Words Unlimited

Book of The Month: Tim Winton's, Eyrie

This is not a perfect book, but it’s a brilliant book. Perhaps I’ve come to expect too much of Tim Winton but, for me, the first fifty pages were a tad over-indulgent – too much time trapped inside Tom Keely’s monumental hang-over. We get it. It’s bad, really bad. And then there’s that stain in the carpet that never quite gets explained, well, apart from its metaphorical significance. If I hadn’t been a devoted Winton fan I might not have read on. That would have been a pity because this is one of the best novels I've read in a while.

When Keely enters the world of neighbour, Gemma, and her grandson, Kai, the pace quickens. By the midpoint of the book we’re into a page-turning thriller. Keely’s mother, Doris, a bracelet-jangling old Hippy, is vividly drawn and provides a still point of sanity as Keely’s world spins out of control.

Gemma and Keely have a childhood in common, having grown up in the same suburb. Since then he’s had a glittering career as an environmental campaigner with high media profile; she has had a daughter, now in jail [drugs] and a grandson who she’s determined to keep out of the clutches of social services, and worse.  Because Keely has fallen from grace they are neighbours again, but in a rather grim tower block in Freemantle, bustling port of Western Australia. 

Gemma is used to leaving Kai alone at night as she fills supermarket shelves, but when Keely and Kai form a friendship things begin to change.

Keely, jaded from a scandal we never quite have fully explained, is disillusioned, broke and at rock bottom. Among contemporary politicians, the mining corporations, how does the environment stand a chance and how can any one individual make a difference? He numbs such thoughts with drink and a growing addiction to painkillers. But as he begins to care about Kai, he starts to inch his way back to some kind of self- respect, albeit reluctantly.

Winton seems to be saying that whatever else we lose we can always choose to care for those nearest to us. In that respect we can make a difference, find some dignity.

Kai, the six-year-old who draws Keely out of his pill-popping stupor, reminded me of Ort in that earlier Winton novel, That Eye, The Sky. Like Ort, Kai is a visionary or, rather, a child who has seen too much for his years and imagines the worst. He has dreams of falling and worries about whether or not he will grow old.

Kai is given to leaning over the rail of the walkway, ten storeys high. Keely experiences hallucinations of the child falling but witnesses him so often poised over the rail, as if to fly, that he begins not to be able to tell the difference. Notions of falling, literally from the tower block or falling out of your life, permeate the book. 

The sense of place is palpable. I feel as if I could find may way around Freemantle – the dingy high-rise, the sprawling port, shiny marina, neat suburbs. Through Keely’s eyes, we see contemporary Freemantle both from the ground up and from his tenth floor eyrie.  Keely moves through the crowds witnessing junkies, rough sleepers, joggers, latte-sipping professionals and barristas – all jostling along together yet in their own worlds.

Winton is brilliant at handling backstory. Keely has a failed marriage and a tarnished career. None of this is fleshed out or visited in lengthy flashbacks. It is generally spliced into dialogue. The characters know what has gone on and talk obliquely, warily, to each other of the past.  We glimpse those past events between the lines of dialogue as Keely talks to his ex-wife, his mother, his sister, snatches that we must piece together.

I have the impression that Winton knows exactly what Keely has been through but now, in this story, we are dealing with the consequences, he’s not going to waste good story time filling you in. Keep up, reader! The effect of this is powerful as it pulls the reader closer to the characters, keeps up the tension and our curiosity.

So, not a perfect book but an absorbing, thoughtful read, an unflinching look at the contradictory layers of contemporary city life, a story that follows you round days after you’ve finished the book plus, a master-class in the art of minimal exposition.  

 

The Week In Other Words & Music

Maybe it's because the weather is suddenly so sunny and the days long but I seem to be getting out more. It's so easy to lose sight of the pleasure of writing or any creative activity. There's no better way to return to that pleasure by finding pleasure in the creativity of others. I feel well nourished this week by music and poetry.

Sunday 22 June
In Aldeburgh for the 'Musicircus ' - part of the Aldeburgh festival - a re-creation of a John Cage Happening, first performed at the University of Illinois in 1967. Fast forward to a Suffolk seaside town 2014. Between 11am and 1pm on Sunday morning, around 700 musicians lined the beach and the Crag Path to play. The 'audience' was free to move among them, creating their own 'concert'. Highlights for me: the percussion section of the CBSO, freed from the back of the concert stage, came forward to play a spirited piece on upturned dustbins.

More drummers paraded along the sea front - students from The Guildhall, London.

On the beach there was the lone piper with boats plus the mugs and plates hanging from what looked like a clothes airer and many more.

As a kind of 'finale' the whole of the CBSO turned up shortly before 1pm. Dressed in Sunday casual gear, and conducted by Thomas Ades, they performed part of Ravel's Ma Mere l' Oye in a tent on the front. Seagulls joined in. Ades's face was fascinating to watch as he conducted - not something you'd see in the concert hall at Snape - it was filled with the joy, the pleasure of making music.

