I don't write like my mother, but for many years I spoke like her, and her particular, timorous relationship with language has shaped my own. There are people who move confidently within their own horizons of speech; whether it is cockney, estuary, RP or valley girl, they stride with the unselfconscious ease of a landowner on his own turf. My mother, Rose, was never like that. She never owned the language she spoke. Her displacement within the intricacies of English class, and the uncertainty that went with it, taught her to regard language as something that might go off in her face, like a letter bomb. A word bomb. I've inherited her wariness, or more accurately, I learnt it as a child. I used to think I would have to spend a lifetime shaking it off. Now I know that's impossible, and unnecessary, and that you have to work with what you've got.
As a working-class refugee in a posh girl's grammar school, burdened with my parents shortened vowel sounds and North Midlands dialect words (and yes, it also took me time to learn that you don't say skelington and chimley!) I can completely identify with Ian McEwan's struggles with the English language which he describes in The Times.
It's not only non-native speakers who have to wrestle with it, y'know!
I'm a step behind with blogging about my favourite books of 2008 because I've just been so busy the last week or two. Domestic Goddess replaced for a while Book Diva.
There's always the pressure, if you write about books, to be constantly on top of the latest fiction, but in 2008 some of my best reading experiences came about as I filled in gaps with things I should have read long before. Some of these books I've written about before so just follow the links back to fuller reviews.
Ian McEwan's Atonement and Nabokov's Lolita ( a reread this) are were both superb, and I think easily weigh in as my favourites of 2008.
The novel is narrated by the mother of a boy who has taken part in a mass killing in a high school killing in a series of letters to her estranged husband. The novel is deeply disturbing - not just because of the horror of the ending (the last fifty pages is a ride of white-knuckled terror worthy of a thriller), but because of what it implies about human nature - that a child can be entirely evil from birth even if he is given every opportunity in life and has completely committed parents who try their best to do everything right.
Shriver says in this interview with the BBC's Woman's Hour that the book caused a great deal of debate especially in the US because it broaches one of the last taboos - that parents must love their children and that children are inherently innocent, corrupted by life. She explains that she was really writing from her own fears about having children. (These were, I must say, fears I could strongly identify with myself.) (There's another excellent interview with Shriver at salon.com.)
Another of my books of the year was The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Dias which took the Pulitzer prize for Fiction this year. I love, as I've said before, "voicy" books : here the narrative voice is especially strong, and there's a terrific energy in the writing. This is a tragi-comic tale of an overweight dude called Oscar who writes fantasy fiction and :
... wore his nerdiness like a jedi wore his light sabre or a Lensman her lens. Couldn't have passed for normal if he'd wanted to.
Two questions propel us through the narrative - will Oscar manage to get laid? And will he finally manage to beat the fuku or curse which has destroyed lives down the generations? (The story isn't Oscar's alone but embraces a broad sweep of family history both in the Dominican Republic and in the United States.) I also mighty curious to find out who the narrative voice actually belongs to. (For the most part, it turns out to be Yunior, his sister's boyfriend.)
There are copious footnotes - unusual in a contemporary novel -but it's hard to see how Dias could have avoided using them. They provide much necessary background information for those of us who know next to nothing of the Dominican Republic, and add considerably to the texture of the story.
If you want a much better review than you will find here, A.O.Scott's discussion of the book at the New York Times is a real pleasure to read.
I have more bests of the year to come, so hold on!
I last wrote about novellas here and really do think they are a great way in to serious fiction for the reader who may be put off by the length of a full-length novel.
But it was really Dave Sharpe's story to tell, and tell it he has, in a (ghost written) memoir Complete Surrender, due to be launched if a few day's time.
McEwan's foreword for the book, which can be read on the Guardian website, is a most moving essay about how his brother's illegitimate birth and handing over to strangers on a railway platform has forced a painful reevaluation of family history, and of parents who almost certainly carried the pain of the lost child (whose existence they never acknowledged) to the end of their days.
Peter Wilson (the journalist who blew the whistle on the ... errr... fictional aspects of Ishamel's Beah's memoir) looks at Ian McEwan's moment of embarrassment (if it even amounted to that!) at the Hay Festival recently.
In The Australian he relates how McEwan read a piece from his novel in progress in which the main character is eating a packed of crisps on a train, and is shocked when a muscular young man starts eating from the same packet and staring straight at him. Only later does he realise that his own crisps are in his packet and he has been eating from the other man's packet!
