Talkin' 'bout my dissertation

It ends ...

2006-09-10T15:07:00.000-07:00

... well, sort of. Until around about December, when I get my mark and go round kissing/punching each of you individually for voting for something that has either impressed or depressed the judges.

(Actually I think they are more likely to be depressed in any case, given the generally downbeat endings of all three stories, but it's a question of whether they are depressed in a good way or not. Sebastian Faulks/Graham Greene levels of depression are what I'm after. More kind of beautiful melancholia than depression, actually. Depression's quite sordid, or so I understand, where as sadness is rather stylish. Anyway.)

Thanks to everyone who gave me input or commentary, verbal and written. The People's Choice seemed to be The Hardest Florist in Stockwell, but with a different ending. There was a late surge in favour of GDYPC, but in the end I went with the one that would give some appearance of semi-coherence and connection between the stories. Normally I like to show off my versatility, but I thought I'd aim for consistency this time around; it remains to be seen whether this gamble comes off or not. They might mark me down for being limited in scope, or something. The fuckers. It's just so hard to know what will appeal.

Enough of this agonising. If anyone cares, I'll probably be sticking up the semi-final versions of the two other stories that went to make up the dissertation at some point, although part of one of them is published in the UEA 2006 Anthology under the title Tastes Like Chicken. I'll plug the Anthology in a future post, but it's available to buy now, if you fancy it, here. Please forgive the somewhat inelegant prose of the press release - I did not write it (although I offered ...).

Story five: removed cos I'm submitting it for publication

2006-09-01T16:51:00.000-07:00

It's going to a prestigious online magazine that I like, so wish me luck. If it gets in I'll put a link to it at the magazine site, until then I don't want to jinx it.

Do you miss it already? Do you?

OK, here's the beginning of something I'm not sure I can be arsed to finish. Thoughts welcome. (I nicked the title from someone's username - email me if you're annoyed, ABTOG).

A beautiful tunnel of ghosts

Mato is in the shower when the lights go out. The tepid water continues to hiss around him, louder and harder now that he’s in the pitch black with his hands cupped as though in supplication, just about to shampoo his hair. He stands still for what feels like about a minute, waiting for the glow tiles in the ceiling to stutter back into life. Nothing happens. The water pummels him. The bathroom is windowless. The darkness is total.

Mato raises his hands and starts to lather his hair. His eyes sting as foam drips into them. He doesn’t have a mirror in the shower, and never thought he’d need to be able to see just to wash his hair, but in the dark he is clumsy, banging the sides of the cubicle as he raises his hands, poking himself in the eyes and ears as he tries to rinse his head. He cannot find the dial to turn the water off, and flails around, fingers splayed, trying to grasp it. He is beginning to get scared. What if the cut is longer this time? Last week it was only a few seconds, like a missed heartbeat; everything went off and, almost at once, back on again. He hadn’t been sure until this moment that he hadn’t imagined it. You got some funny ideas in here. That’s what the optician had said.

There’s a sharp, metallic cough from the ceiling and the tiles flare, then start to glow softly, building up to full luminescence. Mato shivers with relief. He's somehow got turned around while the lights were out, and the shower dial is far from where he thought it was, almost nudging his left hip. He twists off the water and steps out of the cubicle.

When he isback in his room, dressed again in his thin, damp stripes, he thinks about the cut. He bows his head over his breakfast mash and moves the spoon around, but doesn't eat. They can't give you hours for not eating, unless it's a hunger strike. What does it mean? This place is supposed to have failsafes up the wazoo. In theory, it can't lose power. It says in the manual that you have to adjust to constant illumination, that it takes the average person a few weeks to adapt. So what's going on outside that they’ve had not one but two cuts in the last week?

“You have lost the right to privacy,” the manual says, “therefore you have lost the right to darkness”. During the hours of sleep, the ceiling tiles dim but never go out. Mato guesses that it's cheaper to have them on all night than to use infra-red cams. It's all about economies of scale, in the end.

Commentary

2006-08-29T12:28:00.000-07:00

It has been brought to my attention by my good friend Tim, who tried to leave some comments on the stories below after repeated pestering by me, that it may not be all that easy to do so unless you're already on Blogger.

*

Damn.

I have enabled comments and you should be able to comment as either a Blogger, Anonymous or Other. Only problem is that you won't be able to see them up on the site until I approve them (which I most assuredly will). In the mean time, if you can't get in and would like to speak your brains on my stuff, please email me (no pervs or spam, thanks) at

talkinboutmydissertation@yahoo.co.uk

Sorry it's such a mouthful, all the other versions I tried were gone.

(Yeah, I know, I should do that *at* thing, but the whole address is such a fag to type that I'll take my chances for the sake of people being able to just cut and paste.)

*By the way, you probably don't want to Google for images of "tape over mouth" in a work environment (WHICH I DIDN'T). It's not, ah, safe.

Why you should read Eleanor Rigby

2006-08-27T22:44:00.000-07:00

Based on guess which Beatles song, this new novel by Douglas Coupland takes the line about "all the lonely people" and runs with it. Liz Dunn is a woman with basically no friends - she's got a sister, brother and mother who all try to interfere in her clockwork routine, a dull, well-paid job, and has never had a boyfriend, and just to really hammer it home, she/Coupland tells us, frequently, about how unattractive and fat she is.

So far, so meuh. You just know that her regular round of metro-boulot-dodo is going to be busted up good by some seismic event in her life, which in this case is the arrival on her doorstep (metaphorically) of her long-lost son Jeremy. He's charming and handsome and impulsive and sociable, all the things she's not, and of course he teaches her to smell the flowers, see the joy in the world etc. (there's one great scene where he gets her crawling down the central strip of a highway). But this is Coupland, and Coupland's beautiful youths are rarely long for this world, and so it is with Jeremy, who has terminal (primary progressive) MS.

Hmm. While I appreciate the transcendant and fleeting beauty of human life as much as the next person, Coupland really has got a jones for his dying/comatose heroes and heroines, and I'm not sure why he's often so egregiously cruel to his characters. They're always such suffering saints, dangerously reminiscent of little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin, whose death I particularly looked forward to when we were reading it in class at school. (Did anyone else find Simon Legree kind of sexy, by the way? Just me then.)

Oh all right, that's a pretty unfair comparison. Coupland is nowhere near that schmaltzy - but he's certainly got a sentimental/mystical streak (see the execrable and nigh-on incomprehensible Life After God) which can often get the better of him. If anyone remembers Mazzo, the cancer patient from The Bumblebee Flies Anyway, Robert Cormier does dying characters a lot more interestingly.

But enough about Jeremy - Liz is our narrator, and she's the one we care about. I thought Coupland's m-to-f ventriloquism was better in Girlfriend in a Coma, to be honest, but Liz as a character remains almost always likable and convincing, although as a woman I'm not so sure. On occasion Liz sounds more like a middle-aged man dressed in a fat-lady suit than I would like her to, and the fact that s/he is constantly going on about her lack of physical charms smacked of the author protesting too much, trying to remind us that yes, the narrator is still an overweight woman.

And who, by the way, ever goes on about their flaws and demerits in real life situations when they can't see the person they're communicating with? Imagine if this happened on bulletin boards, or over the phone: "Hi, I'm John, just thought you ought to know I'm losing my hair and have a below-average size penis." I mean, what? Every single human being on this planet has vanity, except Liz, apparently. Again Coupland errs on the side of saintliness (or rather martyrdom) for Liz; it's pretty dehumanising not to allow your character vanity. And if she's so very, very, unassailably unattractive and doesn't care, what's she doing in high heels? It's not for comfort, that's for sure.

(Hmm. I'm wondering if Coupland has actually been a lot cleverer than I'm giving him credit for and the protesting too much - about not caring she's a minger, that is - is not meant to be convincing, but a sort of cry for help. Hmm. Maybe I'm underestimating Coupland - he's a pretty clever man most of the time.)

Anyway, despite all the nitpickery above, the reason you actually should read this book is because, as usual, it's sleekly and slickly written, the story is interesting and involving, and it just flies by. If you love Coupland you won't be too disappointed (although it's not a patch on the excellent All Families Are Psychotic) and if you don't you'll be surprised (especially after this review, hem hem) by how much there is to love. And either way, I can vouch from personal experience that it's the perfect book for a long train journey.

Story four: The hardest florist in Stockwell

2006-08-25T11:29:00.000-07:00

There comes a moment in everybody’s life, thought Pete, just after him and Mike had been kicked out of Stockings, when you have to ask yourself questions. Questions like am I a nice person? And, more importantly, do I care?

