Literature

there will be no miracles here

Narratologists are endlessly fascinated by 'plot' - one of the most famous books on the topic is even called Reading for the Plot. Whilst I did read Peter Brooks (who wrote the aforementioned tome) and Mikhail Bakhtin at university, I was never a great fan of narratology. I preferred poetry to prose and if I read fiction, I sought out works that somehow clashed with Brooks' ideas of 'narrative ends' and 'sequence and progression'. EdinburghA couple of years ago Tom McCarthy's novel C was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. McCarthy was rather good at sound-bites. He declared the novel ‘the Finnegans Wake for the 21st Century’ or even a nouveau roman. This was utter nonsense, of course. I enjoyed the novel a great deal but at its core it was a rather conventional Bildungsroman cleverly disguised as an experimental anti-novel.

I just finished reading Keith Ridgway's Hawthorn and Child. It is difficult to call it conventional and as I was reading it, I could not help but think of McCarthy and Brooks.

Hawthorn and Child is a detective novel - that most conventional genre of fiction and one which narratologists love because the genre's raison d'être is precisely narrative logic and satisfying progression of plot. Yet Ridgway's novel is also not a detective novel. The recurring characters of Hawthorn and Child are police detectives and we follow them in their job, but we only catch glimpses of plot. A boy was shot. Who shot him? We are never told. The boy says a car shot him. There is a man, Mishazzo, with whom the police appears obsessed. What does he do? We do not know as we only glimpse him driving from one place to another.

And that is what you get with this book. You get stories of the detours, the gaps, the liminal spaces within conventional plot structures. Does that make it sound hard-going? It is not. You leap from one character to another - in a way, Hawthorn & Child can be understood as a short story collection too - and every section/story is exceedingly well-written with very distinct stylistic choices.

For me, the whole book came into its own with the segment "How To Have Fun With A Fat Man" which is so cleverly constructed and written that I read it several times just to savour what Ridgway did. Here he juxtaposes Hawthorn policing a riot with Hawthorn attending an orgy in a sauna. Bodies mingle, mix and become blurred - and so Ridgway's prose mingles, mixes and becomes blurred. Paragraphs become bilocated in the narrative. It is a dream-like, yet visceral read.

Hawthorn & Child is an extraordinary read. I cannot remember the last time I have been this excited about a book and I don't think my words do it justice. Word of mouth has been very strong - in fact I first read about it on John Self's book blog - and I think that is how the book will find its audience. I hope the audience will be a large one. It deserves to be read (and read and read).

(Hawthorn & Child is my second read of the year. My first read was Mary & Bryan Talbot's Dotter of Her Father's Eyes; a graphic novel partly about Lucia Joyce, daughter of James Joyce.)

A Year in Books: 2012. Oh GOD.

2012 was the year my boyfriend read more than 120 books - not including re-reads. I read 80 books - a vast increase on 2011's 45 books, 2010's 21 and 2009's 38 . I wish I could say it also meant a huge increase in quality, but 2012 was a year of reading low-brow, easily-digested genre literature. My Kindle had something to do with this: it became far too easy to grab yet another regency romance when I found myself in need of distraction. And so I read books called things like The Wicked Wyckerly, Mad About the Duke, Surrender to a Wicked Spy and so forth. I remember very little about most of these books. So easy to read, so easy to forget. Writing about the best books I read in 2012 is easy. There weren't that many.

Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin was fantastic. I also really liked an anthology called Justified Sinner: An Archaeology of Scottish Counter-Culture which looked at radical arts & literature in Scotland from the 1960s onwards. It's a niche publication but definitely my sort of niche.

I did have a handful of decent reads - mostly regencies like Loretta Chase's Miss Wonderful which was a thoughtful, well-researched look at the impact of the Industrial Revolution upon rural Derbyshire post-Waterloo. It was also a look at what warfare does to the human psyche. It veered closer to traditional romance territory in the second half, but even so it remained psychologically convincing. Sherry Thomas' Ravishing the Heiress was beautifully cynical and almost uncomfortable to read.

