Aly Monroe's Blog, page 10

Winter Waterloo

Last Sunday we celebrated my mother's 90th birthday. Given the weather in the UK, this turned out to be rather brave. We had to get from Edinburgh to Guildford – and then back. We were luckyish – some slight delays, walks in minus 8 temperatures due to lack of taxis. But our trains there and back were among the few not cancelled.

My brother and his partner tried to get the 20.30 Eurostar back to Paris on Sunday. They arrived at mid-day on Monday. On our way to King's Cross we saw the queue waiting to get into St Pancras. From families with young children to elderly people, several thousand were being made to wait outside in sub-zero temperatures.

At King's Cross we were frequently informed the weather was 'inclement' and that everything was being done for our 'security and comfort.' The 'comfort' part was notional. King's Cross has been a very small station for generations – doubtless all this will change when the building work is finished.

The 'security' part was more obvious. The unfortunate police were out in force at St Pancras and they were keeping an eye on King's Cross as well. My brother says potential passengers were each given a bottle of water and 'a bag of chips' at about 5.30 in the morning after the police had been called in and someone arrested and restrained for protesting at the lack of information and the order that everyone go out and through security again after someone else had left the building, apparently for a cigarette.

From Guildford the London train goes to Waterloo, named after a famous battle. The Duke of Wellington is supposed to have attributed his success to a lack of rigid planning or, more accurately, to tying a knot in a rope when it broke.

My suspicion (I am being nice) is that companies no longer do knots but summon the police, instead. Perfect storm patrol? I would hope the rail companies are charged for this service but suspect they simply add it on to fares. there is no Plan B. As they say at King's Cross, platform zero is to the left of platform one

I was also reminded of John Buchan's career, based on cracks in the thin veneer of civilization. If Richard Hannay had tried to get a train on Monday 20th December 2010, he'd definitely have died.

Snow Strikes

I recently delivered the completed manuscript of Blacklight – Peter Cotton book number 3 – which is set in London in the long, freezing winter of 1946-7. Rationing was worse than during the war. The coal ran out. Water, whether in the Thames, water pipes, or outside loos, froze.

In what I hope was an entirely unrelated event, it began to snow here in Edinburgh. The first day, my ninety two year old father-in-law told me how calm and pristine it looked from his East Lothian window and that afternoon, he even ventured out in his walking boots, thick coat and balaclava helmet, stout cane in hand, for a short stroll in the quiet white.

The view from our front windows overlooks some gardens, which soon became filled with Lowry-like figures of children (schools all closed) tobogganing down the slope on what looked like brightly coloured plastic tea trays.

The next day I put on my own boots and went out to meet a Spanish girl, recently graduated as a vet, called Rocío, for lunch. I knew all her family years ago in Cadiz – where it almost never snows, being almost entirely surrounded by sea. I believe a few flakes fell in 1968. But I knew that her grandparents lived in Granada, so she would have seen snow before in the Sierra Nevada. 'Yes, she said, 'but I love this. It's the first time I've seen falling snow!' The tone of wonder in her voice took me back, and I remembered how Spanish parents in the south of Spain would, like the father of the protagonist in 'A Hundred Years of Solitude', make expeditions with their children so that they could 'conocer el hielo' – see ice and snow with their own eyes, as a wonder of the world.

Over the following days, in Edinburgh, the wonder creaked and froze. A note of disquiet began to creep into my father-in-law's voice. 'What if there is no food in the shops? What if there is a power cut?'

I reassured him as cheerfully as I could, feeling pleased that our local supermarket was in charge of delivering our weekly shop (and my father –in- law's) – and pleased that (barring power cuts), heat and facilities such as indoor loos were commonplace now.

As soon as I put the phone down, the supermarket texted me to say that they had had to cancel my delivery due to the road conditions, and that I should reschedule my order. This I did, but it still left me with having to negotiate my way down a snow and black ice slope – past people trying to dig out their cars – to stock up while waiting for my delivery.

Rocío's plane back to Spain was postponed due to the weather conditions at Edinburgh airport – but I hope this didn't prevent her from taking back her 'falling snow' feeling to Cadiz.

She also had to contend with the air controllers' strike in Spain. Thirty five years after his death, the Spanish government had recourse to a measure employed by Franco. They 'militarized' the strikers.

Port Sunlight

I have been out of blog action finishing Blacklight, the third Peter Cotton book. The fourth is already started but I have to find a name for it.

So back a while, to the Ellis Peters Historical Award ceremony on the 4th November. All very civilized and friendly. I had already felt, perhaps from the follow through from Wolf Hall, that it was going to be a Tudor year.

