Category: News

Here is the beautiful and effective cover for the US edition of The Adjacent, which will be published in hardcover by Titan Books in April 2014.

A few extracts from the reviews of the book are now available on this site. (A new page is opened.) For those doubters, the full un-extracted reviews can also be found, with links from that page.

I suddenly realize I have written nothing here since the beginning of August, just after returning from our trip to Avilés (below). I have been in that strange and unproductive realm where a new novel lurks tantalizingly out of reach. Many false starts have led to raised and dashed hopes, but I think I have finally cracked it. It doesn’t take more than a few words of draft to realize that you have found a way into a complex story, but it can take ages to reach that realization. A decade and a half ago I spent nearly six months fruitlessly trying to find a way in to the book that eventually became The Separation. I drafted some twelve different openings, only to realize that the very first attempt was actually the one I wanted and should have been using all along. Anyway, after only about six abortive attempts, the new novel now has a beginning I think will lead somewhere, and I have even worked out the title for it. Dark winter days with the comfort of something in progress lie ahead.

It has been a time of reading. I have just finished Simon Ings’s new novel, Wolves, which strikes me as certain to be one of the key books of next year. I have no idea why it is called Wolves, and I don’t like the cover (which I think separates me from everyone else), but it is a serious, ambitious and discomfiting novel.

I also gave a long and attentive reading to a new novel called Erotic Lives of the Superheroes, by Marco Mangassola. I truly wanted to like it, as in many ways it is extremely well wrought and appears to have been given an excellent translation (by Anthony Shugaar). The publisher, Salammbo Press, is a small independent house, who must have gambled heavily on the book. Good luck to them. But it’s a novel that takes superheroes seriously and literally, and because of that it walks directly into one of my blind spots. I thought Watchmen was pretty good, but firstly that was enough, and secondly it was a quarter of a century ago. I’m going to pass this copy across to Nina, as she is more receptive than I can ever be to this sort of thing. Sorry, Salammbo. Sorry, Signor Mangassola.

I am currently reading Richard House’s The Kills. I might be gone for quite a while.

We have also seen some terrific movies in the last few weeks, some of them real discoveries.

Try Chronicle (dir. Josh Trank, 2012), a fabulously entertaining found-footage sf film, written by Max Landis, son of John.

Holy Motors (dir. Leos Carax, 2012) was a real oddball, about a man touring Paris in the back of a limousine, performing good deeds (or otherwise) on the way. Kylie Minogue appears in a scene in a ruined department store, shades of Liebestraum, in one of the most surreal pieces of casting I can remember. The film is a lot better than David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, with which it is often compared (also about a man being driven around in the back of a limousine).

Alias Betty (dir. Claude Miller, 2001) comes close to being my film of the year so far – it is based on a novel by Ruth Rendell, and has a constantly intriguing structure and plot.

In spite of a long antipathy to the work of Neil Jordan (don’t ask), I rather enjoyed his new film Byzantium (2012) not least because it was filmed effectively here in Hastings, gaining little gasps of recognition from the audience in our local Odeon.

My film of the year so far: The Place Beyond the Pines (dir. Derek Cianfrance, 2012). The worst thing about the film is the title, which is meaningless, pretentious and irrelevant, and I’m certain helped ensure that few people paid to get into the cinema. On one level the film is a well-made violent thriller (starring Ryan Gosling), but the truly wonderful thing about it is its structure. It drives a train through the received Hollywood wisdom that films must have a certain story arc or structure: unless you peek at the reviews first (I rarely do) you will have no idea where this film takes you, or how it is going to turn out. It breaks most of the storytelling rules that so cramp Hollywood style, and does so brilliantly.

We caught up at last with Summer of Sam (dir. Spike Lee, 1999), which was another film that did not at all develop in the direction you assume from the subject-matter (serial killer in New York) and the opening scenes.

