Back home everyone said I didn’t have any talent. They might be saying the same thing here, but it sounds better in French.
- Jerry (played by Gene Kelly), An American In Paris.
Saturday, December 24, 2005
Fire flies
I'm flying to Melbourne today to see my family. Here in Auckland there's a gale force wind and it's been raining all week. You'd never know it's summer. Across the Tasman, three states have declared total fire bans and bushfire season is well underway.
A few years ago, I lived in the bush south of Sydney. On Christmas Day a huge firestorm swept through the National Park, burning three quarters of it (that's a lot of trees - a lot of animals). I was in Melbourne, as usual, for Christmas lunch, and watched the fire front get closer to my house - on the TV news.
So on Boxing Day (or maybe it was the day after) my brother drove me back from the beach house in the middle of the night to the airport, I jumped on a plane, and went back to Sydney to defend my home.
Our town was blocked off by the fire. I had to leave the car across the water and get a ferry. By then the fire front was visible from the roof, heading our way. The sun was blood-red, like Mordor. I was the hobbit.
One day I'll be able to describe what it's like to choose a suitcase worth of your life - just enough to carry - and make the decision to leave everything else: thousands of books, paintings, memories, stuff. I've got a lot of stuff. Your grandmother's sewing machine. The painting you did aged five that Dad had framed. Photos - hopefully someone else has the negatives. Gifts from lovers, from children, from friends. I've written before about choosing one book to save.
I had time to say goodbye. I had time to clear up the bush debris and soak the grass and climb on the roof with the hose to fill the gutters with water. I had night after night on watch, eyes streaming with the smoke, endless repetition on the fire warnings coming over the radio, endless hosing and raking and covering windows.
The fire stopped outside town. We were saved by a wind change and some very brave and dauntless fire fighters. We were driving through it for days, as the fire brigades mopped up: flames right next to the road, smoke spewing everywhere, until it rained at last.
It's no coincidence that I've been writing a story about the Great Fire of London for the last few months, about random flames, power, smoke, ferocity and dread.
So my thoughts are with everyone in that town tonight (since the bush will have just grown back enough for the leaf litter to have built up again) and every other town facing the possibility of an inferno over the next few days.
As we say in Aussie, avagoodweegend.
The blog will be off the air while I deal with a roast lunch and plum pudding (probably in 35 degree heat, but we're used to it).
A few years ago, I lived in the bush south of Sydney. On Christmas Day a huge firestorm swept through the National Park, burning three quarters of it (that's a lot of trees - a lot of animals). I was in Melbourne, as usual, for Christmas lunch, and watched the fire front get closer to my house - on the TV news.
So on Boxing Day (or maybe it was the day after) my brother drove me back from the beach house in the middle of the night to the airport, I jumped on a plane, and went back to Sydney to defend my home.
Our town was blocked off by the fire. I had to leave the car across the water and get a ferry. By then the fire front was visible from the roof, heading our way. The sun was blood-red, like Mordor. I was the hobbit.
One day I'll be able to describe what it's like to choose a suitcase worth of your life - just enough to carry - and make the decision to leave everything else: thousands of books, paintings, memories, stuff. I've got a lot of stuff. Your grandmother's sewing machine. The painting you did aged five that Dad had framed. Photos - hopefully someone else has the negatives. Gifts from lovers, from children, from friends. I've written before about choosing one book to save.
I had time to say goodbye. I had time to clear up the bush debris and soak the grass and climb on the roof with the hose to fill the gutters with water. I had night after night on watch, eyes streaming with the smoke, endless repetition on the fire warnings coming over the radio, endless hosing and raking and covering windows.
The fire stopped outside town. We were saved by a wind change and some very brave and dauntless fire fighters. We were driving through it for days, as the fire brigades mopped up: flames right next to the road, smoke spewing everywhere, until it rained at last.
It's no coincidence that I've been writing a story about the Great Fire of London for the last few months, about random flames, power, smoke, ferocity and dread.
So my thoughts are with everyone in that town tonight (since the bush will have just grown back enough for the leaf litter to have built up again) and every other town facing the possibility of an inferno over the next few days.
As we say in Aussie, avagoodweegend.
The blog will be off the air while I deal with a roast lunch and plum pudding (probably in 35 degree heat, but we're used to it).
Friday, December 23, 2005
Fantasy hero
There's an article on Slate right now which summarises some fascinating theories on why kids love fantasy (and therefore, why it's OK for kids to love fantasy, so the Pope can stop worrying about Harry Potter).
The crux of the argument is that theorising and fantasizing are similar processes:
Einstein would agree, I'm sure, since he saw theory as inherently creative and imaginative. So, perhaps, would Tolkien.
As if to back this up, the New Yorker this week serendipitously features an interview with Philip Pullman, focused on his views on religion (with a nice bit of anti-Narnia spleen-venting thrown in for good measure):
The crux of the argument is that theorising and fantasizing are similar processes:
... Cognitive science suggests that children may love fantasy not because they can't appreciate the truth or because their lives are difficult, but for precisely the opposite reason. Children may have such an affinity for the imaginary just because they are so single-mindedly devoted to finding the truth, and because their lives are protected in order to allow them to do so... The point is not that reading fantastic literature or playing fantastic games will make children smarter or more well-adjusted or get better grades in their chemistry classes...
But, still, since it's Christmas, we might indulge in a moment or two of sheer childlike pleasure in a beautiful reality. The spirit of possibility and play that leads children to read the Narnia books and watch the Harry Potter movies, and to just imagine, is at the heart of what it is to be human.
Einstein would agree, I'm sure, since he saw theory as inherently creative and imaginative. So, perhaps, would Tolkien.
As if to back this up, the New Yorker this week serendipitously features an interview with Philip Pullman, focused on his views on religion (with a nice bit of anti-Narnia spleen-venting thrown in for good measure):
In Lyra's world, the Bible isn't quite the same as ours: when Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, the first thing they see is the adult form of their daemons. "But it en't true, is it?" Lyra asks of the story. "Not true like chemistry or engineering, not that kind of true? There wasn't really an Adam and Eve?" Lord Asriel tells her to think of the story as an "imaginary number, like the square root of minus one." Its truth might not be tangible, but you can use it to calculate "all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it." The metaphor is not just cunning; it helps explain why Pullman, a champion of science, writes in the fantastic mode.
Thursday, December 22, 2005
Take that, you rotters
Well, well, well.
The much-maligned Enid Blyton strikes back. This week, British adults voted her Famous Five series as their own favourite books for children.
The series - which started 63 years ago - pipped Chronicles of Narnia to win first place in a national poll (by YouGov, commissioned by the National Literacy Trust). This is in spite of a couple of decades of derision directed at Mrs Blyton and her creations, and all the current hoo-ha about CS Lewis's Narnia stories.
In announcing the result, John Ezard in The Guardian still couldn't quite bring himself to be gracious:
Blyton's gentle fantasy, The Faraway Tree, came third, followed by Tolkien's The Hobbit and Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Both of which, you imagine, ought to have had a bit of a boost from Hollywood in recent years). Blyton also took 16th and 17th place in the top 20 with the Secret Seven adventure series and the Malory Towers girls school series. There's no mention of my personal favourite, The Secret of Killimoon - my mother's old copy had some critical pages missing, and I nearly cried with the anguish of never knowing what had happened in them.
The Famous Five were Julian, Dick and Anne, plus their cousin Georgina (George) and dog, Timmy. It's fair enough to say that it's hard to tell Julian and Anne from Peter and Susan in Narnia, or any of them from the Secret Seven, but George may well be responsible for me never ceasing to be a tomboy. Still, we won't hold that against poor Enid. I'm sure she didn't intend it.
In defence of Enid Blyton, although I find it hard to read the books as an adult, at least her Five and Seven characters had interesting adventures - a new mystery to solve every time - and they were smarter than the police, brave and energetic, cycled everywhere, and never had to be saved by grown-ups. They were never sappy like dumb old Nancy Drew. They had dogs, which is always good, and big appetites. I remember most vividly the descriptions of High Tea which always came at some point towards the end and sounded terribly grand. "What's jugged hare, Mum?" I'd ask. "Can we have that for dinner? Can you please make scones? It's an emergency." The Famous Five might not have had the grand scale of Lord of the Rings but they were ripping good yarns, well told.
It must be said that adult memories of cherished childhood books are sometimes more faithful to the experience of the reading adventure, than the text itself. My bet would be that the order would be different if all those who voted had to read the books again. But never mind. The people have spoken, and here's the list:
Top 10 books
1 Famous Five
2 Chronicles of Narnia
3 The Faraway Tree
4 The Hobbit
5 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
6 Black Beauty
7 Treasure Island
8 Biggles
9 Swallows and Amazons
10 Lord of the Rings
Anyway, what's wrong with being a jolly good sport?
The much-maligned Enid Blyton strikes back. This week, British adults voted her Famous Five series as their own favourite books for children.
The series - which started 63 years ago - pipped Chronicles of Narnia to win first place in a national poll (by YouGov, commissioned by the National Literacy Trust). This is in spite of a couple of decades of derision directed at Mrs Blyton and her creations, and all the current hoo-ha about CS Lewis's Narnia stories.
In announcing the result, John Ezard in The Guardian still couldn't quite bring himself to be gracious:
The Famous Five are a group of clean-living, well brought-up middle class children who take pride in being "jolly good sports". Their adventures, fuelled by their inexhaustible addiction to ginger beer, lemonade and sandwiches ("Oh goody, cucumber," said George), were dismissed as hopelessly outdated and irrelevant by librarians and others in the 1970s.
Blyton's gentle fantasy, The Faraway Tree, came third, followed by Tolkien's The Hobbit and Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Both of which, you imagine, ought to have had a bit of a boost from Hollywood in recent years). Blyton also took 16th and 17th place in the top 20 with the Secret Seven adventure series and the Malory Towers girls school series. There's no mention of my personal favourite, The Secret of Killimoon - my mother's old copy had some critical pages missing, and I nearly cried with the anguish of never knowing what had happened in them.
The Famous Five were Julian, Dick and Anne, plus their cousin Georgina (George) and dog, Timmy. It's fair enough to say that it's hard to tell Julian and Anne from Peter and Susan in Narnia, or any of them from the Secret Seven, but George may well be responsible for me never ceasing to be a tomboy. Still, we won't hold that against poor Enid. I'm sure she didn't intend it.
In defence of Enid Blyton, although I find it hard to read the books as an adult, at least her Five and Seven characters had interesting adventures - a new mystery to solve every time - and they were smarter than the police, brave and energetic, cycled everywhere, and never had to be saved by grown-ups. They were never sappy like dumb old Nancy Drew. They had dogs, which is always good, and big appetites. I remember most vividly the descriptions of High Tea which always came at some point towards the end and sounded terribly grand. "What's jugged hare, Mum?" I'd ask. "Can we have that for dinner? Can you please make scones? It's an emergency." The Famous Five might not have had the grand scale of Lord of the Rings but they were ripping good yarns, well told.
It must be said that adult memories of cherished childhood books are sometimes more faithful to the experience of the reading adventure, than the text itself. My bet would be that the order would be different if all those who voted had to read the books again. But never mind. The people have spoken, and here's the list:
Top 10 books
1 Famous Five
2 Chronicles of Narnia
3 The Faraway Tree
4 The Hobbit
5 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
6 Black Beauty
7 Treasure Island
8 Biggles
9 Swallows and Amazons
10 Lord of the Rings
Anyway, what's wrong with being a jolly good sport?
Real history
Robespierre famously announced in 1792 that, "History is fiction". If he'd known then how many times he was to appear as a character in later historical novels, he might have said rather more on the matter.
How very post-modern of him. I wonder what he would have made of Jeanette Winterson's imagined history, The Passion, where lines from TS Eliot pop up unannounced in Napoleonic Venice, where religion and romantic passion are both "somewhere between sex and fear", and where the beating heart of the beloved is always elsewhere - literally. Napoleon makes a guest appearance, the same character familiar to readers of Tolstoy (or more recently Gallo) and yet at once more heartless - in a story about passion, the Emperor's only great love is chicken. History as passion.
Tolstoy's Napoleon is the classic portrayal - he may or may not be a genius, he is lonely and certainly vain, he can lead his Army into hell and deserts them in the ice. Napoleon is a man who stalks the deserted corridors of the Kremlin.
History as gilt-framed portrait.
Tolstoy doesn't care about Napoleon (although he does care about Kutuzov). He cares instead about his families, his earthy weeping soul-filled Russians. They are the heart of his history - the rest is a wind that buffets, an inexplicable movement of armies and time (war and peace). But that's another story altogether.
Max Gallo's Napoleon (I've only read the first two volumes so far) is an altogether different person: fanatically focused, almost hollow, almost mad, almost explicable - but not quite.
History as the story, once again, of great men. Not the Great Men of Victorian history-making: the empire builders, the stalwarts of Rorke's Drift, the arrow in the eye, the honour roll of endless generations of Cecils or Norfolks. It is the history of great men, retold, from an imagined interior.
We know what the great man Bonaparte wrote, said in public, wore - even how he behaved. Except that he also lied, fantasised, exaggerated, and was famously inconsistent. Historians can argue details about his well-documented life, and yet here is a character real and imagined who is also unknowable. You can join the dots any way you like - and any portrait will still be a likeness. "What is history," he once asked, "but a fable agreed upon?"
If only the young Napoleon had been more involved in the Revolution and Terror, he might have figured in Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety. He might for once have been a real character, as fully formed as her Danton and Desmoulins, and chilling Robespierre, whose "history is fiction" she quotes, and plays with, throughout a novel that is and isn't history, that is written in past and present tense, that realises the lives of real people perhaps more perfectly than any other.
AS Byatt writes in On Histories and Stories that the experimental third-person narratives by Mantel (and Pat Barker in the Regeneration Trilogy) "can creep closer to the feelings and the inner life of the characters - as well as providing a Greek chorus - than any first person mimicry" (the historical narration she calls "ventriloquism"). Byatt should know - she's a dab hand at it herself. Barker and Mantel, she says, "tell us what we don't know... they imagine it on the grand scale - and we are richer as readers."
In children's historical fiction, the grand scale of history, of great movements or times of turmoil, provides the opportunity for young protagonists to face danger or launch quests or solve history's puzzles. They are cast out into history, and history allows them to operate outside their normal lives or fears (and those of the reader). They can be caught up in history, as innocent bystanders; they can be involved in history, winning battles or saving lives; they can observe and mature and celebrate history. History as adventure - history as a familiar pattern.
Great men (and sometimes great women) are always popping up to lend a hand, or wave a flag, like Sean Connery suddenly appearing as Richard the Lion Heart in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. I quite like that. It's a Victorian tradition that has never gone out of fashion - the Children of the New Forest grow up just in time to ride into London with the restored King.
That's history as finale, as reward to the young reader for sharing so many dangers. The historic moment, the celebration of victory - even in fantasy as history, magic as history - brings a tear to my eye every time. Luke Skywalker stands in front of all those Ewoks wearing his medal, in exactly the same way as Peter, Susan, Lucy and Edmund sit on their thrones in Narnia, the hobbits in Lord of the Rings, Harry returned safely to Hogwarts - it's Arthurian, and has a history and tradition of its own.
So history may be swirled around in fantasy or magic, or random, or circular, or parallel. You can live it or watch it or imagine it or jump through time into other histories. History as the unexpected.
Robespierre's complete sentence, made as always in the spirit of history-building, if not fiction writing, was: "Our revolution has made me feel the full force of the axiom that history is fiction and I am convinced that chance and intrigue have produced more heroes than genius and virtue."
History as intrigue.