Delighted for Rory Clements and his artist wife Naomi that Revenger won. I had met Rory and Andrew Williams before since we are all John Murray writers. Andrew Taylor was, as always, generous and amiable and I met S J Parris (Stephanie Merritt) for the first time and instantly forgave her for being the same age as my elder daughter. C J Sansom, the runner-up, also with a Tudor book, couldn't be there. I may be wrong but I think I heard the word flu.

Another reason I felt it was a Tudor year was because we were on the site of Bridewell Palace, Henry VIII's residence after Westminster Palace burnt down in 1512 and where the papal delegation arrived to discuss the annulment of Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon.

The reason I know this is because my father worked for many years in the old Unilever building and I remember visiting him along what felt like the dark passages of some Pharaoh's tomb many years ago.

All that has gone. Inside the façade is a mercifully light filled structure. I went up in a glass lift with someone who said 'Wasn't all this built by someone who made soap?' Not exactly. But there was something about all the glass that induced a sensation not of stepping on the past but of reflected ghosts. There is time and there is space repeatedly occupied and left.

Thanks to everyone there.

Don No

Last Sunday, by chance, I saw a bit of the first James Bond film, Dr No, released forty-eight years ago in 1962. It was, of course, made before Bond became a franchise that multiplied and morphed. The makers were trying it out to see whether or not it would fly with consumers.

My interest was drawn as I realized that I was seeing in historical time, as it were, the film background to the American TV series Mad Men. It had not struck me before just how much the series protagonist, Don Draper, is a version of Sean Connery's portrayal of Bond as a hard-boiled, long-zipped hero. It's not just a question of the male hair applications, or the women poured into girdled moulds, but even, despite the difference in accents, down to some intonations.

Dr No links male tradition and female corsetry. Men bear and command; women pour, and just can't help it if they like a pillar of strength. But it is an escapist fantasy - I was particularly fond of James Bond turning the radioactive level explosively up and then looking for the girl chained into a sloping Angelica position.

Unless you're a fashionista, Mad Men is less escapist. I think of the series as skilful Balzac for today, but rising from time to time into a stylish existentialism and, just occasionally, into wonderfully scrappy bits that mean living people clash at indecorous, often unknowing levels of deference, self-respect, discomfort and resentment. From that point of view Mad Men is rather sophisticated. I understand the character of Peggy Olsen is, to some extent, based on the female founder of Cosmopolitan magazine. In other words, a boss is not a lover, but may be even more time-consuming and influential. Her narrative danger? Just a little too much of the Ad-woman's pilgrim's progress.

But what really struck me is that it is TV series like Mad Men, (and The Sopranos and The Wire) that lead the way in popular narrative terms. Written narrative, though it gradually assumed the cuts associated with film, is still not sharing that freedom and those possibilities.

It may be of course that the audience for written fiction feels happier with more traditional exposition and explanation, but it is probably more to do with the producers' economic model.

Take, for example, last Wednesday's episode (in the UK, that is.) in which Peggy casually mentions Margaret Mead. In a book, I suspect the author would need to add 'the anthropologist'. And very likely 'author of Coming of Age in Samoa'. The fact is, that by mentioning Margaret Mead, Peggy is misreading male irritation and confusion with a vending machine. She is about to get a crash course in 'Mating in Manhattan' and 'The position of crude innuendo in the work place', and finds out that solidarity amongst women can lead to being called a 'humourless bitch' by another female - the recipient of the original Margret Mead remark.

I am aware that some people, particularly of my mother's generation, find Mad Men uncomfortable, or even unwatchable. It can seem a very sharp portrait of the extent to which conformity and decorum, and what was regarded as important, look, in retrospect, pointless and trivial and cruel.

Don Draper's ex-wife, Betsy, would-be but failing model of the supported, supportive and fragrant trophy wife, described his date as 'at least fifteen' - reflecting her own emotional age rather than accusing her ex-husband of cradle snatching. 'He has it all,' she complained, with considerable envy.

The girl in question, poured exactly into the same hairdo and fashion sense as she is, is a younger clone of herself. With one exception. The young lady made Don 'comfortable' before trotting demurely and knowingly back to her dorm.

Yes, at one level it is excruciating. But I'd point to two justifications. It's scalpel sharp. And if anyone thinks this could not be applied to life now, they might like to think again before it's too late.

Prizewinning

My husband takes solace in the works of David Hume. He finds something reassuring in the great sceptic philosopher's prose. It is true, of course, as Julian Baggini and others have pointed out, that Hume was pre-soundbite. My husband says the prose is nearly hypnotic, like hearing the click of a verbal abacus.

I tend more to hearing the civilized whirr of a privileged 18th Century mind – never knowingly oversold, as it were.

Hume is famous on several counts. One is his remarkably brief autobiography, My Own Life. At just ten pages long it is, on one level, anti-Proust – at another, anti much detail at all, once a rigorous process of selection has been applied.

