BOOK REVIEW: A writer's opinion

 

Kate Atkinson

A God In Ruins (Costa Award Winner 2015)

Not The End Of The World (short stories)

 

I am a great fan of Kate Atkinson and, if I could write like her in even a small way, I would be thrilled. Ever since I read ‘Behind the Scenes at the Museum’, in my early twenties, I have loved her work.

I particularly enjoyed the Jackson Brodie series, helped by the TV dramatisation starring Jason Isaacs at the height of his sex appeal. Atkinson is an award-winning, literary writer, ambitious, confident and original, but she also has the ability to write in an extremely compelling and readable style, and the capacity to bend, combine and reinvigorate genres. I have tried to analyse her technique but it is difficult to actually see it, which I think is the point. She writes in an apparentky effortless way.

There is a pacy fluidity to her prose, which is tightly packed with narrative detail but still not bogged down in unwieldy imagery or purple prose. Her characters leap off the page, poignant, plausible, monstrous. Her plots twist and turn, taking the reader down unexpected alleys. She is not averse to making use of magic realism and exploring new ways of telling a tale, but her writing never seems forced or precious.

This year, I have read two of her books. One was a collection of short stories I downloaded when I was doing my MA in Creative Writing last year, as I had to write an essay on the short story as a genre. However, I never actually got round to reading her collection at the time as I had so much else to read. I started reading it a few months after I graduated and found myself rapidly pulled into the linked but independent tales, which was quite a surprise as I don’t generally read volumes of short stories very often (except for the purposes of university essays!).

 

I’m not generally keen on volumes of short stories, though I like the genre in itself. I prefer to read short stories in occasional small doses and collections tend to invite you to keep reading. Generally, I find I end up with a cloying feeling of having read too much, my mind clogged with different characters and events that each exist in its own bubble.

Atkinson’s collection overcomes this by being a series of interconnected short stories, bound together by the classical myths that underpin them, though this classical inspiration is not always obvious to a casual reader despite several newspaper reviewers implying that the magical realism aspect is overdone. Personally, I felt it was often very subtle, as when a dead woman who later comes back to life sees pomegranate seeds in a dish, reminding us of the tale of Persephone. Where it is more obvious, as when the nanny, Missy’s, boots turn into silver sandals and a quiver of arrows appears on her back, it felt quite natural and thematically appropriate. One critic I read suggested that Atkinson’s use of Latin and Greek quotations at the start of the stories serves mostly to highlight the triviality of the tales themselves, and that it was unclear why Atkinson had chosen Ancient Greek mythology as her underlying inspiration, as opposed to myths from other cultures. However, I would counter this by asking why not?  And I would also say that, for me, these stories sparkled with vivacity and were a sheer pleasure to read, so if Atkinson wishes to indulge herself and show off her knowledge, that’s fine by me.

            The links between the stories aren’t always obvious, particularly on a first reading. Some characters are referred to in different stories, and there is an echoing here and there of themes and ideas. One review I read claimed that Atkinson was in love with the sound of her own voice in these stories, implying that they lacked depth and genuine meaning, and I can see how readers might feel this, certainly with some of the more superficial tales. However, I felt that even the most obvious, the ones that used most literary trickery and experimentation for its own sake, were still highly readable, and some of the stories have stayed with me months after I read them – particularly the story of the boy whose prostitute mother is dying of cancer.

              What makes these stories so compelling is Atkinson’s characteristic verve and energy. They fizz along and carry the reader with them. I found the characters vivid and convincing, though their stories were often far from realistic. The stories also radiate with flashes of Atkinson’s wonderful dark humour. All collections of short stories are going to contain individual pieces that appeal more or less to different readers, that are objectively various in terms of quality even, but I enjoyed even those stories I felt were the weakest in the collection. I have read this collection twice this year, which I can’t say about any other volume of short stories I’ve read, including those of the fabulous Alice Munro.

 

RATING: Not The End Of The World *****

 

 

The second Atkinson book I read this year was a long novel which won the Costa Prize in 2015. I had downloaded a few of her novels, and decided, quite randomly, to read this one, not realising quite how long it is until I was well into it and fully involved in the story.

It tells the story of Teddy Todd, a World War 2 fighter pilot, beginning in his childhood and narrating his life story and those of his daughter and grandchildren.  Having not read ‘Life After Life’, I didn’t realise that Teddy is actually the much-loved younger sibling of a character from that novel, Ursula, but that doesn’t matter at all as this novel stands entirely on its own.

