, among the writers.

The email to send your list to is: bowie@obversebooks.co.uk

I’ve been reading about Bowie myself in preparation, though I don’t think I’m anywhere near able to spot everything. I’m still at that nice point in getting to know someone when all the images and ideas are in freefall around you, and rather overwhelming, and you don’t really know whether this part of the story follows that one or vice versa. It’s quite different from the experience of growing with an artist – keeping faith with them (or not, in some cases, though hope springs eternal for the next album, or their comeback in ten or so years’ time…)

I haven’t written on here for a bit because do you really want to know about all those Christmas reads now (The Christmas Bower, The Winter of the Birds, etc)? Err.. no! Time has moved on.

And since then, I’ve been trying to get back in the swing of things – reading archaeological misadventures such as The House on the Brink (with the rather terrifying ambulatory log), The Secret World of Polly Flint (Moondial, only with a dog in a boat), Whispers in the Graveyard (both moving and hokey), and just this week, Sand by William Mayne, another triumph of tremendous atmosphere, uncannily convincing depictions of child identities, and barely any plot at all.

And I’ve been trying to write something for a friend – more about that later – and it’s had me in coils, trying to say what I want to say, trying to be exact. When you don’t sound like yourself, and you can’t say what you want to say, and you don’t know where you’re speaking from, it can be quite dispiriting. You have to know what place you are speaking from, and it MUST NOT be your arse. (As I wrote this I had an email from him: ‘ feels a bit vague/weak to me’)

It’s a rainy day in South London, and I’m glad. I love a grey day, rain on the window, or marching through it with my rather unwieldy umbrella. I sometimes think that’s how the air ought to feel – textured, full of points. When the wind blows and weather is in the streets we are reminded of all the invisible things right in front of us, coming up…

(I quite like the idea of a competition on the blog, don't you? Shall I run my own next week?)

Deepening visions ... Edward Burra at the Pallant House Gallery

2012-01-08T14:30:00.004Z

Right: if you’re able, you’ve got nearly a month to go and see the retrospective of Edward Burra at the Pallant House gallery in Chichester. It finishes on the 19th of February and, as Rachel Cooke says in this review of the show, it’s drawn from so many collections, public and private, that it’s unlikely to be assembled in one place again for a long while.

Admittedly, there will then be that nice surprise of spotting an artist you like in a crowd of strangers, like finding you’ve a friend in common, and there can be something overwhelming about several rooms of one person’s life work; we went to one on Miro last year and had to skip a couple of rooms or stay there all day. But it’s so exciting to delve deep in the turns and B roads of someone’s ideas, and Burra’s developed in such unexpected ways – from the faces and colours and the atmosphere of story that in his street and café scenes, to his surrealist satire and wild English landscapes, to his spectral motorways, busy with translucent figures.

And if it wasn’t for this retrospective, I would never have noticed Burra’s name, never recognised that the men in zoot suits and the café crowd (recognisable from several Penguin Modern Classic book covers) was one and the same with that skull in a soldier’s helmet, the mud-coloured landscape, that they were all united in one slowly deepening vision. I would never have seen the delight in those early ones, the queer pleasure in soldier’s glutes, the celebration of Mae West’s tiny glinting eyes (all eyes in the exhibition are alight somehow, as if signalling some occult possession), I would never have seen those Neo-Romantic landscapes (yes, back to those favourites of mine – and Burra was a friend of Paul Nash’s, as well Conrad Aiken, father of Joan, and George Melly too – very well connected for someone who lived in Rye) which in their blue-grey-green misty superimpositions, resemble more obviously even than those of Graham Sutherland, the covers to those spooky children’s novels of earth magic, Cooper, Garner, Gordon.

Funny that book covers seem relevant, given there’s little evidence in this show that he was involved in illustration. But he did consume all sorts of supposedly lowbrow culture, horror movies and HP Lovecraft and, according to his biography, schlock (I had a look to see if he was a Doctor Who fan, but the only thing anyone is certain he watched was Poldark). I’m sure these cultural cross-currents are much more common than critics like to admit – particularly when it comes to images of the British countryside which, in the 1950s, became less acceptable in modern British art and increasingly utilised in historical drama and Hammer horror. And a taste for genre hokum runs right through the Surrealist lineage back to Magritte and Ernst.

I hope Pallant House has a couple of Burra’s in its own keeping for when I return and have a good rummage round the rest of the place: Steve and I were careful not to dilute our rich, deep draft of Burra with Peter Blake, Duncan Grant, Ivon Hitchens etc It’s an treasure house of strange and beautiful things, and hidden away down a side street away from the shops and cafes. If I was a town planner in Chichester, I’d want to be leading tourists and shoppers astray a bit more, perhaps by gilding the pavement slabs leading from the mundane world to the doorstep of Pallant’s wonderful one. It might take us a while to find it again – but it will be worth it.

The old year out, the new year in

2011-12-31T19:47:00.015Z

This year we’ll be at home, and just us two. We’ll have something nice for dinner and then, at TWELVE, we will rush to our respective doors – him at the front and me at the back door, maybe, and open them and beckon the new year in out of the cold, and usher the old year cheerfully out into the back garden with the cats and fallen leaves.

I made a list yesterday on the bus home (returning from visiting friends in Oxfordshire) as we swished through the night rains: New Year’s with people who’ve since gone off or come back, people who I’ve fancied or fallen out with, parties in pubs or clubs, and the way I was more/less: timid, excitable, optimistic, drunk.

I kept diaries some of those years but more often not. The last two years I’ve blogged – though such a lot falls outside the entries here. I don’t even have a list of my reading independent to my blog, which for the first time strangely took charge of me a little. What with this new bout of study at Roehampton, and the Green Carnation, I found myself reading all sorts of things I couldn’t have predicted.

And doing unpredictable things and making new friends, for all sorts of reasons. You just never know! But I tried to make the most of it, and do feel lucky. To varying degrees, illness got in the way this year, barely for me but more for friends, the body asserting itself over the plans we lay. Well, then there’s the imagination. You have to keep that alive, in the face of the earthly, mortal world. And we’re back to books.

Highlights of my reading this year; others do top tens, but that’s too hard for me, especially not duplicating authors (besides, you know I make it up as I go along – please myself – blah blah). And let’s put the Green Carnation shortlist to one side, because I don’t want to use up six choices on them, and they are all fab.

But Jeanette Winterson and John Waters didn’t make the leap from long- to shortlist, and I adored their memoirs this year, both books about battles for identity, for eccentricity and not taking the easy route; both are full of energy and good humour.

These last few New Year’s Eves, Jon and I have gone and bought new books to take us into the unknown (a new book is still a treat for me, a hardback especially – I read a lot of library books and yellowing ancient paperbacks). Last year I bought The Local, written by Maurice Gorham and Edward Ardizzone, a beautifully reproduced pre-war celebration of the pub: wise but unpretentious, warm without sentiment. Full of protest at the passing of fashion, that futile anxiety any place we call home is marked with.

Also illustrated by Ardizzone, and also gorgeously old-fashioned, The Nine Lives of Island Mackenzie is still there twinkling away in my head, which is one of my ways of judging a good read. It made a lovely bedtime read, like Joan Aiken’s Half Past Eight O’Clock, the story of the ancient telephone call being the most sublimely perfect bedtime story ever, for my money.

It’s been a Joan Aiken year: I’ve just read the third Wolves novel and it was great fun, but I had such a good time reading Blackhearts in Battersea that I wonder if any of her books will ever surpass it, it was that full of odd incident, fabulous dialogue and fantastic (in the old sense) action. I also loved her ghost stories this year, and am going easy with her masterful Touch of Chill. She had a brilliant story in the second Virago Book of Ghosts, along with Mary Butts’ With and Without Buttons. In fact that Virago Book was full of surprising treats.

Are you wondering what book I bought to take into the New Year, from the wonderful Bookseller Crow in Crystal Palace? Well, it was The Gate on the Stairs by Lorrie Moore. Why? Because compiling this list made me feel like my favourite reads have been the most fantastical, and like I needed a nicely observed domestic drama for a change.

There was Enter Wildthyme, the first novel for the transtemporal extraordinaire in a double-decker bus, and like those other novels it’s still alive in my head and certain moments come back all the time. Like the strange expedition through a tear in a map, in a bus motoring up a mountain on an alien world, arriving in Hammersmith 1973…

And Titus Groan, with an insane image or conversation on every page. I love it when they’re all gossiping at dinner – you get a taste of every single whisper – and somebody’s so bored they fall asleep and their head bounces off the table with a bang. Somehow the detail stimulates and doesn’t smother the imagination: we’re there.

And there was The Final Programme by Michael Moorcock, which was just like the mad delirious lucid dream that takes you to weird quarters of your own head.

And my favourite read of this year, a novel I wish I’d read years earlier, was Does it Show by Paul Magrs, which was just so masterfully complex, taking us to so many places, with so many voices and viewpoints and eruptions of the fantastic, without ever feeling like an empty exercise. It was full of sincerity and human warmth.

Oh, this was only meant to be quick and here I am writing on into the evening. Nobody will read this till way into the new year, when we shouldn’t be looking back at all. I want to talk about The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, The Dribblesome Teapots, and The Unforgotten Coat. And all the memories stirred up looking back over the blog: Butcher’s Shop bought with a book token, Pink Rabbit inspired by a museum visit, Teapots bought after my haircut, Unforgotten Coat an e-book…

But yes, it’s time to look forward to the new. If you still feel the need for some new year spirit, here’s the song that’s carrying me and Jon into the unknown – a gorgeous folksong rendered perfectly by the Unthanks, who we saw in a church earlier this year, people who work with passion, sincerity and good humour, and work hard, and produce wonderful things to set you on track when your brake-blocks catch fire (that happened to us this year, coming home from Brighton on Eurovision night!). Well, here is Tar Barrel in Dale, and here’s to you and your wishes and surprises.

Best wishes,

x

Ho ho Who ... The Christmas Ornament, by Sarah Hadley

2011-12-26T12:07:00.007Z

It's Boxing Day. Happy Boxing Day! Jon's up in the frozen North - well, Cheshire - and I'm at home with the Campbells, reconnecting with Oscar the cat and entering a strange sort of zen state with regard to time. Here's a festive treat for you: a special Christmassy adventure for the eccentric Doctor Who, written by my friend Sarah Hadley.

She's embroiled the current Doctor - probably one of the best we've ever had - in a sort of modern take on Meet Me in St Louis, with monsters. (She wouldn't describe it like that but it's my blog, so ha!). And the monsters are old enemies of the Doctor's, from its dark and foggy past... You should be able to download The Christmas Ornament here: http://is.gd/80YAIB

For the Great British Public, Doctor Who is now a Christmas staple, with the mysterious traveller in space and time doing something heartwarming in the snow every Christmas Day night for about six years now. Even if it doesn't always ring my bell, it makes perfect sense: panto and ghost stories being right there in the show's DNA.

And Sarah and I have known one another nearly twenty years, and have met precisely once. We were brought together by a pen pal association for fans of the Oz books: yes, two lonely children with a taste for ludicrous fantasy brought together by the postal service. I used to long for those giant orange envelopes from Sarah, covered in drawings of Jack Pumpkinhead or Jon Pertwee as a Yorkshire terrier, and we'd pull out all the stops at Christmas, writing long letters full of scrupulous document of our lives and fantasy sequences in which we met for coffee or solved mysteries...

So I've always been reading Sarah, and especially at Christmas. And slowly I've seen her stories evolve too. It's funny how different we are, when it comes down to it: she likes those dark tones, the big sf ideas, the relentless rain of Blade Runneresque worlds (though you could also ask her about The Couch Fairy...) So The Christmas Ornament, with its eponymous baubles, is something of a departure for her - but she promises me there is something stranger and darker on the way in 2012. So I'll be watching out for that...

The 'Pile of Leaves' Christmas Do

2011-12-23T09:55:00.008Z

Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again. Or was it Green Knowe? Some big old house in the countryside, for the Pile of Leaves Christmas do. It had to be slightly grand because all readers of the blog were invited, and everyone was welcome: and you and you and you and you were there – and I remember that parts of it weren’t very nice – when someone knocked over the egg nog, just as Russ Abbot’s (I Love A Party With An) Atmosphere began playing – but most of it was beautiful. Most of the guests were too, in that medieval hall, among the tall candles, plates of gingerbread and warm sausage rolls.

The first to arrive – in lederhosen (‘Any excuse,’ he confessed) was an old friend, soon sipping on a brandy by the fireplace to banish his Christmas cold. We were soon joined by a young woman in an old style tuxedo, explaining that she’d wanted to wear one since she was six years old and started watching Fred Astaire movies, umpty-billion years before she ever realized she was gay. We chatted for a while, but then the both of them gravitated toward attractive members of their preferred gender.

Other guests were arriving but I couldn’t fail to have my head turned by a gentleman done up note perfect as Kay Harker of The Box of Delights. A seasonal outfit and also very flattering to those who have the calves for it. He was followed in by a friend who had just flown in from LA, and must have come straight from the airport dressed in the style of Chuck Bass from Gossip Girl. Kay Harker had a snowball and a gave me a quick hello, before making a beeline for Su Pollard, who was trying to persuade the pianist to give her I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus in an agreeable key.

The soiree was really underway now. My friend from LACMA was hobnobbing with Jacqueline Susann, Majenta from the Rocky Horror Picture Show and William Hartnell, all of them starting the evening gently with gin and tonics of various quantities. Suddenly in came a friend dressed as a Christmas pudding, in conversation with Dudley Moore in his Santa Claus: The Movie persona. I gave the Christmas pudding a wave and a glass of ice cold coke with a slice of orange. Dudley had brought Twister and excitement rippled through the crowd at the thought of a game.

A round of applause greeted the most ambitious fancy dress costume of the night: Barbra the sentient vending machine. Its wearer danced round the hall showing it off, silver paper gleaming in the fairy lights, ensuring authenticity by drinking (and dispensing) slightly flat orangeade and handfuls of prawn cocktail Skips. Before long he was gossiping away to Jacqueline Pearce, who in turn was helpless with laughter.

Guests were still arriving. One was dressed as a kitten and taking photos; another was in a silver cardigan and Bjork-style ginger wig. Both were talking with the last homme to arrive, in velvet tuxedo and slippers designed by his lover Tom Ford. He was already onto his second brandy Alexander, and I heard him say: ‘The first one goes down so fast, the second is the one that gets you drunker than you expected,’ and he was just asking the kitten to make sure he didn’t kiss anyone before midnight, when it was time for carols, and we all gathered round the tree.

Halfway through Good King Wensceslas, the man in the wig pointed out that it was snowing, so we all ran outside into the walled garden for hot cider and readings.

Goodness, it’s hard to believe all this really happened, isn’t it?

By the light of the moon, we took it in turns to read our favourite Christmassy piece, with Kay Harker getting things off to a lovely start with a carol by the Divine David:

Dead puppies we’ll bring
For you and your kin
We wish you deathanddestruction at Christmas
And a truly miserable new year

Broken glass you will find
In your bed
We wish you death and destruction
And a really miserable new year…

Then the lad in lederhosen read from The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper:

Slowly the door opened, and the elusive silvery music of the Old Ones came swelling up briefly to join the accompaniment of the carol, and then was lost again. And he walked forward with Merriman into the light, into a different time and a different Christmas, singing as if he could pour all the music in the world into these present notes - and singing so confidently that the school choir-master, who was very strict about raised heads and well-moving jaws, would have fallen mute in astonished pride.

And we all looked about at one another, seeming to hear that music beckoning there and then.

And then the girl in the tuxedo sang a sentimental old Tennessee song:

Fah-who for-ay, dah-who dor-ay,
Welcome Christmas!
Come this way.
Fah-who for-ay dah-who dor-ay,
Welcome Christmas,
Christmas Day!

Welcome, welcome
Fah-who rah-moose.
Welcome, welcome
Dah-who dah-moose.
Christmas Day is in our grasp
So long as we have hands to clasp.

Fah-who for-ay, dah-who dor-ay,
Welcome, Christmas,
Bring your cheer.
Fah-who for-ay, dah-who dor-ay,
Welcome all Whos far and near.

Welcome, Christmas!
Fah-who rah-moose.
Welcome, Christmas!
Dah-who dah-moose.
Welcome, Christmas, while we stand
Heart to heart and hand in hand.

Fah-who for-ay, dah-who dor-ay,
Welcome, Christmas,
Christmas Day!

And those of us who had begun to fah-who rah-moose along wiped away a tear and applauded her, and her mysterious hooded accompanist on calliope.

Jacqueline Susann’s drinking partner stood up, then, and read from one of the tingliest bits of Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol:

“You don’t believe in me,” observed the Ghost.

“I don’t,” said Scrooge.

“What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?”

“I don’t know,” said Scrooge.

“Why do you doubt your senses?”

“Because,” said Scrooge, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

At this the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook its chain with such a dismal and appalling noise, that Scrooge held on tight to his chair, to save himself from falling in a swoon. But how much greater was his horror, when the phantom taking off the bandage round its head, as if it were too warm to wear indoors, its lower jaw dropped down upon its breast!

Scrooge fell upon his knees, and clasped his hands before his face.
“Mercy!” he said. “Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?”

After this wonderful Victorian melodrama, the Christmas Pudding took to the stage, and read Snow, by Carol Ann Duffy, from her book of this year:

Then all the dead opened their cold palms
and released the snow; slow, slant, silent,
a huge unsaying, it fell, torn language, settled;
the world to be locked, local; unseen,
fervent earthbound bees around a queen.
The river grimaced and was ice.

Go nowhere -
thought the dead, using the snow -
but where you are, offering the flower of your breath
to the white garden, or seeds to birds
from your living hand. You cannot leave.
Tighter and tighter, the beautiful snow
holds the land in its fierce embrace.
It is like death, but it is not death; lovelier.
Cold, inconvenienced, late, what will you do now
with the gift of your left life?

And then the man dressed as Barbra the vending machine read us some Truman Capote:

Imagine a coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.

A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window. She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico dress. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen; but, due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched. Her face is remarkable—not unlike Lincoln's, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind; but it is delicate too, finely boned, and her eyes are sherry-colored and timid. "Oh my," she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, "it's fruitcake weather!"

The person to whom she is speaking is myself. I am seven; she is sixty-something, We are cousins, very distant ones, and we have lived together—well, as long as I can remember. Other people inhabit the house, relatives; and though they have power over us, and frequently make us cry, we are not, on the whole, too much aware of them. We are each other's best friend. She calls me Buddy, in memory of a boy who was formerly her best friend. The other Buddy died in the 1880's, when she was still a child. She is still a child.

"I knew it before I got out of bed," she says, turning away from the window with a purposeful excitement in her eyes. "The courthouse bell sounded so cold and clear. And there were no birds singing; they've gone to warmer country, yes indeed. Oh, Buddy, stop stuffing biscuit and fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat. We've thirty cakes to bake."

The man in the velvet tuxedo read Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe:

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of ANNABEL LEE;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love-
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me-
Yes!- that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we-
Of many far wiser than we-
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

And then there was a final guest, at the eleventh hour (well, it was something o’clock in the morning actually). He was kitted out like an understudy for Fascinating Aida, and had been making small talk with Bjork Gudmonsdottir and a large glass of amaretto. He asked if we still had time for a reading, and we had all the time in the world. And he read from Generation X by Douglas Coupland:

Christmas Day. Since early this morning I have been in the living room with my candles – hundreds, possibly thousands of them – as well as rolls and rolls of angry, rattling tinfoil and stacks of disposable pie plates. I’ve been putting candles on every flat surface available, the foils not only protecting surfaces from dribbling wax but serving as well to double the candle flames via reflection.

I hear the sound of taps running upstairs and my Dad calls down, ‘Andy, are you down there?’

‘Merry Christmas, Dad. Everyone up yet?’

‘Almost. Your mother’s slugging Tyler in the stomach as we speak. What are you doing down there?’

‘It’s a surprise. Promise that you won’t come down for fifteen minutes. That’s all I need – fifteen minutes.’

Have you ever tried to light thousands of candles? It takes longer than you think. Using a simple white dinner candle as a punk, with a dish underneath to collect the drippings, I light my babies’ wicks – my grids of votives, platoons of yahrzeits and occasional rogue sand castles. I light them all, and I can feel my room heating up. A window has to be opened to allow oxygen and cold winds into the room. I finish.

Soon the three resident Palmer family members assemble at the top of the stairs. Mom mentions that she smells wax, but her voice trails off quickly. I can see that they have rounded the corner and can see and feel the buttery yellow pressure of flames dancing outward from the living room door. They round the corner.

‘Oh, my –’ says mom, as the three of them enter the room, speechless, turning in slow circles, seeing the normally dreary living room covered with a molten living cake-icing of white fire, all surfaces devoured in flame – a dazzling fleeting empire of ideal light. All of us are instantaneously disembodied from the vulgarities of gravity; we enter a realm in which all bodies can perform acrobatics like an astronaut in orbit, cheered on my febrile, licking shadows.

‘Oh, Andy,’ says my mother, sitting down . ‘Do you know what this is like? It’s like the dream everyone gets sometimes – the one where you’re in your house and you suddenly discover a new room that you never knew was there. But once you’ve seen the room you say to yourself, ‘Oh, how obvious – of course that room is there. It always has been.’

After he had read his piece, we were all feeling sleepy, so we headed back into the hall and watched The Snowman under our rugs, passing a tin of Quality Street. And before I knew it, I was drifting off – as irresistibly as if I was waking from a dream – and I wanted to make sure you were all alright, to say: thank you, or good night, or Merry Christmas. I had exactly the words, just before I dropped off – I had it perfectly.

But whatever it was, for some reason, I really don’t remember. Do you?

Festive Nostalgia, Gobbolino and the Magic Hamsters: It's Christmas Storyteller!

2011-12-19T14:37:00.005Z

Hello! After two weeks of sore eyes, complaining and low attention spans, I am on the up. I confidently predict that tonight I will be out of the cold and into the eggnog. I’m so keen to step into the Christmas feeling, which is still eluding me. Some nice things coming up on the blog this week, including the Pile of Leaves Christmas Party (!) and a Christmassy story by my friend, Sarah Hadley. They ought to help me – you’re not having any difficulty with the season, are you...?

I’m reading The Winter of the Birds by Helen Cresswell, but also Mysterious Christmas Stories, satisfying a sharpened midwinter appetite for the macabre. And I found two fab anthologies at my local library (in the children’s section, with my sister: ‘Do you come in here a lot?’ she asked me, visibly perturbed – ‘Don’t you feel a bit... big?’), one by Michael Foreman with things like Kenneth Grahame and Hans Christian Andersen, one from the OUP with a real mix of things, from Sue Townsend to John Gordon.

Just last week I lifted down the Christmas Box from the attic, December reads mixed up with icicle lights, home-made decorations and wooden snowmen: The Box of Delights, Gawain and the Green Knight, A Child’s Christmas in Wales – and my Christmas Storytellers. Special issues of a part-work from the 1980s whose ambition I still admire: fortnightly miscellanies of folktales and fairytales, serialised novels like Heidi and Pinocchio, and original material.

