David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

The first book I remember being given by anyone outside my immediate family was an end-of-year prize awarded by the local Sunday school – Enid Blyton’s The Land of Far Beyond. I was six years old and the prize was for attendance rather than spiritual commitment, but it was a book, and all books were treasured. I don’t imagine it’s much awarded these days and, if it is, it must strike its readers as rather an odd sort of book on the whole – allegory isn’t really the mode du jour, and the fact that it’s essentially a retelling of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress probably wouldn’t make it any more attractive to the average pre-teen punter, though Bunyan was still a name to be reckoned with in the late 1950s. I don’t know if this is a shame or not. With Philip Pullman’s more radical take on religion now available to us, Blyton’s anodyne theology may no longer be needed. But the book had a powerful effect on me, and – because this isn’t always the case – the effect was primarily, although not entirely, the one intended. It tells the tale of a bunch of people whose various sins are made manifest as physical burdens attached like shaggy buffalo humps to their backs. (So far, so Bunyan.) They’re an oddly assorted gang and, as they travel to the only place in which their humps can be removed, they meet with a series of adventures, or learning experiences as they’re now known. Slowly the travellers lighten their loads or, at worst, come to terms with them. For a children’s book with an anything but subtle purpose, it’s surprisingly complex, and many of the scenes have stayed with me, partly because of the striking illustrations by Horace Knowles, more of which can be seen here. In search of understanding and moral growth, allegory and the picaresque often go hand in hand, like Hansel and Gretel through the dark wood. But one of the problems about using allegory and the picaresque to talk about moral growth is that the former is necessarily binary, static (someone called Courage is hardly likely to take fright and do a runner), while the latter might involve changing surroundings and new adventures but the central figure need be no more than the string onto which these are threaded. Blyton gets round the problem – as Collodi did when he revised Pinocchio – by having the settings static but the protagonists capable of growth.

Which is a long but necessary way round to where I want to be. David Mitchell‘s fourth novel, Black Swan Green. Set in Worcestershire in the early 1980s, it’s a first person narrative and the teller of the tale is a thirteen-year-old boy called Jason Taylor. It’s customary at this point to remark that the book captures what it’s like to be a thirteen-year-old boy but surely that’s a rather reductive approach? Why should all thirteen-year-old boys be assumed to be the same? What makes Jason, and this book, special is that, although some of the situations (or ‘scrapes’ as they used to be called in the literature) are familiar enough – the book ticks off the usual boxes of childhood angst – bullying, divorce, first love, the fear of losing one’s reputation – Jason himself is a source of constant surprise. Unlike the allegorical heroes of strictly allegorical journeys, ciphers on a pre-ordained quest towards understanding, Jason’s an extraordinarily realised character, complex, thoughtful, confused about his needs, anxious about the effect he might be having on the world around him and, most importantly, capable of change. The world he travels through, like that of Pinocchio or Blyton’s heroes, is peopled by parents, other boys (and – at a tantalising distance – girls), neighbours, uncles and aunts – one of the most exhilaratingly comic scenes in a book that isn’t short of humour is a family meal in which Jason’s father and uncle spar in typical suburban hunter fashion. But other elements constantly intrude, or threaten to – disturbing figures with a fabular feel to them – and it’s sometimes hard to tell how far Jason’s creative imagination is at work as the confines of the Worcestershire village of Black Swan Green, where no swan, black or otherwise, has ever been seen, ripple and part to reveal something darker and more mysterious. Old ladies in houses hidden away among the trees, child-murderers, cannibals, corpses frozen beneath the ice of a local lake. Mitchell doesn’t help here, allowing his boy hero free rein to move from the real to the possibly-real, and the book would be a far lesser thing if he did. It’s all part of Jason’s world and, however phantasmagorical it might sometimes seem, not a word is wasted. He is, after all, a poet.

