Summertime blues

The winner of today's Most Arrogant and/or Deluded Question in the 'Books & Authors' section of Yahoo Answers goes to this:


Question about Publishing companies?
I know they have hard due dates but if needed to take off for like a year if it was really important would they let me?? (I'm trying to figure out when I should become an author.)

Congratulations, mystery fuckwit. Your prize? A solid kick up your arse, you vacucous little tit.

***

I know I only reviewed a book the day before yesterday, but the next one I read was only about 250 pages long. Plus, I had a hospital appointment yesterday with lots of hanging around in over-heated waiting rooms full of people with coughs, limps, growths, personality disorders, hernias, loud voices, psoriasis, obese children and suchlike, so I had plenty of reading time.

I should start by saying that Nick Cave is one of my favourite musicians, and his first novel, And The Ass Saw The Angel, is truly brilliant. Disturbing, visceral, nightmarish, gut-wrenching, horrific and full of vile people being relentlessly and sickeningly cruel, yes. But also brilliant. I would usually be vastly sceptical about a novel written by a rock star, but I don't think Nick Cave actually counts as a rock star. More like a terrifying, crazed balladeer.

The Death Of Bunny Munro is, rather like And The Ass Saw The Angel, full of pretty unpleasant people doing pretty unpleasant things. Bunny, a door-to-door cosmetics salesman and misogynist sex addict, returns home one day to find that his wife, finally driven to despair, has hanged herself, leaving Bunny to care for their nine-year-old son, Bunny Junior.

Surprisingly enough, the novel is funny. Darkly, horribly funny. Bunny is possibly the least sympathetic protagonist in anything I've ever read, jaw-droppingly vile at times, but there is a strong vein of tragicomedy, even pathos, running through the book that becomes more pronounced as things go on. Bunny Junior, who adores his father against all the odds and barely questions his decision to take him out of school and drag him off on a seedy whisky-and-wank-fuelled road trip via provincial hotels, rundown council flats and dying English seaside towns, is a brilliantly-drawn portrait of a confused and grieving little boy, and at times, the relationship between Bunny and Bunny Junior is heartbreakingly sad as the boy calmly watches his father's inevitable breakdown - a breakdown which unfolds slowly as the full extent of Bunny's misdemeanours, not to mention the degree to which his own self-image is skewed, is gradually revealed.

Did I enjoy this book? Well, it's hard to say. Probably not, in all honesty. I thought it was clever, funny and incredibly dark, but ultimately, depressing, and somewhat unfulfilling in its grubbiness. Put it this way: I wanted to have a bath when I'd finished reading. Not that this is necessarily a fault in the writing - I detest readers who only want to read about people doing predictable things and making the same moral choices that the reader would make. But I'd be hard-pushed to say I enjoyed it. It's ultimately about people with few redeeming features, and it doesn't have the same sweeping, Gothic, startlingly original nightmarish vision and sick poetry of And The Ass Saw The Angel, not by any stretch.

All in all, a mind-boggling read, but my expectations were probably far too high to live up to.

***

I haven't been in at all the right mental or physical state to write anything for quite a while, which bothers me. Lots and lots of ideas, though, which is something. I struggle to be remotely creative during summer. I hate the heat, I hate any sort of humidity, I hate the sun, which either burns me or brings me out in a horrible rash, I hate the fact that a single gnat in the room overnight will leave me looking and feeling like a child with chicken pox, I hate the muggy nights, I hate the hayfever. I wilt in this.

A lot of people will tell me that they're just the same. Then in the next breath they'll chirrup on about all the things they've been doing that I would never contemplate doing in summer, and I look at them, perspiration-free, lightly tanned, planning their beach holiday, and it becomes immediately obvious that they're not. I suffer much, much lower moods in summer than I do in winter. Markedly so, to the point where I even looked up Seasonal Affective Disorder to see if it only applies in winter (it doesn't, but I'm not one for trying to make excuses for / put a trendy label on / over-analyse my ailments, so I'm dismissing it as a pile of nonsense. Either way, my brain is addled to buggery and I would like it tidied up.

News from the Slough of Despond

I have noticed of late that there seem to be certain things in life that not only does everyone seem to like except me, but also seem to provoke an infuriating desire in my friends (of which I have few) and acquaintances (of which I have rather more) to attempt to make me enjoy them, or talk about them incessantly in the hope that I will acquire a love for them by osmosis.

Currently, these things include:

Glee
Music festivals
Rugby Union
Rufus Wainwright
Twilight
Summer

If anyone mentions any of these things in a positive light in my presence again, I may be forced to have them killed.

