Will Bring up the Bodies win the Booker?

I’ve always loved historical fiction. I discovered Jean Plaidy in Snaith library when I was about twelve and binge read my way through Henry VIII and all those wives in large print plastic-wrapped hardbacks. The thing that is handy about historical fiction is that it is learning on the sly. I’ve never studied History but would bet a fiver that I know more about Catherine de Medici than pretty much any English person who doesn’t have a degree in French History. Possibly for that reason, I am a bit of a purist in that I like the sort of books that have real people reimagined but that don’t veer too far from the source material. Okay by me to make up emotions, but not to invent facts.

Very fancy sprayed edges

 

Laurent Binet in his magnificent novel HHhH rather disagrees and a sizeable chunk of his retelling of the assassination of Heydrich is given over to examining how far it is appropriate to dramatise history – in his view, not very far at all. He does all this so interestingly and so amusingly, whilst never detracting from the very many horrors that he depicts. I can’t think of many books that have provoked the range of emotions in me that this one does. I thought I’d learn things, I expected to be moved but I didn’t know that I’d laugh as much as I did. It is a measure of my obsession with this book that I am reading it in the original French. Though, that’s not strictly true. I’ve bought it in French but haven’t yet started to read it. I like the idea of reading it in French. I like the idea of getting ever closer to this story, of visiting the scene, of sitting on a bench in Prague imaging Heydrich and his assassins and the way they must all have felt. Perhaps my obsession is in part because Binet has refused to speculate on what they felt. If he doesn’t know it, he doesn’t use it, so what we get is accurate but also leaves an intriguingly unpopulated space for the reader’s imagination to dance around in.

 

 

 

Today is the anniversary of the day that Anne Boylen was beheaded, the day on which her little neck was scythed off by a swordsman brought from France. Hilary Mantel has continued to explore the Tudor world through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell in Bring up the Bodies which deals with the downfall of Anne Boylen. This is the book I was most looking forward to reading this year and even with that level of expectation it blew my socks off. If you only read one book this year, or indeed ever, this should be the one. Mantel creates a world so vivid that I continually caught myself thinking, ‘oh, so that was how it was’ and having to remind myself that I was actually reading a fiction. I want to read it over and over again, preferably in the cafe at The National Portrait Gallery so that I can keeping popping into the Tudor corner to stare at Cromwell’s portrait. And something interesting ocurred to me this morning – surely Bring up the Bodies is a huge contender for the Booker Prize in which case it would be the first time an author won it for two successive novels on the same subject.

That Catherine de Medici I mentioned was a lonely girl who turned into a cruel woman – she drilled a hole in the ceiling so that she could torture herself by spying on her husband in bed with his mistress the very beautiful femme d’une certain age Diane de Poitier. Doesn’t that just make you want to run off and read a novel about her? Or even write one.

And is it true? I don’t know. I read it in a novel.

If you would like to visit a bookshop to look at these books I particularly recommend Hatchards on Piccadilly which is the oldest bookshop in London and has a very good historical fiction section, where I spent many an afternoon in 2007-8 putting all the Jean Plaidys in the correct series order. They also have separate sections for historical and classic crime. That’s a whole other exciting topic but will have to wait for another day. I bought HHhH from the brilliantly large foreign language section at Foyles on Charing Cross Road. I took the photo I’ve used here in the Waterstones at Chiswick.

If you want to read a bit more about these subjects then this Guardian article by Hilary Mantel is sublime and James Lasdun goes into lots of deatil on HHhH here.

Come to my book shop in the sky

From 2.30 – 6.30am this morning I was comforting and cleaning up after my dear, brave little boy as he repeatedly threw up. I was also, during the brief times when we both lay down in his bed and tried to go to sleep, cheering myself up by having imaginary conversations with imaginary customers in my imaginary book shop. It is a hell of a heavenly place, my bookshop in the sky, it is staffed with all my favourite colleagues from over the years including people I’ve never worked with but have always admired and shopped in by all my favourite customers. And, because it is in my imagination, it faces none of the very real difficulties encountered by bookshops today.

It does, however, adhere to UK publishing schedules, so I know that all the books I am going to tell you to read RIGHT NOW are either available or a couple of days away from a real bookshop near you.

With thanks to Alison Barrow for the pic.

First up is The Light Between Oceans by M.L Stedman. Imagine a lighthouse keeper and his wife living on a remote island. Imagine their longing for a baby and her grief when she miscarries. Imagine, then, what happens when a boat washes up on their island holding only a dead man man and a little baby who is very much alive.
I read this in one go simultaneously crying my heart out and admiring the way Stedman handles her material. The action takes place post WWI, many of the characters are battle scarred and this is a worthy addition to books like Birdsong and My Dear I Wanted to Tell You that deal with the emotional aftermath of war.

