Category: Journal

Lice in the Locks of Literature

chris

“Science fiction is the cockroach in the house of books: it survives on scraps and never goes away. Occasionally, as in the work of HG Wells and JG Ballard, it becomes sublime.” (From the Guardian, 19th November 2012.)

This comment (part of an essay which was semi-jokingly trying to create all sorts of new literary genres) was written by Robert McCrum, an associate editor of the Observer. Before he joined the newspaper McCrum worked at Faber & Faber as an editor.

It was in this capacity that I met him in the early 1980s. Before his arrival he had been described to me by Matthew Evans, the Chairman of Faber, as a representative of the new generation of editors who was going to be brought in to revitalize the Faber fiction list. McCrum duly took up his post and some time later he took me to lunch. At this time I had been with Faber since 1969 and had published all my books with them. These included my first five novels, a short story collection, an anthology and a children’s book. I felt my position with Faber was more or less secure, although by instinct I never take anything for granted – just as well, as it turned out. At the time of our lunch I had recently delivered my new novel to Faber, The Affirmation. The editor for this was Charles Monteith, one of the greatest of all post-war book editors, who worked with William Golding, P. D. James, Lawrence Durrell, Philip Larkin, Brian Aldiss, many more. Charles Monteith was due to retire from Faber shortly, and McCrum was his replacement.

“You’ve had it easy up to now,” McCrum said to me over lunch. “Faber’s going to change out of all recognition. The big boys are in town.” I looked at this young chap with the pink ears and shiny face – he looked as if he had started shaving earlier that week. I asked him which of my books he had read … in particular had he read The Affirmation? “I don’t read sci-fi,” he said in a pained voice, implying of course I don’t read rubbish, as you should know. He went on, “If you want to stay publishing with Faber you’re going to have to look to your laurels.” In spite of my many qualms about being defined by science fiction, or indeed any other genre, I realized that arguing with this rising young star of publishing was going to be a complex and difficult matter. No time for that then – our lunch was quickly over.

I knew only one thing about McCrum before we met: he had just published his own first novel, In the Secret State. On my way home I bought a copy. I read it on the train and finished it that evening. It was an illuminating experience: McCrum was a lousy writer! The novel is a sort of sub-genre of the Le Carré type of thriller, told through the medium of former public schoolboys mingling with each other in the secret services, and having to interview lesser types, while making knowing allusions to privilege and position, and betrayal of the class by those whom they feel should know better. Familiar enough, but McCrum’s addition to this genre was amateurish and incompetent. I couldn’t help wondering why any pro publisher had accepted it. He was incapable of controlling a short scene, let alone a whole novel. Clumsy viewpoint shifts occurred two or three times a page and he could not imagine or describe a scene with any conviction. His attention to detail was erratic and often incorrect. The dialogue in particular had a phoney feel to it, and the book depended heavily on the use of this unconvincing dialogue.

A working relationship between me and this young high-flyer seemed likely to be problematic. The point needs to be made that I do not expect my editor to be a published novelist. In fact, most of the editors I have got along with best have not been writers. For a sole example, Charles Monteith never to my knowledge published a word of fiction in his life. The other editors I have worked most productively with over the years have been the same. However, if an editor should in fact turn out to be a fellow professional then I naturally expect that he or she should be at least as competent as me, and preferably more so. To judge by In the Secret State, McCrum had a lot to learn. I certainly did not feel like taking any lessons in writing from him, not then, or indeed now, three decades later.

It’s perhaps just as well that writers and their editors do not have daily contact. I kept my head down and began work on my next novel, The Glamour. Charles Monteith duly retired, and McCrum’s reign at Faber began. I had only intermittent dealings with him over the next two or three years. On one occasion he sent me a manuscript by a young writer he had just taken on, saying he felt that some of the “sci-fi” elements needed an expert view. Gritting my teeth I read the thing – it was OK, but the writer was as hopeless at viewpoint as McCrum himself. Suspecting I was flogging a dead horse, I wrote a detailed report to McCrum, and gave as just one example of poorly handled viewpoint a chase scene where every moment of doubt or fear or suspense was undermined by the writer’s habit of switching between the characters, so that nothing was left to the reader’s imagination. When the novel finally came out I was interested to discover that the clumsy shifting around of viewpoint was just as I had read it before, except in the one scene I picked out as an example, where this simple technique was now handled correctly. McCrum hadn’t been able to convey a basic editorial point to the writer, not because he didn’t agree but because he clearly didn’t get it.

In the meantime, The Affirmation had been published. It suffered poor sales in hardback and Faber had great trouble in selling paperback rights. McCrum and Matthew Evans took me to lunch, ostensibly to talk about future plans, but told me they wanted to “reposition” me in the market. I was suddenly interested. To me, this meant that Faber were acknowledging they had published and sold The Affirmation inadequately, and they were planning to do something about it. I listened carefully. “What we want you to do,” McCrum said, “is get in your car and go out and discover England.”

Although it was optioned to Faber, my next novel, The Glamour, was published by Jonathan Cape.

McCrum’s career as a publisher is usually regarded as successful. The Faber general fiction list, which until his arrival was clearly looking a bit moribund, was duly revitalized. The firm has now, once again, become a leading publisher of literary fiction. This sort of “repositioning” is of course a result of a business decision as much as an editorial one. A company with a blue-chip literary reputation like Faber will have no problem attracting the best novelists if an effort is made, with an editor appointed to make the effort and propagate the new policy to literary agents and speak encouragingly to the writers. Meanwhile, the company will back up the initiative by making the right sort of money available. Since those days McCrum has moved on – for a while he was Literary Editor at the Observer. Now as one of that newspaper’s associate editors he appears to be a freelance commentator on the world of books, writing regularly for the Guardian blog.

