John Nash in Meadle

An update to the post on ‘Totes Meer’ below. I was in Tesco’s and they’ve started to do a small selection of ‘local’ books. One was a walks in Buckinghamshire guide. I like to flick through these as they usually have at least one walk that passes within about half a mile of where I live — and it reminds me not to take for granted the fact that in a ten minute stroll (or five minute run) I can be in some of the best walking country in England. (And I was brought up within a few miles of the Pennine Way.) A national trail, the Ridgeway, is less than a mile away and I can see  two long-distance paths (the North Bucks Way and the Midshires Way) out of the front of the house and a local long-distance route (the Aylesbury Ring) out of the back.

Quite often these walking books have nuggets of interesting information interspersed with the directions. I was reading a circular walk in the book with a route that passes very close to me and saw it had a reference to John Nash (the painter of The Cornfield). It said he’d written the ‘Shell Guide to Buckinghamshire’ in 1936 in a village (hamlet really) called Meadle, which is about a mile and a half away, a dead-end off a road in the middle of nowhere that I sometimes run past — the place seems to be dominated by stud farms and stables. (The Shell guides were much more ‘arty’ than normal 1930s tourist guides — those the Nashes did were described as surrealist.  John Betjeman wrote the guide to Cornwall.)

I did a Google search on Meadle and John Nash and found a useful Chilterns AONB page giving a detailed biography. Nash lived in Meadle from 1922 until 1939, when he again served in the military. The website says ‘the location, on the edge of the Chilterns, provided great inspiration for him. The escarpment with its beechwoods and the farmed landscape with its daily activities became the subject of many of his paintings.’

I then found that another of his most famous works, which is in the Tate Collection, is ‘The Moat, Grange Farm, Kimble‘ , painted in 1922. According to Wikipedia this is a classic use of the landscape to represent reflections on the human condition — using a brooding claustrophobia that refers back to the war. I can see Grange Farm from my window and have walked past it several times (it’s on the North Bucks Way).

While ‘The Cornfield’ has an obvious appeal to me because it’s a painting of the region where I live, I find it fascinating that, unknown to me in the years since I bought the print, that the artist could almost have been my neighbour, having chosen to live for 17 years literally down the road.

Also, the work of both the Nash brothers fits incredibly well as a theme to my novel. Quite early in the novel I’ve written something about Kim and her attitude to the second world war. It’s debatable whether a German of that age really thinks about it too much and were that to be the only reference it would probably be read as fairly gratuitous. However, as the Nashes were artists who painted both world wars and also drew and/or lived in the area where the novel is set and also appreciated its much older, almost spiritual ancestry then the historical aspect could be developed.  (Also, it’s interesting that the Tate owns most of these picture — shame they don’t seem to be on display — as I’m setting some significant scenes from the novel in The Tate Gallery.)

The process of developing what appears to be a soapy story of people running a pub is actually dredging all kinds of connections out of my subconscious. It’s producing a unification of character, setting and theme that’s very specific to me personally.

‘A Beginning, A Muddle and An End’?

Interesting blog on the Guardian Books website today by Robert McCrum. He talks about Ford Madox Ford’s advice that the literary quality or narrative power of a novel should never be judged by the opening alone but by reading a random page from within the book — which has been called the page 99 test  (i.e. open any book at page 99 and see that is comparable with the opening).

He quotes Philip Larkin’s observation after being a Booker prize judge that modern novelists concentrate far too much on grabbing a reader’s attention with the opening — the books had ‘a beginning, a muddle and an end’.

I guess no-one would say they would want to buy and read a book that had a stunning first few pages but which proved to be unrepresentative of the rest of the book. However, experience on the City University course suggests that novelists, particularly debut novelists, need to concentrate intensely on those first pages to have any hope of attracting an agent’s attention.

At the end of June, as mentioned at the time, we had an evening where we all read extracts from our novels to an invited audience of literary agents and other industry people. Because we had an hour for the reading, we each had four minutes each, which was rigorously enforced. For most of us that worked out about 600 words — or about two pages of a novel. Mostly we all chose the opening of our novels — or, if not, something that would work well as one.

