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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.

Agented

5 April 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Advice for writers, Writers, Writing

I’m delighted to say that I’m now being represented, for my non-fiction work, by the Robert Dudley Agency. So I’ll finally have the chance to say: speak to my agent!

It’s worth pointing out as well, to any would-be writers, that despite what it says in all the How to Get Published books about an agent being absolutely vital, I’ve got this far (nine books published by five different publishers) without an agent, and I still represent myself for my fiction work. So, while I’m hoping being with Robert Dudley will help move me into a higher division, having an agent is certainly not necessary when starting a writing career.

Advice for Writers – no.1 in an occasional series

4 April 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Advice for writers, Writers, Writing
  1. Trust the words.
  2. Remember, readers have less knowledge but more imagination than you realise. They don’t know what’s in your head but they can bring your words alive in their minds.
  3. No, really; trust the words. They’ll do the heavy lifting for you.
  4. Disconnect from the internet. If possible, find an old computer or laptop that doesn’t have a modem; write on a typewriter or use a pen and paper. Your productivity will immediately double.

What’s Wrong With Runners?

29 March 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Things You Never Knew

weakness-clipart-TiredWhy don’t they smile?

You see, it went like this. I was into my fifth decade, I was sitting at a desk all day, and gravity was beginning to win in its battle against the flesh. So, to fight back, I decided to try running. After all, it only required me to step out the door. There are some lovely parks nearby. And running – unlike pretty well every other form of exercise – doesn’t require any money (as a dirt-poor writer, this latter was a major consideration).

So, one morning not so long ago, I put on my trainers and stepped out the door. It was a lovely morning. The sun was out, the birds were singing and, what’s more, having expected on my first run only to be able to puff my way once round the park, I found that I could run quite a bit further. There’s few things more flattering to a middle-aged man’s vanity than to find he’s fitter than he thought he was.

Running was fun. Running was great. Everyone should do it.

But then, I started passing other runners. Heads down, staring at the pavement, or looking glazedly ahead. What was going on here?

Maybe it was down to the time I was running. After all, people aren’t usually at their best early in the morning. So, I thought I’d try going out when lots of runners were around, when everyone would have had the chance to wake up properly and enjoy the day – and the run.

Good Friday was a bank holiday, it was sunny, it felt like the first day of spring and the park was so crowded with runners that traffic lights where paths crossed would have been useful (the green man would be shown jogging on the spot). In fact, it’s got so busy, the council is running a consultation on creating jogging paths. But not a single runner I passed even made eye contact, let alone acknowledging another runner. I had expected some sort of fellowship among runners but it seems that sharing a moment of (slightly breathless) camaraderie, or even giving a rueful (if you’re middle aged and slightly spreading, like me) or smug (if you’re young, fit and full of breath) grin to someone else pounding the pavements simply does not happen. So, what is the matter with runners? Are they all so caught up in a dopamined, iPodded solipsism that they are simply unaware of anyone or anything around them? Or is there some mysterious runners’ etiquette, of which I am unaware, which precludes any contact with other runners?

Come on, runners, smile! Let the world know you’re enjoying it, and this is not some form of modern self-flagellation. (Or maybe it is. After all, we’re a civilisation so fallen away that we now worship our own physical form rather than any god. Self-torture in expiation for crimes against the ideal body; future ages will look at us with the aghast amazement we regard early medieval anchorites, perched on pillars in the desert.)

But if there is some sort of running omerta, could someone tell me. Please. You’ll know me. I’m the chap who grimaces as he passes. That’s me, trying to smile.

Adventures in Bookland: The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko

28 March 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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Having tried American vampires in The Passage I thought I’d take a look at their Old World rivals: the vampires, shapeshifters, magicians and witches of Russia. (Also, I was away on holiday, and the place where we were staying had this book in its small library and there’s few things I enjoy more than the bibliodipity of thrown together book collections in out of the way places – there’s no telling what you might find there, since this is where books go to die. As many of the characters in the book are undead, it was all the more appropriate.)

