New Welsh Review

Brave New World that Has Such Objects In It

2012-01-30T10:19:00.004Z

My relationship with physical stuff was never easy. That I was a clumsy child whose most memorable wreckage was the school projector, may have jaded my attitude. The shopping mania of the boom years didn’t help, nor does living with a hoarder whose speciality is DIY kit that mainly remains unused. So the trend towards upcycled clothes and those aspects of austerity that make us waste less in our personal lives, are home truths for me.

But as sentient beings we aren’t all comfy in our brave new virtual world. Letting go of things can be hard, and since nostalgia and sentimentality are bound up with anxiety, the runaway success of books celebrating objects, such as A History of the World in 100 Objects and last year’s Costa biography winner, The Hare with Amber Eyes, is no surprise. A new paperback edition of a 2007 title adds to the pile: Evocative Objects, Things We Think With, in which editor Sherry Turkle allocates to trinkets the role of ‘companions to our emotional lives’.

Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes is no lazy fetishist of his ancestor Charles Ephrussi’s collection of Japanese ‘netsuke’ carvings as he traces its displacement, alongside his family, across the world. How could he be, when Charles was one of two historical model’s for Proust’s Swann, and Proust the pastry-chef of the madeleine, that ‘evocative object’ par excellence? De Waal knows full well that the unfashionable scale and source of his family’s wealth (Jewish bankers) are unlikely to elicit reader sympathy as to its loss, and yet his telling does so. Equally civilised is his patience with the opposite urge (to erase), such as his grandmother’s burning letters: ‘Why keep things, archive your intimacies? Why not let thirty years of shared conversation go spiralling in ash?’

A potter, like de Waal, Turner prizewinner Grayson Perry has the obsessive hallmarks of a collector. Traumatised at age four by emotional shutdown following his father’s departure, Perry’s feelings steered into fantasy and fetish, especially around female outfits. Considering this, it is incredible that emotional articulacy characterises the first person voice of his engaging biography, Grayson Perry, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl.

Grayson states, ‘getting attention is a large part of making art’, and his work is indeed a serious exploration of this apparently flippant comment. His exhibition, The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, has extended its showing to 26 February at the British Museum. Although his own installations are showcased, Grayson’s main role is as curator to others who failed to gain or who shunned attention. Grayson is doubly brave. He runs counter to celebrity culture by fêting anonymous craftwork. And he does it in a frock.

This is a version of Gwen Davies' Western Mail Insider column published on Saturday 28 January 2012.

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The Klezmer revival in Wales by David Thorpe

2012-01-24T15:25:00.003Z

Several Welsh bands are experimenting with the Eastern European Klezmer tradition and finding intriguing parallels. Klezmer is a strong part of a musical tradition that originates with the Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern Europe. It is lively dance music, infectious and laden with emotion - both happy and bittersweet but ultimately lifting the spirit. Like traditional Welsh music, it has been largely passed on from generation to generation by example rather than written down. Several Welsh bands are now experimenting with playing Klezmer and, in one notable case, hybridising the style with Welsh music.

Cardiff's Klezmer Kollectiv is an eight-piece who play all around the Cardiff area. They employ the traditional instruments of clarinet, accordion, bass and guitar, but also add cello, sax, trombone and cajon (a box containing a snare for percussion) to give a full, romping sound.

Similarly the Llanidloes-based Klezmonauts, while gigging less often, are educating audiences in this infectious dance style.

Machynlleth-based former Ember member Rebecca Sullivan is also experimenting with Klezmer at the monthly Ceinws acoustic sessions.

South Wales duo Fiddlebox, however, are unique in trying to meld that tradition with the Welsh one, and in so doing to redefine the boundaries of Welsh traditional music. Fiddlebox claim to have invented a new musical style, which they call 'Klezreig' - a synthesis of Cymreig and Klezmer that is proving highly popular with audiences everywhere. The duo are fiddle-player Helen Adam and George Whitfield on accordion. They have just recorded their second important album, On The East Wind, which was launched late last year at a special concert at Burnett's Hill Chapel, Martletwy, Pembrokeshire.

Nowhere is the Klezreig style better exemplified than by a Klezmer version of the traditional song 'Machynlleth' which, by being played in a Klezmer scale, immediately gains emotional poignancy. This version arose from an improvisation at a party in Machynlleth, between Helen and Tony Corden, the guitarist and organiser of the politics and music festival El Sueno Existe.

I interviewed them at George's house in Narberth, Pembrokeshire, and wanted to know first of all about the story behind the title.

Helen began her answer by referring to one of the album's key tracks, ‘The Girl From The East’. ‘This song takes as its starting point an English folk song, 'The Girl I Left Behind Me'. I wrote three variations on it... the first is written in the Klezmer style’.

George has a more poetic attitude to the identity of ‘The Girl From The East’. ‘She's got her eyes on her own country in Eastern Europe, but is dancing in these green hills of Wales!’ he smiles. ‘The “girl from the east” is actually Helen!’

Helen Adam is one quarter Lithuanian Jewish, and a quarter German, on her mother's side, a part of her heritage of which she is increasingly aware. So you could say she arrived in Wales on the east wind. A recent visit to the Jewish Museum in Berlin led her to reconnect to her Jewish heritage.

‘My grandmother emigrated to Germany and converted to Buddhism to marry a German Buddhist writer,’ she says. ‘Then she left him and came with my mother to England and became a Catholic. But she ended her life in a convent in North Wales! The Klezmer track ‘Hora Dorothea’ on our first album called, simply, Fiddlebox, is about her.’

If you didn't know Fiddlebox was a duo, at times you'd think there were four of them, especially since both members sing. This is in many ways also due to George Whitfield's ability to make his custom-made accordion, which is vital to the unique Fiddlebox style, sound like two instruments at once. George had his accordion specially constructed by a top craftsman, Claudio Beltrami, in Stradella, Italy. It employs a unique bass switching system, designed to his specification, with an electric midi on board (that he doesn't use for the purely acoustic Fiddlebox), three rows of bass buttons that permit more complex bass lines and four sets of hand made reeds. Together these produce a big sound with chunky chords, that is usually only achieved with larger concert accordions. The bellows have a short delay time enabling a punchy reverb effect, which George uses eerily to open his song ‘Simply Fly’.

Helen and George are both immigrants to Wales, where they met, but they have made it their home. Helen is fluent in Welsh and has represented Wales at the International Celtic Congress. Fiddlebox are a regular at events at the National Botanic Gardens and the Royal Welsh Show.

‘So, the “girl from the east" is happy to be here, but remembers her country,’ says Helen. ‘She feels an interloper, but that's how I present the Welsh material we play because I don't think I can pretend to be Welsh. We are trying to channel Welsh music through the prism of our own identities.’

George nods. ‘We are doing what no one else is doing. I think it's a shame that Welsh culture has a lack of extension outside Wales, unlike Irish culture which extends all over world. One of the reasons for this is that there is a perception that Welsh music is just scales and arpeggios and we are trying to say it's not true.’

Helen attributes this to the point at which Welsh music was written down. In fact, its historical development up to date seems to have gone through two phases. Firstly, before the advent of Methodism, Welsh music was highly social, just like Klezmer, and centred around community celebrations, both seasonal and familial. It was jolly and upbeat.

In the eighteenth century, however, Methodist ministers frowned on such profane practices and the music became more sombre, or overtly religious. There are stories of musicians' harps being stowed away and falling into disuse.

Secondly, there is a feeling amongst some historians of music, such as Phyllis Kinney, author of Welsh Traditional Music, that the scale in which Welsh music was originally played was the Dorian scale, which contains notes similar to those used in seventh and minor chords.

However, when it came to be written down, by collectors such as D. Emlyn Evans and Llewelyn Alaw, there was a tendency to regularise it to fit with accepted musical theory. For example, seven-bar phrases might become eight-bar, and Dorian might become minor. This is how it is now played. A further change is that originally tunes were closely associated with the lyrics, and thus followed the stresses and cadences of the Welsh language. Often, the original words were lost, and this has contributed to a further regularisation of the tunes. Therefore, in the past, it is likely that Welsh music would have had more emotional depth or breadth than it does now, perhaps something like the blues and gospel music.

Fiddlebox's Helen Adam offers her own angle on this: ‘For me, Welsh music must be robust enough to stand its own ground against others, and not have too much preciousness about it,’ she says.

The implication is that we need to keep an open mind about how to present this material. A culture is not static, but rather changes in reaction to the times. Just as it has been forced to evolve in the past, as Wales opens up to welcome visitors from abroad, this is bound to influence its culture and its music.

But Fiddlebox's new album is not entirely Klezreig. George Whitfield cites his influences as rock, country, blues and folk, while Helen also is classically trained and practises contemporary composition. Between them they offer the full emotional range and some very catchy tunes, from George's upbeat ‘Simply Fly’ to an update of the gruelling traditional English song ‘Pills of White Mercury’ which is about syphilis in the eighteenth century.

George observes, ‘On the whole album, nothing was recorded that wasn't played live first, and much of it was played live for 6 months beforehand to make sure we had it down.’

Fiddlebox were insistent that they wanted no special effects like echo or distortion. It would all sound exactly as it would at a live gig. The album was recorded in an old Welsh chapel by producer David Unlimbo. The chapel also contained nesting swallows, and the mikes picked up their chirruping songs. Listen closely to the album and you can hear them, deliberately left in.

The swallows are gone now, blown on the east wind far away for the winter. Perhaps they are like the girl from the east, and dream of their homeland. Except Fiddlebox's girl has made Wales her home, and Welsh music is all the more enriched for it.

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Gwen's next blog: more on Grayson Perry, The Hare with the Amber Eyes and the renaissance of the object

Handbag etiquette and A.N. Wilson roots for Wales!

2012-01-23T14:34:00.003Z

Among DT grand-daughter Hannah Ellis’ plans to revive the Dylan Thomas Society (WM, 14/1/12) is an interactive version of A Child’s Christmas in Wales. For my mother, it was decade-spanning stocking fodder, with its ‘shawling snow’ and ‘polar cats’. Happy days, and yet too much pudding chokes the dog, as the Welsh idiom goes. Two recent titles from London publishers prove that DT’s shadow continues to dampen our new fiction pages.

The Coward’s Tale by Vanessa Gebbie won the Telegraph’s Novel in a Year award and an accolade (his first for Wales?) from A.N. Wilson. The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price Purveyor of Superior Funerals is Wendy Jones’ fiction debut. That she previously wrote the biography of the transvestite potter, Grayson Perry, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, is attractive, as is the deluxe hardback edition of her novel. But my ideal of fictional small-town life is closer to Psychoville than Llareggub, so I was deflated to read Jones on blog.booktopia.com.au: ‘I listen to [Under Milk Wood] most days’. And both Thoughts and Happenings… and The Coward’s Tale were rendered limp at first glance by their tableaux of eccentrics defined by honorifics and occupation. Reviewers: prove me wrong!

Mid-decade Manhattan is the place to escape Welsh clichés, even though Dylan died in 1953 at NY’s Chelsea hotel. My Santa wish-list for a Mad Men Series 5 DVD was foiled by legal wrangles keeping the masterpiece off-air (from forbidden BskyB) all last year and up to March. Since one of Don Draper’s bed mates, according to the Times, was ‘not another woman but The Best of Everything, [a] 1958 novel by Rona Jaffe’, I gave that a go instead. The career girl genre never shook my Martini, although I enjoyed the holiday R4 broadcast on Helen Gurly Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl (1962), revealing it as another of the genre’s pioneers as well as being a model for Mad Men. So Jaffe’s novel being dubbed as a precursor to Sex in the City should have been a warning. It is baggy, and while its matching handbag etiquette is educational, as is its portrayal of pre-Pill sex anxiety, there is nothing here of sexual mores (and indeed fashion mags) that Sylvia Plath didn’t put pithier in The Bell Jar only five years later: ‘Bile green. They were promising it for fall, only Hilda, as usual, was half a year ahead of time. Bile green with black, bile green with white, bile green with nile green, its kissing cousin…. Fashion blurbs, silver and full of nothing, sent up their fishy bubbles.’

Postscript: A.N. Wilson on Resistance. Gets the film, still doesn’t get the language. We know we're fascinating but give us a rest, dear.

This is a version of Gwen Davies' Western Mail Insider column, published on Saturday 21 January 2012

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The Echo Chamber, Chapter Cardiff, 27-28 Jan

2012-01-19T14:16:00.003Z

At some point in your life you may have found yourself wondering what might happen if four international avant-garde theatre actors and producers came together to create a piece of performance art exploring the peculiarities and mysteries of the human condition. If so, then the Llanarth Group’s newest production, The Echo Chamber might satisfy your curiosity. Weaving together music, text and sound, the group’s latest offering claims to explore the relationship between our physical bodies and that immeasurable ‘something else’ that has been the domain of philosophers for centuries.

But if the Llanarth Group’s reputation is anything to go by, this will not be merely idle musing. Following on the heels of Told by the Wind, a production whose success saw it tour between Chicago, Poland, Berlin and Portugal, The Echo Chamber places two men in separate rooms and incites them to ‘dance the other’s absence’, as Chicago Time Out put it. The piece is a labyrinth, reverberating with the echoes of memory, in which inner landscapes sound and resound.

‘This is all very well,’ you may say, ‘but what does that mean?’ I don’t know, but if any production team can pull off such a feat, it is the one behind The Echo Chamber. This quadrumvirate of introspection is made up of playwright Kate O’Reilly, whose Ted Hughes Award-winning piece Persians was recently staged on an army base in the Brecon Beacons, and Phillip Zarrilli, internationally renowned director, actor, actor-trainer, and author (and founder of the Llanarth Group), as well as director and artist Peader Kirk of European avant-garde production company Mkultra and actor Ian Morgan, in his first performance in Wales since returning from seven years working in Poland. If the clear wealth of this team’s experience at the cutting edge of performance art doesn’t convinced you of the calibre of the performance, then perhaps a glance at the glowing reviews will. The Guardian described it as ‘hypnotic…a haunting, painterly beauty…[with] the astringent purity of a haiku poem…[an] intense meditation in movement’, while British Theatre Guide calls it ‘easily the most hypnotic piece of theatre I have experienced.’ The Echo Chamber premieres in Cardiff’s Chapter Arts Centre on 27-28 January and plays again on 2-4 February.

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Etchings for Primo Levi by Jane Joseph. Exhibition review by Paul Griffiths

2012-01-18T14:08:00.000Z

Etchings for Primo Levi by Jane Joseph

Review by Paul Griffiths of an exhibition at the Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno

Gallery 4: 19th January - 11th March 2012; opening event: Saturday 28th January, 2pm

Jane Joseph is a painter, draftsman and printmaker whose reputation, since the late 1970s, has been based on her integrated approach to both her subject matter—notably, the post-industrial Thames bank of West London—and her methods of working, in which her drawings and prints, in particular, create a strong and distinctive perception of reality.

In 1999 and 2001, Joseph was commissioned by the Folio Society to produce etchings to accompany their special editions of works by Primo Levi, If This is a Man (published 2000) and The Truce (2002). The two suites of etchings now exist in two modes; as images that relate to specific texts in each book, and as sets of the original prints to be exhibited.

Both sets of prints have been shown together once before, in 2004, at the School of Art Gallery, Aberystwyth. The Mostyn's present exhibition, timed to coincide with Holocaust Memorial Day on 27th January, is another opportunity to view all these prints together. On the 28th, January Jane Joseph will be in conversation in the gallery with Emma Hill, Director of the Eagle Gallery, London, with whom she has had a long term working relationship. This show also coincides and interacts with the exhibition in gallery 3, Anselm Keifer: Artist Rooms.

The key to understanding these prints is the intimate relationship between the Folio Society, as publishers of Primo Levi's books, Joseph's role as illustrator, and the book's actual texts. The Folio Society asked her to choose the specific texts that would be illustrated, and left her to decide what form the images would take, creating a situation in which she had considerable creative freedom. Joseph has remarked that she was fired by Levi's writing, by 'his prose so full of the most wonderful analogies', and feels strongly that his writing 'doesn't need embellishment of any kind' and that 'in a way it should not be illustrated'. Joseph's fundamental achievement is that her approach to the selection of texts, and to the production of images to accompany them, amounts to a complex act of literary as well as artistic interpretation, resulting in the creation of diverse, ambiguous and allusive relationships between Primo Levi's books and her etchings.

With one exception, an image of a tap, none of the images directly represents scenes or incidents from the books. Most images can be understood as observation-based landscapes, located in familiar urban, rural or post-industrial situations, or as still lives that have a life of their own. In each book, only one or two images stand apart from such matter-of-factness. For example, in If This is a Man, a nocturnal scene of shipwreck, a tonally sombre aquatint, is dramatically illuminated by a shaft of moonlight penetrating the clouds. Such singularly theatrical images operate as a localised 'rupture' of the fabric of Jane's dominant way of working. The actual subjects of most images place us, the readers, simultaneously within and outside the contexts of the books; in the latter situation, bringing us closer to 'home', away from the reality of the Nazi Lager, but not necessarily comfortably so. The rupture of the shipwreck underscores our discomfited state. Yet it is in keeping with the complexity of these prints that the same image might also release us into the world of narrative, of fiction even, offering us some kind of relief and rescue.

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Julia Forster talks to Horatio Clare about The Prince's Pen

2012-01-16T13:01:00.003Z

In December, The Insider made a day-trip to the Hay-on-Wye Winter Weekend festival.