It was interesting to listen to people’s polished four minute extracts. We workshopped them over the course of a few weeks and they were all excellent and sounded great when read on the night — it was fascinating to see the improvement as some took shape. It was also interesting to see how much the extract reflected what we knew of the rest of the novel in progress.

My own reading was, I think, fairly unrepresentative of the rest of what I’d written. The style was fairly typical — quite a lot of dialogue, not much exposition, although I’d edited out a lot of the more ‘literary’ description for timing purposes.

However, it may have misrepresented the genre as it was a firing scene set in a City office block — a corporate location that’s never returned to after the first few pages. The rest of the novel is about alternative lifestyles, art, beer, food, wine, dissolute afternoons spent drinking in pubs, relationships that break down, others that simmer, communities and sex is a recurrent theme, as I was reminded by Jennifer more than once.

So a scene in a modern office block meeting room with people sat behind desks talking corporate speak is very atypical of the novel — but it’s important as it’s a starting point that the characters react against and that drives the rest of the novel.

Just before the reading I got some advice from an agent to reverse my first two scenes and start the novel referring to the artistic elements rather than corporate. That was my initial instinct and it was very satisfying that she’d picked up the tone and theme of the novel from the few thousand words she’d read. (Obviously it’s her job to do that but my writing must have had enough quality for her to engage with it.)

But it was too late to change my extract for the reading — which I’d chosen after much indecision on the basis of its conflict and dramatic impact. So I’d have failed the page 99 test myself — at least on genre expectations.

However, the way novels and novelists are judged by agents and publishers  is on the first few pages — at least to determine whether they want to read more or reject the work. And that might be pragmatic because that’s what readers have traditionally done when browsing novels in a bookshop.

I read a worrying report in the Wall Street journal via a retweet from City coursemate Michael Braga about how e-books and the dire economy are making it virtually impossible for literary writers in the US to make a living — even if they’re published their advances are pitiful.

This is partly blamed on the effect  of e-books. These cost the customer less and publishers are proportionately reducing the income to the author. This seems unfair as its the publisher who’s saving the costs of printing and distribution. The writer still has to do the same amount of work as with a physical book.

Another effect of e-books is that they tend not to be browsed, as are physical books. Readers are said to be more likely to buy an e-book based on marketing (like film and TV tie-ins, Richard and Judy and so on) or from recommendations (such as published reviews, reader reviews on Amazon, word of mouth and so on).

This has led to fears that the reading market will concentrate more on blockbuster fiction and there will be much less opportunity for authors to grow into a career over the course of three, four or five books. Currently the view seems to be that a new author has to sell a lot of copies of their debut and, if they get the chance, second novel or else they will be dropped.

There is a counter view in the WSJ article that e-books, because they’re cheaper, will expand the market and, because they require much less capital investment in the product, will change the publishing industry from being largely controlled by huge multi-nationals to one that has many more independent small publishers. My own guess is that it may polarise the market at either end — a few mega-publishers and a lot of small ones. The fate of the literary writer is likely to be to start off at the small scale end and perhaps move across to big publishers once they’ve established a track record.

If the market changes like this then it means the role of the agent may also change. I’d guess they will still be as important to writers as ever but their skill may be required more to get a writer noticed and to build a reputation. There may be a situation where fewer and fewer publishers are willing to take chances on unknown writers but technology such as e-books and print-on-demand may mean it’s not as difficult as in the past for authors to be published.

The investment involved previously in getting a book onto a bookshop shelf has been a quality filter in itself and, to return to the original point, a reader might feel that if the first few pages are good then it’s likely that the rest of the book won’t be too dire, having been through a professional production process. If e-books are the future then covers and opening pages may play a lesser role than the general ‘buzz’ that gets book noticed in the first place.

I guess what the conscientious writer should do is to write the whole novel to the best of their ability and then go back to the beginning and work on that again once the book has been finished. This is what I’m planning to do and I’m not intending send anything to an agent until I have something that’s as good as I can make it all the way through.

This is a bit Catch-22 as it would be helpful to have some professional feedback to both motivate and give a realistic assessment of the whole endeavour. And I’m finding it’s taking forever. However, I wouldn’t want to end up with one of Philip Larkin’s muddled middle books.

Time on Franzen

Jonathan Franzen’s new novel ‘Freedom’ has been causing a stir among reviewers — one Guardian Books blogger is already calling it the novel of the century.