These two are objects of deep nostalgia for me, enchanted tomes (about the weight of a Radio Times) and like other things of that kind, I can’t help wondering whether it gave me ideas. My Mum’s Mum, Joyce, must have bought them for me when I was two, tiny, book-loving and impressionable. They came (stand by as Nick reveals his age) with cassettes, since lost, and I can just about remember lying on the carpet, listening, looking at pictures, vanishing into that world. I wonder sometimes if that’s a lost ideal of reading experience, of Christmas too: lying alone, enspelled by disembodied voices.

They would have been years worth remembering anyway – year by year that followed there were fewer Campbell’s and Brazier’s about. Now it’s just us four, same house, same table. Such a mysterious way of marking time, of registering change – to go back to something beyond memory, or back to no particular memory, shared between a group.

One of the most memorable stories for me – and other fans of the series, it turns out – is a special Christmas adventure for Gobbolino, born a witch’s cat, determined to be a kitchen cat. In the arms of the farm children with whom he has made he his new, non-occult life, our tiny fluffy hero goes carol singing through the snow. But what are those eyes – not human eyes – flickering in the darkness – and that ungodly caterwaul of accusation:

‘Gobbolino is a witch’s cat! Gobbolino is a witch’s cat!’

All turns out for the best, you’ll be pleased to hear, though Sheila Hancock really goes for it, and the music is rather dramatic. I realised just today that this is (dramatic chord) a special commission from Ursula Moray Williams. It’s not trumpeted as such by Storyteller: well, who would care? The magazine doesn’t even credit the writers of new material, its only real failing (apparently Geraldine McCaughrean was among them). But it warms me to think that in ‘83 Moray Williams had a new audience for a book she wrote in the sixties, that she knew about it and contributed to it.

She’s an interesting one, Moray Williams: prolific writer, lived in a castle, was a magistrate, worked with Jackanory and the Puffin Book Club. One to keep an eye on.

Right, I’m off for another cup of hot, sweet tea...

'What if, hey?' The wonderful Russell Hoban

2011-12-14T18:17:00.004Z

Hello! I wanted to write today about John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things, which Daniel of Hibernian Homme so kindly sent me earlier this year, and which I saved to be my first guilt-free, non-Roehampton read of the Christmas holidays. I’m battling through a stupid cold which is stopping me writing, stopping me talking (how can something so minor be such a bugger?) and in the midst of this weird islanding by mucous, I’ve been following our young hero David as he treads his way through the forests of fairy tale and nightmare.

I wanted to talk about that, but today I read of the death of Russell Hoban, and those are strange and sad words to type. Hoban is one of the most wonderful writers I’ve ever read, and every interview with him I’ve read (and one I had the luck to see, with Hans Ulrich-Obrist) convinced me he was a modest man too, and what is more an enthusiast, a man who loved art and movies and music and books, London and ghost stories and whiskey, with enthusiasm and a deep engagement. He loved working and he loved others’ work, and increasingly that was the energy driving his novels.

In the last ten years he has produced as many novels for adults as he did in the first thirty years of his career (though that’s setting aside his masterpiece of children’s fiction The Mouse and his Child, and a string of beautiful and unique picture books like The Twenty Elephant Restaurant), shorter than those others, in some ways denser and in some ways lighter, and all essentially novels of romance: telling the reassuring story of what new possibilities open up when we recognise that we are not alone, but telling it slant. Relationships in Hoban novels are as often with beautiful women as with works of art, imaginary beings, historical figures, whatever: all of them direct, honest, sensual, liable to be difficult. His other novels are not always as optimistic, though they are pretty much all ambitious, satisfying, lyrical and strange.

In more than one place, I read that he was looking forward to seeing his YA novel published next year, Soonchild – he almost talked about it with the expectation of it being a last published work (though he did also say he felt ‘physically unwell’ if he wasn’t writing, that he’d never retire, that he was working on new stuff) so there’s an extra sadness in that not happening. The death of a writer always carries that bitterness of knowing no more new writing is coming, but I suppose it has the consolation that the life in their work is ineradicable, so long as it goes on being read.

And though I will come back to The Book of Lost Things, it is nice that the strange versions of Snow White and The Goose Girl and Rumpelstiltskin in John Connolly’s novel take me back directly to the Grimm Brothers’ Household Tales, and particularly the edition illustrated by Mervyn Peake for which Russell Hoban writes an introduction. It’s a quite wonderful introduction going into the grain of peculiarly fascinating stories like The Goose Girl (one of my favourite fairy stories as a boy, which might mean something), right into the sound of the original German, the place of the story in the household, and the philosophical idea of the household of the world, the ‘story of us’:

We make fiction because we are fiction. Because there was a time when “it lived” us into being. Because there was a time when something said, ‘What if there are people?’ A word, perhaps, whispered in the undulant amorphous ear of the primordial soup: ‘What if there are people, hey? What if?’

It lived us into being and it lives us still. We make stories because we are story. The fabric of our myths and folk tales is in us from before birth. The action systems of the universe are the origin of life and stories. The patterns of blue-green algae and the numinous wings of the Great Nebula in Orion and the runic scrawl of human chromosomes are stories. Begotten by no one knows what, stories beget people to live them. We are the offspring of immeasurable ideas.

A Chat in the Garden with ... Paul Magrs!

2011-12-12T01:00:00.001Z

Christmas has come to the tranquil walled garden of my blog. A string of rainbow bulbs are winking on the weathered wall and a robin is eyeing the bird feeder, and I’ve a very special visitor over for hot chocolate in the gazebo: the acclaimed Paul Magrs, author of the Brenda & Effie spooky mysteries and the wild adventures of the Doctor and Mrs Wibbsey (which begin tonight on Radio 4 Extra!), and creator of Iris Wildthyme (transtemporal adventuress extraordinaire) and overall one of my very favourite writers. Even his blog is a delight...

His latest novel might be the perfect read for Christmas: a snowy winter for New York booklovers, young lovers and art lovers – and vampires! I’m very proud to welcome you, Paul – stamp the snow from your boots and pull up a tartan blanket.

How are you? Have you stopped work for Christmas yet?

Thanks, Nick. It’s very nice to be invited! I’d heard you had a garden here. I’m just stopping by for a little while… That’s how this whole year has been, for me, it seems. Stopping by briefly and catching up with people… making cameo appearances here and there.

I haven’t stopped yet – but I know when I will. It’ll be the 23rd of December. There are two main things that I must get finished before then. One is the final chapters of my second Iris novel, Wildthyme Beyond… and then the other is a script for a new thing that needs a two hour long script… but I can’t say what it is yet. But it’s a brand new thing, featuring a new range of characters and mysteries that I’ve been waiting and wanting to write about for a little while… So it’s just a couple of thousand words a day for the next three weeks or so… Though, of course, the festivities are already beginning…

All the necromantic fun of 666 Charing Cross Road begins with Liza Bathory receiving a particularly odd book in the post. Was this inspired by good or bad experiences you have had with book buying off the internet?

I don’t think I’ve had any bad experiences in that line! Poor Liza ends up with an old book that just happens to contain the quintessence of all evil… and that must be a fairly rare event. All my bibliomancing has led me to the nice and the good; or to the rare and the nostalgic… I remember using the internet when I was first aware of it, in order to find myself a copy of the Eric Houghton YA novel, Steps out of Time that I had loved so much at school in 1980. Just a little search and soon an ex-library copy was winging its way to me for an exorbitant price…

In more recent times, I did a search for Jon de Cles – the author of a comic fantasy novel I have loved for almost twenty years, The Particolored Unicorn. It was like tracking down a mythic beast… and there he was, with a blog and a sequel to the book about to be published. He even sent me an advance copy by email! Amazing!

Then when I started my own blog in 2009 it put me in touch with readers of all kinds. And you trust that your blogging about reading will draw you into the orbit of clever, friendly souls, who’ll leave comments and discuss stuff… and be able to answer seemingly impossible questions you’ve harboured for years. Such as my impossible question to you, not quite two years ago – about the books I remembered from being 11, for which I had no titles nor authors. And somehow you came up with details on both – The Captain Hook Affair by Humphrey Carpenter and A Billion for Boris by Mary Rodgers. I still find it incredible you did that – after just a few stumbling bits of description from me.

And that’s what book-buying online has been like… Filching things like The Jon Pertwee Book of Monsters and Purnell’s Disney Storybook from the back of someone’s unloved collection…

I suppose that's one aspect of this novel - we might be buying from this place on the other side of the world - but why are they selling what they're selling, and what past do these books have?

Liza copes rather well, though. She’s another one of the women of ‘a certain age’ who take lead roles in your work, along with Brenda and Effie, Mrs Wibbsey, even Iris, ostensibly. Is this coincidence?

There’s no coincidence about it at all… I come from a Northern family – a matriarchy from the North East of England. In our family, all the men gathered to watch football silently in the living room – and all the women gossiped in the kitchen over tea and cake. I sat in the kitchen and listened to their tall, tall tales. And I prefer to write about larger-than-life characters and women who talk a lot – because that’s what I’m used to. I can still hear their voices.

666 isn’t strictly a ‘Christmas read’, but it does feature the festive period heavily. Are there any other Christmassy stories of the undead that you know of, and enjoy?

I’ve always loved stories with a lot of snow and spooky stuff in them. I remember being entranced by the Disney cartoon, ‘Lonesome Ghosts’ which always seemed very wintry to me. I had a Viewmaster Camera as a very young kid, and you could run the cartoon backwards and forwards and at all different speeds…

My favourite kids’ books ever have very snowy interludes… The Box of Delights, Carrie’s War, The Dark is Rising, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Wind in the Willows. I think it has to do with the contrasts and extremes – the freezing outdoors and the danger – juxtaposed with cosy, homely interiors. The nostalgia of making for home through heavy weather and impossible adventures… Plus, also, the sound distortion when there’s thick snow on the ground… the way echoes are muffled and everything sounds so immediate and intimate… that’s a very scary moment, when you realise the world has telescoped to just you in the snowy woods in a dwindling pool of moonlight…

You obviously have a powerfully visual imagination and your website has a few of your drawings. Have you always drawn like this and has it ever shaped your writing?

Yes, it has done, I think. I do less drawing now than I used to… but I do think in visual terms, of making a scene work - and the progression of set-piece to set-piece. And I like to steep scenes in colours – I think I respond very emotionally to colours. I have to know what the curtains and wallpaper is like when I’m writing a scene… And I really do see the faces of my characters as they talk.

Here in the imaginary garden of my blog, it never stops snowing all through December. What do you think to my snowman?

I think he’s marvellous. But… hang on! He’s hopping over the fence…! Should he be doing that?

Oh dear...

Tonight on Radio 4 Extra, they begin broadcasting your adventures for Tom Baker’s Doctor Who – and I'm a big fan of these. What sort of experience do you try and give your listeners with these? And can we have some more next year please?

Oh, thanks for that! I’ve loved doing all three of these seasons of stories. Each year I spend the first six months writing and rewriting, and working with my amazing script editor and commissioning editor, Michael Stevens. Each year we have an over-arching storyline (Evil hornets from space! A demon in multiple disguises through history! A sacred magic serpent egg that the Doctor attempts to steal away and hide!)… and we slot five independent stories within the overall shape. I love the way Audiogo and the brilliant team who’ve worked together so successfully simply go with the flow and bring life to my ideas… like this year – with our Russian Revolution in outer space; our Victorian ghost tale about the boy with the paper head… the Arabian Nights adventure that happens inside a Faberge egg… and then the tale of how the whole of Hexford Village gets whisked off into space…

It’s a kind of phantasmagorical, macabre take on Doctor Who – fairy tale horror in lots of different voices. And presiding over it all – like the lord of misrule himself – is the legendary Tom Baker. My Doctor since childhood – approaching the role and these adventures as if he’s setting off as Doctor Who for the very first time. It’s all been bliss.

And as for 2012… well, I can’t say anything yet… Just wait and see!

Here’s a question I’ve asked all my guests in the garden. Do you have a big dream and if so, has it changed since you were a child?

My big dream has always been to write exactly what I want to write and get it out into the world. I wanted to write amazing adventure stories featuring characters I love. I’ve stuck to that bloody-mindedly from childhood into adulthood and now… and I’m still hanging on. I hope I haven’t sold out at all. I can honestly say that every project and book that I’ve worked on has been exactly what I wanted most to be doing at any one time. I’ve never had the vast popular success that others have… but then, at the same time, I’ve never been able to sit on my laurels and get complacent, either. I’ve had to fight for every little thing I’ve put out there in the world. But having said all that… it’s tough being told all the time that you’re ‘niche’, ‘troublesomely unique’, or… ‘quirky.’ So – sooner or later – it’d be nice to break through to a bigger audience. And that’s where the dream is still pointing.

Since this garden disobeys the usual rules governing reality, if you could invite anybody living or dead or unreal to join us, who would it be...?

I’d like my best friends here. Is this soppy? It doesn’t matter if it is. So much of life is about trying to organise get-togethers with friends. They’re all split up and floating about around the world… and sometimes you can snag some time with them. Like I said at the start… it’s all about trying to find time to catch up with each other – properly. So – if this garden is really magical, and a lovely still spot like it seems – I’d like a nice long get-together with my friends. Oh, only the nice, loyal, proper friends. And they know who they are!

Without intending to, my blog has developed a tendency for old kids books, ghost stories, and magic realism. What can you recommend that’s nothing like them?

Oh dear! They’re my favourite things, too. But let’s see… outside of those, what do I love? Something resolutely un-magical, un-childike…aagghh! I don’t know! I’m not sure I do love any fiction that doesn’t have a bit of those elements to it… Oh, here. Look – Truman Captote’s ‘In Cold Blood’ – which is bleak and exhausting and horrible. And one of the most marvellous books I’ve read.

Do you think a particular book has changed your life?

Going right back, I’d have to say Alice’s Adventures… changed everything. When I was seven and had to go back and forth at weekends to my father’s family on access weekends, there would be these terrible scenes in the car. He was a policeman and he would effectively interrogate me, every Saturday morning in lay-by’s on the route to his new flat. He wanted to know who I loved the most – him or my Mam. He ranted and raved and wept about her and about the divorce and how he hated her. He wanted to know every detail of what was going on at home and what had been said about him. It was all this adult mind-game stuff going on… and I was learning, at seven, about how childish and destructive adults could be. But I remember having Lewis Carroll with me one time… in a splendid hardbacked scarlet copy. And I kept my head down and kept reading. He was wanting me to do boy’s stuff like watch football matches and then go and play the wretched game… but I wanted nothing to do with any of that. That was one of the most powerful, early senses I had of a book being a complete escape from the outside world. More than that – sitting in his car in the passenger seat – with him all red in the face and yelling – it was the book as a barricade.

What’s the first book after childhood that you really, really loved?

My first boyfriend made me read my first novels by Armistead Maupin and Anne Tyler. I loved ‘Tales of the City’ and ‘If Morning Ever Comes.’ I went on, quite quickly, to read everything by them. ‘Maybe the Moon’ and ‘Saint Maybe’ by those two authors respectively are two of the books I love the most.

When you read, what voice do you hear? Or are you deep in the action of the novel? Are these just things I wonder about…?

I love wondering about things like that, too. I’ve always heard my own voice inside my head, reading – and then imagining different voices for dialogue, I think. And so I read pretty slowly as a result – with everything unwinding in my head in real time…

And do you have a particular place or position you like to read in?

In the summer I love reading at the bottom of the garden in the Beach House – on the bed settee with Fester the cat lying asleep on my chest. Because I sit quite still when I’m writing or reading, Fester comes to sit on my lap wherever I am around the house. I have a chair in my tiny working room where we will both curl up to read. Right beside the ‘To Be Read’ bookcase is the best place to be. Comfy – with cat – and no end of books in sight.

Where do you get recommendations from?

Close friends, blogs, reviews. The usual places. But the people and blogs I listen to are ones that I think are ‘real’ readers… that is, not those over-excited about the hype and the shiny-shiny lure of the new and the much-trumpeted. You have to pick your way so carefully through the minefield of recommendations everywhere… and also, you have to watch out for acting on a recommendation – and then, if you dislike what someone has loved – breaking it to them gently enough… and not getting in a row about it. I love discussions about all that stuff – but you have to watch out for hurt feelings, I think. One thing I dislike in all the reviewy/ hypey / bloggy stuff is the degree of amazement and rapture over huge commercial success... it’s kind of X Factor thinking – when the sheer size of the pound and dollar signs wipe out any real thought or opinion…

What are you reading at the moment, today I mean?

I’m bang in the middle of Sue Townsend’s ‘Queen Camilla’ – which is a lovely satirical fantasy about Britain from five years ago that I’ve only just got round to. It’s about a Britain in which the royal family has been forced to live on a council estate. I loved ‘The Queen and I’, which preceded it, quite a number of years ago. In this sequel, the country has become a nastier, darker, more cynical and paranoid place – which is, of course, entirely true. But in all of that, the warmth and humanity of Townsend’s characters shines through. She’s made me feel empathy for the Royals!

In the old crumbly red brick wall of this garden is a wooden door painted green. It opens onto anywhere in all the world that you could wish. Where would you like to go?

The Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris in July. Reading under the trees with a glass of pink wine. Which is – I’ve just remembered – one of my other favourite places to read.

Paul, thank you so much for taking time in the middle of Wildthyme Beyond to come by for a chat. Mind how you go, now - I'll lend you an umbrella - and have a very merry Christmas! (666 Charing Cross Road is available from Headline Books.)

Archaeological Adventures: Moondial, by Helen Cresswell

2011-12-09T01:00:00.000Z

The BFI on London’s South Bank shows lots of good stuff, but its series of more unusual screenings – The Flipside – are especially up my street. It’s all surreal or supernatural stuff that might be forgotten or unseen – this year they showed The Terrornauts, an adventure in time, space and green face-paint for Charles Hawtrey and Patricia Hayes (‘I can’t believe it – me who’s never even had a car – squirted through time and space like a television programme!’). Last Christmas it was the BBC’s adaptation of The Children of Green Knowe. I dragged Jon along for six episodes of ghosts, boy choristers, Daphne Oxenford and exploding trees. Bliss.

On Saturday they screened another children’s drama of the 1980s: Moondial. I yelped when I read the news: no, really, I did! The story of a girl who finds a sundial in an old house, capable of whirling her away into other times – to encounters with ghosts and demonic figures – to reconciliation... All this is the very stuff of my research at Roehampton, particularly ideas it stirs up about heritage: Helen Cresswell (a polygenre-ist like Joan Aiken, author of Lizzie Dripping, The Bagthorpes Saga, and so on) wrote the teleplay and novel in tandem, commissioned by the National Trust.

But Moondial means so much more to me. I must have seen it when I was six or seven, and its images and ideas took root like fireweed. Before the internet it was harder to pin down, and maybe that’s why it thrived inside my head. To return to it I had to conjure and enter it: the dreamlike sequences of Minty Cane running barefoot through moonlit gardens, clinging to the moondial and its eerie weathered figures, asking herself strange questions, calling to hooded figures, chased by masked children, and by daylight, dealing petulantly with idiot adults and their platitudes.

I’ve talked on here before about my friend Luke, how I met him ten years ago and what it meant to find someone who shared a way of looking at the world. We shared memories of Moondial, of being frightened and excited by that creepy moonlit mood, and probably of being impressed by that sharp-witted loner of a schoolgirl lead as well. So of course he came along with me on Saturday, and we were both apprehensive about facing up to a story that had such nice memories attached, had maybe even played a part in shaping our imaginative landscapes and tastes.

There was quite an excited vibe amidst the audience too. Luke had said to me: ‘I just want to see who else goes to see Moondial on a Saturday night!’ And there was a row of young women just in front of us, and two probably gay blokes chatting excitedly in the interval. If you were there – please make yourself known. Particularly if you were the glam woman sitting next to Luke with short silver hair. You walked past just as I was saying, ‘I wonder who it is you’re sitting next to!’, but as Luke pointed out, who wouldn’t want to be a figure of intrigue? Speaking of which, if you were next to me and have a beautifully full, dark beard, please also get in touch.

The introduction was slightly hysterical as well – Siri O’Neal’s memories of Jacqueline Pearce going to bed in full make-up, and next day having to go into studio to have it all taken off and then be made up again for filming – and then one of the curators saying, ‘I think we have the son of the director in the audience – is that right?’, and someone saying that they had the director himself, Colin Cant, so they got him to come down the front and be interviewed too, about how when he went to Siri’s stage school, he saw a roomful of auditionees for the role of Minty, and then said: ‘And who have you not allowed to come today…?’ after which they dragged Siri out from behind a pillar or something, like an old Hollywood musical.

Moondial is not out on DVD, but has been released on VHS, and I watched it once with my first boyfriend, enthusing over it feverishly: it was quite a disappointment, for both of us, having been hacked to bits to form one telemovie of half the length. But this time, in full, with a lovely slow pace and all cliffhangers included, it was far from disappointing. It was actually revealed as a very brave and bold production. Minty is in a complex emotional situation: her father is dead, and suddenly her mother is involved in a car accident – this is harder stuff than Tom’s Midnight Garden.

Cresswell writes that first episode very carefully, with close attention paid to constructing Minty’s real world, from Kellog’s cornflakes and Sue Lawley and subtle, naturalistic dialogue. Minty’s reaction to her mother’s accident is shocking; her Aunt Mary’s attempts to comfort her are convincingly misjudged. And then Minty’s timeslips are so visually disorientating – sickening spins, as though the moondial were the head of a drill boring down into the past. Cant is able to move the camera where he likes, because this has been scripted specifically for this place, and so we can believe in it. I, at least, believed in Minty – like Dark Season’s lead character (another favourite, another thing by Colin Cant) she knows her genre. She has lovely esoteric conversations with the dead and the living, and gives mysterious women short shrift.

And that, of course, is Jacqueline Pearce, in her dual role of crazy 19th century governess, Miss Vole, and sexy, enigmatic ghost hunter Miss Raven in the present day. Her departure is oddly unsatisfying (the whole storyline takes a mystifying turn in the last ten minutes), and we really just want more of her, stalking around the grounds of Belton Hall like something out of another TV drama altogether. And this is another brave move by Cresswell and Cant, and thoroughly entertaining. I’m dipping into the novel too, and Raven is older there: her aura of power is a matter of interpretation. Pearce’s Raven wears outfits covered in cobweb patterns, and goes heavy on the serpent accessories.

But she’s a slightly ridiculous figure, at core. She steps out by moonlight in her ghost hunting outfit (‘It has a hood, too!’ she tells Minty and her Aunt excitedly) and the audience is conscious that the world of this story is more complex than that. Even if it’s, perhaps, too complex and incomplete for us to understand. I will have to read the novel, and some more Cresswell along with it, and see where it leads me.

And I hope that next year the Flipside shows Tom's Midnight Garden - which I am reading today...

The bouquet of Green Carnations goes to...

2011-12-07T01:00:00.003Z

Today we are proud to announce that the winner of the 2011 Green Carnation Prize is... Catherine Hall, for her amazing novel The Proof of Love! Us judges are proud and we are pleased but we didn’t half have to wrestle with the decision. The shortlist this year has something for everyone – or, in my case, everything for one person. Patricia Duncker’s Strange Case of the Composer and his Judge had me electrified; Jackie Kay’s Red Dust Road melted me; Bob Smith made me laugh and cry at Remembrance of Things I Forgot, and Zoe Strachan’s seductive Ever Fallen In Love led me into some very dark places. Our only book of short stories, Colm Toibin’s The Empty Family, struck a typically assured scale of emotion.

