Tyger tyger burning…lite

Caution – Book Review Ahead

Just read Tracy Chevalier’s latest book, Burning Bright, and I have to say I don’t think it is her best: in fact it bears all the hallmarks of a novel written in a hurry. Set against the backdrop of the French revolution, it spans a period of just over a year (1792-3) and tells the story of a family who move from Dorset to Lambeth, largely through the eyes of the children. Chevalier has clearly done her research very thoroughly – and that’s the problem: the research is far too obvious. She hasn’t lived with it and allowed it to settle – so the facts she has learnt about chair-making, for example (the father’s trade), or button-making (what the mother and daughter do in their spare time) and about life in late 18^th-century London, intrude on the narrative instead of being in the background. But the biggest bone I have to pick with this novel are the narrative contrivances which bring William Blake (yes, the William Blake) into their lives. First and most improbably, the family move all the way from Dorset and find themselves living right next door to the Blakes: not only that, the first time they see him, he happens to be wearing the Bonnet Rouge which proclaims him a supporter of the French revolution, thus helpfully ushering in this theme. Then the lad of the family, Jem, who has formed a friendship with local girl Maggie, is discussing with her in the street the question of opposites: a most improbable conversation in the context of their usual topics – and who should happen along at that very moment to clear everything up and quote from his own Songs of Innocence and Experience – but Mr Blake himself! Blake’s poetry is quoted much too freely and at length throughout (as assiduous readers of this blog will know, I am a fan of Blake, so that is not the rub) and there were times when I thought that I had stumbled upon a child’s guide to Blake’s poetry and his life and times.

That said, it speaks volumes for Chevalier’s narrative and descriptive powers that I enjoyed reading this book. Her descriptions of the London of the era were compelling, the historical detail, though intrusive, was often fascinating, and I cared about the characters enough to follow them to the end. I was outraged by the sexual and political hypocrisy – and she does do a good job of putting the background to this aspect of Blake’s work across. However, I thought the narrative a little disjointed and ill-thought-out, especially towards the end where two pregnant girls arrive in Dorset, hastily invent husbands who are at war or in prison, but don’t think of procuring wedding-rings.

Not her best – and definitely not up to the standard of Girl with a Pearl Earring. She has written two or three others so I’ll give these a go and see what I think.

Have you read this? Let me know what you think.

I think I shall do more book reviews on this blog. If there’s a book you would like me to read, let me know. But for now I shall just recommend to you (coincidentally with a very similar title) last year’s Booker Prize winner, White Tiger, by Arvind Bhatt. Read it a few weeks ago, couldn’t put it down, and now parts of it keep coming back to my mind. Also, if you’ve got about three months to spare, A Suitable Boy. Best three months I ever spent. Well, almost.

Enjoy the day. Let me know what you’re reading.

An email has flooded in..

..demanding to see some of my most successful short story.  OK here’s a taste.

For two days she kept to the house, moving quietly and keeping away from the windows, while she made preparations to leave. On the third day, going downstairs to make tea, the first thing she saw on opening the kitchen door was a milk saucepan bobbing along the floor. She snatched it up, thinking of using it to bale out the water – but opening the back window, saw that there was nowhere to bale out to – the water was several feet deep already. She checked the cupboard and fridge (opening the fridge door with difficulty) and saw that, though some food in the bottom had been contaminated, what was left constituted about two days’ worth. Government leaflets had stressed the dangers of eating food contaminated with flood water, and although most of what these leaflets claimed was utter rubbish, it was clear that this made sense: who knew what the flood water had been in contact with? Trying not to think too hard about this, she evacuated the fridge and turned off the electricity. It was time to go. By now probably the whole town had left; she imagined the soldiers herding people onto buses, trains, trucks – whatever the army and police could commandeer – and driving up into the hills where they had set up camps, reportedly along the Pennine way. God only knew what that must be like – a picture came into her mind of back-packers on a ridge, silhouetted against the sky, bent double against the wind and rain. There had been a positive deluge of government leaflets in recent weeks, warning that those who resisted would drown, though the reality, according to rumour, was that resisters were being rounded up and shot. It was this last dreadful aspect of the disaster that had decided Anna; not all she had heard about the camps, rife with cold, insufficient food and disease, had galvanized her as much as this one fact: they were not giving people a choice. And in Anna’s world, you had to have the choice: it was a fundamental human right, deciding how to live your life. Deciding how to end it.