Finally: Silver Linings Playbook (dir. David O. Russell, 2012), a film about people suffering personality disorders, and unusually for a Hollywood film not softening up the awkward details. It is remarkable for a brilliant performance by Jennifer Lawrence. All of these films I recommend.

Currently: catching up with the box sets of Breaking Bad. Best thing I’ve seen on TV in years, rushing through it incontinently.

Last week we went to the Celsius 232 convention in Avilés, in the Asturias region of Spain. It was a hugely enjoyable visit, largely hosted by Ian Watson and Cristina Macia. Writers from the UK included myself, Nina Allan, Paul McAuley, Jonathan Grimwood and Joe Abercrombie; from the USA there were Robert Sawyer and David Simon; from South Africa came Lauren Beukes. Most of the best Spanish writers of the fantastic were there too. A high point, recognized by everyone, was the instant translation provided by Diego Garcia Cruz, who not only interpreted our fumbling words with precision and real inflective flair, he worked seemingly without a break for hour after hour. Unfortunately I do not have a good picture of him, as he was the star turn. We visiting writers from abroad do not exist without translators.

However, here is the pedestrianized centre of Avilés. It was siesta time, and only mad dogs and photographic Brits were about:

Our hotel, the NH Palacio de Ferrera, was a conversion from a former palace in the Plaza de España. Although most of the guest rooms were in a modern extension at the back of the old building, the main part remained. The room below had been restored to its former appearance, the spiral staircase leading to a small balcony on a tower overlooking the town:

During one of the free days we visted Gijon, a coastal town (part Spanish Navy, part tourism) where some eight years ago I was a guest at the annual Semana Negra, a book fair mostly concerned with thrillers and the fantastic. As I had found in 2005, Gijon seemed unphotogenic to me, but while we were having lunch in a shaded alley in the old town, I noticed this sign for the Street of Recollections:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now a few pictures of some of the people who were there.

Here is Jon Grimwood, a shy writer, who has recently re-invented himself for his literary novel The Last Banquet:

Ian Watson now lives in Gijon, and seems to be blossoming under the heat of the sun, the rejuvenating impact of the sea winds and the wonderfully tasty Spanish cuisine. Here he is, not pulling a silly face:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, here are Joe Abercrombie and Lauren Beukes, being sociable in the modern way. I read in the Guardian this morning that this activity is now known as phubbing:

A few more spare and extra copies of CP’s old books have come to light, mostly in surprisingly good condition. We need to make space in this house crowded with books, so once again I am offering several of these titles for sale. Signature and/or dedication (or freedom from all such marks) available on request. A beautiful handmade bookmark, with vulgar self-commendation, is included with every copy from the main list. All the books are in the original English, some being UK editions, others from the USA. (All are described accordingly.) Most are first editions, although there are a few book club editions (again, marked appropriately).

Translated editions are also available, with a link to the dealer who now holds all available titles. Many of these are beautifully printed hardcovers with dust-wrappers. None of the translated editions is signed, but that can be arranged if you are interested.

Please note that the numbers available for each title are strictly limited, and in some cases there are only one or two copies available. It would be a good idea to email me from the Contact page on this website to check availability before sending money. The list will be kept updated, so it should give a  good general idea of availability at any time.

Prices and payment. Each book has a core price of £4.00, but I do need to charge extra for post and packing. Postage costs in particular have recently been increased in the UK, and the Post Office’s concessionary rate for books sent overseas has been abolished. The current rate works out at about £2.00 per title when sent inland, but significantly more when sent abroad. There are savings, of course, if several titles are ordered at once. I’ll quote you in advance. Payment by PayPal is acceptable (the contact email address can be used), but because the average PayPal commission is about 5.5%, direct payment by internet is to be preferred. I don’t have to pay a commission to the bank. (Details sent on request.) If you order from within the EU, I can supply SWIFT and IBAN details; if you are ordering from further abroad I can accept cheques in pounds or dollars. A receipted invoice is sent with every parcel.

The current list can be read here.

