Nobody Move, This Is A Review: HOPE: A TRAGEDY by Shalom Auslander

HOPE: A TRAGEDY opens with Solomon Kugel hearing strange sounds in the attic of the farmhouse he and his wife have recently bought after moving from Brooklyn to the small, rural community of Stockton. Fearing that the scratching sounds he hears in the attic are mice, Kugel goes to investigate. Much to his surprise, he discovers that the ‘scratching’ is in fact typing, and that the typist is an elderly woman who lives in the attic. Rather more surprising is the fact that the elderly woman is Anne Frank, previously, and famously, thought to have perished in a concentration camp during the Holocaust, but who has instead spent her entire life hiding out in attics.
  Being Jewish, Kugel finds himself in a bind. The tattoo on her arm confirms that the woman is indeed a Holocaust survivor, even if she isn’t Anne Frank. Will Kugel be the man to be identified as the Jew who threw a survivor out of his house? And what if the woman really is Anne Frank?
  HOPE: A TRAGEDY has been compared to a wide variety of Jewish writers, including Philip Roth and Woody Allen, but for me the novel was very much in the same vein as Kurt Vonnegut’s work, and I mean that as the highest of compliments.
  Auslander very elegantly, and hilariously, presents the reader with an impossible scenario, that of a man discovering that Anne Frank is alive and well in his farmhouse attic, and working on a novel which she hopes will trump the thirty-two million sales of The Diary of Anne Frank.
  For some, such a scenario may prove too irreverent, especially as it’s the case that Auslander has his characters engage with the Holocaust, and the entirety of Jewish persecution, in a way that few writers would have the courage to do. Essentially, Auslander is questioning the sacred cow of Jewish suffering, and asking tough questions about a culture, and an industry, that has grown up around the unquestioning acceptance of the Jews’ right to claim that their suffering trumps all others’.
  It’s a very tough sell, especially as Auslander is writing in the comic style - although it’s fair to say, I think, that the humour is of a very black pitch. For example, the first chapter is something of a very short prologue, about a man suffocating to death in a house fire. Chapter Two then opens with: ‘Solomon Kugel was lying in bed, thinking about suffocating to death in a house fire, because he was an optimist … Hope, said Professor Jove, was Solomon Kugel’s greatest failing.’
  But Auslander is being quite clever, I think, in his subject matter. While some might object to the irreverent way in which he writes about the Holocaust, for example, Auslander never fails to provide the context of the Holocaust, and never shies away from portraying the horrors, the banality of the evil, the sheer scale of the industrialisation of the attempted murder of an entire race. In other words, Auslander gets to have it both ways, and he copes with the balance remarkably well.
  Kugel himself is a very likeable character, the classically ‘nebbish’ Jewish character who is riven with paranoia and anxiety, and who is too self-aware for his own good. Constantly second-guessing himself, his heart is in the right place - who wouldn’t, if offered the opportunity, give Anne Frank a place to live? - but this clashes with his more immediate responsibilities, to his wife and young son. He is, naturally, in therapy, although Kugel’s therapist, Dr Jove, is a rather bracing man who preaches against hope and optimism. ‘Give Up,’ says the sign in Dr Jove’s office, ‘You’ll Live Longer’.
  Around Kugel, Auslander has created a number of enthralling characters. Chief among them is Anne Frank herself, whom Auslander re-imagines as an elderly crone, shuffling around an attic as she types her never-ending novel. Anne has been poisoned against the human race, as you might imagine, given her experiences, and proves to be a fairly callous, uncaring tenant, one given to pronouncements on the Holocaust that should shrivel the soul. She is a malign, brooding presence in the Kugel attic, and one which drives a wedge between Kugel and his wife, Bree.
  Kugel’s mother is another fascinating character. Abandoned by her husband as a young woman, leaving her to rear Kugel and his sister Hannah alone, Mother is an embittered creature who has learned to foist all of her disappointments in life on the Nazis. She blames the ‘sons of bitches’ for everything, even though she was born and raised long after WWII, in relative comfort in Brooklyn. ‘Ever since the war,’ she mutters whenever something goes wrong, which leads those who don’t know her well to presume that she suffered badly during the Holocaust. For those who do know her, and particularly her family, they learn to accept her self-association with the Holocaust as one of her many quirks and foibles. From pg 107, when Kugel and Mother are talking about when it’s appropriate to tell a three-year-old boy about the Holocaust:

Reason rarely worked with Mother, so Kugel had appealed, as he often did, to her emotions. As destructive as her way of showing it may have been, Kugel believed she loved Jonah deeply, and genuinely cared, first and foremost, for his well-being.
  You’re going to scare him, Kugel said, looking deep into her eyes.
  Somebody has to, Mother replied.

