Cornflower Books

Parodic schmaltz and gallopy bits*

        Absorbing useless information in an idle moment, I discover that Stephenie Meyer was inspired by the excellent and musically very interesting Muse while writing her Twilight books, and fittingly then, it was Muse's *great Neutron Star Collision which was the lead single for Eclipse the third film in the Twilight series.

    That set me wondering about what, if anything, writers listen to when they write, and what other music might have given rise to or at least fed the creative ferment for which books. According to this article, Colette described Bach as "that heavenly sewing machine", but did he provide the soundtrack for Chéri or Claudine, say? Alexander McCall Smith finds that music "assists the process of writing" and favours Mozart (see more here).

    I'd love to know more about this and be able to plot some 'music-author-book' triangles, so if you happen to have any information on the subject, please do leave a comment. 

Bargain of the day - The Snow Child

    Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child is out in paperback today. One of my top favourite books of 2011, its main post is here, and here is an article by Mary-Anne Harrington, Eowyn's UK editor, on why she bought it - always fascinating to go 'behind the scenes' of publication.

Books in brief: The Colour of Milk

    "this is my book and i am writing it by my own hand ...

       my name is mary. m.a.r.y.

       my hair is the colour of milk."

    Nell Leyshon's novel The Colour of Milk is the story of a year - 1830 - in the life of Mary, a farmer's daughter. I won't go into the plot at all for that would be to give far too much away; suffice to say the book is pastoral, though it's no rural idyll, confessional, but never self-indulgent, pared back to the bones, raw, intense, naively poetic, highly distinctive and quite compelling.

    It stands out for the sheer economy of its prose, its near-perfect idiom, and for the significance of its subject matter and the themes which are worked out so skilfully in so few words. It's quite something.

The Bruce

    My final event of this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival was last night's session with historical novelist Robyn Young. Author of the million-selling Brethren series, Robyn is currently writing about Robert the Bruce and the 13th and 14th. century Wars of Scottish Independence, her books Insurrection and Renegade (and there's a third to come) opening up that era to a large and loyal readership.

    As with Hilary Mantel, much of the discussion centred on the gaps in received knowledge and how the historical novelist fills them. Fact is not always as 'hard', as sure, as it seems, details are debated and disputed, events are subject to varying interpretation, and so the novelist must "pick a path and follow it" - decide on a plausible way of filling those gaps, make sure a character's motivation is consistent with what is known or believed, and then working within those constraints, tell a convincing story. Asked whether she found it helpful or restrictive to have to work within fixed plot points, Robyn said it was both: comforting, in so far as the structure of the story already exists, but testing in terms of the responsibility to be fully credible and serve the genre well. She referred to a recent conversation she'd had with historian turned historical novelist Alison Weir in which Alison talked of writing about a particular event firstly as a historian and then as a novelist; in the first instance she said the facts "didn't feel right", but her imagination was able to make them right when she wrote of them in fictional terms with the relative creative freedom that allows.

    Robyn read a passage from Insurrection, an excerpt from early in the book when Robert the Bruce is in Ireland searching for the Staff of St. Malachy, a relic sought by Edward I in the belief - stemming from an Arthurian prophecy - that he who held it and other artefacts symbolising the constituent parts of the British Isles (the Stone of Destiny, for example) would rule a united kingdom. Robyn revealed that for that section of the book alone she travelled 2,000 miles round Ireland, visiting locations, getting a sense of the land in order to bring something of the actual place into her writing. But research takes different forms, and understanding one major aspect of medieval life involved Robyn in acquiring a skill: she learned to ride, and that has given her a new respect for the men who rode into battle in full armour, she says.

    Asked what initially attracted her to Robert the Bruce and what it was about him that convinced her he was a big enough subject to carry a trilogy, Robyn commented on the epic nature of Bruce's story; it was a quest, something on a truly grand scale which would require more than just one book to do it justice. He was not "an easy hero like the 'black and white' William Wallace", but was a complex man who switched loyalties not once but four times in all, a flawed character but one who was still sympathetic. As such, he is a challenge to write, but one senses that Robyn accepts that challenge with relish.

