August 24th, 2010
I follow various writers’ blogs and I’m always interested to see what they are reading because they usually range over unexpected territory. In June I posted about the books I was reading or had read recently. Time to do it again.
I tried reading Elizabeth Kostova’s book The Historian but after 250 pages I had to put it down. I didn’t care enough about the characters to keep reading and I found it to be repetitious and guilty of what I was told is a major crime in novel writing – cramming in all your lovely research because you find it too interesting to leave out. leave it out, it’s a narrative traffic jam. If I was fascinated by the history and legends of Romanian vampires perhaps I would have persisted - but I’m not, so I didn’t.
I moved onto Sarah Waters’ book The Night Watch which had me right from the start. I prefer a straight narrative with no flashbacks, but I found the characters so compelling the back- to- front storytelling enhanced rather than detracted. I wanted to know more about them and finished the book with a sigh, disappointed that there was no more. I’ve bought two more of her books but have had to squirrel them away for the time being.
After the disappointment of The Historian I wanted the soothing pleasure of an old favourite so I returned to Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong and took my time with it - I’d read it before. A second, slower reading always pays off and I found myself moving deeper into the story of Steven, Isabel and the soldiers in the hell of trench warfare. A humane and riveting story.
Because I’d recently read Faulks’ The Girl at the Lion D’Or I thought I may as well go for the trifecta and picked up Charlotte Grey. I was curious about how Faulks slips secondary characters from previous books into the foreground of subsequent stories. For example, Charlotte’s father was Steven’s (Birdsong) commanding officer in World War One. Hartmann, who seduces Anne in The Girl at the Lion D’Or, finds himself on the way to a concentration camp in Charlotte Grey, along with the German Jewish doctor who rescued Steven in Birdsong.
I was also reminded of the botched film of Charlotte Grey - a disappointing translation from book to film. But aren’t they all.
I moved on to contemporary Urban Fantasy with Trent Jamieson’s Death Most Definitely. I have never been interested in fantasy, science fiction or paranormal stories. But Trent is an Australian writer, the book is set in Brisbane and he’s a stablemate of mine at Hachette Australia, so I decided I would give it a go. I loved the location and the surreal goings on in the middle of a sub tropical Australian city. The inventive and imaginative aspect of the book had me turning pages, and while I’m not a convert to the genre I have to read the next two in the series to find out what happens. If you like urban fantasy it’s a great read.
I moved onto Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise because I found a very cheap copy and had been meaning to read it for awhile and still had the taste of Vichy France in my mouth.
Paul Gray in The New York Times writes -
“”Storm in June,” the first novella of “Suite Française,” opens as German artillery thunders on the outskirts of Paris and those residents who have trouble sleeping in the unusually warm weather hear the sound of an air-raid siren: “To them it began as a long breath, like air being forced into a deep sigh. It wasn’t long before its wailing filled the sky.” … With the utmost narrative economy, sharp, scattered images coalesce into an atmosphere of dread. Parisians wake up to the realization that nothing, particularly the gallant French Army they have read and heard so much about, stands between them and the Germans, and they decide, as one, to get out fast. To depict the widespread chaos that ensues — railroads hobbled by overcrowding or bombed tracks, shortages of gasoline and food — Némirovsky concentrates on a few individuals caught up in the collective panic.”
Next I picked up a book by George Makari called Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis – a very readable account of the development of new ways of thinking about inner life, an evocation of old Middle Europe and the feuding Freudians, Jungians and Kleinians who squabbled over the intricacies of their theories while seemingly oblivious to the disastrous state Germany was sliding toward. Now I’m switching between Freud and Robert Harris’s The Ghost - about a ghost writer, a politician with a nefarious past - because I need something light to switch off with after reading about the spiteful bickering and territorial spats of theorists at play.
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June 11th, 2010
I’m always curious to know what books people are reading. It’s a bit of a nosey question, like asking what they’re having for dinner that night or what brand of knickers they have on. And it also assumes that they have a book on the go, but many people who love to read don’t have the time or energy unless they are on holiday. Or they just don’t read.