When a member of the audience said that he had read the same story somewhere , McEwan explained that the passage was based on an overheard conversation, and he had no idea it had previously appeared in print.
The mix-up over the crisps had the feel of an urban myth to it, McEwan said, adding that he would be grateful for any more information about the anecdote's provenance.
Said anecdote has indeed appeared in print before -- not once, but many times. Probably its most famous occurrence was in Douglas Adams' So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, published in 1984. Adams' protagonist, Arthur Dent, recounts the story in a fashion very similar to the above, the only significant difference being that the "purloined" snack food consists of biscuits (cookies), not crisps. Adams himself is said to have claimed that the passage was based on an incident that really happened to him, though it was known to have circulated as an urban legend well before before the book came out.
I immediately recognised it from a short story called '' by Jeffrey Archer from A Quiver Full of Arrows.
In this story, a public servant named Septimus Horatio Cornwallis never varies from his daily routine. On his train trip home from work he always buys the Evening Standard and a packet of 10 cigarettes, two of which he habitually smokes during the journey home as he reads his paper.
On this particular day, his routine is disrupted by a stranger on the train who grabs Septimus' newspaper and smokes his cigarettes throughout the journey.
After a tussle that lasts all the way to his stop, during which he grabs half the paper back and furiously smokes the entire packet of cigarettes, Septimus gets up to leave the train and, as he does, he bumps his briefcase which springs open.
There inside is his untouched copy of the Evening Standard and his full packet of Benson and Hedges cigarettes.
Wilson suggests that that McEwan might drop the incident from his novel. I would be greatly disappointed now if he did, though he might be a bit wary after being jumped on most unkindly by the press for "plagiarising" a passage for Atonement.
What's more - this is exactly the kind of every day embarrassment that we blunder into all the time. (Or maybe you don't, but I do, being terminally uncool.)
And let's face it, because of their common currency, these urban myths belong to all of us.
Along the way he shares his thoughts on subjects such as: Zadie Smith and the new generation of authors; how Amazon.com has changed the retail market; the rise and rise of Rowling; Franzen snubbing Oprah; the explosion of literary festivals; how literary prizes have come to be the most reliable guides in a perplexing landscape; why McEwan's success typifies the decade; how blogs have taken over the role of reviewing; how Lynne Truss talks to our anxiety in an age of cultural upheaval; and finally, the Kindle.
This article is a must-read for anyone interested in the trends, and it's nice to discover that McCrum is very optimistic about the future of the book :
... what I have described are the birth pangs of a golden age. The market for the printed book is now global; the opportunities for the digital book are almost unimaginable. To be a writer in the English language today is to be one of the luckiest people alive.
And now it's time for the Nibbies, as the British Book Awards are affectionately known, a whole cluster of awards decided by publishers, booksellers and the general public, and reflecting (i think it's fair to say) more popular, rather than rarefied literary, taste.
Among the winners :
Ian McEwan picks up the Galaxy Book of the Year for On Chesil Beach, and Reader's Digest make him Author of the Year.
Richard and Judy vote Khaled Hossieni's A Thousand Splendid Suns, their Book of the Year.
Catherine O'Flynn is Waterstones' Newcomer of the Year.
Kim Edwards' The Memory Keeper's Daughter wins Sainsbury's Book of the Year.
And J.K. Rowling gets the Book People Outstanding Achievement Award.
The complete list of awards and shortlisted titles here.
It is not evil that undoes the world, but small errors prompting tiny weaknesses - let's not call them dishonesty - gathering in rivulets, then cascades of consequences . . . We will not rescue the Earth from our own depredations until we understand ourselves a little more, even if we accept that we can never really change our natures.
Ian McEwan talks to James Button in the Age about becoming a more public figure and about his next novel which addresses global warming and grew out of a journey he made in 2005 with a group of scientists and artists to the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic to observe a melting glacier. (I actually caught a programme about this trip on the BBC last year and it was so nice to see Ian on the ice.)
Noticing the tendency of expedition members to nick items of kit from others in the boot-room of the ship and the rows and chaos that ensued, McEwan began to muse about human nature and the fate of the Earth. And that provided the starting point for the fiction.