Hume's 'Life' is a literary life. As one of the first, possibly the first, man of letters to make a living

from writing books (his histories sold more than his philosophical works), he describes what he calls

the 'vanity' involved in writing an autobiography: 'It is difficult for a man to speak

long of himself without vanity; therefore I shall be short.' This is not all puff. Overegging it a little, he describes, his first work as having fallen 'still-born' from the press.Hume, of course, was not given any literary awards – they are a more recent invention. And of course, they vary. The Nobel Prize, recently given to Mario Vargas Llosa, is big. The Booker, recently given to Howard Jacobsen, is big in Britain.

But there are others. And I have recently been nominated for the Ellis Peter Awards (along with five other writers, two of whom have already won the award before). The Ellis Peters awards are for historical – that is now minus at least 35 years – crime fiction.

My attitude is – I really am very grateful to be nominated at all.

But it has struck me that 'history' is a long time. I think my Washington Shadow is the most recent in terms of setting (1945) – three of the shortlisted books are set in Tudor times. All historical novels, of course, reflect the present to a greater or lesser degree. Whether they mention doublets or zoot suits, they all have an angle on now.

And I suppose what I am really saying is that I am increasingly conscious of why the past matters. The attitudes of the nineteen forties in Britain, what I will call the non-funding of sometimes admirable, sometimes over-ambitious things, sticks to us now. For the last sixty years Britain's efforts to remain a world power but with a degree of social justice have proved … let's call it expensive.

Good luck – I mean it – to the other short listed writers.

Shortlisted for Ellis Peters Historical Award

I have heard today that Washington Shadow has been shortlisted for the CWA Ellis Peters Award, together with fellow John Murray writers Rory Clements (for Revenger) and Andrew Williams (for To Kill a Tsar), as well as S.J. Parris (for Heresy), C. J. Sansom (for Heartstone) and Andrew Taylor (for The Anatomy of Ghosts)

The results will be announced on 4th November.

Hold

Many years ago, on reading a poem by W B Yeats for school (see The Tower), something stuck. I became conscious the poet was complaining of age: he had 'fantastical' imagination, but what he lacked as an old man was stamina, the ability to hold and sustain the construct that turns imagination into the something people can read and share.

As I say, I made a note of this for future reference. Would I ever, I wondered, given my evident differences from a great poet, experience something similar? And when?

Blogreader, I may just have done so. I have been working hard on one hundred thousand words (Blacklight) and last Sunday, the effort to hold the whole book in mind resulted in, or rather collapsed into, a fantastic image – a vulture perched on an empty skull. I'd guess that image follows on from a sensation of dark, heavy wings at the back on my mind before the old scavenger took over.

It may even be a rather literal take on the word 'deadline'.

However grandiose the image however, it was simply like the mind turning its own light off. Also known as working too long.

Sleep helped.

It did give me pause however – enough to write this, anyway. As I have said before, I do not read long books when I'm at this stage of writing. And I have been looking at The Original of Laura by Valdimir Nabokov.

Described on the cover as 'a novel in fragments', that is precisely what it is. It appears that Nabokov himself wanted it destroyed. I don't want to get in to whether it should have been published or not. (It should not have been).

What it does show is Nabokov at the end of his life, being sporadically what we think of as 'Nabokov' – but it is really more a collection of notes, mnemonics and puzzles, and problems to do a lot of work on and develop.

Nabokov was also a considerable lepidopterist. Rather cruelly, The Original of Laura is like bits of a butterfly with too many legs, missing scales and misplaced antennae - almost a butterfly broken on the wheel before it had become a butterfly.

Romantic? No.

Right at the end of writing a book, even this modest writer is anxious not to lose the energy and stamina needed to make it enjoyable.

Less Is More

On the advice of the marketing department, the title of my new Peter Cotton book, due out next spring, has been changed from 'London Blacklight' to Blacklight. Here is the cover.

The setting remains London, of course, but the word Blacklight is, I think, seen as strong enough to stand on its own. Indeed the London part probably weakened it, possibly confused it. There is geography and there is UV light.

At first I was unsure – I had used place in the two previous books, Cádiz and...

Elephants and Mice

There is an old story that elephants are afraid of mice. I suspect it is not the kind of tale that wins research money to test whether or not it is true. I can also imagine that mice, short-sighted creatures, might nonetheless pick up on something huge nearby, sometimes by shadow but mostly from the tremors running towards them through the earth from the placement of alarmingly large, heavy feet.

When writing, I tend to read books that come in short sections. Recently I have bought Ms...

Audiobook of Washington Shadow

The Audiobook of Washington Shadow, published by Isis, is out today. It is read, as was The Maze of Cadiz, by the excellent Jonathan Keeble, and is available direct from Isis.
I am looking forward to receiving my copies to hear how it sounds!