Port Sunlight

I have been out of blog action finishing Blacklight, the third Peter Cotton book. The fourth is already started but I have to find a name for it.

So back a while, to the Ellis Peters Historical Award ceremony on the 4^th November. All very civilized and friendly. I had already felt, perhaps from the follow through from Wolf Hall, that it was going to be a Tudor year.

Delighted for Rory Clements and his artist wife Naomi that Revenger won. I had met Rory and Andrew Williams before since we are all John Murray writers. Andrew Taylor was, as always, generous and amiable and I met S J Parris (Stephanie Merritt) for the first time and instantly forgave her for being the same age as my elder daughter. C J Sansom, the runner-up, also with a Tudor book, couldn’t be there. I may be wrong but I think I heard the word flu.

Another reason I felt it was a Tudor year was because we were on the site of Bridewell Palace, Henry VIII’s residence after Westminster Palace burnt down in 1512 and where the papal delegation arrived to discuss the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon.

The reason I know this is because my father worked for many years in the old Unilever building and I remember visiting him along what felt like the dark passages of some Pharaoh’s tomb many years ago.

All that has gone. Inside the façade is a mercifully light filled structure. I went up in a glass lift with someone who said ‘Wasn’t all this built by someone who made soap?’ Not exactly. But there was something about all the glass that induced a sensation not of stepping on the past but of reflected ghosts. There is time and there is space repeatedly occupied and left.

Thanks to everyone there.

Don No

Last Sunday, by chance, I saw a bit of the first James Bond film, Dr No, released forty-eight years ago in 1962. It was, of course, made before Bond became a franchise that multiplied and morphed. The makers were trying it out to see whether or not it would fly with consumers.

My interest was drawn as I realized that I was seeing in historical time, as it were, the film background to the American TV series Mad Men. It had not struck me before just how much the series protagonist, Don Draper, is a version of Sean Connery’s portrayal of Bond as a hard-boiled, long-zipped hero. It’s not just a question of the male hair applications, or the women poured into girdled moulds, but even, despite the difference in accents, down to some intonations.

Dr No links male tradition and female corsetry. Men bear and command; women pour, and just can’t help it if they like a pillar of strength. But it is an escapist fantasy - I was particularly fond of James Bond turning the radioactive level explosively up and then looking for the girl chained into a sloping Angelica position.

Unless you’re a fashionista, Mad Men is less escapist. I think of the series as skilful Balzac for today, but rising from time to time into a stylish existentialism and, just occasionally, into wonderfully scrappy bits that mean living people clash at indecorous, often unknowing levels of deference, self-respect, discomfort and resentment. From that point of view Mad Men is rather sophisticated. I understand the character of Peggy Olsen is, to some extent, based on the female founder of Cosmopolitan magazine. In other words, a boss is not a lover, but may be even more time-consuming and influential. Her narrative danger? Just a little too much of the Ad-woman’s pilgrim’s progress.

But what really struck me is that it is TV series like Mad Men, (and The Sopranos and The Wire) that lead the way in popular narrative terms. Written narrative, though it gradually assumed the cuts associated with film, is still not sharing that freedom and those possibilities.

It may be of course that the audience for written fiction feels happier with more traditional exposition and explanation, but it is probably more to do with the producers’ economic model.

Take, for example, last Wednesday’s episode (in the UK, that is.) in which Peggy casually mentions Margaret Mead. In a book, I suspect the author would need to add ‘the anthropologist’. And very likely ‘author of Coming of Age in Samoa’. The fact is, that by mentioning Margaret Mead, Peggy is misreading male irritation and confusion with a vending machine. She is about to get a crash course in ‘Mating in Manhattan’ and ‘The position of crude innuendo in the work place’, and finds out that solidarity amongst women can lead to being called a ‘humourless bitch’ by another female - the recipient of the original Margret Mead remark.

I am aware that some people, particularly of my mother’s generation, find Mad Men uncomfortable, or even unwatchable. It can seem a very sharp portrait of the extent to which conformity and decorum, and what was regarded as important, look, in retrospect, pointless and trivial and cruel.

