The Guardian's Blog, page 143

Women's fantasy fiction: join the quest for a world unknown to bookstores

'Blokes in cloaks' are still the overwhelming presences in the genre section. Who are the writers they've overlooked?

With Game of Thrones entering its fourth season on HBO later this year, bookshops up and down the country will soon be setting up tables stacked high with recommendations for what to read after GRR Martin. Let fantasy fans rejoice! Unless, that is, you happen to be a woman. According to the fantasy writer Juliet E McKenna, booksellers and the media are so obsessed with "grimdark books about blokes in cloaks" that it's hard for anyone else to get a hearing.

I will give a book of mine, of their choice, to the first person who can send me a photo of such a display that isn't entirely composed of male authors. Because I've yet to see one. I have challenged staff in bookshops about this, to be told "women don't write epic fantasy". Ahem, with 15 novels published, I beg to differ. And we read it too.

I'm one of those readers. We certainly do. And, partly in an attempt to redress McKenna's concern that the Guardian "repeatedly discuss[es] epic fantasy without ever once mentioning a female author", partly inspired by this fantastically overfunded Kickstarter, but mainly because I fancy finding something brilliant to read this weekend, let's name some of them.

Riffing off a 2012 list of fantasy writers which included nine women out of 113, SFF blogger Werthead makes a great start. Robin Hobb – yes, she's brilliant (my go-to reread). Who else out there is just a little bit excited about this summer's release of a new book in the Fool and Fitz story, Fool's Assassin? Werthead also reminds me that I've been meaning to read NK Jemisin for ages, and that Elizabeth Bear is wonderful.

Here in this household, Ursula K Le Guin is a fixture on the bookshelves, as are Jaqueline Carey, Juliet Marillier and Kelly Link. It's on the horror side, but I adore Muriel Gray's books, as well as Diana Wynne Jones (for children, but I still read them). I loved G Willow Wilson's Alif the Unseen, I have just started reading Sarah Pinborough, I've liked both of Jess Richards's quirky, fantastical outings Snake Ropes and Cooking with Bones, and my new favourite author is Kameron Hurley, partly because God's War is so good, partly because she makes such good points about the trap of hyper-masculinity.

I'm thinking of starting the weekend with something by Mary Robinette Kowal, an author I've never read, but who has behaved with such good grace in the latest SFWA row. But who are the other female fantasy authors you'd recommend, and where should I start?

FantasyFictionAlison Flood
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Margaret Atwood translates translation

The novelist has great sympathy for those taking her work abroad, perhaps because her own life has provided similar problems to decode

As it was the WG Sebald lecture, Margaret Atwood told her audience at the British Library, she was entitled to make it as freeform as Sebald's writing, full of "peripatetic" wanderings, mixing up memoir with other genres, and just plain "odd".

Though this was a warning not to expect a linear argument, let alone a theory of translation, her beguiling autobiographical digressions in Atwood in Translationland were not there just for fun. They illustrated that "we spend much of our childhood translating"; that it's a universal activity, not one confined to professional translators. Atwood recalled a childhood divided between Ottawa (where her parents listened to bemusing BBC radio broadcasts) and a cabin in Quebec, where the local language was French and she would try to decode the writing on cereal packets.

Other puzzles included the symbols used in cartoon speech bubbles to indicate extreme emotion, hints of sex in murder mysteries, and phrases such as "interfered with" in newspaper crime reports (she blundered in decrypting "child molester", Atwood said, assuming it meant a child willing to collect moles).

And then there was nonsense verse, such as Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky ("helpfully some translation is provided, though by an egg"), which led her on to Alice saying to Humpty Dumpty: "The question is, whether you can make words mean so many different things." To which he replies: "The question is, which is to be master – that's all." She found in this exchange an encapsulation of two possibilities: are you "using language like a tool", or is it impossible to control and even "processing" you like a computer?

Being a novelist, Atwood implied, is at once an attempt at mastery and a surrender of control, and more loss of control – being processed – is what paradoxically happens if you're successful enough to be translated. Although she had some examples of daft questions she'd been asked by translators ("Is this funny or not funny?"), they were outnumbered by instances of difficulties her writing posed for them ("I'm always a nightmare – puns, jokes, neologisms"), and the challenges that all fiction presents.

Balancing readability and fidelity, deciding whether to incorporate foreign phrases or go for a "seamless" read, tackling slang, finding the right language for historical fiction or for protagonists who can be "a pig, an Orc, a rabbit, a vampire, a Mohican or a curlew", getting round the peculiarities of particular tongues (Finnish, for example, has only gender-neutral pronouns) – "the choices that bedevil the writer bedevil the translator 10 times over. If a writer has a bad day, you can say, 'At least I don't have to do a freaking translation.'"

Far from depicting them as nuisances bound to distort her words, she viewed translators sympathetically, as serious Alices lost in bewildering Atwoodland, and potentially as her most intimate creative partners: "Nobody is going to be reading more closely than a translator. Some have picked up typos that editors have missed."

