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Poem of the week: Cartography for Beginners by Emily Hasler

Ambiguity and precision overlap in these very personal instructions for map-making

I discovered this week's poem – and poet – in issue 76 of Michael Mackmin's influential Norwich-based poetry journal, The Rialto . It was the tone of Emily Hasler's "Cartography for Beginners" that particularly attracted me: colloquial, playful, assured. The playfulness and assurance extend to the way the poem remodels and subverts what a cartographer might call its "ground-truth" – a lesson on how to draw a map.

That the speaker is only pretending to issue a set of useful instructions, meanwhile creating her own myth of map-making, quickly becomes clear in the ordering of priorities, beginning with that emphasis on "the correct blue". When, in lines two and three, the speaker advises that the shade of blue should not be "too watery" because "people do not like wet feet", the map and the place mapped are suddenly fused, and we might even suspect the tutee is in on the joke. A mock-didactic poem needs two people to play the game.

Blue could be associated with feelings too, of course, and perhaps an openness to feeling. Beyond its aesthetic potential, water constantly draws the speaker's attention. It becomes so significant that, even if there's no actual water to be indicated, she insists that the choice of blue still has to be made. Later, she will go farther and say that, if the area has no water, "I have to question why you are bothering". The most powerful image or symbol in the poem, water connects, through baptism, to the church (listed in the places of worship) and, of course, to the pub. Finally, the poem considers the possibility of a completely submerged East Anglia. Its resemblance to "a sodden Constable" suggests that the place is not so much a place as a picture of a place – the converse idea of a map which causes wet feet.

Elements from both art and science, the disciplines the making of maps traditionally employs are allowed to unsettle one another. That unsettling is inherent in many kinds of mapping, of course. Perhaps the key reference is to "the twin and warring gods of Precision/ and Wild Abandon". In mentioning the coastline paradox the poem reveals an awareness of the difficulty of exactly conveying complex spatial information on paper.

Precision, symbolised by Mandelbrot's investigation, is burdensome, but cannot be jettisoned ("get a stepladder"). "Wild Abandon" is hinted in "licence" (line 13) and, more resolutely projected at the end, when the speaker seems to be persuading the addressee towards a real, physical encounter and an implied sexual landscape. Tensions exist in the antipathy of wet and dry, public and private. The map is interpreted as an act of communication with "people", an intimate space between friends or lovers, and a delightful playground for the solitary imagination.

Formally, there's a resistance to end-stopping. The many enjambed lines create their own variable coastline – the line-endings – and flow gracefully over the edge. There is a civility in the poem that recalls Elizabeth Bishop's finely controlled, often ruefully humorous, navigating potentially dangerous emotional waves.

"People do not like/ to be lost", the speaker remarks in lines 10/11, but, of course, some discoveries can be made only when one is lost. This poem disorientates us, but in a gentle and fruitful way. While we're not allowed to find out, metaphorically, exactly where we are, some East Anglian locations towards the end are reassuring. And they allow an affectionate poem of place to emerge from an intimate address to a particular individual.

Originally from Felixstowe in Suffolk, Hasler has published work in various magazines and anthologies, and her first pamphlet natural histories appeared from Salt in their "modern voices" series, and is still available. "Cartography for Beginners" is from an unpublished sequence of four poems, "The Map Lover". I look forward to seeing this, and more of Hasler's work, in a first full-length collection.

Cartography for Beginners
for CL

First of all, you will need to choose the correct blue
to indicate water. This should not be too watery.
You must remember: people do not like wet feet.
If there is no water to indicate, no matter,
you must still elect a blue. Let me recommend
eggshell, at a push, azure. Choose a symbol
for church/temple/mosque/synagogue. Choose
a symbol for pub. Dedicate your life
to the twin and warring gods of Precision
and Wild Abandon. People do not like
to be lost. Buy Mandelbrot's 1967 paper
on the coastline paradox, put it on the highest shelf –
but get a stepladder. Take a little licence with rivers,
especially their curves and estuaries. Add
an oxbow lake if at all possible. If the area you
are mapping has no seas/lakes/rivers/streams,
I have to question why you are bothering. You
won't get to use that lovely blue you spent so long
deciding upon. Do the Norfolk fens instead. Better
yet, East Anglia in its future state, quite utterly
submerged like a sodden Constable. Come on,
get your coat, I'll show you. You won't need your shoes.

PoetryCarol Rumens
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Reader reviews roundup

William Boyd, Morrissey, and Jhumpa Lahiri are among the writers under review this week

Normally a fan of William Boyd's "rollicking yarns", Christopher Philip Howe was left disappointed by Solo, Boyd's newly-published take on an over-the-hill James Bond, calling it a "peculiar book" that feels like a compromise between Boyd's usual style and Ian Fleming's.

It is as if Boyd can't make his mind up. Should he write Bond his way, or Fleming's way? His indecision is reflected on every page as well as in the overall structure, in which the eponymous solo mission doesn't start until two-thirds of the way through the book. Faced with a story that unfolds over a shorter time frame than he is used to working with, it is as if Boyd has padded it out.

