William Peace's Blog, page 5

Review: The Thirty-Nine Steps

This novel of only 119 pages is on the list of 100 best novels in English because it is the prototype of the tightly- written spy thriller.

The author is John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir (26 August 1875 – 11 February 1940) was a Scottish novelist, historian, and Unionist politician who served as Governor General of Canada, the 15th since  Canadian Confederation.

As a youth, Buchan began writing poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction, publishing his first novel in 1895 and ultimately writing over a hundred books of which the best known is The Thirty-Nine Steps. After attending Glasgow and Oxford universities, he practised as a barrister. In 1901, he served as a private secretary to Lord Milner in southern Africa towards the end of the Boer War. He returned to England in 1903, continued as a barrister and journalist. He left the Bar when he joined Thomas Nelson and Sons publishers in 1907. During the First World War, he was, among other activities, Director of Information in 1917 and later Head of Intelligence at the newly-formed Ministry of Information. He was elected Member of Parliament for the Combined Scottish Universities in 1927.

In 1935, King George V, on the advice of Canadian Prime Minister, R. B.Bennett, appointed Buchan to succeed the Earl of Bessborough as Governor General of Canada and two months later raised him to the peerage as 1st Baron Tweedsmuir. He occupied the post until his death in 1940. Buchan promoted Canadian unity and helped strengthen the sovereignty of Canada constitutionally and culturally. He received a state funeral in Canada before his ashes were returned to the United Kingdom.

John Buchan

The principal character and narrator of the novel is Richard Hannay, a wealthy mining engineer who has just returned to London, and finds his life boring. A panicked neighbour, Franklin Scudder, who is a journalist, knocks on his door and tells Hannay about a plot to kill the prime minister of Greece, Constantine Karolides, in a few weeks time – an event which the plotters hope will start the First World War. Hannay provides Scudder with a refuge against the plotters, but when he returns to his flat, he finds that Scudder has been murdered. Hannay discovers a coded notebook which Scudder had kept and which was what the plotters has been looking for. With the notebook in his possession and a dead man in his flat, Hannay realises that he will be sought by both the plotters and the police. So, he leaves his flat, disguised as a milkman and boards a train to Scotland. He alights from the train at a remote station in the Galloway Hills, and what follows is a cat and mouse game during which he eludes capture by the plotters and the police. Hannay manages to decode Scudders notebook, and he learns that the plotters are a German spy ring known at Black Stone, whose objective is to learn the disposition of the British fleet before the outbreak of war. Hannay resolves to inform  Sir Walter Bullivant, Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office of the plot. As he hurries to escape capture, he enters what seems a disserted house, he finds himself face-to-face with with the leader of Black Stone. Hannay is locked in a storeroom where he finds a store of explosives. Using his mining experience, he blasts his way out and boards a train south. He finds Sir Walter at home in Berkshire, and convinces him of the truth of the plot except for the assassination of Karolides, until it breaks into the news. Hannay and Sir Walter travel to London to sound the alarm. At Sir Walters townhouse, Hannay sees a person he assumes to be the First Sea Lord leaving the meeting, but, as he goes by, Hannay recognises him as one of the Black Stone plotters in disguise. Realising that the plotters must physically transport their stolen information across the Channel, Hannay consults Scudders notebook which mentions a seacoast landing which is accesses by 39 steps. With the help of a coastal pilot, he is able to identify the place, the plotters in disguise and a German yacht ready to take them home. But they are captured before they can escape.

This is a fast-moving story, with many twists and turns. The settings, the events and the characters are credible, their credibility reinforced by the actual situation leading up to WWI. A pleasant and engaging read!

Not a Review: Ulysses

This isn’t a review, because I haven’t read the entire book. Call it “My Preliminary Thoughts on Having Read about 10% of the Book.” The problem was that 10% of the book was enough to discourage me from reading any further. In fairness to James Joyce, the author, I ought to take a stab at something else he’s written.

Wikipedia says this about Joyce: “James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce’s nove Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer’s Odyssey Homer’s are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism.

Joyce was born in Dublin into a middle-class family. He attended the Jesuit Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare, then, briefly, the Christian Brothers–run O’Connell School. Despite the chaotic family life imposed by his father’s unpredictable finances, he excelled at the Jesuit Jesuit Belvedere College graduated from University College Dublin in 1902. In 1904, he met his future wife, Nora Barnacle, and they moved to mainland Europe. He briefly worked in Pula and then moved to Trieste in Austria-Hungary, working as an English instructor. Except for an eight-month stay in Rome working as a correspondence clerk and three visits to Dublin, Joyce resided there until 1915. In Trieste, he published his book of poems Chamber Music and his short story collection Dubliners, and he began serially publishing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the English magazine The Egotist. During most of World War I, Joyce lived in Zurich, Switzerland, and worked on Ulysses. After the war, he briefly returned to Trieste and then moved to Paris in 1920, which became his primary residence until 1940.

Ulysses was first published in Paris in 1922, but its publication in the United Kingdom and the United States was prohibited because of its perceived obscenity. Copies were smuggled into both countries and pirated versions were printed until the mid-1930s, when publication finally became legal. Joyce started his next major work, Finnegans Wake, in 1923, publishing it sixteen years later in 1939. Between these years, Joyce travelled widely. He and Nora were married in a civil ceremony in London in 1931. He made a number of trips to Switzerland, frequently seeking treatment for his increasingly severe eye problems and psychological help for his daughter, Lucia. When France was occupied by Germany during World War II, Joyce moved back to Zürich in 1940. He died there in 1941 after surgery for a perforated ulcer, at age 58.