Speaking to us exclusively before appearing on stage about his first work of fiction, The Prince’s Pen, the erudite Horatio Clare told us what inspired him to write a novella narrated from the point of view of the androgynous Clip, a freedom fighter in Clare’s terrifying, dystopian world.

In the original Mabinogion myth on which this novella is based, Llud, King of Britain seeks the wise counsel of his youngest brother, Llevelys, in trying to rid his kingdom of three plagues which have been cast over it. Clare fast-forwards this myth to a post-apocalyptic Wales, resource-rich in precious water, bordering infighting England which has become an archipelago of islands besieged by climate change.

The re-telling stays true to the nub of the original. In Clare’s hands, it also benefits from a political twist and inherits what readers of Clare’s previous memoirs will recognise as the echoes of the author’s life history.

Take our narrator, Clip: an archetypal outsider. Clare explains he feels some affiliation with outsiders, being English (with, he says, a ‘posh accent’ to boot) and yet having been schooled in Wales fifteen miles as the crow flies from the cosy Blue Boar pub in which we meet.

Without spoiling the third section of the book, you also can’t help but feel that the setting in this part is also indebted to the isolated sheep farm so high in altitude I imagine ears would pop approaching it, where Horatio lived in his infancy.

One of Clare’s talents that shine through in this novella is his prowess at dialogue; he’s able to exploit his obvious relish of the Welsh cadence, a lilt which imbues all that Ludo says.

Clare attributes some of this skill to having cut his teeth at Radio Four as a young producer. It was at the BBC, Clare explains, that he learnt to think in terms of sound: there, he mastered the art of eavesdropping. And this is where Clare felt the freedom in writing this commission most keenly. For, after all, what is retelling a myth but an eavesdropping on the oral stories of old and redressing them to make them relevant for the present day?

Although Horatio’s heart is Wales, his home is in Verona, Italy and he has just spent two months on a container ship researching his next book, mucking in and sharing dinner with Danish sailors, surprisingly quiet, Horatio remembers, in the saloon. It will be fascinating to see how he interprets the tensions between silence and noise of life at sea in his next offering.

A version of this was published in the Western Mail Insider column, Saturday 14 January 2012. Julia Forster is an online and print contributor to New Welsh Review

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Tair Rheol Anrhefn by Daniel Davies. Review by Dafydd Saer

2012-01-11T10:57:00.001Z

Tair Rheol Anrhefn (The Three Rules of Anarchy) is Daniel Davies’s fifth book and is the winner of the 2011 Daniel Owen Memorial Prize, one of the chief literary awards presented at the National Eisteddfod.

Immediately this book was Not My Friend. The general state of mild irritability in which I constantly live was heightened considerably when I observed with disappointment that the author had opted to use dashes instead of quotation marks. Why, when countless millions of writers and readers manage famously with quotation marks? In the absence of any mark signifying the closure of a quotation, how many times, during the reading of this book, did I find myself in the middle of a speech that did not make sense, only to realise that I had left the speech, and was in the middle of narrative again? How annoying.

However, I forged ahead and soon found I couldn’t put it down. It’s a thrillingly fantastical tale of intrigue and industrial espionage set against the slightly unlikely backdrop of the Pembrokeshire Coastal Path – with some cryptic clues for those who enjoy that sort of thing; personally I was carried along on the crest of the action.

Dr Paul Price and Professor Mansel Edwards have developed the next generation of LCD televison technology – not in Tokyo or Silicone Valley as one might expect, but in the dusty halls of Aberystwyth University. The Welsh boffins’ research is a threat to the vested business interests of several international parties, wherein lies the subterferge and intrigue of a convoluted plot to acquire and suppress their research. Their lives are in dire peril!

As the tale unfolds from this anus-clenching premise, most of the action occurs during a Pembrokeshire walking holiday undertaken by anti-hero Paul. He encounters various characters who turn out not to be all they seem, and becomes embroiled in twists and turns which involve eccentric walkers and sundry members of the police and the secret service. Throw in the occasional murder for good measure, season with plenty of romantic conflict and tension, and you can be sure that the reader’s hand is constantly reaching for the next page.

The tongue-in-cheek delivery is established quite firmly in the first couple of chapters when a surprise birthday party for Paul degenerates into a hilariously unpleasant full-scale family feud, unwittingly set off by an inebriated Paul. He manages to upset not only his own dysfuncional relatives, but also his partner Llinos’s, with repercussions that haunt him for the rest of the tale.

So. A contemporary tale with hints of James Bond action – though I can’t see an entire 007 movie being shot entirely on location in Pembrokeshire (not even with a few scenes shot in Pembroke Dock). I mean, youth hostels, anoraks and walking boots can only precipitate a very limited amount of excitement – unless you’re blessed with Daniel Davies’s imagination and story-telling skills. Take the novel with the pinch of salt with which it is offered, and enjoy!

Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgwick. Review by Anite Rowe

2012-01-10T15:56:00.000Z

This latest Young Adult novel from Marcus Sedgwick has a most unusual plot construction, and is a departure from his previous works where the narrative follows a more conventional curve. Also the fantasy element is slighter. There is a stronger sense of realism and mystery combined with an atmosphere of timeless myth and atavistic superstition, which gradually draws the reader in.

The book is divided into seven parts plus an epilogue, each part taking place in a different period on the same fictional island, The Blessed Island, set somewhere in the far north, in the land of the 'Midnight Sun', where the language is English but appears to have developed, like island customs, from old Norse and Icelandic traditions. Apart from this and the setting, the only fantasy elements here are the climate - the summers are so warm that wheat and fruit grow plentifully – and a magic flower called the Little Blessed Dragon Orchid which grows profusely all over the Western half of the island, but not the Eastern. Tea brewed from this flower has all kinds of amazing properties, some beneficial, others sinister. There is also a supernatural element in that the protagonist has seven lives, each corresponding with one part of the book. Other characters also reappear in each section, under slightly different names.

Part one is set in the future, June 2073. While the other six sections are flashbacks, they do not appear in chronological order. Part two takes place in the present day, in July 2011, then the other parts regress in time while the months go forward: August 1944, September 1902, October 1848, and the tenth century. The seventh and final part is set in 'Time Unknown'. The epilogue returns the reader to the end of the first section, in June 2073. In each month the moon has a different name, from Flower Moon in the first part, to Blood Moon in the seventh part, when a lunar eclipse turns it red.

The tale that weaves through the whole is a love story, in which the two lovers meet and part again and again. But underlying this is the sinister theme of blood sacrifice, in which I find subtle echoes of D.H. Lawrence's long short story, ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’, and of the 1973 cult film, The Wickerman. The author tells us in the acknowledgements that this theme was partly inspired by a painting in a museum in Stocholm called Midvinterblot, Swedish for midwinter sacrifice. A similar painting by a fictitious painter, one of the protagonist's seven different selves, is described in Part Four. Sedgwick is a past master at evoking sinister undercurrents that flow beneath apparently tranquil and harmonious beauty, and he has excelled himself here.

Lobbying for Libraries, guest blog by Paul Cooper

2012-01-09T09:51:00.002Z

Last month I interviewed poet and author Matthew Francis for New Welsh Review about his upcoming short story collection, Singing a Man to Death. He told me how he attempts to recreate ‘the chaotic pluralism of modern culture’ in his work, and about his early flirtations with surrealist literature (‘the idea of it liberating, the practice usually disappointing’). His collection weaves together a truly staggering breadth of settings and influences. Did you know, for instance, that the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary was a mythical tiny sheep once thought to grow from the stem of a plant? No, neither did I. Like Michael Ondaatje or Anne Michaels, Francis’ background as a poet (he was named as one of the Poetry Book Society’s ’20 Best Modern Poets’ in 2004) has given him a prose style that is at once spare and energetic, and an impressive eye for detail makes his new collection an enchanting read.

As the Leveson Inquiry into media ethics fills the Royal Court of Justice with a strange mix of comedians, authors, actors, and the victims of unspeakable tragedy, anyone following the news this week would be forgiven for overlooking another investigation taking place in the halls of government, one that could have even broader ramifications for the cultural life of the nation. A cross-party select committee has been summoned to investigate the forest fire of closures currently set to ravage libraries across England and Wales. The situation on this side of the toll booth looks particularly dire. Libraries in some of North Wales’ worst areas for literacy and employment face closure, as do many in Newport, Cardiff, Swansea and Bridgend, and all this despite book-borrowing in Wales enjoying an increase of 5.4% last year. Before you start entertaining notions of going door to door collecting signatures, or setting up tents and placards outside your local library, be aware that there is a simpler solution. The select committee, chaired by conservative MP John Whittingdale, is calling for members of the public to send in their thoughts about what they would consider to be ‘a comprehensive and efficient library service for the 21^st Century’ and are asking for perspectives on ‘the impact library closures have on local communities’. If you think you have a thing or two to say on the subject, email your testimony as an attachment to cmsev@parliament.uk by 12 January, with ‘Library Closures’ as subject. Guidelines for submitting evidence to a select committee can be found at http://bit.ly/1g2o3v. Have fond memories of your own local library? Believe they should be reformed into Open University-style hubs of learning and betterment? Think that cutting libraries in recession is like cutting hospitals in a plague? Let the committee members know!

A version of this was published in the Western Mail on Saturday 7 January 2012

Paul Cooper is an online contributor and intern for New Welsh Review

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Blow on a Dead Man’s Embers, Mari Strachan. Review by Crystal Jeans

2011-12-09T14:28:00.003Z

Mari Strachan’s second novel, Blow on a Dead Man’s Embers, is set in a quiet Welsh village just after the First World War. Davey has recently returned from the trenches. One morning his wife, Non, finds him crouched under the kitchen table holding an imaginary rifle in a waking dream. The same the next morning, and the next. Davey is not the husband Non married. He’s quiet, he doesn’t laugh anymore. He’s admitted that he was unfaithful while abroad and cannot be her husband as he once was. They sleep in the same bed, but separate. She wants her husband back.

Non also has to cope with a demanding, gossipy neighbour, an adopted son, Ossian, who does not speak and screams when touched, a dragon bitch mother-in-law from hell, and a heart condition that causes her to feel death is constantly at her shoulder. Did I mention she has a special gift which enables her to see people’s physical illnesses? That she’s a herb-gathering witch-healer and an ex-abortionist? She’s got a lot going on, has Non.

The story sees Non trying to find a way to help her husband recover his mind. She travels to London, visits pawn shops, clairvoyants, hospitals full of sick men. In doing so she inadvertently finds out some life changing truths about herself. These little revelations and the lead up to them are quite compelling, so much so that this book might have Mystery added on to the end of Family Drama/Historical Fiction/Romance/Supernatural.

Basically Non is on a journey. Half way through the story, she begins to express a tentative feminism. She grows a pair of (metaphorical) balls – they’re not very big ones, but they’ll do. This is the time of the suffragettes. Women are only allowed to vote once they reach the age of thirty. Any balls are good balls.

My main criticism of this novel is that sometimes the characters are just slightly two-dimensional. The baddies are pretty bad – the mother-in-law, Catherine, who is spectacularly foul in every scene, pervy Uncle Billy who likes to get young girls pregnant, and Teddy the traveller who’s just plain creepy. The nice characters – Davey, Non, nephew Gwydion, son Wil, neighbour Lizzie – are a little too wholesome for my tastes.

Blow on a Dead Man’s Embers is about doing the best you can for the ones you love. It’s about dealing with the disturbing things in life which are as yet unnamed – autism, shell-shock, statuary rape. Despite this, it’s a gentle read. Death, war and mental breakdown seen through chaste eyes. This is not my thing, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. My Nan will love it.

Crystal Jeans is an online and print contributor to New Welsh Review.

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Review of Lucy Caldwell's The Meeting Point, Dylan Thomas prizewinner

2011-12-05T09:50:00.002Z

The winner of this year University of Wales Dylan Thomas prize, announced last month, is an old-fashioned book. This was my first impression of Lucy Caldwell’s The Meeting Point, which the novelty of it being my first novel on an e-reader (Sony) did nothing to dispel. The story of losing my e-book virginity is simple: it was an impulse buy for a journey; I also had to carry a heavy art book, and the device was borrowed. I am not a convert: I couldn’t get a handle on the novel’s length (it felt short) and I seemed to be turning pages too often. Also my initial excitement at the prospect of making electronic notes evaporated when I only managed to make squiggles on the page as though it were an expensive version of Etch-a-Sketch, rather than creating detailed observations ready to cut-and-paste into a review. So rather than replacing my main love, Sony will only be allowed on business trips, if he behaves himself.

There’s converts aplenty, though, in The Meeting Point, since its protagonist, Ruth, is the wife of a northern Irish evangelical Anglican vicar set on a mission to smuggle bibles and other weapons of mass conversion from Bahrain into Saudi Arabia. Troubled teenage Noor has been sent by her English mother to the island to stay with her born-again orthodox Muslim father, Dr al-Husayn. Noor, however, falls headlong under the influence of the golden Irish Christian couple who have moved for a few months into her ‘compound’, and despite the ways in which she, as a vulnerable minor, is exploited by Ruth, has become a born-again young woman by close of play. The (too numerous) bible quotations kick in by page 11 (on Sony Reader’s old lady large print setting), and we quickly realise that this is a novel about faith, especially when the setting shifts from rural Ulster to the Persian Gulf. But Caldwell confounds any readers’ assumptions that they may be in for a dose of Middle Eastern fundamentalism or critique of cultural mores. The Arab characters are either westernised (Ruth’s love interest Farid), rediscovering their faith (Dr al-Husayn) or ‘happy… and unembarrassed’ to be a second wife (Maryam).

Either Caldwell is a Christian herself (I noted Spitalfields Alpha course among the acknowledgements), or she has managed the feat of entering the mindset. Ruth opens the story with the revelation that her wedding was brought forward because she was pregnant. We start to wonder why she is complaining so much about the loss of a harvest wedding to an early spring one until we realise both parents feel a ‘quiet guilt… at not having waited until their wedding night… as they had ought to.’ Ruth’s reference to Bible readings, prayers and sermons to guide her behaviour displays an almost exotic mentality for liberal, secular readers. Having set her goals so high, she is very nearly hung for a sheep as she gets reckless once her prized virtue starts to slip.

The Epic of Gilgamesh and evidence associating the sacred island paradise or ‘Holy Dilmun’ with Bahrain as the source of the Garden of Eden story, greatly enriches The Meeting Point, widening its references beyond the notion of Ruth’s Christian fall from grace. The title itself is a reference to the confluence of rivers (including the Tigris and Euphrates) said to water the Garden. Deft use of imagery also unites the novel. Broad cultural symbolism surrounding stones is beautifully handled, as is the pencil-size roll of paper, variously used for love messages between strangers and to slip the gospel over the border. Once we get used to Ruth’s measured tones and bed in to Noor’s urgent voice and story, this is a fantastically structured page-turner with depths.

This is a version of Gwen Davies’ Western Mail Insider column published on Saturday 3 December 2011.

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Review by Sophie Long of Michelle Paver's Dark Matter

2011-11-30T11:32:00.002Z

Having never actually read a contemporary ghost story, I wondered whether people’s assertions that ‘books are scarier than films’ was in fact true. In a world where graphic, explicit scenes of violence in video games and films are commonplace, I thought perhaps it would be far more difficult for a book to elicit that same chill using only words.

I could not in fact, have been more wrong, although it would take me a while to discover it when reading Dark Matter. I found protagonist Jack’s neuroticism fairly irritating at the start. Other reviewers have supposed that his preoccupations with class and general tendency towards depression are important as the book moves on and becomes darker. In the beginning though, these traits are not particularly well explained, nor are they rooted in concrete relationships or events. In many ways, it seems as though Michelle Paver is merely trying to tick all of the ‘sad loner’ boxes – no family, no friends, dead end job, depressed....

As the narrative moves on from London into the North and eventually to Gruhuken, these niggling matters melt away as they do (much later) for Jack. Paver’s descriptions are just right, being only sentences here and there evoking shapes and colours as opposed to long-winded paragraphs. There is a definite monochrome palette running throughout the story, which makes phenomena such as the Northern Lights stand out, and the disappearance of the twilight is almost as unnerving for the reader as it is for Jack.

It is when the reader joins in his frequent swings between terror and rationality that Jack’s psychological profile comes into its own. Paver is able to make the slow, encroaching footsteps of the ghostly trapper echo in readers' minds as much as they do in Jack’s. The storyline of this ghostly presence is woven into the fabric of Jack’s everyday life: much as Jack does, the reader goes through periods of believing the ghost is real and then suddenly the real world will intrude in the form of Algie or Gus on the wireless, and for a time it appears that everything is alright.

By the end of the novel, with footsteps pounding around the hut, Jack’s terrified realisation that the ghost is able to enter the hut is as chilling for the reader as it must be for Jack. Another reviewer mentioned that at this point she became afraid to look out of the windows of her own house, and this particular feeling of jumpy paranoia also afflicted me as I read on to the end.

Given that the prickly, unsettled feeling this book gave me lingered for an entire weekend, I must say that this book is by far scarier than any film. I was not just a voyeur, instead I was forced into feeling and experiencing everything as Jack does, as my mind created a picture of Paver’s perpetually dark Arctic winter.

Perhaps I’m just a little bit wimpish, but I dare you to try it for yourself.

Sophie Long is an online contributor and until recently was an intern at New Welsh Review.

