Author: David Hebblethwaite

BBC National Short Story Award 2015: ‘Broderie Anglaise’ by Frances Leviston

2nd October 2015 / / 0 Comments

This is part of a series of posts about the shortlist for the 2015 BBC National Short Story Award.

Invited to her cousin’s wedding – but “not maid of honour, not even a bridesmaid” – a young woman determines to take a private revenge by wearing a dress that will subtly outshine the bride and annoy that side of the family. Unable to find something suitable in the shops, she decides to make her own in secret. The trouble is that, no matter what method she tries, she can’t quite get the hang of it.

There were times when I found Leviston’s first-person narration a little over-egged (that is, more like a writer’s voice than a character’s), especially in comparison to the snappier rhythms of the contemporary dialogue. But I guess you could also take the view that it creates a contrast between the narrator’s interior and exterior life, in a story which is all about breaking down emotional barriers. The protagonist’s relationship with her mother is transformed through the act of making this dress, leading to the kind of symbolic patterning for which I always have a soft spot in fiction.

Listen to a reading of ‘Broderie Anglaise’

Anthology details (Foyles affiliate link)

The BBC National Short Story Award 2015, Comma Press paperback

BBC National Short Story Award 2015: ‘Bunny’ by Mark Haddon

2nd October 2015 / / 2 Comments

This is part of a series of posts about the shortlist for the 2015 BBC National Short Story Award.

I was not much enamoured of this story at all, I’m sorry to say. Birdy Wallis is a morbidly obese twentysomething who finds the scope of his world contracting, until he’s befriended by Leah, an old acquaintance from school. The tale is one of two characters searching for an emotional connection: Birdy stuck in his house, and Leah who never followed her friends to the big city.

There’s some effective use of rhythm and repetition in Haddon’s prose, and (for example) the opening passage detailing Birdy’s excesses is appropriately enticing and repulsive at the same time. But ‘Birdy’ ends up falling awkwardly between several stools: it’s a character study that doesn’t get under the skin of its characters enough for my liking; its realist approach points towards social commentary, but ultimately it doesn’t seem to say much; it has a touch of the macabre that doesn’t gel with the rest, and leaves the story’s ending unearned. Frustrating.

Listen to a reading of ‘Bunny’

Anthology details (Foyles affiliate link)

The BBC National Short Story Award 2015, Comma Press paperback

BBC National Short Story Award 2015: ‘Briar Road’ by Jonathan Buckley

1st October 2015 / / 0 Comments

It’s BBC National Short Story Award time again, and they’ve kindly sent me an copy of the shortlist anthology, so I can do a story-by-story blog of the list. I’ll be going through each of the five stories, before the winner is announced on Tuesday. It’s been a good few years since I’ve done one of these, so I’m excited to get started…

First up, Jonathan Buckley’s ‘Briar Road’, which begins with its narrator observing the house she’s about to visit. If I’m honest, some of the imagery here feels a little too crisp and studied (“Every sill gleams like milk”); but this woman’s occupation and purpose eventually justify her narrative voice. She is a psychic, come to help a family whose daughter has gone missing; the way she describes it, her talent is like picking up traces that others wouldn’t notice in the manner of someone with a more acute sense of  smell or taste, so it’s only natural that she should be finely observant, and her voice rather measured.

‘Briar Road’ is a story of familial tensions being revealed, albeit in an understated way. The trouble for me is that, on the one hand, I find it short on ambiguity (although Buckley doesn’t spell everything out, you can infer pretty clearly); but, on the other, the sheen of the prose creates a distancing effect which lessens the story’s emotional impact, despite its directness. I find ‘Briar Road’ fine as it goes; but I would have wished for more.

