A shit book cover, yesterday.

As part of my lifelong project to become well-read before the end of it, I read Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence.  I had not read any Lawrence before, so I thought I perhaps ought to.  In the sixties, what with the Lady Chatterley trial and the Ken Russell film of Women in Love, reading Lawrence was quite the done thing.  These days, you don’t see it happening so much (although I’m sure it still happens behind closed doors), and you can read Cormac McCarthy and people will still think you’re clever.

While Lady Chatterley’s Lover is his most famous work due its one-time illegal naughtiness, I am reliably informed that it’s nowhere near his best.  Sons and Lovers is considered his first masterwork, on the other hand, and so seemed a good place to start.  To be honest, it wasn’t what I was expecting.  Although, like much of his writing, the book does concern itself with sex, Lawrence had yet to achieve the level of frankness he would later become notorious for.  Rude encounters are instead buried halfway through long dense paragraphs, conveyed in the delicate phrasing that getting published in 1913 no doubt required.

The story itself is pretty simple.  Young man Paul Morel grows up in a mining community near Nottingham where no one says anything nice to anybody ever, but finds he cannot give himself fully to one woman because of his feelings of belonging to his mother.  All rather Freudian, obviously, and also a bit Norman Bates, although Morel’s mother at least has the decency to actually be alive.

The work is also rather obviously semi-autobiographical, with the telltale signs of seemingly superfluous details lingered over, and events one would draw attention to if making things up mysteriously skimmed (I, of course, would never lower myself to such a thing).

We get a real sense of the past being a ‘foreign country’, as L.P. Hartley put it.  With its temperance societies and expected church attendance, the turn-of-the-century working-class mining community is a long way away from anything that it’s possible to know in Britain today.  It takes a fantastically long time for Morel to work out he even ought to be having sex, and even longer to realise he’s having it with the wrong person.  A process that takes years then would take a feral fifteen year old a weekend now.

For a landmark work of modernism, I was surprised by how ‘Victorian’ the language at first appeared to be.  Adverbs fly everywhere with abandon, and if it reminded me of anything, it was the writing of Arnold Bennett, who was exactly the sort of author, according to the Official History of Literature, that Lawrence was meant to have overtaken.

The difference between the two, however, is in the psychology.  In a novel such as The Old Wives’ Tale, Bennett shows how the differing temperaments of two sisters take them down separate paths towards different experiences.  In Sons and Lovers, however, experience (notably that of the mother/son relationship) defines temperament.  In Bennett, characters are born.  In Lawrence, they are made (These days, now we’ve replaced Freudian analysis with theories of the mind that actually make some sort of sense, characters are more or less both born and made).

Overall, I found Sons and Lovers admirable in its sense of purpose and thoroughness in exploring its subject.  It is the ultimate Oedipus Complex novel, in the same way you’re not likely to get a book more about what whaling than Moby-Dick.  It is, however, a pretty severe read.  I couldn’t really say that I  have any warm feelings towards it.

But then, it’s not really a novel for now.  Today, we’re all too keenly aware of how we’re connected to things.  Banks screw up, and we feel the pinch in our pockets.  Our government’s foreign policy decisions increase the level of risk at home.  Lawrence intentionally kept the bigger social picture out of Sons and Lovers, choosing instead to concentrate on analysing the purely personal.  You need calmer times for a novel like that.  Maybe I should have read it in the nineties.

A while back, I wrote a lot of short stories. At first, I was writing them simply to experiment with voices, styles and genres, and see how far I could push myself. After I’d come up with a few, however, it became clear that something bigger was emerging. The stories began to link thematically, and together became a body of work called The Shuffle.

In The Shuffle, connections are made only to fall apart. Order and randomness fight it out for control. The supernatural rubs up against the banal. Some stories are as meticulous as I can make them, while others are left deliberately loose. One’s nearly as long as a short story can be. Another is just one paragraph. It’s a patchwork quilt, as stitched together by a colour-blind lunatic who may or may not have gotten hold of some dangerous hallucinogens.

This summer, I am presenting short stories from The Shuffle on this blog. There’s a catch, however. Once a story has been up for a week, it gets deleted and replaced by the next one.  This is partly so my blog doesn’t get clogged up with short stories, but also hopefully to lend a sense of occasion and urgency to it all.

Why not print out and keep them in a ring-bind folder?

Nicholas Fisk, smoking a pipe, ages ago.