Because we had business in nearby West Byfleet, and it was a lovely day, we decided to drive on afterwards to Woking for lunch and have a look at the Wellsian sites there. I take my duties as Vice-President of the H. G. Wells Society proudly and seriously, if somewhat intermittently.

We went first to 143 Maybury Road, to which Wells had moved in June 1895. The house then was named ‘Lynton’, a small semi-detached villa opposite a railway line, but with a garden at the back. Woking has its own huge Common in Horsell, apparently visible from the top floor windows of the house, and there and in the surrounding countryside, Wells and his second wife Amy Catherine (who was known as Jane), took frequent bicycle rides. These trips were part of the inspiration for Wells’s 1896 novel, The Wheels of Chance. The photograph shows 143 Maybury Road as it is today. A commemorative blue plaque seems long overdue, because this is the house in which The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man were written.

Please note that the photograph of 143 Maybury Road shown on the Woking website about H. G. Wells is incorrect. It is also incorrect on Wikipedia. The house shown on both these sites is actually no. 141, and has no Wellsian connection.

Next, we moved to the centre of the town, where in 1998 the artist Michael Condron installed his breathtaking sculpture of the “Martian Walking Engine”. This a beautiful piece of work, not only a fine sculpture in its own right but accurate in many details to Wells’s descriptions in The War of the Worlds. It is almost the right size: Wells said the tripods were at least 60 feet high, and the sculpture is not far short of that.

Close beside it is this smaller sculpture, depicting one of the Martian cylinders after its dramatic nose-first crash landing in the sandpits of Horsell Common. And speaking of which, we concluded our mini-tour of Wells memorabilia with a walk across the Common in search of the sandpit itself. It is not at all difficult to find, as there is a large map of the Common in the car park, with the main features clearly shown. Because of the long winter just finished, and the delayed spring, British trees seem incandescent with brilliant green at the moment, and the walk under the tall pine trees (with a few large young oaks growing up between them) was an inspiring and reinvigorating experience. The sandpit itself is still much as it must have been in Wells’s days, at least before the Martians came along and ploughed everything up, and as it was a weekday we had the place almost entirely to ourselves.

I should have noted at the beginning of this post that a spoiler for The Adjacent is contained within.

Simon Spanton at Gollancz has sent me a couple of advance copies of The Adjacent. To Simon I therefore say, Thanks! No matter how many years I have been doing this, the moment when you see the first copy of your new book, when you hold the thing in your hand, is a memorable one.

The Gollancz edition of The Adjacent, I have to say, is a thing of exceptional beauty. Brian Roberts’s cover manages to be both understated and declarative (see the image on the side of this page), a lovely cool green, made iconic with silhouettes of one of the few British aircraft almost everyone can identify on sight. It’s appropriate to the story, even though it’s not a novel about Spitfires, or if so, only adjacently. I should also mention the physical shape and feel and weight of the book: it seems to me to have classic proportions, perhaps by design, perhaps by accident. It is good to hold.

Before I get too sentimental, let me add that it’s also a snip at £12.99. One of the less-advertised wonders of our age is the way that the prices of hardback books, in a time of alleged recession in the book-buying habit, and under the much spoken-of threat of downloads and e-books, remain competitive. Almost exactly twenty-three years ago, my novel The Quiet Woman came out in hardback from Bloomsbury. In 1990 it was priced at £13.99 and contained half the number of pages of my new one. The hardback of The Prestige (Touchstone, five years later) was priced at £15.99. And some books not only keep their prices but gain in value as the years go by. That hardback of The Prestige now usually sells secondhand for hundreds of pounds – there’s a copy on AbeBooks at present, going for £950. I wish I had kept a few more of them.

One final word of gratitude, this time to Charlie Panayiotou at Gollancz, charged with the responsibility of transferring my proof corrections to the final copy. In the manuscript I had devised an eccentric scheme of chapter headings and subheads, which someone in Orion’s production department rather sternly corrected. I appealed to Charlie to restore my original, and now I have seen the book I realize he did, and exactly so. Thanks, Charlie!