Don Draper’s ex-wife, Betsy, would-be but failing model of the supported, supportive and fragrant trophy wife, described his date as ‘at least fifteen’ - reflecting her own emotional age rather than accusing her ex-husband of cradle snatching. ‘He has it all,’ she complained, with considerable envy.

The girl in question, poured exactly into the same hairdo and fashion sense as she is, is a younger clone of herself. With one exception. The young lady made Don ‘comfortable’ before trotting demurely and knowingly back to her dorm.

Yes, at one level it is excruciating. But I’d point to two justifications. It's scalpel sharp. And if anyone thinks this could not be applied to life now, they might like to think again before it’s too late.

Prizewinning

My husband takes solace in the works of David Hume. He finds something reassuring in the great sceptic philosopher’s prose. It is true, of course, as Julian Baggini and others have pointed out, that Hume was pre-soundbite. My husband says the prose is nearly hypnotic, like hearing the click of a verbal abacus.

I tend more to hearing the civilized whirr of a privileged 18^th Century mind – never knowingly oversold, as it were.

Hume is famous on several counts. One is his remarkably brief autobiography, My Own Life. At just ten pages long it is, on one level, anti-Proust – at another, anti much detail at all, once a rigorous process of selection has been applied.

Hume’s life is a literary life. As one of the first, possibly the first, man of letters to make a living from 

writing books (his histories sold more than his philosophical works) he describes what he calls the ‘vanity’ 

 involved in writing an autobiography:  ‘It is difficult for a man to speak long of himself without vanity; 

therefore I shall be short.’ 

This is not all puff. Overegging it a little, he describes, his first work as having fallen ‘still-born’ 

from the press. 

Hume, of course, was not given any literary awards – they are a more recent invention. And of course, they vary. The Nobel Prize, recently given to Mario Vargas Llosa, is big. The Booker, recently given to Howard Jacobsen, is big in Britain.

But there are others. And I have recently been nominated for the Ellis Peter Awards (along with five other writers, two of whom have already won the award before). The Ellis Peters awards are for historical – that is now minus at least 35 years – crime fiction.

My attitude is – I really am very grateful to be nominated at all.

But it has struck me that ‘history’ is a long time. I think my Washington Shadow is the most recent in terms of setting (1945) – three of the shortlisted books are set in Tudor times. All historical novels, of course, reflect the present to a greater or lesser degree. Whether they mention doublets or zoot suits, they all have an angle on now.

And I suppose what I am really saying is that I am increasingly conscious of why the past matters. The attitudes of the nineteen forties in Britain, what I will call the non-funding of sometimes admirable, sometimes over-ambitious things, sticks to us now. For the last sixty years Britain’s efforts to remain a world power but with a degree of social justice have proved … let’s call it expensive.

Good luck – I mean it – to the other short listed writers.

Shortlisted for Ellis Peters Historical Award

I have heard today that Washington Shadow has been shortlisted for the CWA Ellis Peters Award, together with fellow John Murray writers Rory Clements (for Revenger) and Andrew Williams (for To Kill a Tsar), as well as S.J. Parris (for Heresy), C. J. Sansom (for Heartstone) and Andrew Taylor (for The Anatomy of Ghosts)

The results will be announced on 4^th November.

Hold

Many years ago, on reading a poem by W B Yeats for school (see The Tower), something stuck. I became conscious the poet was complaining of age: he had ‘fantastical’ imagination, but what he lacked as an old man was stamina, the ability to hold and sustain the construct that turns imagination into the something people can read and share.

As I say, I made a note of this for future reference. Would I ever, I wondered, given my evident differences from a great poet, experience something similar? And when?

Blogreader, I may just have done so. I have been working hard on one hundred thousand words (Blacklight) and last Sunday, the effort to hold the whole book in mind resulted in, or rather collapsed into, a fantastic image – a vulture perched on an empty skull. I’d guess that image follows on from a sensation of dark, heavy wings at the back on my mind before the old scavenger took over.

It may even be a rather literal take on the word ‘deadline’.

However grandiose the image however, it was simply like the mind turning its own light off. Also known as working too long.

Sleep helped.

