Author: chris

Today is Bastille Day, La Fête Nationale. The French celebrate in style, notably with a military parade down the Champs Elysées. When I was a child I would see film of this on television and think they were celebrating my birthday. I have had an irrational but enduring affection for France ever since.

Just back in fact from Paris, where there was a festival showing of the film of The Prestige, in a small town called Bois d’Arcy on the western edge of the city. The festival was organized by an old friend of mine, Claire Duval. The facilities were tremendous: a modern conversion of large farm buildings into a cultural centre, including a substantial but intimate cinema. All the arrangements were perfect, organized by Claire with unobtrusive style. I made a speech in school-learned French to introduce the film, and was still cringing half an hour later. The film looked good on the big screen (I had not seen it in a cinema since 2008, when I was at a screening in Russia, with Russian dubbing). It seems to gain conviction with the years, looking better and better. The print Claire had ordered was subtitled, not dubbed in French, which helped compensate for the poor sound level of much of the English dialogue, especially at the end.

I seem to have passed away during the night, or at least passed on — the Guardian has left me out of its birthday listings today. A reversion to form, as the paper consistently ignored me for at least sixty years, but then by some unstated miracle began putting me in. I knew it was too good to last, and I am returned to unnamed oblivion. Funny how these small slights gain one’s undivided interest, if only for a minute or two. However, I was glad to see that most of my co-birthers remain: the television presenter Sue Lawley, a mediocre politician who used to run London called Illtyd Harrington, and the historical novelist Susan Howatch, all remain on the Guardian‘s ‘A’  list.

 

The cover of The Islanders has finally been agreed between myself and Gollancz, a matter of some relief to both sides. An earlier version of the illustration has been popping up on the internet, and Amazon.co.uk have put a version of it on their page for the book, but all these earlier ones were roughs. Similar to but not as polished as the full version.

Speaking of polish, the jacket will be printed on matt laminate, the islands picked out with spot varnish.

The cover is the work of an artist called Grady McFerrin. A gallery of his work can be viewed here. The illustration on the back of the book is a word cloud, based on the key images of the novel, and Mr McFerrin is not responsible for that.

(When possible I will upload a copy of the finished artwork, but at the moment the only copy I have is not the final, final version.)

Meanwhile, printed bookmarks based on images from The Islanders are distributed free with GrimGrin titles ordered from this website: here. You can also get one if you email me and ask nicely.

 

Planned and known CP appearances in the near future:

• 15th September – Alt.Fiction, Derby. Please check the Writing East Midlands website for more information. This is the Derby launch of CP’s new novel, The Islanders.
• 27th September; 6:30 pm – Foyles, Charing Cross Road, London. Launch of the anthology House of Fear, published by Solaris. CP has a new story, “Widow’s Weeds”.
• 30th September/1st October – Fantasycon, Royal Albion Hotel, Brighton. CP will be signing copies of the The Islanders. Also, will be interviewing special guest, Brian Aldiss.
• 25th January 2012 – BSFA London Meeting, Upstairs room, The Antelope Tavern, 22 Eaton Place, London SW1W 8EZ. CP interviewed about The Islanders, by Paul Kincaid.

 

I have spent much of this weekend reading and checking the page proofs of The Islanders. A long task, with all of the fears associated with proof-reading that many writers suffer. By the time a book is in proof it’s much too late to make substantive changes, so the things you belatedly notice as infelicities have to be nodded through. Most of the printing errors I was able to correct in The Islanders were tiny: a couple of missing or extraneous commas, an extra blank line that appeared mysteriously on one of the pages, a couple of my own repetitions of words. All were of the same minor ilk. Just over a dozen in all.

Because publishers now habitually set a book’s text from the copy-edited electronic media supplied by the author, accuracy has become almost uncanny, and the perfection can be a distraction. You find yourself reading along, seduced by the apparent lack of errors, and so more likely to miss any that really occur. Things have certainly changed for the better – my first several books were set in letterpress, and when checking the proofs you had to be on your guard at every moment. Some of the compositors’ mistakes were hard to spot, because occasionally one commonly used word would be substituted for another. One of my novels had a phrase that was something like it was more difficult than before … this became in the proofs it was more daffodil than before. I missed this entirely on my first two readings and only happened to spot it by chance just before sending the proofs back. The proofreader at Faber had also missed it, and later rang me up to compare notes, in case there were others.