McCrum’s weakness is that he will not acknowledge his blind spots. Genre fiction, or what he thinks is genre fiction, is the prime example. He abdicates himself from addressing the problem by assuming that genre fiction abides by rules and conventions that general fiction does not, and that it has an orthodoxy he neither understands nor wishes to learn about. He thinks it is a specialist form that can only be dealt with by an editor with specialist expertise. On the whole he believes that genre fiction lacks the greatest challenges of literary fiction by taking a less demanding route, an easier way. He sees all genre writers as buttressed by an undiscriminating fan readership. He assumes they lack any clear critical standards or apparatus, and that they are untalented or unambitious.

This is true in varying degrees of all writers and all areas of fiction, but to take literature seriously we have to look at its best examples. McCrum seems unable to grasp that. He dismisses what he does not know as being worth only his lip-service, his derision.

That is his weakness, but the real problem is that he is out of date. When I met him thirty years ago I could temporarily forgive his callow manner and patrician attitudes, but I was alarmed and discouraged by his conventional and unoriginal approach to literature. Out of date then, and still out of date now, to judge by the flippant and ignorant article I quoted at the beginning of this. I find his glowing, exempting reference to J. G. Ballard particularly offensive, as when I knew him McCrum had never even heard of Ballard, a writer whose astonishing work had been influential since the late 1950s, but whose presence only dawned on the likes of McCrum after Empire of the Sun was published in 1984. Anyone who doubts McCrum’s wider areas of weakness should glance through the 68 comments that followed his appearance on the Guardian website.

 

Holy Cows

chris

I first read The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth in 1962. I was 19. I had been influenced by Kingsley Amis’s description of it in New Maps of Hell (‘many claims to being the best science-fiction novel so far’). I bought the then-current paperback edition published by Digit Books and read it in a sitting. I can remember almost nothing about it now, except that I agreed with Mr Amis. Following his instruction I considered it then, as I consider it now, to be one of the ‘best’. Years later, when I was sometimes called upon to give talks to groups of general readers (i.e. not dedicated science fiction fans) I would take along my Digit paperback, and use it to illustrate the familiar argument that what you see on the cover of a book does not necessarily tell you anything about what’s inside. I would show the cover and invite people in the audience to guess what the novel might be about. The painting shows a large machine, shaped rather like a spaceship, and with a propeller whizzing at the front, bursting upwards out of the ground, knocking over a man who happened to be standing there moments before. Various wrong guesses from the audience always followed – I remember, for instance, the fairly typical reaction from one grumpy chap who was clearly not enjoying my talk, ‘Some stupid bloody thing about people flying around in spaceships and being attacked by pirates.’ When I explained that the novel was a satire on American advertising, that the ‘space’ in the title was a reference to advertising space, and that the story dealt with a copywriter who had to mount a fraudulent campaign to sell property on a bogus version of the planet Venus … the point was presumably made. (50 years)

In the same year I read (for the first and only time) George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, again partly from a recommendation in Amis’s book, but mainly because a few years earlier a BBC TV dramatization of the novel had caused a sensation in the press and among viewers. I had been too young to watch it then and I was curious. Although I have always meant to read the novel again I have not done so, although I have over the years referred to it. I see it as Orwell’s supreme novel, an unquestioned classic, but overall I consider his non-fiction to be his best work. This high regard is both for the timeliness of his thinking, a genuine and fulfilling insight into those turbulent years surrounding and during the second world war, and for the clarity, precision and sheer beauty of his writing style. (50 years)

1965: Penguin Books published Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle in their science fiction package. I read it and ever since have considered it to be exceptional within Dick’s oeuvre, in that as well as the ingenious idea it contains some excellent writing. I have not read it since, and no longer even own a copy. Is the writing still excellent? I know that these days it is close to heresy to question Dick’s wonderfulness, but because so many of his other books reveal hasty passages of scrappy writing and a tendency to fall back on hack-writing techniques, I can’t help wondering if High Castle is a true exception to his norm. Still, I remember it well, and by this time I was 22 and clearly knew a thing or two. (47 years)

By 1967 I was regularly reading manuscripts for the publishers Gollancz. One day I received a phone call from them, wondering why I had not yet reported on the manuscript they had sent me three weeks earlier. (For my part I was wondering why there had been such a long gap.) When I went to the Post Office sorting depot I was handed a large, bedraggled and torn package, with sheets of paper falling out of all sides, and various loose sheets attached to the outside with a large elastic band. It was the top-copy original manuscript of John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, now regarded as a classic of the genre. By some miracle none of the pages had been lost, although several were crumpled and dirty. I read it as soon and as quickly as I could, and reported positively on it – Gollancz did not publish it, as it happens. Although I knew John Brunner personally and considered him a friend, I always kept my thoughts to myself about his books. He wrote terrible potboilers and a lot of them too. Stand on Zanzibar was different: it was glib and clever, like so many of John’s other novels, but it was also ambitious in scope, innovative in form and uniquely amongst his books to that date it contained genuine passion. It was a breakthrough for him. (45 years)

We move forward fifteen years. By 1982 I had started acting as an agent for a small number of hand-picked American writers who until that date had not had anything published in Britain. One of them was William Gibson. He sent me, rather diffidently under the circumstances, the typewritten manuscript of a novel called Neuromancer. As soon as I read it I recognized it for what it was, even though it was not entirely to my own taste. I realized my opinion was irrelevant, and sent it to Malcolm Edwards at Gollancz. He immediately bought it. I am still no great fan of cyberpunk, but it was in its time radical and different. Neuromancer was the first and best of that sub-genre. (30 years)

