Month: September 2010

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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.

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Come And Watch Me Perform!

I’ll be reading my poetry at the Swan Theatre in High Wycombe on 14th October — 1.10pm in the Oak Room. See: http://www.wooburn.com/Web/lunchtimeP2.htm

It’s part of the Wooburn Festival who have asked Metroland Poets, of whom I’m a member, to do two readings.

I have a ten minute slot and I’ve been trying to work out which poems to read. The organisers are printing a running order with titles of each poem.

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‘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.

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Spooked by Heartbeat’s Demise

I was rather gutted (as footballers say) a week last Sunday by the transmission of the last ever episode of ‘Heartbeat‘.

No really — this isn’t meant to be a piece of wry irony. I enjoyed the programme, and admired in many ways, its comfortable Sunday night formula of mostly gentle drama and character-based comedy.  I only started watching it about 1996/7 when it had been going a couple of years when I was bogged down at the weekends doing a part-time MBA course — it seemed to be a non-demanding distraction and it reminded me of ‘The North’.

This was in symbolic terms — I’m a Lancastrian and I’ve never even been to the interior of the North York moors (although I think 25% of my genetic make-up may be from there) but it reminded me of outings and school trips to the Yorkshire Dales and so on. ‘Heartbeat’ itself also seems to use many of the elements of the classic late 70s series — ‘All Creatures Great and Small. (I sometimes wonder if my love of the English pub dates back to Tristan’s (Peter Davison) adventures in The Drovers’ Arms, which made a big impression on me in my early teens.)

What really grabbed me, though, was that while on the surface ‘Heartbeat’  appears to be all whimsy and sentimentality, it could treat its characters with merciless brutality. The Niamh Cusack doctor character developed leukemia and I wondered how she was going to be cured – and then she suddenly died – which was genuinely shocking. Many other lead characters have met gruesome ends – in explosions, shootings, falling off railway bridges and so on. We were left on tenterhooks as to whether Oscar Blaketon would survive his impalement on a piece of agricultural machinery.

With a long-running series it’s often necessary to change the cast in this sort of way as actors leave (or get ill or die) but this leads to a type of plotting that isn’t normally available to the novelist or dramatist – to kill off your principal character well before the end. In the 80s series ‘Robin of Sherwood’, which I still think is the best Robin Hood series ever due to Richard Carpenter’s liberal infusion of Celtic mythology, I was also stunned to see Michael Praed’s Robin get killed by the Sheriff’s men – ‘that’s not meant to happen!’. They then used a Doctor Who type regeneration to get the next actor into the role, which I didn’t think worked particularly well.

‘Heartbeat’ is also a good example of how the plot can often be an almost perfunctory piece of machinery. The supposed lead characters – policemen, doctors and nurses usually – seem to act out their roles mainly to elicit some reaction from the large cast of secondary, but more permanent characters, usually sat around the bar of the pub.

There was almost always a comedy sub-plot involving the ‘mechanical’ character  – originally Bill Maynard but later Geoffrey Hughes and ending with  Gwen Taylor. Sometimes the two plots ran totally separately – the characters in each never interacted – which was again quite bizarre.

So I think ‘Heartbeat’ was more than a small part subversive – the more so because it seemed so conventional – and there’s quite a lot of ‘Heartbeat’ that has made its way into the Angel.

Of course many of the characteristics of long-running drama series are shared by soap operas – long standing characters, anchored settings, traumas and plot points occurring almost as in real life rather than by dramatic convention and so on.

Some people have said that there are soapy elements too in my novel extracts and I agree to some extent – and also bearing in mind the point that some soaps are examples of exceptionally good dramatic writing that are worth aspiring towards — and I like the emotional directness that’s often exposed in soaps where characters are pushed to breaking point (the drawback for soaps is that these events happen implausibly often to the same characters) .

In ‘The Angel’ I have a pub setting and a small cast of characters who will inter-relate closely. What I’m finding is that I’m working with a nod towards the soap genre rather than try and write something that goes in the opposite direction (e.g. a pub where the most exciting thing that happens is someone cleaning the beer lines every week).

One of my first blog postings was on the plotting of ‘Spooks’ last autumn – and this is another series which regularly kills off its key characters — except for the perennial Harry who’s always wondering about leaving. I’m looking forward to seeing how the new Sophia Myles character develops (I loved the Doctor Who episode where she featured as Madame de Pompadour) as I never really liked Hermione Norris’s Ros.