I feel shamefaced that it's taken me so long to read Ian McEwan's Atonement. As I said earlier, I was halfway through it when I was asked to review or proofread something else. I put it aside. Other books interposed themselves (as books are wont to do). It went back onto the bookshelf, surrounded by other books I know I will love, but haven't had the time to open.
This is one instance when being a member of a book club really helps. My friends chose it as the January read - no doubt nudged by the release of the film which some of them have seen.
Atonement is now my favourite of McEwan's novels (a position previous held by On Chesil Beach, A Child in Time and the first terrible chapter of Enduring Love):
It's breathtakingly good, so beautifully written and carefully detailed that you are drawn right in ... to a large English house on a stiflingly hot summer's day, to the war ravaged landscape of France as an army retreats to Dunkirk, to a London hospital swamped by the war-wounded in the aftermath.
As so often in McEwan's novels, something completely unthinkable happens and destroys the lives of all involved.
Here the testimony of a thirteen year old girl, Briony Tallis, sends an innocent man to gaol for a rape (or molestation) that he did not commit. Was it simply a misunderstanding from which Briony found it impossible to withdraw once events were set in motion? Was she the victim of her own over-dramatic imagination? Was she simply jealous of the sexual passion that had been ignited between her sister, Cecilia, and Robbie?
Whatever the truth, Robbie's lower social status weighs against him. He is the son of the housekeeper, hitherto treated as a member of the family, and Mr. Tallis has even paid for this education at Cambridge and is willing to finance his further studies in medicine. But that relationship seems now to carry no weight. He is sentenced while the true perpetrator of the crime is not even suspected, although all the clues are there.
Cecilia pledges her love as her man is led away, but really can there be a happy ending for the two? And can Briony ever really atone for the harm she has caused?
One of the biggest delights of the book for me was the post-modern twist towards the end which has the reading flicking back to re-evaluate the story in the light of new evidence.
I shall give no more than that away, even though I'm dying to. (And no spoilers from you lot either!). It's enough to say that I found the book moving and unputdownable and surprising.
Back in 2001 I remember banging on to whoever would listen about how glad I was that Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang won the Booker that year. Now, while that book still remains a firm favourite, I'm forced to reconsider!
I love to know where novels I love came from. McEwan explains in an interview on the Barnes & Noble website how the novel was born from a single arresting image (arrived at after 15 months of false starts!) that of:
... this girl stepping into the room with a bunch of wildflowers. The room has a certain kind of elegance, there's a young man outside she wants to see -- but doesn't want to see -- and there is a vase that she is looking for on a low table by a french window. And I don't know why, really, and I certainly didn't know why at the time, but I thought, This is a toehold for me. This is the beginning of whatever it is I'm going to write.
He had set out with the vague ambition he says of writing a love story:
I had this thought as to whether it was possible, at the end of the 20th century, for the literary novel to explore the subject of love in quite the way it was automatically a subject in the 19th century. I mean, have we wrapped ourselves in so much irony and self-reference that we can no longer simply tell a love story?
... a young woman's reading of gothic novels causes her to misunderstand everything around her. And I've often thought that I would rather like someone with imagination to cause some sort of havoc.
For me there were echoes of several other novels, though I've no idea whether they influenced this one - most especially L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between (country house, class distinctions, adults sexuality and a child misunderstanding things, a child carrying letters) and E.M. Forster's A Passage to India (a false accusation of rape, a changed testimony).
Those in our book club who have seen the film rate it very highly indeed, and here's the trailer which I also think gives the flavour of the book.
Anyway, it's been an awful long time since I asked you, but what are you reading at the moment and what have you been reading?
In it McEwan talks (among other things) about his novel Atonement which has recently been made into a film, and about the whole concept of atonement for a past wrongdoing.
I wish the interview had been longer and a bit more searching, but this is particularly interesting:
It seems to me that the impulse to atone is a religious one, and yet you are a self-declared atheist. Yes, I am an atheist, and probably Briony* is, too. Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past.
It’s a little easier if you’ve got a god to forgive you. Not necessarily. Faith in itself is not easy to sustain. Well, we won’t get into that.