              As I write this, I haven’t finished the book so this review is rather pre-emptive. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the chapters I have read very much. The novel moves about in time with little warning – the reader simply has to keep up – but this didn’t feel like a chore, and I found it easy to work out where we were in chronological terms. Teddy is a charming child, realistic and sympathetic. He has the fortune/misfortune of being immortalised by a family friend in a series of popular children’s novels (clearly based on Richmal Crompton’s Just William books) about the redoubtable Augustus, novels he is vaguely embarrassed by. Teddy grows up to be a decorated war hero, but his marriage to his childhood sweetheart, Nancy Shawcross, is an unhappy, unfulfilling one, and his daughter, the hideous Viola (a brilliant monster of a woman whose behaviour made me laugh and cringe simultaneously), is a disappointment. He has a better relationship with his grandchildren, however, who are both damaged to some degree by their ridiculous, self-centred mother.

              I had to leave the novel at the point where Atkinson is just beginning to describe Teddy’s experience of the war, which has been hinted at in previous chapters but not fully explored, but the writing so far makes me know that I will return to it soon to finish reading it. I have an inkling of where the story is going due to reading some online reviews, and I now want to read ‘Life After Life’ too. 

             

RATING: A God In Ruins *****

Further adeventures of a freaked-out, middle-aged bride-to-be...

 A fad or an enthusiasm?

Earlier this year, I watched a few online videos about painting with acrylic paints and stupidly thought ‘That looks easy’. 

    It was but the work of moments to reach the next step in the inevitable process: spending money I can’t really afford on paint, brushes and canvas, donning an old blue and white spotted smock-top that is three sizes too big for me, and trying my hand at painting. Honestly, if I still had the red beret I bought when I was seventeen, I'd have worn that too.

I have a history of what my mum would refer to as ‘fads’, but which I prefer to think of as ‘experimental enthusiasms', aka ‘the learning process’. There was the craze for making homemade chocolates, the cake-baking phase, the soup-making whim, the jam-making vogue, the embroidery rage, the greetings-card-making obsession, the quilt-making frenzy… 

However, to be fair, many of these things weren’t just fads, they were all about learning a skill which I’ve continued to use, particularly the food-based ones. I still make fantastic soup on a regular basis, for example, and that's because I put in the legwork learning how to do it, trying things out, until I mastered the art of soup-making and discovered what kind of soup I particularly enjoy eating and how to make it brilliant. Anyone can do this, but most people can’t be bothered – or just don’t like soup that much! Similarly with baking – I have always made cakes and related goods, but I have got much better at it over the years, particularly in the last few years when I’ve developed enough confidence to try out my own ideas, and the only reason I don’t bake more often now is that I have pre-diabetes and can’t eat the fruits of my labour. My baking is good enough for the young admin assistant where I work to pay me to bake cakes now and then for her and her boyfriend, and generally people seem to enjoy my cakes these days. Several people have suggested that I could make money selling my cakes. So they must be ok. They certainly taste good to me. Again, there's no particular skill involved except that which arises naturally from enthusiasm, lots of practice, the right equipment and being a gluttonous foodie.

On the other hand, some things clearly were fads. The jam-making, for example. It did last several years and I was beginning to see my skill level increasing, but in the end I decided it wasn’t worth the effort and the mess. Good-quality jam is readily available in supermarkets and, to be honest, neither of us eats it much. I like cherry jam, whereas P prefers orange marmalade, but the reality is that a jar of either of these will sit in our fridge for a year until I finally throw the mould-encrusted stuff away. Incidentally, we have very different tastes in food. Tastes I absolutely adore, such as aniseed and almond and coffee and cherries, are things he hates, and tastes I loathe (such as vanilla and tea) are his favourites. We can never share a dessert. We can't even agree on which fruit goes best with chocolate - he loves chocolate-orange (which I hate) and I love chocolate and cherry or raspberry. If compatibility was down to food preferences, we'd never be allowed to get married. 

I used to make fruit curds, chutneys, pickles and herb jellies too, but it became a faff rather than a fad. I am, however, using the skills I’ve learned to make blueberry jam to put in miniature jars for the favour bags for guests at the wedding, alongside miniature packets of calendula and marigold seeds from my garden (thank you for that idea, Amanda) and miniature bottles of flavoured alcohol (I’ve made blackberry vodka and sloe gin for around a decade now every Christmas, so does that still count as a ‘fad’?). Foraging is another thing my mum refers to as a 'fad'. A few months after I left my teaching job in a school sixth form some years ago, I met up with some of my ex-A Level students and, when they asked what I'd been doing since I left, I told them I'd started foraging. They thought I meant that I was so hard-up without my teacher's salary that I was being forced to live off wild nuts and berries, like Frankenstein's creature in Mary Shelley's novel! They actually became quite enraged as they already blamed the headteacher at the school for forcing me to leave (which wasn't the case in reality). I think they imagined me, a wizened old woman in rags, staggering about the hederows, plucking rosehips and stealing ears of wheat from the farmer's fields, muttering curses against all headmasters under my breath as I struggled to extricate myself from bramble bushes and burnt my hands on giant hogweed...

