A Little Book Learning

This week I have reminded myself that I can learn things from books.

Yes, I know, “The Most Obvious Statement Ever Made,” etc.  I do know.  But I was actually reminding myself of something a little bit more specific than the obvious.  It was the face that, as a writer, you can learn much about writing from actually reading.

Still pretty obvious but it amazes me how many people pursue writing hobbies and careers in the belief that they don’t need to read anything in order to do it.  Just reading that sentence makes it seem so silly to me yet I see it quite a bit.

Anyway, I’m not here to pontificate – not today anyway.  I just want to refer to two novels which I recently finished reading, both of which taught me something useful about my own writing endeavours and, particularly, what I should expect to find within my writing.

The two books are ‘The Elegance of The Hedgehog’ by Muriel Barbery and ‘Inheritance’ by Nicholas Shakespeare and, before I say more about them, I need to thank my friends at Castlebar Book Club who put me on to both of these books.  I would not have found them by myself and that, for me, is the indispensable value of the book club.

Onwards…

Each of these books taught me a lesson which I can take away to my own writing.  I’d like to tell you what those two lessons are without getting too deep into either of the two books.

Let’s start with ‘The Elegance of the Hedgehog’ which has the simpler of the two lessons.  The book is the story of a Concierge in a Parisian apartment building who hides her intellect and her Aesthete nature from the people she deals with.  It is also the story of a young girl who lives in the apartment block – a girl who fully intends to blow herself up.

It’s a nice set-up.  It is quite heavy on the intellectualising… wait, let me tell you what I learned and that’ll probably say enough about the book.

The story sets itself up very quickly, it does this very well.  We are only a few pages in when we know the Renee and what is driving her.  We know Paloma too, it’s all good.

“Ah,” I hear you say, “I know where he’s going with this.  After the start of the book, nothing happens. That’s it, right?”

Well no.  I thought that was it, I really did.  You see, halfway through I was hating this book, I was pleading on Twitter for somebody to give me an excuse to stop reading the damn thing.  And I thought it was because nothing was happening.  But, looking back, I could see that loads of things had happened, loads of good stuff…

… that’s when I saw why the book had lost me as it did.

Nothing changed.

There was loads of events and opinions-expressed and comings-and-goings but, despite all this, by page 125, the Concierge was still hiding her true nature and the girl was still going to blow herself up.  No change.  Then, on page 129, a tiny little event happened but this event was different to all the others.  It caused change.  And then, dear friends, the book took off.

So that’s my lesson from this book – happenings and action are not enough to engage the audience/reader, you have to evoke change in your characters.

Onwards again…

The next book, was ‘Inheritance’  It’s got a great notion behind it, this book.  What movie makers would call ‘high concept’ which means you hear the premise described in a few short sentences and you are engaged.

The premise here is this;  a guy goes to his teacher’s funeral but goes into the wrong crematorium chapel by mistake.  As a result of attending the wrong funeral, he inherits seventeen million pounds from the deceased man.

See?  It’s good innit?  Here’s what it taught me. 

I’m a story-man, me.  Story first.  This idea of developing characters and then inventing something for them to do… that doesn’t work for my writing.  For me, the characters usually grow to suit the story.

Well, until now anyway. 

You see, the first half of this book is all-story.  The character, the guy who gets the money, seems to stumble through the story without really showing himself in any interesting way.  As with the previous book, the first half of it lost me but, again, the second half won me back.

In the second half, the deceased character comes to the fore as his story is told and, boy, he is a real character for sure.  With the arrival of this real character, the book comes alive.  Taking things a step too far, I now think the author deliberately drew the main character a little bland to then elevate him in the presence of his better-written second character.

What I learned then is that 'Story' on its own will not be enough.  No matter how good the story is.  I have to pay attention to my characters more.

Yes, Ken, but the books… are they any good?

For me, neither were world-beaters but both have rewarded me for reading them.

Give them a go, I’d say.

That Mysterious Book I Sometimes Read Just Before Sleep

‘Can’t sleep without reading a book.   ‘Can’t do it.

Even if I tumble in the door at four in the morning (a comparatively rare event, you must agree), I would still have to hit the current book and read for a while before sleep might come.

Usually it happens that I read for awhile and then I start to feel tired and so I put the book away, turn out the light and go to sleep.  That’s probably the normal chain-of events for most book-reading-people-of-the-bed, nothing unusual there.