He is joined on the longlist of what the organisers call Britain's "most dreaded literary prize" by Jeanette Winterson with a passage about robotic sex from The Stone Gods; Ali Smith for Girl Meets Boy, and Gary Shteyngart with an athletic description of his crass hero from Absurdistan bedding one of his many conquests ("Her vagina was all that, as they say in the urban media - a powerful ethnic muscle scented by bitter melon, the breezes of the local sea, and the sweaty needs of a tiny nation trying to breed itself into a future"). ... The late Norman Mailer makes a posthumous appearance with a passage from The Castle in the Forest in which the male protagonist's "Hound" is described as "soft as a coil of excrement". More poetic bawdiness is on offer from Christopher Rush's life of Shakespeare, told in the Bard's "own words", and his maritime-themed description of coitus with Anne Hathaway, in which "I clung like a mariner to her heaving haunches, the deep keel of her backbone dipping and lifting through July, through the green surge of growth ... Our vessel ran shuddering onto the rocks, a wave of wetness ran through us, the air was rent with screams and I became aware that the bank on which we lay drenched and grounded was journey's end, love's end, the very sea-mark of our utmost sail."
Does McEwan deserve an award meant to:
... draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it...?
I'm actually feeling quite outraged that anyone should have a snigger at McEwan's expense and can only think it's a reflection of the enduring British embarrassment about things sexual.The whole point of On Chesil Beach is that he is deliberately setting out to write about sex so disastrous that it has life-time consequences. And I feel he does it very well indeed.
I can't speak about the other nominees, not having read them ... but I think that quote from Absurdistan (above) rather lovely. I don't find myself laughing at Christopher Rush's maritime imagery either. What do you think?
My favourite award and this year a sense of bewilderment ...
He brushed off discussion in the British press on whether On Chesil Beach was a novel or a novella and questions over whether it should have been entered for the Man Booker prize. "That's their problem, not mine," he said.
Quite.
The same article in the Australian also points out that Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (which I'm reading at the moment) is only 45,000 words long. Thought I was zipping through it rather fast.
Postscript:
As if to answer the question, just came across this passage in Mohsin Hamid's book:
"It's done," she said solemnly. I waited for her to say more, and when she did not, I asked, "'It' being?" "My manuscript," she said "I'm sending it to an agent tomorrow." I took it respectfully in both hands, resting it flat across my upturned palms. "Congratulations," I said, and then noticing it was rather light, added "Is that all of it?" She nodded. "It's more a novella than a novel," she said. "It leaves space for your thoughts to echo."
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.
Well, by now the Booker news isn't news anymore. (Thanks so much to the friend who SMSed me the results as soon as they came out, while I was in deepest darkest Pahang!)
None of the first time novelists on the longlist made it through to the shortlist, and that includes our Mr.Tan.
Am very sad, very disappointed ... the novel certainly would not have been out of place on the shortlist ... but making it to the longlist in the first place was such an amazing achievement and has undoubtedly put him on the literary map and won him an international readership.
Am also sad that Peter Ho Davies The Welsh Girl wasn't chosen, as it is another novel which wouldn't have been out of place on the shortlist.
If it's any consolation, I can't help feeling that there must be an awful lost of pressure attached to being on the shortlist, with suddenly every book lover across the bibliosphere (nice word, just made it up!) having strong opinions (informed or not!) on your work.
Guardian readers have their say on the shortlist on the blog, and there's oodles more opinion from ordinary readers on the Booker website. And this is one of the nicest things about the Booker, there's a whole lot of people talking about the same titles and debating them up and down.
Anyway, here's the final six who made the cut, with appetite-whetting judges comments:
Nicola Barker - Darkmans
... an ambitious and energetic contemporary ghost story with a vibrant cast of characters, set in modern day Ashford.
Anne Enright - Gathering
... a very accomplished and dramatic novel of family relationships and personal breakdown in Ireland and England.
Mohsin Hamid - The Reluctant Fundamentalist
... this is a subtle and thoughtful examination of the raw meat of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, and one man’s personal response to working within it.
Lloyd Jones - Mister Pip
Mr Pip is well-rooted in dramatic and frightening events in Papua New Guinea, with vivid characters and a fascinating literary frame of reference.
Ian McEwan - On Chesil Beach
... a tight and beautifully written narrative which sustains high emotional tension throughout.
Indra Sinha - Animal’s People
Indra Sinha is an engaged campaigning novelist. The book clearly draws from real life events in Bhopal, but is a sustained imaginative creation in its own right, with intriguing parallel use of new media.
A longer discussion of each title can be found here. (Or if you prefer, John Crace's very funny Digested Reads!)
