Who Is This Man Joseph Hone?

It’s fair to say that the world - niche as it is - of Irish crime writing never fails to surprise me. Late last week, it came to my attention that Lilliput Press has just published a novel called GOODBYE AGAIN by Joseph Hone, with the blurb suggesting that the novel might - just might, mind, given Lilliput’s predilection for publishing literary fiction - be considered a crime thriller. To wit:

Ben Contini, a disenchanted painter of considerable talent, has just buried his mother. Rifling through the attic of her Kilkenny house he stumbles across a Modigliani nude, worth millions. Determined to learn the provenance of the painting, he and Elsa, a disturbed and secretive woman who accosts him at the funeral, become embroiled in the sinister world of Nazi art theft. But they are not the only one with an interest in the painting ... Together they set off on a frantic journey that leads them from Dublin to France via the Cotswolds, down the Canal du Midi into Italy. The intrigue surrounding the shadowy half-truths about their exotic families becomes increasingly sinister as Ben and Elsa are forced to confront their pasts and their buried demons. Set in the 1980s, this is a fantastic new book from established thriller writer Joseph Hone, who weaves a breathless, galloping intrigue packed with narrative twists and sumptuous evocations of Europe’s forgotten past.

 ‘Established thriller writer’? Surely not, thought I, being so well-versed (koff) in all things Irish crime fiction. But lo! A little investigation - very little, to be perfectly frank - unearthed the following on Wikipedia:

Joseph Hone (born February 25, 1937) is a writer of the Spy Novel. His most famous novels featured a British spy called Peter Marlow. The first of the series was THE PRIVATE SECTOR (1971), set in the Six Day War. Marlow’s story continues in THE SIXTH DIRECTORATE (1975), THE FLOWERS OF THE FOREST (a.k.a. THE OXFORD GAMBIT) (1980), and THE VALLEY OF THE FOX (1982). Today, Hone’s novels are out of print. During his heyday, in the 1970s, however, he was favourably compared with writers such as Len Deighton, Eric Ambler and John le Carré.

  Impressive enough, but over at the Faber Finds blog, Jeremy Duns waxes rather more than lyrical about one Joseph Hone. Quote:

“A third of the way through THE PRIVATE SECTOR I thought I was reading a beautiful marriage of Orwell’s BURMESE DAYS (in its evocation of profound British colonial torpor) and John Fante’s ASK THE DUST (in its rendering of a hopeless, near-rebarbative love affair). But that is before the spy game truly gets underway, and Hone shifts gears to show his expertise in that department too.”

  Crikey. Elsewhere, Duns quotes a Washington Post review of THE PRIVATE SECTOR:

“There are moments in this book – indeed, whole chapters – where one is haunted by the eerie feeling that Joseph Hone is really Graham Greene, with faint quarterings of Lawrence Durrell and Thomas Pynchon. His tone is nearly perfect – quiet, morbidly ironic, beautifully controlled and sustained, moodily introspective, occasionally humorous and more often bitter, with a persistent undertone of unspeakable sadness and irrecoverable loss.”

  So that’s me and my ignorance well and truly told. Sounds like Joseph Hone might be one of the great lost Irish thriller writers, and that GOODBYE AGAIN is well worth a whirl. I’ll keep you posted …

All About Eve

I’m way behind the curve on Deborah Lawrenson’s latest offering, THE LANTERN, which has already been chosen as a TV Book Club pick in the UK. Still, better late than never, eh? To date Deborah Lawrenson has written historical dramas spiced with mystery - THE ART OF FALLING, the Lawrence Durrell-inspired SONGS OF GOLD AND BLUE - and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed both. THE LANTERN is being pitched as a Gothic take on the historical drama, with the shadow of REBECCA falling across the Provence landscape. Quoth the blurb elves:

When Eve falls for the secretive, charming Dom, their whirlwind relationship leads them to purchase Les Genevriers, an abandoned house in a rural hamlet in the south of France. As the beautiful Provence summer turns to autumn, Eve finds it impossible to ignore the mysteries that haunt both her lover and the run-down old house, in particular the mysterious disappearance of his beautiful first wife, Rachel. Whilst Eve tries to untangle the secrets surrounding Rachel’s last recorded days, Les Genevriers itself seems to come alive. As strange events begin to occur with frightening regularity, Eve’s voice becomes intertwined with that of Benedicte Lincel, a girl who lived in the house decades before. As the tangled skeins of the house’s history begin to unravel, the tension grows between Dom and Eve. In a page-turning race, Eve must fight to discover the fates of both Benedicte and Rachel, before Les Genevriers’ dark history has a chance to repeat itself.

  THE LANTERN was published last month in the UK, and will be published in the US in August. If it’s anything like Lawrenson’s previous offerings, it’ll be a cracker. You have been forewarned …

PLF: RIP

It’s with sadness that I interrupt this blog’s usual programme of log-rolling, trumpet blowing and self-aggrandising braggadocio to bring you the news of the passing of one of the 20th century’s greatest writers, Patrick Leigh Fermor (pictured right, centre front row), who died yesterday at the advanced age of 96, and is very probably compiling exploratory notes on Heaven as we speak. To call him a travel writer is to understate the case by a considerable margin; Patrick Leigh Fermor, or more simply Paddy, was sui generis.
  Best known for his two-part trilogy A TIME OF GIFTS and BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER (although the third part is finished, apparently, and will be published in due course), Fermor’s MANI and ROUMELI - both accounts of remote parts of Greece - were the books that first seduced me, and introduced me to the travel writing of his friend and foil Lawrence Durrell, and that of Norman Lewis.
  Had he left behind only his writing, Fermor’s legacy would be assured. But Fermor wasn’t only a writer, and his exploits for the SOE during WWII, and particularly the part he played in the outrageously daring smash-and-grab that abducted General Kreipe from German-occupied Crete in 1944, is the stuff of Boy’s Own adventure stories. Indeed, Dirk Bogarde played the part of Fermor in the film subsequently made of the epic tale, which was adapted from Billy Moss’s ILL MET BY MOONLIGHT.
  Writer, soldier, hero, and a man amongst men, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s like will never be seen again.
  For more, clickety-click here …

On Writing As Wasteful Self-Indulgence

I’ve written in these pages before about Deborah Lawrenson, author of the very fine THE ART OF FALLING and the Lawrence Durrell-influenced SONGS OF BLUE AND GOLD (and the forthcoming THE LANTERN) - indeed, it was the Lawrence Durrell hook that drew me into her novels first. She isn’t a crime writer by any stretch of the imagination, even if there is a crime lurking at the heart of SONGS OF BLUE AND GOLD, which is why I’m doubly pleased that she not only agreed to read the m/s of THE BABY KILLERS, but offered the following blurb:

“THE BABY KILLERS is surreal rollercoaster of a read, full of the blackest humour, and yet poignant – an outrageously funny novel that’s also deadly serious about the pain of being a contemporary writer. The joy is in the writing itself, all sparky dialogue and wry observation, so smooth that when it cuts, it’s like finding razor blades in honey.
“Here’s the agony that underpins the novel: the writer – as opposed to the real-life human being who is father, husband, son, brother, friend – only truly becomes what he strives to be when he is on this own, wrestling with his creations on the page. Yet, at certain times in life, when there is a new baby for example, or publishing hits the economic buffers, guilt for all those stolen hours sets in and those fictional creations become demons.
“In THE BABY KILLERS, Declan Burke hasn’t just written another comedy crime novel (at which he excels) but has used it as a getaway vehicle to peel away the layers of the writing process itself, howling with anger at the state of the world and sparing himself no punishment along the way.” - Deborah Lawrenson

