Macmillan New Writing focus

Cover the Mirrors
Faye L. Booth

OK, I know I said I wasn't going to do any more Macmillan New Writers for a while. I am happy to reverse myself for Faye L. Booth's Cover the Mirrors, because it's a book the discerning reader will read with pleasure and profit.

Cover the Mirrors is the story of Molly, a fraudulent spiritualist in 1850s Preston. The spiritualism is a nice idea, but less central to the novel than the blurb would have the reader believe: what Cover the Mirrors is really about is the position of women in nineteenth century England. The conventional Victorian romance novel has women yearning for a chaste fulfilment with husband and children. Molly, on the other hand, wants nothing of the sort. Her desires most certainly do not run in the direction of chastity, and she sees a husband as nothing more than the man who will legally steal the house her aunt has left her. Any son will grow up to own the house and Molly will have to live in her own home on sufferance. In any event, childbirth is messy, painful and dangerous.

Molly nonetheless finds herself married and pregnant as she struggles to reconcile her cold-eyed view of life with her attraction to men. The plot plays out with skill and neatness, and some vivid, if bloody, setpiece scenes.

It's a take on the nineteenth century which may surprise some readers, but ironically would not have seemed strange to contemporaries. Jane Austen may not be so direct in her subject matter, but reading any of her novels we see that for a young woman marriage is not just--or even primarily--about love: it's business.

As well as this unusual but clear-eyed perspective, Cover the Mirrors does the bread and butter extremely well. The characterisation is first-rate, not just the engaging Molly but her childhood friend Jenny, her unsentimental Aunt Florrie and William, the husband for whom Molly has such equivocal feelings. Booth is steeped in the period and readers of nineteenth century novels will not find themselves raging at anachronisms. In addition, the prose is always well-judged and shot through with a wry humour.

Faye L. Booth is already a writer with a distinctive voice. I hope we will be hearing plenty more of it.

Why Should I Read?...

The Talented Mr Ripley

Patricia Highsmith, 1955

If you’ve been following this series so far, you will have formed a picture of my reading tastes. You will have noticed that I enjoy books with a cool narrative tone, that I often come back to the thriller format, and that a morally-compromised protagonist is often appealing. It is not from this point a great leap to find Patricia Highsmith on the list. The Talented Mr Ripley is the first and best in a series of five novels exploring the career of Tom Ripley, con-man, art-swindler and unrepentant murderer. Best of all, he gets away with it.

Highsmith is in many ways reminiscent of Richard Stark. Ripley, like Parker, does what he needs to do without any kind of commentary by the author. Unlike Stark, though, Highsmith gives us much more of her protagonist’s inner life. We don’t just see what Ripley does, we see why he does it. Most of his crimes are for financial gain, or self-preservation, but his first murder, of idle rich Dickie Greenleaf, whose identity Ripley assumes, is triggered at least in part by pique at Dickie’s rejection of his friendship. Ripley being Ripley, he also manages to turn the situation to his financial advantage.

Ripley is not without a conscience, but it’s a rudimentary one, and he doesn’t pay it a lot of attention. It comes to the fore when he feels in danger of being caught, and if his dreams are troubled at night, it’s because he always feel the authorities on his tail, not because he’s really troubled by what he’s done.

Highsmith does not set out to make Ripley sympathetic. She does not elaborate on his difficult childhood (although there are hints) or justify his actions. The prose is cool and uncluttered, even when Highsmith is revealing Ripley’s inner thoughts. He acts as he acts, and the reader must take him or leave him. Given the continuing success of the novels, readers seem to have been happy with that bargain.

How has it influenced me?

Highsmith is a comparatively recent discovery for me: she is not in my DNA in the way of Jack Vance, for instance. Nonetheless, The Dog of the North is in one sense an anti-hero novel, and Highsmith is up there with the best of them. In deciding to write a novel in which the protagonist unapologetically makes a living from crime, gets away with it, and whose thoughts and emotions are retailed without stage-villain mugging, then The Talented Mr Ripley, which I read soon before starting my own book, can certainly be seen as a distant cousin.