I grew up in a family of readers. That’s what we did. Sport, other than walking, was something that happened on the television and made you want to turn it off. Sporty people find that bizarre. Well, maybe so, but I didn’t know any different. I didn’t go to a live sporting event until in my thirties – and then I was only shepherding a mob of little boys. I brought a book with me and sat up the back of the stand, doling out money and food on request.
This inaugural sporting event was a soccer match. I’ve stood through endless winter mornings watching schoolboys play soccer and reading a book at these matches was akin to publicly beating your child with a mallet, so in spite of my bookish ways I became fascinated with the game. So I may have to slow down my book intake once the 2010 Soccer World Cup starts, because I can’t help myself, I have to watch. Although I’ll be hunting down a copy of Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch to read during half time.
But to satisfy those who ask I list below the books I’ve read over the last six weeks.
The Fatal Englishman, Sebastian Faulks
I’d be happy reading Faulk’s shopping list so when I stumbled on this in a second hand bookshop I grabbed it. “Faulk’s triple biography of three English prodigies who died young diligently sets each tragedy in its historical place and time to show how the feelings of a generation came to be projected upon their tragedy.” Brian Case, Time Out.
I enjoyed this book as I knew I would. At the front of the book snippets of reviews can be read and on the front cover David Hare of The Spectator declares the book to be “wildly exciting.” I don’t know what sort of life Mr Hare leads because although this is a fascinating read it’s not quite as exciting as he would have us believe.
The Group, Paul Solarotoff
Another fascinating non fiction book. Journalist, Paul Solotaroff writes about a New York therapist and the six people he is treating through group therapy. Sex addiction, compulsive spending, drug abuse, bullying husbands, crippling shyness – all worked through in the group, some successfully, some not. Solotaroff’s description of the group dynamics and the ultimate fate of the therapist is compelling.
Kate Atkinson, Case Histories
Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum
Kate Atkinson, One Good Turn
Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?
Yes, I’ve had a Kate Atkinson binge and I feel so much better for it. Although her propensity for killing women and children in her books gets to me sometimes.
Philip Kerr, March Violets
Philip Kerr, The Pale Criminal
Philip Kerr, A German Requiem
Philip Kerr, The One from the Other
and I’m halfway through …
Philip Kerr, A Quiet Flame
These five books feature a private detective, Bernie Gunther. Gunther is a fabulous character with his hard boiled morality and hilarious, dark, tough guy humour. Kerr’s research is deep and thorough, and his recreation of the Weimar years of the German Republic, and the moral minefield of Berlin in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, provide a sense of time and place so intense I wanted to get out my ration card, nylons and a ticket to Argentina.
Kerr’s Bernie Gunther books are ‘a brilliant transfer of a Chandler novel to postwar Germany. The wise guy dialogue … and the moral man making his way in an immoral world are pure Chandler. Powerful and impressive.’ The Observer.
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May 3rd, 2010
April was a hell of a month for me. Rewriting a manuscript while promoting another book has been draining. I’ve been scribbling in notebooks on planes, trains, hotel rooms, cafes, beds as well as experiencing reviews of the book for the first time, doing interviews, readings, a couple of launches and book signings, keeping the house going - sort of - and wrestling with this new world of the published author and all it’s internal and external crises.
I’ve enjoyed most of the publicity work, particularly the radio interviews and meeting booksellers at various bookshops. Aspiring writers could do no better than to go and have a chat with the managers of these bookshops to get a good feel for what people buy and why. I suspect booksellers are overlooked as a resource for unpublished writers because, apart from being busy, they don’t have a hotline to the givers of contracts. But I’ve learned so much from having a chat to both managers and staff and from looking at every detail of how books are presented to buyers in these shops.
You can look at the Nielsen Top Ten best sellers and think you’ve done your research on what readers are buying, but until you go to the coalface, you haven’t really. I’m looking forward to doing more and to having a few days break while the rewrites sit and ferment.
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March 21st, 2010
Helene Young has been writing for eleven years and her first novel, the adventure/romance Border Watch, has been published this month by Hachette Australia. I’m lucky to have Helene as a guest on my blog this week where she talks about her book, her writing and her work as a commercial pilot in North Queensland, Australia.