Margaret AtwoodFiction in translationFictionWritten languageJohn Dugdale
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Mots justes: pick the perfect word in a poem

At Oxford, I was taught that every particle of a poem can amplify its meaning, and when poets get it right individual words can add volumes of sense. Trying to fill in some of their blanks is a useful lesson in this fine art

My favourite episode from Monty Python's Flying Circus features a trio of inept Spanish Inquisitors charging a little old lady with heresy. She doesn't understand, is pummelled with soft pillows, and when she is unaffected, is put into – gasp! – the comfy chair. She must remain there until lunchtime, with only coffee at 11 to sustain her!

I found this irresistible, at the time, because it mirrored some of my Oxford tutorials, during which my tutor continually challenged me with various torments designed to make me – a naive colonial in his eyes – feel uncomfortable, and perhaps to confess my dire lack of (English) sophistication.

One day, as I sat myself down in his comfy chair, and sipped my coffee, he asked me to open my Collected Poetry of Matthew Arnold, and to read To Marguerite.

Sensing a trap, I perused the poem anxiously, gingerly, took my time, read, reread, thought and rethought. I could feel him lurking on the sofa across from me, ready to pummel me with his soft pillows.

As adequately prepared as I could be, I looked up.

"There is only one line of genuine poetry in the entire poem," he announced. "Which is it?"

I could hardly have been more astonished if a golem had slithered down the chimney. I'd never heard anyone say anything like that, never regarded it as a thinkable thought: a substantial poem with only one line of poetry?

I was aware that it was an Arnoldian trick he was playing, for I had – only the previous week – offered him an essay attacking Arnold's notion of "touchstones" – lines of poetry that, according to Arnold, were in themselves enough "to keep clear and sound our judgments about poetry."

So what did I – smartarse American postgraduate student – have to say when invited on a touchstone hunt?

It never occurred to me to resist the question, deny its postulates, turn it around, sniff it all over, and reject it as as stale as last week's crumpets. "Goodness me," I might have said, "do you honestly think that is a reasonable thing to ask?"

He pounced. "It's obvious, dear boy," he murmured, citing the final line of the poem: "'the unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea'. Pure poetry, lovely."

On consideration, that seemed pretty poetic to me. (Certainly the poem ends better than it starts: the opening line is a clear contender for Worst Ever: "Yes! in the sea of life enisled"). But the more I thought about my tutor's answer, the more questions I wanted to ask. Had I had the nerve, I would have observed that, in his one line of genuine poetry, there is only one poetic word. "What is it, dear old thing?"

The key, of course, lies in the string of adjectives. There is nothing very exciting about calling the sea "unplumb'd": it gets pretty deep out there. Nor is "estranging" likely to give one much of an aesthetic thrill; indeed, it's a cliché. But "salt"? That is another matter, and rather wonderful. You don't need the concept of touchstones to make this point: the very nature of poetry should consist, as Coleridge put it, of "the best words in the best order". Arnold's "salt" is such a word. We do not expect to meet it there, and having done so are delighted, and teased into further thought and deeper admiration. When he rejects the obvious and inadequate adjective "salty," for a term that is at once adjective, verb and noun, the possibilities multiply incrementally.

We may first think of tears, and undrinkable, deathly water. Or perhaps pillars of salt? Yet the biblical connotations of "salt" are generally positive, coming as they do from a middle-Eastern context. If you salt something you may enhance it, preserve it, disinfect it. Salt was used as an offering, or a symbol of friendship. Newborn babies were rubbed with salt to greet them into the world, and to protect them. Arnold knew this, and was drawing upon it. Thus "salt" which seems to confirm the bleak emotional register of "unplumb'd" and "estranging" – as might seem appropriate in a poem which is a lament for the transience of love – also opposes the pervasive sense of hopelessness. His sea, at the final moment, is estranging and connecting, a symbol of life and death, of love and the failure of love.

So we have the best word in the best place. You might make this point pedagogically, and dramatically, by using a fill-in-the-blank method.

"Here is the last line of a poem. What do you think goes best in the blank space?"

   The unplumb'd, ________, estranging sea.

If you gave this to 100 very smart students, poets and critics – having allowed them read the rest of the poem – not one of them would come up with "salt," though a good few of the less able might have suggested "unplumb'd" or "estranging" if the blanks had been there.

But it's not enough that we be surprised, of course. It may be necessary, but it is hardly sufficient, else we might have the distinctly surprising, but inappropriate, "pancreatic," or "buxom," or "left-wing" – the kinds of random adjectives that computer-generated poetry spews out.

For what we need, in filling in this blank, is not merely a word – the best word – that is appropriate to the sea, but also necessary to the sea in this particular poem. Else you might suggest "snotgreen" or "scrotumtightening," which work pretty well in Ulysses, but would shipwreck To Marguerite.

Let me give another instance, keeping with the image of the sea, this time not the last line of a poem, but the first:

   She sang beyond the ______ of the sea,

We don't have much to go on. We may be looking for a spatial concept, or one involving physical qualities like sound, or wetness. There might be a reference to the emotional effects of being at the seaside – the sorts of feelings carried by "unplumb'd" and "estranging" – but we have, as yet, no information. To Marguerite's three adjectives conclude the poem, this single word will give us a crucial early insight into what the poet is going to be up to, and – if it works – suggest a deal of what is to come.