Out now in paperback: Ghastly Business

 

    The recent paperback release of Louise Levene's superb Ghastly Business slipped past me, and in case you missed it too, or haven't come across the book before, here's my post on what was one of my top favourites last year:

 

    The novel is set in London in 1929 when young Dora Strang, denied the chance of becoming a doctor by her Harley Street physician father who considers medicine an unsuitable career for a woman, and - it must be said - by a lack of ability on her part, takes a job as secretary to the eminent pathologist Dr. Alfred Kemble. As she types up the notes of his post mortem findings, sits in on his morbid anatomy lectures and assists with his forensic enquiries, she finds her strong stomach and all her early reading of her father's medical textbooks standing her in good stead. She's resourceful, professional, and having won the school cup for "Good Manners under Difficult Circumstances", is rarely thrown by the somewhat peculiar nature of the work she is called upon to do.

    Kemble himself is quite the boss. The Big White Chief of the hospital, he is something of a celebrity as far as the newspapers are concerned as his appearances as expert witness in so many murder trials have raised his profile far beyond the laboratory. He is dashing, handsome, distinguished, and having a rather unconventional bedside manner, shall we say, is an embodiment of Dora's colourful fantasies, but when even his wife describes him as "ghastly", this cannot bode well.

    If you don't mind the fairly grisly subject-matter (you'll learn a lot about 1920s medical procedures here) then there is much to love about this book. It's stylish, witty, written with brio, and there are so many good lines which show off Louise Levene's flair for a well-turned phrase or a gimlet-eyed observation, while characters, even minor ones, are pinned to the page in mercilessly exact fashion, rather like butterflies preserved in a specimen drawer. In addition, there's the research - beautifully placed detail setting the book firmly in time and place and social milieu (a very strong feature of Louise's earlier novel A Vision of Loveliness, too), so all in all it's a seamless, perfectly paced piece of work, highly accomplished and great fun.

Good lines: the pen is mightier ...

 

 

    "When it was time to write, and he took his pen in his hand, he never thought of consequences; he thought of style. I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semi-colon. Once paper and ink were to hand, it was useless to appeal to his better nature, to tell him he was wrecking reputations and ruining people's lives. A kind of sweet venom flowed through his veins, smoother than the finest cognac, quicker to make the head spin. And, just as some people crave opium, he craves the opportunity to exercise his fine art of mockery, vituperation and abuse; laudanum might quieten the senses, but a good editorial puts a catch in the throat and a skip in the heartbeat. Writing's like running downhill; can't stop if you want to."

From A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel.

Deckchair at the Edinburgh International Book Festival (see other varieties here*); Hilary Mantel's Festival event reported here.

*Edited to add: designs by Frances Castle.

Telling tales

    As I mentioned in the last post, I was at the Book Festival yesterday to hear Lian Hearn talk about her latest book Blossoms and Shadows, set in 1860s Japan, and Susan Fletcher her fourth novel, the recently published The Silver Dark Sea. From the Meiji Restoration and the turbulent, male-dominated world of Japanese society, the end of the Shogunate and the re-establishment of imperial rule, to a fictitious Scottish island in which story-telling is at the heart of everything, and it's a strange kind of flotsam that is washed ashore one day, both books sound like immersive reading experiences crafted by authors with a very sure grasp of their real or imagined worlds.

    As a deliberate foil to its cast of feuding men, Lian's book has a woman as its central character - Tsuru, a doctor's daughter, herself medically trained, and based on the real person who inspired Orito in David Mitchell's excellent The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet. The narrative alternates between Tsuru's first person, past tense telling, and male characters' third person, present tense episodes, a good way of handling complex material and incorporating multiple points of view. Susan's new novel moves away from her previous books which each told just one person's story; here, in her island setting, she brings in the whole community she has created - "that's a lot of people to have in your head, and sometimes they were very noisy, " she says - but among them she found, as she puts it, "the centre of the flower, all the others being the petals", and she knew she had her focal point. Her book is about storytelling, myth and folklore, and she has given the novel itself an air of make-believe, "wrapped in mystery like a bedtime story." Having loved her last book (there's a post on it here), I was keen to read the new one, and hearing her talk about it doubles that sense of anticipation.

    But speaking of the last one, we learned why it had two titles (that is the UK editions) being published first as Corrag and then becoming Witch Light: a bookseller refused to stock it under the original title and so it had to be changed. The audience were quite amazed to hear this, and I'm mystified as to the perceived need for any alteration to the name (which is that of the main character). I asked Mr. C. for his opinion - would either title make him more or less likely to pick up the book in a shop? He said he would certainly pass over something called Witch Light because from that alone he would assume it was a "young adult paranormal romance type of thing", in which case he'd be missing out on what is a very fine novel indeed, and that would be a great pity.

