Chichester Writing Festival 2009

I've spent a very enjoyable weekend at the latest Festival, run by Greg and Kate Mosse in the sublime surroundings of West Dean, just north of Chichester. Greg and Kate have been very supportive of The Dog of the North since before it was published (as they are with all aspiring writers) so I'm delighted to go along to anything they run; but even without that connection the Writing Festival is an occasion to delight, with an array of stimulating panels and panellists. And it's always good to catch up with old friends and make some new ones (quite aside from the fact that some of them might buy my book...).

The panellist who seemed to make the biggest impact on the audience was Roger (R.J.) Ellory, whose novel A Quiet Belief in Angels was picked up by Richard & Judy last year. The book epitomises the "classy commercial" fiction which is currently the publishing industry's Holy Grail, but what really impressed about Roger is that he wrote 22 unpublished novels before making the breakthrough--all the time while carrying on a demanding day job. His hard work and astonishing self-belief will inspire and daunt the aspiring writer in equal measure.

If there was a common theme among all the many writers on display it was that passion and a commitment to hard work are the essentials without which publication will never happen. From my own example, minor as that may be, I'd say that's a perfect message to take away. The bottom line is that you really do need to put in the hard yards.

The next Chichester Writing Festival is scheduled for November 2010 and I'm looking forward to it already.

Bite-Size Reviews

Since submitting The Last Free City I've had a bit more time on my hands which I've been using to catch up on my reading.

First on my list was Cecelia Holland's Jerusalem. Holland is a highly-regarded historical novelist, although new to me, and while some aspects of the book failed to please, I can see why she is so well thought of. Jerusalem takes place at the time of the Second Crusade. It encompasses the final years of the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, with some well-realised court intrigue with a particular emphasis on the Templar Order. Holland is first-rate in economically conveying the feel of the period, even if her dialogue is a little too modern-American for my taste. There was also a tendency to switch point of view, even within conversations, which I also found offputting. Set against this, the characterisation was subtly nuanced, with the protagonist Rannulf especially interesting. What hinted most at Holland's mastery of the form was the ending, however, which it is hard to discuss without spoilers. Suffice it to say that, in refracting what could have been a downbeat resolution through a twelfth-century lens, Holland firmly anchored the book in its period. I will certainly be reading more of her work.

Next I turned my attention to one of my favourite Jack Vance novels, To Live Forever. Vance, to my mind, gave up writing true science-fiction in the late 1950s, and this is the best of his core sf novels. It explores the practical consequences of a treatment bestowing immortality--a treatment that must be rationed if a population explosion is to be avoided. The novel follows the fortunes of Gavin Waylock, who has been cheated of his own immortality and is determined to win it back by any means at his disposal. It's one of Vance's earliest forays into the crime-fiction format he later developed in the Demon Princes and Alastor series, and is a good starting point for the science-fiction reader who wonders whether Vance will be to their taste. Published in 1956, it is the first novel to showcase the precise and pared-down style which was to become his hallmark. To Live Forever shows Vance's facility for creating bizarre but plausible societies and then pushing them to breaking point. The novel is hard to find these days and unjustly neglected. Why not track it down?

The Church of MNW

As you will all know, The Last Free City is with Macmillan at the moment, while my editor decides if it's right for them. You might view it as disingenuous in this context to review, very favourably, two MNW titles acquired by that selfsame editor. The fact is that L.C. Tyler's A Very Persistent Illusion and Doug Worgul's Thin Blue Smoke are both such very fine novels that they are sure to attract the attention of readers who do not have a vested interest in keeping their editor sweet.

Len Tyler is one of my favourite Macmillan New Writers: more to the point, he's one of my favourite writers, full stop. He lists P.G. Wodehouse among his favourite writers, and his highly distinctive voice is reminiscent of Wodehouse on a very, very heavy dose of downers. A Very Persistent Illusion is the kind of book for which the much-abused term "black comedy" was coined. His narrator, Chris Sorenson, is at once dislikeable while embodying many of the characteristics we will recognise in ourselves. His unusual pathology plays out to an unexpected ending with a sureness of touch and a facility with the devastating one-liner which will be familiar to readers of The Herring Seller's Apprentice. If your taste in humour runs to the dark, this is the book for you.

