Reading Matters

CWA Ellis Peters Historical Award winner 2009

Congratulations to Philip Kerr who won the 2009 Crime Writers’ Association’s (CWA) Ellis Peters Historical Award with his wartime novel If The Dead Rise Not at a ceremony in London last night.

I was one of the lucky few in the audience, thanks to a kind invite by Crimeficreader, who's written a great post about the event here.

It was a fun night (particularly meeting the marketing and PR bods from various publishing houses -- oh, and the canapes and drinks were very nice too) and Mr Kerr's speech was brilliant, particularly the bit where he blew the dust off the speech he'd prepared for last year's event (he was shortlisted for the same prize in 2008, but lost out to Laura Wilson). If his books are as entertaining, humorous and forthright as his speech, then I look forward to reading them.

You can find out more about the award on the CWA website.

UPDATE: Here's a video of Kerr's speech.

Links for today

Does anyone else remember Anne Rice's vampire series, way back before the current Twilight/True Blood obsession? In preparation for Halloween (and in order to promote her new novel Angel Time) Ms Rice has chosen her five favourite reads for The Daily Beast. I love that she chose The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, as that's such a wonderful book!

How's this for a cringe-worthy (punning) headline about John Le Carre switching publishers for the first time in 38 years: John le Carré defects to world's paperback superpower.  There was a similar one in tonight's London Evening Standard (not online) and I suspect there'll be more in tomorrow's news.

Anyone know what happened to Top 21 Book Sites? Reading Matters was number 5 for quite awhile, riding on the coat-tails of The Asylum, at number 4, and dovegreyreader scribbles at number 2. Now the site seems to have gone bust.

@Joethepublicist has written a wonderful post in praise of independent book stores on the Penguin Blog. It's worth checking out the comments for the names of stores that have been nominated as particular favourites. Not that I need anymore bookstores to visit, mind.

'Winterland' by Alan Glynn

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 480 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

I love Irish literary fiction and I'm quite partial to the odd crime novel, so when I first heard that Alan Glynn's Winterland was described as "Dublin noir" I knew I'd probably enjoy it. I was right. This is a cracking story, brilliantly told and incredibly entertaining, and I bet it won't take long before the film rights are sold and we see it on the big, or possibly little, screen some time soon.

The real strength of this story is its wholly contemporary feel. Anyone who knows anything about the Irish economy will love this book, because it so beautifully captures the murky machinations of the property bubble (before it went "pop" earlier this year), planning policy and politics. Throw in a gangland murder, a dash of violence, a smidgen of retribution and you've got all the right ingredients for a dark and thrilling read.

The book opens with a young thug, Noel Rafferty, being gunned down in the beer garden of a local pub. Police figure it's a gangland murder, because the victim is a small-time drug dealer. But later that same night Noel's uncle, also called Noel Rafferty, is killed in a mysterious car accident. Why have two members of the same family, sharing the same name, died on the same night? Coincidence? Or something more sinister?

Enter Gina Rafferty, aunt of the first Noel, sister of the second, who doesn't believe the official explanation that the car accident was exactly that -- an accident.

She begins some detective work of her own, and before long she finds herself thrust into a world of dodgy dealings involving property and politics. She learns that her brother, an engineer, was working on a huge skyscraper, the tallest of its kind in Europe, known as Richmond Plaza. He had a close working relationship with the property's developer, Paddy Norton, a greedy man intent on turning the Dublin skyline into a mini-Manhattan. Norton, in turn, has connections with Larry Bolger, a power-hungry politician with an eye on the country's top job. There's obviously some shadowy goings on between these three men, but proving it takes Gina into dangerous and uncertain territory.

To complicate the story further, enter Mark Griffin, the sole survivor of a car accident that left him an orphan more than 20 years earlier. Is he connected to the Rafferty deaths and, if so, how?

All these characters, including the lone female heroine whom everyone in authority dismisses as an airhead, might sound slightly clichéd but in Glynn's capable hands they become very real people, with foibles and flaws. He really gets into the heads of each individual character and presents their motivations and desires so intricately it's easy to feel empathy for even the most loathsome of the bunch.

The dialogue, smart and snappy (and riddled with Dublinese and obligatory swearing), moves things along at a crisp pace. There's plenty of unexpected twists and turns along the way, but apart from one over-the-top scene towards the end of the book, the whole of Winterland feels authentic and prescient. Highly recommended.

Winterland is published on November 5.

A visit to Daunt Books, Marylebone, London

How is it that you can live in a city for 11 years and yet never have heard of, much less visited, one of the most beautiful bookshops in London? I'm not sure why Daunt Books has never really made it onto my radar, but having recently heard about it, I decided that I must visit, and so today, with no other plans, I headed to Marylebone for a squizz.

