Author: David Hebblethwaite

A squad of debuts: the Waterstone’s 11

28th January 2011 / / 9 Comments

This week, Jackie from Farm Lane Books has blogged about why she loves debut authors, and now her thoughts on the Waterstone’s 11. This is not a football team, but their selection of eleven debut novels, all to be published in the UK during 2011. A sample chapter of each book is on offer available at the Waterstone’s 11 website; Jackie has read all those and posted her reaction.

Well, I also like debut novels, so I thought I’d do the same as Jackie and see how our opinions compare. Many of the selected books were already on my radar, so naturally I am interested to find out what they’re like; and I’m intrigued by the ones that are completely new to me.

So, following the same order as Jackie, here we go:

David Bezmosgis, The Free World

1978: a family of Jewish refugees are travelling from Latvia to a new life in Chicago; this opening section follows them from Vienna to Rome. I liked the prose at the beginning, but found the extract as a whole difficult to grasp — partly, I think, because I’m unfamiliar with the subject matter. I gain the impression of a talented writer and a significant book; but, like Jackie, I’ll be waiting to see what others think before I decide whether to read on.

Anticipation rating: ***½

Sophie Hardach, The Registrar’s Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages

A Kurdish refugee enters Germany, and, years later, a German registrar (now working in Paris) who once knew him questions of the legitimacy of a forthcoming wedding. I love the writing in this extract — the opening scene is especially vivid — so this novel is definitely going on my list of books to investigate.

Anticipation rating: ****

Kevin Barry, City of Bohane

Mainstream-published books that could be read as speculative fiction will always pique my interest, and this near-future tale of crime bosses in an Irish city is no exception. Jackie didn’t much care for this extract; like her, I found the dialect quite heavy going, but I am intrigued and suspect I will return to the book.

Anticipation rating: ***½

Amanda Hodgkinson, 22 Britannia Road

A woman travels with her son from Poland to England, where she will be reunited after six long years with her husband, who had been serving in the Polish Corps and now has a house for the family in Ipswich — but the years apart have changed them. I’m ambivalent about this book — I think it’s well written, but at the same time, it doesn’t grab me. I’ll put it down as a ‘maybe’.

Anticipation rating: ***½

Shehan Karunatilaka, Chinaman

A dying sports journalist resolves to find a cricketer whom disappeared years ago — a cricketer he considers great, but who is otherwise largely unknown. Jackie doesn’t like cricket, and couldn’t drum up any enthusiasm for this extract. Fair enough. I don’t like cricket, either, but I thought this was great; the prose is vigorous and quirky, and I want to read more — I have a real sense that I could fall in love with this book.

Anticipation rating: *****

Stephen Kelman, Pigeon English

Narrated by a Ghanaian boy now living on a London estate, this was Jackie’s favourite extract of the eleven. Myself, I think Kelman creates the boy’s voice very well, and I can already see some interesting contrasts being established –yet I don’t have the instinctual feeling that the book is for me. I’ll be seeking out other opinions, I think.

Anticipation rating: ****

Sam Leith, The Coincidence Engine

The most clearly speculative title in the selection, with its “Directorate of the Extremely Improbable” and a hurricane that spontaneously builds an aeroplane from junk, this most certainly goes on my list. It could go either way — depending, I suspect, on how tongue-in-cheek it tries to be — but there’s enough interesting strangeness in this opening extract to make me want to find out.

Anticipation rating: ****½

Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife

In 1941, German bombers ruin a city in the Balkans, and a tiger escapes from the zoo, eventually making his way to the village where the narrator’s grandfather (then a boy) lives. For that boy, it is an occurence as wondrous as if Shere Khan himself had come to life. The synopsis of the book (which points to intriguing developments beyond the scope of this opening extract) alone would persuade me to read on; now I’ve read the sample, the prose does likewise. Put both factors together, and…

Anticipation rating: ****½

Johanna Skibsrud, The Sentimentalists

At the start of this extract, the narrator moves her ailing father to another town, to live with the father of his friend who died when the two were serving in Vietnam. I have less of a sense from reading the sample of what the novel as a whole might be like than I’ve had with any of the previous titles on the list; though I’m broadly in agreement with Jackie — the writing is nicely descriptive, but I’m not really inspired to read further.

Anticipation rating: ***

Mirza Waheed, The Collaborator

Kashmir, 1993: a teenage boy is made to collaborate with the Indian army; in the opening extract, he is sent to collect weapons and ID cards from the fallen bodies. There’s an effective contrast drawn between the boy’s valley before and after the army arrived, and the prose has considerable momentum. I don’t think it’s a book for my must-read list, but I can imagine returning to it in time.