Ulysses frequently ranks high in lists of great books, and the academic literature analysing his work is extensive and ongoing. Many writers, film-makers, and other artists have been influenced by his stylistic innovations, such as his meticulous attention to detail, use of interior monologue, wordplay, and the radical transformation of traditional plot and character development. Though most of his adult life was spent abroad, his fictional universe centres on Dublin and is largely populated by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and friends from his time there. Ulysses in particular is set in the streets and alleyways of the city. Joyce is quoted as saying, “For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.”

James Joyce

The novel is 673 pages long. Here is a paragraph I’ve chosen from what I’ve read, at random:

“Mr Deasy looked down and held for a while the wings of his nose tweaked between his fingers. Looking up again, he set them free. — I am happier than you are, he said. We have committed many errors and many sins. A woman brought sin into the world. For a woman who was no better than she should be, Helen, the runaway wife of Menelaus, ten years the Greeks made war on Troy. A faithless wife first brought the strangers to our shore here, MacMurrough’s wife, and her leman, O’Rourke, prince of Breffni. A woman too brought Parnell low. Many errors, many failures but not the one sin. I am a struggler now at the end of my days. But I will fight for the right til the end.”

It is often difficult to follow Joyce’s train of thought, and his images are occasionally so unique as to be puzzling. There are frequent references to historic, ideas, events and people in Ireland, with which a casual reader may not be familiar. Then, there are bits of Latin and other languages which aren’t deciphered. For me it was very hard reading.

Review: Heart of Darkness

This novel, by Joseph Conrad, is one of the books I haven’t read on the list of 100 best novels in English. (I’m now down to just a handful.)

Joseph Conrad

The Biography website says this about Conrad: “Joseph Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on December 3, 1857, in Berdychiv, Ukraine. His parents, Apollo and Evelina Korzeniowski, were members of the Polish noble class. They were also Polish patriots who conspired against oppressive Russian rule; as a consequence, they were arrested and sent to live in the Russian province of Vologda with their 4-year-old son. When Conrad’s parents died several years later, he was raised by an uncle in Poland.

Conrad’s education was erratic. He was first tutored by his literary father, then attended school in Krakow and received further private schooling. At the age of 16, Conrad left Poland and traveled to the port city of Marseilles, France, where he began his years as a mariner.

Seafaring Years

Through an introduction to a merchant who was a friend of his uncle, Conrad sailed on several French commercial ships, first as an apprentice and then as a steward. He traveled to the West Indies and South America, and he may have participated in international gun-smuggling.

After a period of debt and a failed suicide attempt, Conrad joined the British merchant marines, where he was employed for 16 years. He rose in rank and became a British citizen, and his voyages around the world—he sailed to India, Singapore, Australia and Africa—gave him experiences that he would later reinterpret in his fiction.

Literary Career

After his seafaring years, Conrad began to put down roots on land. In 1896, he married Jessie Emmeline George, daughter of a bookseller; they had two sons. He also had friendships with prominent writers such as John Galsworthy, Ford Madox Ford and H. G. Wells.

Conrad began his own literary career in 1895 with the publication of his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, an adventure tale set in the Borneo jungles. Before the turn of the century, he wrote two of his most famous and enduring novels. Lord Jim (1900) is the story of an outcast young sailor who comes to terms with his past acts of cowardice and eventually becomes the leader of a small South Seas country. Heart of Darkness (1902) is a novella describing a British man’s journey deep into the Congo of Africa, where he encounters the cruel and mysterious Kurtz, a European trader who has established himself as a ruler of the native people there.

Later Life

Over the last two decades of his life, Conrad produced more autobiographical writings and novels, including The Arrow of Gold and The Rescue. His final novel, The Rover, was published in 1923. Conrad died of a heart attack on August 3, 1924, at his home in Canterbury, England.

Conrad’s work influenced numerous later 20th century writers, from T. S. Eliot and Graham Greene to Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. His books have been translated into dozens of languages and are still taught in schools and universities.”

This novella – it is only 99 pages – was first published in 1902 and is set at the end of the 19th century. Conrad actually sailed up the River Congo in 1890. There are two principal characters. Marlow, the narrator, an able seaman who is waiting for the tide to turn in the River Thames, and Kurtz, an agent of a Belgian company, who has become incommunicado in the interior of the Congo Free State. Marlow tells the story of his employment by a French company to be the captain of a steam river ferry. When Marlow arrives in the Congo, he is appalled by the racism and the laziness of the white colonists. The blacks seem indifferent to their mistreatment. The colonial managers are largely in awe of the remote Kurtz, who espouses unrevealed, complex theories about life. He is worshiped – almost as a deity – by the native people. Much of the book describes the jungle through which the steamer passes on its way to find Kurtz. The darkness of the jungle is similar to the darkness and remoteness of the blacks, to the immorality of the colonists and human nature in general. Marlow finds Kurtz, who dies. At the end of the novella, Marlow meets Kurtz’ fiancée, who speaks highly of him. Marlow decides not the tell her his impression of Kurtz.

This book is a vivid depiction of the colonisation of the Congo under the direction of King Leopold II of Belgium: cruel, inefficient and ineffective. Conrad uses a first person narrator to convey human consciousness vividly, and he uses different characters to express divergent opinions about a vital issue.

Do I Have to Write a Novel?

There is an article on the Electric Lit website by Amy Stuber dated 1 October 2024 which rang bells for me. Its title is “I Love Short Stories Do I Have to Write a Novel?”

