December 21, 2009

A great big teapot all sizzling and piping hot

“And now”– here he suddenly looked less grave– “here is something for the moment for you all!” and he brought out (I suppose from the big bag at his back, but nobody saw him do it) a large tray containing five cups and saucers, a bowl of lump sugar, a jug of cream, and a great big teapot all sizzling and piping hot. Then he cried out, “A Merry Christmas! Long live the true King!” and cracked his whip and he and the reindeer and the sledge and all were out of sight before anyone realised that they started.”– from C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

December 21, 2009

On The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Though I suspect my aversion to all things science-fiction/ fantasy might be genetic, I can also trace it to having to watch a cartoon version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe during one rainy indoor recess back in grade one. That witch, the way one character spoke about “strangers in these woods”, what a strangely terrifying thing is whatever is “turkish delight”, and then when they cut the lion’s mane off! I remember it all vividly, and with such a frisson of horror (and don’t even get me started on the indoor recess where we watched The Neverending Story and the horse drowning in the quicksand).

I’ve had a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe sitting on my shelf for a while now, and this weekend I finally got around to reading it. Because it’s a children’s classic, and you can’t judge a book based upon a cartoon adaptation you watched when you were six (as the adage goes). And I can see why I was creeped out all those years ago, but I did enjoy it and will pass it along to Harriet to read when she is bigger. Christian allegory or not, it was an absorbing story, I loved the role of the Professor who confirms that Narnia is not just the children’s fantasy, the obtrusive narrator, the complicating nature of Edmund’s treachery, connections to Lewis Carroll and Wonderland, and idea of a world where it is always winter and never Christmas (which sounds a little like February).

It was an absorbing story indeed. If I were ever to give advice on how to start a novel, I’d advise a writer to have a character discover a secret world (“ok, I’m intrigued), explore it, and very quickly return back and then discover the world’s portal has shut (“ok, I’m reading this book to the end now just to figure out what this is all about”). It’s a double-bait, and it’s excellent.

I’m also now thinking much about book titles that are itemized lists of what the book contains. There are plenty with one item, many with two, but how many others with three items? (Off the top of my head, I can only think of an old YA book called Maudie, Me and the Dirty Book.) Such a title would hardly be inspired, would it? Though alliteration certainly works in its favour here.

I don’t imagine I’ll be reading further chronicles of Narnia, because not being a small child, I’ve come to these books much too late. But I’m glad I finally read this one, particularly in order to discover that (SPOILER ALERT) Aslan doesn’t die!! Or he is reincarnated, or… something. I don’t know how I missed that during Indoor Recess. Perhaps I was so traumatized by him being shorn of his mane that I missed the rest of the film? Nevertheless, I was much relieved by this happy ending.

December 18, 2009

Books in Motion #1

I’ve long maintained that contrary to all signs of doom, people are reading all the time and everywhere. And now, in the tradition of the late, great Seen Reading, I want to drive that point home with a record of good books I see being read out and about. These are signs of hope, you see, these books in use. And today was the middle aged woman in the subway, white with brown hair, wearing a bulky winter coat (and weren’t we all?) reading a battered copy of Who Do You Think You Are? So there. Now doesn’t that make you feel better?

December 18, 2009

Why a bias towards fiction is essential

Douglas Hunter’s recent article on readers’ bias toward fiction made me consider that literary non-fiction benefits from a reading public hungry for Wayne Rooney’s autobiographical volumes, Sarah Palin’s memoir, Eat Pray Love, The Secret, that book about the world’s worst dog, Skinny Bitch Bun in the Oven, and Mitch Albom no more than literary fiction does. In fact, literary non-fiction (which, according to Hunter, is usually about ice and written by men called Ken) probably ends up worse off, because “literary non-fiction” is not a term so flung around anyway, and most of us fictionish folks do imagine the Kens basking out there in the glow of bestsellerdom, along with Mitch Albom. Non-fiction sells; everybody knows that, and we’ve just never cared to break it down any further.

Hunter’s point that literary non-fiction gets short shrift is a valid one then, but I felt Canada Reads as his target was strangely misdirected. The point of Canada Reads is the novel, so it’s unsurprising that a word of non-fiction has never been included. Perhaps that a similar campaign does not exist for non-fiction makes more sense to consider, and Hunter does go on to show the underwhelming amount of attention paid to the Governor General Literary Award’s non-fiction nominees as opposed to the fiction, or to the Charles Taylor Prize compared to the Gillers.

But it is here that I want to stand up and state the importance of Canada Reads being about fiction, and the importance of fiction in general. Because there are certain instances in which a book is not just a book, and I think that a remarkable novel is one of them. There is an exercise in imagination necessary for fiction that non-fiction does not require, which is not to say that the latter is inferior, but rather that the effect of a group of people reading the former is a far more powerful thing. Reading not necessarily to learn, not to be transported to a place that has ever existed, sans political or cultural agenda (most ideally), to conjure a world that has been created out of air… and words. A book that exists for the sake of itself.