How very post-modern of him. I wonder what he would have made of Jeanette Winterson's imagined history, The Passion, where lines from TS Eliot pop up unannounced in Napoleonic Venice, where religion and romantic passion are both "somewhere between sex and fear", and where the beating heart of the beloved is always elsewhere - literally. Napoleon makes a guest appearance, the same character familiar to readers of Tolstoy (or more recently Gallo) and yet at once more heartless - in a story about passion, the Emperor's only great love is chicken. History as passion.
Tolstoy's Napoleon is the classic portrayal - he may or may not be a genius, he is lonely and certainly vain, he can lead his Army into hell and deserts them in the ice. Napoleon is a man who stalks the deserted corridors of the Kremlin.
History as gilt-framed portrait.
Tolstoy doesn't care about Napoleon (although he does care about Kutuzov). He cares instead about his families, his earthy weeping soul-filled Russians. They are the heart of his history - the rest is a wind that buffets, an inexplicable movement of armies and time (war and peace). But that's another story altogether.
Max Gallo's Napoleon (I've only read the first two volumes so far) is an altogether different person: fanatically focused, almost hollow, almost mad, almost explicable - but not quite.
History as the story, once again, of great men. Not the Great Men of Victorian history-making: the empire builders, the stalwarts of Rorke's Drift, the arrow in the eye, the honour roll of endless generations of Cecils or Norfolks. It is the history of great men, retold, from an imagined interior.
We know what the great man Bonaparte wrote, said in public, wore - even how he behaved. Except that he also lied, fantasised, exaggerated, and was famously inconsistent. Historians can argue details about his well-documented life, and yet here is a character real and imagined who is also unknowable. You can join the dots any way you like - and any portrait will still be a likeness. "What is history," he once asked, "but a fable agreed upon?"
If only the young Napoleon had been more involved in the Revolution and Terror, he might have figured in Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety. He might for once have been a real character, as fully formed as her Danton and Desmoulins, and chilling Robespierre, whose "history is fiction" she quotes, and plays with, throughout a novel that is and isn't history, that is written in past and present tense, that realises the lives of real people perhaps more perfectly than any other.
AS Byatt writes in On Histories and Stories that the experimental third-person narratives by Mantel (and Pat Barker in the Regeneration Trilogy) "can creep closer to the feelings and the inner life of the characters - as well as providing a Greek chorus - than any first person mimicry" (the historical narration she calls "ventriloquism"). Byatt should know - she's a dab hand at it herself. Barker and Mantel, she says, "tell us what we don't know... they imagine it on the grand scale - and we are richer as readers."
In children's historical fiction, the grand scale of history, of great movements or times of turmoil, provides the opportunity for young protagonists to face danger or launch quests or solve history's puzzles. They are cast out into history, and history allows them to operate outside their normal lives or fears (and those of the reader). They can be caught up in history, as innocent bystanders; they can be involved in history, winning battles or saving lives; they can observe and mature and celebrate history. History as adventure - history as a familiar pattern.
Great men (and sometimes great women) are always popping up to lend a hand, or wave a flag, like Sean Connery suddenly appearing as Richard the Lion Heart in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. I quite like that. It's a Victorian tradition that has never gone out of fashion - the Children of the New Forest grow up just in time to ride into London with the restored King.
That's history as finale, as reward to the young reader for sharing so many dangers. The historic moment, the celebration of victory - even in fantasy as history, magic as history - brings a tear to my eye every time. Luke Skywalker stands in front of all those Ewoks wearing his medal, in exactly the same way as Peter, Susan, Lucy and Edmund sit on their thrones in Narnia, the hobbits in Lord of the Rings, Harry returned safely to Hogwarts - it's Arthurian, and has a history and tradition of its own.
So history may be swirled around in fantasy or magic, or random, or circular, or parallel. You can live it or watch it or imagine it or jump through time into other histories. History as the unexpected.
Robespierre's complete sentence, made as always in the spirit of history-building, if not fiction writing, was: "Our revolution has made me feel the full force of the axiom that history is fiction and I am convinced that chance and intrigue have produced more heroes than genius and virtue."
History as intrigue.
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Best "best of" list
I take it all back. Philip Roth may have a point.
In his "Best quotes for 2005" list for the Sunday Times, John Dugdale ferrets out those lines in or about books that have made most readers squirm this year (beside the Bad Sex Awards, although Marlon Brando appears in both lists).
His gong for Most exciting academic project was awarded to this extract from the programme for Birkbeck College’s Dickens Weekend:
So sorry I missed that.
My personal favourite is the quote from a TV interview with Jonathan Coe which gets the Worst timing award:
You may agree with him on this, but not longer after Coe's biography of BS Johnson, Like A Fiery Elephant, won the £30,000 Samuel Johnson prize. I haven't heard whether he gave the money back in protest at being part of a contest or news story.
Coe, funnily enough, has lectured at Birkbeck, so he's obviously a hilarious chap. Sue Tyley once wrote (in Birkbeck's journal), admiringly, that "Coe livens up his fiction as much for his own sake as for the reader's: he has confessed to getting bored easily while writing, to changing voices frequently because of losing confidence in them, and to breaking out of a conventional narrative line into email, letter or unpunctuated dialogue as much because he can't bear to do another chapter in the third person as because the subject matter requires it."
The Sunday Times list makes excruciating reading, except for the fact that most of the writers quoted are in deadly earnest, and you know perfectly well that within each of us beats the impulse to spout nonsense - hence the popularity of blogging.
In his "Best quotes for 2005" list for the Sunday Times, John Dugdale ferrets out those lines in or about books that have made most readers squirm this year (beside the Bad Sex Awards, although Marlon Brando appears in both lists).
His gong for Most exciting academic project was awarded to this extract from the programme for Birkbeck College’s Dickens Weekend:
"A panel will suggest new ways of reading Great Expectations, using gendered contemporary discourses of dementia to propose an understanding of Miss Havisham as menopausal, deploying theories of memory and nostalgia to explore childhood in the novel, and interrogating the text’s various forms of bodily care, including homoerotic nursing."
So sorry I missed that.
My personal favourite is the quote from a TV interview with Jonathan Coe which gets the Worst timing award:
Q. If you could abolish one thing in the book world, what would it be?
A. Literary prizes — they wrongly encourage seeing literature as a contest or a news story. They've got to go.
You may agree with him on this, but not longer after Coe's biography of BS Johnson, Like A Fiery Elephant, won the £30,000 Samuel Johnson prize. I haven't heard whether he gave the money back in protest at being part of a contest or news story.
Coe, funnily enough, has lectured at Birkbeck, so he's obviously a hilarious chap. Sue Tyley once wrote (in Birkbeck's journal), admiringly, that "Coe livens up his fiction as much for his own sake as for the reader's: he has confessed to getting bored easily while writing, to changing voices frequently because of losing confidence in them, and to breaking out of a conventional narrative line into email, letter or unpunctuated dialogue as much because he can't bear to do another chapter in the third person as because the subject matter requires it."
The Sunday Times list makes excruciating reading, except for the fact that most of the writers quoted are in deadly earnest, and you know perfectly well that within each of us beats the impulse to spout nonsense - hence the popularity of blogging.
Post script: I've just started reading Roth's Shop Talk, a book of interviews with fellow authors such as Primo Levi, Milan Kundera, and Edna O'Brien. They're more like discussions, since sometimes the questions take up a couple of pages. Still, I can't help thinking he must have forgotten writing it when he called for a moratorium on discussing books. It's hard to sound normal when you're discussing ideas and writing. It's not like talking about the weather.
Monday, December 19, 2005
Bundeena after the fire
(For Les Bursill)
A strand of tar threads through blackened bush.
Steam snakes up to meet the rain.
Somewhere hidden here
are flying fish and low-sweeping gulls,
burnt scrub, bandicoots,
and foul-mouthed hermits.
Waterfalls splatter across the road.
Under a cliff flank
an echidna etched in ochre
is three hundred years old and fading fast –
below it, in yesterday’s dust,
are tracks, and an ant hole scratched wide open.
On the beach,
bluebottles on the wet sand
deserted by an ebb tide
are left to desiccate
just out of the ripples’ reach.
Nobody knows what else there might be –
pale unseen orchids or
snakeskins or
ships’ ribs under sandbars or
bushfire sparks or
a whale’s fluke
just offshore.
But at night, and in the early mornings,
there is only the mist, the car radio, and the black road.
A strand of tar threads through blackened bush.
Steam snakes up to meet the rain.
Somewhere hidden here
are flying fish and low-sweeping gulls,
burnt scrub, bandicoots,
and foul-mouthed hermits.
Waterfalls splatter across the road.
Under a cliff flank
an echidna etched in ochre
is three hundred years old and fading fast –
below it, in yesterday’s dust,
are tracks, and an ant hole scratched wide open.
On the beach,
bluebottles on the wet sand
deserted by an ebb tide
are left to desiccate
just out of the ripples’ reach.
Nobody knows what else there might be –
pale unseen orchids or
snakeskins or
ships’ ribs under sandbars or
bushfire sparks or
a whale’s fluke
just offshore.
But at night, and in the early mornings,
there is only the mist, the car radio, and the black road.
Don't mention the war
The long-awaited trial of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk was adjourned on Friday amid concern in the European Union (EU) that the case could challenge freedom of expression.
Pamuk, author of My Name is Red and Snow, faces a possible three-year jail term for "insulting Turkish identity" by saying that a million Armenians were killed in massacres 90 years ago and 30,000 Kurds in recent decades. You're not supposed to mention those sorts of things in Turkey. Why they don't just blame the Armenian massacres on the Ottoman Empire and move on, I don't know (fear of compensation claims, perhaps, or because of the historic link to the more recent Kurdish insurgency).
But Pamuk's case comes at a critical time as the country begins serious negotiations about joining the EU - which doesn't look kindly on laws which limit freedom of expression, or on countries which jail writers and journalists for saying what they think.
Yet in a continent quietly celebrating the recent Austrian charges against Holocaust denier David "Did I really say that?" Irving, allowing membership to an entire nation that denies a genocide is undoubtedly tricky. On the other hand - how do you get a country to admit responsibility for alleged war crimes? And how do you admit your own complicity: when it was the European powers and the US which drew up the boundaries of modern Iraq and Turkey, denying the Kurds a homeland, after World War 1? The US, Britain and France aren't exactly famous for 'fessing up to their own colonial incursions.
I was in Turkey last year and people were largely very excited about joining the EU (they saw it as a fait-accompli) and the Euro was proudly encouraged. I loved every second of my time in the country, but when I started researching Turkey prior to my visit, I was confronted with a terse statement on the home page of the Government Ministry's websites denying any killing of Armenians ever took place. It's still prominent. You can read instead about "the killing of Turks by Armenians." It's at complete odds with Turkey's usually sensitive approach to the commemoration of the Allied 1915 invasion of their own land along the Dardanelles.
My impression was that there's a cultural gulf between central government in Ankara and a clamouring Euro-focused entrepreneurial class - particularly in Istanbul, one of the world's most exciting cities - and perhaps between traditional rural people and city folk. I imagine this will lead to divisions later on issues such as agricultural subsidies and trade tariffs. It's always been a country on the cusp of two continents, two histories, just as Istanbul has always been amongst the world's most cosmopolitan of cities, so these aren't new issues.
But I admit I wasn't brave enough to start engaging complete strangers in discussions about the Armenian genocide or the war against the Kurds. Like many issues of national identity, inside the country, even among friendly and invariably generous people, the belief in these events as "myths" appears fairly common. Every country has those. Ask a Tasmanian whitefella about the fate of the Aboriginal inhabitants. Ask the Japanese Prime Minister about the Sandakan Death March, the Rape of Nanking, or the Korean "comfort women". Indeed, just the other day I read an extract from a Southern US history textbook all about how the relationship between "masters" and slaves was one based on mutual respect and benefit. No mention of whips or lynching.
Pamuk's case, along with the dramatic shifts in Turkish society, will be critical not just to the question of EU membership, but also to the future political environment inside the country. While the hardline nature of the government has eased over the years, it's still concerned with keeping a certain kind of "peace".
The trial will restart on February 7, 2006, after a dispute as to whether the law under which Pamuk is charged can apply, as it was introduced after his statements in an interview. All very well, legally, but I can't imagine Pamuk shutting up about it now, whether new laws or old apply.
George W Bush banged on a great deal about the Kurds killed and dispossessed by Saddam Hussein - haven't heard him sticking up for Orhan Pamuk, though I guess he's got enough going on at present.
Pamuk, author of My Name is Red and Snow, faces a possible three-year jail term for "insulting Turkish identity" by saying that a million Armenians were killed in massacres 90 years ago and 30,000 Kurds in recent decades. You're not supposed to mention those sorts of things in Turkey. Why they don't just blame the Armenian massacres on the Ottoman Empire and move on, I don't know (fear of compensation claims, perhaps, or because of the historic link to the more recent Kurdish insurgency).
But Pamuk's case comes at a critical time as the country begins serious negotiations about joining the EU - which doesn't look kindly on laws which limit freedom of expression, or on countries which jail writers and journalists for saying what they think.
Yet in a continent quietly celebrating the recent Austrian charges against Holocaust denier David "Did I really say that?" Irving, allowing membership to an entire nation that denies a genocide is undoubtedly tricky. On the other hand - how do you get a country to admit responsibility for alleged war crimes? And how do you admit your own complicity: when it was the European powers and the US which drew up the boundaries of modern Iraq and Turkey, denying the Kurds a homeland, after World War 1? The US, Britain and France aren't exactly famous for 'fessing up to their own colonial incursions.
I was in Turkey last year and people were largely very excited about joining the EU (they saw it as a fait-accompli) and the Euro was proudly encouraged. I loved every second of my time in the country, but when I started researching Turkey prior to my visit, I was confronted with a terse statement on the home page of the Government Ministry's websites denying any killing of Armenians ever took place. It's still prominent. You can read instead about "the killing of Turks by Armenians." It's at complete odds with Turkey's usually sensitive approach to the commemoration of the Allied 1915 invasion of their own land along the Dardanelles.
My impression was that there's a cultural gulf between central government in Ankara and a clamouring Euro-focused entrepreneurial class - particularly in Istanbul, one of the world's most exciting cities - and perhaps between traditional rural people and city folk. I imagine this will lead to divisions later on issues such as agricultural subsidies and trade tariffs. It's always been a country on the cusp of two continents, two histories, just as Istanbul has always been amongst the world's most cosmopolitan of cities, so these aren't new issues.
But I admit I wasn't brave enough to start engaging complete strangers in discussions about the Armenian genocide or the war against the Kurds. Like many issues of national identity, inside the country, even among friendly and invariably generous people, the belief in these events as "myths" appears fairly common. Every country has those. Ask a Tasmanian whitefella about the fate of the Aboriginal inhabitants. Ask the Japanese Prime Minister about the Sandakan Death March, the Rape of Nanking, or the Korean "comfort women". Indeed, just the other day I read an extract from a Southern US history textbook all about how the relationship between "masters" and slaves was one based on mutual respect and benefit. No mention of whips or lynching.
Pamuk's case, along with the dramatic shifts in Turkish society, will be critical not just to the question of EU membership, but also to the future political environment inside the country. While the hardline nature of the government has eased over the years, it's still concerned with keeping a certain kind of "peace".
The trial will restart on February 7, 2006, after a dispute as to whether the law under which Pamuk is charged can apply, as it was introduced after his statements in an interview. All very well, legally, but I can't imagine Pamuk shutting up about it now, whether new laws or old apply.
George W Bush banged on a great deal about the Kurds killed and dispossessed by Saddam Hussein - haven't heard him sticking up for Orhan Pamuk, though I guess he's got enough going on at present.
