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I started this blog in 2013 to share my reflections on reading, writing and psychology, along with my journey to become a published novelist. I soon graduated to about twenty book reviews a month and a weekly 99-word story. Ten years later, I've transferred my writing / publication updates to my new website but will continue here with occasional reviews and flash fiction pieces, and maybe the odd personal post.
“You’re not Superwoman, Anne!” It was no doubt a combination of tussles with my current WIP, Charli Mills’s post on her horror of perfectionism and reaching the end of Shelley Harris’ second novel that reminded me of this feedback from a colleague over twenty years ago. Tasked with resettling longstay psychiatric patients into more ordinary lives within the community (incidentally, the subject of my current WIP), youthful idealism made me susceptible to setting unrealistic goals, both for myself and the service. Not recognising my misguided heroics, my colleague’s comment helped me to take a step back. However much I might have wished to, I couldn’t save the world! So, although I’ve never been tempted to don a cape and mask and strut about my home town righting wrongs, I don’t find it too difficult to identify with the protagonist of Vigilante, who does exactly that. Jenny Pepper has abandoned her career as an actor to become a mother; now she finds herself increasingly marginal in her teenage daughter’s life and unstimulated in her work as the manager of a charity bookshop, the spark long having gone from her marriage. Rendered virtually invisible by dint of her age, unglamorous job and gender, tidying-up has become her life’s purpose until, en route to a fancy dress party, she witnesses a woman being attacked. Although lacking the skills of a comic-book superhero, Jenny does manage to rescue the woman from her assailant. Soon, her secret identity has become an addiction, threatening her marriage, friendship and her own safety. When a masked villain stalks the town, preying on girls the age of Jenny’s daughter, her alter ego is tested to the limit.
St Petersburg, March 1914: Avrom Rozental has travelled to the city to take part in the World Chess Championship. Due to the fragility of his mental state, his minders have referred him to Dr Otto Spethmann, a renowned psychoanalyst. A widower with an adolescent daughter, Dr Spethmann is becoming overly involved with a new patient, Anna Petrovna, a society beauty and daughter of the powerful Zinnurov, nicknamed The Mountain. The psychoanalyst is also a chess player, engaged in a remote game with his friend and celebrated musician, Reuven Kopelzon, who he has never yet defeated. He considers himself one step removed from politics, until his office is raided and he and his daughter imprisoned on suspicion of concealing information in relation to a dual murder. Zugzwang is a term used in chess to refer to the state in which a player is reduced to utter helplessness, obliged to move, yet every move is guaranteed to make his position worse. Replete with parallels between the logic of the game, the practice of psychoanalysis and the sociopolitical shenanigans of a country on the brink of revolution, there are many zugzwangs in the novel, leading to a climax in which Dr Spethmann is faced with an impossible choice between different kinds of love. Beatrice and Peter are united in their love for each other, their church and God, but when only he is selected as missionary to a faraway planet, they accept their separation with goodwill. Rocketing trillions of miles in a drug-induced coma, Peter is too excited by the challenge to question the motives of USIC, the organisation that has recruited him. His first hours on the base are a catalogue of strange new things: the green water that tastes of melon; the humid atmosphere that twirls and creeps like prying fingers beneath his clothes; the community of loners quietly engrossed in their various roles in establishing the colony. But Peter has not been recruited to attend to the spiritual needs of his fellow humans; his job is to satisfy the indigenous population’s thirst for what he calls the Bible and they “the book of strange new things”. To the earthlings, the Oasans are disturbing creatures, despite their small and frail stature, shrouded in hooded robes of a fabric “disconcertingly like a bath towel” that intermittently reveal faces like twin foetuses “nestled head-to-head, knee to knee”. But, trusting in God and humbled by their openness to Christian the message, Peter easily overcomes his initial revulsion. On the night after Christmas, a middle-aged woman picks up her pen to write a letter to her estranged friend, Nina, without knowing where she might be or even whether she is alive or dead. Although they have had no contact for more than a decade, the pair have been friends since childhood and, for a few years shared a house as adults along with the narrator’s husband, Nicholas, and Teddy, their young son. Ironically, the narrator addresses her erstwhile friend by the name Teddy assigned to her on their first meeting, although as the novel progresses, its accuracy becomes more apparent (p158) Butterfly: settling on nothing, at the window pane basking or trying to get out, batting at the light as if baffled by this lovely form that is (so it thinks) some fragile decoration of its ugliness. My Dear Readers, I know that a novel written in the form of letters is