I’m soppy about An Invisible Sign of my Own by Aimee Bender because it was first published when I lived in New York in 2000/1 and I queued up for the author’s signature long before I ever thought of being a bookseller or realised that I’d spend a sizeable chunk of the next few years organising author events. It is reissued here after the success of The Peculiar Sadness of Lemoncake and I reread it to see if it would still appeal. It’s a resounding yes and I highly recommend you spend some time with lonely math teacher Mona and her strange, sad story.
Right, I’ve talked about At Last by Edward St Aubyn on my blog before. It’s the book that I thought should have won the Booker but didn’t get on the longlist and it continues the story of Patrick Melrose and his troubled life. It is the fifth in a series but what I am going to suggest to you, dear reader, is that if you haven’t read the others then please DON’T think you necessarily have to read all the others first. I desperately with all my evangelical bookselling heart want more people to read these books and it makes me nervous that you might be thinking five books is a commitment too far. I promise that you could read this as a stand alone. I promise too that At Last is, as well as a fine piece of literature, extremely funny. Please go and buy it immediately. You will? Phew. Thank you. And can I bother you to tell all your friends to do so as well? Magnificent. (I know you’ll want to read all the others as soon as you’ve read it, they’ve all been beautifully reissued and I hear tell of a boxed set – what bliss!)
And now for something completely different…Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James is a fascinating book for about a million reasons. In no particular order (I haven’t fact checked this) it started out life as Twilight fanfic, it was a self published ebook sensation in the states and, oh yes, it is all about bondage and sado-masocism. (I can’t spell it let alone do it!)
It was bought and published at high speed and has been very succesful so far, prompting lots of chat about whether it is a load of old badly written nonsense or a bit of a brilliant thing. Well, I’m rather on the brilliant thing side of the fence, mainly because of all the reasons that Sophie Hannah describes here so I won’t repeat them all. Suffice to say, it is a page turner, I really wanted to read it to the end and I want to read the next two in the trilogy. The bondage stuff is all quite interesting and there are just SO MANY JOKES to be had when discussing it with friends and colleagues. And the book industry doesn’t have a lot to laugh about at times so I do think its great to have something to cheer us all up a bit.
So why not read it and then you can have an opinion of your own.

This is the last time I shall write this blog as a bookseller as I’m leaving Waterstones on Friday after nearly ten years. I still think I’ll want to imagine my bookshop in the sky, though, and I still think I’ll want to talk to you, dear reader, about all sorts of different books. Reading is a broad church and shelves deserve to have a bit of everything on them, don’t you think?

What to read RIGHT NOW

The thing I most miss about working in a book shop is talking to strangers about books and the query I particularly loved, often from a regular, was the excitingly simple, ‘So, what’s good, right now?’ I miss the physicality of walking around a shop learning about how someone likes to read, about how they like to think, and gathering a pile of books so that you send them away with a tailored slice of the current week’s publishing. The cream of the crop, chosen and packed up with thought and care.

So, can you indulge me? Can you be the perfect customer, wandering in with a bit of time and money to spare? There are two books in particular which beyond lots of other very good books I would have a spring in my step about trying to sell to you today.

Hope by Shalom Auslander

I’d heard a lot of good things about this and it was on my pile but it was this brilliant review by Naomi Alderman that suggested that Jews and non-Jews consume Holocaust films differently that made me start reading it yesterday, and indeed finish it last night. It is about a man called Kugel who buys a new house in search of a better life and discovers that Anne Frank is living in his attic. It is incredibly funny – I could quote whole chunks – and so clever that I feel like my brain has been rewired. I won’t talk about it at length – click the link to the brilliant review – but I would love to be selling it to you today. If you were real, if you were facing me in a bookshop, you might admit that you wondered if it were, you know, a bit too clever? You might confess to not wanting to work too hard. I could reassure you that it is a breeze. Not a page turner, no, but there is no effort in reading this book. Just an odd kind of near hysterical joy.

The Land of Decoration by Grace McCleen

This is narrated by ten-year-old Judith whose mother died giving birth to her because her religion wouldn’t allow her to accept a blood transfusion. Judith’s father is a kindly man but the same religion leads him to take Judith knocking on the doors of their neighbours to tell them that the end is coming. None of this helps Judith in her quest not to be bullied at school for being strange and as she sits in her bedroom making a model world she starts to believe that she can hear God. This is a stunning novel and I totally believe in it. If the Orange judges overlook it for the longlist I will probably cry myself to sleep.

