Category: Journal

The problem with working in the slipstream is that many people misunderstand what you’re trying to do. This is also, of course, the greatest strength: you are free to do whatever you wish with slipstream without having to conform to expectations. Much slipstream is concerned with the fantastic, and this will sometimes add irritation to confusion, in the minds of those who expect genre clichés. A case in point is the critical reaction to Mike Cahill’s new film, Another Earth, which has been to a large extent hostile or uncomprehending.

The film bears a superficial similarity to Lars von Trier’s recent masterpiece, Melancholia, which for me was the best and greatest film I saw in 2011. In both films a previously undetected planet moves into the same planetary space as Earth. In Melancholia the outcome is depicted in the first few moments of the film: a visual prologue of shocking beauty and intensity – in Another Earth the new presence is of an altogether more subtle kind. A duplicate Earth, complete with attendant Moon, hovers in the sky. It has the same appearance: a blue-green sphere with swirling clouds, and a glimpse of the Horn of Africa.

It does nothing. It comes no closer, presents no apparent threat, sends no messages. When radio contact is eventually made it seems that Earth 2 (as the people on our world call it) is identical in every way. Synchronicity is all. The people of that world call their planet Earth, and have even dubbed our world Earth 2. What is it? A previously hidden and unsuspected world from the far side of the Sun (which is the irrelevant explanation offered by Melancholia)? A coincidence? A visual metaphor? An illusion? A glimpse into a parallel dimension? No matter – there it is.

And there is the fantastic element laid out, and is full of slipstream traps. Those who regularly enjoy a sneer at the trappings of science fiction film (sci-fi, as they call it) will wait for the weapons to be armed, the rockets to be launched, the robots to appear, the violent war to begin. They are going to be disappointed, and so will be the fans of that kind of stuff, if they go looking for it. Certainly, many of the film critics wrote reviews that veered between bafflement and hostility — presumably they had geared themselves up for a good and thoroughly enjoyable kicking of another sci-fi blockbuster.

The real story of Another Earth is an altogether quieter one and it occupies roughly 95% of the film. A young woman, Rhoda, celebrates her scholarship to MIT, where she plans to study astrophysics. She celebrates too hard and unwisely drives herself home. She hears a radio announcement of the mysterious appearance of the other planet, squints up drunkenly into the night sky to see the emerging blue shape, and collides head-on with another car. Her life is changed forever, as are the lives of the young family in the second car. She serves a long prison sentence for her criminal act, and emerges shattered. The other Earth hovers bluely in the sky above her. She finds a job as a janitor in a local school. Eventually, she makes tentative contact with the only survivor from the other car and discovers another shattered life. A difficult and emotionally impaired relationship starts to form, based on guilt, sorrow and a need to seek forgiveness. The other Earth hovers bluely in the sky above them, synchronous, silent, portending nothing more than a duplication that cannot be shared. But then there is a hint that the synchronicity ended when that first radio contact was made: the mirror has a tiny crack.

The film was written by Mike Cahill and Brit Marling, two names new to me. Cahill also directed the film and did the photography. Brit Marling plays Rhoda. I am eager to see what they will do next. Another Earth is a brilliant, beautiful and thoughtful film, pure slipstream, deeply felt, completely original.

LINKS.  My earlier review of Melancholia is on the “Recent” page of this site. Here are baffled and negative reviews of Another Earth from two critics who normally get things right: Philip French and Peter Bradshaw. On the other hand, Roger Ebert came good. Finally, here is Mike Cahill launching semi-incoherently into the familiar but unavailing explanation of slipstream to a world of deaf ears — his film is better.

Last night to see The Awakening, a British film about a ghost. The best thing about it is the central performance by Rebecca Hall, an actor whose career I have followed with interest ever since her rather intense and original portrayal of Sarah, the put-upon wife in the 2006 film of The Prestige. (You can read more about The Prestige in a moment.) Hall is a beautiful young woman, with an intelligent look and an active and subtly interrogative use of her eyes, that makes everything she does distinctive and memorable. If she is not yet a major star she soon will be.

The film is respectably and professionally made, backed by BBC Films and StudioCanal, and it looks good: muted colour, appropriate use of shallow focus, a tremendous stately-home location (Manderston House, near Berwick).