***

Failing as I currently am to write anything, I have been reading a lot instead. First, I read The Owl Service by Alan Garner. I am a great admirer of Alan Garner's work, and share his fascination with certain themes - an almost obsessive sense of place, in which locations and geography assume lives of their own; a feeling of the past threatening to overwhelm the present; the 'Stone Tape' theory; English rural folklore. The Owl Service is at once tragic, beautiful, difficult, touching and brutal, and I can't help wondering if, were a children's writer to attempt to publish a book like this today, any publisher would have the guts to take it on. These days, we seem scared to challenge children with books like this - books that are exquisitely written, uncompromising and ambiguous. Thank god for the 60s.

My next book was Misfortune by Wesley Stace. Stace is apparently also a folk musician under a different name, and I shall be checking out his work, as I adored this book. A bizarre tale of gender confusion and family ties, it reads like an insane cross between Bleak House, Gormenghast, Orlando and The Moonstone with a tiny hint of A Series Of Unfortunate Events. Beginning in the 1820s, it tells the story of Rose Old, rescued from a rubbish heap as an abandoned baby by the effete Lord Geoffroy Loveall and raised as his daughter and sole heir in a desperate bid to replace his young sister, Dolores, with whom he is still obsessed after her death as a five-year-old, decades previously. 

Unfortunately, the baby is a boy.

I should point out that this book does have its faults. Historically, Stace appears to be confused, as despite being set largely in the Victorian era, there are certain details that seem to be borrowed from the early Regency period. Moreover, there are a number of digressions which I felt could have been edited down considerably. Some readers, too, might be irked by a few remarkable coincidences - although I considered them to be appropriate for the genres from which Stace appears to be drawing his inspiration.

Despite these minor faults, Misfortune is a remarkable achievement for a first novel. Darkly comic, occasionally bawdy, occasionally heartbreakingly sad and frequently all three at once, it sucks the reader into the borderline-surreal world of the Lovealls and their even-crazier, money-hungry relatives, each of which is a hilarious but sinister grotesque more repulsive than the last. There are characters to love and characters to hate, but each one is drawn in exquisite detail, from Rose himself right down to Pharaoh, the idiot-savant who realises the package he's been asked to dispose of contains a premature baby, and Geoffroy Loveall's monstrous, bed-ridden ageing mother.

   

The youth of today

One of my guilty pleasures in life - although 'pleasure' is perhaps the wrong word, as it does also tend to make me furiously angry sometimes - is to browse the 'Books & Authors' category on Yahoo Answers.

The questions tend to fall within a number of categories:

-Teenagers announcing that they have written a novel (usually a supernatural romance) and are now ready to get it published, but are wondering if publishers and agents will look down on them because they are 13.

- People posting extracts from their writing and wanting a critique. The extracts are always, without exception, very bad.

- Teenagers posting their English literature homework questions verbatim.

- Teenagers wanting plot summaries of books they were supposed to read for school but haven't.

- People announcing that they are going to write a book and become a bestselling author, but have no ideas or plots, so would like people to suggest some.

- People unable to think of names for characters or titles for novels.

- People asking questions about self-publishing.

- People asking for book recommendations or asking if a certain book is 'good' - usually without revealing anything about themselves that would help us to make a reasoned judgement on what sort of books they might enjoy.

- Teenagers asking whether we prefer Twilight or Harry Potter, as if no other books were available.

- Other miscellaneous Twilight or Harry Potter questions, usually heartstoppingly inane.

I may reproduce some of my favourite questions in a future post, because they really can be eye-wateringly funny, but for now, I'm concerned with something else.

That is another category of question that infuriates and disturbs me slightly: teenagers asking for books that are specifically suited to their age category, or worse, asking if a book is 'appropriate'.

Now, I can understand that a nine-year-old might want to find a book that will pitched at their particular reading level or interests, but surely once you're, say, 14, you're reading with enough fluency to be able to pick up any book off the shelf? Why is someone of 14 - or worse, 18 or 19, or even in their early 20s, which are ages that regularly crop up in these questions - looking solely for age-specific fiction? I understand that they might want to read about people their own age, or things that they are interested in, but that doesn't seem to be the main thrust of their questions on this subject. What they appear to want is books - not necessarily about people their own age, but specifically pitched at what they consider to be their level. They almost seem scared to pick up an adult book, as if it will be too difficult or contain something that's 'inappropriate'. It's as if books are supposed to carry age banding on them, like DVDs.

I worry about this. I will be honest and say that I learned to read very young and was a bit ahead of myself in terms of my reading age, so I read a lot of books that weren't for children from the age of about 10 or 11 onwards. I'm not necessarily suggesting that this is something all kids would or should want to do. But once someone is 14 or 15... surely they should be of the mindset that they can read anything that interests them? But no, it all seems to be Young Adult this and Young Adult that, as if they have to read within a specific age bracket and couldn't possibly just pick up something from the bestseller chart like everyone else. And this bothers me. It really bothers me that teenagers would feel that a whole world of books wasn't for them. My view is that once you can read with any fluency, you can read anything.