As she stood in wellington boots in the kitchen, deciding what to take, a flash of silver caught her eye: the radio. It would be useless without electricity, but fortunately had a handle to wind it as well as a lead. She wrapped it in a carrier bag and stowed it deep in the rucksack. Not that there would be anything to listen to besides the regular, oft-repeated Ministry broadcasts – the government had taken over all radio stations and their broadcasts alternated between various health warnings about contaminated food and water; and somewhat Churchillian exhortations about the hill camps and how the “Backbone of England” could “never be submerged.” When she heard these, Anna had a vision of Churchill on the deck of a sinking ship, giving a two-fingered salute as it disappeared beneath the waves.

Greetings to all in the blogosphere

Haven’t blogged for a while. How y’all doing? I have been having a short story frenzy and I now have a total of 21 stories on the go. Themes are as follows:

Crime – “Safe”, “Tea”(poisoning seems to be a favourite.) The fact that this keeps cropping up is a little disturbing – but I guess all crime writers are fascinated with the same idea: what if we were to act on the hostile impulses we all experience? As a practitioner of yoga I’m supposed to be wking on eradicating these impulses but they seem to keep resurfacing. I wonder if putting them in a story will help them to diminish?

Homelessness/work and unemployment (“One day in Paradise”, “Marcie Proust’s Doughnut”)

Teaching (“Groundhog Day”)

Religion (“Jesus Won’t Let me Go”, “Samadhi”)

Science fiction (“Tuesday”, “A Saturday Afternoon in the Museum of thought”)

Myth and fable (“Three Sisters”, “The Griffin”)

Global warming (“The Flood”, “Ratae Coritanorum”)

Abortion (“the Red Dress”)

…and others. I am now researching outlets for crime stories and planning to send off the first two, which I think are the best. I don’t read a lot of crime fiction, but I do admire Ian Rankin. I have read all the Rebus novels and any plot I might construct wouldn’t hold a candle to these – but in any case what interests me are the psychological and symbolic aspects of crime rather than the logistics. I don’t plan to write a lot of crime stories – but then, I didn’t plan to write these two – I just started something and then it turned into a murder. I guess I just got carried away. Your honour.

On the yoga front, you’ll be happy to know I’ve been successfully Verified. That’s Ver-ified. In other words, my teacher training course is running to the national standard.

For this relief, much thanks!

Goodbye, dear reader. I’ll try to post more often – I know I’ve been neglecting you.

PS Ratae Coritanorum, in case you’re wondering, was the Roman name for Leicester. Except that now they think it was something else, but I can’t remember what. The theme of the story is discovering modern Leicester a few hundred years in the future after a flood has wiped us all out. A companion piece to “The Flood”, which, narrative-wise, is I think the best thing I’ve written. But then I always struggle with narration. Bit of a handicap for a writer, don’t you think?

* Sigh! *

Yawn again…

A while ago, don’t ask me when, there was a band called “Pop Will Eat Itself” (PWEI for short.) Maybe they’re still around – I don’t know. At the time, I thought the name was prophetic: pop was indeed eating itself all over the place, what with tribute bands and, who knew, soon there might be tribute-bands-to-tribute-bands, and not to mention cover versions proliferating like cluster bombs, though without any of the same dynamic  effects. I gave up turning on the radio last Christmas: trying to avoid the three cover versions of “Hallelujah” was more than one dial could cope with. (I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had tuned to Radio 3 and heard some orchestral arrangement around the major lift succeeding to the minor fall.) However, thanks to the presence of a fifteen-year-old girl in our house, I now realise that all is not lost.  There is some original music out there; something with its own energy, its own dynamic, something that speaks for itself rather than being an echo of an echo of some fade-to-grey cliche. Don’t ask me who it is – I haven’t a clue, but I hear it and I feel it, and I know in my gut that this is the stuff: this is The Who before The Wall, The Beatles before they so wisely broke up, and, yes, even Paul McCartney before the Frogs got in his throat and the Mull of McIntyre turned his music to mush. This is real. So yes, pop will eat itself – but rock….rock will eat you. And that is just as it should be. So roll over, Bjorn Again – and just die, already!