But there were far too many forgettable, formulaic books in my reading year. The few times I read non-regencies, I didn't like the books much due to poor choices on my part.

I have a plan, though. And that plan is called "my bookshelves". I have so many books that I genuinely want to read:

New Year Reading

From the bottom up:

  • Andrew Drummond's Volapük - An Abridged History which appears to combine many of my favourite literary topics (Scottish literature, universal languages, Sir Thomas Urquhart and lunacy).
  • Jasper Fforde's The Woman Who Died A Lot. The seventh book in the Thursday Next series. We met him in 2012 and I turned into a puddle of fangirl goo despite myself.
  • AS Byatt's Ragnarok. One of my all-time favourite novelists reworking Norse mythology. Why haven't I read this already?
  • Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood. Her Oryx & Crake was one of my novels of the last decade. Why haven't I read the sequel yet? Why?
  • Carol Birch's Jamrach's Menagerie. I found this on the kitchen table, cornered the boyfriend and accused him of keeping an interesting sounding book away from me. Apparently I bought this for myself for my 2012 birthday..
  • Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Because I have read Charlotte and I have read Emily. And I'm a sucker for 19th century melodrama Brontë-style.

Finally, and not shown in the photo because I bought it for my Kindle, Keith Ridgway's Hawthorn & Child. The novel has been making serious waves among book bloggers and publishers - and since I used to move in those circles (before knitting took over my life) I am rather curious.

Care to see how much I am sticking to my plan? Want to exchange some book love? Why not catch up with me on GoodReads? One thing is sure: the only way is up..

I Gotta Use Words When I Talk To You.

One day I'll stop viewing the world through TS Eliot's words. Thankfully that day is not yet here:

There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Today is my writing day. Visions and revisions, toast and tea. And in the company of Old Possum who laboured over words way back in 1915.

It feels like the past ten years never happened.

You are Changing Forever Anyway

I was 12 and a bookish girl who was curiously prone to catching fevers, colds, and coughs. I spent days reading in bed or curled up in the big cream chair at the far end of the living room. My dog would snore at my feet as I got lost in yet another book. I came across one of Margaret Mahy's books during one of these spells - The Tricksters. I think it was one of the very first supernatural YA books I ever came across. I lived in Nowheresville, Denmark and I had almost run out of books to read from the local library. Margaret Mahy - I kept that name in my head.

Then my local library bought Margaret Mahy's The Changeover. My life would never be the same - it was one of those books that changed you. At the very least it changed me.

The synopsis sounds fairly mundane: a teenage girl discovers her young brother is possessed by a demon and she enlists the local school prefect to help her battle the demon. Okay, the synopsis sounds pretty terrible - but the book was terrific. It was well-written (and later I'd discover the literary allusions one by one) and the real dangers lurked in every-day life beyond the surface drama of soul-stealing demons and witchcraft.

What changed me? I think I caught a glimpse of myself in the book.

I have never been good at identifying with characters in books and much of my reading pleasure derives from well-turned prose, intelligent plots and clever structures - but I think my 12-year-old self saw something of herself in Laura Chant, Mahy's teenage protagonist. Laura Chant was realistically drawn: a strong and independent girl but with a complex family life which renders her more than a bit vulnerable. Mahy also captures Laura on the cusp of becoming something more than just a daughter, a sister, and a girl. There is a strong streak of yearning throughout "The Changeover" - characters yearn to make sense of the world and move beyond petty squabbling in the school ground and the tiny shopping centre. "There is a world out there," the book whispered, "and it is yours to explore!"

I read and re-read "The Changeover" getting it out of my local library again and again. I bought the novel in English when I first set foot in Foyles some six years later. It was one of the first books I ever read in English, let alone owned. I still re-read my copy every couple of years or so. Time has not lessened my love.

