The Dead Hand of Recommendation

In my last post I concluded by raving about Michelle Paver's Dark Matter, and that got me thinking about the problems that come with recommending books. What problems? I hear you say - probably because you have a life to lead and don't allow yourself to get unduly disturbed by life's lesser paradoxes.

Nevertheless, I can't be the only person in the world to have noticed that a gushing book recommendation nearly always results in disappointment. Even if the book in question is good, a teensy bit of frustration seems all-but-inevitable, especially if you're a gullible type who's liable to take other people's effusions very literally. "Your life will never be the same after reading this book", affirms the Arts & Books section of the Saturday paper, so I go to extraordinary lengths to obtain said book and turn to page one with palpitating heart, bidding a fond farewell to my old life as I do so, only to emerge two hundred and forty seven pages later feeling a little flat and thinking "...oh."

On the other hand, being in love with a book is like being in love with a person: cautious language feels pathetic and cold and altogether inadequate. You don't want to say "Hmm..." when you're really thinking, "Yes! Yes! Yes!" so you don't - can't - hold back in your praise. Phrases like "eye-poppingly, mind-bogglingly stupendous" suddenly seem quite tame, and as a result your inflamed listener goes to extraordinary lengths to obtain said book and turns to page one with palpitating heart, bidding a fond farewell to their old lives as they do so, only to emerge two hundred and forty seven pages later feeling a little flat and thinking "...oh."

I suppose there are worse things to lie awake fretting over.

Of Ghoulies and Ghosties

It's not really the time of year for ghost stories, but I was given a couple of spine-tinglers for my birthday and hadn't the patience to wait for the requisite long winter nights and crackling fires. Anyway, I need to read ghost stories for 'research purposes', because I am in the middle of writing one.

'Research' is such a pompous word to describe something as fun as reading ghost stories that I almost (almost) feel like a fraud for deploying it. Therefore, just to prove that I have actually been working extremely hard, even when it looked as though I was lying on a picnic rug in a semi-comatose state with a paperback over my face, I hereby present my findings:

The first of the two was This House is Haunted by John Boyne, which is a traditional ghost story set in the nineteenth century, involving all the creepy Victorian fandangles you could possibly desire, including a big, sinister house and some small, sinister children. Personally I would have gone for a more enigmatic title if I was John Boyne, but then again you can't accuse this book of failing to do exactly what it says on the tin. Once our plucky heroine (the new governess, naturellement) has reached Gaudlin Hall, barely a page is allowed to go by without one supernatural shock or another: locked windows fly open, possessed dogs rampage, yokels dispense dire warnings right, left and centre, and ghostly hands try in vain to shove our heroine underneath various forms of moving vehicle, from steam trains to horse-drawn milk floats. I kept imagining a manic, over-caffeinated editor waving the manuscript in the author's face and screeching, "I want to see more action, John! More cliché!You can't have enough cliché!"

In all fairness, the story itself was strong and the whole thing rollicked along pleasurably enough. You will recall, however, that I was not reading it for pleasure but for serious research purposes, and this being the case I feel duty-bound to report the following observations:

a) For the sake of Atmosphere, Flash-Bang-Wallop should be applied sparingly. The best (most menacing) chapter of This House is Haunted was the first one, where newspapers rustled at a gloomy breakfast-table in London and fog swirled abundantly, but nothing awful actually happened.

b) Cliché is a big, big problem for ghostly fiction because, for once, the zero-tolerance approach doesn't work. There must be darkness and a place (yes, it's usually going to be an old, large house) where bad things have happened, and there has to be a protagonist who starts out as an innocent rationalist and ends up changed (i.e.a complete nervous wreck, or dead). There have to be bumps in the night and things half-seen and half-heard...otherwise it's not a ghost story. But how do you stop these fundamentals tipping over into pastiche? (It's a genuine question; I'm not writing as one-who-knows.)There's not much middle-ground between chilling and funny. Take a typical passage from This House is Haunted, and see if you can read it without coming over all Hammer Horror:

"'I'm sure I'll be back often,' I told her.'I'm the new governess at Gaudlin Hall so I expect I will be in and out of the village on a regular basis.'
The moment I said this, the tea cup slipped out of her hands and fell to the floor, smashing into a dozen or more pieces.
'Oh dear,' I said, looking down at it. 'I hope it wasn't valuable.'
Molly, however, was not looking at the broken cup but staring at me instead with a ghastly expression on her face."