If you were real, if we were able to have a conversation, our chat might be around child narrators and what they bring to a story. I might confess to you that it is this book that has changed my mind, because I thought I didn’t like them. If you haven’t already, you might decided to leave with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time or I Capture the Castle. Or we might instead talk about God, about our belief or lack of it. You might leave with Jeanette Winterson’s memoir or even Alain de Botton’s latest Religion for Atheists.

You might say you don’t buy hardbacks. That’s fine, I’ll say – I never try to sell people things they don’t want – and I’ll get excited because that probably means you haven’t read How to be a Woman by the magnificently incomparable (though my Dad thinks she is like me – swoon) Caitlin Moran, which is out in paperback this week. I’d probably tell you that this is the book that made me start a blog because I wanted to write about how it made me feel. I’ll tell you how much it made me laugh, made me think, how it gave me a massive surge of feminist confidence. I’d tell you that I’ve recommended this to not far off millions of people and they all love it. I’d tell you again that my Dad thinks she is like me. We’d probably have a laugh about that.

We’re getting along, aren’t we? Shall we discuss the Booker winning The Sense of an Ending, fresh out in paperback with a very lovely jacket. Please say yes. Please let’s have a long conversation about Julian Barnes. I can tell you about how I first read Metroland when I was at sixth form in Scunthorpe and you can tell me….What will you tell me?

Because that is what I think I’m really missing, dear customer. I miss talking to strangers about books but mainly I miss the fact that you talk back. I like the magical to and fro of a good bookseller/customer conversation. Because we’ve only scratched the surface here. These are just the biggest publications this week. Imagine all the other things we could talk about.

Anyway, I’m off, before I get too soppy over you. Think about reading some of these books. And you could always comment, I suppose, or talk to me on twitter. My favourite thing even beyond talking to strangers about books was when those strangers came back to talk again…

Seriously bad love…the only kind that really works

It is a truth not particularly universally acknowledged that simple, plain, uncomplicated and stress free love doesn’t really work in fiction. Almost all romantic fiction stops at the point when the amusing misunderstandings have been cleared up and the happy couple walk off into the distance together to enjoy three years tops of uncritical staring into each others’ eyes before they make compromises, have children or get divorced at which point they may (just) become fictionally interesting again. During the loved up phase they are of absolutely no interest to any reader of novels. So much is this the case that I offer you a challenge. I have a theory that if you meet a happily married couple at the beginning of a novel then one of them is about to get run over by a bus or will turn out to be perpetrating some terrible undercover activity, like being a Russian spy or a serial killer. Seriously, happy love has no fictional purpose other than to be destroyed.

What does work spectacularly well in fiction, however, is  selfish, exploitative, heart-wrenchingly hideous love. Heart break, betrayal, duplicity and double crossing all work a treat.

What I am working up to is that if you are, this Valentine’s Day, planning to spend the evening with someone you love in a nice normal way then well done you and please do buy them a book, but just buy them something really good that they’ll like. Or poetry. If you want to buy a love-themed book then poetry works really well.

If, however, you are jaded and faded and fed-up with love, if love has put you through the wringer too many times and you will be spending tomorrow night alone with a book, then console yourself with the idea that the absolute best of literature is at your disposal and is ready to be your kindred spirit. Doesn’t matter what your romantic axe is, there is a book that wants to grind it for you.

A few suggestions of the best below. I’m sure I’ve left out lots of good (bad) ones. Please do tell me…

And I hope you have a wonderful day tomorrow, no matter what you choose to do, or with whom you choose to spend it.

1.       I had an affair. I knew it was wrong. It all ended badly. (This seems to be true in literature and in life – beware):

Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje

2.       Obsessed, obsessed, I can’t stop being obsessed:

Damage – Josephine Hart

The End of the Affair – Graham Greene

 3.       She/he slept with my best friend (or I was so scared that she/he might that I screwed it all up anyway:

Talking It Over – Julian Barnes

Before She Met Me – Julian Barnes

4.       I know she/he is a fairly sub-standard person but that doesn’t stop me aching to be with them:

Of Human Bondage – William Somerset Maugham

Hopes and Dreams – Debut Fiction in 2012

I’ve been thinking about the turn of the year and about what it is that makes reading debut fiction so appealing and have decided that there is a lot of common ground based on the triumph of hope over experience. In the case of the New Year, the resolutions are unbroken and still hold out the glorious promise of self-improvement. In the case of pre-publication debut fiction, the dreams for the author and the book are still intact. On the 2nd January we can all still believe that we will be better, thinner, brighter people and that all the novels that we love will achieve every possible measure of success.