‘Spooks’ returned again this week. Graeme A. Thomson (author of ‘Under the Ivy’) tweeted a review on The Arts Desk website which described the series as something like ‘last week’s newspaper headlines fed through a scriptwriting program’.

I tend to agree – the characters dialogue has to be short and punchy because if it was any more contemplative then the issues involved would be so ponderous and loaded with politics that each episode would turn into a moral treatise. But the dialogue is not really the point about ‘Spooks’ — it’s an excellent example of how fast-paced plotting (and editing) can transform the mundane. Apart from the one spectacular explosion per series, almost all the scenes are on anonymous London streets, in ‘The Grid’ or somewhere pretty dull like the bridge of a container ship — all intercut with stock footage of places like the Freemason’s Hall on Great Queen Street (not the real Thames House).

Yet it all works brilliantly on its own terms (like ‘Heartbeat’) which means it doesn’t matter that the scenarios are complete nonsense and the script seems to have been written by people who are fortunately unencumbered by any knowledge of computing or the internet.

It’s a bit of a salutary lesson to what I’ve been writing recently — which has been pages and pages of two characters explaining how they feel about each other. I’m not sure whether in the end I’ll take a hatchet to this dialogue but it does help me explore what the characters are feeling. If I leave much of it in, though, it will probably take the reader as long to read about two characters talking over breakfast than for a plot for London’s imminent destruction to be planned, discovered and foiled in ‘Spooks’!

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Totes Meer

I’m finding it quite tricky to write a section of ‘The Angel’ in which Kim is in transition between London and the rural countryside. Part of the reason is that she’s currently making a journey alone, which isn’t a great source of dramatic conflict, except if the conflict is played out within her own mind — and the ideas that I want her to grapple with are difficult to convey without becoming a pretentious candidate for pseuds corner in Private Eye.

I’m tempted to bin, or severely edit, what I’ve written but as I’ve ploughed on I discovered some very surprising connections that suggest that certain themes in the novel are coming from deep in my subconscious.

I have Kim standing at a viewpoint and being blown away (almost literally) by the view. This sets off a series of associations as she spots that the view towards a place called Wittenham Clumps is signposted. This is a series of hills near Wallingford in Oxfordshire and my friend Kathy finds it a beautiful, meditative place and has sent me photos. It has the mystical appearance of the many of the chain of ancient locations that lie on the northern slopes of the Chilterns and the Berkshire Downs  — such as Avebury, Silbury Hill, Barbury Castle, the Uffington White Horse, Whiteleaf Cross, Beacon Hill (near Chequers) and Ivinghoe Beacon. Most of these are linked by the Ridgeway.

Wittenham Clumps was also a location frequently painted by Paul Nash — who is sometimes described as one of the most important British artists of the 20th century. He admired Wittenham Clumps in the same way he revered the standing stones of Avebury which he described as ‘wonderful and disquieting’. Nash’s paintings examine the English landscape in an intuitive, slightly surrealist way that conveys as much about the interior thoughts of the painter as much as the physical landscape. The effect was described by Jonathan Jones in ‘The Guardian’ as being ‘in a distinctive, painted world that is part William Blake, part JRR Tolkien and all England. Red suns rise over chalk hills, grey breakers hit coastal defences. The landscapes of Kent keep recurring, along with unfamiliar views of London…[Nash] paint[ed] his dreams, and mix[ed] up homely landscapes with personal myth in a way comparable to Dalì’s mythologising of Catalonia…his sensibility is as ­knotted as an English oak.’

The quotation above was from a review of an exhibition of Nash’s work in Dulwich earlier this year which was widely reported so I don’t think I really need to stretch artistic licence too much for Kim to have known about Nash and even attended the exhibition. What’s also striking is that, before I found that review, I’d written a description of what Kim sees in the landscape and alluded to both Middle Earth (Brill Hill can be seen from the same view, on which Tolkien based the village of Bree) and the ‘feet in ancient times’ from Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’.

I knew that what was also notable about Paul Nash was that he was an artist in both the World Wars. However, I learned a lot more from watching a fascinating programme on BBC2 this week about the art of the second world war. One of Nash’s most famous paintings is ‘The Battle of Britain’ and perhaps his best known work, which is owned by the Tate, but doesn’t appear to be on display, is ‘Totes Meer‘. This is German for ‘Dead Sea’ and is a depiction of a scrapyard near Cowley (also visible — and referred to frequently in ‘Burying Bad News’) full of fighter aircraft wreckage which he paints to look like a moonlit sea.