Amy Stuber’s fiction has appeared in the Missouri Review, New England Review, the Masters Review, and elsewhere. She’s an editor at Split Lip Magazine, and she lives in Lawrence, KS. Her debut story collection, Sad Grownups, will be released in October 2024,

Amy Stuber

Ms Stuber says, “In 1993, I published my first decent story in a literary journal and a few months later received a letter from an agent whose name I recognized. I’d written short stories in college classes, sent them off, and typically the only thing that came back was a rejection, housed in the self-addressed-stamped envelope I’d sent with the story, my own handwriting preparing me for the paper inside that said thanks, no or we liked this, but.

The agent letter was a surprise, and I was buoyed by it for days. The letter went something like this, “I enjoyed your short story. I’d be interested in seeing more of your work. Do you have a novel?” It felt great  to be approached. It was flattering. But the answer was no: I didn’t have a novel.

A few years later, I received another agent letter after another story publication. A few years after that, an email. The notes all said some version of “I liked your short story. But do you have a novel?”

I’d heard from my graduate school creative writing teachers, who taught us only to read and write short stories, that a fiction writer’s final form was novelist, or at least, they said, that was the publishing industry’s core belief. The books that sold well, the books editors at big publishing houses wanted to acquire, were novels. Collections could be published, sure, but they were afterthoughts or add-ons.

Whenever it came up, the “do you have a novel” question made me a little indignant. Novels use words and sentences, obviously, just like short stories, but they require a different skillset, as well as a lot of attributes, like patience and a good memory and discipline, that I—first as a 20-something who just wanted to write poem fragments on my forearms and listen to Pavement, and later as a parent, shellacked with two smallish kids and a full-time job—did not have. If I could write even a third of a short story over a few weeks, it felt like a win. 

When my kids were more self-sufficient and I found myself with actual pockets of time to write and submit, I started getting wildly, embarrassingly jealous of every Publisher’s Marketplace announcement I saw. More egalitarian and generous writers would Tweet about how “there’s enough success for everyone, there’s plenty to go around,” but I, then in my 40s, felt like maybe there wasn’t. Maybe short story writers, all of us vying to win the same few small-press collection contests that ran each year, were doomed to not have book deals. I decided to try to feel content about publishing individual stories in literary magazines and pushed aside the idea of a book. 

The next time an agent emailed me was 2020, and it was the same line as ever. “Do you have a novel?” No. “I really cannot sell a collection on its own.” Okay, I understand. “Do you plan to write a novel?” I guess. Maybe? 

I signed with the agent, which was a leap of faith more for her than for me. I started trying to expand a short story I’d published, to build it somehow into a novel. In most ways, it was like trying to make a bathmat work as a rug in a room the size of a ballroom. Still, I wrote early in the morning, on weekend days, while waiting for doctor’s appointments, on all-hands meetings. I remember even feeling a little bit hopeful, like, “Maybe I’m doing it, maybe I’m really writing a novel, finally,” like this magic land, unenterable for twenty plus years, was opening to me. 

In the end, my draft was more of a loose assemblage of stories. The plottier parts that lurched each chapter forward, the parts that made it a possible novel, weren’t working. When I expressed self-doubt to my agent, she asked me, more than once, if this was “the book [I wanted] to send into the world,” which felt pretty jagged. I remember thinking, Well, the book I want to send into the world is my short story collection. Maybe I even said it out loud. 

The process was flattening. People wanted “propulsion,” and I was focused on sentences and moments. I liked the quiet pockets I was able to build into short stories but that felt harder to make work in a novel.  

In a stupid fit of “now what?” I frantically, in a few months, wrote a whole other novel. The agent hated it, which stung, but it was likely hate-worthy. 

How did I spend the pandemic? I speed-wrote two novels, only to realize I am not a novelist, or at least not yet, and market trends, traditional publishing’s seeming demands for books that rapid-cycled you from beginning to end in one sitting, weren’t going to make me one. 

In summer 2022, I parted ways amicably with my agent and returned to story writing. She told me if I started working on another novel project, she’d take a look. I didn’t fault her. Agents have been told collections don’t sell. So many of them have to deal with the industry realities of looking for plot-heavy books. This isn’t to say there aren’t brilliant and successful poetic, experimental, quiet novels – there obviously are. But if you’ve queried an agent lately, you know: propulsion and plot are king. 

I disassembled the second novel draft and built some short stories from the parts, then wrote some new stories, too. I understood stories and loved how within one I could focus intensely, think about every word, and I could experiment without worrying about staying on a path of forward momentum. I revamped my short story collection, sandwiched in some new stories, moved things around, took out the flash fiction.

This, I thought, feels like the book I want to send out into the world. 

I submitted it to the same few indie presses and university contests where I’d sent earlier versions of a collection and had been rejected more than once. At this point, only a few of the stories were the same. What the hell, I thought. I was 54 and had gotten my first “but do you have a novel?” agent letter thirty years earlier. 

And then I waited. Items in my Submittable queue changed from Received to In Progress. 

In August, I moved my daughter into her first dorm room in a tall building, and I thought, simplistically probably, about how the dorm, each floor, with each room another person, style, story, was a collection, and how so many things in the world were more an assemblage of disparate parts than a mellifluous whole. My daughter, who is also a writer, said it didn’t make sense for people to be so weird about short stories. Why was publishing so opposed to short fiction, when the world seemed to want and love short-form everything else?

In September, a few weeks after leaving my daughter in New York, in my haze of sadness that was like an anvil hitting me repeatedly and saying you fucking fool why did you help make a person who is designed to leave you, I got an email from one of the small presses. I saw the re: ____ subject line, and I braced myself for the rejection those emails usually are. Instead, it was a nice editor I’d corresponded with a few years before, telling me they wanted to publish my collection.