The sub-category of these age-appropriate book questions, the 'Is this book appropriate?' also, if not worry, then baffle me. It amazes me that a teenager could be worried that they might pick up a book in a bookshop and somehow be damaged by the raciness of its content. And we're not talking about famously controversial books here, either. We're talking bestsellers like The Lovely Bones and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Ordinary bestselling genre fiction, mostly. Are 15-year-olds in America (because I have never, ever seen any of these questions asked by English or Australian teenagers) being scared into a prudishness that is surely not entirely natural for a kid of that age? Isn't it pretty much normal that a teenager would always seek out reading matter full of sex and horror? Don't they want to be shocked at that age?

When I was a teenager, there wasn't actually much Young Adult fiction available. It was just emerging as a genre, and it was nothing like the huge market it appears to be now. Consequently, we just read adult books most of the time. I just went into a bookshop or the library, picked up whatever book looked interesting and read it. It never once occurred to me to be concerned about the reading level or the nature of the content, and from the age of about 14 onwards, I don't ever recall any adults around me being concerned, either. My school library was full of adult books, and we read them. I remember reading The Silence Of The Lambs at school, lending it to other kids and discussing it with our teachers. The word 'inappropriate' never cropped up.

At the risk of sounding like a geekier, more bibliophilic version of Carrie Bradshaw by ending my argument with a question: is the Young Adult fiction market killing our teenagers' reading habits?

Maybe this is indeed a cultural difference between England and America that I'm just not getting, because as I said, the English teenagers never seem to ask these questions, even though I'm assuming we have just as much Young Adult fiction knocking around here and I don't doubt that teenagers are reading it. Although bookshops in England shelve children's books in vaguely age-related sections - there's usually a section for toddlers and under-5s, then a 5-8 years section, then a 9-12 section and then a section labelled 'teenage fiction', 'young adult' or 'books for older children' - there are generally no age guidelines in the blurb on the back of the book, and there was a huge fuss from many high profile authors, plus teachers, librarians and many parents, when some publishers suggested printing age brackets on children's book covers.

Ho-hum.

The last thing I read - which, it only now occurs to me, I would probably have loved at 14 - was Company of Liars by Karen Maitland. I can't say it was the greatest book I've ever read, although despite considering it to have had multitudinous faults, I still found myself wondering if I might read her second book, The Owl Killers, to see if she's improved.

Company of Liars is set in 1348, the year of the Black Death - not that it was ever called that at the time, as the novel acknowledges - and the plot is partly driven by the need for the characters to keep moving constantly to escape it. A motley collection of chance acquaintances, each of them has a story to tell, but each also has a secret to hide, and the plague isn't the only thing that pursues them on their journey. It's a great premise for a novel, but the writing overall wasn't as good as it could have been, and I guessed pretty much every 'twist' at least three chapters in advance. Subtle it ain't. Moreover, I felt the ending was something of a cop-out, and the climax to which the story built just didn't work for me. It was almost as if the author hadn't worked out a few things, and decided to wrap them up with a catch-all plot device which didn't really work with the rest of the book - I can't reveal why without dishing out a gargantuan spoiler. All I will say is that I think she could have introduced something much more chilling and much more thematically linked with the rest of the novel.

One of the devices that I did find effective was the frequent exploration of mediaeval prejudices and superstitions - firstly because it was fascinating, but secondly because it helped to demonstrate how important it was for the characters to keep their secrets. The atmosphere, too, the details, really worked for me. The year of the Black Death was freakishly wet - records from the time suggest that it rained almost every day in many parts of the UK for about six months, and huge areas of fenland and saltmarsh in the east were devastated by floods while crops were spoiled. It's said that as many people starved to death that year as died from the Plague. The bleak desperation of this, the sheer gloom, is handled very well in the book - as is the brutality of the age, which is violent and shocking. And the characters' tales were often genuinely touching. So, possibly I'll give Karen Maitland a second chance with her second book.

50 to 1

50 to 1 is an online lit mag that publishes two things: great first lines of stories, and complete stories in 50 words.

I submitted a piece, Underground, to them a couple of weeks ago. This afternoon, I had an email back to say that not only had they accepted it, but that it appears in this week's issue. The news slightly brightened up an otherwise rotten afternoon, and for that I am grateful. 

I absolutely must work up the mental energy to write more. Lots of ideas swimming round my head at the moment like so many salmon fry.

Did you know that salmon are called different things at different times in their lifecycle? Well, they are. When they first hatch, they are called fry. Then they change slightly in appearance and are called parr, having developed camouflage in the form of vertical stripes. They then become smolts, at which point their body chemistry changes to allow them to survive in salt water. Finally, they mature into salmon.

I watched salmon leaping in a waterfall in Scotland once. It was a beautiful spectacle, although there is something terribly poignant about it, the incredible efforts the poor things must go to in order to migrate. They'll keep leaping until they die of exhaustion. Sometimes, you can see them leap and clear the waterfall, only to misjudge their landing and get dragged back down again by the current.

I'll remember the salmon when I receive my next rejection, no doubt.