Keith Ridgway, Horses

No, not the Patti Smith début album, much as I love it, but a long story by the Irish writer Keith Ridgway, unknown to me until a few weeks ago, when I read a typically perceptive review by John Self of a more recent novel, The Long Falling. John rightly praised not only Ridgway’s fiction but also his website; it’s a joy to read, critically alert and thoughtful, witty, precisely expressed, humane. So, once again, thank you, John.

Horses was first published in First Fictions: Introduction 13 in 1997, with work by Elliot Perlman and Hannah Crow. It was reissued as a standalone volume in 2003, something that’s hard to imagine these days, certainly from a mainstream publisher like Faber. Technically, I suppose, the story is a novella, a form that’s about as popular among publishers in the current climate as mumps at a stud farm (no, no bitterness). But it punches, as they say, well above its 80-page weight.

It’s a short book about death and how people deal with it – essentially the death, or absence, of the woman – mother or wife – represented by the death, through arson, of three horses. These horses become a symbol of loss but also of freedom, and of knowledge ‘about how the world was made and how it moves’, as Mathew puts it in his dream-vision after being attacked by the arsonist and left for dead. Mathew’s attacked because he’s spoken to the priest, half-revealing a secret. The book begins and ends with secrecy and revelation. The first sentence goes like this:

In the broad spaces of the streets near the square, Mathew stood and watched for the secrets which the rain reveals.

The rain is a constant presence throughout the book, creating its mood of oppression and relentlessness, as fictional rain invariably does. But it’s also the great mover here, without which nothing would be revealed at all; Mathew would never be offered shelter by Fr Devoy and tell him what he has seen without it. Fr Devoy, the doctor and the policeman would not have found themselves isolated from the rest of the world without the storm, ‘cluttering the view’ but also, with its lightning, cutting through the darkness.

Mathew, described as ‘a village idiot who is a genius’, is an outsider, and the book looks at what that might mean in a tightly-knit community. But he isn’t the only one. The arsonist too is someone who doesn’t belong, a Protestant who converted to Catholicism and changed town to be with his wife, who is now dead. Even the priest is new to the town, and shaken by what he’s found, fearing the influence of the big city as something ‘watery and perverse’ as arson strikes. The doctor is Protestant, the doctor’s daughter, whose horses have died in one of the fires, is orphaned. This might be the set-up for a story about small country towns and the way they work, absorbing and repelling in the vein of Straw Dogs or Cranford, according to the author’s bent. But the book’s less concerned with belonging, finally, than with its corollary, displacement through loss; for a story set in a traditional community it has a lot to say about not knowing who you are, and about the way in which community won’t help you find it out. Towards the end of the book, Mathew confesses his secret to Helen, the doctor’s daughter:

‘What is the secret of you, Mathew?’

‘I’m not sure. I can’t remember.’

‘What has it to do with?’

‘Pardon?’

‘What kind of secret is it?’

‘To do with confusion.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I did not know my mother.’

‘That’s your secret?’

‘That is the only secret I know, Miss Helen.’

‘I don’t see how that’s a secret.’

‘It is.’

‘Is it?’

‘It’s a secret who she is.’

‘Oh.’

‘That is the secret of me.’

When Mathew asks Helen her secret, she tells him.

‘Dying, I think.’

Mathew nodded.

‘That is the secret of most people,’ he said. ‘Dying and not dying.’

At the end of the story, Mathew and Helen are alone in the field where Helen would exercise her horses, ‘huddled on a plank by the leftovers of the horses who were dead and in the sky.’ The final sentence reads:

The men walked by, missing them.

Some books yield less the more you think about them. Horses does quite the opposite. I recommend it.

Sing Sorrow Sorrow

My earliest holiday memories are of Wales, of a caravan behind the dunes of Abersoch, of wind lifting the sand and throwing it, stingingly, against my goosebumped legs. During the night, the same wind would rock the caravan. I was four years old at the most. In a photograph I’m wearing what looks like a pair of knitted trunks, hoisted high above my little-boy belly, my arms and legs like winter asparagus. I’m smiling. It’s the stuff of nightmares.

