Book review

Adventures in Bookland: The Serpent Sword by Matthew Harffy

7 August 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, Writers

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Like two warriors, we circled each other: wary, watchful, waiting for the other to make the first move. Each of us thought ourselves kings of our realm, alone and unchallenged until, through whisper and word, news came of another claimant to the throne.

The throne was the king of the 7th century and we, writers, working in what we had each thought was a personal playground until we found the other: the interloper, the intruder. The rival.

At least, that’s how it was for me. I’d been writing Edwin: High King of Britain for a month or two, all the while congratulating myself on my wit in staking claim to this most transformative yet unrepresented era in history when I learned that one Matthew Harffy was busy writing his own novel, The Serpent Sword, set in the same period. What was worse, Edwin, my King Edwin, was in his book as well.

My first reaction was, naturally, to hope for his complete and utter failure. That this Matthew chap – what was it with the two ‘f’s, after all? – would prove just another wannabe, telling the world he was a writer before he’d actually written anything of any worth.

But then he went and got himself an agent. Not good. Not good at all – particularly when I didn’t have one. All right, I had a publisher – Lion Fiction – but it was surely only a matter of time before his agent got him a publisher and then he’d be the first to put his words into the 7th century and lay claim on Northumbria. Luckily, I was almost finished with Edwin and, what’s more, we got a commendation from Bernard Cornwell – yes, that Bernard Cornwell – to go on the cover. Round 1 to me, I thought.

But then The Serpent Sword came out. And while it didn’t have Bernard Cornwell extolling it, it had pretty well everyone else. Looked like this Matthew bloke could write. What was worse, he was being nice to me online – he even bought (and read!) Edwin. Now what was I going to do?

Read his book, of course.

But there we hit the hidden fear that gnaws at the heart of every writer. What if we’re really not any good? All the good reviews flow off our backs like water, but every 1-star sticks barbs into our souls and refuses to come out.

What if I read Matthew’s book and thought it was better than mine?

Then my publisher asked me to read another book set in 7th-century Northumbria, The Abbess of Whitby by Jill Dalladay. While there was some overlap with my work, the focus was clearly different: I could try this.

So I read it and, reading, found myself twisted sideways, like looking at a spoon through a glass of water: everything distorted. Reading about these people – people I had written in my own books – imagined differently was intensely, in fact unpleasantly, distorting. Having finished The Abbess of Whitby, I realised I could not go near another vision of 7th-century Northumbria until I had finished my own exploration of the time.

While Matthew and I had become steadily more acquainted online – chiefly through his unfailing generosity and support – I prevaricated and circled around the great big elephant in our room: the fact that he’d read my book and I hadn’t read his. Two more books were written – my Oswald: Return of the King, his The Cross and the Curse – and still I circled away, attempting to repay his generosity with promises to, someday, read Matthew’s work.

Then, the day came. I had finished Oswiu: King of Kings. I was finished in the 7th century. Now there was no more hiding. Now, I had to read his book and answer the question: is he better than me?

The answer: yes.

Yes, he is. He is better at doing what he is doing than I could ever be. But, reading The Serpent Sword, I realised that Matthew isn’t doing what I am doing: we are writing different worlds set in the same place and time, and exploring different aspects of storytelling and world creation.

Matthew writes of men and battles and blood and war better than pretty well anyone else around – his nearest comparison is, in fact, Bernard Cornwell’s Uhtred and a mark of how fine a debut The Serpent Sword is, is the fact that Beobrand doesn’t suffer in comparison with Uhtred.

I don’t know how he did it, but Matthew seems to have escaped every single one of the usual first novel traps: there’s no over exposition, there’s no repeating information to the reader, there’s no failure to trust his words. Everything is lean and taut and finished: like the titular sword, this story cuts.

My only word of warning to prospective readers is that it’s pretty brutal. These were, of course, brutal times, but if you are squeamish about the depiction of violence, this might not be the book for you. But if you enjoy story telling of the highest order, this book is for you.

 

 

The Reviewer: A Story Review of Robert Aickman’s Strange Stories

8 July 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, Writing

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The Reviewer – for that was how he signed his name at the bottom of his column – sat down at his desk. He always took an almost physical satisfaction at it: the grain of the polished wood, the smoothness of the carving, the finish, all quietly spoke, in unison, of the taste of the man who sat before it. That was, the reviewer, thought, as it should be.

