The Art of Fielding

In response to that post below, Going, going ... I’ve kept track of a month’s worth of reading. Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman; The Corner That Held Them, by Sylvia Townsend Warner; Life, Death, Prizes by Steve May; Stray by Amanda Dalton; The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright. That’s not a bad collection, is it? God, it’s a big chunk of my month. A lot of time spent with people who don’t exist, who inhabit made-up worlds, and have fictional problems.

I enjoyed all of them, but the one I want to talk about is the one I’ve just started. The Art of Fielding by Chad Hernbach. I’m only about 40 pages in, but I’m already loving it. It’s the book that left a hole in Jonathan Franzen’s life, apparently. That’s what it says on the cover – ‘It’s left a little hole in my life, the way a really good book will.’ What’s that going to look like? A book-shaped hole? I know what it feels like. I’ve had some bad days lately, days when you feel frustrated and got at and puzzled and infuriated all at once. Coming home on those days it’s good to hug the kids, it helps to have a couple of glasses of wine, but it’s also great to pick up a really good book, like The Art of Fielding. To sit down with it somewhere quiet and comfortable and start reading. The consoling power of literature. It’s like remembering something. Oh yes, this, it’s coming back now, it slipped my mind for a while there, but this is so much more important than all that other stuff. And in a sense this fiction, these words arranged on a page, it’s more real than that other stuff too. I relax into it, feel the stress ebb a bit, feel pleasure tentatively creeping in. That familiar dual pleasure in the story and characters first, but also in the craft, in the knowledge that you're in capable hands. I’ll miss this book when it’s gone. Till the next one.

Festivals

So I went to the Kings Lynn Festival. Home to Leeds, Leeds to Peterborough, Peterborough to Ely, Ely to Kings Lynn … a long journey, a jagged diagonal across the East side of the country, landing up with a load of writers in Norfolk. It’s a good weekend, you do a reading, you sit on a panel or two, you sell a few books and sign them, drink a lot and chatter with the other writers, with the friendly, enthusiastic and tireless organisers, you talk to the audience who mill around the book stall and the tea table in a generally good-humoured, curious way. And I’ve been invited to the Edinburgh Book Festival (12^th August, don’t miss it), and to one intriguingly called How The Light Gets In, which is a festival of philosophy and the arts. I’m not a philosopher. I’m also not good off the top of my head. It takes me time to process stuff, to formulate an opinion and a way to articulate it. But it’s nice to be asked, it’s nice to travel round the country talking about these books I write that hardly anyone has seen or heard of before. Hello, here I am, have a look at this, you might like it ...

And back home, I’m introducing two friends who are launching their books locally. The very excellent Amanda Dalton, poet, whose Stray has just been published by Bloodaxe, and the equally excellent Stephen May, whose novel - Life! Death! Prizes! – is published by Bloomsbury. Both recommended.

Going, Going ...

I’ve got Pure, by Andrew Miller lined up to read next. I read his first novel, Ingenious Pain, about ten years ago. Here’s what I remember about that – it was a period novel about, I’m pretty sure, a man who couldn’t feel pain. And I enjoyed it. That’s it, that’s all I can tell you about that highly thought-of, prize-winning book. I might as well not have read it. The same goes for pretty much every novel I read these days, and every film I see for that matter, good or bad, they fade, they disappear like a photo left in the sunlight. So what’s the point? Is it just about the pleasure in the moment?

It would be good if reading a book was more like listening to music, more of a sensory experience. It’s easy to remember a loved piece of music, even easier to remember a gig. Listening to The Pretenders play Brass in Pocket at the Marquee, The Specials at the Lyceum, The Clash at Lewisham Odeon. I saw some good gigs. Hearing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto on a friend’s car cassette player as he drove me away from the hospital on a sunny day in 1982. I remember the sounds, sights, textures of those experiences, I associate layers of feelings with them.