Anticipation rating: ***½

Sarah Winman, When God Was a Rabbit

It’s quite difficult to give a flavour of this extract without going into too much or too little detail; to say it focuses on a girl growing up in the 1970s is too bald a description, but so much happens and is hinted at that it’s hard to summarise. But that doesn’t matter, because the prose is brilliant. Jackie wonders if the novel will be too busy for its own good, and that’s a possibility; but I’m optimistic, and I know I’ll be reading this book on its publication.

Anticipation rating: *****

===

So, out of eleven books, there are four I will definitely be reading (Chinaman, When God Was a Rabbit, The Coincidence Engine, and The Tiger’s Wife); several more I may read at some point; and, though not all the extracts are to my taste (nor would I expect them to be), there’s nothing that makes me go, ‘what were they thinking?’ I think this is a list which genuinely has something for everyone. Good work.

Naomi Mitchison, ‘The Hostages’ (1930)

27th January 2011 / / 1 Comment

The tale of three children held hostage by Romans, this was my first taste of Mitchison’s work, and I’ll be reading more. The plot of this story struck me as overly thin, but I liked the flow of the prose very much; so, though this piece wasn’t really for me, I am keen to see out others by the author.

Rating: ***½

Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology, Vol. 3 (2010)

26th January 2011 / / 5 Comments

The Bristol Short Story Prize is awarded annually to stories of up to 3,000 words, with the twenty shortlisted pieces being published in an anthology. On the table today is the anthology resulting from last year’s Prize, and a nicely wide-ranging selection it is, too.

The three stories on the winners’ podium are printed first in the anthology, so that seems a good place to start. The story awarded first prize by the judges is the shortest of all, just a few hundred words, yet it’s plain to see why the judges thought so highly of it. ‘Mum’s the Word’ by Valerie O’Riordan is about a girl being abused by her father; its detail is so chillingly precise (‘Three times with his grunting and the calloused hand over my mouth…’) that the story has a much greater impact than its length might suggest. A worthy winner.

Ian Madden was the second-placed author, for ‘Only the Sure of Foot’, a tale of grudges and secrets on a Scottish island. Madden evokes the harshness of his setting well, and how that has shaped his characters; I particularly like the ending, which effectively uses the landscape as a metaphor for the unspoken territory between two of its characters. Third prize went to a debut story, ‘Gardening’ by Rachel Howard, in which an old woman named Elena moves into the garden of Alice, who has become too afraid to leave her home. I like the matter-of-fact tone of this piece, the way that the rather odd situation becomes something important for both women – and the story ends in just the right place.

Though I’ve described the situation in ‘Gardening’ as rather odd, there’s a whole different level of oddness in Ben Walker’s ‘Bitter Gourd Fruit’, where a man from our present day wakes to find himself a severed head (with faculties and speech intact) on board a ship, apparently some time in the past. Walker tells his story with a straight face, and the occasional nod which acknowledges the absurdity of its premise (with the protagonist’s help, the ship’s crew end up rehearsing an adaptation of Highlander). It’s a tone that works well at keeping the story sufficiently grounded, all the way to the nicely-judged ending.

Mike Bonsall’s ‘Man Friday and the Sockball Championships’ is another story that takes a fantastical situation and works by focusing on the reality of that situation rather than on explaining it. Bonsall’s protagonist is imprisoned in one of a series of cubes in a vast cavern; he doesn’t hunger, and heals completely if injured – but he can go nowhere, and doesn’t know where he is or how he got there. Bonsall explores well the emotional state of his protagonist, and the varying stages of bewilderment, claustrophobia, resignation, and trying to cope. Natasha Tripney’s story, ‘An Experiment’, likewise features a protagonist trapped by forces beyond their control, though in a very different setting. Cecily is a (presumably poor) girl who has been taken into a wealthy household to receive the kind of education (in Latin, piano, arithmetic, and so on) that would otherwise have been denied her; here, Cecily’s benefactors assess her progress. This is a tale where the connotations of the title carry considerable weight: Cecily’s humanity has been eroded, because she is viewed in the story as an experimental subject, Tripney never allows her readers to lose sight of that, and it gives the story an effective note of unease.