  I thank you kindly, ma’am.
  THE BABY KILLERS, for those of you new to these pages, is a novel which will be published later this year, and which has already received a number of humbling blurbs from some very fine writers. As such blurbs by definition come from fellow writers, I’m a tad concerned at this point that the book, which is in part concerned with the process of writing a novel, will be more interesting to other writers than it will to readers who aren’t writers. And there’s always the danger that a reader with no interest in the process of writing, or the struggle to get published that most writers experience, will simply feel that that aspect of the novel is at best self-indulgent.
  All I can say to that is that this book captures a particular frame of mind, an especially profound time and space in my life, and that I wanted to incorporate that into the story itself. As a challenge, as an experiment, as a once-off peek behind the curtain of the writing process, to expose myself as a pathetic ‘wizard’ furiously pulling on levers in a vain attempt to convince the world of my ‘magical’ powers. Perhaps it’s because so much of the publishing industry - leaving aside the actual writing for the moment - is an exercise in smoke and mirrors, one in which too many writers swan about offering lofty guff about genius and the creative process and dropping broad hints as to how they occupy a different plane entirely to their readers, when the truth is that they are every bit as desperately seeking truth, inspiration and meaning as the people who read their books.
  Most writers, if they’re honest, struggle with the same issues (financial and otherwise) as are dealt with in THE BABY KILLERS; most writers, if they’re honest, lose the battle, although very few, thankfully, resort to blowing up hospitals in frustration.
  Maybe THE BABY KILLERS is an exercise in self-indulgence - at this point I’m still too close to it to offer any kind of balanced opinion. That said, and for those writers who aren’t earning a decent living from publishing novels, which is most writers, the very act of writing, that of stealing away time, effort, income and emotion from your nearest and dearest in order to invest it in a tissue of lies, all for the sake of satisfying ego and ambition, is as self-indulgent a process as can be imagined. But can you imagine how much poorer the world would be without it?

Something Pooky This Way Comes

John Connolly has been dabbling in the dark corners where demons lurk for many years now, and Stuart Neville’s THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST (aka THE TWELVE), as the title suggests, also incorporated supernatural elements, or at least allowed for the possibility of such. Is a trend starting? Should I start dusting off my dog-eared collection of Aleister Crowleys? For lo, the blurb for Stephen Leather’s latest, NIGHTFALL, runneth thusly:

“You’re going to hell, Jack Nightingale.” They are the words that ended his career as a police negotiator. Now Jack’s a struggling private detective – and the chilling words come back to haunt him. Nightingale’s life is turned upside down the day that he inherits a mansion with a priceless library; it comes from a man who claims to be his father, and it comes with a warning. That Nightingale’s soul was sold at birth and a devil will come to claim it on his thirty-third birthday – just three weeks away. Jack doesn’t believe in Hell, probably doesn’t believe in Heaven either. But when people close to him start to die horribly, he is led to the inescapable conclusion that real evil may be at work. And that if he doesn’t find a way out he’ll be damned in hell for eternity.

  And if that doesn’t constitute a trend, then how about THE DEVIL, the forthcoming Jack Taylor from Sir Kenneth of Bruen? Quoth the blurb elves:

America - the land of opportunity, a place where economic prosperity beckons: but not for PI Jack Taylor, who’s just been refused entry. Disappointed and bitter, he thinks that an encounter with an over-friendly stranger in an airport bar is the least of his problems. Except that this stranger seems to know rather more than he should about Jack. Jack thinks no more of their meeting and resumes his old life in Galway. But when he’s called to investigate a student murder - connected to an elusive Mr K - he remembers the man from the airport. Is the stranger really is who he says he is? With the help of the Jameson, Jack struggles to make sense of it all. After several more murders and too many coincidental encounters, Jack believes he may have met his nemesis. But why has he been chosen? And could he really have taken on the devil himself?

  Jack, of course, has long been at war with the demon drink, but this sounds a bit more personal …
  So. The Big Question: Any other upcoming occult-themed Irish crime novels out there we should know about? Or any featuring a few angels, maybe even a Messiah? We’re all ears, people …

  This week I have been mostly reading: DIAMOND STAR HALO by Tiffany Murray; PILGERMANN by Russell Hoban; and SICILIAN CAROSUEL by Lawrence Durrell.