In a funny sort of way I love it, but funny is the operative word and it means I'm not scared.

I cannot over-emphasise how enjoyably menaced I was by the second item in my 'research programme', however. I didn't chortle my way through this one, I can tell you. Aside from two snoring kids and a couple of guinea-pigs, I was alone in the house on the night I started reading, and the atmospherics all got a bit much - I had to put it down and read something frivolous instead.

Dark Matter, by Michelle Paver, is set in the 1930s during a long, arctic winter on the island of Svalbard. It's a pretty straightforward story about a scientific researcher enduring months of total darkness on his own after his colleagues abandon him, one after the other, for sinister-yet-plausible reasons. I could outline the entire plot for you in one, short paragraph (don't worry, I wouldn't be such a spoil-sport), but I find it much harder to analyse than the John Boyne novel partly, I suppose, because it's easier to be snide about clunky writing than to understand the workings of something seamlessly brilliant. Anyway, for what they're worth, here are a few thoughts:

a) Dark Matter manages to be classic and original in the same breathe. All the essential components of the ghost story are present and correct, and yet they're given a twist - so for example the creaky haunted house becomes the research station on the bay at Longyearbyen, and the requisite dark palette is provided (in spades) by the arctic winter itself.

b) Atmosphere reigns supreme. Hints are dropped, suspicions are formed, things are glimpsed, but nothing definite happens for quite a long time. It's all about ratcheting up the tension to the nth degree.

c) Place and story are inextricably woven together, so that terror of the ghost and terror of the arctic landscape merge and become the same thing. Michelle Paver's ghost isn't some eccentric apparition wandering around an old house and saying 'Boo' for it's own amusement, it is an integral - even a metaphorical - part of the remorseless winter that Jack endures. I think that's what gives this book such depth. As the days on Svalbard got shorter and shorter, and the darkness started closing in on Jack, I wasn't sure whether I felt claustrophobic for supernatural or non-supernatural reasons (or, indeed, whether that distinction makes much sense. Is it rational or irrational to fear darkness and solitude?)

I'm going to end this post by quoting a passage from Dark Matter, in which Jack records seeing the sun for the very last time before the winter sets in for good:

"Twilight. Behind the bird cliffs, the red glow of dawn, but to the west it was night: the cold glimmer of stars. The black bones of the mountains jutted through the snow. On the shore, the whale ribs glinted with frost, and the rocks sloping down to the sea were white and smooth. The water was dark purple, vivid and strange.
Because of the cliffs, we couldn't see much. We saw the sky turn bloody and inflamed as the sun struggled to rise. We saw a sliver of fire. An abortive dawn. The sun sank back, defeated.
Gone."

Right I'm off to find some more 'research'. Gosh, I'm such a grafter, it can't be healthy. I ought put my feet up for a bit instead and relax with a good book.



A Cross-Cultural Exchange

Just now, whilst writing one of the Victorian chapters of my novel, I had an odd experience. I had just positioned my hero in an arm chair, his would-be lady-love standing beside him, when I found myself writing the following sentence: He wrapped his arm around her as he spoke, so that she couldn't move her legs to reach the carafe.

As I read the sentence over I felt a frisson of absolutely genuine horror and thought to myself, Good heavens! What kind of a book is this? You can't go mentioning a woman's...lower limbs...just like that! It's positively obscene! A moment later I came to myself and remembered that twenty-first century folk are used to the idea of women having legs, even to the point of accepting that nineteenth century women had them too, and that my lewd reference was unlikely to cause widespread offence.