For better or worse I have come to be seen as a John Wyndham specialist, and have been commissioned to write several speeches and essays about him and his work. This has meant fairly regular re-readings of his novels. These I continue to like, but with substantial reservations. Wyndham was one of the first SF novelists I discovered, when I was 16, long before even The Space Merchants. Until I had been able to read more widely, and understand where Wyndham’s work was best placed, he was my favourite SF writer. Of his four main novels the one I continue to like most is The Kraken Wakes, but I happen to think that The Day of the Triffids is in fact a better written novel. It has certainly grown into its status as a modern classic. I last re-read it in 2005 and it remained as effective as I remembered. Incidentally, I disagree with Brian Aldiss’s familiar and often quoted put-down of Wyndham, that he wrote ‘cosy catastrophes’. I believe the sobriquet is wilfully misleading and takes no account of the time and place when Wyndham was writing his best-known work. There is something steely and uncompromising inside most of Wyndham’s work, which an attentive reading will discover. (7 years)

John Fowles died towards the end of 2005. My own response to the unhappy news was to read, for at least the third time, his best and most lasting novel, The Magus. Although not at all a science fiction novel, and barely even fantasy, it is of huge importance to the genre because of the influence it has had, not only on so many writers, myself included, but also on film-makers. I think it has become fashionable to denigrate The Magus, partly because of what Fowles himself often said about it (he seemed to be the only person in the world who thought the ‘god-game’ was worth playing), partly because of some of the second-rate novels with which he followed it, and also partly because of the execrable film that was made of it in 1968, starring Michael Caine. However, back in the mid-1960s The Magus came over as a startling and fresh and technically dazzling novel. I was certainly dazzled by it for a long time. The writing in the first third of the novel has always seemed to me among the finest descriptive passages I have ever read – the forensic last part constitutes probably the most intricate and challenging thriller-writing of the century. My last reading of the novel was the 1977 revision, which until then I had not liked as much as the original. (7 years)

In 2006, the publisher Peter Owen brought out a re-issue of one of the gems in the Owen backlist: Ice by Anna Kavan. I had first read this in the early 1970s, when it was in a Picador paperback with an amazingly appropriate cover using a detail from (I believe) a painting by de Chirico. I have always loved the book, seeing it as a core slipstream text, one that will enchant as many readers as it might infuriate others. I was pleased to be invited to write an Introduction to the new edition, if for no other reason than it gave me a chance to re-read this short and almost perfect novel. (6 years)

I first read Keith Roberts’s Pavane when it appeared as a series of long stories in the magazine Impulse. I was mystified and enthralled by the stories and read them again as soon as they were published together as a novel (1968). Pavane is one of those rare novels which is not only beautifully written but also compellingly told. It is a novel set in the then present day (the late 1960s) in a world where Queen Elizabeth I was assassinated, and a repressive Papal-dominated kingdom was set up in Britain under the Spanish. The details of the resulting low-technology society, the subtlety of the observations and the apt choice of significant characters are all to be marvelled at. I remember Michael Moorcock belittling the novel when it was published (probably because he and Keith Roberts did not like each other) – he said disparagingly that it was no better than the sort of stuff John Brunner turned out every week. This must constitute one of the most lead-bottomed literary judgements ever. I re-read Pavane for pleasure in 2007, and it was even better than I had remembered. (5 years)

Finally, The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin. I read this around the same time as everyone else who took an interest in such things: not long after it was published in 1969. It seemed then to be a remarkable and innovative novel – it won several prizes, and since then has remained a well-regarded and perennially popular novel. I had always remembered it in the most favourable way, feeling that it was a work of traditional science fiction that one could rely on to mount the best sort of argument in support of the genre. Some of the descriptive writing is vivid and appropriate, the characterization of the alien beings is totally plausible and sympathetic, and the idea, in its day, was suitably radical and startling. I re-read Left Hand in 2008, more out of curiosity than anything, in effect to see if it really was as good as I remembered. I discovered that it held up well, that it was a much shorter book than I expected, that the descriptive writing was still superb, but that the sexual chemistry that had seemed so unusual and alien four decades earlier was synoptic in a way I had not recalled. Overall, the novel felt more ordinary than I wanted it to be – it no longer seemed to be the paradigm shift it had once been, but this, I suspect, is a result of its own influence. It broke new ground and a generation of writers took strength and confidence from it. It remains a work of classic status, in my view. (4 years)

The point of all this:

The number of years noted at the end of each description is of course a rough estimate of the time since I last read any of these books. I have revisited these titles because throughout most of November Nina was encouraging me to take part in the Locus “All-Centuries” poll, and vote for the “best” novels and short stories from the 20th and 21st centuries.

In their publicity, Locus did not explain what they meant by “Best”, which immediately raised the usual questions of definition: best written?, best selling?, best loved?, and so on. Never mind that. I was resisting because I generally find these popularity polls a bit meaningless, rather like those internet polls you sometimes see: Do you believe in God? Vote now: Y/N. In the world of books such a poll has an extra quality of absurdity in a genre of fiction where there are so many sacred cows, so many false or misleading literary values, so much reader-nostalgia for the stuff they read when first discovering science fiction or fantasy.

Nina’s best argument in favour of making me think up my own submission was that unless a large number of people with a variety of interests actually voted for the work they believed in, those cows would remain sacred, and the familiar hegemony of the Heinlein-Asimov-Clarke-Bradbury school would stay unchallenged.

Well, I finally gave in, while suspecting that there aren’t enough votes in the world to dislodge Robert A. Heinlein or Frank Herbert from their dominant position as immovable greats. Using the “memory-jogger” lists that Locus provided (which were in fact pretty good, as the net they threw was quite a wide one) I came up with about fourteen titles from the 20th century that I could argue were the “best”. After some thought I dropped four of them. I wanted, for instance, to include something by H. G. Wells, but in reality his best scientific romances were all published in the 19th century, and it felt like special pleading to put in something like The First Men in the Moon (1901) just because it was by Wells.