For Euan Ferguson it is Fleming's original Bonds (particularly the later ones) that are "frankly padded". But Christopher Philip Howe has avoided the trap Ferguson identifies for critics of "trying to judge [Boyd's] book against the James Bond films", arguing that "Fleming's Bond is pivotal to the plot, not incidental like Boyd's". When Howe invokes the film franchise, it is only to compare Boyd's 007 to Roger Moore's "plodding" portrayal.

So Bond is a veteran – but of what? Instead of showing flashbacks on Bond's previous career – perhaps he thinks readers will know too much about this already – Boyd is at pains to show us Bond's doubts about what he is doing, about what he wants, by having him reflect and ponder over coffee, dinner, cocktails and so on, but it is always generalised and wholly unconvincing.

But, as Ferguson notes, the Bond cocktail has always been difficult to reproduce – even for Fleming himself. For Howe there's something fuzzily unsatisfying about both the Moore-era films and Boyd's novel. Maybe only a few early Flemings and a handful of classic Connerys are mixed to the correct recipe.

Our current reader reviews of the novel are unanimously negative, but is anyone willing to break the critical consensus? Let us know if you loved Solo, or at least were won over by the footnoted recipe for salad dressing that Boyd winkingly includes in the text.

Solocontrotutti sums up the balance of opinion on Morrissey's Autobiography when characterising Mozza as "a man with an eye for detail, clever, pedantic and somehow always missing the point".

The book's first ten, paragraphless pages clearly impressed: "The book starts off in fine fettle. The opening few lines sets you hoping for the much touted classic that is heralded on the cover." But like other reviewers, solocontrotutti found the rest predictable, even wondering, "how do you review ... someone who is contemptuous of the predictable and yet has become more predictable than the Manchester drizzle?" We ask ourselves all the time, solocontrotutti, all the time ...

At times it's as though you are reading Morrissey trying too hard to be Morrissey. You catch yourself thinking, no one can be this Morrissey, this predictable – it's not possible.

It's that Mozza attitude and posture, of course – "all the cleverness exists in a love of words but not an understanding of what they mean" – but more importantly, that Mozza worldview. "I kept having to pinch myself that I wasn't reading about the 1870s," solocontrotutti continues. Surely 1970s Manchester wasn't that bad. But in the unreliable world of the celebrity autobiography, anything is possible.

Including the unlikely experience of finding ourselves drawn to continue reading nonetheless. As solocontrotutti points out, "reading predictable Morrissey is just more interesting than an unpredictable anyone else".

Finally Amritachoudhury1255 found herself charmed by Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland. After worrying that Lahiri's usual "intricate patterns of human relationships is starkly missing" from the novel's opening, she was relieved to find that the author's "knack of capturing those little nuances of small, unknown people" hasn't disappeared; it just takes a while, in this most political of novels, to show.

This week we're reminded that readerly patience, or just plain slogging on, is sometimes rewarded. Sometimes not. Of course, when in doubt – read the reviews! Thanks for all this week's contributions – if I've mentioned you this week, do write in (to claire.armitstead@guardian.co.uk) and let us know. We'll stand you a book from our cupboards.

Fiction
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More me time: The Rest Is Noise festival reaches the 70s

With a weekend of literary events focused on Thatcher-era Politics and Spirituality, there's lots to self-interest you

The Rest Is Noise season at the Southbank Centre in London has been getting going again after a long summer break. Last week the investigation of the cultural and political currents of the 20th century moved into the 1960s counterculture and revolution, where the event programmers set the Beats against the Profumo affair. Like so many others I'm sad to say that the 1960s have been and gone – but the coming weekend promises some equally interesting juxtapositions.

Now the season is moving into the 1970s and 1980s, looking at Politics and Spirituality, the closing stages of the cold war, and Thatcherite economics. I'm especially curious about a talk Alain de Botton will be giving on how spirituality fitted into an increasingly consumerist world. Do we see all this fluffy thinking as a reaction to the hard-edged politics brought in by Mrs Thatcher? Or might the brands of spirituality that began to grow ever stronger in the 1970s and 1980s represent a continuation of the me-first politics that so shaped the latter years of the 20th century?

A devil's advocate could easily suggest that the introspective, inner-self brand of yoghurt-weaving that arose during this period was just another sort of consumerism, even if it emerged smelling of patchouli. If the advocate were feeling particularly naughty, he might even suggest that Alain de Botton, with his gentle eloquence and curious attempt to turn Proust into a self-help manual might himself be a symptom of this trend. mind, body And spirit books, self-help manuals and management theory guides always seem to me to cater to similarly selfish impulses.

Less cynically, I should note the probability that De Botton will talk about plenty of other forms of spirituality, and that plenty of them will be far less selfish. It could also easily be argued that rather than a reaction to Thatcherism and consumerism, the growing interest in spirituality during this time was a natural result of a lessening interest in conventional religion. At least if we stay on the western side of the Iron Curtain. The writer Karen Armstrong (author of The Case for God, among many others) will be looking at this decline. Just as interestingly, she'll also show the reverse side of the coin and the return to more traditional religious values in the Communist bloc.