Time magazine a couple of weeks ago gave Franzen the honour of being on its cover — something achieved by very few authors and was the magazine’s gesture towards placing him in the canon of ‘The Great American Novelists’.

The accompanying article was, compared to most of these profile pieces, long and thoughtful and had some comment on where novel writing might be heading in the future:

‘Early readers of Freedom, including this one, have found that the book has an addictive quality, the kind one usually associates with mysteries or thrillers. This isn’t by accident. Franzen is very conscious that people are freer than ever — that word again — to spend their time and attention being entertained by things that aren’t books. That awareness has changed the way he writes.’

Franzen, suggests the profile’s author, Levi Grossman, argues that this need to work to engage harder with the reader by implication means that to avoid becoming an obsolete and arcane art form the novel needs to avoid intellectual novelty-seeking and boundary stretching. Perhaps the self-indulgent aspect of literary fiction might finally be exhausted:

‘A lot of literary fiction strikes a bargain with the reader: you suck up a certain amount of difficulty, of resistance and interpretive work and even boredom, and then you get the payoff. This arrangement, which feels necessary and permanent to us, is primarily a creation of the 20th century. Freedom works on something more akin to a 19th century model, like Dickens or Tolstoy: characters you care about, a story that hooks you. Franzen has given up trying to impress with his scintillating prose (which he admits he was still doing in The Corrections). “It seems all the more imperative, nowadays, to fashion books that are compelling, because there is so much more distraction they have to resist,” he says. “To me, now, to do something new is not to develop a form for the novel that has never been seen on earth before. It means to try to come to terms as a person and a citizen with what’s happening in the world now and to do it in some comprehensible, coherent way.”‘

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2010000-4,00.html#ixzz0yAaJL6mA

Country Life

Not the Roxy Music album with the famous cover (that James no doubt sneaks a look at from time to time in his CD collection) but some ‘research’ I did yesterday.

I’ve done a lot of research into the London settings of ‘The Angel’ and most of what I’ve written is set in the heart of the city so I redressed the balance and went to the Bucks County Show, just north of Aylesbury– which is one of the biggest agricultural shows in the country.

Unfortunately the show this year was held on possibly the most depressing and dark summer days I can remember — cars had headlights on at 5pm — and it followed 24 hours of continuous heavy rain. The showground was a complete quagmire — a mudbath of Glastonbury proportions. (Apparently the Reading festival is already in a similar state.) It didn’t seem to bother most of the visitors — who were wearing wellington boots almost to a person, no doubt the green variety might be their footwear of choice.

The event is so thoroughly immersed in rural and agricultural pursuits and activities that it’s almost incredible that the showground is less than 20 miles from a tube station. (In the 1930s the London Underground extended past Aylesbury and ran within about 5 miles of the show.)

Part of the show is judging the best in breed of sheep, cattle, goats, horses, flowers (a couple of the prizewinners grew their blooms just down the road from me), giant vegetables and so on.  One may also inspect the many tractors, sprayers, fertiliser hoppers, the new high-lifting vehicles that farmers increasingly use to carry around huge straw bales (not sure what they’re called) and even combine harvesters. It’s more Borsetshire than Buckinghamshire.

There were various rings for showing the animals and the main ring had show-jumping and even, apparently, camel racing.

Bucks Show 2010
Tractors, Combines and Saddles in the Mud

I’d expected all the above but wasn’t expecting quite the broad representation of country life that made up the many exhibitors — like the many arts and crafts stalls, car dealerships, estate agents, solicitors, local newspapers, councils, charities, environmental groups and so on. There was also a sizeable military and police presence — mid-Bucks has a surprisingly big RAF presence with Strike Command in a huge bunker under a hill near High Wycombe and RAF Halton, whose Scottish pipe band performed at the show, is a huge base that trains most of the RAF’s new recruits. Marking the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, a second world war Hurricane fighter aircraft was on display.

There was even a bookshop, although the titles on display didn’t include the latest Guardian books page recommendations — instead I noticed a whole book devoted to making your own compost among the many gardening titles plus a good selection of books on steam locomotives and the second world war.