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Writing your way out – an interview with Matthew Francis by Paul Cooper

2011-11-29T10:56:00.009Z

Matthew Francis’ long poem 'Things that Make the Heart Beat Faster' is in the winter issue of New Welsh Review, out now. The sequence is inspired by the writing of Shei Shōnagon, the medieval Japanese courtesan and recorder of The Pillow Book. Things that Make the Heart Beat Faster is the working title of Matthew’s next poetry collection.

Singing a Man to Death, your first collection of short stories, will be published by Cinnamon in April. It is an impressively eclectic collection that weaves together music, myth and history, with dozens of different voices and characters. How do you think a collection that incorporates an assassin in the Fatimid Caliphate, a first-millennium Pope, as well as a journalist floundering to encapsulate the experience of 1970s punk manages to feel so cohesive? Was this your intention?

The stories were written over a long period, so I’m glad you do find them cohesive. Over the last few years, I have become increasingly aware of recurring themes and patterns in my work; they developed without any conscious effort on my part, but it’s been intriguing watching their appearance. With regard to the variety of setting and subject, I have always found it difficult to write the kind of realistic, semi-autobiographical fiction that is a staple for many writers – when I do, I usually find myself getting very self-conscious. I am strongly drawn to historical, or even mythical, settings because I enjoy being taken away from the preoccupations of my everyday life. Of course, good writing always arises from your own concerns, but I hope by transposing them in place or time (or both) I gain some perspective on them that I wouldn’t otherwise have had. Having said that, I must admit that some of the stories in the volume are more directly autobiographical. In the title story, the urban folktale of a song that kills the listener was such a far-fetched fantasy theme that it somehow freed me to include some quite personal reminiscences of my undergraduate days. ‘The Lovers’ has fantastic elements, but is set in a school very like the one I went to. ‘The Beehive’ and ‘Sleevenotes’ are about characters very different from me, but incorporate my memories of, respectively, office life and being a somewhat sceptical follower of punk rock in the 1970s.

Isidore Ducasse famously described the inherent beauty of juxtapositions such as ‘a chance encounter between an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table’. I felt that you exhibit a talent in your writing for creating surprising and satisfying contrasts between a story or poem’s elements. For instance, the embattled tropical nation of Kuovala in 'Demonland' manages to contain CIA agents, communists and jazz girls, giant blue butterflies, demons and codeless computer programmes within a very tight narrative arc. To what extent do you feel that bringing together the disparate is a guiding principal behind your work?

It probably has something to do with being a poet; metaphor, which asserts the similarity between apparently dissimilar objects, is fundamental to poetry. I remember stumbling upon the technique of narrative juxtaposition in the first story I wrote, ‘American Fugue’. I was writing about an amnesiac American poet who runs away from home and ends up living on a university campus in the Nevada desert. For some reason that wasn’t apparent to me at the time, I made this a very odd university, in which all the students were divided into social groups according to their main interest in life: vegetarianism, religion, Eastern mysticism etc. It just seemed to make the story more interesting to have two unusual and apparently unrelated things going on it. Afterwards I realized that it was saying something about the sometimes chaotic pluralism of postmodern culture. I try not to follow a single line of thought, but let my mind jump tracks every now and then, and see what the result might be.

You have been compared to both Byron and Borges during your career – which of these do you feel more affinity with? In 'American Fugue', Dr. Jespersen contends that ‘life was essentially paradoxical’. Do you consider yourself a surrealist?

Definitely Borges. My eldest brother gave me a copy of Labyrinths for my sixteenth birthday: Borges has been a touchstone for me ever since, and the comparison to him in a review was, for me, the finest compliment my work has received. If there’s a Borgesian element in my fiction, it’s perhaps the determination not to let too much realism get in the way of an interesting idea.

As for Dr Jespersen’s remark, it’s a disguised reminiscence: when I wrote that story (many years ago), I was not long out of psychotherapy myself. It was a very unhappy time in my life, and the comic confusion of the nameless narrator reflects my own more distressing confusion. During my therapy, I was taught the technique of ‘paradoxical intention’, where the patient deliberately tries to bring on unpleasant symptoms as a way of preventing them. It seemed to epitomise the upside-down world I was experiencing at the time, and which my narrator also experiences.

And regarding surrealism, I find the idea of it liberating, the practice usually disappointing (in literature, anyway – I admire surrealist painting and am a huge fan of the films of Luis Buñuel). Just as I don’t want to be too trammelled by realism, so I don’t want to escape from it altogether. A related question would be whether I consider myself a fantasy author. As a matter of fact, I am now, for the first time, experimenting with fantasy fiction in a novel I’ve just begun. Up to now I’ve only flirted with departures from the physically possible. In ‘Singing a Man to Death’ the magical powers of the song are only hinted at, never confirmed, in ‘The Vegetable Lamb’ the mythical object of the heroine’s quest never quite appears, and so on. I suppose being bitten by a butterfly (as in ‘Demonland’) is impossible, come to think of it, but it’s a minor detail so it hardly counts.

Your background in the computer industry obviously influenced your 1989 novel WHOM, in which a gigantic computer system controls the White House, and stories such as 'Demonland', in which demons are apparently manifest in lines of computer code. Apart from these examples, do you find that your background in computing has informed your writing as a whole? Have you found any surprising parallels between the process of writing fiction and that of writing software?

For most of my computing career I was a technical author, writing manuals for software systems. It was great training for a writer – you get used to producing large numbers of words quickly and editing your own work and that of your colleagues. In one of my jobs I gave in my notice, and then had to spend a month sitting at my computer in the office with nothing to do, since no one was going to give me a new project at that stage. So I used the opportunity to start work on WHOM. I was never very knowledgeable, just good at translating what I learned from the programmers into a language ordinary people could understand. WHOM is very unsophisticated in its treatment of IT: put it alongside William Gibson’s incredibly prescient treatment in Neuromancer, which came out at about the same time, and you’ll see what I mean. ‘Demonland’ parodies an actual piece of documentation I came across in the course of my work, and draws on anecdotes I had heard about programmers who were assigned to far-flung places. ‘The Beehive’ also uses some of my experiences of that time, including an explanation of how to make breakfast using the principles of project management!

It’s interesting you mention Gibson: I find dreaming to be a strong recurrent theme in your writing, as in his. In the millenarian 'Between the Walls', one of the stories in Singing..., you call dreams ‘the medium by which God communicates with those of us who are not ready for the ulcers and the haloes’ of sainthood. Do you consciously make dreams a concern of your work? Are the processes of writing and dreaming essentially similar?

I am fascinated by dreams and the way they act as a counterpoint to our waking lives. They’re a wonderful source of imaginative energy, but at the same time I find it very difficult to draw on them directly – just as I also find it difficult, as I mentioned before, to dispense with the laws of reality in my writing. Tell people about your dreams, and they just switch off: it’s the same, most of the time, with writing about them. Some of my favourite works of fiction are those that have overcome this problem: Robert Irwin’s The Arabian Nightmare and Jonathan Carroll’s Bones of the Moon are two extraordinary and underrated contemporary novels dealing with dreams, and an older and even finer example is Jan Potocki’s early nineteenth-century masterpiece The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. I have written about dreams in my poetry, which is perhaps a more appropriate form for them – poetry could be described as a dreamlike use of language. But I’ve never really managed it in fiction.

Your next novel, tipped to be set in the seventeenth century, and moving between London and Wales, seems to continue many of the themes that have concerned your previous work. Do you feel this is true, or will it be a break from what has gone before? Is it going to be a set of seemingly unrelated stories, like WHOM, or have you set your sights on a more traditional narrative structure?

The novel, which still hasn’t found a publisher, is called The Book of the Needle. It’s based on the life of a real man, the seventeenth-century Welsh tailor and prophet Arise Evans. In some ways, Evans resembles the narrator of my 2008 poetic sequence Mandeville. Both are men with a very clear personal view of the world, and in both cases it’s difficult for the reader to know how far to believe them. Questions of belief seem more and more important in the contemporary world. We haven’t, as some of us expected when I was much younger, moved beyond faith: rather we have a world of multiple faiths, constantly conflicting with each other. Mandeville and Evans, unlike me, are both very religious people, and each, in his own way, is a visionary. Ultimately the reader is not going to accept those visions, and the way they come into conflict with reality is sometimes a source of comedy. At the same time, I hope the visions are a richly imaginative experience even when you don’t share the narrator’s faith that inspired them.

Best of luck finding a publisher - I look forward to reading it! Your next collection of poetry, a section of which is published in New Welsh Review under the provisional title 'Things that Make the Heart Beat Faster' finds its setting in medieval Japan, and recent poems have spanned seventeenth-century Muscovy and even a voyage to the moon. What compels you to travel so far in the scope of your work, and occasionally to move so far back in time?

All the three of the poems you mention have literary sources. ‘Things that Make the Heart Beat Faster’ is based on The Pillow Book by the tenth-century Japanese courtesan Sei Shōnagon, ‘Muscovy’ on a journey to Russia undertaken by the poet Andrew Marvell and described in a book by one of his travelling companions, and ‘The Man in the Moon’ draws on a piece of early modern science fiction by the seventeenth-century bishop Francis Godwin. I am increasingly fascinated by the technical and imaginative challenges involved in adapting material like this; Mandeville and The Book of the Needle are other examples. My first few stories were all set in foreign countries that I hadn’t even visited, and at one time I thought I was incapable of writing a story set in the UK! Just as I feel the urge to look outside my own life for my subject matter, so I often like to start from someone else’s words rather than my own. Writers have always done this, of course – Shakespeare hardly wrote an original plot. In the poetry world, there has been a vogue for adaptations of classic material recently. I’m currently reading Alice Oswald’s Memorial, the latest of many recent poetic adaptations of Homer. I prefer not to use sources that everyone is familiar with, though – digging out obscure but fascinating texts like the writings of Arise Evans or that account of Marvell’s trip to Russia is one of my great pleasures, and I see it as an important part of my creative process.

In Familiar Spirit, one of your recent poems, you celebrate the ‘downbeat, doorstepping rhythms’ of Welsh speech. I even thought (though this might be stretching too far) that the ‘salad of trees’ line in your poem 'The Man in the Moon' bore more than a passing phonological resemblance to the famous ‘cellar door’ analogy that Tolkien used to praise the Welsh language. As a writer in English, what is your attitude towards the Welsh language, and how has living in Wales sculpted your voice?

I’ve lived in Wales for twelve years, the last eight of them in a Welsh-speaking area on the west coast [Llanon, near Aberaeron]. I hear Welsh spoken around me every day. I still hope one day to learn the language myself, but at present, I’m afraid, I only know a few common words and phrases, plus the meanings of place-names etc. One of the effects of hearing a ‘foreign’ language spoken regularly is that it dissolves the spurious layer of normality that clings most of the time to one’s native language. Carol Rumens describes this brilliantly in one of her poems: on coming back to England from France she hears people speaking English and finds the sounds strange: ‘a language lumpy as a ploughed field’. Living in Wales has probably not made me any less English (though I am flattered when, occasionally, I read descriptions of myself as ‘a Welsh poet’), but it’s put my Englishness in context, as well as giving me glimpses into a rich culture that, as yet, I barely understand. The earliest piece of mine which draws on my Welsh experience is the title poem of my 2001 collection Dragons, in which I tried, without being too obvious, to draw on the rhythms of South-Walian English. I also think there’s something very ‘Valleys’ about the gentle irony with which it spoofs the ubiquity of that mythic Welsh symbol. There’s a lot of Welsh material in The Book of the Needle, and in some of my recent poems, but none in the stories. Some were written before I came to Wales, but of those that came after, two have what I call a disguised Welsh setting. ‘The Vegetable Lamb’ is set in a fictional Tartary, and ‘Assassin’ in the Middle-East, but those landscapes are really based on Wales. I walk in the countryside as often as I can, and feel privileged to live in such a beautiful place.

In the eponymous ‘Singing a Man to Death’, a mysterious song is believed to kill any man who hears it a certain number of times. Similarly, in ‘The Lovers’, ‘Read a certain word on a certain page and the succubus slips in through your eye into your brain.’ Words, literature and music seem to become weaponised in your work. Are they potentially dangerous things?

Certainly powerful things. And dangerous, not usually when used by artists, but by demagogues, whether religious or political. That’s a theme in both my novels, but in the stories it’s hinted at rather than explored in detail.

One of my favourite lines in the poem ‘Muscovy’ is: ‘He wrote us so far. Now he must write our way out.’ Is your work a process of ‘writing your way out’?

‘He’, in this context, is Andrew Marvell, one of my favourite poets. And the line alludes, once again, to the theme of language as an instrument of imaginative power. Most of my main characters are writers of one kind or another, in addition to their roles of traveller, courtesan, prophet or whatever else. So for all the wide-ranging interests of my work, much of the time I’m looking at the reflection in a variety of distorting mirrors of this bizarre thing I’m doing: writing.

Paul Cooper is currently an intern at New Welsh Review and will take up his MA in Creative Writing at UEA next September.

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Next on blog: review by Gwen Davies of the new Dylan Thomas prizewinner, The Meeting Point by Lucy Caldwell

Barrie Llewelyn on how as a memoirist she found herself recreating her grandmother as a Chicago prostitute

2011-11-28T10:18:00.004Z

I never knew my paternal grandmother. Nor did my father. She was persuaded to leave her marriage and her infant son for $500 in 1925. My dad told me the stories he had heard. She was ‘incapable of looking after him’. She ‘left him wet or dirty’ while still at home; afterwards, she’d try and ‘kidnap’ him back. ‘Rosie was a prostitute.’

On car journeys, my father would rage, but not at me. I was a girl traveling alone with him, but I wasn’t scared. I learned to share his pain. His missing mother lived in both our lives. When I had my own babies, I couldn’t comprehend how anyone could give up a child. As the years went by, so my dad’s depression grew, despite his having seemed a happy and popular, if introverted, man. The terrors of his childhood may have caught him up.

Five years after my father took his own life, I found myself in a hotel room in Fort Lauderdale. I started to write and before long I had down the first section of Rosie’s story. She is in the waiting room at Chicago’s Union Station, in her purse an envelope containing $500 cash. Rosie isn’t thinking about what she will do with the money, nor about the decision she has just made, nor the new life ahead of her. All she cares about is what she looks like.

My novel in progress attempts to understand Rosie’s choice. In reality, I didn’t even have her maiden name or know where in Chicago she’d lived. The facts my father had, he took to his seaside grave. I had no hope of knowing her, nor the will to conduct a thorough search. When I finished my first draft in 2008, I felt that I had found her story, her truth. I had to accept my own version of her life.

But last month I had a message on Facebook: ‘Are you George Volk’s daughter? I am his half sister.’ I am now in contact with Rosie’s daughter, my aunt Franny. Francine told me stories of her mother’s life. My missing grandmother was a flapper in Chicago who frequented Al Capone’s speakeasies. Francine and her sister Caroline believe that any love Rosie had was left behind with her baby son. How it would have changed my father’s life to know his mother loved him!

Franny and I haven’t spoken since I returned from holiday. I’m hesitating about getting back in touch. Why am I somehow disappointed? This is my theory: I never actually wanted to know anything about Rosie. As a writer and storyteller, I preferred to make it up. So how do I go on with the story now?

A version of this was first published in the Western Mail's Insider books column on Saturday 26 November 2011. Barrie Llewelyn is an online contributor for New Welsh Review.

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Next blog: review of Lucy Caldwell's Dylan Thomas-prizewinning The Meeting Place

Next interview coming soon: Matthew Francis

Jim Perrin talks to the Wales Literature Exchange about his latest book West

2011-11-22T16:09:00.009Z

Jim Perrin's 'Slate Country Fictions' is in the winter issue of New Welsh Review, out this week.

Jim Perrin from Wales Literature Exchange | Cyfn on Vimeo.

Film by Sara Penrhyn Jones

Jim Perrin's latest book, West, A Journey Through the Landscapes of Loss, was out in paperback from Atlantic this spring. His essay 'Slate Country Fictions, Outside Views of Wales' looks at three novels of the past sixty years which succeed to varying degrees in capturing 'the agricultural/industrial interface along the northern and western margins of Eryri: sheep-country; slate-country; Kate Roberts country.' The novels are Patrick O'Brian's Testimonies(1952), John Wain's A Winter in the Hills (1970), and Peter Ho Davies' The Welsh Girl(2007). You can read Jim Perrin's 'Slate Country Fictions' in the winter '11 issue of New Welsh Review, straight to your doormat this weekend if you subscribe or order from us direct, or in shops from 1 December.

Next author interview: Matthew Francis, whose long poem 'Things that Make the Heart Beat Faster', inspired by Shei Shōnagon (Japanese courtesan and recorder of The Pillow Book), is also in our winter issue. Things that Make the Heart Beat Faster is the title of Matthew's next poetry collection.

Christien Gholson talks to Paul Cooper and Nia Davies

2011-11-22T13:09:00.007Z

Christien Gholson is author of a novel, A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind and a prose-poetry collection, On the Side of the Crow, both published by Parthian. His dystopian short story, The Feed, is published in the winter edition of New Welsh Review, out next week. Paul Cooper is currently an intern at New Welsh Review and will take up his MA in Creative Writing at UEA next September. Nia Davies works at Literature Across Frontiers, has published poetry for Salt anthologies, and is drafting her first novel.

David Mitchell recently described Hari Kunzru’s new novel Gods Without Men as ‘an echo chamber’. I felt this description also applied to A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind – such a varied mix of voices and influences resonating together: from Magritte and Rimbaud to The Battleship Potemkin. Do you feel this is an accurate description of your novel, or indeed novels in general?