But in the end, I fell for The Proof of Love: for its voice, sweet and evasive; for its evocation of that world, summer in 1976 in the Lake District, the close knowledge that strengthens and stays the community like the intricate barriers of its dry stone walls; for its queering of a story this reader thought he knew backwards. It’s a novel that pulses with life, and I’m pleased to see it take the prize.

The Green Carnation celebrates brilliant fiction and memoir by LGBT authors, and never seems quite to avoid a bit of controversy. There is the stuff to be expected – ‘my favourite author isn’t there’ (we’ve all yelled that at some shortlist or other in our lives) and ‘why do the gays have to have their own award now?’ – but actually I had the question thrown at me, by gay and lesbian friends of mine: do we need this prize? aren't we past this?

And then, as if in response, came reports that we had ‘snubbed’ the more famous (for which, perhaps, read: the approved) LGBT authors of today. We still live in a world where representation of queer writers is carefully framed and contained; however positive it may appear, any static picture of something as alive as sexuality, and something as potentially revelatory as new writing, is worth shaking up a bit. Not with negativity and ‘snubs’ (how meaningless) but with recommendations, new discoveries and pleasures, and love, love, love!

It is a queer's lot that an act of love is a political act.

So here’s to surprise, new pictures of the world, enthusiastic recommendations and love. And here’s to Catherine Hall and her entrancing Proof of Love!

‘Don’t talk too much about it – unless you suspect that they, too, have had similar experiences...’ Rereading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe

2011-12-05T08:50:00.005Z

Hello!

Always winter, and never Christmas: It’s a wonderfully musical bit of foreboding, isn't it, with the cadence of a parent’s playful threat. As someone in my 1900-1960 class said last week, it’s every child’s worst nightmare. Well, not every child, obviously – somebody else in class had been forbidden as a girl from reading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by her Mum, who read the murder of Aslan as anti-semitic (‘So, of course, I read it, and loved it,’ she told us; I like her a lot). And in spite of the power and immediacy of the idea, we might imagine that CS Lewis himself was a little embarrassed at its overt whimsy. Compare the Narnia books with the work of JRR Tolkien and it hardly looks the most serious run of stories, but this first to be published is just that bit more laissez faire.

‘Always winter, never Christmas’ is central to the novel: it is the White Witch’s predominant power, her blight upon the land and her political tyranny in one, the sign of her sterility and un-womanness, clearly important to Lewis, her signature dish as refugee from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy story, the thing most likely to send her into a fit of pique and start zapping people into pieces of garden statuary. It’s what Aslan undoes, just by returning to the shores of Cair Paravel on the Eastern Sea. But it’s also one of the most tortuous and peculiar ideas, at least the way Lewis treats it.

I don’t mean to get autistic about this. I find these self-contradictions are the air bubbles that keep the greater mass alight... but – the Witch’s power is presented as a spell of time suspended: it is always winter, and not only never Christmas but never spring. But I was disappointed to rediscover that this isn’t eternal night-time (how much more atmospheric?). Dawn follows and day follows, and Christmas being a winter festival could – technically – be celebrated on any of these mornings. So it is implicitly not the Witch’s magic which keeps Narnians from going door to cave door carolling, but her totalitarian power, policed by wolves and bent fauns.

But then there’s the fact that nobody in the novel actually gets around to celebrating Christmas, before or after the Witch is vanquished. Instead we get the arrival of Father Christmas himself – so a physical emblem of the festival, and an especially culturally specific one – zipping about delivering booze to talking animals, and instruments of war to visiting children, as well as some quite unpleasant observations: ‘Battle is ugly when women fight.’ We might wonder what experiences led this spirit of the holiday season to form such an attitude. But soon after this there are warm breezes, there are snowdrops, a wonderful thaw.

Why is it called Christmas at all, given that Christ is presumably a meaningless name in Narnia? Shouldn’t it at the most be Aslanmas? When we start looking at the analogies and Christian allegories in this context, things get still more confusing: is the Witch a Satanic figure, or a figure of pure irreligiosity and stasis? In future Narnian novels, strong female villains will be presented as serpents and temptresses (and mass murderers from other worlds) but the White Witch is described as a descendant of Lilith (‘one of the Jinn’) and as the chief executioner for the Emperor-Beyond-The-Sea (i.e., God – right?). This isn’t confusing – it’s literally mystifying.

But I do still love it. I had a lovely time re-reading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, and it’s partly because all that religious mystery is very mixed-up, not strict allegory, and full of references to the deeper magic ‘from the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned.’ We are into religious mysticism here, despite Lewis’ higher intentions, which is probably a better mirror of a child’s earliest experience of Christmas, particularly a British child, to whom religious matter is normally delivered in a fond but faintly embarrassed way, joy tinged with melancholy, and the strangeness of passing time. The way children tend to learn about Christ is generally disordered (I remember Tilly, telling us when she was not quite four, that there were two Jesus’s: one who was born and one who died), so the weird temporality of Narnia is part of that – as is the strangeness of Christmas, which we also learn about in a non-diachronic, illogical fashion, thank goodness.

And though the Narnian stories do not follow, as I’ve said, in quite the same ‘bung it all in and hope for the best’ manner (though we do meet Father Time, a few books later, and a few talking stars) this earliest book has a lovely relaxed air of a dream, full of surreal juxtapositions. In fact, Lewis talks about it arising from pictures in his head, which suggests dreams: the faun and the lamppost and the snow and the parcels. I’ve always wondered about those parcels.

I feel I should say something about The Hobbit, but I just want to talk about Narnia, because of all the books I’ve re-read for this course, I look on this the most fondly and had the biggest rush of nostalgia in reading. Of course there is Lewis’s clarity of style, the perfectly judged style and tone in which he narrates, and the relative shock of Edmund’s character (there are plenty of bad boys in children’s fiction before Lewis, but few whose unpleasantness and bullying and insecurity are so overt and so recognisable).

But I think it’s also because its many little allusions disturb all sorts of early memories of story. I found myself going right back, even to one of my earliest memories – with Mum on a school trip for her class at Thurlow Park to the Polka theatre in Wimbledon, a production of The Snow Queen, and that woman in the sleigh, shockingly pale, surrounded by dancing flakes of stage light…

Archaeological Adventures: Stag Boy, by William Rayner

2011-12-02T10:22:00.002Z

Hello! (It’s Christmas now on Pile of Leaves, so I’ve gone a bit cheery. Blame the fumes from the brandy cream.)

So this is one of my texts, these children’s novels I’m after, where acts of archaeology summon something dangerous or revelatory. Often I explain my quest with reference to Alan Garner’s Owl Service, that story of the many unhappy returns of Welsh myth upon whoever reads too much into it. Often, though, there is time travel too; this summer in a charity shop, between applying to do this research and finding I would be, I turned up a time slip novel by William Rayner which seemed to fit: Big Mister.

This study ought to be archaeological in itself, and Rayner’s was a name I’d never heard of, though Big Mister’s blurb suggested it was highly regarded at time of publication. I am a superstitious character, and to leave it behind would have felt like my own rejection of the PhD application. But it was whilst Googling William Rayner that I discovered his other novel: Stag Boy.

Can we glory in that title for a couple of minutes. Stag Boy. Doesn’t have much in the way of nuance or atmosphere, does it? The Owl Service / Stag Boy. Try saying it aloud – imagine, maybe, that you’re a parent asking after it in your local bookshop. The Times Education Supplment has called it a work of ‘great beauty and strength … with a welcome vein of broad humour.’ Ideal for your kids. Look at it queued up for reading on my shelf for reading: The Whispering Knights … The Waterfall Box … Whispers in the Graveyard … Stag Boy.

It does sound filthy, doesn’t it? And lo and behold, it is! It’s a sexed-up version of The Owl Service. Jim has come home from the city to the countryside, and here’s the girl he used to be closest to, Mary (sometimes it seems all the girls in the children’s books I read are called Mary, or Susan) and of course she’s lovelier than ever and gives him a different feeling to the one he used to have. But Mary prefers the handsome, clever and rich Edward. (Edward forms part of her imagined ‘future world … of parties and dances … amusing people, clever people, rich people’ while Jim reminds her of the wild and silly let’s pretend of childhood amongst hills and trees.)

Edward is strong and likes hunting; Jim is asthmatic and likes hanging round spinneys and deserted cottages. But when Jim puts on the ancient antlered helm from the strangely undisturbed cave, he finds he can enter the body of the stag, be powerful and playful, embarrass the hunt by leading it in circles. Will Mary notice the change?

The mysticism of Herne the Hunter is actually handled very nicely, which is to say, there are some potently disturbing sequences, particularly a dream sequence with a mysterious exchange, ‘his answers mounting from some deep unguessed part of himself.’

Again and again the word came, like a pulse: ‘Blood.’
‘What seals the great bargain?’
‘Blood.’
The dance of the antlered man changed. There came into Jim’s head the words: ‘Paid and bought.’

The scene is set for a hackneyed but basically interesting take on this masculine magic, these old orders. There might be a bravery in tackling the erotic aspect of this encounter with myth, which Garner’s novel somehow leaves out, though it includes a whole lot of things. A lot, of course, rests on Mary and her response to Jim and to this slightly ridiculous macho mysticism of antlers and inheritance. You suspect a woman might be best placed to write a novel of this kind – but who knows?

Well, things turn a lot less subtle when Jim blurts out his special power to Mary, and follows up his revelation with a visit to her garden in stag form. Mary, at this point, is of course naked (‘I’m so hot,’ she said aloud. ‘I’m so hot.’) and she’s bowled over by this uncanny visitation. You’re still, by your fingernails, clinging to the notion that this might be a slightly misjudged but overall interesting addition to the genre, when Jim the Stag comes to Mary’s window with a rose in his teeth.

Not long after this, Mary is riding round on Jim the Stag by moonlight, still naked, and they’re both having a wonderful time: Jim gets over his asthma and Edward turns out to be an idiot, and what’s worse, unromantic – desperate for a quick fumble in the woods. Edward couldn’t summon the magic sexual power of the stags, not for money.

So it’s stilted and clichéd and its vision of sexuality, even teenager sexuality, is superficial to say the least. None of this makes the novel uninteresting, of course, bearing in mind the recommendations from the likes of the TES and Junior Bookshelf.

And if you don’t care about any of that, the cover is beautiful – and appears to feature David Bowie quite heavily. Unfortunately, though, there are no gnomes.

'Oh, don't say they're in this house too!' ... Rereading The Borrowers and Mary Poppins

2011-11-30T01:00:00.000Z

Nearly at the end of term now: can you believe it? This year life has begun tearing past, like these winter winds in London just now. There’s never time to do everything you’d like, it seems, so you have to decide what you want done, you really have to put your shoulder to the gale. I don’t feel I’ve gained much ground on my big studies at the moment, but I have overcome some crises of confidence left over from my MA.

I met a friend recently who underwent the same MA at the same place, around the same time as me, and as we sipped our beers in that strange theatre pub, autographed picture of Peggy Mount on wall, we were united in regret. Both of us had gone into the experience bouncing with enthusiasm; both left humbled, stumbling failures.

But last week I gave a little class presentation on The Borrowers, and it went well and I was pleased. I saw people scribbling notes and I felt we had a good discussion after. I picked Mary Norton’s novel, knowing I’d have the most to say about it – but there’s too much almost. It’s a suggestive novel, full of narrative elisions and rich, inventive detail. It almost made the rest of the course feel reductive: you see the children’s novel develop from Nesbit to Garnet via Streatfeild, and suddenly there’s this (apparently) unprecedented leap forward in sophistication. Of course, earlier highlights can recede among the bolder hues and big names of more famous works.

That said, we’re now (in 1952) at an amazing time for children’s fiction, of respect and alarm at the child: a child born out of world war, austerity, depression and heavy industrialism. The urge is to equip the child, to challenge them, to rescue them out of the terrifying present (as ever) but nowadays not by carrying them away to the Past That Never Was but send them forwards, into new, more complex ways of living. And the Borrowers is about resourcefulness, in that wonderful house built of cigar boxes and old letters, warm and dark beneath the floor.

But it’s also about the oppression of life down there, below stairs, below carpet. This is the experience of Arrietty, a teenage girl living in isolation, self-educated beyond her parents, sexuality a-burgeoning, yearning for freedom. Her experience mirrors oddly the nameless Boy’s life in the house, at full-size: an Anglo-Indian immigrant, a product of Empire, deracinated and lonely. And their loneliness, their friendship, mirrors again (oddly again) the friendship of old Mrs May and our narrator, telling stories about little people in the sad evening light of the morning room.

And we can’t ignore that in the life of the Clock family we see mirrored, in a particularly antique mirror of the kind you’d find in an old English house, the reflection going glossy and dark and unreliable, an image of life in Nazi Germany, as well as, painted broadly, an English working class family changing in a time of crisis, as well as, in the soft light of nostalgia, life in the country at the turn of the century, shadowed by the terrible intervening hand of Empire. It’s resistant to strict analogy because the place and characters live on the page, which allow for self-contradiction, which is the stuff of life.

There is so much to say, and perhaps I spent too long talking; look, I’ve done it again here. There’s not enough space left to last Thursday’s other book, Mary Poppins. No room for PL Travers’ sad childhood and her reinvention of herself, and her invention of Mary, the flinty Nanny with a glint in her eye. I loved the movie as a child but only read the book in my teens, a cosy read amidst GCSE exams, explorations of the city and of my own sexuality, burgeoning as it was (yes, a bit).

It’s nothing like the movie. Julie Andrews has too much nunly virtue to emulate this Mary’s vanity and mystery. An enigma in a crisply ironed blouse, Mary is unique, and her odd encounters with star-gods in John Lewis and women with edible fingers are inspired and oddly affecting, like half-remembered dreams. I like how it’s a very London series, full of zoos and parks and shops.

I’ve been wondering, just this week, whether my interest in children’s literature is motivated by a sense of it (not an idea) as a sort lost literature – like the playground culture that the adult can never quite venture upon; that these texts have a kind of mystical aura we allow ourselves to forget. And Mary Poppins is almost the definition of that: her zoo adventure, with the eerie dance of the animals, is suggestive of a deeper magic we long to access again.

And speaking of which, this week’s text is The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe...

A Chat in the Garden with ... my friend, Rosie!

2011-11-26T14:05:00.018Z

Welcome back into the tranquil walled garden of A Pile of Leaves; winter is in the air (I hope you’re well wrapped up). This morning I’ve asked my lovely friend Rosie Anthony over for a chat; in addition to being knowledgeable about trees and plant-life, Rosie’s a wonderful photographer of it: her pictures reveal the detail of leaves and bark and flowers to be subtle and bewitching as the lines of faces. She also kept me sane when my job was sending me funny, which was no mean feat. (And she has a lovely blog she doesn’t update nearly enough – read it and encourage her!)

So welcome to the garden, Rosie! Will you have a cup of tea?

Nick! Yes, let’s have it with some cake – I made my favourite and brought it with me, I hope it hasn’t been squashed in my bag. Slice of almond and hazelnut chocolate gateaux anyone? There’s plenty to go around and perfect with friendly chat.

Ooh, lovely, thank you! Are you really going to apply to be on the Great British Bake-Off?

Perhaps in twenty years when I’ve baked more, had time to learn flavours and maybe grown a skin thick enough to cope with the “helpful comments”. To be honest, I love baking and adore the programme. Who couldn’t love Mary Berry, with her kindly, lovely ways? But I just don’t think I’m good enough. I know I make things that taste really nice but they don’t always look it! For me the look just isn’t that important (obviously I want it to look as though it was made by a top French patissiere, but I am being realistic), I just want to be able to bake things that delight people. Honestly, I’m terrified of Paul Hollywood!

What’s your advice to someone like me who, in the kitchen, is a danger to himself?

I think if you truly are a danger (have I told you that once I managed to set my oven gloves on fire in Home Ec. at school?), then you are probably best just staying well away from a kitchen! I think though, that you just lack confidence and feel under pressure with people around. Am I right? My advice to you Nick, make everyone leave the kitchen so you can do it without anyone watching and try to relax!

Can I thank you for your gorgeous picture of fallen leaves with which I have wallpapered my blog? What trees did they fall from again?

You’re very welcome; I’m honoured to feature on your marvellous blog. The leaves are from the cherry tree that I can see from my office window. Cherry trees happen to be my favourite tree (delicate blossom and splendidly coloured autumn leaves), but this one is particularly special to me. When I am having a bad day, a quick glance through the window and I feel instantly soothed. Seeing it in its full autumn colour left me know option but to grab my scarf, camera and lie on the floor capturing the loveliness around me.

All your photos of natural things are so beautiful. What sort of thing will usually grab your attention and make you take a picture?

Usually something very tiny catches my eye. I love taking photographs to show up the detail. If I can do a close up of a small section, then I will. My macro lens is my most used lens. I think I just want to show people what little bits of beauty and awe make up a whole big lovely thing.

How long have you been taking photographs? Have you been on courses and night classes and things?

I became interested in photography when I was learning about botany at university. As I said earlier, the details of flowers just grabbed me and I wanted to record them. Then I started wanting to share them and joined flickr. It was all probably about 6 years ago now. I haven’t ever been to classes, just read some magazines and practised, practised, practised! Like anything, the more you do it, the better you get. I think it also helps to have a passion for your subject. I love the things I photograph so much, I can’t help but want them to be seen in the best light possible.

You must have to hunker down in quite uncomfortable positions to get so close?

You certainly do! But you get used to it. My family and friends are all quite used to me suddenly throwing myself on the ground to take the perfect photo. It helps that they all thought I was slightly crackers to start off with!

You have a whole book of photos of my favourite flower, the poppy. Is it your favourite too? Why do you think it’s so fascinating?

I have just learnt about the Victorian language of flowers, where certain flowers were used to express emotions. The poppy was used to mean imagination and fantastic extravagance. It is my favourite flower, but only the small ones! I like the red common field poppy, Papaver rhoeas, best of all. The fragililty breaks my heart and what better petal to convey extravagance than the silken blood red tissue.

You are officially a tree expert. What tree is your favourite? I love an oak tree and of course the horse chestnut, but I actually think my favourite is the sycamore.

I find trees inspiring and peaceful. Being amongst them is good in every way. I particularly like sitting under one in summer with a good book and a slice of cake, but you also can’t beat just staring at them during autumn when their leaves are changing colour. They seem to light up even the dullest of days with their fiery lanterns glowing through the gloom.

Who or what inspired your interest in horticulture and the natural world?

That was my beloved botany teacher, Nigel Brown. I learnt, and continue to do so, an incredible amount from him. Not only the facts but about being passionate and loving the natural world. The natural world was a part of his soul and he gave a little piece of that to all of his students. I learnt to respect and adore the world around me from him. He also is the man who inspired me to pick up a camera!

We’ve discussed your childhood love for Pippi Longstocking and I must say, she seems to have been a positive influence on you, even if you have never beaten up any policemen (to my knowledge). What other books did you love as a child?

It was reading Pippi Longstocking that made me lie the wrong way round in bed! Unfortunately, it was so hot under the covers that I nearly boiled to death! I was mad on all of Enid Blyton books. I am still in love with the idea of childhood innocence and long hot summers, both of which are rapidly fading from the British way of life. Images of wandering aimlessly through country lanes, picking fruit off bushes and being happy, still make me smile.

Yes, I have the same nostalgia for a time that maybe never was. Wandering aimlessly and blackberrying in the sunshine. You were an enthusiastic reader as a child, then?

When I was born, my dad bought a big box of books from a car boot sale. Of course I was too small for them and he put them in the loft, sat there, just waiting for me to be ready. I’ll never forget the excitement as a young child of getting a book each time he went to the loft. I’d often cry, “Daddy, daddy, are you going to the loft today? I need a book!” It was a tragic day when the last book came down. I just couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t be getting another from the magical store!

And what’s the first book after childhood that you really, really loved?

I honestly have no idea, I mean when does childhood really end? I went through a phase of reading lots of crime novels, then didn’t get a chance to read very much throughout my Masters. This time round though, I’ve made sure that I always have a book on the go. So far this year I am on book number 42! I find it is a wonderful way to escape from study and the drudgery of real life.

What are you reading at the moment?

The Small Hand by Susan Hill is my current book. I read The Woman In Black for the first time over Halloween and was enthralled, so thought I’d try another of her ghost stories!

Do you have a particular place or position you like to read books in?

I like finding a quiet spot; by the sea, under a tree and so on but I will read anywhere. I read while I’m walking home and most often read in bed when I wake up early.

Do you think a particular book has changed your life?

Can a book change your life? I saw you asked about this in your previous interviews and it got me thinking. I think it depends on what sort of book you’re reading. For example the books that accompany the Great British Bake-Off certainly have revolutionised my life, but will reading The Woman In Black? I’m not sure that it will. I do think that books have an effect on you and possibly change your outlook on life. They make you think and can sway your opinions. I think I’ll sit on the fence with this one, with a very flimsy “it depends”.

Without intending to, my blog has developed a tendency for old kids books, ghost stories, and magic realism. What can you recommend that’s nothing like them?

I really enjoyed The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh. It was a lovely story about a girl learning the aforementioned Victorian language of flowers. For a thriller about Bohemians, life and love, I really enjoyed The Poison Tree, Erin Kelly. Anything set in Paris or a cupcake café!

When you read, what voice do you hear? Or are you deep in the action of the novel?

I think I act it out in my head. I visualise a lot of things and imagine who would play the part if it should become a film. I create images and voices. One thing I’m interested in is whether an author can write as the opposite sex… something I’m intrigued about and am now consciously noticing throughout my reading.

In the old crumbly red brick wall of this garden is a green door. It opens onto anywhere in all the world that you could wish. Where would you like to go?

Without a doubt, that would be Paris in any era. I just can’t but help love the romance of the city.

Since this garden disobeys the usual rules governing reality, if you could invite anybody living or dead or unreal to join us, who would it be...?

I’m not very good at answering this question really. I think I’d like Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe to help me choose which dress to wear. I would also like to ask Natasha, my lovely flickr friend who I am longing to meet in real life. Perhaps we should ask someone from government so that I could pass on my idea for making petrol cheaper and for a bit of something to look at, I wouldn’t mind if Ed Westwick popped over…

I am coming to stay the weekend with you and your beautiful boyfriend, Rhid, next January (yes, I definitely am this time!) – which Hollywood musical shall we watch on the Sunday afternoon?

Perhaps we could watch a Gene Kelly? Did I ever tell you that when I was little all I wanted to do when I grew up was star in old Hollywood musicals? I think I would have given my right arm to be in Anchors Aweigh! Though it may have changed the plot somewhat if I had been, especially with no right arm and all!

Oh, Kiki’s followed you into the garden. She’s sniffing the compost heap. Can you explain for our reader who she is and how she came to be in your life?

Kiki is our kitten. She is now seven months old but we adopted her about 3 months ago. One night I rescued her from under my car, it’s a long story involving children and broomsticks, and immediately fell in love with the bundle of black and white fluff. A few days later, her 6 year old owner, heartbrokenly asked if wanted her as she was no longer allowed to keep her. I tried to be calm and collected but basically screeched yes and nearly snatched the poor little girls’ arm off, but the good news is that she only lives two doors down and gets to continue playing with Kiki. I try to pass the act off as a Mother Theresa type act of love, instead of me just selfishly not being able to resist owning a lovely, tiny kitty! She also took her first steps outdoors last week. Heartbreaking it is, having to let them go.