Jason’s status as poet is central to the book. There’s a wonderful conflict between his inner life and outer self, and glimpses of what might happen when that conflict is finally resolved. He briefly finds a mentor in the form of Madame Crommelynck – lovers of Cloud Atlas will be delighted to see her reappear – and is admonished by her, when pouring wine, with the following advice: “Always pour so the label is visible! If the wine is good, your drinker should know so. If the wine is bad, you deserve shame.” It’s a lesson worth learning, but not the easiest to apply in a world in which the very idea of poetry is even more gay, in the pejorative sense, than going to see a film with your mother, itself as close to a hanging offence as one can get to in the cut-throat jungle of rural early adolescence and survive. Jason already knows how hard it is to follow Madame Crommelynck’s edict. He points out:

If you show someone something you’ve written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin and say, ‘When you’re ready’.

It’s revealing that he should see the writer as a sort of vampire here, as though he already knows the extent to which he’ll be drawing blood from his own life and using it to write down what he sees and hears (and that doesn’t mean I think Jason Taylor is David Mitchell in any strict one-to-one correspondence, although I wouldn’t be surprised to find myself at least partly wrong). Magically, towards the end of the book, our hero finds himself writing words that we’ve only just read ourselves, as though the book were catching up on itself, like an ouroboros. Language does that, shaping and surprising and tripping one up, reminding one that the journey is at least as important as the arrival, that finding oneself in the same place and knowing it for the first time isn’t just a modernist trope. Even Jason’s stutter, memorably referred to as the Hangman, is a reminder that what we want to say might not always be that easy, and that the struggle -the struggle to be true to oneself and to utterance – is the largest and most lasting part of the achievement.

Niall Griffiths, Ten Pound Pom

One of my father’s brothers lived in Perth. He came back to the UK when I was a child, with his Australian-born wife, to visit. He was a brash, arrogant man who thought that the Lambert family – or his branch of it -had invented God and still held the patent. He bullied his wife, an overweight placid woman called Sylvia, and tried to bully my mother, without success. She told him she had a mind of her own, a concept so novel he was briefly speechless. He had a curious accent, half-Lancashire, half-Aussie, and used it to criticise the old country whenever he got the chance. He was the worst kind of convert, in other words, and he didn’t do very much for the image of his new home as he stalked around the old one, picking fault. He certainly didn’t encourage affection towards the Antipodes in me. He was particularly scathing, I remember, about my brand new identity bracelet, de rigueur for thirteen-year-old boys at the time (in my eyes) but a sign, to him, of deeply suspicious sexual ambiguity; a moment of rare intuition. He’d moved to Australia just after the war, as far as I know -anyone who might know better is dead – and I wonder if he was among the first to take advantage of the assisted passage scheme that started in 1945 and ended in the 1970s.

Among those who did take advantage of the scheme were the parents of author Niall Griffiths, and his book Ten Pound Pom, is an account of the three years he spent as a boy in Australia, interleaved with his experience of the country now, revisiting the scenes of his childhood thirty years later as he retraces the trip his family made from Brisbane to Perth. The first thing to say about the book is that it’s emphatically not a celebration of the country. Brisbane, where he started – and starts – his journey, is particularly roughly handled, and his dislike – most clearly stated in the following judgement on p. 42 – This is a shite place. I can’t wait to leave it – is more than substantiated by his description of the place and its people. Perth fares a little better, but not by much. He’s a vivid and passionate writer, and the picture he gives is rich with detail and as generous with its affection towards what’s good as it is with his fury towards what isn’t. The language is endlessly inventive. Here’s his description of a mad Big Issue seller:

She’s got eyes like fruit-machine reels about to pay out and a laugh like a stack of saucepans falling onto a hard lino floor.

But it’s not just pyrotechnics. There’s a lot of hard thinking – and feeling – going on as Griffiths the man moves through a world that’s both alien and familiar, surprised that so little has changed and shocked, not always positively, by what change there is. The constant shifts from present to past, from opinionated (in the best sense) travel journal to the unsentimental, and unsentimentalised, trawling of memory through association, makes the book not only a portrait of a place, but of a way of seeing place, idiosyncratic, responsive to the point of being raw-skinned, endlessly alert to what matters. It’s a lovely book – honest and humane – and it confirms my impression of Griffiths as a writer whose work is absolutely worth seeking out. Just read his piece on dignity and self-worth (p. 126) if you don’t believe me.