I also have fads which come and go.  About thirty years ago, I started making a hand-stitched quilt out of P’s old shirts and it’s still half-finished in the cupboard. It’ll probably end up being used as my shroud. Every few years, I get it out and do a bit more. I once read somewhere that Jane Austin used to quilt (a respectable past-time for a young lady) so she could drop the quilt over her current manuscript if visitors arrived (writing being considered rather unladylike). Visiting Chawton once, I saw a quilt made by Jane and her sister, Cassandra, and I remember being impressed by the fact it was hand-stitched and the stitches were so tiny and precise. Whenever I prise my half-sewn quilt from its drawer in the cupboard under the stairs, I think about this.  

A friend once asked me why I didn’t just buy an electric sewing machine and sew the patches on that way, but she missed the point. I have a tendency towards OCD. If I decide it will be hand-stitched, it will be hand-stitched – and it will also be finished: the only question is when. Some of those patches make me think about the programmes on TV or the radio I was listening to, or the conversations I was having, or even the things I was thinking about, as I stitched – it’s better than a diary! There is something about sewing by hand that kind of stitches your memories into the fabric. It’s probably because it is slow enough to give your mind time to wander. Very soothing – until the point where it becomes very irritating, of course.

The Covid-lockdowns saw the quilt expand in size quite substantially. In fact, I even made my mum a quilted cushion as a Christmas present last year. It was entirely hand-stitched, and was actually a nice object in my view and in colours that matched both my houseproud mother’s bedroom and her living-room (even my sister liked it, and she hates everything I do or buy or think!), Nevertheless, my mum clearly hates it. She’d never say so openly, but it's obvious to the trained eye. I think the cushion has been thrown in the back of a wardrobe, or even into the bin. I suspect she thinks it’s unhygienic because the patches are made from fabric from old shirts – she's a hygiene-freak who has a panic attack if people share a dip in a restaurant. She would never let us drink from public water-fountains or use public toilets without first laying sheets of toilet paper over the seats, when we were children, and she literally redecorates her house every year just to make sure it is clean. It’s a wonder she can still get into her rooms as the walls must be so thick with layers of paint by now. She even gloss-paints the inside of her kitchen cabinets. I hasten to add that the shirts were thoroughly laundered before I cut them up to make patches, and they weren’t very old when they were abandoned by P (because they were ‘too small’ or ‘the cat had ripped the front’ or ‘they were too fashionable’ or some other lame excuse he came up with to buy a new shirt!).

In my early twenties, I had a craze for embroidery, particularly cross-stitch, and I made some things which were incredibly time-consuming. I have always eschewed the sorts of cross-stitch where you are given a design and you just have to copy it. That feels like the needlecraft version of painting-by-numbers to me. So everything I stitched had to be a ‘Wilford original’. This culminated in my creating three designs which were based on the notion of a sampler – a piece of embroidery that displayed the different stitches and patterns of the embroiderer. I stuck to cross-stitch but did abstract designs which entirely covered a rectangular piece of canvas. I framed them and had them on my walls for years, simply because after all those hours of work I’d put in I felt they deserved to be displayed, even if they were rubbish! I used to hang them in the spare room where people hardly ever went. During Covid, in the middle of my cushion-making fad, I took them out of their frames and made them into tiny cushions and gave two of the three away to friends as extra Christmas gifts. I personally think they are lovely but I expect the friends were secretly disappointed! I mean, what can you actually do with a cushion the size of a large pencil case? In fact, they would have made good pencil-cases, now I come to think of it…

Anyway, this gives you the background to my current ‘fad’, the acrylic painting. The reason I mention it is that I had a stupid, painting-related, idea for the place-setting name-cards at the wedding, but I’ll leave that until the next instalment…

Further Adventures Of A Freaked-Out Bride-To-Be

 Mail-Order Bride

In my ever-more-depressing quest to find an outfit to wear on The Big Day, and also as part of our general house reburbishment, I have been ordering and returning so many items online that I’m sure our neighbours – not to mention the delivery people – think I must be considerably more wealthy than I appear to be, in terrible debt and/or I have a shopping addiction.

In fact, it has reached the point where it now gives me a weird giddy sensation each time I order something – strip out the frisson of guilt and it must be how rich people feel all the time.