 
The store is billed as a bookshop for travellers. That's because its contents are arranged by country, so that travel guides, coffee table books and novels nestle together. For obvious reasons I was keen to see what the "Australia" section was like and headed downstairs (left and right, above) to where the Antipodean, American (North and South) and Middle Eastern countries were located. Sadly, the Australia section was rather predictable -- Tim Winton, Peter Carey et al -- so I headed back upstairs to check out the European countries.

I took this photograph from the very top gallery (on my camera phone, hence the blur), looking down to the main floor below. Sadly, it doesn't really capture the true beauty of this room. It's essentially a long oak gallery with skylights, so the room is amazingly light and airy, the kind of place you could easily while away an entire afternoon. There's even a very large table in the middle, which you can sit at to do a spot of reading, if you're that way inclined.

The front of the store features a stunning selection of non-fiction and fiction, arranged "normally" (ie. in alphabetical order), and it supposedly stocks books on other subjects -- cookery, interior design, art and the like -- although I missed them, because I was accompanied by a non-bookish partner who was making noises about wanting to leave!

Of course, I couldn't go home empty-handed, so I purchased Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford and Hans Fallada's The Drinker. I was delighted when my books were put in a lovely cotton shopper (left, above) at no extra cost. Not only does it make a great souvenir of my outing, it will come in handy for toting other books around with me during my daily commute.

Daunt Books is a truly beautiful shop, a real bibliophile's heaven, and I can't wait to go back.

If you want to visit, it's located at 83 Marylebone High Street, London W1U 4QW. There are branches at Belsize Park, Hampstead and Holland Park.

You can see all my posts about other book stores I have visited here.

'The Space Between Us' by John MacKenna

Fiction - paperback; New Island Books; 282 pages; 2009.

At what point do you decide to abandon a book? I ask, because I came very close to abandoning this one. I struggled with the first 54 pages, not quite believing the dialogue (too verbose, too artificial) nor the characters (too one-dimensional, too false). But something convinced me to keep reading on, because who knows, maybe it would get better. And, thankfully, it did.

Reviewing this book proves somewhat problematic, however, because the plot has several key revelations which are best discovered by simply reading the book rather than reading this review. (And, whatever you do, don't read the review or "product description" on Amazon, because they're riddled with spoilers. I found this out the hard way, but even though I discovered what was going to happen, The Space Between Us still left me reeling at the end, part in shock, part in awe.)

The basic premise of the novel goes something like this.

A young architect opens the door to two police officers (or guards, as they are known in Ireland) who inform him that his wife, a solicitor, has been killed in a car crash. His reaction is not what one would expect. Instead of being overwhelmed with grief he's overwhelmed by relief -- their marriage had been floundering for a long time but neither party had had the courage to end it. Now, left alone to raise his two-year-old daughter, our unnamed narrator has been given a second chance to start afresh. When a married friend, Kate, confesses she's in love with him, there seems only one road to take...

The book then jumps ahead 17 years and we discover the narrator living in the same house, but alone. His daughter, Jane, is studying classical music at university, but comes home to spend her weekends with him and their dog, the impossibly named Rostropovich. The story then follows our narrator for a year, and in that year, we find him being tested on very many levels.

"You need to stop letting things happen to you and make them happen for you," his neighbour berates him one day.

"You need to be more passionate about life. And I'm not talking about shagging me. I'm talking about you and this way you have of sitting back and letting life wash over you. I've known you for twenty years and you've allowed yourself to just exist, you've lived without passion."

This seems to mirror something Beth, his late wife, once told him when they were on holiday in Amsterdam almost 20 years earlier. She thought a permanent move to the Netherlands would be the impetus needed to kick-start his career to the next level, "the move that gives you the grand design". But he's content designing houses in small-town Ireland and the idea doesn't interest him.

"I think you're afraid of the world," Beth said. I knew by her eyes she was serious. "I think you feel safe being the medium-sized fish in a tiny pond. But what happens if another fish appears in that pond?"

In essence this is a novel about the choices we make in life and the consequences of those choices. It's also very much about unrequited love, death, grief and the relationships between fathers and daughters. And I defy anyone not to read this and be incredibly moved by the gentle prose and the emotional story that unfolds but most of all by the powerhouse ending that turns everything else on its head. This book isn't what I expected, it's far more shocking and disturbing than I could have possibly envisaged, and I rather suspect anyone who decides to give it a try will concur.

Oh, and if anyone does read this book, please come back and let me know: I'm dying to have a proper discussion about it, as it throws up so many interesting topics and issues.

Neglected classics

BBC Radio 4 is carrying out an interesting exercise as part of its Open Book programme. It asked 10 British/Irish authors to nominate the books that they "feel most deserve to be re-read and reinstated onto our bookshelves". The list of neglected books, which is being discussed on radio, looks like this:

• William Boyd nominated The Polyglots by William Gerhardie

• Susan Hill nominated The Rector's Daughter by F M Mayor

• Hari Kunzru nominated A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov

• Ruth Rendell nominated Many Dimensions by Charles Williams

• Colm Toibin nominated Esther Waters by George Moore

• Beryl Bainbridge nominated The Quest for Corvo by A J A Symons

• Howard Jacobson nominated Rasselas by Samuel Johnson

• Val McDermid nominated Carol by Patricia Highsmith

• Michael Morpurgo nominated The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico

• Joanna Trollope nominated Miss Mackenzie by Anthony Trollope

Apparently listeners are being asked to vote for their favourite book from this list and Radio 4 will dramatise it next year.