I waver between two possible conclusions. On the one hand I may, deep down, be much more seriously repressed than anyone ever knew. On the other hand (and this is obviously my preferred option) maybe, for approximately two seconds of my life, I was mysteriously transmogrified into an actual, real-life Victorian writer with an actual, real-life horror of...you know...female perambulatory equipment.

June 19th - I had only got as far as the top of the stairs when...

Alexis Smith as Marian in The Woman in White, 1948

I've been thinking about diaries again: fictional ones, real ones and the ones the fall somewhere in between.

It's partly because I'm at the very, very, earliest stage of a new novel - the vaguely planning to plan a vague plan stage* - and I'm wondering whether to do it (or part of it) in diary form.

I can think of plenty of upsides to writing a fictionalised diary. There's the intimacy of looking over the narrator's shoulder as she sits there, hunched up in bed in her pyjamas, scribbling away. There's the excitement of feeling that the story is happening now; that the narrator is never more than a couple of steps ahead of the reader. There's the way the diarist's perspective is severely limited to the here, the now and the personal - i.e. you can't use retrospective or omniscient wisdom to colour in character and events - which seems to me like a helpful discipline when you're looking to tell a story economically and well.

The main downside of the fictionalised diary (that I can think of) is its artificiality, especially if it's part of a very plot-driven novel. Whilst writing this post I've been flipping through my old copy of The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. I have such fond memories of reading it aged 15, and in particular the severe diary-envy I suffered whilst reading the melodramatic section that is Marian Halcombe's journal. How come Marian's journal had such a strong narrative drive? How come mine just drifted about from non-event to non-event?  Here is one of Marian's typical daily offerings:

June 19th - I had only got as far as the top of the stairs when the locking of Laura's door suggested to me the precaution of also locking my own door, and keeping the key safely about me while I was out of the room. My journal was already secured with other papers in the table drawer, but my writing materials were left out. These included a seal, bearing the common device of two doves drinking out of the same cup, and some sheets of blotting paper, which had the impression on them of the closing lines of my writing in these pages traced during the past night. Distorted by the suspicion which had now become a part of myself, even such trifles as these looked too dangerous to be trusted without a guard....  

 

As diaries go, it's a far cry from Got up, had breakfast... I was convinced that the fault lay with me and my capacity for writing the wrong bits of life down. Only later on did it dawn on me that Marian Halcombe's diary is A Literary Device.

 

In times of great crisis - when, say, you're urgently trying to work out how to rescue your sister from a lunatic asylum where she's been consigned by her evil husband, having been forced to swap identities with a dead woman to whom she bears an uncanny but as yet unexplained resemblance - are you likely to sit down at regular intervals to write a detailed literary account of everything that's going on, including verbatim accounts of lengthy conversations that will, though you don't know it yet, turn out to be profoundly significant? Are you going to be able to select the details that are relevant to your story and edit out those that aren't, even as they're happening? How do you know that the fact Sir Percival paced uneasily round the drawing room after breakfast is highly suspicious, but the fact he had an extra glass of wine last night is not worth mentioning?

So that's the artificiality problem. But does it matter? It doesn't spoil The Woman in White for me, not even now I'm grown-up and more attuned to such things.

Yes, but just because you can shrug it off in a Victorian novel doesn't mean it wouldn't irritate in a twenty-first century one...

Then again, all fiction is selective and artificial by definition, so why should a melodramatic diary be particularly problematic?

I don't (in case you hadn't guessed) know. But it's the sort of thing I have fun thinking about.


*I love that stage of planning, when absolutely anything is an option and maybe, just maybe, this novel is going to be the next War and Peace. Well, why not? It isn't until I start getting tangible words down onto tangible bits of paper that I come back down to earth with a bump.

Gorgeous George Gissing

My latest pin-up.