                                 champagne-coloured, glitter-covered, stiletto-heeled slingbacks

Of course, the vast majority of these items are returned to the stores, which in itself is an act that varies considerably in stress-level. Some stores simply include a sticky-backed returns label and a simple form on which you indicate the reason for your return by means of a code number. You then just repack the item in its original packaging, stick on the label and take it to the post office or courier service. Others require you to also inform them by email or via your account on their website, which is a pain if you don’t have an account as you then have to set one up. Sometimes they forget to include the Returns label or the Returns form, or you have to print off your label and stick it to your package with sellotape. And I sent P to the post office so many times when I was giving away my Terry Pratchett books (see last blog post) that he’s considering eloping with the postmistress.

What I have found is that I am much more likely to buy from a store which makes it very easy to return stuff, particularly if they also make it very easy to buy the stuff in the first place. This is why Amazon is so successful. Once they have your card details, you can buy with a click of the mouse or the press of a finger against a screen. When I was young, the idea that you could buy new books for your Kindle while lying in bed in the middle of the night with insomnia would have been a source of fabulous wonderment. It is incredible, really – and horrifying too – that, if you have a sudden yearning for a biscuit tin decorated with an etching of a 1920s Orient Express, you can probably buy it while sitting on the loo in your friend’s en suite. I hate the fact that Amazon pays so little tax and puts so many people out of business – but, boy, is it convenient!

I’ve had problems with delivery people who don’t understand what a bin-shed is, or who leave parcels on the doorstep – we live on a main road and such parcels are ripe for pilfering. But I have to say that so far none has gone missing. I’ve also been refunded all the money for items I have returned, thank goodness – though every time I return something, I get the nagging suspicion that I’ll never actually get the money back. I am in fact deeply impressed by the efficiency of courier services and the Royal Mail – you don’t realise how great they are until you have to use them a lot. The email and text messages online companies send can be weird though: I recently had one telling me that the ‘first package’ in an order was on its way, which alarmed me as all I’d ordered was a mattress topper!

So where am I now with regard to The Wedding Outfit?  In a perfect world, I would be intending to wear the beautiful midnight-blue velvet wraparound dress I bought (online from Bombshell) two months ago, but I don’t live in a perfect world. The dress just about fits me, as the wraparound design gives it some flexibility, but it would definitely look better if I lost weight. The neckline is a bit too plunging, so even with the ‘body-improving’ underwear (bought online from M&S), including the push-up bra, I would still need to pin it together to avoid an embarrassing nip-slip. Incidentally, I was quite impressed by my decolletage in the push-up bra – the bra might be extremely uncomfortable, but feeling like someone is trying to saw through your rib-cage is a small price to pay for suddenly having an eye-catching bosom! 

I tried the dress on the other day with the glittery champagne-coloured stiletto-heeled sling-backs I bought (online from Paradox) and it was the right length and, from the front at least, it looked pretty good. However, from the side and back I looked like one of those cottage loaves made from two fat rolls of bread (the smaller one stuck on top of the larger one).

There is no way I’ll lose enough weight by 21 December to make a useful dent in that blubber, sadly. I lost two stone last year, after learning I was pre-diabetic, but I have gradually put most of it back on over the summer this year. A month ago I went back on the diet and I was very strict – for a fortnight I ate three small, low-calorie, low-carbohydrate meals a day, and I felt hungry constantly. At the end, I weighed myself and I’d put on 7lb!!! This was so depressing that I immediately gave up! The ‘giving up’ coincided with a two-day trip to Northumberland, our only holiday since 2019, during which we spent most of our time in restaurants and teashops due to the permanent heavy rainfall (we’re rain-gods – we have had summer holidays in Cornwall during thick fog or thunderstorms), so I ate too much then.

                                               Alnwick beach, Northumberland, late October 

For the past fortnight, though I haven’t exactly been stuffing my face, I haven’t exactly been cutting down much either. I weighed myself yesterday, out of interest, and I’d put on a further 5lb! So, if these scales are to be believed, I have become 12lb heavier during the past four weeks while either dieting strictly or eating a modest amount of food and an occasional treat. I admit that I haven’t done much exercise during that period, but I still suspect the scales just aren’t working properly!

Anyway, if I’m not going to wear the blue velvet frock, I need an alternative, so I’ve gone back to my original idea of wearing a trouser suit of some sort. I have decided on navy blue trousers and top and an ivory jacket. I bought the jacket (John Lewis online) some time ago – it’s one of those floaty loose-fitting things which are longer at the back than the front and don’t fasten, made of chiffon or some such. They look great on tall, willowy models in photos but not so good on short, fat women, but needs must. After many, many online purchases and returns, I have three pairs of potential trousers – one has a chiffon over-layer so it looks dressy, one is a kind of crepe material and the other is a bog-standard M&S pair in a thin material. They are all too long so need shortening.