If I was to nominate a book it would probably be Kenneth Cook's Play Little Victims, which is sadly out of print, or George Johnston's My Brother Jack, although it's not particularly neglected in Australia, it's just that no one living in the Northern Hemisphere seems to have ever heard of it!

(One of my favourite blogs, by the way, is The Neglected Books Page, where I first saw this list mentioned. It's worth a visit if you're ever in need of some inspiration for reading long-lost classic fiction.)

Have you got a favourite book that you think deserves more attention? Or read any of the books on this list?

'Let The Great World Spin' by Colum McCann

Fiction - paperback; Bloomsbury; 349 pages; 2009.

Anyone who has seen the Oscar-winning documentary Man on a Wire or read Philippe Petit's To Reach The Clouds will know of Petit's daring high-wire act between between the Twin Towers in New York City on August 7, 1974. It was an act that stunned the world but has taken on extra significance now that the Twin Towers are no longer standing.

Adding to the mythology of Petit's incredibly daring stunt (he walked the wire for 45 minutes, making eight crossings between the towers, and was arrested shortly after) is Colum McCann's equally ambitious novel. I say ambitious because it's fairly staggering in its scope, telling as it does the individual stories of a diverse group of characters living in New York, using Petit's walk as a kind of bridging link between them all. Does he pull it off? In my opinion, not quite.

Long-time readers of this blog will know I have a penchant for Irish writers and stories set in New York, so I rather suspected that Let The Great World Spin would be right up my street, seeing as it ticked both boxes. But there was something about this book that didn't gel with me and I've spent the best part of a week trying to figure it out.

I think the problem is not so much the scope and the huge canvas that McCann uses, nor the diversity of his characters -- an Irish monk, a prostitute and an Upper Eastside housewife among them, all expertly drawn -- but that the book reads very much like a collection of short stories strung together (pun not intended) by Petit's high-wire act. Some of these stories interconnect, others, such as the very brief chapter about Fernando, a 13-year-old subway graffiti artist, do not. And, as ever with books of this type, there is a danger that the reader will like some characters better than others, so that certain chapters become more exciting, or more dull, than others, leading to an inconsistent read.

But I don't want to sound too harsh, because there's no doubt that McCann knows how to write beautifully, painting pictures in just a handful of words, as this example shows:

I watched a long pink boa scarf get caught up in the wheels of a patrol car. It wrapped the wheelbase as if in affection, and bits of tufted pink spun in the air.

Similarly, his ability to get into the skin of so many different characters -- a rich house wife who's grieving over her son killed in Vietnam, a Jewish judge called to deal with Petit's legal case, a black hooker fighting to see her two grandchildren, a reformed drug user guilty of a hit-and-run fatality -- without chiming a wrong note is impressive. And his "bridging" segments about Petit are also a delight to read, particularly the section describing the high-wire itself:

The shouting, the sirens, the dull sounds of the city. He let them become a white hum. He went for his last silence and he found it just stood there, in the precise middle of the wire, one hundred feet from each tower, eyes closed, body still, wire gone. He took the air of the city into his lungs.

Interestingly, when I saw McCann at the Cheltenham Literature Festival last week, he confessed that he wanted the book to contain two very strong fictional characters, mirroring the Twin Towers, but that he accidentally killed one off before he really got started -- and he just couldn't bring him back. Whoops, I hope that wasn't a plot spoiler.

'The Haunting of Hill House' by Shirley Jackson

Paperback - fiction; Penguin Modern Classics; 246 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Reviewing two Shirley Jackson novels in the space of a week might border on overkill, but having very much enjoyed We Have Always Lived in the Castle I was anxious to try The Haunting of Hill House, which was originally published in 1959.

First and foremost, unlike We Have Always Lived in the Castle, this is a horror story. Of course, the title itself should give you an inkling of the subject matter, which is essentially a rather creepy tale about a haunted house.

Now this is where I put up my hand and declare that I'm not much into the horror genre. I read so many of these types of books (think Stephen King, Dean R. Koontz, James Herbert and Anne Rice) in my teens and early 20s that I eventually became bored with their formulaic style. And since then I can count on one hand the number of horror stories I've read (Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian and Bram Stoker's Dracula).

There's no doubt that The Haunting of Hill House is a creepy, look-under-the-bed-and-check-the-closet type reads. But in Jackson's capable hands it also has a smattering of humour throughout, so it's not overly claustrophobic and is far less spine-chilling than, say Stephen King's The Shining, which this book brought to mind quite a few times. But Jackson ratchets up the suspense by playing with the minds of the characters, so you're never entirely sure whether the terrifying events she depicts happen physically or psychologically.

