William Peace's Blog, page 51

Professor Harold Bloom

On its ’10 Questions’ page at the back of Time Magazine, May 11th, there was a series of responses from Harold Bloom, who is a literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University.  He comes across as an iconic, contrary, interesting figure, and while he was teaching at Yale while I was there, I never met the man.

In the ‘interview’ he makes several points about literature which interested me.  (He also discussed students and Yale and Naomi Wolf: of less interest.)

He was asked whether he was ever tempted to write a second novel, after The Flight to Lucifer.  His response was that on re-reading The Flight to Lucifer, he decided that writing fiction was not for him.  He was then asked what qualifies him to be a critic if he isn’t a novelist or a poet.  His answer was that he loves books.  To my mind, that’s a good answer.  To be a competent critic, one does not need to be a writer, but one must be an educated, insightful, voracious reader.  Good writers do not necessarily make good critics, and good critics can be poor writers.  What good writers and critics have in common is a love of reading.

He also says that ‘we live in an age of visual overstimulation’ and that the ‘pernicious screen’ destroys the ability to read well.  I’m not sure that it destroys our ability to read, but it certainly can distract us from reading, and I think this is particularly true of young people.

Bloom says that writers should read ‘only the best and most challenging and traditional’.  I don’t agree with this.  I think writers, as readers, need to experiment.  I find that when I read a book that is not one of the ‘best’ or is not ‘traditional’, my horizons are widened.  I can see mistakes that were made, and I can evaluate new approaches and techniques.  This is part of my learning process; sticking to the best, traditional literature narrows my vision.

Time asked Bloom whether he is familiar with ‘websites that provide reviews by common readers’.  Bloom’s response: “Their effect upon the mind is not good.  They do not enlarge and make the mind more keen and independent.  Reading is not in that sense a democratic process.  It is elitist.  It has to be elitist.”  What a lot of bullshit!  Bloom comes across as a dedicated elitist who wishes to protect his own sublime position as a critic.  While it may be true that many of the reviews posted on, for example, Amazon.com are cursory and less than insightful, it does not follow that such reviews should be deplored. Many readers have a desire to express their views on what they have read; to deny them the opportunity to express those views may take away part of their incentive to read.  Besides, a sophisticated review reader can find the wheat amid the chaff.  Reading is not a democratic process?  That’s a ridiculous statement!  If he meant that literary criticism is not a democratic process, I would agree.

Someday, I would like to meet Professor Bloom.

Review: Nichijo: The Testimony of John Provoo

As a participant in the Reader’s Favourite book review scheme, I had to select a book from among those that had been submitted for review. Nearly all of the books submitted are in electronic format. I prefer hard copies, so I selected the book I wanted to read and bought it on Amazon.

Nichijo: The Testimony of John Provoo interested me for several reasons: It concerned the Second World War in the Pacific, and there were elements of Buddhism and Japanese culture. (I read much of the book while on a recent trip to Japan.)

The author is John Oliver who has a Batchelor’s degree in Political Science and Religious Studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara.  He was working in Hawaii when he met John Provoo and decided to tell his story. The book is therefore an autobiography; as it is written in the first person.

According to his ‘testimony’, John Provoo grew up in San Francisco, having been born in 1917. He was attracted to Buddhism and believed in the sanctity of all life. In March 1940, he went to Japan to study for the Buddhist priesthood.   He returned to the US in May 1941 under the threat of imminent war, and enlisted in the US Army. He was sent to the Philippines where he worked as a clerk in Army headquarters in Manila. He was captured by the Japanese in the Battle of Corregidor and became a prisoner of war. Much of the book concerns his time as a Japanese prisoner. Because of his fluency in Japanese and his understanding of Japanese culture he often had to deal directly with his captors. This led simultaneously to somewhat more lenient treatment of fellow prisoners and suspicions by the same fellow prisoners that Provoo was giving aid and comfort to the enemy. When he returned to the US, he was accused of collaboration with the enemy, was acquitted and re-enlisted in 1946. For most of the next ten years, he was pursued by the US Justice Department for treason, and underwent several trials, during which his homosexuality was used against him. Eventually, he was acquitted and went to Japan to complete his Buddhist training and to Hawaii, where, as a high level Buddhist priest he lived the rest of his life, dying in 2001.