And Margaret Mahy was instrumental in kick-starting my love for New Zealand. I was 24 when I travelled through New Zealand for a month and I hung out the bus window desperate to get a photo of the sign saying "Welcome to Paraparaumu" - a town mentioned in "The Changeover" as a mundane place. The mundane place seemed magical to me. I still have that photo too.

Rest in Peace, Margaret Mahy. And thank you for making a lonely teenage girl much less lonely and far bolder.

"I like to swim in deep water. I like to be where I can't feel the bottom and I have always liked that from the time I was very small, but there is always the fear of the shark sneaking up from the darkness below, and grabbing your foot. After you've been frightened of the shark for a while, you begin to tell stories about it, to take it over ... and in odd moments of life, when you have a little go at being the shark yourself, you recognise an old truth in what you are doing."

Taking Comfort

ShawlSometimes a project comes along that just makes you sigh with pleasure. This is one of those projects. It is work knitting, but it also feels like comfort knitting. This is a shawl pattern that is destined for my Doggerland collection. It is knitted in Navia Uno, a gorgeously soft yarn from the Faroe Islands. Technically it is a light fingering yarn - almost 3 ply - but I am working with it on 4.5mm needles which gives it a magical drape, yet a satisfactory weight to the fabric. I am currently on the second repeat of my stitch pattern - the world is distracting me a bit too much with other things, but I need to knuckle down as I have deadline knitting in addition to this shawl.

I am really enjoying working on this collection, though. Part of the fun is researching Mesolithic Europe but also thinking about materials that would have been available to the peoples at the time. I have decided against using glass beads and metal beads for obvious reasons - but how can I justify using wool when I cannot a) find any material on Mesolithic textiles and b) any evidence of sheep? Well, I am allowing myself artistic freedom to use wool but I will attempt to use relatively unprocessed yarn. Obviously knitters using my patterns can choose whichever materials they want, but I have had fun thinking about my choice of materials rather than just reaching for the merino/silk blend and that jar of glass beads.. as tempting as though it may be!

I have been reading a couple of non-related books, too. I gulped down Susan Hill's Howards End is on the Landing last night. I adore books about books and have a big section of my home library devoted to them. Sadly Landing is not so much a Book About Books but rather a Book About Famous People Susan Hill Has Met  - and it does suffer from it.

There are some very good bits tucked away in Hill's book: how to (not) sort books, the physical pleasures of reading a codex rather than an e-reader, collecting books over the years, and how to choose a title for book. However, the good bits are drowned out though by incessant name-dropping.

Did you know she had lunch with Benjamin Britten who liked her novel? That she once waited on a doorstep with TS Eliot? That E.M. Forster once stepped on her toes? That Kingsley Amis once said to her in 'a genuine tone' that he was very proud of his son? That she interviewed one Sitwell and recited Thomas Hardy to another Sitwell? That Bruce Chatwin's parents lived doors down from her? And so it goes on.

I am sticking to Anne Fadiman's wonderful Ex Libris, John Baxter's A Pound of Paper, and Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading. Hill's Landing ended up reading like chatter from a woman who has nothing interesting to say even about the most fascinating things. But did you know she once was on a reading panel with Roald Dahl who signed a book for her?

Sorry.

I better get back to work/comfort knitting. (Fortunately all this knitting coincides with the European Championship of Football - my homeboys won their first match!  I may have biked through Glasgow silently singing old football songs.. this is an expat thing, surely).

Friday Linkage

I came home from my holidays Monday. Apparently I cannot leave the UK for seven days before the place is going to hell in a handbag as I have been rushed off my feet ever since returning. I'd share details but nobody really needs to hear me whine about my mountain of work! Denmark was lovely - absolutely lovely - and I want to share some of the highlights with you. There will be knitting involved (of course there will) but there will also be some tales of history and culture. Before I do so in a series of posts, let me just link some of the things I've read/seen/enjoyed on the internet over the past few days..