At long last! Have you missed me? Sorry for the extraordinary delay. My computer’s been in cyber hospital for ages (as those of you attending the meetings have heard!) and I’m sorry to say was consigned to the great big server in the sky last week. So here I am with a snappy little model, sitting in the Café Brutus on the High Street and taking advantage of some wonderful wireless technology whilst sipping on my favourite triple bean latte. Who ever thought that Wednesdays could be so…bohemian!
There’ll be lots to catch up on too – in particular the meal we all enjoyed in town and the subsequent night on the tiles. I haven’t stayed up that late for years! It was a superb little Italian, chosen by Jasmine (sans Prof H fyi[1]) and came with the full package: a genuine Italian family presided over by a proper, well-proportioned Italian momma who pinched the cheeks of the men and bossed her innumerable (handsome) sons around. It was interesting being as we got to talking about Italian Literature, or a lack of knowledge on that front apart from the likes of Petrarch and Dante and practically no one at all from contemporary times apart from Italo Calvino and Primo Levi. Jasmine talked about Calvino’s Italian Folktales though – a wonderful collection of stories from around the country that he collected himself. All the usual stuff you’d expect is here but the breadth of the tome (available in a delightful edition) gives one more of the culture than general folktale anthologies can ever do, providing that is that one donates the time to read them all and doesn’t just dip in and out like I would!
Then Clem chipped in with a few words on Levi’s The Wrench. A wonderful tale of a man’s relationship with a rigger, an everyman of sorts, a hero of the modern era, confident, ambitious, talkative and immodest in the extreme yet imbued with the essence of what it is to be a true grafter; an artist engineer. Most of us of course know Levi from his memoirs of his Holocaust experience, and indeed of genius collections such as The Periodic Table which fuses the chemist and the writer in a series of remarkable stories linked into the elements, and I’d never heard of The Wrench at all. Clem description of its main character Faussone really conjured up his indomitable spirit and he talked about the speaker’s quiet observation that made, for him, for one of the most memorable characters in modern fiction.
There was soon talk about a new collection of short stories by Levi (A Tranquil Star we think it’s called) one story from which appearing in the Guardian Review not so long ago so perhaps that’s one to look out for.
We’ve been reading Tomorrow by Graham Swift of late and it’s had a mixed reception. Many bought into its depiction of familial tension – an emotional build up and miniature saga told on the eve of a revelation that is set to throw a family into disarray. And yet others found they lost interest the moment the secret was revealed to the reader (and a secret many thought could be spotted a mile off although it took yours truly by surprise!). Swift’s prose is ever so engaging and terribly authentic and there were moments of insight that cast Swift’s narrator Paula as a remarkably three-dimensional character. Her tale told through the night to her sleeping teenage children slowly built up the picture of her life, but what struck readers was the way each chapter seemed to have its own theme or trope, like capsules of thought and suggestive nuance within a wider narrative arc.
Jasmine, whilst leaning back with her glass of Chianti, thought it ‘a meditation on truth and becoming, where the later is governed by the former and where what one thought was the truth is in fact an illusion.’
Well, yes, I suppose I agree (although I think our Jas has spent a night too many in Pseud’s Corner, no? Sounding like the elusive Professor Harry methinks! Only kidding Jas – you now what I mean). Clem was (as usual) a little harder to persuade. He felt ‘this secret business is just a blatant narrative technique to make you plod through a book with essentially nothing to it. So they bought a cat. So they lost the cat. So the cat came back. So she fancied the vet. And so on. And more to the point, so what? Yes, he can write. It’s well written. But I was bored by it and I guessed the secret almost immediately. I mean, the cover tells you everything you need to know.’
I’ll agree with that too. It’s bloody obvious when you think about it. But I didn’t, so I suppose it worked for me.
And that, with regard to reading, was that. We settled into the usual BBP social mode and the bottles of wine emptied with a rate of knots! We moved on from the restaurant to one of the quayside bars but it was too noisy so we ended up in the The Crown. Darling Mary read another of her poems which this time it addressed the plight of dear Donald who still keeps his vigil in the tree. It’s called ‘The Library Watcher’ and finishes with some beautiful lines: ‘Can you still watch / What is not there?’[2]
And it went down hill from there. I only just remember the karaoke, and Stella still denies singing ‘Smoke on the Water’ despite there being photographic evidence knocking about somewhere!
See you at the next meeting, My house – Thursday.