Back on the ground, historians, journalists and social theorists Alwyn Turner and Bea Campbell will be discussing the impact of the Iron Lady's politics while Robert Winston will discuss the scientific miracle of test-tube babies. Peering behind the Iron Curtain, meanwhile, the poets Elaine Feinstein and George Szirtes will be discussing a generation of Polish poets active in the 1970s and 1980s, led by Wisława Szymborska and Zbigniew Herbert. I wish I could tell you more about that, but have to confess near total ignorance. This lack of knowledge only makes me more inclined to find out more. As does the fact that I've never been to a dull event featuring George Szirtes.

One other point of interest from a literary point of view. The book-based strands over the weekend are good - but it seems to me that the film events will far outshine them. The curators are showing the entirety of Krzysztof Kieślowski's mighty Dekalog series for a start. There's a possibly even greater treat in the form of an illustrated talk on Andrei Tarkovsky by Layla Alexander-Garrett, who worked with the Russian director on set, during his great last film, The Sacrifice. I wouldn't hesitate to say that both Kieślowski and Tarkovsky were both geniuses. The latter one of the greatest, fiercest and emotionally overwhelming artists of any age. I'd be hard pressed to name two writers from the era of similar stature. I wonder in fact, if film was actually more vital in those days? Did literature produce anyone able to go head to head with Tarkovsky when he was at the peak of his powers? Or any novel as intense and powerful as Stalker and Solaris? If there is one, I want to hear about it! So please do post suggestions below.

Alain de BottonSam Jordison
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Poster poems: Villains

Evil characters make for good literature, they say, so we're looking for great bad things from you this month

There's nothing quite as attractive as a good villain, or so we're led to believe. After all, where would the drama be if every character in a story was a goodie? And it's not just true for narrative fiction; since poetry concerns itself with all of human life, poets frequently explore the nature of villainy in their works and present us with compelling studies of bad eggs of all descriptions.

In the Christian west, the ultimate villain has always been Satan, and as with most classic baddies, the depths of his depravity are all the greater because of the angelic height from which he has fallen. It is Milton's keen awareness of this psychological reality, and of his anti-hero's consuming motivation as summed up in the oft-quoted line "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav'n", that makes "Paradise Lost" the great poem of villainy that it is.

By way of stark contrast, Dante's Lucifer is an immobile and personality-less ogre, frozen in space and time. This Devil is all physiology and no psychology, a deformed embodiment of evil that is quite carefully placed outside the bounds of human understanding. It is a depiction that perhaps appeals less to the modern reader than Milton's does, but it is, in its own way, equally overpowering.

It's tempting to explain the differences between these two handlings of the ultimate Christian villain in terms of a medieval versus a modern understanding of the world. However, I'm not convinced that it's as simple as that. Chaucer was born a little more than 20 years after Dante's death and was clearly familiar with the Italian poet's work. However, his great portrait of a baddie, "The Pardoner's Tale", is rich in psychological realism as the protagonist, a professional hypocrite and conman who is a kind of human devil, reveals himself as a result of his pride in his own evil intelligence. It's a delineation of villainy that matches anything in Milton.

Another bad guy who made it into Dante's Hell was Bertran de Born, a 12th-century baron, troubadour and "stirrer up of strife" who enjoyed nothing more than causing conflict between his neighbours. Seven hundred years after his death, Ezra Pound set out to dig him up again in a poem called "Sestina: Altaforte". It's a spirited attempt at rehabilitation and Pound asks the reader to judge for themselves if it is successful. Parallels with Pound's own later career are disturbingly prescient.

"Sestina: Altaforte" was written at the beginning of a century that was replete with villains on the grand scale. Four years after its publication the second world war broke out and for poets like Siegfried Sassoon the baddies weren't always on the other side. In his poem "The General", the villainy lies not in bad intentions, but in ineptitude above and beyond the call of duty.

Bad as the General may have been, he was nothing compared with some of the politically-motivated villains to come. On one side of the divide you had Joseph Stalin, whose reading list for part of 1926 forms the basis for David Wojahn's poem "Stalin's Library Card". It's a reminder that evil is not some abstract entity, but a distinctly human behaviour, perpetrated by people who are, on one level, ordinary men and women with the kinds of interests you might meet more or less anywhere.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the political spectrum, the Nazi leaders wrapped themselves in a kind of pseudo-mystique derived from their notion of a "pure Aryan" mythology. This pretension is savagely satirised in "Dr Joseph Goebbels (22 April 1945)" by WD Snodgrass. It's a performance that Dante might have been proud of.

And so this month's Poster poems challenge is to write poems about villains. You might want to focus on the big names from history, or it may be that you have your own Bertran de Born you want to excoriate, the choice is yours. One way or the other, please share your poems here.