If I have a bone to pick with this book, and I do, it’s not with its author, who has done a grand job, but with whoever was responsible for proof-reading it (i.e. its publisher). If a book’s worth putting out – and this one emphatically is – then it’s worth paying attention to presentation. I’m not talking MasterChef here, just making sure the food is on the plate. There’s barely a page in the book that doesn’t have at least one error of punctuation or formatting or spelling. Some of them are irritating – the confusion between ‘it’s’ and ‘its’ (and no, I’m not being anal). Others are more disconcerting: when Griffiths recalls the first girl he ever kissed, ‘a Scottish girl his age called Jackie Thompson’, we find this:

I had my first proper kiss here. On that balcony, there. With Jackie Thompson. Wonder what he’s doing now.

Shades of identity bracelets? No, just shoddy editing. In a book that’s rightly scathing about a badly proof-read information leaflet, errors like ‘hereded’ for ‘herded’ and ‘Iisland’ for ‘Island’ (three times on the same page!) and ‘thoise’ for ‘those’ (I could go on) could profitably have been avoided.

Steve Hely, How I Became a Famous Novelist

What made me buy this? A good review in a broadsheet a month or so ago? The author’s credentials as writer for David Letterman and The (American) Office ? Or the sneaking, inadequately suppressed and probably best not shared suspicion that it might actually contain some nugget of information that will lift my own novels out of the six-figure doldrums and into the Amazon top 100? Because the aftermath of publishing a novel isn’t only, as one might expect, the joy of finally seeing oneself in print; it’s also the time-consuming and soul-sapping anxiety that so few other people have, and what this might mean to the chances of the next book, and the book after that. I came across a comment recently (and forgive me for not being able to credit it), made by an author when her publisher mentioned her sales figures: ‘I write the books. You sell them. They’re your sales figures, not mine.’ Quite. So how do you do it, Steve? Spill the beans.

Well, the book does and doesn’t do what it says on the tin. It’s been described as a laugh-a-minute satire on the world of publishing, and that might be true if the reader knows absolutely nothing about that world, has a passion for airport novels and thinks that deep sentiment is necessarily alliterative. Otherwise, maybe not. It has some very clever parodies indeed of various kinds of popular fiction, but the general thrust of the book doesn’t seem to qualify as satire because the world it’s describing isn’t sufficiently far removed from this portrayal of it. Satire exaggerates for its effect, and I’m not sure Hely exaggerates quite enough. Dan Brown, it’s been pointed out a thousand times, is beyond satire and Hely’s piss-take, funny though it is, actually feels like an act of literary recuperation, as though Brown’s (non-) style were being helped to get back into shape by a generous personal trainer. The underlying assumptions about what makes people write, of course, are anything but generous, and the general odour of snake medicine Hely detects pretty much everywhere confirms a widely-held suspicion that fiction is guff, and meretricious guff at that, which may be true in part, but it isn’t a part I want to recognise as mine. Still, what might seem shocking to people who aren’t themselves practitioners of the noble art of fiction, such as the hero-narrator’s squalid and demeaning motives for wanting to write a best seller in the first place, doesn’t seem so much like parody as the outing of a small, partial and rather guilty secret. Carlo Gébler has some useful, and chastening, things to say about this here. It’s all very well to say that writing is one thing and the business of publishing another, but it looks as though the line between them isn’t always etched that finely. Motives bleed across it, like ink or its equivalent on Kindle.

Still, it’s a good read and does have some wonderfully exhilarating moments, although these might be more appreciated by American readers – I’m thinking of Oprah, but the book’s full of culturally sharpened axes to grind and straw gods to see them wielded against. And it does, finally, acknowledge that, deep down, beneath all the bestseller lists and publishing house accountants’ angst, and the chat shows and TV interviews and image building, there’s also the business of making a book that works, in the real sense. It’s a comforting thought, but, in some ways, it also feels a little like a cop out, as if Kafka had written The Truman Show.

