Imagination is a Place

No, no, no, no, no, no. You don’t run short of imagination. You can get jaded, myopic and maybe sluggish. But imagination is...  it’s more a place actually, or a lab. Stories are infinite. You help yourself to as much as you want. You. Your kid. The human mud of your marriage. It’s all material. For that to run dry — it’s unthinkable. It would be like a fish worrying about water when it’s in the sea. The world has infinite plots for me.

Great quote from Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell who is interviewed by Patricia Nichol on The Times website and talks about why he enjoys anonymity. His latest work is a historical novel set in feudal Japan.

When the Short Story Grows Up, It Wants to Be a Novel

The lines between the short story and the novel are becoming increasingly blurred, writes Julian Gough in the Guardian.

We've already seen that in the UK (though not in the US ... or here for that matter) the former is something of an endangered species and there have been conscious attempts to revive it, particularly through the National Short Story prize (which Gough won earlier this year).

He says that he thinks that the "membrane" between the two forms has become more "permeable", and reckons that much of the UK's best writing is from short story writers forced to find ways to write novel-length stuff.

He takes Ian McEwan as a case in point, and says he:

... started out as a terse, disciplined short story writer. But "the market demands novels". Now he is seen as a terse, disciplined novelist. Yet a more interesting way to think of him is as an increasingly, and deliberately, sprawling, short story writer.

And he reckons that On Chesil Beach, currently shortlisted for the Booker, is in fact a short story. (Something I agree with.)

... And it couldn't be a shorter story (skip the next line if you don't want the entire plot revealed): a man has a premature ejaculation which destroys two lives. That's it. Perfect, essential McEwan. Because McEwan has one thing he wants to write about again and again: middle-class lives destroyed by a single, shocking, unfair incident. His readers know that. So, in both Saturday and On Chesil Beach, he uses our knowledge against us, like the director of a good horror sequel. His chapters are now the equivalent of the slow pan around an empty room, with the viewer forced to look too long on every innocent object. Time gets stretched, objects obsessively overdescribed in an almost drugged atmosphere of dread. These are technically fascinating short stories of enormous length. Which is not to say McEwan is not a fine novelist. It's just that he is a writer who very seldom gets novel-length ideas (The Child in Time and Atonement, primarily).

David Mitchell, he says, is another author who is at heart a short story writer:

A genius of the unpublishable length, the long short story, the novella, he finds a new structuring principle and assembles a novel from modules of story. He nests six novellas (Cloud Atlas) in a marvellously metafictive regression. Or he weaves a gossamer-thin line from which to hang nine stories that drift west, around the world (Ghostwritten). It is revealing that the only book of his to have disappointed the critics was his first "proper" novel, Black Swan Green.

Gough also makes the point that readers don't seem to like short stories that don't connect to each other and reckons that writers need an "organising principle" for their work.

Lots more worthwhile reading on Julian Gough's website and blog. His new novel Jude: Level 1 was launched last month.

It's A Crime!

If Dickens were alive today he would be writing genre fiction or churning out soaps for TV.

Discuss with reference to at least five episodes of CSI London.

Okay, okay I'm being completely fascetious. I'm as guilty as anyone. of not taking genre fiction as seriously as that which we dub *"literary fiction" a.k.a. the real stuff, the hardcore.

The Guardian yesterday quite rightly rapped my pretentious knuckles:

What is it, when Man Booker juries meet, that makes genres "inferior"? ... Why is crime writing, with its "very conscious structure" and ability to raise "big moral issues" outside the box of introversion, such a poor relation of "literary fiction"?

Truth is, a "very conscious structure" to me reeks of predictability and formulaic writing.

Give me genre fiction that subverts the genre and I will be thrilled. Just as I'm thrilled to read the "literary" novel which breaks new ground.

Give me an elegantly turned plot, language that's so rich I want to drink it, characters I can care about, deeper issues to keep me awake at night just wondering, wondering. And I won't care what kind of fiction you call it.

There are crime writers who manage it. Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, for example, caught me completely off balance - how does she get the reader to side with the truly despicable Ripley? Yet we do. And in the process are forced to confront our own definitions of "moral behaviour".

Yet I really don't think it's true to say there is no genre fiction on Booker shortlists - it's just that the kind of authors who make it that far tend to play with the narrow definitions of genre. Is Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin science fiction or detective story? Both and more.

Atwood has also written some of the best "speculative" fiction (i.e. sci-fi that could happen) - the chilling Oryx and Crake (nightmares free of charge) and The Handmaid's Tale (so prophetic in it's vision of the religious extremism sweeping America).

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell on last year's shortlist wraps a story within a story within a story and incorporates several genres - thriller, fantasy, comedy ... and each one superb.

Julian Barnes Arthur and George is a historical novel which is also centres on the solving of a crime.

Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell was not only shortlisted for the Booker but also also bagged the Hugo award for science ficition writing and the Mythopoetic award for fantasy.

In the end it isn't so much a choice between Literary fiction and genre, as between the straightforward and fomulaic and the multilayered and surprising.

I know which I'd rather have!

(*By the way, hadn't really realised until Tash's talk at Silverfish that American fiction does not recognise such artificial distinctions.)


Postscript:

Even deep-end litfic types dabble in genre. The Elegant Variation has the news that Banville is headed in that direction next.

A Set Of Russian Dolls

Just finished Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, the novel tipped to win the last Booker prize, although it was pipped to the post by Alan Hollingsworth's In The Line of Beauty.

Quite an amazing read - very daring! It's like a set of Russian dolls with one story nestling inside another story nestling inside ... . In all there are six novellas of equal length - covering a whole range of genres and text types - history, comedy, thriller and science-fiction ... journal, letters, memoir, best-seller, musical composition, interview and oral history. In a playful twist the protagonist of each story becomes the consumer of the story that has gone before. Our need for stories is part of our humanity, he seems to say - and always will be. Less savoury aspects of our humanity are explored through the stories - greed and consumerism, prejudice, exploitation and enslavement.

I must confess to having enjoyed The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish most. I don't often laugh out loud when I read, but this was deliciously, wickedly funny. Loved it where a disgruntled author encounters a critic who has written a particularly negative review, pitches him over the balcony. (Makes you wonder if there is an element of wishful thinking on Mitchell's part here!)

But ultimately It's Mitchell's skill with language that excites most - how does the guy manage to juggle so many styles, so many distinctive voices? In the final story Shoosha's Crossing and Everything After he creates a completely new post-apocolyptic dialect of English which is both plausible and poetic. In Half Lives - The First Luisa Rey Mystery he manages to write a thriller which conforms to all the characteristics of the genre (one which I generally hate)- but which is actually a great deal better written than many of the thrillers that make the best-seller list. He makes it look so effortless too. And I found myself underlining some of Timothy Cavendish's hilarious pronouncements because they delighted me so much. Can't resist slipping in a couple of my favourite lines here:

A trio of teenettes, dressed like Prostitute Barbie, approached, driftnetting the width of the pavement.

Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms around the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.

The only moan that I have about the book is that the Sceptre paperback version had print so small that it had me reaching for my reading glasses, and one of the least inspiring cover designs I've seen on a paperback in yonks.