I think I've found him: the male Victorian novelist who can write female heroines. It's such a relief. I've had a Dickens-shaped bee in my bonnet ever since writing that post on 6th February (The Visible Woman). I hope I'm not an essentially unforgiving person, but I find it difficult to overlook Dickens's saintly child-women on the grounds that he was a terrific story-teller, humanitarian, Genius...etc, etc. I mean, can any of that actually excuse the existence of Agnes Wakefield, "ever pointing upward...ever leading me to something better; ever directing me to higher things"? Ever making me wish I'd never got up today. Ever making me reach for the bottle. And if that's what a woman ought to be, according to the most incisive chronicler of the age...

Then along comes George Gissing and single-handedly rehabilitates Nineteenth Century Man. Well done, George. Granted he was forty-five years younger than Dickens, but he died in 1903 which makes him a bona fide Victorian gent in my book. Please, if you haven't already, read The Odd Women (how can you could resist the title?) and New Grub Street and the zillion others I haven't got round to reading yet. Gissing's women are wonderful. They can defy their fathers, abandon their husbands, even declare themselves as out-and-out feminists, and still retain moral complexity. Yes! I know! Can you imagine how Dickens would have dealt with a woman who leaves her husband for financial reasons and then (once he's dead) pilfers her own cousin's fiancé? Or an unashamedly intellectual single woman, bitterly opposed to the institution of marriage, who falls in love with but ultimately turns down our handsome hero? They'd be cardboard cut-outs, and as readers we would be expected to unite with Dickens in amused disapproval. Disapproval doesn't come into it for Gorgeous George, he just presents his readers with ordinary, complicated people and stands back without comment. I like that kind of modesty in a novelist.

By the by, his biography (or the little I've gleaned of it from Wikipedia) suggests to me he was a loveable chap. Maybe my criteria for lovability are a bit skewed, but this paragraph in particular made me want to hug him. See what you think:

"Gissing's academic career ended in disgrace when he fell in love with a young orphan prostitute, Marianne Helen Harrison, known as Nell. He gave her money in an attempt to keep her off the streets and when funds ran short he stole from his fellow students. The college hired a detective to investigate the thefts, and Gissing was prosecuted, found guilty, expelled, and sentenced to a month's hard labour in Belle Vue Gaol, Manchester in 1876."

Oh George.

What to Read when the Weather's Draughty-Dampish

Castletown (IoM) gets a hammering at New Year

I find it funny, and a little bit sad, how my attitude to stormy weather has diluted over the years. When I was a teenager, storms were pure Romance. My bedroom was in the attic (very nearly a genuine artist's garret, if only my parents hadn't been so prosaic as to insist upon central heating and a wall-to-wall carpet) and there was nothing I liked better than a good gale thrashing through the garden, whistling round the eaves and chucking rain at my Velux window. It never crossed my mind to worry about storm damage; that was mum and dad's problem. I was too busy feeling snug under my duvet and channelling the spirit of Emily Bronte.

But now, when the wind is sweeping off the Irish sea of a February night, it isn't Heathcliff and Cathy who spring to mind so much as the wheelie bin (what if it takes flight, lands in the middle of the road and causes a major pile up?); the garden fence (ditto); the roof (will it even be there in the morning?) and so on. So far we've been lucky: a fence panel fell over and three tiles blew off the roof, but nobody died and the house is still standing. It must be frightening and deeply depressing to have your home flooded or otherwise wrecked, and my heart goes out to people living in the Somerset levels and elsewhere, who are experiencing just that. Any lingering feeling for the allure of stormy weather would be extinguished forever, I should imagine, in the heart of anyone who's watched their prized possessions floating round the sitting room in a stinky, brown soup. Heathcliff himself would be yearning for a getaway break to the Med.