Helen Garner, The Spare Room

It’s a truism that we no longer know what to do with death, that we skirt it as a source of discomfort and unease, as something extraneous to the business in which we’re so completely, so passionately engaged, that of living our own lives to the full. Death’s antithetical to life, and its enemy; it wipes us out of the picture in a way we’re not prepared to accept. We admire those people who skirmish with death and then return to tell us about it; we call them survivors. We fight for life, we beat disease; it’s all very martial and antagonistic and it’s hard now to imagine ourselves using a more consolatory language or, indeed, one that might recognise the redeeming nature of death, the idea of death as friend, not foe. There are signs of some gentler recognition. The current fondness for the word passing, which seems to have usurped the place of passing away as the euphemism of choice, recognises the need we still have to think of death as a gateway rather than an end. Because that’s how we’d like it. But it doesn’t ring true because so few of us can imagine beyond the gate. I wrote some weeks ago about H.G. Wells’ short story, The Door in the Wall, in which the other place is imagined in all its lushness and tranquillity. It’s a myth, of course, however much we might prefer it not to be. We know that nobody wants to pass, let alone die. It’s as though death had become the most unnatural thing of all, the one thing life can’t countenance.

But maybe this has always been true? Maybe it’s only wishful thinking that posits an age in which people looked calmly on death as the natural culmination of a life well-lived, rather than its brutal, definitively obtrusive denial. Maybe we’ve always raged and fought, and doubted, but had no cultural space in which to say it. Maybe we’ve always been so desperate to live we’d have done anything not to die.

Helen Garner‘s novel is about two women, old friends. The narrator, Helen, has offered her spare room to an old friend of hers, Nicola, for three weeks, while Nicola plans to take a course of alternative cancer treatment involving massive doses of Vitamin C and ‘cupping’. It’s immediately clear that Nicola is far worse than Helen expected and it isn’t long before Helen’s patience is stretched to the limit, not only because of the strain put on her by Nicola’s illness and the devastating effects of the cure, which is immense, but also by Nicola’s fervent belief in the course of treatment she’s undergoing, so obviously both life-threatening in itself and without a shred of medical evidence to support the claims the clinic is making. It’s quackery from start to finish, and Nicola’s refusal to accept this, because to accept it would be to accept death, soon drives a wedge between the two women. It’s a wedge that’s exacerbated by the special claims Nicola makes as fighter, as though her threatened life had an added value as a result. Her conviction that everyone should be contributing to her struggle – should be only too happy to to do so – is one of the most appalling things about her. What Helen wants, and what I, as a reader wanted, is for Nicola to give up, to acquiesce; to acknowledge that she has no choice but to die, and then to do it. It’s a book that has much to say about carer’s guilt, as Helen’s inadequacy and exhaustion – and fury – take over from anything more altruistic. Nicola has no capacity – or need – for empathy. Why should she? Everything centres on her. But it’s the failure of empathy in Helen that frightens most, as it should, because it’s what will happen to us all. It certainly frightens Helen, who says, at one point, ‘My heart was full of holes.’ Everything curves around death, like light around gravity; everything is less substantial, but that everything is all we have and know.

At the heart of the book is selfishness: the situations in which we allow it to ourselves and others. We tend to grant the dying more leeway in these matters, perhaps because we have a sense of the future they’re forbidden; to behave otherwise seems churlish. But Nicola’s selfishness expects to be given that same leeway despite her refusal to die. It’s as though she were making claim on a reserve of understanding that’s been intended for something else, something fatal. Lying to herself, and others, she seems to forfeit her right to have the world revolve around her, and this is what Helen can’t handle. Her brutality, as she sees it, is in direct response to the brutality of Nicola’s blinding, desperate egotism.

The book pulls away at the last, and a sort of dignity is achieved that casts a gentler light on the harsh truths that precede it. But the force of the book comes from those truths, unpalatable but cleansing. DH Lawrence once said that sentiment ‘does dirt on life’; in this novel, Garner strips that dirt away.