New Covent Garden flower market, reborn in the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in a warehouse just off the treeless Nine Elms Road, bursts into bloom at three a.m. every weekday and four on Saturdays. Daisy-like, it opens on the cusp of night and morning, when even the hardest-core clubber is thinking about a breather, or a night bus, at the same time as the first early-shifters are wriggling in their beds, anticipating the alarm clock and the grey, subdued ride in on the first tube of the day.
At four in the morning, most of London, even the West End, is dead, echoless, shining with overnight rain. But New Covent Garden is a wet blaze of rainbow petals and foliage, a land of midnight sun under the arc-lights’ intense gold. People look sharper, brighter, among the petals, behind the dazzle; the strangeness of the hour softens their faces and ebbs the rancour from their raucous voices. Or so it seemed to Pete. But by this stage, Pete was so drunk he was almost sober again, and he could barely understand his own thoughts, let alone express them to anyone else.

He’d been trying to hail a cab for half an hour now, while meandering down through Victoria, its shuttered shops and tea-haunted caffs, and over Vauxhall Bridge more or less in the direction of home. And then he’d remembered hearing about the flower market in class, long ago, some evening when he’d barely been listening; probably flirting with Liz or Heidi or one of the others; maybe twisting sappy, bright brown stems into a lopsided love-heart for one or other of them. Their tutor had asked if anyone wanted to train professionally, become a florist. He’d snorted with derision.
“Yeah, right,” he’d said. “I’d be the hardest florist in Stockwell.”
“You’d have some competition,” she said. She’d been in the bloom business for thirty years and astonished them by telling them about the dawn flower market where all the florists went to buy their stock. In Vauxhall, of all places.

Pete reckoned that inside there’d at least be a café, or a burger stand or something, and that some food would help him think. It was cold now, and last night’s mizzle still hung in the wet indoor air, freshening the blooms and dewing the florists’ faces with rainwater sweat. The lights on the striped stalls glistened in rain-jewelled hair and scarves. Even Pete’s black wool overcoat, bludgeoned with daily use, sparkled.
It had almost been a good night. Him and Mike and Ash, just like old times. Ash’s wife was pregnant. Mike was getting married, thinking of leaving London. Nothing like old times, in fact, come to think of it. Pete had bought a bottle at the bar and greeted them with fake-punches.
“Lads,” he’d said, “tonight we’re drinking to forget!”
They’d asked him what he wanted to forget and he’d just shaken his head and grinned. Whatever it was, he’d forgotten now. His plan had clearly worked. Under the hard yellow pub light, they’d looked balder and fatter, Ash’s gut straining against his Thomas Pink, Mike’s thinning hair like buzz-cut baby fuzz, his scalp sweating and shining underneath.
He’d always carried a picture of the three of them in his head from Bolivia, where they’d spent their summer after university trekking and camping and doing drugs and other stupid shit that made him wince with fear and pride when he thought about it now. The boys in the photograph were lean, tanned, careless, up for it. They were laughing at the camera. The people at the table no longer looked like the same ones in the photograph. They looked like the target audience for over-25 nightclubs. Like dads on the razz. And now the camera was laughing at them.
That was when Pete realised it was going to be a heavy night.

He wandered slowly, meditatively, past a stall bursting with roses, every scent and hue, crammed together in explosive abundance, scarlet, ivory, apricot; petals striped like paint-dribbled walls and graduated like a dawn sky, butter-gold to salmon-pink. The smell of sap and waxy petals; the naive Turkish Delight sweetness of heavy-headed tea-roses, pale and faint, then rich as chocolate when you bent your head down as though to kiss them. Pete stopped and stared, transfixed.
Naturally, the main reason he’d done the course was because it was a sure-fire way to pull, but he’d always liked flowers; their delicate perfumes and juices, the astonishing softness of petals between your fingers, the abundant uselessness of them. Like women, he’d said to Mike and Ash after the first week of class. He’d meant it as a joke – obviously, of course he had – but Mike had looked embarrassed and Ash had muttered something about watching what he said. Pete didn’t know when, or how, they’d got so humourless. His fellow novice flower-arrangers, the women especially, had laughed at the very same punchline when he’d said it in class. And if the girls could take a joke, why couldn’t Mike and Ash?

“Can I help?”
The girl who ran the stall poked her head between a couple of tall bunches and cocked pertly, like a pigeon. She had black hair and eyes, and soft pink cheeks which almost matched the petals framing her. He thought of telling her that she looked like a rose between two thorns, but wasn’t sure she’d get the gag, or the reference. She looked very young. She might get offended.
“How much for ten?” he asked.
“This is wholesale. The smallest bunch is twenty.”
He felt in his pocket. Was that a screwed-up note, or a credit card receipt? Did she take cards?
“All right, twenty. The dark red ones.”
He’d need some sort of gift for Liz when he got home. Most questions could be pre-empted by presenting her with a huge bouquet. She wouldn’t have got in until two or three, anyway, what with her flight times. Jet lag would keep her awake. He could say he’d spent the evening watching telly, couldn’t sleep, then had a romantic impulse and walked down to Vauxhall to get her some flowers. To remind her of how they’d met. Yeah. It was the sort of thing she’d believe he’d do. It was the sort of thing he would do. He was doing it, wasn’t he?
He handed over his note – a twenty – and got a tenner back. The flower-girl’s red fingers were warm against his, for an instant. He blinked.
“You sure that’s the right change, love?”
“Yep, it’s a tenner for twenty, twenty quid for fifty.”
“You got a special offer on, or do you just like my face?”
She smiled despite herself, if only at the ridiculousness of the idea, and looked down.
“No, it’s always this cheap. Wholesale, like I said.”
He smiled his thanks and walked away carefully. Not bad, considering. No slurring, no swaying; he took pride in it. Luckily, he’d always been able to handle his drink. So had Mike and Ash, once, but tonight they’d had to send Ash home in a cab when it was barely past midnight.
“Night night Cinderella.” Pete had sung, waving at Ash’s slumped figure through the rain-dashed taxi window.
“That’ll be the last we see of him once Nadia drops the sprog,” Mike had said, morosely. And Pete knew that it was true.
After that, Mike had got drunk and sullen very quickly. He’d sworn his head off, voice rasping and snagged like a broken tooth, when the bouncer wouldn’t let them into Spearmint Rhino. Stockings came later. Pete had had to drag him back down to Soho, to Bar Italia, where he fed Mike espresso and water. He’d wondered idly, mutinously, when it had come to this; the booze buzz just hitting you, the good times starting to roll, and the next thing you knew the club had closed, it was spitting tepid rain, and you were spoon-feeding caffeine to a piss-eyed thirtysomething at a wet outside table, where you had to keep catching the cups and glasses so they didn’t slide off the tabletop and smash on the ground. Who made me your fucking fielder, he thought, staring angrily into Mike’s glazed and wandering eyes. But just for a second. Beer gave him a temper like a flash fire. He was all right now. Pete was always all right.

It had been a twelve-week course, and he’d wasted the first six pursuing Heidi, a sharp-fringed radical playwright, one of the youngest in the group but getting nowhere fast. After a long, circuitous night in the Nest, she’d finally taken him home. She’d been almost too pissed to speak, although not to shove him heavily onto the futon and go at his neck like a cat shaking a mouse. At the next class, she’d confessed over beige machine-coffee that she had a boyfriend. Not that you could tell. Liz had been a better long-term prospect overall – more predictable. Unhappier, by a slender margin. Elegant. And she didn’t keep secrets from herself, or from anyone else.
Pete still thought of Heidi, occasionally, when he had a spare moment in the showers or punishing the treadmill at the gym. He had dark, vague memories of their night together, although he wasn’t completely sure that some of them weren’t drawn from dreams. Pete had extremely erotic dreams. Sometimes, if he was lucky, they stayed with him through the day, shivering through his body at unexpected moments, catching him off-guard, like a whiff of last night’s aftershave. She’d been springy, musky, like a rutting fox. One night only though. Not worth it, otherwise. Like freesias, heady Heidi didn’t last.
He’d found the class on the Hotcourses website. It ran every Friday evening for three months in some Institute of Further Education in far-flung Richmond, and was administered by Goldsmith’s College. He’d been lonely and not afraid to admit it. All his mates were shacked up, married or engaged or, God forbid, starting a family, and he had a lot of catching up to do if he didn’t want to end up as the sad fucker in the corner of the pub staring bleakly at the big screen for the rest of his life.
He’d tried a reading group, but he’d hated most of the books, which had rendered him virtually silent every week – after all, everyone got a chance to choose a novel for the group to read, so criticising people’s favourite writers was taken as a personal attack. Shame they’d all had such shit taste, though. The most attractive women always chose the worst books, he noticed. Grace, the trophy wife, had made them wade through some post-apocalyptic cod-philosophical shite. Millie the grad student had chosen a comedy fantasy novel – presumably as a joke, or to show that she wasn’t an intellectual snob. He’d left the group after they’d voted seven to five that the Christmas party should be fancy dress, with everyone coming as their favourite literary character.