Naturally, this being a huge farmers’ marker in itself, there was a great selection of wholesome, locally produced artisanal produce in the food tent. From the farmer P.E.Mead and Sons, I bought a bottle of locally grown (and pressed) rapeseed oil. It’s apparently better for you than olive oil — rape is a strange plant as it looks stunning when flowering in the late spring but the plants are pretty ugly later on with their scruffy little horizontal seed pods. I had a chat with one of the Jenkinson brothers from Chiltern Brewery who recognised me and I bought a couple of bottles of their excellent Lord Lieutenant’s Porter.

All rural life was represented and there was hardly a reference to anything metropolitan or, perhaps worse, suburban, even though the show was in a region that’s officially classified as one of the three most densely populated in Western Europe. Yet there was evidence that one organisation was as effortlessly at home in the muddy fields in Buckinghamshire as it was in the heart of the city when I visited its coffee shop on Monday on Oxford Street in London — John Lewis.

John Lewis and Waitrose had a marquee which was well worth visiting just on account of the food samples they were giving away — strawberries and some very nice cheeses. A few of their suppliers shared the tent, including a fascinating beekeepers’ display of a glass-walled hive.

The presence of John Lewis was interesting because, like the tube and commuting, it brings together the two apparently disparate worlds of city and agricultural show rural yet it’s by no means a universal denominator — its customers are almost completely middle-class with a comfortable income, they need to be if they buy their groceries at Waitrose.

I’ve already used a couple of references to John Lewis in what I’ve written so far and perhaps I’ll consciously carry this on as a bridge between the two ostensibly very different worlds that my characters inhabit. But under the surface there are a number of similarities between inner-city existence and the rural life. There’s the same economic polarisation between rich and poor and, as I found with the Bucks Open Studios fortnight, there are as many, if not more, artists working away in rural areas (not just the obvious places like Cornwall, the Suffolk coast and Pembrokeshire) as there are in Hoxton or Hackney Wick.

Hurricane and John Lewis
Two Indomitables of England -- the Hurricane and John Lewis

Red Kites and the Liminal Zone

I went to one of the Bucks Open Studios events this afternoon at St. Dunstan’s Church, Monks Risborough. There was some really fascinating stuff there — a lady had done the most stunning watercolours of (of all things) parsnips and carrots, even salsify. There were some very interesting interpretations of the Chiltern landscape — some were linoleum engravings and others were very vividly coloured abstract views.

Outside the church were some metal sculptures — and a couple of these were of the famous red kites that I often mention on Facebook. Recently these incredible birds of prey, which have a wingspan of about six feet, have almost constantly hovered overhead. I drove down the M40 after a City class and knew it was time to pull off soon when I saw the birds circling over the motorway at Stokenchurch. There were four circling the garden this morning. The sculpture below is pretty much life sized — it’s by James Sansome. The event has its own web-page with details of the artists.

Sculptured Kite, Monks Risborough
James Sansome's Kites at Monks Risborough

Monks Risborough church is extremely old — there’s been a church there for at least a thousand years. Most of the building is 14th century but the font is 12th century — 900 years old — and came from an older church. The boundaries of the parish are apparently the oldest in the whole country — and the shape of the parish is very long and thin to apportion parts of the contrasting landscape features to the village. These include wooded hilltops, steep grazing on the escarpment, the spring line (where the settlement is) and then the more fertile low-lying flat farmland in the Vale of Aylesbury.

The geography is amazingly varied and makes me think the general location is a great place to locate the action in a novel. I’m going to fictionalise the actual location of The Angel but it will be close to the hills and all their celtic and mystical associations (there’s an ancient cross cut into the chalk of Whiteleaf Hill, which overlooks Monks Risborough) and there are some very large areas of woodland where it’s easy to go for a quiet, contemplative walk. However, turn the other way and you very soon get to some remote farming areas which, while not quite as desolate as the Fens, might not be too dissimilar to somewhere like deepest Devon.

I went for a run through these places today and I ran down one lane for about two miles (which takes me near enough 20 minutes) and didn’t see a single car, just a farmer’s Land Rover and no other humans apart from a cyclist who nearly ran me over and a horsey-looking blonde woman mucking out a stables (not noticeably fat-bottomed unlike the ones I wrote about in my last reading). In fact the whole area is pretty horsey — there are a few studs around and one of the biggest point-to-point events in the country is held just down the road at Easter.