I think it’s important that if as a nation we’re to read just one book that that book be a novel. Perhaps my bias toward the authenticity of fiction is showing, but it has more potential to take us places together. One nation, one book, and that one novel will be a different book for everyone doesn’t matter any less, for that’s the very point of it.

December 17, 2009

Our Menagerie

This morning at the library, I was excited to find a book called Animals in My House. “Finally,” I thought, “a book that Harriet will be able to relate to.” How disappointed was I then, when I discovered the book was about domestic animals, exclusively pets? And does anybody know a book we can use to help explain to our daughter the mice under the floors, the squirrel in the wall, spiders on the bathroom ceiling and that family of raccoons outside the door? Or is this just a board book begging to be written?

December 16, 2009

The Post

If I had to pick just one thing about the English novel, I don’t think I could, but if pressed to pick five things, one of them would have to be the post. Much in the same way that cell phones are pivotal to contemporary plotting, the British postal system is essential to the 20th century Englist novel. As are teacups, spinsters, knitting, seaside B&Bs, and the vicar, or maybe I’ve just been reading too much Barbara Pym, but the mail is always coming and going– have you noticed that? Someone is always going out to post a letter, or writing a letter that never gets posted, or a posted letter goes unreceived, or remains unopened on the hall table.

My day is divided into two: Before Post and After Post. BP is the morning full of expectation, anticipation, and (dare I?) even hope. AP is either a satisfying pile on the kitchen table, or acute disappointment with fingers crossed for better luck tomorrow. In my old house I was in love with the mailman, but that love remained unrequited because I was in grad school then and he only ever saw me wearing track pants. When we lived in Japan, I once received a parcel addressed to me with only my name and the name of the city where we lived (and humiliated myself and was given a sponge, but that’s another story.) When we lived in England, the post arrived two times a day and even Saturday, but the only bad thing was that when I missed a package, I had to take a bus out to a depot in another town.

All of which is to say that I love mail as an institution, as much as I love sending or receiving it. I once met a woman who told me that her husband was a mailman (though she called him a “letter-carrier”, I’m not sure if there’s most dignity in that), and I think she was taken aback when I almost jumped into her arms.

So when I read this piece in the LRB by a Royal Mail employee regarding the recent British mail strike, I had mixed feelings. I was troubled by the bureaucratic nightmare that is the Royal Mail of late, the compromise that comes from profit as the bottom line, the explanation of how Royal Mail is part-privatized already, their focus on the corporate customer. “Granny Smith doesn’t matter anymore,” this piece ends with, and they’re not talking about apples, but instead their Regular Joseph(ine) customers. Those of us whose ears perk up at the sound of mail through the letterbox, at the very sound of the postman’s footfall on the steps.

I took some heart, however, from the article’s point that it is a falsehood that “figures are down”. “Figures are down” appears to be corporate shorthand to justify laying off workers, increasing workloads, eliminating full time contracts, pensions etc. Apparently the Royal Mail brass has no experience on the floor, they’re career-managers (and they’ve probably got consultants) who come up with ingenious ways to show that “figures are down”. Mail volume, for example, used to be measured by weight, but now it’s done by averages. And during the past year, Royal Mail has “arbitrarily, and without consultation” been reducing the number of letters in the average figures. According to the writer, “This arbitrary reduction more than accounts for the 10 per cent reduction that the Royal Mail claims is happening nationwide.”

So yes, none of this good news about the state of labour or capitalism, but what I like is this part: “People don’t send so many letters any more, it’s true. But, then again, the average person never did send all that many letters. They sent Christmas cards and birthday cards and postcards. They still do. And bills and bank statements and official letters from the council or the Inland Revenue still arrive by post; plus there’s all the new traffic generated by the internet: books and CDs from Amazon, packages from eBay, DVDs and games from LoveFilm, clothes and gifts and other items purchased at any one of the countless online stores which clutter the internet, bought at any time of the day or night, on a whim, with a credit card.”

This is hope! I do love letters, namely reading collections of them in books (and particularly if they’re written by Mitfords), but I’ll admit to not writing many of them. My love of post is not so much about epistles, but about the postal system itself. A crazy little system to get the most incidental objects from here to there. I like that I can lick an envelope, and it can land on a Japanese doorstep within the week. I like receiving magazines, and thank you notes, and party invitations, and books I’ve ordered, and Christmas presents, and postcards. I like that in the summer, Harriet received a piece of mail nearly every single day.