Then I looked again at the 10 titles that remained, and the doubts about the whole enterprise returned in force. I was and am painfully aware of how long it was since I had read most of them. Now that I have looked into my recollections of the reading of each title, I realize how unreliable my judgement must be. Not only is my reading of (e.g.) The Space Merchants half a century old, it comes from a literary culture that has disappeared, and even the corporate America that was being satirized is no more. This is the same flawed argument that makes some people cling to their liking for the Heinlein juveniles or the Asimov robot stories they read when they were 14. I was 16 when I read the most long-distance of all these books, but at least I have re-read some of them in relatively recent times, so feel I can argue for or against them with some confidence.

I have listed the books in the chronology of my most recent reading – this is not the same as the order as I would put them in for preference. In fact, now I look at the list I think that I would reverse it entirely: but with Pavane above Left Hand, and The Space Merchants below Nineteen Eighty-Four.

However, I know that my false values, my nostalgia, my sacred cows, are just as unreliable as everyone else’s. I never sent in my list. Locus will be announcing the thrilling results later this month.

 

In the Future Past

chris

Nevil Shute wrote several novels with speculative content, of which the most celebrated is probably On the Beach (1957). Although his style was conventional and he is often thought of as a middlebrow author, Shute often had adventurous ideas and put considered speculation into his novels. No Highway (1948) is known for containing an accurate prediction about the catastrophic effect of metal fatigue on airframes (Shute was an aeronautical engineer), and his 1938 novel What Happened to the Corbetts contains a description of the indiscriminate bombing of the city of Southampton. Until I read it recently I did not know that In the Wet (1953) is also a speculative novel:

It is perhaps the oddest book I have read this year. Odd not because of its story (which is a relatively straightforward speculative account of a possible future for the British monarchy, written shortly after the accession to the throne of Elizabeth II), but because of its intricate literary structure. It is in fact structured in such a complicated way that I am still not sure if Shute wrote it out of fiendish planning, or if the complications of the story got out of hand and he simply lost control of it.

The principal narrator (i.e. the one who starts and finishes the novel) is a vicar recently appointed to a remote part of Queensland, Australia. The first 60 pages or so of the novel are an account of his efforts to bring his pastoral work to the local inhabitants. This is not thrilling – several times during the long opening sequence I was tempted to put down the book, but in the end did not. The main story eventually emerges: the vicar is present beside the deathbed of an elderly man, a local drunk called Stevie, who is believed locally to have been a pilot in the RFC during the first world war. The two men, and a nursing sister, are trapped by torrential rains in an isolated shack in the Queensland outback. The dying man relates his life, a sort of confession, and this takes the form of a long flashback.

The first structural or narrative surprise comes with the beginning of this flashback. The dullish opening of the novel is told in the first person by the vicar, while the long narrative of the dying man (which makes up most of the book) is told in the third person. Although this is only a minor thing, you would expect it to be the other way around. Then there is the way in which the flashback begins, which Shute slides into skilfully and almost imperceptibly. One moment you are in the Queensland shack with the rain hammering down on the galvanized iron roof while the elderly vicar is straining to hear the dying man’s delirious words, then almost between one sentence and the next we enter the main narrative, the third-person story of the man’s life.

This is obviously set in the past, when he, Stevie (whose real name he now declares is David Anderson), was an Australian Air Force pilot attached in the UK to the Queen’s Flight, and operating a new kind of aircraft called a Ceres – a long-haul jet aircraft, probably based on an aircraft Shute had once worked on, called an Avro Atlantic (a civil variant of the Vulcan bomber). It soon emerges that the actual date of this memoir is somewhere in the mid-1980s. In other words, Shute, who was writing in 1951-52, was setting this sequence thirty years into his future. This of course implies to the reader that the narrative of the vicar, who is listening to and reporting the flashback, is many years beyond even that, perhaps another three decades. An alert reader might at this point be wondering at the real ages of these people. The vicar has already told us he was born in 1890, while Stevie is said to have been an operational pilot in 1914-18, yet is still alive and drinking hard in the second decade of the twenty-first century. I.e., about now.

That matter will be resolved to some extent by Shute’s story. For the time being, we are following his speculative account of the future break-up of the Commonwealth, and the growing independence of nations such as Australia and Canada. Britain in the 1980s is depicted as being in steep decline, with a wrecked economy, austerity politics and even the remains of wartime food rationing. Australia is a much better place, with a burgeoning immigration and a huge enlargement of its main cities. (Shute and his family had emigrated to Australia in 1950.) A love story develops between Anderson and a royal aide called Rosemary. Although all goes innocently and well between them, Anderson is troubled by vivid dreams and at one point suffers a lucid and apparently predictive nightmare in which he sees himself in a shack in Queensland, dying while the rain pours down and a vicar sits in attendance. However, he awakes to his normality and it appears to have been only a dream.

At the climax of the long flashback narrative, Anderson and Rosemary are about to be parted but have plans to get married. During the night before they are to part David Anderson falls into a troubled sleep, with a feeling that he and Rosemary are drifting inexorably away from each other. He comes to his senses, but finds he is lying at the point of death in a rough bed, in a shack in the Australian outback, while the rain pours down. We return abruptly to the first-person narrative of the vicar, sitting beside him, who hears the old man utter his last word: ‘Rosemary.’ Stevie’s death follows immediately.