I recently saw a conversation on the Lannan Foundation site between John Berger and Michael Ondaatje, two of my favourite authors, in which they both spoke about echoes. Ondaatje said that when he was writing In the Skin of a Lion he was immersed in the murals of Diego Rivera. “Someone’s holding a wrench over there on that wall,” he said, “and someone’s holding a pencil over there on that wall. It’s exactly the same gesture...” Those echoes intrigued him, and he mirrored them in gestures and scenes between all the characters in the novel. Berger said of echoes: “No story exists without them, really”, and I would agree. All the characters in Fish are different aspects of one whole; each particular narrative trajectory needs the others to find its completion. The pattern of the novel is, for the most part, the order in which it was written, so anything that was left unsaid, or unfinished, is completed by someone else in a following chapter. If you lifted just one character’s narrative out of the book and read it all by itself, I’m not sure it would make sense.

My own experience is that the self doesn’t really exist as some rigid, defined thing – an isolated billiard ball clacking against others – but that it exists only in context, mired in a constant process of creation and interaction with its surroundings. As the master magician Chiqui says to Guy: “Nothing exists by itself.” Everything is in a constant process of being created; the idea that things exist in isolation is, to me, an illusion. That surfaced in the pattern of the book - in a community of characters that, in the end, couldn’t exist without each other.

Most people imagine a novel starting with a single idea, a ‘eureka moment’. Was this the case for you? What was the initial spark or germ that you felt carried it through to the end? In what ways did its conceit mutate and develop as you wrote?

If you mean that in terms of a vision where a skeleton of the entire story appears all at once, then no, that didn’t happen. It started as a long prose-poem sequence: fish swimming through fog over the Belgian countryside (which now appears as one of Marie’s visions about three quarters of the way through the book). I’ve always been fascinated with the phenomena of animals, insects, or other odd things raining from the sky - the mystery of it. And I’ve been equally fascinated with the funny contortions that Science and the excessively logical-minded must do to explain it.

The prose-poem sequence turned into the opening of a short story. All the characters were there at the beginning, except the Rimbaud scholar, Raoul. The short story seemed unfinished somehow, so I thought I’d expand it a bit more, turn it into a novella. The more I worked on it, the more I encountered odd surprises that propelled me further, deeper, and I just kept following the trail of crumbs.

So the mystery of the fish was the initial question - the initial koan - that appeared, and I took a whole novel to ‘answer’ that question.

Your family travelled a lot, including to Belgium, where the novel is set. How much of the novel is an account of your own experiences, and how much is imaginative invention? Do any of the events have a basis in reality?

Between the ages of 10 to 15 I lived in Obourg, a cement factory town in Southern Belgium, somewhat like the town of Villon. Years later, as a young adult, I walked across Southern France, and then lived for a month in the municipal campground in Mons, which is near Obourg. Many strange things had happened to me on the journey and I needed a familiar and comforting place to let it all sink in.

While I was in Mons, I wandered out to Obourg and saw posters all over the town announcing: “Obourg...poubelle d’Europe.” Obourg...rubbish bin of Europe. I asked around and found out that the cement factory was to lease their empty quarries as toxic dumps for waste that would be imported from all over Europe – and there was a movement to stop it. Similar issues are still ongoing in that area, if I’m not mistaken.

I hesitate to go into more detail about what was my own experience and what is imaginative invention because a couple of the most ridiculous and illusory scenes really happened. It’s a truism to say that life is stranger than fiction. Fish do indeed fall from the sky.

A Fish... is set in an area of Belgium heavily touched by industrialism, near to an enormous quarry and a cement factory. Did you find any inspiration for the setting in Wales’ industrial past, and your time living in Swansea?

Oddly enough I wrote the book in the Central Valley of California, in Davis and Sacramento. The only similarity I found in California to southern Belgium was the smog. As a kid, though, the broken landscape and rain of cement dust was all I knew. Because my father didn’t work at the factory, I had an economic distance from it: I saw it as both a great evil monolith – especially when one of my sisters developed breathing problems - and as a mysterious and sometimes beautiful thing. There’s nothing like a sunset through plumes of cement dust. It’s only when I started working in factories around Philadelphia that my deep rage at industry’s enormous waste began. Many people live far away from the factories that make their lives possible. They don’t see the incredible cost – to the earth, to individual lives. The factories are invisible to them. In the novel, the cement factory is almost as consistent an image as the mysterious fish. It is mysterious only because it is so big, dominant... and yet invisible.

Living in Swansea, with the steel works of Port Talbot a constant vision on the east side of the bay, has triggered memories of the various industrial and industrially ‘forsaken’ places where I have lived. Still, on clear nights the flames from the flare stacks are beautiful, a match to the eye. But I see it from a distance. A tourist’s view. Factories like that make Mumbles and Swansea possible. Yet who is clocking the cost?

The novel takes illusion as one of its main themes, and I wondered if you see the writing of a novel, and indeed poetry, as a fundamentally illusory process?

There’s a bit of the magic trick about novel writing. You want the devices and tricks you use to be transparent, unobserved, so the reader can sink into the dream of the story. So, yes, there’s a bit of distraction involved; a bit of talking your way through the trick, keeping the audience focused on the monologue, so no one notices how the egg or the coin actually disappeared. There’s nothing worse for me when I’m reading a story than constantly ‘seeing’ how it was put together. I want be unaware of the devices and techniques used.

I definitely see writing as a trickster activity. Far in the background of Fish, there is the figure of Til Eulenspeigel - the itinerant vagrant of the Middle Ages who plays the fool in order to expose vice and greed and hypocrisy. At the time I wrote Fish I was also steeped in North American Coyote tales. And Zen Buddhism has a bit of the brain-breaking trickster aspect about it, too. The beauty is that the trick, the illusion, reveals a truth that sometimes cannot be told any other way. What’s the Picasso line about art? “Lies that tell the truth.”

Many have commented on the seeming ease with which poets can turn their skills to the practice of fiction (Joe Dunthorne and Anne Michaels for example). Do you feel that your background as a poet prepared you for the challenge of writing the novel? Did you discover any surprising difficulties?

Although I’ve written many prose-poems that seem to have a narrative line, quite a bit of the poetry I write and read has no conventional narrative. Most of my poetry makes connections by juxtaposition or in the flow of the overall pattern, and I think poets with more of a narrative bent are more likely to ‘get’ the tools of fiction.

Having said that, as a poet I think I picked up description and dialogue fairly quickly. It was for a big demon like Plot that my poetic background had not prepared me at all. What it did do, though, was give me license to do anything I felt like doing. I didn’t know enough to care about ‘how’ a novel was supposed to be structured.

If I knew then what I know now, I probably never would have attempted the same interweave of six characters for my first novel. I was basically learning about fiction as I wrote the book. I think there’s something to be said for that sort of naiveté, though – you aren’t aware of what you can’t do, so you just keep going, whistling in the dark.

What’s funny is that Ondaatje’s novel In the Skin of a Lion was one of the models I used for Fish, and that he is also a poet as well as novelist.

The novel is clearly concerned with the great variety of voices that each of its characters uses and inhabits. For instance Marie, the Seer, who experiences in each object she touches the impressions left by its previous owners, or Father Leo, the Lover, who sees everything he experiences as a variation on the mantric theme of the fish. Even the epistolary Seeker is affected by his narrative voice, which we experience through his letters. If we think of the narrative voice as a device that allows us to approach something particular in each character’s nature, what were your considerations in choosing their voice – which techniques did you most enjoy, which were the most yielding?

I think of each narrative voice as a melody played by a jazz musician. Soon enough, the musician moves very far from the melody, taking it apart, reassembling it in different ways, but no matter how far out they go they always return to the melody. It grounds the entire performance. So, in the case of Marie, once I wrote the section where she tries on a dress in Casimir’s house for the first time and inhabits the story of the person who previously wore the dress, I knew her melody. I could go anywhere with her and always have something to return to. With Father Leo, whenever I was stuck I would return to his internal fish chant and that would unlock the next sequence.

I didn’t consciously choose those devices, though. These narrative voices, for the most part, appeared in an unconscious way. All but Raoul. His letters are, to a certain extent, an intentional conscious choice meant to fill in any gaps left in Guy and Chiqui’s discussions about illusion.

Marie was the surprise of the book, the easiest to write. She came seemingly out of nowhere, and yet she immediately seemed the most familiar character of all, as if I’d known her all my life. Guy was the hardest, simply because his illusion problem had to be explained without dabbling too much with Buddhist terminology.

Maybe Guy and Marie are my favourites because they are the key to the book for me – Marie’s experience of mystery as ineffable, juxtaposed with Guy’s more negative belief that because everything is impermanent, then all is illusion, and thus pointless.

Your book was taken on by Parthian, the independent Welsh publisher, and published in June 2011. Many people nowadays seem to be of the opinion that the major publishing houses play too safe with their acquisitions of new authors, and are too shy of risking large overheads on first-time writers of literary fiction. Do you feel that the independent scene, at least in the UK, finds itself better placed than the big houses to publish literary fiction?

From what I’ve read since I’ve been in the UK, I think the larger publishers in London are a bit more open than those in New York. Not by much, but there’s still good, interesting literary novelists who slip through into the UK mainstream. Most mid-list literary authors in the States have to find smaller publishers. I’ve also noticed that some small press American novelists are being published by larger houses here. And I mean the very same books.

But, on the whole, it’s been the same story for years in the larger publishing houses – marketing departments are the ones in charge. The decision to take on an author is no longer in the hands of editors. With Fish, three editors in three houses in NY wanted the book but each time their marketing departments said no - because they didn’t know how to market it. Parthian, on the other hand, took the book because they thought it was a good book and should be read. I don’t think their first question was ‘how can we monetize this?’

So yes, the smaller presses are, for the most part, publishing the most interesting work at the moment. But that’s always been the case, especially with writers working in more experimental ways. Since the collapse of the publishing industry in 2008, small presses have become THE place for most novelists to send their work, bringing publishing back to a human scale. You don’t necessarily have to deal with agents and marketing departments to see your work into print. That should lower the blood pressure of a large percentage of writers... it lowered mine.

I enjoyed your dystopian short story The Feed, published in the winter edition of New Welsh Review, out next week. It seemed to share some themes with A Fish... – namely society’s voyeuristic tendencies, and an unending appetite for entertainment and illusion. What do you think are the concerns that most strongly permeate your writing?

The question of what is and is not illusion still permeates my recent work. When dealing with illusion, I’m necessarily also dealing with the question ‘so, what’s reality, then?’ I don’t see it as a tricky, philosophical postmodern question, though. My own understanding of illusion comes somewhat from a Buddhist perspective – that our concepts, expectations, desires, ideas of what life is and how we want it to be, are all blocking us from experiencing what is right there in front of us. So, for me, it’s pretty basic - about finding a true grounding. Discovering what is.

Illusion and Mystery (with a big M) will probably always be a part of anything I write. Illusion (especially the illusions created by the satanic-mill-factory-financial system currently in place) eats us. Mystery feeds us.

Do you think your imminent return to the States will change your writing?

I have a feeling that when I get back to the States I’ll write more about Wales. That’s how it seems to work for me. I wrote about Belgium in California, I’ve written a bit about the South-western US while living in Swansea, and I’ll probably write about south Wales once I get back to the States. It takes a good long while for any experience to alchemize inside my body before it re-surfaces as a story.

Lastly, if you don’t mind me asking, what’s next for Christien Gholson? Another novel, another burst of poetry?

For the past two years I’ve been writing a long poem tentatively entitled Tidal Flats (echoing Buntings’ Briggflatts). The poem’s central focus is Swansea Bay (I’ve basically spent the last two years hanging around the bay). It weaves together the sensual foundations of language, the evolutionary dependence of human cognition on the environment, current climate change catastrophes, and my rage (and sorrow) over the massive wave of extinctions going on throughout the world. The usual.

Hopefully I can get the first draft done by the time I leave Wales – then look at the incredible mess I’ve made and see what’s salvageable. It might end up being quite a bit shorter than it is now. It probably should be. Then maybe someone other than my wife will read it.

As to fiction, I’m working on a group of speculative short stories in the same vein as The Feed (these spec stories take place in the same world as my second novel, a dystopian work called Among the Angels’ Hierarchies). I also just started working on my third novel, but the less said about it the better. I’m superstitious about these things.

NIA DAVIES ASKS:

The poems in On the Side of the Crow seem to be ekphrastic riffs that stem from

artworks which may or may not be real - pieces such as a 'Collage made from refuse found on a movie theatre floor' or 'Patterns burnt by an atomic flash onto desert stone.' Were these visual pieces starting points or end points?

The beginning image that started the poem didn’t usually end up being the central focus. If you look at “Portrait of Leo’, the one about someone listening in on an arms dealer’s conversation, that started with an image of a blind, albino fish in a cave pool. So - don’t know where they come from, don’t know where they’re going to go...

Can you describe something of movement between visual/kinetic into language that takes place in your poem-making?

I find image rides the language and language rides image. They’re usually

inseparable.

So... what states best trigger these kinds of poems for you - darkness or bright

light? Noise or silence (etc)?

I write the initial lines of most poems outside, so I’m a big proponent of silence (i.e., non-human noise). Most poems I’m interested in weave their way between both noise and silence.

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Next interview coming soon: Matthew Francis

Slate and alabaster, inside out

2011-11-21T15:40:00.004Z

On Thursday, Alan Llwyd’s biography, Kate: Cofiant Kate Roberts 1891-1985, was published, and its claim that our respectable grande dame of Welsh fiction was bisexual, aired last night in an S4C documentary Kate, Y Cofiant. In both book and documentary, Alan Llwyd presents correspondence between Roberts and her husband Morris T Williams before and after their marriage to back up his assertion. One letter in particular, describing an encounter with ‘the butcher’s wife’ (and her ‘alabaster skin’), Llwyd cites as evidence that Roberts was sexually attracted to women. He interprets this letter as a coded message to Williams signalling that she knew of his homosexuality and that their future partnership might work to both their advantages, not only as a decoy in a prejudiced age but also by creating a sphere of mutual tolerance and understanding based on compromise.

The notion that Morris T Williams (with whom Roberts ran the press Gwasg Gee) was most likely gay and in a relationship with Kate and Williams’ mutual friend, the poet E Prosser Rhys (published by Gee) is already in the public sphere. But, apart from his sensational interpretation of Kate’s sexuality, what is most refreshing here is Llwyd’s unfailing ability to inhabit her corner of this love triangle. So he views a letter from Williams to Prosser Rhys, embargoed until after his death as indicating a much stronger attachment on Williams’ part to his male friend than to his wife. He ran much greater risks than her in his behaviour, and yet she needed him more than he did her. Tragic stuff!

No more sensationalist revelations, I fear, in the winter issue of New Welsh Review. But Kate Roberts’ concerns of ‘enduring virtue… moral realism… [and] her centrality accorded to women characters’ as well as her fictional settings ‘among the agricultural/industrial interface along the northern and western margins of Eryri: sheep country, slate country’ are what unite the books reviewed by Jim Perrin in his essay ‘Slate Country Fictions’.

These novels from the past sixty years are by authors based outside Wales: Patrick O’Brian’s Testimonies (1952) and John Wain’s A Winter in the Hills of 1970 (‘differently powerful and distinguished’), as well as 2007’s Booker-longlisted, Richard & Judy Bookclub-boosted The Welsh Girl. This novel by Peter Ho Davies, who is of Welsh-Chinese parentage, topped a Bookseller pick of ten this autumn with reported sales of 152,117, beating Carrie’s War, Aberystwyth Mon Amour and A Child’s Christmas in Wales. Perrin’s judges The Welsh Girl to contain ‘ignorance, presumption and falsity’; my recollection is that its geography is confused, reflecting a sense of location either lapsed or never properly grasped. In contrast, Perrin praises Testimonies as a ‘fascinating and accomplished novel’ and attributes its author’s ‘sense of a particular small corner of rural, Calvinist Wales [to] his four-year, post-war sojourn in Cwm Croesor [Llanfrothen].’ As to A Winter in the Hills, ‘for an explanation of the benign, wide-ranging and perceptive vision of Wales afforded… I suspect the answer is… hearth-talk and pillow-talk in Wain’s long, happy and successful second marriage to Eirian James.’

While Perrin’s essay is subtitled ‘Outside Views of Wales’, its author would value, as a travel writer, the alternative perspective offered by authors from elsewhere on Welsh subject and setting, just as no one would seek to restrict the horizon of Wales’ authors to slate rooftops. Such ‘outside’ views, however, at least in naturalistic fiction, should at least aim for an accurate basis in history, politics, geography and language.

In Jay Griffiths’ Wild, An Elemental Journal, white ‘outsiders’ see only desert where Australia’s aborigines see depth, meaning, songlines (no clichéd comparison of Oz and Welsh citizens intended). And yet ‘outsiders’ may be privileged by their own authentic viewpoint, even while it sets them at odds with others, as Charles Russell shows in his survey of untrained and mentally ill artists, Groundwaters, A Century of Art by Self-taught and Outsider Artists. So, three Insider recommendations on ‘outside’ views. ‘Upside down… inside out’: make Diana Ross proud of your Christmas reading list.

This is a version of Gwen Davies’ Western Mail Insider column published on Saturday 19 November 2011, but contains additional material on Kate Roberts’ life as portrayed in Alan Llwyd’s new biography. Katie Gramich also highlighted the strength of Kate Roberts’ feelings for and interest in women in two news stories in Golwg, autumn 2011, where she confirmed that the author must have known that her husband, Morris T Williams was gay.

