All good books

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.
- Ernest Hemingway

Last words

I've written an awful lot of book reviews in my life. Nowadays I write at least five a month for the magazine, not counting all the snippets here. I often notice a strange urge to use a word I wouldn't use in any other context - reviewspeak takes a hold and I'm off, describing prose as purple or some poor sod as insightful - memoirs seem to quite often be gentle, and if I'm weary or it's late afternoon and I haven't had a cup of tea lately, I have to prevent myself from savaging people with adjectives such as "compelling". (I used "enigmatic" to describe one of my characters in a synopsis the other day. For God's sake, I muttered, there must be some other word that doesn't sound like a book blurb, but had to remind myself that it does have a meaning beyond Mr Darcy.)
Anyway, Ben McIntyre has translated some of those euphemisms used in literary reviews - and nowhere else:
Triumphant return to form actually means "I was expecting this to be as abysmal as the last one, but it was only mildly disappointing."
Gnomic Baffling.
Imaginative Fiction reviewers use this to describe a book that they wish they had written; nonfiction reviewers use it to describe a book they do not believe.
Compelling I managed to finish it.
Painfully funny / sad / poignant / long Demonstrates the deep sensitivity of the reviewer. A health warning also attaches to any book described as achingly, eye-wateringly or heart-stoppingly anything.
Arch I’m not sure if this is funny
Detailed Has footnotes.
Richly detailed Has lots of footnotes.
Densely detailed Has footnotes, endnotes, acknowledgements, epigrams, foreword, preface, bibliography, appendices, indices, and marginalia. Translation: unreadable. qv panoramic, workmanlike, painstaking, extensively researched.
Exquisite sensibility Gay.
Veiled sensibility Closet gay.
He's had fun with this. You can read the entire list in The Times.

Queer thing, reading

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly in hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.
- Anne Frank

Reading pile update

Just finished John Wray's fine novel, The Right Hand of Sleep, set in Austria in 1938.
Now, you know when you begin reading a novel set almost anywhere in Europe in 1938 that you will spend most of the next few hours or days beset by a dreadful foreboding.
Wray not only brings that to a climax, but he also leaves you there in it, quite consciously, as if there's nothing more he need say on events after 1939, and their probable impact on his puzzling but somehow vaguely unlikeable protagonists. There are no simple equations here: of right or wrong action; of political answers; of fear versus courage. Kindly old uncles are vicious anti-Semites. Jewish friends are too drunk or fearful to comprehend the new order. Lovers keep secrets, hermits seek company, pacifists lash out with their fists, Nazis charm and cajole.
It's an interesting contrast - or perhaps complement - to Iain Pears' The Dream of Scipio, which I read last year and which continues to play on my thoughts. Here, the ethical threads that run through the three narratives are summed up by the book's conscience, the philosopher Sophia:

We must be just, we must strive, we must engage ourselves with the business of the world for our own sake, because through that, and through contemplation in equal measure, our soul is purified and brought closer to the divine...

You see how its impact carries on? Wray's may well be the same. We shall see.
So now I'm in my post-novel slump, which may last for an entire afternoon, in which I feel bereft and abandoned (perhaps cast out is a better term) of the imaginative world I've inhabited, courtesy of good writing.
But I recently read about a wonderful new translation of War and Peace, and it must be at least a year since I read it last. I've never warmed to my current copy, which was purchased in an emergency: all names are Anglicised, so that Nicholas rescues Mary, which doesn't seem nearly so romantic.
It's hard to feel the same way about a pale and suffering Prince Andrew. Our plumber is called Andrew. He's a lovely plumber, too, but I feel a Russian prince really ought to be an Andrei.
And when you get to the dramatic moment when the bandaged general exclaims, "You see before you the unfortunate Mack!" my guy says instead, "Vous voyez le malheureux Mack". Luckily I know what he means.
I need a long, happy voyage in a book right now, so I'm pushing aside that demanding reading pile and climbing back into the loving arms of Tolstoy.
As soon as I buy a new copy.

Knock out

What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while... What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
- J. D. Salinger (who never answered his phone)

Postmodernism is history

Well, there you go.
Henry Reynolds, the brilliant if controversial Australian historian, reckons postmodernist theory is old hat.
In a discussion at the Sydney Writers' Festival, he said that postmodernism had provided an interesting take on the language of history but "it just goes round and round, with lots of lights and colours and doesn't get you anywhere".
I wish I'd said it like that.
His take on the role of history, especially in schools, is also interesting - as usual. You can read more about it here.