McEwan is apparently still the favourite, and I feel ambivalent about that. Saturday which didn't make the shortlist last year is undoubtedly the more complex, substantial work, and I'm sure posterity will judge it as the more important. And whileOn Chesil Beach is an excellent novella, it feels more like a lengthened short story rather than a short novel. It wouldn't have made my cut and I shall be rather disappointed if it wins.
I'm keeping mum on the rest till I've read them, except to say that I'm really glad Indra Sinha's Animal's People, which I'm reading at the moment, is there.
Back then to the Bookerthon! I now need only copies of Mr. Pip and Darkmans, which hadn't arrived in the bookshops here last time I checked.
One might think that Ian McEwan is treading on slightly dangerous ground in his new novella, On Chesil Beach, having chosen for himself a scenario which, for British readers (at least), will bring to mind smutty seaside postcards and sniggered blue jokes: a young couple on honeymoon find themselves unable to consummate their marriage. Instead, he presents us with a heartbreaking tale of misunderstanding and lost love.
It’s the early 1960’s, a few years before the so-called “sexual revolution” and the advent of The Pill and the accompanying shift in moral attitudes. Girls are still expected to “keep themselves” for a future husband and nice girls don’t “go all the way”. Edward and Florence are pretty typical of their time: they come to their wedding night with no sexual experience.
Both are anticipating the now officially sanctioned act of sexual intercourse with trepidation. Edward worries about how the act might be achieved “without absurdity or disappointment” and is afraid of (as he quaintly puts it) “arriving too soon” while Florence has “a visceral dread” of sex which she sees as a physical violation.
To make matters worse, she has been further put off by a sex manual she has read in lieu of being able to have an intimate conversation with the women in her life. Despite its “cheery tones and exclamation marks and numbered illustrations” the book is written in a formal sexual vocabulary that almost makes her gag in places. She though realises that she has signed all rights in the gloomy sacristy after the wedding ceremony and prepares resignedly to meet her fate.
McEwan fills in the story of the couple’s path to the altar in flashbacks, and draws each as a convincing individual. Florence is a talented violinist who dreams of performing with her string quartet at the hallowed Wigmore Hall. Edward is studying history at University College and wants to write biographies. Both are idealists who actively support CND (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) and, in fact, meet when he encounters her handing out leaflets in Oxford. The later tragedy is compounded by the fact that this is a couple already very much in love. They are physically and intellectually well-matched, and they have already negotiated many of the practical difficulties which might have separated them.
But neither has yet learned how to break free of cloying convention. Neither have an appetite for the heavy roast beef dinner they are served in their room but struggle to finish it because it seems the polite thing to do. They are at liberty to kick off their shoes and run down to the beach but actually don’t because, “for now, the times held them ? a thousand unacknowledged rules still applied.” And so it is with sex.
Marked by clumsiness, down-right ignorance and an inability to communicate with each other about their feelings, their fumbling attempts at intercourse are indeed every bit as disastrous as both feared. McEwan doesn’t flinch from detail (a single kiss is given a page and a half, for example) but the writing is never prurient. Indeed, there really isn’t a word out of place in this beautifully crafted story.
In a moment of disgust and blind panic, Florence rushes out of the room. In their angry confrontation, injured pride stands in the way of any real communication and the conversation has life long repercussions for both.
How ironic it is that in the larger scheme of things their lives are destroyed – not by an atom bomb (as both feared) or by the whims of a dictator (of the sort that Edward is researching) but because the society of the time did not make discussion of intimate matters possible.
The book makes a convincing plea for effective sex education that deserves to be heard in the Malaysia of the early 21st century.
There's also a very nice review by J.N.C. Tay (Janet trying to be a bit incognito?) of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's, Half A Yellow Sun.
In the print version of the paper there are vouchers to clip that will give you a very good discount on the books. (25% off the McEwan at Kinokuniya and 20% off Adichie's book at MPH).
If you want to sell your book, you have to promote it. But, it seems, the author's tour may be a thing of the past.
Ian McEwan is doing a tour of the US to promote his latest book On Chesil Beach. Only ... he's not going to be there himself. Bob Thompson in the Washington Post reports that independent booksellers Powell's Books has come up with the idea of making a high-grade film (part of which is viewable with the article) of the author reading from and talking about his book, and of building events around that. McEwan's film will be shown at 54 other screenings around the country, mainly, but not exclusively in bookstores, with discussion being lead in some cases by other local novelists.