OK. You've made a list. There are a vast number of possibilities, many of which might work, given that we have nothing much to go by. But in the light of a knowledge of the whole poem, the chosen word is, if not inevitable, then merely perfect:

   She sang beyond the genius of the sea,

Not many of my panel of 100 would have got this, which is why they are just guessers and our poet is Wallace Stevens (and the poem The Idea of Order at Key West). "Genius" is a remarkably rich word, which can be made to work – as it does here – in a variety of ways. We associate it with brilliance, depth and acuity, but it also refers to an essence, ability or influence. In Middle English a genius is an attendant spirit, somewhat later the term may refer to a disposition, and later still to a special capacity. All of these possibilities are tossed into the air in the opening lines, and the poet is going to make various uses of them.

Already we are engaged and intrigued: What might it mean to be "beyond" the genius of something? What does singing have to do with it? Who is "She?" In eight words the poet has captured us entirely, suggested myriad possibilities, and revealed almost all, and almost nothing, of what is to come.

I have done this analysis sketchily and too quickly, of course, for such an exercise requires time, and concentration: the leisure to point to this, and then to that, to consider and to reconsider, to connect one thing to another, and both to something else. To me this is what good reading necessitates, and why it is so rewarding. I was trained, all those years ago, in what Americans called "new criticism," and the English – prompted by IA Richards – called "practical criticism". The loving and unstinting attention to the words on the page. I learned to read like this, and I have spent a reading lifetime being grateful for it.

Not many people read like this anymore. The university departments of literature caved in to the newly fashionable structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstruction. Feminist and post-feminist, gender and queer theory, and post-colonial interpretations were put forward as evidence of right "readings". I found this then – and continue to find it – alien, and diminishing to the primary authority of the author and of his or her words on the page. I am sometimes engaged by feminist or post-colonial interpretations of literature, but what I object to is the prevailing tendency to substitute this mindset for one which engages carefully with literary language itself. When I read such commentary, or exegesis of a poem or work of fiction, the fact that it is literature disappears. The texts are appropriated, and converted into instances, signs and symptoms of this, or that, or the other. These judgments are too frequently delivered in voices oozing the self-righteousness, self-referentiality, and self-satisfaction of the true believer. And the attendant contempt for non-believers.

I'm reminded of the wise words of John Kenneth Galbraith: "Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialisation is a cover for either grave ____or terminal _____, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom."

The blanks?
(1) "cerebral inadequacy"
(2) "laziness"

You might well have guessed those.

And, yes, there's an irony here. As my tutor's Arnoldian reading was superseded by my generation's new criticism, so were our reading ways overtaken by post-structuralism and various ideologically-driven modes of interpretation. It's a fact, it may be the essential fact, of human life: things come, and they go. But I don't have to like it, or to accede gracefully. I seem to get saltier in my old age.

PoetryRick Gekoski
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Cry babies: children's books that make you blub

It's embarrassingly easy for bedtime stories to get me weeping. How about you? Share your sorrows here

This is not something I am proud of, but sometimes – often – reading a bedtime story to my three-year-old daughter, I find myself choking back the tears. The most recent culprit is Julia Donaldson's Paper Dolls. It's the little girl's memories which get me every time: after a little boy chops up her chain of dolls, they "flew into the little girl's memory, where they found white mice and fireworks, and a starfish soap, and a kind granny, and the butterfly hair slide, and more and more lovely things each day and each year." The kind granny! It's heartbreaking.

Obviously, Goodbye Mog is a tear-jerker of the first order, but I've even been known to shed a tear at Owl Babies ("And she came! Soft and silent, she swooped through the trees … ) And at Peepo! – the mundanity, the sweet everyday baby-ness, of "and his teddy, and his ball" ; the father in his soldier uniform who might not come home. And if I'm in a particularly saccharine mood, at Guess How Much I Love You ("to the moon and back", of course). It's just a cold, I tell my daughter valiantly, as I dash away the tears.

I thought it was just me – I'm pretty easy to move to tears at the best of times, and I had a new baby six months ago. But a quick google reveals there are lots of us out there, with Mumsnetters blaming everything from Once There Were Giants – yes, we got this from the library a few weeks back and I was surreptitiously sniffing while reading – to The Snail and the Whale for bringing on the weepies. "And she gazed at the sky, the sea, the land, / The waves and the caves and the golden sand, / She gazed and gazed, amazed by it all, / And she said to the whale, 'I feel so small'."

God help me when she gets a bit older and we start on E Nesbit. Just thinking of Bobbie's "Oh! My daddy, my daddy!" has me crying right now. Here, let me quote it more fully and see if I can start any of you off:

That scream went like a knife into the heart of everyone in the train, and people put their heads out of the windows to see a tall pale man with lips set in a thin close line, and a little girl clinging to him with arms and legs, while his arms went tightly around her.

Didn't work? How about these last lines from a children's classic?

Still with his eyes on the world Christopher Robin put out a hand and felt for Pooh's paw. 'Pooh,' said Christopher Robin earnestly, 'if I – if I'm not quite – ' he stopped and tried again - 'Pooh, whatever happens, you will understand, won't you?' 'Understand what?' 'Oh, nothing.' He laughed and jumped to his feet. 'Come on!' 'Where?' said Pooh. 'Anywhere,' said Christopher Robin. So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.