The novel is far from finished, although there are only about 25 pages to go. One revelation after another is to come. We learn that the real name of the dead man was never ‘David Anderson’, but Stevie, or Stephen, Figgins. The vicar who has related the story admits he was delirious with fever so might have misheard or misunderstood, the nurse who was with him says he was in fact asleep for many hours through the period in which Stevie was allegedly telling his story, and furthermore she denies hearing anything at all said by Stevie. In a worried way, the vicar starts to wonder about the nature of reality. Later, apparently now recovered, the vicar comes across a man called Anderson who works in the bush, whose wife gave birth to a baby boy at more or less the exact moment that Stevie Figgins died – she can’t decide on a name for the child, but thinks it should be either Stephen or David. At this point our narrator more or less gives up trying to work out what might have happened, or indeed might yet be about to happen, and the novel ends.

This synoptic account has left out many interesting details of plot and background, particularly in the speculative section of the book, which looks forward to a time in Shute’s own future (which is of course the recent past for a modern reader). It is mildly fascinating to come across Shute’s guesses about the future, most of them wrong, but a few rather uncannily accurate. The structure of the plot is what I have described here, not the plot itself. In the Wet is indeed an extremely complex novel, written between his two other, better-known speculative novels: No Highway and On the Beach. Some of it is sophisticated and intriguing; much else is somewhat banal, inhibited in social and sexual terms, and at times (particularly in the matter of the central character’s nickname, which I have left out of this account) embarrassing to a contemporary reader. It was, though, a fascinating literary discovery, one I hope other people will make.

Abattoirs, Rickshaws, Haunted Dreamers and The City

chris

This is not a review of a novel so much as a recommendation of one – the best new novel I have read this year is Sam Thompson’s Communion Town. It is a first novel of impressive skill and imaginative flair, ambitiously structured and beautifully written, described by the publisher as a city in ten chapters, which in fact sums it up admirably. The central city, which might be London, or Boston, or Tel Aviv, or Melbourne, grows slowly into vivid life as you read the stories of the various people who live there.

Each chapter is different in type and is written in a slightly different style. I shrink from using the word “pastiche”, preferring the idea of literary hommage, as I suspect Mr Thompson intended. Several writers are explicitly summoned, H. P. Lovecraft, Raymond Chandler and Arthur Conan Doyle among them, but to many readers there will be implied echoes of many more. I sensed the benign hovering presence of J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Bruno Schulz, Jorge Luis Borges, M. John Harrison, Iain Sinclair, even W. G. Sebald. Even so, Sam Thompson’s voice is his alone, and this is a major work. It is the sort of book that is so well written it makes you want to declaim passages aloud to the people around you, your nearest and dearest, pedestrians passing your house, other passengers sitting opposite you on the train, anyone will do – so great is the author’s style, so deep his range, so wonderful and rich are his images.

But this amazing young writer appears to have slipped below the radar. Although Communion Town was fairly widely reviewed, the general sense I gained from reading the reviews was that almost none of the critics appeared to understand it, even those who claimed to approve. Several of them referred to the novel as a collection of short stories, which it emphatically is not. The Sunday Times called it a “dreamt-up mish-mash”, the Daily Mail said it was “frustrating”, and the reviewer in the Oxford Times said, “I’ve no idea what it all means”. I hope Mr Thompson was not too discouraged by this sort of evasive and pusillanimous journalism.

Communion Town did make it to the Man Booker longlist, although these days that can be a bit of a mixed blessing. Hope briefly rose that for once a genuinely adventurous and challenging novel would rise to the surface of the literary millpond, but a few weeks later it sank out of sight when the shortlist was announced. The judges missed a wonderful opportunity to draw attention to the arrival of an astonishing new literary talent.

A similar opportunity remains, perhaps, for the judges of the Clarke Award to make amends, partly to make up for the omission by the Booker judges, but also to try to restore confidence in the Award after this year’s dismal effort. Here is a novel of pure slipstream, nothing like traditional science fiction, but an emphatic illustration of the recent argument that the heartland of science fiction writing has become irrelevant through exhaustion. Communion Town is from what Paul Kincaid describes as the borderland of SF, a book on the edge of the fantastic, a celebration of the nature of speculative images and allusive writing and subversive imagery.

Too much to hope that the science fiction world will embrace this novel? China Miéville, for one, has said he likes it and is quoted on the cover of the hardback: “Dreamlike, gnarly and present,” Miéville writes, “Communion Town shifts like a city walker, from street to street.” My dictionary defines “gnarly” as rough, twisted and weather-beaten in appearance; perverse or ill-tempered. I think Miéville probably intended it as a recommendation. I add mine too.

Communion Town is published by Fourth Estate, £14.99, 280 pp, ISBN: 978-0-00-745476-1

Currency

chris

I returned from Israel nearly two weeks ago. The period that follows a trip abroad is for me invariably marked by twin evils: firstly, a backlog of stuff to catch up with (in this case, more than 150 emails, plus the need to get my tax accounts done soon), and secondly, a state of lethargy. These two combine with deadly effect. However, here is the news.

It appears The Adjacent has been accepted by Gollancz – Simon Spanton was reassuringly enthusiastic about it, the delivery advance has been paid and the book is scheduled for August next year. Always a relief  to get things done and dusted. Writers do have a pathetic wish to be accepted.

Now I seek, through Gollancz, an American publisher for The Adjacent. No edition of The Islanders ever appeared in the USA, although some copies of the British edition were belatedly distributed. I cannot afford that to happen again, if only for financial reasons. As things stand, just about the only book of mine most people in America have heard of is The Prestige – when I was in Israel someone gave me a copy of the Tor paperback edition to sign, and I discovered that it was in its eleventh reprinting. I like people knowing about The Prestige, but I wrote it two decades ago and I’ve written a lot of stuff since.

