Epiphanies of New York

2: Ellis Island Museum

New York is packed with museums and galleries but none that I've visited has anything like the resonance of the Ellis Island Museum, a place that opens a window into the soul of America.

Ellis Island, hard by the Statue of Liberty, was the processing centre for US immigrants between 1892 and 1954, and has been restored to something like it would have been during its turn of the century heyday. The visitor gets something of the sense of what it must have been like for the millions of immigrants as they got off the boat and went through the battery of tests to determine whether they would be allowed to stay in the US.

The museum is intelligently and imaginatively structured; it works on several different levels. The visceral feel of standing in the very halls where immigrants queued is supplmented by a more cerebral series of statistical displays about the history of US immigration (much more interesting than it sounds). There were also the personal effects of many of the immigrants and all kinds of marginalia from history, like the passenger manifests from some of the ships. The displays were informatively signposted but the artifacts themselves were sometimes more eloquent. There was a passenger manifest from 1892, full of Irish passengers. On adjacent lines were Rose Lenihan, 20, servant, and Kate Lenihan, 18, servant. There were no other Lenihans, so no doubt they were sisters, travelling together to America to make a new life. But Kate died on the voyage. What must it have been like for Rose, just out of her teens, alone in a new country and mourning her sister? Millions of such stories created America.

The thing that really strikes the visitor--the European one, at any rate--is just how young "America" is. (That is not to ignore the people who lived there before the era of mass immigration). All countries have their creation myths, but "Britain", as we understand it today, was arguably born in 1066. In America, that creation myth is only just beyond living memory, and perhaps most Americans will remember talking to an elderly relative who was born overseas, and remembers growing up in Lithuania or Poland, Jamaica or Croatia.

For anyone who has an interest in the past--or indeed in understanding the present--few experiences will be more absorbing and enlightening than the Ellis Island museum.

Epiphanies of New York

1: Running in Central Park

At school I was averse to any form of exercise, and it was not until my early thirties that a friend asked me to do a "fun run" and I realised that actually I liked running. Ever since, I've run two or three times a week, injuries aside.

Last year when we went to New York I regretted not taking my running shoes when I saw all the runners gambolling in Central Park. This year I didn't make the same mistake. In my week there I managed to squeeze in three five-mile runs - quite a hefty mileage for me.

The first run in the Park was an astounding experience. At 7am the roads were thronged with runners--as many as if there was an organised event taking place. Running is essentially a solitary activity (the Zen aspect of it is part of the appeal) but it takes on an added dimension when there are others around. For someone who loves running, a sunny morning surrounded by trees and grass, with scores of other runners alongside you, is just about as good as it gets. And, like all days when running is perfect, you even forget that you're tired.

To have such a serene, almost transcendental, experience in the middle of one of the world's busiest cities is something I never expected. The view from the central running track itself, ringed by trees with skyscrapers behind them reaching up into the early-morning mist, is one I'll never forget.

Firing on Some Cylinders

::Acquired Taste is back after a week in New York. I'm still groggy with jetlag (I don't deal well with anything which mucks up my sleeping patterns) but I'm here just in time for the paperback launch of The Dog of the North, which is released on Friday. My author copies have arrived and they look marvellous: so good, in fact, that you'll want to buy another copy even if you already have the hardback. Even if you hated it... The future of The Last Free City may well hinge on The Dog of the North's sales performance, so let's all buy a couple of dozen copies.

In general I'm not a city person. The only two cities I actively enjoy spending time in are Paris and New York: if Betjamen's friendly bombs are to fall on Slough, they might as well go the extra few miles and take out London while they're at it. My week in New York was hugely enjoyable, if tiring, and two of my experiences were so stimulating that they'll rate their own blog entries once my brain has returned to what passes for normal functioning.

In my absence, a tremendous new blog in the speculative fiction world has launched: SFFE, or Science Fiction and Fantasy Ethics. In genre which suffers more than its fair share of negative criticism--internally as well as externally--SFFE is set up explicitly to celebrate the positive side of science fiction and fantasy. A lot of top authors in the field have signed up to the manifesto--and yours truly--so why not check it out. There's already some great content over there.

Talking of great content, I've ordered today Joe Abercrombie's latest, Best Served Cold. Abercrombie is one of the best writers working in fantasy today so I'm looking forward to this one immensely.

New Interview

While things are a bit quiet here at the moment, BFK Books has a lengthy interview with me to while away the time. There are stacks of other reviews and interviews there too, so even if mine soon palls there are many more to enjoy.

The interview adds further evidence to the hypothesis that there is only picture of me in existence...

Matters Vancean

The regular visitor to ::Acquired Taste will know that my appreciation for Jack Vance knows no bounds. For many years I believed I was alone with this particular enthusiasm; I was wrong. Vance remains a minority taste, but those people who enjoy tend to take it to extremes.

In 1999 a group of those aficionados got together to republish everything Vance had ever written--4.4 million words--and if that were not enough, to extirpate every unwarranted editorial intervention. This was not, as you may suspect, a straightforward task. I should know: I was one of those aficionados.

The editor-in-chief of this project, the Vance Integral Edition (VIE), was Paul Rhoads. Paul has recently collected and revised a series of essays he wrote about Vance's work over the life of the VIE. Published by Afton House, the essays in Winged Being: Thoughts on Jack Vance and Patient Explanations of the Obvious, are provocative and always lively. In attempting to show Vance's work in its cultural context--a context much wider than science-fiction--Paul Rhoads' essays pay Vance the compliment of serious critical attention.

For anyone who has even a passing interest in Vance's work, this book is sure to entertain, educate and amuse.

On Boxes and Boundaries

I had an email from Will, my editor at Macmillan, yesterday which was not the hoped-for offer to publish The Last Free City. On the other hand, neither was it a rejection. Instead, it was a request to linger a little longer over the decision while various factors are taken into account. One of these, reasonably enough, is the sales performance of The Dog of the North, but more interestingly there's also the consideration that they can't work out what kind of book it is (I paraphrase Will's views here).

This isn't a post about the iniquities of the publishing industry--after all, The Last Free City may still appear under the MNW banner--but instead about genre. Like it or not, books are not just 'books'. Someone has to sell them, and for that they need to have a label. It's all very well to rage about the artificiality of genre boundaries, but the fact is readers like them just as much as booksellers. Genre labels are here to stay, and that's something we all have to live with.

That isn't such good news for The Last Free City: it's a fantasy without most of the trappings of fantasy; an historical novel about a place that never existed; a romance punctuated with shocking violence; an action novel with long periods of reflection. No wonder Macmillan don't know how to sell it. Readers of fantasy, of historicals, of romance, of action, might all find much to enjoy - but equally they will find their expectations confounded at key points (I'm actually making the novel sound much better than it is here...). From an artistic point of view, I can defend this as healthy and challenging; but I can understand marketers taking a rather different perspective.

The downside of the genre boxes is that it can make work which is genuinely original and contemptuous of accepted boundaries difficult to sell. Genres are self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing: the more books that are bought which fit the mould, the thicker those walls become. (This can create a different set of problems: I'm bursting with admiration for Brian McGilloway who can operate wholly within his genre boundaries and yet create something fresh and original).

So what kind of book is The Last Free City? If pushed, I'd go for that sub-genre of fantasy sometimes known as fantasy of manners. This is characterised thus:

Major influences on the subgenre include the social novels of Jane Austen, the drawing room comedies of P. G. Wodehouse, and the historical romances of Georgette Heyer. Many authors also draw from nineteenth century popular novelists such as Anthony Trollope, the Brontë sisters, and Charles Dickens. Traditional romances of swashbuckling adventure such as The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy, or the works of Rafael Sabatini may also be influences. The Graustarkian romances typified by The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope, or George Barr McCutcheon's Graustark itself, are also of some consequence as literary precedents, as are the historical novels of Dorothy Dunnett.
A typical fantasy of manners tale will involve a romantic adventure that turns on some point of social punctilio or intrigue. Magic, fantastic races, and legendary creatures are downplayed within the genre, or dismissed entirely. Indeed, but for the fact that the settings are usually entirely fictional, some of the books considered "fantasy of manners" could be considered as historical fiction. Ellen Kushner is perhaps the definitive writer of fantasy of manners tales; almost all of her novels have some of the traits of the genre, and her homoerotic Swordspoint: A Melodrama of Manners (1987) is considered as the epitome of the genre. An earlier example, and possibly the first true fantasy of manners, is the Gormenghast series (specificially the first two books) by Mervyn Peake

Is there still a market for this kind of thing? You tell me--or better yet, tell Macmillan's marketing department!

The Endless Appeal of the Tudors

Over the past year I've read most of Philippa Gregory's Tudor novels without ever really deciding whether I like them or not. The latest to fall into my hands is The Queen's Fool, which follows the life of Hannah Verde, a Jewish refugee from the Spanish Inquisition. It has all Gregory's traditional virtues: a claustrophobic sense of life at court, plausible and interesting representations of historical figures. Queen Mary's descent from the optimism with which she took the throne to her tyranny and miserable death is convincingly bleak; Princess Elizabeth's mixture of calculation and provocation is equally compelling; and if Robert Dudley is overdrawn as the rakish intriguer, at least he has style.

Where Gregory is on less certain ground is the character of Hannah herself--a fairly major problem given that she is the first-person protagonist. The way in which she flitted from one court to another, seemingly trusted by both sides, in itself strained credulity, but what I had trouble swallowing was her modern outlook. The idea of a woman independent in outlook and aspiration is not anachronistic (Gregory herself brings Bess of Hardwick, the exemplar of the type, to vigorous life in The Other Queen) but Hannah, at once shrewd and naive, never fully convinces. To this reader at least, she is a 21st-century feminist somehow lost in the 16th century. If you want to read a novel in which an independent female character still manages to feel at one with her historical context, I'd recommend instead Ann Weisgarber's The Personal History of Rachel DuPree, Alis Hawkins' Testament or Faye L. Booth's Cover the Mirrors: it's the kind of fiction Macmillan New Writing does particularly well.

Downtime

Things are a bit quiet at ::Acquired Taste at the moment. I have produced no babies; I am not in the running for awards; I have not just finished the final draft of my latest novel; and I'm in between series of The Wire. I am, in fact, in limbo. The Last Free City awaits the yea or nay from Macmillan and until that happens, future plans are on hold. I have several ideas for new stories, but which one I invest the time and emotional energy into working up depends on where Macmillan (or Tor as it will be if we move onto Book 3) see TLFC. There should be news on that soon, so for now a period of quiet reflection is in order.

Let Me Count the Ways

For someone who doesn't watch much television, I seem to have spent an awful lot of time in front of the box recently. Since Christmas I have consumed, with varying degrees of rapture, Rome, Bones and Prison Break (all of which have something to teach the student of narrative). Now I have run across the programme sometimes described as the best TV show (at least if you read The Guardian). I refer, of course, to The Wire, an exceptionally ambitious and accomplished piece of television. So far I've watched only the first series, which is enough to confirm its greatness.

For those unfamiliar with the show, it's an ensemble crime drama in clear line of descent from Hill Street Blues, through NYPD Blue and particularly Baltimore: Life on the Street and indeed The Wire is set in Baltimore. The first series looks at the efforts of a marginalised group of cops, with contrasting motivations, as they try to take down a drug gang in the city. So far, so standard. But The Wire is much more than that.

It's routine to describe cop shows as "gritty", but it's hard to imagine any other drama being quite so worthy of the adjective. The Barksdale gang -- the drug dealers -- are presented, if not sympathetically, then certainly with compassion and understanding. They are a bureaucracy in exactly the same way as the police, and the two organisations are often explicitly contrasted -- not always in the police's favour. The economic imperatives behind the dealers' lives are explored, without ever condoning their conduct; the police, meanwhile, are hampered by internal politics and rivalries. And at the end of the series, there are no pat resolutions: the drug dealer we sympathise with the most is sentenced to 20 years, because he won't testify against his much worse colleagues; the police unit is disbanded, mostly in disgrace except for the one who has snitched on his mates. It's that kind of show--angry about the state of urban America and not willing to pull its punches.

The show is also a hugely daring technical achievement; it makes few concessions to the viewer. Cops and robbers speak in their own argot and it's several episodes before the viewer can make much sense of it. I can see why audience figures were relatively modest. There are no flashbacks, and no recaps: if you miss something, you've missed it.

Most episodic dramas follow one of two formats over a series. There's the Bones model: one case a week, a rising and falling movement captured in 45 minutes. There may be a subterranean story linking episodes together, but essentially each episode is standalone. This is easily accessible, but also easily exhausted. Such shows survive on the basis of the characters, because the plots become either formulaic or contrived. The other format is the Prison Break model: one story, with subplots, told over the life of the series, with each episode ending on a cliffhanger. This allows greater scope for character development but it's constrained by the need to punctuate the action at regular intervals because that's all for tonight, folks.

The Wire, by contrast, unfolds like a novel. Each episode stops after an hour, and if there's no cliffhanger, well, there's no cliffhanger. The series starts slowly, invests in building character and environment, and then lets them play out. It can only be viewed as a single, unified piece. It's a very, very high risk way to make a TV show.

Add in the uniform excellence of the large cast, which makes you care about the characters on both sides of the fence, and you have an artistic achievement which can only astound. This is as good as television gets.

The Borderland of Fame

Are you the kind of person who likes to be ahead of the trends? Who spotted JK Rowling before anyone else - or wish you had? If so, I have a tip for you: Brian McGilloway. His crime novels, featuring the life and cases of Inspector Benedict Devlin, are not yet household names: but they very soon will be.

I read the first of the Devlin novels, Borderlands, a year or so ago, and its sequel, Gallows Lane, at the weekend. McGilloway's third and most recent offering, Bleed A River Deep, hurries from Amazon as I write.

Series detective novels are difficult to pull off. They need to be satisfying in their own right, but at the same time to show character development in the protagonist. (Unless you opt for the Agatha Christie approach and deploy unchanging Poirot or Marple time after time). Your protagonist must be essentially sympathetic but with credible flaws sufficient to make him interesting. And please, don't make those flaws centre around alcohol abuse--it's been done before, you know. Chandler and Rankin can get away with it; the rest of you have to come up with something else. (Just about the only flaw in The Wire, TV's most novelistic cop show, is McNulty's hard-drinking act).

Brian McGilloway has realised all this. Devlin is not an embittered loner; he is a family man and his attempts to reconcile the demands of domestic life with the rigours of policing is one of the interesting and original features of the series. Devlin is clearly one of the good guys, but he's not above doing the wrong thing for what he thinks are the right reasons (in Gallows Lane he plants evidence on a suspect he cannot otherwise convict: you know it's not going to turn out well).

McGilloway is already attracting comparisons to Ian Rankin and it's easy to see why. Both are socially-aware crime writers whose work is firmly anchored to a specific time and place.: both are also extremely accomplished. The series detective can go one of two ways: Rebus, growing credibly but sometimes unexpectedly, or Scarpetta, ever less believable with a welcome long outstayed. Given McGilloway's understanding of character, I have no doubt he'll be in the former camp.

I'm looking forward to keeping Inspector Devlin company in his cases for years to come.