Lessons for the aspiring writer

The reader will identify more readily with a strong rogue as a protagonist than a feeble hero (the latter device really only being effective in comedy)

Criminals need not be caught at the end of the novel (especially if you plan a sequel…)

When exploring the mind of the amoral or sociopathic, a cool narrative tone works best

Overt moralising does not lead to good fiction

"Why Should I Read...?" Takes Stock

Our second list of books has come to an end. On the sidebar to the left is an entirely subjective list of eighteen books which have changed my life, and each has a mini-essay about why I think it's so good, how each has helped make me the writer I am today, and what others can learn from them.

Such a list is never-ending. As writers we are - or should be - the most voracious of readers. Some of the books on my list have been part of my life for over twenty years, some for only a year or so. We never stop learning, and nor should we. Somewhere out there is the next great book in our lives. (Somewhere out there is The Dog of the North, waiting to belong to someone other than me).

"Why Should I Read...?" is not going to stop at eighteen books. I've spent some time over the past few days thinking of other books and writers I want to share. In no order of merit, over the next few months you can expect to read about: Sherwood Anderson, Honore de Balzac, Alfred Bester, Italo Calvino (trust me on this one), Wilkie Collins, Edmund Cooper, Greg Egan, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Patricia Highsmith, Kazuo Ishiguro, John Foot, Daniel Keyes, Paul Kimmage, Ursula K. Le Guin, George R.R. Martin, Richard Matheson, Philip Pullman, Robert Silverberg, Cordwainer Smith, Jack Vance (again), Barbara Vine, Alison Weir and Emile Zola. I may even chuck in a couple of others. The list is deliberately eclectic, and reflects nothing more than books I've enjoyed. There's a mixture of nationalities, periods and genres. For the first time, we have some short stories on the list. Some of these books have had less obvious influence on me than others, and l'm looking forward to exploring those as I come to them.

::Acquired Taste is not a democracy; blogs are, by their nature, monuments to the ego and vanity of their creators. Any service they provide to the public is far outweighed by that they provide to themselves. That said, if one of your favourite - or indeed least favourite - authors is on the list, why not let me know. I am happy to allow queue-jumping at my readers' request. The new "Why Should I Read...?" will begin next week.

Why Should I Read?...

Lucky Jim

Kingsley Amis, 1954

Ironically, given Amis' reputation as an "Angry Young Man", Lucky Jim is the funniest book I've ever read. No other book has reduced me literally to weeping with laughter on a (fortunately largely deserted) train. Anger and humour are not incompatible, of course, but Amis' great gift is primarily comic.

Lucky Jim tells the story of Jim Dixon, a monumentally lazy lecturer in a 1950s redbrick university, as he attempts to hold on to his job despite his utter contempt for his colleagues and his marked preference for drinking and chasing women. Its focus on contemporary academic institutions made it seem a groundbreaking work in its day, but it follows an archetypal pattern. Dixon is the outsider who never fully assimilates the world of the novel - a world on which he acts as a window for the reader. Dixon is by no means an admirable character, but he is refreshingly free of hypocrisy and pretension, vices which his colleagues embody to excess. Like Jack Vance's Cugel stories or Richard Stark's Parker novels, in Lucky Jim we identify with a flawed protagonist. Amis, in using humour as his primary technique, has rather more in common with Vance than Stark.

And indeed it is humour which sets Amis among the greats. Again like Vance, Amis is a precise verbal humourist, and the amusement arises not so much from the situation as the way in which it is retailed. Have you ever woken up with foul taste in your mouth and a hangover? Me too. Ever thought of describing it like this? Me neither.

His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

In another episode, Dixon writes a deliberately illiterate poison-pen letter.