All this made me realise, as I was running, that The Angel’s location re-inforces one of its themes. It will be in a place that in one way is very connected with London (on Wednesday I left the Queen Boadicea in EC1 at 10.45pm and still didn’t have to get the last train home). But go the other way and it’s easy to find isolation and a connection to a way of life that’s still incredibly traditional.

So the novel’s location is on a boundary — a kind of liminal zone. And that’s the point where its characters are too — they’re on the boundary between urban and rural, commercial and artistic. They’re on the edge too and wondering which way to turn.

During the slightly boozy session about ten of us had in the Queen Boadicea after the class, we were all put on the spot to say what our novel was about — and any personal elements to it. I said mine was ‘escape’ — and a lot of the stuff I write seems to share that theme — but both main characters do want to escape their predicaments at the start of the novel. Emily’s suggestion that I take a look at Ann Tyler’s ‘The Accidental Tourist‘ as it’s in a similar sort of sub-genre maybe also re-inforces the theme of reaching an edge and thinking about escape. True as the answer was, it wasn’t the one that some of the class had hoped for, given that I’d read what’s now becoming my notorious sex scene on Monday (of which more in a coming post — no pun intended).

‘Sweat Me Garlicky’

We had to take along a published poem (by someone else) to Metroland Poets last night on the theme of ‘Poems to Read Aloud’. There was a very varied and entertaining selection ranging from ballads by Walter Scott to Edwin Morgan’s famous ‘Loch Ness Monster’s Song’.

I made a choice in about five minutes flat but was quite pleased with the poem that came to mind. It’s ‘Cooking with Blood’ by Linda France, which is featured, along with an interview with the poet, in the Open University’s ‘Creative Writing’ course (A215). Click on this link for the poem and an opportunity to hear her read it out.

Again there’s a link with The Angel as it’s all about cooking (in the section I’m workshopping on Monday James tells Kim about his passion for food). It’s also dedicated to Delia Smith in a way. Delia is someone I’ve loved even more since her famously tired and emotional appearance on the pitch at half time at a Norwich City game.

I get the feeling she’s far less prim and proper than supposed ‘edgier’ cooks like Nigella and Jamie Oliver (who I think, to use Kim’s vocabulary, is a bit of a tw*t).

‘Cooking with Blood’ was inspired when Linda France was looking through the index of a cookery book, probably Delia’s, and found all kinds of exotic names for dishes and techniques. What people found quite remarkable when I read the poem was the amazing use of these names as verbs in the poem. ‘Wouldn’t we sausage lots of little quichelets’, ‘She played en papilotte/for just long enough to sweat me garlicky’, ‘I’ve stroganoffed with too many of them’, ‘[I] triped
myself into a carcass’.

Making imaginative use of verbs (and, in fact creating new verbs like this) is something that I don’t really do enough of in my own writing — probably because I do it too quickly. I’ve got the opportunity to experiment a little in this way in my next chapter when I get James and Kim completely plastered. I’d like to try and hint at their altered states of consciousness by attempting to play with language in the same sort of way.

The poem also appeals to me as it’s very sensual. There’s clearly a link between food and sex in the poem (even as far as talking about procreation) but it’s amusing and thought-provoking: ‘After I’d peppered her liver, stuffed her goose/
and dogfished her tender loins, she was paté/in my hands’ and ‘We danced the ossobuco;/her belly kedgeree, her breasts prosciutto.’ I think this poem must have tapped into my subconscious quite deeply as I tend to return to similar elements in my writing: people say it’s quite physical. I tend to write a lot about what people do with their hands and their body appearance.On Monday in the workshop I’m sure it will be noted that James is something of a compulsive breast watcher (well, he’s done it twice once with each of the women). I’ve played this up deliberately for mild amusement but I’m starting on the journey to finding my writing ‘voice’ and I think I’m always going to have a theme of the physical and sensuous. I’ve done the same in ‘Burying Bad News’ with Frances imagining herself and other people with physical attributes of grape varities. It’s interesting as I’m not a touchy-feely type person in normal life at all — I just seem to write about it.