Listen to a reading of ‘Briar Road’

Anthology details (Foyles affiliate link)

The BBC National Short Story Award 2015, Comma Press paperback

Goldsmiths Prize 2015: the shortlist

1st October 2015 / / 3 Comments

This year, I thought I would pay closer attention to the Goldsmiths Prize, for fiction that “breaks the mould or opens up new possibilities for the novel form”, as my reading is leaning more and more in that direction. The 2015 shortlist was announced this morning:

Beatlebone by Kevin Barry (Canongate)

Acts of the Assassins by Richard Beard (Harvill Secker)

Satin Island by Tom McCarthy (Jonathan Cape)

The Field of the Cloth of Gold by Magnus Mills (Bloomsbury)

Grief is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter (Faber & Faber)

Lurid & Cute by Adam Thirlwell (Jonathan Cape)

(Links above are Foyles affiliate links.)

First impressions? It’s disappointing that the list is all white and all male (and for a prize whose previous winners have both been women), and that all the books are from relatively large publishers (in the past, the Goldsmiths has shone a spotlight on the likes of CB Editions and Galley Beggar Press).

Still, this is the shortlist we have, so what about the books? The only I’ve read so far is Satin Island, which I liked (read my thoughts here and here). An extract from Lurid & Cute was published in the 2013 Best of Young British Novelists issue of Granta; I was unsure at the time how its narrative voice would fare at novel length, so count me as on the fence about that one.

The others all intrigue me. I know Kevin Barry from reading his short fiction, but I’ve yet to read him at novel length. Richard Beard has been on my list of authors-to-read for a while.  I’ve never yet been tempted to read Magnus Mills, but have heard praise for him from such different quarters over the years that maybe now is the time. Max Porter I know as an editor at Granta Books, and have heard a lot of good things about his first novel.

The winner will be announced on 11 November, and the chances of my actually being able to read the full shortlist before then are pretty slim. So I’m just going to read what I can, but I hope to find some good stuff along the way.

The Black Country: We Love This Book review

28th September 2015 / / 0 Comments

We Love This Book have my review of The Black Country, the fascinating debut novel by Kerry Hadley-Pryce (and another of Nicholas Royle’s finds for Salt Publishing, which include Ian Parkinson’s The Beginning of the End and Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse amongst others). It’s about a couple whose lives begin to disintegrate when they’re involved in a road accident one night – but the novel is transformed by its fuzzy prose style:

Harry pads out his memory of this day quite a bit. Maybe what he tells us is important. We’ll decide that. he tells of a time during the service when he reached for Maddie’s hand, prompted by what he calls a ‘prickle of a memory’ — Harry’s the type to say things like that — a prickle of a memory of a time when Gerald suggested the two of them work together, help each other out, pool ideas. So they worked together for the first time, reading some book or other. Harry says he wasn’t sure he got it, but Maddie did. Maddie got it, she understood it. If we let her, she#ll go on about how she found it all so brilliant, and Harry, being Harry, sort of fell for her then. That’s what he says.

Read the full review here.

Book details (Foyles affiliate link)

The Black Country (2015) by Kerry Hadley-Pryce, Salt paperback

Learning to read Kazuo Ishiguro

22nd September 2015 / / 8 Comments

Recently I’ve started to read The Buried Giant, another novel that I thought might make the cut for next week’s Goldsmiths Prize shortlist. Reading Kazuo Ishiguro has very much been a learning process for me, and one that’s been documented on the blog – so I thought I’d take a look back…

NocturnesThe first Ishiguro book that I read was his novella collection, Nocturnes, shortly after its publication in 2009. Reading my review back now makes me wince – not because I didn’t get along with the book, but because I’m not happy with how the review turned out. For one thing, it’s snarkier than I would generally write – and snark, fun though it may be, is rarely conducive to careful thought. Sure enough, I did something that I now hate to see in discussion of books: I came up against something unexpected, and dismissed it out of hand without really thinking about it. I put my own terms of engagement ahead of the book’s.

I was under the assumption at the time that Ishiguro was a writer of transparent realism, but now I’m not so sure. And that means I’m on shaky ground treating something of his as ‘unrealistic’, especially without stopping to think what that means, and why the fiction might be that way. This is not to say that I would inevitably like Nocturnes more if I read it now; but I do think there was something fundamental that I didn’t (couldn’t?) appreciate about it.