Saturday, December 17, 2005
Shoot 'em all
I'm going to have to give up this blogging business. American author Philip Roth, in an interview with the Guardian, has called for a "100-year moratorium on insufferable literary talk". Supporting his nomination for World's Grumpiest Writer (currently neck and neck with Tom Wolfe), he refuses to smile for the camera, insists he never smiles unless alone, continues to not smile, and says he wishes he could:
He can't be blamed entirely for sounding solemn - the interviewer, Danish journalist Martin Krasnik, focuses on death and the fear of dying. But clearly the writing life is tragic, so I'll have to give up on that as well:
Quite possibly, everyone else was too frightened to get in there with him.
"shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot."
He can't be blamed entirely for sounding solemn - the interviewer, Danish journalist Martin Krasnik, focuses on death and the fear of dying. But clearly the writing life is tragic, so I'll have to give up on that as well:
It's a horrible existence being a writer filled with deprivation. I don't miss specific people, but I miss life. I didn't discover that during the first 20 years, because I was fighting - in the ring with the literature. That fight was life, but then I discovered that I was in the ring all by myself.
Quite possibly, everyone else was too frightened to get in there with him.
Friday, December 16, 2005
Deception
I believe that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
- Margaret Atwood
- Margaret Atwood
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Florence Nightingale's owl
There were two moreporks in the tree outside our kitchen window last night. Moreporks, for the uninitiated, are small, very owl-shaped New Zealand owls, with a distinctive call that sounds like someone calling out "More pork!". I think we have them back in Australia too, but they must have an accent, because they're called Mopokes or Boobooks.
Anyway they are rarely seen. We saw one close up the first day we came to inspect the house, and decided that an owl paying a visit was a sign, so we moved in. Never saw the little blighter again, until the other night, although he calls out often. Now he has a friend. They are as owl-like as each other. They were sitting on the branch, deep in conversation.
Florence Nightingale had an owl called Athena, which she carried around in her dressing gown pocket. She would perch on Flo's finger for treats, and make a bow and curtsey on the table. She must have been a Little Owl: Athene noctua.
Athena had been rescued from some naughty boys at the Acropolis, where the great carved stone owl of the original Athena perches (she's now outside the museum - I loved that owl, and scoured Athens' shops until I found a little replica to bring home).
When Florence left for Constantinople to nurse soldiers during the Crimean War, Athena got left behind in the attic. She died not longer after, they said, of heartbreak.
But that's not the end of Athena's fame. Last year she was rediscovered in a collection of Flo memorabilia (Floriana?) which was about to be sold off.
People fell in love with poor, stuffed Athena, and a campaign sprang up to raise the money to buy her. That gorgeous man from the Antiques Roadshow, ceramics expert Henry Sandon, had a special fundraising porcelain piece made for the Save Athena Fund: needless to say, it was a statue of the Lady With the Lamp.
Anyway they are rarely seen. We saw one close up the first day we came to inspect the house, and decided that an owl paying a visit was a sign, so we moved in. Never saw the little blighter again, until the other night, although he calls out often. Now he has a friend. They are as owl-like as each other. They were sitting on the branch, deep in conversation.
Florence Nightingale had an owl called Athena, which she carried around in her dressing gown pocket. She would perch on Flo's finger for treats, and make a bow and curtsey on the table. She must have been a Little Owl: Athene noctua.
Athena had been rescued from some naughty boys at the Acropolis, where the great carved stone owl of the original Athena perches (she's now outside the museum - I loved that owl, and scoured Athens' shops until I found a little replica to bring home).
When Florence left for Constantinople to nurse soldiers during the Crimean War, Athena got left behind in the attic. She died not longer after, they said, of heartbreak.
But that's not the end of Athena's fame. Last year she was rediscovered in a collection of Flo memorabilia (Floriana?) which was about to be sold off.
People fell in love with poor, stuffed Athena, and a campaign sprang up to raise the money to buy her. That gorgeous man from the Antiques Roadshow, ceramics expert Henry Sandon, had a special fundraising porcelain piece made for the Save Athena Fund: needless to say, it was a statue of the Lady With the Lamp.
Sunday, December 11, 2005
Being Pinteresque
Harold Pinter was unable to be present to accept his Nobel Prize due to illness, but that didn't stop him addressing a few thoughts in a lecture last week, beamed into Stockholm on video. He got stuck into Blair and Bush over Iraq and even volunteered to be a speechwriter for Bush.
But he also had some interesting things to say about the nature of fiction and reality:
He concluded by calling for an "unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man."
You can read his full speech here.
But he also had some interesting things to say about the nature of fiction and reality:
It’s a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author’s position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can’t dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man’s buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.
So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.
But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.
He concluded by calling for an "unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man."
You can read his full speech here.
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Historical fiction dilemma #2: Voice
How did pirates sound?
Nobody knows. But we can be pretty sure they didn't all swagger around snarling, "Ahoy, me hearties! Walk the plank, you scabby sea-dog!"
Pirate crews were quite cosmopolitan, especially in the Mediterranean, where men (and they were almost entirely men, with a few notable exceptions) from ports right around the Middle Sea and beyond could find themselves lumped together on the same ship for years.
How did their families sound? We do know something of the pronunciation of some classes of people in Britain, at least, because until Doctor Johnson's Dictionary set down standards of spelling, people often wrote words as they sounded. (There's a fascinating glimpse of this in Liza Picard's wonderful Restoration London.) But even those records, in letters and journals, only tell us how the literate classes sounded.
We have to imagine it. Historical novelists always have.
So here's the thing: If you're writing historical fiction, especially in the first person, should you aim to replicate the imagined voices of the time in which your story is set?
In an article in Solander, Belinda Copson posed the question more broadly: "Should characters think and behave in a manner authentic to the period, or are we happy for them to be modern teenagers in period costume?"
And if you try to create an "authentic" voice, would anybody read such a thing?
It can work - sometimes. Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang is an example. But we've all seen it backfire badly into incomprehensible or laughable gibberish. You have to be very good to pull it off. Few of us are.
It's an issue if you're writing for younger readers, who won't skip over boring bits but either give up altogether, or plod on under sufferance - particularly readers aged 9 to 12, such a vulnerable time in anybody's reading career. A few impenetrable books and you'll be turned off reading for life.
I remember having to force myself to plough through Kidnapped at that age, since I had no idea how a real Scots accent was supposed to sound, and couldn't understand what anyone was saying for the first half of the book. It was the same with the broad Yorkshire voices in The Secret Garden - and yet Stevenson and Hodgson Burnett are amongst the best of their era. Kidnapped's thrilling plot, and The Secret Garden's gloomy atmosphere and brilliant characters, carried me through.
On the other hand, anachronism drives me insane. I'm one of those people who shouts out loud in the cinema if anyone in a period film set before about 1850 says, "OK". Keira Knightley's apparently 17th century character uttered it in Pirates of the Caribbean. I nearly had apoplexy.
I understand that it can happen unconsciously to one writer, and perhaps slip by an editor (it will happen to me one day, and you can quote this back to me), but not when there's a team of writers, directors, actors and a million other people on a project. Did nobody wonder: "Gee, that sounds a bit modern"?
Even worse are the supposedly groovy updated versions of old stories (Hamlet in a leather jacket, that kind of thing). I've only seen it work a few times on stage: Julius Caesar set in a corporate boardroom, with the august Robyn Nevin as a female Mark Antony; or in opera, such as Don Giovanni set in 1930s Tangier. Clueless and Bridget Jones's Diary succeed as reworkings of Jane Austen because they are utterly different in everything but plot. Gwyneth Paltrow's Valley girl portrayal of Emma did not, because her body language was completely 20th century, even if her frock was Empire line.
So I've gone for the immediacy of a transparent (I hope) modern narrator's voice, without any (I hope even more fervently) glaring anachronisms. Somewhere between Copson's two extremes, but verging towards the modern.
Older characters may have a few little mannerisms (I have to admit that in my head they mostly sound like my great aunts and uncles), and people from other countries who are speaking English have a certain cadence that I hope has been conveyed.
It's the solution mastered by Geoffrey Trease in the 1930s with Bows Against the Barons and the Carey series, and it's certainly the style that most appealed to me as a young reader. I've been re-reading him lately and it's reinforced my belief that young people ought not have to struggle to read historical fiction.
It should create a sense of wonder and engagement. Anything that takes attention away from that is affecting the reading process - and the reader's enjoyment.
Historical fiction dilemma #1: Ethics
Nobody knows. But we can be pretty sure they didn't all swagger around snarling, "Ahoy, me hearties! Walk the plank, you scabby sea-dog!"
Pirate crews were quite cosmopolitan, especially in the Mediterranean, where men (and they were almost entirely men, with a few notable exceptions) from ports right around the Middle Sea and beyond could find themselves lumped together on the same ship for years.
How did their families sound? We do know something of the pronunciation of some classes of people in Britain, at least, because until Doctor Johnson's Dictionary set down standards of spelling, people often wrote words as they sounded. (There's a fascinating glimpse of this in Liza Picard's wonderful Restoration London.) But even those records, in letters and journals, only tell us how the literate classes sounded.
We have to imagine it. Historical novelists always have.
So here's the thing: If you're writing historical fiction, especially in the first person, should you aim to replicate the imagined voices of the time in which your story is set?
In an article in Solander, Belinda Copson posed the question more broadly: "Should characters think and behave in a manner authentic to the period, or are we happy for them to be modern teenagers in period costume?"
And if you try to create an "authentic" voice, would anybody read such a thing?
It can work - sometimes. Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang is an example. But we've all seen it backfire badly into incomprehensible or laughable gibberish. You have to be very good to pull it off. Few of us are.
It's an issue if you're writing for younger readers, who won't skip over boring bits but either give up altogether, or plod on under sufferance - particularly readers aged 9 to 12, such a vulnerable time in anybody's reading career. A few impenetrable books and you'll be turned off reading for life.
I remember having to force myself to plough through Kidnapped at that age, since I had no idea how a real Scots accent was supposed to sound, and couldn't understand what anyone was saying for the first half of the book. It was the same with the broad Yorkshire voices in The Secret Garden - and yet Stevenson and Hodgson Burnett are amongst the best of their era. Kidnapped's thrilling plot, and The Secret Garden's gloomy atmosphere and brilliant characters, carried me through.
On the other hand, anachronism drives me insane. I'm one of those people who shouts out loud in the cinema if anyone in a period film set before about 1850 says, "OK". Keira Knightley's apparently 17th century character uttered it in Pirates of the Caribbean. I nearly had apoplexy.
I understand that it can happen unconsciously to one writer, and perhaps slip by an editor (it will happen to me one day, and you can quote this back to me), but not when there's a team of writers, directors, actors and a million other people on a project. Did nobody wonder: "Gee, that sounds a bit modern"?
Even worse are the supposedly groovy updated versions of old stories (Hamlet in a leather jacket, that kind of thing). I've only seen it work a few times on stage: Julius Caesar set in a corporate boardroom, with the august Robyn Nevin as a female Mark Antony; or in opera, such as Don Giovanni set in 1930s Tangier. Clueless and Bridget Jones's Diary succeed as reworkings of Jane Austen because they are utterly different in everything but plot. Gwyneth Paltrow's Valley girl portrayal of Emma did not, because her body language was completely 20th century, even if her frock was Empire line.
So I've gone for the immediacy of a transparent (I hope) modern narrator's voice, without any (I hope even more fervently) glaring anachronisms. Somewhere between Copson's two extremes, but verging towards the modern.
Older characters may have a few little mannerisms (I have to admit that in my head they mostly sound like my great aunts and uncles), and people from other countries who are speaking English have a certain cadence that I hope has been conveyed.
It's the solution mastered by Geoffrey Trease in the 1930s with Bows Against the Barons and the Carey series, and it's certainly the style that most appealed to me as a young reader. I've been re-reading him lately and it's reinforced my belief that young people ought not have to struggle to read historical fiction.
It should create a sense of wonder and engagement. Anything that takes attention away from that is affecting the reading process - and the reader's enjoyment.
Historical fiction dilemma #1: Ethics
Why Malta?
Since I posted my travel notes (they're silly things, really, not research findings), a few people have asked why I have set the Swashbuckler! novels in and around Malta. The reasons are many, but here are a few:
- Malta has a fascinating and unique history
- The Maltese fleet played a critical role in legal piracy for hundreds of years
- The Maltese people spontaneously rose up against the French invaders
- It's one of the most inspiring and historically compelling places on earth
- The sea there is a beautiful blue.
Perhaps most importantly, Malta's strategic position and maritime influence were critical in the Napoleonic era, and at many other times in history, including World War 2.
In 1801 Napoleon told the British Ambassador, "Peace or war depends on Malta. It is vain to speak of the Netherlands or Switzerland - they are but trifles. I would rather see you in possession of the heights of Montmartre than of Malta."
His nemesis, Admiral Nelson, wrote to London: "I now declare that I consider Malta as a most important outwork to India, and that it will give us great influence in the Levant, and indeed all the parts of southern Italy. In this view, I hope that we shall never give it up."
Two years later Admiral Lord Keith wrote, "Malta has the advantage over all other ports in the Mediterranean... the whole harbour is covered by its wonderful fortifications."
This was a time when empires were being created - a complicated time of upheaval, expansion and change that would become the basis of the modern world. And in the middle of it all, as always, was Malta.
- Malta has a fascinating and unique history
- The Maltese fleet played a critical role in legal piracy for hundreds of years
- The Maltese people spontaneously rose up against the French invaders
- It's one of the most inspiring and historically compelling places on earth
- The sea there is a beautiful blue.
Perhaps most importantly, Malta's strategic position and maritime influence were critical in the Napoleonic era, and at many other times in history, including World War 2.
In 1801 Napoleon told the British Ambassador, "Peace or war depends on Malta. It is vain to speak of the Netherlands or Switzerland - they are but trifles. I would rather see you in possession of the heights of Montmartre than of Malta."
His nemesis, Admiral Nelson, wrote to London: "I now declare that I consider Malta as a most important outwork to India, and that it will give us great influence in the Levant, and indeed all the parts of southern Italy. In this view, I hope that we shall never give it up."
Two years later Admiral Lord Keith wrote, "Malta has the advantage over all other ports in the Mediterranean... the whole harbour is covered by its wonderful fortifications."
This was a time when empires were being created - a complicated time of upheaval, expansion and change that would become the basis of the modern world. And in the middle of it all, as always, was Malta.
Opening the mail
Nobody writes letters anymore, so we have to make do with the morning blink of the Inbox screen.
I still love opening mail. The post arrives early here, usually bringing a few boring bills and a reminder from my accountant that I still haven't done my tax return.
But you never know when the letterbox might instead be jammed full of surprises.
Yesterday was the monthly thrill of the arrival of the BBC History magazine (second only to the arrival of the Literary Review, both that much more welcome because they've had to travel halfway around the world).
And a parcel.
I love parcels.
I'm a compulsive buyer of cheap books in online auctions, and it has been suggested by someone who knows me far too well that I only do it so I get lots of parcels.
Parcels are especially good if wrapped in brown paper (sadly, no longer tied up in string ... These are a few of my favourite things). I can hardly get them open some days, mostly because of that infernally effective brown packing tape, but sometimes because it's just too exciting.
Yesterday's parcel was only a plastic Post Shop envelope, which are even harder to open, but inside was an omnibus edition of Rosemary Sutcliff's later King Arthur stories, which I've never read because I was grown up by the time they came out in 1979. This is the first sentence:
I've read that line over and over. I just don't know how she gets away with it. Sure, it's not her best opening line, but it's thrilling and sage-like and somehow plummets the reader through time, until you're sitting in the Great Hall at the feet of a bard, with the head of your Irish Wolfhound resting sleepily on your knee.
It conveys an entire world and a years-long phase of bloody British history in one crystal clear sentence. It gives you a sense of character, time, place and action.
You know you're in the Dark Ages, you know Vortigern's a spineless creep, "slew" tells you that there's going to be lots more swords and daggers and drama, and you know the stakes are high. You know you're reading a story about history and interesting people all at the same time.
