Author: David Hebblethwaite

September wrap-up

1st October 2012 / / 2 Comments

I read quite a  number of excellent books in September. M. John Harrison’s classic series Viriconium progressively destroyed the notion of fantasy literature as escape. In NW, Zadie Smith created a superb portrait of interlocking lives in north-west London. Scarlett Thomas’s Monkeys with Typewriters was a creative writing book with as much interest for reader as for budding writers.

I began a story-by-story review of Roelof Bakker’s anthology Still, a book of stories inspired by Bakker’s photographs of a vacated building. That project will continue into October.

I also reviewed: the fifth Bristol Short Story Prize anthology; Ryan David Jahn’s Low Life; Evan Mandery’s Q: A Love Story; Terry Pratchett’s Dodger; and Tarun J. Tejpal’s The Story of My Assassins.

In features, I blogged the first and second parts of a round-table discussion about State of Wonder by Ann Patchett. For Book Blogger Appreciation Week, I wrote about what book blogging means to me. I posted the shortlists of the BBC International Short Story Award, the SI Leeds Literary Prize and the Man Booker Prize.

There were three Sunday Story Society discussions, concerning Angela Carter’s “The Merchant of Shadows“, Alois Hotschnig’s “Two Ways of Leaving” and Krys Lee’s “Drifting House“.

Sunday Story Society: “Drifting House”

30th September 2012 / / 5 Comments

On the table today, we have Krys Lee‘s story “Drifting House”, which you can read on the Granta website here.

It’s the title story of Lee’s debut collection, which has been reviewed in various places, including: The Daily Beast (by Anna Clark); Sul Romanzo (by Monica Raffaele Addamo) The Short Review (by Elaine Chew); Korea Joongang Daily (by Bart Schaneman); Pop Culture Nerd (by Thuy Dinh); The Guardian (by Kamila Shamsie); The Telegraph (by Andrew Marszal); The Financial Times (by Sung J. Woo); NPR Books (by Heller McAlpin); The San Francisco Chronicle (by Marie Myung-Ok Lee); Editorial Eyes; Of Books and Reading; The Brunette Bibliophile.

And here are a couple of interviews with the author, at The Rumpus and The Economist.

Conversation Starters

A couple of questions you might like to consider:

What do you think of Lee’s use of landscape in the story? Is this more than just a physical journey for the brothers?

How well does the structure of “Drifting House” work for you?

Next time: on 14 October, we’ll be discussing “Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring” by M. John Harrison. See the full schedule.

Still: ‘Sanctuary’ by Andrew Blackman

29th September 2012 / / 1 Comment

The photograph: a stopped clock on a wall. The wall is bare white, apart from trails of rusty water streaming down from the base of the clock.

The story: an armed man being chased by the police claims sanctuary in a modern church. This story is really enriched by its context, because, like the Still exhibition (albeit in a very different way!), it’s about a space being repurposed. I also love the way Blackman transforms the imagery of dirt trailing down a wall; the ending of ‘Sanctuary’ becomes as much a tableau as one of Bakker’s photographs.

Link: Andrew Blackman’s website / interview with Blackman on his story

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

Book notes: Tarun J. Tejpal and Ryan David Jahn

28th September 2012 / / 1 Comment

Tarun J. Tejpal, The Story of My Assassins (2009)

The first that Tarun Tejpal’s protagonist, an unnamed investigative journalist, learns of the attempt on his life is when he hears that the Delhi police have captured his would-be assassins.

He is placed under police guard whilst still unsure of what exactly has been going on. Tejpal’s novel then alternates between the protagonist’s struggles with his magazine and relationships, and stories of the killers’ backgrounds. The panorama revealed is altogether broader and more impersonal than our man could have suspected. The tales of the assassins show the various ways they were drawn into crime by circumstance. One discovered as a boy that he was handy with a knife, and saw that as his means of getting on in the world. Another was a timid underachiever until he fought back against one of the padres at his English-language school, and then found his true talent among gangs rather than in the classroom. All have ultimately been moved around by forces beyond their control.

And, as he learns more, the journalist learns that something similar has happened to him – that this is about something more than just a plot to kill him. Tejpal mirrors this theme in the structure of his novel: self-contained sections reveal more than one person could know. The Story of My Assassins adds up to a wide-ranging portrait of people trying to make something of life, if it doesn’t get made for them first.

(This review also appears at We Love This Book.)

Ryan David Jahn, Low Life (2010)

I don’t know quite why it took me so long to read another Ryan David Jahn novel after I so enjoyed his debut, 2009’s Acts of Violence (aka Good Neighbors). But now I have, and I won’t be leaving it so long again. Where Acts of Violence explored why a disparate group of people might refuse to help an attack victim (with the inevitable result), Jahn’s follow-up is almost the reverse. Low Life focuses tightly on one individual trying to puzzle out what’s happening to him, and the outcome is far from certain.