He picked up his pen, feeling it thick between his fingers, and paused, holding it above the fresh expanse of virgin paper that waited, spread upon his writing desk. Always, the pause; the delicious hesitation, the wait.

Ah, the wait.

The Reviewer allowed the wait to turn into the weight: the heavy load of words, building in his mind, swirling there in inchoate, pregnant silence.

Then, release.

When it was over, and he was spent, the Reviewer put the pen down, laying it neatly beside the sheet of paper: always, exactly parallel to the edge, and an inch away. Precision in such matters was a signifier of his own singularity.

With the pen retracted, the Reviewer turned his eyes to the paper. First, he cast his eyes over its entirety, taking the expanse in, in one single, appraising glance. The shape of the review was the first element of its felicity: how often had he, in his youthful, fumbling experiments, cast aside a work simply because the words made an unbecoming shape upon the page.

But here, the paragraphs were well proportioned, their very form propelling the reading eye onwards, down the page towards the final, juddering climax. For, of course, the Reviewer saved his best work for those authors he cared for most deeply: the ones he truly despised. For them: evisceration. The exposure of their incompetence was his satisfaction, the reason for his existence as a reviewer.

And this was one of the worst. A writer whose cod historical dialogue was meant to add veracity to his recreation of the 7th century, but who revealed, by the inversion of word order and his failed attempts to catch the alliterative punch of Anglo-Saxon poetry, only the tin ear of the 21st.

The Reviewer, satisfied with the form, steepled his fingers.

Now, to read.

The writing always came in a Bacchic flood, the word frenzy flooding his body and mind, so that he did not know what he wrote; only, that he was, finally, deliciously, spent.

The reading, however, was Apollonian: the careful, weighted appreciation of every word and phrase, every syllable and sentence. The Reviewer knew no purer aesthetic experience than the first reading.

He breathed out, calming mind and body, then brought his eyes to the page.

The Reviwer read through to the end.

He stared long at the page.

The words upon it did not change.

For a moment, he thought if, perhaps, some other hand had written them. But he was too fastidious in memory to allow himself that escape.

The words. Those trite, banal, graceless words were his.

They were worse, even, than the talentless hack he had sought to expose.

The Reviewer stood up. He left the paper white upon his desk, and went out into the street. The street lamp, its dirty yellow staining the pavement, lit him. The Reviewer looked up and down the street where he lived. No one left and no one came.

The Muse had left him.

No matter. The Reviewer knew where to find her again.

The last time, she had called herself Jade. The Reviewer’s lips ticked upwards in something like a smile. She had said, he had the biggest talent she’d ever seen.

He would just have to find the Muse again.

As he set off, walking down the street towards the cluster of drab yellow neon that told of the Muse’s presence, he wondered what she would call herself this time.

The End

(There. Robert Aickman’s strange stories are, indeed, strange, and I wasn’t at all sure how to review them. But if you like this little tale, then you’ll enjoy Aickman’s stories too.)

 

Who Killed Horror?

8 July 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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I’m old enough to remember how, back in the 1980s, it seemed like the horror genre was going to take over the world. Stephen King, of course, had started it: Carrie came out in 1974, Salem’s Lot in ’75, The Shining in ’77 and The Stand in ’78. Jumping on the bandwagon, a whole host of writers and publishers began churning out horror books through the following decade – and I was a big fan of them, picking lurid covers off the shelves at bookshops.

And then, it died. Not for Stephen King, of course, but for the rest. The blood-stained tracks became too trampled, the public lost interest, the publishers stopped publishing. The 1990s saw lots of articles written, asking variations on the question, who killed off the horror genre.

Now, having read The Turn of the Screw, I can answer the question. We did. We writers, we killed it off. Drove a stake through its heart, chopped its head off, pulled out its entrails and painted its drained blood upon the walls.

And that’s how we did it too: by piling up bodies, horror on horror, and forgetting that, for horror to work, there has to be something worse than death and the pain of dying; something much worse.

This is what makes The Turn of the Screw, and the other Victorian ghost stories, so effective: because these writers believed – or at least belonged to a culture that believed – that there are things worse than death. That a soul can be lost and, in its loss, something infinitely more precious than the mere pumping of blood and inflating of lungs is lost too.