He chased the smell of bacon and chips down an alley loud with carnations and tulips. Turning right, Pete lingered at a stall that sold freesias and arum lilies. The lilies were heavily perfumed, elegant, leggy, expensive; the high-class call girl of flowers. Easy to display, too; you only needed one or two stems and the vase was full. He bought freesias.

Flower arranging, the brilliant, barefaced incongruity of it, had been a stroke of genius. It had allowed him to be at once a rare commodity, cherished and unique, constantly solicited (as poor Nicholas sat back, ignored and amused) for the “man’s perspective”.
“They treat you like a fucking orchid,” Nicholas had told him when they stepped outside together for a fag. “Like you’re the only bloke here.”
Pete had shaken his head, embarrassed. Not that he had any problem with his unique position. He was more than tolerated; he was a privileged spy in the house of women. He thought, as he stood amongst a gaggle of them, nose buried in the ubiquitous metallic tea, listening with a fierce attention he never displayed in class, of those journalists who trained and shipped out with troops to Iraq. Embedded, they called it. Bedded more like, if he had his way. And, over the next few months, he did.
He’d clocked the married women at once. Even the ones who didn’t wear weeding rings, for whatever reason, had something about them. A reserve. A lack of need. They weren’t as hungry for his attention as the others, the singletons and the divorcees. Liz he’d found hard to gauge. She wore a wedding ring, but on the wrong hand. Was she divorced? Separated? He’d wondered briefly if she maybe had a girlfriend.
There was a pub around the corner from the college – the Eagle’s Nest, right opposite the bus stop, so that when a few of them had taken to going out for drinks after class there would always be one or two glasses left half-finished on the table as people saw the 65 coming and leapt out to flag it down. It turned out, over the course of a few conversations, a few nights of understanding nods and delicate enquiries, that Liz was married after all. It was to Pete’s credit that he’d moved in on her anyway, correctly guessing that if she was spending her Friday nights wrapping stems with a bunch of desperate housewives in South-West London, her relationship probably wasn’t going too well.

He turned a corner and caught the early-morning sun blazing through the high, grimy eastern windows; its raw brassy yellow hurt his eyes. The tubes must have started again by now; the sounds and light were becoming fuller, more familiar. The roses and freesias ached on his arm. He felt like a diva at the end of an opera, swooning under the weight of flowers.
At the largest stall in the market, decked out like a painter’s palette with vivid swathes of gardenias, gerberas, poppies, chrysanthemums, irises, pansies, hollyhocks, daisies, sweet peas, Sweet Williams and many other varieties whose names and colours twitched sleeping memories, he discovered that they took cards, and bought several bunches of the freshest and brightest blooms. The stallholder gave Pete another bag and improvised a sort of quiver so he could carry them all. Pete had no idea what he was going to do with them, but he was petal-drunk, and knew that somehow he’d make it work.
Liz would love it; would love him for it. A bushel of blossoms said spontaneity, generosity, romance. And their anniversary – or what he reckoned was their anniversary, although, to his secret disappointment, they hadn’t discussed it – was around now. They’d been together for a year: she deserved a flat full of flowers. They both did. Congratulations and celebrations – wasn’t that how the song went? Mike and Ash had told him, barely joking, that Liz deserved a medal. She’d kept him on the straight and narrow for longer than anyone. He was almost starting to like it.

Pete considered there to be four cardinal virtues: loyalty, honesty, charity and bravery. Although he was pretty sure he was all right on most of them (well, maybe not honesty so much; but he’d always been honest with himself and that, he reasoned, had to count for something) bravery was the one he prided himself on. It was a brave man who’d take a challenge like Liz head-on, pursue her, woo her, and eventually win her; but it took exceptional daring to do it while knocking off two other classmates at the same time.
Pete’s average looks weren’t a problem – women distrusted men who were too attractive, thank God – but he still had to soften them up first, get past their sleaze defences. Had to prove to them that he was a nice guy, but not the kind that finished last. It was a fucking tricky balancing act, frankly, but he had it down. The best way was to make friends first. First came the trust, then the lust. A blurred and beautiful image faded into his head of women falling into his arms like ripening fruit, like freshly cut flowers.

Women didn’t look at him as much since Liz; he seemed to have faded, somehow, into the background. Or perhaps he just wasn’t trying as hard. And all those meals out and nights in didn’t help; it was harder and harder to motivate himself to go to the gym when Liz and lasagne and a bottle or two of Bordeaux were waiting for him at home. What was the point of pushing himself towards washboard abs he’d never have? By the time your shirt came off (unless it was a particularly wild night) the woman had already made up her mind. He thought about the girl in Stockings. She’d certainly made up her mind. Decisive, like Liz.
He trudged home, the sunrise behind him, until he hit Stockwell. It was somewhere around six when he got in, because Mehdi’s was opening up, but the flat was still empty. More flight delays, terror scares and whatnot. Sometimes if she was exhausted after a trip she just checked into a hotel airport and slept it off. He’d come back that evening to find the kitchen table arrayed with strange new spirits and national foods, like a stall at a harvest festival. She always brought him back presents.
Pete staggered up the narrow stairs, bowed under the mass of petals. There was no message on the home phone, but she never called that number anyway. She’d have left a message on his mobile, wherever that was now. Somewhere outside Stockings, probably.
Fizzing with new energy, he filled the lounge, the kitchen, the bedroom with bloom. He worked diligently, slicing the stems at diagonal angles, prinking the petals and arranging the flowers in complementary colourways; blue and yellow, pink and white. He propped them in vases; then, when he ran out, in pitchers and jugs, raiding the under-sink cupboard. He cherry-picked the recycling and placed single stems of red roses in empty wine bottles on the stairs, one on each tread, all the way up. Such a lot of bottles.
The remaining flowers he strewed on the bed, ripping handfuls of petals off the more tired and broken roses and scattering them over the duvet and floor. It was a gesture of thankfulness and propitiation, disguised as romance. In the dark crack of his heart, Pete knew it was gratitude that moved him, not love. He didn’t mind admitting that he was grateful she’d still have him. Ash and Mike were just amazed. He was dog-tired, almost hallucinating, by the time he’d finished. All-nighters were hitting him harder and harder. His head bobbed and jerked as he stripped off his socks and crawled into the mussed sheets. He felt exhilarated, but exhausted too, like after drugs, or sex. Or stairs, these days.
He closed his eyes and the darkness span. He shouldn’t have done that nasty coke Mike had scraped up from somewhere. He shouldn’t have smoked that pack of Bensons in the club. Liz would smell them on him. She’d probably scent the cigarette smoke even before the roses. Like a sniffer dog, she was. Those wide silent eyes. Those narrow otter nostrils, the finely calibrated instrument of her small nose. She had a profile like a Victorian cameo. Like that other girl tonight, that girl in the club, in Stockings.
He shouldn’t have tried to chat her up. Stockings wasn’t a place for conversation. At least he’d known better than to touch her while she was giving him a dance, but he certainly shouldn’t have followed her into the Ladies afterwards. But she’d reminded him of Liz – of the Liz from photos of twenty years ago, a young Liz he’d never known. He felt jealous of Liz’s past. He wanted to have been there. But he hadn’t had much luck explaining that to the bouncer on the way out.

Pete woke at midday, his head dry and mouth sticky like a pub floor. The light piercing the blinds hurt him. Through narrowed, swollen eyelids, he saw red petals spattering the floorboards, peppering the wizened, half-eaten pizzas still in their boxes, the carrion of fried chicken. The bedroom was carpeted with crumpled newspapers and plastic bags. From somewhere came the sharp reek of vomit. He brushed at his face and torn rose petals came away on his fingers, dark and bruised. The sickly odour of freesias rose from the musty bedspread, making him gag.
And now he remembered why Liz wasn’t home yet. She’d told him last week, just before the business trip. She’d managed to pack everything she needed into two bags and a suitcase, and she wasn’t coming back.
That was what he’d been drinking to forget. That was it.

Why you should read The Penelopiad and The Pleasure of My Company

2006-08-16T14:15:00.000-07:00

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

Part of a (possibly aborted) series in which slender, high-end hardbacks based on classical tales or texts were commissioned from well-known authors. Average word count seems to be about 50,000 (the length of a Mills and Boon novelette or intercity train journey) and cover price is £12.99. However, despite this book's quality and appeal to Atwood completists, I doubt Canongate made their money back once they'd spunked most of the budget on hiring Maggie.

Anyhow - for those who don't know much about the classics (me) this is a sparky revisiting of the Odyssey from a female perspective, told in contemporary language by the dead Penelope as she wanders in the asphodel fields of Hades.