The book opens with a rather ominous description of the house.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and some of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Into this secluded mansion come four main characters: Dr John Montague, a doctor of philosophy, who thinks himself something of a "ghost hunter" and has rented the house for three months in order to find scientific evidence of the supernatural; Eleanor Vance, a 32-year-old loner, who has spent the past 12 years looking after her (now dead) invalid mother; Theodora, a Girl Scout type with psychic abilities; and Luke Sanderson, a liar, thief and heir to the house.

The house has two dour-faced caretakers, Mr and Mrs Dudley, who live in the closest town, six miles away.

"I don't stay after I set out dinner," Mrs Dudley went on. "Not after it begins to get dark. I leave before dark comes."
"I know," Eleanor said.
[...]
"So there won't be anyone around if you need help."
"I understand."
"We couldn't even hear you, in the night."
"I don't suppose--"
"No one could. No one lives any nearer than the town. No one else will come any nearer than that."
"I know," Eleanor said tiredly.
"In the night," Mrs Dudley said, and smiled outright. "In the dark," she said, and closed the door behind her.

It doesn't take long before creepy things begin to occur inside Hill House, but I'm not going to divulge them here. You'll just have to read the book yourself. But make sure you do it in daylight. And preferably not while you're alone.

'A Far Cry From Kensington' by Muriel Spark

Fiction - hardcover; Virago Modern Classics; 208 pages; 2008.

The late Muriel Spark is one of those writers whose back catalogue is so long and eclectic it's almost impossible to know where to start. I read Aiding and Abetting last year, because I was intrigued by the real life disappearance of Lord Lucan upon which the novel is based. Having seen KevinfromCanada's glowing review of A Far Cry From Kensington last month I decided this novel, first published in 1988, was the next to try.

I treated myself to a lovely Virago Modern Classics edition, featuring an introduction by Ali Smith, and found myself reading the entire book in just two longish sittings. To say I was utterly charmed by it would probably be an understatement. This is a deliciously enjoyable story that is so perfectly constructed it's almost impossible to find fault with it -- on any level. The prose is simple, the characters believable and the plot expertly drawn, so that you're never quite sure where it's going to take you and then feel overwhelmingly satisfied when you arrive at its destination.

The story is narrated by Mrs Hawkins, a war widow, looking back on her life in London some 30 years earlier when, in 1954, she lived in a South Kensington rooming house and worked in publishing. She was only 28 at the time but had a matronly air about her.

There was something about me, Mrs Hawkins, that invited confidences. I was abundantly aware of it, and indeed abundance was the impression I gave. I was massive in size, strong-muscled, huge-bosomed, with wide hips, hefty long legs, a bulging belly and fat backside; I carried an ample weight with my five-foot-six of height, and was healthy with it. It was, of course, partly this physical factor that disposed people to confide in me. I looked comfortable.

Even her boss, Martin York, of the struggling publishing firm Ullswater Press, confides in her, inviting her to his office for a minute ("A minute meant an hour, sometimes more"), where he would stand at his window, or sit in his leather armchair, and regale her with his thoughts. (Despite his confiding tone, he never reveals that he's carrying out fraudulent activities for which he's later arrested and imprisoned for seven years.)

But her forthright manner and her maxim that "no life can be carried on satisfactorily unless people are honest" lands her in hot water. When a purple-prosed would-be writer, Hector Bartlett, starts stalking her in order to get his work published by Ullswater Press, she tells him in no uncertain terms that he is a pisseur de copie, a French phrase for a hack writer who urinates copy. Unfortunately, for Mrs Hawkins, Mr Bartlett is having an affair with a well regarded author, Emma Loy, who has a lot of powerful sway in the book industry. You can guess what happens. Mrs Hawkins not only loses her job, her candid admission (and Mr Bartlett) follows her wherever she goes, and comes back to haunt her in more ways than one...

Meanwhile, back at the rooming house, one of the tenants, Wanda, an immigrant Polish dressmaker, receives a poison pen letter accusing her of "not declaring your income to the Authorities". Wanda almost has a nervous breakdown over this, because she's petrified of being deported back to her homeland. This is where the ever-dependable Mrs Hawkins steps in to do a bit of detective sleuthing to see who might write such a nasty letter. Her efforts come to nothing. It's only when the letter writer phones Wanda to warn her off, that things take a sinister turn for the worse and Mrs Hawkins finds herself being accused of the very crime she's trying to investigate.

So what A Far Cry From Kensington delivers is a two-pronged narrative, one that focuses on the book publishing industry in 1954 and Mrs Hawkins' career as an editor (this makes fascinating reading in itself), and another that focuses on a sinister campaign to frighten a lodger out of her wits, but to what end?

