Author: David Hebblethwaite

Still: ‘Morayo’ by Sarah Ladipo Manyika

1st November 2012 / / 1 Comment

The photograph: rows of empty bookshelves.

The story: Morayo, an old woman about to move into a nursing home, thinks about her beloved books, which are shortly to join her – but Tom, the social worker set to bring them over can see only a messy pile that needs to be disposed of as efficiently as possible. This piece is both a portrait of the emotional value that books can have to someone; but it’s also a poignant tale of loss – with Tom”s failure to recognise or consider which books matter most to Morayo acting as an indication that the person she has been is becoming lost.

Links: Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s website / interview with Ladipo Manyika about her story

This is one of a series of posts on the anthology Still. Click here to read the rest.

October wrap-up

31st October 2012 / / 0 Comments

The best book that I read in October was Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt (the latest title from And Other Stories, publishers of Deborah Levy’s Booker-shortlisted Swimming Home). It’s a disturbing but superbly realised study of how language and thought can be manipulated to make something abhorrent start to seem reasonable.

Harry Karlinsky’s debut novel, The Evolution of Inanimate Objects, is a biography of a fictitious historical character — Thomas Darwin, youngest child of Charles, who thought he could apply his father’s theories to artefacts. It’s a playful mixture of fact and fiction, a poignant character study, and a reflection on science. I reviewed it for Strange Horizons.

More reviews from October:

…and I continued my story-by-story review of Roelof Bakker’s anthology Still.

In features:

Still: ‘Sere’ by David Rose

30th October 2012 / / 1 Comment

The photograph: the corner of a room, with a flyer for an old amateur operatic performance lying among the dust and flakes of wallpaper.

The story: the word ‘sere’ means ‘dry’ or ‘withered’, and the old narrator of this piece is feeling that way in relation to the modern world. Rose captures a certain stiff formality in the voice of his protagonist; and the range of details focused on creates an effective sense of diffuseness.

Links: David Rose’s website / interview with Rose on his story

This is one of a series of posts on the anthology Still. Click here to read the rest.

Book notes: debuts by Martine McDonagh and Caroline Cass

28th October 2012 / / 1 Comment

Martine McDonagh, I have waited, and you have come (2006/12)

Thirty years hence, when climate change has worn away most of the society we know, Rachel lives alone in an old mill in Cheshire. She has little desire for human contact, avoiding the nearby communes, but does make the odd trip to the market for supplies. It’s there where Noah, a trader, invites Rachel to meet up later (it seems to hesitant to be called a ‘date’). She agrees, but finds not Noah waiting for her at the local pub, but a man named Jez White, who claims to be a friend of Noah’s. White appears more and more in Rachel’s life, and we see from pages of his journal that he’s had an eye on her for some time – but Rachel is on her own search for the truth about Jez White.

I have waited, and you have come is rather subdued in tone, as befits a novel narrated by such an insular character as Rachel. Her narrative voice is largely focused on process and physical detail, which works well for the book in a number of ways. It brings to life the grey dampness of the landscape, and its uncertainty – familiar place names and institutions, but no longer as tightly bound into a society. It also makes it harder to anticipate Rachel’s ultimate intention, leading to an effectively understated ending.

Links: Martine McDonagh’s website / Myriad Editions, the publisher

Caroline Cass, The Plant Hunter’s Tale (2012)

In Victorian England, Rullie Montrose is a plant hunter, who travels the world in search of newplant specimens to bring back to Kew or his own garden. In this short novel by Caroline Cass, he heads to the Himalayan kingdom of Hunza, said to be the home of one of the rarest of all flowering plants. When Rullie reaches his destinations, he learns from Hunza’s ruler, Zafran Khan, that the kingdom has no such plant. But it does have delicious apricot trees, a few seedlings of which Khan is prepared to give Rullie – in exchange for all his gold. Rullie returns to Hunza several times over the next few years – for more apricots, yes, but he has also taken a shine to Zafran Khan’s young daughter.

The Plant Hunter’s Tale is a story of obsession – a portrait of man clearly more at home on his search than staying with his wife Charlotte in the English countryside. Cass conveys Rullie’s restlessness well, though I found some of the secondary characters less successful (Zafran Khan’s daughter in particular tends to come across as a cipher). But there’s an effective melancholy to the ending, where the novel takes on more of a folktale shape – and we see the inevitable coming just before it happens.

Link: Quartet Books, the publisher

Still: ‘A Job Worth Doing’ by S.J. Butler

27th October 2012 / / 1 Comment

The photograph: an old telephone, with its handset off the cradle, sitting on a large wooden meeting-room table.

The story: a cleaner goes to do one last shift at the defunct and empty town hall. This story recalls (coincidentally) the first entry in Still, ‘Midnight Hollow’, which takes a very similar premise. Butler’s story is as evocative as Piggott’s, but the tone is warmer, less melancholic. If ‘Midnight Hollow’ is a story of loss, ‘A Job Worth Doing’ is more a celebration of what has passed.