After my recent miserable experience reading Northern Lights by Philip Pullman, compounded by the traumatic memory of the time I found myself in a locked room with only a JK Rowling novel for company, I asked myself the question, ‘Why do people like this shit?  Surely everyone’s just being silly and got it wrong.  I remember children’s books being loads better than this when I was young.’

A children’s author I particularly remembered liking was science fiction writer Nicholas Fisk.  His books still haunted me.  Their concepts, as much as I could recall them, seemed pretty mind-blowing even after all this time.

I resolved to re-purchase all the books of his I remembered reading to see if they were indeed as good as I thought they were then.  If so, I would make it my mission to tackle Rowling/Pullman worship at every turn, and erect statues of Nicholas Fisk outside all the branches of Waterstones in the land.

Now out-of-print, the books popped through my letterbox one at a time as they arrived from various online retailers.  Excitingly, they all had the covers that I remembered them having, and some of them were the same print runs. I was even tempted to renew my membership of the Puffin Club using the coupon at the back.  Anyway, I began to read.

Space Hostages (1967) is the story of a group of kids who are sent into space by a deranged RAF pilot, hoping to save them from nuclear war.  It’s pretty darn exciting stuff, powered along by some excellent characterisation as the brainy kid and the school bully seek to win control of the spacecraft and stop them flying into the sun.  It’s also notable for having a black main character, a rare thing in British kid’s fiction back then.

Trillions (1971) tells a less coherent story, but contains a central idea which is great.  An alien race arrives on Earth that consists of tiny compatible elements.  They fit together and build structures for mysterious purposes.  It’s not often that aliens in kid’s books are truly alien, but they are here.

Grinny (1973) is, I think, Fisk’s most popular book.  In it, an alien robot infiltrates a family in the form of an elderly relative in order to gain information about Earth prior to an invasion.  I’m pretty sure they read this to us in school.  There’s a paragraph about dogs ‘mounting’ that I think they might have skipped over though.

Robot Revolt (1981) features a charismatic religious cult leader who buys a robot servant that, in league with the leader’s children, ultimately seeks to overthrow him.  The sci-fi aspects are a bit ordinary here, but the sheer scariness of the religion more than makes up for that.

On the Flip Side (1983) is the most interesting for me.  A strange, ambiguous tale of communication with animals and parallel dimensions, it contains some pretty harrowing descriptions of society collapsing as animals go mad and inter-dimensional beings invade.  One paragraph in particular, in which a girl telepathically communicates with her dog has stayed with me over the quarter of a century since I read it:

Yes, Duff could still fill her with loves she never felt of her own accord.  The trouble was that these heartfelt loves became sickly and left a taste.  ‘Fondest mistress, worshipful young mistress – I love you, and you love me.’ Followed, of course, by the inevitable anxious question – ‘You do, don’t you?’

Coming back to them, I can see that Fisk’s books do have notable flaws.  Although he will invariably root the stories in a child’s viewpoint, they will often get too big, and the sympathetic protagonist’s perspective will get lost amongst various scientist and military types (this is perhaps why I remember the earlier chapters the best).  Also, his conclusions sometimes feel arbitrary, and in his earlier books, girls are not presented well, interested only in attention and being like the kids on telly, while younger children are possessed by a strange logic incomprehensible from the outside.

Having said that, the books are imaginative, original, haunting and challenging, encouraging children to think about science and the role it plays in the world they are growing up in.  So, all things considered, is Fisk a better writer than Rowling and Pullman?  For me, yes he is. I am off to erect my first statue in his honour.

Budget cuts have no effect on the new series of Doctor Who.

On the eve of a general election that has the potential to change the nature of British democracy forever, my thoughts naturally turn to the latest series of Doctor Who.

This series is notable, of course, for being the first since the resurrection of the programme in 2005 not to have Russell T. Davies at the helm as Head Writer and Executive Producer, and the baton passing instead to Steven Moffat.

This change was anticipated with some excitement by many fans because, although the Russell T. Davies era had many strengths, with some cracking stories, ideas and characters, the flaws were far from negligible, and inescapably the result of Davies’ storytelling style and attitude to narrative.

As Head Writer, Davies was responsible for a significant number of the episodes himself, as well as dictating the overall story arc.  The problem was that, of the excellent team of writers that he had assembled, Davies was by far the weakest.  Consequently, watching Doctor Who was often a bit like buying a Rolling Stones album only to find all of Side One having been written by Bill Wyman.