Several stories in the anthology carry a sting in their tail. ‘A Sense of Humour’ by Rik Gammack – about a man who had himself cloned as insurance against dying, and hatches a plan to take advantage of the situation – is essentially a shaggy-dog story, but amply serves its purpose as a light, entertaining read. ‘Born Not Made’ by Rachel Sargeant works well enough without the twist at its end, as it transplants the rivalry between Mozart and Salieri to present-day Britain with the tale of Mozza, a young trouble-maker with an uncool interest in (and talent for) music – an interesting juxtaposition of subtext and surface tale. Darci Bysouth’s ‘Marrakech’ is a very effective piece in which a mother reminisces to her daughter about the time she lived in Marrakech. The city becomes a symbol of lost dreams; the contrast between the mother and her more practical-minded is brought out well; and the final shift of perception adds yet another layer to the story.

There are also pieces that transport us very well into the distinctive minds of their protagonists. For example, in ‘Ten Plastic Roses’ by Yana Stajno, the protagonist, Melanie, obsesses over the fake flowers she has thrown out. They were the last gift given to her by her ex-husband Richard, and now that final symbol of him is gone – except that the council’s waste collectors won’t take the roses away. Stajno controls the flow of the story well: Melanie’s attitude changes unexpectedly, and there’s a hint that her history with Richard may not be all that she claims. The narrative voice of Clare Wallace’s ‘But Then Again, Maybe It Is’ is superbly realised; Wallace’s narrator – a man out looking for the girlfriend who has left him – is consciously unreliable, revising his testimony as he goes, such that there are few secure footholds in the story. And Sherri Turner’s ‘Being Mother’ is an unsettling piece whose narrator takes her children out for an old-style tea-party (insisting they wear traditional clothes); layer on layer of perception and reality is peeled back as the story goes on, to great effect.

So, that’s a tour of some of the highlights of the third Bristol Prize anthology. There is some good stuff here, and the book is well worth seeking out.

Elsewhere
A.J. Kirby reviews the anthology for The Short Review

Books On The BBC

25th January 2011 / / 1 Comment

Today, the BBC announced a year of book-related programming, and has a rather extensive website detailing what’s going to be included. Naturally, I’m very pleased to see this, as we really don’t get enough book-related television in this country; and there are some interesting programmes lined up, from Sebastian Faulks on the characters in British fiction to a series on books as artefacts. I’m sure I will find plenty to watch.

And yet… I have a nagging sense that “Books On The BBC” may not be all that it could be. On the basis of the website, it seems to me that there could have been more diversity in terms of the presenters and books covered in the documentaries, and the works chosen for dramatic adaptation.

It also feels that too much of the discussion about new books is being tucked away on the radio, or in late-night television strands like The Review Show, which won’t give it such a high profile. I’m pleased to see there’ll be a Culture Show special on “Britain’s Best New Novelists”, but the most prominent new programme in the schedules is likely to be My Life in Books, essentially a bookish version of Desert Island Discs (hosted by Anne Robinson, who was quoted yesterday as saying that contemporary fiction was not her reading material of choice), a format which will inevitably focus on older books.

Those are my initial reservations, then, though of course I recognise that I’m talking about a season of programmes that hasn’t even begun. I do look forward to that season, and I hope it heralds a prominent place for book-related programming in this country.

Linda Grant, We Had It So Good (2011)

24th January 2011 / / 3 Comments

Linda Grant’s We Had It So Good is the first title selected for the Virago Book Club; it is fair to say that this novel would not be on my radar otherwise, but I am very glad to have read it. We Had It So Good follows three generations of the same family during the second half of the last century and the first years of the current one; the focus is particularly on the baby boomers of the family, but there are themes and patterns that run across the experiences of the different generations.

Stephen Newman is an American who comes to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship in the 1960s, but is expelled on the discovery of his drug-manufacturing activities. Not wishing to be drafted to Vietnam, the only way that Stephen can avoid having to return to the US is to marry Andrea, the English girl he met and fell in love with at Oxford. Though this is rather a marriage of convenience, it lasts; the couple move to London, at first living in an ‘urban commune,’ as their friend Ivan puts it (‘Don’t think of it as a squat,’ p. 58), but eventually making successful careers, he as a maker of science programmes for the BBC, she as a psychotherapist. They have children, Max and Marianne, whose lives come to have their own ups and downs – then Stephen finds himself in his fifties, wondering what happened to the kid he still feels he is.

Stephen is the fulcrum of Grant’s novel, though the actual structure is episodic, moving between viewpoint characters without a fixed pattern (there are a couple of confusing points where viewpoint shifts within a scene, but this is a minor issue). The effect is a series of moments building up into a whole – and, happily, We Had It So Good works well at both those levels.