Yes, it’s been too long..

..since I posted a parody of TS Eliot.  This is a parody of one of his lesser-known poems, Coriolan, which I can only assume from the title, is about Coriolanus, a play I don’t know.

Corrie-olan

Oak, stone, oak, cobbles, oak, stiletto heels

over the Street

and the trombone wails, the cat jumps

from the tiled roof

Here come the titles.

Press the volume button

- I can’t hear. Such a press of people

on the sofa. How many? Count them.

Are they coming? No. Not yet. Who is it?

It’s

Ena Sharples

100,000 curlers in her hair

mouth askew

and now

Elsie Tanner

smoking her 10,000^th cigarette

what about Ken Barlow?

Is he coming? Is he there?

No.

Here she is now, look.

There is no make-up on the eyes

nor lipstick on the lips

the mouth a blur, talking, talking, talking

O Hilda.

Hilda in the kitchen, Hilda under the sofa

searching

for an ashtray.

At the still point of the burning cigarette

O Hilda.

Now the adverts come. And we put the kettle on.

Now comes the tray bearing

tea

tea

mugs of tea, and now

Oak, cobbles, oak, stone, oak, stiletto heels

over the Street

It’s on again.

Laugh! How we did laugh!

That’s it now. Trombone rolls the credits

Shall we turn over and watch Brookside?

WE SHALL.

Just been reading Wendy Cope’s “Making cocoa for Kingsley Amis” which has a brilliant TS Eliot parody in it, which escapes me and sadly the book has now gone back to the library.  So you’ll just have to look it up yourself.

i am going to enter a poetry competition judged by Ruth Padel.  I need to read some of her stuff to get an idea of what she might go for and see what I’ve got.

Just collected all my short stories together and I’ve got about 15, which can’t be bad.  Send a couple off recently for a competition.

TTFN!

PS Peter has a new blog – ratae.wordpress.com

A Private conversation…

This is a response to something which happened yesterday: Carol Thatcher (whom I have always thought a reasonable human being in spite of her parentage) apparently referred to someone in the Green Room of a daytime TV programme as “looking like a golliwog” – and the comedian Jo Brand, who was there at the time, reported this to the media. Now, I’m not sure what I think about Jo Brand welching on what was essentially a private conversation, but I also think that such a comment is not only unacceptable in public is also unacceptable in private. Which led me to ask myself a question: how do we police ourselves? And what would happen if we didn’t? So here’s the question I asked myself:

Private Conversation

What manner of nig

nog

nastiness

lurks in my drains -

what kind of slag

whore

slapper

hides under the carpet -

and what fairy

nonce

pansy

crouches in my cellar

waiting

for

my policeman

to fall asleep?

Here in Britain we have a national crisis, precipitated (literally!) by several inches of snow. This has given rise to great joy, because we can now indulge the national pastime of Moaning. In fact we can push the boat out (not literally) because there are two major things to moan about: the snow itself, with all its attendant problems such as losing money, trains being cancelled, blah blah blah (incidentally this brings the further joyous opportunity to give another outing to the phrase “the wrong sort of snow”.) – and secondly, how we are Never Prepared. In vain do I stand in the supermarket queue and try to persuade people that we can’t compare ourselves with Canada because they have this every winter from October to March whereas we only have it once in every eighteen years – logic does not enter the equation. Nothing must deprive people of the chance to gripe, in fact they pounce on the legitimate opportunity to use the phrases “like a third-world country”; “two inches and the country grinds to a halt” not to mention the bonus of being able to work in a boast at the heart of the moan – a sort of “boan-us point”: (“When I was in Finland they didn’t have this problem”; “Yes, I used to live in Switzerland and they didn’t grind to a halt every winter”… and so on.) You would think that someone who lived in Switzerland would have observed that they have snow every winter, regular as – well, clockwork, and can therefore be expected to be well-prepared, whereas we poor sods have to cope with scattered showers, sunny intervals, hurricanes, floods, blazing sunshine (I think I remember that once) and now, snow – all at the drop of a hat.