The weaknesses in the film are many. Least of them, perhaps, is the use of loud bangs on the soundtrack whenever anything sudden occurs, including falling in and out of water! All that a sudden surprise can do to the audience is make everyone jump — it doesn’t create a sense of menace, or fear, or even excitement. It just makes you jump, and after the third or fourth time you can’t help feeling that you are being manipulated into a response rather than being drawn into it by the excellence of the story, the acting or the writing.

Excellence is in short supply in The Awakening. The script is minimalist. The schoolboys who are at the centre of the story (the death of one of them after allegedly seeing a ghost traumatizes the others, and this is the event that initiates the main story) are treated as a bunch of diminutive extras in Eton collars and 1920s’ haircuts. We know nothing about any of them, and can barely tell them apart. They soon depart for half-term hols, leaving behind one of their number, who the film-makers apparently did not realize then obviously becomes Suspect No. 1. Such dialogue that exists between adults is cursory and plot-motivated. There are directorial touches that briefly suggest a greater depth in the characters (in particular, the briefly seen sadist, McNair), but the rest are shallow. Dominic West as a WW1 veteran with a limp, a stammer and a horrid bubo growing on his thigh, is merely adequate in an underwritten part. Imelda Staunton plays the school’s matron-cum-housekeeper, who exists inside a swarm of mumsy clichés, so that the moment she appears you know she is not at all what she wants us to think she is. Even the part played by Rebecca Hall is so underwritten that much of the film’s action depends on Ms Hall running around a lot in slightly dishevelled clothes, breathing stertorously and shouting in fear and/or anger. In addition, the dramatic integrity of her part depends entirely on our suspending disbelief that what happened to her as a child has been TOTALLY forgotten.

The script (co-written by Stephen Volk and director Nick Kirby) is not just minimalist, it’s extremely derivative. All the way through you keep being reminded of other films. At the start of the main story, for instance, there is a picturesquely photographed steam-train journey through lovely countryside, and you think in a bored way of Harry Potter. The great grey mansion where most of the story is set simply reminds you of a hundred other period films made in country estates, and you know that the catering tent, production vans and the spare bits of camera and lighting equipment are parked out of sight on the other side of the house. There is what seems at first an effective use of a dolls-house reproduction of the big house, which apparently contains tableaux of key events in the story, and then you remember the much less explicable, and therefore more sinister, scale miniature building in The Shining (1980). There are, incidentally, many more small details to remind you of The Shining. The overall approach to the visibility/invisibility of the dead is an unashamed lift from M. Night Shyamalan’s much over-rated The Sixth Sense (1999). So it goes.

Most of all, though, the film reminded me of the 2007 Spanish/Mexican film, directed by Juan Antonio Bayona, The Orphanage. Both films deal with a beautiful young woman going to or returning to a large country house, now in up-dated use (a school, an orphanage). Both films assume that small children are inherently sinister or frightening. Both have scenes of horror in which old mysteries are apparently re-enacted. Both depend on the reality of ghosts. And both include the logic-defying scene in which the central character discovers a previously unknown flight of steps, leading down into a dark and gloomy cellar where many horrible things seem likely to be lurking. Logic suggests that in the state of fright being endured by the young woman, just about the last thing on Earth that she is likely to do is start going down those steps while the menacing music rises around her.

And speaking of derivative, I’d like to record that pp. 62-66 of the first edition of my novel The Prestige (1995), and pp. 54-58 of the Gollancz Masterworks edition of the same book (2010), contain a detailed description of a fraudulent spiritualist meeting, where an elderly and recently bereaved lady is duped into believing that she can be put back in touch with her dear departed loved one. The fraud is violently exposed: the heavy blind keeping out the daylight is roughly pulled aside, the magician’s cheap tricks are sensationally exposed as the charlatanry they are. This scene was for some reason never used in Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of the novel, but it plays a prominent part in the story of the novel. And it does, funnily enough, play a prominent part in The Awakening. It comes first in the film and is the scene by which the Rebecca Hall character’s deep scientific scepticism about ghosts is illustrated. Such exposées of spiritualist fraud are of course nothing new: Harry Houdini quite often broke into fake séances, and a couple of years ago Derren Brown was attempting something similar on his Channel 4 programme. However, I still felt that it was a reminder too far. It revealed this film’s unoriginal approach both to the subject of ghosts, and, much more seriously, to the making of film. Rebecca Hall deserves more original material to work in. She was good in The Prestige — pity she had to do it twice.

