Blog Archives

Becoming ungrounded: The Weightless World by Anthony Trevelyan

30/6/2015

Back in the day when I worked with people who had psychotic experiences, it could be something of a challenge to distinguish fact from fiction in the stories they told me about their lives. Now and then I’d find myself wondering what if their seemingly incredible account were actually true?

I was reminded of this on reading the latest novel for the Curtis Brown Book Group. Steven Strauss, twenty-something PA to the charismatic (and now deposed) founder of Resolute Aviation, Raymond Ess, is on a business trip to India with his boss. Since the company’s decline due to the collapse of a prestigious deal, Ess has been on sabbatical, or possibly sick leave. Returning to work with renewed vigour, Ess has a grandiose plan to rescue the company through the purchase of a remarkable invention he came across by chance when lost in rural India. Of course Steven doesn’t believe in the antigravity machine, but he’s persuaded to accompany his boss on his quest to find it in order to keep Ess out of the way while Resolute Aviation goes into receivership. What happens makes Steven – and we, the readers – question the boundary between madness and sanity. In the absence of gravity, what would keep us grounded to the real?

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Psychologists write: Ian Wilkinson

23/6/2015

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I’m delighted to welcome Ian Wilkinson for the second post in my blog series Psychologists Write (following in the footsteps of Voula Grand). I knew Ian from my time as a clinical psychologist in the north-east of England, but hadn’t seen him for about twenty years when we met up by chance at a Society of Authors event on working with the media. I’ll pass straight over to Ian to let him tell you about how psychology feeds his writing and vice versa, as well as the background to his debut novel – and how you can get yourself a review copy.

What inspired you to become a writer and a psychologist?

My mother would say I loved stories so much that she taught me to read to find some peace. At family parties, my uncles told stories to the children, so producing my own seemed natural - especially since I can’t sing and I’m tone deaf. Stories and films teach you deep emotional lessons; in ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’, a storm in the final scene blows all the gold dust away into the desert, leaving the two survivors with nothing but their deep friendship for each other. Which is the real treasure? That film gave me a rather wonderful lesson at a very early age.

I was also bullied as a child; the moment I became a psychologist was when I discovered myself retaliating so aggressively that I had become… a bully.

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Watch the Wall, My Darling: The Insect Rosary by Sarah Armstrong

18/6/2015

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Nancy and Bernadette have spent every summer at the remote farm where their mother grew up. Despite the sullen nature of their uncle, Donn, and the religiosity of their aunt, Agatha, who returned from training to be a nun to keep house for him, it’s an idyllic place to a ten and twelve-year-old from London. But the bond between the sisters is weakening, as Nancy, now at the comprehensive school, wants to play at being a grown-up. And there are far darker forces at work than sibling rivalries. For in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, the English are unwelcome in certain parts and a lonely farm has every chance of being co-opted into the undercover war.

Thirty years later, having barely spoken to each other since childhood, the sisters return to the farm with their families on the pretext of seeing the place for one last time before it’s sold. It starts badly: Nancy’s American husband is both overly chatty and bored; Bernie is critical of her sister’s hypervigilance around Nancy’s fourteen-year-old son, who appears to have some kind of attention-deficit disorder (p79):

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From writer to author: claiming the authority of your book.

16/6/2015

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A couple of years ago, I published a post on the four criteria that make one a writer. Although I can appreciate the differing perspectives offered in the comments, I’m still happy with my description of a writer as someone who edits their work; understands the “rules” (although doesn’t necessarily follow them); has served their time; and has attracted readers beyond their immediate friends and family. Conveniently, this definition of a writer enabled me to claim the title for myself.

I didn’t really consider the word “author”, and certainly not as a stand-alone title (as opposed to “author of” such-and-such a work), until I joined The Society of Authors last summer. Even then, it was because I needed advice on my publishing contract rather than to club together with other “authors” – such an old-fashioned term, I thought, that ought to be abandoned in the way that “artists” have now rebranded themselves as “painters”. That changed when, last month, I attended an event on working with the media, led by the award-winning former BBC TV reporter, Alistair Macdonald.

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In which I read my review of Reader for Hire by Raymond Jean

14/6/2015

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A novella about the pleasures of reading aloud and being read to demands a review in the same vein. And an audio review gives me the opportunity to get in some much-needed practice in performance – not to mention the chance for another fiddle with YouTube – in preparation for reading in public from my own novel. My review takes just under eight minutes. However, if you prefer to read it for yourself, you can download a print version below. Your feedback on any aspect of the content or its delivery will be much appreciated.

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Teenage tribulations: Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle

11/6/2015

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“Sometimes I have trouble finding the edges,” says the narrator, Sean, on page 9 of this unusual and deeply moving debut novel. So far, all I know about him is that he returned from hospital to his parents’ home with painful skin grafts and that, as a young child, obsessed with comic books, he’d imagined himself a throne in his grandparents’ garden, declaring himself King Conan. You’re not the only one, I might have replied. Sharing none of his tastes in TV, music and games, I didn’t hold up much hope of venturing beyond the edges of a novel that spirals round and round its subject but, when I did, I was deeply impressed. While preferring to eschew spoilers, despite the evidence that they are more likely to enhance the reading pleasure than destroy it, I can’t convey my enthusiasm for the novel without wheeling towards its centre, so read on at your own risk.

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Writing for publication: It’s all a bed of roses?

8/6/2015

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Writing last week from the hospital bedside of her dear friend, Charli Mills invited Rough Writers to compose a 99-word story featuring a rose. I immediately thought of a scene from my forthcoming novel, Sugar and Snails, in which the main character, Diana, looks back on her childhood. There’s not much of a narrative arc in this episode, but I thought I’d share it anyway, slightly amended, although it works better in context where it gains an additional layer of meaning:

“Don’t think it’s all a bed of roses,” said my mother, handing me the potato peeler and nudging me towards the sink.

Since my sister had left home, I’d taken to helping out with cooking and cleaning. I didn’t mind, but I was embarrassed that my mother would think I was hankering after a future as a housewife. It seemed to me that a bed of roses summed up my mother’s life exactly: perfumed petals imprisoned within a tangle of thorns. I wanted to ramble beyond the pot of soil in which she’d planted me. I wanted to bloom.

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Odyssey interrupted: The Rocks by Peter Nichols

5/6/2015

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Lulu Davenport is the proprietor of Los Rocques, a clifftop hotel on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca, frequented by a certain type wealthy Brit who holds themselves aloof from the package-tour hordes. It’s also a popular hangout for the teenagers who spend their summers on the island, roaming freely after months of more orderly education abroad. For almost sixty years, Gerald Rutledge has lived in a small house just a kilometre away from The Rocks (as everyone calls it), but he’s rarely set foot on the premises. It’s not just because, having married a local woman and made his living from the land, he’s more assimilated into the Spanish community, but also because he’s persona non grata to Lulu following their brief and calamitous marriage only a few years after the end of the Second World War.

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Coupling and creativity: The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett

3/6/2015

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Version One Laura Barnett is obsessed by the image of a woman on a bicycle swerving to avoid hitting a dog, watched over by a young man casually walking down a lane. Eva and Jim are nineteen, students at Cambridge in 1958, she studying English and he law. Laura has some idea about their backgrounds – Eva the daughter of Jewish musicians who fled Austria in 1938; Jim the son of a now-deceased famous painter and an unstable mother – but she can’t make up her mind where to take them next. So she writes three different versions of their story, falling in love with each such that she can’t bear to discard any one of them. So she puts all three in the same novel.

Version Two Laura Barnett likes romance, but she’s a bit suspicious of the happy-ever-after premise. Although still young herself, she doesn’t agree that later-life get-togethers are somehow inferior to younger couplings. She sets herself the task of writing a novel that will follow the same two characters across their entire adult lives through three different versions of their story: one in which they marry young and two in which they don’t, Eva instead marrying her original boyfriend, the narcissistic actor, David. In these latter two, Eva and Jim’s paths cross intermittently, in one version resulting in an extramarital affair, another in which they recognise their mutual attraction but, either through circumstances or restraint, they remain loyal to their other partners.

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Fictional psychologists and psychotherapists: 17.5. The Analyst by John Katzenbach

1/6/2015

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In the year he fully expected to die, he spent the majority of his fifty-third birthday as he did most other days, listening to people complain about their mothers. Thoughtless mothers, cruel mothers, sexually provocative mothers. Dead mothers who remained alive in their children’s minds. Living mothers, whom their children wanted to kill.

So begins this engaging thriller about New York psychoanalyst, Dr Ricky Starks, who, the day before his summer break, receives a letter from a man who calls himself Rumpelstiltskin, challenging him to guess his identity. If he is unable to do so within two weeks, he must either kill himself or see fifty-two of his relatives destroyed one by one. Rapidly thrown into a state of terror, Ricky is compelled to cast aside his customary thoughtful detachment and act promptly if he is to beat his tormentor at his game.

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