Buying the top has been a nightmare, however.  Many places claim to have perfect-looking tops but then it turns out they only have one size 8 in stock. I’ve bought several which only go up to the size below what I really am, but which I have bought on the slim chance that a miracle will occur and I’ll fit into them or maybe they’ll be made slightly big. All of those have had to go back, though I kept one which I thought might be nice if I did lose weight (ha!). I even bought a sleeveless navy-blue vest made out of t-shirt material to wear if all else failed! I have now ordered a navy blue chiffon top from Evans which, if it ever arrives, should look appropriate – I’ve ordered three sizes to ensure one fits! The ivory jacket would look better if it was a thicker material, but I should at least feel comfy in this outfit. It looks much like what I wear for work! Except that, not being a drag-queen (if only I looked that good!), I don’t wear glitter-covered stiletto-heeled slingbacks for work.

So, visualize this: I’ll probably be wearing navy-blue, loose, dressy trousers with a loose, navy-blue sleeveless top, and an ivory floaty jacket. I’ll be carrying a bouquet of blue and white flowers (blue thistles, white roses, eucalyptus leaves, apparently). I’ll be wearing the aforementioned glittery champagne-coloured stiletto-heeled slingbacks. I’ll be having my hair ‘put up’ in some fashion by the nice hairdresser I mentioned in a previous post and I have two ‘hair vines’ (one with gold leaves and tiny pearls on it and the other with larger pearls) which the hairdresser thinks she will be able to twist together and thread through my hair. I’ll be wearing drop earrings with three pearls on them, and a necklace consisting of several strings of pearls loosely twisted together. And I’ll be wearing make-up and a new pair of glasses which I am collecting next week. So I should also be able to at least see what’s going on, having recently had a long-overdue eye-test.

I won’t look great. I’ll look like a short, fat woman in her fifties who is trying hard, but who should have lost more weight by now. But speaking as someone who has been having sleepless nights thinking about what I’m going to do if I can’t find anything to wear, I’m just grateful I have something halfway presentable.  Though I love the shoes (my niece took one look at them and asked drily if I was channelling Dorothy, but I ignored her), I haven’t worn heels for about two decades so I will be at serious risk of falling over.  As you know, I am prone to falling over at the best of times. In fact, I had another of my ridiculous falls very recently, this time right outside my front door while I was attempting to creep up on P (who was unlocking the door with his back to me). That’ll teach me to be childish! I jarred my side and sprained a couple of toes, but – much worse – I’ve cracked the screen on my mobile phone which was in my hand when I fell. Let’s hope that I can avoid falling down the stairs at the Town Hall – I’ll have to use P and our MC, Dave, to prop me up as I walk.

Now I’m just going to have to spend my sleepless nights worrying about the various stupidly time-consuming ideas I have had for place-settings and favour bags…

 

 

Book Review: A writer's opinion

 

Wilkie Martin:

The Inspector Hobbes ‘Unhuman’ Series

 I first came across Wilkie Martin’s ‘cosy detective’ books a few years back when the first in the series was recommended to me by Goodreads, based on my previous reading. I have to say that, though I enjoyed these books, they clearly didn’t make all that big an impact on me as, when the most recent one came out, I couldn’t remember whether or not I’d read the one immediately before it. I went back to that one on my Kindle and read the first chapter but I was still unsure so I went back to the one before and read the first chapter of that. That rang a very faint bell, so I decided to start from there. Eventually I realised I had read books three and four before but I’d simply forgotten virtually everything about them! This doesn’t really suggest they are particularly inspiring, does it? However, I enjoyed reading them a second time and it allowed me to read the new episode confident that I was up to date with the ongoing adventures of the hapless Andy Caplet.

 

    

   

 

Set in the sleepy Cotswold town of Sorenchester, the stories are narrated by young Andy, who is a reporter on the local newspaper when the first book opens. Andy is incompetent, accident-prone and generally something of a loser, but his life improves considerably after he meets Inspector Hobbes. Hobbes is, we eventually learn, an ‘unhuman’, along with one or two other inhabitants of Sorenchester, though what precisely this means is unclear. He has certain unusual abilities, such as extraordinary physical strength and agility, and certain unusual habits, such as his fondness for chomping up animal bones when he is stressed. He also appears to be extremely long-lived and has been a police officer in the town for several generations. Hobbes is a wonderful character – he is quiet, calm, extremely good at his job, insightful, kindly and irreproachably decent, honourable and brave.  And he seems to see the potential for these qualities in Andy, which is why he takes him under his wing.

           After becoming homeless, Andy moves in with Hobbes and his elderly but extraordinary housekeeper, an expert in both martial and marital arts, and a woman whose incredible cookery skills engender in Andy a keen interest in food which results in him eventually becoming the food critic for the local newspaper. Hobbes and the housekeeper become surrogate parents for Andy, whose own parents are awful, and Andy becomes much more successful and develops many of the traits of his peculiar mentor as the books progress. He even meets and marries the woman of his dreams.