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.’”

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.

This Month I Was Mostly Reading …

Ye olde reading time was at a premium this month, for a variety of reasons, but while the quantity was low, the quality was pretty good. I gave up on Stieg Larsson’s THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO after something like 120 pages, not because the preamble was so tortured, but because I didn’t believe in what appeared to be the two main characters, Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander. It just didn’t make sense to me that a wealthy industrialist, who wanted his family’s history explored with discretion and could afford the finest private investigation talents available, would turn to a journalist who had been recently disgraced in a high-profile court case in which he was found to be guilty of a serious error of judgement. The Lisbeth character, meanwhile, came on like a goth Modesty Blaise who was simply too good to be true. It’s a pity, because the overwhelming verdict seems to be that TGWTGT is a modern classic, and Ali Karim reckons it’s sequel is even better. Maybe I’ll come back to it in a few years’ time and try again.
  For some reason I re-read Alistair MacLean’s WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL immediately afterwards, and I should point out here that WEBT is one of my blind spots – I must have read it about six times by now. I’m not a MacLean fan, though. I know I read more of his novels in my misspent youth, but none of them stand up the way WEBT does. If you haven’t read it, it’s set amid the Scottish islands and features Philip Calvert as a British Secret Service agent investigating piracy on the high seas, which makes it kind of topical. The ‘Philip’ is a nod to Marlowe, presumably, as the style is a Chandleresque take on the typical Bond story, albeit one grounded in the kind of self-deprecation where Calvert describes himself as a civil servant. Pithy, funny and pacy, it’s a darling read, and I’ve only semi-plagiarised the style with third-rate knock-offs twice to date.
  I went straight from that to MacLean’s THE GUNS OF NAVARONE, because I’m working on something right now that involves WWII shenanigans in the Greek islands. I made it as far as page 17 or thereabouts, which was when MacLean has one of his characters tell how an island in the Dodecanese was invaded by German forces, some of whom were parachuted in. As far as I could tell, the story is set midway through WWII, but to the best of my knowledge the German parachute regiment – the Fallschirmjager – was downgraded to infantry after the debacle that was the airborne invasion of Crete, in 1941, and never went a-parachuting again. I hope I didn’t put away the book on the basis of my getting the timing wrong, but that kind of detail should be important. I can only presume the Allied commandos succeeded in their mission, given that FORCE TEN FROM NAVARONE was a subsequent best-seller, but I’ve never seen the movie and I probably won’t be reading the book again.
  I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I don’t read a lot of women writers. I don’t think it’s a sexist thing, but more to do with the fact that men tend to write the kind of stories I’m interested in. Anyhoos, Mary Renault is one of the rare exceptions, and THE KING MUST DIE was the latest of her novels, most of which are set in classical Greece. It’s a fictionalised version of the Theseus myth, or the first half of it, covering the hero’s journey on the Greek mainland and his coming to recognition as the son and heir of the King of Athens, Aigeus, before he volunteers to be one of the victims sacrificed to the minotaur of King Minos and sails off to Crete to become a bull-dancer. Renault strips away the mythical elements, while remaining true to the quasi-spiritual aspects of the myth, and presents a fascinating tale of the clash of civilisations between the crude barbarians of the mainland Achaeans and the sophisticated culture of Minoa, which would eventually be undone by a combination of indolence, earthquake and ravening hordes from the north. Again, there’s a topical resonance, and Renault is a beautiful writer. Mind you, for a woman she tends to write quite a lot on the quintessentially male topics of war, conquest and glory – Alexander the Great was an obsession of hers – so maybe she’s not really an exception. I think she was a lesbian too, although I’m open to contradiction.
  Speaking of women with a male mind-set, I dipped into Alex Barclay’s latest, BLOOD RUNS COLD, and found myself fascinated by her creation Ren Bryce, a hard-drinking, no-bullshit FBI agent who seems to have more balls than most male characters. So I’ll be reading that next month. I’ll also be reading Donna Moore’s latest, on manuscript, because GO TO HELENA HANDBASKET was screamingly funny, and the first couple of chapters I dipped into there were just as hilarious. Staying with the manuscripts, I was sent an m/s of Alan Glynn’s WINTERLAND, which is due out next year and already claiming all kinds of wondrous big-ups. The first chapter seems to bear them out, so that’s another cracker lined up for next month.
  Back to this month and another female writer, Deborah Lawrenson, whose THE ART OF FALLING was a terrific read. Set in the present day, but driven by a parallel narrative from WWII (Italy this time, rather than Greece), it’s the story of a woman on a quest to lay some ghosts to rest in order to gift herself the peace of mind she needs to be happy. Lawrenson published TAOF herself, before Random House picked it up and gave it the Big House treatment, and I enjoyed it every bit as much as SONGS OF BLUE AND GOLD, which employs a similarly dual narrative, this time steeped in the fictionalised life of a writer who bears a very strong resemblance to Lawrence Durrell, and which I’ve already recommended in these here pages.
  Finally, and for research purposes, I’m about to finish THE RASH ADVENTURER: A LIFE OF JOHN PENDLEBURY by Imogen Grundon, which features a foreword from Patrick Leigh Fermor. Pendlebury was a renowned archaeologist in the period between the wars, a specialist on Egyptian and Minoan culture. His life came to a premature end on Crete in 1941, when he was shot by German forces as a spy while working with the Cretan resistance while operating under the guise of the island’s ‘honorary consul’. His was a life lived to the full, and he seems to have been the classic kind of post-Edwardian renaissance man, and a superb writer in his own right who played a huge part in making the esoteric science of archaeology accessible to the masses. Grundon is also a beautiful writer, her own descriptive work no less evocative than the liberal sprinklings of excerpts taken from Pendlebury’s letters. All in all, it makes for stirring stuff.