The real worry is that something dreadful will slip past everyone. Many years ago, Private Eye gleefully pointed out a passage in some terrible old novel by Georgette Heyer, in which a Regency buck, waiting in the drawing room for his belle to appear, passed the time by peeing into a mirror.

In fact, I was late to the game. At the time I started being published, galley proofs (the long sheets with at least three pages of text on them) were being discontinued, to be replaced by the more compact and useful page proofs (either an unbound set of signatures, or, in the case of The Islanders, a stack of A4 sheets formatted with final page layout and measurements). In the old days, the really old days, writers like Charles Dickens used to see the galley proofs as a sort of convenient extra draft and would return them to the hapless publisher with hundreds of changes, huge deletions and thousands of words of additional text. I hope Gollancz will be pleased to adjust my commas.

 

If since October last year you have sent me an email care of this website, it was almost certainly treated as “undeliverable” and bounced back to you. However, in reality it did actually arrive, albeit diverted to a folder on my son’s website. (Simon hosts this site for me.) Yesterday he discovered the missing mails, and they are now where they belong. The main problem is that there are several hundred of them, and it’s going to take me a while to deal with them all.

Just to say “sorry” to everyone, and to assure you that emails sent from the Contact page on this site are now arriving normally. If you have spent the last ten months thinking me a rude and neglectful sod for not replying, you might be right but not for the reason you think. A personal reply will be sent as soon as possible.

 

Early one evening in March 2009 I was walking through Mexico City with Mike Harrison, when we passed a side-street where many cars were parked in the deepening shadows of the trees. Mike and I had previously noted the profusion of flowering jacaranda trees in the city – in this road one of the trees had shed most of its flowers on a white Ford car parked beneath it. Mike, who was temporarily without his camera, asked me to take a shot of it. After we had returned to England I sent Mike a copy of the picture, which because of the low light turned out to be fairly grainy. I think the grain enhances the atmosphere.

A year later, while drafting my novel The Islanders, I began to think of ways in which certain scenes in the novel could be illustrated. I looked through my collection of photographs to see what might be possible. The M. John Harrison Jacaranda, as I’ll always think of it, quickly suggested itself as an illustration of part of Muriseay Town, the largest city on the Dream Archipelago island of Muriseay.

‘Muriseay Town’ is not Mexico City except in parts: the vast spread of Muriseay’s shanty-town suburbs could come from Mexico City, but also from other places I’ve seen. In my images of Muriseay there are memories and imaginings of Athens, Paris, Yekaterinburg, London, Kuala Lumpur, Houston and many other big cities and ports, all jumbled up together. In the same way, the Archipelago itself is not a transplant from a single place, but is an amalgam. You can find archipelagian images and recollections of Guernsey and Sark, the Greek islands, Harrow-on-the-Hill, the French Riviera, the Harz mountains in Germany, Hastings, the Pennines, even Dartmoor and the Isle of Wight. I have many memories and a few photos of all those places and others, a kind of literal or codified memory, not at all the same thing as an imagined landscape, but an interesting parallel vision.

As I went on with the novel I found ways of manipulating many of these images, linking them to certain scenes in the book and captioning them with relevant text. The novel deals with the work of a particular novelist, so I decided to design and include some book jackets for him; as other writers came into the story, they too had covers designed for them. It’s the sort of literary displacement activity that’s almost as rewarding as writing the novel, but much less hard work.

I call the finished collection The Islanders Gallery. If it interests you and you would like to find out more about it and perhaps get hold of a copy, see the GrimGrin page on this site.

Here is a true story:

A few weeks ago a reader sent me for signature a hardback first edition of my novel The Affirmation. This was published in May 1981 by Faber. It’s a scarce edition and this copy had been well looked after. I duly signed it and looked for a padded envelope in which to return it. However, just before sliding the book into it I noticed there was a Faber review slip tucked into the copy.