As part of the annual Charing Cross Road Fest, my new novel The Adjacent will be launched at Blackwell’s Bookshop (100 Charing Cross Road) on Saturday 22nd June. I will be in conversation with Simon Ings, from 12:30 lunchtime. Tickets are free, but have to be booked in advance.

Simon is the editor of Arc, the digital magazine about the future, and is the author of Dead Water, one of the novels inexplicably neglected by last year’s Clarke Award judges. He is currently writing a science fiction novel about Hampshire, a place he hates. His other books are soon to be reissued by Gollancz.

Click here for full details of the Blackwell’s event. (For “Afghanistan” read “Anatolia”, incidentally. Not my error, and not Blackwell’s, either.) Tickets can be ordered from: events.london@blackwell.co.uk

Be there?

While I am on this sort of subject, two weeks earlier, on Saturday 8th June, I will be addressing the British Humanist Association annual conference, at the Hilton Leeds City Hotel, Neville Street, in Leeds. As this is a conference you would have to join in advance – places are still available, and may be booked here.

Here are links to some recent blog entries on this site:

12 May 2013
Bomber Command memorial – the most recent entry.
‘In June 2012 a permanent memorial was created to the RAF Bomber Command campaign of the second world war. The memorial is to all lives lost during the war, notably the estimated 600,000 civilians and non-combatants killed on the ground by the bombing, but it is also, at last, a memorial to the young men, all volunteers, who served as aircrew in the air force. Theirs was one of the most dangerous jobs of the war.’

16 December 2012
Lionel Asbo by Martin Amis – a review of this novel.
‘Bad books are usually written by incompetents, so are bad in uninteresting ways, but occasionally a real corker comes along: a poor or careless or contemptible piece of work by a highly rated author.’

9 December 2012
Robert McCrum: “cockroach in the world of books” – a response to one of McCrum’s Guardian essays.
‘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.’

27 October 2012
Communion Town by Sam Thompson – one of the best novels of 2012.
‘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.’

28 March 2012
Hull 0, Scunthorpe 3 – a polemical essay about the ineptly managed 2012 Clarke Award shortlist.
‘It seems to me that 2011 was a poor year for science fiction. Of the sixty books submitted by publishers, only a tiny handful were suitable for awards. The brutal reality is that there were fewer than the six needed for the Clarke shortlist.’

2 January 2012
The Inner Man – The Life of J. G. Ballard by John Baxter – a review of this unreliable biography of the great writer.
‘Gossip is the main weakness of Baxter’s book, because he falls foul of the temptation to rely too heavily on the memories of living witnesses. From evidence I have seen elsewhere, much of this book appears to have been heavily influenced by long interviews with Michael Moorcock.’

 

We are now only a few weeks away from the release of my next novel The Adjacent (to be published by Gollancz on 20th June), so it’s time to mention a debt. The background for a section of the book came from the RAF bombing campaign against Germany in the Second World War. This is the second of my novels to deal with this difficult period of British history: The Separation (2002) described more directly the impact on the life of a young man who flew with Bomber Command in the early part of the war. The Adjacent does not go over similar ground, but it does touch on the same sensitive subject.

In June 2012 a permanent memorial was created to the RAF Bomber Command campaign of the second world war. The memorial is to all lives lost during the war, notably the estimated 600,000 civilians and non-combatants killed on the ground by the bombing, but it is also, at last, a memorial to the young men, all volunteers, who served as aircrew in the air force. Theirs was one of the most dangerous jobs of the war. 55,573 RAF men were killed in bombing raids during the war, and another 18,000 were wounded or taken prisoner – which was more than half the total number of crew involved (about 120,000). Serving in an RAF bomber gave a worse chance of non-survival than that of an infantry officer in the 1914-18 war. Bomber Command survivors and the families of many of the lost men have campaigned for years for the sacrifice of so many lives to be acknowledged. Winston Churchill, who through much of the war was an enthusiastic advocate of destroying German cities, and killing as many civilians as possible, changed his mind towards the end of the war, probably realizing belatedly how history might regard him. Under his orders, no Bomber Command campaign medal was ever struck, surviving career officers were demoted to their pre-war ranks, and most of the remaining civilian volunteers were demobilized and sent home as soon as possible.