I was so numbed by life that month, by all the accumulative sadnesses of being 50-something in a whirlpool of life change, that I wasn’t sure how to feel. But when I stood up from my computer to walk around the neighborhood and look at all the familiar things, so many of which had years of memories attached to them, each their own little story, I let myself feel happy. This wasn’t the novel. It wasn’t the Big 5. But it felt truer to the writer I wanted to be.

Small presses, less beholden to concerns over big sales, are able to publish collections and the kinds of books Big Publishing tells writers we shouldn’t bother making. For that, I’m grateful. 

As is true of so many writers I know, some of my favorite texts are short stories. Each time I come upon a new collection in the library or in a bookstore, I get excited about the hive of situations and characters I’m about to dive into and the room for experimentation. It feels like so much possibility. 

I remember hearing last year that a lot of traditionally published debut novels sell only in the hundreds of copies. The managing editor of the small press that accepted my collection told me something like, “During the life of the book, a good outcome would be selling 1000 copies.” A thousand sounded good. Better than the hundred of some novels. Big Fiction’s insistence on the novel as default is maybe a failure of marketing or the imagination about what a book can be and do. 

I’m trying again to write something that approaches a novel, but this time I’m letting myself lean into my tendencies and reminding myself that a novel does not require a traditional narrative arc, nor a set number of scenes and beats. So I’m trying a “novel in stories,” and I’m not writing it with some big splashy publication in mind. I’m writing it when and how I want to write it. 

After an excerpt of the novel-in-stories project won an Honorable Mention in a contest, an agent I adore, a “dream agent,” messaged me and asked me if I had the full novel ready.  I don’t, at least not yet. But when I do, I hope I’m able to pull together a whole made of small slices of the world pulsing together, a collection in its own way, that champions the short form while also feeling like a whole. To the industry, maybe it will even be considered a novel. 

Is this just an essay about someone who wanted to and couldn’t sell a novel so now wants to champion the short story? Maybe a little. But, more, it’s about a circuitous path away from and back to the thing I actually enjoy writing, that the industry told me I shouldn’t do if I wanted to succeed.” 

I may be in the same boat as Amy, but I got in it at a different port. I’ve written ten published novels. Some are good, some are rubbish, but none have sold 1000 copies. I want to try short stories, and I’m about 2/3 of the way to completing a collection – a collection of good short stories, enjoyable to write and to read. Maybe this is what I should have been doing!

Review: Invasion

I admire Frank Gardener, the author of this novel, for his bravery in recovering from severe injuries while he was reporting for the BBC in Saudi Arabia. But not only has he survived, but he has largely overcome his mobility impairment by becoming the BBC’s security reporter

and he is a best-selling novelist. Well Done, Frank!

Frank Gardener

Francis Rolleston Gardner OBE (born 31 July 1961) is a British journalist, author and retired British Army Reserve Officer.  He is currently the BBC’s Security Correspondent, and since the September 11 attacks on New York has specialised in covering stories related to the War on Terror. 

Gardner joined BBC World as a producer and reporter in 1995, and became the BBC’s first full-time Gulf correspondent in 1997, before being appointed BBC Middle East correspondent in 1999. On 6 June 2004, while reporting from Al-Suwaidi a district of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Gardner was seriously injured in an attack by al-Qaida gunmen, which left him partially paralysed in the legs. He returned to reporting for the BBC in mid-2005, using a wheelchair or a frame. He has written two non-fiction works as well as a series of novels featuring the fictional SBS officer-turned MI6 operative Luke Carlton.

This novel is set in England, China, Taiwan and vicinity in the present. The main characters are Dr Hannah Slade, a full time climate scientist at Imperial College, on a ‘collection assignment’ for MI6; Luke Carlton, case officer with MI6; and Jenny Li, intelligence officer with MI6. Hannah is apparently in China to attend a climate conference, but her real mission is to collect a small microchip from a senior agent with access high in China’s military. The microchip contains details about China’s plans to invade Taiwan. She meets the agent, receives the microchip and hides it behind her missing wisdom teeth. Almost at once she is captured and moved to Macau by criminals of a Chinese triad. When MI6 realises that Hannah has gone missing, they send Luke and Jenny to find her and the microchip. Luke and Jenny follow a lead to Macau, where they realise that a powerful triad is involved, and is in the process of moving Hannah to Taiwan. An attempt to recapture Hannah on the sea fails. Luke and Jenny go to Taiwan where they investigate a lavish temple,which turns out to be owned by the shadowy triad boss, Bo. Bo’s intention is to sell Hannah to the highest bidder: China, Taiwan, USA or the UK. Before Bo is able to act, the three Brits escape. Hannah hands the microchip to Luke for safe keeping. Jenny and Luke make good their escape, but they have to leave the injured Hannah behind. When they are back in the UK, Luke and Jenny learn that Hannah, who has fallen into the hands of China, is accusing MI6 of deserting her.

I had expected this novel to be about a fictitious invasion of Taiwan, but the only activities by the Chinese military are the firing of a hypersonic missile by a Chinese warship, the taking over of a tiny Taiwanese island, and preparations to take over Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. This was a bit disappointing, but if Gardener had written what he doubtless knows about an actual takeover, he would have doubtless been censured by the UK government, so the triad had to be inserted as the bad guys.

The book is well written, credible and suspenseful.

Are We Authentic?

There is an article on The Conversation website by Sreedhevi Iyer dated 29 August 2024 titled ‘Why are authors expected to be authentic?’ which is both amusing and sad.