After all, the problem with death, when that’s all there is, is that death ends everything. It’s the black curtain, the exit, the end, the close to suffering and the final release. Writing in a culture where death is the great, the sole, evil, robs horror of, well, its horror. Take away dread, the unspoken, wordless, formless dread of things and fates beyond and above and below death, and horror is reduced to variations on torture porn: how much can we make the protagonist suffer before his end? There is no horror in this, only the workings out of a monkey curiosity, drained of empathy.

So, for horror to work, then there must, indeed, be fates worse than death. It is the knowledge that this is true that makes The Turn of the Screw – despite Henry James’s rather curious prose style, so much more laboured and laborious than his brother, William James’s – into such a haunting book. And, reading it, tells us how flattened we have allowed our imaginative world to become.

 

Adventures in Bookland: The Colour Thief by Andrew Fusek Peters

8 July 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

25590502Depression exists underneath words, and outside them. It drains meaning from them and renders them pointless squiggles on a page or passing breath, taken by the wind. So, this picture book largely dispenses with words and uses pictures to tell of how a young boy learns of, understands and copes with his father’s depression. It does so beautifully and the central metaphor – of depression as the thief of colour – works perfectly. Highly recommended for anyone having to deal with depression in the family, and particularly when it affects children.

 

Adventures in Bookland: Here Comes the Poo Bus! by Andy Stanton

5 July 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, Poetry

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In Here Comes the Poo Bus! narrative poetry – an undeservedly neglected form in the 20th century – reaches a new pitch of artistic tension and, final, blessed, relief. Have you ever reached that point, in the creative process, where the artistic load has grown to such a mass that it simply has to be dumped, immediately, no matter where you are and what you are doing? Even in the midst of the most important meeting or walking the high hills of Yosemite, unseen connections have been made in the dark, unplumbed places and then, suddenly, they all come together and have to be released.

Ever had that happen to you?

Or, if not, have you ever been overcome by the desperate, this-will-not-wait, desire to do a poo?

Then this is the book for you!

It contains what is, I think, the single finest verse ever committed to paper:

Here it comes! The poo bus!
Along the avenue.
It’s big! It’s brown! It drives through town!
It’s made out of poo!

I should mention that, before I read this extraordinary work, my favourite poetic couplet came from T.Rex’s seminal statement of artistic, cultural and political change, Children of the Revolution, and simply states:

I drive a Rolls Royce
‘Cos it’s good for my voice.

Mind, it’s worth bearing in mind, when choosing suitable reading matter for yourself and your children, that my own finest poetic achievement came in distilling the emotion (“Oh my goodness me, I cannot believe I am seeing this”) in the tranquility of recollection. So, to finish, here it is. If you like this, you’ll love Here Comes the Poo Bus!

Gorillas eat their poo?
I can’t believe they do.
Oh no! Oh yuck!
It’s true!

 

Adventures in Bookland: The Lion Comic Book Hero Bible

26 May 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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While the beginning was a Word, spoken by God to and of himself, what are we to do in an age when words – the packets of meaning that carry the dim, refracted reflection of the original Word of creation – are being systematically devalued and drained of meaning? Think on it: from the inversion of meanings in slang and street talk to the complete draining of sense and colour and, sometimes, even logic that occurs in business speak, our language is having the sense drained from it, so that the awareness of power that once existed in speaking and reading, the belief, sometimes inchoate sometimes explicit, that words carry power and that that power might be made concrete in arenas as different as the working of a spell or the raising of a crowd, that sense of the power of words has diminished and in places disappeared. After all, look around you. Everywhere, people looking at screens but, for the most part, they’re watching cat videos or, thumbs blurring, they’re playing some graphics heavy game.

Our words have grown old and tired. Maybe it’s the penalty of centuries of civilisation. Maybe it’s a consequence of hearing ourselves speak so much that we have grown sick of the sound of our own voices. Or, more likely, it’s the response to the flashy new toys of the video kid. After all, movies are only a century old, TV just over half a century, and the new era of instant visuals is barely a decade old. No wonder people are dazzled by them – they still carry the flash and dazzle of movement, the deeply laid instinct to look towards something that catches our eye. Words, in comparison, are static: you have to seek them out. So no wonder then the Bible, the source of so many of the words, and most of the ideas, that underpin our creaking civilisation is passed over: it’s all just words on a page.

One way of facing this visual deficit is exactly what Lion have done with this brilliantly produced and richly conceived book: turn words into pictures – to be precise, the sorts of pictures that were the precursors of much of the film and gaming entertainment of today: comic-book art.