           The novels are sweet and gently funny. Andy resembles the warm-hearted catastrophe-magnet characters played in old films and TV series by comics like Norman Wisdom, Abbott and Costello, Charlie Drake, Michael Crawford and Jerry Lewis, but the novels are set in the (roughly) modern world. The humour generally works and I have been known to chuckle out loud while reading them, though it usually raises a smile rather than a belly laugh and sometimes you just want to give Andy a good slapping, quite frankly. Nevertheless, he is an endearing character, though I think it is surprising that Hobbes and Andy’s wife are so patient and forgiving with him. As the tales are told by Andy himself, the reader is put in the position of seeing events through his naïve and rather stupid eyes. Such an obviously unreliable narrator stretches the reader’s suspension of disbelief at times, but the novels are so quietly charming that I found myself just going along with the silliness and generally enjoying it.

           These aren’t high-brow novels and they won’t appeal to readers who like fast, hard-hitting action or hard-boiled detectives. They are gentle, enjoyable stories about characters who are mostly pleasant and decent, and who fight against injustice and intolerance in a comforting way. It is a bit like Midsummer Murders but with added supernatural seasoning.

 

RATING: Inspector Hobbes series ***

 

 

Interesting fact: Wilkie Martin is having some success with these charming, if undemanding, tales, and has written a recipe book spin-off of dishes that Inspector Hobbes would enjoy.

Tales from a freaked-out bride-to-be

 How To Be A Champion Procrastinator...

No sensible person would decide to get half her house redecorated and recarpeted straight after a worldwide pandemic and right in the middle of organizing a wedding, right? 

    Well, 'Sensible' isn't my middle name. In fact, my middle name isn't even sensible.

The logistics alone felt like we were giving one of M.C.Escher’s interiors a revamp. Our house is tall and thin and there is, quite literally, nowhere to put anything. It's necessary to empty the contents of one room into the space between the contents of another, then empty them back before the painter returns to do the next bit. It’s like a toddler tipping coloured sand from one container to another – most of it ends up scattered all over the floor…

We began by emptying the room we designate ‘great-nephew’s bedroom’, dismantling the elderly self-assembly cupboard (which wobbles alarmingly every time anyone walks past it), and distributing sections of the bed and other bits of furniture and toys between the bedroom on the top floor and the living room downstairs. We also moved the tall bookcase, which has stood on the middle landing for two decades, into our bedroom, which at least gave me the opportunity to stub my toe on it on each of my frequent night-time visits to the bathroom, and ensure that P couldn’t get into his side of the built-in wardrobe (which was fine as I don't make him sleep in there any more). The carrier bags full of books festooning the two sets of stairs were also something of a health hazard, bearing in mind my propensity for falling over - I mean, I fell on my arse this very afternoon outside my front door while standing still and attempting to attract P's attention, so I can't realistically be expected not to fall over obstacles on the stairs.

We hired a local decorator to wallpaper the entire staircase and paint Great Nephew’s Bedroom. The night before Decorator was due to arrive, his father was rushed into hospital so he asked if he could delay the work for a week. I have no idea whether this story was true – the man had a habit of making sure he was alone with me before trying out a cat-like facial expression conveying a mixture of distress and hopeless resignation to the vicissitudes of life, which he clearly felt would work better on a woman than on the man of the house. In fact, he would have done much better using it on P, who is a sucker for this sort of thing. You’d think men would realise, by the time they hit their fifties, that women are basically world-weary cynics who never trust a bloke with a pathetic expression on his face. Nevertheless, I couldn’t very well say no just in case he was telling the truth, so we had an extra week of toe-stubbing and tripping over toys.

Finally, Decorator got on with it. I’d bought the number of rolls of wallpaper he’d advised me to get, plus two extra as I wasn’t convinced by his calculations, but even so we got in from work to find he had run out of paper halfway through the hall. I was a model of patience, which isn’t like me, and I ordered more paper online, but this meant a further week of falling over Lego tables and night-time collisions with tall bookcases. It also allowed me time to examine Decorator’s handiwork, which was definitely substandard in places, but - as the alternative was my doing it myself - I was happy to overlook it. Eventually we got the paper and he put right some of the ‘minor snags’ (eg, a ten inch tear across one sheet of paper, very badly finished bits round the light-switches, paper stretched over lumps of plaster that should have been sanded down, so it looks like mice have been papered over, mid-scamper).