[1] For your information, for your information
[2] Speaking of things not being there – Jake, who goes for late night/early morning jogs around Bullman Hill says he couldn’t see Donald in his tree last Tuesday. I do hope the stalwart isn’t wavering…
Friday, 6 July 2007
Tuesday, 13 March 2007
Editorial - The Launch, Some News, A Winner
There are few things nicer than an early stroll through Bullman Hill. The hazy sun is a light dreamed up purely for the endless avenues, the crescents and the City Heath to the south. People in warm coats walk their dogs, joggers, focussed and red-faced pound the streets, early cars stammer the silence of the waking hour. Poor Donald looked frozen to the bone and so I was glad I’d remembered his coffee. He is not very communicative in the morning as most of you know and even though he said he’d slept well he looked like he hasn’t enjoyed forty winks in years! Still, without people like him where the hell would we be? He reckons the council are coming today to strip the inside of the Library and I’ll certainly be poking around in the bins to ensure that good book stock hasn’t been thrown out. There was an impressive collection of National Geographics (always the first to go) that had been gathering dust for decades – no doubt destined to become a yellow slick in a skip. Can’t they give them to Bullman High? I’m sure the Librarian there would be delighted![1]
On the Wasserstein’s front, two men in hats were measuring the inside of the empty shop last week. Had the traffic on the High Street not increased twentyfold in the last year or so then I might have got across and quizzed them but they’d disappeared by the time the green man kicked in. The Big Issue lady (you know the one – kindly and always seated) saw me coming and said something about the High Street getting a facelift (is she French?) but then we got caught up in the transaction (since when has the Big Issue been more than a £1?). There’s nothing on the Wasserstein’s website either… In the words of the irrepressible Stella ‘take your own advice and BOGOF’. Others wait with excitement (particularly since a new rumour suggests the store will have a coffee shop!).
Anyway, some reactions to last week’s blog:
Firstly - sorry Steve, I think I see your point about my describing Daljit Nagra’s concerns as ‘a la mode’. The term, with its fashion connotations, is a little flippant. I meant that his work is topical, and should have said so, which of course is an altogether different thing from fashionable. Perhaps I was grasping for zeitgeist.
Secondly – I mentioned Mary was the only one old enough to remember the war. I was wrong. Dave is considerably older than he looks.
Thirdly – Mary was delighted that you all remembered your cushions but there’s a little William Morris number that’s been left at hers. She says she likes it so much she might keep it unless someone takes possession by the weekend.
Fourthly – you are all right. I didn’t give the account of the launch that I’d promised I would and I feel awful about it seeing as said soiree was the last time our dearly departed Library was used for a community event (hence our flouting of the council rules by having wine!). And what a launch it was – Mary’s poem (and inaugural piece for the Bullman Blotters) was at once beautiful and true, kind and honest and the final lines ‘we float into the new ether together / with our footsteps made of words’ might be adopted by the Bullman Borough Pages as something of a motto maybe? Permission from the poet please! We were all profoundly sorry that Jasmine and Professor Harry had to go home early. Nobody seems to have seen them since then – do let us know if you’re alright folks! I know that Jasmine’s suggestion of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (a wonderful homage to Forster’s Howards End incorporating the breakdown of a marriage and a philandering academic) for the reading group was a book very close to her heart for one reason or another…
It was lovely to see the youngsters too. Jake and Louise (Jake’s girlfriend we think but they’re pursuing the route of the indefinable relationship such is the preserve of the under twenties) were very welcome, and they suggested some very interesting titles. I’ve never read Michel Houellebecq but am interested to see what all the fuss is about and have tentatively put Atomised down for sometime in the summer. Louise waxed lyrical (almost too lyrical at one point! She knows what I mean…) about G W Dahlquist’s The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters. Lots of sex apparently, so there we go, but I said that I’ll reserve judgement until I’ve read it (another beast of a book by all accounts but it was published in ten instalments originally, which is nice). I really ought to thank Stella for the wine too. Her sister Daphne, who lives in Portbridge (so could more or less be in the Bullman circle if she so wished, but doesn’t) gave us a discount because she manages the off licence on Osbourne Road. Good stuff that Claret, although our Stella put most of it away whilst offering an impromptu talk on Edward St Aubyn’s wonderful Mother’s Milk (the one everyone thought was going to win the Booker but didn’t) and how alcohol seemingly threads the whole story together (or at least the bits that focus on Patrick Melrose, the main character from St Aubyn’s earlier Some Hope trilogy). ‘The book,’ summed up Stella, ‘is a life-affirming, caustic meditation on the inheritance of fallibility. We can’t get away from the fact that we are essentially human and therefore cannot but help to pick up and pass on the flaws of our family.’ Thankfully Stella’s family passed on the wine…
Although nobody from the University was able to come, Professor Harry (I really ought to stop calling him that, but I’m so proud of him!) said the Head of School passed on her best for what she described as ‘a robust magazine with grand ideas’ and then he disappeared, and soon after Gregory took up the guitar and we all had a few songs before the caretaker asked us to leave (what was his problem?). Naturally we ended up in The Boundary but it all turned a bit sour when poor Boggins saw us and insisted he’d not been invited (you really had Pete!) and swore at Louise. It was fine though once he realised we’d listen to his poem ‘March of the Gluttonous’ and the sonnet sequence entitled ‘You Can’t Globalise Me’ and he fell asleep half way through anyway so it wasn’t too bad. So to conclude, there were no doubt a few foggy heads in Bullman Hill the next day (with the exception of darling Mary whose tonic and lime habit must give her enough quinine to fight an army of mosquitoes!)