  The novel is a classic novel-of-ideas, with Auslander freewheeling through a variety of concepts, exploring philosophies and putting his very idiosyncratic spin on them. For all the whimsical, irreverent humour, and its apparently ludicrous central concept, the novel has very serious things to say about the human condition, and humanity’s constant ability to generate hope and optimism despite all the evidence to the contrary. Strip away the jokes and Kugel’s self-flagellating mind-set and the story becomes a very bleak tale of the inevitability of death, and the extent to which hope is a self-deluding folly; and more, a dangerous folly, for there is no depth, the novel warns, to which humanity will not sink.
  The novel is also an exploration of the creative process, Anne Frank typing away in the Kugels’ attic being a metaphor, presumably, for Auslander’s struggle to write fiction, even as someone stalks the darkness outside, bent on burning down Kugel’s farmhouse. It is chock-a-block with literary references, from some very pointed and funny comments on Philip Roth’s superstar status in the literary establishment in New York, to throwaway mentions of Zelig, and Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’, and a whole range of final utterings by famous people.
  HOPE: A TRAGEDY is a wonderful novel. The writing is wonderfully arch, the humour is brilliantly bleak, and it’s a book bursting with ideas, concepts and notions. It’s subversive, irreverent, scabrously funny and profound - in short, it represents for me everything a novel should be, raising far more questions than it provides answers for, and asking the reader to decide, in the end, if the writer is serious or not. I believe he is deadly serious about the philosophical notions in the book, and that there’s an incandescent anger about the Holocaust burning brightly between each and every line. - Declan Burke

Blessed Am I Amongst Women

The internet really is a wonderful place. You hang out, you meet lovely people, you talk about blowing up hospitals and Kurt Vonnegut. That is to say, you talk about blowing up hospitals, and Kurt Vonnegut. There’ll be no exploding Kurt Vonneguts on these pages, no sirree, ma’am.
  Anyway, Alex Donald was kind enough to host me over at her Multiverse yesterday, where she asked me, among other things, about the meta-fictional elements of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL and who influenced the novel most, which is when the name Kurt Vonnegut came up. If you’re interested, the interview can be found here …
  Alex was also good enough to read and review AZC last week, with the gist of her opinion running thusly:

“Darkly funny, superbly written, meta-fictional and with more than a passing nod to Paul Auster, Flann O’Brien and (dare I say it) Chuck Palahniuk’s FIGHT CLUB, ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL l fuses literary and crime fiction to create something utterly original.” - Alex Donald

  I thank you kindly, ma’am.
  Meanwhile, over on the other side of the Atlantic, Elizabeth White hosted a guest post from yours truly on her blog, in which I talked about violence in the crime novel, and how the impact of real-life violence alters what you write - or whether you write at all. It also features such searing insights into the contemporary crime novel as the following:

“Meanwhile, it’s also true that the Irish crime novel, in common with most other territories’ crime novels, has for its structure the basic three-act drama of Greek tragedy. To wit: 1) Things Are Mostly Okay; 2) Things Get Screwed Up and / or Someone Sleeps With His Mom; 3) Things Are Mostly Okay Again.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …
  Not all the internet ladies have been so kind, of course. Over at Good Reads, ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL is currently thriving on a 4.29 average from 17 ratings. The average would probably be considerably higher had not one Celia Lynch, bless her cotton socks, given the book a one-star rating, even though the book’s status is ‘gave up’. Now, I know there’s absolutely no rules when it comes to internet reviewing, and that the ethics and standards that apply to professional reviewers go out the window, but isn’t it a bit much, regardless of your reviewing status, to award a rating to a book you haven’t had the courtesy to finish? Mind you, I suppose I should feel chuffed; the only other books Celia gave up on were by Joanne Harris and William Burroughs.
  Finally, and for all of you who have been waiting breathlessly for the Tuam Herald verdict on AZC - it’s in. To wit:

“While the character-coming-to-life device is clever enough, the real beauty of this book is the sharp dialogue, the witty vignettes and the well-sharpened digs. The running commentary on the state of the world is priceless … his delightfully jaundiced take on our current ‘reality’ could provide a political primer for any arriving alien unluckily enough to be beamed down here right now.” - Tuam Herald