Speaking of The Prestige, the two stage versions are both moving forward slowly. I wrote a straight dramatic adaptation in 2011, and that is being produced in Britain. Scheduled, I believe, for an opening next year. Meanwhile, a musical stage version is in preparation in Russia. I wrote the ‘book’ for that a couple of years ago. The straight play and the musical are completely different from each other, incidentally – I regard them as separate works. They are also both different from the film. Christopher Nolan’s film changed the ending and omitted several of the best scenes, so there was a lot left to work with. The straight play is a dark take on the main story, while the musical is a more open and entertaining version. Both are to include live magic performed onstage – the play deals with magic as psychological illusion, the musical treats it as entertainment.

Gollancz have just contracted for reprints of four of my older novels: Indoctrinaire, The Space Machine, A Dream of Wessex and The Quiet Woman. All four of these have been out of print for some time, so I’m glad to think they’ll be available again.

Incidentally, the Gollancz paperback editions of The Glamour and The Extremes usually show as unavailable from internet sellers, but they are in fact, as Nielsens’ database confirms, still available in PoD editions through bookshops. Fugue for a Darkening Island, The Dream Archipelago, Inverted World, The Affirmation and The Prestige are all still in paperback, and should be in stock.

Next week, as lethargy finally fades, I will be starting work on my next novel.

Old New Land

chris

I have spent the last 9 days in Israel, guest of ICON: The Tel-Aviv International Festival for Science Fiction Imagination and the Future. I spent most of the time in Tel Aviv itself, but was taken to Jerusalem for one eye-opening day. In fact, the whole trip was something of an eye-opener, as I had little idea in advance of what life in Israel would be like. A handful of photographs (four shots out of about four hundred in all) are below.

This is just to say a million thanks to my many new friends in Tel Aviv, notably Uri Aviv, who is the  driving force behind ICON, as well as the team around him: Ayelet Cohen, Shahar Golan and Eliyahu Zigdon. Especial thanks and greetings to Tom Shapira and Izhar Izhaki, my personal ‘minders’, who gave up hours of their own lives to take me sightseeing and other places, walk with me, share meals with me, watch movies with me, and on one notable occasion to catch me with a swift rescuing lurch, as I toppled on a flight of shiny marble stairs in the darkness. Thanks Izhar! Other friends too: notably Ziv Kitaro, his wife Galya, and his prestigious brother Nir. Many more — I think of you all. Here’s to the next time …

This is the sculpture in the plaza next to the Habima Theatre in the centre of Tel Aviv. The theatre itself is outside the picture to the left — the building in the background is the cultural centre, currently being refurbished. The sculptor is Menashe Kadishman:

This is Ibn Gvirol Street, a main road in the centre of town, which runs between the Cinematheque (where ICON took place), and the hotel I was staying in. Crossing this street several times a day was a life-challenging experience, but on this one occasion it was briefly free of traffic:

This is a view of the Arab area of Jerusalem, which we did not enter. In the top left of the picture is a glimpse of the Israeli West Bank Barrier:

Finally, this picture was taken at approximately midday, when the temperature was at least 90º in the shade, with no shade. This was in the compound of the Western Wall:

 

They Flooded the Place Afterwards

chris

This is a photograph of the Devonshire Inn, in Skipton Yorkshire, currently a branch of the JD Wetherspoon group:

In 1893, though, the hotel was known as the Devonshire Arms, and set the scene for the opening pages of my novel The Space Machine, which is doubtless fondly remembered by all who read this journal. In the late nineteenth century the Devonshire Arms operated as a commercial hotel, catering in the main for travelling salesmen. My character in the book was one of them. I learned of the place in a book I was researching from (a portrait of the lives of commercial travellers in the 19th century — literary research leads one down many unexpected avenues), but in the late 1970s I discovered that the place still existed and I paid it a visit. It had by then become the plain Devonshire, and was being run as a pub. Here is the picture I took of it then:

Earlier this month Nina and I were on holiday in Lancs/Yorks, and one evening ate dinner in the present Devonshire Inn. It was all OK. Being away from the desk (and the internet, and the long silences of others) provided a welcome break, and the break was on the whole rather OK. Although the Pennines and the Yorkshire Dales are a rainy part of the world we had several sunny days, but towards the end of the week the rain began to fall. There was a beck running in a steep-sided rocky gill at the back of our rented cottage, a shallow babbling brook of no harm or interest to anyone, but with the onset of the rains it deepened rapidly and on the day we left it was about three-quarters of the way to the top. As the north of England has subsequently suffered many hours of torrential rain, I don’t like to think what the harmless little brook must look like at the moment.

One day we drove across the glorious scenery of the Dales to the town of Harrogate, a dull place in which I have only a single interest and hold but one vivid memory.

In 1969 I was on a train heading towards Harrogate in the company of the science fiction writer Norman Spinrad, a striptease dancer called Terri and the author William Burroughs. Mr Burroughs spent most of the journey in the bar, knocking back one glass of whisky after another and telling me and the others that he was on something called the ‘drinking man’s diet’ — as he was of cadaverous and skeletal appearance I think it’s safe to say that it was a diet that worked. We were greeted on arrival in Harrogate by the publisher John Calder, who fussed and fawned over Mr Burroughs, dancing attentively on his needs, carrying his suitcase, etc. Spinrad, Terri and I followed on humbly behind. We were ushered into Mr Calder’s shining and splendid Jaguar, waiting at the station entrance: Mr Burroughs was helped into the front passenger seat and the rest of us crammed in behind. We drove away from the station portal, heading across the broad concourse. Mr Calder was in a sort of rapture: talking nineteen to the dozen to the great man in the front seat, sloshing the praise out unstoppably, regarding the famous author with loving eyes. However, in the back seat the three of us could hardly fail to notice that the Jaguar was heading towards a long flight of pedestrian steps. Our cries of warning went unheeded as Mr Calder blithely accelerated on. Within moments we were rattling and clattering down the steps, with loud and expensive-sounding scrapes and bangs coming from beneath the car. Halfway down the flight, the steps levelled out briefly before resuming. Here the beautiful Jaguar at last came to a halt, rocking to and fro on its chassis, balanced on the lip of the topmost step, just like the bus at the end of The Italian Job. We continued our journey to the hotel on foot.