Ah, I’m looking forward to getting to know her in January. Thank you for stopping by, and for the cake. You’re a star!

Tenderness, toughness and Adrienne Rich - A chat with Ben Webb, Part Two

2011-11-24T23:49:00.009Z

Ben Webb and his theatre company, Risking Enchantment, are staging a celebration of the work of Adrienne Rich, this coming Monday 28th of November, at the Ovalhouse Theatre in London. I’ll be there (will you?) but I don’t know much about Rich and her work. We had a chat about it in my imaginary garden, and Ben kindly brought along a couple of Rich’s poems to read me and give a flavour of her work.

DEDICATIONS
by Adrienne Rich

I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a gray day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plain’s enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses momentum and before running
up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.
I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the Intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your
hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

Ben, what do you think is unique about Adrienne Rich’s work?

In her essays she is passionate and articulate and she carries you with her somehow. In her poetry it's the tenderness and the toughness playing with each other, and the fearlessness with which she evokes the tight rope between knowing and not knowing. Her work is vividly political and deeply erotic - and the best of it is both at the same time.

What was your first experience of her poetry?

Where does anything begin? I think we studied A Valediction Forbidding Mourning in Sixth Form, and I was intrigued by this poem which was had such a distinctive voice behind it but confused me at the level of meaning. The voice however intrigued me. A year or so later, I picked up the Margaret Reynolds Erotica anthology, a collection of women's writing. I got it second-hand on Sussex University campus, and in that I found Floating Poem, Unnumbered.

Again it was the voice that got me - the tenderness, the exquisite grasp of image, and the freedom within form to move and delight in equal measure. I went out and got a collection of her poems and haven't stopped reading her since. And her essays are as vital to me as her poems - the two forms complement each other.

On Monday, which poem will you open your celebratory evening with?

Dedications, which is a poem that moves through time and place to touch on the experience of a multitude of imagined readers. The voice in the poem repeateadly states "I know", but weaved through the lines is an uncertainty about ever adequately speaking for another person, ever embodying another. I chose to begin with this poem because it has a steadiness and a solidity but builds gorgeously and is full of voices.

A while ago you leant me Rich’s essay, 'Poetry and Commitment', and in that she refers to ‘voices mingling in a long conversation, a long turbulence,’ the tradition of radical modernism, the work of ‘those who have written against the silences of their time and location’, without which ‘our world is unintelligible.’ Does this mean poetry has a political power? How does that happen in Rich's work?

I have a feeling that often Rich is writing through the voice of characters who are other than her in order to excavate and expose notions and assumptions of otherness. And this process of embodying the other feels ethical and valid to me as a way of undoing all the constant othering which capitalism uses to promote and reinforce fear, perhaps.

Yes, if we say 'I don't know who's receiving this, and if I think I know, what if I think about any other reader or listener or audience it might be...' She says in Dedications, I want to know what you don't understand.

Who gets to write poetry, who gets to read it, the canon, received formal notions, subject matter, verbal privilege – all of that's political, isn't it? And it's all weaved right through the 60-odd years of poetry that Rich has produced so far, because she's always engaged with the social contract - who we are to each other. For me, as I've worked on curating this performance of her work, I've been provoked into thinking a lot about the relationship between the personal and political, and a realisation, which I think Rich would share, that they're not separate at all. 'The personal is the political' feels like a somewhat old-fashioned sentiment and at the same time more urgent than ever. There's a bit of Rich which I love where she says:

The moment when a feeling enters the body
is political. This touch is political.

I love that touch.

Is pleasure a part of your enjoyment of her work?

There is a pleasure for me in her language and her rhythms, and a pleasure in the really thorough excavation of themes - often facing things for what they are, with flashes of surprising beauty. So yes pleasure is a big part of the experience for me. Pleasure and a different way of thinking.

WE ARE DRIVEN TO ODD ATTEMPTS
By Adrienne Rich

We are driven to odd attempts; once it would not have occurred to me to put out in a boat, not on a night like this.
Still, it was an instrument, and I had pledged myself to try any instrument that came my way. Never to refuse one from conviction of incompetence.
A long time I was simply learning to handle the skiff; I had no special training and my own training was against me.
I had always heard that darkness and water were a threat.
In spite of this, darkness and water helped me to arrive here.
I watched the lights on the shore I had left for a long time; each one, it seemed to me, was a light I might have lit, in the old day.

Something To Hold Onto, a celebration of the work of Adrienne Rich, is on Monday 28th November at the Ovalhouse theatre.

Someplace where there isn't any trouble

2011-11-24T10:03:00.003Z

I think I can pin-point this now. It was Christmas 1986 when me and my Mum and her Mum came in from the bitter snow and biting wind, shaking the snows of yesteryear from our shoes, and were called into the living room by Dad to watch The Wizard of Oz on BBC1. Onscreen the wind was shrieking low as well, and Dorothy Gale’s farmhouse had just been plucked from the plains of Kansas and tossed in a monochrome sky, as I settled by Dad and tried to catch up.

What must I have thought when Dorothy stepped, apparently without quite registering it, from the black, white and grey of the house into the colour – no, we must be specific – the Technicolor of the land of Oz? I suspect my imagination enlarged by a good third in that moment of visual surprise. I don’t think anyone has ever done so much good by going out of their front door. This is surely what cinema was invented for.

The Wizard of Oz, which I saw on a proper big screen at the BFI on Monday, became my favourite movie straight away. It ruled and defined my childhood. Everything else was measured against it and judged to be substandard. And really, I was right, I think.

There is nothing like it. No musical so fantastical, no fantasy so giddy. The performances in it are sublime: Margaret Hamilton and Jack Haley and Bert Lahr are all, I think, in different movies, but they give it all they’ve got. Judy Garland, alternately wide-eyed with awe and with outrage, mediates between them and stitches the story together like a child in a playground game, or the hostess at a party full of happy drunks. It is, essentially, panto – and a world of stage tradition and history lies in those performances, that script, the outrageous sets.

I drew and retold and reread the story, and with my friend Sarah #2 (first love) I re-enacted and debated it, each of us insisting to the other that it was all true. I don't think this self-delusion lasted for long: in 1988 Sarah was taken to see the Royal Shakespeare Company’s big restaging of it, and because I was so desperate to go, she gave me her programme. It told the whole story of the original book and its genesis and its creator, and one way or another Oz gave me an early sense of writers and illustrators and adaptations.

For a long while after that I tried to write my own adaptation to be performed at our school. Thankfully it never came to be staged, and shatter my dream, but the making of it, and the re-making of it, became part of the pleasure of it. Maybe this was part of that continued search for what was ‘all true’ about Oz. The movie came to be intimately associated with my idea of Hollywood and with cinema before the war, with America and big cities and the terrible life of Judy Garland, and in many ways with the idea of Christmas tradition. I’ve always loved the idea of my Dad watching it as a child on telly, black-and-white throughout (what an idea!), his parents enjoying it along with him. These strange repeats that tie one generation to another.

The past few years, I’ve been to see it at the cinema when it's rescreened for Christmas (this being one of the great wishes of my childhood). I’ve been with my Mum, last year my sister, and this year Jon and Luke and Martin, and everybody seems to come out and say, ‘I enjoyed it – but what a strange, strange film!’

This year more than ever, I think. Everyone was surprised at the garishness of it, the daring escapes of Toto the dog, the midgets with green hair and distorted voices, the spectacle that is Billie Burke, the violent mood-swings. Perhaps the most peculiar of these: the terror of the witch BLAM the joy of finally meeting the wizard BLAM five minute comedy song by Bert Lahr BLAM mock ceremonial with carpet BLAM ‘The wizard says go away!’ BLAM Dorothy in total despair BLAM ‘I’ll get you into the wizard somehow!’

And so on. This is after all a movie made by a committee: multiple writers, directors, multiple audiences, three near-death experiences, and so many cuts at the last minute (there are at least two lines of dialogue which make no sense at all, referring to scenes that have since gone in the bin). And as Luke said, a lesson learned by Dorothy that is so flowery and gnomic, it’s hard to tell what she’s talking about: ‘If it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.’ Mm?

I always thought it was a bit rich, that whole ‘She had to find out for herself.’ This after Dorothy and all her friends have come close to being variously destroyed by the most terrifying character ever seen in a children’s film. What ‘Dorothy has learned’ would seem to be about self-possession, not about ‘home’ (which she’s been going on about since she arrived in Munchkinland). It’s a shame she doesn’t get much of a show-down with the Witch, then. There is something important about the way she melts her – literally deconstructs her – which is about the inherent lack of substance. This is true of the Wizard as well, of course, and she does at least get to tell him, ‘You’re a very bad man.’ Even if he refutes that immediately, we feel her disappointment in him like a sledgehammer.

For a film with so many references to mortality, it’s strangely coy when it comes to Dorothy’s parents: there’s no reference onscreen to her being an orphan (is there one in the book?). So her story is full of unspoken significance; her Aunt and Uncle aren’t getting any younger, after all. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been reading Rustin and Rustin’s Narratives of Love and Loss, but I was struck by Dorothy’s maternal acts, arguing passionately for the life of her dog, guilt at having abandoned Aunt Em, and of course those many acts of education and comfort with her wild, needy boys. Perhaps her melting of the witch is significant because it’s one of the times she really succeeds in helping someone she has a responsibility toward – and what is the Scarecrow but a lanky child-empathy figure? Her first moment of taking control.

With Monday’s showing of the Wizard, I symbolically began to allow myself to feel Christmassy. No-one else that evening would join me, so it was a half-hearted transition. But it’s begun.

A Chat in the Garden with ... Ben Webb of Risking Enchantment!

2011-11-21T06:00:00.001Z

The scent of a bonfire drifts into the tranquil walled garden of A Pile of Leaves, which is all butter and paprika coloured here in the heart of autumn. Today I’m welcoming my friend Ben Webb into the arbour, out of the rain, for a chat: as well as a passionate reader, Ben is director of theatre company Risking Enchantment, who are staging a one-off celebration of the poet Adrienne Rich this month. I want to know about that, and I thought this would be more fun than just going to their website: www.riskingenchantment.com

So, Ben, why are you doing this ‘Something to Hold Onto’, this evening of celebrating Adrienne Rich?

The short answer is because nobody else is doing it. Rich is a living artist with a sixty-year body of work, full of (ahem) riches and deeply charged, and I just love her poems. So I wanted to share that publicly by producing this evening of readings, celebrating and exploring her legacy. As a theatremaker I’m thinking more and more about the relationship between the personal and political, and Rich is an ongoing inspiration in that sense.

Your 'Kathy Acker Mobile Library' had readings of her work, and some of them set to music. Will there be singing - or dancing – in ‘Something to Hold Onto’?

We’re still working on it, so I can’t say for sure. You’ll have to buy a ticket and find out on 28th November.

I never really went to the theatre before I met you, unless you count the Polka Children’s Theatre in Wimbledon. Who got you interested in that world?

My Great Nan used to live in a council flat at the Barbican, so during childhood Summer holidays I would spend a lot of time there. I saw shows there, in particular I remember seeing Sylvester McCoy fronting a variety show called The Teddy Bears’ Picnic. But it was Theatre de Complicite’s Caucasian Chalk Circle at the National Theatre in my teens that really turned me on and then a whole string of mid-period Katie Mitchell shows.

You’ve written plays in the past. What's been your main aim when you write?

To create a space in which authentic and complex emotion can be felt and sat with for a time before people then move into their lives with slightly altered thinking. It’s the same when I direct.

‘Authenticity’ seems vital to your more autobiographical work. I could be completely taken by surprise at the way an emotion is staged and yet recognise it completely and believe in it. When is something of yours next being staged?

The Well & Badly Loved will be at Ovalhouse throughout March 2012. It’s our biggest project yet – a trilogy of queer plays about love, loss and everything in between.

That’s where we saw So Little of You Left the first time, me and Luke and Jon all in a row, crying. It will be fantastic to see that again in relation to its sequels. Do you have a big dream and if so, has it changed since you were a child?

My ambition was to work with the actress Janet Henfrey. But I’ve done that now. So I’ll have to find another ambition.

We originally met because you were DJing at a student night when I was doorman and I spotted your Swing Out Sister. You ran a clubnight in Brighton – my favourite club of all time – called Eat Your Make-Up. Do you think you’ve been influenced by John Waters in any other ways?

Maybe in the sense of not being ashamed of bad taste. To refuse the idea of guilty pleasures and experience only pleasures.

Actually though, we met before that club night. Well, I noticed you across the room at the LGBT meeting during your fresher week. You were talking very deeply to someone about books and I just stood there drinking you in. Then a few weeks later I saw you on the bus into town talking about visiting graveyards for fun with some friends. But I don’t think you were aware of me on either occasion.

You were going to DJ at a wedding recently. What did you play for their first dance? What would you have as your first dance, do you think?

At the wedding the first dance was “AMORE” by Louie Austin. …I think me having a first dance is a long way off.

Do you sing in the shower and if so, what? My current selections are Stop and You Will Become Aware by Helen Shapiro, and River by Joni Mitchell – but it turns out I don’t know anyone else who sings in the shower, round the house, walking down the street as I do.

I don’t sing in the shower, but I do sometimes sing on the toilet. Usually Unchained Melody for some reason.

Since this garden disobeys the usual rules governing reality, if you could invite anybody living or dead or unreal to join us, who would it be...?

Karen Dalton – THE voice.

Ah, perfect for this gorgeous 'high autumn'. Look at all those windfalls from the garden next door. Can you make jam?

No. I buy mine from Melrose and Morgan.

Oh. It would strike me as very ‘you’ to turn these fallen things into sweetness. Or maybe that’s just because we share a love for Jeanette Winterson and, she’s always exhorting her readers to do homely things. Why does she mean so much to you?

She writes short books (tick) which can be very beautiful (tick) and she makes me laugh (tick).

What are you reading at the moment, today I mean?

I am reading - and really enjoying - Better than Language, a gorgeous anthology of new poets, curated by the brilliant Chris Goode for Ganzfeld Press. I'd totally recommend that everybody go to the Ganzfeld website now and treat themselves to a copy.

You’ve been a tremendous influence on my reading life. Do you think a particular book has ever changed your life?

Maybe Derek Jarman’s At Your Own Risk when I was a teenager.

Do you have a particular place or position you like to read books in?

Lying down.

Do you enjoy book shopping and general browsing of old things? Where do you do it?

I love it in theory but actually most of my book buying disgracefully happens online. I just don't know where the good bookshops are... I'd love to be told.

What’s the first book after childhood that you really, really loved?

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café or Oranges are not the only fruit.

When you read, what voice do you hear? Or do you see pictures? Or is it all happening to you?

It's like watching a film, quite detached I'm afraid. Poetry, on the other hand...

So it sometimes seems all I read is kids’ books and ghost stories. What can you recommend that is neither of these?

How about Juan Goytisolo's The Virtues of the Solitary Bird? Or Muriel Spark's gorgeous and subtly radical A Far Cry From Kensington.

In the old crumbly red brick wall of this garden is a wooden door painted green. It opens onto anywhere in all the world that you could wish. Where would you like to go?

Venice.

Perfect. And when we get back, where can we see the Adrienne Rich evening?

Ovalhouse Theatre, 28th November:

http://www.ovalhouse.com/whatson/detail/something-to-hold-onto-celebrating-adrienne-rich

The gnarled, sweet strangeness of a folk tale

2011-11-18T12:12:00.002Z

What questions have you asked a writer you like at a reading or a signing? I always plan to make the most of the opportunity and then words fail me. I’m wary of explanations, I suppose: I just want more stories. I don’t go often to readings or signings these days, but a couple of weeks ago I went to a workshop hosted by the Children’s Bookshow. The focus of the evening was Kevin Crossley-Holland, probably the most famous reteller (and reinvigorator) of folk tales for children in the UK today.

We were talking mainly about retelling these old stories, which entails rereading them of course. In preparation I had gone back to my big book of British Folk Tales by Crossley-Holland, purchased on a bright lunch hour in Hove’s George Street charity shops, and among the more straightforwardly unfamiliar stories there was a lovely, darkly fresh retelling of Beauty and the Beast. Called Black Dog, it’s quick as a skirmish. Crossley-Holland’s language is always tough and sharp as teeth, his prose clean and bare and unornate, his guide and grounding the Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic sagas. His retellings have the bold confidence of urgent necessity: we have to keep these alive and new.

As well as a couple of exercises and some slightly awkward discussion (I said something about his ‘making strange’ the idea of language and got a nonplussed look in response, which was slightly discouraging), there was an introduction from child literacy specialist Myra Barrs about the value of folktales to child literacy. I would love to have heard more from Barrs on this subject, if only because it rang a bell for me. You ask yourself sometimes why you are how you are, and I was exposed to a lot of folk and fairy tales as a boy and loved it all.

Barrs talked about the child’s natural affinity with the folktale – children loving to repeat and retell stories, and these stories needing to be retold, rewritten, renewed. And she talked about that early understanding a child can inherit from folktales, of narrative structure, of the ‘melody’ of story, of emotional expression. And, though she didn’t mention it, of manageable fear, I think, and contact with gnarled, sweet strangeness.

I was read fairy tales as a boy, in the disconcerting splodgy interpretations of Tony Ross and the somehow weirder, because more naturalistic, Ladybird illustrations: paintings which looked aged and sober as the portraits of Kings and Queens you’d see in museums and galleries. And then there were books of fairy tales published, bizarrely, by Sainsbury’s (a supermarket chain, for the benefit of Daniel and Phil), and in one of these I encountered the story of The King of the Cats, which is still my favourite folk tale of them all. It made the hair stand up on the back of my little neck, and there are no royal weddings or rich prodigal daughters to round things off.

Come to think of it, that reminds me of Mother Holley, my Mum’s favourite story as a girl – your typical ‘Oh, young girl,’ said the Apple Tree, ‘please shake down my apples, for my boughs are so heavy!’ story, but dominated by the dangerous figure of Mother Holley, who lives at the bottom of a well and makes it snow in our world when she shakes her duvet and the feathers fly.

At heart, inexplicable worlds.

I loved the stories of Anansi we heard at school, the man who is both troublemaker and hero, and also (inexplicably) a spider, like a sort of (hello blasphemy) arachnid Christ. I coveted the book of his stories so much I tried to buy them at the school Book Fair, but was informed that I didn’t have quite enough pence. I’ve now uncovered that exact edition in Roehampton’s School Experience Library, bringing an end to years of frustrated Googling.

And then there was Storyteller magazine, with the Ju-Ju Man, the Child of the Sun, the Creatures with Beautiful Eyes. Stories that went beyond the ghost story in describing a world where good or bad things happen for no especial reason – an order existing beyond the superficial ones we know. And maybe I was learning from these the beats of story, the music of story, a love of language, not too much emphasis on the explainable. They might not explain anything at all, but they might explain me.

I took my book up to Kevin at the end, but I was too shy to have it signed or speak about it. I bought an edition of his story-poem The Sea Bell instead, and talked about my PhD in a way that didn’t explain it at all, and thanked him profusely. But I wonder now if any of those thanks meant anything in the end – because I didn’t manage or even attempt very well to explain all that I was thanking him for...

Here’s a bit of Paula Rego for you. Have a lovely weekend – I’m off to Brighton!

No such word as

2011-11-16T06:00:00.002Z

Praise be to friend, photographer, dancer and all-round seeker after beauty and truth, Stevie Taylor, reader and interviewee of Pile of Leaves, who sent in this finding for me and you to enjoy. Where that word comes from is open to the imagination...

Stevie says: "It was on the way up to Alexandra Palace where I spotted it, just on the pavement outside someone’s house, it was quite small and people passing by was a bit confused as to what I was taking a photo off as I had to crouch quite low to make it clear. But I thought it was pretty awesome."

Have you found something hiding in a pile of leaves? Do you have any photographic evidence? Don't be shy - send it along. I like how this picture of fallen leaves sits on top of Rosie's picture of fallen leaves. I suppose each leaf is a constellation of material anyway, so why shouldn't it be a little of web of other things, other leaves, smaller leaves, ad infinitum?

Yes, I know it's an odd thought but why shouldn't it be?

Roly poly, roly poly ... Studying Tarka the Otter and The Tale of Samuel Whiskers

2011-11-15T07:52:00.002Z

There is a question we ask sometimes when we come to certain books for children:

Why was I never read this as a child?

I had intended to read Tarka the Otter, one of last week’s texts, for about twenty years. Back in the day I had actually been to his setting of Exmoor, when Goodrich Primary School took part in a scheme (run by the author Michael Morpurgo) for town children to spend a week on a real farm. We learnt that vegetables don’t grow in supermarkets, that nature is beautiful, that rural life is tough when it’s cold and you don’t want to get up in the dark to shovel runny shit into a wheelbarrow, and that being away from your parents is heavy but bearable. It was one of the best experiences of my life, and I’ve never forgotten being told that a man called Henry Williamson wrote a novel about the animals living in this river, the one you’re crossing on stepping stones, the one your dormitory’s named after.

But I never wondered why they hadn’t read us any of it. (They read us The Hound of the Baskervilles instead, by pencil torch. God bless Miss Hunter and Mr Johnson.)

We had a week on anthropormorphic animals. We talked about Beatrix Potter first, about The Tale of Samuel Whiskers. I was read The Tale of Peter Rabbit enough times, lingering on that image of shame and despair in the garden, the mute little mouse and the weeping bunny. But this particular Tale, this little book of discalm, this Peter Straub for preschoolers, this Hideo Nakata with watercolours, never came my way. Or is it like David Lynch, what with the animals in waistcoats and flounces?

It’s a strange and frightening narrative, all the stranger for being so deliberate, so confidently composed. When Potter veers off into the world of nightmare from one sentence to the next ("I've lost my dear son Thomas; I'm afraid the rats have got him”) we know we are in the hands of a professional storyteller. When she slows the action, lingeringly, with short paragraphs and macabre discussion (about whether the strings binding a kitten will be digestible when it is made into a dumpling) we know we are into something. And we may resent her skill when she delivers us a line such as:

Tom Kitten bit and spat, and mewed and wriggled; and the rolling-pin went roly-poly, roly; roly, poly, roly. The rats each held an end.

Another one page paragraph, with an unequivocal black and white illustration. We cannot look away from that roly poly roly poly. What on earth is going on here? Is it a cautionary tale? Is it a satire on Victorian parenting (shut them up in the cupboard; send them up the chimney)? Just a fun scare with a Faginesque villain? What are we to take from the ending, with the little girl kittens nailing rat tails to the door – and little Tom traumatised?

I never have been a fan of animal stories. Paddington and Mortimer are probably the closest I get, normally. The Mouse and his Child – a bit closer. The Nine Lives of Captain McKenzie: an actual, non-magical cat, closest. I can’t stick the idea that animals might talk, possess language, and live as they do. Language seems too powerful to leave you trapped in a cycle of eating and hibernating. Animals of Farthing Wood, go home.

In our chilly seminar room, I was sweaty palmed waiting to make my confession; I’d had a bad time with Tarka. It had been like trying to read an actual otter. Writhing, nipping, squeaking in my hands.

