The Guardian's Blog, page 227

Live webchat: Kamila Shamsie at A Room for London

The novelist currently enjoying Artangel's extraordinary retreat for artists perched over the Thames in central London will be answering questions about what she's learned on Monday 29 October between 12-1pm (BST)

This month, A Room for London plays host to novelist Kamila Shamsie. For four days each month, a different artist is spending time in the houseboat currently perched on the top of the South Bank Centre in London as part of Artangel's year-long project, A London Address. Earlier in the year we welcomed Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Jeanette Winterson for live webchats from the boat.

The writer currently undertaking this challenge is Kamila Shamsie, author of the novels In the City by the Sea, Kartography (both shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Salt and Saffron, Broken Verses and Burnt Shadows which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize.

Kamila will be holding a webchat live from the boat on Monday 29 October, taking place here between 12-1pm (BST). She will be talking about the time she has spent on the boat and whether it has aided her creativity and productivity, as well as discussing her work and writing.

Post your questions below now and come back on Monday at 12pm to chat live to Kamila.

A Room for LondonFiction
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Scary stories for Halloween: The New Mother by Lucy Clifford

At first sight a familiar kind of Victorian cautionary tale, this story opens on to some unusually profound anxieties

I came across The New Mother via Alan Garner and Neil Gaiman, a promising route to the uncanny. Garner includes a version of it in his Collected Folk Tales, published last year (with an introduction that states, firmly: "We need to be scared. It is healthy and good for us"). Reviewing the collection, Gaiman explains how Garner strips the story, also known as "The Pear Drum", down to its elements, weaving in a mournful refrain: "Iram, biram, brendon, bo, / Where did all the children go?"

Garner's spare, incantatory tale of how two children are tempted into naughtiness for the sake of a magical pear drum is unsettling in an almost wistful way: the fuller version, written in 1882 by Lucy Clifford and widely available online, is a tangle of nightmarish horror.

Two children, Turkey and Blue-Eyes, live with their mother and baby sibling in a lonely cottage on the edge of the forest, the tall fir trees "so close that their big black arms stretched over the little thatched roof". Danger is pressing in from the start on their nursery idyll, presided over by their loving mother, a classic angel of the hearth. When she sends them off to the village warning them not to talk to strangers, we are on the lookout for a wolf by the path, but the danger they meet with is wonderfully perplexing. "A strange wild-looking girl" sits by the side of the road holding a curious musical instrument with a box on its side. The children "were most anxious to see inside the box, or to know what it contained, but they thought it might look curious to say so" – yet their careful respectability crumbles when they hear that there are little people inside, who might come out to dance and tell them secrets, if only the girl will open it.

"'Let you see!' she said slowly. 'Well, I am not sure that I can. Tell me, are you good?' 'Yes, yes,' they answered eagerly, 'we are very good!'" But this turns out, for once, to be the wrong answer: only naughty children are allowed to peep inside the box. So the children begin a campaign of bad behaviour, much to the sorrow of their angelic mother, who warns them that if they can't return to their better selves, "I should have to go away and leave you, and to send home a new mother, with glass eyes and wooden tail".

The idea horrifies the children as much as the reader, but as the wild girl carelessly reassures them: "They all threaten that kind of thing. Of course really there are no mothers with glass eyes and wooden tails; they would be much too expensive to make." It's this strange mixture of wordliness with the otherworldly, realism with fairytale, that makes the eerie charge of a mother with glass eyes and a tail – imagine it dragging along the floor! – so powerful. Those eyes, that tail combine the inanimate with the animalistic in an economically horrible manner: the bric-a-brac of Victoriana stirring something deep in the subconscious.