I’m don’t want to dwell on what might happen later on in the year (oh, the heart breaking thought of all those undrunk sachets of miso soup and usold books!) so will get straight on to my favourite debuts from January, February and March.

I resisted The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach for so long. ‘No,’ I cried, ‘I don’t want to read another long American novel. And especially not one about baseball.’ On and on, I said it, lots of people told me it was very good indeed and I trusted them, I just didn’t fancy a long American novel about baseball.

And then, finally, after someone told me the female character was particularly well drawn, I decided to try a page or two. ‘No pressure,’ I said to myself. ‘I don’t have to marry the thing. I’ll read the first few pages and at least I’ll have given it a go.’

Anyway, it is exceptional. I didn’t race through it but sort of gleefully glided. Despite the sports stuff it lacks the aggression that I sometimes get from long American novels, that ‘you just sit there in your chair, little girl, whilst I hit you over the head with words’ feeling. Although we are often in the locker room, or on the sports field this book has no posturing or manly swagger about. It offers a consensual, enlightening experience that I highly recommend. And no, you don’t need to know anything about baseball, and I found I enjoyed all the baseball bits without really understanding anything much of the game.

Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles is full of the detailed directives about domestic matters that Oskar leaves for his flat-sitting friend when he goes off to LA to get divorced. The ensuing chaos reads like Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em as if written by Kafka as our haphazard hero rattles disastrously around the unnamed European city. There’s  cleaner, a lap dancing club, a piano, and some of it is even about wooden floors. And it carries off the perfect twist, in that after a moment of surprise it all makes perfect sense.

I stayed up all night to read The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey, a story set in the author’s native Alaska about Jack and Mabel and the way their bleak and childless marriage is transformed when they make a little girl from snow. There is something very special going on here in the way that the far away and even fairy tale setting contrasts with the highly familiar emotional territory. I was breathless and on the edge of tears the whole way through. Slightly soppily, I like the fact that the author is a bookseller and dreamt up her ideas whilst shelving books. I hope she becomes deservedly rich and famous.

The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan transports us to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in 1914. When an explosion wrecks their ship, newly-wed Grace becomes a widow. Her husband’s last act is to get her on to a lifeboat and she spends the next three weeks exposed to the dual dangers of nature and humanity whilst doing what she can to stay alive. This is a cracking page-turner and I’m still not sure I quite understand the ending so would like lots of people to discuss it with me, please!

Rachel Joyce gives us a different kind of journey in The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. Harold has never made much of a mark in life but when he finds out that his old friend Queenie is dying he decides to walk the length of the country to see her. Along the way, we find out why Queenie was so important to him and the other sad secrets of Harold’s life. The more I think about this book, the more that I think it is about the battle between refusing and accepting the knowledge that the people we love might die. It’s always good to find out that a book has broad appeal. I gave this to my Dad who now wants to visit all the towns on Harold’s route and to a colleague who said it made him cry buckets of life-affirming tears. Those kinds of emotional reader responses make my bookseller heart beat gladly.

And finally…And so absolutely not least, even though it is last…

I haven’t felt so excited about a book for a long time

The Land of Decoration by Grace McCleen is narrated by ten-year-old Judith whose father takes her knocking on the neighbors’ doors to tell them that the world is about to end. As she sits in her bedroom worrying about having her head flushed down the toilet at school she creates a model world, populates it with little pipe cleaner people and starts to believe that she can talk to God. The imagination at work in this novel is extraordinary and the brave, sad sometimes funny voice of Judith has a unique resonance. I absolutely believe in this book and believe that we will all be talking about it next year. I think it will win prizes and sell huge amounts and I want all that to happen because it should, because this author deserves to be read and because this character deserves to be heard, but most of all because I want people, I want you, dear reader, to have the experience of this book.

There is a beautiful taste of it here. The voice is that of the author.

So, those are my favourite debuts for the first three months of 2012. They are a tiny percentage of the amount of books published so it could be that all these books succeed. Well, anyway, at the moment, with no benefit of horrible hindsight, I can imagine them all as the sure things of the future…

(I have taken some of this from the monthly column I do for The Bookseller so if it seems familiar it is hopefully me reminding you of me…)

Little People v Erotic Despair

I’ve admitted before that I have irrational prejudices which often turn out to be nonsense and I caught myself at it again today. This morning I finished The Land of Decoration, a powerful debut which publishes next March. It is about a ten year old girl called Judith whose Father takes her knocking on doors to tell people that the world is going to end. As she sits in her bedroom waiting for Armageddon and worrying about getting her head flushed down the toilet at school, she starts having conversations with God and becomes convinced that she is his instrument.