Speaking of Mary – what a fabulous reading group on Thursday! The Costa Book of the Year – Stef Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves gave us a great deal to talk about and proved most popular. Few titles have roused the rabble to such a chorus of approval as this expansive number.
‘Who, precisely, gives a toss,’ said Steve in reference to the news that agoraphobic Penney researched the book entirely in the British Library, ‘that the author never went to Canada? That’s fiction; writing about stuff you don’t necessarily have first-hand experience of. Half of the world’s great literature would never have happened if you had to experience everything you wrote about.’
I more or less agree, but doesn’t experiencing something if you can make for a better book? Doesn’t the experience permeate the writer and therefore the writing like no amount of research can? It’s a fantastic book, but could it have been…dare I say it?... better?
‘Not in the least,’ said Stella. ‘The act of imagination is intrinsically linked to the act of writing fiction. And anyway, it’s set in 1867. How could she ever have experienced that?’
She couldn’t, granted, and therefore we can make no comparison in that case. But can we make a comparison in terms of what she could have experienced? I’m probably playing devil’s advocate here and haven’t realised it yet and I knew on Thursday that I gone too far down this route when Mary suggested I was being insensitive to Penney’s condition. Perhaps there would be nothing to argue about if her publicist hadn’t mentioned it in the first place…
The book begins in the Canadian town of Dove River (if it is a town at all), a small but spaced out Scottish immigrant population pretty much in the economic grip of the seemingly unscrupulous Hudson Bay Company. This is the land of trackers, trappers and tough, weather-beaten folk struggling to survive in a community that knows more about each other than some would like[2] and where the wilderness stretches out further than anyone can imagine… A murder takes place, a boy goes missing, a member of the native population is suspected and a mysterious figure has been tracked across the tundra but nobody knows who he is: this is a literary page-turner. Penney’s characters are wonderfully drawn and believable and pretty much in abundance but it is testament to her skills as a writer that each stands up in the mind almost immediately, from the tough survivor Mrs Ross, and her errant and suspected son Francis to the calm focus of native tracker Parker.
‘The prose is clear and insightful,’ said Mary who enjoyed reading the third person narrative and then comparing it with the views of the first person narrative, as told by Mrs Ross. ‘You sometimes get two views of one person and it can jolt you into asking: is this the same person we heard about before? It’s very clever and I felt the contrasting elements to a person, the conflicting nuances of a character’s nature were allowed to flourish with seemingly little contrivance or labour on the author’s part. Like the wilderness that surrounds the characters the book is dominated in more ways than one by a force of naturalness.’
Stella agreed: ‘There don’t really seem to be goodies or baddies in this; just people, with all their goodness and imperfection, struggling in a sometimes inhospitable environment. It’s a gem of a book.’ Although Stella’s positive outlook did its usual skidding u-turn when Clement declared that he hadn’t finished the book and would the group mind awfully if they didn’t spoil the end for him? Dear Stella went to great lengths to ensure the book’s ending was laid bear, much to the annoyance of Clem, although I have to agree with Stella on this point (even though she may have been a little less militant): if you come to the group without having read the book be prepared to find out about the ending. It’s pretty much an unwritten rule…
As for my favourite line: ‘It’s always comforting to know that a suspected murderer loves his mother.’ Well it is, isn’t it?
The next group (at Jasmine and Harry’s supposedly so watch this space…) isn’t for a few weeks but there’s talk of maybe going out for a meal if that tickles anyone’s fancy? Suggestions to me by Friday if you would, and for goodness sake let’s make sure old Boggins knows he’s been invited this time!
[1] I once had an argument with a school librarian who was sick of being given ‘secondhand rubbish’. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth!
[2] Ahem, sound familiarly anyone?
On the Wasserstein’s front, two men in hats were measuring the inside of the empty shop last week. Had the traffic on the High Street not increased twentyfold in the last year or so then I might have got across and quizzed them but they’d disappeared by the time the green man kicked in. The Big Issue lady (you know the one – kindly and always seated) saw me coming and said something about the High Street getting a facelift (is she French?) but then we got caught up in the transaction (since when has the Big Issue been more than a £1?). There’s nothing on the Wasserstein’s website either… In the words of the irrepressible Stella ‘take your own advice and BOGOF’. Others wait with excitement (particularly since a new rumour suggests the store will have a coffee shop!).
Anyway, some reactions to last week’s blog:
Firstly - sorry Steve, I think I see your point about my describing Daljit Nagra’s concerns as ‘a la mode’. The term, with its fashion connotations, is a little flippant. I meant that his work is topical, and should have said so, which of course is an altogether different thing from fashionable. Perhaps I was grasping for zeitgeist.
Secondly – I mentioned Mary was the only one old enough to remember the war. I was wrong. Dave is considerably older than he looks.