So I feel slightly embarrassed to be gushing about this beautiful Ted Hughes poem, Wind, which I discovered in an anthology the other day. The glamour of a gale is perhaps better appreciated when your chimney stack is not flinging itself across the garden. But I'm going to copy it out anyway. If the thought of celebrating bad weather is just too grating, and you can't afford a foreign holiday, can I recommend you read The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim instead? It's one of the most cheering books ever written. That moment when Lottie Wilkins opens the shutters on her first morning in Italy...I defy you not to feel real, live sunshine on your skin. It's much less hassle than a holiday, and you can read it in your wellies.

Anyway. That Ted Hughes poem...

Wind by Ted Hughes

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up -
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

The Visible Woman

The reason I blogged about Nobles Park last month was because I was thinking about the relationship between walking and writing, and the reason I was thinking about the relationship between walking and writing was because I'd just finished reading Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, which is a novelishly good biography of the great man by Simon Callow. (It might also explain why I've started writing interminably long sentences, containing interminable numbers of clauses, which is a dubious tendency even if you do happen to be Charles Dickens.) Anyway, the point is that Dickens not only wrote a lot; he also walked a lot. And I don't mean half hour rambles. 'Going for a walk' in Dickens-speak means pounding the streets of London for a minimum of three hours a day at an average pace of 4mph. And he did it because it nourished his writing. "It was," writes Simon Callow, "one of Dickens's maxims that a given amount of mental exertion should be counteracted by a commensurate amount of bodily fatigue...As he marched through the great metropolis, he drew energy from its energy and his absorption of its life replenished him."

The divine Mary Hogarth

Which is all well and good, only as I read I couldn't help wishing that Dickens had done a little less walking and put in a bit more time with his wife. I know you shouldn't judge other people's marriages, and I know Victorian women didn't lead the most dynamic lives at the best of times, but Catherine Dickens does seem to have put up with one hell of a lot. Not least bearing ten children to a man whose ideal woman was a virginal adolescent with angel's wings more or less sprouting from her shoulder-blades. As if such a generalised ideal weren't tiresome enough, Dickens had a specific tendresse for Catherine's very own younger sister, Mary Hogarth, who died aged seventeen, "the age at which for him a woman was at her most perfect: she never grew fat, dull, tired, tedious." Mary appeared in novel after novel (think Agnes Wicklow in David Copperfield, Rose Maylie in Oliver Twist, Amy Dorrit in Little Dorrit): ever youthful, attractive, gentle, pure...ever aggravating.



Catherine Dickens in 1852

So there's Catherine, in futile competition with one dead sister and another live one (Georgy, who came to live with the Dickenses at the age of sixteen, when Catherine was a mother of four heading into her thirties...) Dickens's genius - as generous and imaginative as it was in its effects on society at large - monopolised the lives of his family, especially his wife. Everything he did - from walking, to writing, to campaigning on behalf of the disadvantaged, to fathering children - he did with a sort of manic excess. No doubt he was an exhilarating friend, acquaintance or patron but he must have made an oppressive husband. I felt depressed on Catherine's behalf as she trudged stoically through life in his wake, putting up with his eccentricities and his massive popularity whilst bearing children right, left and centre. Finally, after twenty-two years of marriage, Dickens abandoned her in favour of eighteen year old Ellen Ternan.

Catherine doesn't seem to have interested biographers or historical novelists*, any more than she interested her husband. I suppose the bare bones of her story - from pretty and loved to old and unloved - is not exactly rom-com material. I see there's a new film about Ellen Ternan called The Invisible Woman, based on the biography by Claire Tomalin. I'm sure it will be fascinating - of course it will, the clue's in the title. Much better (in film and literature, if not in life) to be The Invisible Woman. All that sexy mystique. But you have to feel for Catherine. After all, somebody had to play the thankless role of Dickens's All-Too-Visible-Wife. I hope someone writes a sympathetic account of her life some time soon, if only on the basis that visible lives are every bit as mysterious as invisible ones.  

* With the exception of Lillian Nayder. The Other Dickens : a life of Catherine Hogarth was the only item of Catherine Dickens literature I could find.