Sreedhevi Iyer

Sreedhevi Iyer has lived in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Australia, and can only answer ‘many places’ when asked where she is from. Her writing has been published in several countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Australia, Sweden, and Italy.Jungle Without Water is her first book published in Australia. The Southeast Asian edition was shortlisted for the Penang Monthly Book Prize 2017. Her fiction work has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in the United States. She has guest edited Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and Drunken Boat, and was writer-in-residence at Lingnan University of Liberal Arts in Hong Kong. Sreedhevi is currently teaching creative writing at the University of Melbourne and RMIT.

Ms Iyer says: “The recent Oscar-winning movie American Fiction – an adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel Erasure by screenwriter and director Cord Jefferson – is a scathing look at the racial stereotyping prevalent in the publishing industry.

In one scene, Theolonius “Monk” Ellison (played by Jeffrey Wright) participates in a literary panel to promote his new book. The event is woefully under-attended. Monk then decides to join the crowds for celebrated black author Sintara Golden’s sold-out session. Golden is promoting her book We’s Lives In Da Ghetto. She gives a reading in an overtly black vernacular, to the audience’s delight and Monk’s disdain.

In another scene, Monk and his literary agent are on the phone with a publisher interested in purchasing Monk’s latest novel. Its title is My Pafology. Monk has written it as a joke, a satire of black stereotypes, but the publishers mistake it for serious literature. At his agent’s insistence, Monk speaks in “black” parlance to them, in keeping with his pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh. He sounds “street”. He sounds “real”. The publishers love it.

Such scenes proliferate in American Fiction. As an academic, an intellectual and the author of several books, Monk faces the reality of having to fake-write the kind of book “they want”. The satire highlights the deeper issues around what the book industry considers “authentic”, and the burden it places on African-American authors.

Monk resists the requirement that he has to “write black” and even “talk black” to be a spokesperson, that he must represent his racial experience. But the more he resists this pressure – by moving his books to another shelf in a bookshop or refusing (initially) to accept the publisher’s bid – the more the audience becomes aware of the restrictions on his self-expression.

“Look at what they publish.” Monk says. “Look at what they expect us to write.”

Literary personas

Fictional writers, like Monk and Sintara Golden, satirise the reality faced by authors of colour, who are expected to perform a version of themselves in public and, paradoxically, end up adopting a persona – a supposedly “authentic” but in fact phoney persona – for the benefit of readers, literary gatekeepers and other industry players.

Reductiveness in the name of “authenticity” is not specific to the American market. Global literary discourse also requires authors of colour to produce ostensibly “authentic” narratives. They are then required to embody this “authenticity” when presenting themselves in public.

But are such narratives predetermined by race, ethnicity and language? Who qualifies as an “authentic” author? The demand for “authenticity” – within literary culture, in particular, and postmodern culture in general – has become a problematic, paradoxical idea. Authors are now expected to depict an authentic experience – and yet the form of such authenticity is pre-determined on their behalf.

There would seem to be several underlying reasons for this. One is that contemporary literary culture tends to equate the author with the worlds they create in their books, expecting them to align. Laura Mandell, an assistant professor of English, argues that

whenever we talk about “great literature” using an author’s name, we confuse people and texts, subtly reinforcing the unconscious idea that authors are literature rather than that they wrote it. The ideology of authorship fosters such a confusion, and it simultaneously imposes expectations on people as to how to behave.

Another reason is the way book publication automatically renders the author a public figure. Even if this is expressly resisted, as in the case of Elena Ferrante, whose real identity remains uncertain, it only further underscores its ubiquity.

Authors of colour often employ personas as means of navigating these expectations. At a literary event in Hong Kong some years ago, I interviewed Junot Diaz on his views around his identity.

Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, and a professor of Creative Writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His writing voice employs a mixed register of Spanglish, nerd jargon and taboo slang – perhaps an amalgamation of Monk and Golden. Here is his response, verbatim:

I’ve always told people that you know whatever your formula is about being Dominican, about being African diasporic, or being poor or being from New Jersey or being an immigrant, whatever your formula is, please, safely put me outside of it. Whatever your test is, I have failed. Really, I have failed. I am so much happier to fail everybody else’s formulas, to not belong, that’s my joy, although I am deeply embedded in my community, even though I feel strongly related to my community.

My poor girlfriend feels like she’s living some crazy Dominican nightmare, 24/7. Everybody’s fucking Dominican in my world, so, she’s like what the fuck am I doing with this guy? Even with all these things, I will still argue that whatever people’s reductive formula about what authentic is, of a Dominican person in New Jersey, I don’t want any part of it.

Diaz’s uneven, mixed register of street vernacular and academic lingo is a strategic performance. His persona acknowledges both his racial and class background, and his transcendence of that background through his literary accomplishments.

He is, however, also indicating that he is “keeping it real”, that he is still a part of his community, while not accepting the “reductive formula” around his identity.

Like Monk in American Fiction, Diaz resists being pushed into a finite category around race or ethnic identity. At the same time, he is performing that identity in his manner of speech, the same way Monk is asked to speak as “Stagg R. Leigh” over the phone. Even when he is denigrating the idea of his pigeonholing, he is enacting it.

Another example is from an interview with Madeleine Thien, Booker-nominated author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Thien’s prose, unlike Diaz’s, is spare and lyrical, focusing on small moments. Also unlike Diaz, Thien in real life embraces her pigeonholing, almost weaponising it.