Links: S.J. Butler’s website / interview with Butler about her story

This is one of a series of posts on the anthology Still. Click here to read the rest.

Paul Rooney, Dust and Other Stories (2012)

26th October 2012 / / 2 Comments

Paul Rooney is an artist who often works with text-based materials. Looking at the publication credits, many of the pieces in Dust first appeared in other forms – as video or sound works, or different kinds of written text. Now they’ve been brought together in this collection, a joint publication by Akerman Daly and Aye-Aye Books.

Voice is a key concern in these stories, and perhaps especially the extent to which the ‘voice’ of a story can be trusted. In ‘Towards the Heavenly Void, a musician with a sideline in mediumship finds himself channelling the voice of Les Dawson – or at least of someone who claims that the comedian we know as Les Dawson was someone with whom he swapped lives, whilst the man who’s ‘talking’ went off to South America in search of Che Guevara. Rooney captures the tone and character of one of Dawson’s monologues, leaving us with layers of voice that – as the tale’s ending symbolises – evaporate when you try to unpick them.

Rooney also makes use of different textual forms in Dust. ‘Transcript’ (a collaboration with Will Rose) purports to document a Q&A session between Rooney, Rose, and a film-maker. The talk soon gets maddeningly and entertainingly out of hand with audience interruptions, which dissolve the text into a clamour of voices – all overlaid with the interventions of the anonymous transcriber. It’s typical of Rooney’s playful approach that, as a character, the author says nothing; though of course his words are all over this piece.

Other stories have more conventional structures but come at the author’s concerns in equally effective ways. ‘Words and Silence’ tells of a call centre worker who creates elaborate personas for herself when making calls; eventually her imaginings threaten to swamp her view of reality. ‘The Kendal Iconoclasm’ turns a spy thriller into a tale of existential horror: its characters know they’re in a story – they can see it being typed out in front of their eyes – but not who the writer (or writers) are. Rooney’s protagonist tries to exert some control as he heads up the motorway, but he seems not to realise just how deeply enmeshed he is in the story – there’s no escaping from this escapist fiction. It’s just one example of the treachery of stories and words, as seen in so many ways throughout this collection.

Any Cop? Yes – taken together, the stories of Dust are an interesting exploration of voice and text. And Rooney’s diverse approaches means that there’ll always be something different on the next page.

(This review also appears at Bookmunch.)

Still: ‘Noise’ by James Higgerson

25th October 2012 / / 1 Comment

The photograph: an enclosed roof space, viewed through a series of triangular support frames, with lamps hanging above. You can almost hear the harsh echoes that would result from any loud noise here.

The story: Higgerson’s protagonist tries to explain to his counsellor/therapist how everything ‘got too loud’ for him. What follows is a snappy, rhythmic jaunt through the cacophony of modern life.

Links: James Higgerson’s website / interview with Higgerson on his story

This is one of a series of posts on the anthology Still. Click here to read the rest.

Harry Karlinsky, The Evolution of Inanimate Objects (2012): Strange Horizons review

24th October 2012 / / 0 Comments

Strange Horizons have published my review of The Evolution of Inanimate Objects by Harry Karlinsky. I was talking yesterday about creative approaches to the material of sf, and here’s one — a pseudo-historical biography of Charles Darwin’s (fictional) son Thomas, who applies his father’s theories of evolution to the development and classification of everyday items.

This is a playful concept, but Karlinsky’s novel is more than a diversion: it’s also an effective character study, and a reflection on science and how it progresses (see Alan Bowden for more on that point).

Click here to read my review in full.

The art of science fiction

23rd October 2012 / / 6 Comments

Martin Lewis has been wondering just how many (or how few) contemporary science fiction writers are really stretching with their art – not just writing well, but going further to create works which are uniquely their own, rather than cleaving too closely to the well-worn paths of the genre. People like M. John Harrison, Christopher Priest, Adam Roberts… I joined in with the comments, which concluded that it’s hard to think of many such authors.

This discussion comes in the wake of a review by the science fiction critic Paul Kincaid of three ‘best of the year’ anthologies, in which he argued that many of the stories in those books felt tired, carried a sense of going through the motions. Responses to Kincaid’s review included Martin Lewis’s one about aesthetics, and Jonathan McCalmont‘s more political take, where he suggested that sf authors were shying away from serious engagement with the issues facing us now and in the future.

I recognise the problem McCalmont highlights, but I’m closer to Lewis’s view here. Partly this is because, by inclination, I’m more interested in the artistry of fiction than its politics. But it’s also because I think there are many valid ways of using the tropes of sf to create fiction with substance – and that it’s substance in general that is most lacking from contemporary sf  (to be clear, by ‘substance’ I mean the kind of artistry for which Lewis is calling).