Kay Sexton, Minding My Peas and Cucumbers

I was never much of a gardener as a child, despite the evidence of the muddied wellingtons and the working-man’s size mug of tea in this photograph. I grew up in large, half-renovated houses with rambling gardens, and my mother made preserves and bottled fruit with the passion of anyone who’d lived through the war and couldn’t bear to see good food go to waste. I remember the two of us crying our eyes out one afternoon as she forced horseradish root through the mincer; as far as tear ducts are concerned, no onion in the world comes within wailing distance of raw, minced horseradish. In the house outside which this photograph was taken, we had an attic filled with apples from our orchard, the floor a carpet of gold and russet, the scent so heady with sweetness and incipient rot you had to steady yourself or fall. But I don’t remember actually gardening.

It wasn’t until I went to my final primary school, a two-roomed village school in Staffordshire, that I had to dirty my hands. The children in the top class, all ten of us, each had a strip of land, the size of two double beds pushed head to head, to grow things in. I don’t recall much guidance being given; there was something oddly counter-cultural about the freedom we seem to have been allowed, although my fellow pupils generally plumped for the standard crops of carrot and onion and lettuce, most of which were stripped overnight by rabbits, to cries of grief from the girls. Some boys grew potatoes, one or two of the girls may have slipped the odd pansy in among the parsnips. I, and I blush even now to recall this, planted rows of gladioli. I think I may have met with some resistance from Mrs Fletcher, the headmistress, but my father – to his credit – backed me up and my gladioli stood proud among the entirely utilitarian produce of my schoolmates.

Which brings me to Kay Sexton’s Minding My Peas and Cucumbers, subtitled, as you see here, Quirky Tales of Allotment Life. I can’t think of anyone better suited to write this book than Kay. Her gardening skills are as evident as, well, my gladioli, and she’s more than qualified in the quirky stakes as a quick glance at the first chapter, which opens in a French nudist camp, will confirm. I should declare an interest here. Although Kay and I have never met, we’ve been aware of each other for some years now, initially as members of a novel-writing workshop on Zoetrope, where she proved enormously helpful, more recently as fellow-tillers in the larger allotments of the blogosphere. Kay has reviewed and interviewed me three times, to my genuine gratification, and I’ve been looking forward to having the chance to review her back. So here goes.

This book is a delight, giving pleasure in so many ways. In two or three pages, taken at random, it provides information about the importance of winter digging, psychological observation about love (though I think a new lover may also be a project) and sheer poetry (…parsnips…as heavy as elephant tusks but sweet-smelling and draped with whiskery roots like an Oriental grandfather’s beard…), not to speak of a recipe that would make the most vegetable-averse think twice (about kale!). What Kay brings to the book is not just a substantial hands-on knowledge to the business of allotment-holding – and obtaining, probably the greater struggle – but a novelist’s sense of what makes people interesting and, finally, human. It’s a truism that all small worlds are microcosms, but if a microcosm is really going to tell us about more than just itself, it needs to be filtered through the attention of someone who’s alert not only to what’s typical but also to what isn’t. Kay’s tales are quirky in their attention to what’s genuinely quirky in the world, and quirkiness can be funny, touching, tragic, charming, just like this book. Behind the attractive, slightly retro cover, along with information on how to grow asparagus and rotate crops and conceal water butts, not to speak of some very appetising recipes, there’s a sense of a world, as vital and unpredictable as parsnips (which aren’t just poetic – you’ll see what I mean when you read the book). And the title isn’t just clever, either. The book is certainly about growing food, but it’s also about the etiquette of social relations and the importance of respecting others; like a hybrid of Montaigne and Monty Don.

PS I hate gladioli, and can’t imagine why I wanted them. I now have a lemon tree which, like this book, wonderfully combines the beautiful with the useful.