But books? Films? Slipping away. Going, going, gone. Shards and tatters of memory, twisting and turning as they vanish, dwindling, out of reach. I used to review books. For the TLS, The Spectator, Kaleidoscope on Radio 4. Couldn’t tell you much about those same books now. In an ideal world, memory would be a resource, something you could turn to, file through, like your own personal Wikipedia. You consult a memory, examine it, and find it in some way helpful. Maybe I should work harder at it, make lists of books I’ve read, even a few notes about each one. Is that a bit weird though, a bit anal? It makes life sound like an exam for which you’re being continuously assessed. Our tastes may create us, but that doesn’t mean we have to remember every step along the way. Maybe it’s enough that a book retains a resonance, an emotional weight. Something lingers. 

That title, Going, Going - it's from a Philip Larkin poem, right? One that's actually got nothing to do with memory. I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure ...

The Dark

My second novel, The Alchemist, explores the strange evolution that makes children into adults, and suggests that what we accept as normal life is subject to radical change, beyond our control. I could trace in it aspects of my own life, which have been creatively processed, but I don’t really want to try. There’s probably nothing to be gained, and possibly something to be lost, in too thorough an examination. I wrote a short story a few years ago, in which a man walks out of his job, finds his relationships with people beginning to fracture, and spends his nights out in the garden digging holes. I liked it without quite knowing what it was all about, until someone, well Ian McEwan actually, suggested it was a writer, leaving his structured, ordered life and, for no obvious reason, digging in the dark. That rang true. I like the dark aspect, the delving and exploring and fumbling and tripping over but picking yourself up and carrying on, not always knowing what you’re up to or where you’re going, till you step back and think ‘Ah, got it, that’s what this is about.’ Sometimes it's much more planned and self-conscious, but it’s that dark aspect, that makes it fun and mysterious and frustrating occasionally but exciting too. 

A Chinese Summer

So along came, in 1988 when I was 25, my first novel, A Chinese Summer. It was about the aftermath of a relationship, about a young man who gets cancer, and about a movement from depression and isolation towards a sense of community and belonging in the personal and in the wider world. Like many first novels it was a short, first-person piece in which the narrator was the same sex and the same sort of age as the writer. And lived in the same place as the writer, and travelled on the same trains, and shared some of the same experiences. But he wasn’t the writer. No, honestly. He was like the writer, but he reacted to things differently, he was a bit over the top about things, and he saw things differently, in a more heightened way.

I was just reading Lindsay Clarke on this. He suggested we use story to convert experience into something with meaning and value. It's the way we pass from feeling into meaning. Makes sense to me. Anyway, I don’t think it’s possible to choose not to use your experience. It tends to be what you care about, what’s central to you. It’s not just what has happened to you, it’s also what has helped to make you who you are. Throw in a vast mixture of events, and the emotions they give rise to, add nature, as well as nurture, and personality, which perhaps has some sort of core content, irreducible, put all those together and some weird alchemy makes an adult out of a child. And in my case, because I’d always wanted to be a writer, as long as I could remember, part of that process was writing a novel. That sounds like it got coughed up - whoops, there it is. No, it was crafted, lovingly, sentence by sentence, beat by beat, and also it was consciously, ambitiously, a step on the way to becoming a writer. Experience, craft, ambition, heart. Those are good ingredients. 

1988. It’s history now, isn’t it?

Big Snakes

My mate asked last night, (over sloe gin and Scrabble), if he could have my kids' hamster, after it died, to feed to his kids' snake. Blimey. Wasn't sure they'd be up for that, especially six year old Son. (Him of the forks and scorpions, below.) I could see him being unsettled and confused by it. Is this what happens to all dead creatures? What about aged relatives? Are they fed to a big snake when they die? No, not too sure about that. If we did it, we'd have to have a ceremonial burial, then follow it with a moonlit, Burke and Hare style exhumation. Take the corpse to the reptile. Midnight feast. Of course, worms, snakes, what's the difference in the end? Circle of life, etc. I told him I'd think about it. Drank some more gin.

