What I really wanted for Christmas

And have been wanting for years, is something like an atlas of physiognomy. I want to be able to judge, definitively, whether the character I have in my mind’s eye really has hooded eyes, or not. What, exactly, is a Roman nose or a Grecian brow and if I say a woman has the square lower lip of a Pre-Raphaelite model, does anybody actually know what I mean or does it just go straight over everybody’s head.

So maybe I am strange – maybe everybody else has a much clearer sense of what these terms actually mean, or maybe nobody cares, but it has always really troubled me that while I can identify a retrousse nose without the faintest difficulty, I can’t possess the same absolute certainty about the squareness of a square chin or the scale that a forehead must possess to be considered broad.

Perhaps it only matters if you’re writing historical fiction (that’s a subtle clue as to what’s absorbing my hours right now) where the convention of describing characters is more developed than it contemporary literary fiction where it seems the convention is much more to describe sexual characteristics or grotesqueries of feature. Hmmm … so has anybody ever seen or heard of that kind of reference book or should I be getting myself some kind of therapy for over-literary exactitude?

2010 is a better writing year already …

Last year was depressing beyond expression (which is probably why I spent the year writing a novel about autism, suicide, adoption and race! Art imitating life etc) but already I am enjoying 2010 more because:

On 5th February a story of mine is being read aloud at New Venture Theatre’s From the Heart evening. I am really looking forward to it – I love hearing others read my work aloud.

On 11th February from 7pm at Field Place, Worthing, I’m talking to West Sussex Writers Club about writing sex for fun and profit. Tickets a fiver on the door if you’re a non-member – feel free to come along and get the low-down on what good sex can do for you (in the literary sense, of course!)

And I’ve had a story accepted by Fractured West - a new literary venture that looks exciting and fresh.

What a joy to start the year on a few high literary notes.

Writing about unattractive characters

I’m wading my way through A Game with Sharpened Knives by Neil Belton and thinking about how people write unlikeable characters. When I say wading, I don’t mean that the book is badly written because it’s not; it’s an allusive, complex, disjointed narrative that opens up the lives of Erwin Shrodinger and his associates to scrutiny.

The issue is Shrodinger – he was a peculiar, weak, oddly ego-less but selfish person. His strange personal life (not to give anything away to those who don’t know his story) might have passed with less notice in a different age, but as a man whose scientific career straddled the two world wars, who spent some time looking like (but perhaps not actually being) a Nazi apologist and ended up marooned in an Ireland seeking an identity in its own neutrality during World War II he acted, bluntly speaking, appallingly. And I am finding Belton’s depiction of him painful, ugly and depressing.

On the other hand, I love the late and much lamented Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen – granted Zen is fictional, he appeals to me so much that I feel a tiny pang each time I remember that there will never be another Zen novel. Aurelio is equally weak, strange and badly behaved, but I adore the way Dibdin drew chis character. And yet … Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley leaves me cold. I know Ripley has an actual fan club, has been much adapted for film and TV etc, but I just find his kind of unpleasantness unbearable. And yet … I do love Hannibal Lecter – a serial killer with few redeeming features (as an aside, both he and Ripley love forms of music which do little for me so it’s not that) who has become an international film figure too. And yet ... and yet ...

So how do we write these nasty types? It seems to me that there’s a warmth to Lecter and Zen – not so much a warmth of depiction but a warmth within them, which is lacking in Ripley and Shrodinger – or perhaps the warmth isn’t in them - but they have a kind of warmth that resonates with me, while whatever warmth there may be in the other two (and surely there isn’t any warmth in Ripley?) doesn’t.

As I’m revising – with hideous slowness – a historical novel in which my lead character is pretty nasty in many ways, I’m trying to unpick what makes some unlovable characters work for me, while others don’t – but I’m coming to the conclusion that liking and hating may be more visceral than intellectual and that means that I should write my dubious hero for myself and hope that there’s enough other people out there who feel as I do if he ever sees print.

Aurelio Zen's Venice courtesy of ezioman at Flickr

Snow interrupts play

Or rather, it interrupts work. I have just finished writing a commissioned erotica (paradoxically, featuring a parasol and a tropical waterslide, very inapposite to the snow outside) and spent several days turning over a pile of short stories, deciding what to send where.