I asked Twitter for suggestions, and have been inundated with reminders of titles which should come with parental warnings: Dogger by Shirley Hughes, The Sad Book by Michael Rosen, Lost and Found by Oliver Jeffers. I'd love to hear about the children's books which make you cry when reading to your kids – mainly so I can steel myself when I inevitably end up picking them up from the library …s

Children and teenagersJulia DonaldsonMichael RosenShirley HughesAA MilneAlison Flood
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Why Henry Miller and Louis-Ferdinand Céline deserve success as well as scandal

Eighty years after their breakthough books, these writers' reputations have declined but their influence is as vital as ever

This year marks the 80th anniversary of two scandalous books: Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller and the first English edition of Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (originally published in France in 1932). Featuring rowdy descriptions of sex and profanity – mainly in Paris during the late 1920s and early 30s – these novels outraged readers and set new literary precedents. Both books were semi-autobiographical first-person anti-narratives: their authors' use of slang and surreal imagery were at odds with the popular realist style of the period, and notoriety soon beckoned.

Overnight, Céline became a celebrity, receiving a nomination for the prestigious Prix Goncourt. Elsewhere, George Orwell heralded Miller as "the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past". But despite their initial acclaim, Tropic and Journey have had more influence on other writers than mainstream audiences. Today, you're more likely to find Tropic hidden in the erotic book section of many bookshops, and only small independent publishers have ever dared to print Journey in Britain. Why?

Partially because of the controversy that surrounds these authors and their books. Tropic was banned until 1961 in the US for its "obscene" content; in the UK it faced similar prohibition until the same decade. This made it an underground classic but also prevented it from gaining wider readership. That his prose is occasionally overwrought and misogynistic has also not helped Miller's reputation. Consider the following passage: "O Tania, where now is that warm cunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters, those soft, bulging thighs? There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed." The transgressive tone is seemingly borrowed from Rimbaud, the French poet whom Miller admired so much he published a book-length study of his verse, and the pornographic element of such descriptions was undoubtedly the result of Miller's second career writing sex novels to make ends meet.

When Miller arrived in Paris from his native New York in 1930, he was poor, middle–aged, yet determined to become an artist. He lived hand-to-mouth during these years, doing anything to get by, including entering into relationships with women who provided him with shelter and money, mostly notably Anaïs Nin, who wrote a book about their affair and funded the first edition of Tropic. Miller's debut novel gives a frank account of this period, yet with the characteristic enthusiasm of a new writer desperate to appear literary. The book is peppered with philosophical asides, poetic outbursts and graphic sexual details, devices pioneered by his hero Rimbaud, whom Miller is often merely mimicking. Tropic is not Miller's finest book, but nonetheless an important introduction to his innovative literary vision.

Comparatively, Journey has aged better. Detailing the fortunes of "Ferdinand Bardamu" as he survives the first world and travels to Africa and America before becoming a doctor in Paris (like its author), Journey is exceptional because of Céline's talent for black humour. "When the grave lies open before us, let's not try to be witty," he says, reflecting on his experience in the trenches. "But on the other hand, let's not forget, but make it our business to record the worst of human viciousness we've seen without changing one word. When that's done, we can curl up our toes and sink into the pit."

Such sentiment won him praise from left-wing figures including Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir; he was even invited to tour the USSR, which he declined. However, in 1937 he published the first of three anti-Semitic pamphlets and during the second world war he served as a physician under Nazi occupation. After the war, he was lucky to escape the firing squad, and although he published many more books, his reputation still remains divisive. Given his later fascist ties, it's difficult to find quite so much enjoyment in Céline's frequently misanthropic observations, yet writers still cite both him and Miller as sources of inspiration. In an essay entitled Writers Lost in the Distance, the late Chilean author Roberto Bolaño praised Miller's work and lamented his slide into literary oblivion. Celine has also been celebrated by writers including Will Self, Irvine Welsh, Tom McCarthy and William T Vollmann.

Elsewhere, their itinerant lifestyles hugely impressed the Beats in the 1950s, and William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg visited Céline in Paris in 1958. In an early short story called Entropy, Thomas Pynchon tipped his hat to Miller by opening with a quote from Tropic. Samuel Beckett also paid tribute to the American's debut, calling it "a momentous event in the history of modern writing". Indeed, the ambiguously autobiographical novel, which Miller and Céline championed, has also seen resurgence in modern literature through the work of WG Sebald, Enrique Vila-Matas, Paul Auster and Iain Sinclair. So why have these two authors been lionised to such degree?

The answer seems to be the result of the premium Miller and Céline placed on the role of language in our understanding of the world. What their highly personal works suggest is that the experience of both life and fiction can only be expressed through words, and that as such, the two share the same intellectual space; a philosophical idea that Proust and Thomas de Quincey arguably first introduced to literature. But whereas Proust romanticised this very human experience and De Quincey sought truth in his dreamlike opium visions, Miller and Céline presented this blurring of the distinction between fact and fiction as a nightmare, hence the ultimately nihilistic visions of both Tropic and Journey. However, in doing so they also pioneered a new concept of the novel; one written in caustic language, that abandoned the structure of the realist novel that James Joyce had begun demolishing in Ulysses. This is reason enough to revisit these old, uneven masterpieces.

FictionRoberto BolañoWG SebaldWill SelfGeorge OrwellSamuel BeckettHuw Nesbitt
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Moving stories: what do you do with your books when you change houses?

