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Noughties is 24-year-old Ben Masters' debut novel. It's a coming of age story, set over the course of a group of students' final night at Oxford as we follow them from pub to bar to club in what Masters explains is a "tongue-in-cheek Miltonic descent". The novel is told through the voice of Eliot Lamb, English undergraduate and, as we learn as we piece together the events of his university years through his flashbacks, our somewhat unreliable narrator.
Masters wrote the novel after his own student days in Oxford. Regarding it as "prentice work", he completed the first draft in a mere five months. "I just wanted to get it done," he says, "I was always quite hesitant about spending too much time on it. I knew I wanted to be a writer so I wanted quick feedback, I wanted someone to tell me whether I could write or not. I was always going to carry on regardless, but I wanted that affirmation from an agent and publisher."
By far the best advice he received during this period came from his "then literary god", Martin Amis. Queuing up to have a him sign a copy of one of his books after hearing the author speak, Masters told him that he was an aspiring novelist. "Get it finished" was Amis's recommendation, and so that became Masters' working motto.
Although, he assures me, the novel is not autobiographical in the strict sense of the term - "my university experience was too standard, too boring, to be turned into a novel" - Masters, like his protagonist Eliot, also read English at Oxford. He admits that he drew on his experiences to a certain degree though; after all, he was only 22 with "very little life lived" when he wrote it, so "what else are you going to write about?" he admits.
"But I don't see it as an 'Oxford novel' per se," he adds, "so much as a university novel. After all, the last fifteen to twenty years has been quite a peculiar time in university student history, what with the idea of mass university-going - something that could be about to come to end now. If you think about it, it's a standardized experience, but where's the novel that encapsulates that?"
"Perhaps Noughties fills a hole there," he suggests, not least because campus novels like Lucky Jim or Wonder Boys tend to focus on the university staff rather than the students.
But Masters' experience at Oxford informs the novel in more ways than one. Knowing that he wanted to be a writer, he saw his degree as "preparation", again referring to his work as a vocation: "I saw my apprenticeship as reading the canon."
Noughties is an incredibly intertextual piece as well as being markedly stylised, and is self-consciously literary in terms of the many allusions and quotations that pepper its pages. This doesn't necessarily mean that a reader has to be well versed in literature to appreciate the novel, but Masters admits the intertextual moments "are there for a reason".
He describes the book as a "comedy of the intellect": it's a novel about Eliot's maturation, "the story of three years of his head being filled with this highbrow arcane knowledge, and he's finding his voice and working out what to do with it."
It seems fair to make a comparison here with what Masters himself is doing: finding his own voice amongst those already out there, not least because of the emphasis he places on reading as his preparation.
"The writers I admire have a certain amount of literary swagger," he explains, "they write with literary inheritance. But at the same time I'd say they're fiercely individualistic writers, and that's what I'm aspiring to, a voice that's completely my own."
He goes on to tell me that his second novel - which he's working on right now - is even more intertextual than Noughties. It's full of pastiches, or what he prefers to call "loving emulations". It's style however that really excites him - he's currently writing a PhD on the subject at Cambridge - and I have to admit that that's what really stood out for me in his own work.
"I don't like critics who dismiss ornate writing as being all style and no substance," he declares. "So much substance is in the style, and style can shape content."
This is something he feels particularly passionately about when it comes to debut novels: "If you're a first novelist and you haven't got a certain amount of stylistic gusto, what are you doing?" he asks. "There should be an energy there. So many of the works I admire - The Rachel Papers, Lucky Jim, White Teeth - that's how it should be, something that overflows its boundaries. There has to be a certain amount of joy in the prose if you're a young writer."
Despite the fact that his own prose is well articulated, it's clear that Masters is aware he's a young novelist still finding his voice. Noughties, he says, is "the beginning of something. I'm not happy with it, it's going to be bigger and better, I'm going to go on and write more."
I joke that it's refreshing to hear that he sees himself as an evolving author with a trajectory ahead of them, rather than resting on more egotistical laurels. "Oh, there's a lot of egoism," he replies with a laugh, "of course there is. But I'm also well aware that there's the danger of seeing the publication of Noughties as an 'I've arrived' moment. I prefer to maintain the attitude that I'm only as good as my next novel."
Noughties is published by Hamish Hamilton.
Lucy Scholes, January 2012
Among the more intriguing is a marathon Shakespearefest at the Globe Theatre, part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, which promises 37 plays in 37 languages from April to June including a Bangla Tempest and a Hip Hop Othello: "I hate the bastard, hate the Moor. I hate his rhymes, I hate his whore."
If your resolutions extend to reading more short stories you can't go wrong with Adam Ross. Sample one of his offerings in his just published collection here. You will also enjoy Penguin Shorts, and their digital take on classically styled affordable tales for a mass audience.
On the subject of captivating design, the short film The Joy of Books has been a recent Twitter sensation, recalling Spike Jonze's equally lovely Mourir Auprès de Toi, an animation set in the Shakespeare & Company bookshop in Paris.
Last but by no means least, this week saw the Man Asian Literary Prize 2011 shortlist announced. Not the usual five, but seven, titles have made the final list, with stories ranging from "the arid borderlands of Pakistan, the crowded cityscape of modern Seoul, and the opium factories of nineteenth century Canton". A resolution you may not yet have thought of could be to read each of these novels before the winner is declared on 15th March.
On your marks...
Farhana Gani, January 2012
"Austen novels are comedies, but as the 19th century goes along
marriage plots follow the women into the difficulties of marriage, and
become darker. Those novels - Middlemarch, The Portrait of a Lady, even Anna Karenina - are the ones I love."
On the face of it, The Marriage Plot is more conventional - and far less experimental - than Jeffrey Eugenides' previous two novels, The Virgin Suicides (1993) and Middlesex (2002), though they all deal - to various, startling degrees - with mixed-up youth. How did this a campus novel, with its themes of 19th-century romance, manic depression and the search for religious truth, come about? Mark Reynolds investigates.
I was writing another novel, about a rich family that was throwing a debutante party, and I suppose even that idea was less outrageous than Middlesex. But out of that book three characters appeared who, the more I thought about them, didn't belong in that novel. That was Madeleine and Mitchell, basically, and Madeleine's boyfriend Leonard, and at the start I wasn't sure how important a figure he was going to be. And I took those characters out of that novel and gave them their own novel.
Madeleine's story began with the sentence "Madeleine's love troubles began at a time when the French theory she was reading deconstructed the very notion of love." So she came with semiotics attached, and she came in the midst of a romantic predicament. And then later on I realised she was a devotee of 19th-century fiction, especially Austen and Elliot and James, and in a way was trying to emancipate herself from the romantic illusions those books had fostered in her.
I'm not an Austen scholar like Madeleine, but The Portrait of a Lady is my favourite Henry James novel, and probably more than any book that Madeleine reads looms large in my affection and looms large in my conception of the marriage plot. If you think about the Austen novels they always end in weddings and they're comedies, but as the 19th century goes along marriage plots follow the women into their marriages and into the difficulties of marriage, and they become darker. Those novels to me - Middlemarch and The Portrait of a Lady, even Anna Karenina is a marriage plot - are the ones I love from that era.
I think it's possible to convey meaning with a novel, to say true things about people and society. I'm not with Derrida that all texts have apparent contradictions that will render them incoherent or meaningless. Maddy's old professor says that "the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot" and it's certainly a valid position to hold, but perhaps a reactionary and outmoded one. It's one I've toyed with, but I don't share it. I began reading novels because of James Joyce and the modernists, so I came in long after the marriage plot was dead and it didn't bother me, so it's not something that has been central to my conception of the novel. But obviously I was playing with the idea of the marriage plot here, and the extent to which what we read affects our actual life. It's not just the marriage plot: Mitchell reads many mystical books that affect him; Madeleine reads both Victorian novels and French theory that affect her. And, especially for people in college, what you read gets into your bloodstream like a drug and affects your life, and that's really what I was trying to examine in this book.
Deconstructivism and semiotics were coming into play in America in 1978 when I got to college, and it was causing a great disturbance in the English department, so you had a schism where some professors either were ignorant of it or distrustful of it, and others who were enthusiastically adopting it. So if you were a student then, you were kind of a child of divorcing parents, and perhaps had an affection for both parents, but would shuttle back and forth between the houses, and that was my own experience as an English student. And that's why I gave Madeleine this predicament of being both attracted to the new, hip philosophy of semiotics, and also rooted in a more traditional pedagogy of literary preferences. I was just trying to reflect the time.
I've been influenced by French theory and Foucault. One of Foucault's books led me to write Middlesex. There are certain post-modern elements in my fiction, but I resist the notions that the author's dead. Again, I resist the idea that text can't convey meaning, and I resist some of their more doctrinaire positions. And I love narrative, I love storytelling, and I believe in creating characters with whom the reader can identify or whose story is compelling to the reader. So I have affection for a lot of traditional elements of novel writing, as well as many theoretical agreements with the semioticians.
It seems like there's lots of social conduct that tries to keep us from behaving badly, and many of the things that are so-called PC are probably good sense. At its heart it means trying to be sensitive to the feelings of other people, especially disadvantaged people or people who have been discriminated against. So it doesn't seem in the main a wrong emphasis. Is it against human nature? Yeah, it's perhaps against male nature not to go and grab every woman that looks attractive to a man, but it wasn't PC that got men to behave a little bit better than the brutes that they are in the jungle; it's not so different from the many religious teachings that have formed our culture.
I remember graduating and seeing that people were going off to interviews with investment banks, and I had no idea what that meant. Now that's partly because I'm stupid, partly because I was an English major, but also because in general people weren't talking about it that much. And this entire move to Wall Street on the part of our best and brightest hadn't quite begun. It was a much smaller part of the economy. Since then it's grown and grown and grown so that a place like where I teach at Princeton, something like 40 to 60 per cent of the graduates might end up working for Wall Street in one way or another. You know, you have the 'quants', the brilliant mathematicians, being hired to do that instead of figure out how to run NASA. This has nothing to do with my novel, but in my opinion the financial sector has grown far too large. It's a necessary thing to have in a capitalist society, but the fact that so many of our smart kids are going into a line of work that is really not innovative, creative or productive, but necessary in some way, doesn't seem to be a great trend. But it hadn't quite started at the time I'm writing about at Brown.
When Madeline leaves college she has the summer with Leonard, taking care of him, that is difficult. It was important to show both the neediness and magnetism of the manic-depressive. I was trying to imagine what such a person would be like, and the difficulties of being in love with someone like Leonard: from both sides. I was trying to show Maddy's point of view and Leonard's to the best of my ability. Had I not conveyed that, I don't think I would have conveyed the essence of the problem at the heart of their relationship.
I think there's been a lot of attention to depression, but not to mania, so I felt that, in writing the scenes where Leonard becomes manic, I hadn't read an account like that before. And going back to this novel seeming more conventional, I found that some of my most experimental writing ever occurred in trying to map and describe Leonard's overheating mind in Cape Cod. So I think in so-called realistic novels, there are many places where the novelist is called upon to work experimentally, just in order to try and describe how a person's mental processes are working, and that the labels realistic and surrealistic sometimes don't do justice to what is actually going on inside a book.
Mitchell I think discovers a certain amount of truth in his searches. I mean he's someone who was not brought up religiously, and embarks on a real investigation of religion through his studies, and then is not content just with academic knowledge, but wants to try and have an actual mystical experience and goes about that as many people do at that age, and little by little he comes to the conclusion that the only validity of any religious dogma is if it changes how you behave in life and how you conduct your affairs. So he tries to be the best possible person he can become when he goes to work for Mother Theresa and joins the Quaker group. He's defeated in his attempt to become a saint, but I think he does gain a certain measure of self-understanding through that process. At the end of the book he's making another step toward being a better person when he's understanding that Madeleine is not going to be the woman he's going to be with, and that he has to give her her freedom as easily as possible and not cause any scenes. There's a line at the end when he's feeling a little better about himself, where I think he makes a step toward the kind of person he wants to become. And I think it's being with the Quakers, and having thought about all these things over the years, that allow him to do that.
The Marriage Plot is published by Fourth Estate.
Mark Reynolds is a freelance editor and writer, contributing editor to Untitled Books, and Literary Editor of The Drawbridge.
]]>Rather than treading on the toes of existing publishers, what they're doing, Sophie Hicks tells me, is "filling a gap in the market". They haven't employed any extra in-house staff, just enlisted the services of the digital production company Acorn, and a part-time publicist to help market the titles. As the current Bedford Square Books list is compiled of books by their existing authors that are currently out of print or unavailable, all the agency is doing, Hicks and her colleagues Charlie Campbell and Edina Imrik explain, is "providing a further service for our authors". Were a publisher then to approach them looking to take on one of the titles, there would be no conflict of interest; this remains the obvious goal. For example, they recently sold the Chinese rights to Good Times, Bad Times in Frankfurt. The New Year will also see the launch of the accompanying Bedford Square Stories - short stories or one-off articles individually priced and downloadable - all sourced, again, from their authors' back catalogues. A task which, bar potential stumbling blocks when it comes to the rights of previously published pieces, particularly journalistic ones, actually makes perfect sense when you've got as eclectic and illustrious a list as Victor.
Nevertheless, I'm intrigued as to whether the project has encouraged a host of fresh aspiring ebook-savy authors to approach the agency, or alternatively, whether the agency itself is actively seeking out new ebook and POD authors as separate from their other clients? Not at all, everyone explains. Though alongside the otherwise out-of-print titles the Spring will see the launch of the first Bedford Square Books Originals; Dead Rich by Louise Fennell. Victor is extremely excited about this debut novel - described by the author as "a Shameless [the Channel 4 TV show] with nobs on" - and so confident about it's appeal that, despite being turned down by publishers seventeen times, he's decided to go ahead and publish it himself: "I feel like the Viet Kong fighting a guerilla war," he tells me with a laugh. A grand launch party is scheduled for February with a guest list that includes the rich and famous (Victor warns that only my very best party dress will be suitable attire for the event), but the book is already making the press - last week the Evening Standard pondered whether it could indeed be the "e-jewel in Ed Victor's literary crown". I'm certainly keen to see the sales figures, as success with an original title has the potential to send Bedford Square Books, and the agency itself, in an entirely new direction.
Dead Rich and Bedford Square Stories launch updates to follow in the New Year...
Lucy Scholes, December 2011
Bakewell's novel is full of incredibly precise period details, so much so that I'm eager to find out whether this return to the late 50s and the early 60s was a journalistic or a novelistic impulse?
The 60s, she explains, was such an important decade: "Right-wing commentators often accuse the permissiveness of the period as being what has led to many of the problems society faces today. So I'm very conscious that it's a radioactive and explosive decade. The 60s moved culture on at a fantastic rate - at the beginning of the decade you had book, film and theatre censorship, and homosexuality and abortion were illegal - but all that had changed by the end of the decade so as a novelist, I saw it as full of possibilities."
Bakewell's novel gives a good account of these possibilities that were opening up for the younger generation, with particular emphasis on the new freedom women were afforded as we follow her teenage protagonist Martha from her staid suburban family home in Staveley, in Derbyshire, and heads for the bright lights of Liverpool.
London is the traditional setting for these kind of formative innocence to experience novels, so what made her choose Liverpool instead?
It was a city "absolutely heaving with the love of music" during this period, she tells me gleefully. "I mean, you just had to get your hands on a guitar, by fair means or foul."
She goes on to explain that at one point during the 60s there were more than six hundred groups in the city - obviously many of them just a couple of teenagers getting together, whether in the streets, on bomb sites or in attics, just to make some music together - a sense of youthful creativity that is depicted well in the novel.
Jazz, Bakewell clarifies, was already a strong influence in the city, and the musicians who played it were outraged by the corrupt rock n' roll that was springing up all over the place, they tried to keep it out of the cellar bars, but obviously to no avail.
"It was a cultural moment. A bit like Florence in the Renaissance - people were just creative to a fantastic extent. Partly perhaps because there wasn't much else, people had ordinary jobs, ate ordinary food and wore (bar the rise of the leather jacket of course) ordinary clothes."
Was this ordinariness one of the key differences between the 60s and today?
Yes, Bakewell agrees: "People today have been led to think they must have money, and notions of acquiring stuff or having a stylish pad, has got them locked into the wrong ambitions."
We discuss the fact that culture in London today is not being led by young people, not least because it's often an expensive thing to pursue. This means, Bakewell argues, that people feel "removed" from what's going on, whereas it was the exact opposite that was the case in the 60s: "people were just getting together and doing it, and not because they wanted to get rich - that's a contemporary phenomenon - it was just done for the love of it."
"There was" she continues, "an opening up of ideas on all fronts that just doesn't happen so much today. Youngsters are on a sort of ladder - the concept of "getting on" wasn't so crucial back in the 60s, everything was more relaxed, which in turn allowed the imaginative part of the brain to roam free. That's something that I think is incredibly important, creativity needs to drift."
In light of the recent Occupy Movement both here in London outside St Paul's, and in New York on Wall Street, does she sees any similarities between today's protests and those she writes about in the novel?
"Well," she considers, "I do think that after the lapse of a couple of decades people certainly seem to be getting political again. The nuclear threat was, of course, dire, and the CND saw people protesting on a scale previously unwitnessed. But in light of the global scale that today's protestors are claiming, I'm beginning to think that there's a real feeling that the world has to be reconfigured. The protestors themselves don't have the answers, they've scarcely got the questions, but they are starting to ask them, and I suppose that's also what's going on in my book. It's about people beginning to ask questions, it's an account of how the 60s came out of the 50s."
Bakewell herself was living in London during the 60s, presenting the groundbreaking late night discussion television programme, Late Night Line Up, on the BBC. Filming for the show took her over to America to report on the Civil Rights Movement.
"Young people", she remembers, "were fired up generally in the 60s, and the music helped. I mean, heavens, think of Dylan or Joan Baez [both of whom were featured on the show]. The whole protest song movement was very important and we adored it. It really chimed in with what we were thinking over here in Britain."
Of course, American music had already hit Britain in the previous decade with 'Rock Around the Clock', Bakewell remembers, as a breakthrough track. But despite being familiar in terms of its music and its movies, the country itself was still a world away from Austerity Britain. She describes travelling to the States as a "glamorous adventure"; walking the streets of Manhattan had a "really glitzy feeling". Americans themselves, she recalls, "really did look taller and fitter by comparison to the people back home in the UK due to all their good food".
She goes on to explain that in She's Leaving Home she wanted Martha's own growth into adulthood to be reflected in what was happening in the external world around her.
"There was", she says, "a growing sense of change in the 1950s. Things were changing fast, but still not quite fast enough, and I wanted to explore what this felt like in the mind of a young girl."
As the novel progresses Martha's mother takes centre stage herself, making a nice juxtaposition between the opportunities and ambitions available to the different generations. This makes for interesting reading in itself, but I'm also intrigued to find out what Bakewell thinks about what today's young women have made of their newfound freedom.
"I think they're bewildered," she tells me. "Some of course have had amazing successes - there are lots of jobs now in the BBC for example, it's become quite a feminized institution. And twenty-five percent of Labour peers in the House of Lords, like myself, are women."
"On the other hand", she muses, "there are women who think that getting drunk is being free. But it's not, it's actually an enormous straitjacket that limits your choices so it's sad to see that."
"It is clear though," she goes on, "that women will always have the problem of how to have children - which they'll certainly want to do and enjoy - and how to have a satisfying job at the same time. Sympathetic, softer (and by softer I mean tender-hearted) men have helped, and will help, a great deal, but I do think it's a perpetual problem that's obviously not going to go away."
So, what does she think we should learn from the 60s?
"You can learn some things," she tells me, "but you also have to remember that the world now is very different. There was a lot of innocence around then, people were more trusting. But it's important to recognize that change is brought about by human behaviour, so I think people can, and should, be quite optimistic that that's the only way you will get change."
She's Leaving Home is published by Virago.
Lucy Scholes, December 2011
As another year draws to a close, we reflect on literary highs and lows. Libraries are under mounting pressure, hardbacks are losing ground to ebooks, and literary prizes have been criticised for shortlisting 'readable' books. But, it's not all bad. We enjoyed World Book Night, the return of the beautiful book and many literary offerings from all corners of the world.
The literary salon is on the rise, with the irrepressible Damian Barr drawing big crowds and big writers to his monthly soirées at Shoreditch House. The Book Stops Here, based in Soho, is another author evening to keep an eye on. Track our events pages in 2012 for readings and salons across the country.
As the recession shows little sign of receding, it would be nice to believe that when the going gets tough, the tough may turn to a good book. Could it be that our economic woes will have a positive effect on short fiction? Random House recently launched Storycuts, dedicated to digital short stories: great content that just might baffle those who judge a book by its cover. Look out, too, for Bedford Square Stories, a new venture from the Ed Victor Literary Agency offering individual e-stories and articles at bite-size prices.
Planet of the Apps is where most of us now live, so how best to combine our love of the written word with digi-magic? Check out the Anobii website (Anobii is the plural of a bit of the scientific name for the common furniture beetle, whose larvae are bookworms. See what they're doing there?). Download the clever free app, and merrily scan book barcodes in any shop, library - and your friends' bookshelves - for the latest reader reviews. It's sure to change the way we buy and share books, and it will be curious to see how it impacts on the conventional broadsheet book review.
This final issue of the year fills your virtual stocking with literary goodies. Umberto Eco, Padgett Powell, Jeffrey Eugenides, Joan Bakewell, Ellen Feldman, short fiction from Tessa Hadley and Dag Solstad and new voice SJ Butler, plus Professor David Parker shining a light on the Asian literary scene. Could the next big literary star once again emerge from the East? All eyes will be on London's Asia House on January 10th.
A very Happy Christmas to you all. See you on the other side...
Farhana Gani, December 2011
Brill is in good spirits and speaks eagerly and engagingly about his work. "I'm not sure my publishers know quite where to place me," he explains over our drinks as I ask him about the type of novel he writes.
Kennedy is right, How To Forget is a very funny book, Brill excels, it seems, at different degrees of humour, from slapstickesque sequences to wordplay and puns - " ... the not-so-clever dregs from a leftover bottle of sunblock that had rendered the two of them lobsterized - which may not be a word but you can just take it as red" - but it's also a tightly plotted thriller that leaves you in suspense until the bitter end, as well as a self-reflexive meditation on writing and identity. It's quite rare to find a book that's both comedic and literary, to find a novel that engages with literary criticism in the way that this (and, perhaps even more so, Making Love) does.
"I think it's quite difficult," Brill says. "I think that people who study these theories in depth find it very hard to think that someone who makes light of it knows what they're talking about."
"Take Making Love, for example. It's all very grounded in a lot of research; the history of love, and literary history. I wrote it quite soon after finishing university" - after early success as a playwright, his first play 'Frikzhan', won the 1985 National Youth Theatre/Texaco Most Promising Playwright Award when he was only nineteen, he then pursued a career in journalism, beginning at the Evening Standard, before giving it up to go to Oxford as a mature student - "so I was filled with all those theories at the time."
"They are," he explains, "ideas that are so easy to ridicule because they're ideas of endless meaning, but that's interesting in itself as it basically brings you to the idea of the joke anyway, where you switch the meaning of the word, and I like to laugh at what I'm doing. Take the 'lobsterized' pun for example, it's just a pun, but you can't do that unless you've stepped outside the story."
Brill's unique style of writing necessitates that he steps outside of his stories in more ways than one. Making Love is actually two books - Brill wrote both then interspersed them - the first is the narrative itself, the love story, attributed to Marius Brill, and the second is a social history of love, an argument against love, the work, we are informed, of one Paul Pennyfather (this is Evelyn Waugh's protagonist's life work had he not been sent down from Oxford). The dust jacket carries a biography of both authors, underneath which the reader is warned: "One of the two authors of Making Love: A Conspiracy of the Heart is entirely fictional. Unless both are." And then again, in How To Forget, Brill distances himself from the role of author, informing his readers that he is merely the "proud" collator of the manuscripts of one Dr Chris Tavasligh, a neuroscientist specializing in the causes of forgetfulness who disappeared without trace.
As if this heady comedy/thriller/meta-narrative combination isn't enough, How To Forget is also preoccupied with two central concerns: magic and neuroscience. "Having dealt with the heart in my first book," Brill tells me, "I kind of thought I'd do the head this time round. So it begun that way, I was looking at motivations in the head. One of the first things I did in terms of research was train as a hypnotherapist."
You actually completed the full training as research, I ask? Yes, he tells me, he's a fully qualified hypnotherapist. So you're a method writer, I say. "Yes, I suppose you could say that, but that's because I come from journalism where the model is that you do something and then you write about it." He tells me about hypnotherapy, admitting that it's "90% compliance, and all about illusion."
"There are all kinds of constructs which you work within," he explains. "Although the therapist has all sorts of power, it's you yourself who's doing the work. You're basically giving a magical presence to the hypnotherapist."
So what about the magical side of things - one of the main characters in the book is a magician, and I've already seen that Brill himself has a trick or two up his sleeve.
"I ended up having to learn some tricks for my son's birthday party. So I read up on it, and as I was reading I suddenly realized that you're actually doing a lot of the same thing. A lot of the convincers that you use as a hypnotherapist are basically magic tricks."
The two "worked in tandem and I realized that this was my way into the brain through my own experience, thought I obviously read an awful lot of neuroscience too" - not unlike Making Love, the narrative of How To Forget is interspersed with neuroscientific papers, all based on actual fact so extremely interesting but not, Brill admits, absolutely integral to the story itself. A reader could, he informs me, skip them and still read the book quite happily if they wanted to.
Despite these more obvious shortcuts, this type of literary fiction, or metafiction, can be very demanding on the reader, so does he worry that this might alienate some from his work?
"The whole point," says Brill, "is to do something like The Simpsons. You can watch that with your kids and they take it as straightforward entertainment, but you get jokes that they don't. So hopefully the same sort of model applies to How To Forget. It can just be read as a narrative about two people, you don't need to understand all the literary references or spend hours pouring over the neuroscience. There's no way that I would have the courage to sell a book based on the reader having to understand certain things in order to read it."
"Not least because you're only going to get about ten percent of what you want out of it anyway, the rest is about writing something that people enjoy reading. You can slip things in, and some people will get them and some people won't. If there's a message here, it's that your brain is more gullible than you think, and I think that's the same message that magicians show too. Just when you thought it was one thing, it's another. In fact, I'd actually be really happy if someone who didn't like supposed 'literary fiction', enjoyed reading the novel."
The worry when writing something that obviously comments on itself, he goes on to explain, is that it runs the risk of becoming "boringly postmodern". "But I try not to take it too seriously, and I hope that comes across. I think a lot of the jokes in the book are an attempt to not take myself too seriously."
And in an extremely welcome way he doesn't, and we spend the rest of the afternoon talking candidly about the publishing industry and rising tuition fees at universities with, I'm pleased to say, a fair sprinkling of magic tricks thrown in for gratuitous entertainment - he manages to guess my birthday to within two days accuracy with no help from me, astounds me with card tricks and makes a £2 coin disappear right before my eyes.
Lucy Scholes
How to Forget by Marius Brill is published by Doubleday.
While Barnes' Booker win was sniffily judged by some as an uninspiring and predictable lifetime's achievement award, it was refreshing to see him deflect some of the plaudits towards his book designer. It will be curious to see if publishers react to his sentiment and work harder on cover design to create objects of pickupable beauty for 2012.
One thing they are doing markedly more of is producing hefty tomes. Tod Wodicka examines the trend, focusing on the literary event that is Parallel Stories by Peter Nádas. 18 years in the writing, five years to translate, and a whopping 1,133 pages long, is it heavy in a good way?
The most recently announced literary prizes focus on books of eastern origin. The Man Asian Literary Prize longlist features 12 novels from Japan, Iran, China, India, Pakistan, South Korea and Bangladesh, including work by Rahul Bhattacharya and Amitav Ghosh. And the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature has winnowed down its 2012 shortlist too.
The eulogy got the literary treatment last month. Acclaimed US writer Mona Simpson delivered a short story-like tribute to her brother Steve Jobs, opening up much twitter speculation on what his last words could possibly have meant.
Words of a different nature also stoked our curiosity. David Crystal's The Story of English in 100 Words (Profile Books) features exactly that: 100 words that best illustrate the huge variety of sources, influences and events that have helped to shape the English vernacular.
Another book that hooked us is The Breakers by Claudie Gallay (MacLehose Press). Fans of TV land's dramas The Killing or Spiral will be absorbed by this subtle and satisfying mystery.
We're enjoying the concept of Canongate's new website: canongate.tv. Perhaps once the content really gets going, the site will offer a storytelling alternative to conventional television's treatment of readers and writers where the review is king.
If you want to turn away from economic woes, the impending collapse of the Eurozone and bankers haircuts, what better than to lose yourself between the covers of a good book? Nikki Gemmell's Top 10 is full of dangerous distractions, and we also feature sparkling content from Penelope Lively, Craig Taylor, Marius Brill , Thomas E. Kennedy, translator Adam Thorpe, debut novelist Helen Gordon and short fiction from Peirene Press.
We also have some treats in store on the run-up to Christmas. Visit the site regularly between issues to catch an interview with Jeffrey Eugenides, a fascinating new development in the ebook-versus-pbook debate, and much more.
Happy reading!
Farhana Gani, 7th November 2011
Seven years later and Funder has written her first novel - All That I Am (Viking) - but she hasn't completely abandoned historical fact for the realm of fiction. The novel is about a small group of left-wing German activists who, after being exiled from Germany in 1933, continue their clandestine activities in London despite being hunted by the Gestapo. Based on the real life experiences of Funder's friend Ruth Blatt, the novel, Funder explains in the afterword, is what she has "made" of Ruth and her friends' stories: "It is reconstructed from fossil fragments, much as you might draw skin and feathers over an assembly of dinosaur bones, to fully see the beast".
Where Stasiland features real people as subjects, All That I Am turns them into fictional characters, so, I ask Funder, was this a hard task? Writing a piece of fiction based on people that you've known, she explains, "is like having a model and making a painting of that person. You're not making any claims that they see themselves like that. It's you who sees them that way". And which does she find the most demanding to write I enquire, fiction or non-fiction? Non-fiction, she replies: "Although there are lots of limits in writing fiction, it's incredibly important to get the emphasis right when you're dealing with characters to whom real things happened". She then goes on to explain that the sections of the novel that she found the hardest to write were those set in contemporary Sydney as Ruth looks back over her life - here she felt an "obligation" to render her settings exactly, precisely because she knows them so well herself.
But what of the rest of the novel - her depiction of Ruth's life first in Germany and then in London, and the sections told from the playwright Ernst Toller's viewpoint in New York after the war - she obviously allowed herself freer reign here? "Of course," she replies. "The events I write about fit into what is known in the historical record. Everything my characters do is congruent with what they [the real figures] did. But the whole imagining of those characters lives is obviously the novel. Every breath, every observation, every bit of dialogue is invented. What I'm interested in is representing consciousness, in representing the interior life of these characters, and that can only be done in a novel. That's where non-fiction stops." So, I ask, would she describe it, even in part, as a factual text? Does she see her protagonists as fictional characters or historical figures? Can the two even be separated from each other? Funder answers by making it clear that she makes "no grand historical claims" for the novel. "I see this book as a different thing," she says. "It's not a history. It doesn't make the kind of truth claims that history or historians make, it doesn't operate in that way. The truth claims it makes are about the human heart, they're about being convinced by the reality of another person".
It seems apt to ask her what exactly it is about German history that has captured her interest for so long now, but she refutes my suggestion that she's got a one track mind, explaining instead that her interest begins with the people, not the historical period. "Twentieth century German history is so tragic and extreme and it's led to extraordinary stories precisely because people have been required to make very dramatic moral decisions that are fantastic for storytelling in many ways," she tells me.
"I think that the way we understand ourselves is through stories," she elaborates. "You never know whether this is the end of a story or the beginning of one, and I think that we cobble together, rather arbitrarily and always in hindsight, bits of our lives into a beginning, middle and end. That's how we understand ourselves and that's how we understand each other. We are always constructing sense out of things that in themselves might not make any sense, so storytelling - choosing the beginnings, middles, endings and everything else - is interesting to me."
And, I ask her, was there an element of detection involved in writing this novel? Does she think it's odd that her writing process - of piecing together historical facts and filling in the gaps - somewhat mimics the processes of spying and detection that she's writing about? "I think it's not so much detection," she pauses before she continues, apologizing that her jetlag is making her less articulate than usual (though I can't say I've noticed any evidence of this myself, all her responses seem thoughtful and eloquent). "It's more like a child who runs along the beach and finds a shell and feels impelled to run back to you and say 'look mummy, look mummy, look mummy, look it's a shell,'" she continues. "And you say 'yes, it's a shell,' and it is a shell, but to them it's a wonderful thing that's theirs. I think there's an element of that. It may not be amazing to anyone else, but it's a real object that you've found and then you make something out of it."
So, what now I ask - will her next book be fiction or non-fiction? Fiction, she answers without hesitation.
Lucy Scholes
Find my review of All That I Am in The Independent here
]]>Last week the Guardian published its British Books Power 100 and, lo and behold, Amazon's Jeff Bezos tops the list of the most influential people in the UK publishing industry - and arguably the world's.
The list came out in the same week that Bezos launched the Kindle Fire, at first glance giving a passable impression of Apple's Steve Jobs. It's going to be a while before the Kindle tablet hits our shores, along with the fun-sized Kindle Singles. Bezos would make us very happy if Kindle UK were to start offering individual short stories to readers. Until then, enthusiasts can enjoy three new stories in this issue, as well as the rich archive we've accumulated down the years. If you want more, we heartily recommend the Library of America's Story of the Week, selected from its extensive catalogue of classic and contemporary authors.
Bookshops are on the minds of two of our contributors this month. Sarah Hall reminisces about her childhood aversion to bookshops as places that were drab and unappealing, while Alexander Maksik throws up a novel idea for sorting out good books from bad.
We have not one, but three interviews this month, with Charles Frazier, Anna Funder and newcomer Gavin James Bower. Contributions, too, from Andrey Kurkov, Alexander Maksik, John Hart, Kavita Bhanot and H.M. Naqvi.
The Nobel Prize for Literature is announced tomorrow, and since we last checked, two poets are favourites to scoop the big-money prize (and neither of them is Bob Dylan). By the time our next issue comes around, the Man Booker will have been awarded - and doubtlessly strenuously debated. We're secretly hoping chair of judges Dame Stella Rimington will cast a decisive vote in favour of a couple of hapless hired killers.
Happy reading!
Farhana Gani, 5 October, 2011
]]>His days are now spent working on Quartet's website and editing the works of others, then in the evening he heads to the British Library for a couple of hours of his own writing. When I ask him how he has time to fit it all in, he jokes that publishing isn't exactly "back-breaking work", but, on a more serious note, he explains that he thrives on the variety. "Part of me would love to live off writing," he admits. "But there's a bigger part of me that knows I wouldn't be happy just writing alone in the library. I'm not sure that would be enough". In fact, he continues, "I get a bigger sense of pride" from editing the works of others.
He describes himself as someone who can "scatter" his skills; a bit of writing, a bit of editing, some work on the website, some pitching, and then out of everything "hopefully", he guardedly admits, "comes a career". It sounds to me though that he's made it already - a much sought after job in publishing, two novels under his belt and a third book already in the pipeline (the story of Claude Cahun, the French artist, photographer and writer, which he's planning to write this winter).
He describes working at Quartet as having meant that Dazed and Aroused was a "sort of dry-run" of a book. Now he understands how publishing works, this time around he took an active part in all stages of the writing, editing, publishing and marketing process. He jokes that he's being both "subject" and "publicist" in this interview, but it's not too far from the truth. He's interested in what I thought of the book's cover (it was designed by a good friend from a photograph Bower himself took of a wall in an old mining town in Derbyshire), and he has the canny ability to turn even the slightest bit of criticism into a compliment. At the same time, he's well aware that he's in what he calls "an extremely privileged position" to be able to have had this much control over his own work, as in larger publishing houses only authors of consistent best-sellers would have a say in every aspect of their book's development.
Made in Britain is told through the eyes of three sixteen-year-olds living in the Lancashire town of Burnley as they take their GCSE's. Told as a first-person narrative in the three different voices, Bower does an admirable job of maintaining the distinction between them, a task that he admits was "really hard, a constant struggle of redrafting". It's a gritty, raw and uncompromising depiction of today's disaffected youth - in many ways a timely book, given the recent rioting and the debates that raged in the aftermath, but when I ask him whether he was ahead of the zeitgeist in writing about the problems facing the youth of today, he reminds me that his characters aren't rioters or looters, they're simply three teenagers who live in a society that offers them a distinct lack of opportunities. But, he continues, "anything that sharpens the discourse around how we treat and view the young working class, can surely only help the situation."
He talks eloquently and informatively about the problems facing what he aptly calls "the rudderless, not the lost, generation". "What generation in the past fifty, or even hundred years," he asks, "has grown up thinking they can't change anything? Even amongst the shallow capitalism of the 80s there was a sense that you could change the world." He then refers to the phrase "reflexive impotence", as used by Mark Fisher in his book Capitalist Realism. "It's not apathy," Bower explains. "It's not ambivalence. It's the feeling that you don't have the power to change anything, so what's the point in bothering."
In a less overtly political way, we see the exploration of this attitude in his novel - his teenagers are already trapped, for the most part, in the lives they're living (though he professes that there's a slightly brighter glimmer of hope at the end of the novel than I had inferred) and he does little to provide answers to their, or indeed, the bigger problems in society as a whole. Contemplating their GCSE results, these are children about to turn into adults, but, Bower says, "I didn't want to paint the picture that university is the answer to everything, it certainly wasn't for me" - an interesting comment considering his career would seem to suggest that he's done well out of his own education.
Like his protagonists, Bower too grew up in Burnley so the book is also, as he's been quoted elsewhere as admitting, the product of his "love-hate relationship" with his home town. It shares its title with Evan Davis' recent book and television series about the British economy - work that Bower took umbrage with in an article he wrote for The Guardian earlier this year in which he argued that Davis didn't address the real ramifications of Britain's decision to relocate much of its manufacturing abroad. In its depiction of the dilapidation and poverty facing these now "ghost towns", Bower's novel directly engages with "the legacy of Thatcherism on the post-industrial North of England".
So, I ask, would he leave London and move back up North again? Not immediately he says. After all, if he wants to stay in publishing, London is the place to be. But eventually, yes. "As I've gone further away, I'm more and more in love with it. I'm always going to be pulled back there," he explains. He would like to live somewhere else in the meantime though, somewhere like Paris he says. After all, he left Lancashire in the first place because there was "a lot of world out there".
Lucy Scholes
]]>In fact I'm keeping my eye on the Scottish literary scene at the moment - having been impressed by the recent fiction offerings from Sandstone Press. They followed Jane Rogers' Man Booker longlisted The Testament of Jessie Lamb with Zoe Strachan's impressive Ever Fallen in Love (find my review here), and Frederick Lightfoot's My Name is E has just dropped through my letterbox ...
]]>Over in America this has taken the form of the tried and tested platform of facebook, but here in the UK, Harvill Secker (the Random House imprint publishing the book) decided to take an innovative new approach. This took the form of a collaborative project with Failbetter Games (the award-winning digital fiction company, best known for its browser game Echo Bazaar) to design an "interactive online storytelling experience" that invited users to attend a series of five circus performances opening at staggered intervals between 1st September and Halloween.
Dan Franklin, the Digital Editor at Random House UK, told me that the minute he read the novel he saw immediate resonances between Echo Bazaar's fog-shrouded, fantastical version of Victorian London and Morgenstern's magical fin-de-siècle-set tale. The underground secret community encouraged by Failbetter's design, he continued, perfectly matched the clandestine atmosphere surrounding the Night Circus itself in the book.
Although the use of an online storytelling experience is an inventive and original marketing tool - the press release for the novel called it a "trailblazing" partnership with Failbetter - Franklin explained that it combines the concept of classic 'choose your own adventure' stories with the reward system of the more traditional gaming environment. Based on characters and situations from the novel, The Night Circus game allows users to choose their own "narrative path" through the circus, picking up 'mementoes' that can be saved to unlock certain secrets along the way. You explore the circus via fragments of text that can then be shared with others using your facebook or twitter feeds; the idea is that these snippets of the story then encourage others to play the game, and your own ranking increases as a consequence, thus allowing you further access inside the game.
Fascinatingly for a novel that already stands just short of 400 pages, Failbetter actually created an additional 40,000 words of new writing for the game; creativity thoroughly endorsed by Morgenstern herself who explained that she found it "absolutely fascinating" to watch them take the book and turn it into what she calls "a marvellously illustrated puzzle filled with tantalizing bits of story".
So, has Harvill Secker's all-singing, all-dancing campaign actually translated into book sales? Initial figures would suggest so as this week saw The Night Circus reach number 15 in the hardback fiction chart - pretty impressive for a debut novelist. It would seem that Harvill Secker's hopes of using the game to unlock a new online audience has worked - of the 8,000 odd people who have played the game, nearly 1,000 have clicked through to the 'purchase the book' link at the end, and the number of players is apparently still growing. Given that so much of the current talk about digital potential in the publishing world focuses on ebooks, it's both refreshing and optimistic to see the digital world being used to promote actual print sales. As Franklin explained, it's all about "making your books discoverable".
Lucy Scholes
]]>After being introduced by Emma - with a keen eye for their comic potential, she makes a habit of trawling amazon for reviews of the featured novels written by less than impressed readers - Rachman was the first to take to the stage, explaining as he did so that this was the only time he'd ever been introduced by bad reviews (a forgivable idiosyncrasy considering The Imperfectionists has already sold over 400,000 copies since it was published last year). His rendition of an international newspaper's obituary writer oozed comic genius, leaving everyone hungry for the hotly anticipated film - Brad Pitt has optioned the film rights and Oscar-nominated Scott Silver is tipped to write the screenplay.
Next up was Jill Dawson who aptly chose a Soho-set extract from Lucky Bunny - the story of Queenie Dove, an East End orphan-girl turned thief. After introducing us all to the concept of "rolling" (when a prostitute gets the punter to pay upfront, then legs it without putting out) - a description that the audience met with much joy - Dawson's reading plunged us into the backstreets of 1940s London amongst the hustle and bustle of a working girl's hand-to-mouth existence.
Finally came the pièce de résistance of the evening with the glorious Ali Smith's energetic performance of the opening of There But For The. The vigour of her reading really brought this story of a dinner party guest turned unwelcome squatter to life, highlighting the way in which her prose celebrates language in the form of puns and repetition.
It was without doubt an evening enjoyed by all, and with alumni such as Hari Kunzru, Kevin Barry, Evie Wyld, Joe Dunthorne and Helen Oyeyemi, this autumn's programme looks set to be an exciting addition to the diaries of all book lovers.
The Book Stops Here - from 7.30pm every second Monday of the month at The Alley Cat, 4 Denmark Street, Soho, London WC2H 8LP
More information here.
Lucy Scholes
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