known as an epistolary novel, but is there a word for a novel that starts with an intriguing letter and then goes on to portray the lives of the letter writer and its intended recipient? I’m asking because two novels I read recently followed that format and I’d like to tell you a little about them. I’d love to hear your views and, if you do wish to reply, you can do so in the comments box below. With all best wishes, Annecdotist. Surely this is every book lover’s dream? Roberta works in one of those idyllic old-fashioned bookshops owned, not by some faceless conglomerate, but by a true aficionado of the printed word, the laid-back Philip Old. She rearranges the shelves, serves the occasional customer, dust books, and collects the letters, postcards and till receipts she finds between the pages. These serve as epigraphs for the chapters comprising the contemporary strand of the novel. The first is a letter from Jan Pietrykowski, written in 1941, ending his relationship with Dorothea because he disapproves of something she’s done. Roberta has found this letter in an old suitcase belonging to her hundred-and-ten-year-old grandmother, Dorothea, now residing in a nursing home. She’s never heard of Mrs D Sinclair, whose name is inscribed in the suitcase, but Jan Pietrykowski is her paternal grandfather, dead before Roberta’s father was born. Otherwise the letter makes little sense to the reader, or to Roberta, especially as it contradicts what she’s been told about the family narrative. It takes the rest of the novel for her to come anywhere near to approaching the truth. In reviewing Peter Matthiessen’s novel In Paradise, I referred to our collective responsibility to bear witness to the Nazi death camps. Yet in focusing on the Second World War, it’s easy to overlook the fact that the first concentration camps weren’t the brainchild of Hitler, but constructed by the British in South Africa during the second Boer War. When British troops destroyed the farms of the Dutch settlers, ostensibly because they were providing supplies to the command of fighters – much as the Nazis did to the Russian peasants as illustrated in Audrey Magee’s debut novel, The Undertaking – women and children were forced into refugee camps where rations were meagre and infectious diseases rife. This shameful episode of British history is explored in two novels published earlier this year. The Visitors is a coming-of-age story that begins on a hop farm in late Victorian England. Liza, deaf-blind from the age of two, is like a wild animal until Lottie, through laborious hand signing, gives her the gift of language. Travelling to the oyster farms of the Kent coast as a child, and to South Africa as a young woman, Liza learns about first love and the limits and compensations of her disability. Since infancy, she has communicated with ghosts in her head; through them she finds a way of saving those who have saved her. While I enjoyed this novel, I had a sense that it was trying to cover too much, and I found Liza’s character most interesting when she was locked into her own world, raising questions about what it means to be without language, what makes us human. But it was heartening – in contrast to those novels depicting duplicitous female friendship – to spend time in the company of strong female characters who were prepared to travel great distances to support each other and those they loved. In both style and its attention to historical detail in the lives of ordinary people, Rebecca Mascull’s debut novel was reminiscent of the work of Tracy Chevalier, making her a writer to watch for the future. Facing Their Demons in the Fight for Freedom: After Before by Jemma Wayne … and a 99-word Flash19/9/2014 The best part of Jemma Wayne’s debut novel is the part the reader might feel tempted to skim over. We know what’s coming – Emily/Emilienne is a traumatised Rwandan refugee – but, even so, when it comes, the account of her family’s massacre is so harrowing we might prefer to look away. In a previous post, I asked how does one write about the feeling of terror? Jemma Wayne has produced a credible account of terror both in the here and now and its longer term repercussions via Emily’s panic attacks and episodes of disassociation. This novel addresses various other serious topics I’ve foisted on my blog readers. A diagnosis of terminal illness leads Lynn to confront her lack of fulfilment in the traditional women’s role of mother and homemaker: new priorities constructed themselves around her. Their foundations rested robustly upon that single new word, wife, shooting taller with each passing month so that it became harder and harder to peer over them as they arched into a protective dome above her, their oculus, that ever-present possibility of another word, mother. (p90) as she struggles to remain active in the process of her own death: They talked about themselves. All three of them seemed united in this end, though the lunch had been, Lynn knew, a symptom of their guilt at the fact she was dying […] She should humour them, act the grateful parent, but she couldn’t help the surge of bitterness inside her […] Every now and then one of them […] made an inquiry into her health: was she experiencing any of those dizzy spells she’d been warned about yet, any sickness, any lethargy? This was the topic on which she was consulted, her illness, though even this was not something they considered her to be an expert in. They knew better it seemed. They were