Cut and paste

    Here's what sounds like a very good tip for writers courtesy of Susan Fletcher, author of the marvellous Witch Light (also known as Corrag ), gleaned at the event she shared with Lian Hearn at the Book Festival today:

    Susan said that she is ruthless when it comes to cutting sections of her novels which she feels slow the narrative or otherwise don't work as well as they might, but she admits that that is very difficult to do as most writers become attached to bits of the text which they particularly like or feel have some merit. What she does is paste the excised passages into a folder she calls 'stuff' - a ragbag of lines, a repository for that which may yet be utilised - and then she'll come back to them later and "strip them for parts", she says, using what she can when she finds another, more suitable position for that material elsewhere.

    More on today's event later.

Observation of the day

    "He gestured for her to follow him and led the way into a room off the back of the hall. 'The library,' he said. 'Rather a lot of unread books.'

    Her eyes went to the shelves that stretched up to within a few inches of the ceiling. All four walls were covered; piles of books stood here and there, teetering, vulnerable, she judged, to the slightest footfall. 'But who doesn't have a lot of unread books? It's nice, though, just to know that they're there.'"

    That observation comes from Isabel Dalhousie in Alexander McCall Smith's The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds (out very soon), and as someone who has a lot of unread books, I'd agree with her view of their presence as a source of pleasure, comfort and as yet undiscovered delight.

    How do you view a large collection of books you haven't read? A waste, a reproach, and a cause of stress? A treasure trove? Or would such a thing not move you either way?

Clerical collars and the moral maze

 

    Today's Book Festival treat was hearing novelists William Brodrick and James Runcie talk about the moral and philosophical problems they encounter and try to solve through their fictional detectives, Father Anselm and Canon Sidney Chambers.

    While James Runcie's world is that of the arts - as writer, film maker, literary festival director - his understanding of the clerical life and the dilemmas and questions of conscience faced by men of the cloth comes from his family background (he is the son of the late Lord Runcie, former Archbishop of Canterbury). William Brodrick comes to the craft of detective fiction and its attendant issues from a different angle, beginning his working life as an Augustinian monk and then spending ten years as a barrister before turning to writing. The Day of the Lie is the fourth of his books to feature Father Anselm (he won the 2009 CWA Gold Dagger Award for A Whispered Name), whereas Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death, on which there is a post here, is the first of James Runcie's Grantchester Mysteries series, now set to be dramatised by the BBC.

    The clerical detective, the spiritual figure in fiction, fascinates both writers because of its inherent focus on so much more than bare fact. An examination of the conscience of a perpetrator - "that darkest of corners", of the victim and their suffering, of redemption and atonement, these subjects more than straightforward ones of "whodunnit and how" inform their books and challenge their central characters. "If you have a clergyman you automatically have a moral framework," says James Runcie, while William Brodrick finds himself continuously grappling with the nature of evil and moral restoration, and both men find that "the capacity to behave morally is as interesting [both in philosophical and fictional terms] as the will to behave badly."

    Questions from the audience, including one from a prominent member of the Scottish judiciary, centred on these issues. Asked about the view held by psychologists that a person damaged by their experiences early in life may be incapable of making "undamaged decisions" later, William Brodrick mentioned that this poses a technical problem for novelists in that by and large they like to show change and development in characters, and thus this 'fixedness' can be difficult to make work convincingly in fictional terms. His books are a meditation on moral responsibility with Father Anselm the walker in the moral maze, but he pointed out that they were difficult to fit into a clear category, crossing boundaries between crime fiction, historical fiction and literary fiction.

    In a lighter vein, James Runcie entertained the audience with anecdotes concerning his father and with stories which illustrated how tone is crucial where the clerical detective is concerned: the tragic and the comic are so often present in the same moment in situations where clergyman are at work, and a shift of emphasis one way or another may make or break a scene. But it's not just the serious stuff which perplexes these writers, it's the more superficial issues, too. James revealed that he had been having trouble deciding on his book's title so he sought advice from a fellow writer friend. "Use your detective's name," she suggested, "call it 'Sidney Chambers and the something of something'. "You mean like 'Harry Potter and the blank of blank'?". "Well, it worked for me," she said.