Helene, you work as a Check and Training Captain with a regional Australian airline and have been flying for twenty years. I’m quite awed by this and I’m curious to know what led you commercial flying.
The idea of something so heavy getting airborn fascinates me, and that fascination started when I was young. My dad had a brochure from the late 1920s for a Flying Flea, an aircraft he’d dreamed of building. From time to time he’d pull the pictures of this boxy little craft out and I’d pour over it with him, wide-eyed and awestruck. (One of these aircraft still hangs in the Brisbane Museum.)
We also spent a lot of time at Currumbin Beach and our house was under the flight path for Coolangatta airport. You could just about count the rivets in the wings as the aircraft roared in to land. A nightmare for residents now, but from a child’s perspective it was magical! The desire to fly simmered away until I was twenty-four. I still can’t quite believe I’m paid to have fun every day.
How have you found working in a male dominated industry?
Like most industries that have been the traditional preserve of men, the last few years has seen a major influx of women. In our Queensland operation, 9% of the pilot group are women. The vast majority of Cabin Crew are women, so on a fun day, there are four feisty females running the show! (Love the look on a tough mine worker’s face when he realises his life is safely in the hands of a couple of chicks.)
I’ve been privileged to have some wonderful mentors who tucked me under their wings and shared their knowledge - Gordo and Tubby get special mentions. I’m now heavily involved in Checking and Training and, while it is rarer to see another female in that role, I get to work with a fantastic team of men.
Why did you start to write, and for how long have you been writing?
I started writing with intent when we moved to Cairns for my airline job. We didn’t know anyone and I had more spare time than I knew what to do with, so I started tapping away at the keyboard. ‘This’ll be easy and a bit of fun,’ I thought. ‘I’ve always loved reading.’ As it turns out it was fun, but 11 years later it’s not been easy!
Your book, Border Watch, released by Hachette Australia in March, focuses on the flight surveillance operations on the endless Australian coastline, and features a feisty heroine, terrorists and a scene of Circular Quay being blown up, (a scene I can’t wait to read). Tell me how the idea for Border Watch developed.
I only threaten to blow up Circular Quay, Phillipa, LOL! Though every time I go through the train station I look up and wonder…
Three key events came together to create Border Watch. In 2000 a boat full of asylum seekers made its way from Indonesia, around Cape York, inside the Great Barrier Reef, past Port Douglas, and came ashore at Holloways Beach, about 5 kms from Cairns CBD. They tried to phone a taxi, but the driver became suspicious and called the police. That’s when the authorities noticed the rusting red boat resting on the sand. The next event was finding a body washed up on my local beach. That tragedy took a while to distil into something I could write about. The final thing was an influx into the airline of pilots who had flown for Coast Watch, the real surveillance operation that protects our coastline. Their stories were fascinating. They’d witnessed all manner of border incursions during their time with the operation, from asylum seekers, to pirates and drug smugglers. All good fodder for an overactive imagination!
You live in Cairns near the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland, a very beautiful part of the world. Is developing a sense of place an important part of your writing?
Place is so important to me. I hope I’ve made the Australian landscape another character in Border Watch. The moods, the colours, the drama, make for a wonderful vibrant canvas. Most people won’t have the opportunity to see northern Australia from my perspective. I hope I can transport them there without them having to leave the comfort of their hammock or fireside armchair.
How do you find writing and piloting aircraft fitting in together? Obviously you’re not preoccupied with character dialogue while you’re bringing a plane into land, but you must meet many people who spark your imagination.
I won’t admit to having internal dialogues coming into land, Phillipa –might be too disconcerting for the travelling public! A girlfriend insists it’s fortunate I’m a Gemini… split personalities come in handy… There are days when I wonder myself how it fits together. In aviation, I’m checklist driven, numbers focused, analytical left-brain oriented. When I write I’m anything but analytical! The two roles need to stay very separate and perhaps the act of putting on a uniform helps to keep that distance.
I meet people who inspire me in the strangest places. Just last night a group of us were having dinner at a Thai restaurant close to the Sydney hotel. One of the pilot’s mother and new partner joined us. The gentleman was a fireman – my next story involves fires, so it was serendipitous!