Underpaid reviewers often sell on their copies to dealers and it’s not unusual to find these slips in secondhand copies. I wondered idly who might have reviewed this particular copy. It couldn’t have been the present owner as I happened to know he is less than 30 years old. Seeing that review slip was a little like glimpsing a sort of time-tunnel to my own past. I well remember the early summer of 1981, when I had many hopes pinned on that novel.

I turned the review slip over. The back of it was covered in handwriting, hasty notes scribbled in fountain pen. Here were a reviewer’s thought processes in action!

Now, I have always felt there was something a bit fishy about the way The Affirmation was reviewed, thirty years ago this month. It didn’t just get a “mixed press”, in the words of the euphemism, but the reviews gave me a feeling I can only describe as vacuum. A few of the reviewers were generally positive, but most of them rebuked me for reworking what they saw as a familiar theme: a novel about writing a novel, a young writer struggling to express himself.

For example, there was someone called “M.R.”, who wrote for the Catholic Herald, and he or she said the novel was “prosaic”, but added (with fabulous apathy) that it was “never sloppy and full of unexpected excitement.” Then there was Andrew Sinclair in The Times, who said it was “not engaging.” Mike Aitken (The Scotsman) said it was “a novel about madness,” but added that “the reader loses interest.” Someone in the Irish Press said “the whole thing smacks of the factitious; and a rather colourless, deadpan narrative does not help.” Martin Seymour-Smith (Financial Times) scolded me for writing about the nature of fiction: “This is dangerous ground.”

Finally (I am not a masochist, so this is the last one for now), John Naughton in The Listener said:

“The Affirmation tackles that quintessentially modern fraud, the man in search of his identity. In this case, he hunts for it by writing a fictional, and rather precious, autobiography. His creator then mixes this with a straightforward chronological narrative. The result confuses not only the hero – who seems as baffled at the end as he was at the beginning – but also the reader, who wonders why the whole rigmarole was entered into in the first place.”

Until this review slip turned up unexpectedly I had completely forgotten those reviews from so long ago. The Affirmation somehow survived its critical drubbing and has remained in print more or less ever since. It has been translated into several languages, it won a Dittmar in Australia as best novel of the year, and was short-listed for a couple more prizes in Britain and the USA. It is still around – in 2011 Gollancz will be reissuing it as one of their Masterworks series.

When a novelist gets bad reviews, there is a security blanket that helps ward off drastic reaction – such as suicide. The writer becomes convinced that the bloody reviewers could not have read the whole thing, that they must have skipped most of it and therefore missed the point.

I too was wrapped in that blanket, because I knew something about The Affirmation that many of its glummest critics appeared not to. The novel does not go on as it begins. True, the story opens with an unhappy young man heading off to a friend’s country cottage, there to try to “find himself” through writing, but not only was this a fairly conscious piece of mild satire on an admittedly over-familiar gambit, it was by no means the whole story. Some 180 pages of the novel follow the completion of the young man’s writing, and there are, if I may say so, several unexpected reversals to come. Indeed, The Affirmation has over the years given many readers a few shocks, some with startling effect. I still get letters from readers who have enjoyed, so they say, the feeling of a trapdoor suddenly opening beneath their expectations, or the rug being pulled out from under them.

The unhappy memoirs in the cottage are just the first moves in a complex story, and we soon proceed beyond them. Furthermore, this was my first attempt at writing a Dream Archipelago story at novel length, a locale that isn’t obvious from the first twenty pages or so.

Looking at those old reviews now I’m convinced (as I was in 1981) that within the short time allowed by a newspaper deadline, or the temptations of the next book on the pile, few of the reviewers persevered beyond the first few pages of The Affirmation. Let me say at once that they still might not have liked the novel any more if they’d gone on to the end. That’s fair enough, but I’m certain the reasons they would dislike it would not be the same.

All this was brought to mind by the handwriting on the back of the review slip. The first hasty words are: “After 20 pp. Principal limitation is one of imagination.”