  For the full report, including the reviewer’s appreciation of Raquel Welch in her fur bikini, clickety-click here …

  Finally, this week’s reading: Paul Johnston’s THE SILVER STAIN is the latest Alex Mavros novel, is set on Crete and dabbles in the Nazi invasion of that island in 1941; it’s terrific stuff. I’m also reading THE BOOK OF JOB AS A GREEK TRAGEDY by Horace M. Kallen, which is a hoot and a half; and THE GOLDEN SCALES by Parker Bilal, a private eye tale set in contemporary Cairo that may or may not herald a wave of Egyptian hardboiled noir.
  So there you have it: this week’s AZC flummery in full. Do tune in next week, when we’ll very probably be talking about Sophia Loren, Edward Anderson’s THIEVES LIKE US, the new Donald Westlake novel from Hard Case Crime and what it was like to meet Amanda Hocking (lovely person, very unassuming, big Kurt Vonnegut fan).

ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL: So It Goes

Is it really five months since the publication of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL? Jayz. Seems like it happened only a couple of weeks ago, and at the same time it feels like half a lifetime ago. Weird. Anyway, 2012 is off to a good start, review-wise; my cup fairly ran over last weekend.
  First up was the inimitable Glenn Harper of International Noir, who opened his review by referencing a number of authors who dabbled in meta-fiction, most of whom (to be perfectly frank) I’d never even heard of. Glenn finished up something like this:

“Among the many crime fiction references, it’s [Patricia] Highsmith that resonates most with ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL (for me) … Declan Burke has cemented his central position in the current wave of neo-noir and contemporary crime fiction.” - Glenn Harper, International Noir

  As you can imagine, I was pretty pleased with that; Glenn Harper knows of what he speaks. Then a review popped up from an Irish blogger, Alex Donald. Now, I should declare an interest here: about 18 months ago, Alex and I were two of a quartet of writers who sat down to establish a writing group, essentially to motivate one another into finding the time to write. As it happens, I was working on a different book entirely for that writing group, and only managed to make it along to two sessions; despite the writers being a smart and funny bunch, the truth was that I didn’t have the time to devote to any motivational sessions designed to find me time to write. Anyway, cutting a long and not very interesting story short, Alex was kind enough to review AZC over at her blog, with the gist running thusly:

“Darkly funny, superbly written, meta-fictional and with more than a passing nod to Paul Auster, Flann O’Brien and (dare I say it) Chuck Palahniuk’s FIGHT CLUB, ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL fuses literary and crime fiction to create something utterly original.” - Alex Donald

  Last weekend, incidentally, Dufour Editions was good enough to declare AZC its Book of the Week. I’m not really sure what that means, to be honest, although it was very nice indeed of the Dufour people to republish the Publishers Weekly review of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL that compares it (favourably) to Stephen King’s THE DARK HALF.
  Also last weekend, the Sunday Independent carried a review of AZC, under the headline, ‘Darkly hilarious classic takes modern crime writing to a whole new level’. As you can probably imagine, the review that followed was broadly positive. To wit:

“Stylistically removed from anything being attempted by his peers … [a] darkly hilarious amalgam of classic crime riffing (hep Elmore Leonard-isms and screwballing) and the dimension-warping reflections of Charlie Kaufman or Kurt Vonnegut. Like the latter’s SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL sees another Billy ‘come unstuck’ in what is, frankly, a brilliant premise.” - Hilary White, Sunday Independent

  I have to say, it’s all getting a little confusing in terms of the references. Patricia Highsmith, Paul Auster, Flann O’Brien, Chuck Palahniuk, Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, Charlie Kaufman, Kurt Vonnegut … that’s a pretty wild brew.

  I should also say that Hilary White was inspired, in terms of references, in his choice of SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE. The Billy in AZC is so called as a homage to Billy Pilgrim in Vonnegut’s classic, which is one of my favourite novels from one of my favourite writers; Vonnegut is one of those very rare writers who combines hugely entertaining and accessible stories with great profundity. In my head, Kurt Vonnegut’s fingerprints are all over AZC, to the extent that I went out of my way to erase all traces of his influence in the final drafts - apart, of course, from renaming Karlsson ‘Billy’.
  God, I wish I had the time to go read a Vonnegut RIGHT NOW …

Writer’s Rooms # 1: Declan Burke

The Guardian used to run a nice feature on writers’ rooms, and Sinead Gleeson has a musician’s variation on it over here, so why can’t we? Herewith be Part the First of Writers’ Rooms, a very probably erratic series about, well, y’know. To wit:

Writers’ Rooms # 1: Declan Burke

“I have a room upstairs, away from the rest of the house. The physical distance is a psychological one too, but I also smoke when I’m writing, and that’s not good for everyone else. In fact, the writers’ room is the de-facto smoking room.

“All the essentials are here: tobacco, cigarette papers, coffee. And a PC. I don’t know if I would’ve been able to write on a typewriter. Or by longhand, for that matter. I write very, very slowly, making heavy use of the cut and delete buttons. I have about eight drafts of the story I’m working on now, and I cut-and-paste from one file into the next, grubbing down the lines and paragraphs as I go. I used to compare it to planing and sanding wood, but right now it feels like stone-rubbing. Is there such a thing as stone-rubbing?

“I like to sit facing a window, even if the blind is down or the curtains closed. Just to know it’s there is good enough. The view is of the back lane of a small housing estate, and beyond that, ploughed fields, trees, a golf course and the kind of steep, forested hill we like to call a mountain in Ireland. It’s a nice view, and it faces west, and in summer the sunsets can be amazing.

“I’ve had the same desk for about ten years. It’s a cheap piece of assembly-pack plywood, but it’s sturdy and it does all I want it to do. I wrote a line for A GONZO NOIR to the effect that I wanted to be buried in a cheaply varnished plywood coffin, and it was the desk I had in mind. All writers should be buried in their favourite desks. Some sooner than others.

“I like to be surrounded by books when I’m writing. I don’t feel any creative force coming off them or anything like it, I just like to know they’re there. Whenever things aren’t going well, which is a lot of the time, I can look on one side and say, ‘Well, at least it’s not as crap as that,’ and on the other and say, ‘Well, it was never going to be as good as that anyway.’ A wall of books is the finest wallpaper anyone can ever have.

“If you look to the left of the picture, the second shelf down is the Chandler shelf. No one else gets a shelf to him or herself. Not Elmore Leonard, not Lawrence Durrell, not Cormac McCarthy, not Kurt Vonnegut. Just Chandler. He’s not perfect, but then neither was Mozart. As Rossi says in the sequel to THE BIG O, ‘Genius isn’t supposed to be perfect, it’s not that kind of gig.’”

A Pinteresque Pause

Jason Pinter is running a terrific series over at his blog about the future of publishing, inviting contributions from anyone involved in the publishing industry in answer to this question: “What is one thing you would you do to change book publishing for the better?”
  Jason’s received some interesting and even provocative responses, although I have one caveat – most of the answers are critical of the publishers and the way they go about their business. Silly advances for silly books; anachronistic marketing; a failure to adapt to the latest technology; in short, most people complain that publishing companies are clinging to an outmoded business model.
  This may all be true, and the Good Lord knows that I’ve had my fair share of disappointing experiences with publishers, as most writers tend to have; but is there an element of mote-and-beam going on here? In other words, no one writer has said that the one thing they’d do to change book publishing for the better is write better books. For all the hand-wringing about publishers’ inability to incorporate the interweb into their marketing model, how many writers have incorporated the interweb into their writing? How many writers have thought to themselves, for example, about the sea-change in other forms of popular art – movies, TV and music – and audience appetite for a blend of reality and fiction?
  There’s a generation of potential readers coming through for whom the Fourth Wall doesn’t exist. Last night, for example, I watched the ‘Family Guy’ episode in which Peter ‘outs’ Luke Perry, with the character of Luke Perry voiced by Luke Perry – although Lois refers to the character as ‘Dylan’, his character in Beverly Hills 90120.
  On Wednesday I watched the documentary ‘Anvil!’, the story of how an aging metal band from Canada are still trying to make it in their fifties. As a movie, or even a mockumentary, it would have been very funny in the ‘Spinal Tap’ mode; as a documentary, a real take on the rock ‘n’ roll dream, it was simultaneously soul-destroying and inspirational.
  Next Thursday, I’ll be getting along to see ‘Notorious’, a biopic of the Notorious B.I.G., who – regardless of your opinion of gangsta rap – made art of his life, of experiences that are possibly fictionalised but certainly rooted in an authentic, relevant reality.
  I can’t remember the last time I read a book that left me hollowed out and yet bursting to make something new, the way ‘Anvil!’ did. Or, for that matter, a book that makes me laugh like ‘Family Guy’ does because – bonkers as it is, and with no respect for the boundary between truth or fiction – it taps into the experience of our utterly confused cultural narrative.
  This morning, on the web, in the space of an hour, I read a short story, took on board the responses to Jason Pinter’s question, checked last night’s football scores, watched a book trailer and two music videos, downloaded the latest Anthony and the Johnsons album, and watched an extended trailer for the ‘Notorious’ movie.
  Can, or should, that kind of disjointed cultural mish-mash influence my own writing later on, when I grab a quiet couple of hours? Not the specific elements; but the jump-around nature of it, and the blend of reality and fiction?
  Maybe it’s because I watch a lot of movies, reviewing them for a living, and read a lot of books, but I’m finding it increasingly difficult to suspend my disbelief when confronted with a story I know is pure fiction, regardless of how good it is. For that matter, just look at the Oscar noms for ‘Best Picture’ – Frost/Nixon, Milk and Slumdog Millionaire are all, to a greater or lesser extent, examples of the collision between fiction and reality.
  I’m currently working on a story in which the name of one of the main characters, Billy, is a nod to Kurt Vonnegut and SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE, which is the last book I read, when I re-read it last May, to really suck out my guts and make me think about life, the universe and writing (I subsequently read ARMAGEDDON, but it’s not Vonnegut’s finest moment). Billy, my Billy, is actually a character from a novel I’d written about five years ago, who last May turned up in my back garden wanting to know why he’d been forgotten, and condemned to the limbo of the unpublished ghosts. The result was a book called A GONZO NOIR, which is currently under consideration with a U.S. publisher, although I’m not optimistic about its chances; nonetheless, I’ve started a new story, in which Billy returns, telling me about this guy he’s met on Crete, Sebastian, who claims to have been involved in a Nazi war crime, but who has been left in the limbo of an unfinished manuscript after the untimely death of the author, who may or may not have been writing a novel based on a true story. Can I help Sebastian finish the story and get him out of limbo?
  Whether anyone will want to read that story is a moot point. And I’m not claiming that the notion of meta-fiction is so new and fresh that, to come back to Jason Pinter’s question, it’s going to change the industry – Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, Flann O’Brien, Italo Calvino and, going a long way back, Laurence Sterne, are all favourites of mine.
  I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that if there’s problems with the publishing industry, it extends to all elements of the industry, and that includes, vitally, the writers. Maybe, just maybe, a central issue for the future is that the audience, and certainly the generations coming through, won’t be content with straightforward fiction, in the way that even the best animated movies from Pixar, Dreamworks and Disney will, for adults, always be just kids’ movies.
  For what it’s worth, the latest kids’ movie from Disney is ‘Bolt’, and it’s about a dog with super-powers who realises that his super-powers only exist on TV, because he’s an actor. When Disney are throwing ‘The Truman Show’ loops at kids, you just know the conventional novel is finished.
  Roll it there, Collette ...

The Curious Case Of The Non-Meme Meme

Memes being the interweb’s version of pesky chain-letters, I’m not going to tag anyone in particular for the meme-ish notion below. But feel free to run with it, and link back here if you like. For simplicity’s sake I’ve kept it to one book per author, and the idea is that the last book on your list is the book you’d most like to die reading, if you had to die reading. To wit:

A long, long time in the future, in a galaxy far away, the doctor says, “Sorry, but you’ve only got a month to live.” What ten books would you re-read in your last month?
  My choices runneth thusly:

THE MAGUS – John Fowles
THE LONG GOODBYE – Raymond Chandler
THE CATCHER IN THE RYE (and ‘Teddy’ from NINE STORIES) – JD Salinger
SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5 – Kurt Vonnegut
THE GREEK MYTHS – Robert Graves
PROSPERO’S CELL – Lawrence Durrell
THE DOUBLE TONGUE – William Golding
THE ODYSSEY – Homer
STARDUST – John and Mary Gribbin
PETER PAN – JM Barrie

  For anyone interested, I'd like the theme music from ‘Match of the Day’ played as they carry the coffin out. Cheers.

On The Perils Of Not Being A Genius: A Grand Vizier Writes

‘Read, read, read and write, write, write’ is what experienced writers tend to say when their aspiring brethren ask for advice on how to become a writer, although the Grand Viz (right, in full-on smug-on-holiday mode) is of the opinion that if you need to be told to read a lot and write a lot, you’re probably not a writer by instinct. Anyhoo, the point being: submerge yourself in story, find out how the best do it, and then do what they do, only different and – hopefully, one day – better.
  Solid advice, for sure, and the most fun you can have while dressed to boot.
  But here’s the kicker – is there a danger of absorbing too much story?
  The Grand Viz has always loved books and movies, and over the last two decades has spent his professional life moving to a point where he now pretty much writes about movies, books and theatre for a living. Nice work if you can get it, certainly. But last Monday, for example, the Grand Viz attended two movie screenings (Meet Dave and Savage Grace), read a goodly portion of Benjamin Black’s new novella THE LEMUR, and saw Tom Murphy’s play The Sanctuary Lamp at the Samuel Beckett Centre in Trinity College.
  The movies, for very different reasons, were both poor; THE LEMUR is terrific fun; and the current production of The Sanctuary Lamp, which the Grand Viz had seen years ago, is excellent.
  The rest of the week was a little quieter from a story point of view, although it still involved watching the movies Baby Mama, City of Men and Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (!), finishing off Fritjof Capra’s THE TAO OF PHYSICS, and reading Liam O’Flaherty’s THE ASSASSIN.
  All of which is wonderful, as the Grand Viz tends to spend most of his week steeped in story, absorbing almost by osmosis the hows and whys of the way others craft narrative, learning from their mistakes, taking note of where they got it right. It seems churlish to complain, especially as there’s a pleasing diversity in terms of story and discipline, and it all generates income for the ever-pressing ‘baby needs new shoes’ fund.
  But is there a danger of saturation? Is there a part of the brain that requires stories in order to be satisfied, and if fully sated, won’t need to create any stories of its own? Is there a danger of becoming imaginatively ham-strung, in the sense that you can begin to second-, third- and fourth-guess yourself, dismissing embryonic ideas as ‘already done’, or not potent enough to rise above the mass of stories clamouring for the public’s attention? And where, once you’ve established that the story you have in mind is fresh, unique and worth another person’s precious time, does the time come from, and enough blank mind-space, to put it all down on paper?
  And all this, of course, is susceptible to the Grand Viz’s sneaking suspicion that no story he could possibly contrive could compete with the interest he has in the narrative of his real life, particularly that of the most recent addition to his family, the endlessly fascinating Princess Lilyput (right).
  The GV does have stories he wants to write and / or redraft, although whether he needs to write them remains to be seen. Matters aren’t helped when he steps out of his reading-for-review routine, as he did last night, and embarks on one of his most self-indulgent pleasures, that of reading a master for the sheer enjoyment of it, in this case Lawrence Durrell’s MONSIEUR, the first of the Avignon ‘quincunx’. It’s at times like these that the Grand Viz begins to wonder if there’s any point in writing anything that doesn’t at least aspire to Durrell’s (for example) quality of writing and scale of ambition. With time so precious – his own time, and everyone else’s – and vast swathes of popular culture engaged in a dizzyingly fast race to the bottom, has the Grand Viz – or anyone else, for that matter – the right to write anything that isn’t, in a word, mind-blowing?
  Of the 41 books the Grand Viz has read so far this year, Cormac McCarthy, John McFetridge, Flann O’Brien, Salman Rushdie, Elmore Leonard, Adrian McKinty and Kurt Vonnegut excited him to the point where he resolved – each time – to abandon reviewing / blogging / his wife (if not his child) in order to get down and dirty with the blank page. Each time, happily enough for his wife, he resisted the temptation. Because he’s saturated, soma-like, with story? Because he simply doesn’t have the time? Or because he’s becoming acutely aware that he’s simply not good enough, and very probably never will be, to match and perhaps even better the stories he most likes to read?
  Questions, questions … Although, the Big Question is, given the outrageously poor time-to-benefit ratio involved in writing novels, at least at the Grand Viz’s level, particularly when said time could be much more profitably spent elsewhere – changing nappies, for example – why bother?
  This month there’s a final edit on the sequel to THE BIG O to polish off, which should be a hugely enjoyable experience, but once that’s out of the way, answers will have to be delivered. One thing is for sure – something’s gotta give, folks, and it won’t be Mrs Viz and Princess Lilyput. Stay tuned …