It’s a thankless bloody task, as any writer will tell you, and reflecting back on the year behind me, I’ve realised just how competitive a business the short story world can be. And competitive is okay, but there’s something rather disturbing about the stories that I’ve read this year (and that’s hundreds and hundreds of stories, believe me) which is that they all seem to fall inside some kind of ‘rules’.

These rules are sometimes well-established eg start your work in media res and sometimes seem to be massive extrapolations from a current success – why were so many stories in the second person published in the past year or so? Because one or two high profile writers produced good work in the second person, obviously, and editors thought they’d like to have something like that too.

Quirky stories always seem to involve drugs and/or urban settings. Bleak stories end without resolution. Stories set in exotic locations always feature bad, grasping, culturally blind Americans or Europeans.

This is an exaggeration of course, but I have read almost no literary short fiction in the past two years that was quirky and rural, bleak and had a clear ending, exotic and featuring sensitive Americans/Europeans. So that would rule out Willa Cather, Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene if they were writing today, which of course they are not, but you take my meaning I hope.

And I know I sound curmudgeonly, and I’m not the only one to be bleating about the narrow range of short fiction that gets published today, but I’d love to hear of some magazines, zines and journals in the literary genre that are pushing the boundaries by accepting short fiction that falls outside ‘the rules’. Please? Because I seem to have an awful lot of it on my desk …


(winter jasmine in my garden - full bloom in the bitter cold, it's got to be a metaphor for something, right?)

Book review: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

One of the issues I end up debating quite a lot with other writers, and with readers too, is whether it’s better to read an ambitious book that’s flawed, or a flawless book that’s pedestrian in scope. And of course the question, in part, depends on your definition of ‘ambitious’ and ‘flawed’.

I would use both words to describe The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, published by Gallic and excellently translated (as far as I can tell) by Alison Anderson. This is a fiercely French novel, in the best possible senses: it’s rich with ideas, highly textured, focused on the value of the lived life and clearly posits the idea that philosophy should not just be a subject of study, but an element of everyday life. The unapologetic way in which Ms Barbery condemns people who live banal lives is refreshing – and when her two protagonists indulge in the quiet luxuries of thought and observation she manages to make us share in their belief system.

In my view though, the book is still flawed, as many ambitious books are. While it may be a personal prejudice, I found her preteen protagonist Paloma to be unlikeable and unpleasant. On the other hand, Renee the fifty-something concierge who has ‘the elegance of the hedgehog’ (ie she conceals her autodidactic profundity behind the imbecilic front that is superficially the uniform of any Parisian concierge) is quite delightful and rewarding to experience, right up to the moment when she experiences a ‘life-shock’ of the kind that the average therapist dreams of delivering, and is apparently set free of her inferiority complex by a simple sentence spoken by the rich and worldly Mr Ozu who has recently moved into the building she looks after. At which point this reader felt she’d moved from the reading lectern in a forbidding French library to the couch with Oprah. And the ending is simply sentimental. I won’t spoil it, but brace yourself for an Amelie moment.

So would I recommend it? Unreservedly yes – while it’s definitely a French pastime to write intellectual books for the masses (Alain de Botton has done well enough from it) such books often lack the charm that this one has in copious dashes. And when Barbery is good, she is very good indeed, eg when thinking about the difference between European doors and Japanese sliding ones, Renee muses ‘I was fascinated by the way the Japanese use space in their lives, and by these doors that slide and move quietly along invisible rails, refusing to offend space. For when we push open a door, we transform a place in a very insidious way … a door disrupts continuity without offering anything in exchange other than freedom of movement’. It’s exactly this kind of potted intellectual exercise that has had some critics foaming, but I think potted exercise is better by far than none and all and I’d take a hundred books like this (were they on offer, which, sadly, they currently are not) over all the grimly realistic, reductionist, Carveresque offerings that currently dominate popular literary culture.

A final word. The cover of this paperback is simply divine. If you have ever sat on a train, looking at the lighted windows of houses along the track, pondering the flashes of life that you see from your vantage, the illustration alone is enough to give you hours of pleasure. I am rarely won over to books simply by their covers, but in this case the perfect harmony between content and image is remarkable and noteworthy. There appear to be two covers on offer - make sure you get the one I've featured, it provides your money's worth, almost before you open the book!