PoetryJohn MiltonDante AlighieriGeoffrey ChaucerBilly Mills
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Inside job: 10 crime writers turned detective | John Dugdale

In claiming to have solved a real-life murder mystery, PD James is in distinguished company. Don your deerstalker and join us on the trail of other literary detectives

Edgar Allan Poe, The Mystery of Marie Roget (1842)

The boozy progenitor of all detective fiction also inaugurated the "solving" of real cases by crime writers – at least in fiction. A year after shop assistant Mary Rogers's body was found floating in the Hudson river, Poe transposed the unsolved case to Paris and set his detective Auguste Dupin to work on it. However, news of a confession apparently explaining Rogers's death (suggesting a botched abortion) broke during the serialisation in Snowden's Ladies' Companion, forcing him to rewrite.

Arthur Conan Doyle, George Edalji case (1907)

After spending three years in jail for supposedly carrying out brutal attacks on farm animals and writing threatening letters, solicitor Edalji (by then unable to practise) wrote asking for help in clearing his name. Conan Doyle's resulting press campaign made the arguments in favour of the court of criminal appeal – founded in the same year – irresistible, and almost a century later inspired Julian Barnes's novel Arthur & George.

Francis Iles, Was Crippen a Murderer? (1934)

A member, like Sayers and Agatha Christie, of the Detection Club, Iles had already drawn on the case of Dr Crippen – hanged for poisoning his wife, Cora, in 1910 – in his best-known novel Malice Aforethought. In his essay he argued the American homeopathic physician was guilty only of manslaughter, having intended just to drug Cora long enough for him to escape and visit his mistress. Iles also wrote about other crimes, notably the 30s love-triangle tragedy known as the Rattenbury case and the Wallace murder.

Dorothy L Sayers, The Murder of Julia Wallace (1937)

In a sensational trial in 1931, William Wallace was convicted of murdering his wife Julia; he claimed, however, that he had discovered her body on returning home after a fool's errand – following up a phone call from a ''Mr Qualtrough" asking him to visit a non-existent Liverpool address – and was acquitted on appeal. Sayers's verdict? The onus is on "those who prefer a more out-of-the-way solution to the obvious one" to identify a convincing alternative killer.

Michael Dibdin, The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1978)

Among the most outlandish examples of theorising about true crime, Dibdin's Conan Doyle pastiche offers a solution – as many other authors and screenwriters had done, in fiction and non-fiction, and as Patricia Cornwell would do later – to the elusive identity of Jack the Ripper. His ending, though, asks us to believe that the original serial killer was someone previously thought to be a fictional character.

James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia (1987)

Ellroy's novel follows LAPD cops investigating the grotesque and still-unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short (nicknamed the Black Dahlia by the press, largely because she wore a black suit), one of whom eventually links the crime, in classic Chandler-esque fashion, to a wealthy local family. Nine years later, Ellroy investigated his mother Geneva's murder in 1958 (when he was 10) in the non-fiction book My Dark Places.

Ian Rankin, Black and Blue (1997)

Still seen as the best of Rankin's Rebus books, this multi-stranded novel includes a storyline about the real-life, uncaught 60s Glasgow serial murderer dubbed Bible John, who re-emerges to pursue a (fictional) copycat killer called Johnny Bible. Whether Rankin offers a solution is debatable, but his detective eventually realises that someone he has met in his travels – by no means the most obvious figure – is Bible John.

Patricia Cornwell, Portrait of a Killer (2002)

Cornwell switched to non-fiction to set out her theory that the painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper, after a lengthy and vastly expensive research process that included buying up several Sickert paintings. Ripperologists and art experts were both unimpressed (and no-one liked her arrogant subtitle, Case Closed), while crime-writing fans noted that the eccentric project coincided with Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta series starting to lose the plot.

Stieg Larsson, Men Who Hate Women, AKA The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005)

The killing of prostitute Catrine da Costa in 1984 in Stockholm has been called "the real-life murder that inspired Stieg Larsson". His response was not to try to solve the case, either in fiction or non-fiction, but to begin his trilogy with a novel centring on violence against women, in which two respectable figures – Lisbeth Salander's legal guardian and a businessman – turn out to be misogynistic monsters. This arguably invited Swedes to read that back into the Da Costa murder, for which the prime suspects were both doctors.

PD James, Julia Wallace case (2013)

After using the case in two novels, James reviews the evidence in her Sunday Times article, and concludes the "obvious" solution – the husband's guilt – is the right one. She argues the "Qualtrough" phone call was a prank (not to get Wallace out of the house) by Richard Parry, the other chief suspect, thereby weakening the case against Parry.

Crime fictionThrillersFictionPD JamesArthur Conan DoyleJohn Dugdale
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So the Alex Ferguson stories were non-fiction after all

We've heard the tales in Fergie's memoir before. Who would have thought they were actually true?