At the end of a Davies story, myself and many others would be left with the sense of violated trust.  It was as if we had placed ourselves in the hands of someone who’d promised he wouldn’t let us fall, only to be dropped from a great height.  Basic tenets of storytelling were ignored.  Leading characters would become weirdly passive, just because it suited the story for them to be that way.  Meanwhile, the character of Donna (played by Catherine Tate) had her memory wiped, meaning that all the development in her that we had followed over the preceding weeks was rendered irrelevant.  Ultimately, storytelling is all about watching people change through experience.  You mess with that, and you’re effectively sticking two fingers up at your audience.

Alongside all this, the Davies era became increasingly turgid, with David Tennant’s Doctor  so weighted down with the pain of his responsibility and guilt to the point that he was just a chore to be around, repeatedly dwelling on the same problems week in, week out.  The promise of Moffat, and with him a new Doctor, Matt Smith, seemed to be just what was needed.

Moffat came with an impressive CV.  He’d been behind the landmark teen series Press Gang, the good-if-you’re-into-that-sort-of-thing ‘British Friends’, Coupling, and the excellent horror reimagining of Jekyll, as well as some of the very best Who episodes of the Davies era.  And in many ways, his version of Who doesn’t disappoint.  The first episode felt very fresh indeed, and even the weakest story since hasn’t felt like a kick in the shins in the way that bad Davies often did.

Hand on heart, however, I don’t think I can say that he’s quite managed to provide the programme with the new direction that I and other fans deep down know it needs.  There are still some lingering issues that mar otherwise perfectly decent stories, and stop Doctor Who from all it can be.

Here are the things I feel need addressing.

1) Action set-pieces.  The series introduced the Doctor with him hanging out of a malfunctioning Tardis as it flew over London.  CGI now allows the BBC to stage scenes that would once have only ever featured in Hollywood movies.  This diminishes the character.  The key to the Doctor is that he is absolutely unique in the world of fiction.  If you can imagine anybody else doing the things he does, then the programme is not being true to itself.  You could have had a similar scene with Inspector Gadget or any other madcap character who uses technology.  Doctor Who is not Inspector Gadget.

2.  The Doctor’s awareness of his own legend.  At the end of the first episode, the Doctor scares off the alien menace by informing it of his past victories.  This is tiresome.  The charm of the Doctor Who universe used to be its very lack of coherence.  Although, logically, news of the Doctor should precede him, the fact that it didn’t meant that he always served as an unexpected factor thrown into a situation.  The bad guys should win, but don’t, because the Doctor turns up.  Take away this, and you just have another fantasy adventure series with a load of intertwining strands like Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (good though that was).  Doctor Who needs to protect its boundaries, and maintain what is unique about it.

3. Wasting good ideas in too-short stories.  Both the second and third episodes of this series suffered from this.  ’The Beast Below’ had a fascinating future Britain on a spaceship, the intricacies of which were never explained (Why, for instance, were the fairground heads in the cases there in the first place).  ’Victory of the Daleks’ meanwhile completely threw away its brilliant idea of the Daleks fighting for Britain in WWII.  This could have run over three episodes, with the audience waiting and waiting for the Daleks to turn bad, then all hell breaking loose when they finally do.  Instead, they revealed their evil intentions almost immediately, and the episode just ended up looking rather silly.  The audience needs to be trusted to wait for things.  And if they don’t know how to wait, Doctor Who needs to teach them.  Waiting was what much of the original series was all about, to its credit.

4. Overarching storylines crippling standalone stories.  In this weeks’ ‘Flesh and Stone’, returning villains the Weeping Angels would not have been defeated had the crack in time from episode one appeared and ate them.  This was not the story we were promised.  We were meant to be watching the Doctor defeating them using his own ingenuity.  Instead he just manouvres them into place and feeds them to the metanarrative (Even though this episode was popular, I think it was a mistake to bring back the Weeping Angels.  They would survive in the memory better if their only appearance was in the classic ‘Blink’.  There was nothing gained by elaboration.)

5. Companions fancying the Doctor.  Amy Pond’s efforts to seduce the Doctor at the end of this week’s episode were beyond painful, and not in a good way.  Doctor Who is, at heart, a children’s programme, even though it’s audience contains a healthy slab of adults, as it always has.  If it forgets it’s a children’s programme, however, it instantly stops working.