So, how do these Russian vampires compare with their American counterparts? Considerably better personal hygiene and a marked tendency to break the action for long discourses on philosophy, in particular the emptiness at the core of human (and vampiric) experience. The American vampires just want to eat people. And, yes, the Russians drink more. Much more.

The Night Watch is much shorter than The Passage. There are more stories. The world does not end.

Go with the Russians!

 

Adventures in Bookland: The Passage by Justin Cronin

27 March 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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OK, let’s get one thing clear from the start. If, by any chance, you ever find yourself on a military appropriations committee and someone appears before the committee to ask for the funding to create a race of super soldiers that, by the way, happen to derive their powers from psychotic vampire bats, just don’t do it! Seriously, just say no. No, no, no.

This is the biggest draw back to the first part of Justin Cronin’s mega blockbuster vampire apocalypse: can you really believe that anyone, even the most jingoistic of patriots, would really say yes to such an idea? What’s more, after giving these potential super soldiers ‘the shot’ – distilled super vampire bat essence – these new super soldiers (who are all, incidentally, condemned killers just to add some human darkness to the vampire brew) all hunch up in corners, eating rabbits raw while producing rows of new razor teeth. Now, come on. Suppose you’d been mad enough to let things go this far, you’d still decide, being a ruthless sort, that the time had come to bring a curtain, a terminal curtain, down on all this.

But no. You leave it too late and the vampire super soldiers escape and – well, not to put too fine a point on it, eat the world (or at least America, the two being pretty well synonymous for the purposes of the book). And that’s just in part 1!

So, despite the slightly (well, completely) ludicrous premise, the story rips along and I really enjoyed part 1. But then, we reach part 2 and it pretty well all stops for about 200 pages. Yes, this new, post-apocalyptic world is all very interesting, but come on, do we really need to hear ALL the backstory? I think not. I have a life, commitments and lots of other books to read. So, I skimmed and I advise you to do the same. You can do so safely: I suggest taking a quick look at every fifth page, just to get an idea of what’s going on, and then continuing. The story does get going again, but it takes some 300 or 400 pages to do so. And then, you get to the end, and find that’s just the end of part 1. I mean come on! So, getting to page 872, or whatever it was, I faced a question: how much of my life did I want to devote to this story? Now, it’s true some stories can illuminate an entire life but The Passage isn’t one of those. I’d suggest limiting yourself to a week’s reading time on this one, while hoping that Justin Cronin employs a more aggressive editor for part 2.

The obvious comparison is Stephen King’s The Stand. Is The Passage as good? No. Despite The Stand being even longer (although it does finish the story within the confines of one book) at no point reading it did I start skipping – I wanted to read it all. With The Passage, I wanted to know what happens in the end, but preferably without having to plough every furrow along the way.

 

On the Radio

19 March 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Things You Never Knew

This is deeply scary. I’m going to be on the radio, talking – live (!!!)( eeekkk!!!!) – with Jumoke Fashola about London: A Spiritual History on Sunday 20 March at about 8.40am. Here’s the link to the show. If I do well, leave reassuring comments; if I don’t please pass by in sympathetic silence.

Jumoke Fashola
Jumoke Fashola

Update: If you want to listen to me, wind the programme forward to 2 hours and 43 minutes. I’m on for about eight minutes after that.

Adventures in Bookland: North York Moors & Yorkshire Wolds by Mike Bagshaw

11 March 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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I spent over ten years writing and editing guide books for Time Out, so I know a good guide book when I see one – and this is a really good guide book.

