Jonathan Coe's Blog, page 2

New novel and short story

Jonathan is pleased to announce that his 10th novel, EXPO 58, will be published by Viking Penguin in September 2013. Foreign rights have already been sold to many of the European countries, so translations should follow soon after the English version.

Also, on December 23rd, the Sunday Telegraph will publish his new short story, ‘Rotary Park’. Close readers and fans of The Rain Before It Falls will recognise a few characters from that novel.

End of 2012

Dear Readers, if there are indeed any of you still out there. We are nearly at the end of the year and, if I’ve been quiet on here for the last few months, that’s because I have been pretty busy elsewhere.

I spent some time in the late summer/early autumn writing the short story ‘Pentatonic’, and then working with Danny Manners on the audio version, which we performed live twice in the UK in September, and then recorded at the studio of our good friend Ken Brake near Regent’s Park in London. We’re both very happy with the result, and I hope that some of you are motivated to download it: it can be purchased from eMusic, amazon and iTunes.

Last month I finished another story, ‘Rotary Park’, which will be published in the Sunday Telegraph this Sunday, December 23rd. I don’t think it will be made available online, although now that I’ve increased my lifetime’s output of short stories from 3 to 5 in the space of a few months, you never know, I might have enough for a collection before too long …

The thing it gives me most pleasure to announce, though, is the completion of my new novel, EXPO 58. As the title suggests, it is set during the Brussels World’s Fair of 1958. It’s a comic novel of the Cold War, mixing espionage, politics and romance. I think of it as John Le Carré meets Evelyn Waugh, although a friend who read it said it was more like GK Chesterton meeting Alfred Hitchcock. Penguin will publish the book in the UK in September 2013, with Dutch and Italian editions coming out at the same time or even sooner.

All of these new works, ‘Pentatonic’, ‘Rotary Park’ and EXPO 58 are extensions or by-products of the same family saga which began with the story ‘Ivy and Her Nonsense’ and continued with THE RAIN BEFORE IT FALLS.

Incidentally if you’re not already a subscriber to eMusic I would strongly recommend it as offering the best value (and most interesting selection) of all the music download sites. Here, for instance, is my favourite musical discovery of the year: Vince Mendoza’s 1999 album EPIPHANY, a beautiful fusion of jazz and orchestral music which accompanied me through the writing of the last few chapters of EXPO 58, and provided a constant stream of joy and inspiration. The first track, ‘Impromptu’, is just extraordinary.

A happy, peaceful and creative 2013 to everyone.

New short story on ebook and audio

A new short story by Jonathan called Pentatonic has just been published by Penguin in ebook format only. The text-only version can be downloaded from the Kindle Store on amazon.

Better still, you can hear an audio version, narrated by Jonathan himself, with music by Danny Manners. The running time is 33 minutes and it can be downloaded from iTunes, Audible and (soon, we hope) eMusic. This is the best way to experience the story as Danny has written some wonderful music, which relates very closely to the narrative itself. In this respect Pentatonic is a significant extension of their collaboration on 9th and 13th. Fans of The Rain Before It Falls will also recognise some of the characters and settings.

Jonathan will blog about the story very shortly - as soon as he has a moment!

Public appearances - past and forthcoming

Hello everyone

I’m writing this in the Belgian countryside, where I have managed to carve out some quiet writing time for myself - courtesy of a dear friend, who has kindly lent me her house on the outskirts of Brussels for a few days.

It seems a long time ago that I came to the Comédie du Livre in Montpellier, but my belated thanks go to the many French readers who came to see me and get their books signed over that beautifully sunny weekend. I really enjoyed my session with Vanessa Guignery and Pascal Arnaud, talking about BS Johnson, and it’s now possible to see a recording of the whole event here.

A few weeks before that, while I was in Paris, I had the pleasure of meeting Élise Guillon and Caroline Bodin from the excellent website Hors d’Oeuvres. We did an interview which - I have to say - was far more wide-ranging and better-researched than the ones I usually do with print journalists. You can read it here.

My next festival event will be in beautiful Cortona, in Tuscany, on August 4th, my father’s 84th birthday. Please come if you happen to be nearby!

Writing Britain (and my rock star moment)

A brief suggestion that anyone who is going to be in London between now and September should head over to the British Library in St Pancras to see their Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands exhibition.  It has been described as a “book geeks’ dream” and contains an amazing variety of literary treasures. To name just a few:  William Blake’s notebooks, the original manuscripts of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and To the Lighthouse, a (totally indecipherable) manuscript page of Ulysses – all of it easily enough to keep the visitor enthralled for two or three hours, I would have thought. (There is also a manuscript page of The Rotters’ Club, I should mention, but that rather pales in comparison with the other rarities on display.)