Thirdly – Mary was delighted that you all remembered your cushions but there’s a little William Morris number that’s been left at hers. She says she likes it so much she might keep it unless someone takes possession by the weekend.
Fourthly – you are all right. I didn’t give the account of the launch that I’d promised I would and I feel awful about it seeing as said soiree was the last time our dearly departed Library was used for a community event (hence our flouting of the council rules by having wine!). And what a launch it was – Mary’s poem (and inaugural piece for the Bullman Blotters) was at once beautiful and true, kind and honest and the final lines ‘we float into the new ether together / with our footsteps made of words’ might be adopted by the Bullman Borough Pages as something of a motto maybe? Permission from the poet please! We were all profoundly sorry that Jasmine and Professor Harry had to go home early. Nobody seems to have seen them since then – do let us know if you’re alright folks! I know that Jasmine’s suggestion of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (a wonderful homage to Forster’s Howards End incorporating the breakdown of a marriage and a philandering academic) for the reading group was a book very close to her heart for one reason or another…
It was lovely to see the youngsters too. Jake and Louise (Jake’s girlfriend we think but they’re pursuing the route of the indefinable relationship such is the preserve of the under twenties) were very welcome, and they suggested some very interesting titles. I’ve never read Michel Houellebecq but am interested to see what all the fuss is about and have tentatively put Atomised down for sometime in the summer. Louise waxed lyrical (almost too lyrical at one point! She knows what I mean…) about G W Dahlquist’s The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters. Lots of sex apparently, so there we go, but I said that I’ll reserve judgement until I’ve read it (another beast of a book by all accounts but it was published in ten instalments originally, which is nice). I really ought to thank Stella for the wine too. Her sister Daphne, who lives in Portbridge (so could more or less be in the Bullman circle if she so wished, but doesn’t) gave us a discount because she manages the off licence on Osbourne Road. Good stuff that Claret, although our Stella put most of it away whilst offering an impromptu talk on Edward St Aubyn’s wonderful Mother’s Milk (the one everyone thought was going to win the Booker but didn’t) and how alcohol seemingly threads the whole story together (or at least the bits that focus on Patrick Melrose, the main character from St Aubyn’s earlier Some Hope trilogy). ‘The book,’ summed up Stella, ‘is a life-affirming, caustic meditation on the inheritance of fallibility. We can’t get away from the fact that we are essentially human and therefore cannot but help to pick up and pass on the flaws of our family.’ Thankfully Stella’s family passed on the wine…
Although nobody from the University was able to come, Professor Harry (I really ought to stop calling him that, but I’m so proud of him!) said the Head of School passed on her best for what she described as ‘a robust magazine with grand ideas’ and then he disappeared, and soon after Gregory took up the guitar and we all had a few songs before the caretaker asked us to leave (what was his problem?). Naturally we ended up in The Boundary but it all turned a bit sour when poor Boggins saw us and insisted he’d not been invited (you really had Pete!) and swore at Louise. It was fine though once he realised we’d listen to his poem ‘March of the Gluttonous’ and the sonnet sequence entitled ‘You Can’t Globalise Me’ and he fell asleep half way through anyway so it wasn’t too bad. So to conclude, there were no doubt a few foggy heads in Bullman Hill the next day (with the exception of darling Mary whose tonic and lime habit must give her enough quinine to fight an army of mosquitoes!)
Speaking of Mary – what a fabulous reading group on Thursday! The Costa Book of the Year – Stef Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves gave us a great deal to talk about and proved most popular. Few titles have roused the rabble to such a chorus of approval as this expansive number.
‘Who, precisely, gives a toss,’ said Steve in reference to the news that agoraphobic Penney researched the book entirely in the British Library, ‘that the author never went to Canada? That’s fiction; writing about stuff you don’t necessarily have first-hand experience of. Half of the world’s great literature would never have happened if you had to experience everything you wrote about.’
I more or less agree, but doesn’t experiencing something if you can make for a better book? Doesn’t the experience permeate the writer and therefore the writing like no amount of research can? It’s a fantastic book, but could it have been…dare I say it?... better?
‘Not in the least,’ said Stella. ‘The act of imagination is intrinsically linked to the act of writing fiction. And anyway, it’s set in 1867. How could she ever have experienced that?’
She couldn’t, granted, and therefore we can make no comparison in that case. But can we make a comparison in terms of what she could have experienced? I’m probably playing devil’s advocate here and haven’t realised it yet and I knew on Thursday that I gone too far down this route when Mary suggested I was being insensitive to Penney’s condition. Perhaps there would be nothing to argue about if her publicist hadn’t mentioned it in the first place…
The book begins in the Canadian town of Dove River (if it is a town at all), a small but spaced out Scottish immigrant population pretty much in the economic grip of the seemingly unscrupulous Hudson Bay Company. This is the land of trackers, trappers and tough, weather-beaten folk struggling to survive in a community that knows more about each other than some would like[2] and where the wilderness stretches out further than anyone can imagine… A murder takes place, a boy goes missing, a member of the native population is suspected and a mysterious figure has been tracked across the tundra but nobody knows who he is: this is a literary page-turner. Penney’s characters are wonderfully drawn and believable and pretty much in abundance but it is testament to her skills as a writer that each stands up in the mind almost immediately, from the tough survivor Mrs Ross, and her errant and suspected son Francis to the calm focus of native tracker Parker.