This doesn’t happen often. The last time I had such trouble with a novel was The Melancholy of Resistance by Laszlo Kraszhnahorkai – a novel I wanted so much to like: a Czech existential fugue about a travelling circus with a stuffed whale in a caravan. Like Dr Lao but deep. I had my eye on a more recent Kraszhnahorkai novel as well, War & War, both of them looked tangled and tough, satisfying and strange, but I gave up on the Melancholy of Resistance, I almost think I was meant to – the sentences coiling endlessly on and on, with just a few commas sustaining the sense, and how is it that when we read something of this sort of anti-construction, or when I read it at least, we or I actually find ourselves or myself breathless as a diver, as though in common practice we mimed the dialogue, unconscious even of it ourselves, myself, yourself.

I had once made it through Repetition by Peter Handke. I did it mainly by drilling through the pages with my eyes, letting it go in like images. A bit like drinking a glass of water backwards but more likely to give you wind than take it away. Beckett, being choppier, more like poetry or, sometimes, woodworking instructions, doesn’t have the same weird effect. Iain Sinclair will chuck in some ghoulish image or reference to Bram Stoker or a little light misogyny to keep you going. All in all, I felt up to a novel published by Puffin Modern Classics with a pretty cover.

I had to admit to the class that I had had trouble. But to my great relief, I was not alone. It, or at least the experience of reading it, was universally – bar our lovely tutor – loathed.

Williamson’s animals do not have the easy power of language. His novel is intensely evocative, brutal, alive with mysticism and constant danger. Like the Melancholy of Resistance, it leaves you gasping. I was reading with a terrible headache, and began to worry that I was slipping into a fever. Like that time when I was thinking how amazing The Golem was and a day later was having full-on hallucinations (due to flu). Here I go, I thought. One book about spooky archaeology too many. I’m cracking up.

And off went Tarka, crunching a skull every other page, nipping out of the teeth of a hunting dog at the end of every chapter. A harsh read. As someone pointed out, this is the nature documentary before the nature documentary is possible. And really, it’s not a children’s novel. The pretty cover on the Puffin Modern Classic is a lie, the vague blurb on the back a glossier gloss than usual.

Sometimes we reread a favourite children’s book and ask, How did they get away with this. What was my Mum thinking? This is terrible, we say, or Thank goodness this bolt of terror slipped the bars of the playpen. I am who I am for this fright or this strangeness. And sometimes we ask Why was I never read this?, and we read the thing and we say Oh.

And the answer is frequently: Because they knew best.

Fill Your Heart … Could It Be Magic, by Paul Magrs

2011-11-12T12:21:00.006Z

It’s November here in South London, the leaves are thick on the ground but the festive season is still just at arm’s length. But in Phoenix Court in Newton Aycliffe, Christmas is over and we’re rocketing toward New Year’s, and there’s a party round Penny’s house, the council house turned commune by her, her English teacher and his ex-boyfriend, Andy, after her mother, Liz, disappeared with a bus driver at the end of Does It Show? Everyone’s coming – not the rough lads of the estate, of course, but all the neighbours, the mums and old ladies, the illustrated, bisexual Dad, Mark – and Penny and Andy are dressing up for the occasion. Andy watches Penny apply her make-up and says, ‘Do you know what you’re like?’

‘What am I like?’ she asks.

Andy doesn’t know – he’s pissed, it was just a thing to say.

And that night, everything happens. A dramatic return in the snow – a violent incident – an angry phone conversation – unexpected sex with the tattooed man, and a split condom.

This is a novel full of upheaval – for all its flashes of humour, it’s a less happy story than Does It Show, which was full of meetings, arrivals, and searches. There’s loneliness in Could it be Magic, physical pain and the pain of separation, frequent acts of vandalism and an atmosphere of threat. It’s brave of Magrs, who could have taken Tales of the City as a model and written a whole string of adventures for the same characters we loved the first time round. Instead we have new, quite different people in play: like the straight boy Craig, in love with Penny, harbouring an awful secret, and resenting his family’s troubles.

It would have been a different novel if Craig had been presented as the other or the enemy. He mirrors the destructive potential of his mother, his stepfather and their neighbours, and at first it seems he might keep Penny in the small town she longs to escape. But nobody is condemned in the world of this trilogy, no character is static, change and regeneration and escape are all possible. Craig narrates some of the novel, and wonderful things happen to him. At one vital point he is envious of Andy’s escape, his self-sufficiency, his unusual child.

Andy’s child is a more overtly fabulous manifestation than anything seen in Does It Show. A source of both love and trauma for Andy, an emblem of love and of another order, another way of seeing family, a mythic creature born on a club toilet floor. Could it be magic? It alarms people, this child of impulse and desire and fantasy; Andy fantasises about his Nanna’s disappointment in him, that he might be compromised instead of ‘making your own life up the way you want.’ Nanna Jean’s dream is a common one in the Phoenix Court trilogy – to follow your dream and go your own way. Does Andy’s child make that impossible, or does it help us disentangle some of the threads of that dream?

It would be interesting to see more in the life of this figure of surprise, this peculiarly untattooed but leopard-printed, this naturally exotic young man, and if there’s one thing I don’t like about the book, it’s that so much is wrapped up in less than ten pages, so much is left open. It wasn’t only the characters I wanted more from, but the ideas and stories and secrets still to come out. And after Does It Show, it was sad to have a whole book without Liz in it, even if she is central to a lot that goes on.

And she does have one of the most amazing scenes in the book – a scene in which Crossroads plays a quite surprising role. Crossroads, like Craig’s Marvel comics, being one of the grand mythologies by which we discover and measure ourselves, not leaving out the ridiculous denouements and camp twists: we ought to be aiming to discover those aspects of life just as much as the sadnesses and triumphs. 'What am I like?' Some of the transformations of this trilogy, cases of people making their own lives up the way they want, come from wonderful fortuitous meetings with people who are already fabulous beings. But in the absence of these encounters, stories stand in for them. In Liz’s case, in quite a surprising way, story turns out to be a sign of life.

I started this on my way home from Budapest, in a particularly orange airport next to a perspex case full of unpleasant looking pastries. Time's gone by but the icy-fresh energy of the novel is still crisp and sharp for me. That it’s taken me so long to write about it is a sign of the times. It also means, until next year, I might not be able to continue my quest to read all of Paul Magrs, or Angela Carter, which is a shame. My last couple of blog posts have both mentioned Paul as well, which is only right, seeing as he’s become a friend of mine in the last year, but we only met in the first place because of my great love for his work (this feels an important note, for the six or seven discerning people who regularly read Pile of Leaves). And discovering his first three novels has been a fab experience – I only wish it wasn’t the Phoenix Court trilogy, but a tetralogy, a pentalogy, an ennealogy (Enyaology?). But I think there's even more wonderful stuff to come.

There's Hockney's Two Boys Aged 23 or 24. Leopard spots!

Go purple!

2011-11-04T14:05:00.006Z

Well, here’s something. This is the beautiful and astounding cover to Wildthyme in Purple, the newest chronicle of the life of Iris Wildthyme from Obverse Books. Snow Books published the first novel about the trans-temporal adventuressthis year, but Obverse have already published three books of short stories, in which Iris pilots her rackety old bus to the edges of the galaxy and the dark depths of Darlington and all points in-between. This new collection differs from those, inasmuch as it includes a story by me!

You may have guessed, I’m rather excited about this.

I’ve been a fan of Iris’ for many years. I’ve submitted a few ideas for Obverse in the past – bringing a human search engine to the mountains of North Wales, sending a branch of Fitness First into a Hope Hodgson-style Otherworld, and having Iris become a nun in 11th Century Japan to disrupt an infernal tea ceremony – but not till I set Iris and her friend Panda on the heels of France’s most popular arch-criminal, Fantômas, did editor Stuart Douglas finally let me in. It’ll be published in the next couple of weeks, alongside stories with such gorgeously irresistible titles as ‘The Many Lives of Zorro’ and ‘The Devil Wears Panda’.

This is Iris in the land of pulp fiction, and it’s a rare character who can move from genre to genre and remain, essentially, herself, unchanged and undiminished: a bon viveur, bolshie and bohemian. She has an inherently subversive power whatever fictional world she turns up in, almost purely because she’s everything those worlds like to suppress into a supporting or ‘character’ role: the Northern old lady (‘The Northern Woman – she’s like the Galapagos turtle. She’s an entirely different species’, as Alan Bennett said). There’s an extra level of anarchy because, even as anti-hero, she doesn’t obey established form: she’s irresponsible, rude, frequently pissed. On occasion, it turns out she’s to blame for whatever trouble she and her pals are doing battle with – out of curiosity, absentmindedness or some terrible, secret and suppressed reason.

When she manifested herself in the world of Doctor Who, for instance, she caused all sorts of bother. ‘I’ve been in love with you for years, you stupid man!’ she told him, shortly before laying claim to all his favourite adventures. Despite originating outside that universe – in many a sense – her adventures share some of its existential whimsy. One highlight in her career – besides Enter Wildthyme, which reads like Jerry Cornelius spiked with camp magic realism – was Big Finish's audio play, Find and Replace. Here, a madcap return to the 1970s for Jon Pertwee’s companion, Jo Grant, effortlessly moves into a piercing, poignant story of past loves, regrets and happy memories.

Yes, Iris is always at her very best in the hands of her creator, Paul Magrs, but the wonder of her – again, that rarity – is her ability to glitter with the same disconcerting magic, even in the hands of others. Whether she manages a shimmer or two in my attempt remains to be seen – but she does throw a wineglass at Max Ernst on the page one.

A Shortlist; A Short Question: The Green Carnation Prize 2011

2011-11-02T21:06:00.004Z

It seems like just the other day that Paul Magrs was saying that there ought to be a book prize for LGBT writers and Simon Savidge made it happen. Like just yesterday that we had the fabulous Gay's the Word bookshop thronging with shortlisted authors and their fans, and then awarding the prize - via feverishly synchronised blogging - to Christopher Fowler's beautiful, funny, touching Paperboy.

And although there was more to read this year, and decisions were more difficult, and all sorts of unexpected stuff along the way, this year seems to have zipped by. And here we (me, Paul, Simon, Stella Duffy and Michelle Pauli) are with our six shortlisted titles for the Green Carnation Prize 2011.

That's The Strange Case of the Composer and his Judge by Patricia Duncker, The Proof of Love by Catherine Hall, Red Dust Road by Jackie Kay, Remembrance of Things I Forgot by Bob Smith, Ever Fallen in Love by Zoe Strachan and The Empty Family by Colm Toibin.

You'd be pushed to find six more different reads, and the voices are the kind that hook you right away - what's that? You incline your head, lean in close, what's that you were saying?

Something about sex and death, love and time travel, murder and regret and secrets buried for all kinds of reasons.

What will you try first?

Well, okay, here's another question. I'm hoping, along with the other judges, we'll be blogging a bit more here on the website: http://greencarnationprize.wordpress.com/ But what would you like to read about? If we can rustle up interviews with those shortlisted writers, what are the things you want to know? Is there anything about the GCP we ought to clarify? Or is there an aspect of queer lit we could talk about more? Please email me if need be - I want to be writing something worth reading!

(Oh and by the way - what a load of links! This has actually taken me since midday to prepare... But it was worth it. Click a couple and make me proud.)

The Staircase of Temptation

2011-11-01T09:47:00.004Z

I’m steadily building a staircase of temptation. It’s growing up from the floor within reaching distance from my side of the bed, like some strange garden flower growing in the November light, all the things I’d like to be reading and MUST NOT. Even with all this time, now I’m working only three days a week, now I have all these journeys by bus and by train, now that Jon is off to Scandinavia again on holiday. I read too slowly to fit everything in – and I have to prioritise. (Have you read something when you really shouldn’t have? Is it as bad a guilty feeling as I remember?)

Bizarrely, the books I have been reading – the novels at least, if not the criticism and theory – are comfort reading and light pleasures for other people, normal people, on the other side of the looking glass. I haven’t written about my 1900 – 1960 seminars since the first two weeks, but after that we had the witless, bloodless Story of Doctor Dolittle together with that annotated catalogue of nursery wallpaper, Winnie-the-Pooh; we had Biggles and Ballet Shoes (that’s two titles there, not some terrific story of shell-shocked war veteran rehabilitated by dance lessons and late-blooming same-sex romance); last week it was B.B.’s Brendon Chase and Jon’s favourite, Swallows and Amazons – boating and hiding and Titty (‘And this is a children’s book?’).

And they’ve let me sit in on a class for the Time & History in Children’s Literature course, so I finally read A Traveller in Time, which was slow and beautiful and extremely like Children of Green Knowe – and two haunting historical novels, Isaac Campion by Janni Howker, and A Parcel of Patterns by Jill Paton Walsh. I would have loved to have seen more of that class – there was an interesting thread developing about the historical novel as an archaeological act.

When we think of archaeology, we think of digging and excavation, but that’s like saying that cookery stops when we’ve washed our vegetables. Paton Walsh and Howker are writing about the extrapolation we do from memory, from sparklingly clear recollections of moments, as well as from artifacts – and how to tell a story from them which doesn’t tidy people up into it. Something which has people as the focus. Something in perspective. Difficult! And here’s another connection with Green Knowe I only spotted last week – Paton Walsh seems to have stayed at Lucy Boston’s house to write some of her novels in the 70s and 80s. I must investigate that.

These differing decades in children’s publishing are very telling. Some of the inter-war period I’m very fond of, but I really can’t wait for the 1950s, and it feels quite taunting to have 1960 as the event horizon. Peter Hunt, who seems to be a sort of all-round expert on pre-1980s stuff, talks about irony as children’s literatures’s great strength, and I think it’s true. We might say it was the voice of the child – not necessarily subversive, but very lightly mocking. Such a mass of fantasy is heaped against it – and a successful ironic tone is one of the greatest correctives to bombast and overwrought mysticism. It’s right there in 1901 with Five Children and It!

And that’s not really let me touch all the reading I have to do for my actual research. Charlie Butler’s Four British Fantasists, Jacqueline Rose’s sharp critique of Alan Garner, Peter Bramwell’s intriguing Pagan Themes in Children’s Literature (with special mention for Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood, which wins my heart), and a cavalcade of writers to explore in that magic-countryside genre: Penelope Farmer, Judy Allen, Ali Sparkes…

But when friends have given me some really ace reading matter, how frustrating not to leap straight into The Tiger in the Smoke, The Brides of Saturn, Travelling Magic, and The Book of Lost Things. And how strange to be in autumn – one of the gloomiest and rainiest in years, it seems, curiously illuminated (because of the late summer heat) by treefuls of crimson and saffron-coloured leaves – and not reading any Holmesian adventures, not to have read any ghost stories (besides the ones by Geoffrey Palmer, of all people), not to have read the Robin Jarvis I had planned for Halloween; how sad not to finish my Angela Carter-a-thon with Nights at the Circus and Wise Children, or find out what happens to poor old shipwrecked Dido Twite…

Imagine the willpower I exercise every visit to Roehampton’s University Library! Because when I think of the sort of academic I hope to be, I like to think that I am primarily a reader, greedy and enthusiastic, and interested in what compels us to love or remember a certain book, of completing a moment or seeking some mystery or making private investigations or deepening a friendship. Temptation waits, by the bedside table – but I live in hope. Things may be more peaceful next week, a bit calmer and easier to manage.

And beyond that, I’m thinking of Christmastime. I don’t care, I can’t help it, round where I work the lights and displays have been up and out since mid-October. I’m already building a little pile of reads for that week, for that time outside time…

(And I know this blogging thing has slowed down, but I hope you'll pop by now and then dance down my staircase of temptation with me in top hat and tails.)

Secret orders ... The Obstinate Ghost and other ghostly tales, by Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd

2011-10-31T10:07:00.003Z

Do you have to believe in ghosts to enjoy ghost stories?

After my Mum and Dad married, the first house they shared was in a road not far from Peckham high street. They could never quite get the back bedroom warm enough, and anyway they thought it was that bit too small for a family of three. After they moved, Dad’s cousin Paul said they’d done the right thing: ‘Definitely a presence in that back bedroom,’ he told them. ‘Couldn’t get to sleep the whole night.’

That’s the sort of story my Dad tells with a wary laugh – nothing too showy. A bump, a glimpse, a feeling, ‘a presence’. The wartime sing-song you could hear drifting up from the basement of the Kings-on-the-Rye. My Mum talks a lot less about that sort of thing – I think because she takes it that much more seriously. She wouldn’t dream of going, as he has in recent years, for a session with a spiritualist.

My sister and I grew up with supernatural forces as a matter of fact, though never a commonplace. Do I believe in ghosts? If you asked me in public, I’d definitely hesitate. And say No. But I’ve read enough ghost stories now to know the word itself is used as ambiguously as the fairy in fairy tales.

I do associate them, though, with an impulse toward irrationality. This weekend, in the kitchen of my boyfriend’s parents, we were leafing through their calendar (it was a personalised one with pictures of Jon’s niece and nephew). I suddenly found myself saying, ‘Don’t turn over the last two months, it’s bad luck.’ There was a rush of embarrassment – what if his Mum or Dad had heard?

Are the openly superstitious shunned in our society? Are there any of us left but me?

I’m certainly a little ashamed of my tendency. It suggests a disconnect between belief and pragmatism – like eating meat, when I know it was once gambolling in a field somewhere – which can lead only to hypocrisy and political apathy, or at best twitchiness. It is twitchiness, of a kind: Don’t open that here, don’t say that now, let just one person make the tea. But though they are by nature defensive actions, and possibly against the sort of thing that defines ghost stories and might be out on the town of a Halloween night, they’re not, I think, entirely fearful.

They actually have a yearning quality, a nostalgia, a sort of affirmative quality: a quality of belief, I suppose. I remember a review by Hilary Mantel of a book about secret societies, saying the thing that appeals to us about secret societies isn’t that they’re secret but that they’re societies – they’re organised. Anyone who’s tried organising a meeting of any committee with all members present, all agenda items covered and all catering sufficiently delivered will recognise this dream. This dream of order – or orders; orders and levels of power and knowledge and reality.

If you read a certain quantity of ghost stories, you will find new things to look out for. You will be impressed by new ways of being scary or poignant or eerie or strange: there’s something inherently surreal about a good ghost story (even at its most simplistic – a head tucked underneath an arm) which might excite and disturb us on one level. But initially at least, the pleasure of a ghost story is to be persuaded through some means or other that what we are reading is a true account, a reliable guide to a breach of that secret world order.

Apart from the odd thing – A Christmas Carol and something by Dylan Thomas – my Dad never read me any ghost stories as a boy. I uncovered them in libraries and charity shops while on holiday, and devoured them ardently. The Obstinate Ghost is one of those: these last few years I’ve grown curious about it – you wonder, don’t you, what went into your head when your guard was down – but until the other week, when I found it in our University library (!), I couldn’t remember the exact title.

I had thought it might be Susan Dickinson’s The Unquiet Ghost: I’ve read several spooky anthologies for children this year. As in most of them The Obstinate Ghost has no unhappy endings (for the undeserving) and plenty of benevolent spirits with ominous warnings. There’s one ghoulish number about the man who tries witchcraft in destroying his daughter’s sweetheart, makes a mistake (aha) and is haunted to death by her spirit.

Aside from that there’s little genuine terror, but the voice of them is chatty, flecked liberally with detail (‘I tried to quell my uneasiness by humming Men of Harlech…’). Interestingly, the more thrilling variety have obvious roots in folk tales or local myth. I wonder if the vogue for these anthologies in the sixties (this one’s 1968) was partly from worrying after the war that these stories weren’t passed on any more, that they were gathering dust in the academic library. And I wonder if my taste for them came out of an inclination toward my parents viewpoint – that early impulse to try and get at the truth. The stories that feel most true are the most disconcerting, the least fantastical. A chilly back bedroom. What does that mean?

A few years ago I submitted a couple of stories to a book of scary tales for young readers – to be used in EFL, I think – and I got all excited about revisiting this early passion for the uncanny, and for continuing that strange tradition. They didn’t want my stories, but seeing as it’s Halloween I thought I would upload one of them here. Enjoy, and best wishes for a restless night...

Is this Desire? ... The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, by Angela Carter

2011-10-15T00:47:00.003+01:00

‘Autobiographically, what happened next, when I realised that there was no limitation what one could in fiction, was … I stopped being able to make a living.’ And here we are, in the wilder thickets of Angela Carter, where the trees surrounding us are suddenly higher, more copious, wreathed in exotic blooms and filled with brightly coloured, disconcertingly alien-looking beasties. This novel – her longest, I’m sure – is wonderfully excessive. Compared with its immediate predecessor, Love, you feel some restraint has been broken: ideas and images teem in every time. It makes even the post-apocalyptic lushness of Heroes and Villains look a little paler. The air here is hot and steamy and spiced with strange scents, and it vibrates with life – though the trick to it all may be that it retains a certain coolness of tone.

I remember The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman being on my Mum’s bookshelf – maybe the first of Carter’s novels I was conscious of. Back when the Campbells bought their first PC in the dim and distant past, the only place it and its users could be accommodated was Mum’s room, her ‘study’; it was wedged in with teaching materials to one side and Mum’s accumulated books on the other, and sometimes when I was waiting for something to download or upload or load or just for the ever-hesitant machine to decide whether or not it was going to crash, I would reach out and have a browse of some interesting title.

I think Doctor Hoffman must particularly have stared at me, though, I remember its King Penguin cover so vividly: Rene Magritte and Georgia O’Keefe united with, perhaps, Roald Dahl for the very first time, in this strangest of fruits.

Covers are interesting. Ideally, that is. The King Penguin Carter’s emphasised her eroticism, Virago (once upon a time) her powers of deconstruction. Nowadays we have faux-naive illustrations (not faux- enough in my book), the more effective silhouettes and most successfully, the Penguin Modern Classics with their aggressively gaudy photographs. Ali Smith contributes a brilliant introduction to my edition of Doctor Hoffman, but all these images are interesting little efforts at interpretation (of wonderfully imagistic texts). My cover was by Zandra Rhodes, and I think it’s a bit patronising really: lipstick dicks, pouty arabesques and – well, at a stretch they could be glasshouses, which is nice, but I think they’re just mirrors. Much more geometric than the other covers for Penguin. But what I loved about my edition is that the inside covers are a fabulously unreal shade of hot pink.

It hovered like a border of Mae West lipstick, a fuschia CSO aura. And Doctor Hoffman is not a difficult read, but it can be demanding – it does offer you some grand themes and big ideas – and even if you read it only for the galloping, surrealistic plot alone, you don’t get much time for a breather. It’s an immersive experience, and I was curiously glad of that energising bar of colour. Our hero (or somebody’s hero) Desiderio, on his picaresque journey from culture to culture, goes into fine detail of history, place and sign. Oddly, it’s one of the things which stops this feeling a stylish but empty work, that reassurance of reference to real worlds, other worlds, that power to convince. But that power like all powers is a little suspect, and the stare of the pink was a reminder that each of these passages, of story and exquisitely detailed costume, is just another layer in the wash of colour. Just bent light, illusion.