Reviews trickling in

Here are extracts from a couple of recent reviews of Ocean Without End:

"Lily Swann's transformation from slave to pirate princess as she searches for her father ... is surprisingly believable. Set off Santa Lucia, near Malta, the swashbuckling story also carries a palatable dose of history."
- Ann Packer, Dominion Post

"...A good narrative for either sex to get their teeth into. It is well-assembled in a young person's (not to say children's) sense, with sentences and paragraphs structured to meet the target audience.
... But an Enid Blyton tale this is not... There's a bit of everything thrown in - drama, violence, escape - as is required with a young person's read, but the yarn will keep them up to finish it. And then they'll want the next in the series. A good stimulus to get them reading.
If you give Ocean Without End to your offspring, remember to set the alarm on school mornings."
- Christine Jordan, Greymouth Star

Hiccup

It's the last day of my two weeks off work: next Monday, it'll be up at sparrow's fart, shoes on feet, hair combed, and back to the office to churn out another fabulous edition of the magazine.
So I should be writing like a demon but I'm not.
It's not that I'm stuck so much as bewildered. I have several things I ought to be doing next and I can't settle into any of them. I also need to get stuck into my coursework for the Children's Lit diploma - and I did, yesterday - but it's just yet another item on the list of urgent priorities.
The thing is, I'm dying to get into research for a completely new book, but not sure I should start it yet. It's not the next thing in the queue. But it's just all so fascinating - set in a place and a time and a community that I am desperate to understand better.
Oh what the hell. Where's that encyclopaedia?
[Tears up list of urgent tasks.]
I'm going to curse myself next week when I can't do any of these things. Not enough time in the week.
In the meantime, when in doubt ... Eat lunch.

[Update - the next day - wrote like a demon until late last night. Awake half the night writing in my head. I guess all I needed was food.]

Dipping in

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away.
No one has stepped twice into the same river.
But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?
- Marina Tsvetaeva

Tips from the top: Diana Wynne Jones on writing

Found a marvellous article from the eminently sensible Diana Wynne Jones on how to write stories. It's aimed at young writers but, as they say on the infomercials, there's something here for everyone.
My favourite tip:

Some people get stiff and unhappy writing because they think they can’t manage to write how it feels to have an adventure, or to be in the middle of very fast, exciting action. This is nonsense. Everyone knows.
What you have to do, if you are stuck this way, is to stop thinking in words and then shut your eyes and think how it would be if you were the one having the adventure, falling down the cliff or being attacked by a vampire, or whatever.
You'll know at once. Then you simply put down what you know. It may come out queer, but queer is good where actions and feelings are concerned.

Read the rest on her website.

The new black

Apparently historical fiction is the flavour of the month (just as "adventure is the new fantasy" in children's lit). A happy juncture for some of us, but what's it about?
One could argue that a certain style of historical fiction, perhaps kicked off by I, Claudius and hovering in the space between Robert Graves and Georgette Heyer, has never gone out of fashion and indeed includes many best sellers of the last thirty years.
Pipes and Timbrels delved a little into this apparent rebirth in a recent edition, citing Shakespearean scholar Martha Tuck Rozett's essay "Constructing a world: how postmodern historical fiction reimagines the past", on the latest generation of historical fiction writers:

What they share with the new historicists - and what distinguishes their novels from traditional or classic historical fictions and allies them with postmodern fictions - are a resistance to old certainties about what happened and why; a recognition of the subjectivity, the uncertainty, the multiplicity of truths inherent in any account of past events, and a disjunctive, self-conscious narrative, frequently produced by eccentric and/or multiple narrating voices.

Clearly this applies more to Geraldine Brooks and Julian Barnes than to Bernard Cornwell, but writers such as EL Doctorow and Laurence Durrell were doing interesting and new things with modern history way before anyone barthed up (sorry) post-modernism.
I'd suggest that the new directions in history writing in general (fact or fiction) are based more in post-war and more specifically post-Cold War cultural uncertainty, greater access to archival information, the impact of modern history and particularly war, influences from fields as diverse as psychology and forensics, broader international dialogue between writers and researchers in history and archaeology, and new forms of writing that pre-date post-modernist theory.
That, too, has been a recent influence, but it is not the only nor the most significant one.
It's all part of the same wave, if you like, currents heading off in different directions, overlapping and clashing and sometimes drowning each other out.
I just made that up, but I'll call it a theory.

Or north, as the case may be

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
- TS Eliot

This poem will save your life

Daisy Goodwin, in The Times, reckons a poem's as good as a lifebelt - or maybe a Valium.