The humour in Thin Blue Smoke is of a different stamp. Worgul takes a wry look at a beautifully realised ensemble cast, refracted through the lenses of barbecue, blues, baseball and bourbon. Of these, barbecue is closest to the book's heart, and LaVerne, ex-baseball star and barbecue philosopher, is an offbeat and pleasantly flawed hero. At one point he discusses the essence of barbecue with another character (it's that kind of book), and they conclude that barbecue is the art of taking the worst cuts of meat, and transmuting them slowly over a low heat, making them into something wonderful. Worgul does something similar with his characters: poor, disadvantaged or alcoholic they may be, but over the course of this marvellous novel he smokes them until they too, turn into lives which fascinate and move us. A novel as quintessentially American (just what is a "pulled chuck"?) as A Very Persistent Illusion is British, Thin Blue Smoke deserves to be a huge success.

One of the things I really do like about Macmillan New Writing (aside from the fact that they publish me, of course) is the sheer variety of the titles they put out. Considering MNW only publishes twelve titles a year (it really is a small press hidden inside PanMacmillan), the breadth of output is remarkable. I can never read titles like the two above without that old genre writer's inferiority complex kicking in at some level: MNW publish fantasy, too! And my fantasy at that... Maybe reading two such accomplished MNW titles just after I've submitted my own was not such a good idea after all. Those not in that singular position need not hesitate, and should get hold of these two excellent novels immediately.

Into the Ether

Yesterday I sent The Last Free City to Will, my editor at Macmillan. (Will, if you read the previous more downbeat post - only joking! The Last Free City is the greatest work of literature written in English...). There is nothing more I can do to the novel unaided. If Macmillan accept it, of course, I get to work with a professional editor and that will improve it. A good editor will bring a keen and objective eye to material you may have been living with for a period of years, and if my experience of The Dog of the North is anything to go by, the effect on the text can only be positive.

Of course, Macmillan may not want the book - and as a writer you should never submit anything unless you're prepared for that outcome. I feel curiously relaxed about it, because there's nothing else I can do now to improve my chances: I've spent a year writing the best book I can, I've sent to an editor who likes my writing, and that really is all I can do. It's out of my hands now.

I'm already thinking about what I'm going to write next. For some time I had this nailed down pat: The City of Green Glass, the story which wrapped up this particular part of the Mondia cycle. Now I have other ideas, and I may reach a couple of generations back into Mondia's history instead, because there are stories there which interest me, and directly bear not only on The Last Free City but also The City of Green Glass--which is now likely to have a different title, because it's so confusingly close to its predecessor. Alternatives I'm thinking about are The Vitrine Gates and The Glass Labyrinth. I don't need to worry too much about any of this just now: until I know the fate of The Last Free City, I can't devote too much time to another project because I might have more editing to do.

For now, I can just enjoy not having a work in progress--although soon enough I will be bored, I'm sure!

An Acceptable Level of Failure

At what point is a book finished? Anyone who's ever written one will know that the answer is "never", but there does come a point when, whether through inertia, frustration or some external factor, the writer accepts that there is nothing to be gained from further work.

The Last Free City is almost at that stage. I spent last week at home polishing the latest, near-final draft. All of the loose ends I can find have been tied off: the story is complete and it's told in the way I eventually decided to tell it. It has scenes of high drama and characters I have come to love and it has--no great surprise here-swordfights, possibly to excess. It nods to Vance, Shakespeare and Calvino.

This should be cause for celebration, but I always find this part is one of the grimmest of the whole process. The end of the first draft is a fantastic feeling - the whole story is there, I know what happens to everyone and there's still the chance to fix what's wrong: I can even include more swordfights should I wish. Because the gestation of The Last Free City was so difficult (I radically changed the structure of the book halfway through the first draft), there wasn't too much to do subsequently; the first draft was really drafts one, two and three rolled into one, not the way I wanted to write the book. There is a real sense of triumph in subduing such a slippery foe. It's like duelling with a vastly superior swordsman and...well, if you if you like that kind of metaphor you might enjoy the book.