And I really love Christmas cards. Leah McLaren doesn’t though, because she gets them from her carpet cleaner and then feels bad because she doesn’t send any herself. I manage to free myself from such compunction by sending them out every single year, and in volumes that could break a tiny man’s back. Spending enough on stamps to bring on bankruptcy, but I look upon this as I look upon book-buying– doing my part to keep an industry I love thriving (or less dying). Yesterday, I posted sixty (60!) Christmas cards, though I regret I can no longer say to every continent except Africa. Because my friend Kate no longer lives in Chile, but my friend Laura is still working at the very bottom of the world so we’ve still got Antarctica, which is remarkable at any rate.

I love Christmas cards. I send them because I’ve got aunts and uncles and extended family that I never see, but I want them to know that they mean something to me anyway. And it does mean something, however small that gesture. These connections matter, these people thinking of us all over the world. Having lived abroad for a few years, I’ve also got friends in far-flung places, and without small moments of contact like this, it would be difficult to keep them. It’s impossible to maintain regular contact with everybody we know and love, but these little missives get sent out into the world, like a nudge to say, “I’m here if you need me.”

I also send them because I’ve got these people in my life that I’m crazy about, and I want to let them know as much. Particularly in a year like this when friends and family have so rallied ’round– let it be written that it all meant the world to me, then stuck in an envelope and sealed with a stamp.

But mostly (and here I confess), I write Christmas cards because people send them back to me. I’ve never once received as many as I send, but the incomings are pretty respectable nonetheless. I love that most December days BP, I’ve got a good chance of red envelopes arriving stacked thick as a doorstop. And if not today, there will be at least one card tomorrow. I love receiving photos of my friends’ babies, and updates on friends and family we don’t hear from otherwise, and the good news and the hopeful news, and just to know that so many people were thinking of us. We display them over our fireplace hanging on a string. It is a bit like Valentines in elementary school, a bit like a popularity contest, but if you were as unpopular as I was in elementary school, you’d understand why strings and strings of cards are really quite appealing.

I love it all. That there are people in places all over the world, and they’re sticking stuff in mailboxes
pillared or squared, and that stuff will get to us. That at least one system in the universe sort of almost works, and that I’ve even got friends. And then– this is most important– what would the modern English novel be without it?

December 15, 2009

Bits and pieces

I’ve got some good stuff in the works here, but I need a day or two for polishing before it’s posted, so please bear with a little list of links instead of actual content. Oh, and also know that Canada Reads: Independently will be unveiled in the coming days. And further, that I just finished reading The Killings at Badger’s Drift by Caroline Graham, which was the first Midsomer Murders book. I only read it to uncover Barnaby lore, but I enjoyed it. Realize I’m lazy at mysteries though, refraining from trying to put the pieces together myself. You know that chapter where the detective knows who did it, lays all the cards out on the table and his subordinate (and the reader) are expected to draw their own conclusions? I don’t even bother. Puzzles make my brain hurt. I read these books for the plotting, so I’m hardly going to stop and think when I can flip over to the next page. I also read An Education by Lynn Barber, which I highly recommend. Less sensational than I’d been led to believe, but a wonderful record of a somewhat unconventional career in journalism.

Today at the Advent Books Blog, I recommend Cynthia Flood’s The English Stories. I loved this list of Books my toddler loves for no good reason that I can work out. Canada Reads’ official blogger defends the books selected for this year. The TNQ Cover story. And in case you missed it, Rebecca Rosenblum announces her second book.

December 14, 2009

Carol Shields: Evocation and Echo

I once wrote a story in response to Carol Shields’ story “Scenes” (from Various Miracles). The story was rather niftily structured as a “prose glosa” around four lines of Shields’ story, and I fell completely in love with it. I submitted it only once for publication, however, receiving a rejection remarking upon how Shields’ prose next to my prose only made clear that I was no Carol Shields. And that was sort of devastating, of course, though it was nothing I didn’t know already.

There is something about Carol Shields, though. How her death seems to have left a conversation hanging, unfinished in the air. How impossible it seems to consider her work, and that we’ll have no more of it. And this is the reason I’ve been so eager to get my mitts on anything that’s been published about her since she died– Eleanor Wachtel’s book Random Illuminations, Blanche Howard’s letters A Memoir of Friendship. To discover more about Shields is to gain deeper access to the work she left behind. This is also the reason why I so enjoyed using her work as a starting point for my own story. And all of this not just because we don’t want her literary life to be finished, but rather because her literature is such that it never will be– begging to be reread, picked apart and put back together, toyed with, read again, examined from a different angle, a few years down the line. With Carol Shields’ signature generosity, she’s created a legacy that refuses to be left alone.