‘The prose is clear and insightful,’ said Mary who enjoyed reading the third person narrative and then comparing it with the views of the first person narrative, as told by Mrs Ross. ‘You sometimes get two views of one person and it can jolt you into asking: is this the same person we heard about before? It’s very clever and I felt the contrasting elements to a person, the conflicting nuances of a character’s nature were allowed to flourish with seemingly little contrivance or labour on the author’s part. Like the wilderness that surrounds the characters the book is dominated in more ways than one by a force of naturalness.’
Stella agreed: ‘There don’t really seem to be goodies or baddies in this; just people, with all their goodness and imperfection, struggling in a sometimes inhospitable environment. It’s a gem of a book.’ Although Stella’s positive outlook did its usual skidding u-turn when Clement declared that he hadn’t finished the book and would the group mind awfully if they didn’t spoil the end for him? Dear Stella went to great lengths to ensure the book’s ending was laid bear, much to the annoyance of Clem, although I have to agree with Stella on this point (even though she may have been a little less militant): if you come to the group without having read the book be prepared to find out about the ending. It’s pretty much an unwritten rule…
As for my favourite line: ‘It’s always comforting to know that a suspected murderer loves his mother.’ Well it is, isn’t it?
The next group (at Jasmine and Harry’s supposedly so watch this space…) isn’t for a few weeks but there’s talk of maybe going out for a meal if that tickles anyone’s fancy? Suggestions to me by Friday if you would, and for goodness sake let’s make sure old Boggins knows he’s been invited this time!
[1] I once had an argument with a school librarian who was sick of being given ‘secondhand rubbish’. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth!
[2] Ahem, sound familiarly anyone?
Monday, 26 February 2007
Editorial
It’s been a busy week in Bullman Hill. The Library has closed (Donald is still keeping up the Swampy-esque vigil outside and the bookish faithful maintain the soup and sandwiches run to keep the stalwart sustained) and there’s still talk of a chain bookshop (let’s call them Wasserstein’s!) on the High Street. The readers are divided as you can imagine because the death of Boggins’ Books is still for some a very raw subject. Poor Boggins has taken pretty much to The Boundary more-or-less fulltime and Brendan (the landlord) is concerned. There are those of course who see the potential arrival of the chain store as a positive thing… (send in your views or pass them to me on ‘old-stylee’ paper at the meeting on Tuesday if you’d prefer) and then there are those who don’t.
Sorry, have I jumped in at the deep end?! Welcome to the first official blog[1] of the Bullman Borough Pages! Most of you reading this will have come here through being involved and/or coming to the launch, but to those of you who have found us accidentally (and what an accident you’ve had!): you are very welcome indeed. You might find us a little on the controversial side (Stella – I’m thinking of you here babes! Tee hee!) but on the whole we’re pretty open to new things (unless it’s a Wasserstein’s on the High St – ho hum!). Basically we’ve been troubled by our carbon footprint for some time now: the Bullman Borough Pages was reaching quite a few interested parties in its paper format and pulling in submissions from across the district in an alarming rate. That, dear reader, means paper and the destruction of the rainforest cannot but be on the forefront of the mind of anybody sensitive enough to read a rag about books. So! Here we are – electronic and thrusting forth into the 21st Century! (I know a website would’ve been better but I’m not prepared to shell out for Dreamweaver[2]).
So what can the accidental reader expect from this blog? Well basically we’re a bunch of literary travellers navigating the world of contemporary writing together, although where some of us cruise the M6 of fiction (hovering up the Bookers, Costas and Oranges of this world) others take the esoteric B690 so to speak, ambling through the high hedges of independent publishers and vaulting the five-bar gate of the rare out-of-prints. Here you will find reviews, thoughts, news and even the odd bit of Creative Writing from the newly formed Bullman Blotters. All the interactions from the Reading Group (it’s in Mary’s this month – Friday not Thursday, and Mary requests that you bring a cushion) will be recorded in this editorial section so hopefully Stella will resist the urge to swear for once (nudge nudge! – I can almost hear her say ‘arse’ now!).