Grant captures some very interesting and effective moments on the page. Sometimes, this is a result of her description; here, for example, is the young Stephen reflecting on his differing perceptions of the US and UK :

Stephen felt that he had come from a country so brand new that if you peeled off the layers of the present you would only find more present. Here, the continuous uncovering of the past, history’s insistence of not getting out of the way, was depressing. It reminded you that soon you would be bones under the ground. One day you might be a fossil unearthed and on display in the Pitt Rivers museum. (p. 13)

At other times, there are striking contrasts within scenes. One example is when Grace (one of Andrea’s and Stephen’s friends from Oxford who embraced fully their friendship group’s 1960s ideals, and has spent her life travelling abroad) visits for Christmas. Young Marianne has built up a mental image of Grace as an exotic, almost fantastical figure, with wonderful stories to tell; it’s quite a shock to her (and us) to then meet Grace and find instead a weathered woman who insults Marianne as soon as looking at her.

Shortly after this, there’s another particularly strong scene where Max performs a magic show for the assembled friends and family, and his parents’ differing reactions really illuminate their characters: he’s absorbed in trying to work out how the tricks are done, whilst she asks herself if Max’s desire to perform means she didn’t give him enough attention when he was younger. I find these and other observations of Grant’s very acute.

At the broader structural level, We had It So Good highlights the turn of the generational wheel, and how life never quite turns out the way one expects. When Stephen looks back on his life and wonders how he got from there to here, from his youthful dreams to a middle-age which is comfortable, but still middle age, we might wonder the same – though each of his and Andrea’s decisions though life make sense at the time, we have experienced them as episodes, and so have the same sense (though for a different reason) of not understanding the complete journey.

In addition to this, the tales of the younger Andrea’s and Stephen’s exploits seem unreal to their children, who can’t reconcile what they hear with the image they have of their parents. Yet the same goes for Stephen’s parents, aspects of whose earlier lives are as unreal to him; and there is a sense that Marianne and Max are living stories that will in turn seem extraordinary to their children. So it goes on. We Had It So Good is fine both as a series of snapshots, and a larger portrait of life. And, in Linda Grant, I have another author whose work I should investigate further.

Further links
Linda Grant’s website
Grant’s video introduction to the novel
Sam Jordison interviews Grant
For Books’ Sake review of We Had It So Good

Richard Hughes, ‘A Night at a Cottage’ (1926)

23rd January 2011 / / 1 Comment

A three-page piece about an escaped prisoner who, on a rainy night, takes refuge in an abandoned cottage, where he meets a mysterious stranger. I don’t think this story has withstood the passing of time very well: its ideas are over-familiar now, and the telling isn’t interesting enough to compensate.

Rating: **½

The book I hated at school

22nd January 2011 / / 12 Comments

Literary Blog Hop

A question from the Literary Blog Hop:

Discuss a work of literary merit that you hated when you were made to read it in school or university. Why did you dislike it? 

I suspect that many people who studied GCSE English in the north of England (and, for all I know, further afield) had Barry Hines’s 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave (filmed the year after as Kes by Ken Loach) as one of their set texts. This is the story of Billy Casper, a young lad living in a South Yorkshire mining town. His father has left home, his older brother is a bully, and his mother has no time for Billy, being more occupied with a string of affairs. School is no better: Billy can barely read or write, is often picked on by the other boys, and the teachers (with the exception of one) treat him as a no-hoper. Although he’s about to leave school, Billy has no idea what he’ll do next. But there is one good thing in the boy’s life: Kes, the kestrel Billy has trained himself and is highly adept at handling.

‘Hate’ is perhaps too strong a word for my reaction to the book at the time, but certainly I didn’t get along with it. I think this was because it was so much the opposite of the fantasy I was particularly into reading at the time, and I just didn’t know how to appreciate novels like A Kestrel for a Knave on their own terms. Yes, I could interpret the book well enough to write an essay on it, but I could see nothing beyond that other than a rather miserable story that had nothing to say to me.

I re-read A Kestrel for a Knave a couple of years ago, to see what I could get from it now I was a better reader. There was no dramatic change — I didn’t suddenly fall in love with the novel — but I did find more in it to value. It wasn’t quite as miserable a book as I’d remembered, and I could appreciate it as a study of a character who’s been prevented by circumstances from making the most of (or perhaps even recognising) his talents.

I have a question for anyone reading this: did studying literature at high school help or hinder your love of reading? For myself, I wish I had been as open to different kinds of literature as I am now. Of course, I can remind myself that developing as a reader is an ongoing process, that where I am as a reader is more important than where I was… but, still, it would have been good if I could have seen more back then than just another essay to be written.