Carol Shields: Evocation and Echo is a collection of reader responses to Shields and her work. Edited by Aritha van Herk and Conny Steenman-Marcusse and published throught the Association for Canadian Studies in the Netherlands, the responses range from critical takes on Shields’ work and her feminism, to fiction and poetry using her work as a springboard. Susan Swann writes from the point of view of Mary Swann regarding Shields as her creator; one of my favourite pieces “Moving On” by Charlotte Sturgess has one of Shields’ creations reporting to a rather inspired fictional bureaucracy called the Character Complaints Office; several writers created fictional amalgams of ideas presented in Shields’ incredible collection Various Miracles, Alex Ramon advances the story of Larry Weller. Typical for a writer for whom the domestic and professional were so closely linked, two of Shields’ daughter make appearences. Friends and associates have presented eulogies, some of which were first published in newspapers around the time of Shields’ death.

As with my little prose glosa, a response to Carol Shields is a long way from Carol Shields, but these “evocations and echoes” are still very effective– her spirit is evoked in these pieces, and her work opened wider by the echoes they’ve inspired. I particularly appreciated the European focus, writers and scholars who put a different spin on Shields than I’m used to, examining her outside of the Canadian Literature context. This curious scrapbook is a tribute to the engagingness of the work of Carol Shields, and a celebration of readers and reading.

December 12, 2009

A masterful essay by Rachel Cusk on women's writing

Rachel Cusk’s “Shakespeare’s Daughters” is a masterful essay on women, women writers and women’s writing. I’ve just read it and feel blown away by the craft of it, how she has articulated a muddle of thoughts that have been clouding my head for years. I urge you to read it in its entirety, and I’ve also copied some excerpts below:

“The future, of course, never comes: it is merely a projection from the present of the present’s frustrations. In the 80 years since Woolf published A Room of One’s Own, aspects of female experience have been elaborated on with commendable candour, as often as not by male writers. A book about war is still judged more important than a book about “the feelings of women”. Most significantly, when a woman writes a book about war she is lauded: she has eschewed the vast unlit chamber and the serpentine caves; there is the sense that she has made proper use of her room and her money, her new rights of property. The woman writer who confines herself to her female “reality” is by the same token often criticised. She appears to have squandered her room, her money. It is as though she has been swindled, or swindled herself; she is the victim of her own exploitation….

It may be, then, that the room of one’s own does not have quite the straightforward relationship to female creativity that Woolf imagined. She, after all, had by dint of circumstance always had a room and money of her own, and perhaps being the eternal conditions of her own writing they seemed to her indispensable. Yet she admits that the two female writers she unequivocally admired – Jane Austen and Emily Brontë – wrote in shared domestic space. The room, or the lack of it, doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with writing at all. It could be said that every woman should have a room of her own. But it may equally be the case that a room of her own enables the woman writer to shed her links with femininity and commit herself to the reiteration of “masculine values”. The room itself may be the embodiment of those values, a conception of “property” that is at base unrelated to female nature….

Some of the most passionate writing in The Second Sex concerns the ways in which women seek to protect their privileges and property under patriarchy by condemning or ridiculing the honesty of other women. This remains true today: woman continues to act as an “instrument of mystification” precisely where she fears and denies her own dependence. For the woman writer this is a scarifying prospect. She can find herself disowned in the very act of invoking the deepest roots of shared experience. Having taken the trouble to write honestly, she can find herself being read dishonestly. And in my own experience as a writer, it is in the places where honesty is most required – because it is here that compromise and false consciousness and “mystification” continue to endanger the integrity of a woman’s life – that it is most vehemently rejected. I am talking, of course, about the book of repetition, about fiction that concerns itself with what is eternal and unvarying, with domesticity and motherhood and family life. The sheer intolerance, in 2009, for these subjects is the unarguable proof that woman is on the verge of surrendering important aspects of her modern identity.”

December 11, 2009

On book club questions

I enjoyed this Guardian blog entry about why “back matter” in novels (author q&a, book club questions, suggested reading lists etc.) is “a waste of space”. I’ve actually found some of this content worthwhile in my reading, but usually just author interviews or a list of the author’s favourite books. In general, however, I skip over the stuff, and in particular when it’s questions for book clubs.

Here’s what I don’t understand about book club questions– doesn’t the fact that someone else had to come up with them undermine your reading of the book in the first place? Surely if you read in an engaged fashion, you should be able to come up with your own? And if you aren’t engaged enough to do so, that’s either a discussion in itself or your book club is reading the wrong books?

In her blog piece, Imogen Russell Williams makes a good case for how limiting back-of-the-book book club questions can be– one discussion topic requires readers to argue a particular take on an ambiguous ending, undermining the fact that the ambiguity itself is pretty remarkable. It seems these discussion questions seek to nail a book down rather than open it up wide, and therefore I can understand how such discussions could certainly be less than scintillating.

I’d probably quit that book club.