I'm delighted to welcome Michelle Lovric back to Cornflower Books today.
Michelle was a guest here in late 2010 when she wrote a post for us on living and writing in Venice.
Today, shortly after publication of Talina in the Tower, her latest Venetian novel for children, she's back with "The Peregrinations of a Pariah"!:-
Good title, isn’t it? I stole it from Flora Tristan, melodramatic protofeminist granny of Paul Gauguin. Flora’s book charts the perils of a journey to Peru. My blog is about the perils of commuting from London SE1 to London WC2, or on the vaporetto between San Samuele and San Tomà in Venice with a cold in the head.
Back in the days when I was just the writer-in-residence at my own home, I used to almost welcome a nice, cosy little cold. Something for the weekend, to nurture with warm drinks, an excuse to shuffle around in a flannel dressing gown, a reason to take a hot water bottle and a nascent manuscript back to bed.
But now I am afraid, very afraid of getting a cold. Because now, one day a week during term time, I ride the RV1 bus to the Courtauld Institute of Art, where I am a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. And I too now know the evil looks that the teeniest sniffle paints on the faces of the other passengers. I’ve seen a student recoil as I reached for a tissue, and a burly security guard scuttle off like a rabbit when I uttered a light, ladylike cough.
I too have become paranoid about other people’s germs. A perfectly nice young man clears his throat on the seat next to me. Surely that’s a Swinish cough? His eyes look red. Ebola? That bulge under his shoulder – plague bubo?
At the very least, I think bitterly, he’s just given me a cold. And who has time for a cold these days? Certainly, I think arrogantly, not moi. And it’s never just a cold, is it? Already I’m feeling the beginning of a sore tickle at the back of my throat. My sinuses clench up. I see sleepless night racked with tearing coughs. I see pneumonia filling my lungs with a painful mist.
Lady Macbeth has but a mild case of OCD compared to my hand-rubbing with the antiseptic gel.
‘Kills 99 percent of all known germs,’ it says.
What about that one percent? Surely that’s the deal-breaker. The killer bug. The one that will lay you out for weeks, just at deadline-time. Against that recalcitrant one percent, I swallow vitamin pills as big and shiny as cockroaches.
My father is a doctor. When we were very small, we were told that he went to work every day to fight germs. At kindergarten, my sister painted a huge and sinister red splotch. She told us that it was ‘Daddy’s Germ’. It’s still framed in my father’s house. And its grim spectre rises in front of me every time I come into contact with someone manifesting mucus or fever. Instead of feeling compassion, all I can think of is contagion.
Is this a commendable way to carry on? Does it become a writer of children’s books? Could this paranoia not be channelled to the good? Think of all the children transformed by or via illness – Katy in What Katy Did, Lucien in Stravaganza, City of Masks
. What of Tiny Tim? Or Colin in The Secret Garden
? I checked “sick children” on Amazon.com – 1159 results, of which 110 were stories.
Clearly, I should embrace every microbe with open arms. I should learn to think of each encounter with a virus as privileged research. I too should be mindful of the transformative power of illness. If I play it right, it could transform my manuscript.
I’ve been trying. I gave Renzo a touch of the plague in The Undrowned Child
. I brought a sickness called the Half-Dead Disease on Venice and London in The Mourning Emporium
. In Talina in the Tower
, my latest, I afflict my eponymous heroine with an air-starvation curse. This one comes straight from Venetian mythology. If you bury someone’s hair in a pot of sand with a scorpion, so Venetian witches say, then that person will suffocate as fast as the insect.
When The Undrowned Child was published, my lovely publishers made a leporello with little artefacts glued on. Among them were Venetian seagull feathers, fresh from Venetian seagulls, whom I followed around for weeks, whispering ‘Shed it! Go on! Shed that tail-feather!’ My husband was horrified, insisting that every tendril of every grey and white plume was coated with pestilence. At his insistence, I washed them all in antiseptic fluid. This had the effect of bedraggling them sadly. Yet still, they were genuine Venetian gull feathers that the lucky special accounts people received.
There were also little bones. Although a fervent vegetarian, I had pleaded for a bag of bones from the Borough Market and boiled them up for six hours. Firstly, to make little saint relics for the leporello, but secondly to force myself to experience the nauseating atmosphere of a factory ship, part of the plot in The Mourning Emporium .
When I showed him the little heap of bleached bones, and described the stink I had brought upon my home, my editor asked, ‘Michelle, is there nothing you wouldn’t do for children’s literature?’
Yes. I wouldn’t catch a cold for it.
My thanks to Michelle for writing for us today; she's a most welcome guest and I hope she'll pay us another visit before long. Meanwhile, you may like to visit her website, including the Talina in the Tower pages, or read her posts on The History Girls and An Awfully Big Blog Adventure.
What a splendid post! Being at the tail end, I hope, of a very long cold, or two consecutive colds, and having been awakened once again last night by my husband's hacking, I feel just as Michelle feels. And because, fortunately, I don't even get colds very often, when I do, I'm convinced that this one will be the killer pneumonia. I've even considered those little white medical masks. Anything to avoid disease! There's a very funny episode of '3rd Rock from the Sun' where the aliens all get colds and think they're going to die because their new human bodies are leaking.
Posted by: Joan Kyler | 24 February 2012 at 12:43 PM