It did give me pause however – enough to write this, anyway. As I have said before, I do not read long books when I’m at this stage of writing. And I have been looking at The Original of Laura by Valdimir Nabokov.

Described on the cover as ‘a novel in fragments’, that is precisely what it is. It appears that Nabokov himself wanted it destroyed. I don’t want to get in to whether it should have been published or not. (It should not have been).

What it does show is Nabokov at the end of his life, being sporadically what we think of as ‘Nabokov’ – but it is really more a collection of notes, mnemonics and puzzles, and problems to do a lot of work on and develop.

Nabokov was also a considerable lepidopterist. Rather cruelly, The Original of Laura is like bits of a butterfly with too many legs, missing scales and misplaced antennae - almost a butterfly broken on the wheel before it had become a butterfly.

Romantic? No.

Right at the end of writing a book, even this modest writer is anxious not to lose the energy and stamina needed to make it enjoyable.

Less Is More

On the advice of the marketing department, the title of my new Peter Cotton book, due out next spring, has been changed from ‘London Blacklight’ to Blacklight. Here is the cover.

The setting remains London, of course, but the word Blacklight is, I think, seen as strong enough to stand on its own. Indeed the London part probably weakened it, possibly confused it. There is geography and there is UV light.

At first I was unsure – I had used place in the two previous books, Cádiz and Washington. Didn’t this break the map and pin look to the series?

I was also thinking of helping the kind of reader like my grandmother who had difficulty remembering whether she had or had not read a book because mystery titles do have a tendency to blur. I have some of this myself. Though I have read a few books by Dick Francis I could not, given a list of titles, tell you which ones.

So it has come down to a question of priorities. And one book title at a time. Blacklight it is. Be confident. Less is more.

I haven’t dare mention that some people have said – ‘Do you mean backlight?’

Yes, marketing is pretty tricky.

Elephants and Mice

There is an old story that elephants are afraid of mice. I suspect it is not the kind of tale that wins research money to test whether or not it is true. I can also imagine that mice, short-sighted creatures, might nonetheless pick up on something huge nearby, sometimes by shadow but mostly from the tremors running towards them through the earth from the placement of alarmingly large, heavy feet.

When writing, I tend to read books that come in short sections. Recently I have bought Ms Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Vivaldi and the Number 3 by Ron Butlin, and Why Look at Animals? by John Berger.

This post concerns the very first section of John Berger’s book called A Mouse Story. It is preceded by some friendly drawings of mice by the author and it dates from 2009.

It involves ‘a man’ who has to cut off a ten centimeter slice of a loaf of bread each morning to remove the signs of mice meals. By accident, when looking for a file in the shed by the house, the man comes across a mouse trap made by a previous owner.

It is not a death-trap. It is a cage. One by one the man traps the mice and releases them at some distance from the house.

This was familiar to me. A few years ago my mother found mice in her living room. The rodent expert suggested her liking for chocolate might be the reason. John Berger is much more traditional in his story and uses cheese for bait. Our rodent expert – his name was Tim – said mice were not fond of cheese. He’d use After Eights but, given a choice, always went for Toblerone.

We too went for a humane – that is non-backbreaking – trap. I bought some Toblerone and every morning would transport a mouse past the pond and the hedged around compost heap, and release it into a field owned by a Dowager Duchess and from which, to my mother’s irritation, deer would break through and eat only yellow flowers.

I immediately recognized from John Berger’s descriptions the different behavior of the different mice. I missed out on two descriptions. Our trap being plastic, a mouse could not cling to any wire roof. And I never found nine babies had been born overnight.

I recognized the others though. There was ‘I don’t want to leave’. There were the immediate turners, to left or right. And then there was the mouse ‘the man’ christened ‘Alfredo’.

Our respective Alfredos took off like a kangaroo, leaping high in the air and appearing again two or three times well above the tufts of grass.

In the story, Alfredo is the penultimate mouse. The last mouse is a disappointment, just a scuttle, and the man understands he had been hoping to see another leaping prisoner attaining his dream of freedom.

I have to admit, I thought my Alfredo was invigorated more by fear. That opinion is also based on the number of what I will call pellets in the trap. That had to be washed out.