Last night Julian Barnes won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for his novel, The Sense of an Ending. My review of this novel can be found in Recent, on this site. On the same page are other reviews, notably of Daniel Kehlmann’s Fame and Emmanuel Carrère’s A Russian Novel. Neither of these was eligible for the Man Booker, nor would they ever be, as they are translations from other languages. I read none of the other five books on the Man Booker shortlist, so I’ve no idea if the Barnes novel was the best of them, or merely (as some have claimed) the best of a bad lot. All I know is that having read Kehlmann, Carrère and Barnes at more or less the same time, the Barnes came last, having been lapped several times by the others. If his unoriginal, unimaginative and facile novel represents the best of fiction in the English-speaking world (excluding the USA, of course), then these are dire times indeed for the English novel. They are in fact not, but to judge by the panel’s inexpert choices this year (not to mention their embarrassing and philistine comments in response to criticisms such as this one) they would not know that.

From the Booker website, I discovered this information about the sponsoring company: The Man Booker Prize is sponsored by Man Group plc. Man is a world-leading alternative investment management business. It has expertise in a wide range of liquid investment styles including managed futures, equity, credit and convertibles, emerging markets, global macro and multi-manager, combined with powerful product structuring, distribution and client service capabilities. Man manages $71.0 billon. I haven’t the faintest idea what any of that might mean, except I know they can’t spell ‘billion’ correctly. You would think they’d get that right, since it’s the final brag in their self-advertisement.

I have always maintained that the real purpose of literary awards is not to give aid and comfort to authors or publishers, but to make the givers of the awards feel good about themselves. What on Earth is an organization professing expertise in ‘liquid investment styles’, ‘global macro and multi-manager’ and ‘client service capabilities’ doing by interesting itself in literature? What is their motive? Must be a tax-break in there somewhere.

The whole thing is secondrate, and the art of literature is diminished by such events.

I was interested to learn this week that the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer has been made this year’s Nobel Laureate of Literature. I met him at the Adelaide Literary Festival in 1982, and one evening we had dinner together. My Swedish was non-existent — his English was slightly better, so we spoke in English. Communication was not easy, but I liked him. Although I had not then (and have not since) read any of his poetry, one or two people at the festival had, and said he was an excellent lyrical poet.

I mention this for a couple of reasons. Firstly, one does not get to meet and then name-drop many Nobel Laureates (although my old pal Salman must surely be waiting in line, for his highly praised but verbose and to me unenjoyable novels). Secondly, one of the few topics of conversation during that awkward mealtime meeting concerned whatever it was I was working on at that time, which happened to be the early stories of the Dream Archipelago. Mr Tranströmer told me that he lived in an archipelago, close to Stockholm. I have discovered this week that one of his best-liked poems, and the title of one of his collections, is ‘The Dream Archipelago’.

When a newly published book is being reviewed the writer can find himself in a perverse and slightly frustrating position. There is a sort of convention under which the writer is expected to stay silent and not respond to published reviews, favourable or otherwise. A writer who breaks with the convention can look a bit of a prat: comment on a friendly one and you seem as if you’re preening yourself, but respond to a negative or hostile review and you appear to have been provoked, and are revealing an over-sensitive nature or hinting at an old feud that has been festering. The only possible excuse for a response is if the reviewer makes an error of fact, and then only if it is a serious error or a seriously misleading one. Otherwise, the best advice is to keep your trap shut.

That said, let’s head on into the night. Yesterday’s Guardian Review supplement carried a letter from Paul Kincaid, pointing out a small but intriguing mis-statement in Ursula Le Guin’s review in the Guardian of my new novel The Islanders. Le Guin had said that the reference to the island of Collago was ‘a big hare to start and not pursue’ – Kincaid corrected this, saying that The Affirmation, published in 1981, was an entire novel about Collago island and what goes on there. The hare had been not only started and pursued, but chased back into its own nest and beyond.

