The Bone Clocks

I liked Holly. From her running away in the first section to her dismal, scarily plausible, just this side of The Road life in the final section. The fantastical side of the story worked fairly well too, the immortal good guys and the slightly less immortal bad guys and their endless war. It provided a satisfying underlying narrative, a sort of muscle that helped the whole thing cohere and kept it moving forwards. Perhaps not the showdown in the Chapel. It was quite tense but a bit too silly, with (spoilers) good guys and bad guys firing mind bolts at each other, then the bad guys gloating that they’d won, in that way that bad guys do, until the good guys broke the Chapel and, basically, made it fall on them. If I understood that correctly.

But the main problem was the three long sections of the novel devoted to the men. Hugo Lamb, Ed Brubeck, Crispin Hershey. Ed was fine as a teenager but a bit dull as an adult, and seemed to be there mostly to earnestly explain to us that Iraq was a hideous mess, in case we didn’t know. (Nice sequence involving a missing toddler though, reminiscent of the beginning of McEwan’s Child In Time.) Hugo was loathsome and – this is possibly a naive response - I didn’t want to spend that long in his company. He and Crispin were both almost, sort of saved by loving Holly, but Crispin’s section was the weakest of the three. It seemed to arrive from a different novel, it could have been removed entirely without any damage to the plot. Crispin was a cross between David Mitchell himself and Martin Amis, a successful author whose success was ebbing, and the whole section smacked of a writer who’d run out of things to write about.

So, disappointing, slightly, from one of my favourite living novelists, but I did like Holly, and her story kept me interested and caring and wanting to know where we were going for nearly 600 pages. It’s a much inferior book, but it might make a better film than Cloud Atlas.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Why do I like this novel? Not for the plot, which is a sketchy thing, in which evil is eventually overcome by laughter, like a cheesy Star Trek episode. It’s not especially about the characters either. The two boys are Huck Finn-ish, which is nice, but the dad is a bit cliched, wise and weary, and the women are awful. Two mums, who appear only briefly to worry about their sons and tell them off, plus a fifty year old teacher who aches to be young again, and a witch. It’s of its time of course, and there’s no rule that says women have to have decent roles in a book, but it’s disappointing, and for me distracting, when they don’t.

So why is this novel impressive? The language. It sparkles like broken glass, it’s constantly reaching to describe the dark things in Ray Bradbury’s head. You get a sense of a man twisting and stretching words to try to describe a dream. This is a man who loves words, who never uses only one when he can use ten, who stokes his paragraphs with metaphor and simile, and who adores a hyphen because it means he can yoke two words together in his striving to say something new. He has an overpowering urge to evoke and make real the fantastic. It’s a unique style, occasionally a bit awkward, a bit purple, a bit overwrought, but it’s always grasping for the best possible effects, and for truth.

Interesting comparison with Neil Gaiman. The Ocean at the End of the Lane is clever and unsettling and well-shaped, like most of his shorter books. It’s a very good read, but his evil is less evil than Bradbury’s, less cloying and claustrophobic, his world is a less scary place, and I think that's down to that passionate, surprising, yearning language.

An Unhappy Ending

It seems to be generally accepted that as you get older - assuming you avoid botox and facelifts - you get the face you deserve. The scribbled map of wrinkles, crows’ feet, frown lines and smile lines you finish up with, is determined by what kind of face you’ve chosen to present to the world over the preceding years. The same is true of a story – the ending is determined by what went before, the narrative grows organically to produce an appropriate, fitting conclusion. So with an Unhappy Ending in fiction – a death, a loss, a closing down of promising paths into the future – you see where it comes from, and thus you tend to have a feeling of acceptance along with your sadness. This is even true of surprise endings. Yeats talked about the surprising word that seems inevitable, and it’s the same with a surprise ending – you may not have expected it, but once it comes along you realise there is no other way the story could have come to an end.