What makes this novel work so wonderfully is, of course, the detail that brings the book trade and post-war London to life. But it's also the sparkling wit (I laughed out loud several times), the delicious characters (Hector Bartlett, for instance, seems as frightful as his prose) and the seamless weaving of two different narratives that are expertly drawn together right at the very end to deliver a really satisfying conclusion.

Competition winners

Thanks to everyone who entered my competition to win one of two new release hardcovers. The number of entries were rather small, so that makes the odds of winning a little higher.

There were two entries for Michelle Moran's Cleopatra's Daughter and four for Eoin Colfer's And Another Thing.

I used a playing card shuffler to determine the winners. All suits were represented, but only Aces and Twos included in the first draw, and Aces, Twos, Threes and Fours in the second.

The winners are:

'Legend of a Suicide' by David Vann

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 240 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

David Vann's Legend of a Suicide is a deceptive book. I started it, thinking it was a novel, and was mid-way through it before I clocked that it was no such thing. This is actually a series of stories, albeit about the same character, Roy Venn, dealing with the suicide of his father, Jim.

The first, Ichthyology, is told through the eyes of a young Roy, who is obsessed with his aquarium and sneaks out of the house in his pajamas whenever he hears his parent's fighting. We learn that his father, a dentist, is a troubled man beset by marital woes. The ending, when it comes, via a .44 Magnum handgun on the deck of a fishing boat, feels like a relief.

The next story, Rhoda, is a black comedy about Jim's second wife, "who had dark, dark hair, pale skin, and a dropped eyelid that, on closer view, made her terribly beautiful". At only 13 pages long, it's enough for the reader to glean that Jim's unable to relate to women very well: within days of their marriage the pair are rowing and Jim's telling Roy, "She wasn't like this before. This isn't the woman I married." We also discover Jim's penchant for guns.

A Legend of Good Men is set after Jim's death and focuses on Jim's first wife (Roy's mother) and the succession of men that she dates. Or, as Roy so aptly puts it:

The men she dated were a lot like the circuses that passed through our town. They'd move in quickly and unpack everything they owned, as if they had come to stay. They'd tempt us with brightly colored objects -- flowers, balloons, remote controlled race cars -- perform tricks with their beards and hands, call us funny names like snip, my little squash plant, ding-dong, and apple pie, and yell their stories at us day and night. Then they'd vanish, and we'd find no sign left, no mention  even, as if we'd simply imagined them.

By now, we've built up a pretty good picture of Jim, his first wife, his second wife and his son, and how his death has altered their lives forever. And then David Vann pulls a brilliant literary trick out of the magic hat and presents us with a two-part novella, Sukkwan Island, that is some of the finest story-telling you're ever likely to come across in modern fiction. I loved this section of the book, which is told in the third-person (as opposed to the first-person in the preceding stories), and read it with a mixture of awe, fascination and fear.

Again, this story looks at Jim's suicide from another angle: what if a bereaved son could extract his revenge on his dad before such a cowardly act is even carried out? I won't spoil the plot, but if you think Stephen King meets Cormac McCarthy's The Road you'll get a fair idea of the horror and bleakness of what unfolds. Mind you, it's quite hilarious in places, if you don't mind laughing at gruesome things. Basically, Jim decides to spend a year living on a remote Alaskan island, taking his now 15-year-old son with him. He is woefully ill-equipped, both physically and mentally, for the task and when winter sets in things begin going a little awry, with devastating consequences...

The fifth and final story, Ketchikan, is told through Roy's eyes as an adult revisiting the town his father once lived in, hoping to confront the mistress that destroyed his parent's first marriage. But instead of putting ghosts to rest, Roy realises that perhaps there were very real reasons for what happened and that he's failed to properly grasp them, let alone understand them. It feels like an emotional low-point, and the reader's left wondering how much of the father's patterns of behaviour will be carried on by the son.

Interestingly, David Vann has dedicated this book to his own father, James Edward Vann, who killed himself when David was a child. In his acknowledgments David thanks his family "because it was an uncomfortable topic I was writing about -- my father's suicide -- and there's exposure in these stories." He adds: "They're fictional but based on a lot that's true."

Legend of a Suicide was published in the US to critical acclaim last year; it will be published in the UK for the first time at the end of this month.

Cheltenham Literature Festival: Colum McCann and Colm Tóibín

Colum McCann, photographed by Seamus Kearney, and Colm Tóibín, photographed by Larry D. Moore,
used under a Creative Commons Share Alike License.

Even before they'd opened their mouths, it was clear Irish writer Colum McCann was going to be the chalk to his fellow compatriot Colm Tóibín's cheese. One is suave, handsome, writerly, with a scarf thrown casually around his neck in a kind of nod to American collegiate life; the other, taller and older, has a kind of dishevelled air about him, as if you've just interrupted him midway through a long session at his writing desk, and he's had to abandon everything to come and talk to you. Together they make a formidable pair, and they were the only people on this year's Cheltenham Literature Festival bill that I really wanted to see.