She's not an easy read for young people. I notice that more now than I did when I was a young reader, perhaps because prose has been simplified in the last couple of decades (some would say it's been dumbed-down). She often breaks the supposedly cardinal rule of telling, rather than showing. She does sometimes bang on a bit about the bright light of Christianity shining through the Dark Ages - although she's not as missionary as Lewis.
And yet she's a master story-teller, a master of the craft of history and myth, and a spell-binder.
All that, in a Post Shop envelope. And I haven't even got past the first page.
I still love opening mail. The post arrives early here, usually bringing a few boring bills and a reminder from my accountant that I still haven't done my tax return.
But you never know when the letterbox might instead be jammed full of surprises.
Yesterday was the monthly thrill of the arrival of the BBC History magazine (second only to the arrival of the Literary Review, both that much more welcome because they've had to travel halfway around the world).
And a parcel.
I love parcels.
I'm a compulsive buyer of cheap books in online auctions, and it has been suggested by someone who knows me far too well that I only do it so I get lots of parcels.
Parcels are especially good if wrapped in brown paper (sadly, no longer tied up in string ... These are a few of my favourite things). I can hardly get them open some days, mostly because of that infernally effective brown packing tape, but sometimes because it's just too exciting.
Yesterday's parcel was only a plastic Post Shop envelope, which are even harder to open, but inside was an omnibus edition of Rosemary Sutcliff's later King Arthur stories, which I've never read because I was grown up by the time they came out in 1979. This is the first sentence:
In the dark years after Rome was gone from Britain, Vortigern of the narrow eyes and the thin red beard came down from the mountains of Wales, and by treachery slew Constantine of the old royal house and seized the High Kingship of Britain in his place.
I've read that line over and over. I just don't know how she gets away with it. Sure, it's not her best opening line, but it's thrilling and sage-like and somehow plummets the reader through time, until you're sitting in the Great Hall at the feet of a bard, with the head of your Irish Wolfhound resting sleepily on your knee.
It conveys an entire world and a years-long phase of bloody British history in one crystal clear sentence. It gives you a sense of character, time, place and action.
You know you're in the Dark Ages, you know Vortigern's a spineless creep, "slew" tells you that there's going to be lots more swords and daggers and drama, and you know the stakes are high. You know you're reading a story about history and interesting people all at the same time.
She's not an easy read for young people. I notice that more now than I did when I was a young reader, perhaps because prose has been simplified in the last couple of decades (some would say it's been dumbed-down). She often breaks the supposedly cardinal rule of telling, rather than showing. She does sometimes bang on a bit about the bright light of Christianity shining through the Dark Ages - although she's not as missionary as Lewis.
And yet she's a master story-teller, a master of the craft of history and myth, and a spell-binder.
All that, in a Post Shop envelope. And I haven't even got past the first page.
Historical fiction dilemma #1: Ethics
History, no matter what they tell you in school, is not objective. Writing about history, or conveying history indirectly as part of a narrative, is even less so. Writing historical fiction for younger readers brings with it a whole range of questions that need to be answered and sometimes can't be:
- Conveying a complex international political situation in a few brush strokes
- Delving into age-old prejudices and divisions without taking a too-obvious position
- Dealing with critical issues (like slavery) without hectoring
- Balancing contemporary moral codes with those of history.
Why ask? I've written adventure books about a young girl who is kidnapped by pirates and then becomes one. Pirates, needless to say, are vile creatures. Does she become a vile creature? Does she kill anyone? Rob anyone? Do the people around her? Are they all horrible?
This isn't about levels of violence (that's a different dilemma) but about creating a consistent, credible, and appealing character.
Does she, who was once a slave, help take slaves?
What would a reader of nine or eleven make of a heroine who did or didn't behave in these ways?
The broader picture: Piracy in the Mediterranean from the age of the Crusades to the end of the 18th century was largely divided along pseudo-religious lines. The navies of the Islamic states and the Ottoman Empire attacked so-called Christian ships, and vice versa, with the Knights of Malta the most dramatic example of legal Christian pirate/Crusaders. (Except that most normal pirates were hardly religious types, and everyone seems to have attacked the poor old Greeks, who were seen as being far too Levantine in their Orthodoxy, and somehow responsible for the loss of Constantinople.)
So the characters in a book set in this era must present this world view, regardless of the author's position.
It's a situation that holds some resonance in the 21st century and it's impossible not to be conscious of that. I'm also conscious that any statements made by characters will be interpreted by young readers in the light of what they know about the world today.
It's an old dilemma, obviously. Flaubert argued that, "An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere".
I don't know, frankly, if I've managed it.
- Conveying a complex international political situation in a few brush strokes
- Delving into age-old prejudices and divisions without taking a too-obvious position
- Dealing with critical issues (like slavery) without hectoring
- Balancing contemporary moral codes with those of history.
Why ask? I've written adventure books about a young girl who is kidnapped by pirates and then becomes one. Pirates, needless to say, are vile creatures. Does she become a vile creature? Does she kill anyone? Rob anyone? Do the people around her? Are they all horrible?
This isn't about levels of violence (that's a different dilemma) but about creating a consistent, credible, and appealing character.
Does she, who was once a slave, help take slaves?
What would a reader of nine or eleven make of a heroine who did or didn't behave in these ways?
The broader picture: Piracy in the Mediterranean from the age of the Crusades to the end of the 18th century was largely divided along pseudo-religious lines. The navies of the Islamic states and the Ottoman Empire attacked so-called Christian ships, and vice versa, with the Knights of Malta the most dramatic example of legal Christian pirate/Crusaders. (Except that most normal pirates were hardly religious types, and everyone seems to have attacked the poor old Greeks, who were seen as being far too Levantine in their Orthodoxy, and somehow responsible for the loss of Constantinople.)
So the characters in a book set in this era must present this world view, regardless of the author's position.
It's a situation that holds some resonance in the 21st century and it's impossible not to be conscious of that. I'm also conscious that any statements made by characters will be interpreted by young readers in the light of what they know about the world today.
It's an old dilemma, obviously. Flaubert argued that, "An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere".
I don't know, frankly, if I've managed it.
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Rewriting history
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself... You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
- Angela Carter
At the moment I've got my head stuck in Pax Britannia, the second in Jan Morris's imperial triptych.
I laughed out loud several times this morning on the ferry until the chap sitting next to me could stand it no longer and asked me what I was reading. I suppose he thought it was Billy Connolly or some such thing, because he looked at me as if I was an alien when I told him it was a history of the British Empire.
Jan Morris writes triptychs - other mere mortals write trilogies. (Have they made her a Dame yet? She'd probably decline, but it would be delicious. I shall suggest it next time I see the Queen.)
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Of pirates and pasticci
Today I'm posting my travel notes from a trip to Malta in May. My pirate books for young readers (Swashbuckler!) are set in Malta and its oceans, so the visit was to confirm the research I'd done from the other side of the world.
If you've read these before, my apologies: use the links in the right hand column to find something more interesting.
Here's my explanation about why I chose to set the books in Malta.
Day one
I really should not be left alone in a city of wooden boats, knights and really good door knockers.
I know I'm supposed to be doing very serious research but it's gorgeous and you can't help falling in love - the cities glow yellow, and sea and sky are ridiculously blue. The limestone is crumbling now, but it's warm and honey coloured, and even the most impressive ramparts seem somehow welcoming (unless you're a Turkish corsair, of course). Flew in a circle around the islands and it all seemed terribly familiar, except for the high rise apartments, which don't feature in my unique 1798 picture of the archipelago. Then the first things I saw when I arrived was a restaurant called Il Pirata and a house called Lily [the name of the main character in Swashbuckler!]. Mind you I have since seen houses called Eileen, Doris and Elvis.
Then I opened the curtains in my hotel room and a schooner sailed past.
Day three
Am resting up after a day of scrambling around dusty old forts. Having invented a series of secret tunnels under Vittoriosa for Swashbuckler! book 3, today I found some real life ones, and there was some very undignified squeezing through rusty iron gates and crawling along drainage ditches (which I'd also invented).
Tomorrow I have a guide, driver and car, courtesy of the Tourism Authority, so I'm going to make them climb up cliffs and trudge around fictional swordfight sites. The day after, I'm going to find myself a boat.
Trip notes continue here.
If you've read these before, my apologies: use the links in the right hand column to find something more interesting.
Here's my explanation about why I chose to set the books in Malta.
Day one
I really should not be left alone in a city of wooden boats, knights and really good door knockers.
I know I'm supposed to be doing very serious research but it's gorgeous and you can't help falling in love - the cities glow yellow, and sea and sky are ridiculously blue. The limestone is crumbling now, but it's warm and honey coloured, and even the most impressive ramparts seem somehow welcoming (unless you're a Turkish corsair, of course). Flew in a circle around the islands and it all seemed terribly familiar, except for the high rise apartments, which don't feature in my unique 1798 picture of the archipelago. Then the first things I saw when I arrived was a restaurant called Il Pirata and a house called Lily [the name of the main character in Swashbuckler!]. Mind you I have since seen houses called Eileen, Doris and Elvis.
Then I opened the curtains in my hotel room and a schooner sailed past.
Day three
Am resting up after a day of scrambling around dusty old forts. Having invented a series of secret tunnels under Vittoriosa for Swashbuckler! book 3, today I found some real life ones, and there was some very undignified squeezing through rusty iron gates and crawling along drainage ditches (which I'd also invented).
Tomorrow I have a guide, driver and car, courtesy of the Tourism Authority, so I'm going to make them climb up cliffs and trudge around fictional swordfight sites. The day after, I'm going to find myself a boat.
Trip notes continue here.
Malta research trip: Day four
One of the charming things I'd forgotten about Maltese people is that they are not the tallest people in the world, generally speaking, so I am a giant among women for the first time since grade six. Funnily enough, half of them speak English with a stong Brunswick accent, having spent decades in Melbourne - making my pasticci, no doubt - or they sound shockingly like Cilla Black, which is a little disconcerting when you feel sure you're in the middle of the Mediterranean.
Needless to say, the greatest collection of swords in the world is closed for renovation. But there are lots of boats, castles and cannons, baroque churches with illuminated manuscripts, medals, and '50s buses. And there are a few swords. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, see Visit Malta.
Day six
In a bad way: suffering cathedral neck from craning to see frescoes (lucky I have my binoculars and torch); walker's hip (lucky I have my father's long-distance knees); ancient temple-induced sunburn (unluckily I have my mother's pink nose); and most of all glutton's bloat (all my own fault after calamari at Il Pirata). But I'll cope, after days of fishing villages with more bright blue boats even than Turkey (luzzus, painted blue for the sea, yellow for the sun, green for hope and red for courage); chiselled stone temples more ancient than Stonehenge; palaces and cobbled streets and fortresses and bastions and vedettes and castles.
I have had a driver and guide for the last few days, who are very sweet, but I'm also suffering Travel Writer Grimace, from nodding politely. The guide's getting the hang of things now, though, and can now advise on pirate landing places instead of wondering if I'd like to buy some lace. He even laughed when I sidled up to the famous cliffs of Dingli, a jagged precipice which plays a key part in the finale of the Swashbuckler! books, looked over expecting to see raging torrents and jagged rocks, and found instead olive groves and terraced fields - and that is why I had to come to Malta to check everything...
Trip notes continue here.
Needless to say, the greatest collection of swords in the world is closed for renovation. But there are lots of boats, castles and cannons, baroque churches with illuminated manuscripts, medals, and '50s buses. And there are a few swords. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, see Visit Malta.
Day six
In a bad way: suffering cathedral neck from craning to see frescoes (lucky I have my binoculars and torch); walker's hip (lucky I have my father's long-distance knees); ancient temple-induced sunburn (unluckily I have my mother's pink nose); and most of all glutton's bloat (all my own fault after calamari at Il Pirata). But I'll cope, after days of fishing villages with more bright blue boats even than Turkey (luzzus, painted blue for the sea, yellow for the sun, green for hope and red for courage); chiselled stone temples more ancient than Stonehenge; palaces and cobbled streets and fortresses and bastions and vedettes and castles.
I have had a driver and guide for the last few days, who are very sweet, but I'm also suffering Travel Writer Grimace, from nodding politely. The guide's getting the hang of things now, though, and can now advise on pirate landing places instead of wondering if I'd like to buy some lace. He even laughed when I sidled up to the famous cliffs of Dingli, a jagged precipice which plays a key part in the finale of the Swashbuckler! books, looked over expecting to see raging torrents and jagged rocks, and found instead olive groves and terraced fields - and that is why I had to come to Malta to check everything...
Trip notes continue here.
Malta research trip: Day eight
A potted history of Malta, so you know what I'm doing here:
Settled first by Sicilians, who built miraculous temples of huge monoliths a thousand years before Stonehenge and worshipped a short fat woman who sleeps a lot. My kind of people. From then on, it's a Mediterranean hit parade of all the usual gang - Phoenicians, Ulysses (spent seven years in a cave on Gozo - no doubt eating crunchy bread and honey with Calypso the naughty nymph), Romans, Arabs, Normans. Then the Knights of St John, who'd been thrown out of Rhodes by the Ottomans, were handed the islands (they tried to hand them back - they'd have preferred a small European nation). They built the great fortress cities and set themselves up as pirate crusaders, that is, they took Muslim slaves and gold as a way of getting back at the Barbary states. In 1798 Bonaparte arrived, Nelson in his wake (and my imaginary pirates).
Most of what I knew about Malta, before I started researching the books, was about the World War 2 experience (I remember Mum telling me how everyone in Malta was so brave the king gave them each a medal - actually they got one to share, but they remain the only country ever awarded the George Cross). They got the hell bombed out of them, and nearly starved to death - and no wonder so many migrated to Australia after the war. The British influence is still evident in the classic '50s orange Bedford buses with names like Lady Diana and Vera Lynn and, rather
surprisingly, "Toon-Gabbie NSW".
I was shown around a palazzo which was built by one of the Knights and is still inhabited by Maltese nobility (my host was the Ninth Marquis, Nicholas de Piro). Oh the books. Oh the furniture. Oh the library. Oh the gilded sedan chair in which one would be carried by one's slaves to the palace next door - and up the stairs to the drawing room as well. And under the palace and all its 17th century glories are the WW2 bomb shelters, and the ubiquitous unexploded Fascist bomb that fell through the house one morning.
I spent all day yesterday back in Mdina, the Old City, since my guide the other day only thought we need an hour there, whereas I spent eight. Lots of pirate research there, as my books' narrator, Lily, and her crew have a few adventures there and I had to retrace all their steps I had made up. Luckily it all makes sense, and in fact it's a perfect pirate town. The laneways twist and turn, a bend every ninety paces, as that's the usual flight of an arrow, so you can fight a running battle in the streets.
This afternoon I've been out on the water, checking the fortifications from below (impossible, impenetrable - don't know how those pirates are going to break through).
Trip notes continue here.
Settled first by Sicilians, who built miraculous temples of huge monoliths a thousand years before Stonehenge and worshipped a short fat woman who sleeps a lot. My kind of people. From then on, it's a Mediterranean hit parade of all the usual gang - Phoenicians, Ulysses (spent seven years in a cave on Gozo - no doubt eating crunchy bread and honey with Calypso the naughty nymph), Romans, Arabs, Normans. Then the Knights of St John, who'd been thrown out of Rhodes by the Ottomans, were handed the islands (they tried to hand them back - they'd have preferred a small European nation). They built the great fortress cities and set themselves up as pirate crusaders, that is, they took Muslim slaves and gold as a way of getting back at the Barbary states. In 1798 Bonaparte arrived, Nelson in his wake (and my imaginary pirates).
