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.