The Hammond House prize announces its results on a local (Lincolnshire) arts channel which they call ‘Billboard. This year they did a little montage of entrants, including me, introducing themselves. You can see it here, me at 8:50.
Last year I placed third, one of my best ever results, so it would probably be greedy to hope for anything this year.
I was reviewing the rules for the Southport writing competition and I see they include the advice ‘Titles should be both appropriate and interesting.’ Who’d a thunk it, eh? No wonder my strategy of using titles that are both irrelevant and boring isn’t paying off.
Then I tried to come up with the most tedious title I could think of, and it is strangely difficult. A List of my Socks – no, somehow you start wondering about these items of footwear. Are they alphabetised or sorted by colour? The old Beachcomber column used to publish extracts from the List of Huntingdonshire Cabmen. In a televised version they got, I think Ralph Richardson to read them, and they were gripping.
What about Some Dream I had once – no, I’m interested already, even though other people’s dreams are notoriously tedious and dreams are a terrible plot deflator. Or Common Houseware Problems – the trouble is that with a title like that, you automatically suspect the author of slyly concealing a very uncommon narrative. The truly boring title has to sound sincere but be utterly colourless. In the end the best I could come up with was A Tale, which seems blandly uninviting. On reflection I thought I could go one better with A Further Tale, which adds the dispiriting hint that you’ve probably already missed any good bits. But I can still imagine glancing at it. So somehow I’m just not getting the real nadir of off-putting boredom.
Here’s my look at writing contests I’m thinking of entering next month.
I got an honourable mention for my story ‘New Troy’ in the Literary Taxidermy competition! This is an unusual competition where you have to take the first and last sentences of a novel (Brave New World in this case) and fill in the gap with a new story.
A building that fills a whole world; an endless sequence of halls, all filled with statues. Here and there the sea has broken in and flooded or destroyed some of the great marble figures and massive stairways. And here lives one resourceful man who has contrived to live off fish, befriending the albatross and other birds who also live here. He is not quite alone. He regularly meets the Other, a man in smart suits, and together they try to obtain powerful magic. The Other jokingly calls him ‘Piranesi’; he knows this not his real name but does not mind. Piranesi believes there are probably only fifteen people in the world; the rest are all skeletons that he cares for respectfully.
This is the new novel from Susanna Clarke that we fans of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell have been waiting for so eagerly. We had The Ladies of Grace Adieu to keep us going, but nothing more substantial. Are we satisfied?
Well, the new novel is not a sequel, and as we eventually discover, it is set in the twenty-first century. There are no delightful footnotes, and it is relatively short. However, it clearly comes from the same imagination as Strange and Norrell. There are no fairies, but the underlying conception of magic as a dialogue with the powers of Nature is still here. The fascination with (the real) Piranesi’s bizarre architectural fantasies is obviously here, too. Even if our hero were not given the tell-tale nickname we should recognise that these halls owe something to the dream-like images of the Italian architect and artist, though for many readers they will call up faint echoes of Borges’ total library, too. These visions presumably shaped the King’s Roads in Strange and Norrell and explicitly provide the design for the tremendous Thoresby Bridge in Grace Adieu. There are some other signs of kinship with Strange and Norrell. We might say (slight spoiler) that both books feature a resourceful black man with a false friend who inadvertently inherits an enchanted realm.
One of Clarke’s great achievements in Strange and Norrell was to provide a really satisfying conception of magic which chimed well with folklore yet got everything to make sense. Here we don’t quite get that. Piranesi’s world is explained, partly by a kind of guru who seems to be a cross between Julian Jaynes and Aleister Crowley; but there’s a certain amount of handwaving involved. In some ways I almost feel it would have been better to leave the modern world out of it and simply give Piranesi adventures in his own self-justifying world.
Overall, this isn’t the further volume of Strange and Norrell that many of us would have liked, but it’s a great book and very welcome. More please, more!
Did a reading today at the online launch of the Leicester Writes anthology, featuring my story ‘The Reddifers’. Here are the shortlisted folk waving their copies.
Seen and Done 