Anyway, I strongly recommend that you visit it. The details are here.

Meanwhile I’ve finally decided that the public should be allowed to share in the moment of musical glory I enjoyed in New York last year. Nigel Blows A Tune (written by Dave Sinclair of Caravan and included on their 1971 album In the Land of Grey and Pink) has always been one of my favourite tunes, and when Wesley Stace invited me not just to read but to perform some music at his Cabinet of Wonders show in March 2011, I tentatively suggested we do our own version. For the purposes of this show, Wesley works with a fantastic house band called The English UK, and they lost no time in learning the song and thrusting me in front of the audience armed only with a keyboard programmed to sound as close as possible to Caravan’s original Hammond organ. I can’t imagine that anyone knew exactly what to expect but the results were – well, not too embarrassing, I think, listening to it a year later. Judge for yourselves, in any case …

News and Musical Links

I have to begin, of course, with routine apologies for the lack of blogs over the last few months. No excuse, in particular, apart from the fact that putting words - any words - on paper (or on screen) seems to get harder and harder as time goes by.

Nonetheless, I have not been entirely idle lately. Last year I wrote a short book for children called The Broken Mirror, and I'm pleased to say that it will be published by Feltrinelli, in a translation by Delfina Vezzoli, at the end of September this year. There will be ten full-colour illustrations by Chiara Coccorese, whose wonderful portrait of me I have linked to on this site before. No news of publication in other languages yet, but I hope to have some soon.

Meanwhile I am making good headway with a new novel, and hope to have it finished later this year.

Music continues to be an important inspiration. Lately I've been listening a lot to The Quickening, the latest album from a band called Remember Remember, who specialise in just the sort of tuneful, multi-layered instrumental music that I love. Most of all, though, I would recommend that you visit the Soundcloud page of the brilliant Louise Le May to check out her haunting voice and the exquisite melancholy of new songs like 'A Tale Untold' and 'Angry Birds and Uncle Sam'.

A band called Colour Clouds have alerted me to a new song of theirs called 'The Pier's On Fire', with some of the lyrics inspired (I think) by Michael Owen's visit to Weston-super-Mare in the early chapters of What A Carve Up!. You can listen to the song here - it's very good. I can hear a strong Smiths influence.

Finally, my heartfelt thanks to all the people who came to hear me speak in Switzerland and Italy last weekend. Vevey, on the shores of Lake Geneva, provided a splendid backdrop to my discussion with Josée Kamoun, who translates my books for Gallimard, and I was - as always - overwhelmed by the warmth and enthusiasm of the hundreds of Italian readers who came to meet me in Rome. These encounters are one of the things that give me the will to go on writing, and convince me that it must be worthwhile.

Say Hi To The Rivers and The Mountains

A last-minute reminder that there is a rare London performance of this show coming up this Friday (October 7th) at King's Place in London. Tickets are available here.

This unique theatre piece has been written in collaboration with my friend Sean O'Hagan and his band The High Llamas: in many ways it's the culmination of my experiments with combining music and the spoken word. This performance is part of the Notes and Letters festival - there is an amazing cast and I think it's going to be the definitive version. Please come if you can - that last performance was in Spain more than eighteen months ago, and after this, who knows when we'll get the chance to do it again!

Rescuing the Hitchcock nine

For the last few days I've been reading Raymond Durgnat's book The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock. Durgnat (who died in 2002) was one of those rare critics whose books are compelling to read whether you are familiar with his subject matter or not. He was, in himself, a fine prose stylist and phrase-maker. Once, in his monograph about Georges Franju, while writing about the almost unwatchable 1949 documentary Le Sang Des Bêtes ­(filmed in a Parisian abattoir) he described human society as 'an organization of deaths': and this expression haunted me so insistently that it found a permanent place in my consciousness, finally leading me to use it as the title of the second half of my novel What a Carve Up.

For some reason I had not read Durgnat's Hitchcock book before, and it is predictably brilliant, drawing the director's disparate films together into intriguing groupings, finding unexpected thematic links between them. I turned to it after watching To Catch A Thief for the first time. I'm not sure why it's taken me so long to get around to seeing this film. I knew it was only meant to be a frothy, minor Hitchcock; but still, it comes from his greatest period, the mid-1950s, so I suspect that in a way I'd been holding it in reserve, deliberately holding off from watching it so that I had another of his films to look forward to. (I'm doing much the same thing with Rosamond Lehmann's fourth novel The Weather in the Streets - still the only one I've never read.)