One has the sense, in reading the book, of an honest re-counting of history, and, as such, it makes very interesting reading: in particular, the conflicted position in which a Japanese-speaking Provoo found himself as a Japanese prisoner of war; the shameful conduct of the Justice Department in mounting a hugely costly campaign against him and in using his homosexuality against him. It appears that John Oliver undertook a considerable amount of independent research to complete this book, and that he did not rely only on what Provoo told him.

There are several areas that are worth mentioning. John Provoo was clearly a very complex character, but one does not get a full understanding of this complexity in the book. Rather, the emphasis is on the historic (what was done) rather than the psychological (why it was done). Might it have been a more interesting piece of literature if instead of being entirely in the first person, the author had intervened as the narrator now and then? In the latter part of the book, there is too much name dropping (who the various interested parties were), and on exactly what they said. I think it would have been sufficient to summarise the key points, and use footnotes where essential. While the writing is good and effective, there is very little description of the various environments in which Provoo found himself: again the emphasis on history rather than literature.

That said, Nichijo, (Provoo’s name as a Buddhist priest) is quite an interesting read. I enjoyed it.

Writers Earn £11,000 per Year

-There was an articled in the April 21st edition of The Daily Telegraph entitled ‘Want to write?   Expect to earn £11,000 a year’.

This was sufficiently eye-catching that I think it bears repeating.  I quote:

To many, it is the dream job: toiling to create a fine work of literature or academia.  But the reality of being a writer has been laid bare in a new report highlighting the low earnings many endure.  A study, conducted by Queen Mary University of London, showed only one in ten authors can afford to earn a living from writing alone, a drop from 40% a decade ago.  A typical professional writer, it found, earned £11,000 annually.  In real terms, the average earnings of authors is down 8% since 2005, according to the report commissioned by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society.  Five percent of authors earn 42.3% of all income earned by writers, with the struggle for those working in non-fiction and academia particularly acute.  The study points to a publishing world where houses are less willing to take a chance on new authors, opting instead for ‘safe bets’ and celebrity writers.  The report, entitled The Business of Being an Author and based on a survey of nearly 2,500 writers, noted: ‘For the majority, writing remains a low-earning profession.’  A remarkable 17 percent of writers did not earn any money in 2013 despite 98% having had work recently published.  Women were found to earn 80% of the income of their male counterparts. Nicola Solomon, the chief executive of the Society of Authors, said publishers had been compelled to tighten their belts in recent years, investing in high-demand authors.  ‘There is a tendency towards safe,’ she said.  ‘But do we want safe?  Surely the whole point of reading is to be introduced to things that are daring and challenging and different?’   The report was ‘a bit depressing’, she said.  Earlier this year, a YouGov poll found being an author was the most desirable job in Britain, with 60% of people claiming they would like to do it for a living.

Unquote.

This doesn’t surprise me and it confirms some of my own experience.  For me, as a retired business executive, I’m not writing to make a living.  I’m writing because I enjoy it, and because people who read my books tell me that they enjoy them.  I don’t feel that I have to concentrate on ‘what will sell’.  Rather, I can concentrate on what interests me and what will interest some people.  As long as I’m in good health, I don’t really have a deadline.  Someday, if I’m lucky, one of my novels will ‘go viral’, and I’ll have a £11,000 windfall!

Review: H is for Hawk

Having read Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm, which was shortlisted for the Costa Book of the Year Award, I have now read H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald which won the top prize.

H is for Hawk tells the experiences of Helen Macdonald, a writer, illustrator, historian and lecturer at Cambridge University in training a wild hawk. Macdonald had some advantages in this task: she was fascinated by falconry and hawks as a child, and she had experience of hunting with hawks, but she had never trained a wild hawk to hunt. There was a major disadvantage: her much-loved father, a renowned photographer, had just died suddenly when she acquired the hawk for £800 from a breeder in Northern Ireland. Much of the book deals with the intense commitment and frustrations which the falconer must endure over the lengthy process of winning the trust of a wild predatory animal so that it works together with the falconer in killing wild game. The goshawk in the book has personality: feral, proud and beautiful, unpredictable, iconic. One learns, incidentally, that Macdonald is a scholar, an intelligent and sensitive person, but the author also exposes her vulnerabilities: in particular, her crippling grief over the loss of her father. In parallel with the story of Macdonald’s goshawk, she tells the story of T H White, now deceased, a dedicated, but somewhat eccentric falconer and the author of The Goshawk. We learn of his mistakes and his anguish as he tries to train a goshawk. So this book operates at several levels: a present, objective account of the training of a wild hawk; there is a past, reported account of the training of a different hawk; there are psychological explorations of both the author and her role model, T H White. This may sound rather complex, and, in a way, it is, but Macdonald weaves it all together beautifully so that it is quite natural.