The memorial is situated in Green Park, London, at the Hyde Park Corner end of Piccadilly. It contains some suitable statuary of an RAF crew, and several commemorative tablets explaining what was at stake for the ordinary people who were so terribly affected by this aspect of the war. I found it to be an unpretentious monument, and was moved by the many simple and heartfelt comments people had written on their cards and tributes.

Because none of my family or close friends were involved in RAF activities during WW2, and because I am a novelist and not an historian, I’ve always felt a bit uncomfortable with the idea of my taking a stand on the morality or otherwise of the bombing of Germany. However, I have been reading books about this subject ever since I was a teenager, invariably torn between horror of what happened and sympathy for those caught up in it.

I have long held that many of the books written by participants in WW2 are the literary equivalent of the outpouring of poetry that appeared in the First World War. In fact, relatively little good poetry was produced in 1939-45 (Daniel Swift’s recent book Bomber County, 2010, is the best existing account of what we have — reviewed by me here), but in the immediate postwar years, starting in the late 1940s but mostly from about 1950 onwards, there was a veritable flood of books containing war stories, war memoirs, war experiences: captives escaping from prisoner-of-war camps, agents parachuted behind enemy lines, bombers attacking dams in the Ruhr, nurses and firemen in the Blitz, gunners in the rear turret of Lancaster bombers, U-boat submariners in the North Atlantic, memoirs of generals, and so on. At first, during the 1950s, these books were produced by trade publishers as general titles, but in recent years those that are reprinted come from specialist military publishers, small presses or have been sponsored by the families. Many can be found in the Military History sections of large bookstores (which like many bookshop departments can be a bit of a misleading label), and of course the internet will locate most of them. They make up a neglected but unique vernacular history of that appalling war. None of them is a literary masterpiece, but like much of the poetry from the earlier war they are written with energy and a sense of total personal experience and commitment, they are moving, they contain material that is sometimes graphic or shocking or surprising, they are above all true in every sense of the word. Here are a few, but there are literally hundreds more:

Bomber Pilot, Leonard Cheshire (1943)
The Wooden Horse, Eric Williams (1949)
A WAAF in Bomber Command, Pip Beck (1989)
No Moon Tonight, Don Charlwood (1956)
The Naked Island, Russell Braddon (1952)
P.Q.17, Godfrey Winn (1947)

A postscript. I visited the Bomber Command memorial at the end of June 2012, just two days after it had been officially opened by the Queen. Many of the floral tributes and cards were still fresh. I found the one from Martin Barratt (in the photograph above, dated the day before), and took a couple of pictures of it. The poignant little message struck me as sharing the same sense of ordinary decency and pain that I had encountered many times before in these books. I moved away, looking at the other tributes. When I returned to the place where Mr Barratt’s message had been left, I discovered that it was now missing. It had not been moved to one side, it had not fallen to the floor, there was not enough of a wind to have blown it away. I looked everywhere around, but someone must have removed it. I can’t imagine why.

All the spare copies of The Affirmation and The Quiet Woman that I had for sale have now gone to their better places, and I have no more. Thank you to all who ordered, and I hope the books have arrived in good condition.

Copies remain, however, of The Glamour in its beautiful Jonathan Cape hardcover strip. The core price of this book is £4.00 a copy, with £2.00 added for p&p within the UK and Europe. If you live further afield please be prepared to add a little more for surface mail, and even more for airmail. I belatedly discovered the the UK post office has recently removed its concessionary rate for books sent abroad. No doubt this is a sign by officials of their wavering faith in the future of books, which, incidentally, I most certainly do not share.