Various Authors, a Fiction Desk anthology

I first came across The Fiction Desk when I found a thoughtful and generous review there of my first novel , Little Monsters. Soon after, I discovered that the man behind the desk, Rob Redman, was operating from Rome, where I’ve been living and working for almost thirty years. We met up for lunch in a very pleasant restaurant in Garbatella, ostensibly so that I could be interviewed – my first face-to-face interview, as it happened. I was nervous, excited, wondering how well I’d acquit myself. I practised the kind of answers I’d give to the questions I thought I might be asked (something I’ve been doing since I imagined myself on the Eamonn Andrews Show at a worryingly early age). At the same time, I thought, what could be easier than to have the chance – and implicit obligation – to do nothing but talk about myself as I ate and drank at someone else’s expense. But my natural – let’s say, to dignify things a little, novelist’s – curiosity overwhelmed the original function of the occasion and I came away knowing an awful lot more about Rob than he knew about me, other than that I liked seafood, white wine and poking my nose into my interviewer’s business. We had a second attempt shortly after that in Via Ostiense, in a tavola calda beneath where I teach, a windowless place with a mirror ball and dark blue walls that transforms itself by night into a club. I behaved myself better, Rob asked his questions and I found the experience gratifying and challenging in equal measure – a sign that Rob knew just what he was doing. You can read the result here.

Among the facts I discovered about Rob was that he intended to move into publishing. So I wasn’t surprised when I heard about his plans to produce a quarterly anthology of short fiction. The UK doesn’t really have a decent short story quarterly; those publications that do exist often feel too small-pressy, for economic reasons, or self-serving, for editorial ones. Granta, as far as I know, hasn’t published an unsolicited or un-agented piece of modern fiction for years. Rob’s plan was to produce something that looked, felt and read like a real book. Something that readers would be proud to own and writers proud to appear in. On the strength of the first number, Various Authors, he’s done just that.

It’s not my job, as one of the contributors, to review the book, although I’d certainly find much to commend there if I did, not least the extraordinary range of styles and approaches, reflecting Rob’s openness and sound editorial judgement. (I will say that I was moved to tears, laughter and admiration on several occasions.) I’m sure these qualities will be confirmed by the second volume, due out in summer 2011 and entitled All These Little Worlds. So if you care about short fiction and its continued appearance in the UK, do yourself a favour and pick up a subscription.

Amy Bloom, Where the God of Love Hangs Out

Falling in love isn’t really that hard to write about. People having been doing it for centuries, winding the story up as it heads towards the altar, or some exciting irremediably other place that marks the new start for the fortunate couple. In narrative terms, falling in love is a sort of ideal convergence that separates the before – complicated, fraught, yearning – from the after – fulfilled, achieved, the heart’s appetites finally appeased.

These days, of course, stories are just as likely to start in that angry, anomalous bedroom where the end of love is the real issue and the recovery of who and what the two people are, or were, is the force that drives the plot from perdition to fulfilment. It’s a fast forward – narrative breakdowns don’t hang about – but also a rapid reverse, into singleness; a harder game to play than falling in love, but one that offers a myriad of possibilities; an opening out rather than a closing in.

And then there are the stories that find their substance in love itself, that moment at the top of the helter-skelter that can last an endless second or a lifetime. It’s a harder trick to pull off, in narrative terms. Like happiness, love exercises a sort of tedium on the creative impulse. It’s nice to do, but less nice to watch, or describe. At its worse, it has a yah-boo-sucks feel to it, as the reader’s sense of deprivation, and then resentment, overwhelms the initial gratitude that such a thing should be possible and deemed worthy of record.

And then, as rare these days as beluga sturgeon, there are stories that talk of love as it is, as something that doesn’t go away and isn’t simple, and won’t behave, sexual love and familial love and the love of friends and the godawful, painful, unavoidable clutter that lies between these three, binding and dividing and generally rendering life as complicated and fulfilling as it can get. Like the stories in Amy Bloom‘s extraordinary collection, Where the God of Love Hangs Out.

I bought my copy in Clifton Village, in one of those upmarket charity bookshops you find in places like Clifton Village, three doors down from a Farrow and Ball outlet. I was there with my partner and someone I loved for a long time, and still do, in my way, but I’d left them looking at paint while I browsed for something to read. We’re all friends now, although we might not have been, it’s taken work and commitment and an investment on all our parts, and it strikes me that if anyone were to set down the past three decades of my life and get it right, the mess of it and the spareness of it too, the spareness of what’s mattered to it, Amy Bloom would be the one. What her stories do, and do in an exemplary way, is show how driving and disruptive the force of love is, and how, despite or perhaps because of this, it should never be regretted; even thwarted, it brings its rewards; even the damage it does has worth.