Most of what I knew about Malta, before I started researching the books, was about the World War 2 experience (I remember Mum telling me how everyone in Malta was so brave the king gave them each a medal - actually they got one to share, but they remain the only country ever awarded the George Cross). They got the hell bombed out of them, and nearly starved to death - and no wonder so many migrated to Australia after the war. The British influence is still evident in the classic '50s orange Bedford buses with names like Lady Diana and Vera Lynn and, rather
surprisingly, "Toon-Gabbie NSW".
I was shown around a palazzo which was built by one of the Knights and is still inhabited by Maltese nobility (my host was the Ninth Marquis, Nicholas de Piro). Oh the books. Oh the furniture. Oh the library. Oh the gilded sedan chair in which one would be carried by one's slaves to the palace next door - and up the stairs to the drawing room as well. And under the palace and all its 17th century glories are the WW2 bomb shelters, and the ubiquitous unexploded Fascist bomb that fell through the house one morning.
I spent all day yesterday back in Mdina, the Old City, since my guide the other day only thought we need an hour there, whereas I spent eight. Lots of pirate research there, as my books' narrator, Lily, and her crew have a few adventures there and I had to retrace all their steps I had made up. Luckily it all makes sense, and in fact it's a perfect pirate town. The laneways twist and turn, a bend every ninety paces, as that's the usual flight of an arrow, so you can fight a running battle in the streets.
This afternoon I've been out on the water, checking the fortifications from below (impossible, impenetrable - don't know how those pirates are going to break through).
Trip notes continue here.
Malta research trip: Day ten
Nobody but my niece Tess knows this, but in the second Swashbuckler! book there is a long sequence where the pirate crew goes into the Inland Sea - and today I did. It's a crack in the rock on the smaller island of Gozo, and you zoom through in a fishing boat (you don't row, lucky I checked) and the cliffs a sheer on either side and the water is... actually there's not a word for it... it's not electric blue, and azure doesn't even come close, it's just Impossibly Blue, that's all, and so clear you can see the coral forty feet down. I was in a little fishing boat with a grin from ear to ear (me, not the boat), although Max the fisherman told me I was crazy because you're supposed to do the research before you write the books. Thanks Max. And can I go visit his Aunty Maria in Springvale next time I'm home. She probably lives next to my Aunty Maureen.
Someone should really pay tribute to the Maltese Mullet (hairdo, not fish), and it may as well be me. It begins at the front with the short spiky Robbie Williams-style sticking up hair so beloved of eight year old boys and lesbians the world over, then cascades down to the shoulders, which are slouching rather theatrically. So far seen only on young men, some even verging on Rod Stewart circa 1976, but last night I went to see Kingdom of Heaven with about 300 of them, and they cheered so loudly for Orlando Bloom I have high hopes that he may inspire a comeback of long flowing locks. The Maltese are after all Crusader stock.
Trip notes continue here.
Someone should really pay tribute to the Maltese Mullet (hairdo, not fish), and it may as well be me. It begins at the front with the short spiky Robbie Williams-style sticking up hair so beloved of eight year old boys and lesbians the world over, then cascades down to the shoulders, which are slouching rather theatrically. So far seen only on young men, some even verging on Rod Stewart circa 1976, but last night I went to see Kingdom of Heaven with about 300 of them, and they cheered so loudly for Orlando Bloom I have high hopes that he may inspire a comeback of long flowing locks. The Maltese are after all Crusader stock.
Trip notes continue here.
Malta research trip: Day twelve
All right. So I'm just a little bit sunburned. The baseball cap doesn't cut it here. But for some time now I have been coveting a new straw hat, of the style known in my family as Pop's hat. This is due to the unexpected windfall of an entire shipment of straw hats which fell off the back of a truck sometime in the mid-70s and lasted my grandfather (and me, and several other people) for many years. Things were often falling off the back of trucks in Port Melbourne. Or off the back of ships into waiting warfie hands. Anyway, the hat is the cool bookie kind of hat, worn by such luminaries of the racing fraternity as my Uncle Teddy - in his case with a Hawaiian shirt (he was an early influence on me) or snappy suit. It's the kind worn by Frank Sinatra on the cover of Songs For Swinging Lovers, if memory serves. You know the type.
Well, it turns out this is just the kind of hat for which Gozo is justifiably famous. So I'm at the market in the piazza and this is what happens...
Trip notes continue here.
Well, it turns out this is just the kind of hat for which Gozo is justifiably famous. So I'm at the market in the piazza and this is what happens...
Me: How much is this one?.I am at last allowed to buy the hat.
Stallholder senior: No, no, signora, that is a man's hat.
Me: That's OK.
Stallholder's son: Perhaps this one would suit you better?
Me: I really like this sort.
Senior (to assembled stallholders): She wants to buy a man's hat!
Son: Perhaps this nice one with pretty flowers?
Me: Can I see this one in the mirror?
Senior (ditto): She's putting on the man's hat!
Me: Do I look like Frank Sinatra?
Senior mutters something in Malti like "Saints and angels preserve us"
Son: Well, it looks OK but it is still a man's hat.
Me: It's just like my Pop's hat.
Son: This other hat has a lovely vinyl trim. See? Real vinyl.
Me: They are all very nice but I still like this one. How much is it?
Senior: It must be for her husband!
Son: Why didn't you say it is for your husband?
Me: It didn't occur to me, but now you mention it...
Senior (playing to the gallery): It's her husband's hat.
There is cheering
Trip notes continue here.
Malta research trip: Day thirteen
I'm sitting in the internet cafe, music blaring, as it does everywhere here - it's some really bad Europop this evening but anything is a pleasant change from Engelbert Humperdink's Greatest Hit And Twenty Other Songs that I've been listening to all day on the boat. What is it with the muzak thing in Europe? I have never heard so many Gloria Estafan songs in my life.
Today was the final research day, the bit I've been looking forward to - the circumnavigation of the islands. Did without the guide after yesterday ("What do you want to go down there for? Seen one catacomb you've seen them all") but we did have a sublime rabbit stew in Mgarr.
So I just booked one of those normal cruise boat things, filled with sunburned English people who all sound like extras from Bad Girls ("Wot's that then?" "Cliff, innit.") all unsuspecting that they are involved in a great pirate enterprise. They thought they were going snorkelling in the Blue Lagoon (with buffet). Actually, it wasn't blue today, just a crazy kind of aqua. Because today was the first cold day. Nobody told the Lobsters who were all in their swimming gear, all the better to get
sunburnt.
After lunch came the coastline I really need to see, because I've decided on all these pirate landing places and my guide had put the fear of God into me by saying they are all hopeless - and of course he showed me the cliffs that were about as death-defying as a council drain.
The cliffs! From the sea, they soar. For miles. And the pirate haven I had chosen on the basis of book-learning only looked absolutely perfect to me, and there are grottos (in French, it's "La Grot") deep into the limestone and on every headland a Knights of Malta watchtower still stands, beautiful squat stone things they are too. The wind rose, the sea was heaving and a wonderful dark blue. I was grinning from ear to ear again, and then heard a rather disconcerting noise.
On the top deck, holding on for dear life in the wind was me, some Maltese-born Canadian women with their whole families so excited they pointed out every rock ("Look Derek, LOOK!" "Yes, dear, I see it, it's a cliff. It's the same cliff you pointed out two minutes ago.") and a few hardy Germans. We were all having a blast. Down below things turned out to be not quite so pretty, as the heaving seas had the Lobsters heaving up their buffets.
Worst thing that happened to me was that when I got back to the hotel I realised my hair had gone all Marj Simpson. Actually, it was more like the woman on the Bentley bonnet badge, streaming out behind me, very Art Nouveau. Well, it would have streamed, but since I don't have much hair it was streaming in principle. And I seem to be swaying in my chair from the after-effects of the swell.
I'm coming to the end of my time here, and it's been a bit mad, rushing around, and yet quite often I've found myself all alone in some of the best museums. In the Fine Arts Museum, for example, I was the only person there, which made me a sitting duck for Leonard The Bored Guard and Art Expert who physically dragged me from painting to painting and explained the Renaissance as the bit that came before real art (ie Baroque, in which Malta specialises). Bless him. He got so excited about one of
Preti's St John's that he gave me a hug. It's a bit like that here.
There are lots of boats, excitable people, cool buses (and hats), perfect cities and wonderful fortresses. And pirates. Even if I have to invent them myself.
Today was the final research day, the bit I've been looking forward to - the circumnavigation of the islands. Did without the guide after yesterday ("What do you want to go down there for? Seen one catacomb you've seen them all") but we did have a sublime rabbit stew in Mgarr.
So I just booked one of those normal cruise boat things, filled with sunburned English people who all sound like extras from Bad Girls ("Wot's that then?" "Cliff, innit.") all unsuspecting that they are involved in a great pirate enterprise. They thought they were going snorkelling in the Blue Lagoon (with buffet). Actually, it wasn't blue today, just a crazy kind of aqua. Because today was the first cold day. Nobody told the Lobsters who were all in their swimming gear, all the better to get
sunburnt.
After lunch came the coastline I really need to see, because I've decided on all these pirate landing places and my guide had put the fear of God into me by saying they are all hopeless - and of course he showed me the cliffs that were about as death-defying as a council drain.
The cliffs! From the sea, they soar. For miles. And the pirate haven I had chosen on the basis of book-learning only looked absolutely perfect to me, and there are grottos (in French, it's "La Grot") deep into the limestone and on every headland a Knights of Malta watchtower still stands, beautiful squat stone things they are too. The wind rose, the sea was heaving and a wonderful dark blue. I was grinning from ear to ear again, and then heard a rather disconcerting noise.
On the top deck, holding on for dear life in the wind was me, some Maltese-born Canadian women with their whole families so excited they pointed out every rock ("Look Derek, LOOK!" "Yes, dear, I see it, it's a cliff. It's the same cliff you pointed out two minutes ago.") and a few hardy Germans. We were all having a blast. Down below things turned out to be not quite so pretty, as the heaving seas had the Lobsters heaving up their buffets.
Worst thing that happened to me was that when I got back to the hotel I realised my hair had gone all Marj Simpson. Actually, it was more like the woman on the Bentley bonnet badge, streaming out behind me, very Art Nouveau. Well, it would have streamed, but since I don't have much hair it was streaming in principle. And I seem to be swaying in my chair from the after-effects of the swell.
I'm coming to the end of my time here, and it's been a bit mad, rushing around, and yet quite often I've found myself all alone in some of the best museums. In the Fine Arts Museum, for example, I was the only person there, which made me a sitting duck for Leonard The Bored Guard and Art Expert who physically dragged me from painting to painting and explained the Renaissance as the bit that came before real art (ie Baroque, in which Malta specialises). Bless him. He got so excited about one of
Preti's St John's that he gave me a hug. It's a bit like that here.
There are lots of boats, excitable people, cool buses (and hats), perfect cities and wonderful fortresses. And pirates. Even if I have to invent them myself.
Sunday, December 04, 2005
Lion roars
There's much excitement here in New Zealand over the imminent opening of the Chronicles of Narnia , a film made here, and directed by a Kiwi-born lad - for once genuinely a Kiwi, as opposed to people who stopped in once on a cruise or went to school in Grey Lynn for a term, and are therefore labelled by the local press forever as New Zealanders.
They are really the kinds of books that are best enjoyed as children - I never got the Christ allusions until I was 20 and read Lewis's essays. Like Enid Blyton, his writing and characterisation has dated in ways that the books of Rosemary Sutcliff, for example, or Stevenson, rarely do. The magic wears off.
Educators and critics may debate the virtues or shortcomings of CS Lewis all they like. He made one critical statement which has never dated and its wisdom resounds through the years:
They are really the kinds of books that are best enjoyed as children - I never got the Christ allusions until I was 20 and read Lewis's essays. Like Enid Blyton, his writing and characterisation has dated in ways that the books of Rosemary Sutcliff, for example, or Stevenson, rarely do. The magic wears off.
Educators and critics may debate the virtues or shortcomings of CS Lewis all they like. He made one critical statement which has never dated and its wisdom resounds through the years:
"You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me."
Friday, December 02, 2005
Cabin fever
Got totally stuck this week. Couldn't write. Couldn't focus. Couldn't even concentrate on research. Sleepless. Tired. Had a couple of good solid writing bursts, but not like my usual marathons.
Walks on the beach didn't help. Extra coffee was no use. Watching Food TV made me hungry (there wasn't anything on the History Channel apart from endless hours of mummies or stupid US documentaries like "The Wonders of Engineering" - is the BBC on strike or is it just Mediocrity Month?).
Reading something completely off-topic or web grazing made no difference - although it did fill in the time and I know much more about Queen Victoria's Jubilee celebrations and Pushkin than I did last week. And you never know when that'll come in handy.
It's a new book, nothing to do with pirates, and so I tried to analyse my way around the blockage: behave like a fiction plumber. Connected to the fact that pirate book three was delivered last week? Need to let go before working on something else? Fourth book syndrome? Performance anxiety? Can't write about anything but pirates? Total loser?
Tried printing out the patchy draft and reading it on paper. Made lots of corrections. Bored even myself. Had another coffee.
Then yesterday I had to leave the rock (to go to the mainland cinema for Harry Potter). Sat on the ferry in the sun. There was a manta ray in the shallows.
Before we'd even left the pier, the notebook was out, novel subversion was underway, pipes unblocked and all was well with the fictional world.
Diagnosis: Simple case of cabin fever.
Next week I have to return to the land of the living for a couple of weeks to earn a crust. I'll spend the whole time cursing my wasted stuffed-up week.
Walks on the beach didn't help. Extra coffee was no use. Watching Food TV made me hungry (there wasn't anything on the History Channel apart from endless hours of mummies or stupid US documentaries like "The Wonders of Engineering" - is the BBC on strike or is it just Mediocrity Month?).
Reading something completely off-topic or web grazing made no difference - although it did fill in the time and I know much more about Queen Victoria's Jubilee celebrations and Pushkin than I did last week. And you never know when that'll come in handy.
It's a new book, nothing to do with pirates, and so I tried to analyse my way around the blockage: behave like a fiction plumber. Connected to the fact that pirate book three was delivered last week? Need to let go before working on something else? Fourth book syndrome? Performance anxiety? Can't write about anything but pirates? Total loser?
Tried printing out the patchy draft and reading it on paper. Made lots of corrections. Bored even myself. Had another coffee.
Then yesterday I had to leave the rock (to go to the mainland cinema for Harry Potter). Sat on the ferry in the sun. There was a manta ray in the shallows.
Before we'd even left the pier, the notebook was out, novel subversion was underway, pipes unblocked and all was well with the fictional world.
Diagnosis: Simple case of cabin fever.
Next week I have to return to the land of the living for a couple of weeks to earn a crust. I'll spend the whole time cursing my wasted stuffed-up week.
"I love magic"
More excited than any kid there, I lined up for the new Harry Potter film yesterday (Goblet of Fire). It must be nerve-wracking to one of those pedants, of any age, with every line of dialogue and potion recipe crammed into your brain, sitting and watching and waiting for a directorial slip-up. That way, surely, lies madness and disappointment. There's been much Myrtle-moaning about various characters and sub-plots omitted from the screenplay, but the only essential ingredient missing for me was JK Rowling's wonderfully dry humour, which lights up the books and is often lost in translation to the screen. Key to her success, if you ask me, but funnily enough the pedants often ignore it in plot-obsessed film and book reviews. Chill out, giggle, and be scared. Much more fun.
Goblet of Fire is the best of the series in its special effects, narrative drive, the kids' performances, and the ratty school-like reality that was also a feature of the last. It creates a sense of wonder. Magic.
I'm easily scared, and jumped clear out of my seat a couple of times, having completely forgotten everything that happens in the book. My nine year-old friend Maddie gripped my hand really hard a few times, and admitted afterwards she'd thought it was so "freaky" her legs were shaking. She's going back tomorrow to see it again.