First, it fulfills the primary role of a guide book: it guides. When we visited the North York Moors in February, the book showed us where to go and what to see and, being published only last year, the details were all correct. But the mark of a really good guide book is when it goes beyond the basic guide book function and this one does. Reading it before we left, it made us even more eager to visit, by unveiling all sorts of places that we would never have known to visit, from the stepping stones across the River Esk in Egton Bridge to loneliest pub in England, the Lion Inn atop Blakey Ridge, to which we repaired for some much needed hot food as the wind blew spindrift over the snow fields atop the moors. And looking at the book after we have returned has helped us appreciate even more what we saw, as well as firing a determination to return again.

Mike Bagshaw fills the book with the sort of detail that comes from many years intimate knowledge of a place and its people – I was particularly struck by the story of his late neighbour, a true Yorkshireman, who through all his three score years and ten never once set foot beyond the county’s boundaries.

Having seen the demise of Time Out’s guide books – which were pretty well the best city guides out there – it’s good to see a publisher, Bradt, that is still prepared to invest in producing a high-quality, well written guidebook. Well done Bradt and well done Mike Bagshaw!

 

Adventures in Bookland: The Touchstone by Andrew Norriss

9 March 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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Go on ask me a question. Any question. You know you want to.

It can be anything, anything at all, and I’ll tell you the answer. Which stocks to buy, who will win the league, how to build a destructor death ray shooting pink plasm. All you have to do is ask, and I’ll tell you the answer.

I reckon I’d like to be able to do that – but then, I’m the sort of person who likes quizzes. My dream job would be as the Chaser on The Chase (which, if you don’t know it, is a daytime quiz programme where a team of four attempt to escape the Chaser, a professional quizzer, as the Chaser hunts them down: each time the contestants get a question wrong and the Chaser gets it right, he draws closer).

Sadly, I don’t even know enough to be the Chaser, let alone the Touchstone. Because the Touchstone really can answer any question you ask it. Any question at all. Including the one about how to make a destructor death ray shooting pink plasma.

Ah. So, perhaps not the sort of thing you want to give to just anyone. Quite right. But, the question is, who should you give it to? The Guardians? (They are, in fact, the Guardians of the Galaxy, only this version does not feature talking raccoons and ambulant trees but rather a somewhat ruffled civil servant.) Now, this is the first of Andrew Norriss’s books where I don’t think I agree with the answer. I’m not sure any institution could guard such knowledge since the knowledge would, in the end, corrupt the institution, leading the, in this case, Guardians, to see themselves as more important than that which they’re guarding, ie. everything else. It’s what happens to institutional bureaucracies over time. I’d much rather have Douglas, our 12-year-old hero, in charge of the Touchstone than the Guardians. I sort of think I’d even prefer the gung ho adventuress who gives him the Touchstone to have it. But then, there is one question that will answer with surety what your attitude to the Touchstone would be, and it’s the same question that was posed to Achilles: to have a long and happy life, or a short and glorious one.

When I was fourteen, I posed that question to my classmates and, to my surprise, received a unanimous reply: long and happy. I was the only one, at the time, who wanted glory and fame. I suspect that was because, to that point, I’d never really been unhappy, and, when you’re 14, the prospect of dying at 28 seems just as dim and distant as dying at 78.

The Touchstone is for those who want a long and happy life and, as I’ve got older, I have come to appreciate that much, much more. But, in our increasingly safety conscious world, I fear we lose something by giving no avenue for the young glory hunter: in previous ages he could sail off to strange lands, now there’s no such opportunity.

Another thought: with the internet increasingly omnipresent and omniscient, have we, in effect, given a Touchstone to everyone? If so, it’s chief effect seems to be a proliferation of cute cat videos and the further loss of personal memory; if everything can be called up, why bother to recall it? But, I suspect, memory is an underappreciated aspect of intelligence. We are currently applying a worldwide test to see if we can do without it. I suspect the answer will be no – and I don’t think I need the Touchstone to tell me that.

But I do need The Touchstone for another take on how to write a book without a single excess word or spurious phrase (like that one!).  Read it, tell others about it, answer questions on it. Make it your touchstone, if not your cornerstone.