I had of course noticed this when I saw Le Guin’s review, but under the above convention felt it wasn’t my place to point it out. (So: many thanks to Paul Kincaid.) Anyway, it seemed obvious to me that Le Guin had either not read The Affirmation, or had forgotten all about it.

I saw no problem with that. The Affirmation came out more than thirty years ago, and no one can keep up with everything. Indeed, if the roles were now reversed and I were to review a new Le Guin book, I’d have the similar difficulty that I have not read any novel of hers since about, say, 1981. But her minor slip does open up an interesting connection with Le Guin herself.

There are two things I want to make clear about The Islanders. Firstly, it is not a sequel of any kind to earlier books or stories. Secondly, it is not a roman à clef.

On the first matter, The Islanders is intended to be read as a standalone novel: you don’t need a qualification in Priest books to follow it or enjoy it. It is of course a novel set in the Dream Archipelago, which I have written about before, but apart from a couple of short sections which were published while I was drafting the novel (one in Interzone, the other in an Ian Whates anthology) it is all new work, independent of everything else. True, there are a few references back to earlier stories, but they are small, irrelevant and inconsequential. If you miss them you miss nothing. If you want to go and hunt for them (mostly in the collection called The Dream Archipelago, but also in The Affirmation), you will probably find them, but will at once agree about the smallness, the irrelevance and the inconsequentiality. Neither the earlier work nor the new is changed or improved by these small sly references.

As for The Islanders being a roman à clef: it simply is not that. With one exception.

When in the mid-1970s Ursula Le Guin came to stay and work in Britain, I was eager to meet her. I was a young and growing writer – she was at that time a very good writer, but not yet a great writer. (Her impending greatness was clear to a small group of us who had followed her work, but she was then little known to the wider world.) We met several times and, I think and hope, we became friends. She struck me as a nice woman, intelligent, wise, humorous, imaginative, and by her example gave young writers like me much to aspire to.

In 1977 I was editing a new anthology for Faber & Faber and was having to write a story of my own to go into it. The result was a Dream Archipelago story called ‘The Negation’. In this a young writer (not in fact based on me, or even my own idea of myself) meets an older and more experienced writer. I gave her the name Moylita Kaine, and although she was not at all intended as a depiction of Ursula Le Guin, she had many of the qualities I had sensed in Le Guin: the wisdom, the warmth, etc. In the story, Moylita Kaine has earlier written the one novel which most inspired my young writer, and which had made him want to become a writer too. For the moment he is a conscript in wartime, serving as a member of the Border Police protecting his country, but he plans to start writing in earnest as soon as he is free.

Her novel, which he carries around in a battered old paperback, is called The Affirmation. At this time, my own novel of that name did not exist; I later co-opted the title for myself (thinking ‘why the hell not?’), but this means that in every way the title of the Kaine novel has priority over my own use of the same title.

The plot of the Kaine The Affirmation is loosely described in ‘The Negation’. It bears no resemblance to anything Le Guin ever wrote, and for that matter it is completely unlike the plot of my own The Affirmation, which came out some three or four years later. If anything, the plot description in the story gives an acknowledgement to a novel which had once had a similar inspirational effect on me: John Fowles’s The Magus.

I’ve no idea if Le Guin ever read ‘The Negation’, or if on reading it she might have recognized something of herself in the character, because by the time the story appeared she had returned to the USA and we were more or less out of contact. It didn’t matter: I intended it only as a harmless mention, a fond acknowledgement to someone I rather liked.

Moving on thirty years, we come to The Islanders. Moylita Kaine reappears.

She features in three parts of the novel. In the first, she is a young writer edging her way towards publication, and writing her own first novel. This turns out to be The Affirmation. (The cover image of the first edition is included in The Islanders Gallery.) You need not know about my earlier short story.

In her second appearance, Moylita Kaine has become a successful and well-known author: as yet very good rather than great. She has had to travel to a remote island in the Archipelago to collect the remains of a young Border Policeman, killed in an accident. You need not know about my earlier short story.