My sole interest in Harrogate, a mere 43 years later, was to return to the station and: (a) try to find out if the car was still stuck there, (b) if not, to try to find the gouges and scrapes caused by the incident if they were still visible, and (c) if not even that, at least to find the flight of steps and take a souvenir photograph of them. However, Railtrack station refurbishment has put paid to this fragment of literary history, and there was no sign or trace of the Staircase of Beat Generation Chagrin. Slightly disappointed, I contented myself with other shots of the old spa town, including this one of a quiet, rain-wet passage that runs beside the Harrogate Baths:

From the other side of the island, here are some rocks. These are at Jenny Brown Point, in Lancashire:

Low hills are visible on the horizon of the picture from Jenny Brown. This is the area of upland that lies just behind Morecambe Bay: the Forest of Bowland. Bowland is a huge tract of countryside, largely unknown by many people south of Watford. It is a varied landscape of unspoiled and undeveloped hills and valleys, much moorland, many small rivers and streams, hardly accessible by road and therefore a walkers’ paradise. The M6 motorway runs alongside it, but the road is mostly undetectable from more than about 100 yards away. It was amazing and reassuring to find such a large and beautiful area of undamaged landscape in modern Britain. In the wildest of bleak moorland we saw a sign to the local town: LANCASTER 6-> it said.

Here is a row of chairs, inside a pub, on the edge of Bowland:

Here now are two trees on Pendle Hill:

I was going to claim that we saw these windswept trees after we had reached the very summit of Pendle Hill (alt. 1,827 feet), but the truth is they were only halfway up. Well, part of the way up. Um, maybe not that far from the car park …

It was a bleak and windy day and the ground was sodden — in fact most of the path had water running along it. The day before I had twisted an ankle while walking in Skipton and it was still painful. I was distinctly nervous of this terrain of broken stones, muddy shallows and half-buried rocks. However, we went quite a long way up the hill, which dominates the landscape for miles around, and the views were breathtaking. On the way back down we passed a deep gully where an old house was hiding. Although it is not in fact typical of the Pendle scenery, there is to me something essentially English about the scale, the colours and the inescapable dampness of this simple cleft in the countryside:

 

The Adjacent

chris

Just to note a date, more to allow for my own faulty memory than any other reason, and knowing that one day I will need this to remind me: today I finished and delivered The Adjacent. Looking back at diary notes (again kept as a precaution against fading brain cells) I discover that I began work on it at the beginning of June 2009, when it was briefly entitled The Retreat. This was itself a change of title: Gollancz had it in their database (perhaps they still do) as a novel imaginatively called Untitled. Anyway, The Retreat ground to a halt within three weeks, but I began again on 1st July, and by then it had become, and remains, The Adjacent.

I worked on it fairly consistently after that, but there were several interruptions I could not avoid. Firstly, I wrote a short story called “Widow’s Weeds”, then the novel The Islanders (for many weeks I was writing The Adjacent and The Islanders in tandem), and finally the stage-play version of The Prestige. Throughout all these distractions, The Adjacent remained alive and interesting, and I went back to it whenever I could, but I have been working on it exclusively for most of 2011 and 2012.

It’s the longest, most complicated book I have written. Nothing whatever I can say about it now would make sense, to me or to anyone else. This is the usual unsubtle hint to rush out and panic-buy a copy whenever you can.

One minor fact. Under contract I was supposed to deliver this novel by 31st August 2012. I should like everyone to know that I am more than three weeks ahead of the deadline. This a first for me, and at a guess a first in the entire history of authorship. I should like to dedicate this achievement to my old pal Douglas Adams, who had an admirably escapist way of dealing with deadlines.

Arrows in Hastings

chris

It was one of those phone calls that can change your life – or in this case that might even end it. One morning in September 1973 Brian Aldiss telephoned me to say that he had met one of the RAF people who were in charge of the Red Arrows aerobatic team. He had offered Brian a flight in the rear seat of one of the jets. Brian was up for it – he wanted to know if I would like to be up for it too.

While I suddenly sat down on the floor with a bump, Brian elaborated. He had this idea we could get Faber in on it (we were both published by Faber at the time), and make some kind of publicity stunt. He warmed to his theme: during every Red Arrows display two of the jets fly at low level on a high-speed collision course. They flip to avoid each other at the last moment. ‘I’ll be in one of them,’ Brian said, ‘and you can be in the other. Think of the publicity!’

I said, ‘Yes, and think of the publicity if we fail to avoid each other.’ But in the end I said in a faint voice, ‘OK, I’m in.’

In the days that followed I was obsessed. While Brian went away, presumably to make arrangements, I had a bit of thinking to do. Not complex or subtle thinking. Straightforward in fact, but quite big: there was no question that I was going to do it – who would miss a chance like that? On the other hand, well, you can imagine the dilemma. Life goes on in its safe old way … or you grab the possibility of a glorious death. Thoughts don’t get much bigger than that.