When I interviewed her about reviewing culture in Canada, she also enacted a persona, but in a different way. “I used to feel frustrated and sad by the misreadings of works by writers of colour,” she said:

[Reviewers] make such sweeping generalisations about a place, and what they think the literary culture is, when they actually have possibly not read a single book about Vietnam, or whatever it is, you know, about Lebanon, about China, even, I mean, most people have not read a single novel set in China and yet when they sit down to write that review, there’s no conception that they are out of their depth. Because if you know you’re out of your depth, you can’t really write a really sensitive and interesting critique that comes from that place, you know?

The paradoxical nature of contemporary literary discourse around “authenticity” requires Thien to perform her activism, her outrage, her wielding of identity politics, her sense of responsibility to the rest of her ilk. It’s the prescribed social self of the “real” author.

But instead of claiming her “authenticity” is not up for discussion the way Diaz does, Thien discusses her responsibility to the larger culture. She wields her identity and power of representation (perhaps in some ways like Sintara Golden), performing the outrage expected of her in the diversity conversation.

True to oneself?

The idea of being true to oneself now extends into identity politics. It pigeonholes writers to produce a certain type of narrative. It’s not write what you know; it is write what only you know. Deviation renders the work (or worse, the writer) inauthentic – one of the last taboos of postmodern culture.

In one of the later scenes in American Fiction, Monk and Golden have a quiet lunch together in a miserable room. They have been brought together as jury members for a literary prize. Curious about Golden’s contempt for his hoax-novel Fuck, Monk gently suggests Golden’s writing is guilty of the same pandering.

The questions are also from the audience. How did she catch that the writing panders? What did she see in it that was disingenuous? And is she perhaps aware of the disingenuousness in her own work? Is she pandering on purpose?

The film refuses us the satisfaction of an answer. Golden merely throws Monk’s query back at him. She implies that his perspective comes from a position of academic privilege, making him unaware of the realities of black life. It is an irony in the context of the film, but it also confirms how Golden views her own role in the industry, and how she views being “authentic”. Monk and Golden, like Diaz and Thien, both make choices around authenticity. Their opposite responses are both true.

Review: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest

I have now read the third book in this amazing trilogy. You can find reviews of the first two books in the Millennium Trilogy two and four weeks ago. Of the three, I think that the first volume, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is the best. It has a self-contained plot and is probably the clearest example of Stieg Larsson’s amazing talent for writing thrillers, which include: creating distinctive, memorable characters, building and keeping tension high, designing a plot which captures the reader’s interest, and keeping the reader guessing with surprises at critical junctures in the plot.

Stieg Larsson 1954 – 2004

The plot carries over from the second book in the series. Lisbeth Salander (the heroine) is in the hospital with serious injuries caused by her half-brother, Ronald Niedermann, who has a rare congenital condition which makes him insensitive to pain, and who is on the run with the cash of an outlaw motorcycle club which hired him to kill Lisbeth. Two rooms away in the hospital is Zalachenko, Lisbeth’s father, a former Soviet operative who tortured Lisbeth’s mother, and who was injured by Lisbeth with an axe. Zalachenko is shot to death in his hospital bed by Evert Gullberg, the head of a renegade section of Sapo, the Swedish equivalent of MI6, and who is terminally ill. Zalachenko is killed for fear that he will reveal the existence of the section which protected Zala, and instutionalised Lisbeth with the help of the corrupt psychiatrist, Dr. Peter Teleborian. Gullberg tries to kill Lisbeth, also, but is frustrated by her lawyer Annika Giannini, Mikael Blomkvist’s sister. Gullberg commits suicide. Section operatives murder Gunnar Björk, Zalachenko’s former Säpo handler and Blomkvist’s source of information for an upcoming exposé; the operatives falsify the death as a suicide. Other operatives break into Blomkvist’s apartment and mug Giannini, making off with copies of the classified Säpo file that contains Zalachenko’s identity.

Torsten Edklinth, a Sapo official is informed of the renegade section of Sapo, and begins a clandestine investigation with Monica Figuerola. Blomkvist, secretly arranges to have Lisbeth’s hand-held computer returned to her in the hospital and arranges a mobile phone hot spot to keep her in touch with the outside world. Blomkvist plants misinformation about plans to defend Lisbeth at her trial for the attack on Zala. The section swallows the bait, plants cocaine in Blomkvist’s flat and tries to have him killed.

On the third day of the trial, Blomkvist’s expose is published, causing a media frenzy, and leading to the arrest of section people. Giannini destroys Dr. Peter Teleborian’s credibility, and proves that the section conspired to cancel Lisbeth’s rights. The prosecutor realises that the law is on Lisbeth’s side, withdraws all the charges and the court cancels Lisbeth’s declaration of incompetence.

When she is freed, Lisbeth discovers that she and her twin sister are to share Zala’s estate which includes an abandoned factory. She goes to investigate the property and finds Niedermann hiding there from the police. During a struggle with him, she nails his feet to the floor with a nail gun. She informs the motorcycle gang where Niedermann is and then she informs the police of the resulting chaos. Mikael Blomkvist visits her at her apartment and they reconcile as friends.

This novel is 715 pages long, and, as such, the plot is far more complex than the above summary suggests. It is also richly populated with minor bit-part characters, whom I sometimes had difficulty keeping track of, even though each one had an essential role to play in keeping the story advancing, credibly.

All in all, this is a great story!

For Whom Do You Write?

Jericho Writer’s Harry Bingham makes a good point in his Friday email. He says, “I mean, readers, yes, obviously. But who? Your mum? That old English teacher you loved? Crime fans in general? People who love Patricia Cornwell in particular?