So I’m particularly suited to reviewing Sing Sorrow Sorrow, a collection of creepy tales from Welsh publisher, Seren. Not all the stories are set in Wales, but they all, or nearly all, know that the fastest way to the universal – and what can be more universal than fright? – is through the local. Local in this collection ranges from typically concrete Welsh settings, mountains and mines, cottages and camper vans, to the more phantasmagorical: a vast, apparently unpeopled city, a mysterious entertainment venue called Neptune’s Palace, the ruins of Wadi-Washm. One of the shortest stories, Box by Deborah Kay Davies, on the other hand, plays fast and loose with place, period, language. It’s a tale of casual devil-may-care horror, set everywhere and nowhere, where large and small nightmares jostle for space, and hope is the ‘hefty, blessed dose of general anaesthetic you never wake from’. Some of the stories draw on other stories. One of my favourites, The House Demon by Maria Donovan, uses the demon of the title to talk in a powerfully touching way, about tradition and displacement, home and its irreparable loss. Another, Three Cuts by Roshi Fernando, de-disneyfies a popular fairy tale in a harrowing manner, while The Pit, by Jon Gower, casts economic change in the role of Frankenstein and allows its compromised victim/monster free play below ground.

Not all the stories make use of the supernatural to achieve their effects. Richard Gwyn’s The Handless Maiden rang a few bells with me with its tale of drug-befuddled doings in the Mediterranean. Zillah Bethell’s Herself, a dark and comic tale about the dangers of literary fanhood, thankfully, didn’t. And then there are those stories that, in Turn of the Screw fashion, don’t let on what’s real and what’s imagined, such as the chilling tale by Cynan Jones, The Epilept.

All in all, an impressive collection, varied, thought- and shiver-provoking and, unusually for an anthology of this length, without a dud. I recommend it. I’m not sure I’ll be going back to that camp site in Abersoch though. Not unless I can find my knitted trunks.

Red Plenty and The Lazarus Project

I’ve been interested in Ukraine these past few weeks, for reasons that will soon, I hope, become apparent. Francis Spufford and Aleksander Hemon have also been interested in the country recently, obliquely and in very different ways. I came across Spufford’s Red Plenty in the reference section of my local library (and I’ll take this opportunity to support the institution of local libraries, and the very different serendipity they provide), so it’s obviously been classified as a sort of history. Which is, as I discovered when I read it, exactly what it is. A sort of history. The book’s slightly ill-served by its subtitle – ‘Inside the Fifties Soviet Dream’ – not only because the book ranges more widely in time than that decade, encompassing Khrushchev and beyond, but also because it suggests something dryer and more objective, in a documentary sense, than what’s actually being offered. The book’s an odd amalgam of fact and fiction, commentary and story, telling and showing. Each section begins with an authoritative, albeit highly personal, account of the economic and political developments in the period about to be portrayed. It’s an unglamorous era on the whole, if the massacres and idealism that preceded it can be said to have glamour, but Spufford’s decision to use fiction to develop the book’s historical insights, more than makes up for – indeed, illuminates – the overall greyness. And Russia in the 50s and 60s was not entirely without its own idealism, and massacres, as the book shows. It’s a crafty book, in both senses, well-made and insidiously enjoyable. And it reminded me of Farrell’s Empire trilogy (see below), although the two works couldn’t be less similar in their approach or style. But the tension in both comes from the (mis-)match between the larger world and the individual, and  the responsibility the latter, willy-nilly, infinitesimally or not, has for the former. Spufford’s very good on complicity and compromise, two of the main channels along which that responsibility flows. But he’s also generous, and understanding, and this compassion for his characters, which extends even to Khrushchev, is certainly something he shares with Farrell. And there’s a story about Brezhnev’s buttons that has to be read to be believed.