A Pleb Writes

The world’s dumbing-down continues apace, and we can but weep. The latest example is Deborah Lawrenson’s novel SONGS OF BLUE AND GOLD, a fictionalised version of Lawrence Durrell’s complex love-life during his time on the island of Corfu, which is being marketed without any reference at all to Lawrence Durrell on the basis that the plebs won’t have heard of him. Blummin’ plebs, eh?
  Happily, Ms Lawrenson herself is more than happy to wax lyrical about the inspiration for SONGS OF BLUE AND GOLD over at her interweb malarkey, with the gist running thusly:

“Inspired by the writer, poet and traveller Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990), this is a novel about love and memory, identity and biography.
  “It sparked into life one gloomy winter afternoon when I rediscovered PROSPERO’S CELL on the bookshelves of a bedroom at the top of the house. Opening it and starting to read was like injecting the grey with vivid blues and emeralds. A richly evocative account of Durrell’s life in Corfu in the 1930s, it was first published in 1945 and purports to be a diary in which he is a serious young writer living blissfully in the sun, deeply in love both with his new wife and with the idea of Greece.
  “Durrell states that PROSPERO’S CELL is a “guide to the landscape and manners” of Corfu but it never quite becomes this. It is a lyrical personal notebook, and what he leaves out is as poignant as what he includes.
  “Its content is almost unrecognisable as the same ground his younger brother, the zoologist Gerald, covers in his famous Corfu book MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS, in which ‘Larry’ lives with the family (which he never did) and is the ‘diminutive blond firework’ by turns pompously literary and hilarious.
  “And by the time he wrote PROSPERO’S CELL, Lawrence and his first wife Nancy had separated. He was already sadder and wiser, and living in wartime Egypt with Eve Cohen who would become his second wife.
  “I was intrigued. Further researches and a reading of several biographies soon revealed a complex and contradictory character - and a further two wives. His work, over a period of nearly sixty years - most famously in The Alexandria Quartet - was concerned with duality: love and hate; truth and fiction; memory and misinterpretation. And running through it all, the transfiguring effect of time …
  “Durrell aficionados might be disconcerted by the way I’ve played fast and loose with his chronology, compressing and altering his travels and his wives’ biographies to give an impression of the author’s life without providing in any way an accurate portrayal. In this, the book has more in common with his fictional characters, his use of dualism and reinterpretation, than with real people. “All these writers [in my books] are variations of myself,” he said a few years before he died. So, on one level, Julian Adie is another fictionalised version of Lawrence Durrell: what he might have become if certain events had taken place …”