The following week, because of political turmoil in the Middle East, the Arab countries that supply the West with oil embargoed all sales. This had a drastic effect on life in Britain: fuel shortages, power cuts, the 3-day week and much else. One of the less publicized effects was the grounding of the Red Arrows. The publicity stunt for Brian and me was off. Six months later, when fuel supplies were back to normal and the Red Arrows were flying again, the idea was forgotten. Life, it seemed, was to go on in its safe old way. To this day I feel sad when I think of it, but since then I have taken an extra interest in the what the team does. My blog entry of 16th June, immediately below this, describes a visit to the Red Arrows base at RAF Scampton, in Lincolnshire, where I was able to watch the Red Arrows practising – in effect a full display above their own airfield.

They came to Hastings last weekend, on 22nd July. That was the annual ‘Pirate Day’ in Hastings, when a vast number of otherwise apparently sane Hastings residents dress up like Johnny Depp, and wander the streets with cutlasses, striped T-shirts and three-cornered hats. I walked along to the vantage point of East Hill to watch the Red Arrows. It was the first real day of summer weather, so the conditions were perfect for an air display. The Red Arrows provide a curiously uplifting experience: both beautiful and frightening, artistic and disciplined. Their formation flying is so exact that when they bank the sun flashes off the wings simultaneously. Yet there are idiosyncratic touches too – in this display, apparently in an off-the-cuff moment, the formation of jets sky-wrote an unmistakable pirate’s hook across the blue.

I filmed the event, in the video above. The film has the many of the usual shortcomings of amateur footage, so you know what you are in for, but the whole display is there. The colours are lovely, and it’s not too jerky – promise! It was the first time I had tried to film anything, and because of the bright sunlight it was difficult to see the viewfinder. Those are my excuses. The film opens suddenly because in the nature of things the Red Arrows tend to appear without warning and at 500 m.p.h. In fact they arrived in Hastings on the dot of 5:30, as arranged, and flew exactly across the Old Town harbour, as expected. The display began immediately. I looked hard, but couldn’t spot Brian Aldiss.

More information about the Red Arrows from their website.

Where Am I?

chris

I’m clearly not the most committed of bloggers – I can’t help noticing that I have not been here since the middle of April. It’s not because I have been assassinated by Charlie Stross’s fans, nor cast into outer darkness by China’s, nor indeed anything at all. The simple truth is that I have been doing what I am paid to do: which is (with a few ‘structured’ exceptions) stay at home every day and concentrate on what I’m writing.

I completed the first draft of The Adjacent in the first week of April, just before Eastercon, took that weekend off, then went straight back to the second draft. A second draft for me involves a complete rewrite from beginning to end, and is likely to take at least a few weeks more. My target for completion of The Adjacent is the end of July (just as everyone in publishing vanishes on vacation for weeks on end), and I still believe that’s a likely date. I am already more than 200 pages into it.

I rather enjoyed Olympus 2012 (the official name for Eastercon this year) – since the event a video has emerged: me on the platform. You may view it here. I appear after about 12 minutes, if you sensibly wish to skip the boring and irrelevant stuff that comes first.

In the first week in May, the Arthur C. Clarke Award went to Jane Rogers and her novel The Testament of Jessie Lamb, as exclusively pundited here, and a good thing too. The judges had a sudden outbreak of previously undetected literary taste and good sense, and against all expectations came up with the right book. Good for them – no need for them to resign, then. All is forgiven, chaps. Until Next Year.

The first of my structured breaks from the second draft came during the second week in May, with a short but unhurried visit to the Lincolnshire Wolds – a research trip for The Adjacent. I had never before visited Lincolnshire, and was pleasantly surprised. Amongst other places, I went to RAF Scampton (you have to book ahead, as it is an operational RAF station), where there are still the original hangars where 617 Squadron’s Lancasters were stored and repaired, and where Guy Gibson’s office is situated. (Not open on the day we visited, as the building is being refurbished.) "Nipper"'s last resting place ...Outside the office is the well-tended grave of a certain Black Labrador, whose real name has become a matter of fear and loathing, but which is well known to everyone who takes an interest in these things. (For the record: I totally disagree with modern PC attempts to rename the dog – I understand that the Stephen Fry rewrite of the screenplay of The Dam Busters – produced by, of all people, David Frost, and which has been optioned by Peter Jackson – calls the dog ‘Nipper’.)

Red 6 car parkWhile at Scampton I was able to watch the Red Arrows practising. I might one day write about this, as it had a remarkable effect on me. For now, here is a photograph of the Red Arrows’ car park, with a glimpse of the aircraft in the background. There are ten such parking spaces, and the Red Arrows practise twice a day. I have seen the Red Arrows perform before, so what they do was not a novelty, but I must say that watching these amazing manoeuvres, behind the scenes, so to speak, thrilled me to the core.

Later to Coningsby, another operational RAF base, where we saw at close quarters the last airworthy Lancaster in the UK (there is one other in flying condition, in Canada). This is the Lanc that you glimpse doing a flypast at royal occasions, etc. In the same hangar there were several airworthy Spitfires and Hurricanes. If I had been able to make this visit when I was 14 I should probably have exploded with excitement, but now I am no longer 14 I just feel a keen interest and a warm sense of something or other which is probably a bit too naff to reveal.

In the bookshop I bought two books whose titles made me want to cheer aloud. As an inveterate book buyer I am used to feeling the uncontrollable acquisitive urge in a bookstore, but these two Owner's workshop manualsbooks were more or less emitting shrill whistles across the room, to get my attention.  Just look at their titles!

Afterwards back to work until the beginning of June, when a visit to a books festival, agreed and confirmed long ago, actually had to be gone to. This was Comédie du Livre, in Montpellier, in the south of France, and turned out to be not at all a grind (as dreaded beforehand), but a highly enjoyable visit, more like a holiday than, er, work.  Brilliantly organized, set in a beautiful medieval town, with the sort of weather you just never get in England: good coffee, good wine, great food … and several hundred writers.

Since then: back to the grind, and I shouldn’t be writing this.