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Next blog: guest piece by Barrie Llewelyn on how as a memoirist she found herself recreating her grandmother as a Chicago prostitute

Next interviews coming soon: Christien Gholson, Matthew Francis

And God Created Burton, Tom Rubython. Review by Laura Stowe

2011-11-16T16:35:00.003Z

This latest biography by Tom Rubython attempts to delve into the life of arguably the most successful Welsh actor of all time. And God Created Burton takes the reader on a rollercoaster ride through history that spans from late nineteenth century Wales, through the golden age of Hollywood, to Richard Burton’s untimely funeral in 1984. It is Rubython’s third major biographical work and follows on from books about the lives of Formula 1 racing drivers Ayrton Senna and James Hunt.

Tackling the life and times of Richard Burton would be no mean feat for any biographer; especially as numerous other works already exist, including the popular Melvyn Bragg version. I was sceptical that the author would be able to find an original take on Burton’s life and feared reading a re-hash of the all-too familiar tales of excessive drinking and his love affair with Elizabeth Taylor.

I was right to be cautious. Of course, you cannot write a book about Richard Burton and not address these points and, to his credit, Rubython’s version is far more detailed in these areas than many other Burton biographies. However, it does seem a shame that more pages are not dedicated the actor’s work in film and theatre. Although he was often accused of ‘selling out’ to Hollywood, Burton enjoyed a long and varied career. Despite the fact that he was no stranger to the occasional ‘turkey’ or ‘dry patch’, his achievements and accolades should not be underestimated. He produced some of the most critically acclaimed performances of all time, won multiple awards and could recite Shakespeare in a manner rarely witnessed since. Thanks to the colourful nature of Burton’s life, Rubython certainly had a wealth of material to draw on, but he has let the more titillating details of the actor’s personal life overshadow what he managed to achieve professionally. Of course, the same could also be said of Burton’s work while he was alive.

All that said, this biography still makes for an addictive read. The actor’s penchant for women and, with devastating consequences, for alcohol is certainly no secret and this book reveals some fascinating anecdotes about both. While working with filmmaker Andrew Sinclair on Under Milk Wood, Burton proclaimed proudly that he would be staying sober until they had completed the film. Sinclair asked him to ‘define sober’, to which Burton replied ‘only one bottle of vodka a day. I am sober on two, but when drinking it’s three or more.’

The alcoholism, combined with his libidinous behaviour, made Burton the epitome of the Hollywood ‘bad boy’. Despite his often dishevelled appearance and lack of self-control, Burton’s charm and good-looks still managed to draw the world’s most beautiful women. His most famous love affairs are here (Taylor, Bloom, Strasberg, etc.) but there are also details about his less famous flings, including a brief liaison with Mary Ure who was married to writer John Osborne at the time. This took place when Burton and Ure were working together on her husband’s new film, Look Back Anger. A tangled web indeed.

At 800-plus pages, this biography is not exactly commuter- or handbag-friendly, but if you’re a Burton fan or just appreciate the intricacies of a remarkable life, then you should find this both a fascinating and absorbing read.

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Interview with Tessa Hadley about The London Train

2011-11-15T12:01:00.007Z

This interview is based on one conducted by Gwen Davies at the Dylan Thomas Centre as part of their festival, November 2011

Tessa Hadley, born in Bristol, teaches Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, where she gained her own MA. She is the author of 4 novels, of which her debut, Accidents in the Home, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. Her debut short fiction collection, Sunstroke, appeared in 2008, and her latest, Married Love, is due in January, when the pb version of The London Train also appears. Tessa lives in Cardiff.

NWR: The London Train has an unusual structure in two parts, linked by the Cardiff-Paddington train and the character Paul (a husband in Part 1 but a lover in Part 2). When I reached the middle and came to a new section entitled ‘Only Children’, I thought I’d stumbled into two novellas by mistake. The parallels and links quickly became clear but this and your experience in short fiction made me wonder: was The London Train conceived as a novella?

TH: It had a rather long and tortured history, as some books do. One’s hope is that none of this shows up on the book’s surface later – so perhaps one ought not to confess to the torture? I wrote the first part as a full-length novel, that didn’t work. I got the voice wrong, it felt flat and spiritless. Then I changed the story, kept some essential elements, rewrote from the beginning completely, in mostly new words – as a novella. As I was drawing near to the end of that, I had an afternoon of tumbling visions – that it needed another novella to match, its twin; and that this one would be a woman’s story, as my first part was a man’s story. And the second part, Cora’s story, wrote easily as a dream, as if to compensate for the difficulty of the novel’s beginning. All the connections which made the novel whole, and not two separate parts, fell into place naturally, as if they’d been waiting for me all along. Writing, sometimes one struggles against a stiff headwind, sometimes one bowls along more easily. Does this working difference show, in the finished work? I’m not sure.

NWR: The novel emphasises the perception of Cora and Paul, those characters most unhappy in their marriages, that they are both from a class ‘lower’ than their spouses. It also includes subplot lines involving classless or displaced immigrants (for example Pia’s Polish boyfriend, the Iranian from the immigration detention centre, Cardiff asylum seekers). How has your interest in privilege and class developed as a writer, and is it fair to say that for many of your characters, class is bound up with feelings of guilt?

TH: I’m not sure many people still think of any class as ‘lower’ – certainly Paul and Cora don’t. They’re proud of their class origins, and assert them often; both of them are firmly middle-class – a writer and a teacher/librarian – but carry their family working-class history as a point of honour. I suppose there is some guilt for Paul, if you want to call it that (this doesn’t work for Cora, whose own father had already made the crucial break into teaching); the classic unease of the clever working-class boy whose education, which is what his parents have aspired to on his behalf, nonetheless takes him away from his parents, estranges him from them, because the currency of his thought is no longer the currency of theirs. He has loved his mother dearly, yet she can’t really enter into his thinking, nor he into hers. Class and its complexities, its tangles in consciousness, its subtle markers, are an irresistible part of the mix for any writer, a wonderful grit to drop into the machinery of any story. When Paul and his wife Elise quarrel (she comes from a boarding school, house-in-France background), they use their class history against each other. They would use anything that came to hand, and that hurt enough, of course. Paul sometimes uses his class origins as a weapon in his quarrels with his friends, too.

NWR: Both sections of your novel contain ironic digs at ‘women’s fiction’. The Bookseller reported a 10% fall in sales of titles in this genre during the first half of 2011. I’m sometimes tempted to describe women’s fiction as ‘chicklit with deeper psychology and more guilt’. Is this fair, is ‘chicklit’ the same as ‘women’s fiction’, and what are your views on any labels that may have been applied to your own books?

TH: The ironic dig is Paul’s (not mine). Cora isn’t ironic, she means what she thinks, about how lifelike lots of what’s called ‘women’s writing’ is, how much more feeling and more true to real experience than some more ‘highbrow’ novels (horrible term, but one’s dealing in such shifting categories here). I’m not myself participating in this debate, in these little teasing references; I’m just enjoying describing it. But as I’m sure my own books are often read as ‘women’s fiction’, I suppose I’m more likely to be closer to Cora’s ‘side’ of the argument than Paul’s. I always knew Paul would never read my books. Perhaps they’re in that pile by his wife’s bed. By the way, I hope there isn’t much guilt in my books. I don’t think we’re as guilty as we used to be, now that our idea of duty is so diminished (mostly for the good?); guilt needed duty to measure itself against. I’m not sure how interesting guilt is as an emotion, these days (it can seem indulgent). I’m interested in conscience, though – which isn’t the same thing.

NWR: Your fiction is notable for an acute degree of psychological perception, leading to strengths in terms of empathetic characterisation. The crime writer Mark Billingham argued in a recent Guardian supplement, ‘How to Write Fiction’, that it is empathy that drives suspense and pace rather than plot. The London Train contains important twists and red herrings (for example Pia’s pregnancy, Gerald and Elise’s relationship, the detention centre scandal, Robert’s injuries close to the end). But for me, suspense increased threefold with the possibility that Cora and the inhibited, decorous Robert might get back together again. Which was your main suspense tool for this novel, plot or empathy?

TH: I’m not sure I can separate these. It’s a really interesting question. For me story (it’s a better word than plot, which always has overtones of Colonel Mustard with the lead piping in the library) is part of the miracle of people and lives. How extraordinary, that such things happened – or didn’t happen. Our appetite for story, for stuff, for the abrupt swerves and changes that life produces – a birth, an accident, an affair, a fortune or the loss of one, daily work, a death – is as deep as human community, surely. Without stuff happening, people don’t exist as themselves (even if their story is that nothing much happens); their personalities and the texture of their experience come about through stuff happening – or not happening. Therefore I can’t quite separate the empathy a writer most wants to create in the reader, from the massed elements of a character’s history, their adventures, their choices, the junk-shop jumble of family connections they drag with them… But it’s wonderful to think that the empathy is the susupense. Yes, that’s very nice.

NWR: The ‘london train’ links Wales and London, with the novel being set equally in both locations. Its Monnow valley settings offer evocative descriptions of landscape. However, I sense a conflicted attitude (possibly authorial, possibly character-led) towards feelings of belonging to place; Paul, especially, seems to resent his farmer neighbours’ attachment to the land. And I was almost shocked to hear from Cora’s mouth what I’ve come to think of as the outdated, or even taboo terms (in our post-devolution Wales): ‘parochial’ and ‘provincial’. Are these terms intended ironically and do they show aspects of Cora that you as an author might regard ambivalently? What is your approach to portraying ‘Wales’ in novels? May you tackle creating a ‘rooted’ community in your fiction?

TH: I don’t think I have that ‘rooted’ experience you’re talking about – although I’m not sure why, as I’ve lived in one city for thirty years now. Perhaps city-dwellers aren’t ever rooted in quite the way you mean – and definitely, although it makes excursions into the countryside, my writing is about an urban scene, it’s what I know and where I belong. I’ve thought a lot about those term ‘provincial’ and ‘parochial’. I think they might need rehabilitating, for a new age. I read an article by a political theorist, on how the necessity for politics in the 21st century is that each nation (this was referring not to Wales but to the UK in a global context) must abandon its parish histories, imagine itself outside them. This may well be true for politics, it probably is. But what I thought was: without parish histories, no novels. Novels are parish histories, whether they’re set in Bristol or Cardiff or London or Rouen or Boston or Abuja (even if the parishes are full of transients, too). Novels’ specificity, which makes their worlds not interchangeable with other worlds, is of their very nature. So parochial and provincial aren’t negative terms to me. I treasure the specifics of locality. I love the hiddenness of evolved forms of human living, in places away from the coarsening spotlight-blare of power. I’m suspicious of the confidence of anywhere that imagines itself a ‘centre’. I remember the subtitle of Madame Bovary, moeurs de province. There’s a novel which overtly deplores the pokiness and dullness of the backwaters of provincial France - yet all the while embodies its least detail in a poetry of such beauty that it endures into our unrecognisably different time.

NWR: What is your next writing project?

TH: I’m more than halfway through a novel which is written in the first person, a woman’s history from her childhood in the nineteen-sixties. She’s my age but nothing like me, much braver. All sorts of things happen to her (see empathy and things happening, above!) I want her to embody a kind of heroism of the domestic, of the hidden, private life.

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NWR Interviews: Deborah Kay Davies on True Things About Me

2011-11-15T11:10:00.005Z

This interview was conducted via email by Gwen Davies for a Dylan Thomas Centre festival 2011 event in which the editor was in conversation with Tessa Hadley about The London Train.

Deborah Kay Davies started writing as a mature student of creative writing at Cardiff University. Her debut poetry collection, Things You Think I Don’t Know, was published by Parthian in 2006, and the same press brought out her debut short fiction collection, Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful, which was the Wales Book of the Year 2009. She was selected for the Culture Show’s pick of twelve best new novelists in 2011 for her novella, True Things About Me, which was published by Canongate in 2010.

NWR: There are some themes and plotlines shared between True Things… and The London Train, for example a major female character in a submissive sexual role, inconvenient pregnancies and the abdication of responsibility. Your book is much shorter, however, at novella length; its message is cynical, and if it shares any of Tessa’s territory of the psychological novel, it is as one stripped bare. Your first books were poetry and short fiction. True Things… is stamped with a distinctive staccato style, and you use a mannered though engaging dialogue; menace to rule pace and grotesque motifs (such as Gran morphing into a chicken). To what extent have the folk tale (specifically) and your sense of short fiction forms (generally) enabled your distinctive style to develop?

DKD: I have no idea how the folk tale has any connection with my style, so I can’t answer that question helpfully. I am strongly motivated to condense everything I write, although I am not consciously muttering ‘keep it snappy’. It’s just how I do it. On a simple level this has a connection with short fiction maybe. Question: Is the book’s message cynical? As far as I’m aware it has no message. It’s merely my exploration of a well-recognised way of behaving. The woman in the book could just as easily have been a man, hopelessly fixated on an exploitative woman.

NWR: I loved your understatement of expression in this book, which naysays action that moves from menace to full-blown violence. Your headings are a good example of this: ‘I misuse bread’ for a chapter in which the protagonist hits her friend’s kids with a baguette, or ‘I serve myself unusual nibbles’ as a reference to her contemplating a whole bowl of sleeping tablets. In the main narrative you write, ‘He patted my cheek firmly three times, not very hard, and I lost my balance and fell over, hitting my head on the coffee table’, which could have come straight from Roddy Doyle’s The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. How self-conscious is your use of humour as a means to take dark content further? Have you literary models for this technique?

DKD: I always want to inject a shot of humour into everything I write. It acts both as an aerating device and an intensifier of darkness and poignancy. Hopefully. Think Nabokov and Lolita.

NWR: Your protagonist is a masochist who experiences rough sex then seems unable to escape an increasingly abusive relationship. She is so passive that she always blames others for her predicament and yet feels judged by bodies animate and otherwise (the dentist, her house). She eventually reverts to an infantile state, helplessly calling her mother ‘Mummy’. She is also detached and narcissistic, with little to no sense of ‘the other’ aside from her mirror image, with whom she endlessly converses (and a touching relationship with best friend Alison). You underline this sense of a fallible narrator with sly references to ‘one of those films where the viewer knows things long before the people in the film do’. What is your attitude to the notion that empathy drives suspense? Must an author who is exploring narrative fallibility necessarily sacrifice empathy? Is it fair to suggest that your extraordinary style and compelling voice make up for areas such as plot and empathy as a tool of suspense?

DKD: I would disagree with your interpretation of the narrator as ‘passive’ and ‘detached’, although you are free to interpret the book in any way you see fit. I wanted to create a character, often self-deluded, who wilfully pursues the object of her desire, and is determined to experience anything that this unwise relationship throws at her. I didn’t for one moment see her as a victim. She embraces the violence and fear. She offers herself to him. It makes her feel alive. Empathy and suspense? I don’t know. For the reader there has to be some sort of connection with a character and their predicament. Otherwise one would hurl the book over the back of the sofa, as I’m sure we’ve all done. What creates that empathy is different for each reader. I don’t think it’s my task to worry about it. I’m motivated by my desire to tell a good story, in the way that seems natural and right to me.

NWR: The London Train and True Things… are at polar opposites in terms of their treatment of domesticity. In the former, Cora is ‘doing up’ her Cardiff house, while the Monnow Valley house seems idyllic. True Things…, when it evokes the spirit of Delia above the casserole, contains the best pastiche of lifestyle-fantasy-anxiety I’ve read: ‘[“]We don’t want them to frigging steam, after all. This is all about caramelisation.[”] La, la, and thrice la, she sang.’ And the protagonist’s house (ever the harsh critic) is punished by being stripped bare of all possessions save the bed. Compared to The London Train, which is a reunion romance, True Things… is a cynical anti-Romance. What is your attitude to the reported 10% fall off in sales of women’s fiction, and would you ever be tempted to dabble in this genre? Is horror or crime writing a more likely direction for your fiction to take?

DKD: My protagonist is all too aware of what makes a good home. At times she stage-manages tableaux that will look warm, loving and content to an observer. Her parents live in happy domesticity. Her patron saint is Delia. She wants to assimilate her lover into this fantasy, imagining him in a pinny, overseeing the barbecue, whilst knowing it will never happen. She’s not attracted to him for those reasons. She loves that he is part of another world. I don’t countenance the term ‘women’s fiction’. It always sounds belittling. However, I know what you refer to. These things are cyclical. The publishing world is teeming with greedy sheep. And I don’t know about my direction, thank God. I go on writing to find that out.

NWR: What’s your current/next writing project?

I am deep into a new thing. Will I sound like a complete poseur if I say I don’t want to talk about it? Yes? So be it then.

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Interview with Tessa Hadley available shortly.

Owen Sheers' Resistance, Page and Screen

2011-11-14T08:53:00.004Z

Ten days ago, glamorous literary figures Owen Sheers and Francesca Rhydderch met at Aberystwyth Arts Centre to preview the new film Resistance, based on Sheers’ novel imagining 1944 Britain under Nazi occupation, and starring Michael Sheen. The session explored how ‘true’ to the novel was Sheers’ first screenplay (co-written with director Amit Guptar) or indeed the final movie to the script.

This approach underlined too heavily the original text’s supremacy. But Sheers did emphasise his goal of enabling a vision faithful to the spirit of the film. And while for him the process brought home how much freedom a novelist has, he had relished the restrictions (eg on cast and viewpoint) imposed by the medium and budget.