What book are you currently reading and where is your favoured reading spot?
If you ask me in a couple of weeks it will be ‘The Book of Love’!
Meanwhile, I’m reading Undercover by Damian Marrett. I read anywhere I can. For now the seat on a jet heading home (as a passenger) is the most likely place I have time to read. It’s so important to keep reading, but when time’s tight that’s one of the luxuries I lose…
Thanks for having me on your blog, Phillipa.
Thanks for being my guest, Helene. I loved Border Watch even though you didn’t blow up Circular Quay. Perhaps just a small explosion in the next one - confine it to Fort Denison? I look forward to Beyond Borders, published by Hachette Australia in 2011.
To celebrate the arrival of The Book of Love and Border Watch Helene and I are asking my blog readers to tell us where they like to curl up with a book. The most interesting will win a copy of The Book of Love and the runner up will receive a copy Border Watch
See links page for link to Helene’s website
Helene signing a copy of Border Watch
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January 26th, 2010
In my past life in the visual arts world I noted – along with thousands of others – that any overtly female artwork, not feminist, but dealing with the business of being of the female gender, was neatly sidelined as ‘women’s art’. Some female students scrambled valiantly to get away from this label because it was the kiss of marginalisation and obscurity. But some embraced it with an enthusiasm and passion usually reserved for the beheading of aristocrats in revolutions.
Sculpture departments in art schools are full of traditional masculine technologies such as woodworking, metalwork, steel, clay and so on. During my time as a student in a sculpture department all the permanent staff were in their men in their forties, (the part timers were female). At the end of each term students would display whatever it was they were working on and the staff, and other students, would gather around for what was termed a critique.
When a female student exhibited a ‘female’ piece of work the tension became unbearable, because criticising these artworks was impossible. The male teaching staff - poor bastards - were being asked to walk through a minefield. Bristling female students held their breath as they anticipated a bloody explosion, but the male students wandered off – it didn’t concern them, it was a chick thing. And anyway, it was ‘women’s art’ – made them a bit squeamish, a bit guilty and a lot bored.
So what’s the point of this little story, I hear you ask. The point is, despite being fifty one per cent of the world’s population, representation of women and their lives is still considered a minority interest, and of lower status than the dominant masculinised culture. New York Times film critic, Manhola Dargis, talks about this problem in regards to Hollywood filmmaking. (Jezebel.com, December 14)
“There’s a reason that women go to movies like Mamma Mia. It’s a terrible movie… but women are starved for representation of themselves. … It’s a vicious cycle. We’re (women) not going to movies because there aren’t movies for us. Therefore we’re not seen as a loyal movie going audience. My point is that if there are stories about women, women will come out for that…
That’s why [women] go to a movie like The Devil Wears Prada and make huge hits. They want to see women in movies. People in the trade press constantly frame that as a surprise. This, gee whiz, Sex and the City’s a hit, Twilight, hmm, wonder what’s going on here. Maybe they should not be so surprised. In the trade press, women audiences are considered a niche. How is that even possible? We’re 51 percent of the audience.”
To generalise, women are interested in stories about relationships between people. In popular culture romance and women’s fiction are invariably focussed on relationships both within the family and beyond, how woman negotiate these relationships and how individual women find a place in our society. These books represent us to ourselves – larger than life, sure, but with a core of truth that we recognise. However these books are marginalised, and in the case of romance, trivialised and stigmatised.
A relative of mine can’t get his head around the fact that I’ve chosen to write romantic comedy. The word ‘romantic’ sticks in his throat. He just can’t understand why an overeducated, intelligent western woman would be writing such things.
And I’ll tell you why – Australian author and academic Bronwyn Parry describes romantic fiction as having four main characteristics – a concern with relationships, with the emotional arc or journey of the characters, affirming the power of love and with an optimistic ending. I’m interested in relationships, I’m interested in exploring emotions, I know happy endings don’t mirror reality but people like to be uplifted occasionally. And I do believe in the transformational power of love – not in some queasy pink Hallmark way, but as a human who has had lovers, children, partners, friends and parents, and seen love at work. Everybody is, or has been, on a journey toward intimacy with another human being – it’s not a minority experience.