That their gig was going to be held late on a Tuesday night, a two-hour train journey out of London, didn't deter me. I simply booked a few days off work, decamped to a lovely hotel down the road and spent a night, well, okay, 75 minutes, in their company.

Sadly, the event wasn't a sell out. If ever two writers deserve attention and acclaim, it is these two, and yet, there were just 50 or so people in the audience. (I wonder if it might have been different if Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn had made the Booker shortlist?) The event was moderated by Ramona Koval, from the ABC in Australia, so I felt very much at home, listening to a strong Aussie accent and two Irish ones. (Mind you, Tóibín has an odd "affected" accent that often drifts into a slow Texas drawl. It wasn't what I expected.)

I didn't take notes, so this is by no means a comprehensive account of what they said. But it was interesting to hear their vastly different views on writing and reading. Tóibín is a huge fan of the 19th century novel and lists Henry James and Jane Austen as his major influences; McCann says he would "die of boredom" if he had to read 19th century novels, he loves the more modern stuff and name-checked James Joyce's Ulysses (which he reread earlier this year during a stint in hospital) and Don DeLillo.

McCann loves to write, he enjoys the whole craft and experience of it, saying it is what he lives for; Tóibín hates it -- with a passion. The audience laughed their heads off at this admission; granted it was said in a rather theatrical manner, with a shaking of the head and wringing of the hands! (I'd love to attend one of Tóibín's lectures; I imagine he's rather prone to hamming it up and playing the woe-is-me card at any opportunity. It would be hugely entertaining.) Ramona was obviously shocked by this and kept insisting he was joking, but he kept insisting he wasn't. He mentioned John McGahern's admission that McGahern never wanted a new idea for a story to arrive before Christmas because that would ruin the entire festive season; Tóibín feels the same way.

The one thing both writers did agree on was the importance of authentic detail to their work. Tóibín said you just needed one true piece of detail (in a sentence), two was overkill and demonstrated you were trying too hard. It must look effortless.

McCann concurred and said it was no use doing loads and loads of research because you then felt compelled to include it all in the story; it was much better to find out a few fascinating facts from firsthand accounts because these were more authentic. You can always go back and fix any glaring errors up later. He explained that when he wrote Dancer, his 2003 novel about Rudolf Nureyev, he spoke to a few ballet dancers and learnt that they hate that bit in Swan Lake when all the snow falls around them. This is because the snow, reused over and over again night after night, often contains bits of dust or dirt or the back of someone's earring and therefore poses a danger to them as they dance over the top of it. That kind of detail, he explained, is so authentic you would never find it in a reference book and that's the kind of stuff that works best in a novel to give your story a true flavour.

Both writers read sections from their latest books. McCann read the bit from Let The Great World Spin (which I plan on reviewing shortly) about a Park Lane housewife, whose son has died in Vietnam, hosting a tea party for her grief group. Interestingly Tóibín chose the gruesome bit from Brooklyn, where Eilis is on the ship from Liverpool to New York and does a lot of vomiting. He said it was based on personal experience, a time when more peas came out of his mouth than went in! *Shudder*

'Quartet' by Jean Rhys

 Fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 144 pages; 2000.

It seems ironic or pre-determined (or something), because no sooner than I write a post about bleak books and ask you to submit your suggestions, than I pick up Jean Rhys' debut novel, Quartet. Ms Rhys doesn't necessarily have a monopoly on bleakness, but boy, she does an exquisite line in melancholy and hopelessness.

This book, first published in 1928, brings bohemian Paris in the 1920s to life. It's set in the neighborhood of Montparnasse, where people lived in hotels and passed their time in smoke-filled cafes and ate out every night because they simply didn't have the facilities to cook at home. Women were generally seen and not heard, and relied on men to support them.

Living in this dark, seedy world is Marya, who left England four years earlier to marry a Pole called Stephan. Despite the fact Stephan, an art dealer, "disliked being questioned and, when closely pressed, he lied", she feels safe and "strangely peaceful" when she is with him. But then he is imprisoned, and she's left penniless and alone.

An older sophisticated couple, Mr and Mrs Heidler, come to her rescue, offering her the spare room in their apartment. Although the idea of living with them fills her with "extraordinary dismay", she is left with little choice and moves in. 

It works out well in the beginning, but Marya, a deep thinker, soon finds herself being manipulated and it all goes down hill from there.

I can't say much more than that, because I don't want to ruin the story for those yet to read it. But it's melancholy and rather glum and poor Marya seems unable to get herself out of the hole she's created. She comes across as being rather young and naive, but also slightly weak, as if she feels that because she is trapped there's no use fighting and that it would be simply easier to succumb to other's desires and needs. Even when her husband is finally released from jail, she seems unable to stand up to his devious ways and just lets him get on with it.

This is a beautifully written book, and I love that Rhys doesn't explain everything, so it's up to you, the reader, to fill in the gaps. It's only 145 pages long, but I did have to re-read certain sections because I felt that I'd missed a subtlety that was crucial to the plot. I think there's so much going on here, between characters, even within certain character's heads, that it's the type of book that would benefit from two or more readings and you'd come away from it with a whole new perspective and appreciation of Rhys' talent. (Remember this is her first novel.)