Simon Johnson is marking time at 34, with a dead-end job and no social life, when he’s attacked in his LA apartment. He fights back and kills the intruder, only to see that the man bears a striking resemblance to himself. Identification on the body reveals that this was one Jeremy Shackleford, who turns out to have been a mathematics lecturer. Why would he possibly have wanted to break into Simon’s home and kill him? To find out, Simon adopts Shackleford’s identity – and the lines between his two personae start to blur.

In Low Life’s early stages, Jahn skilfully evokes the bleakness of Simon’s existence. The novel then comes to focus more on its protagonist’s personality – the title refers to dark thoughts that a person may have but would never normally act upon; Simon finds himself becoming more and more consumed by this ‘low life’ of his. The reader’s journey with him is disturbing and thrilling by turns, as we wonder how far Simon will go, where this will all end up – and how much is even real.

Sunday Story Society reminder: “Drifting House”

27th September 2012 / / 0 Comments

This Sunday, I’ll be hosting a new short story discussion on the blog. Our choice this time is the title story of Drifting House, the debut collection by Krys Lee, which is published by Viking in the US and Faber & Faber in the UK. One of the other stories in the collection, “The Goose Father”, has been shortlisted for this year’s BBC International Short Story Award.

But it’s “Drifting House” that we’ll be talking about this weekend’ You can read it here at the Granta website, and there’ll be a discussion post up here some time on Sunday.

Still: ‘My Wife the Hyena’ by Nina Killham

27th September 2012 / / 1 Comment

The photograph: through an open office door, we see a dusty desk with a cardboard folder placed in front of the chair. The eye is drawn beyond the desk to an empty coat-stand in the corner of the room.

The story: a man tells of his relationship with his wife, who is indeed a hyena. I love the matter-of-fact tone of this story (‘Her cooking is never memorable. It is difficult to cook with four paws’). What Killham describes is absurd, doesn’t make sense even on its own terms if you think about it too closely… But, for those four pages,  the author convinces you it’s all true.

Link: Nina Killham’s website

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

Still: ‘Midnight Hollow’ by Mark Piggott

26th September 2012 / / 2 Comments

The photograph: a close-up of the view through a keyhole. The doors and corridors beyond could as well be a set of abstract shapes.

The story: an old man named Edward explores the empty town hall where he used to be a caretaker. He finds his old floor buffer, and gives the place a polish for old times’ sake. This piece is a poignant evocation of time passing, and reflecting on what’s been lost in a life. And the ending is a real shock to the system

Link: Mark Piggott’s website / interview with Piggott on his story

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

Roelof Bakker (ed.), Still: Short Stories Inspired by Photographs of Vacated Places (2012)

26th September 2012 / / 36 Comments

Still is the first title from Negative Press London, and it’s a very intriguing prospect indeed. Artist-photographer Roelof Bakker invited contributors to write a short story inspired by one of his photographs of Hornsey Town Hall in north London (there are examples on Bakker’s website). So this anthology is the book of Still the exhibition, but it also gives Bakker’s images a new context. For me, the mix of writers is so interesting that I want to do a story-by-story review. Here are the stories:

The titles of those stories will turn into links as I work my way through the anthology. I’m looking forward to the exploration.

Scarlett Thomas, Monkeys with Typewriters (2012)

23rd September 2012 / / 7 Comments

The infinite monkey theorem says that, given enough time, a monkey with a typewriter will almost certainly produce the complete works of Shakespeare just from tapping the keys at random. As Scarlett Thomas points out in the introduction to this creative writing book, though, writers don’t work that way – they write with purpose (though of course that’s not the be-all and end-all of a finished work), and don’t have unlimited time. This is one of the recurring themes of Monkeys with Typewriters: that writing is more than a technical exercise, even if you can see some of its workings.

It’s fair to say that I wouldn’t have chosen to read this book had the publisher not sent me a copy on spec, because I’ve no ambitions to write fiction. But Thomas has such a distinctive style of writing fiction that I was intrigued to see what she had to say. It turns out that Monkeys with Typewriters is interesting for readers as well as aspiring writers. Thomas is less concerned with telling her readers ‘how to write’ as encouraging to think more deeply about how what they read and write works.

The first half of the book is devoted to ‘Theory’, and especially to examining the mechanics of plots. Thomas goes from Plato, through Aristotle and Nietzsche, to Northrop Frye and Christopher Booker, examining (and sometimes criticising) the different ways plots have been analysed and classified. There’s plenty of food for thought here, even for a non-writer – I like Thomas’s distinction between story (the chronological events that happen) and plot (how those events are arranged by the writer), which I hadn’t thought of in the way before. It’s also fascinating to see the connections Thomas makes, such as when she highlights the similar basic narrative arcs of Toy Story, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, and an episode of Supernanny. Underneath it all is an enthusiasm for writers to find and do their own thing; after presenting her idea of ‘the eight basic plots’, Thomas invites her readers to devise their own taxonomy.