The most interesting thing about Fergie's memoir is not that it is breaking all records, selling the most in its first week – some 115,000 copies – of any other non-fiction book in the history of non-fiction books, at least according to the book trade, and it is clearly going to clean up as the Christmas top book. Or even that it must be the sixth or 16th or even 60th book by or about Fergie in his long-legged life. No, the really interesting thing is that there are in fact no amazing revelations in it.

What we have, what all footer fans have now been presented with, in his own sharp, snidy, self-justifying words, is confirmation of what we have known for years, or thought we knew, stuff we had heard but only half-believed could possibly be true.

His row with Beckham, from being convinced that Posh Spice was a bad influence on him, turning him into well, David Beckham, to the incident in the dressing room when he accidentally kicked a boot at him, ha ha. Turns out all that was not just back-page gossip, which we all chortled over and Fergie dismissed at the time as being tittle tattle, unworthy of us, but it is dead true. For Fergie himself has now told us, in his own words. The Master has spoken.

And that stuff about falling out with Roy Keane, which we lapped up, and all the other players who crossed him and who found themselves booted out before they wanted to go – it's all kosher, cos Fergie has now put his seal on it. Till now, we knew it, but we didn't really know it. Now we do. From the horse's mouth. It's the most brilliant publishing trick, to tell us what we know – and sell loads of books.

From now on I am going to believe every tit and tattle on every back page of every sports section. As if I didn't anyway. But now, when I say to myself "I read it in the papers so it's true" – it will be. Lord Leveson, please note …

Autobiography and memoirBiographySir Alex Ferguson
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Do returns diminish on rereading and re-rereading?

Judging the Booker prize has made me wonder how worthwhile it take second, and third, literary looks

I had an awkward moment during this year's deliberations over the Man Booker prize. We had just trudged through 151 novels (I actually read a few more than that – 183 in all to be precise – but that's a tale for a different time) and we began the process of re-reading the longlist. As I re-cracked a spine, like some kind of literary Bane, it struck me that I don't re-read that often. I re-read classics most: Scott and Dickens, Eliot and Woolf, Melville and Zola most often. I've read Ulysses more times than I can remember (but sometimes just sections), and Perec's Life: A User's Manual certainly more than thrice. But contemporary novels? It was an embarrassing blank. I've certainly read Midnight's Children more than once, and I've read Golding's Rites Of Passage and Byatt's Possession twice. Occasionally, with a cold, I've re-read The Mouse And His Child by Russell Hoban. I've dipped back into many books, from Finnegans Wake to The Recognitions by William Gaddis to Christine Brooke-Rose's Textermination. But actually re-reading? Less than a handful of modern novels.

The Man Booker judges are always in a strange situation, provided they do the work as assigned. We will have read the winner more frequently and more stringently than the so-called average reader. I should, for the record, say that no reader is average. Each has a unique engagement with a text, and every one of those responses is valid, if not right. But let's face it, not many of the slightly fictitious reading public are going to read any Man Booker winner three times.

When we came to re-re-read the shortlist, certain things became evident. A crime novel would have to be more than just a crime novel to survive the second "re". It might be impressive first time round, and the second time one could be impressed by the precision with which the solution had been placed and patterned. Third time? A comic novel will struggle too: is there any joke that's funny the third time you hear or read it? I loved Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole, and have recommended it to many people, but haven't actually re-read it (even though bits of it, in memory alone, make me laugh).

Re-re-reading is odd: a book has to have a certain depth to survive multiple readings. That is not to say that a book which one races through, enjoys, and wouldn't return to is not without merit. There are pleasures other than profundity. A significant reason why the prize went to Eleanor Catton was that The Luminaries can, I think, be enjoyed on the surface level as a gripping story, a homage to Victorian sensation fiction, with opium dens, murders, extortion plots, séances and a supernatural vision. But every time, I re-read it (I'm on four now), I found more and more in it. Its elaborate, astrological structure asks purposeful questions about destiny and character. The halving is both an image of perfection (the Golden Section) and the law of diminishing returns, fitting neatly with the book's exploration of greed, accumulation and capital.

Serendipitously, I hared back to Scotland from the Guildhall for the Scottish Mental Health Association book festival which, in my capacity as creative programmer for Glasgow's Aye Write! book festival, I'd been asked to deliver. One of our guests was Ella Berthould, the co-author of The Novel Cure, an ingenious set of literary diagnoses for ailments. We got talking about re-reading, and she made the smart point that re-reading doesn't just take us back to the book, it creates a link with the person we were when we read the book before. It made me slightly melancholy to think of all those lost links to my own history I was missing by always looking to read the next, new thing.

I've only experienced this in a small way: reading books as an undergraduate I'd read as a schoolboy, and then dipping into them for reviews or books I was writing later on. Re-reading Moby-Dick or Middlemarch in my 40s is a far deeper experience than reading it as a callow youth. On the other hand, I'm fearful that re-reading some old favourites from that time of my life – Flann O'Brien, for example, or Anthony Burgess – might be dispiriting. What if it's not as good as I thought? Worse: what if it showed my earlier critical capacity to be gauche and easily-impressed by trickery? I think I might prefer for some books to be the memories of themselves, not a repeat performance.