He or she stopped reading at page 20! Was it just a pause, or was it the place where critical objectivity was abandoned? It’s hard to be sure, but the note looks like an uninterrupted scribble. It’s not a draft of a review – these are the sort of aides-mémoire reviewers note down before they start writing. I have done it myself, still do.

Here are some of the scribbles (there is a facsimile JPG at the end of this post): “Not of itself interesting … Yawn … So what … [It] suffers from colossal limitations.”

There doesn’t seem much chance of a favourable review coming out of these notes.

My curiosity was aroused. Who was this reviewer who gave up so early? No signature, of course, and no other clues about who it might be.

But there was one indirect clue. There’s more than one reference to a novel by David Pownall, with whom the scribbler dismissively compares me. It seems this novel was in the same batch. “Pownall – creates a whole world, unusual & [illegible] & surprising. Priest – self-absorbed, parochial imagination &, one imagines, self-indulgent.” It was this comparison with David Pownall that sent me in search of my ancient folder of clippings, lying deep and forgotten in my filing cabinet for three decades. I discovered from their faded print and browning paper that Mr Pownall did indeed have a new novel published at the same time (Beloved Latitudes, 1981), and moreover that it was reviewed in tandem with my novel in five newspapers. One of those reviewers therefore seems likely to be the scribbler of the aide-mémoire.

Not, though, Janice Elliott (Sunday Telegraph), as she liked my novel. Nor Nina Bawden (Daily Telegraph) who cautiously commended it. Anthony Thwaite (The Observer) gave it an even-handed notice and had clearly read past the first 20 pages, so it was not him.

Two reviewers remain. One is Peter Ackroyd (in the Sunday Times), the other is John Linklater (Glasgow Herald).

On the face of things Mr Ackroyd appears to have managed to get past page 20. His review refers, for instance, to the island landscape in which my protagonist finds himself. More exactly, he quotes a moral dilemma about “self-deceit and self-embellishment”, which appears in the text of the novel on p.117.

However, telling details can be discovered in a quick skim, as well as in an attentive read. Mr Ackroyd’s review tends to suggest he was skimming. He accurately reports, for instance, the opening pages of my novel, but a sense of imprecision clouds the rest. Then there is a comparison with David Pownall’s novel, a dismissal that is there in the scribbles. I am accused of self-absorption, as in the notes. And Ackroyd complains that the narrator keeps on asking the same question: “What is real and what is imaginary?” No he doesn’t; not even once. Bad guess there, Mr Ackroyd.

Finally, John Linklater. His review of The Affirmation is so short it looks more than anything else like a grudging footnote to his glowing reviews of other novels reviewed in the same column. Like Ackroyd, Mr Linklater is vague about most of the novel after the memoir-writing at the beginning. He fell through none of the trapdoors I had laid for him, or else by a superhuman feat of the imagination he anticipated them and was therefore underwhelmed by them. Again, there is a negative comparison with Mr Pownall’s book – Beloved Latitudes is “a magnificent feat of the imagination,” while my novel is “an exploration of an imagination which, one suspects, is of principal interest to its author.” And once again I am described as “self-absorbed.”

Either of these reviewers therefore could have been the scribbler, but there is nothing certain. And the truth is that after all this time it hardly matters. A few thoughts do however arise from this minor literary detective story.

In the first place, it’s obvious that reviews have little impact on the success or otherwise of books. They might depress or cheer the author on the day they appear, and they might give a line or two to a copywriter having to come up with a blurb, but they don’t make or break a book’s career. My self-absorbed, self-indulgent, parochially imagined, unengaging, factitious, colourless, deadpan, colossally limited novel has looked after itself OK for the last thirty years.

It also raises the idea of what might best be described as a code of honour which should be observed by reviewers. If they haven’t read the whole of the book they have been sent, they have three options.

They should declare exactly how far into it they read, then review on that basis. If they don’t want to do that, they should not declare the omission but pretend or imply that they did in fact read the whole book and give it a dishonest but favourable review. The third option is not to review it at all. The third is the only one with integrity, and is to be preferred.

And one other thing. Reviewers should be careful about leaving bits of paper in their copies when they sell them. You never know into whose hands the books might fall.