For a nomadic generation, the question of how to look after – or get rid of – a personal library is a recurring anxiety

How do you maintain a library when you've got no room for your books? No, this isn't the start of a JL Carr novel; it's a genuine conundrum faced by bookish 20 and 30somethings across the UK. With relentlessly rising rents, and record numbers of young people having to move back in with their parents, it's become clear that we are a nomadic generation.

As a student in Leeds I moved house three times in four years; in London it was seven times in three years. My experience was driven by the problems facing everyone renting in the capital; dodgy landlords, relocation for work, rent hikes, unemployment, a triple infestation of cockroaches, mice and pigeons. We've all been there. Regularly having to load your possessions into laundry bags and crisp boxes takes a toll on your finances and energy, but the effect on our book collection is rarely considered.

Maintaining a collection of beloved books in a damp flat with no shelves, which you'll probably have to move out of in six months' time, is a challenge. Prioritising which books to keep and which to jettison becomes increasingly difficult. Do you hold on to the books you know you'll reread or do you keep the to-be-read pile intact? I have a copy of A Literature of Their Own by Elaine Showalter which, invariably, is forced on some unsuspecting friend right before every house move and then reclaimed the next day. A few of them have attempted to speed-read this fairly dense feminist literary history in the 48 hours I usually let it out of my sight but most have now learnt not to take it out of the bag.

Donating books to a charity shop or local school may be virtuous, but when you haven't had time to read them since your last move it becomes depressing. I dutifully moved a copy of Infinite Jest through six different postcodes, without reading it, until a recent move to Amsterdam meant choosing between 1,079 pages of David Foster Wallace and my hairdryer. Some books we can't give up for the oddest of reasons; there's a copy of Much Ado About Nothing I've been moving around for nearly a decade because Beatrice's speech to Benedict about eating Claudio's heart in the marketplace is the only piece of Shakespeare I have ever managed to memorise.

"Just buy a Kindle!" you might argue – but for many people, books are more than just books. They offer us an emotional connection to the past, to the person who gave it to us. They are a way to brighten up a dingy flat, they are a link to home, they are the hardest thing to move and the most enjoyable thing to unpack.

A recent essay by author Thomas E Kennedy in The New Yorker's Paragraphs Lost column focused on an elderly bibliophile wandering around his house looking for a book. It's beautifully written but, for someone living in rented accommodation, it's the size of his house rather than the style of his prose that makes an impression. He has multiple rooms, multiple bookcases; the man has so many books, he can lose books within his books!

So what do you do if you're moving into your childhood bedroom (which, if you're lucky, hasn't already been colonised by a younger sibling)? What if you're already facing your second move this year and can't bear the thought of pensioning off more of your beloved books? You start reading more. Read every book in your current bedroom and work out if they're worth the trip, give away as many books as you can, leave books with trusted friends to be reclaimed at a later point. Start looking at your books creatively; that stack of unread Daphne du Maurier novels can be a wobbly beside table. That copy of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman becomes a draft excluder.

The idea of worrying about your book collection when you're facing homelessness does, at first, seem slightly ludicrous. Anyone faced with logging onto Spareroom every lunchtime and trailing around dark streets with greasy estate agents every night would immediately swap their entire library for a guaranteed place to stay. But when you are trapped in the rental market, feeling at home in your overpriced, underheated room is important. Until councils start building more houses than they sell off, the majority of young people are going to be renting for a long time. While MPs score points off each other in the housing debate and then go home to their mansions, don't we all deserve one Billy bookcase full of favourite reads and yet to be discovered treasures?

Beulah Maud Devaney
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William Burroughs' opposite number: Maurice Helbrant

Narcotic Agent, the undercover policeman's memoir, originally published back-to-back with Junky, is an intriguing reverse angle on addiction

Junky is a partial, subjective account of heroin addiction and the drug users' underworld. That's not a criticism: the book's strength comes from a feeling of intimate knowledge and immediacy. Who better to give you the view from the gutter than William Burroughs?

Even so, the book does provoke plenty of questions about the other side of the coin - about the laws Burroughs so disparages and the "cops" who enforce them. Those men who appear in the book as variously "frog-faced", devious and loutish, meriting only withering descriptions: "This type of cop could just as well be an oldtime rod-riding thug. There was nothing of the bureaucrat about him."

Readers of the first printed version of the novel didn't have far to look if their curiosity about Burroughs' adversaries was aroused. They only had to turn the book over and start reading Narcotic Agent, the account of former policeman Maurice Helbrant that came 69'd with Junky.

Today, it is harder. Junky remains in print as a Penguin Classic, lovingly adorned with appendices, and with a superb scholarly introduction by Oliver Harris. Narcotic Agent has all but disappeared.

Still, if you've got a spare few thousand pounds, you can pick up a copy of the Ace Original paperback and read Narcotic Agent alongside the original Junky. I don't have that kind of money, but I did manage to get hold of an Arno Press edition from 1981. Back then, it was re-released in the scholarly series Addiction in America, alongside such intriguing sounding titles as Inebriety (1888), Drugs That Enslave (1881), Morbid Craving For Morphia (1878) and Japan and the Opium Menace (1942). It has an austere red, faux-leather cover with the title picked out in gold on the front. There are no notes or other apparatus and the pages are falling out. It's not a book that seems likely to gain a wide audience anytime soon. Except, of course, it's intrinsically fascinating as the companion piece to Junky.