But then, something recently reminded me that there's a whole treasure chest of other Hitchcock films waiting for me to discover: his films from the silent era. Of these, I've only seen The Lodger, one of his earliest thrillers (starring Ivor Novello) - and that was many years ago. One of the silents, The Mountain Eagle­, seems to have been irretrievably lost; some of the others are available on DVD, in one form or another. But the condition of the prints on many of these releases is ropey, to say the least.

Which is why I would urge everyone to have a look at this page on the website of the bfi, who are currently attempting to restore all nine of Hitchcock's surviving silent films to pristine condition. I recently went to a presentation of their work so far, and the difference between the existing prints and the restorations-in-progress was indescribable. I think that when - and if - they are able to present these films on the big screen again, with specially-commissioned live scores, it will be a revelatory experience which will change our perception of this great director's work forever. So please think about making a donation to their appeal if you can afford it.

A musical memory

Well, another summer has slipped by and in the course of it I passed what some people insist on telling me is an important milestone: my 50th birthday.

I would be lying if I said that this anniversary hasn't affected me at all. Coincidentally or not, for the last few weeks I've been in a retrospective mood and have spent a good deal of time looking through old notebooks and diaries. It's strange to come across pages of notes, some of them more than twenty years old, for books which I never got around to writing. Many of these notes date from the early 1990s, the period between writing The Dwarves of Death and starting work on What a Carve Up!.

My trawls through the paperwork also turned up a good deal of journalism written during this time. People occasionally (very occasionally) ask me why I've never tried to collect my journalism in a book, to which my simple answer is that I don't think most of it's very good. The few pieces that I have enjoyed reading again, over the last few weeks, are my reviews and interviews for The Wire, the jazz and modern music magazine to which I was an occasional contributor back in those days. These, at least, did stir up some pleasant memories of some of the musicians I was lucky enough to meet while working for the paper: memorable encounters with Steve Reich and Brian Eno, a bumpy ride in the back of a van to a gig in Camden with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow (one of my teenage heroes) and - perhaps the best memory of all - an afternoon spent in the comany of Annette Peacock.

My interview with Annette now seems to be available to read here (the one with Brian Eno is also available online, I think, if you look around for it). I remember being very intimidated to meet this beautiful and talented singer, who had a dark and rather aggressive presence on stage (I'd been to see her in concert in East London a couple of nights before). Unusually, we didn't meet in a hotel lobby or the offices of her record company: she asked if she could come to my home instead. In those days I was living in a studio on the King's Road in Chelsea, and I shuddered to think what this doyenne of the New York avant garde would make of my little flat with its bourgeois furniture and fittings. But she came, and could not have been more friendly or charming. What I remember most vividly is the photo session afterwards: The Wire's photographer got her to sit on a wooden chair next to a window, her face caught in the fading afternoon sunlight, and for the next twenty minutes, while he took her picture, I put side two of X-Dreams (probably my favourite of her albums) on the turntable. Whether she liked being made to listen to her own music or not I don't know, but to me it provided the perfect soundtrack to our conversation while the photographer went about his business.

The resulting photograph disappointed me, slightly: it was very contrasty, in stark black and white, and showed only the contours of her face, with nothing of the room or the window in the background. Nonetheless, I kept a copy, and framed it, and kept it on the wall of my study for quite a few years. Where is it now, I wonder? It hasn't turned up during any of my recent nostalgic searches.

If you're not familiar with Annette Peacock's music, I warmly recommend her albums X-Dreams, I'm The One (a big influence on David Bowie) and more recently An Acrobat's Heart and 31:31.

And talking of music, I'm pleased to say that next month (October 7th to be precise) there will be a rare, one-off, staged performance of my 'spoken musical theatre' piece with The High Llamas, Say Hi to the Rivers and the Mountains at King's Place in London. Details are here, and I'll try to write a bit more about it in my next blog. Promises, promises!

From Page To Screen

Less than two weeks now before the opening night of Bridport's very own film festival. The opening gala, on Wednesday 13 April, will be a screening of Mark Romanek's fine version of Never Let Me Go, preceded by an onstage conversation between Kazuo Ishiguro and myself. I will be at the festival on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, introducing some of the screenings and welcoming other special guests such as Nicholas Mosley, Bill Forsyth and Emma Richler. The extremely rare screening of Forsyth's wonderful adaptation of Marilynne Robinson's novel Housekeeping is not to be missed.

As part of the run-up to the festival, I've written up some of my thoughts about the relationship between film and the novel in this article for The Guardian.