To be read: Dog Stories

 

          The cover picture alone would make me pick up this book: it is Portrait of a Terrier by the English artist John Rabone Harvey, and it adorns what for me is a 'must-read' -  Dog Stories, the very handsome Everyman's Pocket Classics collection edited by Diana Secker Tesdell.

    What's inside sounds just as appealing as the anthology includes stories from as diverse a group of writers as Chekhov and Patricia Highsmith, Penelope Lively and P.G. Wodehouse. There are tales from Tobias Wolff and Mark Twain, Ray Bradbury and G.K. Chesterton; "imaginative, lyrical and empathetic portraits of man and woman's most faithful friend."

    As a dog-lover I'm looking forward to reading about Kipling's heroically faithful Garm, to O. Henry's tale of a dissatisfied lapdog's escape in Memoirs of a Yellow Dog, and to meeting "an aggressively affectionate three-legged pit bull who lives in a block of flats for dogs" - that's Jonathan Lethem's Ava's Apartment. (I just hope there are no sad ones ...)

View halloo

   

    Spoiler alert! If after seeing Simon's hilarious post on the opening of Mary Webb's novel Gone To Earth you're burning to read the book, click away now because the story's ending is given below.

    Simon's piece prompted me to look up the author in John Sutherland's book (which I was talking about yesterday), and here's the part of her entry which refers to it:

    "[The Golden Arrow*] was followed up promptly by another Shropshire saga, Gone to Earth (1917), in which Webb hit her grim groove. It was well reviewed. Amazingly. Rebecca West chose it as her book of the year - something one can only ascribe to a critical neurosis triggered by the war (going badly for the Allies in 1917) and her disastrous affair with H.G. Wells .... The novel's heroine, Hazel Woodus, is one of Webb's hallmark children of nature, a denizen of the woods, hills and streams - with something of the witch (as her mother was) about her. She carries with her a fragrance of 'morning air' and her soulmate is a pet fox, 'Foxy'. Her father makes coffins - ominously. Ominous too is the opening paragraph [as Simon quotes].

    ... Delectable Hazel catches the eye of the local squire, a hunting man, Jack Reddin. One glimpses, as in a distorting mirror, reflections of Tess of the d'Urbervilles. To cut a long story short (which Webb doesn't), Hazel has to choose between two legs or four. The novel ends with him leading a hunt (tally ho!) in which, to save Foxy, Hazel scoops the beast in her arms and plunges down a mine shaft. Liebestod."

*Sutherland goes on to tell us that in 1928 "a smart young journalist on the Evening Standard, Stella Gibbons, was given the job of editing The Golden Arrow for serialisation in the paper. The result four years later was the witty spoof, Cold Comfort Farm ..."

    I knew, of course, that the terrifically funny Cold Comfort Farm was a parody of, amongst others, Mary Webb's work, but not that Stella Gibbons had had a professional connection with the earlier book.

Literary lives and books laid bare

 

    Back to the Book Festival today to hear Professor John Sutherland talking about fiction with reference to the personalities and predilections of those who create it, all brought together in his massive new book Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives, and John Crace, the writer behind The Guardian Digested Read column and author of Brideshead Abbreviated: The Digested Read of the Twentieth Century.

    

    This was such an entertaining hour, and John Sutherland alone would enthuse even a reluctant reader, I feel, but he, along with "the young John" delighted what must have been a very well-read audience. He began by telling us that although he taught literature for forty years, he really only read books at two periods of his life - when he was very young, and since retiring. Growing up in Edinburgh in the 1940s and '50s, he described the books he discovered in those dark post-war days as a passport to another world, and now much later in life he calls fiction "a fantasy factory", food for the imagination, and it is from that passion that his Lives has sprung.

     Leaving behind the academic world which requires the reader to "keep their eyes on the page", he is now free to indulge his interest in literary curiosities, puzzles, irrelevancies and details, and he is recapturing some of the magic which fiction has always had for him, responding to a book as an agent, not a passive receiver, and following the trails laid by books themselves or by events great and small in their writers' lives.

     Being in Edinburgh on this very rainy day, he was reminded of the circumstances which led Robert Louis Stevenson (a local) to write Treasure Island. In 1880, the Edinburgh summer was marked by weather which was bad by even Scottish standards, and RLS, whose health was poor, was advised to move up to Deeside for better air. There was no respite from the rain there either, and Louis's young stepson Sam was forced to occupy himself indoors. He had a set of watercolours and a room he called his 'studio', and based on the tales of derring-do and boys' own adventures that he'd been reading, he set about painting a treasure map, his artwork the prompt for Louis to start telling him stories based around it, the opening of Treasure Island thus being drafted one evening at the fireside. Had the sun shone that summer, says Prof. Sutherland, we would not have that book!