There are two reasons to ask these questions. The first is marketing. If you’re writing people who want a fresh take on the Patricia Cornwell vibe, that would suggest a certain approach to book covers, titles, marketing slogans and so on. You might even refer directly to Cornwell, or her most famous character, Kay Scarpetta, in your marketing yadda.

The second reason has to do with the choices you make as you write the book itself.

As you write, and as you edit, you are faced with 1,000,000 choices: again and again and again. Are you happy with this sentence? What about this one? Does the attacker strike your heroine? Strike her with what? Does he hurt her? Does she hurt him back? Does she escape? How does she escape? Is her breath ‘hoarse and rasping’ afterwards? Or does it come in ‘juddering heaves of relief’? What phrase do you prefer? And what does she do next?

Now, obviously, you’re going to make all those choices on the basis of what seems right to you – you have no other option. But at the back of your mind, there’s always a sense that you’re writing for one set of readers rather than another.

For example, if I were writing forensically-led crime fiction, I’d have to assume that my readers knew Patricia’s Cornwell work and would be wanting me to break new ground. I couldn’t just reprise Cornwell’s tropes and expect success myself.

Indie authors – intelligently analytical as they are – often take this further, and try to conceive of an ‘Ideal Reader’ – a dog-loving, mother-of-two Kansas 40 year old housewife. Someone with plenty of friends and love of hiking, who watches true crime shows on Netflix, reads mostly crime, but will cry at soppy love stories too.

The idea is that if you know your ‘Ideal Reader’, you can craft your book and your marketing material to appeal perfectly to that one person.

And? OK. Very smart writers I know do just that and they say it works for them. In part, it works because book marketing works best when it’s micro-targeted. A good campaign is one that gets excellent conversions happening amongst a very tightly defined group of readers. A bad campaign is one that starts so-so conversions within a much broader group. So: a hyper-detailed picture of your Ideal Reader keeps your marketing focused.

But I have a somewhat different take.

I think you have to turn yourself into your own Ideal Reader.

Partly, that means bringing your own tastes to bear. As I say, when it comes to editing, you don’t really have a choice.

But you also have to ensure that you become your own readership. What books do you expect your readers to have read? What authors do they love?

You need to have read that book and know those authors. If you’ve read Patricia Cornwell as keenly as your readers have, you won’t just repeat that stuff. In the end, your desire for novelty will be the same as theirs.

These things go deep.

I know, for example, that more of my readers are American than British. So I have a particular love of giving my American readers a taste of Wales that’s very Welsh. So, for example, a few miles from where my Mum lives, there’s a village called Newchurch. Easy to say, easy to spell, right? But I’d pretty much never use that placename in one of my Fiona books. Near Newchurch, lie the settlements of Rhosgoch, Glascwm, Llanbadarn-y-garreg, and (where my kids go riding) Bryngwyn. I’d use any of those placenames instead, joyous in the knowledge that Kate from Kansas and Ali from Arkansas will struggle to pronounce any of them.

Or again: I wrote a book that had to do with the archaeology of the British Dark Ages. I know my readers to be literate and intelligent. Plenty of writers might have avoided a ton of ancient history detail, but I knew my guys would like it. (I know I like it. I’ve become them.) So the book is spattered with chunks of Latin, and late Celtic poems, and mournful Romano-British monks, and factoids about Anglo-Saxon vs British burials. (The main difference being that the Anglo-Saxon invaders were pagan, the ancient Britons were Christian, so their burial rites looked different. I am English, but I’m still on the side of the ancient Britons. Twll dîn pob Sais.)

One last example:

How fast or slow do you take a scene? Do you hurtle through? Offer a reaction shot or two, but still move at pace? Or do you allow yourself a paragraph or two of considered reflection?

My writing creates my readers, but my readers also create my writing. I know that my readers relish the Fiona character – they want more of her, not less. So, while I’m hyper-sensitive to anything that feels boring or self-indulgent, I’m happy to allow proper space for reflection. On the whole, my scenes go slow but deep, not fast and shallow. That’s respecting my readers, not ignoring them.

Over time, any difference between you and your readership gets snuffed out. You learn from them what they do and don’t respond to. You learn what books and authors they like. You follow down those trails.

You don’t have to like everything that every one of your readers like. I’ll get book recommendations from readers (either via email, for example, or from names cited in an Amazon review) where I read the book and don’t like it. But that’s fine too. What matters is knowing (roughly) the universe that your readers inhabit, and using that knowledge to shape your tastes and your choices. The process becomes a rolling, laughing, respectful conversation with a multitude.

And if you follow that path, things become easy. Your Ideal Reader? It’s you.

Review: The Girl Who Played with Fire

So, I’ve finished the second book in the Millennium Series, and, at the moment, I’m two thirds of the way through the final book. As you already know, the series is by Stieg Larsson:

Stieg Larsson (born as Karl Stig-Erland Larsson) was a Swedish journalist and writer who passed away in 2004.

As a journalist and editor of the magazine Expo, Larsson was active in documenting and exposing Swedish extreme right and racist organisations. When he died at the age of 50, Larsson left three unpublished thrillers and unfinished manuscripts for more. The first three books (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest) have since been printed as the Millennium series. These books are all bestsellers in Sweden and in several other countries, including the United States and Canada.

Larsson witnessed a rape when he was 15, and was helpless to stop it. This event haunted him for the rest of his life. The girl being raped was named Lisbeth, which he later used as the name of the heroine on his Millenium trilogy. Sexual violence against women is also a recurring theme in his work.