He read it through, thinking how admirably consistent were the style and the orthography. Both derived, in large part, from the essays of some of his less proficient pupils.

Such a style is a pearl without price and it cannot be taught. Amis' subsequent work never improved upon Lucky Jim; but what a benchmark he had set.

How has it influenced me?

I discovered Amis at a time -- the late 1980s -- when I was becoming very interested in matters of literary style. I could not have been less interested in 1950s' university life, but I devoured Lucky Jim. Amis is one of the very few writers I had discovered (Vance and Austen being the other obvious examples) who managed to impart humour to a situation solely by the way they described it. By divorcing the comedy from the situation, it is possible to find humour in circumstances which are not inherently amusing. At its best, this technique can make us look afresh at the situation, sometimes to feel guiltily complicit with an aggressor, sometimes to counterpoint an underlying poignancy. It's one of the things I try to do most often in my own writing, and Kingsley Amis is one of my touchstones.

Lessons for the aspiring writer

If you really do want to be angry in your writing, you need humour to avoid didacticism or ranting

Genuinely funny writing is a marriage of situation and style

If you are of the "write what you know" school, you almost certainly need to add something else: thematic depth and comedy are good places to start

Your first novel doesn't have to be crap...

More on the Chichester Writing Festival

As I mentioned last week, I spent the past weekend at the Chichester Writing Festival. This was every bit as good as expected. There were some fascinating panel discussions, ranging from debates on the publishing industry to in-depth explorations of individual writers' creative processes (and perhaps the most hilarious discussion of cookery books imaginable...).

I had my own moment in the limelight when I outlined my own experiences with self-publication and being picked up by Macmillan New Writing. It was strange to go from working in utter obscurity to a situation where my own experiences were not only of interest, but in some cases inspirational, to others. If there is a lesson in all this, it's that persistence pays -- not just in the business of keeping writing, but in always looking for new ways to learn and improve. It's one thing (and very praiseworthy) to keep writing year after year, but without applying some kind of analytical process to what's coming out of the sausage machine, sustained improvement is unlikely. I certainly see it as more than coincidence that The Dog of the North was successful in finding a publisher immediately after I'd been on Greg Mosse's course at West Dean last year: there is always someone with something to teach you, and I was lucky enough to encounter Greg at the right time.

Gratifying as my own minor celebrity proved to be, the Festival was really about the views of writers with sustained records of success. There were enough different approaches to writing on display to dispel any notions of there being a "magic bullet" secret for success. All of these professional writers had evolved methods which worked for them, but those approaches had nothing in common beyond a willingness to put in the hours. As writers we all have to find out our own methods.

There was something of interest in all of the participants' views, and all were generous with their time and expertise. It's unfair to single out individuals, so I'll settle for commending William Broderick and Jason Goodwin because I've read and enjoyed their work as well as their panel contributions, and Rachel Holmes for writing the book I came away from the Festival most wanting to read (The Hottentot Venus, a biography of Saartjie Baartman). Particular thanks are due to Greg Mosse for marshalling proceedings with an unobtrusive and good-humoured efficiency, and Kate Mosse for continuing to show writers of all abilities how to deal with success with grace and humility (let's hope this particular piece of knowledge comes in useful...).

On top of that, I got to make some new friends. I'm looking forward to next year already.

Why Should I Read?...

Bleak House

Charles Dickens, 1852-3

An earlier “Why Should I Read…?” looked at Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx, a very 20^th century take on the 19^th century novel. Bleak House is the book which most influenced it, a huge plot covering all social classes with a protracted legal case at its centre.

While Palliser is concerned with deconstructing the Victorian novel, Dickens uses his story as a powerful vehicle for social criticism. Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the legal action at the core of the book, consumes the lives of all the characters who seek to profit from it, and in a final irony, the estate over which the plaintiffs had fought is shown to have been bankrupted by the legal fees.