That said, I have decided to make this my year of re-reading. Or if my reviewer's itch gets unbearable, to at least read minor works by the classic authors I've already read (I did binge on Trollope – Anthony, not Joanna - after the shortlist meeting. The Fixed Period and Ralph The Heir were very interesting indeed). I'm curious to hear readers' experiences of re-reading, re-re-reading, and indeed, whether or not there are many Man Booker winners they have gone back to time and again.

FictionBooker prizeEleanor CattonHerman MelvilleGeorge EliotAnthony TrollopeSalman RushdieStuart Kelly
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Halloween spirits: literature's haunted houses

From Horace Walpole to Helen Oyeyemi, writers' imaginations are still possessed by these constructions

From Poe, King and Lovecraft to Woolf, Wharton and even Ali Smith, there's a long list of authors who've lurked in the literary shadow of the haunted house. So what's the explanation for such settings' continued power and popularity?

Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, written in 1764, is often cited as the first gothic novel; an innovative combation of the old (magic, myths and the fantastic) and the new (realistic characters and conversations, described as though they actually took place). Set in a crumbling castle with all the now-classic gothic trappings (secret passageways, bleeding statues, unexplained noises and talking portraits), it introduced the haunted house as a symbol of cultural decay or change.

Homes are supposed to be places of safety and sanctuary; that's what makes it so terrifying when they turn on their tenants. They can also be an effective analogy for the collective fears of a community. Charlotte Riddell's The Uninhabited House (1875), for instance, tells the tale of River Hall, haunted by the phantom of its former owner, who committed suicide in mysterious circumstances. As with all good ghost stories, there are multiple threats and fears in play; it features the Victorian fascination with money and inheritances, and the impact on estates of spooks, ghosts and ghouls. River Hall's rightful owner refuses to live there, but remains haunted by the bleakness of her financial future if no paying tenant can be found.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's disturbing short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892) explores the idea of a house haunted by its current occupants. A place with "something queer about it", "let so cheaply and left so long untenanted", the isolated setting plays an important role in the narrator's increasing paranoia, hallucinations, and ultimate mental unraveling. In a powerful account of the way women were treated for "hysteria" in the 19th century, the narrator describes signs of violent damage in her room, prompting questions from the reader about who's really responsible.

So what's the source of these unquiet spirits? There are several options, according to Dr Montague in Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (1959): "Some houses are born bad … What it was like before, whether its personality was molded by the people who lived here, or the things they did, or whether it was evil from the start, are all questions I cannot answer."

In Susan Hill's The Woman in Black (1983), betrayal and the desire for revenge fuel the terrifying goings-on at Eel Marsh House, along with Victorian-era tensions between past, present and future. This tension is echoed in Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger (2009). Although set in the 1940s, it explores similar themes; postwar anxiety and upheaval, old estates and families meeting financial ruin, progress conflicting with panic. Whatever the source, malevolence abounds at Hundreds Hall, prompting the Ayres family down a path of suspicion, self-doubt and destruction, uncertain whom they can trust.

What's the future of the fictional haunted house? Can contemporary authors continue to innovate?

Mark Z Danielewski's bestselling debut House of Leaves (2000) won international acclaim for its experimental approach, featuring multiple narrators, bizarre footnotes and unconventional page layouts. A manuscript by a blind author, Zampanò, recounts the experiences of the Navidson family. It describes video footage of the Navidsons exploring their continually changing home, with mysteriously appearing additions such as the "Five and a Half Minute Hallway," a never-ending spiral staircase and maze. But the conundrum is compounded further when another character – Johnny Truant – investigates and can find no evidence or history of the Navidsons or their home even existing.

Helen Oyeyemi also experiments with multiple narrators, along with the recurring haunted house themes of personal and cultural displacement, in her 2009 novel White is for Witching, a rich, nightmarish account of familial grief and guilt and its impact on twins Miri and Eliot. As well as being possessed by the ghosts of former family members, The Silver House has a voice of its own: "One evening [Miri] pattered around inside me … she dragged all my windows open, putting her glass down to struggle with the stiffer latches. I cried and cried for an hour."

In South African author Lauren Beukes's genre-bending The Shining Girls (2013), an abandoned building opens onto different times, compelling serial killer Harper Curtis to stalk the "shining girls'" of the title across decades, and acting as both motive and means. "'The House has been waiting for him,' he thinks. 'It called him here for a purpose. It wants to claim the fire in their eyes and snuff it out.'" Carefully paced and cunningly constructed, the non-linear narrative gives a fragmented, kaleidoscopic view of Chicago, Curtis and his victims through the years, portraying violence against women as an omnipresent cultural force.

So if societal fears are what fuel the continued reimaginings of haunted houses, what does the future hold? What current cultural anxieties could soon be incarnated as literature's next brilliantly bloodcurdling haunted house?