young, they’d been on the Internet, Googled it, had a better grip on these things (p198) Do you ever ponder your dependence on the modern world and wonder how you’d adapt if it came to an abrupt end? My ability to grow my own food, knock up a functional mortise and tenon joint and navigate across country on foot might provide me a modicum of security, but I’d be useless without my glasses to see where I was going and clueless at working out how to make electricity from scratch. And who knows, until we find ourselves in a situation that demands it, whether we have the mental and physical capacity to kill another human being to save our own skins? I don’t know if it’s surviving trauma that evokes such apocalyptic philosophising or whether it’s integral to the human condition. There’s certainly an attraction in the theme for writers of fiction; I’ve just counted seven novels on my bookshelves that speculate on the impact on human society of devastating global pandemics or massive climate change. You might have even more, so how do I persuade you that Station Eleven is the one you really must read? I received my proof copy several months prior to publication and, although I was interested in the premise, I wasn’t in a great hurry to read it, perhaps put off by the hype. It’s described as perfect for fans of Hugh Howey, who I’ve never read, and Margaret Atwood, who I have, a lot. I can detect the similarities to The Blind Assassin and Oryx and Crake, both books I loved, but I’m not a fan of fanfiction. In a fair world, where writing was judged on its merits, Emily St John Mandel wouldn’t need to be compared with the literary greats. She is an excellent writer in her own rights. More fool me for not picking it up sooner. The country house meets friendship betrayed: The Long Shadow by Mark Mills, with fruit for afters27/7/2014 Who says fiction doesn’t change lives? Thanks to Mark Mills, I’ve learnt how to peel bananas from the bottom end, like a monkey. Not that this is a novel about fruit, or animal behaviour (unless you think young boys are like monkeys), but I was grateful for the tip about bananas at a point when the narrative pace seemed to drag. Ben is a scriptwriter aeons away from the big time, a divorced father living in a grotty flat. When a wealthy former schoolmate offers to bankroll his film and install him in his mansion while he does a rewrite, it seems almost too good to be true. As, indeed, it is, but Ben is so seduced by his good fortune and Victor so skilled at manipulation, it takes some time for him to figure out exactly how and why. When he does, it’s immensely satisfying: country house meets poisonous friendship (and so refreshing to have the latter portrayed from the male point of view for a change) seasoned with boys’ games along the lines of Lord of the Flies, the resolution encompasses envy, childhood neglect, rivalry and turning a blind eye to painful truths in a psychologically astute way. I must confess, however, I appreciated this more in retrospect and there were moments across the first 200 pages when I was tempted to give up. Reading Lisa Reiter’s post yesterday on a sanctuary for women on the receiving end of domestic violence, I remembered the research I’d come across years ago indicating that marriage confers greater benefits in health and well-being to men than to women. Alas, I couldn’t access the reference, so this report from the New York Times will have to suffice as my introduction to a trio of debut novels that raise questions about the experience of women in and outside marriage. Two are published in paperback in the UK today and the third came out last year. When Nina first encounters Emma in the street after all these years, she seems afraid and at pains to avoid her. But by the end of the summer she’s engineered an entry into the other woman’s life via a piece of mischief disguised as a favour. Over the next few months, Nina makes herself Emma’s confidante, while secretly despising her both for the narrowness of her current existence and for some as yet undisclosed transgression in the past. Emma, exhausted by early motherhood and adrift from her previous professional persona, is flattered by Nina’s attention and unconscious of any previous encounter. In chapters of exquisite prose narrated by alternate women, we glimpse their separate and intersecting lives to eventually discover the root of Nina’s grudge against Emma and how far she will go to wreak her revenge. I’ve been hanging out with some false friends lately; fortunately these were solely of the literary kind. Three novels by female writers featuring those duplicitous characters our mothers warned us, if we were lucky, to steer away from; not a great advert for women’s friendships but they do make intriguing companions on the page. I first read Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood over twenty years ago, but a recent review from Vulpus Libris has had me itching to give it another airing. A middle-aged painter returns to her home turf to find herself haunted by childhood memories of unbearable betrayals and cruelties perpetuated by her supposed best friend and tormentor, Cordelia. As we’d expect from a writer as talented as Margaret Atwood, the relationship is brilliantly portrayed, both in terms of how the ten-year-old bully grooms and seduces her victim, and its impact on the adult personality of Elaine who, despite objective success in her chosen field, remains badly bruised by the experience.
