But it is not just a different coast that we see as we emerge from our time machine. The landscape is different too. Most notably, there were a lot less people and a lot more trees. Population estimates for this time can be little more than guesses but those guesses often come to a figure for the areas that would become England of about a million. At the end of our time voyage, we step into a country that seems almost empty. But what we do see are forests. Not the tame, truncated forests of our time but vast areas of wood, where wolves and possibly even bears still roamed. While no longer the Wildwood of the immediate post-glacial period (the stone axes of the Mesolithic and Neolithic had efficiently cleared large tracts of land) there were still forests to get lost in, forests where the writ of no king ran further than the occasional tracks and clearings.
The world of 7th-century Britain was…different. Looking back to it now, we are faced with barriers of language, culture, religion. Everything was different. If a time machine were to transport us back to the 7th century, we would find ourselves in a strange landscape.
Although not something we could see when we emerge, blinking, from our time machine, perhaps the most unexpected difference is the shape of the country. The map of Britain is something we’re as familiar with as our own neighbourhoods. But even the shape of the country, particularly in its low lying eastern half, was different. Then, the sea took deep bites into the land: what is today Lincolnshire was almost an island, its boundaries as fluid as the tidal marshes that surrounded it. The Humber flowed through a markedly broader estuary and then spread, north and south, creating a vast marshland south of York. The Wash washed inland to take up almost all of present-day Cambridgeshire. The River Thames was not constrained, as it is today, behind concrete embankments but breathed in and out on every tide, sending its turbid water through deep channels into Southwark and up the now hidden rivers and streams that fed it. The Kentish spur that ends at the shingle beach of Dungeness was salt marsh too, with boats able to navigate up stream along the River Rother as far as Bodiam Castle, built in 1385 to guard against French invaders sailing up stream and landing there. At the eastern extremity of Kent, forming the hinge upon which so much of our history has turned, the Isle of Thanet really was an island, separated from the mainland by the Wantsum Channel, a safe anchorage where many a boat moored before attempting the passage along the north coast of Kent and into the treacherous tidal waters of the Thames estuary.
These tidal estuaries, salt marshes and broad rivers made the eastern coast of England markedly different from today. In the west, only the Somerset levels interrupt a generally familiar coast line, taking a big bite out of their eponymous county and providing, two hundred and fifty years later a refuge for a later Anglo-Saxon king.
The mystery is why this was my first reading of James and the Giant Peach. I am 61 years old. The book was first published in 1961 so it’s actually two years older than me. It must have been on the book shelves of the children’s library that was my favourite place to go as a bibliophilic boy. As a child, I read. In fact, reading was pretty much all I did do! My favourite days were the Fridays before bank holiday Mondays because then you could take two books out on a library ticket rather than the usual one, which meant I could borrow eight books rather than the usual maximum of four. But to give you an idea of just how much I would read, I’d normally have finished all eight books by the end of the bank holiday weekend.
Yet in all that time, and among all those books, there were none by Roald Dahl. Now, trying to visualise the library (since closed) in Archway where I went for my books, I am pretty sure there were some by Roald Dahl there. But, for some reason, I must have picked them up, read the blurb, and then put them back again. The only reason I can think of for why I did this is that it was Quentin Blake’s illustrations. I suspect that, as a rather serious-minded boy, I would have found his caricatures off putting. I preferred the more realistic drawings to be found in Enid Blyton books. And then, as I got a bit older, I began to disdain books with pictures. So I think that Roald Dahl fell into the gap between my artistic appreciation and growing taste for more ‘grown-up’ books.
However, the plus side of this is that I can read his books now and come to them completely fresh. And what a delight James and the Giant Peach was. I read it in a morning, while staying at a friend’s house in the country, with everyone else recovering from a surprise birthday party and me settling down upstairs with a book plucked from the children’s (all now grown) book shelf, as the sun shone over the fields.
In particular, the story is a masterclass in drawing characters with a a few words, as exemplified by the caterpillar announcing, “I am a pest,” to James with evident pride. The story is wild, the aunts whom poor James is sent to live with are truly vile, and the giant creatures who travel with him in the giant peach are each marvels of imagination and the writer’s craft. A wonderful book – I will have to read Dahl’s other books!
In 2004, Susanna Clarke published Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, one of the best fantasy novels of the century. In 2006, this was followed by The Ladies of Grace Adieu, stories set in the same milieu as Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. But then we had to wait until 2020 for Piranesi, as astonishing a book as I have read in the last twenty years.
I would like very much, with such an extraordinary writer, to be reading new work from her every year. But reading her novels and stories, it’s clear that this will never happen: Clarke is a writer who sweats the words onto the page. They are pulled out, extracted, removed from somewhere deep within with all the effort and pain that such deep excavation requires: we are fortunate to have had as much as we have had from her.
That’s not to say that the writing is forced or laboured: far from it. What it is, is precise. Every word, fits. Fits precisely into its immediate context, within sentence and paragraph, and its wider context within the story. The stories have the feel of faceted jewels where every face has been cut and polished to perfection. Such polish cannot be achieved save with time and effort: I shudder to think how much thought goes into every page that she has written. So thank you, Susanna. This reader, at least, appreciates what you do very much.
He’s sold millions of books and has thousands of eager readers. I have sold thousands of books and have a few hundred eager readers. But the strange thing is, in most respects I am a better writer than Dean Koontz: my dialogue is better, I don’t grandstand my political views, and I edit out the second purple prose sentence rather than leaving it in.
But there is one area in which Dean Koontz is a much, much better writer than me, and 99.999per cent of other writers: he is the absolute master of the story hook. Of the ‘what if’ idea upon which the story turns, the idea that drags the reader into the story and keeps them there until the end, wanting to know what happens next.