   

    John Sutherland then introduced John Crace, describing his digested reads as the equivalent of "turning a cow into an Oxo cube", and paying tribute to how carefully he reads the texts he parodies, coming up with an end product which is "both itself and something else ... not so much a hatchet job, more dissection with a surgeon's scalpel", and providing an example of deflation in a world of literary hype. We were treated to a reading of two of his columns, his deconstruction of David Copperfield, marking Dickens' bicentenary, and Antonia Fraser's Must You Go?: My Life with Harold Pinter which he read in a suitably high-pitched voice; both had the audience in stitches.

   

    John Sutherland then took up the Dickens theme with a discussion of the debate over the events of Dickens' death: did he die at Gads Hill Place, as the first authorised biography says, or was it at Ellen Ternan's house with his body later returned to the family home? Did he lead a double life, was he a cruel husband, or was he a decent man who helped a woman in difficulty? Versions of his life abound, and successive biographical works - most recently The Great Charles Dickens Scandal by Michael Slater - present evidence for both theories.

    In answer to a question from a member of the audience, the two Johns talked briefly about defining 'the classics'. John Sutherland quoted the late Frank Kermode: "Old books which people still read; books which cross boundaries," and felt the term 'modern classic' was a contradiction in terms. John Crace noted that the later one goes in time, the more arbitrary the benchmark seems. He cited Salman Rushdie's 1981 Booker Prize winner Midnight's Children and said he had done a straw poll on the book canvassing 40 members of staff at his newspaper. 30 had not read it, four had tried and given up, four had finished and hated it, and only two loved it - perhaps not a scientific study, but an interesting result nonetheless for a novel which has apparently achieved 'modern classic' status.

    An hour was too short a time to fully savour all that "The Two Johnnies" - as they are sometimes called - had to say about books and writers. I could have listened to them all afternoon.

My thanks to the very kind Phyllis of The Edinburgh Reporter for the great photographs of our two speakers.

Overheard in the Book Festival bookshop

First young woman: "Have you read it?"

Second young woman: "Only a page or two of a friend's copy. The grammar made me cry."

    Which book might that have been?

Good lines: on writing and wayfaring

   

    "Stories, like paths, relate in two senses: they recount and they connect. In Siberia, the Khanty word usually translated as 'story' also means 'way'. A disputed etymology suggests that our word 'book' derives from the High German bok, meaning 'beech' - the tree on whose smooth bark marks and signs were often incised in order to indicate routes and paths. Our verb 'to write' at one point in history referred specifically to track-making: the Old English writan specifically meant 'to incise runic letters in stone'; thus one would 'write' a line by drawing a sharp point over and into a surface - by harrowing a track.

    As the pen rises from the page between words, so the walker's feet rise and fall between paces, and as the deer continues to run as it bounds from the earth, and the dolphin continues to swim even as it leaps again and again from the sea, so writing and wayfaring are continuous activities, a running stitch, a persistence of the same seam or stream."

From The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane (of which more here).

 

ETA: Robert Macfarlane will be appearing at a Festival of Walking, Writing and Ideas at Aberdeen University on 28th/29th. August.

Hilary Mantel in Edinburgh

    Charlotte Square Gardens has once more opened its gates to the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and a highlight of this year's event - and a major draw - was Hilary Mantel in conversation with James Runcie, for which I was in the audience this evening.

    It was James Runcie who last autumn produced and directed the fine Culture Show profile of Hilary Mantel; follow that link to see clips from it, or click here to read what the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist had to say, during that interview, about the act of writing, especially on a bad day. Having greatly enjoyed that documentary I was very keen to attend tonight's event to hear more, and I wasn't disappointed.

    James Runcie began by introducing Hilary Mantel as someone who until recently had been known as 'the writers' writer', 'a well kept secret', and this relative anonymity carried on to her Booker shortlisting when she was referred to as " 'Hilary Mantel, 57, from Glossop in Derbyshire', almost as if she were a housewife who did a bit of writing in her kitchen while waiting for the marmalade to set." Happily, that win for Wolf Hall brought a new readership to all her books, and with the recent publication of Bring up the Bodies, the second volume in her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, those fans are hungry for more.