These stories are wonderful things, the two groups of four linked stories in particular, articulating with wit and passion the twisting and unpredictable ways of the heart. The people who follow these ways, or resist them, are old friends, partners of friends, widows, stepsons; young and old, men and women, black and white – all of these factors are important; all of them, in a sense and at times, are irrelevant. If it weren’t a denial of the power of language to describe us, some of the stuff we experience as love should almost be unsayable, if anything is unsayable. One of the questions Bloom ponders, in fact, is how love can be spoken, if words are the way to do it. ‘Night Vision’, one of the second group of stories, ends like this:

She put down the broom and the dustpan and came over to me and smiled at my towel. She put her lips to the middle of my chest, over my beating heart.

“I love you past speech.”

We stood there, my long neck bent down to her shoulder, her hands kneading my back. We breathed in and out together.

“I’ll say good night, honey. Quite a day.”

She waved one hand over her shoulder and walked away.

Ghosts of a Low Moon: An interview with Andrew Oldham

I’ve recently read Andrew Oldham’s debut poetry collection, Ghosts of a Low Moon, published by Lapwing. It’s an impressive collection, moving with ease from what might appear at first glance to be unmediated social realism to moments of great lyricism, and incorporating humour, pathos and crystal-sharp observation with considerable skill. He has a lovely way with long lines, something I’ve a great fondness for, exploiting the welcome they offer towards narrative and the exercise of memory within the poem: a wonderful example of this is The Calling of Young Tony, a massively accomplished poem that you’ll have to buy the book in order to enjoy. These Walls is another example of how long lines can create a fluid sense of immediacy across time, as in:

A place of childhood, of flying brooms and fleeing cats, of washhouses

and privies with grave stones for walls and bubbling cheese on enamel

plates.

I had the chance to ask Andrew some questions about his work. Here they are, and this is what he said.

At what point in the writing of a poem do you realise what you’re doing? How much rewriting is involved in getting it to a state that satisfies you?

This is the thing with ideas, sometimes they come to you complete, as in Costa Coffee Girl – I wrote what I saw but in other cases they start with merest glimmer and then your off like a spaniel in the long grass, ears up, tail wagging, dribbling all the way and occasionally reappearing barking your appreciation. Poems can be like that, in Ways of Autumn I sat down consciously to respond to Wallace Stevens Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird but it became quickly apparent that the poem didn’t want to do that. It became multi-textual, biographical, Coleridge’s Mariner crept in, nature and alcoholism rode side by side. It only began to crystallise when I took the decision of giving the poem a narrative voice but still adhering, loosely, to the original Wallace Stevens structure. That poem took a lot of rewriting, many poems do. I get worried when a poem comes fully formed, I always suspect there is something wrong and there often is but that is the game of hindsight and we all play that. I don’t think I am ever satisfied with a poem, if I was then I wouldn’t carry on writing, I would have achieved perfection and that is a dangerous thing to achieve.

In many poems, you move with great skill from what I’d call a documentary take on the world to something much more lyrical. Is this a necessary procedure for you, or just something that tends to happen?

It tends to happen, in American Vignettes I needed to get a balance between viewpoints. I couldn’t just write a poem where I bumbled along in a documentary style, there had to be a lyrical or a magical element to it. I think this is why some of my more lyrical poetry has been compared to Dylan Thomas, not a bad thing though I don’t drink nearly as much as he did! I think due to health problems, due to a skewed view on the world, due to my love of nature, my involvement in the landscape and the underbelly of the city, that I am constantly tuned into these lyrical undertones. I see the world a little differently, we all do but I choose to explore it rather than fit in. I have always placed myself on the outside, looking in, this sometimes makes me hard to interact with but it affords me the ability to listen to rhythms. I celebrate rhythm, cadence and I contrast them with something that can be fantastic in the mundane. I think as a culture we forget that the most mundane actions have a rhythm and a distinct lyrical beauty.