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January 20th, 2010
Ennui and schadenfreude are what linguists would call loan words. We English speakers pinched them from the French and the Germans respectively because they are just too good not to use.
Tolstoy described ennui as a ‘desire for desires’. As a word it carries much more glamour than the approximate word in English – bored. The woman was too bored to do anything, versus the woman on the couch was filled with ennui. The latter sentence has a story somewhere, a touch of decadence, a hint of wistfulness and a jaded, over sophisticated glamour to it. The former sentence speaks of one who lacks motivation, imagination and perhaps has uncouth personal habits.
And schadenfreude – pleasure in others misfortune. Another word stuffed with shades and nuance. The Wikipedia article on schadenfreude mentions the Latin equivalent – delectatio morosa or in English, ‘morose delectation’. As a phrase it doesn’t quite have the same flavour, although it’s quite delightful in itself. Apparently it was a sin in the medieval church to ‘dwell with delectation on evil thoughts,’ but I imagine that didn’t stop people.
As they say, so much is lost in translation. Nothing is more irritating than watching a French or German film using subtitles with a companion who is a fluent speaker of either language – they sit next to you, snorting and tittering, then lean over and tell you the subtitles are only rudimentary and the subtleties cannot be conveyed without knowing the language.
I’ve been dwelling on thoughts of translation at the moment. I’m reading a book by a French writer and although I don’t know for sure, I think much has been skewed by the translation. It doesn’t read well in areas and I can only assume that the translation is at fault. But the translator, as noted on the book, is an academic and prize winning translator. So what is going wrong? Either I’m being too picky, or too generous to the writer. Some of the scenes involve the characters using dialect, colloquialisms and slang. The translator appears to have used American and sometimes British colloquial speech to stand for French and it just doesn’t work – for me anyway.
The book is not literature and I doubt learned scholars will debate the author’s meaning for years at a time. In today’s publishing climate I’d imagine the publishing house that bought the rights would offer the translation job to various experts and the result accepted as good enough. Or would another editor go over the translation - one who spoke both English and French and suggest alternatives? It could become lengthy and expensive if that were the case.
I recently listened to a radio program about two translators, an older couple - husband and wife - one French, one Russian, who live in Paris and are currently working on a new translation of War and Peace. The woman noted it was not uncommon for them to debate the meaning of a word all afternoon. How glorious. I could hear the slow tick of a wooden clock, see old couches and a sun dappled floor, the busy streets of Paris outside, the cacophony of mobile phones echoing everywhere, and these two, with perhaps coffee and a small glass of cognac beside them, deep in thought and conversation about a word. Now this is the sort of treatment War and Peace deserves. French thrillers probably get translators with serious work habits, less poetic natures and a liking for instant coffee.
Random House in Germany has bought the Book of Love’s translation rights. What they come up with will no doubt be a good translation. But I wouldn’t be able to tell, because I don’t speak German. I’m not too worried about it, I’ll simply assume that the translator gets it right and the book, with my name on it, makes sense to the readers.
This year, for various reasons and simply for the challenge, I am attempting to learn French, with the aim, eventually, of being able to read French novels. The idea of such an effort of mind being put toward a seemingly trivial pursuit appeals to me enormously.
War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“The great novel of the Napoleon excursion into Russia is brought to all its glory by the veteran translators who have been methodically slashing their way through the Russian classics. Their deft work with both Russian and French (Russian nobility spoke primarily French) is a remarkable feat. When I asked my editor, the worldly wonderful Beena Kamlani at Penguin, whether I should read this, she replied, “It will make you glad to have been alive in order to be able to read this.”
Robb Spillman, TinHouse Publishing Blog
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January 17th, 2010
I’m hard at work on finishing my current writing project and have very little space in my mind left for other activities. Anti social? Yes, but that’s the way it is for writers – and indeed for anyone who works for themselves. So instead of posting new pieces this month I’m going to have a sort of ‘best of’ from the early days of this blog.
This first piece – ‘Choosing the Right Word’ was selected by Harper Collins Fifth Estate website for re-blogging in June 2009.