Subsequent drafts, for me at least, by contrast are about defining an acceptable level of failure. By the end of the second draft you realise that the book isn't going to be the touchstone of literary genius you'd hoped (a tarnishing process that begins with the first word of the first draft, if not earlier.) Instead, you're just looking to get out alive: the book is not the Platonic ideal you conceived at the start, and now your ambitions are limited to ensuring that none of the holes is below the waterline.

The good news, then, is that The Last Free City is close to being ready to submit to my editor at Macmillan. The challenging news (for we don't have "bad" news, do we?) is that my attempts to touch the sun have failed, and will have to wait until my next book. Now, if I can only manage to cram in a few more swordfights...

Why Should I Read...?

The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro, 1989

Take a lord with some very strange notions and an ability to get himself into all kinds of trouble, and his selfless butler who ensures that everything is running smoothly behind the scenes. That's the set-up for Jeeves and Wooster, but Lord Darlington, the well-bred fool in The Remains of the Day, has peccadilloes more serious than getting in trouble with his aunt. Lord Darlington, in fact, is a Fascist. And his butler, Stevens, is certainly no Jeeves.

The Remains of the Day is deceptively simple. It's a classic unreliable narrator story, with Stevens reflecting on his years in Lord Darlington's service as he takes a motoring tour. Ishiguro captures Steven's voice perfectly: pedantic, opinionated, repressed. The humour in his stiff phraseology is not unlike Jeeves, but where Wodehouse's character is comic, Stevens' lack of self-awareness is tragic. The reader realises long before Stevens the depth of the relationship between the butler and the housekeeper Miss Kenton--and sees all the chances that he had to act on it--and also the nature of Lord Darlington's sympathies. When Stevens' father dies upstairs, Stevens simply gets on with the job of ensuring his lordship's guests are comfortable. Too late, Stevens comes to realise his mistakes, and that all the years he has spent debating the qualities of a "great butler" or the nature of "dignity" have just been ways of blocking off his emotions.

Ishiguro controls Stevens' voice with precision, and he avoids the temptation to make Lord Darlington too obvious a blackguard. His political views are unpalatable, and the episode where he dismisses his Jewish servants painful (although not as distressing as Stevens' quiescence), but he is presented as a sincere, if fundamentally misguided figure.

The Remains of the Day is a deep and subtle meditation on reflection and emotion, and a melancholy love story of the first rank.

How has it influenced me?
The Remains of the Day is an excellent example of how to make the reader care about an essentially unsympathetic character. I've never tried a sustained first-person narrative of this sort, but if I were to do so, this would be one of the first novels I studied. So much of the information the reader is given is indirect--much of the pleasure for the reader is in seeing things long before Stevens does

Lessons for the aspiring writer

• unhappy endings can be oddly uplifting
• love stories don't always have to pay off in the expected ways
• the precise language of the butler/bureaucrat/pedant is a good source of humour
• you can convey an awful lot of information indirectly--and often the reader will prefer to receive it that way
  
• you can rely on the reader to do most of the work, if you plant the right seeds
  

A Footnote on Footnotes

Over on Becoming a Fiction Writer, blog author Amanda proposes setting up a "Society for the Abolition of Footnotes in Novels". Since one of the examples she quotes is Jack Vance's Marune, it's no surprise to find that I disagree. Unlike the regrettable rantings of Das Übernerd, however, Amanda's arguments are expressed with intelligence and moderation, and while I won't be joining the Society, I can see why many readers find them irritating.

I thought it might be interesting, nonetheless, to look at some of Vance's footnotes and playthings to see just what they're adding. Amanda's central thesis is this: if the information is important to the story, make it part of the story. If it’s not, leave it out.