I love the American sequence. Were these written in situ or recollected in tranquillity?

American Vignettes were largely written in situ and the notes taken on a road trip from Las Vegas to San Francisco underpin the sequence. As I travelled, writing about America, I realised that they were part of poem (I think this is due to the immense distances I travelled whilst there and how the landscape changed). The poem though has distinct separate sections and rhythms, each of these reflect the landscape I was travelling through. The conversations in the poem are one hundred percent truthful, I did not edit them, this is a conscious decision because often we overhear or are party to the most wonderful conversations. I wanted to celebrate a real love of language, of cadence. of connecting with the landscape and still being outside that landscape. After all, I was effectively demoted to the role of tourist, even though the trip took most of the late summer. When I edited the work, it was written outside those parameters though, I was back home and all I had where photos as memories and the notebooks, drawings, menus, tourist crap, I had to draw them together and to do that I was conscious of Jack Kerouac’s novel, On The Road. I aspired to the idea that a poem could be a road journey. That in turn, my wife became a character, I became a character and those around us became part of the fabric of the poem, from cowboys to Ginsberg.

One of my favourite poems in the collection is Ways of Autumn? I don’t suppose you could talk me through where it came from?

Ways of Autumn as I initially discussed came from the Wallace Stevens poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. I am big fan of Stevens, Whitman and Carlos Williams. The initial desire was to learn by doing. I often did this when I was younger, rewriting a poem by another poet. It would lead me into their voice, make me consider the choices that they made. Language in poetry and fiction is vital. People must think I am mad when I go on about finding the right word, the economy of language or the lyrical nature of an event. Recently I wrote The Anchor, a long poem on a day in the life of a pub, though some of the events happen, as they do in Ways of Autumn I expanded others, adding new images, new ideas that would take the poem into something lyrical, something fantastic. That is how Ways of Autumn came about, a simple idea, a simple desire to emulate Stevens but then something else crashed in, and kept smashing into the words and images. It’s almost like a character appeared before me waving their arms and asking to be written about. Never ignore them. If you do so then all the characters that may come to you will just skip over you. It’s not a muse idea, it’s just the idea that all ideas need to be written, and the good ones after a lot editing make it to the page.

Thank you, Andrew. I’d like to conclude this post by giving you the chance to read one of my favourite poems from American Vignettes.

6. Arizona

The place where planes fly by.

In the west, butterfly clouds haze the moon,

and songs are sung about men who drunk at forty bars and

drank at forty more.

Hank Williams and Johnny Cash by a campfire

beneath shooting stars and here, here in Arizona,

a man can stretch his arms for two hundred miles in either direction.

Beneath the big dipper and the night sky, in the shadow of Spirit Mountain,

I met them all, the ghosts of the west, Butch and Sundance, Tombstone men

with ground teeth and skin of copper stained stone and a diabetic

cowboy (who moved from Vegas after witnessing a murder) who

declined the pudding and sugar in his coffee.

And a cowboy singer, son of Sally, drawer of horses and

commemorated in a hall.

John Wilkinson, The Enigma of the Hour

This isn’t a review, but a fond acknowledgement to an old friend, and poet. I’m touched and honoured that John Wilkinson should have dedicated this extraordinary ode to me. You can read it here. I’d say more, but there’s no need; the work speaks for itself. I would just say though that it’s available to be read because the Cambridge Literary Review has made it available, initially in print form and now on-line. CLR is a consistently interesting, imaginative and thoughtfully edited review, and not only for people connected to Cambridge – the next issue has a recently re-discovered story by Donald Barthelme, for example. I suggest you take a look.

The Scent of Cinnamon

I normally write about other people’s books here, but I couldn’t resist posting this review of The Scent of Cinnamon by the highly esteemed Scott Pack, publisher, tireless promoter of books and the people who write them, and producer of the always entertaining and informative blog, Me and My Big Mouth.  Scott’s been writing a daily review of a short story since the beginning of the year on his spin-off blog, entitled, appropriately enough, Me and My Short Stories. I’m delighted to see my story at No. 62.