Quartet is incredibly evocative of another time and place, and as I read it I kept thinking it would make a wonderful film. So I was delighted to discover that Merchant Ivory have beaten me to it. It was made into a movie in 1981 and that it can be watched in its entirety on YouTube.

The house where Alfred, Lord Tennyson once lived

I've just returned from a couple of days' away at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, a little solo treat for myself, which I really enjoyed. (I'll write a post or two about who I saw later.)

The weather was absolutely gorgeous, and this afternoon, before catching my train back to London, I did a lot of walking around, admiring the buildings and taking a few photographs.

I accidentally stumbled upon this quite tall building, in a low-rise area on St James Square, and thought it was absolutely gorgeous, with its sandstone walls and wrought iron details. It wasn't until I walked past it that I noticed the plaque on the wall.

According to cheltenham4u.co.uk, the poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "came to live in Cheltenham in 1844 after he was left penniless by a failed venture into woodcarving machinery".

His mother and sisters rented a house at 10 St. James Square, and Tennyson was recommended to take Cheltenham waters to restore his health. He used his mother’s house as a base for 6 years, but tried to keep away from the fashionable side of the town. It is thought that he wrote most of his epic poem In Memoriam in Cheltenham.

I've since discovered that there's a street named after him. There's also a street named after Lord Byron, who visited the town as a child and later became a resident after his affair with Lady Caroline Lamb ended. The things you learn, eh?

Book giveaway: win a new-release hardcover

I've had a bit of a weed out and taken a giant bag of books to Oxfam today. There's another bag ready to go to charity, but I'll do that later in the week -- there's only so many books I can carry at once.

There were a couple of books I thought I'd offer up to you, my regular readers: Michelle Moran's Cleopatra's Daughter and Eoin Colfer's And Another Thing. Both are unsolicited review copies sent to me direct from the publisher so they're brand new and unread. 

Unfortunately, I'm going to limit the competition to UK entrants only. This is because both books are heavy hardcovers so will attract hefty postage charges if I have to send them overseas.

To enter the competition simply leave a comment telling me which title you'd like to win and I'll draw two names out of the hat this Saturday (October 17). 

Good luck!

Bleak books

AbeBooks has recently released a list of the Top 10 Most Depressing Books nominated by readers -- and I've read 8 of them!

It looks something like this:

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Night by Elie Wiesel
On the Beach by Neville Shute
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Lord of the Flies by William Golding

I compiled a similar list in December 2007, although I called it "harrowing reads". I'm sure I could probably add a few more to it now -- for instance Per Petterson's In the Wake.

Bleak, harrowing, depressing, call it what you will -- have you got any to add to the list?

'We Have Always Lived in the Castle' by Shirley Jackson

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 176 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Put the kettle on, grab yourself some snacks and make sure you've got no other plans when you curl up to read this book, because We Have Always Lived in the Castle is one of those delicious, atmospheric reads from which you will not want to be disturbed.

I was caught in the sway of this mesmirising novel, Jackson's last (it was first published in 1962 and she died in 1965), from its opening lines:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

How could you not be intrigued by that?

Sadly, it's difficult to properly review this novel without giving away crucial plot spoilers, so I'll refrain from telling you too much about the story. (A cursory glance at the blurb on this newly published Penguin Modern Classic edition does reveal one of the "secrets" but it doesn't ruin the suspense.) 

Basically, Mary Katherine, also known as Merricat, lives a secluded life with her sister and their bumbling, eccentric Uncle Julian, in Blackwood House, a Gothic-like mansion surrounded by woods on the outskirts of a village. Every Tuesday and Friday Merricat braves the wrath and scorn of the villagers ("The people of the village have always hated us"), who stare and gossip, to buy food and borrow library books. When she enters the grocery store the owner rushes to serve her before anyone else, while other shoppers stop what they're doing...

holding a can or a half-filled bag of cookies or a head of lettuce, not willing to move until I had gone out the door again...

This sense of creepiness builds further when she has coffee in the local coffee shop, because

If anyone else came in and sat down at the counter I would leave my coffee without seeming hurried, and leave.

It's almost like whichever way Merricat turns, there's an insidious, nasty reminder that she, and her family, are not wanted. But what did they do to earn this hate? The answer to this is the nub of the novel, so I'm not going to tell you here.

But essentially, the secretive, hermit-like existence that the Blackwood's lead is disrupted when Charles, a long-lost cousin, makes an unexpected visit and settles in for the duration. Merricat, a wayward, naive and some might say decidedly kooky teenager, feels so threatened by his presence that she goes out of her way to make him feel particularly unwelcome -- with intriguing consequences.