He was still a better choice than the first guy who’d come round to give us an estimate: he was wearing a tight vest over his enormous belly, flips flops, and had his hair cut into a spiky style more suitable on a teenager than a man in his forties – he resembled Kenneth, the camp hairdresser from the sitcom ‘Benidorm’. I have actually enjoyed the succession of workmen who have traipsed into and out of my home during the past six weeks. The enormously fat plumber with a Terry-Thomas moustache who bore an uncanny resemblance to a grey-haired Super-Mario. The depressed-seeming electrician who looked about twelve years old and who fiddled with our switches for an hour before deciding he could do nothing and charged us nothing beyond the lift to and from his house as he couldn’t drive. The little middle-aged electrician who replaced him, did a great job and regaled us with his misery memoirs over a cuppa afterwards. The second carpet-fitting team whose leader, another short-legged overweight bloke with a big moustache, sucked in his breath through his teeth upon seeing the apparently incompetent workmanship of his predecessors, phoned his boss , and he and the boss then spent thirty minutes ‘tightening up’ and ‘putting right’ the mistakes of the previous fitters – mistakes we hadn’t noticed ourselves. How often does that happen? And how many workmen in South Yorkshire look like Super-Mario?

Next thing was getting the stairs and Great-Nephew’s Bedroom recarpeted. My niece took up all the old carpet for us but she could only come round at the weekend, so we spent five days trying to remember not to impale our feet on the exposed carpet-grippers. The new carpet looks and feels great, but it made the twenty-year-old carpet in our bedroom look every year of its age so we decided to have that done too. This of course involved tipping all the stuff from our bedroom into Great-Nephew’s Bedroom (not to mention the bathroom and landing). Basically, for the past month, our house has looked as if a giant has picked it up and given it a massive shake. 

To add to the chaos, I had to deal with P's bedtime peculiarities. Most bookworms might have one, possibly two, books on their bedside cabinets ready for their twenty-minute read before nodding off each night. I personally have three hardback books and two notebooks beside my bed, but this is because I like to read my Kindle while lying on my side resting my arm on the impromptu pile of books. However, P is different. I suspect that, if he lived alone, he would sleep in a nest made of books, magazines and scraps of paper (usually old receipts and lost shopping lists). At the best of times, the floor at his side of the bed resembles an office after a  messy burglary. The waste bin is beside his bedside cabinet, but I can’t get to it without slipping on items of loose debris so there are usually rolled-up bits of paper and other detritus around the bin from where I’ve attempted to throw rubbish into it from my side of the bed in order to avoid the sensation of trying to ride a skateboard over a rocky beach. I've tried many things to improve this situation. I’ve argued that no one actually needs 38 books about chess, three volumes of political memoir, and 18 back copies of Prospect, Philosophy Now and New Scientist, beside their beds. Who could read all this stuff in the twenty-minute window before they nod off? But no matter how many bookshelves I denude of my own books to give him more space, or the large wicker basket I have placed on the floor on his side of the bed so he can put his current stock of reading material within easy reach, or the Kindle I bought him so he can have his books in electronic form, the nest is always slowly reconstructed over a period of weeks. I wouldn’t mind, but most nights he just solves chess problems on his bloody phone before going to sleep, so when does he actually read any of this stuff?

Anyway, the clearing was finally done and the carpet was laid and most of the stuff is now back where it started. And that's when my brain thought up another way of putting-off sorting out the wedding. Seeing my collection of Terry Pratchett hardback novels on the bookshelf in our bedroom, I had a sudden lightbulb moment. I have most of these books in other editions on other bookshelves, so why not get rid of this collection so P could have most of that bookshelf for his nesting materials? This particular bookcase is special to me because I bought it, years ago, with money I won in a poetry competition, but nevertheless giving up most of it to P’s books seemed a small price to pay for a tidier bedroom. And, I thought, wouldn’t it be lovely to pass on some of these beloved Sir Terry novels to members of the online Pratchett group I belong to, people who would really appreciate them?  I assumed naively that people in that group would already have the books so I thought only one or two would find homes that way, but I was wrong. I was deluged with requests. I ended up spending more than a week wrapping up and labelling books to send to strangers round the world, making numerous trips to the post office, sending apparently endless messages to individuals about their Paypal reimbursements for postage etc, having to make decisions about who would get which book. It was incredibly hard work and immensely time-consuming. And it was an excellent form of wedding-planning-avoidance. In fact, as a method of self-induced stress, I can recommend it highly. 

I have to add that it was also weirdly nice to be giving these books away to people who really value them. The very last book was given to a man who works in a homeless shelter, for him to pass on to a homeless man who is a massive Pratchett fan. Several people had added an extra pound to their postal-reimbursement payments to cover miscellaneous costs, and there was enough money to send this book free to this particular recipient. One lovely person even sent me a private message offering to pay the postage for this book himself! The whole experience has definitely reinvigorated my sense of the fundamental niceness of most people, particularly Terry Pratchett fans, despite the fact that one recipient decided not to reimburse me for postage until he received the book (on the grounds presumably that I was attempting to scam him in some way) and another, having said he would love to receive ‘any of the books’, asked whether he could have a different book to the one I’d allocated him, after I’d packaged the novels up and stuck address labels on them. But there are always one or two people in any group like this. 