And in the meantime: which other haunted houses from literature have left you sleeping with the lights on and the doors double-locked? And is your favourite fear-inducing fictional abode a classic or contemporary take? I'd love your recommendations for my Halloween reading list …

HorrorFictionHelen OyeyemiSusan HillSarah Waters
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Edgar Allan Poe: dividing audiences for nearly two centuries

Many of his peers found his writing pretty hard to stomach. But, like us, they still read it

Dr. Sir,
We have the honour to acknowledge the receipt of yours dated the 3d Inst. Since it was written, the MSS. to which you refer have reached you safely, as we learn from Mr. Paulding, who has been so informed we presume by Mr. White.
The reasons why we declined publishing them were threefold. First, because the greater portion of them had already appeared in print — Secondly, because they consisted of detached tales and pieces; and our long experience has taught us that both these are very serious objections to the success of any publication. Readers in this country have a decided and strong preference for works (especially fiction) in which a single and connected story occupies the whole volume, or number of volumes, as the case may be; and we have always found that republications of magazine articles, known to be such, are the most unsaleable of all literary performances. The third objection was equally cogent. The papers are too learned and mystical. They would be understood and relished only by a very few — not by the multitude. The numbers of readers in this country capable of appreciating and enjoying such writings as those you submitted to us is very small indeed. We were therefore inclined to believe that it was for your own interest not to publish them. It is all important to an author that his first work should be popular. Nothing is more difficult, in regard to literary reputation, than to overcome the injurious effect of a first failure.

That is an extract from a letter sent to Edgar Allan Poe by James K Paulding, the representative of the publishers Harper and Brothers. It was written in 1836 – although the excuses about short stories not selling well might as well have been sent by publisher today. The only thing that really marks out this letter from more modern rejections is its length and the time and trouble that Paulding obviously took to read the stories. But that's not to suggest that 19th-century publishers were somehow more noble or less pressed for time than today's. Pauling goes on:

We are pleased with your criticisms generally — although we do not always agree with you in particulars, we like the bold, decided, energetic tone of your animadversions, and shall take pleasure in forwarding to you all the works we publish — or at least such of them as are worthy of your notice. We are obliged to publish works occasionally, which it would scarcely be expected of the Messenger to make the subject of comment.
The last number of the Messenger came to hand last evening, and in our opinion fully sustains the high character which it has acquired for itself. The notices of the Life of Washington, and Sallust we presume will prove highly pleasing to Mr. Paulding and Professor Anthon.

Yes, it's safe to assume that Paulding only really went to so much trouble because Poe was at that time a popular critic. Sadly, I didn't manage to find Poe's reply and how he reacted to such charming cheek. That's doubly a shame, because whatever you make of Poe's fiction, he could write a damn good letter:

Sir, — I find myself at leisure this Monday morning, June 1, to notice your very singular letter of Saturday, and you shall now hear what I have to say. In the first place, your attempts to bully me excite in my mind scarcely any other sentiment than mirth. When you address me again, preserve, if you can, the dignity of a gentleman. If by accident you have taken it into your head that I am to be insulted with impunity I can only assume that you are an ass.

How's that for an opening? The most pleasing thing about that letter of 1839 is that it was sent to Poe's employer William Burton who owned The Gentleman's Magazine. Poe signed off: "If you persist in it our intercourse is at an end, and we can each adopt our own measures." Is he calling him out for a fight? Not surprisingly, Poe soon afterwards changed jobs.

I came across the above letters while hunting out answers for a series of questions that has cropped up frequently this month on the Reading group. Namely: How original was Poe? How in step with his times was he? How much was he writing for himself and how much was he aware of his audience? Poe himself provides most of the answers in a letter written to Thomas White (another employer and the owner of the Southern Literary Messenger) in 1835. It seems that Poe knowingly rode contemporary currents – even though he couldn't help rocking the boat:

A word or two in relation to Berenice. Your opinion of it is very just. The subject is by far too horrible, and I confess that I hesitated in sending it you especially as a specimen of my capability. The Tale originated in a bet that I could produce nothing effective on a subject so singular, provided I treated it seriously. But what I wish to say relates to the character of your Magazine more than to any articles I may offer, and I beg you to believe that I have no intention of giving you advice, being fully confident that, upon consideration, you will agree with me. The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity … were indebted for it to articles similar in nature to Berenice — although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical. You may say all this is bad taste. I have my doubts about it. Nobody is more aware than I am that simplicity is the cant of the day — but take my word for it no one cares any thing about simplicity in their hearts.

The rest of that fascinating letter is contained in Arthur Hobson Quinn's Critical Biography of the author. In it, Poe compares himself to several contemporaries, pointing out similarities of theme and intent – and suggesting that such stories are popular. Pleasingly he does admit: "In respect to Berenice individually I allow that it approaches the very verge of bad taste." He promises not to "sin quite so egregiously again." As if!

This month, I've perhaps worried enough over how well Poe succeeded with Berenice and other stories. But I should at least say that now I've carried on through my edition The Murders In the Rue Morgue and Other Tales I have found more to admire. There is, for instance, some admirably nasty characterisation in "The Tell Tale Heart". That narrator is one bad man. Likewise the glimpse inside the deeply troubled mind of the narrator of "The Black Cat" was genuinely unsettling. The casualness with which he murders his wife and kills his beloved cat invoke unsettles almost as much as Patrick Bateman.