It's no surprise that this story chimed with Gaiman, whose similarly creepy children's book Coraline features an "Other Mother", modelled on Coraline's real mother, but with buttons for eyes. The other mother: the concept combines two primal horrors, the loss of love and the imposition of the wrong kind of love. "The New Mother" is not just Freudian, and it's certainly much weirder than the average Victorian cautionary tale. The children destroy their idyll from the inside out, and not even by accident; being naughty takes effort. They let horror in precisely by being too sensible to believe in it, and there is no redemption. I certainly wouldn't read this story to children.

FictionFairytalesJustine Jordan
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Great American novel delays

The 34-year break since James Salter's last novel is pretty substantial, but his countrymen have regularly outdone him

This week Picador announced that next year it will publish a new work by James Salter, 87, whose last novel appeared in 1979. This is excellent news for fans of the elegant stylist best known for his Korean war novel The Hunters. Like those of other writers associated with the 50s, notably John Cheever and Richard Yates, his reputation has recently been on the rise, thanks in part to Mad Men. But if it's a record bid, it's a hopeless failure.

For Salter can claim to be neither the oldest still-active US novelist (Herman Wouk, 96, landed a book deal earlier this year) nor the one with the biggest gap between books. True, his 34-year hiatus just beats the mark set by Harold Brodkey, sometimes mocked as the tardiest author ever, who signed a novel deal in 1958, but didn't deliver his monstrous, rambling full-length debut, The Runaway Soul, until 1991. Henry Roth published Call It Sleep in 1934, then only scattered writings until it was reissued and praised. At 73, he embarked on a vast four-novel sequence, of which the first volume appeared in 1994 – a 60-year pause that looks unbeatable.

Why US writers are so dominant in procrastination remains a mystery – the pressures of fame and gigantic advances? The energy-sapping seductions of the New York book scene or the campus posts inevitably on offer to the successful? – but other nations are rarely able to match their standards.

American feats include the longest time-out by a non-fiction author, a breed usually thought to be less prone to writer's block (Joe Mitchell published "Joe Gould's Secret" in 1964, then turned up at the New Yorker almost every day until his death in 1996 without publishing again); the longest recovery time needed after landmark novels (13 years for Joseph Heller after Catch-22, 17 years for Thomas Pynchon after Gravity's Rainbow); and the longest silences. Ralph Ellison had struggled unsuccessfully for 42 years to produce a followup to Invisible Man when he died in 1994, and Harper Lee has so far gone 52 years without making work for printers since her debut, To Kill a Mockingbird, in 1960.

In a rare world-class British contribution to the sport, EM Forster produced no more novels in the 46 years between Passage to India (1924) and his death, but was promoted from the dismal silent division to the gap group when Maurice (1971) was published posthumously. Something similar might occur with JD Salinger, who went into print for the last time in 1965, and then sulked in New Hampshire until his death in 2010. According to his biographer, he still went into his study to write every day, and told one friend that he had completed two novels.

FictionJoseph HellerHarper LeeThomas PynchonJD SalingerJohn Dugdale
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman: Why we're co-writing a zombie novel

It might seem rather unexpected, but there's a Deeper Meaning to the zombie craze

Margaret Atwood: It may seem strange that I'm co-writing a serial zombie novel with Naomi Alderman, being posted chapter by chapter on the global story-sharing site, Wattpad. Why Wattpad? Why Naomi? Why zombies?

First, there's a lot of angst from publishers and writers about the young "not reading", which may mean they aren't reading what older people want them to read. My college teacher, Northrop Frye, said you should let the young begin with whatever interests them; and millions of them are interested in Wattpad. Why Naomi? She's an accomplished novelist and also my Rolex Mentee, and we're exploring many facets of writing and publishing together.

But in her other life – and, as a self-supporting writer for 40 years, I understand the necessity of second lives – she's a videogame author, most recently of Zombies Run!, which has seen her and her co-creators funded to develop the prototype for a similar exercise aid by the NHS. So it's a good fit; and the meaning of the zombie obsession intrigues us both. Naomi has written about it in Granta, I recently made a speech about it at Princeton University. Don't dismiss the zombies: they have Deeper Meaning. They just don't know it.