Stieg Larsson

This book begins with Lisbeth Salander in a long trip to tropical resorts. She returns to Stockholm and buys a luxury apartment with money she siphoned off the accounts of a financial criminal. Nils Bjurman, who had previously raped Lisbeth Salander, focuses his attention on capturing her and destroying the film she made of his crime. He hires a motorcycle gang to capture her, but the attempt is foiled by Mikael Blomkvist, the publisher of Millennium magazine.

Millennium is approached by Dag Svensson and Mia Johansson, who have put together a report concerning sex trafficking in Sweden and the abuse of underage girls by high-ranking figures. Everyone is intrigued by recurring mentions of “Zala”, a mysterious figure heavily involved in the sex-trafficking industry. Salander, hacking Blomkvist’s computer, is taken aback by the mention of Zala, and visits Svensson and Johansson to ask questions. Later that same night, Blomkvist finds the couple shot dead in their apartment. With Salander’s fingerprints on the murder weapon, and her formal record establishing a history of violent instability, she is implicated in the double murder. Bjurman is also found dead, shot by the same weapon; Salander is the prime suspect.

Blomkvist confronts Gunnar Björck, a policeman on sick leave and one of the high-ranking abusers identified by Svensson and Johansson, who agrees to disclose information about Zala if Blomkvist leaves him out of Millennium‘s exposé. Visiting Bjurman’s summer cabin, Salander finds a classified Sapo (Swedish Secret Police) file and begins to make the connection between Bjurman and Zala, whose real name is Alexander Zalachenko. With information from Björck and Palmgren, Lisbeth’s earlier guardian, Blomkvist pieces together the history of Zalachenko: he is a former Soviet defector whose very existence is kept classified by Säpo. Initially an intelligence source, Zalachenko began to traffic in sex slaves on the side. He became the partner of a 17-year-old girl who became pregnant with twins, Lisbeth and Camilla. Zalachenko was an absent father who repeatedly abused his partner; Lisbeth, angered at her mother’s abuse, threw a petrol bomb into Zala’s car while he was in it, causing him near fatal burns. The authorities imprisoned Salander and declared her insane, since acknowledging Zalachenko’s crimes would require them to divulge his existence. Niedermann had killed Svensson and Johansson on Zalachenko’s orders; Bjurman, who was involved with Zalachenko, played a role in the murders and was killed to ensure his silence.

Separately, Salander and Blomkvist find Niederman’s address. Salander is captured there, and shot by Zalachenko, who is hiding out with Niederman. Niederman buries her alive, but she escapes, and attacks Zalachenko with an ax, seriously injuring him. Blomkvist arrives on the scene and calls the emergency services. He captures Niederman and ties him to a lamp post. The book ends at this point.

This second volume is nearly as good as the first: very difficult to put down. I have just two comments. The beginning of the book deals with Lisbeth’s time at resort hotels in the tropics and her purchase of a luxury apartment. Neither of these activities – while interesting – contributes to the plot. In fact the plot continues into the third volume, so that the second volume is not a complete story in itself

Do You Believe in a Muse?

There is an interesting article on the Writers Digest website by William Kenower dated November 16, 2018. William Kenower is the editor-in-chief of Author magazine, a sought-after speaker and teacher, and the author of Fearless Writing (Writer’s Digest Books). He’s been published in The New York Times and Edible Seattle, and was a featured blogger on HuffPost. His video interviews with hundreds of writers, from Nora Ephron to Amy Tan to William Gibson, are widely considered the best of their kind on the Internet. He also hosts the online radio program Author2Author, where every week he and a different guest discuss the books we write and the lives we lead.

William Kenower

He says, “I was at a writer’s conference recently listening to a panel of authors discuss their writing process. They were asked if they believed in The Muse. One by one each author leaned into their microphones and gave an emphatic, “Yes!” or an equally emphatic, “No!” By the time the last author had answered I counted and saw that the panel was perfectly divided. It’s like they were asked if they believe in God, I thought.

I don’t believe in what we call The Muse; belief is too weak a word. I couldn’t write without her. I’ve certainly tried. When I did it was as if I’d forgotten how to write, yet there I was acting exactly like a writer, feeling more and more fraudulent with every lousy sentence. I was like a gardener who was planting Lego pieces instead of seeds. I was on my hands and knees digging and planting and watering all the while knowing nothing would grow.

Having said that, I know why half the writers on the panel explained that they believed in, “working hard” or, “putting their butt in the chair,” or, “mastering their craft,” rather than The Muse. I can control whether I decide to work hard or put my butt in the chair or master my craft. There’s a lot in a writer’s life that is out of our control. Agents and editors and readers, for instance, are out of my control. No matter how hard I work on something, I have zero say over what anyone will think of it, and what people think of it is often the measure of a story’s success. Best to keep my head down and my attention on what I actually can control. I’ve never seen or held or touched this Muse, after all. On dark days she can seem as unreal as all my fantasies of glory and praise—the adulation of all those other people who seem to hold my writing life in their inscrutable hands.

Believe in that. I don’t care what you call it—but you better believe in it. You better not call it luck, but you better not take full credit for it either. You were along for the ride. This may be the trickiest part of all in the relationship between the writer and The Muse. When you publish something you’ll be given full credit for it, but in your mind may linger the memory of how it was written. It was like a dream, wasn’t it? How many times did a character do what they wanted and not what you wanted? How many plot turns surprised you? You probably can’t remember what you labored over and what came easily, but you can remember how much you loved the writing of it, how glad you were for it. That stays with you long after the story has been told, long after the money has been spent, it stays with you and calls you back to the page because there’s another story that needs telling.”

I believe he has this point exactly right!