What is astonishing about Koontz is his ability to come up with so many brilliant story hooks, each different but almost all of them compelling. In The Bad Weather Friend, Benny Catspaw, a hero for whom ‘nice’ is a compliment as well as a completely accurate description, has his life systematically dismantled by nefarious forces, only to take delivery of a seven-foot-tall bad-weather friend, a superhuman protector known as a craggle. Frankly, we all could do with a craggle and I wish I had one too. Reading how Benny deals with his craggle, and how the craggle deals with Benny, makes for a wonderfully entertaining story – although, strictly speaking, the title should have a hyphen: The Bad-Weather Friend.
Mr Koontz, I salute you. I may have a better grasp of the craft of writing but you far exceed me in your understanding of its heart: then what happened?
In the canon of Heinlein’s works, ‘juvenile’ actually translates as mature and substantial. His ‘adult’ works on the other hand, generally appear to have been written by a sex-obsessed teenager (‘I Will Fear No Evil’) with a peculiar fascination for incest (‘Time Enough for Love’). So read his juveniles and skip his adult works. ‘Time for the Stars’ ranks among the best of his juveniles, with a notable lack of the usual garrulous father figure character, a fascinating dynamic between the identical-twin lead characters, and a notably deep exploration of the motives and reasons for long-distance exploration.
I first read White Fang as a reading obsessed child, probably when I was about ten. I remember I also read The Call of the Wild at about the same time. I remember I preferred White Fang to The Call of the Wild for two reasons: first, that it has a (relatively) happy ending and, second, because of the dog fight scene, when White Fang, who before had killed every dog put in his way, is defeated by the slow, plodding advance of a bulldog.
Rereading it many years later, if anything my enjoyment of the book increased. What a writer Jack London was. The prologue, of the two men at death’s edge trying to keep alive through the northern winter as they are pursued by a wolf pack, is as visceral a piece of writing as I’ve ever read. Then, as the focus switches to White Fang himself, Jack London proves that a great writer can break just about every writing rule out there.
One of the things they tell you when writing is show, don’t tell. If your hero is a crack shot, have him shoot the ace out of an ace of spades rather than just telling the reader he is a marksman. But in White Fang, Jack London does a lot – a lot! – of telling. He tells us White Fang’s inner life, his outer life, the life of the north, wild and human. He does this because he won’t succumb to anthropomorphism and give White Fang a personal voice: he is a wolf and does not speak. So London tells us what he thinks and feels and does, and he does this so well that the book makes one really believe that this is how an animal thinks and feels and behaves. If one reason to tell a story is to enter into a world that we cannot personally know, then White Fang does this as well as any story ever written.
He’s sold millions of books and has thousands of eager readers. I have sold thousands of books and have a few hundred eager readers. But the strange thing is, in most respects I am a better writer than Dean Koontz: my dialogue is better, I don’t grandstand my political views, and I edit out the second purple prose sentence rather than leaving it in.
But there is one area in which Dean Koontz is a much, much better writer than me, and 99.999per cent of other writers: he is the absolute master of the story hook. Of the ‘what if’ idea upon which the story turns, the idea that drags the reader into the story and keeps them there until the end, wanting to know what happens next.
What is astonishing about Koontz is his ability to come up with so many brilliant story hooks, each different but almost all of them compelling. In After Death the hero is literally a dead man who comes back to life, but with new and extraordinary abilities. With a hook like that, what reader is not going to want to find out what happens next?
Mr Koontz, I salute you. I may have a better grasp of the craft of writing but you far exceed me in your understanding of its heart: then what happened?
It was 1914 and war had been declared. Two sisters, of seven and a half and six, had been dispatched back to England the year before from India to be raised there while their parents remained in India. But then the war came, the zeppelins started flying, and at the most impressionable of all ages the two girls were sent back to India again.
This is their memoir of five years under the Indian sun. The sisters, when they grew up, both became successful novelists, although Jon Godden is little read now in comparison to her younger sister. But, if anything, it’s the fierce, determined voice of Jon Godden that is the stronger in this book, although it remains a true collaboration.
The girls loved India: its smells, its light, its colours, its people. Perhaps it was the ideal time to be taken back to India as the country is a place of extremes but so also is childhood, and for the girls childhood and India merged and became one. So much so that, as adults, both of them returned to India and lived there, remaining in the country after independence in 1947.
If you want as vivid a picture of early 20th century India as has been written – the vividness enhanced by being filtered through the recalled memories of childhood – then this is an excellent book. It also provides an insightful look into the lives of the last generation of British administrators, through the girls’ memories of their parents. Recommended for those with an interest in India.
In honour of our new puppy, I’ve been reading Isaac, at bedtime, Dodie Smith’s ‘The Hundred and One Dalmatians’. The story had been one of my childhood favourites, as shown by my reading to Isaac from my copy printed in 1970, but I had not re-read the book in many years.
And you know what? It is an absolute delight. Beautifully written, perfectly paced, with a brave and intelligent hero (speaking as a father, it’s a blessed relief to finally read a fictional father portrayed as capable and honourable rather than the bumbling idiots we are written as today, even if the dad is a dog), all set against one of the greatest villains ever put upon the page, Cruella de Vil. In fact, Cruella is so completely wicked and without redeeming features, she may be the only evil villain sure to avoid a modern reworking casting her as a misunderstood symbol of female empowerment. No, she is simply Cruella de Vil – and all the better for that too!
So if you want a great bedtime read for you children, I suggest ‘The Hundred and One Dalmatians’ (and it’s better than the films too).