Siku (Old Testament) and Jeff Anderson (New Testament) draw the Word, and do so with a richness, immediacy and strangeness that kindles the Secret Fire of life back into words and stories grown old with repetition. I particularly liked Siku’s take on the Old Testament – the stylisation of his work marrying perfectly with the mythological strands of the Pentateuch.

I can think of few better ways to gain a new and fresh take on the Bible – or to have a crash course in the major aspects of biblical history. The Bible has a lot of words – the Lion Comic Book Hero Bible has a lot less!

In a culture that is rapidly losing its cultural roots, I’d also hugely recommend this book to any RE teachers looking for a quick and accessible and engaging way to introduce the Bible to a class of de-facto heathens.

 

Adventures in Bookland: Mr Fitton in Command by Showell Styles

22 April 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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Most books and most writers are forgotten. No less than yesterday’s news wraps today’s chips, the flavour-of-the-month writer of a decade ago is landfill now. It’s a melancholic thought. As a writer, I spend a great deal of time and effort trying to create something of value, something that will resonate with readers and cast a light (albeit refracted through the lens of the past) on the human condition. But a visit to a second-hand bookshop is enought to tell me that, despite my efforts, everything I do will be forgotten, left to gather dust on an obscure shelf until the last page cracks and moulders into dust.

So my appreciation of what Faber is doing with its new imprint, Faber Finds, where the publisher republishes worthwhile work and writers that had otherwise slipped from view, is redoubled: not only have they rescued from the obscurity of the second-hand bookshop some excellent writers but someday, after I am dead, a future editor browsing through some dusty shelves will stumble across one of my books and think, ‘Hang on, this is worth a fresh audience.’

The first book I read from Faber Finds was Susan Brigden’s London and the Reformation, one of the most enjoyably scholarly books I’ve ever read and one certainly worth republishing. Now, I’ve started on Faber Finds’ repackaging of Showell Styles’ Mr Fitton series: adventures at sea in the Napoleonic era and, I think, as good a series as CS Forester’s Hornblower. They are a delight to read. Showell Styles died in 2005. Most writers, ten years after death, have been long forgotten. He does not deserve to be and, through Faber Finds, will I hope find a whole new generation of readers.

Adventures in Bookland: Italian Ways by Tim Parks

20 April 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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Listen up, I’ve got this great idea for a book. It goes like this: for two thirds of the book I write about my commute to and from work, throwing in some stuff about the history of the underground to fill things out a bit, and then for the final third I write about my summer holiday. There, what do you think? Reckon I could get a publisher to stump up 20k in advance?

Sadly, probably not (although, if you’re a publisher and you like the idea and, more importantly, are willing to give me a 20k advance then let me tell you about my other idea for writing about my school run and the weekly shop).

But that’s pretty well what Tim Parks does in this book. To be fair to him, he’s a fine writer and he argues, reasonably convincingly, that any human enterprise is necessarily so conditioned and embedded in its culture that to look, in detail, at that enterprise is to potentially understand the whole culture that produced it. However, he really is writing about his commute in to work (from Verona to Milan, so a long way) and what he did on his summer holidays (go and visit the south of Italy).  This can’t help but strike me as a writer blagging his way towards a subsidised holiday – and good luck to him, there’s few enough perks to being a writer nowadays. Well done, Tim! Now, if you read this, could you let me know which editor you sold this to at Vintage. I need to tell him just how fascinating the Piccadilly Line is.

 

Adventures in Bookland: No Ordinary Man by Donald McCrory

13 April 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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He wasn’t. Miguel de Cervantes that is. But he was almost as elusive a figure as Shakespeare, right down to the doubt as to whether they really did die on the same day (23 April 1616). There’s a bit more flesh on his life story: Cervantes fought at the Battle of Lepanto, rising from his sick bed to take part and receiving a wound that left his left hand permanently maimed; he was captured by Barbary Coast pirates and kept as a slave in Algiers for five years; he served the king of Spain as official and tax collector. But there are as many blanks as filled-out pages. McCrory does a good job of telling what we know and makes reasonable guesses as to what we don’t. He’s also good at setting Cervantes’ world in context. But it is, unlike Cervantes himself, a trifle worthy and just a little bit dull. Still, an excellent introduction to the man behind the man from La Mancha.