There's an amusing running gag about Penelope's jealousy of her beautiful cousin Helen and a real compassion for the women left behind which bleeds through the writing, but it's high-class fluff, essentially, which someone of Atwood's talents can and probably did knock out in a fortnight, and everyone involved knows it. The sort of book you'd give to your mother to make her feel clever. In fact, my mum's getting my copy. And it's not even Christmas.

The Pleasure of my Company by Steve Martin

Steve Martin is in my good books. Apart from starring in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, still one of the funniest films of the 80s, and film noir spoof/homage Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, he's also the best celebrity novelist I've ever read. Stephen Fry during the period of The Liar and The Hippopotamus is a close second, but loses points for allowing Making History to suck so very, very much. When love comes in at the window, talent flies out of the door, indeed. And The Stars' Tennis Balls was a shit Dumas rip-off with a shit title, too. Although Bookblog found it "intsteresting" (sic). Sort it out, Fry.

Anyway, back to Steve. The first novel of his I read was called Shopgirl - a sensitive, quiet little love triangle story which was about as far from the sort of thing you might expect a Hollywood comedian to pen as it was possible to be. I was really surprised and pleased by it, and in fact had to check that it was the same Steve Martin. It was. Shopgirl's now a film, which
a) I fully intend to watch on DVD
b) gives me hope for a film of The Pleasure of my Company, which would be brilliant, like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time meets Sideways

The hero of The Pleasure of my Company is called Daniel Pecan Cambridge, and he's a thritysomething loner who suffers from something between OCD and Asperger's, to the extent that it takes him forty-five minutes to get to the shop down the road because he can't do kerbs.
There's some back story, there's some love story, there's magic squares and the Most Average American competition, but mostly what I love about this book is the way that Martin inhabits the voice of the narrator. It's completely readable and completely convincing: a Curious Incident for grown-ups. If you can find it, buy it.

Why you could do worse than read London Revenant

2006-08-14T16:50:00.000-07:00

Published by the wonderfully named Do Not Press, who appear to specialise in noir, splatter, horror, crime, thrillers, dark fantasy and books by "reformed career criminals", this is a sometimes rather nicely written, if oddly plotted, slice of gritty urban noirish subterranean conspiracy mystery/thriller with extra grit.

The author, Conrad Williams, has, I suspect, a background in horror and is as happy as a pig in gore when producing juicy chunks of London-A-Z-meets-Texas-Chainsaw-Massacre prose, where the streets and routes of the capital are described with as much fetishistic loving care as the slicing off of somebody's face.

Like all good Londoners (adopted or native) Adam Buckley, Williams's narrator, is obsessed by the underground - not just the tube, but the catacombs, ghost stations, bomb shelters and subterranean rivers that underscore the city, and also by the idea that there could be a whole civilisation - other world, even - in those miles and miles of tunnels. So far, you may well say, so Neverwhere. But what will make me part with my £2 (knocked down from £7.99 at the remainder bookshop in St James's Park station, fact fans) I hear you cry?

Well, it's quite pacy and involving - and it's always a weird little thrill to read books featuring tube crashes and undead tunnel-dwellers who push commuters in front of trains when you're sitting on the tube. And the hero has narcolepsy, which is reasonably interesting as a character trait, if a complete red herring. And there's a fair amount of sex, some semi-kinky. And if you're a Londoner, and reading about places and things you know (especially Underground stations) gives you a raging hard-on, you should definitely keep this one next to the toilet - Williams has most certainly done his research. Although not, you know, into the faceknife scene. I hope.

In fact, the only problems I have with London Revenant (apart from the fact that I'm not too orgasmic about the title) are that:
a) I'm about 15 pages away from the end and I can already tell that it will suck in comparison to the rest of the book (I will come back and recant if I'm wrong)*
b) The author, who usually has a rather fetching way with similes, allows this one to slip through on page 217: "sadness settled badly into her face like cheap moisturiser"
c) It's not by this, rather sexier Conrad Williams, and therefore I can't in all conscience post a picture of the tasty twin.

Oh all right then.

* Update: it did suck, but not as hard or in quite in the way I expected, although the monster did come back (check) and the hero didn't get back together with the ex-girlfriend we didn't really care about him getting back together with (check)
On the plus side, there was also a nice reincorporation and explanation of a bottle-shaped graffito the narrator keeps seeing all the way through.
On the minus side, there was a pretty left-field late revelation that three of his mates are imaginary. Which was fairly unnecessary, as a plot point, and didn't illuminate much. Seevn out of ten for effort, I reckon.
Would I read another one? Yeah, if it was two quid and wasn't quite so full of ick, shit (Williams is a big fan of filth of any sort) blood and imaginary friends. (I expect that'll be in the running for his next cover quote now ...)

Story Number Three: Cuckoo

2006-08-11T11:55:00.000-07:00

I've basically given up on doing things week by week since starting this new job, as the hours and my energy level when I get home are wiiiildly unpredictable. Plus, I also have a life and can't be spending every non-working hour God sends tapping away in the semi-darkness for the good of my MA.

Anyway - on with the story. As usual, (misquoting Russell Brand on Big Brother's Big Mouth, for which apologies) phone us! text us! email us! comment on us! - we only write it so you can read it. And here it is.