So stop moaning!

Got to leave you now – I have to go and look at my daughter’s snowman in the yard. God, it’s cold! My feet are like blocks of ice! And I hate having to wear lots of layers! Where’s my scarf….I don’t know; two bloody inches and the entire country grinds to a….

Climbing Mon Blog

Yep – life’s a mountain, all right. Here’s today’s poem.

(Fifty years) after T S Eliot

“Actually, I want granary”

said my son

three years old

in the restaurant

The sun had been up for a good long while

- six and a quarter hours

the traffic was mild to moderate

visibility was good

Henman had just reached the quarter-finals

Dr Who was rumoured

to be coming back

- don’t ask me who was in the charts. I haven’t a clue.

And these were the options:

brown

white

granary

brown

white

brown

brown

“Brown”, I said,

and my three-year-old son, right then,

popped up and demurred

“Actually”, he said

“actually, I want granary.”

“That’ll be on his tombstone”, I said

(once we’d finished eating)

Here’s today’s limerick. I’ve given up sending them to Pentatette as they don’t even reply to me.

Reflecting this leg of my life

Dissecting the flesh with a knife

The bones unbelievable

Blood irretrievable

Runs from the vein of our strife

I’m not too happy with the last line, but there aren’t too many rhymes for Life, apart from “wife” and I’m definitely not going with that. Remember “Run for your Wife”? I try not to, either.

Work-wise, I’m annotating all 7 volumes of “Harry Potter” trying to work out how the plots fit together. It’s an awesome piece of engineering where just about every trivial event or throw-away comment fits into the plot somehow. To maintain a plot over 7 novels is an achievement in itself – in fact, the word “plot” seems wholly inadequate in this context. We must include gunpowder and treason for a start, and then some, as our American cousins say. Why “cousins”? what kind of cousins are they? I suppose they must be first cousins – they wouldn’t put up with being second.

Speaking of which, last Saturday, all 5 of my cousins and their partners and families were in the same room, something which probably hasn’t happened since my childhood. The reason? My sister’s wedding. This was a happy occasion with a sparsely-attended civil ceremony (anyone with an average-to-large family would struggle in the room available) followed by a crush of friends and relatives at their home afterwards. John’s best man told some embarrassing stories about him and I tried and failed (on the spur of the moment) to think of some equivalent ones about Mary. Not sure if she was glad or disappointed about that.

But hey! Did you have a register like this? A mysterious black-bound book which gradually filled up with neat corn-rows as the term progressed? Where each morning was marked with a deft upward line mirrored in the afternoon by a downward one? So that each day was like a stitch, each term a row of knitting, with the odd dropped stitch for flu or the dentist. When I became a teacher it was my dearest ambition to reproduce the neat rows of knitting in these books. Alas! I should have known. I was never very good at knitting. Instead of neat rows of one-up, one-down stitches, mine was a mass of blobs, tangled lines where my ticks had overshot the box, crossings-out and corrections. But then, my career as a teacher generally resembled the life of Douglas Adams’ whale, its brief existence a crashing to earth of which it was wholly oblivious. As you see, I use the word “career” in its traditional sense.

Nowadays I expect they have a series of codes, each with a number , signifying everything from the dentist to a cancer scare; figures which will eventually be collated and fed into a statistics-hungry computer. The local authority will then add up all the figures, feed them into a super-computer and disgorge the whole as a nugget of Pure Bureaucracy which can be sold on the open market. Or added to the GDP.

What’s the point of it all?

what’s the point of a baby or a fresco

what’s the point of a party

or a pizza when

you can just as easily

have cheese on toast.

what’s the point of mustard emulsion or cream caramel

what’s the point

why bother

why bother being born

when

foxgloves on the lawn

say

hush

hush

hush a bye

hush

when death

whispers

come

why bother

come

come

come

………

Hey!  I’ve just realised that today is Groundhog Day!  Good film.  It’s about karma – if you think about it.

Enjoy the day.  Don’t relive it!