Wouldn't it be great if McEwan's film, and other author films when they are made, could be shown in bookshops here? We are so starved for author visits, and Malaysia is an awful long way to fly someone to read to us.
Another way for an author to appear without actually appearing is, of course, by video link. We enjoyed a run of those at the British Council a couple of years back when a tiny group of hardened bibliophiles were able to interact with Toby Litt, Beryl Bainbridge and David Lodge.
And nowadays an author can even sign books from half a world away by using the LongPen - (something I thought was a hilarious joke when Margaret Atwood came up with the idea!)
Which is how Norman Mailer (incapacitated by "age, asthma and athritis") will be appearing ... but not appearing ... at the Edinburgh Festival this year and signing books for his fans. And Atwood will be interviewing (again by video link) legendary Canadian short story writer Joyce Carol Oates who will also sign books.
I'm probably opening up a bag of worms with this post but still ...
The most interesting thing in the Sunday papers is the letter from Tunku Halim in the Star because I think it throws up interesting questions about how local books are reviewed and what we expect from reviewers, and I hope I'm not sticking my neck out by bringing the topic up. (Both author and reviewer are my friends, and I hope they both still are after this!)
Michael Cheang's review of Tunku Halim's latest book 44, Cemetery Road appeared last Sunday. It is a compilation of previous stories from his previous collections with three new ones. I haven't read the book yet (drowning in books I have to read for review) although hope to do so soon, so this personal jury is out, for now, on the merits and demerits of the book. My argument then is a general one.
The review was largely a very positive one, but a couple of the criticisms were leveled by Cheang against the writing. He also had issues with the writing style in one story:
... words leaped out at me like a vengeful spirit. Elaborate descriptions, overdone superlatives and textbook-style plotting abound ...
But it was the charge that he had used “very similar plot devices” (similar to each other presumably) and some of his earlier stories were “predictable” that got up the author's nose.
This is a serious allegation indeed against any writer and I wish to state my case. Here it is and right to the point: the stories are NOT predictable, nor are they similar in terms of plotting.
If Cheang thinks otherwise, he should have elaborated, pointing out the offending stories and also to explain why. Such a flippant comment can easily be thrown in, particularly by a reviewer who readily admits from the start that he regards horror stories as often “cheesy”. Yet what he claims is “predictable” is extremely difficult to justify unless we do a test. After reading say 25% of the story, Cheang should then tell us what exactly is going to happen. I doubt he can. This also leads me to the question of predictability or, its opposite, the unexpected ending. It is the journey rather than the destination that matters. If you watch any Hollywood movie you more or less know the good guys are going to win. Yes, predictable. But how? The journey that gets them there is what counts. That’s what you enjoy. It’s the detail of the story, the suspense, the action, even if you know the outcome, is what makes for good entertainment. So predictability should not be an issue. Having said that, my stories are not predictable.
As a reviewer myself, I have to say that the author is not the one to make a judgment about whether his work is predictable or not (no matter how concerned he was about avoiding predictability when he was writing it). It is a judgment entirely for the reader. And in this case for the reviewer. Now a review is a personal opinion. Reviewers differ greatly on how they perceive a book. One loves it. One shreds it. But none of them has the final word.
Just look at how different the reviews of On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (I take this example since I've just finished reading it) are in the New York Times"a small sullen, unsatisfying book" and in The Washington Postwhere Jonathan Yardly enthuses that it "reaffirms (his) conviction that no one now writing in English surpasses or even matches McEwan's accomplishment".
Who is right? Both.
And neither.
These are personal reactions to the novella, and the fact that readers can react so differently to a text is large part of our engagement with literature.
Cheang should have elaborated? Could he have included more specific examples? Perhaps so. But actually he was already 167 words over the limit (according to recent guidelines for Star reviews in which the word limit was cut from 800 words to just 500).
It's unfortunate in a sense that Cheang and Halim opened up such a bag of worms because no local publication gives space for the in-depth discussion of literature that it deserves. There is no forum for in-depth discussion or analysis of texts outside academia. And writers do need to know what they are getting right and what they aren't so that they can move forward.
It's good that an effort is being made in the Star to review local books, and I hope to see other titles on the book pages.