But there’s another way things sometimes go and I wonder if I’m the only one it happens to.  Usually it happens when a book is so good that you just don’t want to stop reading, it’s too interesting/exciting, you just want to read on…

But sleep will come, it will not be cheated of its prey.  That’s when the odd thing happens – to me at least.

Sleep creeps into the text of the book and/or the text of the book creeps into sleep and suddenly the text I am reading is not the text of the book I am holding but some crazy pre-dream-state literary concoction.

If this just happened for a split second, I could let it pass.  But it seems that this can go on for quite some time.  I find myself reading, enjoying the words, when suddenly some remnant of consciousness says, “wait, this isn’t the book you’re reading, this is something else.”  And, indeed it is something else.  Some story with a logic and a sensibility all of its own but not from any printed document that ever existed.

Does this sound mad or do you know what I mean?

It would be much easier to discuss if I could remember anything -  anything at all - of this strange text that my book morphs into just as sleep descends.  But I can’t.  I guess the story is sprinkled with a little of whatever dust gets shaken onto dreams, that gradual but irrevocable self-destruct powder.

And, of course, I may tell you that this mysterious text goes on for quite some time but what do I really know about it?  Dream time is amorphic and tenuous at the best of times.  This thing I think lasts for minutes may only be a split second aberration of the shutting-down mind.

So, effectively, I’m posting about something I know nothing about.

Not exactly a first, no.

What bugs me about it, what makes me think on it now, is that this phantom text which appears in my book as sleep comes…

…well, it’s quite good, I think.

Maybe it's some book of my creation that it sitting inside my head, one I just haven't written yet.  Maybe my mind is giving me a sneak preview as a subliminal encouragement to get on with it.

Maybe I'll never get it written and will only ever see self-destructing passages as consciousness ebbs away.

Maybe I’ll be allowed to read all of it, as I die.

A Shallow Grave for The Dice Man

My youngest son, Sam, has just given up wanting to be read-to in bed at night.  He is Nine.  Suddenly, he only wants to snuggle up under the quilt and read himself to sleep. 

As a matter of interest, the book that grabbed him and made him want to do this is called ‘The Name of This Book is Secret’ by Pseudonymous Bosch – which is possibly not the writer’s real name. I don’t know anything else about it, sorry.

Thus ends my ten-year stint of reading every night to our two children.  It’s something I have enjoyed enormously and would recommend wholeheartedly.  Along the way I have read aloud ‘The Lord of the Rings’, The Hobbit’ all of the ‘Harry Potters’, ‘Watership Down’, ‘Winnie The Pooh’ (which is wonderful to read aloud) and many many others.  Just a few pages a night, every night. It's stunning how much ground gets covered.

As we peeped in the other night at Sam reading his own substantial book, Trish remarked that this was a gift I had given both of our kids.  If that’s true, I’m very pleased.  I myself have adored reading for a very long time.

And I started so very very young.

Well, not so much 'reading' as 'reading adult books'.

My parents were very protective of what I was allowed to watch on television but they never seemed to realise that books could be so much more vibrant, descriptive and damned informative  than TV could ever hope to be.  I quickly got bored with ‘Famous Fives and such and so, when I began to dig around in the adult section of the library, nobody seemed to mind.

I arrived in post-primary school, aged eleven, and the English teacher asked what was the last book we had read, she was a bit taken aback when I told her it was ‘Papillon’.  She took it on board though and slipped me a copy of John McGahern’s ‘The Dark’ while the others were catching up with Dear Enid.  That teacher, Patricia O’Higgins, was a huge influence in my pursuing my writing in the way that I have.  I should really thank her for it somewhere other than here.

Was it a co-incidence then that, at the end of first year in that school, I was given a book prize for coming second in the class?  (I nearly always come second in things).  The book was the rudest book I have ever owned.  It was called ‘A Little Treasury of Limericks Fair and Foul’ and whoever picked it out for me could not have misunderstood the level of content within because it was copiously illustrated.  That book met the same fate as The Dice Man, which I will come to in a minute, but not before I practically memorised it.  I still get laughs from recounting the verse therein from time to time.

Where was I?

Ah, yes, The Dice Man…

At some stage, I got some kind of cold or flu and I demanded that Mum go and get me a book to tide me over.  The book I wanted helps me date that sickness quite accurately.  I wanted a copy of Spike Milligan’s latest war memoirs which were called “Rommel?” “Gunner Who?” and which was brand new out.  That came out in 1974 so I was eleven at the time. 