I’d enjoyed the David Dimbleby landscape art series ‘A Picture of Britain’ a few years ago and bought the accompanying book as it has some reproductions of some beautiful paintings. I liked the painting featured on the cover of the book so much that I bought a canvas print reproduction from the Tate — it’s called ‘The Cornfield’ and is a late afternoon view of an unmechanised harvest just after the first world war in the rolling Chilterns somewhere near Chalfont St.Giles. I’ve had it hanging on the wall of my study all the time I’ve been writing this novel. The artist is John Nash — who I didn’t realise was Paul Nash’s older brother.

The connections are almost spine-tingling: ‘The Cornfield’, Cowley, the Ridgeway, ‘Totes Meer’, ‘Battle of Britain’, Blake, Tolkien — it’s no surprise I’ve ended up writing about a modern-day German artist marvelling at the history of the English landscape.

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A Tense Debate

There’s an interesting post by Richard Lea on the Guardian books blog about Philip Pullman’s recently reported comments about the growing use of the present tense in novels — reflected by half the Man Booker shortlist being written in the present.

Pullman is reported to have said the use of present tense is becoming a cliché, adding ‘it’s a silly affectation, in my view, and it does nothing but annoy’. Hensher apparently said ‘Writing is vivid if it is vivid. A shift in tense won’t do that for you…What was once a rare, interesting effect is starting to become utterly conventional….[The present tense] is everywhere in the English novel, like Japanese knotweed.’

The novelists on the City University course had a varied approach to tenses and there was considerable experimentation by some people about whether past or present suited their novels. There were some examples of using both tenses — for example, present for the main story and past to denote flashbacks. The present tense certainly gives immediacy to a piece of writing — the Guardian blog suggests that its increased use might reflect our 24-hour news culture and the cultural impact of immediate informational gratification via the internet. Perhaps. The present tense seemed to work very effectively for two or three people when reading their pieces at our end of course event. (Another piece that made a big impression on agents avoided the simple past tense and used the past perfect, past continuous and past conditional.)

I doubt whether the present tense is as prevalent as reported, although the more ‘literary’ the aspirations of the writer, perhaps the more likely they are to experiment — maybe in a few years the past tense will be the daring, radical choice? As might be inferred from the example above, the past tense offers a writer far more variations in its use — although one of the missions of creative writing courses seems be to make to make the passivity of the past continuous tense almost as endangered as the adverb (and using less of both is usually the best policy). Good use of the present tense requires skill on the part of the writer. I was at a Q&A with a commissioning editor (of genre fiction) when she was asked what mistakes writers should avoid — ‘First person present’ she said as she received a lot of it and it was, in her opinion, almost impossible to pull off.

I’ve experimented with writing pieces in the present tense and enjoyed the effect — and I’ve also had my work re-written by someone else in the present tense and thought that had improved it. However, I’m quite happy to write my novel in the past tense, even if it reduces my chances of winning the Man Booker!

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Churning Through the Mud

Autumn seems to have crept upon us — it’s grey, drizzly and windy outside — and I’m facing the realisation  that I’ve not written half as much as I hoped over the summer. I made some amends last week by bashing out about 15,000 words. I deliberately just sat down and wrote and didn’t go back and revise anything methodically — and I know some of it is very bad.

I’ve developed a pattern of writing a first draft, printing it out and making corrections on the paper (they seem easier to spot), then printing it again and reading the whole piece out loud (not just the dialogue). After that process I’m usually reasonably happy with it but if I give it someone else to read I then tend to identify a whole slew of other mistakes. I guess this is the basis of the ‘put it in a drawer for a couple of weeks (or months) before looking at it again’ school of advice. This is all very time consuming — but necessary.

I found some sections quite easy and enjoyable to write and I’m still struggling on others. In fact, I may try writing some poetry to describe some of the natural features of the Chiltern landscape I’ve been trying to portray and then cannibalise it.

One good thing about grinding out the words is that I can suddenly take off in unexpected directions and I’ve come up with more ideas for plot and character later in the novel than if I’d just considered them in my head. But that also has the disadvantage of bringing in diversions and new directions in the material I’d originally intended to write.