    The young Hilary did not set out to be a writer, rather she wanted to be a Knight of the Round Table, taken with jousting and justice, ideas of glory and avenging the weak. When she realised (aged 4) that she wasn't going to turn into a boy, it became clear that knight errantry was not an option. However, in writing about the court of Henry VIII, she lives - on the page - in a virtual Camelot, she says, and can act out her early fantasies through her characters.

    She compared advice on writing to counsel given in jousting: resist the ever-present temptation to swerve at the last minute, don't settle for what's easily within your capabilities but work instead at the edge of your confidence and take on something you think is too big for you, and she commented that the self-scrutiny inherent in her early catholicism and the acceptance of an abstracted world of ethereal beings as the ultimate reality were the origins of her career as a novelist.

    As to Thomas Cromwell as the focus of her current writing, it was the trajectory of his story which drew her to him. The blacksmith's son who became Earl of Essex and Henry's right-hand man - how did he do that? What was it like to be so close to the king and to "put one's head in the lion's mouth every day"? His skills and mindset were far removed from those of the other courtiers, the "chivalrous idiots", as she called them; he was a man of exceptional talents. She pointed out that archive material on Cromwell as a public servant is extensive, while as a private man he is so ill-documented that the novelist can go to work, "building on the best information available."

    Hilary then read a passage from Bring up the Bodies (pages 26 to 29, should you wish to look it up - and I must say here that unlike some other members of her profession she is an excellent reader) and she went on to discuss her use of detail gleaned from Cromwell's correspondence and how careful selection for that scene alone allowed her to present both the big Tudor picture and the minute one, the grand and the trivial. From there she talked about the importance to a novel of point of view (and viewpoint), explaining how her positioning of Cromwell in the excerpt she read - she has him watching from a window as Henry and Jane Seymour take a stroll in the garden - means that the readers' sightlines are similarly shifting and what they take from the passage realistically ambiguous.

    As to the craft of writing historical fiction, characters must be three-dimensional and have a vibrancy and an immediacy to them, she thinks, and although we as readers know their fates, it's the tortuous process they go through to get to their ends which allows suspense to operate - the turning points, the moments of transformation where we see the die is cast will draw the reader on, and that is the seat of her dramatic power.

    Hilary Mantel has such a sharp intelligence, a deep-thinking knowledge of her craft and art, and an engaging warmth and wit, all of which make her a delight to listen to, and the rest of the appreciative Edinburgh audience enjoyed hearing her as much as I did. If you want to try her books, I think my favourite so far is Fludd - post on it here - a brilliant, funny novel about the far-reaching change effected in a small community by a very unusual man, but really, everything of hers I've read has impressed me greatly.

Edited to add: re. Adèle's comment below, Hilary will be appearing at Ely Cathedral on Tuesday, September 11th., details and tickets here.

Cornflower Book Group - September 2012

 

    Apologies for my tardiness in choosing the September book for the CBG, but after much deliberation, here it is at last.

    I should think a lot of people will already have read Ann Patchett's award-winning 2001 novel Bel Canto, and if so they may care to re-visit it for the group read or just participate, when we come to discuss it, from their memories of the book.

    For those of us for whom it is new, I'll quote Penelope Lively to set the tone:

    "Bel Canto is a tour de force. Gripping and absorbing, I couldn't stop reading",

and then The Times critics Erica Wagner and Christina Konig:

    "A cleverly paced, suspenseful novel told with great emotional delicacy ... [and] a powerful, unexpected ending. To be read at a single sitting," and "It is that rarity - a literary novel you simply can't put down."

    Here's the blurb -

    "Kidnappers storm an international gathering hosted by a poor Latin American country to promote foreign trade. Unfortunately their intended target, the President, has stayed home to watch his favourite soap. The takeover settles into a siege, bringing together an unlikely assortment of hostages, including a beautiful American opera diva, a Japanese CEO who is her biggest fan, and his unassuming translator, Gen. Two couples, complete opposites, fall in love, and a horrific imprisonment is transformed into an unexpected heaven on earth."

    Ann Patchett is a fine writer who needs no introduction here, and I have high hopes that this will be a most enjoyable book for us. Let's set the discussion date for Saturday, 22nd September, which is just under 6 weeks hence, so there's plenty of time to get hold of a copy - I doubt there will any difficulty finding one, wherever you are. If you haven't joined in with us before, please do so now if you feel like it by reading the book and giving us your thoughts and impressions, as briefly or as expansively as you wish, on or after the 22nd.