So, if you’ll permit me, I thought I’d start off with a summary of the literary goings on of the last couple of weeks. Hopefully we’ll have separate pages for all this soon but as it stands it’s just the editorial at the mo! I’ll make a start with Clement’s thoughts on Daljit Nagra’s much awaited and long lauded debut poetry collection Look We Have Coming to Dover! Clement, who is well known for his straight talking, made the following remark: ‘Bloody good but it should be at nearly 28p per poem. How the hell is anyone supposed to be encouraged to read poetry when a fifty page book(let) costs nine quid? The perceived poetry crisis in this country is slowly being costed into reality.’ Missing the point somewhat, eh Clem? What price great art? And anyway – won’t the Library have it? Stifle your guffaws Bullman Hill! Stifle your guffaws Great Britain! If you are actually lucky enough to have a Library close to you that a) is still open and b) actually stocks books then you’ll be very lucky to be ticking box three as well: c) has its finger on the pulse of contemporary literature and contains a book so wildly inventive, shocking, hilarious, beautiful and a la mode as this small but perfectly formed volume. ‘More from Nagra please’ said Clement in conclusion, but at what price and who is actually to blame? With Faber & Faber (the book’s publishers) involved the recently formed Independent Alliance, it’s sadly in no position to lower its prices in a marketplace swamped with heavily discounted sure-fires and TV Chef tie-ins. (For those interested by the way in the sure-fires, the seventh and final instalment of everyone’s favourite boy wizard is due out in July. It looks as though the HP source has run dry at long last…). I must admit, the book is wonderful (my favourite line: ‘Askance is the peaceful Pizza Hut…’ from ‘Our Town with the Whole of India’) despite its size, giving truth to the adage that good things do come in small packages. I suppose I’d direct a reader with time to read only one poem to ‘Yobbos!’. It is fraught and painfully honest and offers a glimmer of nightmarish horror in the dream that is multiculturalism. Mary was quiet about this book, uncertain and thrown off balance by the Indian English that many of us found, paradoxically, refreshingly jagged and beautifully flowing. She felt, however, that her inability to connect was certainly a fault on her part and she came away from the book feeling somewhat ‘incomplete’. ‘I rather feel,’ she said, ‘that I have led a very different life, although one bound by the same seas.’ We must not forget that Mary was once a poet too…
The Reading Group has been ever so busy. Fresh from the rush of the Annual Christmas Secret Santa Book Swap (thanks to whoever put in The Woman in Black. I’ve never read it before and it was a super little spooky Christmas read. In fact, it was more than that – a meditation on storytelling really and terribly well written) we’ve been tearing through the phenomenon that is The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. Set in Nazi Germany it tells the story of young Leisel Meminger (the eponymous hero) who, after suffering terribly and being separated from her family, winds up with her foster parents, the Hubermanns, in a suburb of Munich. There she encounters all sorts of folk, from the diligent Nazi corner-shop owner, Frau Diller, to the ‘lemon-haired’ Jesse Owens-wannabe Rudy Steiner (one of the greatest characters in children’s fiction if you ask me) who becomes her best friend. However, it is the girl’s relationship with her foster father Hans that really tugs at the heart-strings. Set in the throes of World War II you can guess that this isn’t going to be the happiest of tales, yet what people can find joy in (books, apples, running, reading, family) when all around them the madness and evil of humanity are raging, and indeed that they can find any joy at all, is testament to a kind of humanity that seemed to be forgotten during those years. Mary, who is the only one of us who actually remembers the war properly was greatly moved by the book. ‘I don’t read much about the war,’ she said, ‘I always think that’s for people who weren’t there. And I’ve certainly never read anything from the point of view of the Germans, but this book made me cry. I cried plenty of times during the war itself and when you’ve lived through it you doubt 500 odd pages of paper will have much of an effect on you. But it does. Well, it did to me.’ The book is narrated by death and Tony thought this was a good narrative technique: ‘I’m sick of the usual me, me, me of contemporary fiction,’ said he, ‘Death was much more insightful and thankfully not in a horrendous Terry Pratchett way. You forgot it was him talking sometimes and then the shock of him carrying these broken souls away was suddenly very striking.’ Much agreement from yours truly on that point, although my reservations came in not really knowing who the book was written for: adult? Child? Young adult? Although does it actually matter? The cross-over novel is quite the thing these days (in no small part due to The Curious Incident… by Mark Haddon) and perhaps that’s a good thing. After all, there aren’t paintings especially for children are there?