But that’s fiction. Life’s not like that, it’s more ragged and various and unresolved. We talk about moving on after an Ending, we claim it’s an opportunity, we say As one door closes another opens. All of which suggests we’re turning our backs on the Ending, hurrying away from it as if it’s unwelcome, unlucky, toxic. That’s because an Ending, an Unhappy Ending anyway, leaves you disoriented – Did that just happen? How did that happen? An Unhappy Ending in life has none of that reassuring sense of inevitability you find in fiction. It leaves you sad, it taints everything that went before it, making the whole long journey look as if it was merely a path towards this bad conclusion. And then anger arrives, like bad weather, and you can appear to be suffering from Tourette’s, spitting swear words at perceived or actual injustice.

In fiction, an Unhappy Ending may be the perfect way to finish a novel. In life, an Unhappy Ending is a wound. But wounds heal. And wounds, eventually, are where some of the best stories come from.

May We Be Forgiven

I nearly gave up. Over privileged Americans casually destroying people’s lives. No one seemed to have any genuine feelings for anyone. The characters felt sketchy, and they floated around in an affectless, druggy trance. Why should I care about any of them? Why should I be interested in their lives? Well, I think that question occurred to A.M Homes too. The first part of the novel was published as a short story, and in deciding to continue it, to extrapolate, to follow these people’s lives, she chose to address those two questions. How do you make your main character sympathetic? Have him be kind to children, old people and animals, give him issues with his physical and mental health. How do you make him interesting? Make him have a great deal of sex. I'm sure it wasn't quite that mechanical, but that's what happens - and it works. As the novel develops, it becomes all about absolution,  and the main character sort of inflates from the two dimensional bore of the beginning into a human being with depth, who stops floating and makes decisions, some of them flawed but most of them interesting. You read on, wanting to find out what he’ll do next, what will happen to him next, where he’s going to end up. Story is important, but what’s more important is who is making that story happen, who it's happening to. Character. It’s all about character.

One note. My copy is plastered with reviews which call the book ‘Extremely funny’, ‘Horribly funny’, ‘Brilliantly funny’. These people must be very easily pleased. It raises the odd smile, and has a nice, surprising quirkiness, but ‘Hilarious’? No.

Bram Stoker

I think I mentioned below that I've never won a prize. Well, I have now. BEFORE DAWN is Jo Mitchell and Dominic Brunt's film - between them they starred in it, directed it and wrote the story. They asked me to write the screenplay, and I loved the experience. It's been getting a great reception in festivals, and now this. There'll be a limited theatrical release and a DVD next February. Not to be missed. (If you like zombies.)

By Heart

A whole supplement in The Guardian last weekend, about how to write a novel in 30 days. And nothing in there, I bet, about the tricky business of Epigraphs. Many years ago, I wanted one for my second novel, The Alchemist, so I started by thinking about poetry I knew by heart. That didn’t get me very far.

     Do I contradict myself?

     Very well then, I contradict myself,

     I am large, I contain multitudes.

I think I remember that because I like the direct address, the acceptance that real life doesn’t slip into neat files, it’s more complicated than that, more messy and various. If you know it ‘by heart’ then perhaps it’s because it speaks in some way to your heart, hits you on an emotional level.

     At the round earth’s imagined corners, blow

     Your trumpets angels and arise, arise

     From death, you numberless infinities of souls,

     And to your scattered bodies go,

     All whom flood did and fire shall overthrow.

Or maybe it’s just because it’s stirring stuff, with a fantastic rhythm. You feel like you want to shout that ‘blow’ at the end of the first line.

     Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

     In time the curtain edges will grow light,

     Till then I see what’s really always there:

     Unresting death, a whole day closer now

     Making all thought impossible but when

     And where and how I myself shall die.

I’m not sure that’s right, but it’s something like that. I can remember more of it too, there seems to be quite a lot of it in my head. Death and miserableness have always drawn me towards them. But what’s my memory doing? At school we were given large chunks of Shakespeare (the seven ages of man, Hamlet’s speech involving ‘a quintessence of dust’), and the whole of the Donne sonnet beginning  ‘Death be not proud ...’ to learn, but I don’t remember more than the odd word or phrase of those. They’re presumably floating around my brain somewhere, in some dusty backroom, perhaps along with everything I’ve ever read which, as mentioned below, has just fizzled away like steam.

In the end, many years ago, I looked in a dictionary of quotations for my Epigraph, and came up with something that seemed appropriate.