The writing, in style and language is exquisite. In particular, the descriptions of natural settings and the behaviour of the hawk are breath-taking. For example: “. . . she (the hawk) sees something through the trees, out there on the other side of the hedge. Her pupils grow wide. She snakes her neck and flattens her crown, and the tiny grey hair-feathers around her beak and eyes crinkle into a frown that I’ve learned means there’s something there.” And: “The fields are shorn, yellowed into stalky, rabbit-grazed sward spotted with foraging rooks.”

H is for Hawk is clearly a major labour of love. This love and its result: a durable classic about nature, surely merited the Costa Award.

As a child, I was very interested in falconry; I read everything I could lay my hands on the subject – even flirting with the idea of obtaining a hawk. For me, H is for Hawk has a special resonance, but I suspect that some potential readers may be put off by a book on falconry. For those potential readers, I would say, “This isn’t just a book about falconry. It’s a book about nature, the human condition, grief, joy, life and death.”

Are Top Writers Cowards?

No less a literary figure than Sir Salman Rushdie has labelled a pair of novelist friends (Carey and Ondaatje) as cowards.  In case you didn’t hear about it, on May 5, the global writers’ organisation, PEN, awarded its annual Freedom of Expression Award to Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine which lost eight journalists during an attack by Islamic extremist gunmen in January.  Charlie Hebdo had satirised Islam – amongst other targets.

Six prominent authors: Peter Carey (two-time Booker Prize winner for True History of the Kelly Gang and Oscar and Lucinda), Talye Selasi (author of Ghana Must Go), Michael Ondaatje (Booker Prize for The English Patient), Rachel Kushner (author of Telex from Cuba and The Flame Throwers), Francine Prose (who received the PEN translation prize in 1988), and Teju Cole (Nigerian-American writer) withdrew from the PEN event.

Rushdie, writing on Twitter and  making reference to Luigi Pirandello’s play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, said, “The award will be given. PEN is holding firm. Just six pussies.  Six authors in search of a bit of Character.”

Carey acknowledged that the murders of the journalists were an “hideous crime”, but he questioned PEN’s wish to champion Charlie Hebdo.  He said, “Was it a freedom-of-speech issue for PEN America to be self-righteous about?  All this is complicated by PEN’s seeming blindness to the cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognise its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population.”

Gary Trudeau, the American cartoonist  who produced the Doomsday comic strip said, “By punching downward, by attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie wandered into the realm of hate speech.”

Jo Glanville, director of English PEN, said that the protesting authors appeared to be confused between the principle of free speech and endorsing the message of Charlie Hebdo.  “The big mistake that these authors make is that they are essentially withdrawing their support for the principle of freedom of expression.  If freedom of expression means anything, then it’s supporting work that you don’t like.”  She said that Rushdie knew all too well the risks of causing offense: “It’s highly understandable that Salman Rushdie supports this in the way that he does.  When he was hiding after writing The Satanic Verses he was attacked by writers including John le Carré and Roald Dahl.”

In my view, Ms Glanville has hit the nail on the head: the objecting authors are confusing supporting freedom of expression with supporting material with which you don’t agree.  If one starts saying, “Well, I don’t think they should have said that and therefore I don’t think they deserve a prize for saying it”, one introduces an element of censorship into the process, which is intolerable.