One of the women poets was surprised that ‘Cooking with Blood’ was written by a woman as she thought its tone was quite male. Perhaps that’s down to the physicality of its approach as opposed to the more metaphysical, spiritual tone she might have expected in a poem with a similar message written from a more conventionally ‘female’ point of view. I’m not so sure there really is such a gender bias in reality between male and female writers. At least three of the male novelists on the course are writing from female points of view and Eileen writes in a very convincingly masculine voice in her novel extracts. However, there’s no doubt that many readers form expectations about reading a novel just by reading the gender of the author. That, famously, is why J.K.Rowling is known by her initials — the publishers didn’t think their initial market of teen boys would want to read a book written by someone called Joanne.

Themes and Influences

Going back to Emily’s point about how themes emerge the more that one writes, I’ve realised I’ve unwittingly used some fascinating influences. I’ve just been writing, very slowly, a scene where Kim paints in her tube carriage studio and decides whether she likes James or not. Watching artists at work is not something I’ve properly researched yet but I found myself writing about gestures like her putting a brush to her mouth and nodding her head from side-to-side. I’ve realised where my mind dredged this up from — a rather famous Cadbury’s advert from the 1970s which can now be seen again on You Tube.

I’ve also given Kim a liking of religious choral music, partly because I have some of it on the computer and it’s randomly played as I’ve been writing. I did, however, buy the Classic FM CD ‘Music for the Soul’ last week which has Vaughan Williams’ ‘Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis’ (apparently the third best loved piece of classical music in the country). I’ve seen this performed twice now — once at the Proms for the fiftieth anniversary of RVW’s death (in 2008) — and this really is music for the soul. Heard live, the bass strings resonate through your body. What’s special about the CD is that before the Fantasia is the original theme by Tallis which RVW used as the basis for his work — called ‘Why Fum’th In Fight?‘. It’s quite extraordinary to hear the theme sung and then elaborated by the string orchestra.

I may have Kim be inspired by the Tallis Fantasia later in the novel. I wanted to write it in the current scene but it’s getting quite long and I need to get the characters moving. Instead she plays John Tavener’s ‘Song for Athene’ (the 20th century Tavener, not Tallis’s contemporary). Of course this is most famous from being the music to which the Princess of Wales’ coffin was carried out of Westminster Abbey and was accompanied by the most striking images of the black and white tiling on the abbey floor. There’s also another connection between Tavener, Tallis, Vaughan Williams and Westminster Abbey. The part of Westminster Abbey where the choir sang ‘Song for Athene’  is where Thomas Tallis is buried and Vaughan Williams’ ashes are interred, which I’d not known until I did a bit of research.

I realised that I’m spontaneously generating quite a lot of references to cathedrals and other religious themes. St Paul’s is going to play a part in the story and so will the village church and churchyard (think about Emma). But it’s probably no co-incidence that this is happening with a novel that’s called The Angel — whether the title is a symptom or a cause of this is an interesting question but it all seems to tie in quite uncannily.

I also read on the Guardian’s Book Blog that angels as a general literary theme are meant to be the Next Big Thing, replacing the current vogue for vampires. I’m not sure this is a great thing for my title, seeing as my angels are on pub signs and are symbolic — not the scary sort made notorious by the likes of the famous Stephen Moffat Doctor Who episode — ‘Blink’. I do like the title, though. I’ve even worked it into the dialogue — from recently written chapter two:

He shrugged.

‘Yes, sorry about your job too,’ Kim said.

‘I’ve got the cash for you, though.’

‘You’re an angel,’ she said. ‘Come up and take a look around.’

The Grey Goose

We had a session with Emily about how themes and connections will start to emerge in our work. I realised that I had an interesting location with Village Underground and that there was something subconscious in why I liked it so much. During the class I realised that the trains were a metaphor for the whole city-rural tension in the novel — something that connects the two halves together and they were also an inversion of the natural order — underground trains being on the top of something rather than the bottom.