Finally, we hear about the writing of the one work that established her greatness: a novel called Hoel Vanil, ‘a novel in the form of a document’. (The cover image of this book also appears in The Islanders Gallery.)

There is absolutely no reason why Ursula Le Guin, reading these three short sections of a long novel, should identify any part of herself from them. Even so, I can’t help wondering that if she had known about or remembered the circumstances of ‘The Negation’, she alone in this world might have enjoyed the novel a little more than in reality she did.

The Le Guin review from the Guardian is here.

‘The Negation’ is one of the short stories in the collection The Dream Archipelago.

The Paul Kincaid letter does not appear to have a link, so here is a scan of it:

Once started, I felt I had to finish the damned thing. Once finished, I felt I could not avoid reviewing it. Much of the weekend slipped away as a result.

Go to Recent to see what I am talking about. (Scroll down: I don’t know how to link from this page to particular entries in the Recent list, so this vague reference is to a review of Ian McEwan’s novel Solar.) These things still matter, you know. You think, after years of experience, that nothing you say is going to make the least bit of difference (which is true), but even so you have only yourself to blame if you let it go unsaid.

 

Why is it that publication day is always such a damp squib? Well, here it is: The Islanders is finally out in the world. Celebrations began shortly after 8:30 am with a bowl of Special K and a cup of coffee. Since then I have been doing my VAT return. Will the excitement never end?

In the old days of Faber (1969 – 1984), publication day was always marked by a telegram from my editor (the late Charles Monteith, a great man), and sometimes by a celebratory lunch with Charles. Jonathan Cape (1984) sent me a leather-bound copy of the new book (The Glamour). Bloomsbury (1990) marked the day with what I felt was an embarrassed silence, and began the current trend of damp squibs.

 

I have already mentioned on this site that I should be appearing at QUAD in Derby on Wednesday 14th September (i.e. tomorrow, as I write). I regret to say this has been cancelled at short notice. It was to be a reading from my new novel The Islanders, followed by a special screening of The Prestige. If you were planning to turn up on the night, please be warned! However, I understand the film will still be screened — at 8:45 pm, according to the information I have. (Might be a good idea to check the time with the cinema.) Sorry for any inconvenience.

Meanwhile, NEWS FROM LONDON is a lot better. Word from Foyles in Charing Cross Road is that there has been a steady demand for tickets for both the events in which I am involved in the next couple of weeks: the launch of the Solaris anthology House of Fear on Tuesday 27th September, and the London launch of my new novel The Islanders on Thursday 29th September. I’m reliably informed by my ex-Foyles employee spy that many people leave booking their tickets to the last minute, so if you’re intending to be there, please grab a ticket soon. Tickets are FREE, but have to be booked in advance. Details available here. See you on the night?

The present incarnation of this website began in October 2010, when I was relieved to report that I had at last delivered the MS of my novel, The Islanders. In fact I had sent it in during August, cunningly coinciding with the entirety of London publishing going on holiday, apparently forever. Well, in the end it was read, and accepted, and for the last twelve months it has been grinding at glacial pace through whatever it is that happens to manuscripts between delivery and publication. However, today was the day when finished copies finally turned up here.

All is well. The book looks plausible and intended, if you see what I mean. Gollancz have done well with the production, which looks at this early stage faultless. It is a long book (by my standards): it comes in at 339 well filled pages. It seems competitively priced: how can it be sold at £12.99 a copy? I’m impressed by that. The Prestige, published exactly sixteen years ago in a Touchstone hardcover edition almost as handsome as this one, was sold at £15.99; The Extremes, thirteen years ago, went for £16.99. I hope the Chancellor is noting all this, and is set to reward Gollancz for their commendable disinflationary efforts. Now who says books are over-priced?

Today was the first time I had seen the cover printed on good stock, and I think it looks OK. There is a slight grunge effect, but to those who are interested in such matters, this was intentional. I don’t in fact see where the grunge exists in the novel itself, but never mind.

Gollancz have also sent me some presentation copies of the export trade paperback edition, which apart from its binding is identical to the hardback. It too looks pretty good. If ordering from abroad, and you prefer the paperback, you should note that the ISBNs are different: the hardback is 978-0-575-07004-2; the export paperback is 978-0-575-07819-2.