Aleksander Hemon’s The Lazarus Project couldn’t be more different. Where Spufford is restrained, structured, superficially objective, Hemon is extravagant, sprawling and both eccentric and central to his own project, which is only partially that of Lazarus. Ostensibly an investigation into the life and death of a young Russian immigrant, Lazarus Averbuch (Have a book?), who died in mysterious circumstances in Chicago at the start of the last century, the book’s main concern is with its author, also an immigrant, also, as Lazarus was, reborn. It’s a passionately written book, which benefits and suffers from the fact that its author is not a native speaker. The language has the greedy and unrestrained ebullience of a dumb man recovering his voice; it’s not always accurate, but it never fails to give pleasure. It’s an over-egged pudding, and there are occasional moments of bathos, but these are a small price to pay (and may even reinforce) the book’s powerful, relentless portrayal of loss and displacement. The figure of Lazarus’s sister, Olga, is particularly impressive, and occupies, for me, the emotional heart of the novel. If the aim of the project is to understand what made Lazarus tick, and how he died, its success is partial, as it must be, rather like that of the journey the narrator takes into the new ex-Russia from which Lazarus, twice-victim, twice-born, was forced to flee, a journey as disturbing and ambiguous and, ultimately, thwarted as that of the novel’s eponymous hero. But this double failure only enhances the overall impact of the novel, as grainy and dark and, ultimately, compelling as the photographs – both old and new – that form its shadow. There’s a fascinating passage about the nature of photography towards the end of the book, which ends with the observation: “I felt as though I had achieved the freedom of being comfortable with the constant vanishing of the world.” The book, as a whole, is proof of how illusory that freedom is.

My new tee-shirt

C/o Threadless

The Empire Trilogy

The Man Booker Prize may not always shift as many units as its shortlisted authors and publishers would like, but it does occasionally have the virtue of introducing readers to writers they might not otherwise have met, providing a sort of glorified speed-dating service for the incurably promiscuous among us. And like speed-dating (I imagine; I’ve never tried it but I have indulged in its grittier alternative, as readers of my short stories will be aware), it sometimes leads on the real thing. This year’s decision to award JG Farrell the Lost Man Booker Prize for Troubles is a case in point. Farrell had been on the farthest edge of my peripheral vision for years but I might never have read his work if the Booker judges hadn’t decided it was even better than Mary Renault’s Fire from Heaven. (That good, I thought. Surely not). Well, they were right. I’ve now read all three of the Empire Trilogy and it’s love.

Empires, like relationships and sticks of seaside rock, express themselves most clearly at their point of fracture. And as with relationships (although not, one hopes, with rock), the fracture is likely to be anything but clean. Farrell’s trilogy looks at three different colonial outposts – Ireland, India and Singapore – and three different periods, between 1860 and 1945, and what he finds is that most people – on whichever side of the fracture they stand – have only the slightest idea of what’s happening around them, and of their role in it. This isn’t new; the death-struggle between ignorance and culpability is often at the heart of tragedy. Farrell, of course, is perfectly aware of who does what, and of how small  acts have large consequences, just as large acts can have insignificant, or entirely unpredicted, ones. One of the most interesting aspects of these three novels, for me, is the way the lives of the characters are folded into the greater issues, which will ultimately determine what happens to them and which treat them, as their author doesn’t, with total indifference. Sometimes – particularly in The Singapore Grip, which, more than the other two, sets the action at the local centre of power – this is achieved through the public role they occupy, as movers and shakers, compromised by and complicit in the final throes of the world they’ve helped create. In Troubles, probably my favourite of the three, it’s the way essentially innocent characters – insofar as anyone is innocent – cope with the fallout from larger events that provides the pathos. Farrell’s very good at foolishness, and how dangerous, and dangerously ineffectual, well-meaning people can be – much of the humour in the books comes from this. In Troubles, the Major is a figure of fun, thwarted in love, apparently aimless, damaged by war in a way that hasn’t ennobled him, so much as displaced and demoted him, transferred him to a smaller stage. But he’s also the epitome of decency, and decency is a powerful value in Farrell’s world, regardless of its larger-scale effect, recognising perhaps that there can be no larger-scale effect, and that this isn’t finally so important. Coming across him decades later in Singapore is one of the great joys of the trilogy.

The most lasting single scene for me, though, from these three extraordinarily rich, intelligent and compassionate books, is in The Singapore Grip, and describes a visit to a place called the dying house. Guilt and innocence, realisation and the refusal to realise, coloniser and colonised come together in this scene in the most extraordinary, and – appropriately – harrowing, fashion. I don’t have the book with me as I write, but my index card (see preceding post) tells me it’s on pp 355-360 of the Penguin edition.  It’s wonderful.