This poet came to reinterpret these as a creative challenge akin to verse metre. The screenplay’s demands for a central drama led to his ready re-focus on the relationship between farmer’s wife Sarah and patrol leader Albrecht. This flexibility reminded me of Caryl Lewis’ approach to her first screenplay: a version of her novel Martha, Jac a Sianco (also starring Sharon Morgan). When required to amplify Jac’s dalliance with brash gold-digger Judy, she didn’t hesitate.

Many writers are in the business because they crave control, so Sheers’ acceptance that cinema is collaborative, and his admission that only one third of his original screenplay survived the input of creative others, was disarming. Scripted dialogue was the major casualty; most often sacrificed to actors’ credo that one meaningful glance is worth a thousand words. ‘I told them I hoped it bloody is,’ Sheers said, ‘because a massive plotline hangs on that speech!’

Resistance, fiction and film, belong to the speculative genre of ‘alternative history’, and Sheers was asked whether the movie confirmed whether his basic premise worked. He described how a key scene at Llanthony Show had caused double-takes among the extras arriving on a set where swastikas jostled championship rosettes, making him feel ‘dismay’ at the visual and conceptual desecration he had unwittingly brought upon his home patch.

Perhaps at that moment Sheers regretted the first of his two provisos to the director (the second being that the German officers speak their own tongue): that shooting and setting be in the Black Mountains. The steep-sided Olchon Valley, made famous by book and screen versions of Chatwin’s On the Black Hill, lets nature lend a bleak outlook. Rightly though, artifice and artistry are the architects of Resistance’s distinctive look: sustained close-ups influenced by Terence Malik’s The Thin Red Line; the sepia-washed farmsteads and stranded figures of US artist Andrew Wyeth.

Completed in only two-and-a-half years from script to release on 25 November, Resistance was quick alchemy: he starts work on an original screenplay next year.

A version of this was published in Gwen's Western Mail Insider books column on Saturday 12 November 2011.

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Interview with Tessa Hadley and Deborah Kay Davies available shortly.

Tamar Yoseloff’s The City With Horns. Review by Amy Dennis

2011-11-08T15:05:00.004Z

This review focuses on the main sequence in this collection. Several poems in The City With Horns explore the literal and metaphorical ways we grasp at understanding. Although all the poems are worthy of contemplation, the subject matter’s main sequence is unique in that it centers on the life and art of the abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. Because Pollock painted in abstraction, an ekphrastic poet approaching his work cannot rely on descriptions of identifiable subject matter. One of the strengths of Yoseloff’s poetry is that she transcends this by exploring the life and work of Pollock in a way that is analogous to how he painted. Just as Pollock placed his canvases on the floor, walked around his artwork, and painted from various angles, the main section of Yoseloff’s book approaches Pollock’s life and work from a variety of poetic voices. Throughout the series, she echoes voices ranging from Frank O’Hara to James Dean and Allen Ginsberg. Other personalities present in the poems include Willem de Kooning as well as slight references to contemporaries Mark Rothko and Arshile Gorky.

This layering and blurring of voice is also seen in the poem ‘The City With Horns’. Although written in the third person, Pollock’s voice seems immediate, as if speaking in first person. Yoseloff achieves this through her word choices and tone, which are particular to this part of the book and seem perfectly suited to what is reputedly known of Pollock’s brash personality: ‘horny again, no broad brave enough to fuck him, / this beast of a man, a real artist, no bullshit’. A direct quotation of Pollock’s is then woven into the last line: ‘exciting / as all hell’. This gritty, direct use of language also reflects the volatile, booze-induced ambience that often surrounded Pollock and his contemporaries as they struggled artistically, financially, and emotionally.

It is important to note that two other voices play a prominent role in the collection: Ruth Kligman, Pollock’s mistress, and more predominantly the voice of Pollock’s wife and fellow artist Lee Krasner. Images associated with Kligman allude to a more objectified surface sensuality, as seen in the last stanza of ‘Death Car Girl’. Written in the voice of Kligman in direct address to Pollock, she refers to herself as ‘your Monroe, / your moll, your late model cream puff’. In contrast, Yoseloff’s portrayal of Lee Krasner transcends that of the female muse, and the book’s ability to balance the persona of Krasner with that of Pollock is one of its most significant achievements. The poem ‘Springs’ begins with descriptions of Krasner striving to be the 1940’s version of a ‘proper wife’, but the poem does not confine her to this role in subsequent stanzas. Yoseloff writes,

She could give

as well as she could get. He called her shrew.

She threw another plate and spat

two can play at this. She banned his barroom

buddies, sent them packing back to the Cedar,

called his mother to whip him into shape.

The second poem in the collection, ‘Lee Visits the Studio’, alternates between the voices of Pollock and Krasner in a way that unflinchingly yet sensitively foregrounds the complex dynamic of their explosive relationship. Instead of repeating the standard polarities of victim and abuser, the poem instead affords a more complex insight into Pollock’s confusion and vulnerability, as well as Krasner’s strength, stubbornness, and heightened self-awareness. Whereas Pollock’s voice admits: ‘I wanted to grab her, hit her, / kiss her, don’t know what, / she had me so shook up’, Krasner’s voice confesses her own inability to remove herself from his aggressive tendencies: ‘He’ll wrestle me to the floor / until I’m black and blue, / leave me wanting more, throw me / out the door. I’ll keep coming back’. Lines such as these are powerful because they do not strive for safe or easy answers in their brave portrayal of Krasner and Pollock’s intense emotional connection.

Interview with Tessa Hadley and Deborah Kay Davies available shortly. Next blog: preview of Owen Sheers' Resistance (the movie).

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Interior Lives: women through the lens of Deborah Kay Davies and Tessa Hadley

2011-11-07T10:39:00.006Z

For an event last week at Swansea’s Dylan Thomas Centre, I was in conversation with Cardiff authors Tessa Hadley and Deborah Kay Davies (the latter via virtual interview, available in full here shortly). The session’s title, ‘Interior Lives’, was appropriate, because the worlds of both Hadley’s T he London Train (out in paperback this January) and 2010’s True Things About Me by Book of the Year winner Davies are fiercely claustrophobic.

Reviewing True Things… online for New Welsh Review this spring, I criticised the novella’s ‘goldfish bowl view’ and was impatient with its heroine’s ‘narcissism, passivity, promiscuity’ and tendency to misdiagnose her own emotions. Flicking through it again for the Swansea session, however, I realised how well it stood re-reading, a test that always separates the wheat from the chaff. True Things… is a stylish fall backwards down that tunnel of self-abnegation and dependency that is life as the submissive partner in an abusive, violent relationship.

The Bookseller recently reported a 10% drop in sales of ‘chicklit’ during the first half of this year, and this autumn, WH Smith’s abandoned the term ‘women’s fiction’ as a label for their shelves of pastel-hued novels sporting legs and dogs-in-handbags. Hadley’s fiction, while vastly more sophisticated in psychological terms than the top range of chicklit, has been happy to inhabit the interior rooms of mainly female lives. Indeed, The London Train makes two ironically disparaging references to ‘women’s fiction’ that form a pre-emptive strike on Hadley’s part, proving her feisty attitude to critics of the genre. The latter should also note that half the novel is from a man’s viewpoint!

These novels are poles apart in terms of style, setting and cynicism. Hadley favours a degree of exposition and reveals a squeamish recoiling on the part of most characters at stooping lower than a Travelodge room on the sliding scale of roughing it. A compulsion for rough sex, meanwhile, is the downfall of Davies’ narrator, and her characters think and speak (to themselves in the mirror, to babies, to clothes, to their furnishings) in a mannered dialogue that telescopes wit and menace into a few staccato phrases.

And yet here are two novels with similar central themes. Both concern an ill-advised affair that drags a woman below herself, leaving her pregnant, confined to home and isolated from friends. Both use the death of a relative as a catalyst, even if Hadley’s grandmother figure dies respectably in an old people’s home whereas that of Davies crows and claws the bedclothes like a cockerel gone AWOL.

It is a sign of our literary scene’s maturity that the fans of measured romance such as Hadley’s and grotesque tragicomedy such as True Things About Me, can mingle.

This is a version of Gwen's Western Mail Insider books column, published on Saturday 5 November 2011.

Full interview with Tessa Hadley and Deborah Kay Davies available shortly. Next blog: preview of Owen Sheers' Resistance (the movie).

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Berlin ‘Wild Boy’ Clubbers and Stalin's Nose

2011-11-03T13:39:00.004Z

In ‘Berlin Sensation: Second “Wild Boy” Found!’, Rory MacLean’s 6 October post on his Goethe Institut-hosted Meet the Germans blog, the Canadian travel writer traces a recent spate of Berlin ‘wild boy’ discoveries, one lost in the forest, the second found in a cupboard ‘behind the Panoroma bar’ in the city’s Berghain club, ‘the world capital of techno music’. Surviving, ‘according to unsubstantiated reports’, from the age of eleven to eighteen on raided supplies of ice cream and Red Bull, MacLean reports the latter boy’s discovery:

‘As he has not seen the sun for almost a decade, his skin has lost almost all its pigment. In an effort to protect both his eyes and identity he has been issued with wrap-around dark glasses and so he looks – for all intents and purposes – much like all the other blinking, emaciated Berlin clubbers on a Sunday morning. Like them he also is totally deaf.’

Well I was taken in too, but the clue is in the phrase ‘according to unsubstantiated reports’, the acidity of MacLean’s deadpan style and the ‘surreal’ tag attached to his books, the best known of which is Stalin’s Nose. I’ve just finished this account of a road trip around eastern Europe post Wall fall (first published in 1992) and can pronounce it brilliant fun (especially pig Winston on the back seat) and superbly judged in terms of using black comedy and warm characterisation to leaven unpalatable historical truths.

MacLean was tutor last week at Ty Newydd Writers’ Centre, Cricieth on the course Landscape, Travel and Memoir – from Blogs to Books. The interests of Mark Charlton, his co-tutor and an artist and blogger partly resident in Wales, lie more closely aligned with nature and landscape than Berlin clubbers, widening the course’s appeal.

Nature writing is showcased in the December issue of New Welsh Review. In a response to RS Thomas’ Blwyddyn yn Llyn (A Year in Llyn, out of print in both languages), John Barnie walks the coastal path north of Aberystwyth, bound for Borth and a bacon sandwich. Along the way he is attacked by a seagull, meets a ‘stone man’ with a slighly hippy message, and at his destination notes the major sea defence works undertaken by ‘machine flamingos filter-feeding for stones’. Clarach, a little south from Borth, is also a setting for Jane MacNamee’s essay combining memoir and nature writing. She describes how, having taken delivery of ‘the contents of [her late] mother’s house’ in boxes she consigns to the spare room, she begins to ‘tiptoe’ around them as she had her mother during an earlier illness. These belongings – especially the clothes – become freighted with memory. Her shoes had been barred from the Crematorium dress code. ‘We could choose an outfit, just not shoes…. her partner wanted her to wear a purple woollen overcoat he’d bought for her one winter… It was April. “Won’t she be a bit hot?” I blurted out.’

This is a version of Gwen’s Western Mail Insider books column published on Saturday 22 October 2011.

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Next week: Interior Worlds: in conversation with Tessa Hadley and Deborah Kay Davies

Halloween poetry, guest blog by Christien Gholson

2011-10-31T12:03:00.004Z

The leaves are starting to fly from the trees in the park across the street, settling in pools of red and brown on the grass, and, for some reason, this makes me want to start reading poetry out loud. It could be that the coming of cold weather ignites an ancient race memory of those long winter nights when there was nothing to do but sit around a fire and listen to stories or the repetitive rhythms of an epic poem. Or it could be that everything currently on television has become so amazingly paltry.

I used to believe there was a universal conspiracy against the reciting of poetry. For years, every time I began reading out loud, suddenly a car would start revving its engine below the window, or the buzz of a vacuum in the flat next door would shake the wall, or a group of drunken students would wander out of the dark, singing exuberantly (and off-key) some pop-song-of-the-minute. Once or twice, a helicopter decided to hover over the neighbourhood. Really. No lie.

Because of this, I began to form a personal myth that the urban landscape had attained consciousness, was a kind of jealous god that didn’t want anyone stepping outside the perimeters of his noisy little fiefdom. This was a god dedicated to speed, to things rushing by too fast to ponder or think about them, to channel surfing, to the constant noise occupying the mind.

Reading or listening to poetry requires attention. So, in my myth, my crappy urban god was desperate to censor anything that would cause me to focus, to feel something beyond the change-every-three-seconds consumer frenzy. The poem recited creates a space outside all that speed and noise. Sometimes, when I look up from the page at the end of a poem, I can feel it resonate through the room, through my body, and am left - for a few seconds - with pure perception, blinking like a newborn birthed into an old world.

Can good poetry actually compete against speed culture? Following the actual breath measure of a poem slows us down, allows the poet and their times to inhabit us. Call it ‘poet possession’. You could do worse than be possessed by the breath rhythms of Shelley’s ‘Masque of Anarchy’; or Ginsberg’s ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’; pretty much anything by Pablo Neruda; or (a new discovery for me) Lynette Roberts’ ‘Gods with Stainless Ears’.

With that in mind, as an antidote to all the chattering consumer noise this Halloween season, in honour of the coming of the dark, pick up some volume of a long dead poet and start to read out loud. See what happens.

This is a version of an Western Mail Insider books column published on Saturday 29 October 2011.

Christien Gholson blogs at http://christiengholson.blogspot.com/ and is available on cgholson[at]gmail.com. His story 'The Feed' appears in New Welsh Review 95, and his debut collection of prose poetry is On the Side of the Crow.

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Next week's blog: Tessa Hadley and Deborah Kay Davies in conversation with Gwen Davies at the Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea, Wednesday 2 November

Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending. Review by Paul Cooper

2011-10-21T11:40:00.005+01:00

The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes’ latest novel and the book that (finally) this week won him the Man Booker Prize, is a thin book impregnated with fat ideas. At 150 pages, Barnes’ book only barely dodges the description ‘novella’, a designation that nowadays carries connotations of being somehow ‘lightweight’. If not with its size, Barnes’ latest offering self-confidently (although sometimes self-consciously) asserts itself as novelistic with its cerebral themes, its refinement of style, and the poised and precise prose that has become the hallmark of one of Britain’s most well-respected modern writers.

Barnes’s narrator, Tony, has grown old, his life consigned to mundanity after a failed university relationship and the suicide of school friend Adrian, an aloof Camus-quoting intellectual. ‘History isn’t the lies of the victors,’ Tony tells us, ‘It’s more the memories of the survivors’. But, as ever with Barnes, things are more complex than that. Veronica, an enigmatic, difficult girl, and the focus of his adolescent romantic troubles, was in a relationship with Adrian at the time of his death, and now, decades later, Veronica’s recently deceased mother has bequeathed Adrian’s diary to Tony, despite having only met him once. The only problem is that Veronica has the diary, and she won’t give it back. From this tortuous setup, Barnes weaves a steady and contemplative plot as Tony must relive those early, half-forgotten disappointments with the alluring promise of his friend’s diary, and some kind of answer to the mystery of his suicide, hovering always just out of reach.

The Sense of an Ending is peppered with strong insight into the inadequacies of history and the myths we build up around people. The choreography of scenes is often startlingly real, but at times reaching after poignancy leaves Barnes’ characters merely philosophising woodenly, with the first pages of the novel particularly seeing meditations on the crises of memory and questions of subjective and objective interpretation muscled with slightly too much force into conversations. Despite this tendency, some very real ideological conflicts are powerfully evoked – chief among them the contrast between what Tony perceives as Adrian’s unflinching ‘moral courage’ in committing suicide, and his own shying away from the philosophical imperatives of life: ‘I wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded – and how pitiful that was’. There are also speculations as to whether the parallels between Tony’s particular regrets bear more than a passing resemblance to those experienced by Barnes during his public split with one-time friend Martin Amis.

The book is saturated with the mutability of memory, and Tony is an unreliable narrator in the style of Ishiguro or Faulks. Conversations are qualified with disclaimers such as ‘Was this their exact exchange? Almost certainly not’, and as the novel wends to its depth-charge conclusion, Tony is consistently reminded ‘You just don’t get it’, and neither, the reader increasingly feels, do we. The twist is clever and skilfully delivered, if a little perplexing, but it is a masterfully constructed plot, so much so that once a reader has finished the last page, they will immediately turn back to the first. After all, they have probably forgotten much of the detail.

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Next week's blog: Rory MacLean, Berlin ‘wild boy clubbers', nature writing, grief and belonging

Catherine Fisher our new Young People's Laureate and other matters

2011-10-18T16:11:00.006+01:00

Being pushed outside your comfort zone is salutary. In his piece on recent graphic novels in the winter issue of New Welsh Review, now at proof stage, David Thorpe mentions his friend, a comics ‘virgin’ who couldn’t work out whether to look at pictures or text first. Nor could her eyes gauge whether to follow the strips up, down, right or left. I must admit my sympathy, despite exposure to Japanese animation film (Howl’s Moving Castle, anyone?) and a lifelong love of children’s picture books. This essay ranges from literary adaptations such as Pride and Prejudice by Edginton and Deas (a challenge, as ‘a novel with little in the way of visual action’) to Catel José-Luis Bocquet’s original ‘linear’ biography Kiki de Montparnasse, whose subject, artist, muse and wife to Man Ray, defined the 1920s Paris art scene. This feature is literally an eye-opener.