Cuckoo

Night. Quiet. A haze of moonlight seeping through the thin curtains like blood through gauze. The breathless, foetid-fresh smell of a child’s bedroom.
Mummy stands, her hand still on the doorknob, touching it lightly, like a chess player lingering over an uncertain move. She can hear her own hushing breath as her eyes adapt to the soupy darkness. She can’t hear his, though, which means that he is awake and pretending to be asleep for her benefit. She wonders when he will learn deception, how to mimic the pale snores and gasping snuffles of true sleep. She learned early on, aged six or seven, and remembers thinking that she was a very clever little girl. She still pulls that trick sometimes, when Daddy comes home late and she doesn’t want to speak to him. She does a very good imitation of a peaceful sleeper, which is ironic, as her own slumber is often violent and disturbed. She still suffers from the nightmares of her childhood.
“Nicky?”
He doesn’t respond. She pictures his large blue eyes upturned to the invisible mobile dangling from the ceiling. Ships and balloons and trains and planes and cars. He loves machines, motors, anything that can get you from place to place; he’s not fussy. She moves further into his room, letting go of the doorknob but not closing the door behind her. The landing, too, is dark, but already she can see more, make more sense of the grainy, pullulating shadows. She tiptoes forward and kneels softly on the thick carpet, her head near his. Only the crack of tendons in her knees gives her away. She senses him flinch at the snap, or her nearness, she doesn’t know which. She lays her hand on his forehead and strokes back his soft, fine hair. Warm and clammy, but better than a few hours ago. Less feverish. He is still pretending to be asleep.
“Nicky,” she whispers, “are you feeling better now?”
He does not move, does not answer, a hot, angry little corpse.
“I’m sorry you couldn’t go to the fair, sweetie,” she says. “You had an awful temperature. We couldn’t let you, really.”
Silence. He’s sucking in stiff shallow breaths, lying motionless, rigid with righteousness. She thinks she can make out the rise and fall of his ribs, and is reminded of dogs panting, or mice; the smaller an animal, the faster it breathes. If you could listen to a mouse’s heartbeat it would blur into a constant high thrum.
“Mummy and Daddy couldn’t go either,” she says.
Instead they had enjoyed a rare, relaxed dinner at home over a bottle of wine, both keeping an ear out for the baby monitor. Nicky had wept and grizzled and yelled as far as his sore throat allowed, and even though they had said he could watch the big fireworks on the TV in his room as a special treat – and the big fireworks were bound to be better than the modest local bonfire night, Daddy had assured him – he had refused. It wasn’t the same. He wanted to be there.
Mummy remembers how much Nicky had loved November 5th last year: the smell of wood-smoke on leather jackets, the creamy, salty taste of fire-blackened chestnuts, the crowds coddled in scarves and warm coats, flush-faced beneath the sudden light of exploding stars. How everybody had looked younger, guiltless, in the glow of flames and fireworks. And the games, the fairground stalls; the hot, slapdash smell of carnival food, the lights in the darkness, people shouting to one another over the barkers and fluorescent music, breath billowing like dragonsmoke.
“Silly Nicky,” she says, “don’t sulk now. You can go next year.”
How can she have forgotten the yawning scale of childhood time and space, when a year might as well be a million, where the bottom of the garden is the end of the world? She hasn’t forgotten that Nicky hates being called silly.
“I’m not silly,” he says fiercely, forcedly, reluctant to break his silence but stung into defending himself. She smiles at his profile in the darkness.
“Of course not, sweetie. Sorry. Just ill and a bit tired.”
A grumpy pause.
“I wasn’t even that ill. I could have gone.”
Time to be strict, she knows. She hardens and deepens her voice. How much of parenthood is play-acting, storytelling.
“Yes, Nicky, you were. You were burning up.”
“Like a bonfire,” he says, sulkily.
“Exactly like a bonfire,” she says, brisk and businesslike. She modulates her tone again. “A cross little bonfire. But I’m glad you’re feeling better now.”
“A bit,” he admits, a grudge in his voice. She reaches out to where she knows the bedside table to be and places the beaker on it gently.
“There’s some water,” she says, “and if you want anything in the night we’re just across the landing. You go to sleep now.”
She leans over to kiss him on the forehead but he stops her.
“No,” he says.
A weird cold washes through her.
“No what, Nicky?”
“I can’t go to sleep without a bedtime story. I want a story.”
His tone is plaintive, and she realises that of course, because he had been dozing on and off with the temperature and the fever, they have not followed the usual night-time ritual. He hasn’t been put to bed properly; of course he can’t sleep. His night-light, a rubber bulb that glows a soft angry orange when pushed into a plug socket, has not even been switched on.
“I’ll have to turn the lamp on, then.”
He twists away from her as though from a fire.
“No, it hurts my eyes.”
“Well, darling, I can’t read you a story in the dark. Mummy needs light to see.”
“Can’t I have a new story?”
“What sort of story?” she asks, playing for time, wondering whether she isn’t too tired to make up a satisfying tale at this time of night. Calling Daddy won’t be much help; Nicky complains that his stories are boring.
“A story about Bonfire Night.”
“Guy Fawkes?”
He shakes his head; she sees the movement and hears his hair flap vigorously on the pillow.
“Boring. We did it at school.”
He’s only been going to nursery school for a year or so, but he is already world-weary, blasé about painting and reading and break.
“Oh. Well then.”
“A new story,” he insists. She sits back on her heels, then eases the cramp in her calves by manoeuvring into a cross-legged sitting position on the carpet by the bed. Her mouth is exactly on a level with Nicky’s ear.
“All right then,” she says, not at all sure of what she is going to say next. She feels a brief flash of the vertiginous terror actors must experience when they dry on stage.
“What’s it about?” he demands.
“Bonfire Night.”
He wriggles impatiently. “And?”
“A little boy.”
“A little boy like me?”
“A little boy very much like you. He had big blue eyes, and messy blond hair, and he had a Mummy who was very much like me.”
“Oh good,” Nicky says, approvingly. Her confidence is buoyed like a balloon on an updraught. Write what you know, isn’t that what they say?
“Once upon a time – on a night very much like tonight, in fact, a November 5th not very long ago at all, the Mummy of this little boy decided to take him to see the fireworks on the village green.”
“Was he ill?”
“No,” she says firmly. “He was a very healthy little boy and had absolutely no temperature at all, which was why she decided to take him.”
“Did his Daddy come too?”
“No, darling, the little boy’s Daddy was away at work that weekend, in France. But he wished he had been there, and so did his Mummy, especially after what happened that night.”
She hears him stir, tense, curl himself up into a tight little ball of delighted anticipation. Now she’s got him.
“What happened?”
“We’ll see. I’ll tell you about the bonfire night first.”
“All right.” A fire, almost as good as a mystery; not quite.
“There was a huge bonfire. Blazing.”
“How huge?”
“Very. Bigger than Daddy.”
“Bigger than a house?”
Mummy considers.
“No, not quite as big as a house. Maybe as big as the garden shed. But very big and very hot, with flaming sparks shooting out of it, and wood glowing red-hot so you couldn’t go too close to it without your hair crisping up and your face going bright red.”
“Really hot?”
“So hot you couldn’t toast marshmallows.”
“Why not?”
“Because they wouldn’t melt, they’d just explode in pink smoke.”
“Cool.”
And the fireworks were the best fireworks you’ve ever seen. They’d been brought all the way from China where people had made fireworks for thousands of years.”
“Thousands …” Nicky says softly, impressed.
“They were in the shapes of stars and moons and wheels and planets –”
“Were there rockets?”
“Yes, and when they exploded they filled up the sky with sparkling rain in gold and silver and blue and green and pink.”
“Rainbow rain,” says Nicky.
“Yes, rainbow rain. Like glitter. And the bang was so loud that the church wobbled.”
Nicky giggles.
“But before anyone could watch the firework display, first of all the little boy and his Mummy went to the fairground and had a go on all the games.”
“All of them?”
“Every single one.”
“What was there?”
She tries to remember from last year. All that springs to mind are the gentler, less exciting attractions, the stuff of Victorian nostalgia; the hook-a-duck stall, the hoopla and tombola, the lucky dip. She thinks of other fairgrounds, all the festivals and carnivals of her life.
“There was a … ghost train. And a rollercoaster, just for one night, that looped around the bell tower twice and finished on the cricket pitch. And there were stalls selling toffee apples and popcorn and candyfloss, blue and pink and yellow candyfloss, and hot dogs and hot chocolate and chestnuts and it all smelled delicious and amazing. And there was a shooting gallery, too, where you had to get three shots right in the middle of the target to win a goldfish, or a toy lion, or a cowboy hat, or – ”
“What else?”
Mummy is running out of inspiration.
“There was a hall of mirrors, and a darts game, and hoopla.”
“What’s hoopla?”
“It’s where you have to throw a wooden ring over a pole to win a prize.”
“What prize?”
“Well, there were all sorts of stuffed toys, great big ones, nearly as big as the little boy himself. Every animal you could imagine. Kangaroos and elephants and giraffes. Whales and dolphins and dinosaurs.”
“Bears too?”
“Of course.”
“Bears like Big Bear?”
Mummy involuntarily glances to where Big Bear sits, a fuzzy patch of blacker darkness in the shadowed corner. He is propped up in Nicky’s half-size blue rocking chair, unmoving and silent, his weighted forepaws resting on the arms of the chair like the clenched fingers of a hanging judge.
“Just like him,” she says. “All hanging from the ceiling where nobody but the stallholder could reach.”
“Did Mummy play the hoopla?”
“Oh yes,” she says vaguely, “eventually.”
“What did she win?”
“Ah,” says Mummy, cryptically. “That’s a very good question.”
Nicky scrunches himself up with excitement.
“Why?”
She takes a deep breath and wonders.
“Because when the little boy and his Mummy were going through the fair, the little boy saw the blue candyfloss and wanted some. He’d never seen blue candyfloss before.”
Nicky scoffs. He’d seen it last year, ages and ages ago. He’d eaten so much of it that he’d been sick in the car on the way home. The sick hadn’t been as blue as he’d hoped.
“So, anyway, the little boy was quite a bit littler than you and he was in a pushchair to that his legs didn’t get tired.”
Again Nicky, normally robust to a fault, looks smug in the near-dark.
“And while his Mummy was talking to the stallholder and waiting for the blue candyfloss to give to her little boy, guess what happened?”
Nicky cannot imagine.
“When she looked down at the pushchair again, her little boy was gone!”
Nicky gasps with excitement.
“Run away?”
“No, Mummy says firmly, “although she did think that for just a second, because he’d vanished like a puff of smoke. But what made her realise that the little boy hadn’t run away, that he’d actually been kidnapped, was what was in the seat of the pushchair instead of him. What do you think it was?”
Nicky shakes his head dumbly.
“Go on, have a guess.”
“A ghost?”
“No.”
“A little girl?”
“No.”
“A candyfloss?”
“Now you’re being silly. Shall I tell you?”
“Yes.”
“It was a large stuffed bear, almost exactly the same size as the little boy she had lost. He had soft brown fur like Big Bear, and shiny black eyes like Big Bear, and big heavy paws too. In fact –” she cocked her head at Big Bear, silent in the chair, still and dumb, “– he was very, very much like Big Bear in every way.”
“What did she do?”
“Well, first of all she screamed. She screamed very loud, so that everyone turned around and even the carousel stopped in surprise. And then she started pushing the chair with the bear in it all around the funfair, running over people’s toes and bumping into them, spilling their drinks and their hot dogs and crying and shouting that somebody had stolen her son.”
Nicky’s eyes are wide and luminous, glowing pale grey at her in the iron-coloured shimmer of the room.
“What did they do?”
“Do? They got out of her way. They thought she was mad, poor woman, running through a fairground screaming and weeping with a stuffed bear in a pushchair. But she wasn’t mad. Someone really had stolen her son and put a soft toy in his place.”
“Why?”
“It’s called a changeling.”
“What’s a changing?”
“Do you remember the story of the Ugly Duckling?”
Nicky looks uncertain.
“Yes …”
“Like that. Except that because all eggs look the same, the ducks didn’t know he was a swan until too late.”
Nicky absorbs this. He is beginning to relax a little again: the Ugly Duckling, after all, has a happy ending, like all good stories.
“What happened then?”
“Well, she started going up to all the stallholders, to ask if they had seen anything, if they’d seen somebody carrying her little boy. She described him in every detail but nobody had seen anything. And just when she had almost given up, she came to the last stall.”
“Which stall was it?”
“It was the hoopla. The throwing-rings game, remember?”
Nicky blinks and nods. His face, which this morning had been flushed with fever, is milky pale. He lays his head back gently on the pillow, not moving his eyes from hers for a second.
“And guess what she saw dangling from the ceiling of the stall, hung up on a hook like the straps of his dungarees, looking very confused but perfectly all right?”
Nicky smiled.
“Her little boy!”
Mummy strokes his warm soft cheek.
“Clever you. That’s right. So what do you think she had to do?”
“She had to win him back?”
“Exactly. She couldn’t get past the stallholder to rescue him, because the stallholder was big and strong – bigger than Daddy – and he wouldn’t let her. He said he had no children, and that he needed a son to help him on the stall, and that if she couldn’t win her little boy back fair and square, he would raise the child as his own and all she would have to take home was a stuffed bear.
So he gave her three hoops and told her she had to get all three over the pole to win her boy back. Normally you only have to get one ring over to win a prize.”
“All three?” Nicky’s eyes were wide with indignation.
“Yes, because the little boy was the top prize, the most precious thing, and so she had to be extra good to win him back.
So she narrowed her eyes, took a step forward and squinted at the pole, measuring the distance. She took the first ring in her hand – and even though her hands were shaking and her heart was shivering, she threw it straight and true and it rattled down over the pole easily. The same thing happened with the second ring. But just as she was throwing the third ring, she felt something soft touch her leg, and she jumped and screamed. She had forgotten all about the bear, and it had fallen out of the pushchair against her leg. Or at least that’s what she thought at the time. When she jumped she let go of the ring and it bounced and banged around the pole – it almost looked as if it might still just go over, but then it bounced one last time and fell down on the ground.
She had lost, and the stallholder laughed a terrible laugh and told her to keep the bear, that it could be her booby prize. She tried to climb over, to rescue her son, still dangling from the ceiling by his dungarees, but the stallholder pushed her away and none of the onlookers would help her. She stumbled away, sobbing, with nothing but the pushchair and the bear.”
“How did she get him back?” asked Nicky curiously. For she must have got him back. He was here, wasn’t he, with her now?
Mummy’s eyes are glazed a little with tiredness. In the twilight of Nicky’s bedroom she looks far away, like someone in a mirror.
“She didn’t, Nicky,” she says quietly, gently. “She had to take another little boy out of his pushchair while his Mummy was buying a toffee apple. She put Big Bear in the little boy’s place and hoped that the other Mummy wouldn’t notice. And she didn’t. Not until it was too late anyway.”
She glances across at Big Bear’s corner. “Big Bear came back, of course. Followed them home. He needed a Mummy too.”
Nicky blinks. Mummy glances at her watch, its face, like hers, unreadable in the darkness. Then she suddenly smiles wide. He can see her teeth and eyes gleam.
“Well, it’s time to go to sleep now, Nicky. Good night and God bless.” Mummy stands up, knees crackling like firewood, and leans over to kiss Nicky on his dry lips. As she moves towards the door, she flicks on the nightlight. Two sparks of orange flame ignite in the rocking-chair corner, where Big Bear’s shiny black eyes outstare the night. Mummy yawns and pauses as she opens the door of Nicky’s bedroom.
“Silly Mummy,” she whispers tenderly, “I forgot the most important part. They all lived happily ever after.”
And she closes the door behind her softly.