  Incidentally, Deborah tells us that the Folio Society is publishing a new edition of Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet this month, the introduction to which can be found here …

Mais Oui, MONSIEUR: Some Lawrence Durrell-related Flummery

I mentioned in passing last week that I’d started Lawrence Durrell’s MONSIEUR as something of a non-reviewing, non-crime fiction, non-pressing-reason-to-read-it extravagance. Durrell was at one point regarded as the second coming of Joyce, and he’s a wonderful stylist, a writer of rare elegance – in his obituary, the New York Times selected this passage from CLEA as an example of the ‘quality of his descriptive gift’:

The whole quarter lay drowsing in the umbrageous violet of approaching nightfall. A sky of palpitating velours which was cut into by the stark flare of a thousand electric light bulbs. It lay over Tatwig Street, that night, like a velvet rind. Only the lighted tips of the minarets rose above it on their slender invisible stalks – appeared hanging suspended in the sky; trembling slightly with the haze as if about to expand their hoods like cobras. Drifting idly down those remembered streets once more I drank in (forever keepsakes of the Arab town) the smell of crushed chrysanthemums, ordure, scents, strawberries, human sweat and roasting pigeons.

  Nice. I try to treat myself to a new Durrell at least once a year, mainly because you need that kind of break to allow yourself to forget how agonizingly ambiguous and self-consciously post-modern Durrell was in his fiction (his travel-writing-cum-memoirs are delivered with a far straighter bat). MONSIEUR is delivered in a glancing, elliptical, self-deprecating way and becomes something of a literary version of the Russian doll, in which succeeding sections are revealed as the thoughts of the author who has written the previous section, until you get the point where what’s fact and fiction are so blurred as to be indistinguishable. It’s an interesting idea, in that the author is very loudly calling attention to the writer abnegating his authorship. A portrait of the artist as a self-effacing narcissist, if you will. The effect means that you get three or four different perspectives on the characters you’ve met in the early stages, whom you presumed were first-person narrators, so that even as you penetrate to the heart of the story you feel like you’re being drawn back out, the better to see the big picture. It’s a terrific technique.
  Anyway, intoxicated by the prevailing spirit of meta-narrative japery, I decided to pack the book in with ten pages to go, so I’ve no idea who – if any – of the ‘authors’ was the real author of the various sections.
  “But wasn’t Lawrence Durrell the real author?” I hear you cry.
  Erm, probably. But only in a glancing, elliptical, self-deprecating way.
  Funnily enough, the only other book I’ve been tempted to put away before finishing right to the end was the biography / memoir MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS, by Lawrence Durrell’s brother, Gerald. Mind you, that was because I was enjoying the book so much that I preferred to leave off before the inevitable moment when the Durrell family would have to leave idyllic, sunny Corfu and return to dreary, damp London, leaving them there (in my imagination at least) forever happy and ridiculously post-Edwardian beneath the azure Corfian skies.
  Happily, Durrell G went on to publish another two volumes of his Corfu memoirs, of which I have one left to read. Durrell L, who features in Durrell G’s books, went on to publish (among other things) the dazzlingly brilliant PROSPERO’S CELL, a memoir of his own time on Corfu, a quartet of novels set in Alexandria, and a quintet – or ‘quincunx’ – of novels set in Avignon, of which latter series I have four left to read. I imagine I’ll enjoy the Durrell G more than all the Durrell Ls combined, but that’s the hell of getting hooked on a writer – you have to see it out to the bitter end.
  Ah, reading. Do you think they’ll have books in heaven?

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 …