After ‘Theory’ comes ‘Practice’. Some of the material in this section (such as the chapters on having ideas and the practicalities of writing) is inevitably going to be of more specialised interest – but, even then, it’s not unengaging. The rest will surely get any reader thinking anew about characterisation, narration, and how sentences work. Thomas is an excellent guide through her examples, drawing on classic and contemporary texts alike (from Anna Karenina and Middlemarch to The God of Small Things and number9dream). For her, it’s not about one size fitting all, but about whatever works in context. And this section might well cause you to add one or two books to your to-read list; it only took Thomas to quote one short sentence (‘The lawn was white with doctors’) to convince me I ought to read The Bell Jar.

Whether you want to write or not, Monkeys with Typewriters is the kind of book that renews your enthusiasm for reading in general, a book that believes – and encourages its readers to believe – that great fiction matters. Thomas ends her book with a checklist of key questions for writers. The last one is: ‘If the only copy of my novel was stranded on the top of a mountain, would I go up to rescue it?’ Perhaps the key message of Monkeys with Typewriters is that the only fiction worth writing – and reading – is the sort for which you would head up that mountain. And I’d say a book which argues that is one worth reading.

Book notes: Terry Pratchett and Evan Mandery

20th September 2012 / / 3 Comments

Terry Pratchett, Dodger (2012)

Terry Pratchett visits Victorian London for his latest book. Dodger, a young sewer scavenger, sees a girl escaping from a coach and saves her from being beaten by the two men she was travelling with. This incident is witnessed by Charles Dickens, ‘Charlie’, who becomes a friend to Dodger, and social reformer Henry Mayhew, who shelters Simplicity, as the girl comes to be known. Several events increase Dodger’s notoriety, including his exposing the truth about Sweeney Todd, and he finds himself moving in loftier circles. He also discovers that there are people after Simplicity and an ingenious plan is needed to thwart them – an ideal job for someone like Dodger…

Pratchett brings the atmosphere of his London to life, conveying not just the difficulties faced by his characters through poverty, but also the ways they might survive (or not – his portrayal of Sweeney Todd as a damaged individual is especially vivid). The plot of Dodger doesn’t quite succeed: the antagonists remain too shadowy to have a full dramatic impact. But running through the novel are themes of pragmatism and appearances being deceptive, and here Dodger shines. Charlie understands that Dodger may be able to investigate events in ways which are valuable but not open to others. Dodger himself sees the manoeuvres of politics as not being much different from those of the street. And deceptive appearances are the foundation of the plan to save Simplicity, which gives Pratchett’s novel its fine finale.

(This review also appears at We Love This Book.)

Some other reviews of Dodger: Things Mean a Lot; Simon Appleby for Bookgeeks.

***

Evan Mandery, Q: A Love Story (2011)

An (unnamed) New York academic and writer meets one Quentina Elizabeth Deveril (also known as Q), and promptly falls in love. The pair of them start dating, and find they’re just right for each other. Wedding bells look set to chime… until our man receives a note from himself, asking him to meet for a meal. He goes there, to find his sixty-year-old self, who has apparently travelled back in time to warn the younger him against marrying Q. The two of them, his future self says, will have a son who dies young from an inherited illness, and that will destroy Q. The protagonist decides to call the wedding off, and moves on with his life – but different future selves keep coming back in time to dispense their advice.

Q is Evan Mandery’s third novel; perhaps the first thing one notices is that it’s written in a rather mannered way that pushes it to one side of reality. This technique leads to some fine comic moments, such as the narrator’s and Q’s date on a bizarre miniature golf course, or the time they go on a protest march against a construction project, dressed in vegetable costumes. It also gives the protagonist’s exchanges with his older selves an effectively deadpan tone. But the same style sometimes leaves events without a full emotional grounding – sometimes Q reads too much like a joke.

The narrative thread of Q is full of digressions on subjects ranging from Sigmund Freud’s study of eels to The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; these illustrate the book’s theme of what-ifs and alternatives. As time goes on, our narrator has cause to reflect on what’s important, in life and history; Mandery shows how the most important things are not always what we think they are at the time. The main plot runs like a whirlpool, as the visitations from time travellers become more and more frequent, and the novel heads ever closer to absurdity – until the ending, which is pitched just right, and is really quite affecting.

Any Cop?: Mandery’s style walks the line between annoying and charming, and doesn’t always stay on the right side. But, once you get into the swing of Q, it works. It’s worth a look.

(This review also appears at Bookmunch.)

Some other reviews of Q: A Case for Books; Glorified Love Letters; Raging Bibliomania.

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