Firestation Book Swap, 20th January 2011

21st January 2011 / / 5 Comments

Having thoroughly enjoyed the Firestation Book Swap on Tour at the London Review Bookshop last August, I thought it was about time I checked out the Book Swap on its home turf; so off I went to Windsor last night. The Firestation Arts Centre is a lovely little theatre space in what used to be, yes, Windsor’s fire station (it still has the bright red doors), police station and magistrates’ court. The stage was decked out with chairs for the hosts, sofa for the guests – and, of course, a table full of cake.

Tonight, Scott Pack was joined by a guest co-host, Robbie Hudson, and the two guest authors were Elizabeth Buchan and Emma Townshend. I hadn’t read books by either of the latter, but certainly became interested in doing so after hearing them talk about their work. Of the two, I was instinctively more interested in Townshend’s book, Darwin’s Dogs (which examines the significance that Darwin’s pet dogs had in shaping his work), and it is now definitely on my to-read pile; but Buchan’s Separate Beds (about a couple whose relationship is already under strain who then have to deal with their family moving back in because the financial situation demands it) also sounds worth a read.

The conversation was as varied and entertaining as I remember last time; this is the sort of event where an author may be asked, ‘What’s the difference between Darwin’s genius and Shakespeare’s genius?’ just as she’s about to tuck into a macaroon, or the host may give impromptu tips on how to get five minutes’ silence at a children’s party. You just never know.

Speaking of which: the swapping. I took along my copy of Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey, and ended up swapping it for Harry Hill’s Whopping Great Joke Book, which is about as random a swap as I can imagine. Sitting next to me was my fellow-blogger Jackie from Farm Lane Books, who tried unsuccessfully to exchange her copy of David Nicholls’ One Day (the most-swapped book in the history of the event, said Scott), and very kindly gave it to me afterwards – thanks, Jackie!

And so, I returned home with new books to read, and further books to go on the ‘must read that some time’ list. Oh, and the cake was delicious, too.

Jon McGregor, Even the Dogs (2010)

19th January 2011 / / 5 Comments

At the tail end of last year, I read Jon McGregor’s piece in the BBC National Short Story Award anthology, and liked it very much. After that, I was bound to read one of his novels at some point; Even the Dogs is on the current TV Book Club list, so now seems as good a time as any. The distinctive style and facility with language that I found in the story are here again in this novel, yet I don’t find myself quite as enthusiastic this time around.

In the final week of the year, the body of an alcoholic named Robert Radcliffe is found in his flat; he has slipped through the cracks in society, and the authorities try to piece together who he was. However, the book’s narrators (an unspecified chorus of ‘we’, possibly dead, but in any case unseen and anonymous, like Robert) know who he is, and offer us glimpses into both Robert’s life and those of his friends, who struggle with their own issues of homelessness and addiction.

Even the Dogs is a relatively short novel (little over 200 pages), and that is its ideal length; McGregor’s dense and fragmented prose is most effective in such small, intense bursts. It’s a style that enables the novel to reflect at a structural level the lives of its characters. A very striking example is the second chapter, which focuses on Danny, the friend who first found Robert’s body but didn’t go to the police about it. Danny wanders the city trying to find Robert’s daughter, Laura – trying to find anyone he can tell. There are sentence-fragments throughout the novel, but it’s even more noticeable in this chapter, because each section ends in an unfinished sentence. The sense one gains (through this technique, the constant changes of scene, and simply through the events of Danny’s search) is of a life that never settles – that never can settle.

Elsewhere in the novel, McGregor uses juxtaposition to great effect, as in the fourth and fifth chapters, which deal respectively with the autopsy and inquest. The dry formalities of these official procedures are intercut with scenes from other viewpoints, and this creates some powerful contrasts. For example, the narrators note how methodical and in-depth is the autopsy examination of Robert’s body, and reflect ruefully that it’s more attention than Robert and his friends have ever received in life. Then there are the phrases from group therapy sessions (‘Who’s got something they feel they can share’) studded through the narrative, which serve as emblems of the distance between the realities of the characters’ lives and the standard official responses to them (‘You want to start paying more attention pal this stuff’s everywhere’, p. 67).

And yet, for all that I think Even the Dogs is an effective piece of work, I find it easier to admire than to like. There’s something about its very focus that makes it difficult to view the novel truly from the inside, as it were. Still, I’m glad to have read the book, and will be reading McGregor’s work again in the future.

Links
Jon McGregor’s website
Extract from Even the Dogs
Interview with McGregor at TheExcerpt.com
Even the Dogs blogged elsewhere: Dovegreyreader; Asylum; KevinfromCanada; Bookmunch.

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