But other odder influences are at work in my mind. One CD I’ve been playing in the car is possibly the most untrendy album ever released by the untrendiest of the Beatles — it’s ‘London Town’ by Wings. I’ve always liked the album since I recorded it on cassette from someone over 30 years ago. It was released just after ‘Mull of Kintyre’ had become the biggest selling single ever (until Band Aid) — and this was just as punk was coming down from its heyday. There’s little classic rock/pop on the album in the mould of ‘Band on the Run’, which might have gained it fans. In fact some of the album is pretty rubbish — the Elvis style rockers for example. However, it has the fairly ground-breaking single, ‘With A Little Luck’ which is almost all synthesizers and was released a good three years before the Human League, Soft Cell, Depeche Mode and so on got started with Synth Britannia. Also, the title track ‘London Town’ that was McCartney’s first flop in years is a beautiful piece of music with Linda McCartney’s harmonies sounding beautiful, especially at the end — it’s a shame the lyrics are so ridiculous. When I’ve been walking round looking at London with an eye to finding usable locations I’ve had ‘silver rain was falling down upon the dirty ground of London Town’ going through my mind on many occasions. The main strength of the album, to me, are the four or five folk-rock tracks mainly co-written by McCartney and Denny Laine — ‘Deliver Your Children’ and ‘Don’t Let It Bring You Down’ are cracking songs. The last track, and this is the point of this diversion into ‘London Town’, is called ‘Morse Moose and the Grey Goose’ which is something of a concept song made of a few fragments but the ‘Grey Goose’ bit is a salty sea-shanty type song — complete with West Country sounding accents: ‘the Grey Goose was a steady boat, people said she’s never float, one night when the moon was high the Grey Goose flew away’.

So I’ve had this playing in my car recently.

I was writing about Kim getting herself hammered in the putative first chapter of ‘The Angel’ and I was wondering what she might drink. I thought gin maybe but opted for vodka as it’s in less need of mixers so I wondered about a suitable brand — being the proud owner of a botle of Smirnoff Blue that I bought in 1989 on my first BA staff travel flight and have never opened since. I don’t think I’ve ever actually drunk vodka at home. So I got on the Ocado website to check out some vodka brands — and there are plenty of variants with all kinds of provenance and flavours. I had to go through about 30 before I found one that I’d seen advertised in an expensive magazine like the Economist and that cost about three times the Waitrose own brand stuff. This seemed like something that might be served in the bars of Shoreditch too — it’s apparently distilled from wheat in Cognac and was sold to Bacardi as the most expensive spirit ever at $2bn apparently. The website is very Flash.

It’s called, of course, Grey Goose.

Bean Doing Some Research

I’m writing this from ‘The Bean’ a cafe on Rivington Street, Shoreditch. I had to come into London for a meeting with a colleague in the rather different surroundings of the Holiday Inn, Mayfair. He was offering me some careers advice along the way, which was both good and bad, because more or less everything he said convinced me that I’d be more suited to a novelist’s lifestyle although this is not something one can approach a recruitment agent for.

While on the tube to Green Park I had something of a flash of inspiration while reading a review in The Economist of some books about the credit crunch. It’s a little depressing as the recession and financial crisis are already appearing in fiction — which will possibly make my themes a little dated — although the Economist seemed to think it would take a year or two for anything particularly thoughtful or reflective to come out (my inference from the article anyway). That set me thinking of the many interesting parallels between my three themes — money (finance), art and sex. I had one particularly thought that I’m going to think about further but it could have ‘legs’.

I’ve had another look at Village Underground, from the top deck of a bus this time, which is useful as I’ve been furiously writing about Kim’s tenure there which may form the opening chapter of the novel. I have a few different ideas for openings and I’d like to use Alison’s tutorial on Saturday to see what works best. The problem is I have to write them. I was up until past 1am last night and up again writing by 8am.

On the way here I stopped by the Tate Modern. I was hoping to see the Rothko Seagram pictures, which I thought were there, as I watched the Simon Scharma programme on them on DVD a few days ago — more research. However, they appear not to be there and today’s strike by the PRS (or whatever union it is) meant most of the galleries were shut so hordes of foreign school parties were all crammed into Balka’s box instead, which I guess probably gave it the opposite ambiance to that which the artist intended.

The Shock of the New

It’s going to be quite an intense day on Saturday for a few of us: Rick, Nick and myself have both a reading and a tutorial. The reading is c. 2,250 words and the tutorial extract can be up to 3,000. I slightly exceeded the word limits on both so I’ve got about 5,600 words in for feedback in one way or another — in two different novels, which might land me in trouble.