Remains

At the time I wasn’t especially keen to read Ishiguro again, and it took a few years before I felt the time was right. I went for The Remains of the Day (1989), and was clearly much more receptive to what Ishiguro was doing. Yet I wonder if I didn’t still miss something. My review of Remains is framed as saying, “I can see the same techniques here as I did in Nocturnes, but in this book they work.” In other words, I was still reading from that assumption of transparent realism. Now, granted, transparent realism is what the novel looks like; and I think it’s fair to say that Ishiguro’s fiction has a ‘default’ voice. But, still…

I gather that The Buried Giant is a little different from Ishiguro’s work, and certainly it has garnered a variety of puzzled reactions, which is partly what leads me to suspect that there may be some thread in his writing that I’ve not yet appreciated. Perhaps what I need to do is step back and consider the individual writer – to see his books as Kazuo Ishiguro books first and foremost.

Book details (Foyles affiliate links)

The Buried Giant (2015) by Kazuo Ishiguro, Faber & Faber hardback

Nocturnes (2009) by Kazuo Ishiguro, Faber & Faber paperback

The Remains of the Day (1989) by Kazuo Ishiguro, Faber & Faber paperback

The Disappearance of Signora Giulia

17th September 2015 / / 7 Comments

Sometimes only a sharp burst of crime fiction will do. Pushkin Press have just launched a new imprint for 20th-centurycrime in translation, Pushkin Vertigo. I tried one of their first titles, Piero Chiara’s The Disappearance of Signora Giulia.

The respected lawyer Esengrini, confides in Commissario Sciancalepre, that his wife Giulia – 22 years his junior – has vanished. Sciancalepre investigates, following up a lead suggesting that Giulia may have been seeing another man – but it comes to nothing; and several years go by, with progress on the case piecemeal at best.

Despite the lengthy duration of its narrative time, The Disappearance of Signora Giulia is only 120 pages long, and so has no room to hang about. Chiara’s novel has the efficiency of a well-run investigation, and there’s also a cool and business-like tone to Jill Foulston’s translation from the Italian. One thing I particularly like about the book is that, for all its twists and revelations, the full truth still feels elusive. Something has happened beyond the confines of the narrative, and we’re left in a similar position to a detective plunged into another person’s life, having to piece together incomplete information. The Disappearance of Signora Giulia turned out to be just the brisk literary walk that I needed, and I’ll be keen to see what else Pushkin Vertigo has to offer in the months ahead.

Book details (Foyles affiliate link)

The Disappearance of Signora Giulia (1970) by Piero Chiara, tr. Jill Foulston (2015), Pushkin Vertigo paperback

Satin Island: skimming over the surface

9th September 2015 / / 2 Comments

Read the first post in this blog series on Satin Island here.

It’s one thing to read a novel that promises a revelation about the Secret of the World, and to wonder whether that revelation will actually arrive. It’s another thing when that novel is by Tom McCarthy, and you have even the slightest knowledge of the kind of writer he is. Then, you know that the promise is made with crossed fingers.

Which is to say: I never believed for one page of Satin Island that U. would actually complete his Great Report. Naturally, this affected my reading: I became more of a detached observer. It wasn’t about what U. uncovered, but about the ebb and flow of the network. And it’s not necessarily a voyage of discovery with the wind in one’s sails and the tang of salt on the air: rather, it’s the slow horror of skimming over a gleaming surface with no way to get beneath. As U. wonders at one point: maybe the Great Report on our age is in the process of being written in the algorithms of our online lives, and maybe only a computer could interpret it.