I also don’t think that Carey’s comments about the French nation have anything whatever to do with the issue at hand: Charlie Hebdo is not a mouthpiece for the French government or the French people.  And I think it is wrong for Gary Trudeau to assume that Charlie Hebdo was “attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority”, but if they were, and even if it was “hate speech” does it have to be suppressed?  In his column in The Times, Oliver Kamm wrote; “No one has a right to complain at having their religious beliefs mocked.  No one is ‘disempowered’ by being offended.  No one is entitled to redress for hurt feelings.”

For me, as a writer, the question is: what should I say?  I should be the judge of whether what I write is so offensive to some group of people that they will not see it as rational, but only as an attack.  If what I say is seen only as an attack, why do it?  My writing includes some religious content: Christian, Muslim and Jewish, and these passages, in particular, are where I have to ask the question.  But once I have answered it and once I have written, I fully expect that even those who disagree with what I’ve said will support my right to say it.

Review: Revere Beach Boulevard

I bought Revere Beach Boulevard because there was a piece in my alumni magazine about a fellow writer and a fellow alumnus, and I read most of it while I was on a brief holiday in Sicily.

Revere Beach Boulevard is a contemporary novel set in Revere, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. Four of the principal characters are an Italian-American family: Lucy, the mother, is dying of cancer; Vito, the father is a retired carpenter; Peter, a son in his forties, sells real estate and has a serious gambling addiction; Joanie, the older sister with a secret, is apparently a successful newsreader for a Boston TV station. The other characters – friends and acquaintances – are part of the immigrant culture of Family, Church, and Food, and as such, the novel does them justice. The plot revolves around Peter who is heavily in debt to the local Mafioso. He hasn’t the money to pay, and friends and family are largely losing patience, as is the malevolent Chelsea Eddie, who finds that he doesn’t hold all the cards. Joanne is about the run a TV special on criminals like Eddie.

Without revealing the outcome, the plot has all the elements of a well-written thriller. I found it difficult to put it down. But there is much more to it than a thriller: the examination of values like love, trust, faith and above all: who we are as human beings. The characters, particularly Peter, Vito and Alfonse – the police chief with a secret – are very real and imperfectly human.

Without detracting much from the value and readability of this novel, one aspect that I didn’t particularly like was that each of the characters told a part of the story. This meant that one often had to read a whole paragraph before one knew which of about nine characters was talking. I felt that Peter and an omniscient narrator could have told the story equally well. I had minor reservations about two of the characters. I didn’t think that Chelsea Eddie would worry so much about what Joanie would say about him on the air: any Mafioso worth his salt has an anti-libel lawyer on standby, and Joanie had no solid evidence. Maybe is she were FBI rather than a newsreader? For me, Joanie’s loss of self-control during her visit to her dying mother didn’t ring true. She is a highly-paid TV executive who fought her way up to that position. Distressed, but not an injured child. Neither of these quibbles had any impact on the splendid plot.

The final proof-reading of the text could have been better. Frequently there were extra spaces between words, and hyphens were used instead of dashes to offset parenthetical phrases. For me, this caused confusion.

I certainly recommend Revere Beach Boulevard. It is unusual; it is interesting; it is captivating; it is well-written

Review: Hidden Battlefields

‘Kitty’ posted the following review of Hidden Battlefields on Amazon.com:

Hidden Battlefields, the sequel to The Iranian Scorpion, finds Robert Dawson that book’s main character off on another assignment as an undercover agent for the DEA this time not in the Middle East but in Peru dealing with the guerrilla group, the Shining Path. Other characters from the first book make appearances here, too, as they work out some of their personal struggles dating from that time. There is Robert’s father, David; David’s fiancé, Mary Jo; a journalist Kate, friends to both Robert and David. If you are curious about the intricacies of the international drug trade you will learn much from Hidden Battlefields, as Robert’s work takes him from the jungles of Peru across the Atlantic to Africa and concluding in Italy. One admirable attribute of Mr Peace’s work is the incredible research he does in preparing his stories. One will not be disappointed, as we learn the details of international drug smuggling in several different countries and the behind the scene deals that are made, some involving governments, including ours. Mr Peace’s novels are not one dimensional. We have the plot of the drug trade, but once again we are treated to philosophical and theological discussions. Mary Jo and Robert discuss belief and free will, established churches and native rituals. However, we also have stimulating debates between Robert and Comrade Vancho, among others, who express their approval of Maoist socialism. But there is always a third thread woven into Mr Peace’s books and that is the tension in human relationships. In Hidden Battlefields we have an examination of parent/child relationships. Robert and his father have always had a “distant” personal relationship made more complicated in this book by Robert’s involvement with his father’s “fiancé.” That fiancé, Mary Jo is also dealing with her relationship with her father. The dynamics of both of those make for interesting reading and the solution to both have a satisfactory conclusion, thanks to a talented writer. Similarly, the author comes to a clever resolution of the romantic triangle – or should I say square. If you like adventure, philosophy, human relationships and romance this book will be your cup of tea. You won’t be able to put it down.