Through the work of Doctor Hoffman, there’s no longer any such thing as illusion in the world. People can’t even safely kid themselves about the reality of their own desires, and the strongest desire – which might simply be for change – is suddenly enough to make a cathedral burst into flame. Governments resist Hoffman’s machines, appealing to reason, then to logic and the logic of language and the language of images. But the Doctor has a higher ambition – to liberate us from time and space. Into what, we might assume, is is a world of living myth – living writing – living hell…

Which is – the world of flamboyant sexual deviance? The world of a truly liberated woman? The bohemian 1960s, perhaps. But Hoffman’s new world depends on the power of self-conscious erotic power, all mirrors and cages and captive lovers, edging their way to the brink of temporal apocalypse! I can’t help think self-consciousness is a bit of a theme of Carter’s, especially recalling The Magic Toyshop, its mirrors and such: feel the uncanny frisson and do it anyway. Or perhaps it’s part of that shrugging off of Victorian mores: be self-conscious if you must, but find something good in it – be aware of your role, your potential. Just a step from ‘see your life as a story and you can change the story.’ Here self-conscious sexual pleasure contains the power to rock the world off its axis.

Why exactly does it fail? Because it is brought down by someone morally repulsed by it? Because it becomes what it seeks to overturn? Or because it has nothing to do with love? Hard to love self-consciously, and love is key to the novel, to Hoffman’s plan, to his daughter’s power, his enemy’s motivation. Love is key to our distrust of the narrator too – because he talks a lot about his passion for Albertina, writes so beautifully and convincingly, carries it as the banner over him, but when it comes to it he’s stifling a yawn during her speeches. His whole narrative is dedicated to her memory – and her death was his responsibility. The more he knows about her, the more this dissonance becomes clear, but evidently not to Desiderio.

And that line of interrogation grows stronger when we think of Love, so lately written, the novel I called restrained, and its lovers’ madnesses, power games, games of possession and destruction. Maybe self deception is the real danger, the corroding force affecting the hero, the villain, the woman they love, and their world(s). At one point in the novel, a distinction is made between desire and will – want, need, wish, love, fancy. Dr Hoffman is a novel of big ideas, and seems by turns cool and ecstatic, but taking this (when I re-read it) as an directive – Don’t kid yourself – I think it might feel suddenly human and, for all its romantic poetry, spiritedly warning.

An Eileen Agar sculpture to illustrate this - but it took ages to find the right thing. This was a piece from the 30s but looks punky to me!

A Pile of Puffins: Satchkin Patchkin, by Helen Morgan

2011-10-10T21:52:00.004+01:00

You might be able to tell, just from a look at this cover, that this is another Rescue Puffin from the basement of the Notting Hill Book & Comic Exchange. Like A Rag, A Bone and A Hank of Hair, it has that whacking great felt tip ‘X’ on the front. Poor Satchkin Patchkin, and poor Helen Morgan, crossed out like this. It’s almost like they’ve been marked up for somebody from the council to come round and pop it in a binbag, isn’t it? When actually, they’re marked out for me…

Yes, I couldn’t resist that peculiar name, whispering out at me from the serried (and sullied) ranks of disregarded, underestimated names and titles under electric light. Satchkin Patchkin, come and lift the latch-kin. I couldn’t help but be curious. I also have a soft spot for Young Puffin’s. It always feels like time for hot milk and wheaty biscuits when I see the cover of a Young Puffin. God, does that make me sound a bit peculiar? But there are all sorts of things to go to books for, aren’t there? I certainly didn’t read The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman for succour. I’m a huge fan of WG Sebald.

But this was an extremely pleasant bedtime read.

It’s literally lulling; Morgan fills her little book with half-rhymes and repetitions. Read Aloud, says the colourful flash on the front cover (I believe that’s what they’re called) and you’re so tempted to. It’s hypnotic – a few lines in, and you’d believe you’d been read this ten times over as a child. It’s like an Oliver Postgate series that never was. Perfect to close your eyes to.

I was intrigued by the subject matter too, because it’s yet more earth magic for kids. Satchkin Patchkin is ‘a little green magic man’ and he lives, ‘like a leaf, in an apple tree.’ The apple tree stands at the bottom of an overgrown, brambly garden in the countryside – you’re tempted, aren’t you? – of that nice little old lady, always having trouble with her landlord: ‘a lean man, a mean man, a man without a smile.’ And bit by bit Satchkin Patchkin patches up her life, helps her hens lay so she can make and sell her little cakes and so on.

Hobgoblins are a genre of their own in kids’ books, both nice and nasty. William Mayne writes (at least) one of each – one in Earthfasts, which could give you quite a turn, and years later, the adventures of Hob, a little man who lives inside the clock and comes out after dark to deal with household beasties and talk about himself in the third person. We can talk about Mayne till the tabloid journalists come home, but I had those Hob picture books read to me as a kid and can’t banish the strange state of mind they still conjure. I love the idea of household spirits, in or out of tune with the mood of the household. Give them a bowl of milk (it’s said) and you’ll be okay, though.

Then there was a book I haven’t read, Lob, just a few years ago, though he seems more a garden spirit than one of the household. These seem to be related to the Piper in the Willows and those ‘visionary children’ novels – in Earthfasts, explicitly – but they don’t need the child characters to be aware of them, and there aren’t any in Morgan’s stories anyway. They’re part of children’s literature’s debt to folklore and oral culture, perhaps.

I did enjoy turning in with one of these once a night. It helped that they had Shirley Hughes’ gorgeous illustrations all over and through it. Again, there’s something irresistible and comforting about Hughes’, whiskery, smudgey and yet always exact pictures.

And if you vaguely recognise the name Helen Morgan, it might be because she wrote two other Young Puffin books of short stories, about Mary Kate. I did read and one of these when I was the right age for them, if not quite living in the right age for them – even if they were reprinted in the 1980s like Satchkin – but then again, I don’t think I had any problem as a child with the idea of stories happening in and coming from another time. I suppose these stories all feel part of the black and white world of Watch with Mother, which Mum and Dad used to talk about all the time...

‘Are you sitting comfortably?’

Might I have a bit of earth? Studying The Wind in the Willows, and The Secret Garden...

2011-10-09T20:16:00.005+01:00

Well, maybe it was emotion that made my voice go funny in my PhD meeting, because it happened again in my second MA seminar. Anyone know any good relaxation techniques, koans, breathing exercises? I remember in the first year of my MA getting so worked up it felt I was about to have a heart attack. It’s easier in these classes, where I’m not in knots working out what Derrida would say (or defer saying). More excitement than anxiousness.

Or maybe it’s not that much easier – I certainly didn’t feel normal, quite, when I was gabbling on about the texts of our second week, The Secret Garden and The Wind in the Willows: I felt faintly hysterical. I even said what I really didn’t mean to say, had told myself I must not say, about how filthy everyone's names are in The Secret Garden (which is not really true). I ran on into tangents and at one point, couldn’t even pronounce ‘children’s literature.’

I will have to calm down and talk slower, I think, because much as names are important in the Hodgson Burnett (and everywhere really – except, maybe, The Wind in the Willows) that’s not the sort of criticism I go in for, and it did distract from a nice argument I’d been setting up, about how unresolved the ending is, almost cliffhangerish really, because if you’re tracing the unhappiness of the novel back to one crisis, it’s the loss of Mr Craven’s wife, not only to her family but to her household, and the subsequently abandoned ‘queer house’ of hundreds of neglected rooms, and the typically feminine place – the garden – invaded by men.

With names like Weatherstaff.

It’s a messed up house, abandoned, gone fairytale. And in the end – well, I’m deliberately not spoiling the novel. If you haven’t read it, start today. It’s marvellous.

I wish someone had told me, in similarly strong terms, about The Wind in the Willows. I read The Secret Garden as a kid, in this BBC tie-in edition. I’ve never re-read it and I was prepared for disappointment, but it draws you in with the same pitch-perfect drama and narrative rush – a narrative propulsion that Willows eschews, obeing episodic at best, and often a string of stories, like pockets in a cosy woollen cardy, rooms in a warren, bends in a river, crystalline memories.

If it has a narrative overall, it’s the departure of pompous old Toad on a ridiculous picaresque adventure, spent mainly in drag, and the occupation of his stately home by ‘desperate weasels’ from the Wild Wood. We talked about this as an allegory for Empire or class, and I didn’t really want to concentrate on that, though it’s obviously there. This is a fantasy of stasis, ending with restitution of non-progress rather than peace (as Peter Hunt puts it). But – but – the passages without Toad are so much more about the pleasures and uncanny thrills of the natural world, the awakening of consciousness and sensuous feeling in the sweet, ambiguous figure of Mole.

Yes, you can read him as an office drudge entering retirement, joining the worldly, slightly snobbish Water Rat. But then his actual experience of seasonality, of sociability, of the bleeding Romantic sublime with the Great God Pan – they don’t have much to do with the retired life, do they? And any straight allegorical reading is frustrated by actual human characters. There’s even a peculiar reference to a human town having predated the Wild Wood, suggesting to me a breath of science-fiction, of post-apocalyptic or post-rapture life on Earth.

I don’t know that Kenneth Grahame had that in mind and like I say, I’m not interested in trying to guess at these things – well, not in class, anyway.

That encounter with Pan is wonderfully troubling, though. It feels like a rich seam throughout children’s literature, these moments of mystic vision – which children particularly have, but why? Because they should? Because they can? Because it’s a good metaphor? Well, this is the next four years’ research I’m verging on now. If you have other good instances of this, I’ll have them please, but Dickon himself, tooting his pan pipes under the tree and chatting with robins, is interesting example (as my tutor said, why isn’t he at work…?) with a slightly suggestive name. And last week, the figure of Peter Pan – I mean, is he responsible for it all?

And will there be anything like it next Thursday, with Doctor Dolittle and Pooh Bear…?

You can fly! Studying Five Children and It, and Peter Pan...

2011-10-05T22:15:00.005+01:00

Here we go then. Today I had my first meeting with my lovely supervisors and talked through what to do in the first month of my MPhil (not a PhD yet, of course) in what they probably thought was a tone of high emotion but was mainly due to an incoming cold.

Though it was emotional, being right at the start of something, and oddly in the situation of saying yes to some ideas and later, perhaps, or maybe, no, to others. Each time I describe it to someone new my research interests have a different emphasis. It helps if they know what The Dark is Rising is…

For now my task is to read in the related areas I don’t want to repeat (the rural landscapes and pagan themes in kids’ books) and starting to build a canon. My canon! A picture of a genre! Suggestions welcome, desired, eventually begged. Rural locations, digging up the past, spooky stuff optional.

I’ve already today found one book and one series, from the sixties and the eighties respectively (of course – the eighties being the dawn of If Something’s Worth Doing It’s Worth Doing Over Three Trilogies) which fit and I hadn’t heard of. Ooh!

And meanwhile I’m auditing an MA course in kids’ books from 1900 to 1960. That’s my Thursday evenings – just at the cusp of the last light. It’s broadly if not strictly chronological, ending with Marianne Dreams, opening last week with Peter Pan and E Nesbit. Perhaps I should forewarn you all so you can read in parallel with me. When you hear the chime, turn the page…

So we started off in the first Golden Age – I wonder if even the name of that is drawn somehow from Kenneth Grahame’s book of that era (we’ll be chatting about his Wind in the Willows tomorrow). Supposedly the second Golden Age is the late sixties, and the third one is – well, I don’t know, probably books three to five of Harry Potter? With Skellig roped in. There have always been good kids books – these ‘Golden Ages’ are really just episodes in which the form was basked in the golden glow of media attention and publishers’ enthusiasm, surely?

Though maybe this does get stirred up during particular pile-ups of innovation and surprise.

Peter Pan, for example, was a smash, an immediate cult, and in a time of deep nostalgia and idealisation of the state (or we could say, the estate, the realm) of childhood, intensified retrospectively with the coming of the Great War. And it was a time of new readers – widening education, a boom in print. I read a great thing about the first E Nesbit novels which, I hadn’t realised, were first serialised in the Strand (just like Sherlock Holmes – and there’s a crossover novel I’d read).

It was a time of mags and penny dreadfuls, mass print culture, and the arbiters of taste had to act quickly and pen it off from the classy literary stuff – and in the process, this writer said, children’s literature was aligned early on with trash and pop culture and ‘uncanonised literature.’ I love that idea – and I love that it turned out this writer was Kim Reynolds: a big influence on my research, and she offered me a place at Newcastle Uni (and said she’d supervise me!) when I first applied a couple of years ago.

Edith Nesbit, that wonderful, slightly starchy socialist, stuck in a rubbish marriage, fancied by George Bernard Shaw, was prolific, presumably because of this ephemeral, serial, one chapter a month routine. Her biography describes her writing them all at the last minute, a fag in one hand, wet towels wrapped round her head, and coming into dinner asking everyone for ideas. And yes, this nervous energy, this twitchy fashion-keeping, is a recognisable energy signature in kids books to come.

And Five Children and It is right in with some recognisable tropes – stuff, even, of my research: children on holiday digging up, with their bare hands, an ancient magic. And though it’s quite primly moral, it’s also full of squabbles and surreal humour. It’s most obviously a ‘careful what you wish for’ story, but I think we would see it differently if the idiom ‘I wish…’ had become unfashionable: it’s a novel about sorting out that word, the desires from the hopes and the commands from the expressions of frustration (sometimes we say ‘I wish…’ and don’t mean it).

And it’s also about negotiating a space. The children don’t want to change their lives – they want to have fun and break the rules without getting in trouble, without quite doing wrong at all.

Peter Pan is wish fulfilment of a different variety – it doesn’t feel from the same time, oddly. It has that sense of code and conspiracy, we have the feeling of only getting every other reference, as if Barrie were trying to remind us of something we’ve put away. Pan’s agelessness, and the story’s many performances, have become one – any restaging now has an air of return, a melancholy, unsatisfied, Lost Boy air. It feels much older than Five Children and It because, perhaps, it happens each time in its own time.

I read the wrong thing last week – the play and not the novel, though they are so closely related I could natter on like an aficionado, no sweat. For years as a boy I went to sleep to a cassette of the BBC’s radio adaptation, and knew all about its preoccupation with death, its forlorn, wanting, ickily sentimental eroticism. I remember even adapting it for people at school to perform, which they never did, of course. I think it always makes me cry a bit, though I’m not sure what about.

This Thursday we’ll be talking about The Wind in the Willows and The Secret Garden, and next week – get started now – it’s Doctor Dolittle and Winnie the Pooh…

Oh! You Pretty Things ... Does It Show?, by Paul Magrs

2011-10-04T21:21:00.008+01:00

I’m way behind, as usual, with everything. Does It Show was one of the stack of books I took with me on holiday, and the first one I started on, mid-air. Sat in pavement cafes in Budapest, I was transported to the North-East, to the Phoenix Court council estate, the men, women and wonders who have grown up or come back there, forever in one another’s business, twitching their curtains, gossiping on the bus.

I’m reading all the novels I’ve missed by favourite writers of mine. I think I’ve always been aware that with Angela Carter, I’ve really been looking forward to Wise Children (recommended me by Natalie Dowey in the library in my last week at school) but I think I assumed, however much I liked Paul Magrs’ early books, reading them would just give me context for the other books of his that I love: Strange Boy, Exchange, The Blue Angel, 666 Charing Cross Road and so on.

What I’m saying is, I didn’t expect to discover a new favourite.

This is a novel I wish I had already read and re-read several times over. Magrs' bright, clear prose belies the density of ideas in it. It's full of characters, their lives and their stories (not the same thing at all), and it’s the fleet footwork of the author to make it feel a deceptively easy job, to draw the narrative threads between them and through them and often out from under them.

The impossible thing to do for any fictional character is imbue them with a sense of worldliness – that powerful, slightly hurt sense of knowledge of life. We all have it – even if we think we don’t know anything. It includes all our mistakes and hopes, all our strengths and vulnerabilities. Books are often called 'wise' if they feature strongly even one character who thinks they have it all sussed out (I don't mean a full-on Coelho here, but something in the line of Tove Jansson's The Summer Book) – but the really satisfying novels are the ones where you sense (even if you don’t see) this worldliness in most if not all the cast.

And this is a huge cast, but all of them offer advice and leap into things or keep their own counsel based on an overriding sense of themselves and the world. It’s funny and moving and endlessly intriguing all at once. How does he do that?

The stories of Phoenix Court can get marvellously unlikely, but the whole thing is spun so effortlessly out of witty, irresistible dialogue that we’re drawn helplessly under. And when I say spun, I’m thinking of spider webs, manufactured in a series of bold leaps out of misleadingly airy materials, but always in that reliable shape: precision engineering, forming that fractal in the air. That feels like the structure of the voices and people of Does It Show, almost hypnotically, with no-one particularly at the centre, no-one to whom all of this is happening. Nobody is left out of narrating the story – from the happiest and most free to the most depressed and trapped.

Perhaps we ought to empathise with the newcomer, Penny, who knows more people’s secrets than most. She’s drawn out by the magnetic push and pull of two of the most vital characters in the book – her Mam, Liz, all glamour and mystery and rude jokes, and her English teacher, Vince, both of them coming home to Newton Aycliffe, confident of the territory. But they’re both engaged in big romantic stories of their own, and Penny is maybe more in control, with a stranger power, than either of them. There is something idealist about the way these characters behave, the kooks, stepping out of the bounds of convention to get what they most desire. Making themselves vulnerable, being selfish, loving fearlessly.

It’s all very exciting.

It’s a funny book, but as in the wonderful chapter where the three Mums have their night out in Darlington and it’s Goth Night, nobody is the butt of the joke. It’s that anti-centrality (eww, what a word!): the ladies are wearing black anyway and determined to have a night out with some cocktails. And of course something significant and surprising happens under the disco lights. It’s a novel, in part, about surprises – about the wonderful secrets of your neighbours, teachers, friends and family. Secrets that wouldn’t just shock you, but transform you. These private selves, they’re disguised – or more accurately, costumed. Costume plays a large part in these lives, these performances, whether it’s tarty or animalist.

It’s not a novel about masks and unmasking: it’s more magical than that. And it’s a brilliantly queer novel, and in parts specifically a gay one: I don’t know that I’ve ever read such sexy, beautiful, resonant writing about sex between men. Goodness, that makes it sound almost worthy: it’s not, it’s wonderfully alive, touching, exciting.

I was sad for it to finish, and so pleased to remember that it has a sequel. I had it with me, but there were other good things to read before then…

Another bit of Hockney up the top there. Don't worry, the naked men are coming back. There's a perfect pair ready for Could It Be Magic...

Green Carnation Longlist is OUT!

2011-09-29T09:29:00.006+01:00

So here are a few of the books I’ve been reading and not blogging about – in my capacity as judge for the second year of the Green Carnation Prize. I was so pleased and surprised to be asked back after the inaugural year – the remit was widened from gay male writers to LGBT writers of any gender, and the fab novelist Stella Duffy and one of my favourite writers from the Guardian’s book pages, Michelle Pauli, were joining the judges roster (is roster the right word? I need a PA). I still feel like I’m the bloke on the Clapham bendy-bus, and I hope that brings a nice element to the proceedings, and I feel very lucky to have read some truly brilliant books.

Why not have a look through our longlist, announced yesterday, and see what I mean? Have you read any of them? Which do you fancy winning the prize?

I tell you, it’s all go!

By Nightfall – Michael Cunningham (Fourth Estate)
The Strange Case of the Composer and his Judge – Patricia Duncker (Bloomsbury)
The Proof of Love – Catherine Hall (Portobello)
Red Dust Road – Jackie Kay (Picador)
The Retribution – Val McDermid (Little Brown)
Purge – Sofi Oksanen (Atlantic Books)
There But for The… - Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton)
Remembrance of Things I Forgot – Bob Smith (Terrace Books)
Ever Fallen in Love – Zoe Strachan (Sandstone Press)
The Empty Family – Colm Toibin (Penguin Books)
Role Models – John Waters (Beautiful Books)
Before I Go To Sleep – S.J Watson (Doubleday)
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? – Jeanette Winterson (Jonathan Cape)

Tons more info about the prize and the books and the judges on our blog here: http://greencarnationprize.wordpress.com

New leaves

2011-09-26T08:00:00.000+01:00

There’s a very short thing by Wendy Cope called An Unusual Cat Poem. It goes:

My cat is dead
But I have decided not to make a big tragedy out of it.

To be frank, though I find this amusing, I cannot sympathise with it too much – goodness but I’ll miss Oscar when he goes – but I am going to apply the detached spirit of this ode to my holiday in Budapest.

It’s over. Back to England. Hello rain. Hello Back to School feeling. Hello responsibilities and stuff. Goodbye centuries-old Turkish Baths and getting out of bed at half ten every day.

It was very nice, though – and more pertinently to the blog, I read some lovely stuff, though didn’t quite get through more than half the books I took away with me. These books filled my satchel and also took up some room in our suitcase. Jon was slightly smug with his new Kindle, though he was quite happy to lug his Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close around with him, which, if you’ve read it, you’ll know would not translate too brilliantly to a scrolling monochrome Kindle screen anyway.

Not that I’m a complete Luddite about e-readers and the like – it will be lovely for publishing to slip the noose of Mass Markets, through the loops of the Net Book Agreement, won’t it? – but one of the many marvellous things about fiction in a physical book is the way that it can’t help but echo and correspond to non-fiction in a physical book: a manual, a textbook, a cookbook, a pamphlet, a magazine. We don’t have to get in a different mindset – we can easily allow ourselves to be fooled.

Well, I wasn’t going to chunter on about e-Books. I read books by Paul Magrs, Angela Carter, and Ali Smith, all linked in interesting ways, as well as The Sea Egg by Lucy M Boston which isn’t but felt like a summer holiday read, and some extremely good scary stories by Joan Aiken.

So yes, Back to School it is, in two ways of course. Back to timetabling the new term at one University, and back studying, for the first time in a while, at another. I’ll be interested to see how A Pile of Leaves goes as we tackle this interesting seachange. You will all be kind, won’t you, as I stress out and go quiet and then talk too loud and so on? I’m hoping to keep blogging about the experience.

Doing my Masters a few years ago was a bit lonely – I was rather in awe of my incredibly clever classmates, and found it hard to talk to them about feeling overwhelmed in my first year. I remember an especially trying time with Jacques Derrida. The summer between those two years, I went into a slightly alarmed frenzy of reading, and began to make discoveries, names and ideas and possibilities that seemed to finally connect, and then I was talking to friends about these ideas, in that weird café under the library with the giant mildewy windows, talking to Michael about Mary Norton, and him forcing me to say what I really thought about Theodor Adorno.

We won’t be starting with Adorno this time, or Derrida – this Thursday’s seminar is about Peter Pan and Wendy, and Five Children and It. Yes, we're setting our controls for the past of children's literature! Hopefully we can work some Foucault in too, though. (Suggestions welcome.)

This nice picture, which I’ll make my new profile picture if I can work out how, was taken by Jon on our last night in Budapest. The restaurant was projecting this beautiful, mulchy scene on the wall of a nearby building. There’ll be a new picture for my background too – but I’ll talk about that and who took it later this week.

A Pile of Puffins: Ghosts at Large, by Susan Price

2011-09-22T09:00:00.002+01:00

Another day, another book of ghost stories. Another ghostly anthology edited by someone called Susan. What is it about the name Susan? Add in Susan Hill, currently the Queen of the Nice Literary Ghost Novella, and we have a Susanly trinity. Susan Cooper might be in on the act as well. I get quite strong images of writers from their names, which is unfortunate for them but good fun for me, and Susan Price certainly sounds the smartest of the lot, very natty. I suppose it’s because of prim Eglantine Price in Bedknobs and Broomsticks – lending a hand with the church flowers by day, probing deeper into the hermetic arts by night.