I’ve no interest in omnipotence: my take on editing a magazine is that I’m learning alongside the reader. A fun part of that is using an essay such as Thorpe’s as a building block to creating a shared ‘moving castle’ with rooms that shift in vibe and location. So it is that I spent a morning researching Wales’ own emerging artist-authors for a future issue. The genre is now eligible for Literature Wales’ writers’ bursary funding, and is bearing fruit as Huw Aeron works on his first book, a dual-language version of the epic medieval elegy ‘Y Gododdin’, and US-published author Carol Swain (author of Foodboy) casts her dystopian charcoal-stick over an English story set on a Welsh hill-farm in Gast (‘bitch’). Huw Aeron led dual-language workshops on the graphic novel this weekend at Literature Wales’ October-long ‘Literature Lounge’, a family-friendly pop-up bookswap-shop within Cardiff’s St David’s Centre.

LW’s newfound emphasis on literature for children and young people is especially welcome and those of us banging the drum for YA literature are delighted at the news that Catherine Fisher is our first English-language Young People’s Laureate. The announcement will be made by Charlotte Church at the Literature Lounge tonight, Tuesday 18October, and has been welcomed by Philip Pullman as well as National Poets Gillian Clarke and Carol Ann Duffy. Catherine’s first official appearance will be at the Young People Literature Festival, Theatr Soar, Merthyr Tudful alongside AM Huw Lewis, poets Eurig Salisbury and Mike Jenkins and others, this Thursday 20 October.

If you’re based in the north east, visit the Daniel Owen Festival this week at Mold. This celebration of ‘Wales’ Dickens’ runs from 16 to 22 October. Yesterday, Monday 17^th saw the launch at Theatr Clwyd of Fireside Tales, the first English translation of Straeon y Pentan. Published by Brown Cow Publishing and Y Lolfa, this is Brown Cow’s second title in their ‘Daniel Owen Signature Series’ of all ten Owen titles. Translator Adam Pearce could have braved more linguistic risks, fought for fewer footnotes and assumed a core readership within Wales. But lovely English phrases are here, as well as Owen’s fascination for birds and his striking imagery such as the cat left to die hanging from a tree like a caged canary. One for Halloween.

A version of this was published in Gwen's Western Mail Insider books column on Saturday 15 October 2011.

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Next week's blog: Rory MacLean, Berlin ‘wild boy clubbers', nature writing, grief and belongings

Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-personality by Elias Aboujaoude. Review by Susie Wild

2011-10-12T14:46:00.006+01:00

The internet has been in popular use in the UK for 20 years. Now that is has, essentially, come of age, a string of books has been released examining the effects of the internet on humanity. Virtually You addresses the effect of the disparity between our online and offline personas on our psychological well-being and society. It is a welcome addition to the good arguments already put forth in Alone Together by Sherry Turkle, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr and You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier.

The author, Elias Aboujaoude, is a Silicon Valley psychiatrist who helped to lead the largest US study on problematic Internet use published to date. The study looked at the internet habits of 2,500 US adults and 'revealed alarming rates of online pathological behaviour'. This led Aboujaoude to conclude that while the internet is 'a force for good in many arenas', its dark side still casts a long shadow over society. He acknowledges that each wave of new media has had its detractors, yet believes that the internet's 'much deeper penetration into every aspect of our lives today makes it more insidious, and potentially more dangerous'.

The 'I' is omnipresent in contemporary cyberspace. Yahoo ran advertising last year with the strapline 'your own personal everything'. Today technology is all about the first-person singular pronoun — iPad, iPhone, iPlayer. The centre of the webiverse is you, 'the new you', the virtual and improved you. The Photoshopped you. The avatar you. Your dangerous e-personality. In The Fountainhead in 1968, author and thinker Ayn Rand wrote: 'Civilisation is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilisation is the process of setting men free from men.' Today it seems that while, on the [inter]face of things, our online life is personal, we are actually reverting back to the savage and the dangers of mob rule.

Danger, as any good girl will know, is hellishly attractive, but spelt out by Aboujaoude, the dangers of the e-personality are anything but: delusions of grandeur, narcissism, viciousness, impulsivity and infantile regression. Each of these five foes gets a chapter of discussion in the book, before he concludes:

The part of our psyche that usually reigns in these instincts — what psychoanalysts have traditionally called the superego — finds a worthy competitor in the Internet-assisted id, with its infantile self-centeredness and its dark dreams that demand to be satisfied.

In a world where the concept of long-term planning and the future are becoming lost in favour of immersion in the present, selfishness and narcisurfing — the act of googling oneself — the consequences of our actions have apparently become a lesser concern.

Aboujaoude also draws on clinical work, personal experience and academic research to try and make sense of the psychological characteristics that define our e-personalities, the ways we behave and portray ourselves online. The blurring between our work and social lives, our friend circles, our online and offline lives have become such that we are 'living in the existential equivalent of a well-shaken vinaigrette.' The dangers of the e-personality play out to extremes, as given in examples of high profile tragic news stories: 13-year-old Megan Meier's cyberbullying-related suicide; Philip Markoff, the 23-year-old 'Craigslist Killer'; and the online live video stream OD of troubled 19-year-old Abraham Biggs.

Virtually You is also peppered with less extreme case studies from the psychiatrist's own clinical practice in the field of the Impulse Control Disorders. Aboujaoude's clinic in Stanford has seen a large increase in the number of patients seeking help for internet-related addictive and damaging behaviours. We are not all addicts, yet we are all affected by our internet use more than most realise. Often the bleed from online to offline behaviour is played out on a more minor scale: we become more impatient and impolite in our face-to-face interactions. We are less willing to work at it when the going gets tough in our personal relationships. We withdraw into our other virtual lives, lonelier but 'safer'.

Whilst most of the arguments in Virtually You are common sense, this easy-to-read book offers a decent, layperson’s introduction to the broad psychological effects of the internet. At times it is uncertain who the book is aimed at, as basic terminology from the fields of psychology and technology are painstakingly explained. At others, the author’s tone can come across as flippant, while some of the arguments provide more questions than answers. All these complaints aside, Aboujaoude still makes some important points:

Our e-personality cannot tolerate down time. There is always a discovery or a connection to be made; always some fun to be had. Yet idle time, when the browser is shut down, the smart phone is out of charge […] is necessary to our ability to reflect on the world around us and our ability to self-reflect […] to assess ourselves and our place in the world, as well as consider the downside of the new technologies that are keeping us so busy.

Aboujaoude does not call for the internet to be switched off, but he does ask us to pause, to take stock, and then to proceed with caution. Sometimes we need someone to state the obvious, for these are wise words indeed.

Susie Wild is the Associate Editor of The Raconteur and the author of the short story collection The Art of Contraception and the Kindle e-book novella Arrivals

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Next week's editor's blog: Graphic novels, Cardiff’s Literature Lounge and the Daniel Owen Festival

Smithy, Super Thursday and the evergreen gift book

2011-10-10T17:05:00.005+01:00

Gavin and Stacey’s Smithy did shove up a Severn Bridge toll barrier to ‘break into Wales’. But when all’s said and done, he is no champion of Wales. Still though, James Corden deserves a golden daff just for co-creating the series alongside confirmed national treasure Ruth Jones, not to mention his latest Doctor Who outing as Craig. And I’m not gonna lie to you: Corden’s strip-off on YouTube (‘Get in the Car Smithy!’) is a sure-fire cure for SAD.

What with The Sun’s serialisation of his autobiography May I Have Your Attention Please?, though, and massive publicity for Super Thursday, even I may soon tire of his big smile. Corden’s is one of 225 hardback titles launched on 29 September for Christmas. Skirting the issue of whether comedian’s memoirs are ever as funny as their performances (I fear a tad for Rob Brydon’s Small Man in a Book, trickling out late this week on 13 October), news coverage spun a Death of the Hardback story, focusing geekily on how book dimensions relate to garnering reviews and word-of-mouth buzz.

Predictions of how digitisation will shift reading, shopping and publishing habits are still rumours in the dark. But whatever the discrete threats are to 3-D shops and tomes, the practice of giving books as gifts is safe for now. You may bribe your teenage daughter with a preloaded Kindle for a main present, or fob off a neglected nephew with an iTunes voucher. But a hardback scrawled with a coded (preferably literary) love message carries far more caché. (The difficulty of lending and sharing e-books; the threat to our fantastic heritage of book covers with their seducing suggestion of our impeccable taste; the expense, cost, risk and mess of letting kids’ sticky mitts on an iPad are other thankfully unresolved matters to which I may return another time.)

E ink editions cannot yet handle colour, complex design, tables nor illustration, which is why the proportion of Kindle titles published for the children’s and nonfiction market lags way behind romance and contemporary genre fiction (erotica is the fourth biggest category: advertising personal taste isn’t always advisable). For that reason, specialist art and design publishers such as Thames and Hudson, V&A, Phaidon and Visual Editions may still celebrate the physical this Christmas with linen slip-cases, loose postcards, pop-ups and revivals of the 60s ‘book in a box’ concept. Cheap they are not, but our use for books as display persists. Were I the show-off type, and if someone special bought me Vivian Maier: Street Photographer, with its gorgeous ‘lost’ Chicago pictures, I would let our coffee table shout out ‘Tasteful Cow Lives Here’ right up to Easter. And that cheeky inscription aint available yet in digital.

A version of this was published in Gwen's Insider books column in the Western Mail on Saturday 8 October 2011

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Next week's blog: Graphic novels, Cardiff’s Literature Lounge and the Daniel Owen Festival

New Critics Day and Seren at Thirty

2011-10-03T22:05:00.004+01:00

Admin is the bane of our lives, whether we are teachers, nurses or literary magazine editors. At New Welsh Review our bid to the Welsh Books Council’s just gone in: our plan for a further three years’ funding. Not fun but instructive, since it pins down ideas, contributors, directions for digital development and how to face standstill budgets. Since our funding category is the ‘literary quarterly’, we’ve committed to our remit rather than straying into the general arts. Nevertheless, literature is rightly part and parcel of arts and culture. Recognising this, as well as bringing in new readers interested in general culture, is what my revamped magazine is about. We have new contemporary culture and publishing columns, for example, and match up authors with topics from philosophy to cooking traditions and psychology. We also invite theatre practioners, visual artists and radio producers to spill secrets on the way they work.

Writers are enrichened by exposure to hip-hop opera or photos of our ‘manufactured coast-scape’. Likewise, artists, venues and fans need elegant, enlightening commentary on whatever they produce, promote or experience. These beliefs, and a commitment to raising the level of arts criticism in Wales, are at the heart of a joint venture by National Theatre Wales and Literature Wales showcased on Saturday afternoon at New Critics Day, a free debate at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff.

This event marks the end of a pioneering scheme which matched four emerging arts critics –– Ben Bryant, Megan Jones, Dylan Moore and Adam Somerset –– to top mentors, Guardian critics Lyn Gardner and Elisabeth Mahoney, and offered them reviewing opportunities based around NTW’s first year of work. The fledglings shared their experiences alongside their mentors in a line-up including Matt Wolf of the New York Times; Arts Desk founder Jasper Rees; journalist and broadcaster Aleks Sierz; Arwel Gruffydd from Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru, and academic Hazel Walford Davies. NTW Artistic Director John E McGrath will chair panel discussions on ‘the Welsh context’ (including the potential of our media outlets), how to write a good review, and the future of arts criticism in Wales.

So that was the cerebellum and Sat pm sorted. In the morning literary types loved their bellies at Seren’s all-day street party celebrating their thirtieth birthday at 57 Nolton Street as part of Bridgend’s Food Feastival [sic]. Cake; meet the editor surgeries; book trail with Robert Minhinnick and Mike Jenkins; raffle with signed new book prizes from the New Stories from the Mabinogion set to Patrick McGuinness’ Booker longlisted The Last Hundred Days; ‘open mic’ slots; Dannie Abse reading, and treats from Deli-licious! Happy birthday, Seren: hope you remembered to feed any passing critics: it pays to keep them sweet….

A version of this was first published in Gwen's Western Mail Insider books column on Saturday 1 October 2011.

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Next week's blog: Smithy, Super Thursday and the evergreen book as gift.

It's Raining Fish, Halleluja! And Other Magical Songs

2011-09-26T10:03:00.006+01:00

Fflur Dafydd writes in the current issue of New Welsh Review about the genesis of her second English novel, The White Trail, published on 18 October. An update of ‘Culhwch and Olwen’, this latest addition to Seren’s New Stories from the Mabinogion series is a triumph. A feminist interpretation, its theme is the need for independence from loved ones, even though the failure of her story’s catalyst to cherish her own husband and unborn baby ends in tragedy. ‘The white trail’ of the title is Dafydd’s translation of ‘Olwen’, a girl in whose wake white flowers spring. The original symbolism of this motif is transformed from that of passive female allure – a trail of petals – into a bank of stubborn plants that won’t be picked. Take two heavily-pregnant female foils: Goleuddydd (feisty fireball, capricious) and Olwen (more your traditional docile model), add a third, calm, competent (past post-partum!) Gwelw, and we have a tableau of female types which sends up the Medieval stories’ questing for the perfect wife.

This Malcom Pryce-alike mash-up of detective story with magic and mayhem is a winning combo. The nascent political subplot is curtailed by the novella format so that we start to learn of Health Ministry mess-ups but soon cut back to frenzied action involving pigsty births, abductions, rape and suicide. The White Trail sees a return to Fflur’s parody of the crime thriller which she first explored in the Daniel Owen prize-winning Y Llyfrgell. But since this author is so clearly interested in public affairs, a broader satire of Assembly doings is sure to follow.

There’s more magic in the magazine’s winter issue, now in production. Transvestite magician Chiqui is the inspiration of Christien Gholson’s debut A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind and the novel’s design features on our cover as well as in Reviews. Siân Melangell warns that the plot isn’t easy to follow. But I found Gholson’s distinctive mix of eighties’ industrial smalltown Belgian life and folktale less puzzling than intriguing, once I went with the flow. Why had the dance troupe ‘got naked at the Vatican’ and who is waxing Biblical about bells, crows, and fish rained down from the heavens? With its chapter sections dedicated to roles (The Seer, The Player etc), this novel reminded me of the fiction of Jenny Erpenbeck, the subject of Patricia Duncker’s essay in the current magazine. Patricia gently accuses Michel Faber (author of The Crimson Petal and the White) of exaggerating Erpenbeck’s originality. We need character and plot in fiction more than Modernist archetypes and mystery, she suggests. I would counter that we need all four at different times, depending on our fancy. After all, as www.pottermore.com proves, you can never have too much magic.

A version of this was first published in the Western Mail on Saturday 24 September in Gwen's Insider books column.

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Next week's blog: New Critics Day and Seren at Thirty

What authors can learn from musicians in the digital age

2011-09-18T23:52:00.004+01:00

One blessing of the recession is that the Co-op won’t start draping tinsel round its Back to School alcove just as soon as those daps sell out. At New Welsh Review, however, September is the new December, since I’ve just edited all twenty-two pieces for the winter issue.

Among these is Rhian Jones’ Leader on musicians, authors and the digital world, in which she acknowledges publishers’ ‘palpable lack of the stricken siege mentality which defined the music industry’s reaction to downloading’ and applauds their ‘surprising shrewdness in [their] appropriation of digital’s potential as well as uncharacteristic speed for an industry which… usually has a turning circle like the Titanic’. One such sponsor-based publishing enterprise is Unbound, modelled on the trendier industry’s PledgeMusic, which promotes interaction between reader and author as well as a Social Network-inspired democracy. It works by posting book proposals online: those ideas (hopefully protected from plagiarism) which do not receive enough individual financial pledges will not see the light of day, and its first title will be by former Monty Python star Terry Jones. Basically a slick update of the eighteenth-century subscriber-book concept, it is interesting nevertheless, especially considering that journals such as Granta have moved in the opposite direction in the hope that by reinventing and distributing their product as a book, they will enhance their primary subscriber-based income.

Rhian, who blogs at http://velvetcoalmine.wordpress.com, continues in her NWR piece, ‘As the expectation of profit from music is now firmly weighted towards auxiliary activities like touring, merchandise, or sponsorship deals, so the literary establishment might similarly moderate attitudes to profit and fame from producing books per se.’

The reduced scales and margins in Wales are such that ‘fame’ and even ‘profit’ remain fanciful notions for our authors. And yet those who do embrace ‘added-value’ activities, such as touring shops, bookfairs, festivals and schools, are unquestionably more attractive to cash-strapped publishers. Such image-enhancing opportunities, of course, are also offered by literary magazines in the form of extracts, creative work and opinion pieces, as well as the more obvious short-term benefit of reviewing an author’s book.