Naomi Alderman: The zombies definitely have a deeper meaning – anything that intrigues and fascinates people has something to tell us about ourselves. So why do I feel defensive about being interested in zombies as well as the evils of fundamentalist religion? About researching mythical monsters as well as the history of the Congo? The hiving off of "fantasy" in bookshops is, and always has been, a nonsense. After all, who wrote about witches, monsters and spells? Homer. Who wrote about fairies, wizards and ghosts? Shakespeare. Zombies can be as serious as any Caliban or Poseidon.

But our zombies aren't really serious. That's the pleasure of them. Part of the delight of working on this with Margaret, whose work has influenced and inspired me all my writing life, has been to see that, yes, even serious writers don't have to be serious all the time. From the first lines Margaret wrote, this has been a black comedy.

We're still writing the end of the story. I'm holding on to my last chapter because I don't want this to end; it's been an exhilarating, hilarious, joyful process. Waiting to get Margaret's chapter, reading it gleefully, trying to come up with something that might take the story in an unexpected direction or give her a problem to solve. Then waiting again to see what she's come up with for me. Remembering that writing is storytelling, and storytelling, after all, is play.

HorrorMargaret AtwoodFictionMargaret AtwoodNaomi Alderman
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Scary stories for Halloween: A Distant Episode by Paul Bowles

The fate of a hapless professor in Morocco taking one wrong turn too many is the focus of this profoundly unsettling tale

A Distant Episode follows a similar course to Bowles famous novel A Sheltering Sky: a naive westerner travels deep into Morocco and ends up drowning. Psychologically too, it goes through the same territory: a loss of bearings, a loss of dignity, a loss of freedom, a loss of pity. But because its shorter than the novel, it seems sharper, and possibly even crueller. I defy you to read it without shuddering.

This time the unlucky protagonist is a language professor eager to track down rare dialects, and just as keen to become a friend to the people he patronises with his learning. Of course he comes a cropper – and of course, it's appalling.

His descent is literal as well as metaphorical. We first see him travelling on a bus down from the "high, flat region … with two overnight bags full of maps, sun lotions and medicines". He's having fun, but this being Bowles, there's something not quite right: "Now facing the flaming sky in the west, and now facing the sharp mountains the car followed the dusty trail down the canyons into air which began to smell of other things besides the endless ozone of the heights: orange blossoms, pepper, sun-baked excrement, burning olive oil, rotten fruit." The professor, we are told, enjoys those smells, which of course, makes us wonder about him. So too does an exchange with a man Bowles calls a "qaouaji" in a cafe:

'Does this cafe still belong to Hassan Ramani?' he asked him in the Moghrebi he had taken four years to learn.

The man replied in bad French: 'He is deceased.'

In spite of this lack of respect, the professor allows the man to lead him, at night, "downward" along a road the professor doesn't know. They pass through more disconcerting smells – "the sweet black odor of rotten meat", "the odor of human excrement" – and on to something that looks like a quarry. Here at the "edge of the abyss" the qaouaji leaves the professor: "He spat, chuckled (or was the professor hysterical?) and strode away quickly."

Yikes!

It's thoroughly unsettling. So too is the experience of watching the professor make the "steady and steep downward climb" into the quarry by moonlight. The feeling that something is going to go wrong is unbearable: so painful that it almost comes as a relief when the professor gets to the "bottom", is attacked by a dog and then: "something cold and metallic was pushed brutally against his spine … a gun."

Soon, he sees a group of men advancing towards him, dressed in the black clothes of the Reguibat, speaking in a dialect he (exquisite cruelty!) can't understand.

What are the Reguibat? Explanation comes when we are shown the know-it-all professor's thoughts:

'The Reguiba is a cloud across the sun.' 'When the Reguiba appears the righteous man turns away.' In how many shops and market places he had heard these maxims uttered banteringly among friends ... 'An opportunity,' he thought quickly, 'of testing the accuracy of such statements.'

