February, 2012
What price success?
With the launch of my latest novel in Edinburgh imminent (next Tuesday), my thinking has been tuned to all things literary. And I’ve just been interviewed by a lovely lady from The Evening News whose questions have made me remember all over again why I do what I do.
When your mind is in this groove it’s amazing how often stories about books crop up. Especially success stories.
In the news this week, for example, self-published crime-writer Kerry Wilkinson actually got a mention in The Telegraph. He’s just become the most popular e-book author on the Kindle Store, selling over 150,000 copies of his debut novel (NB. not the 250,000 the newspaper reported). No agent, no publicist either. That’s going some! He’s a sports journalist by background and he wrote Locked In as a challenge to himself apparently. He sold it for 98p and used online media to promote it. OK, I’m listening!
By contrast Sarah Winman had a massive publicity drive to kick-start her debut novel: When God was a Rabbit. 
Thousands upon thousands of free copies were reportedly given away pre-publication (I can’t find the exact number now I want it) and that novel has gone on to win awards and accolades aplenty. Not my personal favourite read though, I must confess, but acclaimed by authors/reviewers whose opinion I respect.
Then there was Eva Rice, Sir Tim Rice‘s daughter, who’s currently writing her fourth novel. A report this week said she regretted publishing her first one at the age of 23, because it isn’t up to the standard of her later books. Nothing earth-shattering there. But I sympathise; I’ve disowned my first one too. And Ian Rankin once said that it’s because no book is ever perfect, that authors feel compelled to keep writing, striving for that goal.
And you’ve probably heard that 24 year-old Amanda Knox, imprisoned and tried for, and then acquitted of the brutal murder of her flatmate, Meredith Kercher, in 2007 in Perugia, has just signed a book deal with HarperCollins, allegedly worth £2.5 million. And she won’t even write it! (I daren’t even tell you the size of my advance, but you can be sure it’s nothing like that.)
Given that I’m seriously considering the best way forward for me now I’ve fulfilled my contracts with Luath Press, these stories all contribute to the decision making process. I think I’ve almost formulated a plan but I’m still open to persuasion.
A mental spring clean
This week I’ve ticked several things off the list that have been lingering far too long. Feels good. A kind of mental spring clean.
Most importantly for this blog, all my books in Kindle format have now been reduced to 88p – a target I’ve had in mind for some time. Question is: will they now tick boxes for a different kind of reader? Time will tell.
On the domestic front, the railings and gates at the front of our house have at last been installed. Just over a year after the accident (first reported in this post).
It’s rarely that we call in workmen chez nous, but this last couple of weeks we’ve had two sets of men working on our behalf; repairing the stonework of our 19th century establishment, as well as replacing the iron work. You hear endlessly of sloppy timing and poor workmanship, but I’ve been so impressed by these two teams. What skill. What precision. What a transformation. What’s more they were all so friendly and quiet and courteous and focused. Meticulous perfectionists. Highly recommended. Thanks to their abilities and application we launch into 2012 with a new image.
And indoors there’s my own year-long project. Contrary to what my blog might suggest, reading and writing don’t absorb all of my time. But I am a self-confessed workaholic. I find it hard to give myself permission to ease off. I do know it’s an unhealthy way to go on, though, so last January I resolved to take time out to relax before bedtime as often as I could. By way of motivation I started a complicated piece of counted thread work (already a hobby of mine) and set myself a target of early December by which to get it finished.
My timetabling was thrown by a rush of visitors and various unexpected illnesses and crises however; 
things that just had to take precedence over several months, and consequently it was actually January 2012 before I sewed on the last bead. Here’s the completed article ready to go for framing – to be converted into a Christmas firescreen, I hope. In reality it’s alive with sparkling gold thread and colourful beads which you can’t see to best effect in the photo.
All the credit for the finished product though should go to the minds that created the design, and worked out the careful combination of colours, and strategic placement of beads and gold thread. I simply followed their instructions.
Oh, and before I forget … I promised to let you know how that acer (maple tree to you and me) damaged in the crash, fared – the one that valiantly sprouted new growth against all odds (see post). 
Having been buried in rubble for a year, sprayed with various building materials and tramped on by heavy boots, the poor thing has finally given up the ghost entirely. Time to move on. Ticked off the list but not forgotten.