Blue books

 

    Just for fun (and loosely linked to this post and this one), some books with blue in the title:

     The Missing Shade Of Blue by Jennie Erdal (whose memoir Ghosting: A Double Life is featured here) - a philosphical thriller set here in Edinburgh, this is "moving, witty and wise,  a compelling portrait of the modern condition, from the absence of faith to the scourge of sexual jealousy and the elusive nature of happiness."

Blue Remembered Hills, Rosemary Sutcliff's autobiography, "a record of the growing up and making of a writer ... full of humour, affection, joy in people and the natural world, and the kind of deep understanding that can come out of hard experiences."

 

    The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald came up in the James Fox programme the other day, and there's a post on it here.

 

    Songs of Blue and Gold by Deborah Lawrenson. Another Cornflower favourite, this is a highly perceptive, absorbing novel based on the life of Lawrence Durrell (post here, and ignore that cover which really doesn't do it justice).

    Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland - "a gem of understated complexity", "an evocative masterpiece" about the lives and loves of those who have owned a Vermeer painting. Have you read it? I've had it on my wish list for ages as it sounds excellent and very appealing.

    Any more blue books to recommend?

Let the feast begin

   

     Months ago I wrote an introductory post on Lawrence Norfolk's new novel John Saturnall's Feast, and after making an excellent start with the book - I was enjoying it greatly - I had to put it down in favour of 'deadline reading' and I'm only now about to pick it up again.

    Having begun with the proof, here is the beautiful finished copy with jacket design by Holly Macdonald, but for an even stronger visual impression of the novel's subject matter, have a look at this short film of the author talking about the story - and the history of English cooking which inspired it - in the atmospheric setting of early seventeenth century Ham House.

Clare Clark on writing

   

    Among the questions I had for Clare Clark (see Monday's interview) were a couple to do with her writing methods and routine, and as there wasn't sufficient space in the article to include what she had to say on that subject, I thought I'd post her answers here.

    I began by asking Clare about the book's complexity and how she went about constructing a long novel which contains so many elements and themes. I wondered whether she was working with all the strands together, carrying them throughout and weaving them in as she went, or were some aspects later additions, characters or references brought in by way of 'accent colours' when the bulk of the work had been done?

    "Naturally much of the book is planned, if not from the beginning at least as the story unfolds, so that as the writer you are always several chapters ahead of yourself. With Beautiful Lies the novel unfolded much as it is now, so that I wrote it chronologically, rather than drastically restructuring it afterwards. Having said that, it remains the prerogative (and job!) of a novelist to make sure that there are no dropped stitches in the knitting so there is always a certain amount of going back over what you have written to make sure that it works as a whole. What startles me always is the way that, even if one doesn't always know precisely where a book is going as you write it, you often discover that, even when it takes you to places that surprise you, there are elements you have already written that seem to set you up for the outcome, as though a part of you knew where you were going all along. I don't know how that works, and I suspect I don't really want to investigate it too closely or attempt to unpick it, in case by doing so I somehow damage the mechanism by which it works."

    Related to this, I asked Clare about her daily routine and whether her research and planning were all done in advance or fitted in as required during the writing process itself.

    "I don't have a ritual as such, though I would admit that I am pretty disciplined. Because I tend not to work too much in the holidays, I have to use the time I have carefully. Every day, once the children have left for school, I catch up on necessary admin (it helps to clear my head) and then go out to the shed at the bottom of my garden or to the library. If it is a writing day I try not to stop until I have written a thousand words. As for research, the bulk of it is done before I start writing. The saying 'write what you know' is just as important to the historical fiction writer as the contemporary one, perhaps even more so, and I have to feel that my knowledge of the period is not only intellectual but emotional, so I have to have done sufficient reading for it really to have penetrated my heart as well as my head. I think that the research acts like a crystalline solution - as I read, the story starts to take shape and it is when the crystal is almost fully formed that I know I am ready to start writing. Of course there will always be details to investigate - it would be impossible to know exactly where one's story is going to take one before you start, and I wouldn't to as the best things happen when you are open to them."

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    For more posts on writing click here and scroll down, and for further interviews click on the authors' names:

Alexander McCall Smith

Madeline Miller

D.J. Taylor

Sara Sheridan            

Paul Torday

Suzanne Joinson