So while it’s gratifying to have 15,000 more words (probably a sixth of a novel) more than I had ten days ago, I’m also a little exasperated that it’s going to need maybe twice or three times as much time again to revise and that, as with my opening chapters, not a lot seems to have happened in a large number of words. However, my intention was in this section to deliberately slow the pace almost to the point where the reader becomes impatient for fireworks to start exploding and I’ve tried to weave a lot of plot background and backstory into these sections.

Overall I think what I’ve written is good and that I definitely believe in it — and I often surprise myself at how much the novel reflects me personally — which shows that at a deep psychological level I’m probably impelled on an irreversible course to write this. However, I’m probably both a bit of a ‘needy’ writer and one who tends to write for an audience rather than just please myself so that’s why it’s a good thing that in less than four weeks I’ll be workshopping some of this material with the majority of the City novel-writing group. We’re meeting monthly on an extra-curricular basis.

Penny Rudge, when she visited the course, said that virtually every chapter of ‘Foolish Lessons in Life and Love’ had been through a post-course workshopping process with her peers. I tend to want to make use of peer feedback to a similar extent – while I could plough on independently  it will be fascinating to meet up with everyone to see how people are getting on.

As mentioned in a previous post we have at least one person whose work on the course has led to being signed by an agent and I know that a few people sent work out to agents after the reading, although I know of only the person who’s actually finished the novel — and he’s now redrafting. In my case it would probably instill some discipline by having an agent’s validation, encouragement and deadline setting. Yet agents can only make active progress when they have a full novel manuscript to work with and I don’t have anything yet in a shape I’d be happy to send out. The way I write means it’s not going to be a quick process for me to get the material into the shape that most advice tends to emphasise before one’s work goes near an agent or publisher – for it to be ‘the best it can possibly be’.  My tendency, mentioned above, to branch off tangentially in a random or arbitrary direction as I’ve been writing is sometimes good and serendipitous but means everything will need to be looked at again i.e. once I get to the end of the novel then I’ll want to make some significant changes to the start.

As an example, I had some very useful feedback from Guy and Charlotte on the course to chapters six and seven and, even though I’d spent a lot of time writing the chapters, Guy pointed out lots of ‘noise words’ like ‘just’, ‘perhaps’, ‘maybe’, ‘a little’ and so on that seem to become invisible on the page if you’ve stared at it too long in one session.

I also posted a reference to a recently written part of the novel a fellow student’s wall on Facebook and the brief exchange of comments that followed opened up a new aspect to Kim and James’ long, drawn-out first day that I’d failed to explore. That accounted for the rather meagre 300 words I managed on holiday.

There will also be a need to maintain consistency, particularly in dialogue. As mentioned in previous postings, Kim will be fluent in English but will perhaps have some transatlantic turns of phrase plus perhaps a tendency to construct sentences grammatically as they would be in German.  I think I’ve largely achieved this as I’ve gone along and she speaks little phrases in her first language from time to time. I’ve been dropping these in with increasing frequency making use of my limited German.  Kim’s English is described by another character (I’m told that this is grammatically correct, which surprised me): ‘Dein Englisch ist sehr flüssig, aber Sie sprechen mit einem leichten deutschen Akzent – sehr Hochdeutsche.’

Any suggestions?

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Linguaphone

I wrote the following in the middle of one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world – looking out into the sea as our ferry weaves between the courses of various huge container ships and tankers. (I’d actually typing into a Word document to post later on but I could have blogged fromt here if I’d been prepared to pay £4 for an hour’s wi-fi – bit steep I thought).

It’s nearly a 9 hour journey from St. Malo to Portsmouth – and would be quite pleasant if it wasn’t one of the busiest days of the year (a Saturday in August) which means all the reclining chairs and seats in the cafe have been marked by the massed middle-class British on holiday with the same sort of territorial ferocity that I learnt at Trégomeur Zoo Park that tigers display when they urinate to mark their patch. I’m typing from up on the sun deck.

I was a very frequent visitor to Europe until the end of the last year, flying on average on a fortnightly basis – mainly Germany but also plenty of trips to Sweden, Spain, France, Portugal, Belgium, Portugal and even Croatia. These trips have tended to be for two or three days and to cities and hotels where English is pretty much the universal language.