It's a test too far. The language expert is beaten, knocked out and when he next wakes (crueller still!) his tongue is removed, accompanied by another mocking glimpse into his mind:

"The word 'operation' kept going though his mind; it calmed his terror somewhat as he sank back into darkness."

And that's when things start to get really bad. To say more would spoil a nasty surprise and a horrible joke. Suffice to say that it's the psychological pain that Bowles inflicts on his character that really matters. It would be easy to characterise this story as a kind of orientalist fantasy: a good westerner is torn apart by the inscrutable cruelty of a desert people. But that's not where its real horror lies. It's not so much that the professor loses his way, as that he chooses to go down such a dangerous path in the first place. Bowles steadily, mercilessly, sadistically strips the professor of dignity and humanity and the result is all the more frightening because we always have the feeling that the poor old professor asks for his degradation. He is a wally. It's not that his assailants are inhuman, it's that the professor is all too human. He's like you and me and everyone else who reads the story, in other words. A Distant Episode strikes close to home, and that's why it will shake your foundations.

FictionSam Jordison
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Live webchat: Tim Lott advises on your novels

Post your questions now for the novelist, who'll be answering questions about creative writing this Friday from 12pm

How do you write a novel in 30 days? If you've read our how-to guide, you may well have a better notion of how to achieve such a seemlingy impossible task. You may even be following the day-by-day tasks - but sometimes, of course, things don't go according to the textbook and you need someone to lend an ear and offer some advice on how to move on to the next step. Well, with this in mind we've asked author Tim Lott to answer your novel-writing questions in a live webchat this Friday 26 October, taking place here between 12-1pm (BST).

This is the first in a series of four webchats we'll host on Friday lunchtimes, aimed at helping you with your fiction writing. To keep the chats focused, each will be around a particular topic covered in the how-to guides. This week, Tim will tackle your questions about brainstorming, creating preliminary outlines, character and plot sketches and research.

You can read more here about how Tim spends his working day, and if you missed any of the guides or the accompanying worksheets, you can find everything you need over here.

Post your question in the thread below now, then come back at 12pm on Friday to chat live to Tim.

FictionCreative writing
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Against 'good reads'

The passive value attached to straightforward storytelling obscures the wider possibilities of more adventurous writing

Michael Clark's latest dance presentation at the Barbican is a visceral reminder of what art can do. Make us gasp. Wonder. Cheer. Feel terrified and exhilarated and stupid and clever – all at once. From the second the lights in the theatre go down and a body is slowly lowered by wire from the heights of the ceiling to the stage far below, we are in a world where anything can happen. Then the dancer's feet touch the surface of the stage and "anything" does.

Why can't reading be like this? Or rather, where can we find the conversation about reading being like this? A lot of us got pretty excited about the idea of this year's Booker shortlist. A lot of us thought, maybe now the conversation about the novel-as-art-form might get properly started up in this country. After all, James Wood has got it started in America. And France and Europe have been talking about it for years. Yet in Britain we're still locked into the same cycle of fixed terms and definitions we've had since Dickens. The terrible rigor mortis of the phrase that is "a good read".

Even with Peter Stothard coming up with a fresh version of it – "re-readability" – for this year's prize, what chance do we have we for exploring the many possibilities of the novel form if we keep returning to simple variations on mimetic writing? If we keep insisting that stories can never be anything other than some variation of the portrayal of the world as it is or was?

This doesn't mean historical novels written in the present tense aren't engaging. Of course not. That's something we all learn in history classes – what fun it is to pitch a modern point of view back into past times and see things from another angle. And it seems as though Hilary Mantel is terribly good at that – and is funny and scary and engaging, and really does present a late medieval world and a shady main character whom otherwise we might not have got to know very well with wit and verve.