Birdsong
I’m having to eat a large slice of humble pie this week. It all started when I watched the BBC 1 drama, Birdsong, shown the weekend before last, and jumped to far too many conclusions.
It’s almost unheard of for me to read a novel for a second time, but that’s what I’ve felt compelled to do with Birdsong
by Sebastian Faulks. Strange really to think that it’s taken eighteen years to dramatise this book which received such critical acclaim in 1994. But at least it was shown in a prime time slot at the weekend when it did finally get an airing.
Although it’s come in for its fair share of criticism, I personally enjoyed the film, but nevertheless had a sense of disquiet (as I usually do in these circumstances) about the extent to which the drama differed from the book. How would the author feel seeing his careful creation thus distorted? It’s ages since I read the book, so I couldn’t be sure, but my sense was that the main male protagonist seemed too weak, both as a potential lover and as a military officer; the romance seemed implausibly fast-paced; the response to the child Françoise too chaotic.
However, I still had my paperback – too good to give away – so I decided to check it out for myself while the film was still fresh in my mind. There is inevitably a degree of licence taken, but to my amazement, the BBC version followed the book much more closely than I remembered, and indeed more so than adaptations usually do.
The story has two main elements: the First World War and a romance. In the book the two are compartmentalised; in the film they’re interwoven to excellent effect.
Stephen Wraysford is 20 when he goes to France to learn more about the textile trade. Portrayed by Eddie Redmayne, he seemed a bit of a wimp, a pretty boy who did a lot of staring in a gormless kind of way. And not exactly gifted in the communication stakes either. Surely not the kind of fella who the beautiful and mature Isabelle Azaire (Clémence Poésy) would fall for. But, there it is in black and white. He’s
‘a tall figure with hands thrust into his pockets, his eyes patient and intent, the angle of his body that of a youthful indifference cultivated by willpower and necessity. It was a face which in turn most people treated cautiously, unsure whether its ambivalent expressions would resolve themselves into passion or acquiescence.’
He does indeed do a lot of ‘staring‘, his ‘face expressionless’. I apologise for doubting the scriptwriter (Abi Morgan), director (Philip Martin) and the actor.
So, what of the precipitate pursuit of the lovely but very dignified Isabelle? In the film they’ve hardly got past the coy looks and one touch of ankles before he’s romping in the red room with her, all caution, all decorum, thrown to the winds. Given the discrepancy in their ages and backgrounds, their relative positions, and the protocol of the times, surely not, I thought. But lo and behold, it’s all there, early in the book – ‘the uncontrollable fury of his desire, fully reciprocated by Isabelle‘. Indeed Isabelle is even more abandoned in the written account of their dealings.
The story of the child Françoise coming to terms with a father who is hugely damaged by the war is admittedly very different in the book, but the film version neatly gets over the omission of a chunk of the narrative that centres on Wraysford’s granddaughter. And the essential truth of the account is neither lost nor distorted by the adaptation. So hats off again to the script writer.
Then there’s the war story. Tall order to capture that, but has it been true to Faulk’s narrative? Wraysford on screen seems initially to be far too timid and fearful to command the respect of his men in the trenches or on no-man’s-land. Surely he’d have had to appear more assertive. But no. A sergeant major says of him: ‘he seemed forgetful and distant … as though he was not all there’ He has a ‘blank, remote expression’, a great ‘void in his soul’. Redmayne took this on board faithfully.
And behind that glazed look beats a failing heart. A scared and haunted man, ill-suited to the task of taking his troops into battle. On the night before a major offensive he explains in a letter:
I am frightened of dying. I have seen what shells can do. I am scared of lying wounded all day in a shellhole. Isabelle, I am terribly frightened I shall die alone with no one to touch me. But I have to show an example. I have to go over [the top] first in the morning. Be with me, Isabelle, be with me in spirit. Help me to lead them into what awaits us.’
The depiction of the war itself in the book is even more horrific than the film version and that was graphic enough. Faulks captures the mood and the mounting tension brilliantly. The feelings of the men facing almost certain death in the Somme attack are evident in a series of poignant letters home, full of false reassurances. Then a moving tense and sleepless night of waiting, dreading.
‘Eight hours before the revised time of attack the guns went quiet, preserving shells for the morning.