Clara and Rachel, the ill-fated best friends in Precious Thing by Colette McBeth, first meet at fourteen, slap in the middle of messy adolescence. Inseparable until Clara mysteriously goes away at the end of their teens, when they meet up again in their late-20s, their roles are reversed: Clara, the previously charismatic one, is insecure, while Rachel, the dumpy awkward teen, seems to have it made with the boyfriend, smart flat and successful media career. What I liked about this novel was that, while it’s narrated primarily from Rachel’s point of view, the reader is left to read between the lines to make up her own mind of which of the two women is the most poisonous. In Keep Your Friends Close by Paula Daly, the psychopathic Eve is certainly the villain of the piece, but Natty is no angel either, and is prepared to give as much as she gets. The two women met at university at the end of their teens and have kept in touch, despite living in different continents, for fifteen years before Eve seizes the opportunity of Natty’s temporary absence from the home to take over husband, house and life. The reader wonders just how far these women will go, as the author makes things progressively harder for her characters, until the surprise but satisfying ending, which neatly ties up several plot threads. While both of these novels are page turners and, with one a debut and the other second novel, it would be unfair to expect them to be as faultless as Cat’s Eye, but in neither of these was I totally convinced that the women’s friendships would have endured the way they did. Although in Precious Thing the reason for the hiatus in, and re-establishment of, the friendship becomes clear towards the end, and reassessing the past is part of the plot, my scepticism did impinge on my enjoyment of the early chapters. In Keep Your Friends Close we are given a rationale for Eve’s extreme behaviour, yet I wasn’t altogether convinced. However, this may simply reflect my preference for novels with a stronger emphasis on character than plot. I also wondered if the difference in the ages at which the girls/women got together affected how credible the unbalanced relationships seemed; I know we can be duped at any age, but perhaps those early friendships are the most risky. You can check out my own limitations in writing about female friendship among children in my short story Jessica’s Navel and among adults in my short story The Good News. What’s your experience of dodgy female friendships in fiction and/or real life? I look forward to your comments. Thanks to Headline Review for my copy of Precious Thing and Alison Barrow at Transworld books and Sonya from the blog A Lover of Books for my copy of Keep Your Friends Close. For someone who considers herself averse to memoir, I’ve been edging perilously close to it of late. Memoir was what drew me into taking part in Charli’s flash fiction challenge although, like several other participants, I chose to produce a memoir for a fictional character rather than myself. Then I hosted a post from an actual published memoirist: a beautifully moving piece from Janet Watson on the process of rediscovering her teenage self in order to let it go. When Lisa Reiter launched her bite-sized memoir challenge, I didn’t think I’d be joining in. Yet School at Seven got me thinking about my first best friend, and he wouldn’t go away: My First Best Friend We sat side-by-side at the front of Mrs B’s classroom. Together we learnt cross-stitch and joined-up writing, drank stove-warmed milk from a squat glass bottle through a paper straw. Together we held out trembling hands as our teacher progressed from child to child, brandishing a wooden ruler. Together we progressed from Blue Book 1 all the way to Blue Book 6. On Saturday afternoons I’d ride over to his house to watch Batman and Robin dispatch the villains of Gotham city on his black-and-white TV. On Sunday mornings we’d seek each other out at church. I thought we’d be best friends forever, until the day he biked round to my house with another bunch of friends. Boys, every one of them. I stayed in my garden, watching till they rode away. In the end, I enjoyed this exercise and was happy with what I produced. Yet where it’s been most helpful is not so much in converting me to memoir, but in nudging me a little further towards formulating my reservations about the form.