 

What people read

We’re coming to that time of the year when people are asked about what they’ve read during the previous twelve months. Well, I say people. Nobody’s asked me so far. Normally this wouldn’t bother me at all because the thing that’s always struck me as little short of miraculous is how those people who are asked actually remember what they’ve read. Not the details of individual books, but the books themselves. I started thinking about some way of remedying this appalling bibliophilic amnesia earlier this year, when we had to get out of our house to make room for builders and I had a strong sense that I was losing control of my life in the most basic ways. I couldn’t find socks that matched, or corkscrews that worked. (Yes, that basic.) My reading was all over the place as well. And then it struck me. Why not combine the need for a bookmark with the need to make some record of my reading? Not rocket science, I know, but it made exciting sense to me. So I bought a pocket of index cards and started to write the author and title of the book at the top of the card, along with the dates I started and finished reading it. On the card, I wrote anything that came into my head as I read – page references to bits I wanted to remember, comments. I resisted the temptation to institute a rating system, and didn’t much care whether what I wrote would make sense to anyone else (and I’m a little worried that anyone else might be a category that includes the future me, if only in terms of sheer illegibility). And now, as we enter November, I find myself with a nice little stack of cards, which I can arrange in chronological, or alphabetical, or, indeed, random, order. And what I’m going to do with these cards now is see exactly which books I have read this year  and, after a little selection, tell you which ones I’ve liked most and why. It’s what Cheryl Cole and Stephen Fry and Orlando Figes (probably not) will be doing in a month’s time. I thought I’d get in first.

Now where are those cards?

Goodbye Hello

This is my first official post on my new blog and, would you believe it, I’ve gone all shy. Give me an hour or two and I’ll try to compose myself. In the meantime, if there’s anything you’d like to see here, let me know. I’m in an obliging sort of mood…

Words

If I had a thousand pounds for every time I’ve heard people complain that the use of the word ‘gay’ to describe what these same people tend to refer to as the ‘homosexual life style’ had deprived them of the only word available in the English language to talk about the really important things in life, like, oh I don’t know, party lights, streamers, summer dresses, just general joy and loveliness, I still wouldn’t have enough money to wrest the term ‘tea party’ back from the misinformed bigots who seriously believe their pathological state of unreason to be ‘political’. This thought came to me as I sliced into a rather good cake earlier today and wished that I had a few good friends with me to share it. A tea party, I thought, how nice. How nice that would be.

Fusion, Wolverhampton style

Seven day wonder

I’d often been intrigued in the past by an ad in the LRB inviting me to spend some time in a large old country house near Girona, in Catalonia, with the author Charles Pallisser, working on the art of fiction-writing. How pleasant it must be, I used to think, to be able to sit around in the sun with like-minded people and a writer who was not only published but had actually written a book I much admired (The Quincunx), not to speak of cooling off body and brain in a convenient swimming-pool, eating local foodstuffs and drinking local wine. It was the stuff of dreams.

And then I published my own first book, and then my second and I began to wonder if it wouldn’t be even more fun to go as the writer, and sit around in the sun, etc. This year, to my joy, that’s exactly what happened when the ad, in a sense (and through Sandra – thank you, Sandra!), got in touch with me to tell me that Lee Pennington, a man of many and considerable talents, and the brains and heart behind the operation, had invited me to be one of the guest authors on his Seven Day Wonder book-lovers’ week in early September. When I heard from an earlier guest that she’d had a great time, I was even keener.

I wasn’t disappointed. I was one of four people to be invited. Clare Dudman was the first, to talk about her most recent novel, A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees. It’s a fine book, honest and beautifully written, and I’m sorry I missed her. Next up was Adam Nevill, currently reinvigorating British horror with Apartment 16. He was there when I turned up late from Girona airport, to be greeted by pasta, wine and general conviviality, and seemed far too sunny and simpatico a man to have conceived such a dark and disturbing work. Someone once asked me how I managed to live with my imagination, and I may have asked Adam that same question.

The final author to be invited, Ann Cleeves, arrived while I was talking to the group and stayed, as I did, until the end. It was a joy to have time to talk a little shop, and discover, among other things, a shared admiration for Fred Vargas. You can see me here on the left, momentarily distracted by the view from the latest and possibly last of Ann’s gripping Shetland novels, Blue Lightning.

Events like these may be built around books, but they live or die by the energy and good will of all those who take part. I have everyone to thank for the welcome we received. Lee, Debbie and Rob, who made sure that the food played as central a role as the reading, and to all of the book-lovers, whose interest and enthusiasm, and discretion, made it a pleasure to be read, and discussed, and finally, with the softest of kid gloves, given the literary equivalent of the third degree. They couldn’t have been kinder, or more generous. Now all I have to do is write another book in time to get invited back…