The reviewer doesn't like the genre? That there are so few competent people willing to review books is undoubtedly part of the issue here. Besides, does not liking a genre actually diminish the value of the review?
But the reviews cannot, and should not, always be positive ones. They should be fair and authors should understand this.
... that local reviewers have a pre-conceived idea of local writers which is “it’s local, so it can’t be much good”. The reviewer looks through blinkers, searching for negatives, not the positives. This means the local author necessarily has an uphill battle from the start. He or she has to convince the reviewer that despite being local the work is great. But take heart, this attitude will change with time.
This is certainly something we should examine our reviewerly consciences for.
When I received Ian McEwan's new book the other day, I was surprised by what a slim volume it is - just 166 pages which I could (had I so desired) have read in a single sitting.
On Chesil Beach is no less satisfying for its brevity, and I will (as I promised before) tell you all about it later.
But it struck me as I read it that I do really appreciate short novels ... particularly in this age of frequently overstuffed fiction, where editors seem unwilling to take scissors to texts and authors seem to feel that they should tie up our undivided attention for weeks at a time.
Author Dan Rhodes commented in the Guardian some time back that:
... it seems obvious (doesn't it?) that writing overlong books is at the very least plain bad manners. I can't understand why writers are so often pilloried for writing short books. Brevity is mistaken for laziness when more often than not it's the opposite that is true. My new book, Gold, clocks in at 198 pages, and I'm convinced that, apart from in truly exceptional cases, this is about as long as a book ought to be. Of course I fully expect to eat my words next time I read a run of 400 page marvels ...
McEwan has been a regular contender for the Booker prize, and On Chesil Beach is one of his best works, I'd say ... but will it be eligible? Will it even be submitted? According to Galleycat, UK bookmakers William Hill, famous for placing odds on those eligible to win the Booker Prize, are turning away those who want to bet early on the book because there is some doubt about whether is is a novel (eligible to enter) or a novella (not eligible to enter). And apparently even McEwan's publishers are unsure whether they will submit the book for the prize or not.
A simple word count should clarify the matter, one would have thought. But how long exactly does a work have to be before it can be considered a novel? Galleycat quotes author Elizabeth Hand:
A novel is usually considered to be a work over 40,000 words in length.
Those of us rash enough to enter the Nanowrimo (where competitors write a whole novel in thee month of November) know that the target is 50,000 words.
Australian writing coach Lee Masterson some useful guidelines about the length of different kinds of story on Author Network. (Have you ever heard of a novelette?) And here again the novel weighs in at 50, 000 words.
I checked a whole lost of websites asking for submissions or giving advice to writers. Some said 40,000. Some said 50,000. There is no rule written on tablets on stone.
The short story doesn't exist. But don't worry, neither does the novel, or the novella. (Or the thriller, science fiction or chick-lit.)
All these terms are used after the fact. They are all mostly industrial terms, pretending to be art terms. The best writers write, and only find a name for what they've written later, when they have to describe it to an agent or a publisher.
Look at the recent fuss over Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach: is it a novel, thus qualifying for the Man Booker Prize? Or a novella, thus not qualifying? The bookies have stopped taking bets till the mess is sorted out. But On Chesil Beach continues to exist, just being what it is, a piece of writing that is not the same as any other piece of writing. Good writers invent something new every time they write.
Is Hemingway's The Old Man And The Sea a short novel? A novella? Or a long short story? It could be any of the three, depending on which of the many definitions of each term you use. The way we describe art has nothing to do with the art. Theory is a separate game, that is only about itself.
Art exists, at all kinds of lengths. And industrial product exists, at all kinds of lengths. There are less things we call 'short stories' these days, because there are less outlets for short stories. But I doubt there is less art. That tends to be a constant. There's never very much of it, but there's always enough.
It would be very sad though if McEwan were disqualified for running for the Booker ... so I'd like to request that, if necessary, and entirely in the interests of good fiction, the prize committee shift the goal posts just a little!
Since Glenda seemed quite intrigued by the comment I made yesterday about male readers choosing not to read female authors I thought I'd post up the article I wrote on the subject. This piece appeared in (the now sadly defunct) men's magazine Chrome in January 2006. Don't know how many of you read it at the time. Greenbottle and Amir Hafizi will find their own words still reverberating!