One thing has been grating though and Stella took to one of her catastrophic rants about it: War. What is it actually good for? Absolutely not fiction, says Stella, or at least not to the current extent. Stella raged: ‘I am absolutely bloody sick of the proliferation of novels about the bloody second world war! It’s all well and good to have one here or there but if I read another dust jacket that starts ‘1943. The bombs are falling’ again I’ll fling the wretched book across the shop!’ Point taken. But isn’t it a valuable subject? Isn’t it good that our art still engages with this event so important and horrific and utterly despicable in order that it never happens again? ‘Rubbish! There are wars raging everywhere. It’s stopping nothing. It’s allowing the tide of cash straight into the publishers’ pockets that’s what it’s doing! Because war sells.’ Ouch. She’s nothing if not biting our Stella. But let’s look at the evidence. I was in Wasserstein’s in town the other day and the following books were in the top 12 (in no particular order):
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
Restless by William Boyd
Winter in Madrid by C J Sansom
The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
You don’t have to be Carol Vorderman to work out that that’s 1 in 3, or 33%. That probably means a ridiculous number of people out there are currently reading a book about WWII as I write this. And I noticed that Justin Cartwright’s new novel The Song Before it is Sung joins the list. Then there’s The Book Thief of course as well as a couple of other children’s books from last year which are still selling: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne and Carnegie Award winning Tamar by Mal Peet (both excellent by the way). But is that a bad thing? Steve says no. ‘If people want to read about the war then it’s about wanting to engage with one of the most important events of the last one hundred years, if not more. It’s about trying to get a perspective on the scale of it, feeding an interest that’s born from the respect most people have for those who endured it.’
Well that’s probably that for this time. I’m off to see how Donald is doing whilst on my way to the High Street for a copy of today’s Guardian and maybe something nice for lunch from the organic shop. Looking forward to the chat in Mary’s (Thursday not Friday, remember). I’ll keep you posted on the Wasserstein’s front too – you never know…
PS – do feel free to send your comments in electronically now. Or, for the luddites, on paper[3] will be fine.
[1] Another of those new, fascinating words Derek for your compendium. It comes from ‘web log’ – got it?
[2] Hark at me!
[3] Recycled please. On old envelopes is fine. Will recycle when done.
Sorry, have I jumped in at the deep end?! Welcome to the first official blog[1] of the Bullman Borough Pages! Most of you reading this will have come here through being involved and/or coming to the launch, but to those of you who have found us accidentally (and what an accident you’ve had!): you are very welcome indeed. You might find us a little on the controversial side (Stella – I’m thinking of you here babes! Tee hee!) but on the whole we’re pretty open to new things (unless it’s a Wasserstein’s on the High St – ho hum!). Basically we’ve been troubled by our carbon footprint for some time now: the Bullman Borough Pages was reaching quite a few interested parties in its paper format and pulling in submissions from across the district in an alarming rate. That, dear reader, means paper and the destruction of the rainforest cannot but be on the forefront of the mind of anybody sensitive enough to read a rag about books. So! Here we are – electronic and thrusting forth into the 21st Century! (I know a website would’ve been better but I’m not prepared to shell out for Dreamweaver[2]).
So what can the accidental reader expect from this blog? Well basically we’re a bunch of literary travellers navigating the world of contemporary writing together, although where some of us cruise the M6 of fiction (hovering up the Bookers, Costas and Oranges of this world) others take the esoteric B690 so to speak, ambling through the high hedges of independent publishers and vaulting the five-bar gate of the rare out-of-prints. Here you will find reviews, thoughts, news and even the odd bit of Creative Writing from the newly formed Bullman Blotters. All the interactions from the Reading Group (it’s in Mary’s this month – Friday not Thursday, and Mary requests that you bring a cushion) will be recorded in this editorial section so hopefully Stella will resist the urge to swear for once (nudge nudge! – I can almost hear her say ‘arse’ now!).
So, if you’ll permit me, I thought I’d start off with a summary of the literary goings on of the last couple of weeks. Hopefully we’ll have separate pages for all this soon but as it stands it’s just the editorial at the mo! I’ll make a start with Clement’s thoughts on Daljit Nagra’s much awaited and long lauded debut poetry collection Look We Have Coming to Dover! Clement, who is well known for his straight talking, made the following remark: ‘Bloody good but it should be at nearly 28p per poem. How the hell is anyone supposed to be encouraged to read poetry when a fifty page book(let) costs nine quid? The perceived poetry crisis in this country is slowly being costed into reality.’ Missing the point somewhat, eh Clem? What price great art? And anyway – won’t the Library have it? Stifle your guffaws Bullman Hill! Stifle your guffaws Great Britain! If you are actually lucky enough to have a Library close to you that a) is still open and b) actually stocks books then you’ll be very lucky to be ticking box three as well: c) has its finger on the pulse of contemporary literature and contains a book so wildly inventive, shocking, hilarious, beautiful and a la mode as this small but perfectly formed volume. ‘More from Nagra please’ said Clement in conclusion, but at what price and who is actually to blame? With Faber & Faber (the book’s publishers) involved the recently formed Independent Alliance, it’s sadly in no position to lower its prices in a marketplace swamped with heavily discounted sure-fires and TV Chef tie-ins. (For those interested by the way in the sure-fires, the seventh and final instalment of everyone’s favourite boy wizard is due out in July. It looks as though the HP source has run dry at long last…). I must admit, the book is wonderful (my favourite line: ‘Askance is the peaceful Pizza Hut…’ from ‘Our Town with the Whole of India’) despite its size, giving truth to the adage that good things do come in small packages. I suppose I’d direct a reader with time to read only one poem to ‘Yobbos!’. It is fraught and painfully honest and offers a glimmer of nightmarish horror in the dream that is multiculturalism. Mary was quiet about this book, uncertain and thrown off balance by the Indian English that many of us found, paradoxically, refreshingly jagged and beautifully flowing. She felt, however, that her inability to connect was certainly a fault on her part and she came away from the book feeling somewhat ‘incomplete’. ‘I rather feel,’ she said, ‘that I have led a very different life, although one bound by the same seas.’ We must not forget that Mary was once a poet too…
