Boyd's Man on the Run

William Boyd talks about double lives and double dealing and his new novel to Christian House in The Independent, and is profiled by Christopher Tayler in The Guardian.

Ordinary Thunderstorms is an innocent-man-on-the-run thriller which focuses on the dark side of the pharmaceutical industry. Here's a synopsis :

Adam Kindred is "a cloud man" with a problem. He is a climatologist who finds himself wanted for the murder of an immunologist he briefly encountered in an Italian restaurant. ... The dead scientist was developing a miracle cure for asthma, a drug that is set to earn his pharmaceutical company untold riches and the secret of which Adam unknowingly possesses. His life spirals out of control as a cast of assassins, river police and corporate flunkies hits his trail.

It sounds pretty exciting, doesn't it? You can read the first chapter on the Bloomsbury website.

Maths and Apes on the Beach

Another novel recently read was William Boyd's Brazzaville Beach. One of the TBR books I've pledged to read this year, it's been sitting on my shelves since I bought this copy, second-hand from Skoob a couple of years ago. The novel won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 1991.

It's the first William Boyd I've read, I'm ashamed to say, and I wonder just why it took me so long because it's such an intelligent, well-written novel that now I want to plunge into the others.

Hope Clearwater lives alone in a small beach house of Brazzaville Beach in an unnamed African country. (There actually is a Brazzaville Beach in the republic of Congo though!). She looks back on the cataclysmic events which have changed the course of her life, and throughout the book two stories run parallel, at times echoing each other.

She recalls her relationship and marriage to a brilliant but psychologically unstable mathematician genius. At the same time describes how she came to Africa to participate in a primate research project at The Grosso Arvore Research Center (there are echoes of Jane Goodall's work here) and finds herself uncovering an unnerving truth about the nature of chimpanzees (and by extension perhaps, about mankind's predisposition towards violence). Her discoveries have far reaching consequences and she finds herself pitched against her employer and mentor who refuses to accept her findings.

Boyd is particularly good here at pointing out the dangers of narrowly focused dogmatic belief and academic obsession. I enjoyed the way Hope refers to the mathematical principles she's learned from her husband, John, and tries to draw a philosophy from them to illuminate the seeming chaos of her own life.

The characters, human and ape, were all well-drawn. Here's a male author convincingly able to inhabit a female skin - I felt a lot for Hope. (And I like to imagine for her the happy ending that isn't quite reached in the book.) I also felt deeply for the manic-depressive John Clearwater who fails to fulfill his dream of great Mathematical discovery and suffers terribly because of it.

This book has one of the best first sentences ever:

I never really warmed to Clovis-he was far too stupid to inspire real affection-but he always claimed a corner of my heart, largely, I supposed, because of the way he instinctively and unconsciously cupped his genitals whenever he was alarmed or nervous.

And if that's whetted your appetite, you can also take a gander at the opening pages on amazon.com.

Blanche d'Alpuget's 1991 New York Times review is here, while Robin Mokie in New Scientist takes a look at how research scientists are portrayed!

Because, while anyone who loves a well-written thought provoking novel will enjoy this book, it will appeal particularly to those of you with a love and understanding of maths and science. (Sham? Machinist? Greenbottle? Burhan?)

The Award Formerly Known as Whitbread

The Costa Book Awards (formerly the Whitbread Prize) have been announced.

William Boyd has won the Costa Novel Award for Restless, the tale of a wartime spy. It's actually his second Whitbread/Costa win, as his debut novel A Good Man in Africa, won a quarter of a century ago. The Independent reports that:

The judges described the novel as unputdownable. "Restless remains in the mind long after you finish it. Double-cross, double-bluff, all written with effortless clarity."

Boyd being a sensible chap said it was necessary to keep a "properly balanced" view of prizes:

I think they're a good thing because they encourage readers and that's what all writers want. But you have to look on it as the equivalent of a win on the horses or the lottery.

The First Novel Award went to Stef Penney a London-based screenwriter for The Tenderness of Wolves, a murder mystery set in 19th century Canada. Penney was unable to research her novel in Canada as she was suffering from agoraphobia, and unable to fly. So much for the old adage about writing what you know!

The Biography Award went to Keeping Mum: A Wartime Childhood by Brian Thompson. Thopson is a playwright and biographer, and he realised that his own family provided him with an ideal subject, though he says he found the book very difficult to write:

... it took me a very long time to realise that some of the most interesting and frightening and abusive people I'd ever met were my parents. I'd been looking in the wrong place for my stories.

John Haynes, considered an outsider when the shortlist (which included nobel winner Seamus Heaney) was announced, won the Poetry Award for Letter to Patience.

And goodness, the subject of this book length poem strikes a chord with me: it's an imaginery letter written by a man who has returned to Britain from Nigeria, reflecting on how the experience has changed him. The judges described it as:

... a unique long poem of outstanding quality, condensing a lifetime of reflection and experience into a work of transporting momentum, imaginative lucidity, and consummate formal accomplishment.

Veteran writer Linda Newberry took the Children's Book Award for Set in Stone:

... an emotionally charged narrative will thrill all lovers of intelligent fiction ...

the judges said.

The overall prize winner will be announced on 7 February.

That Tightrope

We got together to discuss a couple of stories. One by Chet who joined us for the first time and was brave enough to trust us with her story. The second by Norasiah. Both with powerful endings, although needing to build a more solid bridge to those endings. Both about sisters and the rivalry between them. Both about separation and loss. Both with a great deal still to be discovered by the writer ... Stories with much promise nevertheless.

We walk the fine line, the tightrope between telling truth and necessary kindness for a writer willing to take this risk of exposure. I pray we got the balance right. And that we continue to get the balance right. It's a way for writers to grow, as valuable for those giving the feedback as for those who courageously allow scrutiny of their fiction. I know that I learned a great deal from listening to other viewpoints.

Nicest quote for the evening (as we brainsormed possible alternative endings to Norasiah's story): "Who wants to be subtle when you can be sick?" The story could go either way ... it's up to its author to choose - or better still, to play with alternatives and see which one fits best.

Wonder why it is thought that local writers feel the need to so often have the shock-horror twist in the end? (Or as in the case of another published local writer friend - a humourous punchline!) Where has this expectation come from?

I posted an article a month or two back by William Boyd in which he argues that what he called the "event-plot story" with it's surprise ending is somewhat ... passe.

The stereotype of the event-plot story is the "twist-in-the-tail" famously developed by O Henry but also used widely in genre stories - ghost stories (WW Jacobs, for example) and the detective story (Conan Doyle). I would say that today its contrivances make it look very dated, though Roald Dahl made something of a mark with a macabre variation on the theme, and it is also a staple of yarn-spinners such as Jeffrey Archer.

Anyhow ... I found it an enjoyable and exhilarating evening. Chet and Norasiah were sporting. Leah thought she was being a grouch but I think her genuine honesty and well-formulated comments made her a real treasure. (As I say, I'm learning.) And we laughed a great deal too, of course.

Brief Encounters

An excellent article on the short story by William Boyd.

Books | Brief encounters