One rainy afternoon in Bangsar some years go, I was browsing in the shelves of my favourite second-hand bookshop when an elderly, dhoti-clad gentleman burst in from the street, brandishing a copy of Middlemarch at Skoob’s proprietor, Thor Kah Hong. Thor had apparently recommended the novel as the kind of improving read this gentleman said he was after. But now his customer was absolutely irate and demanding the book be changed.
“Why does she call herself George? I don’t read books by women writers.” He spat out the last two words as if they left a rancid taste in the mouth.
The answer is quite simple, of course. Mary Anne Evans became George Eliot to protect herself from prejudice in a predominantly patriarchal society, just as many other women authors have changed their names over the years to make sure that their work was judged solely on its merit.
The most famous woman writer in 19th century France, Aurore Dupin, published under the pseudonym George Sand. The Bronte Sisters, Charlotte, Anne and Emily published under the male pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Karen Blixen (of Out of Africa fame) chose to write under the male name Isak Dinesen. Lula Mae Smith wrote as Carson McCullers, and Janet Taylor Caldwell dropped her first name so as to be taken more seriously, writing also as Max Reiner.
Even in recent times, women writers have chosen to reduce their given names to initials so as to become sexually ambiguous; Booker winner A. S. Byatt and Scottish writer A.L. Kennedy among them. J.K. Rowling says she decided to write under her initials rather than her full name because she didn’t want the fact that she was a female to deter boys from reading her books.
But in these more enlightened times surely our Middlemarch wielding gentleman is an anachronistic exception, and writers like Rowling overly cautious? Sadly, it seems not.
Earlier this year, academics Annie Watkins and Lisa Jardine of Queen Mary College, London, carried out a piece of research to mark the tenth anniversary of the Orange Prize for fiction. They surveyed 100 academics, critics and writers – the people they felt were most likely to be well-read and have the most influential opinions about literature to find out their attitudes to the gender of authors.
They found that while women read writers of both sexes quite happily, most men did not. Four out of five men had most recently finished a book by a male, and most had trouble remembering the last novel by a female writer they had read.
Wanting to see if this held true in the Malaysian context, I carried out a small scale survey on my blog and found much the same results. Asked to say what they were currently reading, over 80% of the men said that they were engrossed in a book by a male author. However, unlike the sample interviewed in Britain, most said that they did read women writers and were able to recall the last book they’d read by one.
For most men, Watkins and Jardine concluded, great writing is male writing and they find it more difficult to like or admire a novel authored by a woman. This held true for one or two of my blog readers. “I don’t think women can write like Marquez, Nabokov or Gunther Grass,” wrote one blogger known as Greenbottle, “to me these guys write as though with penis instead of pen, full of masculine animal energy.” He felt that many women writers, on the other hand, tended to produce “saccharine, wimpy or effeminate writing”. Another blogger, Amir, felt that “prose written by a lot of female authors tends to be, how do you say it? Delicate? Detailed? Ditzy?”.
More worrying is that these prejudices also appear to extend to those who make recommendations about the best books to read and influence buying habits. Of 56 books suggested by male celebrities in the Observer’s summer reading list in 2003, only 6 were by women. A tally of Time magazine’s 100 All-time Novels chosen by critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo and published earlier this year listed only 10 novels by women writers. (Closer to home, see how many articles about women writers you can find in the archives of the Silverfish litmag!) You can’t help but wonder whether women writers are playing on an even playing field.
Now, I’m certainly not one to press for political correctness at the expense of literary merit, and I fully recognise that male readers of fiction are in any case an endangered species (author Ian McEwan went as far as to say that when women stop reading, the novel will be dead).
But if your reading diet has hitherto consisted almost entirely of male writers, perhaps it’s time, at last, to give women a chance?
Ian McEwan found himself in trouble again recently ... for stealing a handful of pebbles from a beach!
He took the stones from Chesil beach in Dorset, the locale which inspired his latest novel of the same name, so that he could keep them on his writing desk for inspiration.
That the pebbles of Chesil are infinitely nickable is explained by Simon Mills. And I greatly sympathize, being a persistent purloiner of beach artifacts myself. Surely the fact that the stones are required for the higher service of art should placate the council officials? (And imagine what McEwan could have sold them for on e-bay once the book hit the Booker longlist!)
Am so mad keen to read On Chesil Beach that I've been studiously avoiding all the reviews of the book and the interviews with McEwan on various literary pages because I don't want any spoilers.