Jerusalem

So Jerusalem was wonderful, not disappointing at all. Maybe a tiny bit overlong, in that final third, but basically I loved it. Traffic wardens, giants and Rooster Byron as a sort of ruined reincarnation of St George or King Arthur, funny and surprising and shot through with a deep thrum of melancholy, which is something I always respond well to, because life is shot through with a deep thrum of melancholy too, isn’t it? Along with joy, you’d hope, and surprises, and a forward-looking drive towards, you know, something. And a good sprinkling of contentment. But Jerusalem, yes, it wasn’t all about that central performance, but still, Mark Rylance was brilliant. I wasn’t sitting there admiring him, admiring the craft, I just believed it. Lovely stuff. Plus the Courtauld Gallery, and catching up with family and friends … all good. And I’m looking forward to Hugo in 3D. And Dr Who this year, from the look of the trailer, it looks pretty good, doesn’t it?
And, as a nice bonus, got home to find a review of The Last Word in The Guardian.  

http://bit.ly/uYc3za

'A lobster quadrille of tentativeness' ... exactly what I was shooting for, obviously.

Slippage

Feeling better now. Been grappling with an episode, not getting it right (apparently), feeling frustrated and worried ... but now it's done, and satisfaction seems to be in the air, and look, it's December, Christmas has moved from a vague shape on the horizon right into view, a jaunty boat with colourful sails and a crew full of elves drunk on Baileys ... I'm going to give up that metaphor. What am I most looking forward to between now and Christmas? Going to London to see family and friends, and, especially, to see Jerusalem. It’s had fantastic reviews, Mark Rylance is supposed to be stunning, have I imagined it or did I see the phrase ‘once in a generation’ somewhere? So obviously, it’s likely to be disappointing. Maybe Rylance will be like Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of New York, over the top, mannered and frankly a bit panto. Maybe he’ll be bravura, like Anthony Sher swinging around on his crutches in Richard III, so you admire and enjoy it, but you aren’t fully engaged, don’t quite believe it. Maybe. Either way, I’m expecting slippage between anticipation and the event. Because I’m a bit of a gloomy git. I’m Paul Giamatti in Sideways (which I saw again a couple of days ago - fantastic), not Thomas Haden Church. But, but, but … still capable of taking pleasure from anticipation, from actual experience, and from memory, because it’s London, family and friends and a play, what’s not to like? And then it’s Christmas, more family, and food and drink and presents and Dr Who. Although Dr Who last year, that giant, floating shark, it was rubbish, wasn’t it?

I Hope It's Forks

My son’s thinking of an animal. So far I’ve managed to establish it has less than four legs.

‘Two?’

‘No.’

OK, maybe he’s thinking of a snail. ‘Just one leg?’

‘No.’

‘It has three legs?’

‘Yes.’

‘No animal has three legs.’

‘This one does.’

We go back on forth on this for a while, but he’s insisting all the time that he's right. Finally, like he’s getting really frustrated with how dim I am, he’s shouting -

‘It has three legs! Three on each side!’

‘OK, we’re getting somewhere. So is it very small, like an ant?’

‘No, it’s very big.’

‘A very big animal with six legs?’

Turns out, eventually, it’s a scorpion. Which has eight legs. My son’s not too bothered about whether it’s an insect, an arachnid or indeed a mammal. He has a thoughtful look in his eyes now.

‘Which d’you think there’s more of in the world,’ he says. ‘Scorpions, or forks?’

Lumb Bank

It’s an eighteenth century mill owner’s house on a long grassy terrace halfway down a valley outside Heptonstall, West Yorkshire. Across the valley you’ve got the hillside, covered with trees and heather, and then down in the valley it’s just seething with trees in every shade of green. Mill chimneys poking up out of the foliage, looking like they’ve always been there.

My Dad was there first, as a student, in the 80’s. I turned up in 1990, tutoring a Starting to Write course. 16 students, two tutors, living together from Monday to Saturday, workshops and one to one tutorials. I was there again the following year, tutoring a school, and then I lived there for three years, with my then girlfriend now wife, we were running the place as Centre Directors. The job wore us down in the end - being nice to people every week, it wears you out - but we never got tired of the place. I’ve been back many times over the years as a tutor and a guest reader, most recently last week, tutoring a lovely Starting to Write a Novel course with Patrick Neate. It’s one of my favourite places in the world.