There’s a clear reluctance in the published genre right now to write across established conventions rather than within them. Martin Lewis comes up against some of the problems inherent in this when he sees ‘resource sf’ take contemporary issues of scarcity and consumption and then fall back on traditional narrative patterns, thereby losing its edge. Fiction can’t engage fully with the specifics of issues unless it develops specific approaches to writing about them. This is why Adam Roberts’ By Light Alone speaks so loudly to the present: not just because its concerns are current, but because there’s also a freshness to how it treats them.

But the tropes and tools of science fiction don’t belong solely in the box marked ‘science fiction’, and haven’t for some time. I would go so far as to say that you are more likely to find creative approaches to sf (however successful) in works published as mainstream. It’s there where writers seem to feel most inclined to go their own way with sf tropes. However successful you consider (say) Girl Reading, A Visit from the Goon Squad, or How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, all present a distinctive vision; their authors shape the material of sf in ways that others wouldn’t. The field is richer because of that.

This is not to say that genre sf couldn’t also show the mainstream a thing or two. A couple of months ago, Max Cairnduff argued in a blog post that contemporary Anglo-American literature wasn’t doing enough to engage with the contemporary world. It’s not all that different from the challenge Jonathan McCalmont makes towards sf. I could see mainstream realist literature drawing usefully on the techniques science fiction has for making arguments about the world (the question of whether genre sf needs to draw more on those techniques notwithstanding). But I also think genre sf could do with taking notes from its mainstream cousins on how to strengthen its own art.

The Confidant blog tour: day 1

22nd October 2012 / / 6 Comments

Welcome to the first stop on a blog tour for The Confidant by Hélène Grémillon. Hélène will be taking part in different features on various blogs this week, starting right here. To get things going, I’ll repost my review of The Confidant from earlier in the month.

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Hélène Grémillon’s first novel begins in Paris of 1975, where Camille Werner is sorting through the letters of condolence she has received on the death of her mother. One of the letters stands out: an account from someone named Louis of his childhood attraction to Annie, a girl from his village. Not knowing anyone named Louis or Annie, Camille thinks no more of this – until she starts receiving regular letters from Louis, telling more of his story.

Camille learns that Annie became friends with one Madame M., a rich young woman who came to the village with her husband, eventually (as Annie told Louis when they met again a few years later, during the war) agreeing to act as a surrogate mother for the infertile Madame M.  Events would subsequently take a tragic turn, and prove to be far more relevant to Camille than she had thought.

The full story of The Confidant takes shape only gradually, as we view the past from the perspectives of different characters. Madame M. kept Alice indoors during her pregnancy, and didn’t tell her about the Nazi invasion of France – but we’re forced to re-evaluate what we think of these individuals when we read Madame M.’s testimony. The final revelations come as Grémillon’s novel turns to poetry, as though prose is no longer sufficient (or can no longer be trusted) to tell this story. All in all, The Confidant is an intriguing piece of work.

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Hélène has kindly answered a few questions about her novel:

Can you tell me about some of the non-literary influences on The Confidant?

I love the theatre. Living in Paris, I’m lucky enough to be able to take advantage of a huge and beautiful range of shows, there’s always something to see. I often go to concerts as well, classical or otherwise. I love musical theatre, in London or Broadway, as sadly, it’s not a very “French” genre. I never say no to an exhibition, but I’m very careful about when I visit them, as I don’t like it when the rooms are too busy, and even less the queues. Finally, I watch a lot of films on DVD!

 What was the seed of the novel? Which came first, the decision to set The Confidant in its particular time periods, the idea of someone receiving letters about the past – or something else entirely?

The first thing I wanted to write about was a conflict between two women. That was really the starting point for The Confidant. Afterwards came the idea of a family secret, and from there came the letters and at last, the historical context. It all had to work well with my plot.

You use a number of different formats in the book – the short alternating chapters when Camille is reading Louis’s letters about Annie; the long monologue of Madame M.’s testimony; poetry at the end. How did you arrive at this technique?

I wanted the story to show different points of view. I therefore started by distributing the body of the story amongst the letters, and then I wrote the long monologue which sheds a new light on things. As for the end, the format imposed itself as I was writing the passage, and I kept it!

Who are some of your favourite writers?

There are many of them, and they depend on the time period. Shakespeare, Proust, Victor Hugo, Jean Anouilh, Stefan Sweig, Maupassant, Fred Vargas, John Irving, and I’ve recently discovered Jonathan Safran Foer, whose writing style I admire.

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Thanks to Hélène for taking the time to respond. The Confidant blog tour continues tomorrow at Novelicious, which will feature Hélène’s writing room. Then, on Wednesday, Stu at Winston’s Dad will be reviewing The Confidant and asking Hélène about her favourite books.

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