 

Monday 23 June

To The Rugby Tavern, London, for the launch of two new chapbooks from Shearsman and readings by two fine poets, Martyn Crucefix and Robert Vas Dias. Crucefix's subtle poems in The Time We Turned explore memory and the Cumbrian landscape.

Vas Dias's Arrivals & Departures brings together his prose poems. Reading Crucefix on the bus home, I was reminded of the power of the unpunctuated line; Vas Dias reminded me what fun you can have with a short prose piece.

Tuesday 24 June

To Keat's House, Hampstead for the launch of the latest issue of Poetry Review - refreshing interlude, indeed. Evening sun in a beautiful garden, meeting other poets, sipping wine, before going inside to hear some stunningly fresh poems. Sean Hewitt and Sarah Howe are both young poets to watch and it was interesting to watch Simon Armitage watching them read. Doesn't seem a moment since he was the 'young poet to watch' and there he was, the voice of experience.

Sarah Howe described her work as 'hybrid, like me, half Chinese, half English. They are somewhere between a poem and a footnote.' 

Sean Hewitt's rich lyric poems took us deep into the woods. 

 

Simon Armitage's reading took us back to his childhood, that watchful boy up on the moors above Marsden, West Yorkshire. There was an elegaic quality to some of these deeply felt and pin-point accurate lines. As if to lift the mood, and to remind us that he also has a

sense of humour, he ended by reading 'Bringing It All Back Home' from Seeing Stars. It was a treat to hear him read from that marvellous book, and it reminded me, for the second time this week, of the power and potential of the prose poem. I shall be re-reading Seeing Stars and look forward to my copy of Poetry Review, due through the letterbox any day.

Earlier in the evening we had a further treat as the winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize was announced - Mir Mahfuz Ali.  He gave a powerful reading of 'MIG-21 Raids at Shegontola'. The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize is awarded to the best poem published in Poetry Review during the year by a poet who hasn’t published a full collection at the time their work appeared in the magazine.

Mir Mahfuz Ali now has a collection, just out from Seren, Midnight, Dhaka. Another one to add to my reading pile.  Well, if the weather changes, I've plenty of creative company to keep indoors.

The Facts & The Fantasy

The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters – another extraordinary novel from Michelle Lovric – is published this month.  As with all her fiction, it is following and ferreting out facts that leads to the weaving of such fantastical stories. Here, she talks about her routes through research from extremely long hair, to quack medicine and the landscape of Ireland

 photo: Marianne Taylor

PJ: For the latest book you’ve had to research, the real Sutherland Sisters, hair, Ireland, quacks and showmen etc. Where do you start?

ML: The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters started when a medical historian friend, Bill Helfand, told me about the Seven Sutherland Sisters, an American septet who rose to fame and fortune peddling quack hair products by letting down their long hair on circus stages. Bill said, ‘I think these girls might interest you.’

He could not have been more right. Their story, like my novel, may seem incredible, but the facts of their lives gives my tale credibility, I hope.

After reading every scrap of material I could find on the Sutherland girls, I looked into the quackery hair products like the ones they sold. I love quack medicine, and have written about it in earlier novels, The Remedy and The Book of Human Skin. Its premise is the lure of words. Worthless chemicals are endowed with almost magical qualities by the process of naming them. Their titles evoke foreign doctors, exotic ingredients, aristocracy. I am interested in the powers of the word as almost sympathetic magic. So as usual I headed straight for the Wellcome Library on that subject. And speaking of sympathetic magic, I looked into beliefs about the power of hair. Cut hair is a dangerous thing. Witches can use it to create storms or make a child wither and die.

My novel is about sisters with torrents of beautiful hair falling from the appropriate places at the tops of their heads. But that raised the issue of what happens when hair grows in the wrong places? So I looked into the life of Julia Pastrana, the Victorian, so-called, ‘baboon’ lady, who was one of the most celebrated side-show freaks of her age.

Apart from words, I am interested in art. Hair in the nineteenth century was almost reinvented by the Pre-Raphaelite painters as a signifier of dangerous feminine libido. So I began to research those ideas, looking at the writings of Elizabeth Gitter, Griselda Pollock and Galia Ofek.

Finally I went to Ireland to do physical research on the post-Famine setting of the novel. That actually set the emotional tone for the book, as I have written here.

Ireland gave me fairies, witches, folk tales and most of all language. I adore the redundancy of Irish language. So several heavy tomes from the philology section of the London Library lived on my desk for many months.

The story of the Harristown Sisters ends in Venice, where I needed to look at the mid-nineteenth century, something I had not written about before. Fortunately the great photographic studios of Venice, including Naya and Ongania, were by that time starting to record the city’s Victorian life. I also wanted to pay tribute to my favourite Henry James novel, The Aspern Papers, so I re-read that, his Venice letters and looked at his circle of friends for their diaries.