Narratively Bleak House is also interesting. It has two parallel narratives, the first related in the first person by the unreliably reticent Esther Summerson, the other an omniscient—but savage—authorial voice. It is never entirely clear how the two strands interact, but each enhances the other.

The true brilliance of Dickens, and the reason we still read him today, is his characterisation. His cast is slightly—in some cases much—larger than life. It’s hard to imagine that anyone has ever done humorous grotesques better—and nobody, anywhere, ever, has surpassed Dickens in the naming of characters. Where Jane Austen creates an illusion of everyday life, Dickens’ characters could never live anywhere but in the author’s imagination. What we end up with is an exaggerated version of the ‘real’ world, but it’s an exaggeration which illuminates our own.

With its powerful satire, compelling portrait of 19^th century urban life and range of brilliant and socially diverse characterisation, Bleak House is an astoundingly ambitious novel. Dickens’ trademark energy and pace abound—across the whole 1,000 pages. It defies ready summary: if you have a couple of weeks to spare, read it instead.

How has it influenced me?

Dickens is a writer of extraordinary emotional range. He is master of an overblown sentimentalism which is difficult to appreciate today, but he also commands an angry satire and humour on many levels. One thing I’ve always admired in his work is his ability to mix the tragic and comic in a way that enhances both. I try for a similar effect in my own work, but few writers can pull it off with aplomb: Dickens is one of the best.

Lessons for the aspiring writer

Don’t be afraid to write a long story…

…but if you do it will need to compel on several levels to sustain interest (the weakness of many of today’s enormous fantasy novels is that don’t have sufficient variety of tone and theme to warrant the length)

Strong characterisation can overcome plot deficiencies; but a strong plot will not bail out inadequate characterisation

The editorialising authorial voice may be out of fashion but handled skilfully it can add power and direction

Fossilised social institutions make excellent satirical targets

Characters' names are worth taking trouble over

Chichester Writing Festival

::Acquired Taste is taking a short break to visit the Chichester Writing Festival at West Dean. Hosted by Kate and Greg Mosse, this promises to be a stimulating weekend. It’s also dipping my toe in the waters of being a “real writer”: as well as going along to listen to the panel discussions, I’m involved with one of the panels in talking about my experiences of being published by Macmillan New Writing. This feels somewhat bizarre; I’ll report on this minor foray into the world of literary celebrity next week.

It’s also a chance to catch up with some of my writing friends. Last year, when I was putting the finishing touches to The Dog of the North¸ I went on a week-long creative writing course at West Dean run by Greg and Kate (highly recommended if you want to spend time really immersed in the craft of writing). Several of us from the course have stayed in touch so it will be good to meet up again (hi Davy, Graham and Jean if you’re reading!). It was on this course that I first heard about MNW, which Kate recommended as a good way into print for the aspiring novelist.

So all in all, West Dean has some good associations for me. I’m looking forward to the weekend.

Why Should I Read?...

Beyond a Boundary

CLR James, 1963

“Why Should I Read…?” has only looked at one sports book before, and that was as much for its narrative interest as its sporting theme. Beyond a Boundary is very different: unlike The Miracle of Castel di Sangro, this is a remarkably self-aware book.

Beyond a Boundary is nonetheless a complex and subtle work. James was a Trinidadian political activist – a Communist for much of his life—who spent many years in the US and Britain. A prominent journalist and writer, he was at the forefront of the campaign for West Indian independence from British colonial rule.

James was also—and here’s where the seeming contradictions start to arise—a passionate cricket lover. There is an immediate irony in James’ attraction to the most British of games even while his political consciousness was reacting against British rule.

Beyond a Boundary is a remarkable meditation. James dwells lovingly on the cricketing heroes of his youth, but always through the lens of the West Indies’ struggle for independence. In one moving chapter he writes of Wilton St. Hill, a black Trinidadian and hero to many, who was selected to tour England with the West Indies. Here he was an abject failure, and James can see this as a blow in sporting terms, but a tragedy in the political environment. “It was the instinct of an oppressed people that spoke”, he said, reflecting on West Indians’ dismay at his failure.