The Reading Group has been ever so busy. Fresh from the rush of the Annual Christmas Secret Santa Book Swap (thanks to whoever put in The Woman in Black. I’ve never read it before and it was a super little spooky Christmas read. In fact, it was more than that – a meditation on storytelling really and terribly well written) we’ve been tearing through the phenomenon that is The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. Set in Nazi Germany it tells the story of young Leisel Meminger (the eponymous hero) who, after suffering terribly and being separated from her family, winds up with her foster parents, the Hubermanns, in a suburb of Munich. There she encounters all sorts of folk, from the diligent Nazi corner-shop owner, Frau Diller, to the ‘lemon-haired’ Jesse Owens-wannabe Rudy Steiner (one of the greatest characters in children’s fiction if you ask me) who becomes her best friend. However, it is the girl’s relationship with her foster father Hans that really tugs at the heart-strings. Set in the throes of World War II you can guess that this isn’t going to be the happiest of tales, yet what people can find joy in (books, apples, running, reading, family) when all around them the madness and evil of humanity are raging, and indeed that they can find any joy at all, is testament to a kind of humanity that seemed to be forgotten during those years. Mary, who is the only one of us who actually remembers the war properly was greatly moved by the book. ‘I don’t read much about the war,’ she said, ‘I always think that’s for people who weren’t there. And I’ve certainly never read anything from the point of view of the Germans, but this book made me cry. I cried plenty of times during the war itself and when you’ve lived through it you doubt 500 odd pages of paper will have much of an effect on you. But it does. Well, it did to me.’ The book is narrated by death and Tony thought this was a good narrative technique: ‘I’m sick of the usual me, me, me of contemporary fiction,’ said he, ‘Death was much more insightful and thankfully not in a horrendous Terry Pratchett way. You forgot it was him talking sometimes and then the shock of him carrying these broken souls away was suddenly very striking.’ Much agreement from yours truly on that point, although my reservations came in not really knowing who the book was written for: adult? Child? Young adult? Although does it actually matter? The cross-over novel is quite the thing these days (in no small part due to The Curious Incident… by Mark Haddon) and perhaps that’s a good thing. After all, there aren’t paintings especially for children are there?
One thing has been grating though and Stella took to one of her catastrophic rants about it: War. What is it actually good for? Absolutely not fiction, says Stella, or at least not to the current extent. Stella raged: ‘I am absolutely bloody sick of the proliferation of novels about the bloody second world war! It’s all well and good to have one here or there but if I read another dust jacket that starts ‘1943. The bombs are falling’ again I’ll fling the wretched book across the shop!’ Point taken. But isn’t it a valuable subject? Isn’t it good that our art still engages with this event so important and horrific and utterly despicable in order that it never happens again? ‘Rubbish! There are wars raging everywhere. It’s stopping nothing. It’s allowing the tide of cash straight into the publishers’ pockets that’s what it’s doing! Because war sells.’ Ouch. She’s nothing if not biting our Stella. But let’s look at the evidence. I was in Wasserstein’s in town the other day and the following books were in the top 12 (in no particular order):
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
Restless by William Boyd
Winter in Madrid by C J Sansom
The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
You don’t have to be Carol Vorderman to work out that that’s 1 in 3, or 33%. That probably means a ridiculous number of people out there are currently reading a book about WWII as I write this. And I noticed that Justin Cartwright’s new novel The Song Before it is Sung joins the list. Then there’s The Book Thief of course as well as a couple of other children’s books from last year which are still selling: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne and Carnegie Award winning Tamar by Mal Peet (both excellent by the way). But is that a bad thing? Steve says no. ‘If people want to read about the war then it’s about wanting to engage with one of the most important events of the last one hundred years, if not more. It’s about trying to get a perspective on the scale of it, feeding an interest that’s born from the respect most people have for those who endured it.’
Well that’s probably that for this time. I’m off to see how Donald is doing whilst on my way to the High Street for a copy of today’s Guardian and maybe something nice for lunch from the organic shop. Looking forward to the chat in Mary’s (Thursday not Friday, remember). I’ll keep you posted on the Wasserstein’s front too – you never know…
PS – do feel free to send your comments in electronically now. Or, for the luddites, on paper[3] will be fine.
[1] Another of those new, fascinating words Derek for your compendium. It comes from ‘web log’ – got it?
[2] Hark at me!
[3] Recycled please. On old envelopes is fine. Will recycle when done.
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