"Poetry has got me through innumerable waiting rooms, traffic jams and airport lounges. It has soothed fractious children, diverted broken-hearted friends and made romantic points.
Patrick Leigh Fermor, author of A Time of Gifts, recited The Odyssey to himself as he walked across Europe; Brian Keenan used the poetry of Pablo Neruda as his touchstone during his long incarceration as a hostage in Lebanon..."

[Daisy clearly hasn't read his travel book about horse-riding across half of South America with fellow hostage John McCarthy, where Keenan bores everyone senseless with recitations. But I digress.]

"Everyone should have at least 10 poems that they can access at any time - building up a mental playlist of poems is a protection against boredom, mental atrophy, and you will never be at a loss when the batteries on your iPod finally run out. In an age of brandwashing, where advertising jingles and TV catchphrases stick in your mind, the ultimate luxury is to have what Coleridge called "the best words in the best order" always accessible."

Quite right, too.
Unfortunately the only thing that ever pops into my head in times of crisis is the Lord's Prayer, which isn't much help since I retract any semblance of faith as soon as the plane rights itself or the shark turns out to be a bit of kelp.
And she doesn't say anything about the agony of trying to remember what comes after the lines you know well:

In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy
Gone a-droving 'down the Cooper' where the Western drovers go;
As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing,
For the drover's life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.
And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wond'rous glory of the everlasting stars.

I was awake for hours the other night, trying to locate the missing bits stowed somewhere in my memory. "I am sitting in my dingy little office/Where a... something something something."
But in less stressful moments, when life is not threatened and memory seems not to be utterly fading, it is as lovely to be able to run Sunne Rising lightly over the braincells as it is to sing Nessun Dorna at the top of my voice in the car when nobody can hear.
And believe me, nobody would want to.
Which reminds me, why do people on public transport sing along out loud with their iPods? Are they so transported they have no concept of the cringing world around them? It seems to happen much more than it used to with mere Walkman (Walkmen?). There's a thesis in that somewhere.
And why do they only ever sing the last few words of each line? A woman on the ferry the other day chorused "Oh yeah" over and over for what felt like 20 minutes. (It could have been worse: she might have sung, "Something something something - oh yeah".)
Oh for the days when people whispered a few verses of Browning silently behind a book.

Pleasure palaces

Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence.
- Jan Morris

Love libraries (mostly)

The Guardian reports that JK Rowling, Salman Rushdie, Irvine Welsh and Jacqueline Wilson are among 150 authors who have pledged to help galvanise support for public libraries in the UK and combat their growing image problem. It's part of the Love Libraries campaign, launched this month.
Rowling compared libraries to the World-Between-The-Worlds from CS Lewis's Narnia books, "where visitors could enter a thousand different worlds by jumping into different pools".
"When I got my eldest daughter a library card I felt as though I had bought her citizenship of that same fabulous world," she said.
Rushdie focused on the potential libraries have for disseminating ideas, saying "if knowledge is power, then the public library system gives that power to anyone who wants it."
But a recent UK study shows that 42% of adults haven't visited their local library in the past two years.
That doesn't necessarily mean people aren't reading. I hadn't visited a library for years and years - not since I stopped studying - but had to start all over again to research historical details for my books.
Even though the Auckland City Library's collection of material on Malta, for example, is limited (not a lot of call for it here, of course) it's quite good on ships and maritime history. And it does always seem full of people.
But don't start me on that library. I only love it on principal; in reality the relationship has soured. The Central Library has taken its entire Children's Literature Reference Collection out of general circulation and carefully stored it in "The Basement". Just when I started studying again. Sorry if I've mentioned this before, but it drives me crazy.
You can't browse or flick - and flicking, as we all know, can lead to the most sublime flights of fancy or blindingly brilliant ideas. But no. Flicking, fancy and flight are not allowed. Now you have to ask for a specific title and wait for the ever-patient staff to bring the book out of its hiding hole. Then, usually, you can't borrow it to actually read - it has to go back to The Basement.
Maybe if they didn't call it The Basement it wouldn't seem quite so sad and dark and lonely. The traditional "stack" always seems like a much friendlier place for books to be stored, as if they might be cosying up to each other, and partying when the lights go out. You can imagine Simon Schama interrogating Tolstoy, Pinter haranguing Hardy, and Margaret Mead scribbling it all down.
The Basement sounds as if it were a lost and found department, with books sitting about sulking, damply and dimly, like wallflowers at a dance wishing someone would ask for the next polka.