I'd love now to be able to crack a joke about how I've read Narcotic Agent so you don't have to, but like William Burroughs when he read it, I have to report, with some surprise, that it isn't bad. I hesitate to endorse it entirely. After a while I grew tired of Helbrant's repetitive adventures and lack of reflection. Reading the book is a useful way of measuring Burroughs' achievement. Junky is far more intense, more vivid, more horrible. The prose is smarter, faster, funnier. It's also a better completed book, with a real feeling of development as the narrator's habit deepens and darkens, his supply ebbs and flows. Narcotic Agent feels like a rough patchwork. Helbrant essentially bungs down as many episodes he can remember from his career, with few thoughts about the wider context or implications of how he himself has changed as a result of the work. Even so, in his workmanlike way, he does give a good account of a unique world and of his own highly risky movements within it. It is, as the author remarks in a typically appalling joke, "the straight dope".

Helbrant is vague about dates, but it seems he started off his career in the early 1920s, during prohibition, and as the 1914 Harrison act was being applied more and more stringently to narcotics users. It ended just before the second world war (and so a few years before Burroughs became an addict). The agent's basic modus operandi was almost exactly as Burroughs lays things out in Junky:

Narcotics agents operate largely with the aid of informers … The … pigeon is given marked money and sent out to make a buy. When the pigeon makes the buy with this money, the agents close in right away to make the arrest.

Helbrant operated undercover. He would roll into town accompanied by a stool pigeon (generally a local user who was either in the pay of his bureau or keen to escape a prison sentence), win the confidence of local suppliers, get his pigeon to make a buy with marked notes and then start making arrests. In the book he travels round Florida, New Orleans, Chicago, anywhere his department has been told there is a "problem". He stays in seedy hotels, often sleeping in the same room as his stool pigeon, sometimes alone with a whisky bottle, sometimes with his wife, who was also in the pay of the bureau, and his dog. He hangs around long enough to make a case, arrests the felons, and almost unfailingly, tells the press all about it. (He loves including newspaper clippings in his accounts.) Then he moves onto the next place.

He was a ruthless, unscrupulous operator, as he himself explains:

I worked hard on my assignments and stopped at nothing– nothing within the law. I had to be tough. I had to wade in muck and fight for my successes, sometimes for my life. I lied, cheated, double-crossed. I was a spy. But as a spy I played within the rules …

In the book, Helbrant treats the law as a kind of permissive deity. So long as he remains faithful to it, he allows himself the right to wreck any number of lives. Most of the people he entraps seem essentially harmless, especially in the early days, before criminalisation ensured that drugs moved into the hands of genuine gangsters. They are doctors, wives, shopkeepers as often as they are thugs. But Helbrant only vaguely alludes to guilt, when he sees the wife of one of his victims, now reduced to working behind the counter of a department store while her radio-announcer husband languishes in jail: "I turned before she saw me. How she must have hated me!"

Otherwise, the book is notable for its singular lack of doubt – and for the clear pleasure he gets in taking people down. He at least gives some justification for the relish with which he torments drug users. Early on in the narrative, in one of his best bits of writing, he explains how he "first heard of dope" and by implication, why he took against it. As a young teenager, he got a job in a cinema, working as a "rewind boy" for the projector operator, "a young fellow called Happy". He says that: "One night the reel stopped suddenly and I turned to see Happy's hand stiffen on the crank, to see him sag and finally crumple on the floor. His heart had stopped from an overdose of morphine, they said later. At any rate, he was dead."

But the strong impression I took from the narrative wasn't so much that Helbrant hated dope as that he was obsessed by it. Early on he says that the subject of dope "has a powerful fascination for most people". It definitely does for him. All through the book he keeps mentioning how much he loves the job, the thrill, the hunt: "We were buyers because we preferred to be."

His obsession is equal and opposite to the narrator of Junky. He too is obviously attracted by the underworld, gets a kick from hanging out on the fringes of society and talks incessantly about dope, the things it does to you, ways to spot a user, ways to get hold of your own, ways to take it, ways to fake it. The book becomes interesting not so much for its differences to Junky as its similarities. As such, it's an ideal companion piece. The editor of Ace editions may have been wiser than he is often given credit for in pairing this book up with Junky. They illuminate each other. Of course, the important difference is that thousands of people still read and value Junky without knowing anything about Helbrant. If Narcotic Agent has any claim on today's readers, it's thanks to an unrepentant addict - an irony to be savoured, even if it hardly needs pointing out.

William BurroughsSam Jordison
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Poem of the week: The Solar Microscope by Walter Savage Landor

Victorian science provides the imagery for a droll vision of competing poets devouring each other's status

Walter Savage Landor begins his 1858 collection, Dry Sticks Fagoted, with a graceful but not entirely modest apologia. His "sticks" may be slender, he says, short of leaves, gnarled and knotty, but they might also be "laurels of a species uncultivated in England" (the 83-year-old poet was living mainly in Italy at the time).