The companions, even though they are adults, are stand-ins for the child viewer, who can imagine themselves travelling through time and space with the Doctor, who is always in some way a manifestation of the original ‘grandfather’ Doctor of William Hartnell.  Unless they’re downright freaks, kids don’t fancy their grandfather, however dapper objectively they think he might look.  Instinct should tell them he’s off-limits.  Again, although it doesn’t make sense that the Doctor’s companions become weirdly asexual as soon as they step on board the Tardis, it’s another thing that makes Doctor Who itself.  If you mess with it, then the programme becomes just like other programmes, at which point it stops being interesting.  There’s no point deconstructing something if all you’re left with are a bunch of broken parts that don’t fit together anymore.

6. No Adric.  I was very upset by Adric ‘dying’ in 1982, and have never fully accepted it.  I don’t believe he’s really dead, and should be brought back forthwith, complete with his star badge he got for being really good at maths.

With all these elements fixed, I firmly believe that Doctor Who will transcend Chocky’s Children to become the best science-fiction show EVER.  Make it so.

We are as gods. Bow down and worship us, puny humans.

Recently I got official confirmation of something that I’ve pretty much known for quite a long time.  That is, I have the Autistic Spectrum Condition called Asperger’s Syndrome.

I’m not particularly big on posting personal details on the internet, as you can attract all sorts of idiots that way (I, for instance, have never publicly revealed the existence of my miniature Schnauzer, Poppy, and don’t intend to) but feel like making a little statement about this for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, I think it’s a relevant context for understanding my writing, both published and yet-to-be-published, and if I waited for everyone to figure it out for themselves it would take bloody forever (although someone’s already cracked the code).

Secondly, it seems to me that the more that’s found out about Asperger’s, the clearer it is that the ways in which it can manifest itself can be quite subtle (although the effect it has on someone’s life, positive or negative, is rarely if ever negligible).  The internet is rife with rumours that public figures like Woody Allen, Al Gore, Steven Spielberg and Prince have Asperger’s or a related condition, but if any ever get a diagnosis, they choose not to reveal it (give or take a Ladyhawke or two).

So I suppose the point I’m making is that the reality of Asperger’s goes beyond the current basic public understanding of it.  Many of us aren’t maths geniuses, and we’re not necessarily being socially inappropriate on public transport (although I reserve the right to do so at any time).  Asperger’s logic can be an integral part of creative thought and artistic expression.  You can also be a good friend, partner, parent, family member.  It’s a difference that contains within it many variations.

Now some of the more mean-spirited out there might look up from their Daily Mail and say, ‘Oh, everybody’s got Asperger’s these days.  You’re just trying to be fashionable and get away with stuff, like that hacker bloke.’

My response to this would be, firstly, ‘fuck off’.

My second response would be that Asperger’s Syndrome has only been available as an official diagnosis in the UK for less than 20 years, and has only entered the public consciousness relatively recently.  Consequently, there are many thousands of people out there of all ages who have gone through their entire lives knowing something’s not quite ‘right’ but are only now stumbling upon a framework for understanding themselves that makes sense.  That’s why it seems that ‘everybody’s got it’ at the moment.

Anyway, there’s a few more things I have to say about the matter, but I shall save them for another time.  Until then, I shall be doing really complicated sums in my head whilst behaving inappropriately on public transport.

It was a Christmas present.

Despite being an absolutely enormous hit, there’s something about Victoria Hislop’s The Island that no one seems to have noticed. This being, that it’s completely barking bad. This perhaps shouldn’t come as much as a shock, winner as it was by the Richard and Judy Summer Read Competition. After all, their viewers have yet to notice that Richard Madeley is also completely barking mad.

It’s a Frankenstein’s Monster of a book, with the history of the Spinalonga leper colony off of Crete in the middle years of the last century brutally welded on to a family melodrama beach-read involving sibling rivalry, adultery and, oh yes, leprosy. Also thrown into the mix is a bit of World War II and a truly ludicrous framing device in which a twenty-something woman seeks to resolve her romantic dilemma by seeking inspiration through the uncovering of her family’s secret leper past.

There’s a lot wrong with The Island. The plot, which is just about visible if you stand at a distance, often builds to anti-climaxes, such as a rampaging mob who plan to attack the leper colony, only to be talked out of it. They threaten to come back, but don’t. So that’s all right then.

Hislop, meanwhile, has a tin ear for a beautiful phrase, so we’re confronted with sentences like this (and on page one too), ‘How different that would make it from the ancient palaces and sites she had spent the past few weeks, months – even years – visiting.’ She’s been visiting the sites for years. That’s the information that needs to be conveyed, so why bring weeks and months into it? Oh dear.