As late as the 1950s, it was inconceivable that a black man could captain the West Indies cricket team, even when—as was the case at this time—there was no white player worthy of a place. James campaigned ceaselessly for the appointment of Frank Worrell as captain, a black West Indian who commanded universal respect. In due course, Worrell was made captain, a role he filled with distinction for several years.

“What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know?” asked James. Beyond a Boundary is the supreme exploration of how sport can reflect wider social questions—and all retailed in prose of lyrical beauty. A great book.

How has it influenced me?

This book was perhaps the first to make me realise that sport isn’t just about what happens on the field. That, indirectly, led to the galley-racing strand of Dragonchaser, but more importantly Beyond a Boundary opened my eyes.

Lessons for the aspiring writer

Even the most trivial aspects of human existence have wider significance

If you want to write about weighty political issues, it helps to be able to write decent English

Sometimes the best way to tackle political themes is not to write directly about politics

Stretton admits "I don't write my own books"

Head on over to the Macmillan New Writers' blog for my shocking admission that I am not the author of the books which bear my name...

Why Should I Read?...

Buddenbrooks

Thomas Mann, 1901

Subtitled “The Decline of a Family”, Buddenbrooks appears on the surface to be a traditional 19^th century novel. It traces the lives of several generations of the Buddenbrook family as they collapse within two generations from the unquestioned merchant princes of Lubeck into complete extinction. This plot is handled deftly—the characterisation, particularly of Thomas Buddenbrook, the head of the family, is especially strong—but the book is considerably richer than a simple plot summary would suggest.

Buddenbrooks was Mann’s first novel (and many would consider it his best). It gains strength from its position on the cusp of the centuries: it reflects not only the traditional story-telling virtues of 19^th century fiction, but looks ahead to the symbolic and allusive elements of the 20^th. For many readers (including this one) Mann’s later work emphasised the latter at the expense of the former, upsetting the balance which makes Buddenbrooks so remarkable. There is a parallel with Muriel Spark magnificently balanced early work giving way to more overtly philosophical but less artistically satisfying later output.

The result in Buddenbrooks is that Mann is able to present a richly detailed picture of 19^th century Lubeck, with characters whose invariably unhappy lives move us, while also presenting a thematically and symbolically nuanced whole. It is a mature perspective with no heroes (although there is at least one out-and-out villain): just recognisable people struggling with their own mediocrity. In its gloomy descent into death and obscurity we can see elements common to great 19^th century realists like Zola and Hardy, although without their relentless sledge-hammering which can make reading them so wearing at times. At the same time Mann can remind us of modernists like Virginia Woolf with his interest in the creative process , the passage of time and his symbolic richness.

Buddenbrooks is unique on my list in that I’ve never read the text the author intended: I don’t read German and have had to rely on Helen Lowe-Porter’s rather twee Penguin translation. Since Mann has a reputation as a remarkable prose stylist, that’s my loss.

How has it influenced me?

Buddenbrooks is a novel I’ve admired without wanting to emulate. Mann is, as we’ve seen, perched between the 19^th and 20^th century, and as a writer I’ve always been much more attracted to the former.

In The Dog of the North¸ Lady Isola and Lady Cosetta act out two different strategies for surviving in a world which is at best indifferent to lone women (in Dragonchaser, Lady Catzendralle adopts yet another approach). In Buddenbrooks¸ Thomas’ sister Tony finds herself with similar difficulties—but I think this is less a case of direct influence and more a question of similar fictional interests.

Lessons for the aspiring writer

If your story is strong enough it can survive a God-awful translation…

Symbolic and thematic richness can add depth to your novel, but it needs to be buttressed by strong plotting and characterisation.

In any culture, social position is important…

…but without money it won’t get you very far. In creating an imaginary world it’s important to recognise these realities