Every room has memories, every corner of every room, layers of memories. When I’m there, I feel like trailing my hands along the walls, picking them up through touch, through smell, through the sound of pens on paper or dishes clattering in the kitchen or people talking somewhere. A reading silencing everyone; a room full of people laughing during a workshop; the party we had the night we got married, the room full of our closest friends; crossing the garden, heading back to the cottage after a reading, beneath a big sky, seeing shooting stars, a hedgehog, hearing the low white noise of the river. And standing there, by the low wall, looking out at the view, in every season, at every time of day and most times of night, just looking.

Twenty Questions

I’ve just done an interview on Steve May’s always intriguing blog.

http://thesecondbesttime.blogspot.com/

20 questions about this and that. Zombies, The Last Word, Emmerdale, Angela Carter - the usual sorts of things I guess. Which makes me think I could do a whole blog entry on meeting famous people, because I have run into a few over the years. It would be about how rubbish I am at it. Angela was an exception, because it wasn’t a social meeting, it had a context, she was reading my stuff and criticising it. And then if I did meet her socially after that I felt like I knew her, and it was fine. It was very nice, in fact. Others though … just awkward. Embarrassed smiles, sidelong glances, blushes, tongue-tied responses. It sounds like a shy boy meeting a girl, doesn’t it? You have to pity famous people I guess, if they get that reaction very much. What are you supposed to do when faced by it? Still. I’m older now. I might be better at it if it happens again. Although I didn't do very well with William Boyd (July 09.) Maybe I'd be better just to avoid them ...

If ...

If I hadn't been ill I'd have gone to Manchester University instead of UCL. I wouldn't have met my future wife. I might not have entered the Time Out/Whitbread competition I stumbled on in my second year, so my first story wouldn't have been published. I wouldn't have had the editor of the LRB as a tutor, so my second story might not have been published there, nor my third which got into Fiction magazine because an agent saw my second in the LRB. I went to UEA partly because a mate who had a cricket match there picked up an application form for me, because of those three stories on my CV, and because of a good reference from another tutor, Dan Jacobson. Perhaps without all those factors I wouldn't have got there either. I wouldn't have written my first novel. Illness gave me a subject, a structure and a style for A CHINESE SUMMER. It gave me a bank of memories, impressions and sensations to draw on, and it gave me a mood-flavoured point of view which gave the novel it's voice.

It's like one of those episodes of Star Trek where they encounter a temporal anomaly, and find out how things might have been. I wonder about this life I didn't lead, those gaping holes it would have left. Would they have been filled by something I'd be equally sorry to lose? I doubt it, but then I would, wouldn't I?

The 1000 Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Finished it. The last third is as good as anything he’s done, which is to say very good indeed. He habitually writes in short stories, linked short stories presented as novels, like my last book, TENDER. 1000 Autumns is essentially three novellas, the first weak, the second an improvement, and the third excellent. So, a qualified recommendation. But there’s a humanity underpinning his writing, a belief that honesty and kindness are the best options in human relationships, that I find very attractive. He's not interested in cheap, attention-grabbing tricks, melodrama introduced to make the plot work, or as an excuse for some purple prose, his stories are inventive and surprising, the ideas bubbling beneath them are always at least interesting, his language is beautiful and distinctive, his characters engaging and his research – which I was a bit snippy about below – unsurpassed. And they're about to start filming his masterpiece, CLOUD ATLAS, I believe. Films of books, that's a whole different discussion ...