Good writing relies on specifics: a crimson tulip rather than a red flower; a curly-haired Bedlington Terrier rather than a medium-sized dog. In writing fiction, we can choose our details to fit with a picture in our head, to suit the rhythm of the prose or to mirror an underlying theme. In writing memoir, we’re supposed to stick with the facts. Janet Watson had her teenage diaries to guide her but, more than twenty years on, they wouldn’t tell her everything she needed to know to complete her book. Even in my short piece of under 150 words, I’m conscious of gaps in my memory, points where I may have strayed from the truth. I feel uneasy that I might be wrong about the year we learnt joined-up writing, and it’s only an assumption that back in 1965 my friend didn’t have a colour TV. I’m not even sure he was my first best friend. It could be I’m unsuited to memoir because I’m too uptight about these minor details, or too lazy to undertake the meticulous research needed to check them out. Charli Mills wrote that a memory can send a writer down one of two paths: fiction or memoir. I’d love to know what makes some of us prefer one path to the other. On her blog, Writing My Novel, Teagan Kearney wrote recently on the virtues of fiction and mentioned her surprise at discovering that a friend couldn’t read novels because she was unable to suspend disbelief. I also have a good friend who doesn’t get fiction but the idea is so alien to me we’d been friends for around twenty years before I was aware of it. However this friend does enjoy memoir, which strengthens my belief that some people are more suited to one than the other. I’m hoping to discover more about this preference for fact versus fiction as the memoir challenge continues, although I can’t guarantee I’ll join in next time. HAVE you ever wondered what it would be like to go back to your teenage years? To your first love? Close friends? Not just as an idle thought, but to really immerse yourself in those years, actually talk to those people and see whether their memories match yours? Dusty Springfield sang about Going Back – the song was played at her funeral – to “the things I learned so well, in my youth”. I carried my story with me for many years but what was it I learned back then? When I started writing notes for a memoir, I knew I too had to go back. Moving away from home was something we all did after school. In the sixth form we were a close group of nine friends, sharing the boredom of school days, waiting for the excitement of the sort of nights everyone recalls from those vivid, growing-up years; high on the future, bonds strengthened by alcohol, and a new awareness of selves and sexual power. Then it was university, new lives, friends, marriages, children. But I never forgot the feeling of belonging I had with those friends. Had they felt it too, those three girls and five boys? And when a tragic death ripped the heart out of the group, could we ever be together again and feel the same? Betrayed, my second June short fiction publication, is my shortest yet and, while I'm pleased to have packed a lot of story into so few words, there's something about it that leaves me slightly uneasy. It can be difficult with an issue-based story not to make it schmaltzy or preachy, but I don't think I've fallen into that trap here. If anything, I've gone to the other extreme and exploited a very nasty situation for entertainment. Or maybe that's the overspill of my Catholic guilt? Don't be fooled by the innocence of the photo I've chosen to illustrate my words: I got the idea for the story when I was reading Philida, Andre Brink's novel about a slave master. It's not that I balk at tackling uncomfortable subjects, and there's a lot fiction can do to bring things we'd rather not know about into the public domain as with Gavin Weston's novel, Harmattan. But I'm not sure if flash can always do justice to the complexity. I've got more to say on ethics in a forthcoming post in relation to another story but, in the meantime, I'd be interested in your point of view on this – either in relation to the particular story or in general. |
entertaining fiction about identity, mental health and social justice
Annecdotal is where real life brushes up against the fictional.
Annecdotist is the blogging persona of Anne Goodwin:
reader, writer, slug-slayer, tramper of moors, recovering psychologist, struggling soprano, author of three fiction books. LATEST POSTS HERE
I don't post to a schedule, but average around ten reviews a month (see here for an alphabetical list), some linked to a weekly flash fiction, plus posts on my WIPs and published books. Your comments are welcome any time any where. Get new posts direct to your inbox ...
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