Against that I must say that Poe has real trouble with endings. The vast majority in The Murders In the Rue Morgue And Other Tales are both abrupt and daft. An egregious example comes in "The Pit And The Pendulum". Just as the narrator is about to be crushed to death, after enduring 20 pages of baroque agonies at the hands of the Inquisition, we hear noises without, the walls that were rushing in move back and we read:

"An outstretched arm caught my own as I feel, fainting into the abyss. It was that of General Lasalle. The French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies."

What spectacular good fortune! It is possible to formulate some kind of defence of the way Poe chucks his story off the cliff. Perhaps the suddenness of the ending, and lack of detailed explanation of the rescue, is deliberately disconcerting, and provides a shock, as much as a relief, after all that has gone before. But it's hard not to think that Poe just gave up when it came to the conclusion – which isn't entirely unlikely, given what we know about Poe's trouble with deadlines, drink and other demons.

In the end, I'm left with divided feelings about Poe, which seems to me to be neatly in accord with the fascinating conversation and variant opinions eloquently exressed on last week's post .

It's pleasing to note that Poe's contemporaries were similarly divided. Sometimes in the same letter. No less than Washington Irving wrote to him on November 6 1839 to say:

Dear Sir, — The magazine you were so kind as to send me, being directed to New York, instead of Tarrytown, did not reach me for some time. This, together with an unfortunate habit of procrastination, must plead my apology for the tardiness of my reply. I have read your little tale of "William Wilson" with much pleasure. It is managed in a highly picturesque style, and the singular and mysterious interest is well sustained throughout. I repeat what I have said in regard to a previous production, which you did me the favor to send me, that I cannot but think a series of articles of like style and merit would be extremely well received by the public.
I could add for your private ear, that I think the last tale much the best, in regard to style. It is simpler. In your first you have been too anxious to present your picture vividly to the eye, or too distrustful of your effect, and have laid on too much coloring. It is erring on the best side — the side of luxuriance. That tale might be improved by relieving the style from some of the epithets. There is no danger of destroying its graphic effect, which is powerful. With best wishes for your success,
I am, my dear sir, yours respectfully,
Washington Irving.

The unnamed story is "The Fall Of The House of Usher". Yes, I am quite pleased that we on the Reading group aren't alone in thinking that Poe rather over-egged the pudding on that one. If only he had relieved some of those epithets.

Meanwhile, talking of contemporary big guns, there's also a surviving letter to Poe from Longfellow in 1841:

You are mistaken in supposing that you are not "favorably known to me." On the contrary, all that I have read from your pen has inspired me with a high idea of your power; and I think you are destined to stand among the first romance-writers of the country, if such be your aim.

Romance! Maybe with a corpse bride. Otherwise, it's hard not to think that Longfellow was wrong. Although not so wrong as the critics who castigated Poe for bending the truth in "The Narrative Of Gordon Pym". Many seem to have believed it was an attempt to describe real events. There's a lovely example in the same Gentleman's Magazine that employed Poe:

"A steady perusal of the whole book compelled us to throw it away in contempt, with an exclamation very similar to the natural phrase of the Indian. A more impudent attempt at humbugging the public has never been exercised … Arthur Gordon Pym puts forth a series of travels outraging possibility, and coolly requires his insulted readers to believe his ipse dixit … "

The review is unsigned and so gloriously wrong-headed that I can't help wonder if Poe himself wrote it as a joke. Either way, Poe has the last laugh. It's a salutary warning against the vagaries of criticism. No matter what we may have made of Poe's writing this month, the outstanding fact is that we and plenty of others are still reading "The Murders In the Rue Morgue" and plenty of his other stories more than 150 years after his death … I imagine he would have settled for that.

Edgar Allan PoeShort storiesFictionSam Jordison
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Webchat: David Marsh answers your questions about grammar

Editor of the Guardian Style Guide and author of a new book, For Who the Bell Tolls, will be joining our live webchat from 12pm GMT, Friday 1 November

How many people reading this can say, hand on heart, that they are 100% confident about all aspects of English grammar? I'm assuming only a small minority have raised a hand. For the rest, our webchat with David Marsh, editor of the Guardian Style Guide, may provide some help.

If you're one of those who have sweated over unwittingly showing your ignorance of "correct English" by misusing a comma or hyphen in an email to, say, a potential employer, or perhaps worse, in a tweet to the whole world, then this is your moment. And while we're on the subject; what is the correct way to begin an email to a potential boss? Dear? To? Hi? And can I begin this sentence with "and"?

Join Marsh on Friday 1 November, for answers all your questions on the subject. His masterclass starts at 12noon (GMT) but you are welcome to start posting your question in the thread below, and then come back on Friday to join in the conversation.

LanguageDavid MarshHannah Freeman
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