Why you should be a bit disappointed by Tom Stoppard's Rock and Roll

2006-08-06T14:35:00.000-07:00

So, anyway. after my long absence from this blog, due mainly to my getting a new job with longer hours (boo) and better pay (yay!) I thought I'd ring the changes a bit by providing a theatre review, because my entire cultural life is not limited to books. Oh no. Although after watching Stoppard's latest, I'm rather thinking it ought to be.

On Saturday it was my father's birthday (or near enough) and to celebrate we did the traditional thing, i.e. went to a matinee of a West End Play. (We're awfully cultural, my family - about four times a year, on each of our birthdays). I have theatre buddies for this sort of thing usually, but we'll get standing tickets at the Donmar or £10 Travelex bargains for the National instead of expensive stalls seats. Oh to be young and poor in London.

I am legendary among my family for being late to the theatre. The irony is, I am almost never late for things I have personally chosen to see, when they start at a reasonable time, i.e. in the evening. But to cut off half my Saturday daytime (which is the only day of the week I can go shopping, for a start) in favour of sitting in a darkened auditorium with a grizzled clutch of baby boomers who all remember Pink Floyd and the Sixties, not to mention one or two who look like they were probably on the Titanic - well, all I can say is that Rock and Roll, Tom Stoppard's latest outing, had better be pretty good.

And (despite the fact that I had to listen to most of the first scene through a door, arriving as I did five minutes after curtain up) it was. Pretty good, that is. Not great; not, despite Sinead Cusack reading Sappho and dying of cancer (you know it's Stoppard when ...) terribly moving or engaging; not, despite the ending which tries its hardest to make an afternoon in the theatre feel like a night at a Rolling Stones gig, particularly exciting. Full of the usual Stoppardian intellectual exchanges on MAW (meaning, art, whatever) without the customary level of wit and humour.

Jan, a wild-haired Rufus Sewell, is our Czech hero. It's 1968 (although we swiftly flip through to 1990 by the end of the play), tanks are rolling into Prague and art rock group the Plastic People of the Universe are being censored. This is Serious Stuff. In fact, it's politics – specifically Communism (hello Brian Cox as a curmudgeonly, unrepentant leftie Cambridge Don OH CHRIST THE PREDICTABILITY I CAN'T BEAR IT). And like almost all polemical/political theatre I've ever seen, the political bits are at best dully didactic, at worst a spanner thrown into the works that brings the whole juggernaut juddering to a halt.

I didn't care or know very much about the Prague Spring (apart from what I've read in Milan Kundera) when I went into this play, and I didn't care or know much more when I came out again - and I feel as though that's fundamentally wrong. Shouldn't Stoppard be trying to make us care, not only about the politics, but about the characters? I counted eleven actors (which included a couple of doublings, such as Sinead as her own daughter) when the curtain rose for the bow, and I think that's just too many for a two-hour play, especially when at least seven or eight had major roles.

The whole thing felt fragmentary, knocked together, and not in a good way; as though Stoppard had torn a few photos out of the family albums from 1968-1990 and made a rather slapdash collage with characters linked by a spiderweb of dotted lines (Esmee is in love with Jan, but Jan is sleeping with Magda. Magda doesn't know Lenke, Jan's ex-girlfriend, is having an affair with Tom, Esmee's father ...)

What does rock and roll have to do with it? Well, Jan's a music buff and has a room full of albums which the Czech authorities take and destroy. Is that the sound of the world's tiniest electric violin, playing just for him, do you think? He has a number of tedious and repetitive arguments with his friend/room-mate about censorship and artistic freedom as applied to rock groups. Extremely loud Pink Floyd is blasted over scene changes. Stoppard's masterpiece this ain't.

But, likesay, it's pretty good. It trots along nicely, and the regular politicky bits (Why I Have Not Left The Communist Party, How To Build A Democratic Socialist State, What I Did In My Cambridge Holidays) function rather like Channel 4 commercial breaks - five minutes to check your watch, admire the ceiling fresco and browse the programme. And it has got some funny bits in it. The actress playing Sinead's 16-year-old daughter is excellent and the character well-written and believable. Tom sensibly avoids a kiss moment when the love subplot is finally resolved at the end. Sinead gets some nice wigs, Rufus has had some Czech accent practice; Brian can add another curmudgeon to his repertoire and will probably be allowed to keep the cardigan.

But what is it for, after all? Rock and Roll is a pleasant afternoon's entertainment for pensionable Floydians, but it didn't rock my world, and I was left slightly puzzled, slightly disappointed (particularly after Arcadia and The Invention of Love) and really very unsure as to what, if anything, Stoppard is trying to say.

Word of the day: Mondegreen

2006-07-10T04:12:00.000-07:00

mon·de·green (mŏn'də-grēn', môn'-)
n. A series of words that result from the mishearing or misinterpretation of a statement or song lyric. For example, I led the pigeons to the flag for I pledge allegiance to the flag.
[After (Lady) Mondegreen, a misinterpretation of the line (hae laid) him on the green, from the song “The Bonny Earl of Murray”.]*

*So, in the orginal, one line would have sounded like [the mourners/pall-bearers/his kinsmen] had Lady Mondegreen. A much more interesting ending. Come to think of it, Lady Mondegreen would be a great name for a character in a bodice-ripper, I reckon. Haven't written anything like that, though ... well, ever, really. Do I sense a challenge? Hmm ...