It was night-time, but no man slept…
Towards four, the lowest time of the night, there was a mortal quiet along the line. No one spoke. There was for once no sound of birds …
Gray, urgent, sour-breathed at the head of the communication trench. ‘The attack will be at seven thirty.’
The platoon commanders were stricken, disbelieving. “In daylight? In daylight?” The men’s faces cowed and haunted when they were told.’
The account of what Stephen Wraysford sees and feels in no-man’s-land when they do eventually go over the top, when they reach the wire, makes heart-stopping reading. The ‘unlivable reality’ as that ‘ragged suicidal line … trudged towards the pattering death of mounted guns’ while all around them ‘packets of lives with their memories and loves go spinning and vomiting into the ground‘. I won’t spoil the effect of the chapter by reproducing parts of it here. You have to build up to it to appreciate the description fully. How anyone returned sane after what they had seen is a mystery.
‘They had seen things no human eyes had looked on before, and they had not turned their gaze away … they had seen the worst and they had survived … they had locked up in their hearts the horror of what they had seen.’ In ‘their sad faces was the burden of their unwanted knowledge. They ‘did not feel hardened or strengthened’ but ‘impoverished and demeaned.’
Stephen himself carries out an act utterly unimaginable except in the First World War trenches – included in sanitised form in the film. And goes on to develop a murderous rage against the people who killed the men he loved; much more poignantly comprehensible in the book. Indeed the rationale for much of what was done needs the slower exploration of the written prose to unravel and explain it.
The bomb blasts and terrible wounds we saw on our screens, too, are multiplied several times in the written word, with its body parts in extraordinary places. Incredibly powerful writing.
‘”Of course,” the lieutenant said with a sigh, “the war has provided all of us with daily lessons in anatomy. I could write a paper on the major organs of the British private soldier. Liver in section. Bowel, extent of when eviscerated. The powdery bone of the average English subaltern.”‘
‘… his head was cut away in section, so that the smooth skin and handsome face remained on one side, but on the other were the ragged edges of skull from which the remains of his brain were dropping onto his scorched uniform.’
‘… there was a roar in the tunnel and a huge ball of earth and rock blew past them. It took four men with it, their heads and limbs blown away and mixed with the rushing soil. … Jack saw part of Turner’s face and hair still attached to a piece of skull rolling to a halt where the tunnel narrowed where he had been digging. There was an arm with a corporal’s stripe on it near his feet, but most of the men’s bodies had been blown into the moist earth.’
After witnessing this carnage in the tunnel, following over six hours of digging forty-five feet underground in pitch darkness with ‘several hundred thousand tons of France above his face‘, Jack Firebrace (brilliantly acted by Joseph Mawie) drags himself over to the dugout, burdened by the knowledge of his own mistake which had led to these deaths. There he is given a letter from his wife but with masterly understatement Faulks writes
‘He folded it away inside his pocket. He could not bring his mind to bear on the distant world her handwriting suggested. He was afraid he would not understand her letter, that she would be telling him something important his mind was too tired to register.’
Firebrace is one of the miners who digs underground tunnels under enemy lines. I hadn’t appreciated their role in the war before. In the book his inner thoughts and conflicts provide vivid insights beyond the scope of any BBC drama, as he worries about his son John back at home suffering, possibly dying, from diphtheria; about his own court martial and probable death; his personal responsibility for interpreting the sounds of enemy action; his need not to form too close a friendship with men who will be blown to smithereens in front of him.
I think I felt the accumulating horror more deeply knowing that my own uncle was one of those whose ‘shattered flesh’ was left to lie in ‘stinking shellholes in the beet-crop soil,’ in that very place in France where Stephen Wraysford fought for king and country. 
Uncle Harold’s name is chiselled into that memorial in Thiepval to the unfound, ‘the lost’ – newly cleaned up to preserve it for posterity. I can only hope my grandmother never heard a true account of ‘the hellish perversion’ he must have experienced. Her heart could not have withstood Faulk’s description of the carnage. It moved me to tears on his behalf, and he died before even my mother was born.
So, all in all, contemplating the atrocities of war, the sacrifices these men – boys really – and their families made, and facing up to my own misconceptions, I’ve had a humbling week.