I am busy engaging in the old must-sharpen-pencils-before-I-can-write strategy. Procrastination, as it is commonly known. But as I write on a laptop, I don’t need the pencils. Perhaps I could check my email – there might be something interesting or urgent waiting for me. Or I could look slightly to the left and stare out the window. Or I could look up the meaning of ‘procrastinate’. May as well know the exact meaning of my current state of mind.
I am, according to the Dictionary.com site, deferring action, and delaying until an opportunity is lost. My 1911 copy of the Oxford English dictionary goes one step further and accuses me of being dilatory. I dilated even further when I dug up my trusty 1952 copy of Roget’s Thesaurus, and I discovered that to engage in procrastination could also be described as engaging in Fabian Tactics.
Fabian Tactics? This could lead to some excellent procrastination.
I nipped over to Wikipedia, despite having an ancient set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. To get out of my chair and walk into the living room, pull down the index and find the entry on the Fabian Society, replace the index and find the relevant volume is just too much like hard work, and possibly against the spirit of Fabian Tactics.
The Fabian Society, according to Wikipedia is ‘a British intellectual socialist movement whose purpose is to advance the principles of Social Democracy via gradualist and reformist, rather than revolutionary means’.
So where does the procrastination come in? To be reformist is not deferring action. I was missing something. On reading further I discovered the Fabians to be named after the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus, nicknamed, (beware transposing those letters…) ‘Cunctator,’ meaning The Delayer, whose battle strategy consisted of the guerrilla tactics of harassment rather than direct confrontation on the battlefield.
It is true that I am not approaching my writing task in a confrontational way, but nor am I conducting guerrilla warfare with it. The term Fabian Tactics proved not be the definition I was after and I returned to Thesaurus where I discovered I was, by procrastinating, indulging in ‘masterly inactivity’, ‘fribbling’ or – thank you Quintus Fabius, ‘cunctating.’
The opportunity to procrastinate is one to savour. But I went one step further back to the old word ‘leisure,’ yesterday and went to bed for the afternoon with Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Be not alarmed, jaded reader, I speak of the newly released Penguin edition in the recognisable orange black and white cover. The covers hark back, (clever Penguin marketing people), to a slower time, a time when choosing a book was not an act decided by a visceral attraction to the cover image.
To pry myself away from the screen and re educate myself in reading has become a compelling obsession for me lately. The screen brings anxiety, brings demands, brings urgency. The book allows me to escape.
I am also about to re engage in an old technology – writing a letter with pen and paper. A novel and charming idea. Imagine the freedom, to squiggle and draw, to scrawl when I want and to do perfect modified cursive if I want. To sketch a little picture next to my words and to not have to master thirty computer programs in order to do so. One drawback. Once written, it can’t be changed. No going back and editing, no cut and paste, no second chances. Get it right first time or not at all.
My father spent the second half of his working life in a position that required him to write long, detailed legal decisions. Despite his assistants and staff all using computers, he would write his decisions in longhand. When asked by me, completely bemused by how he did it without Word, he replied, that he thought about each sentence before he wrote it.
I raised my eyebrows and nodded slowly. Simple question, simple answer.
To write and get it right first time is a challenging concept. My father used an A4 notepad and ballpoint pen and worked on a desk free of clutter. He never used correcting fluid and prided himself on the evenness of his handwriting. (You can imagine what our family dinners were like.)
My handwriting lurches from hastily scrawled printing to illegible and all variations in between. And it deteriorates the more I use a keyboard. When I write handwritten notes my hand grips the pen in an unsteady way, like an accident victim learning to walk again.
I have read, where I don’t know, that writers working on computers tend to become more ‘wordy.’ One would expect from that observation that handwriting a book favoured an economy of style, and yet to read a nineteenth century novel is to experience ‘wordy’ sometimes to exasperating excess.
Did Anthony Trollope cunctate when faced with writing Barchester Towers at 200,372 words? To produce a manuscript of 85, 000 words I have written perhaps 200,000. I whittle away, replace, add a bit, cut, cut more, cut another chunk, until I am satisfied, and it is a long process despite the ease computers lend to writing. Whereas Trollope might have had to get it right first time - by gaslight with pen, nib and notebook. And yet I, with all my modern tools, am still dilating and cunctating. But Trollope’s readers had the leisure for his lengthy books, and my readers, like me, can only steal fragments of leisure in between answering phones, emails, social networking messages, twittering, exhaustion and those gorgeous moments where they allow themselves to cunctate.
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January 5th, 2010
Happy endings. They’re a problem, aren’t they?
Of course, some people rubbish the whole notion of ‘happy endings’, finding them ridiculously simplistic and perhaps evidence of the lowbrow tastes of those who loll about all day in peach coloured negligees eating soft centred chocolates and reading bodice rippers – as so many of us do.
Happy endings are said to be evidence of patriarchal brain washing, seducing innocent young females into fantasies of rescue and everlasting married bliss when they should be fantasising about their earning potential as merchant bankers or realising their inner potential by climbing Everest without oxygen and sans makeup. Marriage these days is not the neat end of the story; it’s not the one and only aim of contemporary western women as it used to be portrayed, particularly in post war popular culture.
It’s not the only aim, if it is an aim at all, because we know that in real life happy endings, where the lovers remain dreamily happy forever, just don’t happen. Lovers turn into partners – or not – and a whole truckload of interpersonal issues get dumped on their white picket fence and, if they stay together, they’ll be dealing with these issues until death or divorce part them.
The story of the courtship, not the forty-year aftermath, is what concerns your average romantic comedy writer. In popular fiction and film, the courtship is much more fun than the marriage because many deeper personality issues have yet to surface and we can enjoy the projected dreams and desires as much as the characters do. We can laugh at their bumbling and misunderstandings, recognising and laughing at ourselves all the while. But where to put that full stop? How can we end on an optimistic note at this point when we know what lies ahead of them?
Marriage, a lifelong commitment to another person is a hard road to travel, and almost half of those who attempt it fall by the wayside. Sustaining a marriage requires relationship skills, generosity, hope, forgiveness and an ability to reach deep into the self to find these things. It’s complicated, more so than most of us imagine when we sign on. Marriage can’t signify a happy ending in this era. So I’m still a bit wary of plonking a marriage at the end of my stories. But we still need resolution and we want an uplifting conclusion that will somehow temper the remorseless of reality, and what marriage does do is signify commitment, and maybe commitment is the optimistic ending we are after.
Getting married is an expression of hope, symbolizing that you will do your best when the bad times come – which they will – to keep the relationship together. So why should that commitment in itself be a happy ending? Why not make serial monogamy or multiple lovers or celibacy the gold standard of human happiness? Because a functioning, intimate and sexually exclusive relationship with a person you respect and enjoy being with – sustained until the end of life, meets so many of our human needs that it is, let’s face it, what most people, male and female, yearn for.
So when the lovers on screen or in the book finally sort out their differences and decide they want to be together, that is what we are wishing for them. Not a sugary, improbable happy ending, but the strength and good fortune to sustain the love until the end of their lives. We know the odds are long, but we close the book or leave the theatre hoping their white picket fence stays upright and only needs a few coats of paint over it’s lifetime.
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December 13th, 2009
Christmas.
What more can I say? That one word conjures up one’s personal images of heaven and hell. Memories of family fights, a friend being genuinely thrilled by a gift you chose for them, hangovers, kids waking at three am, kids in the street with their new bikes, eating all the food you don’t really like because you have to, cringing at the treacly slop that passes for Christmas slogans, you know the ones – ‘goodwill to all mankind,’ and so on, visiting aged rels who declare grumpily that they must be about to die because we’ve all made the effort to visit, spending far too much money and not remembering six months later what gifts you gave or received.
And in Australia, heat, cicada’s thrumming, swimming, sunburn, sand, leftover ham, and the feeling that if you ever see another glass of cold champagne it will be too soon. Here, in the sybaritic Land of Oz, Christmas is – as my old Dad is very fond of saying - a midsummer retail fest. An orgy of consumption fuelled by the sensual pleasures of summer and the knowledge that January is the month for lazing and playing.
And for some of us – reading.