One of the most striking moments in Satin Island for me occurs when U. is visiting a hospital ward, and feels like shouting: “if you can’t save these people,  at least clean the windows.” Sometimes when people talk about books, there’s an implicit opposition (one I don’t agree with) between the intellectual and emotional, with the intellectual being considered somehow insincere. A book like Satin Island might be seen that way, but I think the quotation just above shows that it’s really about different modes of expression. U. responds to the suffering he sees in the only way he can – the only way in which the book’s framework allows him: maybe the deeper problems of the world cannot be solved, but can’t we at least do this? It’s a flash of desperate anger – but, tellingly, U. cannot bring himself to say it out loud. The surface must not be disturbed, which is perhaps the darkest thought of all.

Book details (Foyles affiliate link)

Satin Island (2015) by Tom McCarthy, Jonathan Cape hardback

Satin Island: entering the network

7th September 2015 / / 5 Comments

Becky’s comment on my post from yesterday on the UK covers of C and Satin Island has made me realise that the ‘featured image’ I set for the top of each post doesn’t appear to email subscribers (or, presumably, in RSS readers). So the chances are that, unless you visited the site, you wouldn’t have seen what I was comparing. Here they are:

C Satin Island

Next time I blog about book covers, I’ll remember to put them in the body of the post! Anyway, this post is about beginning to read Satin Island, so…

Tom McCarthy’s protagonist, U., is a ‘corporate anthropologist’, working for an unspecified company, analysing the threads of contemporary culture in order to produce the Great Report that will tie them all together to tell “the First and Last Word on our age.” Images of networks and their implied underlying patterns abound, from the pipes of the Company’s ventilation system to a parade of rollerbladers in Paris. Each paragraph of the novel is numbered like a business report, perhaps encouraging the reader to think that this text, this book, might be the Great Report itself. And McCarthy’s long, tumbling sentences create the feeling of being drawn into a web:

To a soundtrack, incongruous, of looped, recorded messages and chimes, a fruit-machine’s idle-tune, snatches of other people’s conversations and the staggered, intermittent hiss, quieter or louder, of steam-arms at espresso bars dotted about the terminal, a memory came to me: of free-wheeling down a hill as a child, riding my second bike.

But this is a Tom McCarthy novel, and the hints are already there from the beginning that the inner depths for which we may hope are just an illusion. In the first chapter, U. is waiting in the airport terminal, surrounded by screens – phones, computers, the rolling news channel which packages up bombing and oil spills alongside the sports highlights. It’s a whirlwind of a chapter that shows just how easily the most serious events can be turned into gleaming surface detail.

(More on that to follow…)

Book details (Foyles affiliate link)

Satin Island (2015) by Tom McCarthy, Jonathan Cape hardback

Tom McCarthy’s covers

6th September 2015 / / 4 Comments

Considering how much I enjoyed Remainder when I read it in 2007, I’m not quite sure why I haven’t read another Tom McCarthy novel since. But now I’ve picked up his latest, Satin Island, in anticipation that it might be shortlisted for this year’s Goldsmiths Prize. I’ve only just begun, but already I’m warming to it (and quite amused by the sly reference on the second page to the ending of Remainder).

I’ll come back to the reading of Satin Island at a later date; but for now, I just want to mention the cover. I love a thoughtful cover design, and there’s a wonderful symmetry between the UK covers of the new novel and McCarthy’s previous one, C.

Unless you remembered the cover for C, it probably wouldn’t occur to you that there was a connection; but put them side-by-side and it becomes clear: the inversion of black and white; the letter C turned on its side and given colour to become a buffer symbol (the shape of which also nods to the moniker of Satin Island’s narrator, U.); the dripping oil that echoes the squiggles/networks in the background of C.

These two novels are five years apart, and as far as I know they have no particular link beyond the author; yet the designers have gone to the trouble of doing this. I want to thank them for it, because I appreciate the care and attention they’ve put in.

(One more thing I love: as the Vintage designers’ blog reveals, the oil effect was achieved by using black treacle. Inspired!)

Book details (Foyles affiliate links)

Remainder (2005) by Tom McCarthy, Alma paperback

Satin Island (2015) by Tom McCarthy, Jonathan Cape hardback

C (2010) by Tom McCarthy, Vintage paperback

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