"Here are light matters within," he adds, "twigs, broken buds, moss: but who, in making up a volume, has not sometimes had reason to complain of a quality the reverse of lightness?" The same goes for readers, one might add, especially readers of Victorian poetry. So, for this week's poem, a twig – unlike the beautifully-polished miniatures usually chosen by anthologists to represent Landor's English verse. The Solar Microscope is not a masterpiece but it engagingly combines a young man's curiosity with an old man's irony to remind us that, as Landor's admirer, Yeats, went on to say, concerning poets: "The only thing certain about us is that we are too many."

At 10 lines, The Solar Microscope is epigrammatic without quite being an epigram. Its first six lines seem to have an underlying didactic and descriptive impulse. It's almost as if the speaker had begun by letting himself get pleasantly lost in examining this new scientific gadget – a microscope using mirrors and sunlight to project enlarged images on a screen.

Landor would probably have seen such a microscope and observed its projections. Did he perhaps visit the Regent Street shop of the brilliant optical inventor, Philip Carpenter, and witness a demonstration of lucernal microscopes? Perhaps he simply saw the cartoon by William Heath, inspired by Carpenter's demonstrations [PDF], and entitled Monster Soup commonly called Thames Water.

Landor's "animalcules" (wonderful old word!) are perceived from the start as predators, constantly in pursuit of "each that goes before" and spoiling for a fight with their challengers, as line six seems to imply. It's only a small step across the stanza break from animalcules to analogy, and the subject of the apostrophe, "Poets!"

Landor includes himself in the throng he imagines caught struggling in their watery moment. No doubt, as a writer whose career ranged over several generations, he was acutely aware of the march of his successors. The major Romantics lived and died within his lifespan. Yet it's hard to imagine him as a poet heavily motivated by early reputation-seeking, or subsequent envy of the young. He was surely too confident an individualist. And he seems to have had good relations with several younger writers, Southey and Browning, for example, and Charles Dickens, for whom he provided the model for Lawrence Boythorn in Bleak House.

"Impetuous" Landor may have been in his loves and lawsuits, but the poems often express a dry and darkly amused stoicism. He translates into English the temperament, as well as the sentence-structure, of the classical writers he loved, with all the stylishness of Housman (his true successor?) and a little less of the sentimentality. Not that Landor is never sentimental: a tone of tender amorousness persists throughout his writing, and seems a particularly endearing quality in the poems of his old age:

 Lo! where the four mimosas blend their shade
In calm repose at last is Landor laid;
For ere he slept he saw them planted here
By her his soul had ever held most dear,
And he had liv'd enough when he had dried her tear.
    (From an Epitaph at Fiesole)

Some commentators consider that Landor's best poems are to be found among the many verses he wrote in Latin, and that his reputation has suffered as a result of their neglect. That may be so, but how well, today, are even Landor's English poems known? Fine as the anthology favourites are, there are many other stylish, funny, sad, spritely short pieces which deserve to be discovered by any poetry reader who ever " … had reason to complain of a quality the reverse of lightness".

The Solar Microscope

You want a powerful lens to see
What animalcules those may be,
Which float about the smallest drop
Of water, and which never stop,
Pursuing each that goes before,
And rolling in unrest for more.

Poets! a watery world is ours,
Where each floats after, each devours,
Its little unsubstantial prey …
Strange animalcules … we and they !

PoetryCarol Rumens
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Write like Hemingway? There's an app for that

If you want to make your writing 'bold and clear' a new app puts Papa at your shoulder. But can software really help those who have not a prose style?

They made an app. It was a good app. I tried it and wrote better. Then killed a bear.

There is a lot of software offering help to aspiring creative writers (and indeed established ones who have lost confidence) get past the many obstacles in their way. Organising research, plot points, fact checks, thesaurus. Some even offer to advise you on style, but few will be convinced that the journey to their Pulitzer will go via iTunes.

Another stumbling block to creation, of course, is often the oppressive sense that other writers have already written what you want to so much better than you ever could. Some might say this is a necessary bump in the road, requiring the writer to bear with their anxiety of influence, use some negative capability and thereby write something fresh. Others might say: This calls for an app!

And so, answering this call, comes a bit of useful Hemingway programming which offers virtual advice from the man who everybody says is so bloody marvellous.

Actually it's not entirely bad: it points out excessive adjectives, tiresome uses of the passive voice and so on. What it doesn't do, sadly, obviously, is get you any closer to Papa's prose. I fed in some more or less random passages from The Sun Also Rises: some of them were declared "good", others much worse. Surprise surprise: a good prose style plainly makes itself up as it goes along. It would be nice though. Very nice. I could win prizes. And then kill bears.

Ernest HemingwayFictionClassicsLindesay Irvine
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Can't kick the habit: why do so many writers create fictional nuns?

Many authors have explored the rich plot and character possibilities thrown up by the physical, moral and cultural confinement of the convent

As the film Philomena heads into awards season, draped with nominations for Oscars and Baftas, you might think nuns are having a bad PR moment. But then over at Team Convent, Call the Midwife is the star of BBC TV's Sunday nights with a much more sympathetic crew. Both these are fictionalised versions of real stories, and they are just the tip of the iceberg: there are large numbers of nuns in books – surely higher than their incidence in the real-life population – with nearly all the descriptions coming from women authors, though there are a few good men below. (Strangely, I made the same point about flat-sharing in books – is it something to do with women and single-sex groups?).