Edinburgh

Up on stage. Dragged up on stage by an unusual comedian at the Edinburgh Festival, in front of maybe 300 people, squinting into the dazzle, trying to smile, wondering what’s happening to my lips. It was embarrassing of course, but fun too, even while I was up there I was enjoying it, it was memorable. That was The Boy With The Tape on His Mouth, a man doing an hour’s show with his mouth taped up, using mime and physical comedy and the audience; child-like, playful, sophisticated, bit of Tati, one of my highlights. The other would be A Slow Air by David Harrower, lovely play at the Traverse, about family, a brother and a sister, estrangement, something I always seem to be looking at in my fiction, beguiling. And the wonderful story-telling of The Man Who Planted Trees, with the very funny dog puppet, the surprising and engaging kids’ show, Boxes and Bubblewrap, Michael Morpurgo doing his gentle, moving thing in Private Peaceful, and Neil Gaiman at the Book Festival, being pleasant and interesting, though I’d have liked to hear him read.

So that was a success. Daughter desperate to return next year. Son a little more luke-warm, a little less surprised by it all. Walking down the Royal Mile among tightrope walking jugglers, fire-eaters, strangely dressed performers accosting us to hand out fliers, he’s earnestly asking me, Who would win in a fight between Caligula and Blackbeard?

In other news, The 1000 Autumns of Jacob de Z … a bit disappointing. I love David Mitchell, but I’m not enjoying this very much. Jacob de Z’s a bit dull, the thriller story of the second part’s an improvement but not very thrilling and with a predictable (inevitable?) twist. Just beginning the third part. When you admire the visuals on a Pixar film, you know there’s something wrong with the story. Here, I’m admiring the research.

Riots

It’s poverty, it’s bad parenting, it’s police harassment, it’s failed education, it’s lack of aspiration, it’s lack of discipline, it’s the glamorisation of criminals, it’s adults spending too much time trying to be like cool kids instead of showing kids how to be like adults, it’s defining people by consumerism then denying them consumer goods, it’s straightforward greed, it’s gangs of criminals, it’s the cult of self-esteem, it’s lack of role models, it’s the closure of youth clubs, it’s all a bit depressing. Hard to imagine a way back from this. It would take enlightened, longterm work by politicians who weren't going to be influenced by unpopularity, looming elections or the Daily Mail, who were dedicated to perceptive, compassionate, hard-headed policies aimed at improving all the above. Like I say, hard to imagine.

A Different Life

So, after February 1982 (see below) there were about two years where my life was arranged by illness. Chemotherapy, knee replacement, physiotherapy, radical surgery. What does it mean, to be ill? It means being a step back, being passive while other people do things to you, and for you. Doctors and nurses clustered round me, prodding me, examining me, made me feel important. Or they left me alone, walked past, checked a chart without a word, made me feel neglected, ignored. Powerless, either way. I lay in my hospital bed and watched somebody die in the bed opposite, and I was sad and scared while watching it, but grateful to be there, to witness it. I lay there while friends and family visited. I lay there and craned my neck so that I could look out of a window at what was going on in the street outside. I sat in other people’s cars as they drove me to and from the hospital, and looked out at what was happening in the ordinary, breathing world. You’re behind a window a lot, or feel like you are, looking out at life going on elsewhere.

Once a friend called Robin drove me away on a morning when I couldn’t have chemo because my blood count wasn’t right. We drove up the hill out of the hospital, on a beautiful sunny morning, and he put Beethoven’s violin concerto on, and it felt like the world couldn’t be more perfect than this: being driven away from hospital by a friend, in sunlight, with the music playing, and not having chemo. Your values are rearranged when you’re ill. You’ve entered a different world with different rules and when you leave it – if you leave it – you’re changed.

That period has influenced everything since, has made me a different person. I’m more or less with Nietzche on this:

As far as concerns my own sickness, am I not infinitely more indebted to it than to my health? It is to my sickness that I owe a higher health.

OR: What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

(I haven't read Nietzche, I heard the first quote in a lecture, and saw the second at the beginning of Conan the Barbarian. It seemed clever to me at the time, and apt, since I was in the midst of illness, but it’s become a cliché, and lost it’s power. Thanks, John Milius.)

I try not to be romantic about it. If I could keep the change but lose the experience, then I’d do it. But if I could only lose both the experience and the change in myself, then I’d most likely do that. And then I'd be an altogether different person, living a different life.