I really wanted to make a start on ‘The Angel’ and I began by trying to do something clever and writing a scene which, like Alan Ayckbourn’s ‘Norman Conquests’, brought together characters from different works and had them interact in scenes which were interchangeable. I will probably still use the scene. It’s when Sally(from ‘Burying Bad News’) wants to bone up on wine. It turns out she knows Kim (from ‘The Angel’) from London and Kim persuades James to put on a wine tasting at ‘The Angel’. Sally brings Jez along and meets Emma and Gordon, Emma’s doctor father who tries to take over the wine tasting duties. Both Sally and Emma get smashed and Sally sees glamorous Emma as someone who can help make her image over and persuades her to accompany her to Bicester Village Designer Outlet to buy some discount brand label clothes cranking up the balance on the credit card she’s just wangled. In the course of this Sally would give Kim the third degree about why she’s left London and come to the sticks to work for an ex-banker. Kim would show Sally the space in the pub that she’s planning to turn into her studio. Quite a nice little scene I thought but it was quite dialogue heavy and didn’t really get into the meat of the story so I thought it might be a bit of a missed opportunity to present that for the tutorial.

Interesting that I referred to Alan Ayckbourn as I’ve long admired his plays — the way he works within a limited scope and is marvellously funny but still exposes the deepest recesses of his characters’ psyches. What I’ve described above is not too dissimilar to one of his plots.

So I decided to put the wine tasting writing on hold and write something different — and I had about two or three days to do it and last night’s class to fit in as well (in addition to work). I had a very firm image in my mind about how I wanted the novel to end and, bearing in mind feedback about how a reunion on the Millennium Bridge was a bit of cliche, I decided to construct an ending to the novel that took the cliche and subverted it.

I worked pretty obsessively on the piece as there’s not much opportunity for ‘face-time’ with the tutors and I wanted to deliberately address a lot of my concerns about the novel in the submitted extract. I got up at 5.30am this morning so I could send it in before midday (I failed by 8 minutes).

I also put my fieldwork research in the Tate Modern to good use by setting almost all the action in the gallery. I don’t know how successful a strategy it will turn out but I had the characters look at painting that were then used to reflect concepts and emotions from the plot. I tried to use paintings that readers would have a good chance of knowing, such as Warhol’s ‘Marilyn Diptych’ and Lichtenstein’s ‘Whaam!’. My reference to the latter wasn’t very subtle but it’s not a subtle painting. I really want to use the Cy Twombly paintings I saw last week but can’t find them on the internet. I’m planning another trip to the Tate next week to check. I also ensured that my semi-mystical experience inside Balka’s huge box was put to good use (see blog posting below). I hope Alison says that this works because, if it does, it could be quite a hook for the novel as I would see it being marketed at the kind of people, like me, who are reasonably educated and open to new ideas but who know very little about certain types of culture (in this case modern art). It works very well with things like Morse and his fixations with Wagner and Mozart.

I’m not sure how the piece hangs together. Because of the word limit (yes I came up against the word limit and had to edit it down even though it was put together quickly) it’s probably more rushed than I’d anticipate in a full length novel. For example, I’m concerned that I’ve telescoped the plot a bit too rapidly into the dialogue so there might be some cliches in there. However, some of the most basic emotions must transcend cliche. If a character says ‘I love you’ or ‘I want you’ is that a cliche? I don’t think so but I still feel like there must be cleverer ways of writing that or something like ‘Be there for me.’

I wanted to write something that had both dialogue and some extended description but I think I would want to hone the diction and rework some of the imagery in a re-draft. However, I wanted to use the extract to bring in and work on some of the themes I would see running through the novel, such as obsession, depression, communication, misunderstanding, ambition, modern art, etc. There’s also themes pubs and urban-rural tension but these aren’t so evident in the extract.

Now I’ve sent it in I’ll probably do something completely different tonight like watching television — I thought the new Rab C. Nesbitt wasn’t bad last week (I watch it with subtitles as I like to read how the dialogue is written) and ‘Bellamy’s People’ was ok last week.

And I’ve got six absorbing chapters from the other class members to read in detail before Saturday.
I’ve read through two or three quickly already but I’ll read them all through, let them stew away in my subconscious for a while, and then annotate them with any detailed comments I might have.