A Lifetime Burning
January was a cracker of a month as far as books were concerned for me this year. And in their different ways they’ve contributed greatly to my own writing (a novel about organ donation) which has taken off again now that other deadlines have been met. The one I want to tell you about this week has given me the courage to take risks. It breaks all sorts of ‘rules’ about writing but nonetheless – or is it as a result? – garners praise.
It’s thanks to bloggers Stuck-in-a-Book and Cornflower that I heard about A Lifetime Burning by Linda Gillard in the first place. Then the blurb about it took me hotfoot to Amazon to buy it.
‘Flora Dunbar is dead. But it isn’t over.
The spectre at Flora’s funeral is Flora herself, unobserved by her grieving family and the four men who loved her. Looking back over a turbulent lifetime, Flora recalls an eccentric childhood lived in the shadow of her musical twin, Rory; early marriage to Hugh, a handsome clergyman twice her age; motherhood, which brought her Theo, the son she couldn’t love; middle age, when she finally found brief happiness in a scandalous affair with her nephew, Colin…’
The Kindle version was only 88p! Positively scandalous for a novel as good as this one.
The prologue is narrated by Flora, a tortured soul, reflecting on her life after her death. There’s no carefully paced introduction of each new character to avoid confusion; the entire cast are there in one fell swoop – at Flora’s funeral. And the author even gives away key elements of the coming plot right at the outset. You are left in no doubt: this is going to be an uncomfortable read.
‘Theodora Dunbar, matriarch, known always as Dora, is ninety-three. Only my mother could manage to look commanding in a wheelchair … Dora’s wheelchair is manoeuvred by one of her grandsons, Colin. My ex-lover. My nephew. My brother Rory’s son – like Rory, but much darker …
Theo. My son. At thirty-four, a few months older than Colin, taller, fairer, finer-featured and always said to favour me. Everyone agreed Theo’s Apollonian good looks owed little to Hugh. Theo is a Dunbar through and through …
My niece Charlotte is not present. She is on the other side of the globe, the distance she thought necessary to put between herself and my son …
Grace hated me. I can’t say I blamed her. She had good reason. Several, in fact. But if you asked my gracious sister-in-law why she hated me, she’d say it was because I seduced her precious firstborn, relieved him of the burden of his virginity, chewed him up and spat him out on the admittedly sizeable scrap-heap marked ‘Flora’s ex-lovers’. That’s what Grace would say. But she’d be lying. That isn’t why Grace hated me. Ask my brother Rory.’
But far from stealing the coming thunder prematurely, this tantalising glimpse into a complex family structure where nothing is as it seems, and where powerful emotions and talents lead to complicated and unlawful liaisons, serves as an irresistible promise of the haunting and disturbing story to come. And the book certainly lives up to that promise.
It’s well written as well as cleverly constructed. Flora’s posthumous revelations interwoven with third person narrative keep the story spinning along. The setting spans six decades – from the 1940s to 2000, and the story dots backwards and forwards in time. Initially I found this disconcerting. You’re just getting involved with the twins as children when the fifty-eight year old Flora interrupts. You’re sympathising with Dora’s struggles with her toddler twins when the scene flashes forwards a generation to her daughter’s confused feelings for her son. But once you get to know the characters, you start to appreciate how effectively and subtly the author is steering you towards an understanding of the ‘why’, as well as the ‘how’, of the Dunbar family shenanigans. This has to be a fiendishly difficult kind of writing to pull off successfully; in the case of A Lifetime Burning it’s a brilliant accomplishment.
The Dunbar characters are fully rounded, fallible, and utterly believable. They’re often objectionable and their behaviour leaves you torn between all sorts of emotions – incredulity, acceptance, revulsion, pity, sympathy, dismay, admiration, disgust. At once gripping and disturbing. And the title is perfect (shame it’s been used by several other authors though).
Gillard weaves apparently effortlessly between a wide range of subjects too – music, literature, Shakespeare, gardening, acting, horticulture, wildlife. A master of each.
To date the book’s got 28 comments on Amazon all with a 5 star rating! I too am lost in admiration of this writer’s skill. I’ve downloaded two more of her novels but am loathe to start reading them just yet in case they don’t reach this incredibly high standard. Could they?
And there’s a wee postscript … I reviewed this book on Goodreads this week and to my delight the author herself saw it and contacted me, so we’ve now established several links and I was able to tell her that this post was coming. An unexpected bonus. I should post more reviews obviously.