Well, Ghosts at Large is really quite a different collection to Susan Dickinson’s Ghostly Encounters, being a collection of folk tales retold by Price. That quite monstrously creased but still delicious cover is the illustration to a Russian story about a soldier who spends the night in a house built over a ‘hell crack’, and when the various beasties and bugaboos come crawling out for their zombie jamboree, he tricks them all – and does a bargain with Lucifer that leads to a quite unusual relationship to Death… In some ways, it fits my silly mental image of Price, to have her writing something more scholarly, something of her own and at the same time a reviving of an older body of work that really has no author particularly.

And it may be simply that I was reading it in bed while Jon was away, and the autumn weather begun in earnest, whistling and creaking and tapping at the window – but Ghosts at Large gave me some quite strong dreams. I woke up in a cold sweat and had to calm myself down before I could sleep again.

I haven’t read folktales for a while, but I went through a phase of reading nothing but at one time, and a good retelling is pretty much the most nourishing bit of reading you could hope for. Rich with peaty, oaky, riverish smells, the smells of people and food and weather, and alive with the rhythms of language and with real, unnerving imagery. I’m still finding myself going over the story of how the moon was made by four witches, and when they died they had it buried with them, and then the underworld was lit permanently with its strange light, and the dead danced and caroused all day and all night, till people digging graves could see the light glowing up from under the earth, and St Peter thought Lucifer was declaring war on heaven.

I mean, you can’t fault that, can you? Any way you slice it.

This was a spooky kids book / Rescue Puffin combo, found on the remainders trolley at Dulwich Library. Not sure why that trolley is always so full these days… Wolf Hall on it the other day. What does posterity mean with that turn-over? I felt very pleased to give this a home though. It’s covered in biro but I love how beaten up it was – I have the sense that it was passed from hand to hand, or at least carried about a lot by the rather, slightly fearless, slightly terrified child.

Still in Budapest (fingers crossed). Another Cabbage blog. Wishing you all well!

The Probability Pad, by TA Waters

2011-09-20T12:00:00.000+01:00

I found this in Camilla’s in Eastbourne last year, sifting through the towers of sf, horror and fantasy stacked against the wall at the top of the stairs, while the parrot chirped in the living room. I think it marked a bit of a change in me as a bookbuyer. I saw the spine, the quite fab cover, read the back cover blurb and thought, ‘Hmm, this must be awful. Because it’s so bizarre that I’m sure SOMEONE would have told me about it if it was good.’ And I put it back. And then I took it down again.

I read the first couple of pages and realised it was actually making me laugh, and riffing off sci-fi ideas in a way that felt quite aware of the genre – or at least, as aware as I was. I suppose I found it was on my wavelength and vice versa. It had me at ‘Time Bubble bath’, to be honest. And I thought, What if it’s not great – but it is something that only I will like...? Well, it’s worth a try – and better than it languishing another year or more at the top of the stairs.

I’ve become increasingly less impulsive over the years, I think. I find myself looking out for particular writers, titles, genres. I really find that browsing new books, which I used to love doing, is more difficult these days – bookcovers looking more and more alike, and the backstage politics of bookshop positioning (this one on the table, this one facing out, this one on the bottom shelf in a drift of dust wedged up against the anthologies), all in all, hard to lose yourself in. I take less chances. I took a chance on this.

And what a good read it was! A playful irony you don’t associate with potheads, a nice zippy story about a bunch of blobby aliens, mysterious doubles and an unexplained manifestation of Winnie the Pooh on the streets of Greenwich Village. You really have a sense that the author knows his part of town, joking about the horrible cafes and everybody’s general sense of dislocation from reality.

As far as I can tell, it’s Waters' only novel – the third in a trilogy, about a trio, which each book written by one of the three. I found myself curious about him – that whole wonderfully idealist generation and the dreams they dreamed is one that I have real affection for, mainly because of beautiful old Richard Brautigan (particularly the memoir about him by his daughter, You Can’t Catch Death). This is like a happier Richard Brautigan, in New York, with aliens (and, for one wonderfully weird chapter, Count Dracula).

Not having any more TA Waters to read made me think of other US authors of this time I ought to go after – like Tom Wolfe, perhaps, or Tom Robbins. He’s one of those writers I’ve had recommended to me and never got my act together and pursued...

(This, by the way, is a Cabbage blog - written last week. I'm in Budapest!)

A Pile of Leaves-On-Sea

2011-09-15T13:10:00.009+01:00

People turn philosophical in bookshops. In Camilla’s in Eastbourne I heard a lot of lovely conversations. One man said:

‘My Dad always told me – they’re all mad. All of them. The only sane ones are you and me, son. And to be honest, sometimes I even worry about you...’

They would certainly worry about me, kids books under my arm, wending my way to what feels like the end of the line, humming You Got What It Takes by the Lana Sisters (sample lyric: You don’t live in a beautiful place / And nature didn’t give you such a good-looking face / But baby, you got what it takes). Off we go along the coast, past Cooden’s Beach and Norman’s Bay (which has a short platform, so watch out), through Bexhill-On-Sea with the fabulous De la Warr and St Leonards-On-Sea with the splendidly named Warriors’ Square. Reading ghost stories. Listening to a mix-CD made by a friend.

We’re materialising in Hastings – gravity normal, atmosphere normal, slight smell of rain and vinegar...

I realised this visit that I’ve always seen Hastings when I’ve read about Whitby – Jarvis, Stoker, Magrs, Swindells. The rainlashed seaside down (there’s a beautiful photo of a massive white wave hovering over the town in 1903 or somesuch date). The clincher is a ruin overlooking the town, only in this case it’s a Castle, not an Abbey. This photo shows something of the convergence of styles that makes the town what it is...

When I was a kid I always thought going into this street was like walking into the hallway of a house. That was before all the nice little cafes and things opened along here. It was Old Town Amusements and nothing more in my day. I had a little wander after this, with some scampi.

Did you know that the word rummage comes from the days of seafaring? I can’t remember where I read it – something to do with rooms below decks. There’s a wonderful website for this shop – yes, it feels wrong, but it tell you more and gives a glimpse at all the peculiar curios that throng this small shop, which is apparently the oldest house in Hastings. For the time being I remain content with accumulating only books, but I’m sure there are strange old unwanted things in here that know, one day, I am coming for them – they’re peering out of their coffeepots at me as I pass the dusty windows. They’re staring at me as I eat my scampi, their painted eyeballs mournfully accusing.

My Hastings daytrips are now fabulously entwined with the adventures of the Doctor and Mrs Wibbsey, his rather severe house-keeper, as performed (on audio) by the legendary Tom Baker, and written by the acclaimed Paul Magrs. This antiques shop window, with its creepy dolls, old books and stuffed animals (not visible here) was like a concept album cover a la Sergeant Pepper. The Doctor Who annual is even of the right vintage! And there was a Dolls House Specialist opposite.

Camp Nightmare and Ballroom Dancing with Victor Silvester, says it all...

Boulevard Books was closed for the second year running. This time, eccentrically enough, the owner was eating dinner with his family on the shopfloor, just inside the window, surrounded by his wares. I suppose if you’ve got it, flaunt it. On the other hand, this bookshop – one of those where you have to watch your step and keep your eyes peeled – yielded a copy of The Particoloured Unicorn, which I’ve been looking out for for ages, along with a book of ghost stories including one by Christine Brooke-Rose (who was I discussing her with the other day?) and something for Jon’s birthday...

Time was running out – I was due at my Mum’s and had forgotten just how far away Hastings is from East Dulwich. I bid a sad farewell to Hastings Pier which has, like me, gone a lot further South than is good for you, and looks a fright. I hope plans to restore it are successful. But it ought to be livelier than Eastbourne and have a ghost train.

On the long journey home I listened to the first of this year’s adventures for Mrs Wibbsey. You might think something couldn’t possibly live up to the name, Tsar Wars, even if it was set in the far future, and transplanted the story of Nicholas and Alexandra to a world of androids and robots and sinister intelligences waiting in the wings (or, more specifically, the wormholes). But it’s just a sign of the story’s atmosphere, both outrageous and playful, and this story was the most wonderful fun. I particularly enjoyed Tom Baker’s amazing portrayal of the Rapsutin-esque Father Gregory, squaring up to the quite un-Rasputin-esque, wide-eyed Doctor. As Gregory, you can almost see him steepling his fingers, with their twisted, dirty fingernails. How wonderful that things such as these are in the world...!

I hope there’ll be more for next autumn. But then, who knows what the future holds?

Day out: Eastbourne

2011-09-12T21:21:00.016+01:00

Here I am on the train from East Croydon to Eastbourne, wonky face, 50s hair, black coffee and paperback (the psychedelic sci-fi I referenced last week: ZZAP!), off on my annual autumn jaunt last Saturday. In 2009, when Jon needed me out from under his feet, I took a train to the South Coast for a rummage in a Hastings secondhand bookshop I had dreamed about, stopping off in Bexhill-On-Sea for a Joseph Beuys exhibition. On the way there, I read Sarah Waters’ Little Stranger; on the way home, I heard Paul Magrs’ Stuff of Nightmares. Somehow it alchemised into a perfect autumn daytrip so I decided to, as the popsongs go, repeat to fade. It was, actually, much too sunny, considering a) it had been tipping down all week, and b) I was trying to get into a gloomy, spooky, mulchy sort of mood. Also, notice should be given of c) my woollen shirt and chunky cardy combo. Eastbourne, like Hastings, is a perfectly nice town that’s just far enough away from London that I would never choose to go there... But it does have Camilla’s Bookshop, a second book emporium with no rivals so far as I’m concerned. Without having that awful sense you get sometimes in big second-hand places, of thin quality spread over-liberally, the place is stacked to the rafters – and the basement – and the upper rooms, full of interesting stuff. It has a lovely haphazard character – not so that it feels neglected, but enough that you have to voyage heedlessly into the unknown, to peer and crouch and sift and sort and investigate, get your fingertips dusty, all for the thrill of discovery. If you’re looking for early causes of my biblioholism you might find it in Camilla’s, when I uncovered 70s hardcover reprints of The Tin Woodman and the Lost Princess of Oz. My heart nearly stopped at the sight of them. It’s an easy stroll of the train station, which is also a plus. A had a good root round in the tubs and £1 shelves outside. Here I am in the Aladdin’s cave of the children’s section. I will also like browsing in kids books, I think – you get an intoxicating sense of past fads and favourites, fashions, TV programmes, not to mention the forgotten wonders. Even if there isn’t a pedagogic element to the novel – and I think there is always something of that – there is such a sense of a conversation between the book’s writer or publisher, parent or guardian or librarian, and the child. I like listening in to that. And when you think how massive Puffin’s backlist was before the SNES and the Playstation, you realise how many brilliant writers and books are out of print – and because they’re out of fashion, unlike great non-children’s books, they’re unlikely ever to come back. So there really is a sense of archaeology to rooms like these. I was so excited to find this – the original edition of The Three Toymakers by Ursula Moray Williams, which I read in a slightly tatty 1970s Picador reprint with Shirley Hughes illustration, and then sent on to my friend Phil in LA. How strange to find its dustier, hardbound incarnation from the 1930s, with colour plates! Here’s the dastardly Malkin and his peculiarly mouthy doll in one of those original illustrations. I hope Camilla’s owner didn’t think I was casing the joint, taking these photos... Here’s a picture from a book of psychedelic illustrations by Brian somebody. They looked like book covers – you know the kind of collection, with ladies in very little, standing on cliffs, staring at dragons – but seemed to form one long narrative with a lot of Arthur Rimbaud interspersed. I thought about snapping one of the ruder pictures but was worried Pile of Leaves might get shut down. I liked this picture especially because the giant fish (!) is bursting in at a window not unlike the one in this upper room of Camilla’s, the home of military history, sci-fi and horror. After Camilla’s, I went for a wander down to the seafront, passing this eerily deserted fish restaurant. A place over the road was doing a roaring trade, which might have had something to do with it. Every year I go in search of a forlorn, passed-over holiday paradise, and find busy, happy, nice-looking towns on the coast. I think there’s a lesson in life here: Things aren’t as bad as you expect. Sometimes they’re not even as bad as you’d like...! These two, for example, were having a lovely time just staring at the sea and that lovely Pier. They might even go and see Jane McDonald that evening if she’s not sold out yet. It was hotter than ever down on the seafront. I ended up being reminded of summer holidays in Bournemouth, haunting charity shops and car boot sales and reading dusty Puffins just like these.

It might almost have been Nice (I’ve never been to Nice). I sipped my can of Bitter Shandy and wended my way between the daytrippers, many of them visibly wilting in the early autumn heat, and listened on my headphones to the Springfields singing Island of Dreams.

I wander the streets
And the gay crowded places
Trying to forget you
But somehow it seems
My thoughts always stray
To our last sweet embraces
Far, far away on the Island of Dreams

But my voyage to the archipelago of south coastal secondhand book rummage and melancholy nostalgia, not to mention my journey to the planet of the Robotovs, was not even half-done...

Things that go bump in the school library ... Ghostly Experiences, edited by Susan Dickinson

2011-09-08T17:31:00.002+01:00

There’s a curious statement in the little flyleaf-blurb (not sure if that’s the technical name but I find I like it – if I was in a Twee pop indie combo I might call it The Flyleaf Blurb): ghost stories are surprisingly popular, it says, in this age of television and movies and particularly among children. It doesn’t qualify this (why would it, it’s a blurb, not a dissertation) but it is the kind of statement your eye just runs over, the kind of statement you could go back and dig into a little. It feels true: everybody knows that young readers tend to enjoy the supernatural in their fiction. Monsters. Unicorns. Yes, I would expect child readers to like a ghost story. But I don’t know why.

There were, for example, a series of science fiction anthologies for kids in the seventies (a series entitled, after a lengthy brainstorming session, SF-1, SF-2 etc) but are they as well remembered as the similar Armada Books of Ghosts? And were there as many of them? In my limited field of enquiry – by which I mean, rifling through old paperbacks in charity shops and the like – I’ve come across so many more ghost story anthologies for children. Beside the Armada books, there’s Alfred Hitchcock’s Ghostly Gallery; anthologies by Barbara Ireson (is it called The House of Nightmare?), Susan Price, Aidan Chambers, Pamela Oldfield, Charles Molin.

There are original ghost stories by John Gordon, Joan Aiken, Leon Garfield, Margaret Mahy.

I’ve talked about books like those on this blog, endless times. Regular readers must be longing for me to get started on some Dostoyevsky or Lionel Shriver. But it does niggle at me – where does this idea that ghost stories are appropriate reading for children? And that they have an appetite for them?

My Mum and Dad always talked about the supernatural as a statement of fact, which must be why those stories have always got under my skin. My earliest experiences were with Lord Halifax’s Ghost Book. (Have I talked about that on here before? It feels like I’m endlessly repeating myself...) A big green hardback that lived in Goodrich Primary School’s library: in the reference section, specifically, like an encyclopaedia or something else reliably factual. I’d creep into the library during break, which wasn’t actually allowed for some reason – the whole room (a big room, this being one of those roomy Victorian London School Board schools) deserted, the distant sound of children screaming in the playground. Laminated signage (black paper lettering on white) hanging in the stillness. A spider plant.

I’d tiptoe in and read just one story – just enough to freak myself out.

One summer in Bournemouth amid the car boot sales and charity shops, I found similar fodder. One of them was The Restless Ghost, edited by Susan Dickinson – and this little book (which turned up in the Salvation Army Charity Shop in Bethnal Green – hallelujah!) seems to be half the stories from that one. They’re all stories from elsewhere – HR Wakefield, HP Lovecraft, JS Le Fanu, Nigel Kneale: Susan knew her stuff – and one specially written story by Alan Garner, Feel Free.

This alone makes it worth looking for – much more than Kneale’s presumably rare and surprisingly naff short story, Minuke – and I forgive it for not being especially ghostly. (I don’t really need a ghost in a ghost story anyway – do you? The wonderful Joan Aiken story included here is even less connected to the genre, being concerned with the Furies of Greek Legend, turning up on the Armitage family’s doorstep.)

Interestingly, it’s another of those stories about archaeological artifacts that Garner wrote so many of and which make up a genre of children’s fiction so deserving of study. But unlike, say, The Owl Service, the Greek vase that the story’s protagonist is so interested in isn’t possessed or magical at all. The strangeness of the story comes with the mysterious holiday camp that’s arrived in the village, but the final twist is still quite unexpected. It's a typically Garner story in awe of the craftsman, all about the way time really works.

The sun has dipped behind the clouds for the next six months, and the air has a spectral colour to it now, so the season for eerie reads is definitely upon us. There’s a small pavilion at the rear of the Pile of Leaves garden, with a roof. Let’s go and read there, in case it rains. (Having said that, the book I’m currently reading is set in the psychedelic sixties in New York and involves an alien invasion...)

Waiting for bells on Sunday ... Human Voices, by Penelope Fitzgerald

2011-09-06T12:26:00.002+01:00

This was one of those books I knew I wanted to read, was sure I would enjoy, but put off again and again. This is the summer of reading those things, clearing the decks. Yes, I know, outside the wind is howling and the rain is sloshing down, but your autumn is my summer holiday. Your evil is my good. Wherever I tread I leave nothing but wet leaves and muddy footprints.

Anyway, Human Voices. It’s by Penelope Fitzgerald, and in the last few years she’s been talked about more and more, in just the way that we can expect (and at the same time, can never expect) when a body of work is posthumous. She sounded a rare treat of a writer – subtle, clever, witty, surprising. Her novels are weighty but slender, a favourite combination, and her subjects include a community of houseboats in Battersea, a valiant dream of running a bookshop, Broadcasting House during the Blitz.

That one is Human Voices. I love to read about London in the Blitz – a time and place strangely near and yet unfamiliar. I suppose I like books about houses, homes and cities, and it was a time when people were conscious of the vulnerability of their buildings, conscious of mortality, conscious of that longing for home mingling with the need for preservation. A time of reconsidering what home is. I think this is captured best in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day, but there are other great novels about it (Fireweed by Jill Paton Walsh is another) and I’m always on the look out.

The more I read – and the last three years I’ve read more widely than ever before – the more I realise how much I love that sense of place, region, atmosphere, territory. Probably it’s why I’ve always liked sensuous, even over-rich prose. I love voices, I love cleverness, I love ideas, but to be transported somewhere by a novel will always crystallise the reading experience for me into something that really gets under my skin. I’ll be transported anywhere – it’s not about escapism, you can shove me in a cupboard, back me into an office, drop me in a bus.

I was lost in Highgate with a friend the other week, and I looked at a row of those big old houses in the darkness, glowing through their blinds like big, unsubtle metaphors for secrecy. I told Martin I wanted a novel set in one of those houses, just to have a look around. I could sense his horror at my superficiality but I didn’t care. You can keep your philosophical complexity – give me the feeling of trespass.

And intimacy. That’s a part of the illusion of BBC radio – that you’re listening in on another world, not being ingratiatingly spoon-fed. You feel you can almost hear the other listeners, listening. The stuffiness, the quirks, the old routines are not there for your benefit. One of my favourite programmes of theirs is Bells on Sunday. It’s a recording of a particular set of church bells from somewhere in the British Isles. The announcer tells you where the recording was made and what arrangement they’re in. They play the bells, the ringing peals going up and down – and that’s it. Every Sunday at one in the morning. Yes, you readers in the United States of America, you may well shake your heads in disbelief.

And those voices, rituals, incantations famously enspelled the nation in the midst of that crisis and, speaking anecdotally, can still do something for you if you’re feeling cast adrift. I like to think of that building of white brick – just round the corner from my office, actually, tucked behind the church on whose steps I sometimes eat sandwiches – and glowing like the ocean liner Fitzgerald describes, gossip twittering on every deck, and in those wee hours, the lonely announcer reading the same liturgy of the Shipping Forecast, and in those dark days, when the concert hall was made into a dormitory, and the Recorded Programmes Unit was known as the Seraglio because of all the young women employed there. What could be better than a whole novel set there?

Well.

To be honest I was underwhelmed by Human Voices. I may have gone into the novel with low ambitions – just to be in that world again really – but I had expected more of a story. And it always seemed about to happen. Any minute now, I thought, blithely turning the pages. Then halfway through one character vanished and another appeared. Crises threatened management and then dissipated. Boys muttered in the canteen and then, more solitarily, in lifts. Then it was over.

The book’s cover and its review quotes (what are these called? I ought to know) talked about a gentle comedy, but nothing really stirred a laugh. I’m not a crash-bang-wallop sort of reader, I hope, but this was oddly like waiting for somebody to come through a door. They never did. Now, has anybody else read Fitzgerald? Should I try another novel of hers? Is this an oddity? Am I...?

A Pile of Puffins: The Dribblesome Teapots, by Norman Hunter

2011-09-01T22:02:00.005+01:00

‘I declare I’m gasping for a cup of tea,’ said Her Majesty one day when it was getting half-past fourish.

‘My dear, ought you to gasp?’ asked the King. He was known as King Nutherkupp II because that sounded nice and royal, but his real name was Leslie Jones. ‘I mean to say,’ he added, ‘it isn’t very majestic, is it?’

‘It may not be very majestic,’ said the Queen, ‘but is most exceedingly very true,’ and she rang the bell for tea.

I feel oddly embarrassed at how funny I found The Dribblesome Teapots. Nothing, you’d think, dates faster than comic writing. Funny books for children should be worst of all – not going to be very sophisticated, is it? Is it likely, in fact, to have been found funny by anyone in the first place, young or old? Then there’s me. I sometimes catch myself longingly forcing a laugh at some trendy Channel 4 thing and immediately hate myself. I miss those days of not actually being able to draw breath, something was so funny. Nothing is more helpless, more revealing, more relaxing and pleasurable – hmm, I’m getting carried away here: almost nothing – than a really good laugh. I strew roses at the feet of writers who manage it. Frank Cottrell Boyce springs to mind, because I see he has a new one out (so I can stop rationing the three he’s written so far).

This book was published, not in the 1960s as I always assumed (based on Fritz Wegner’s satisfyingly cuddly yet non-twee illustrations) but in 1938. Nineteen thirty bloody eight! This is pre-war comedy, originally collected in some probably wonderful book called Larky Legends, presumably the origin of the stories in books like Dust-Up at the Royal Disco and The Home-Made Dragon (other Hunter Puffins), many of which (like Teapots) I read as a kid. Oh yes, he’s good with titles, clever Norman.

(I also read Hunter’s much more famous Professor Branestawm books, which I’m pleased to see are still in print, and his Puffin Book of Magic, which isn’t, but is completely charming, and has that lovely cover I once posted here. My Dad read me Branestawm adventures at bedtime and made me laugh without having to insert any dirty jokes, quite unlike when he read me Enid Blyton’s adventures of Mr Pink-Whistle.)

So, something I laughed at when I was seven, and something seven year-olds laughed at when my grandparents were younger than I am now, surely shouldn’t make me laugh now, in the terrifying world of 2011…?