Muriel Spark liked her nuns – one of the main characters in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie ends up as Sister Helena, and there is a Marxist Church of England convent in Symposium: in one splendid scene the haloes on the figures in a mural are revealed as the fur hats of Lenin and friends. The Abbess of Crewe is wholly set in a convent, but is well known to be a satire on the Watergate scandal.

And that demonstrates a key feature of convents, fictional or otherwise – they are not actually mysterious hotbeds of unknowable religious transcendence or wickedness. They are communities like any other, with secrets, dramas and troublesome elections. And so, ideal as a vehicle for a good story: any closed community is interesting (see also: country house party, boarding school), there is an opportunity to have good strong female characters without their being framed by their relationships with men, and there is always the underlying question: "Why did these women become nuns?"

Roman Catholic women of a certain age will remember being obsessed as teenagers with Kathryn Hulme's The Nun's Story, book and film – "Is God calling me to be Audrey Hepburn?" It's still a good strong read, and even more fascinating when you know the story behind it. It is a novel, but based on the life of the author's long-term companion, a former nun.

One aspect of nuns in books is that the names are confusing and you get your Sister Mary mixed up with Sister Maria – and apparently the considerable profits from The Nun's Story are languishing unclaimed because no one knows which nuns should have inherited them. More straightforwardly non-fiction are books from Karen Armstrong (Through the Narrow Gate) and Monica Baldwin (I Leap Over the Wall – so much the better name) dealing with the challenges of leaving the convent behind in, respectively, 1981 and 1949.

Of course we all like to read about nuns going off the rails: Rumer Godden's Black Narcissus is an overwrought and enjoyable look at a convent in the Himalayas, and a nun who wants a last chance. There is also the very splendid Lambs of God by the Australian author Marele Day, with its feral nuns including sheep in their community. Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun (overshadowed now by the 1971 notorious-in-its-day Ken Russell film) is non-fiction, full of hysterical and demonic sisters in 17th-century France. The book very much reflects its author's non-believing, child-of-the-enlightenment stance, though it's a rattling good read, and he does his best to be fair.

Other men who have bravely written about nuns include the American novelist Ron Hansen, with his well-imagined Mariette in Ecstasy (1991), paralleling the story of St Therese of Lisieux, and Mark Salzman with Lying Awake (2000) – an extraordinary look at a nun who has visions and writes poetry, but fears both may disappear if she has treatment for epilepsy.

These have all been books with the nuns as the direct focus, but there is also a subgenre looking at them through the eyes of girls attending convent schools. In Edna O'Brien's Country Girl (1960), Cait and Baba deliberately get themselves expelled, amid some fairly unsympathetic nuns. Antonia White wrote what amounted to a misery memoir in Frost in May (1933), a lightly fictionalised version of her own experiences.

(But then it turns out her memories weren't reliable – Samantha Ellis writes rivetingly about this in her new book on literary heroines.) Much more enjoyable is Land of Spices (1941) by the under-rated Kate O'Brien – the title comes from a George Herbert poem and shouldn't be taken to imply anything exotic or cosmopolitan in the content (it means prayer) but, the relationship between Reverend Mother and a child at the convent school is engrossing. And adults get pulled in too: Iris Murdoch's The Bell (1958) is set in a religious community attached to a convent, but the nuns' role is mostly symbolic.

There are astonishing numbers of detective stories with nuns as sleuths or key characters: Antonia Fraser's 1977 Quiet as a Nun (convent, boarding school and the estimable Jemima Shore – triple threat) stands out, and the US author Jane Haddam's crime books often feature religious settings to great effect.

Once you start looking at nuns in history from a modern perspective, there comes a whole new topic – was it actually fun being a nun? Of course there must have been an unknown percentage of women closed up against their will, but it's rewarding to examine the idea that being a nun wasn't that bad an option in earlier times. In fact, dare we say it, was it the feminist choice? Look what they missed: a nun was free from the horrors and dangers of childbirth and the rigours of unwanted marriage. Often they could pursue an interest in medicine, horticulture, art or music. They didn't have to wear corsets or attract men …

This is what fascinates female authors and readers. Sarah Dunant's marvellous Sacred Hearts – published 2009, set in 1570 in Italy – looks at the idea of different choices for different women. Sylvia Townsend Warner in The Corner That Held Them (published 1948, set in an English convent in 14th-century Norfolk) gives us gossip, politics, particular friendships and details of church music.

Charlotte Brontë – daughter of the parsonage – is deeply suspicious of Roman Catholicism in general, and the figure of the nun in Villette is quite troublesome. But as s/he isn't a real nun – well, perhaps we won't examine the psychology of that too closely. She was certainly reflecting back to Gothic fiction and supernatural, creepy religious figures, rather than looking at career opportunities, and she and her heroine Lucy Snowe take a good Protestant line against Papist nonsense.

But Brontë is the exception: most authors understand more and condemn less.

Which other writers created convents worth reading about, and which books make the life sound attractive? Please offer up your thoughts …

ReligionMuriel SparkCharlotte BrontëCall The MidwifeAldous HuxleyReligionReligious studies and theologyMoira Redmond
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