I love a bookshop in the Christmas season. Bulging with new stock, tarted up with promotional material, selling pretty cards and opening itself up like a glorious spring bloom. Presents from my parents, for most of my life, have been books. I suspect - no, I know, - the pleasure my father took in choosing books for my sister and myself. I know this because I love choosing books for people - and getting it right. Sad to say a lot of the time I miss the mark, but I’ve had enough bullseyes for me to persist.
I won’t be buying an e-reader anytime soon however, for myself or for anyone else. Like most of us these days, including children and teenagers, I spend too long in front of a screen. I work all day in front of it, and sometimes at night as well – browsing and so on. But if I really want to switch off and relax I pick up a book. I can’t do this with a screen. Besides I like the physicality of the book, it’s ease of use and portability - and I’m a sucker for book covers. But mostly I want to detach from the digital world and submerge into the soothing, familiar analogue world. The generations coming after me may not know this pleasure, but that’s not my problem. I’m in the here and now, and all my life books with pages and type have played a huge part, and will continue to do so.
I was reading about the popular Nintendo package of the Worlds Great Literature – Dickens, Shakespeare and Austen read on a Nintendo with background music. Fair enough, I suppose. It’s a bit like buying a set of encyclopaedias in the pre digital era and having them displayed on one’s bookshelf – and hoping you’ll be endowed with erudition simply through owning the books. I’d love to know how many people read King Lear on their Nintendo.
I am a bit of a museum addict. I adore walking through hushed halls full of interesting objects. I feel a huge sense of calm descend. I like to look at the stuff of the object – the texture, the marks of human activity, the space it takes up (always surprising), and wonder about the person who owned it or made it. I dislike visiting museums that abandon object display for video touch screens (nearly always broken due to the enthusiasm of small people). Video or films give flatness to a museum, a containment that doesn’t allow for dreaming or speculating. I don’t know if it’s fair to place e-readers in this same category, but I’ll be very curious to find out. I suspect I’ll find a use for one, maybe for certain reference books or cookbooks, but I doubt they will ever replace my addiction to the book.
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December 8th, 2009
Writing about a place you have never been to is a challenge. If you write fantasy or science fiction it all comes from your own head – and it’s impossible for anyone to check your account for accuracy- consistency and atmosphere, maybe, but not accuracy.
Historical fiction writers rely on first hand accounts of the era they are interested in. But if your stories are set in contemporary times then you may have some problems. I don’t like reading books set in the cities I’ve lived in unless the writer obviously knows the places well. Everybody experiences a place differently, of course, but if you know a city very well, it’s easy to be distracted and disappointed if the writer doesn’t seem to and yet has set a story there.
A couple of years ago I set myself the challenge of writing about a city I had never been to – Berlin. I’d been to other German cities, but not Berlin. I was writing a sequel to a manuscript I’d finished in which one of the main characters is from Berlin. I loved those characters and couldn’t let go of them, so I decided to write the next chapter in their lives. I didn’t have a publisher and I hadn’t ever submitted the first manuscript to an agent or publisher, so writing a sequel was either an act of supreme confidence or simply because I needed to.
I bought maps of Berlin and used Google Earth, read guidebooks and fiction, looked at photos, both current and old. I picked the area the characters would live in, I could describe the view from their flat, I found their nearest cafés and shops, their bus routes into the city and wrote at least fifty thousand words. But I had to stop eventually. I knew I couldn’t evoke the place to my satisfaction without ever having been there. I worried that if the manuscript were ever published it would be obvious I had never been there. To evoke atmosphere or a place you need more than a guidebook and photos, you need the smells, the temperature, the faces of the people, the food in the shops, the dirt on the road, the feel of the air, the light and the sky and the everyday sounds. I couldn’t do it.
A few days ago I bought an airline ticket to Germany and I’m experiencing waves of excitement whenever I think about it - even though there’s well over two hundred sleeps to go. There are other reasons for going, of course, but going to Berlin after trying for months to capture the place will be and very interesting experience. I’ll go to the areas I wrote about, not fact checking, because I can do that anywhere, but to get the feel of the place, and to check on my characters and see if they are still happy living there. If I don’t find the house I imagined for them I suspect I’ll be very disoriented, but then again, I may just see them walking through the Tiergarten hand in hand.
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Habitual Reading Two
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