But novels can do other things. And reading them can be like watching dancing. They don't have to be re-readable. (How many people – aside from scholars - will ever think about re–reading Finnegans Wake?). They can be awkward and challenging and not easy to like. They can make us ask questions all the way through. Do I like this? Is this any good? Am I the same person here, half-way through this book, as I was when I began it? I thought I was intimidated, a second ago, because I didn't understand a thing, but now I am exhilarated. Novels can do all this to us. Have us answer back. Shout out. Throw the book across the room. (One volume in to Proust's In Search of Lost Time and that's exactly what I did: threw Swann's Way across the room. And then went on to read the entire, life-changing "adventure that is Proust" as Virginia Woolf put it.) So why keep getting stuck with the passive appetite for the good read over and over again?

Maybe we should just give up on the notion that major so-called literary prizes might represent anything other than the dominant sales-oriented monoculture. But in that case, the time has never been better than now to press for an award that is truly literary – in the sense that literature can represent not just the status quo and marketplace, but can be "that other thing" as Robert Rauchenberg put it. Can be the thing that's difficult and surprising and not like anything else we know. That thing coming down from the ceiling on a wire and is it dead? Is it live? Is it plastic? Is it real? Oh no, look. It's Michael Clark's imagination. It's something that didn't exist before he came along and made it happen.

FictionHilary MantelMichael ClarkDanceKirsty Gunn
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Tips, links and suggestions: Our review list and the books you are reading today

Your space to tell us what you are reading and what you'd like to see covered on the books site, plus our review list

Each time I write this blog I feel like I should start with the classic TV soap line: "In the previous episode..." because that is basically what I'm doing when I pick out comments, conversations and book recommendations from last week's blog and post them here, helping everyone get up to speed with what's going on.

We start with a stalwart member of TLS, tenuousfives:

Just read about the previously unpublished Moomin Book- The Great Flood. Please be sure to get advance copies and to review it as soon as possible. There's a reference to finding their house after a flood (I think) in Finn Family MoominTroll and I wondered where that story resided. Genuinely excited. I still cannot get the children interested in them...yet but if this new book has more pictures, then that may be my new 'in'.

I've just flicked through a review copy that has landed on the desk and I can confirm there are quite a few pictures so fingers crossed this one gets your children hooked. By the way, have you discovered the children's books site?

Lioc wrote:

Just finished The Hydrogen Sonata, by Iain M Banks, from last weeks list, and On the Beach, by Nevil Shute.

The Hydrogen Sonata was not Banks' best work or his worst.

The beginning is self-indulgent and mostly exposition but it builds gradually to quite a strong final quarter. The actual end is the typical introspective few pages that typify most of his works, and I'm getting rather bored of them to be honest. I'd really prefer a more substantive ending for once.

Anyone wanting to approach Banks' Culture stories would do well to read Consider Phlebas, Use of Weapons, and Look to Windward, then resolutely put all the others one side as unnecessary.

ItsAnOutrage2:

I've just finished another of the initial downloads on my Kindle, 'Ready, Steady, Dig!' by Rosalind Winter. Firstly, I should say that I enjoyed it and that there are some very funny jokes in it (and I'm picky where jokes are concerned). It is partly a well-aimed send-up of Time Team, and concerns the discovery of a Roman villa, the archaeologists being variously assisted an hindered by TV people, several cartoon villains and an assortment of spirits and 'guardians' from the past.
My only adverse criticism is that it's a bit lightweight. I wondered a couple of times if it was actually aimed at 'older' children, but eventually decided that it's simply, ...well, ...a bit safe.
As I said, I enjoyed it, but it might be one for when you're feeling fragile.

AggieH:

Speaking of foreign approaches to the Booker prize, I've just read the Man Asian Literary Prize Loses Sponsorship story.

At the bottom of the article, a 'Microsoft Translator' box offered to translate it into Danish for me. I let it.