Ceri Wyn Jones and Fflur Dafydd are two examples of authors who have no qualms about popularising literature through music, schools, festivals and public commissions. The former’s poetry collection Dauwynebog was a Book of the Year nomination; he is a radio and national eisteddfod regular for the crowd-pulling Welsh poetry slams, was Welsh-language Children’s Laureate during 2003-04 and runs children’s and teachers’ workshops nationwide. Singer-songwriter Fflur Dafydd writes in NWR’s current issue about her second English novel (or rather first novella for all you nitpickers), which gives a feminist spin to the Culhwch and Olwen Mabinogion story, as well as satirising the traditional stories' obsession with questing for the perfect wife. The White Trail is published by Seren on 18 October. I was in conversation with both authors together with Caryl Lewis (who heroically attended despite having had her baby daughter eight weeks ago!) in the opening Welsh-language session for PENfro Book Festival this weekend at Rhosygilwen, Cardigan, in front of a packed audience of young adults, teachers and other readers and fans of the authors. Topics covered included writing from your milltir sgwar; the literature teacher as mentor (Ceri sounded far too strict as Fflur's Welsh teacher, even if he was instrumental in her continuing to write in Welsh as well as English); whether Wales' competitive and eisteddfodic traditions benefit literature; set texts, the curriculum and the writer's public role; literature for children, and whether certain jobs (press editor in Ceri's case; creative writing lecturer in Fflur's, and dramatising her collection Plu for TV in Caryl's case) can help or hinder creative work.

NWR also had a stall the following day at the PENfro bookfair: the venue was beautiful, the whole event fantastically organised and great fun. Hopefully next year there'll be more Welsh and a few bigger names on the main day.

Goes to show that Literature Wales can afford to be a bit more generous in support of festivals rather than sticking to their usual policy of covering the bare minimum. Maybe they should push the boat out even further in future and attempt to secure key book festivals and fairs in a more strategic manner across Wales as well as offering realistic support to publishers organising events after a title's launch honeymoon period. Or, dare I say it, the new LW Head, when in post, might sacrifice a few pounds of their advertised salary of £50-£70,000 (£70,000 is nearly £20,000 higher than an Assembly member's pay) and put them towards more generous direct support for writers, together with the proper renumeration of those panel members who decide how to spend the grants for writers' schemes.

A version of this was published in Gwen's Western Mail Insider books column, Saturday 17 September 2011

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Next week's blog: preview of Fflur Dafydd's The White Trail (published 18 October) and review of Christien Gholson's A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind.

Academic novelists are international wall breakers

2011-09-12T10:05:00.005+01:00

Unfortunately Caernarfon-based Patrick McGuinness’ Bucharest-set novel The Last Hundred Days didn't make the cut at last week’s Man Booker Prize shortlisting. But congratulations all the same to him and Seren, the first publisher from Wales to make the nomination stage. Seren was in good company among nine indies on the longlist, sparking debate in the mainstream book trade. Were independent publishers better placed to source literary novels while bigger houses played safe with more commercial titles? Were this year’s judges immune to Literary London’s usual prejudice against independent and small publishers (evidenced by the slog it is for a company like Seren even to get broadsheet reviews)? The presence among the Booker judges of author Susan Hill, who runs small press Long Barn Books, may have tipped the balance for the likes of Seren and Ross-shire’s Sandstone Press. While that of former MI5 DG Stella Rimington may have done so for McGuinness’ debut novel, with its themes of state security and corruption during the Ceausescu era’s dying days over Christmas 1989.

The Last Hundred Days pulls off a challenging feat: to make a phlegmatic first person narrator engaging. In an in-depth author piece in spring’s NWR, McGuinness describes his approach to the novel: to pull themes of disengagement from his poetry, apply them to a world-changing political event and focus on the figure of the ‘passive witness’. Such literary aims may be ignored by general readers in holiday mode as we soar with events into the stratosphere of the thriller. Happily we are accompanied by blackmarketeer/bon viveur/bon-mot-minter Leo and the novel’s moral and emotional heart, hospital doctor Ottilia, who struggles to hold onto her ideals while rocked in a sea of neglect, deprivation, grief and betrayal by those closest to her. More fool those of us expecting tame expat fare from a novel set in an English department by an Oxford University lecturer author.

Stevie Davies is another academic with broad horizons. Into Suez (now out in paperback), set during the postwar Suez crisis, was the holiday read I hoped not to spoil by reviewing. A surprise absentee from the Book of the Year shortlist, like The Last Hundred Days it is an early slow burner whose strengths lie in its purely foreign sections, and whose plot and pace go turbo during its second third. As with McGuinness, Davies is interested in the concept of ideological engagement, although racial prejudice, rather than political compromise, is her characters’ cultural norm. Davies’ perception of women trying and failing to understand each other across generations is acute, while her exploration of how a small girl deals with the emerging independence and ‘otherness’ of her mother is heart-rending. These writers give the lie to academia’s hoary ‘ivory tower’ cliche.

A version of this first appeared in Gwen's Insider book column, Western Mail, Saturday 10 September 2011

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Love Child by Herbert Williams, Review by Whytney Pugh

2011-09-09T19:50:00.002+01:00

There has never been a more apt time than now to read Herbert Williams’ most recent novel Love Child. With our own media overflowing with stories of the dubious tactics of newspaper staff, the reader will discover that little except the technology available to reporters has changed in the world of the press in the last half a century.

Some readers may be alienated in the initial chapters by the attention paid to the inner workings of a major newspaper. However, the novel gathers momentum into an emotional investigation, though surprisingly not of the man and woman bound by the love child of the title. In fact, the reader begins to wonder if they will even meet for a second time within the pages of the book. Instead, they and their current spouses move through the wraths of their past, seeming content to witness a widening gulf between themselves and those closest to them.

The novel follows reporter Steve as he is assigned, fifteen years on, to the small town of his youth where he regresses, subjecting his wife and child to the tweaking of emotional threads that had lain as a tangled but static knot across a generation. We are permitted unrestricted access into the characters’ streams of consciousness and are able to empathise with how most of them begin to suspend both their sense of judgement and that of reality, and see how many have simply come to accept the frustrations of aging in a small town while others are plagued by unrealised possibilities.

Primarily, however, the novel highlights the miscommunication and friction that arise between partners at any stage of life. Williams has the ability to conjure in the reader both the anxiety of being excluded from the inner (and many outer) aspects of a spouse’s life as well as the delicately contained excitement and reckless abandon of illicit behaviour.

In the final chapters, illusions are shattered, conspiracies are overturned, and the labels many had accepted for themselves made redundant. A surprising resolution is provided by a case of mistaken identity as hysteria matures into an unlikely friendship. Love Child is a truthful examination of the conscious choices made by a generation approaching forty as they reassess those ideals and aspirations that they had thought as youths to be intrinsic to their identity.

Whytney Pugh was a runner-up in this year's Terry Hetherington Award.

Coming of Age for All Ages

2011-09-03T15:23:00.003+01:00

My son turned fourteen last month. Despite nights lost to computer games, he does still read. Christopher Paolini published Eragon aged 19. Inheritance, the final in his tetralogy, has been pre-ordered for November (bit late but worth the wait). Birth of a Killer, Irish writer Darren Shan’s first for The Saga of Larten Crepsley, will be ready in September, while Robert Muchamore’s latest in the Cherub series, People’s Republic, was another August birth. Dragons, vampires and boy agents aplently, and yes, these books are series brands. But teenage boys have much else to distract them, mostly in digital formats. And when do we need fantasy most, if not during those years of terrifying metamorphosis?

Another new Young Adult title is Hayley Long’s Lottie Biggs in (NOT) Tragic. As Hayley’s editor on her adult Kilburn Hoodoo (2006), I knew that this teacher with a touch of list-itis and a bad case of pun-orrhea would write for children. (Not) Tragic rounds off Whitchurch oddbod Lottie’s chicklit trilogy, introduces Winnie the Chinchilla and makes philosophy palatable to the GCSE generation. In the next issue of NWR, Hayley explains why kids prefer their favourite authors in multiples, ‘Teenagers like to collect things’, as well as why writing to ‘formula’ will not ever, never be a cinch.

One distinction between teenage fiction and ‘coming of age’ novels is the age of their target readerships. Another is that the moth morphs before our very eyes in the former, while it is recalled in the latter. NWR’s current issue sees ‘coming of age’ play out across the artforms. Young film-maker Tyler Keevil muses on the sound track in films such as Juno, Harold and Maude, and Persepolis. We have a preview pick from Gawain Barnard’s teenage photo portraits, Maybe We’ll be Soldiers, at Ffotogallery’s Pontcanna venue The Dairy (8-24 September). And Liz Jones reviews Richard Ayoade’s Submarine, comparing book and film. Particularly interesting is her criticism (in a positive piece) of the director for transplanting the setting from the original’s apathetic Nineties to an incongruously apolitical Eighties.

Joe Dunthorne spoke at Edinburgh this summer about his second novel, Wild Abandon, out early in August. The author has stuck with teenage voices. Kate and Albert respectively look to the suburbs and apocalypse to escape the collapse of their parents’ marriage and the Welsh commune that is their home. Elements of this may sound familiar but why strain for strange when you have warmth, insight and humour at your fingertips? Not for nothing was Submarine nominated for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic literature. Look out for NWR’s review of Wild Abandon. And in case you were wondering how to turn boys onto books? Unplug the Wifi.

A version of this was first published in Gwen's Western Mail Insider books column on Saturday 27 August 2011.

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Watch this space... upcoming editor blog, 'Academic Novelists are International Wallbreakers' reviewing Into Suez and Booker nomination The Last Hundred Days

Goodness Gracious Me: Wake up to Wales, Radio Four!

2011-09-02T17:59:00.005+01:00

Following his recent Daily Mail piece slamming Bred of Heaven, reviewer Roger Lewis is a dead cert for the Tacsi gong, a Kingsley Amis-sponsored prize for Welsh baiter of the year, previously held by AA Gill. He’s also in the running for the special Kapoor category for self-loathing (presented by Goodness Gracious Me’s Kulvinder Ghir). Raised in Bedwas, Lewis blames the country for a gamut of emotional dysfunctions including ‘hyper-restlessness [and] insane ambition’, even dipping his pen into blood with the racist term ‘appalling and moribund monkey language’.

I hesitate, therefore, to pat a shoulder already weighted with chips. And yet, apart from this slur and the ineradicable image Lewis creates of himself as a man en route to Outta Here trailing skid-marked personals across Cardiff’s departure lounge, his review is basically sound. As I discovered listening to Radio Four’s Book of the Week adaptation (8-12 August).

Independent publisher Profile deserves credit at least for securing this primetime media slot of Jasper Rees’ book, subtitled One Man’s Quest to Reclaim his Welsh Roots. But, give us a break, Radio Four! BBC radio executives continually pitch original writing (fiction and nonfiction) by authors who have a tad more than Rees’ Welsh grandfather to ground them here (and I’m not talking ethnicity or linguistics). Yet here is R4 giving voice to this superficial, stereotypical and outdated vision of Wales via Ben Miles’ mangled vowels (yes we have plenty, Roger)! It is packed (‘like Welshcakes with raisins’, Rees would gush) with ‘bustling’, bosomy mamgus, ‘regal’ swans, plates which ‘groan’ with food and a twee ‘Welsh kind of merriment.’ Annoyingly, Roger Lewis’ assessment that Rees is ‘an author in search of a gimmick’ is spot on.

BBC Wales’ executive producer for radio drama, Kate McAll, told me once that Welsh authors’ ‘bleak’ outlook was often the obstacle to their being adapted on the network as drama, short story readings or serials. But I would rather eat arsenic-laced bara brith than hear another word of Rees’ poorly written jolly to a spectacle of choirs, coracles, coalmines, mountains, rugby fields and (strangely, considering our nonconformist tradition) Caldey Island monks. And wash it down with the bitter Glengettie tea of Niall Griffiths, Caryl Lewis, Cynan Jones or Richard Collins’ fiction. However, we could use more homegrown creative nonfiction set in Wales (building on Seren’s excellent ‘Real’ series). Perhaps Rees’ travesty will inspire memoir writers such as Richard Gwyn and Griffiths, whose most recent works were mainly set respectively in Europe and Australia, to look closer to home for their material. Unlike Roger Lewis, most of us shrugged off the slate chips a few decades ago. We can turn our heads without obstruction. So let’s stop looking over our shoulders.

A version of this was first published in the Western Mail, Gwen's Insider books column, on Saturday 20 August 2011

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Watch this space... upcoming editor blog, 'Coming of Age for all ages', teenage fiction recommendations

The Empty Family, Colm Toibin and Touchy Subjects, Emma Donoghue. Review by Sophie Long

2011-08-19T16:09:00.003+01:00

On paper, Colm Toibin and Emma Donoghue are writers working very much in the same style. Both were born and educated in Ireland, both have lived and worked in the US and both have written a collection of short stories spanning these two countries. In practice however, these two authors could not be more different.

Colm Toibin’s The Empty Family has proved to be a challenging one for me both to read and to review. As a student of creative writing, these stories break almost all of the rules that have been almost relentlessly drummed into me. From sentences that are longer than two lines to graphic sexual descriptions, these things made this book extremely difficult to read with an open mind, and I had formed an unfavourable opinion of it within the first few pages.

However, perhaps the ‘rules’ are different for the more experienced. Under a more practised hand, what I saw as broken rules might in fact be the very best way of telling a story. So, I tried to stop isolating what I saw as negative points and consider them as part of the whole narrative. Did they work in the context of the story? For the most part the answer was yes. For example, the sexual content in 'Barcelona, 1975' might be eye-wateringly graphic, but the main character is a man discovering and testing his own and society’s boundaries. The bedroom is somewhere that this character can discover things about himself and the people around him, somewhere where every action, however small, can carry great meaning and consequence. In which case, the detail is important.

In Emma Donoghue’s Touchy Subjects, the themes are ostensibly the same – significant moments in human life. However, while Toibin’s characters are looking back on life changing moments in their own lives, for Donoghue’s characters, these moments are taking place, the characters reacting as their lives turn on often the tiniest of moments. This gives the stories in Touchy Subjects an immediacy and vibrancy that is necessarily lacking in the reminiscing style of The Empty Family.

Touchy Subjects also displays a wildly varied cast of characters, a born-again Christian, a woman who lies about being pregnant and a man donating sperm to his wife’s best friend. These characters are unusual in their actions, but Donoghue’s easy and unassuming prose makes them likeable and intriguing, as though we are reading about an old friend. In The Empty Family, Toibin’s characters speak through bleak but often highly symbolic language, making them a puzzling read, one where the reader is given nothing and must guess at everything. These characters are not easy to relate to, and they like it that way.

Where Touchy Subjects invites the reader in, The Empty Family leaves them to peer through the keyhole. Where characters in the latter are looking back, those in the former are experiencing, doing, feeling. Both styles are valid and both are equally strong in the way they invite us to watch the most intimate actions of their character’s lives.

These collections are well worth a read, but it is perhaps the interesting, immediate, person-next-door characters and stories of Touchy Subjects that have made the most lasting impression on me. I did not know enough about the characters in The Empty Family to allow me to feel close to them.

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Watch this space... upcoming editor blog, 'Goodness Gracious Me! Wake up to Wales, Radio Four!' (review of radio adaptation of Jasper Rees' Bred in Heaven) and 'Coming of Age for all ages', teenage fiction recommendations

Crotch-rot, gay lib and the payrolled poseur

2011-08-15T14:34:00.003+01:00

As I was an infant in the late sixties, you will forgive my ignorance of how tight men’s trousers had become. In The Naked Civil Servant (1968), Quentin Crisp describes the postwar acceleration of male flamboyance. ‘The population of England now contained more men than women… masculine plumage had become more colourful… the distinction between the sexes was reduced to the point where [you couldn’t] tell the boys from the girls if the clothes of the young men had not become so sexually revealing. Indeed their trousers could go no… nearer unless they adopted a Plantagenet style, wore tights and carried their pride and joy in a specially tailored sack tied with two smart bows.’

Since he was a life model who, when dressed and in his heyday, personified camp, Crisp’s account of art students’ style rings true (as does that of dwindling drawing skills and an ambition shrunk from Michelangelo Muse to payrolled poseur). How come I’d not read this stylish, scream of a memoir?

Another cultural milestone I missed, right up to 1979’s costume-change of crotch-rot latex for rip-aerating jeans, was how tight they were, how tight, throughout that decade too. But my sexual latency lasted longer than Crisp’s, apparently. Born in 1908, abused in infancy by a rag-and-bone man, he braved ostracism, street attacks, arrest, unemployment and snotty sales assistants. His getup was a satin-thread shy of cross dress, complete with crescent eyebrows and henna. Setting off with a mission to educate the world about homosexuality, by the sixties this had crystallised to personality. Nevertheless, the ‘queer-baiting’ continued. Unusually for a narcissist, Crisp happily turns the scalpel on his self. While his self-deprecation is as manicured as his ‘Mandarin’ nails, his perception never falters. Nor does his dissection of social nuance. ‘To the [new] generation… to whom the words “good and evil”, “innocence and guilt” have lost all meaning, it was no longer my wickedness that annoyed them; it was… my insistence on taking the blame for something on which judgement was no longer passed… the symbols… adopted forty years earlier to express my sexual type had become the uniform of young people… I had by mistake become the youngest teenager in the business.’

In the autumn issue of NWR, Mike Parker looks another generation ahead, at gay liberation’s ‘precocious adolescence’ in the post-AIDS era. How did Michael Tolliver, the darling of Armistead Maupin’s landmark Tales of the City becomes a ‘smug bore’ in the series’ latest addition, Mary Ann in Autumn? How does Maupin’s San Fransiscan haven compare with Tristan Garcia’s Paris in his new novel, Hate, A Romance, with its ‘freewheeling rage at the delusions of… liberal queers of the AIDS age’? Pass me my kegs: I’ll tell you.

This was first published in Gwen Davies' Saturday 'Insider' books column in the Western Mail, 13 August 2011

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Watch this space... upcoming editor blog, 'Goodness Gracious Me! Wake up to Wales, Radio Four!'