Why you shouldn't read Only an Alligator

2006-07-06T05:46:00.000-07:00

Picked up in my local charitable retailer on the grounds that it had a picture of an alligator on the cover, this book is shaping up to be far less than the sum of its parts. I am starting to regret the whim that made me think "what the hell, it's only 50p". I could have got a Mars (sorry, Believe) Bar for that. I own one other Aylett book, the never-read Bigot Hall, which I bought because, again a) it had a good cover and b) I thought it might be a reference to, and therefore a bit like, the work of Thomas Love Peacock, author of early 19th-century satires such as Nightmare Abbey, Headlong Hall, Crotchet Castle etc.

Now, I bow to no-one in my love for trashy sci-fi nonsense, but I do like a bit of plot and some vaguely convincing characters in amongst all the wacky inventiveness and cutesy maps. What Only an Alligator is reminding me of at the moment is some hideous arranged marriage between China Mieville and Terry Pratchett, with none of either author's good qualities. It reads like the dregs of Philip Jose Farmer with a tinge of Harry Harrison's later Bill the Galactic Hero books, where his increasingly ill-advised writing collaborations moved further and further away from the satirical excellence of the first novel towards tedious and lurid tenth-rate schlock. Yes, I know that was the point, but even tenth-rate schlock has standards, you know.

I didn't know much about Mr. Aylett so I looked up his website. He's written quite a few books (OaA is the first in a series of four novels in the Accomplice series, God help us) and has, apparently, been described by the Guardian as "distressingly brilliant" - but more interestingly, he's got a whole page of pictures of himself on there. I'm not talking about one or two. There are about twenty of them - most in the same pose and wearing the same Lennon specs/shades. I never quite understand why people who are not actors or performers (who kind of need to show what they look like) do this sort of thing, especially when they are, frankly, not all that attractive. I mean, who is this portfolio of increasingly uninspiring images aimed at? Would even the hardest-core Aylett fan really plaster their bedroom with two dozen very similar pics of their favourite author attempting to look cool? And if so, why?

Anyway, I will attempt to struggle through the rest of this mercifully slender book and report back here when I've finished, for everyone's sake. I fear the news will not be good.

Week 2's story: if you haven't read it yet you're too late now!

2006-07-05T02:26:00.000-07:00

Removed because it's just won a prize, and is due to be broadcast on BBC radio sometime in November (will update when I know the date).

This is turning into a damn good week ...

Why you should read Tales of the Decongested, Vol 1

2006-07-03T09:57:00.000-07:00

Decongested website

Why? Well, a number of reasons.

1) It's got a great cover and it looks cool.
2)The Guardian likes it. A lot.
3) It's full of excellent stories (with a single exception so far - naming no names but it starts on p119 and I'd be interested to know from anyone who's read it if your opinion coincides with mine on this one). This is quite unheard-of from a collection, really, as they are often very patchy, and I am a particularly picky reader. I know I'm biased and all that, but although I don't get any money if people buy more of the books, I will get a big fat thrill to see someone reading it on the tube. Buy one!
And if that isn't enough for you -
4) I have a story in it.

Go on go on go on go on ...

Why you should read No Cure for Cancer (but might also want to check out Bill Hicks)

2006-06-30T04:56:00.000-07:00

Googling the above for linkage purposes, I have now become convinced that I really, really, really should listen to/read Bill Hicks's material because so many people are frothing about Leary having nicked his gags, persona, delivery, underpants, whatever. I'm a Hicks virgin, alas but I really enjoyed this book the first time I read it and seeing it in (guess where?) a charity shop the other day I was curious enough to go back for a second helping.

The book was published in 1992 and has dated somewhat (especially the Kitty Dukakis/George Bush Sr. references) but that's just the way it goes for most stand-up, the vast majority of which is, at least superficially, topical. Some of the rest of it seems eerily prescient (stuff about the first Gulf War echoing today's Iraq issues) - or else convinces you that, depressingly, some things never change.

These are the section headings: Drugs, Drink, More Drugs, Smoke, Meat, War, Life, Death - which pretty much covers everything. A lot of it's still funny (funnier, perhaps?) even without Leary's trademark man-on-the-edge-of-a-paroxysm delivery. And some of it - especially the stuff about being shot in the head by his brother at the age of eight, not to mention his son's birth and his father's death - has the sort of dramatic meat that later proved so satisfying in The Job and Rescue Me.

In fact the whole thing stands up pretty well after fourteen years and made me remember why Leary was such a big hit when he first went to Edinburgh all those years ago. It almost makes me forgive him his bizarre penchant for appearing in abysmal film "comedies" with Pony-Club-voiced plank Liz Hurley.

Almost.

Why you should read The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Dating and Sex*

2006-06-28T13:36:00.000-07:00

Who, honestly, doesn't want - doesn't need - this book? Nuns, possibly. Children under 10, arguably. Those in long-term monogamous relationships - you'd be surprised. (There are, after all, sections called both "How to Deal with a Cheating Lover" and "How to Have an Affair and Not Get Caught").

With advice provided by a veritable panoply of experts on such subjects as how to treat a wine-stain, get an emergency restaurant reservation, escape out of a toilet window, tell the gender of your date, deal with a drunken date and have sex in a small space, this is a truly invaluable addition to any modern urban person's private library. Just for God's sake don't leave it open on your desk at the "Useful Excuses" appendix. Samples:

- I'm too drunk
- I'm not drunk enough
- My turtle died
- I'm gay

*69p from a different charity shop, bargain fans. Cover price £9.99.

Why you should read ... David Sedaris*

2006-06-27T09:14:00.000-07:00

(Part of an occasional series of posts where I praise or slag whatever I'm reading at the moment.)

No reason on earth, on the face of it, I thought, as I stood there in the charity shop eyeing up the books section. (I get nearly all my books from charity shops. This is why I have about three thousand books, at least half of them unread). But the name rang a very vague, very distant bell ... plus it was short stories - I'm trying to educate myself further in the genre - and it had a nicely campy/ironic title-n-cover combo (Holidays on Ice, accompanied by a classy black-and-white shot of a snowflake-design tumbler full of booze). Plus it was only 49p.

And let's not forget the story titles. I was talking to my tutor quite recently and I asked him whether he thought I should change the title of one of my stories. He didn't think it was that great, but opined that titles didn't matter much anyway (possibly why all his novels have one-word, somewhat unrevealing ones). He said he always read anthologies front to back, in strict order. As someone who flicks through anthologies and even novels looking for the juiciest story or chapter title so that I can read it first, this is anathema to me, and I said so.

And here's my reasoning: story number three in Mr. Sedaris's little collection is called "Dinah, the Christmas Whore". I mean, I defy anyone not to read a story with a title like that. Sorry, but come on. It would be rude not to. And any writer who came up with a title like that would surely be worth reading, no? Even in the first, rather unpromisingly titled story, "SantaLand Diaries"? Yep, he would: witness the following gem which made me burble with laughter on the tube, which, unlike so many over-fulsome reviewers, I never do.

I had two people say that to me today, "I'm going to have you fired". Go ahead, be my guest. I'm wearing a green velvet [elf] costume; it doesn't get any worse than this. Who do these people think they are?

"I'm going to have you fired!" and I wanted to lean over and say, "I'm going to have you killed."

And that is why you should read David Sedaris.