The opening in English:

Two days after Hilary Mantel won her second Man Booker award for Bring Up the Bodies

The English opening translated into Danish by Microsoft Translator:

To dage efter Hilary Mantel vandt sin anden mand Booker award for bringe op de organer

The Danish opening translated back into English by me:

Two days after Hilary Mantel won her second husband Booker award for Bring Up The Organs

There was a footnote saying: "This translation facility is being offered as an experiment on coverage of the Man Asian literary prize. If you have a comment about it, please email userhelp@guardian.co.uk"

I assume the experiment is being run by the International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters. They may consider their point proven.

In a previous life I used to play this exact parlour game on Twitter with my followers; I would take a title of a book, translate it into another language using a decidedly ropey translation program, then translate that back into English and send it out for people to guess the original title - hours of fun!

Here's a selection of the books we'll be reviewing this week.

Non-fiction:

• Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum
• A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof by Roger Clarke
• George Osborne: Austerity Chancellor by Janan Ganesh
• Giants of Steam: The Great Men and Machines of Railways' Golden Age by Jonathan Glancey
• The War We Never Fought: The British Establishment's Surrender to Drugs by Peter Hitchens
• Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain's Far Right by Daniel Trilling
• The Most Remarkable Woman in England: Poison, Celebrity and the Trials of Beatrice Pace by John Carter Wood
• Consider the Fork: A History of Invention in the Kitchen by Bee Wilson

Fiction:

• Carry The One by Carol Anshaw
• The Twelve by Justin Cronin
• Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin

Hannah FreemanGuardian readers
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Scary stories for Halloween: Granny's Grinning by Robert Shearman

Exciting Christmas presents open into something genuinely horrific for the children in this grisly tale

I would be hard pushed to say which of Robert Shearman's short stories I found most frightening: thankfully, the best of them are collected in a new volume, Remember Why You Fear Me: The Best Dark Fiction Of Robert Shearman. Shearman is like a very English version of the Israeli writer Etgar Keret: when you start reading one of his stories, you have literally no idea where it will end up. He has a strong vein of surrealism, but this never descends into mere whimsy; at his best, he limns our anxieties and reflects our fears like few other writers can. There is an effect like the psychic equivalent of chalk on a blackboard, a shuddering, screeching moan that you just want, very badly, to stop.

He is one of contemporary literature's great over-doers: the stories constantly reach points where a lesser writer would stop, but he forges ahead, ratcheting up the emotional intensity. Among my favourites are "The Big Boy's Big Box of Tricks", where some brattish children torment a magician with how easily they can figure out how his tricks are done. When he challenges them to do better, one boy eats his own head (the description of his teeth taking his lips, nose, chin and then everything is shuddersome). "Cold Snap" has the most terrifying Santa Claus I've ever read (that his teeth are stained with pea-and-ham soup is the least of it). The selection doesn't unfortunately include the tour-de-force where the Twin Towers miraculously re-appear, then disappear, then re-appear, "History Becomes You".

Lost parents and lost children are leitmotifs throughout Shearman's work, and nowhere is this more fearfully done than in "Granny's Grinning". It begins with mild peculiarity: two children, in exchange for being especially nice to their recently bereaved grandmother at Christmas, get extra-special presents – monster costumes. The first twist is that the costumes literally turn you into monsters. The little boy is delighted with his werewolf; his sister is miffed that she got a zombie instead of a vampire. The description of her putting it on is wonderful: "[Daddy] helped her with the zombie slippers, thick slabs of feet with overgrown toenails and peeling skin. He helped her with the suit, snapped the buckle. Sarah felt cold all around, as if she's just been dipped into a swimming pool – but it was dry inside this pool, as dry as dust, and the cold dry dust was inside her".

Gradually, as Granny reminisces about her late husband and cuddles her granddaughter, we realise that the zombie is not just any zombie: "Daddy said that she'd now understand why he'd asked for all those photographs; to get the resemblance just right there had been special modifications … " The zombie is, in fact, a simulacrum of Granddad. Granny writes a cheque, puts on her nightie and beckons the zombie up to the bedroom. And it doesn't even stop there.