The footnote in question is too long to quote in full here (in itself a support to Amanda's argument). Vance has set out in the main text the various phases of daylight caused by the multiple-star system around which Marune orbits. He then gives us a 400-word footnote on the ramifications of this which, as Amanda says, you need to read if you are to understand the phases. The latter part of the footnote reads:

The Rhunes, as proud and competent as the Majars are demoralized, are also strongly affected by the changing modes. Circumstances proper during one mode may be considered absurd or in poor taste during another. Persons advance their erudition and hone their special skills during aud, isp and umber. Formal ceremonies tend to take place during isp and also the remarkable ‘Ceremony of Odors’. It may be noted that music is considered hyper-emotional and inducive to vulgar conduct; it is never heard in the Rhune Realms. Aud is the appropriate time to go forth to battle, to conduct litigation, fight a duel, collect rent. Green rowan is a time for poetry and sentimental musing; red rowan allows the Rhune slightly to relax his etiquette. A man may condescend to take a glass of wine in company with other men, all using etiquette screens; women similarly may sip cordials or brandy. Chill isp inspires the Rhune with a thrilling ascetic exultation, which completely supersedes lesser emotions of love, hate, jealousy, greed. Conversation occurs in a hushed archaic dialect; brave ventures are planned; gallant resolves sworn; schemes of glory proposed and ratified, and many of these projects become fact and go into the Book of Deeds.

This conveys a lot of information, most of it relevant to the story, some of it merely a gracenote. I don't think it kills the story if you don't read it, but it adds an extra gloss to some of the subsequent action. As a reader, I'd rather have this information retailed in Vance's omniscient crisp prose than see it shoehorned in via factitious conversation (where it could only slow down the plot). Marune is a short novel (around 85,000 words) and Vance could easily have "showed" this information rather than "told" us. It's a deliberate artistic choice and for me, at least, it's one that works.

Vance also often deploys footnotes to sardonic effect. Here's a nice one from The Palace of Love.

On one hand was the display wall characteristic of middle-class European homes; here hung a panel intricately inlaid with wood, bone and shell: Lenka workmanship from Nowhere, one of the Concourse planets; a set of perfume points from Pamfile; a rectangle of polished and perforated obsidian: one of the so-called supplication slabs* of Lupus 23II.

*The non-human natives of Peninsula 4A, Lupus 23II, devote the greater part of their lives to the working of these slabs, which apparently have a religious significance. Twice each year, at the solstices, two hundred and twenty-four microscopically exact slabs are placed aboard a ceremonial barge, which is then allowed to drift out upon the ocean. The Lupus Salvage Company maintains a ship just over the horizon from Peninsula 4A. As soon as the raft has drifted from sight of land, it is recovered, the slabs are removed, exported and sold as objets d’art.

This is characteristic Vance, at once precise, economical, and barbed. You don't need it to advance the story at all; it's an imaginative riff thrown out solely for the reader's amusement. Free-wheeling delight or self-indulgent indiscipline? Tastes will vary.

Vance also employs a similar technique in chapter introductions. Every chapter in the five-volume Demon Princes series has information conveyed through oblique articles, interviews or other pseudo-factual devices. It's an aspect of the books which fans tend to love, but it's not without risk. Would you start an adventure novel with this?

From Popular Handbook to the Planets, 330th edition, 1525:

SARKOVY: Single planet of Phi Ophiuchi.
Planetary constants:
Diameter—9,600 miles
Sidereal day—37.2 hours
Mass—1.40
G—.98

Sarkovy is moist and cloudy; with an axis normal to the orbital plane it knows no
seasons. The surface lacks physiographical contrast; the characteristic features of the landscape are the steppes: Hopman Steppe, Gorobundur Steppe, the Great Black Steppe, and others…From the abundant flora the notorious Sarkoy venefices leach and distill the poisons for which they are famous.

The population is largely nomadic, though certain tribes, generically known as Night Hobs, live among the forests. (For detailed information regarding the rather appalling customs of the Sarkoy, consult the Encyclopedia of Sociology and The Sexual Habits of the Sarkoy, by B.A. Egar.)

The Sarkoy pantheon is ruled by Godogma, who carries a flower and a flail and walks on wheels. Everywhere along the Sarkoy steppes may be found tall poles with wheels on high, in praise of Godogma, the striding wheeling God of Fate.

* * *

News feature in Rigellian Journal, Avente, Alphanor:

Paing, Godoland, Sarkovy: July 12:

As if Claris Adam were to be destroyed for beguiling William Wales:
As if the Abbatram of Pamfile were to be liquefied for smelling too strongly:
As if Deacon Fitzbah of Shaker City were to be immolated for an excess of zeal:
Today from Sarkovy comes news that Master Venefice Kakarsis Asm must cooperate with the guild’ for selling poison.

Circumstances of course are not all that simple. Asm’s customer, no ordinary murderer, was Viole Falushe, one of the ‘Demon Princes’. The essence of the crime was neither ‘trafficking with a notorious criminal’ nor ‘betrayal of guild secrets’, but rather ‘selling fixed-price poisons at a discount.’
Kakarsis Asm must die.
How? How else?

This is our indirect introduction to Sarkovy and its "venefices" (a real word, incidentally), the master poisoners who dominate the first part of the novel. There are other ways of doing this, but would they really be this much fun? One of the ways Vance gets away with this is his immaculate control of voice: he can readily replicate the dry language of a guidebook or the racier tone of a magazine (and indeed the dozens of other mechanisms he deploys across the course of the series, for instance "Reminiscences of a Peripatetic Purchase Agent", by Sudo Nonimus, as published in Thrust, a trade journal of the metallurgical industry). There is a humour here so dry that many readers will miss, or dismiss, it. For those of the same cast of mind, though, it's one of the joys and unending rewards of reading Jack Vance.

Why Should I Read...?

The Stars My Destination
Alfred Bester, 1956

Ironically for a genre whose lifeblood is predicting the future, nothing dates faster than science fiction. Pick up an sf novel from the 1950s and you will probably wince at the scientific naivety, the quality of the prose, and the social attitudes embodied. On the other hand, you may pick up The Stars My Destination (or The Demolished Man, by the same author), in which case you will be astounded to realise you are reading an sf novel over 50 years old, and at least 30 years ahead of its time. It's as fresh today as when it was written, and prefigures the cyberpunk movement which was so influential from the mid-1980s.

I won't retail the plot of The Stars My Destination in any detail, because the book's not primarily about the plot, an energetic retread of The Count of Monte Cristo. Gully Foyle, the most vivid antihero since Heathcliff, sets out to revenge himself on the people who left him for dead. He's not an attractive character, and Bester never tries to pretend he is; neither are his enemies. If James Ellroy wrote science fiction, this is what he'd come up with. Bester gives us telekinesis, ("jaunting"), shadowy global corporations more powerful than governments, astounding weapons and a deeply misanthropic take on the human condition. His prose spits venom and the odd typographical conventions he employs actually add to the whole. It's modern, sparky and unencumbered by the cod-Freudianism which is the only weakness of The Demolished Man.

Because the novel is so singular it's easy to overlook the significant technical achievements it incorporates. Antihero novels are hard to pull off, especially when they have real antiheroes rather than the sheep in wolves' clothing so often passed off as antiheroes. But Gully Foyle is murderer, rapist, thug. Morally he scarcely improves over the course of the novel (I've seen it described as a bildungsroman, but I'm not convinced Gully develops enough to merit that). What Bester gives him is energy, durability, cunning and an absolute will to achieve his ends. He's hard to like, but in a perverse way he's easy to admire--a testament to Bester's narrative skill. The world-building is all the more effective for its unobtrusiveness: we never have the sense that the relentless pace of the story is on hold while Bester fills us in on the background. The tawdry hi-tec industrialisation Bester paints is so compelling that decades later we can see echoes of it in Neuromancer, itself one of the most influential novels in the field.

How has it influenced me?

It's hard to imagine any writer of speculative fiction not having taken on board this novel; like The Lord of the Rings, it's part of the genre's kitbag (and arguably has worn rather better). As a pithy exercise in world-building and a dynamic character study, it sets a standard that few of us will meet. My first novel, The Zael Inheritance, owed much to its model of government by corporation, even if I never felt capable of pulling off a Gully Foyle.