This is all displacement activity, obviously. It’s what we all do when we know we should be working on our novels: ie, something else. I'm double-procrastinating now - or meta-procrastinating, if you will!  I'm taking it to a whole new level! Organising TFW is something I do instead of writing, and now, instead of organising TFW, I’m redecorating the house and wasting time giving well-loved books away to strangers…

 

Book Review: a writer's opinion

 

Little, Big by John Crowley

 

I’m not sure now why I first downloaded this novel onto my Kindle. I'd never heard of it before I downloaded it, so I’m guessing it was a recommendation on my Kindle based on other fantasy novels I’d read. Anyway, for whatever reason, I bought it, and promptly forgot all about it - until a few weeks ago,  when I came across it by chance while flicking through the library on my Kindle, and decided to read a bit, reluctantly, as I was pretty sure I’d hate it.

              I was wrong. 

              This book wrapped itself around my brain and I wasn’t able to put it down once I’d begun to read. It isn’t always easy to grasp the length of novels when you’re reading on Kindle but I soon realized this is a hefty novel, but that only made me happier because I knew the pleasure of reading it would last longer.

              Crowley published the book in 1981 and it won the World Fantasy Award in 1982. As I’d never heard of it or its author, I knew nothing of this background as I read. In fact, I assumed it was a recently-published novel. I think this helped as I was without expectations about it. I was drawn in by the weirdly convoluted writing style at the beginning but had no real intention of reading much of it, so I was surprised to find myself enjoying the peculiar narrative. As I read on, I found myself increasingly drawn in until I was hurtling through the text like an addict.

              So, why?  It is very difficult to describe Crowley’s style. He frequently uses very long, complex sentences, with odd syntax, sentences which bend and twist and fold back on themselves. He loves unusual words (desuetude, congeries, machicolations, etc). There are some passages which go too far, where the purple prose starts wearing thin, but generally I found his style utterly captivating. He broke every writing ‘rule’ I’d been taught on my MA in Creative Writing. I have since read reviews on Goodreads and Amazon which have suggested that some readers find his style utterly tedious and virtually unreadable, but others, like me, find it compelling, magical and entirely appropriate to the tale he is telling. He is the ultimate ‘marmite’ writer.

              I think his writing is enchanting, and I use that word very deliberately. It enchanted me, which is absolutely fitting for a book about enchantments, about the confluence of humanity and faerie, the collision and interconnection between different worlds. It is partly a book about a dystopian future, partly a story of conflict, partly a tale of secrets that pass down through generations. The reader is mostly placed in the position of Smoky Barnable, the story’s first protagonist, who never quite believes in the existence of the faerie realm and never quite gets to see it. We are outsiders, hovering on the edges of the multi-generational ‘Tale’ the Drinkwater family appear to be living. The city itself, an unnamed New York, is described in a way that makes it mystifying, depressing, gorgeous and terrible, all dark alleys and thoughtless crowds and sinister political groups who manipulate the world. Edgewood, the mysterious house out in the country where the Drinkwater clan live, is even weirder, though not always as frightening, and often idyllic, though there is always a darker element lurking in the background. It's name suggests its positioning on the edge of the wood, in that border country between the forest (the location of so many fairytales) and the mundane reality of the human world. In my locale, there used to be an institution called 'Middlewood' for those with psychiatric problems, and people would give dark warnings about it like 'She'll end up in Middlewood' - it was one of those talismanic words always uttered very slightly under the breath. Edgewood reminded me of this.

Little, Big is a story about humans and faeries, but it is not in any way a nursery tale. This is a book for grown-ups, drawing on Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare, Arthurian legend, the tales of Thornton Burgess, and the Cottingley Fairies, among many other allusions. It is a fascinating family drama echoed by the soap opera that the second protagonist, Auberon, ends up writing for TV. The story has many interwoven layers of plot, moving back and forth through time, revealing secrets in arcane glimpses. It reminded me very much of Gabriel Garcia Marques’s A Hundred Years Of Solitude, though I enjoyed it much more.  The magic realism is there, for sure, but there is also real magic twisted through the fabric of these ethereal pages.

 

RATING: Little, Big *****

Key:
*****      highly recommended - a 'must-read'
****         good - well worth taking the time to read
***           ok - will help to pass the time in a boring situation
**            not very good -  just about readable but flawed
*             not recommended - boring, offensive, badly-written or deeply flawed in some other way