     A cheat, a thief, a swearer and

     blasphemer, who smelt of the rope from

     a hundred yards away, but for the rest

     the best lad in the world.

It’s from Clement Marot’s Epitres, as you probably know, (that's a joke), and it does have some aptness, since duality is at the heart of the novel, and my young hero does some very unheroic things, but it felt like cheating to have to look it up. I’ve never used an Epigraph since, or wanted to, but I do sometimes wish I could remember a bit more poetry ...

Blood Meridian

I don’t often reread novels, but I was in the middle of the slow, sad procession of CANADA, by Richard Ford. It begins by saying he's going to tell us about his parents committing a bank robbery, and for a hundred pages or so I thought, OK, creeping sense of inevitablity, good, but for the next hundred I was thinking for God’s sake, rob the bank! I suddenly felt a desire to read BLOOD MERIDIAN again. I bought it in the Eighties, it was recommended by a friend, Adrian Curry, who worked on a bookshop on the Charing Cross Road. It blew me away, and I’ve read a lot of Cormac McCarthy since. SUTTREE, a Faulknerian rush of a book, its prose glittering and lush; ALL THE PRETTY HORSES, a wonderful start to a disappointing trilogy; THE ROAD, his masterpiece. You can get a little impatient sometimes, with his relentless examination of masculinity. There are more ways of being masculine than being either noble and taciturn or savage and taciturn. And there’s another gender out there Cormac, 51% of the world. On the other hand, this is what he's chosen as his subject. He's like a solemn witness to things most people prefer to look away from.

And what a pleasure it is to read him. You just have to take a step back and admire the sheer relentless power of BLOOD MERIDIAN. You sense him, over his career, struggling to hold despair and misanthropy at bay, that’s what makes THE ROAD so wonderful, that attempt to hold up the relationship between the father and his son as the last hope in the darkness. But the darkness pretty much conquers everything in BLOOD MERIDIAN. Even the epigraphs are ominous and admonitory. Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. And the writing seems to come from some ancient hermit, crafting strange sentences that have never been written before. It has the rhythmic cadence of the Bible, idiosyncratic syntax, very little punctuation, and a muscly prose, lumpy with flowery, unfamiliar vocabulary.

Try this – The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely a space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less. Sprent? That sentence is very nearly ridiculous, and perhaps wrenched out of context it seems silly. (What’s going on with that last clause?) But it carries itself with a dark, confident strut, and it smells of doom. Black and bitter doom. Cormac McCarthy – greatest living American writer?

Prizes

Up to now, I’ve only brushed up against prizes twice in my writing life. My very first published story was a runner-up in the Whitbread Short Story Prize. As a result it got published along with the winner and, I think, ten other runners-up in an anthology put out by Hamish Hamilton. It was only open to writers under 25, so there probably wasn’t a huge entry for it, but I was very excited. I was 19, I was published, I was getting started on a literary life. My girlfriend at the time put the letter from Hamish Hamilton in a cheap photo frame and yes, I actually hung it on my wall for a while.

Then, in 2009, I got longlisted for the Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize for my book, Tender. I mention it below. I didn’t make the shortlist but it was all about writers mobilising their friends, relatives, colleagues, acquaintances and family pets to vote for them, so I wasn’t too worried about that. It was nice to get a nod.

Now though, my most recent novel, The Last Word, has been shortlisted for the Portico Prize, which describes itself as ‘one of the country’s leading literary prizes’ and is for a work of fiction set largely in the north of England. It does feel good to get noticed, to find my head raised slightly above the parapet. The Last Word features sex, death and a bus falling down a hole, but my fiction’s generally quiet, it aims to be subtle and suggestive, and publishers tend to worry that they won’t be able to sell it. More than once an editor liked it, but their publicity department said No. So, thanks to Salt – who incidentally also have a book on the Booker shortlist – for taking a chance. 

Does it actually mean anything? No, of course it doesn't. But it may help sales, and on the long slog, sometimes lonely, sometimes thankless, of the literary life I set out on 30 years ago, it's encouraging at least. And encouragement is important. Fingers crossed ...

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.