*he's a lot better-looking in the 1997 edition photo

This week's story: Sinterklaasavond

2006-06-26T03:51:00.000-07:00

“Does everybody know what day it is today?” asked Miss Groot.
All the children looked around at each other. Did she mean the date? Mia had her hand tensed in an ave at her side, palm out, waiting to shoot up. She knew the answer because she’d asked her Dad this morning. She hadn’t thought they would be quizzed: she’d just wanted to know. Mia was curious about things.
One of the boys put his hand up uncertainly. Miss Groot smiled at him.
“Yes, Jan?”
Jan was from The Hague and spoke fast with a thick accent. Mia had only been learning Dutch for a few months and she couldn’t always understand what he said. Sometimes if she knew an answer in English Miss Groot would let her say it anyway, but she was supposed to speak Dutch all the time really.
“The day before Sinterklaas?” said Jan. He was small and bird-boned, with bright blond hair and pale blue eyes. Mia thought he looked like the school lambs in the pen in the corner of the playground. She didn’t know if he’d be annoyed if she told him that, but boys didn’t really like lambs, so she didn’t.
“And what do we call that day?” Miss Groot addressed the whole class. Mia’s hand plunged upwards in a victory punch and she strained her thigh muscles kneeling up to catch Miss Groot’s attention.
“Mia?” Miss Groot was always smiling. She had flat white teeth and thick brown hair, and was wide and round like Mia’s Mum. Mia had not cried on her first day of school much at all, because Miss Groot, who reminded her of her Mum, had come and taken her hand and told Mia she was her new teacher and she’d look after her. Some of the boys, including Jan, called Miss Groot fat, but not to her face. They liked her really, but they were boys.
“Sinterklaasavond?” That was what Mia’s dad had said in the car. Mia’s Dad was always right.
Miss Groot looked nonplussed. Mia’s lip quivered. Had she got it wrong? Mia cried easily. She didn’t mind falling down in the playground but she hated getting things wrong. She was good at things, stories and drawing and sport as well, even though she was shaped like her Mum and Miss Groot.
Miss Groot turned around and wrote Sinterklaasavond on the board in big letters. Then she handed round a pot of coloured chalk and told everyone to decorate a letter. The D of avond was left over so Mia was allowed to draw on that as well as the N, for getting it right.
Mia loved drawing. She would draw anywhere and anything with anything, even when her Dad told her off. Her plasticky magnolia bedroom wallpaper was covered in faces and trees and animals and houses and suns and flowers and on the big patch above the radiator, a whole submarine that Mia had designed and drawn all the rooms for in blue felt tip so that you could see the stuff and the people in them, like when you opened up the front of a doll’s house. She didn’t know why she’d drawn a submarine. It was better than a house though.
Mia took two chalks, green and pink, and went up to the blackboard. Jan worked next to her, on the O of avond. He was shorter than Mia and thin. She thought about lambs again. His hair wasn’t curly though. His fringe was long and he had to keep pushing out his bottom lip and blowing his fine blond hair up and out of his eyes. It looked funny. He caught Mia watching him and smiled at her.

“Today we have a visitor from a farm,” said Miss Groot, “where they keep cows and chickens and lambs.”
The visitor was a thin man who didn’t look like anybody’s Dad. He had a face blown red by the wind and brown hair like dead grass. He was carrying a scratched silver milk-urn and he addressed the class awkwardly in an odd country accent. Mia could barely understand him.
The visitor said something about the milk they drank at school, and how it was boiled and cleaned (“to make it last longer,” explained Miss Groot) and tasted different from fresh milk. He said he had some fresh milk in the urn. Mia thrilled with horror. Fresh milk out of a cow? It would be all dirty and germy. Mia’s Mum wiped down the kitchen surfaces all the time and boiled tap water before she drank it, and Mia had been warned never to drink or eat anything from a stranger. She shrank down at the back of the class, her head sagging so that her black curls dangled near the blue plastic-smelling gym mat she sat on.
Miss Groot swivelled her flat white smile around the class.
“Would anybody like to try some fresh milk?”
Mia looked around, wondering if anyone would dare. Everybody looked like they would rather try some fresh wee.
“It’s perfectly safe,” encouraged Miss Groot. Mia noticed that she wasn’t trying any. The visitor shook the urn encouragingly, as though they were a herd of sheep at feeding time, and the milk sloshed sinisterly inside.
“Come on now, who’s brave?” asked Miss Groot. Mia could tell she wasn’t going to give up until someone sacrificed themselves for the good of the class. There was a dead still silence, like waking up in the night and knowing there were monsters under the bed.
“I’ll do it,” said a boy at the back. Everyone’s heads turned at once. It was Jan, looking bored and defiant. He stood up, pulling his red t-shirt down over his skinny hips. He balled his fists in his jeans pockets and strode across the squeaking gym mats through the dotted copses of the other children. The visitor unscrewed the top of the urn and poured a half-glass into a green plastic beaker. Jan put out both hands. They were stone steady. The visitor and Miss Groot smiled at him. Jan turned around to face the class, who were watching the whole performance wide-eyed and slack-mouthed, and drank the whole lot down in one, wiping the moustache of foam off his top lip with his wrist. There was a muted gasp. Jan looked slightly sick. As he walked back to his place Mia felt her stomach turn over, but it wasn’t nausea; it was something else. She couldn’t take her eyes off his face.
“What was it like?” whispered someone as he went past.
He didn’t turn or stop.
“Warm,” he said.

After playtime they had Discussion. Today’s subject, said Miss Groot, was what they wanted for Sinterklaas. Miss Groot put everybody’s name in a hat and said that tomorrow, on Sinterklaas, everybody had to bring in a little present for the person whose name they picked. The presents could be anything, but not too big or expensive – they mustn’t spend more than five Euros. Mia got five Euros pocket money every week. It didn’t buy much, except sweets, and she wasn’t supposed to have sugar so she usually saved up and bought felt tips or Playmobil people. Most people said they wanted Playmobil. Jan said he wanted a silver pen like his Dad’s. Mia watched his blue eyes as he said it. He looked like her Mum talking about new shoes. He really wanted it. Mia couldn’t think of anything she wanted so she said zout dropjes. She loved the tart, salty liquorice they were made of. It made the spit leap out of your mouth, it was so sour. She didn’t think zout dropjes had sugar in them, either.

*

The next night, when she got home, Mia was told off and sent straight to her room. Her Mum and Dad had sat her down on the big rough white squashy sofas in the living room and explained to her, carefully and calmly, about stealing. Mia had wanted to buy it, but she hadn’t had enough money, and anyway Miss Groot had said they were only allowed to spend five Euros. She didn’t understand why it was stealing if you didn’t have the money, even after her Dad explained again. Mia had been driven back to the shop and made to give the pen back and apologise. The shopkeeper had been very nice because she was crying. She’d felt guilty. She hadn’t been crying because she was sorry, like he thought, but because she had been stupid and she hated getting things wrong.

*

Jan hadn’t looked at her for the whole rest of the day at school. He wouldn’t give the pen back and Miss Groot had been forced to take it off him in the end. He’d looked like a furious little animal, not a lamb but a cat or a bird, something wild. After playtime, which Mia spent in the pen corner feeding the lambs, whose tails twizzled like whirligigs as they sucked the bottle, Mia found that she had a new nickname. Little Groot, someone hissed at her as she passed the bookshelf. She stopped, startled. Groot was a common Dutch name, but it also meant big or fat. She looked around. None of the boys were looking at her. Jan’s pale blond head was bowed over his picture book, sulking. His long fringe hid his eyes. Mia stared down at her round legs and pouting stomach. She had never really thought about why her mother didn’t let her eat proper sweets and why she had different meals from Mum and Dad sometimes. But now she knew.
Mia felt tears clawing at the back of her eyes. She slotted her book carefully back in the shelf and raised her hand to signal she wanted to go to the toilet. Miss Groot nodded and smiled. As Mia passed Jan, he puffed out his cheeks at her. There was scorn in his eyes, bitter as zout dropjes. The tears crawled down Mia’s hot face but she pretended not to notice.

*

At dinner Mia couldn’t eat anything. The sick, empty feeling in her stomach was like the yearning lurch she’d felt when Jan drank the milk, but much worse. It felt like she had swallowed her own tears. She didn’t speak except at the end of the meal, to ask if she could get down from the table. They both nodded quietly.
Mia had her shoe in her bedroom to put out for Sinterklaas, but she didn’t bother bringing it down. If you were bad you just got coal, and she didn’t want coal in her favourite shoes. Instead she went to bed and tried to read, but she couldn’t concentrate. She realised she was hungry. She could tiptoe downstairs and take something out of the fridge, but the last time she’d done that her Mum had smacked her, hard. More than anything, Mia didn’t want to be Little Groot any more, either. She wondered how she could eat but not get fat. There must be a way. There was a way for everything, her Dad said.
Mia thought for a while, then reached up to the shelf for her Dutch vocabulary book. It had a whole food section, with lovely pictures of cakes and sweets and biscuits, cheese and bread and cornflakes and pies. Mia stared at the dessert section before carefully tearing out a chocolate cake. She put it into her mouth, gingerly. The paper tasted smooth and pasty, like flour, and then soft and pulpy and surprisingly tough as Mia chewed. But it was better than nothing, and this way she wouldn’t get fat. She swallowed with a grimacing effort, and began to tear out another picture, this time of a blancmange, with short, ripping tugs. Maybe this one would taste better. She put it in her mouth.
She curled up into a little round ball and thought about school tomorrow. She saw Jan’s puffed out face in the dark when she blinked. The gnawing empty sickness washed over her again, washed in and out like a wave, like the sea, as she chewed and chewed, waiting for the hunger to go away.

It begins ...

2006-06-25T17:37:00.000-07:00

Well, not yet. But soon, and for the rest of the summer. Maybe check back a bit later on today - I've got to edit my recent output to make sure it's fit for public consumption and has as few spelling mistakes as possible.

Also, I'm going to entertain myself by trying to find appropriate images to go with each story (not all the way through, just at the beginning). For example; Metamorphosis might have one of these snuggly little beggars to introduce it:

Awww ...