Oddly, what it reminds me of most are hyperspeed cartoons like The Simpsons and Family Guy, all that physical comedy happening at high speed and then compressed by that famous (pre-War) British reserve. Everything is out of control, constantly on the move: ‘The butler bowed so low that a clump of picture cards that he was collecting from tea-packets fell out of his waistcoat pocket all over the floor and were picked up by the first and second footmen who were collecting the same set.’ Sentences whirl and unravel as people leap and skid and tumble and wrestle, or just bow – I love it when someone bows so low his coat nearly falls off over his head. It just made he laugh again typing that!

I suppose it is a very British, or specifically English thing to be so surprised by high emotion than it knocks you up into the air: ‘The King jumped up so suddenly that he kicked the throne over backwards, and the Queen with it, but happily she feel on some cushions.’ From The Simpsons you could probably trace that manic energy back to Monty Python, who always seem to have influenced everything, and some of that back to PG Wodehouse, and that Wodehousian facility with language, is in Hunter as well. The stories’ clever syncopation and breathlessness also suggest comic song, more popular in the 1930s than it is today. (Probably for the best.)

It's been protected from changes of fashion by its setting – these fairy tale worlds of kings, queens and dragons – but I expect I particularly enjoyed it for those little marks of its time, like those tea-packet picture cards the butler is collecting (when things turn to the bad for him later in the story, the footmen offer them back to him as consolation), like paint-boxes, yellow dishcloths, crossword puzzles: ‘Do you suppose people who’ve come hoping to get half the kingdom will go home quietly if we give them a bag of oranges?’ Why do oranges always stand out in these things as old-fashioned? And why do I like that so much?

I got this in Portobello Road Oxfam, and even though I knew someone would’ve taken it home and loved it eventually – which isn’t always the case – I’m thinking of it as bit of a Rescue Puffin, because it’s obviously seem better days. According to a couple of stamps it belonged to the Arnold House School Library in St John’s Wood, and has been read enthusiastically till the spine split, and mended with sellotape, and read again. It was first reprinted as a Puffin in 1971, which is right in the heart of their golden years. Hunter features prominently in a lot of Puffin Posts and, as a conjuror, performed at several Puffin events. And when you think of it, it’s pretty fantastic that something might come back into print thirty odd years after you wrote it, and stay in print at least another ten years after (this reprint is 1981).

And made me laugh, quite unembarrassedly, on the train going out and coming home last weekend. I mean, you can’t say fairer than that, can you?

Oh, and just before I uploaded this, I found a video of Kenneth Williams reading the title story on Jackanory (you'll have to turn it up a bit and lean in):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebFZSltIzaM

Back of the net! Have a lovely weekend everybody!

'I want to be trapped indoors with my books...'

2011-09-01T11:42:00.003+01:00

‘It’s ten years since it was ten years ago!’ That’s my boyfriend’s response to my obsession with looking back. After last weekend, I might have had my fill of it too.

The wonderful Russell Hoban writes in a stir of book and DVD clutter, in constant use as reference points and inspirations for his novels, which he refers to as his ‘exo-brain’. If this is mine (pictured), what does it reveal about the dreams I dream?

This was the corner of our futon where I spent most of last weekend. Jon was working, using my laptop. The weather was bad. By which I mean great: not the heat you’d foolishly expect of August Bank Holiday, but steady, shadow-coloured heavy rain. In this corner of the living room everything was in easy reach: the Box of Delights, spilling over with Green Carnation submissions. I read a couple of these: one kept me captivated.

Fresh, yellowing, paperbacks. I made an exception to my bookshop-moratorium because I’d just had my hair cut to make me look like a schoolboy from the 1940s (unintentionally) and the Notting Hill Book & Comic Exchange’s basement is full of unloved old books that make my heart ache, and the Oxfam on Portobello Road – the place where the mysteries of ancients are stowed – had a special offer on.

In my nest of bits of twine and twig and printed paper, I smashed my rule of no more than two books on the go. Everything was on the go. I didn’t have the internet and couldn’t go out. The Wind in the Willows, which I must read before the last breath of summer is fully exhaled. Library book reservations that had just come in (any excuse for a walk). Bits of newspaper. Letters from my Mum’s Uncle, which I’m meant to be transcribing. I watched the eccentric Doctor Who in Lime Grove studios with wrinkly Aztec backgrounds, on Wimbledon Common with foam machines and men in babygrows, in CSO living rooms with deadly Troll Dolls, wrangling with miners in OTT gold make-up.

And letters. Photo albums, old magazines, and letters. When I went over to feed Oscar, I could resist a trip to my Mum and Dad’s loft.

Love a loft. It’s the same one I risked life and tiny limb to explore with my Dad when I was six, swinging myself from ladder-rung into musty darkness. I was nostalgic even then, though what for I didn’t know. I loved the sensation of old things, not dissociable from the smell of loft insulation and dust, the glow of bedside lamp on interior brickwork.

Now I curled up and delved into my history. The diaries are hysterical, not in a good way. My opinion of my younger self went up and down like sound levels on a really bad mix tape. It strikes me that the keyboard was my friend: diaries, scrawled in notepads, mess about; I make crossword puzzles of my feelings and, in difficult moments, doodle Cybermen. Typed letters to my pen friend, Sarah #1, emails to boyfriends past, require me to make sense – or at least, not sound quite so worth slapping. It’s an argument for the self discipline of good writing.

Letters to Sarah #1, who lives in the US, go into fine detail about my life, my job, people I meet, my bedroom layout even; sorry, Sarah, but hello, nostalgia freakout! Lists of what I was reading (Orlando – ‘quite brilliant, quite special’, Death in Venice – ‘a bit empty’, Doctor Who: Grimm Reality – ‘not nasty enough’). I had forgotten that when I finished reading The Child Garden I ‘hugged it like a teddy bear’.

Funny to see that amidst the changes, books and anxiety about reading, are among many continuities – bad ones, nice ones. One bit I love, because it is so romantic and over-written teenagerish, and because it feels exactly like something I could have written yesterday about all those ‘to reads’:

What I want is something to trap me [in my bedroom] with my books. [...] Perhaps it’s winter and there are drifts of snow holding the door shut, or floods of water washing down from the black clouds every second. I put on my radio for the sanctity of voices. I begin to read. Perhaps there’s somebody in the room too: you, or D or J or M or just one of my cats. We read. Perhaps it’s all of us. In silence, broken by the crackle of turning pages. Perhaps I won’t need to be trapped in with my books to have the opportunity to read them. Perhaps I’ll run away with someone, and we’ll read everywhere. I’ll have a bag over my shoulder. In it are all manner of books: Margaret Rutherford’s autobiography, the Tractatus, Armistead Maupin, Alice Toklas, Orlando, Cold Fusion, Fermentation, Jarman, Winterson, Janette Turner Hospital...

I sat and went through it all, and in the end it felt like plenty. Enough looking back. I’ll try looking forward again, for a bit. It’s not in my nature but I think it’s worth it.

What is this thing called ... Love, by Angela Carter

2011-08-30T11:51:00.002+01:00

So here we are at what I take to be Angela Carter's least popular novel. In my edition there’s even an afterword from Carter in which she describes the work as ‘a sinister feat’, icy, with 'a penetrating aroma of unhappiness.' I mean, this is not to say it isn’t good. It’s sustained, concise, shocking. Reminiscent of Carter’s earliest novels – a love triangle between emotionally unstable young people with eccentric names and self-conscious identities – it avoids their light notes of wit and whimsy, and also of the gothic grotesque. What seems at first to be a florid romance resolves into an attempt at a realist, if caricatured story of unhealthy minds, entwined.

The result is strangely tender and inscrutable as a heat blister, and has the same uncanny dead warmth. Hard to like, which is unfortunate, because it makes it harder to read, and so more difficult to judge. Unfair on a novel, to want to be through with it – its cruel characters, its cool style, its grim illumination of male sexuality:

Lee deluded himself that since he was not emotionally involved with the girl, Carolyn, he was not, significantly, unfaithful to his wife. In the period of introspection which followed the inevitable catastrophe, he had ample time to ironically applaud the extent of his self-deceit but now he had neither the time nor the inclination to do so nor any intimation a catastrophe might be near for he thought that he had finally established an equilibrium and now things could go on forever.

I think if I want to do it justice I’ll have to re-read it – one of the most respectful things you can do to any book, slipping out of your initial shock and pleasure, to see what’s really on the page and not what you want there to be. I’ll grant this coolly appraising little novel the cool appraise that it warrants. Have you done that – read a novel impatiently, knowing you must come back, that you can’t leave it at this?

There was certainly something absent from the novel, though it’s hard to gauge having come straight out of the world of Barbarians and Professors and fools covered in blood in the woods. We’ve materialised in 1971, five years after her first novel, six years before New Eve and Wolf Alice, only a couple of years after her divorce and escape to Japan. The year of Miss Marple’s last novel, Nemesis, and The Lathe of Heaven, E.L. Doctorow’s the Book of Daniel, and Ted Hughes’ Crow. Crow feels like it’s flown out of Love for independent life – something she couldn’t quite catch, that immediately recognisable, scrabbling, cawing flap of real, though folkloric, life.

I called it realist, Carter says naturalist, and either of these modes requires the same straitjacket – as she writes in her afterword, ‘the essence of naturalist fiction is plausibility... [whereas] life, since it is not the product of the human imagination, holds infinite surprises.’ Nevertheless, I was never quite sure what these three, holed up in the customarily outsized Carter household, drawing on the walls, painting out the windows, represented. A particular generation? A throwback? A last gasp? A first glimpse? I suppose I failed to completely connect with and understand Love, put off by that omniscient disregard for them and their fate.

It’s analytical about that word on the front cover. Its characters put one another into their own private systems, series, webs of meaning. This network, an artificial construct, an unconscious creative act (a fiction not so unlike a novel), whether it is a safety net of constant things or a balancing act of secrets and sex as in the excerpt above, can easily self-destruct. Maybe the destructive element is natural or inevitable – the inevitable catastrophe of Lee’s faithlessness, the natural ascendance of the moon and the sun in the same sky – but the consequences are essentially mysterious for their authors. Natural or artificial, sentiment or real emotion, how to tell them apart?

Interestingly we see only romantic love – mums and dads and grandmothers make fleeting appearances in the text, generally to screw up their offspring to a greater or lesser degree. There are no children, and the other siblings in the book are Buzz and Lee, whose demands and desertions of each other are volatile and extreme. There’s one precocious schoolgirl whose character hardly rings true, and one mother whom Carter says in her afterword she may have underestimated. In fact this uncomfortable read may be worth the work for that afterword, Carter’s self assessment being more interesting than the sort of thing we have to do once a year at work. She brings Buzz, Lee and their contemporaries up to the present day:

The novel ends so emphatically that there is something a little tasteless about taking her husband and brother-in-law and lovers and doctors out of the text that is Annabel's coffin and resurrecting them. But good taste is not a significant attribute of this novel, anyway.

And with that little crack of the ringmaster’s whip, I gave a little snort of laughter and thought, That’s the voice I recognise as Angela Carter’s.

Here’s some Nan Goldin to illustrate today’s post. I love Goldin. Also, the ‘Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ seems to match this novel perfectly. Currently reading a Doctor Who novel from 2001, a Penelope Fitzgerald novel about the Blitz and the BBC, some ghost stories, a memoir, a bit of everything really, as usual...

Reading on the move

2011-08-25T12:53:00.003+01:00

For a long time it seemed I could only read on trains. Well, I say trains – long bus journeys, coach journeys. I dare say an overnight cruise would have suited me just as well. It became a problem: I was a student and was obliged to read a lot, and despite my rail pass I wasn’t made of period returns. Was it because I didn’t feel at home where I lived then – too hot, too cold, too stinking of damp washing - or something to do with the memory of long car journeys.

Some of my best early experiences with books had been made on that long anticipatory crawl through holiday traffic from South London to Bournemouth: E Nesbit’s fairy tales, Bridget Jones’ Diary, Peter Haining’s Doctor Who: A Celebration, Margaret Mahy’s The Haunting. Each one a revelation, each read at one luxurious stretch as the jams thickened round us in the motorway heat.

It was Mahy who cured me of getting carsick while reading. Some people can’t read in a moving vehicle, but I think it’s like any problem: all you need is a real page-turner. Something to forget yourself with.

Maybe the long journey’s an antidote to attention disorders brought on by adverts, pop videos, e-numbers and Judy Finnegan. Especially when you’re wedged in with yours and other people’s luggage, you can’t help but focus. If you’re overwhelmed by duty, or like me, very disorganised and always catching up, a hellish commute is a suitably guilt-free space to indulge yourself – or was, before we had the internet on our phones.

But there’s more to it. My favourite journeys pass through towns or above gardens: we have fleeting but vivid glimpses of other lives. This prurient gaze must stimulate the same bit of my brain that likes a good read, because my favourite books are like that – detail enough to prompt recognition, a seductive sense of mystery, an illusion of intimacy. Don’t you feel that, when your train is ticking, waiting to enter West Worthing, and you’re basically staring into someone’s back room through their open French windows? You look at washing on their line, books lined up against a window, the carpet’s colour; you feel you’re walking in there. Don’t you feel you could find a body in the bath or a Yeti on the loo, or just a terrible secret kept for years between the couple whose jeans and jeggings are dancing side by side in that wind coming in off the sea...?

That’s why I like a journey in rain, in early evening, when lights are on at windows, yellow, white, rose, amber, blue. I had to be persuaded to stop taking coaches from Pool Valley to Victoria Bus Garage, they took so long – I certainly couldn’t take my boyfriend on them, they made him ill and impatient – but I remember exactly the near-ecstasy of travel in a heavy downpour, down high streets and past houses instead of countryside, people coming out of work and putting up umbrellas, piling into pubs or buses, pulling the curtains and putting the lights on, while I read Alberto Manguel’s Black Water for the first time, with Julio Cortazar’s neck-prickingly eerie House Taken Over, Robert Hichens’ Love Came to Professor Guildea, Pomegranate Seed by Edith Wharton: faces illuminated for a moment in the flicker of a word, black water running down the window.

That year I read a lot on station platforms, getting the last train on a Sunday night from Surbiton to Brighton, sometimes via Littlehampton, where we stopped in the early morning silence for half an hour, and passengers walked the platform with their smokes. Jane Eyre getting married in the icy draft of those older, slam-door train carriages; the Lurker on the Threshold, calling to the hills, on East Croydon station. It’s no way to live your life – certainly not the way to get through your University reading list. I learnt that in my third year: park yourself in an armchair, toaster and teapot in reach, and rediscover the power of concentration, of getting satisfyingly out of your depth.

Now I’m learning again, and reading on my journey to work, the volume of leaves piling up in East Dulwich now too much to limit to the evening hours. I’m wedged against the engine at the back of a bendy bus, reading Love, Smut, Flesh, Resentment, Human Voices, and Great Works of Jewish Fantasy, all the way from Barry Road to Margaret Street.

I like a book that begins with a train journey too, like Tolly off to Green Knowe, watching the rain splash down, listening to the women gossiping and smacking their lips with pleasure at the words. But that’s another blog...

Furious Inventions ... Heroes and Villains, by Angela Carter

2011-08-23T15:53:00.002+01:00

‘You are the most remarkable thing I ever saw in all my life. Not even in pictures had I seen anything like you, nor read your description in books, you with your jewels, paints, fur, knives and guns, like a phallic and diabolic version of female beauties of former periods. What I'd like best would be to keep you in preserving fluid in a huge jar on the mantelpiece of my peaceful room, where I could look at you and imagine you. And that's the best place for you, you walking masterpiece of art, since the good Doctor educated you so far above your station you might as well be an exhibit for intellectuals to marvel at as anything else. You, you're nothing but the furious invention of my virgin nights.’

Here’s Marianne yelling at her husband, Jewel, as they trudge across the wet sands toward a seaside town on the south coast. They’re not on holiday – it’s safer by the sea these days, during winter. After the atom bomb blast, civilisation is in ruins and it’s a man-eat-man world. It’s Angela Carter’s first take on post-apocalypse: nature run riot, wild animals loose, and the intellectual elite holed up in ivory-white towers while the ignorant scavenge what they can, faces painted, desperate and angry. Marianne’s a refugee from the white towers, and Jewel’s a barbarian: by this point in the novel, each having forsaken their communities, neither has a place in the world.

At moments like this, Heroes and Villains seems to make a savage and majestic metaphor out of excommunication. These two will make a home for themselves in one another. The scarred and crazed and doomed planet has less use for its stores of knowledge than the little world of two lovers: knowledge of self, new discovery and invention will redeem and sustain them and possibly new life (Marianne thinks she might be pregnant).

But Heroes and Villains is not a romantic story: Jewel attacks and abducts and rapes Marianne, trapping her and bullying her, and marrying her in a pseudo-religious ceremony of old totems (a rapidly disintegrating wedding dress) and bloodletting. The ceremony, along with plenty else in that community of barbarians, is led by and concocted by the Doctor – a refugee from academia, Marianne supposes, though she can’t decide what his specialism is. She thinks it’s likely to have been literature, given his problems with realism. He makes Jewel his own character, teaching and indoctrinating him to become figure of a new religion, its figurehead a caged, poisonous snake.

The figure of the Doctor complicates our more complacent readings of Jewel and Marianne’s story, as when he tattoos Jewel’s back with the image of Adam and Eve. After the ravages of war the Earth is Edenic – cities overtaken by vegetation, and lions, tigers and bears sprung loose from zoos (who would have thought, Carter says, they would take to our climate?). But Carter has it both ways – many ways in fact – telling a story rich in symbology whose characters are capable of reading and even manipulating it. The Doctor is playing a Prospero figure, keeps a Fool straight out of Lear, double crosses two star crossed lovers, but there’s no reason he should be unconscious of these roles. He’s like a politician justifying his actions with a neat Shakespearean quotation.

He makes what could have been a simplistic parody of bourgeois intellectuals – or maybe just another story about the bitter death of Victorian values – incisive and cautionary. In the weird love triangle that threatens to ensue – the strange empathy that Oxbridge-born Marianne feels for the author of her woes – there is a further complication. How does her capacity for ‘furious invention’ derive from their shared class and culture? A much simpler novel would ask what Marianne recognises of herself in Jewel, but there are mirrors between all three of these outsiders.

At the very least, it’s a critique of those ideas of back to nature – retreat from civilisation, so persuasive after the second world war. History can’t be abandoned – someone else will grab it if you don’t, and then you have to watch your back...

We are in the middle of Carter’s nine published novels. She’s yet to write her most daring, her more shocking novels, but the inclination is there – to revise fairy tales, to imagine the end of the world, to subvert male sexuality at its most extreme. I won’t write about Passion of New Eve this year, most likely, because I haven’t time to re-read at the moment, but in many ways it’s the inverse of Heroes and Villains. It might almost be the same world, with Carter asking what if that power of knowledge and religion and the body came into the hands of a woman instead of a man, a Mother instead of a Doctor.

Without Passion of New Eve, Heroes and Villains would look less tame. I was surprised, after having attempted it more than once in the past, to find it less passionless then I expected. Purely as a novel in the sf genre, it’s richly imagined, its world seductively verdant as the rural landscape is to Arrietty Clock, its strange families reminiscent of the Gormenghast clan. Whether Carter wrote with these novels in mind, it feels – more than other of her works till now – the work of Carter the reader, participant in established genres, player with older ideas and images.

Next, and in my bag under my desk in actual real life right now, her 1971 novel. You need Love like I do, don’t you...?

Here’s a picture by Robert Mapplethorp to illustrate Carter. Back in with the naked hommes already...

Happy Birthday Paula Danziger

2011-08-18T14:28:00.005+01:00

This was going to be a week of naked men – it felt we were going that way, with Hockney on Tuesday and then Stevie’s dancing pins – but today I’m thinking about Paula Danziger. Who was a lady. And wrote no erotic novels (that I’m aware of). So if you want naked men you’ll have to look elsewhere (you’re already online – knock yourself out).

Danziger wrote witty novels about teenagers going through problems: at home, at school, with their parents, with their weight. I don’t know whether they were actually aimed at teenaged readers – I loved them when I was nine or ten, and I think there was an element of Just 17 magazine about them (rarely if ever read by anyone of 17): more about aspiration and preparing for the future, and just that experience of reading with outsider characters you can empathise with. I’m glad to see she’s still in print, but still I don’t feel she’s as well known as, say, Judy Blume. I was pleased to read in Kaye Webb’s biography about an interview where she was asked her opinion of (then-controversial) Blume, and Webb said she preferred Danziger because she’s funnier.

There’s a certain note to her comedy. I think you can see it in her titles: ‘Can You Sue Your Parents for Malpractice?’, ‘It’s An Aardvark-Eat-Turtle World’, ‘The Cat Ate My Gymsuit.’ There’s a sort of earthy, wisecracky note to them, so New York, so... unsentimental. They have a sort of gravity to them – almost a desperation, but not problematically: just the way stand-ups often have an air of desperation, whilst staying in complete control. In an interview I found online she says, ‘Humor is touching . . . Because it can make us feel better—almost like a caress of understanding or it can really hurt— like a stiletto in your heart.' It’s not to say that the comedy isn’t broad and the stories sometimes cheesy – The Divorce Express, as I wrote on this here blog, makes a big plot point out of a pink sweater with a unicorn batiked on it. They are written to entertain and comfort – but it doesn’t mean sidestepping the big stuff.

She’s been on my mind because I mentioned to a friend this week that I realised these chats in the garden about everything and nothing are echoes of this interview between Danziger and another writer, co-author on two novels in letter form. In this and other interviews with her she comes across as flamboyant and life loving. Someone asks her if she’ll ever write a book for adults: ‘No,’ she says, ‘I don’t particularly want to. I LOVE what I do.’ She was a bit of a TV personality in the UK – she had a slot on the Saturday morning kids magazine show, Going Live. I remember her enthusiasm, her headscarf flapping, rings on her fingers.

I can’t find a video of that online – or any video of her at all, sadly. She would be an amazing Children’s Laureate now – but she died just a few years ago after a heart attack. According to the internet, her death notice read: “Paula Danziger would like to inform you that she isn't avoiding your calls, she passed away last week...” She was only 59. I suppose these things are always sad – you don’t have to be a bohemian children’s writer with lots more books left in you. Pretty much everyone has some more stories to tell. I suppose I’m sad because I would have liked to meet her.

I did meet her, way back in the mists of the 1990s, when she came to Dulwich Library (at night, it felt like, but must have been evening in winter) and signed a promotional brochure – I didn’t have any of her books, I read them all out of the library. And I don’t remember what I said – just that she was pleased to be there and see us. And though I’d read her stuff, I didn’t know that was half the pleasure of a signing, to say thank you.

This morning I saw that today’s her birthday, so I thought I’d thank her by blog instead – a bit late, but never mind. I might go back to the library this evening, where they say they have one of her last novels, PS: Longer Letter Later (all the earlier stuff, paperback and hardcover, must have gone long since to the great withdrawns trolley in the sky).

And why don’t we celebrate the writers you love, and let them know. It's easier than ever, isn't it? Pardon the earnest tone, but I was reading about how Danziger herself put off writing her first novel, ticking over in her teaching job and saying, ‘One day...’ – then, having survived two road accidents on consecutive days (!) she ‘decided I better do it before I got hit by a bus.’