By the way, if you've never seen JK Rowling's website, take a look. It's fascinating, because it's designed specifically for the way kids scan the screen and use their mouse. For people like me who worked on the web for years and get grumpy about usability, it's a lesson in designing for a specific use. Kids run the cursor over everything to find links - their eyes simply don't do what adult eyes do faced with a computer screen - and Rowling's web design team has developed what is arguably the smartest kid-focused index page on the web. Of course.
Goblet of Fire is the best of the series in its special effects, narrative drive, the kids' performances, and the ratty school-like reality that was also a feature of the last. It creates a sense of wonder. Magic.
I'm easily scared, and jumped clear out of my seat a couple of times, having completely forgotten everything that happens in the book. My nine year-old friend Maddie gripped my hand really hard a few times, and admitted afterwards she'd thought it was so "freaky" her legs were shaking. She's going back tomorrow to see it again.
By the way, if you've never seen JK Rowling's website, take a look. It's fascinating, because it's designed specifically for the way kids scan the screen and use their mouse. For people like me who worked on the web for years and get grumpy about usability, it's a lesson in designing for a specific use. Kids run the cursor over everything to find links - their eyes simply don't do what adult eyes do faced with a computer screen - and Rowling's web design team has developed what is arguably the smartest kid-focused index page on the web. Of course.
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Was it good for you?
The year's most excruciating literary award is announced tonight (give or take the international dateline) in London: the Literary Review's annual Bad Sex Award.
This year promises to be fabulous, with some of the most grandiose names in the literary world among the dozen nominees: John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Paul Theroux. Even Marlon "I coulda been a contender" Brando is a contender, for the "incomprehensible sex scene from his posthumously-released novel Fan Tan", according to the Guardian.
The prize was founded by Auberon Waugh and aims "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it."
Most winners have managed to retain a sense of humour, although Tom Wolfe refused to accept his prize last year - I can't wait to see what happens if Theroux wins this year.
I can't quote any of the nominated extracts because I don't have the stomach for it, but you can read them in all their context-free glory here.
This year promises to be fabulous, with some of the most grandiose names in the literary world among the dozen nominees: John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Paul Theroux. Even Marlon "I coulda been a contender" Brando is a contender, for the "incomprehensible sex scene from his posthumously-released novel Fan Tan", according to the Guardian.
The prize was founded by Auberon Waugh and aims "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it."
Most winners have managed to retain a sense of humour, although Tom Wolfe refused to accept his prize last year - I can't wait to see what happens if Theroux wins this year.
I can't quote any of the nominated extracts because I don't have the stomach for it, but you can read them in all their context-free glory here.
Who? Me?
A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.
- Edith Sitwell
- Edith Sitwell
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Word of mouth
All these "Best Books of the Year" lists make for nice weekend reading, great Christmas shopping lists, and the occasional snort of incredulity, but they have one insidious message: YOU MUST READ THESE BOOKS.
It's not like reading reviews, which I could do (and do) all day. It feels more like getting your high school text book list for the coming term.
I hate that. If anyone tells me there's a novel I simply must read, I don't. Won't. Haven't read Tim Winton for years because I'm sick of the sound of his name. The poor man hasn't done a thing to deserve it, but I hate it when people drool. If everybody raves about a movie and insists I simply must see it, I refuse (silently, but implacably). It's especially true of people who wouldn't know me if I stood up in their porridge, who have met me six minutes previously at a party, and say, "Oh you must read this - I just know you'll adore it".
Word of mouth is very good for everyone else, and for book sales, but on me it has the opposite effect.
This doesn't seem to happen with non-fiction, partly because nobody I know ever says things like, "Oh you simply must read Stalingrad, it's divine". Instead, wise friends slip me a copy and understand that they won't hear from me for a few hours. But for some reason, novels and independent films make people blurt out these desperate pleas to share their passion (I'm sure I've done it myself, but that was in another country and besides the wench probably stole my copy).
There may come a day when I'm stuck on a plane for thirty hours and there'll be nothing to read but Tim Winton and no movies showing but Jesus of Montreal and I'll hang on every word of Dirt Music and watch Jesus of Montreal twice and wonder what I've been missing all these years.
On the other hand (sorry Tim) I had to read The Da Vinci Code between Dubai and Singapore a few months ago and if I could've opened the plane window either one of us would have been out of there. And four million people rave about that.
It's not like reading reviews, which I could do (and do) all day. It feels more like getting your high school text book list for the coming term.
I hate that. If anyone tells me there's a novel I simply must read, I don't. Won't. Haven't read Tim Winton for years because I'm sick of the sound of his name. The poor man hasn't done a thing to deserve it, but I hate it when people drool. If everybody raves about a movie and insists I simply must see it, I refuse (silently, but implacably). It's especially true of people who wouldn't know me if I stood up in their porridge, who have met me six minutes previously at a party, and say, "Oh you must read this - I just know you'll adore it".
Word of mouth is very good for everyone else, and for book sales, but on me it has the opposite effect.
This doesn't seem to happen with non-fiction, partly because nobody I know ever says things like, "Oh you simply must read Stalingrad, it's divine". Instead, wise friends slip me a copy and understand that they won't hear from me for a few hours. But for some reason, novels and independent films make people blurt out these desperate pleas to share their passion (I'm sure I've done it myself, but that was in another country and besides the wench probably stole my copy).
There may come a day when I'm stuck on a plane for thirty hours and there'll be nothing to read but Tim Winton and no movies showing but Jesus of Montreal and I'll hang on every word of Dirt Music and watch Jesus of Montreal twice and wonder what I've been missing all these years.
On the other hand (sorry Tim) I had to read The Da Vinci Code between Dubai and Singapore a few months ago and if I could've opened the plane window either one of us would have been out of there. And four million people rave about that.
Year in review(s)
It must be late November. Newspapers everywhere have started publishing their annual lists of Best Books.
The New York Times hedges its bets with its list of 100 Notable Books of 2005. You understand these are notable, rather than necessarily brilliant, books, and the list seems to be a miscellany gleaned from previous reviews. That means Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince appears in the same category as the latest by Elmore Leonard, E. L. Doctorow, and Zadie Smith. And why not? (I haven't read, for the sake of my health, Camille Paglia's new essays, but the NY Times describes them as "written without ego", which is the best evidence I've ever heard for alien abduction theories.)
In London, the Sunday Times doesn't go in for any such mealy-mouthed nonsense. Its Best Fiction of 2005 has a go at the Man Booker judges ("John Banville's numbingly pretentious The Sea has brought the prize's reputation to a low ebb") and selects Ian McEwan's Saturday and Julian Barnes's Arthur & George to top a sensibly argued list of favourites.
The good old Observer sought advice from "leading figures" including Jan Morris, who selected Charles Nicholl's Leonardo as best biography and Tom Holland's Persian Fire as "most exciting historical narrative". Sarah Waters chose Rory Stewart's Afghanistan odyssey, The Places in Between, while Deborah Moggach raves about Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake.
The book reviewers over at the New Statesman are a terrifying lot - the list includes names like Byatt, Toibin and Dalrymple, usually on these lists as contenders. Hilary Mantel, an expert on public executions (note to self: add A Place of Greater Safety to favourites list), liked The Tyrannicide Brief by lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, while J G Ballard can't decide between Tony Judt's Postwar: a history of Europe since 1945 and the anonymous diary, A Woman in Berlin.
You'll know it's December when they start on the Books to Watch in 2006 lists.
The New York Times hedges its bets with its list of 100 Notable Books of 2005. You understand these are notable, rather than necessarily brilliant, books, and the list seems to be a miscellany gleaned from previous reviews. That means Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince appears in the same category as the latest by Elmore Leonard, E. L. Doctorow, and Zadie Smith. And why not? (I haven't read, for the sake of my health, Camille Paglia's new essays, but the NY Times describes them as "written without ego", which is the best evidence I've ever heard for alien abduction theories.)
In London, the Sunday Times doesn't go in for any such mealy-mouthed nonsense. Its Best Fiction of 2005 has a go at the Man Booker judges ("John Banville's numbingly pretentious The Sea has brought the prize's reputation to a low ebb") and selects Ian McEwan's Saturday and Julian Barnes's Arthur & George to top a sensibly argued list of favourites.
The good old Observer sought advice from "leading figures" including Jan Morris, who selected Charles Nicholl's Leonardo as best biography and Tom Holland's Persian Fire as "most exciting historical narrative". Sarah Waters chose Rory Stewart's Afghanistan odyssey, The Places in Between, while Deborah Moggach raves about Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake.
The book reviewers over at the New Statesman are a terrifying lot - the list includes names like Byatt, Toibin and Dalrymple, usually on these lists as contenders. Hilary Mantel, an expert on public executions (note to self: add A Place of Greater Safety to favourites list), liked The Tyrannicide Brief by lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, while J G Ballard can't decide between Tony Judt's Postwar: a history of Europe since 1945 and the anonymous diary, A Woman in Berlin.
You'll know it's December when they start on the Books to Watch in 2006 lists.
Monday, November 28, 2005
Litcrit voyage
No one is fit to judge a book until he has rounded Cape Horn in a sailing vessel, until he has bumped into two or three icebergs, until he has been lost in the sands of the desert, until he has spent a few years in the House of the Dead.
- Van Wyck Brooks, From a Writer’s Notebook
- Van Wyck Brooks, From a Writer’s Notebook
Saturday, November 26, 2005
Italics
This morning I woke up bleary after a sleepless night and thought: I'm in italics.
Don't ask me. It's a half-asleep editor thing.
I remained in italics for half an hour, until my girlfriend woke up. She decided that since I was in italics I couldn't be trusted to make a pot of tea. She's an editor, too. She understood.
By the time my cup of tea arrived I was back to Times Roman Normal.
Don't ask me. It's a half-asleep editor thing.
I remained in italics for half an hour, until my girlfriend woke up. She decided that since I was in italics I couldn't be trusted to make a pot of tea. She's an editor, too. She understood.
By the time my cup of tea arrived I was back to Times Roman Normal.
State of the reading nation
The redoubtable Agnes Nieuwenhuizen has retired from her position as manager of the Australian Centre for Youth Literature (based at the State Library of Victoria). In a recent interview, The Age describes her as a "writer, editor, cultural warrior and champion of reading for teenagers and older children."
The interview echoes the concerns of writers and experts in many countries:
You can get the full story here.
Harold Underwood has noted a similar trend in the US. At the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators (SCBWI) conference earlier this year, he presented his "weather report" on trends in children's publishing:
Read his notes from the presentation on Purple Crayon.
The interview echoes the concerns of writers and experts in many countries:
In Australia, she says, we have writers who produce "fantastic fiction", and courageous publishers who put it into the marketplace. But a lot of the time, the young people who would enjoy reading these books don't know about them.
"There isn't a reading culture," she says. "We don't have any kind of concerted national program. Our promotion of books is very poor. Reading is not valued in schools. We are losing librarians. And with very notable exceptions, I think things are slipping."
You can get the full story here.
Harold Underwood has noted a similar trend in the US. At the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators (SCBWI) conference earlier this year, he presented his "weather report" on trends in children's publishing:
One strong influence on the climate today and for many years past is the reality that many children's books are bought by schools and libraries, and so political decisions and trends affect the children's market somewhat more than they do the adult market. What's the global warming of children's books in the US? I think it's the anti-tax movement, which going back to the '70s has increasingly affected state and federal budgets. All across the country, there has been less money for schools and libraries, and less of what is called institutional spending.
And publishers have responded... Publishers have closed or cut back their library imprints - both the ones that publish nonfiction series and the ones that publish "review-driven" books - and have put their money more into the consumer market. That's great if you can "write to spec" for book series based on TV shows, but not so great if you are writing literary novels or serious nonfiction.
Read his notes from the presentation on Purple Crayon.
Friday, November 25, 2005
Island mornings
This morning the sea gleamed like rubbed glass. I walked on the beach, and the air was so clear after yesterday's rain that I could see the gullies and the treeline on Great Barrier Island, miles away. There was a lovely old timber ketch moored in the bay, its crew taking tea and toast on deck in the sun. I'm not sure what made me most jealous - the cup of tea or the ketch.
I didn't walk yesterday. I vanished into a writing vortex and didn't realise until 5.30pm that I hadn't yet cleaned my teeth or had a shower. I seem to have eaten lunch, as there was evidence, but I have no recollection of it at all. I must have listened to Missy Higgins over and over on the headphones, because it's the only CD on my desk, or maybe she finished and I didn't notice and sat with my headphones on for no reason all day. Some days it's like that.
Other days I'm easily distracted by blogs or books or the History Channel or doing a load of washing, or I start researching something specific and end up somewhere completely different (not always a bad thing). If I force myself to write on distracted days the work is less good than the vortex days. But I still have to do it. It just takes more revision later.
Some people sit down at a certain time and write a certain number of words, or have to use a certain colour notepaper and grade of pencil, or write for fixed hours. I have to have the dishes washed and the house straightened before I start (even if I am dishevelled myself). I have to make myself work for at least the same number of hours as I do when I do my paid job, or I know I'll fall apart and act like I'm on holidays.
But now there's a tui in the flax outside my window, and the rooster's practising his crow (he's not very good at it) in the back yard.
So it's hard to believe it's work, sometimes, when the sun's out and I can walk on the beach at low tide, wear my pyjamas all day, and just write.
I didn't walk yesterday. I vanished into a writing vortex and didn't realise until 5.30pm that I hadn't yet cleaned my teeth or had a shower. I seem to have eaten lunch, as there was evidence, but I have no recollection of it at all. I must have listened to Missy Higgins over and over on the headphones, because it's the only CD on my desk, or maybe she finished and I didn't notice and sat with my headphones on for no reason all day. Some days it's like that.
Other days I'm easily distracted by blogs or books or the History Channel or doing a load of washing, or I start researching something specific and end up somewhere completely different (not always a bad thing). If I force myself to write on distracted days the work is less good than the vortex days. But I still have to do it. It just takes more revision later.
Some people sit down at a certain time and write a certain number of words, or have to use a certain colour notepaper and grade of pencil, or write for fixed hours. I have to have the dishes washed and the house straightened before I start (even if I am dishevelled myself). I have to make myself work for at least the same number of hours as I do when I do my paid job, or I know I'll fall apart and act like I'm on holidays.
But now there's a tui in the flax outside my window, and the rooster's practising his crow (he's not very good at it) in the back yard.
So it's hard to believe it's work, sometimes, when the sun's out and I can walk on the beach at low tide, wear my pyjamas all day, and just write.
Thursday, November 24, 2005
Sea and stars
I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by.
— John Masefield
And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by.
— John Masefield
Ship ahoy
I love ships, love boats, especially old ones. Love wharves and shipping yards, even today when they are little more than towers of containers and acres of imported cars. Love living on an island so every time I go to town I have to take the ferry. There are dolphins sometimes, and Orca, and on Friday evenings the yacht fleets are out for the twilight races, scattered across the harbour.
I don't come from one of those hearty boating families, all Swallows and Amazons and high tea on the high seas. I didn't learn to sail until I was 40, but I learned in Sydney Harbour, which made up for the wait.
But I was born in a dockside working town (Port Melbourne), and my grandfather was a wharfie, so I guess it's in the blood. If there was a big cruise liner shipping on the weekends, we'd go down to Station Pier and wave them off. If the Navy was in port, we'd get sneaked on board and shown around. You might wonder about security - it was strict, even in those days, but it didn't apply to my grandfather. After he'd retired, the guards still waved him through those gorgeous old wooden gates: "Good onya, Bill. You kids behave yerselves, mind."
Once there was a tall ship, a gleaming white naval training ship (I think it was Portuguese) and I fell in love.