As much as I enjoyed this book and the oppressive, Gothic atmosphere it creates -- think The Village of the Damned meets The Wicker Man -- I did guess the main revelation before the half-way point. But even so, this is a thrilling read, and I can easily see why Shirley Jackson has never been out of print in her native America.

It's not a horror story per se, because it won't have you checking underneath the bed for monsters, but it's a kind of twisted fairytale with a dash of black comedy and a pinch of mystery. Or, as Joyce Carol Oates claims in the Afterword, "We Have Always Lived in the Castle becomes a New England fairy tale of the more wicked variety, in which a 'happy ending' is both ironic and literal, the consequences of unrepentant witchcraft and a terrible sacrifice -- of others".

'Trauma' by Patrick McGrath

Fiction - paperback; Bloomsbury; 224 pages; 2009.

I read Patrick McGrath's Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now last year and enjoyed it so much I made a note to read more of his work. Trauma, his most recent novel, was the ideal follow-up, mainly because it felt remarkably familiar to the final story, Ground Zero, in the previous collection.

Trauma is about a Manhattan-based psychiatrist, Charlie Weir, who is still coming to terms with the break-up of his marriage seven years earlier. Even though he treats patients who have gone through traumatic events, he seems largely unable to confront his own demons.

The opening line makes it clear that Charlie has a guilt complex about his mother:

My mother's first depressive illness occurred when I was seven years old, and I felt it was my fault. I felt I should have prevented it.

Having spent most of his childhood worried about her constant rages, depression and alcoholism, and forever trying to protect her from her suffering, he's self-aware enough to realise that he chose his profession because of his mother.

It is the mothers who propel most of us into psychiatry, usually because we have failed them.

But the psychological effect of his love for her, and her indifference to him, has been further complicated, or worsened, by the absence of his father, Fred Weir, who deserted the family when Charlie was eight years old. A tense, resentful and problematic relationship with an older brother -- Walt, a successful artist -- who never cared much for his mother but was clearly her favourite child, means Charlie's got a few family hang-ups.

All this, by the way, is merely a backdrop to Charlie's real story, which begins with a tentative reunion with his ex-wife, Agnes, and their young daughter, after a seven-year silence. (The reason for their marriage breaking down and Charlie's subsequent solitude is a plot spoiler, so I won't elaborate further.) As the pair begin the long, drawn-out process of mending their relationship, Charlie acquires a new lover, Nora Chiara, and his life, finally, seems to be falling into place.

But, there are complications. He begins sleeping with his ex-wife, who is now married to another man, and then Nora begins freaking him out by behaving in irrational and unexpected ways.

As the tale unfolds it doesn't take long to see that the psychiatrist is becoming just as unstable as his patients.

What I liked most about this book was the fast and furious pace of the story-telling. Even though the narrative jumps all over the place, from past to present and back again, often within a matter of pages, it's easy to follow, and allows the reader to build up a picture of a man quite clearly troubled by past experiences and unable to deal with the consequences of his actions. He's morally dubious throughout, but at what point does the reader even trust his version of events? And who's to say Agnes, Walter or any of his family members are any better?

There's something dark and disturbing about the subject matter, but McGrath has an uncanny ability to really get to the heart of what makes people behave in the often strange and absurd ways that they do. This is the type of novel you race through then wish you'd lingered over the deliciously simple prose that little bit longer. I felt bereft when I came to the end of this book -- read in one sitting, I might add -- and I rather suspect it would make a great choice for a book group, as there's clearly so much to discuss, including psychiatry, family relationships, marriage, sex and jealousy.

Literary links

There's an interesting interview with Colm Toibin on bookgroup.info. When asked how he sees Eilis in his latest novel Brooklyn, a character many readers (but not me!) have regarded as meek and passive, he responds: "Sometimes, she is shy, she does not put herself forward or say what is on her mind. She does not confront experience. This means that her inner life is very interesting. But other times she does assert herself. She is a mixture, oddly unknowable, and I was interested in dramatising the life of a figure like that."

Did you know that Guantanamo Bay has a library housing 13,500 books serving the prisoners? You can find out what the three most popular books are via the Times Online Comment Central Blog.

Audrey Niffenegger seems to be everywhere at the moment, promoting her new novel, Her Fearful Symmetry (see here, here and here for starters). And no wonder, according to this piece on The Daily Beast, the book cost Scribner $33 a word!

The Irish Times take a look at the Stieg Larsson phenomenon. 

The Man Booker Prize winner gets announced tomorrow evening. To catch up on the shortlisted nominees check out the Guardian's multi-media presentation.

Housekeeping

I've changed this blog's template -- again. The last one, while looking rather pretty, had little formatting quirks that meant I spent most of my time fiddling around with nasty HTML code. Hopefully this new look means I can concentrate on the writing rather than the coding!

I've also added a new tab called My favourite authors to give you a brief flavour of the type of writers I love to read. It includes everything from John McGahern (my all-time favourite) to Richard Flanagan. I plan on updating it as I go along and discover new favourites over the course of my reading life.