The characters are flat, good or bad simply because they are, and what motivations they have are laid out for the reader the moment that they become a factor in the story. I don’t think there’s a single thing inferred, or left open to interpretation in the entire book. If I didn’t know better, I’d assume that Hislop thinks her readers might be a bit thick.

Despite all this, however, the sheer ridiculousness of the exercise means that The Island isn’t an unlikable book. It’s not really a story about characters so much as one about a community, although I’m not sure that it knows this. In a way, it reminded me of John Cowper Powys’s Weymouth Sands, an even stranger book written by a very strange man.

Indeed, I can’t help wishing that rather than being the work of a travel journalist wife of a well-connected media type, The Island was written by a dotty lady resident of a bed and breakfast on Eastbourne seafront. It isn’t, but one can dream.

The other week, presumably in an effort to clear the floor dedicated to housing unsold copies of my books at their Pimlico headquarters, Random House sent me yet another box of the trade paperback edition of my first novel, Hound Dog.

I’m not sure what to do with them. I’ve already got one box in the cellar, and there are only so many copies I can try to force through hamster-resembling Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather’s window. I’m beginning to think she’s not interested. Even though I thoughtfully inscribe each one ‘We Shood B 2Getha’ in my own blood. I mean, what’s a guy got to do these days??!!

Anyway, what I’m going to do with the books (Sarah Teather issue is unresolved) is this. If you email me your address, I will send you a SIGNED copy. If you have not read it already, you have my permission to do so. Then, however, you must redistribute in an interesting manner. But here’s the thing. I want photographic evidence of its re-homing, which I can post here on the blog.

For instance, if you were to give it to The Really Wild Show’s Terry Nutkins, it’s not enough to say, ‘Oh, I gave it to Terry Nutkins’. You have to send a photograph of the book being placed in Terry Nutkins’s hand. Whether or not Terry Nutkins is chained up naked in your spare room when this occurs is entirely up to you.

So, just to reiterate: Step 1. Email me. Step 2. Receive book. Step 3. Read book (optional). Step 4. Re-home book AND photographically document this happening. Step 5. Email me photograph, in full knowledge that I’ll piss all over your copyright and reproduce it here.

Well, what are you waiting for? Hop to it, before they send me another box!

Alex Chilton died. He was in a band called Big Star, who were around in the early 70s but didn’t sell many records, and were probably my favourite band when I was seventeen.

I was having trouble negotiating everyday teenage life with an undiagnosed autistic spectrum condition, and their music, listened to on second or third generation tape copies, made perfect sense to me. Their three albums, which would be classified as power-pop, although they transcend any easy definition, seemed to form a perfect trilogy. The first, #1 Record, is optimistic and sunny. It represented for me the life I hoped to attain, but curiously couldn’t get to, due to some mysterious blocks in my head. The second, Radio City, is rawer and more ragged, with Chilton’s co-leader, Chris Bell having departed. Although it still had joyous moments, such as their iconic song September Gurls, a darkness had sunken in. It was as if a realisation that life was harsher and more cruel than they’d previously imagined had now taken hold.

The third album, known as Sister Lovers, or simply Third, and nearly a Chilton solo album in all but name, took this to an extreme. The songs had become strange, and sounded on the verge of falling apart, with gaps in the arrangements that produced a chilling effect. Nevertheless, there was never a descent into nihilism which, in 1993, was what I felt I was being offered by the grunge records someone of my generation was ‘meant’ to buy. Instead I clung to the cautious advice that Chilton offered: ‘Take care not to hurt yourself/Beware of the need for help/You might need too much/And people are such…’

On a wave of interest sparked by Teenage Fanclub and others claiming them as an influence, Chilton fronted a new version of Big Star that year. I saw them live, performing to an adoring audience.

I saw them perform again a couple of years ago, to a roomful of uninterested chattering London hipsters (who I hope are fucking pleased with themselves now), struggling with a bad mix. Now there’ll never be another chance.

Of course, I didn’t really know Alex Chilton, and from the trail of bad feeling he left behind him, I suspect we wouldn’t have got on at all. But when he died, it finally hit me just how important he was to me. I’d forgotten just how much of myself was embedded there, in old copied tapes from 1993.

Big Star on Spotify
#1 Record
Radio City
There are various different orders for the track-listing of Third/Sister Lovers, as the album was never officially sequenced. This is my own personal order that I find produces the most satisfying listen.