So now, wherever I travel in the world (well, besides the desert) if there's a ship or a boat, I'm on it.
I think that demands a post of its own.
In the meantime, here's my dreamboat: the Star Flyer, on which I sailed from Istanbul to Athens, shot from the ramparts of the Crusader castle in Bodrum. Or did I dream that?
And you wonder why I write books about pirates...
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Incurable condition
Writing is not an activity, but a condition. That is why one simply can’t resume the work when one has a job and a free half-day. Reading is the conveyance of this condition.
- Robert Musil (1880–1942)
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Am I brainy yet?
Perhaps this is another twist on Does my brain look big in this?
Bill Scott-Kerr, publisher of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, has told The Times that the book has an "aspirational" appeal:
I guess if you were actually reading the Codex that might be true. I stood and stared at it for hours once (in a museum, of course), and felt infinitely more interesting as a result. I seem to recall it was written back-to-front and in Latin, which might be a splendid idea for Dan Brown's next blockbuster (a searing and thrilling expose of the secret and previously unknown world of lawn bowls).
But Scott-Kerr also admits he had no idea of the monster he was about to unleash on an unsuspecting world, when a proposal first landed on his desk.
Well, it beats me, too. I thought the book was hilarious. Tom Hanks is going to be in the movie, hopefully in his fine A League of Their Own fettle.
Bill Scott-Kerr, publisher of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, has told The Times that the book has an "aspirational" appeal:
There’s an element of reading Da Vinci and being made to feel like a more interesting person.
I guess if you were actually reading the Codex that might be true. I stood and stared at it for hours once (in a museum, of course), and felt infinitely more interesting as a result. I seem to recall it was written back-to-front and in Latin, which might be a splendid idea for Dan Brown's next blockbuster (a searing and thrilling expose of the secret and previously unknown world of lawn bowls).
But Scott-Kerr also admits he had no idea of the monster he was about to unleash on an unsuspecting world, when a proposal first landed on his desk.
If anyone had said that this was going to be the biggest selling adult book ever, I’d have called for the straitjacket. It’s insane.
Well, it beats me, too. I thought the book was hilarious. Tom Hanks is going to be in the movie, hopefully in his fine A League of Their Own fettle.
Forceps delivery
Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries.
- J. B. Priestley
- J. B. Priestley
Mission accomplished
Sitting on the back seat of my car is the final manuscript of the final book in the Swashbuckler! trilogy, all packaged up (with the galleys of the first book) ready to be sent off to HarperCollins.
I sat and stared at the package last night, feeling relieved and anxious, and with a touch of trepidation.
Now I have to focus on something utterly different, write about new people in unfamiliar circumstances, research the intricate details of other places and times.
I'd best go do that then.
Pirates can sail off into the blue beyond.
I wonder if they'll ever come back?
I read that Lian Hearn is writing two more Tales of the Otori. I can understand the appeal of it. She's been so completely immersed in Japanese history and culture it would be difficult to wrest one's mind free of such a compelling imaginative world (although in her other life she's written about many other worlds). But, at any rate, as one of her many readers I'm very happy that there'll be more Tales: it didn't feel quite complete to me.
But perhaps that's only because I wished it wasn't over.
I sat and stared at the package last night, feeling relieved and anxious, and with a touch of trepidation.
Now I have to focus on something utterly different, write about new people in unfamiliar circumstances, research the intricate details of other places and times.
I'd best go do that then.
Pirates can sail off into the blue beyond.
I wonder if they'll ever come back?
I read that Lian Hearn is writing two more Tales of the Otori. I can understand the appeal of it. She's been so completely immersed in Japanese history and culture it would be difficult to wrest one's mind free of such a compelling imaginative world (although in her other life she's written about many other worlds). But, at any rate, as one of her many readers I'm very happy that there'll be more Tales: it didn't feel quite complete to me.
But perhaps that's only because I wished it wasn't over.
The booklist, part one
A few days ago, I wrote about the idea of a list of favourite books: how can you possibly decide?
A favourite is something you can't do without, a book to which you return again and again. Mine is War & Peace, as I said. That's easy. The Heart of Darkness and The Sun Also Rises had the greatest impact on my impressionable young mind. Pride and Prejudice is a perfect gem of a book, and I read it often, but it doesn't stir the heart in quite the same way. But after that, I have to break it down much more precisely.
Let's start with historical fiction (although I have to admit my tastes are quite specific).
Children's books? (The books that I read when I was young, not those I read now for professional purposes.)
But I have to admit I don't read a vast amount of fiction nowadays, because it is so often disappointing. So I won't even start on non-fiction today, except for a few ideas about travel writing:
We could start on most over-rated travel writer or most boring camel journey that nobody ever wanted to read about, but let's save that for another day.
Feel free to leave your own categories and winners in the comments.
A favourite is something you can't do without, a book to which you return again and again. Mine is War & Peace, as I said. That's easy. The Heart of Darkness and The Sun Also Rises had the greatest impact on my impressionable young mind. Pride and Prejudice is a perfect gem of a book, and I read it often, but it doesn't stir the heart in quite the same way. But after that, I have to break it down much more precisely.
Let's start with historical fiction (although I have to admit my tastes are quite specific).
Most likely to leave you wondering: Alias Grace
Most likely to make you gasp out loud: Fingersmith
Most romantically bookish: Possession
Most intriguing lead character: Restoration
Most strangely compelling: Perfume
Best Napoleonic fiction: The Passion
Greatest nautical adventure: Ooh, that's a big call, I think it's a dead heat between Hornblower and Aubrey.
Most melodramatic swashbuckler: The Sea Hawk
Most gripping World War One novel: Regeneration trilogy
Most fascinating discussion of ethics: The Dream of Scipio
Best ragtime book: Ragtime
Children's books? (The books that I read when I was young, not those I read now for professional purposes.)
Most heart-thumping pirate adventure: Treasure Island
Scariest shark attack: The Coral Island
Most brilliant swordfighting: Ronald Welch's Carey series
Most likely to turn a child into a writer: Emily of New Moon (Anne of Green Gables' far more interesting cousin)
Most likely to turn a child into a recluse: My Side of the Mountain
Most likely to turn a child into an archaeologist: The Eagle of the Ninth
But I have to admit I don't read a vast amount of fiction nowadays, because it is so often disappointing. So I won't even start on non-fiction today, except for a few ideas about travel writing:
Book that most makes you want to ride into the mountains on a donkey: The Road to Oxiana or more recently An Unexpected Light
Book that most makes you want to live in Venice and never come home: Jan Morris's Venice
Greatest letters by a camel-riding Edwardian Englishwoman: Gertrude Bell
Book that most makes you want to climb mountains: Feeding the Rat
Book that makes you want to never climb mountains: Touching the Void
We could start on most over-rated travel writer or most boring camel journey that nobody ever wanted to read about, but let's save that for another day.
Feel free to leave your own categories and winners in the comments.
Monday, November 21, 2005
Does my brain look big in this?
More than one in three consumers in London and south-east England admit having bought a book "solely to look intelligent", a recent survey has found.
I wonder if it works? If only these surveys came with before and after photos, so we could judge the effects for ourselves.
The study also reported that one in every eight young people chose a book "simply to be seen with the latest shortlisted title".
So getting on an award shortlist really is a great sales boost - but perhaps not always for developing an ongoing readership. Most of the respondents admitted they'd never finished reading the books.
Happily, the Guardian reports:
...or blogs.
I wonder if it works? If only these surveys came with before and after photos, so we could judge the effects for ourselves.
The study also reported that one in every eight young people chose a book "simply to be seen with the latest shortlisted title".
So getting on an award shortlist really is a great sales boost - but perhaps not always for developing an ongoing readership. Most of the respondents admitted they'd never finished reading the books.
Happily, the Guardian reports:
The biggest group, more than two in every five people, follows the traditional method of choosing their reading; relying on recommendations from close family and friends.
...or blogs.
Scandal! Aging writers in dope probe!
And you thought that only cyclists and swimmers (not Australians, of course) went in for performance enhancing substances? Think again:
The International Herald Tribune's Peter Mehlman has outed Philip Roth as a dope fiend whose output must be helped along by something stronger than caffeine:
You can read the whole silly thing here.
The International Herald Tribune's Peter Mehlman has outed Philip Roth as a dope fiend whose output must be helped along by something stronger than caffeine:
One writer, who requested anonymity to avoid seeming cranky, whispered, "Since I came out with 'Bonfire of the Vanities,' I've written two novels. Roth has churned out, what, 12? Do the math."
Roth's bulked-up output is not the only factor raising eyebrows. Most notably, his sentence structure has shown no signs of the usual age-related deterioration cited in medical literature.
At 64, some eight to 10 years after most writers betray noticeable passive voice, Roth completed his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "American Pastoral" (1997). One of the book's astonishing sentences began with the words, "Only after strudel and coffee," and ended nearly a full page later without even one dangling modifier.
No less a talent than James Joyce (in one of his more piquant observations) said: "By the age of 45, I knew I could no longer start a sentence with a mention of strudel. My fingers would want to do it but my mind just wouldn't react."
You can read the whole silly thing here.
Hanoi Jane
There's a fascinating (and really quite unsettling) review by Rick Perlstein, in the latest LRB, of Jane Fonda's War: A Political Biography of an Anti-war Icon by Mary Hershberger.
While critical of Hershberger's sunny Oprah-style conclusions, he's impressed by her research and that of other historians, delving into the corruption and cynicism of the Pentagon and the Nixon White House during the Vietnam War.
Perlstein outlines the ways in which Fonda's reputation as some kind of anti-American harpy was consciously created by the White House in order to camouflage its own unraveling war planning, and to counteract the growing disillusion over the war.
Fonda arrived in Hanoi, says Perlstein:
You can read the full review at London Review of Books.
While critical of Hershberger's sunny Oprah-style conclusions, he's impressed by her research and that of other historians, delving into the corruption and cynicism of the Pentagon and the Nixon White House during the Vietnam War.
Perlstein outlines the ways in which Fonda's reputation as some kind of anti-American harpy was consciously created by the White House in order to camouflage its own unraveling war planning, and to counteract the growing disillusion over the war.
Opposing the war, at this particular time, was not a radical thing to do,writes Perlstein. Vietnam was widely recognised across the political spectrum as a disaster... Most Americans opposed the war by the time Nixon started running for re-election; every candidate in 1972, including the dozen or so contenders for the wide-open Democratic nomination was promising to end it. Most citizens, even if they didn't fully admit it to themselves, knew that America was losing. This view was held by many GIs, including those POWs Fonda famously visited in prison in Hanoi. So Nixon struck back. It's since been proven that some claims that POWs were tortured because of Fonda's visit were blatant lies. Yet she faced death threats, abuse - veterans still spit at her - and it's no wonder she turned to aerobics.
Fonda arrived in Hanoi, says Perlstein:
as US bombers appeared to be making preliminary strikes against North Vietnam's system of dikes, which if breached would destroy farmland and starve the population. The Pentagon denied the raids. At a press conference in Paris Fonda presented film proving that they had taken place. That same day, the State Department cancelled its scheduled rebuttal.
One of the diplomats laid low by the humiliation was America's UN envoy, George H.W. Bush. "I think that the best thing I can do on the subject is to shut up," he told the press, after promising them evidence of American innocence.
You can read the full review at London Review of Books.
Book bliss
There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquest, "I want you to love her, too!"
It is a jealous passion also. He feels a little indignant if he finds that any one else has discovered the book, too.
- Christopher Morley (1890–1957)
It is a jealous passion also. He feels a little indignant if he finds that any one else has discovered the book, too.
- Christopher Morley (1890–1957)
Procrastination
When I was seventeen (thank you, Janis Ian) I went to college to study writing. It wasn't a very normal thing to do in those days (1979), before teaching creative writing became an industry. Writing was something studied only by bearded long-haired draft dodgers and women who wore floaty scarves. People suggested that teaching might be a more sensible career option (they were probably right - if I'd taken their advice, I'd be on my long service leave by now, unless the government's abolished it).
But at that time the now long-gone Prahran College offered one of the only professional writing courses, and I arrived to find myself one of very few people straight out of school. Almost everyone else was old (like 30, and some were even older!) and a surprising number had beards and long hair or wore floaty scarves.
I learned a lot there. I learned about reading, about Middle English for some reason I can't now recall, about grammar and symbolism; and I learned about drinking. All the people with long hair and beards got drunk at least once a week. After a few months I joined them. There was a pub on the corner called the Duke of Windsor, and we used to sit in the dark and drink tequila and place bets on which of us would win the Nobel Prize first. We all planned to be the next Hemingway (the drinking was part of perfecting the role). I was going to write my first novel probably the week after next.
Then I forgot. I think all the others did too, because I've never seen any of their novels, and none of them has won the Nobel Prize. Yet.
I never got around to starting a novel because I couldn't think of anything to write one about. I dropped out, did other stuff. Years passed. Decades. I kept writing other things, turned myself into a journalist, went back and finished the degree (except now I was the old one and everyone else was seventeen and scary). Stupidly decided to do my Masters as well. Still hadn't written a novel. Had no idea where to start. Read so many bad first novels that I thought really I'd rather not risk it. Snorted coffee out my nose when everyone around me suddenly started writing first novels, even those who'd never shown any inclination to write more than a shopping list.
But any writing teacher or those writing manuals will tell you just to start anywhere - don't worry if you don't have the whole plot in your head. I never thought that rule applied to me (like acting my age or behaving in a lady-like manner). When I write poems or essays or articles, I need to have the whole thing complete in my head, or I can't start.
But then one day, unemployed and traumatised, I sat down and wrote a scene about an ambulance driver in World War One. Then I kept going. Then somehow a few months later, I'd written a novel (it was pretty bad, but I'm rewriting it). Then I realised I could actually do it, and then there were pirates, and suddenly (three years later) there are three books, and more on the way, and there are more ideas than anybody could ever write.
So I'd better stop procrastinating and get on with it.
But at that time the now long-gone Prahran College offered one of the only professional writing courses, and I arrived to find myself one of very few people straight out of school. Almost everyone else was old (like 30, and some were even older!) and a surprising number had beards and long hair or wore floaty scarves.
I learned a lot there. I learned about reading, about Middle English for some reason I can't now recall, about grammar and symbolism; and I learned about drinking. All the people with long hair and beards got drunk at least once a week. After a few months I joined them. There was a pub on the corner called the Duke of Windsor, and we used to sit in the dark and drink tequila and place bets on which of us would win the Nobel Prize first. We all planned to be the next Hemingway (the drinking was part of perfecting the role). I was going to write my first novel probably the week after next.
Then I forgot. I think all the others did too, because I've never seen any of their novels, and none of them has won the Nobel Prize. Yet.
I never got around to starting a novel because I couldn't think of anything to write one about. I dropped out, did other stuff. Years passed. Decades. I kept writing other things, turned myself into a journalist, went back and finished the degree (except now I was the old one and everyone else was seventeen and scary). Stupidly decided to do my Masters as well. Still hadn't written a novel. Had no idea where to start. Read so many bad first novels that I thought really I'd rather not risk it. Snorted coffee out my nose when everyone around me suddenly started writing first novels, even those who'd never shown any inclination to write more than a shopping list.
But any writing teacher or those writing manuals will tell you just to start anywhere - don't worry if you don't have the whole plot in your head. I never thought that rule applied to me (like acting my age or behaving in a lady-like manner). When I write poems or essays or articles, I need to have the whole thing complete in my head, or I can't start.
But then one day, unemployed and traumatised, I sat down and wrote a scene about an ambulance driver in World War One. Then I kept going. Then somehow a few months later, I'd written a novel (it was pretty bad, but I'm rewriting it). Then I realised I could actually do it, and then there were pirates, and suddenly (three years later) there are three books, and more on the way, and there are more ideas than anybody could ever write.