Lessons for the aspiring writer

• If you have a voice, let it off the leash
  
• You can make a sympathetic character out of the most unpromising materials
  
• One book can make your name forever
  
• If you are going to use gimmicks like unorthodox typography, make sure they're anchored in the story
  

The Fly

It's so much easier to talk about a terrible book than a good book; with a good book I don't want to spoil the experience for anyone and with the terrible I desperately want to warn people away. So take this review as a warning.

So says "Das Übernerd", whose mission is to review every Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Award winning-novel since the dawn of time. This is a person who reads a lot of science fiction and fantasy, and we can all be grateful that he's there to warn us off the bad stuff.

But... you knew there was a "but". Which book does he introduce with this dire warning? Sadly it's none other than Madouc by Jack Vance: by any rational analysis (i.e. mine), one of the titanic works of fantasy.

Having roundly panned Glen Cook last week, I'm in no position to throw stones at negative reviews, and can only observe that there are all kinds of opinion in the world. While I could rebut Das Übernerd's arguments point by point (including some errors of fact), it's probably enough to observe that there is no book so good that someone won't hate it. Das Übernerd also strongly disliked (and profoundly misunderstood) Vance's The Dragon Masters and The Last Castle, so this is just one of those cases where wavelengths are awry.

Those of us who've ever had a bad review can surely take comfort from Das Übernerd's ranting conclusion to his thoughts on Madouc:

And then there's what I can only generously describe as "prose". It gets so purple in the novel that it shifts to ultraviolet. The dialog is amazingly clunky as it switches wildly between common dialog and peppering it liberally with archaic terms. It's all heavily overwritten and made me groan at how painful it was.

Not only is Madouc a fantasy novel that features everything I hate in fantasy novels, it is a bad novel on every level. There is not a redeeming feature in it.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the style of someone who presumes to condemn Jack Vance's prose. We can do no better than conclude with the observation of the great aphorist Samuel Johnson:

A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

Buzz off, Übernerd!

Why Should I Read...?

The Ax
Donald E. Westlake, 1997

The prolific Donald E. Westlake, who died last year, wrote under a variety of pseudonyms, the most of famous of which, Richard Stark, became hugely influential in the field of noir fiction. There is an easy generalisation that "Westlake" wrote comic crime capers (for instance the Dortmunder novels) while Stark was the outlet for the darker material.

The Ax gives the lie to that generalisation; under the Westlake byline we have a dark, if bleakly humorous, satire on corporate folly which is more relevant today than when it was written. It's the first-person tale of Burke Devore, the manager of a papermaking plant who is "downsized" (Westlake relishes these management-speak euphemisms). After two years unemployed, Devore realises he isn't going to get another job. He's seen one he's well-qualified for--but he knows others are ahead of him the queue (oh, and the job isn't vacant...). His solution: identify the other potential candidates for the job, kill them, and then kill the incumbent.

While the theme of the novel is clearly satirical, because Westlake is such an accomplished thriller writer, it's also grounded in the plausible. Westlake just tells us what happens, and lets the readers find the satire for themselves. In some ways it's like Stark's Parker novels (relentless attention to the detail divorced from any authorial comment; morally ambiguous endings) but in others it's very different. Stark tells us what Parker does, not what he thinks, but The Ax is a first person narrative, so the book takes place inside Devore's head. His thoughts on his situation, the monstrous but yet entirely reasonable logic he applies, are what makes the book. He is not without conscience or humanity; the reader identifies with him to an alarming extent. The book's resemblance is less to the Parker novels than to American Psycho (which it outclasses by a distance) and Aliya Whiteley's Three Things About Me, another withering deconstruction of the corporate world.

Lessons for the aspiring writer

• Satire need not be crude--indeed it's probably better if it's not
  
• First-person narrative creates instant sympathy
  
• If you are going to have an anti-hero as protagonist, you need pinpoint control of voice
• You can write a comedy--of sorts--about a serial killer