In a genre that frequently tired or reliant on unconvincing pile-ups of adjectives to convey horror, Shearman stands out: he can turn kindness itself into something unbearable.

HorrorFictionShort storiesStuart Kelly
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The lost art of letter-writing

As books on handwriting, letter-writing and paper are published, are we ready to fall back in love with slow communication?

Handwriting; paper; letters: they are drifting from our lives. But there's something in the air, for three books this autumn are devoted to this trio of intertwined subjects: Philip Hensher's The Missing Ink; Ian Sansom's Paper; and John O'Connell's For the Love of Letters. A sense of loss suffuses all these works (Sansom's book makes it plain with his subtitle, "an elegy"). But perhaps these books, this feeling, will spark a revival in the handling of the fountain pen and the wielding of the Basildon Bond. Perhaps it's like pastoral: a genre that could be invented only when the idea of the urban was fully established, Theocritus writing about nymphs and shepherds in the age of Alexandria. Passion can be proportionate to scarcity. Maybe we are ready to fall back in love with what O'Connell's book calls "slow communication".

Here is a full declaration of interest: O'Connell and I were at school together. We've known each other for 27 years. Last week I received a letter from him. On beautiful paper, but in Biro (he apologised, his daughter, he thought, might have appropriated the fountain pen). It was a wonderful letter: thanking me for dinner, yes, but also giving me some advice on a tricky work question, and in general showing that he'd thought about the conversations we'd had that night. This morning, I started reading his book. It begins by movingly describing a letter he received from a friend when his mother died last year. I read this with a guilty shock. I hadn't written to John then. Why not? At what point in my apparently well-brought-up life did I suddenly think it was OK not to write to a bereaved friend?

It wasn't always like this. Depending on what manner of hoarder O'Connell is, he might well turn up some Higgins juvenalia tucked away in a drawer somewhere. I'm pretty sure that if I rootled around in my bureau – where the letters-from-friends archive dries up in about 1997, around the time that email took off – I'd find letters from him, in his distinctive and elegant hand, the Ys rendered with looped tails, as you'd write a Greek gamma. (Philip Hensher, in his introduction to The Missing Ink, recalls realising he had no idea what the handwriting of a good friend, whom he'd known a decade, looked like. Knowing someone's handwriting – O'Connell's is as familiar to me as my own – can turn out to be a marker of a friendship's extreme longevity, at least for those of us whose adult lives began before the digital age.)

Funnily enough, though, in recent months, I have been writing letters. A friend of mine is very unwell. I haven't seen her for some time. At some point, I'm not sure why, I decided to start writing to her: with pen and paper. Partly, I think, as a tease – she's one of the least "analogue", most tech-savvie people I know. But also because I wanted her to feel that I was thinking about her in a personal way, and I wasn't sure that could adequately be conveyed by machine-made letterforms. Let's be clear, this is much more to do with me than her. She gets to plough through near illegible streams-of-consciousness written not on gorgeous Smythson (like John's letters) but rather on, at very best, Conqueror Laid (vellum) or at worst on hotel writing-paper or torn-out notebook leaves.

But still... O'Connell quotes this lovely passage from a piece by Catherine Field in the New York Times.

A good handwritten letter is a creative act, and not just because it is a visual and tactile pleasure. It is a deliberate act of exposure, a form of vulnerability, because handwriting opens a window on the soul in a way that cyber communication can never do. You savor their arrival and later take care to place them in a box for safe keeping.

To John's letter, I replied by text. I said something like this: "Your letter was so wonderful I was almost tempted to strike up a correspondence". I have not written back, of course. Though, on the way back to the office to finish this post, I did find myself walking into the art-supplies shop round the corner, and buying a fountain pen ... something's changed.

BereavementPhilip HensherCharlotte Higgins
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds