Blog Archives

Further instructions for a novel: Neverhome by Laird Hunt

30/11/2015

I was strong and he was not, so it was me went to war to defend the Republic. I stepped across the border out of Indiana into Ohio. Twenty dollars, two salt-pork sandwiches, and I took jerky, biscuits, six old apples, fresh underthings, and a blanket too. There was a heat in the air so I walked in my shirtsleeves with my hat pulled low.

So begins the story of the transformation of Constance Thompson, wife and farmer, into Gallant Ash, fearless soldier and folk legend of the American Civil War. Hers is a story of love and loss, deceit and duty, and the way in which violence can be used as a defence against unbearable pain that, in the end, brings its own trauma. It’s also the story of how women are airbrushed out of history.

While I’d recommend this novel to readers, I want to focus, as I did some time ago with Instructions for a Heatwave, on what we can learn from Laird Hunt’s sixth novel (although the first to be published in the UK) as writers, whether we are looking to write historical fiction or not.

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Punishment and prophecy: The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma

27/11/2015

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In a small town in western Nigeria, in January 1996, nine-year-old Benjamin and his three older brothers take advantage of their disciplinarian father’s absence, and their mother’s preoccupation with their two younger siblings, to go fishing, instead of studying, after school. So absorbed in their secret new hobby, they continue every school day for six weeks, although the eldest, Ikenna, understandably becomes reluctant after a local “madman” tells him he will be killed by “a fisherman”, presumably one of his brothers. However, what finally puts a stop to their enterprise, is one of their neighbours informing their mother, who then tells their father on one of his weekend visits home. The father takes a whip to the boys, with Ikenna the most severely punished, after which, the fifteen-year-old’s behaviour spirals out of control.

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A novelist meets a psychotherapist: The Good Story by JM Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz

26/11/2015

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I’ve mentioned before that I think novelists and psychotherapists are in a similar business, yet the fictional therapists we encounter on the page sometimes fail to convince. So what better way for the writer bent on creating a credible fictional therapist than to eavesdrop on a conversation between a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and a clinical psychologist, lecturer and psychoanalytic psychotherapist? As JM Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz toss ideas back and forth about the intersection between truth, story and morality, the writer is afforded a remarkable insight into the workings of the therapist’s mind.

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Healing Words: Guest post by Kate Evans

23/11/2015

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After proving such a generous host on my own long-distance blog tour, I’m delighted to welcome Kate to Annecdotal as she launches her second novel. Here she describes how she links creative writing and emotional healing. Read on and enjoy!

I had been writing for over twenty years when the depression (which is a part of my make-up) overwhelmed me. Up until that point, I had been very focused on publication, writing feature articles and non-fiction copy for magazines, newsletters, annual reports and newspapers. I also had several unpublished novels.

When the emotional and psychological crash came, I stopped writing. Life became an endless succession of treacherous puzzles and traps which I somehow had to work my way round. Picking up a hairbrush became an enormous act of will, never mind picking up a pen and doing something worthwhile with it. I felt very bleak and hopeless. I became inarticulate. When I went into therapy I would cry but I could not speak coherently. After several sessions, my therapist, probably out of exasperation, said, ‘You’re a writer, write and we can look at that.’

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Is it time for gender-neutral toilets?

19/11/2015

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In my years of blogging by the calendar, I’ve been particularly faithful to World Toilet Day on 19 November with its emphasis on the importance of clean and safe sanitation for global health, equality and well-being. My interest in this topic came from travelling in countries where toilet facilities can’t be taken for granted, and discovered that a blog post on the subject could play a small part in raising awareness of the issue. But for this year, I’d already decided to shift my focus away from toilets, or their lack of, in the Global South onto a toiletry provision nearer home, when I discovered that this would enable me to mark another international commemorative day dear to my heart on the following day.

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Girl-to-boy traditions: The Pearl That Broke Its Shell and Sworn Virgin

17/11/2015

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As the middle child in a family of five daughters in a village in contemporary Afghanistan, Rahima knows first-hand how gender shapes people’s lives. For a few short years she gets to experience the world from the other side: dressed as a boy, she is able to attend school, wrestle with her friends and run errands to the market, while her sisters stay home, helping their mother cook and clean and avoid the blows of their opium-addicted father. But the local warlord has taken a fancy to her and, at thirteen, she is forced to become a girl again and join his three other wives under the disapproving gaze of his mother. All that sustains her through the cruelties of married life is the story she’s been told of her great-great-grandmother, Shekiba, facially disfigured as an infant, mistreated by her extended family when she loses her parents and siblings to cholera, who becomes a guard of the king’s harem.

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Taking refuge in madness? The Offering by Grace McCleen

14/11/2015

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Two and half months short of her thirteenth birthday, Madeline sets off with her parents for a new life on an unnamed island. With no job organised, and no real plan other than to spread the word of God amongst the neighbours, it seems that their faith has been rewarded when they discover a dilapidated farmhouse, with a garden somewhat reminiscent of the picture of Eden in the family Bible. Over the course of that first summer, life is idyllic, as the father finds short-term work and Madeline is home-schooled by her mother, leaving lots of time to roam the countryside with her dog. But, as the chill winds of autumn approach, it seems that their luck – or God’s protection – is running out. Madeline watches with anxiety as her father is refused work, her mother sinks into depression, their stores run low and the house falls into disrepair. Yet, as she records in her diary, she isn’t completely helpless; perhaps, as in the Old Testament, a sacrifice will make God look upon them favourably once more.

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Claiming her life: The Lodger, The Drum Tower and Our Souls at Night

12/11/2015

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A severe cold has meant very little writing in the last few days, but a copious amount of reading (completing my reading “challenge” of 100 books in the year), albeit with not a great amount of depth. These three short reviews of novels about three very different women’s quests for a life, and a mind, of their own is part of the result.

After her father’s bankruptcy and her mother’s death from suicide, Dorothy Richardson has come to London to work as a dentist’s assistant. Renting a room in a Bloomsbury boarding-house, she values her freedom, but life is hard for a single woman on a low income at the beginning of the twentieth century. Invited to spend the weekend at the coast with an old school friend, she is initially unimpressed by her husband, Bertie, a writer of some renown. But Bertie’s approval of her independent mind quickly beguiles her and, despite the guilt at betraying her friend, Dorothy embarks on a secret affair. When the sex proves a disappointment, Dorothy is unsure whether she should expect more, until a new boarder teaches her the meaning of sexual pleasure. But, in her liaison with Veronica while still involved with Bertie, Dorothy finds herself caught between two types of taboo. On top of this, Veronica is a suffragette whose involvement in the movement puts her at risk of imprisonment.

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Fictional psychologists and psychotherapists: 20. Something to Tell You by Hanif Kureishi

9/11/2015

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Jamal Khan is a London psychoanalyst in his fifties, haunted by memories of his late adolescence: his first love, Ajita; the highs of sex, drugs and idealistic left-wing politics; the shady dealings of his college friends, Wolf and Valentin. As he navigates the indignities of divorced middle age alongside his best friend, Henry, he revisits his adolescent obsessions, under the shadow of his lonely childhood with an emotionally absent white mother and physically absent Pakistani father and bullying out-of-control older sister, Miriam. Amongst all this he somehow manages to maintain his therapy practice and share the parenting of his pre-adolescent son, until the repercussions of a brutal attack on Ajita’s father threaten to blow everything apart. A dark and comic tale of London hedonism and politics in the 1970s and in the early years of the twenty-first century, Something to Tell You also supplies some interesting insights into psychoanalytic ideas:

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Disaffected youth: Before the Fire by Sarah Butler and Here Are the Young Men by Rob Doyle

6/11/2015

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June 2011 and Stick and Mac are ablaze with the promise of adventure. Just finished school, they’ve bought a wreck of a car and are planning to drive from Manchester to Malaga, where beaches, girls and a washing-up job in a bar await them. But, the night before they’re due to leave, a random knife-attack puts a stop to that. Mac is dead and Stick’s going nowhere. Bereft and stunned, his family’s attempts to console him only fuel his anger, and the limitations of the law are like a slap in the face to his friend and others like him who live on the wrong side of town. His tentative friendship with the feisty J seems like the only thing that could save him. But she’s a firebrand with a grudge against the police, and the August riots are on the way to Manchester.

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Never let me go: the dilemma of lending books

4/11/2015

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So, you’re midway through composing a blog post when, in a flash of inspiration, you hit on the very book that will nail the point you want to make. You scuttle off to your “library”, zeroing in on the shelf where – however eccentric your filing system¹ – you know it will be waiting for you. Except that it isn’t and, you now remember, it did a flit some time back. You lent it to a trusted friend – his/her exact identity lost in the mists of time – and it’s never been returned.

It’s happened to me a couple of times in recent months. The book in question was one of my favourite novels, namely – I kid you not – Never Let Me Go². I should’ve taken more notice because I’m bereft without it. I want to break into friends’ houses at the dead of night and go rummaging through their possessions till I find it. I’ve asked around of course, but no-one has fessed up.

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