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?