I’ve spent longer in Europe on holiday but, most recently, these trips have been to Gozo (off Malta) where English is an official language and to the Algarve, where, like the Costa del Sol,  it may as well be. I’d probably need to go back over ten years to previous long holidays in France to experience anything like the ‘foreignness’ of the past week.

Foreignness is a relative term somewhere like Brittany. It’s stating the obvious to say it’s very easy, even with a barely scraped GCE in French, to drive, shop (especially in their vast hypermarkets), have a meal and do touristy things. Not only is there a lot of standardisation of laws and regulations (traffic, for example) through EU membership but also because all Western European countries are subject to the same sort of globalisation as we suffer in the UK – though perhaps not as extreme – not just the French love of McDonald’s but all the consumerist brand goods that are now imported from China.

Much popular culture is converging too. I spent most of a Thursday night watching the French version of ‘Masterchef’ on TF1 – a bit more of an X-Factor style audition with three celebrity judges, including an odd Johnny Depp lookalike, than our shouty version with an artificial bit of suspense over who’s the last one through. Very useful research though for me as I want to construct a fictional cookery programme in ‘The Angel’  in which James was a contestant.

It seems that many of the fundamentals of life in the EU are homogenising – and perhaps this is a theme that I have in the novel — evidently by having a European leading character but maybe exploring this cultural assimilation more subtly by having Kim first move to cosmopolitan, multi-cultural London as a staging post, then breaking through into areas of life that are considered sacredly British (or even English) – like the pub.

It’s probably the social customs and decisions made on a local level (and perhaps influenced by – relative – unchangeable like the climate) such as architecture that mark the countries out as culturally different – even eating habits are converging – I saw ready meals and pre-prepared salads in the Super U and Carrefours.

And, of course,  language is still the most striking and difficult cultural factor that makes cultures different. It’s not too difficult to visit for a week and order a meal – but a far tougher prospect to get to a level where one can communicate on a serious level. I know the length of time it’s taken for a friend of mine who’s bought a place in Spain to achieve ‘A’ level Spanish.

I’m thinking of having Kim get quite frustrated when she realises she has the vocabulary to deal with metropolitan life but she’ll realise in the countryside that she’s back at schoolchild level English in certain fields — although maybe many of the natives won’t know how to describe certain things either.

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Good Morning

The Richard and Judy book club is back — albeit in an online manifestation (in conjunction with W.H.Smith) rather than via broadcasting. Seeing as their old ‘This Morning’ book club seemed to have transformed into generic ‘TV Book Club’, which continues on Channel 4, it will be interesting to see how the two fare against each other — although there’s surely room for both to co-exist. (I have a soft spot for W.H.Smith as I worked there as a sixth-former and every Christmas as a student, although, curiously I worked on every department and did almost every conceivable job in the Oldham store — including security guard when the takings were taken in a briefcase to the bank —  except work on books.)

I know there’s more involvement from Richard and Judy themselves than just being figureheads as I follow Richard Madeley’s very entertaining tweets, which have proved a source of inspiration for characterisation on occasions. He has updated his Twitter followers with behind-the-scenes  information about the selection of the books — they retreated to the south of France to read their way through the longlist but this wasn’t as idyllic as it sounds as Richard kept being stung by wasps. Some of his many Twitter followers ensured he countered the wasps with an electrified tennis-racket device which, ironically for me, I’d been introduced to earlier in the summer by my dad.

The wasps are mentioned again in the blog on their website which also has the happy news that Richard Madeley will be guest presenting some more shows on Radio Two in the near future. Previous stints have introduced the world to the recipe for his infamous tuna bake (topped with crushed packets of crisps).

I’m fascinated to see what sort of books (they’re not all fiction nor English language originals) are chosen for this sort of promotion. One thing about following Richard Madeley’s tweets is that his candid, gaffe-prone persona gives the impression that these books are all chosen objectively on merit and not due to publisher lobbying.

It’s interesting that the previous post was on Jonathan Franzen as ‘The Corrections’ came to prominence partly because he was reportedly dismissive about Oprah Winfrey selecting the book for her club — and then she apparently deselected it when informed.

I can see from the writers’ and publishers’ perspective that these sort of book clubs wield a huge amount of promotional power and that it might seem like something of a lottery to have their titles promoted. On the other hand, these clubs must certainly expand the quantitative size of the book market and, because they have had a track record of picking some innovative and challenging books, they probably improve the market in qualitative terms too.