After all of that, I sat down to write!  

PJ: How do you keep you keep track of all the threads – spread sheets? Notebooks?

ML: Until fairly recently I always kept the story in my head as a kind of organic thing, which grew and grew, occupying more and more of my brain. Some bits were lumpy. Some bits seemed dehydrated. I just tended it until it swelled into the right shape. Lately I’ve had some health issues that have meant I’ve been unable to keep my novelistic garden in virtual order. So I have taken more to writing things down.

I keep a handmade spreadsheet for all my novels. It consists of a grid made up of all the characters’ names, both vertically and horizontally. So there is a box in which to put the main issues of tension or amity between each of the characters. If there are blanks, I find ways to fill them. So everyone is threaded together.

The other thing I do is keep a timeline. This records the time of the day or night and the weather. Both these things allow me to monitor the comfort and exhaustion levels of my characters, which are crucial to how well they are dealing with the plot horrors I am pitching against them. This also stops you from writing 29 hour days and 1 hour nights.

PJ: Since you love libraries and collecting fascinating facts are you never tempted to turn your fiction, story-telling skills to a non-fiction book?

ML: I spent many years as an editor, writer, designer and producer of non-fiction books, about letters, museums, cats etc. I loved it. And in many ways, not least financially, I am sorry not to be in that world any more. It was very sociable, and I worked with a fantastic team of people. It gave me a wonderful lifestyle, taking me to all kinds of places – Paris, Rome, Buffalo!

I’ve been writing fiction pretty much exclusively now for about eight years. These days my goal is to synthesize research into my own writing. After all those years of looking at the work of others, I feel I have things to say for myself now, especially through experiences lived.

PJ: For creative research, you’ve said you sometimes write a character as a poem. How does that work? Do you go for sound, image, metaphor? How does the poem become prose character?

ML: Yes, I very often write a poem, a dramatic monologue for a character, or a dialogue, before smoothing it into prose or conversation.

Poetry makes you work harder at language. It makes you concise and it makes you more aware of the sounds of the words. Images need to be distilled without self-indulgence, efficiently, shockingly.

I wrote several parts of The Harristown Sisters in poetry. There is, for example, a description of Manticory’s red hair by a photographer. And something which does not appear in the book was an extremely long poem written in the voice of the Baboon Lady Julia Pastrana, in which I imagined myself inhabiting her body. It was a necessary exercise in empathy.

I usually place the poem in the relevant part of the book, reading what comes before and what after. Then I let it breathe a bit more … like the idea of Prévert’s “How to Paint a Bird”, where the bird is lured into a cage (a lovely metaphor for capturing an idea in verse).

The almost-final act for Prévert is to paint out the bars one by one taking care not to touch any of the bird’s feathers. And you know if the poem/painting is working, if the bird sings. Only then can you sign the work.

 

More on how Michelle Lovric creates her adult fiction, here, and on writing for children, here

Last Week In Other Words ...

It's always a good week when I get out, leave the computer, the current draft and deadline, in order to enjoy other people's words.

Saturday 7 June - To the Betsy Trotwood for the launch of poet Cath Drake's Sleeping With Rivers, which won the 2013 Mslexia Pamphlet Competition, now published by Seren. The book was also the PBS Spring Pamphlet Choice. 

Congratulations to Cath who gave a wonderfully animated reading.

The poems draw on her life growing up in Australia, they are witty, wise and inventive. Cath invited her key mentors to guest read. So it turned into a poetry feast with sets from Mimi Khalvati, Roddy Lumsden and Pascale Petit.

Monday 9 June - to The Troubadour to hear Paul Muldoon in conversation with Cahal Dallat. Muldoon says he first wanted to be a painter, which is, perhaps, why his work has a strong engagement with the image. He’s recently been inspired by the paintings of Rita Duffy. He admires the way a painter can explore an idea, distil it so you 'see it in an instant.'

There is also his passion for film, in particular the Western.  He often tells his students to treat the first draft of a poem as if it were a shooting script for a film – ‘what are we looking at?’

On rhyme: ‘I don’t think of using it, rhyme is what the poems want to do.'

On fashions in poetry, the Poetry Editor of The New Yorker says, he doesn’t see that any ‘single view is to the fore.’

 

 

Wednesday 11 June - To Tunbridge Wells for the launch of Digging Up Paradise, Sarah Salway's book of garden stories, poems and much more. It was one of the most warm and welcoming launch parties I have attended in a while. On a hot June evening Sarah did a reading outside, much to the delight of guests and passers by.

 

 

The Pharmacist

Interesting how self-publishing can lead to other things.

Justin David recently talked to Words Unlimited about putting his short stories on Kindle. He's now been taken on by publisher, Salt.

His debut novella, The Pharmacist is to be the first title in their brand new ebook series, Modern Dreams.