Point of View

I have joined the Florida Writers Association, which is an organisation (based in Florida, but open to non-Floridians) for writers of all kinds.  It has contests, seminars, meetings and plenty of interaction amongst members.

The April 2015 monthly magazine, The Florida Writer, has an article entitled “Why the Point of View is Confusing and How to Think More Clearly About It”.  The article was written by Kristen Stieffel, a “writer and freelance editor specialising is speculative fiction”.  I have no idea what “speculative fiction” might be, but I thought her article was quite useful and interesting.

She says: “A story will be rolling along nicely in one character’s viewpoint, and then an omnipresent narrator will pop up with a history lesson.  Or mid-scene we’ll bounce around everyone’s heads to find out what they’re all thinking.  The author has lost control of the viewpoint.  A large factor in confusion about viewpoint is the labels we use.  If I tell you a story is written in Third Person, what do you actually know?  Only that it uses he and she pronouns.  Nothing else.  Person tells you nothing about viewpoint. Viewpoint is not about pronouns.  Viewpoint is about character.   So instead of saying ‘third person’ and then piling on a bunch of modifiers, I prefer to speak of viewpoint as being either Narrator Viewpoint or Character Viewpoint.  Viewpoint is the channel through which the reader connects to the characters in the story, which means that if the viewpoint is broken, the connection is broken.”

She gives an example from Tolkien which is told in Narrator Viewpoint, and she makes the point that the wide scope of the story and the multiplicity of characters make the omniscient narrator an effective way to tell the story.  She gives another example from Sole Survivor by Dean Koontz which is written in Character Viewpoint.  Both of these stories are written in third person, but their perspectives are quite different.  Stieffel says that Character Viewpoint provides a close connection between the reader and the character, but Narrator Viewpoint is necessary if the author wants to reveal information known to one character but not to another.  She says: “When readers have information the characters don’t, it can heighten tension, but it hampers the ability of the reader to experience the story in tandem with the characters.”

Stieffel says there are various kinds of Narrators: “from the omniscient narrator who knows and tells all, to the unreliable narrator who pretends to know all but lies about it to a narrator that makes no judgements acting as a camera and showing events without commentary or value judgements.”

She makes the point that it is possible to tell a story with both Narrator and Character Viewpoints, but that one has to be careful with  this mode not to lose focus.  It is also possible to tell a story with multiple Character Viewpoints, but it can be confusing and it means that the reader will not bond as tightly with each character.  I am currently reading a novel with half a dozen Character Viewpoints, and the difficulty I am having, as the scene shifts, is who’s talking?

Stieffel doesn’t mention first person.  Perhaps because it is a variation on a Character Viewpoint.  Sable Shadow and The Presence is written in the first person mainly because I felt it offered a better opportunity to connect the reader with the feelings of the principal character.  The novel I’m currently writing is also in the first person, because of the connection with the principal character’s feelings and to enhance the credibility of events that occur to a character who is clearly honest.  When writing in the first person, it is possible to transition into a kind of narrator viewpoint where the principal character becomes the narrator, but one has to be careful not to reveal anything in narrator mode that the principal character doesn’t know.

Clean Reader

I find the reaction to the Clean Reader app rather amusing.

The app was created by the Idaho parents Jared and Kirsten Maughan who were concerned that their daughter had read a book with words that made her uncomfortable.

The app is available on Apple and Android, and it works on a scale from “Clean”, which replaces swear words such as “f***” to “Squeaky Clean” which will replace words including “damn”.  It does not remove any words from a digital file, rather it puts an opaque highlight over the word.  The app can be turned off so that the reader can consume the book exactly as it was written.  On this basis, the creators claim that their app does no violate copyright because it doesn’t make changes to the file which contains the book.

Some authors have gone ballistic.

Joanne Harris, award-winning author of Chocolate and The Gospel of Loki fond the concept of Clean reader “infinitely more offensive than the words it blanks out”.   She added: ” We’ve been down this road before.  We should know where it leads by now.  It starts out by blanking out a few words.  It goes on to . . . stick fig leaves on statues.  It progresses to denouncing gay or Jewish artists as “degenerate”.  It ends up with burning libraries and erasing whole civilizations from history.”

Laurie Penny, a journalist and author said, “There’s now an app for taking swear words out of books.  I find this f***ing horrifying!”

Linda Acaster, a novelist from Yorkshire, stated: “The first act of censorship is to censor books.  The second is to ban them.   The third is to burn them.”

I’m pretty relaxed about this, and I don’t see this silly app as the “sharp end of the wedge” of a new drive for censorship.  I think Western society is liberal and mature enough not to get all upset about the use of the f-word.  After all, it’s used on day-time soap operas, and, if one listens carefully, is part of the vocabulary of the average twelve-year-old.

As an author, I don’t use swear words in descriptive text, because I think that there are alternative adjectives and adverbs that better express the picture I’m trying to convey.  But I certainly have put the f-word into the mouth of a character when his use of the word tells the reader something about him (or her).  (Real people do use profanity).

Would I worry that one of my grandchildren wanted to read one of my novels (The Iranian Scorpion, for example)?  It would depend on the age of the child.  I would say OK to a thirteen-year old who wanted to read it, after I explained what it was about.   (I would be more concerned about the violence than I would be about the drugs, sex and profanity, about which I think most teenagers have at least an abstract understanding.  Video games notwithstanding, I think that real adult violence can be hard to understand.)

Books vs Politics

With an important election coming up in the UK in about six weeks, I decided that I ought to volunteer to help the political party which I favour.  At the last general election, I distributed leaflets door-to-door, and occasionally I would get a chance to talk to a voter.  This time, I responded to a general email soliciting help, and I found myself assigned to a constituency fifteen miles from home.  This made no sense to me (perhaps the party desperately needed help in the distant constituency), so I offered my services to the local party operation.  “What kind of work you want to do?” I was asked.  Did I want to canvas voters, or distribute literature or help out in the office?  “Where do you most need the help?” I asked.  “In the office.”

Since then, I’ve dedicated one afternoon a week to working in the local party office.  (I don’t mention which party, because this is not a political solicitation.)  My job is to input data: voting intentions, views on certain important questions, email addresses and phone numbers into a database which included all but the most recently registered voters.  This data is then used in advertisements, mail shots, emails, etc.  For me, the biggest challenge is reading the email addresses which volunteers scribble down on the doorstep.  I can usually get the gist of their other scribbled comments.

The office is quite a busy place.  On any given day, there are about four paid staff and another four volunteers beavering away.  Frequent visitors are the candidates, themselves, who come in to fill up their voter input memory, to talk strategy with the staff, or to review an outgoing missive.  Candidates are always very kindly and polite to the volunteers, but our opinions are not solicited: we are input generators.

One of the candidates, Dan, in particular (the office covers several constituencies), faces a particularly up-hill battle.  He faces an incumbent who is a mover and shaker in his party, and he won the last election with a substantial majority.  I don’t particularly like the incumbent.  I went to see him about an issue on which I felt strongly and on which Parliament would be voting.  I was in his presence for ten minutes, nine minutes of which was him talking around the topic.  I’m quite sure my one minute made no impression on him, and he voted against my view.

So, I’ve been thinking that new, up-and-coming authors are a lot like Dan: struggling to gain recognition in the face of an incumbent opponent (famous author), whom most of the voters (book buyers), know and recognise.  Maybe sometimes the party (publisher) will put enough money behind the candidate (new author) that New Author actually wins.  Or maybe Incumbent (Famous Author) makes enough mistakes and Candidate (New Author) has such a compelling pitch (The Book) that New Author wins.  Or maybe New Author and Candidate just get lucky and win a Seat in Parliament (Book Prize).

I’ll let you know what happens!