I got the book.  It was funny but didn’t last long.  I needed something else to read.  Mum dug in a cupboard and came out with a thick battered paperback – ‘The Dice Man’ by Luke Rhinehart.  I don’t know how this book came to be in that cupboard.  Nobody in our house had ever read that book, that’s for sure.  If Mum had only read the blurb on the back, she would never have given it to me.  That blurb on the back was so misogynistic and sexually explicit that I would even not be comfortable reproducing the text here although I remember it word-for-word.

So there was me, in my sick bed, aged eleven, reading The Dice Man and quite enjoying it.  It was rude and wrong and overly-educational but I soaked it up and moved on.

The big problem was what to do with it after I was finished with it and feeling better.  Should I have handed it back to Mum, say, “Thanks, that was great.”

Hardly.

In the end, I wrapped the book in a plastic bag, took a spade, and buried the little package in the back garden, behind the old shed.  The limerick book went there too some time after.  Thankfully, that marked the end of my book-burying career.

So maybe I have given my kids the gift of reading – I hope so.  What I won’t be giving them any time soon is the gift of adult reading.

They’ll probably be a little behind me in that respect.

I can live with that.

Charity Shop Stalwarts

I love browsing the books in Charity Shops.

It satisfies my occasional requirement for retail therapy. I can march happily home with some books under my arm having only spent a couple of quid.

It’s interesting to me, though, how some of the same books keep cropping up again and again no matter what charity shop I happen to venture into.


It’s funny, isn’t it?

Mind you, it probably doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out. Everybody gets the more popular books but not everybody keeps them, thus these books end up on the Oxfam shelves more often.

Easy.

It’s just I can’t help but think that there might be a more useful analysis of this phenomenon which could reveal deeply hidden patterns and teach us much about the undercurrents of the society we live in.

‘Bullshit’, I hear you cough into your fist and who am I to argue? So rather than trying to solve society's ills, let’s just look at some of these books which are charity shop stalwarts. Perhaps you can add one or two of you own to my list and then we at least will have a useful document for when the great social research finally begins…

… or not, as the case may be.

The Da Vinci Code: It’s always there, usually in multiple versions. I read this book in its entirety on a train journey to and from Dublin one day. Crass, yes, simplistic, yes but I kept flicking the pages and the chapters kept rolling one into the next. I know people who reckon this is the best read ever. Good luck to them. I don’t want to sound pretentious though, I enjoyed it on the day.

Angela’s Ashes: Frank McCourt sadly died recently. His Pulitzer Prize winning book must have sold to every household in Ireland so it’s probably no wonder that copies abound. It’s actually an excellent book in my opinion, written with a clarity that I often envy. I got the opportunity to ask Frank a question once and, thankfully, I was brave enough to ask the silliest question because as it turned out, all the theories I had read were quite wrong. “Why,” sez I, “is it called ‘Angela’s Ashes’?” The posh theorists had it that the title referred to the metaphorical ashes of the mother’s life or perhaps the ashes she received on her forehead in the church during the Ash Wednesday ceremonies.

Nah! Much more practical than that.

Frank explained that the book had originally been twice as long and ended with Angela’s Ashes being returned to Ireland for burial. When the book got spilt into two volumes (the second called ‘Tis) they kept the title for the first part even though the event it referred to didn’t turn up until the end of the second one. It’s on the charity bookshelf if you want to read it, you can count on that.

James Bond: There’s always a Bond book. Not only that there’s always one of those old Pan versions of the bond books. I always check in case there’s a first edition but that hasn’t happened yet. I did buy a first edition of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (yes, the American version) in hardback in Oxfam last year but it turned out to be the fifth reprinting of the first edition so it wasn’t the goldmine I thought it was. Ah well…

Agatha Christie: They all did it you know! Never mind….

Catherine Cookson: She’s always in there. I can’t tell you anything about them, I think there are bodices and I think they get ripped. You’re on your own from there, I’m afraid.

Captain Correlli’s Mandolin: I hear it gets really quite good, if you can get into it a bit. Like beyond the first hundred pages. But I never could. I think it was actually me who gave this one to the Charity Shop, so that explains that.

Inspector Morse: There are always a few of Colin Dexter’s archetypal detective. I really like these. They are written with a lovely sense of mischief. Try one if you haven’t. They’re good.

So, can you add to my list?

All donations will be gratefully received.