Off the bookshelf

Have just finished reading The Outcast, by Sadie Jones. It was incredibly well-reviewed and I had expected something life-altering. But, like another heavily marketed book, The Resurrectionist, I was left feeling a tiny bit short-changed. 

Of course, your expectations are always raised if something is hyped. But it's a book that leaves you wanting more. It ticked all the boxes: rounded characters – albeit no Huckleberry Finn or Garp or Scout. A decent plot. A period setting, with evidence of strong research. And fabulous writing – especially the drowning scene, which was vivid and shocking and tragic. But towards the end, I was skimming pages just to get to the finishing line. 

And I never quite cared about any of the characters, apart from the delightfully sozzled mother, who was bumped off rather too soon for my liking. It was all trauma and anger and violence, there was no respite, or humour, or moments where things weren't basically bloody awful. So after a while, it started to feel just a tiny bit tedious. 

 

Having said all that, she is a fantastic writer. Her evocation of 1950s Surrey is so intense you can almost smell the gin and freshly mown grass. The language is spare (my personal favourite) and transparent, rather than some fancy wrought-iron fence wrapped around the story – you can see right through it to the world she is describing. 

I also have on my bedside table Gerard Woodward's I'll Go to Bed at Noon, The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and The Robber Bride, by Margaret Atwood. All of which were poached from the strangely eclectic bookshelves at my parents' house. 

I'm reading Gerard Woodward at the moment, and have just enjoyed a funeral scene when one of the characters empties a pot of blackberry jam into her spiteful sister in law's handbag. It's details like this that you suspect come straight from real life – I have met Gerard, and he is one of these rare people who doesn't feel the need to fill the room with the sound of his own voice. Though quiet, he has a strong, rather charming presence, and seems quite content to take it all in, making the odd remark here and there. But when you read his work, and the detail of his observations, you realise what he's up to. I suspect that he wouldn't miss a sneeze two rooms away. 

Something else to work on in my own writing...

What a line: Mrs Dalloway

It took me about two years to finish Mrs Dalloway.

It's one of those books that I began with the best of intentions, but somehow I found her stream of consciousness writing so tedious and overcooked. It was like seeing Salvador Dali's lobster phone for the first time. Sure, he's came up with the idea of surrealism, but then others that came along after him refined his technique. It may have been an innovation at the time, I thought, but god I wish she'd just get to the point occasionally. 

And then, while I was doing the MA at Bath Spa, we looked at some of her short stories for our Poet's Eye workshops with Tim Liardet. Although others in the class declared that they 'can't stand the bitch' and threw the book across the room to prove it, gradually she won me over. Her words are – for me, anyway – best read aloud (I can do this silently, by imagining her posh, slightly trembling voice), and she won't be rushed. It's all about the particular, lilting rhythms of her carefully crafted sentences. The strangeness of her images.

And the occasional line that i just love. Like this one, decribing a guest at Mrs Dalloway's party:

'Nancy, dressed at enormous expense by the greatest artists in Paris, stood there looking as if her body had merely put forth, of its own accord, a green frill.'

That green frill stayed with me all day. And it made me think of another thing this fledgling blog might be good for: recording those strange, inspiring lines I come across while reading. So this is the first in the new 'what a line' category. It's tempting to start another whole blog just on this topic alone, but I don't want to get ahead of myself. 

Between the stacks: London libraries

Question: Where do you go to get some peace in London?

Answer: The Poetry Library

I've only really 'got' poetry in the last few years. I'd always felt it was somehow too hard to understand, deliberately abstract and difficult.

This all changed at a weekend writing workshop, when I shared my reservations with a genuine, real-life poet. He pursed his lips and told me to come along for the tutors' reading that night.

In a cavernous Tudor hall, he read some of his poems, holding our gaze after each one, letting his last line hang in the air for a moment or two. I'm going to teach you lot a thing or two, he seemed to be thinking as he turned the pages slowly. His poems were about ordinary things. One about a woman feeding apples to her dying husband woke me up, made me alert to the power of a clear image, sparingly conveyed.

Afterwards, he cornered me. 'Was that difficult to understand?' he demanded.

And I had to admit that it wasn't. His poems were like stories. Clear, vivid, engaging.

The fact that he spoke beautifully, and we were sitting in a candlelit hall, and I hadn't been read to since Mrs Storey swept through the fabulous Hating Alison Ashley in Year Four definitely helped, but it was more than that. I was a convert.

After that, I felt far more curious about poetry. I've met a few more genuine, real life poets since then, and they make a living teaching, writing, publishing and giving workshops and talks just like other artists. They also watch cricket, get drunk, read food magazines and crack jokes just like the rest of us.

Anyway, to get back on topic, the Poetry Library is the place to go in London if you need a bit of spirit-lifting. The people that work there are lovely. The phone doesn't ring, it tinkles. You'll get a little tour, and you can join up and borrow five books at a time. The librarians – many poets themselves – even show you how to work the stacks, which roll open with big wheels.

And they'll warn you gently to check no one is standing between them before you start rolling.
Although quite frankly, these days the thought of being flattened by poetry is nowhere near as scary or foreign to me as it once was.

Midnight in Sicily

'When travelling, always take with you a book set in the place you're going to.' 

This is one of those bits of advice that I always plan to follow, but when the day of departure arrives it never seems to happen. Sometimes I've forgotten my passport, and have to get back off the the bus, cross the road and catch another bus home to retrieve it ten minutes into my journey (Berlin, Christmas 2006). Sometimes I've moved house that morning, and all my books are in boxes that have been drop-kicked into the new flat before the door is slammed and the van is returned to the hire company, minus its rear vision mirror (Australia, January 2007) . Usually I just forget. 

But as I packed for my last trip, although I omitted a lot of other – in retrospect very useful– things... sunscreen, a hat, summer shoes, snorkelling gear – I did remember that a friend had given me a copy of Peter Robb's Midnight in Sicily. As we were on a Ryanair flight bound for Palermo, I stuffed it into my already overstuffed handbag. 

This book is a gem. Whether intentional or not, the writer has somehow mirrored the character of Sicily in his work – it's rambling, meandering, confusing, beautiful and almost too atmospheric. He veers, with no apparent design, from a discussion of the perfect espresso to the Mafia trials of the 90s, to a meeting with a Palermo transsexual, to a sobering account of a magistrate's murder. As a reader you simply follow him. 

I love his descriptions of food. He writes like a person with a healthy appetite and his description of pasta con le sarde had me peering at menus until I found it for myself. It's a mix of spaghetti, fresh sardines, saffron, wild Sicilian fennel and plump raisins. Found, ordered and swiftly eaten in the town square of Cefalu, where Cinema Paradiso was filmed, it certainly lived up to his prose – though not for very long. 

When he writes about his own experiences in Sicily and Naples he is brilliant, but I found the overview of Cosa Nostra less engaging. Perhaps he was writing for readers with a better general understanding of the organisation's history than I have. Or perhaps it is simply that Cosa Nostra is impossible to grasp, let alone articulate. It makes sense when he writes of a well-known mafia mantra: the best word is the one not spoken.