So I'd better stop procrastinating and get on with it.
Sunday, November 20, 2005
Where the wild things are
You cannot write for children ... They’re much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.
- Maurice Sendak
- Maurice Sendak
Steel springs
I've been having my own private (belated) Armistice Day film festival this weekend, with a stack of documentaries from the 90th anniversary Anzac Day earlier this year. Just returned from seeing the new Gallipoli documentary by Tolga Ornek. It's beautifully made, and narrated by Jeremy Irons, who could make the phone book sound poignant. I'm not sure it has anything very new to say, and it's necessarily brief, but it's refreshing to see many images of the Turkish defenders, and to hear their words (often narrated by Sam Neill, in a nice twist).
In June last year I stood on the beach at Anzac Cove and looked up at the cliffs and muttered, echoing everyone else (besides that ninny General Hamilton) who has ever stood there: "What on earth were they thinking?" I sailed down the Dardanelles a few days later and from that side the peninsula looks equally rugged. It's no use telling me (as they do endlessly on these documentaries, as if it somehow explains or forgives the debacle) the landing boats drifted off course - the country inland of the original Anzac landing place is just as steep.
When you drive in along the peninsula from Istanbul, Suvla Bay stretches out, sandy and flat and convenient, to your right. You can't help asking: why didn't they just land there first?
I was humbled to be guided around the battlefields by the legendary Kenan Celik. We stood in the trench at The Nek, with all the Australians in the group whispering to themselves, "What are your legs? Steel springs", and looked across at the graveyard that marks the Turkish lines. Kenan left us alone for a moment. (If you're not Australian, or you haven't seen the Peter Weir Gallipoli film, just translate it into something like Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman marching up the beach towards Fort Wagner in Glory.)
It doesn't matter how many times you've heard that the trenches at The Nek are only as far apart as the width of Swanston Street, or that Lone Pine is the size of a tennis court - you stand there amongst the graves under the pine tree and think: "12000 men died here, and it's only the size of a tennis court". It's hot and dusty, there are red poppies on the hills and bits of barbed wire, and buried down on the beach is a cousin you never knew you had.
Then it doesn't matter how many books you've read or how many documentaries you've seen, you cry.
The Sphinx: Anzac Cove 2004
PS: If you have no idea what I'm talking about here's an overview.
In June last year I stood on the beach at Anzac Cove and looked up at the cliffs and muttered, echoing everyone else (besides that ninny General Hamilton) who has ever stood there: "What on earth were they thinking?" I sailed down the Dardanelles a few days later and from that side the peninsula looks equally rugged. It's no use telling me (as they do endlessly on these documentaries, as if it somehow explains or forgives the debacle) the landing boats drifted off course - the country inland of the original Anzac landing place is just as steep.
When you drive in along the peninsula from Istanbul, Suvla Bay stretches out, sandy and flat and convenient, to your right. You can't help asking: why didn't they just land there first?
I was humbled to be guided around the battlefields by the legendary Kenan Celik. We stood in the trench at The Nek, with all the Australians in the group whispering to themselves, "What are your legs? Steel springs", and looked across at the graveyard that marks the Turkish lines. Kenan left us alone for a moment. (If you're not Australian, or you haven't seen the Peter Weir Gallipoli film, just translate it into something like Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman marching up the beach towards Fort Wagner in Glory.)
It doesn't matter how many times you've heard that the trenches at The Nek are only as far apart as the width of Swanston Street, or that Lone Pine is the size of a tennis court - you stand there amongst the graves under the pine tree and think: "12000 men died here, and it's only the size of a tennis court". It's hot and dusty, there are red poppies on the hills and bits of barbed wire, and buried down on the beach is a cousin you never knew you had.
Then it doesn't matter how many books you've read or how many documentaries you've seen, you cry.
The Sphinx: Anzac Cove 2004
PS: If you have no idea what I'm talking about here's an overview.
Aspiring novelists
I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realise his ambition. I did my best to explain. "The first thing," I said, "is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write."
- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
[Well, that sounds easy enough. It also explains my obsession with stationery.]
- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
[Well, that sounds easy enough. It also explains my obsession with stationery.]
Feeling clucky
I live on an island.
There are grapevines on the hills behind the house, and next-door's chickens in the backyard. They're waiting for our figs to ripen. I can see them, standing below the trees, staring up sadly at the fruit. Once the figs are ready, of course, the chooks will realise they do have wings after all, and will soar fruitwards, making a huge fuss, as if they'd done something extraordinary.
There are two roosters. I've been cursing them all week because they seem to have suddenly decided to crow, in duet, from 3.30 am, and they don't stop until dusk. But this morning there are very small, very fluffy, very black chicks scurrying through the grass like beetles. All rooster misbehaviour is forgiven.
I should have been working but instead I've been standing at the kitchen sink, binoculars at the ready, watching and clucking.
There are grapevines on the hills behind the house, and next-door's chickens in the backyard. They're waiting for our figs to ripen. I can see them, standing below the trees, staring up sadly at the fruit. Once the figs are ready, of course, the chooks will realise they do have wings after all, and will soar fruitwards, making a huge fuss, as if they'd done something extraordinary.
There are two roosters. I've been cursing them all week because they seem to have suddenly decided to crow, in duet, from 3.30 am, and they don't stop until dusk. But this morning there are very small, very fluffy, very black chicks scurrying through the grass like beetles. All rooster misbehaviour is forgiven.
I should have been working but instead I've been standing at the kitchen sink, binoculars at the ready, watching and clucking.
Saturday, November 19, 2005
David Malouf on blinding light
David Malouf, speaking to Ramona Koval from Radio National (Australia), recalled:
And then we went away for the Christmas holidays, which in Australia is the summer, and we went down to the beach at Surfers Paradise, and sitting on the beach at Surfers Paradise I read three books that told me everything I wanted to know. I was 12. One was the Hunchback of Notre Dame, one was Wuthering Heights and the other one was Jane Eyre. And I can remember, I mean, what’s the wonderful thing is that the mixture of that hot, hot sun burning you up and Jane Eyre going for her walk in the snow.
But that revealed to me absolutely everything about the power of imagination and books. But those books were also telling me things about how outrageous life was, about sex which nobody would tell me about, about whole sorts of other things that the whole adult world was conspiring to keep you from and which Mrs Aeneas Gunn did a fair job of keeping you from as well.
I mean, you can’t say what it is exactly that’s going to do it for a child or what it is in a book that a child reading is going to find. But those two things come together for me, the world of those books and that blazing sunlight on my head and my back.
You can read the rest of this wonderful discussion, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, about lost classics and the books that entranced David Malouf and Michael Ondaatje on ABC Radio's Books site.
When I was 12 I had just finished what used to be called the scholarship exam and we had to read an Australian book, which was this book calledWe of the Never Never, which was about Australia. I was a little boy growing up in the suburbs of Brisbane and it was set in the Northern Territory and it meant absolutely nothing to me, it told me nothing that I wanted to know about life or anything else.
And then we went away for the Christmas holidays, which in Australia is the summer, and we went down to the beach at Surfers Paradise, and sitting on the beach at Surfers Paradise I read three books that told me everything I wanted to know. I was 12. One was the Hunchback of Notre Dame, one was Wuthering Heights and the other one was Jane Eyre. And I can remember, I mean, what’s the wonderful thing is that the mixture of that hot, hot sun burning you up and Jane Eyre going for her walk in the snow.
But that revealed to me absolutely everything about the power of imagination and books. But those books were also telling me things about how outrageous life was, about sex which nobody would tell me about, about whole sorts of other things that the whole adult world was conspiring to keep you from and which Mrs Aeneas Gunn did a fair job of keeping you from as well.
I mean, you can’t say what it is exactly that’s going to do it for a child or what it is in a book that a child reading is going to find. But those two things come together for me, the world of those books and that blazing sunlight on my head and my back.
You can read the rest of this wonderful discussion, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, about lost classics and the books that entranced David Malouf and Michael Ondaatje on ABC Radio's Books site.
What's with the pirate thing?
Here's the point: I've written three books (don't ask me why they always come in threes) for readers 9 to 12 years of age, called Swashbuckler!
The first is Ocean Without End, out early next year. I'm sending off the final manuscript for the third book next week. It's a bit like having triplets: they all need attention at once; but on the other hand, endless proofreading can get very tedious when you actually want to leave pirates behind and go off onto researching World War 2 or the Restoration or Hadrian's Wall.
But Swashbuckler! it is, for the present time. The story is simple enough: Lily, aged 12, gets kidnapped by pirates and turns into one herself. Maybe.
It's set in the Mediterranean in 1798, just as Napoleon Bonaparte's great army was setting off in 400 ships to conquer Egypt, with Admiral Nelson crossing their wake, in the lead-up to the Battle of the Nile. Slaves were still the common currency; the navies of Christian and Islamic states were battling each other as if Saladin were still alive; the grand era of Empire was about to begin, but the fabric of Europe was beginning to unravel.
They have been described as pirate adventure books for girls, but I hope it's not that simple. For a start, I know boys supposedly don't read books with a girl as the main protagonist, but maybe there are enough swordfights and a bit of swearing to ensure there's fun for all the family.
I wanted to pay tribute to the great adventure stories of my childhood, and to the classic elements of the pirate genre (swordfights, evil captains, wild storms, the quest for long-lost parents, treasure hunts, mysterious strangers, maps, sea battles). And a little maritime slapstick never goes astray. But I also had to decide what to do about the standard pirate job description: capturing slaves; murdering innocents; robbing the rich, and then just getting drunk; sailing about looking evil.
Does a 12 year-old girl suddenly turn into a swaggering, lyin', cheatin', murdering rascal? The real-life women pirates of history certainly did.
Or should I take the Rafael Sabatini/Errol Flynn approach?
Wait and see...
The first is Ocean Without End, out early next year. I'm sending off the final manuscript for the third book next week. It's a bit like having triplets: they all need attention at once; but on the other hand, endless proofreading can get very tedious when you actually want to leave pirates behind and go off onto researching World War 2 or the Restoration or Hadrian's Wall.
But Swashbuckler! it is, for the present time. The story is simple enough: Lily, aged 12, gets kidnapped by pirates and turns into one herself. Maybe.
It's set in the Mediterranean in 1798, just as Napoleon Bonaparte's great army was setting off in 400 ships to conquer Egypt, with Admiral Nelson crossing their wake, in the lead-up to the Battle of the Nile. Slaves were still the common currency; the navies of Christian and Islamic states were battling each other as if Saladin were still alive; the grand era of Empire was about to begin, but the fabric of Europe was beginning to unravel.
They have been described as pirate adventure books for girls, but I hope it's not that simple. For a start, I know boys supposedly don't read books with a girl as the main protagonist, but maybe there are enough swordfights and a bit of swearing to ensure there's fun for all the family.
I wanted to pay tribute to the great adventure stories of my childhood, and to the classic elements of the pirate genre (swordfights, evil captains, wild storms, the quest for long-lost parents, treasure hunts, mysterious strangers, maps, sea battles). And a little maritime slapstick never goes astray. But I also had to decide what to do about the standard pirate job description: capturing slaves; murdering innocents; robbing the rich, and then just getting drunk; sailing about looking evil.
Does a 12 year-old girl suddenly turn into a swaggering, lyin', cheatin', murdering rascal? The real-life women pirates of history certainly did.
Or should I take the Rafael Sabatini/Errol Flynn approach?
Wait and see...
Performance anxiety
When you set up one of these blogs, unless you are pretending to be someone else, you're supposed to provide a profile. This, I gather, is a little like forensic criminal profiling: gathering critical information so that assumptions can be made about the personality responsible.
Fair enough. But the questions include: What are your favourite books?
I ask you - what kind of demented torturer would pose such a question? It may seem innocuous enough, but it threw me into a spin. The title of almost every book I've ever loved instantly vanished from my mind. I don't remember ever reading anything. And if I did, I'm not telling you, because the only thing that pops into my feverish mind is The Children of the New Forest, which I read when I was ten, and what conclusions will you reach on that basis? Since I filled out that form, I keep remembering new "favourites" but one has to stop somewhere.
I'm clear about my favourite book: War and Peace. I read it when I was in my early teens and I've read it at least once a year ever since. No contest.
But anything else?
What does "favourite" mean, anyway?
I remembered the moment when my Aunty Judy put into my hands a small blue volume with gilt-edged pages - Jane Eyre. I'd never had a book with gilt edging before - in fact I don't think I'd ever even seen such a thing (maybe a Bible). I held it in my hands and smelled the fine, almost transparent, pages. That was the moment that I became a book collector. I was twelve, at the most. So when bushfires were roaring towards my house in the bush outside Sydney a few years ago, and I had to choose a few precious things to save, I said a soggy farewell to all my other thousands of books, and put Jane Eyre in my suitcase. (Luckily, they all survived.)
I remember all the long hours standing in the Nunawading Public Library, with my head tilted to the left, staring at the bottom shelf in children's fiction, where the authors T to W were shelved. Trease, Treece, Sutcliffe, Welch. It's their fault that I now write historical fiction for children (with lots of swordfights).
Mind you, I owe thanks to the librarians - it was good training for the muscles in my neck, in preparation for the endless hours spent since in bookshops, head tilted to left, looking for my next favourite book.
Writing about Patrick O'Brien in the New Criterion recently, Robert Messenger pondered the idea of "favourites":
Fair enough. But the questions include: What are your favourite books?
I ask you - what kind of demented torturer would pose such a question? It may seem innocuous enough, but it threw me into a spin. The title of almost every book I've ever loved instantly vanished from my mind. I don't remember ever reading anything. And if I did, I'm not telling you, because the only thing that pops into my feverish mind is The Children of the New Forest, which I read when I was ten, and what conclusions will you reach on that basis? Since I filled out that form, I keep remembering new "favourites" but one has to stop somewhere.
I'm clear about my favourite book: War and Peace. I read it when I was in my early teens and I've read it at least once a year ever since. No contest.
But anything else?
What does "favourite" mean, anyway?
I remembered the moment when my Aunty Judy put into my hands a small blue volume with gilt-edged pages - Jane Eyre. I'd never had a book with gilt edging before - in fact I don't think I'd ever even seen such a thing (maybe a Bible). I held it in my hands and smelled the fine, almost transparent, pages. That was the moment that I became a book collector. I was twelve, at the most. So when bushfires were roaring towards my house in the bush outside Sydney a few years ago, and I had to choose a few precious things to save, I said a soggy farewell to all my other thousands of books, and put Jane Eyre in my suitcase. (Luckily, they all survived.)
I remember all the long hours standing in the Nunawading Public Library, with my head tilted to the left, staring at the bottom shelf in children's fiction, where the authors T to W were shelved. Trease, Treece, Sutcliffe, Welch. It's their fault that I now write historical fiction for children (with lots of swordfights).
Mind you, I owe thanks to the librarians - it was good training for the muscles in my neck, in preparation for the endless hours spent since in bookshops, head tilted to left, looking for my next favourite book.
Writing about Patrick O'Brien in the New Criterion recently, Robert Messenger pondered the idea of "favourites":
The Aubrey/Maturin chronicles are really a single large book, in twenty-one volumes, all about love and war and home and hearth and hunting. Thinking about it, I am reminded of something the great economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron wrote about reading: "I have read War and Peace at least fifteen times, and it is still as rereadable as ever. I do not think it contains a paragraph that appears unfamiliar to me as I come across it. Yet on every perusal I never fail to discover something new in this inexhaustible store of observations, insights, ideas, and images that the previous readings have failed to reveal-to say nothing of the infinite pleasure of drifting again along the stream of that language, so simple and so beautiful, so true to the Horatian ideal of simplex munditiis. A book like this is rereadable senz'altro, and at least twice I began rereading War and Peace at once, starting again after having read the last page."
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