It is a wonderful novel, beautifully written with flashes of absurd humour and an uplifting ending. I urge you all to read it.

So, does my urging make you want to read it? I’ve had a copy for a while and a couple of people I trust told me it was really good. But I didn’t start it for a while. I was thinking this morning about why that was and I realised that I think that I don’t like child narrators. I didn’t think I was in the mood for a book narrated by a ten-year-old girl. Thought it might be twee.

Hang on! I said to myself. You like lots of books that have child narrators. You loved Room, you loved The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, you loved My Sister Lives on the Mantlepiece, you loved Wonder.

True, I said back. So why do I think I don’t? I didn’t come to much of an understanding but did start thinking about constructing themes around child voices and that kept me happy for a bit.

Later on I followed a tweet link to the the excellent introduction to Damage that Josephine Hart wrote before she died in which she discusses erotic obsession. Damage is one of my favourite books and is horribly compulsive. You know that the madly destructive desire that the unnamed narrator has for his son’s girlfriend is going to ruin him but you can’t help reading and reading and reading. I like books like that. When I worked in bookshops I was always very keen on the anti-Valentine’s Day display – the books about driven, selfish, shitty behaviour with narrators who either destroy or are destroyed. Damage was always in my display, so also was The English Patient, Hangover Square, Of Human Bondage, Before She Met Me. My kind of books.

And I realised that whilst I still do like a good old bad love story I have broadened out my tastes because back when I was putting up my bad love displays nearly ten years ago I probably would have turned my nose up a bit at a gentler book that was unlikely to contain hefty portions of betrayal and despair. Back then I was uninterested in children and didn’t think I’d ever have any. Now a large chunk of my time and heart belongs to my small dude, and a lesser slice to all the other small dudes and dudettes that we hang around with. How could I not be interested in books about the dilemmas that children face, now? Well, I am. I’m just stuck in the habit of thinking I’m not.

Back to Room which is about a little boy and his mother who are kept in a room by a bad man. I first read it when I was on maternity leave and thought about mainly from the perspective of the mother – ‘how would I feel if?…’ As time goes on and I have the joy of watching my child acquire language I often think of Room from the perspective of the little boy, of how well the voice was captured, of how my little one says things in very much the same way.

We read for different reasons. Some people like to be transported to other worlds. I tend to want to see my own experience amplified, reflected, informed by what I read. Rather nice, perhaps, that these days that is a little more about how small people make their way in the world and a little bit less about how big people treat each other incredibly badly.

Books, cheese, soppy stuff

Books, cheese, soppy ramblings

I’m in Edam, in Holland in the house where my husband grew up. It is a typically Dutch house, with lots of wood, very steep stairs and a canal flowing by outside.
What is slightly more unusual is that it full of books, packed with books, everywhere you turn you see yet more books. Shelves upon shelves. Art books, encyclopedias, history. Whole shelves full of Biggles or Simenon or thriller writers I’ve never heard of.
My father in law who died earlier this year was a bibliophile, a collector. He couldn’t pass a second hand book stall without acquiring something. Even when poor health made it more difficult for him to sell them on, he just couldn’t stop buying books.

There is something very odd for me in being surrounded by all these books that I can’t read. I speak a bit of Dutch now, know my way around a menu and can generally  follow conversations if I have the context. My husband reads to our small dude in Dutch so I’m quite good at animal names, at colours, at the sort of subjects that are of interest to toddlers.

But I am a million miles away from reading an adult novel. I keep having a crack at it though. There are multitudinous Agatha Christies here. ‘Come on,’ I think, ‘You know them all by heart, anyway, so should be able to follow them.’ But it isn’t any good. I’ll sit around staring at the first pages of ‘Miss Marple met Vakantie’ or ‘De Kat Tussen de Duiven’ for a good while before giving up.

It is almost a torture.  Of course, it isn’t, because I’ve brought with me a sack of books that I can read, but I keep thinking about how I’d feel if I hadn’t. What if I was a refugee? What if I had no access to my own language? Then surely the largely pleasurable game I continually play of translating book titles would be horribly frustrating.

(This is the game: ‘De Kleur Pars.’ Any luck? Probably not, but if I tell you that the name on the spine is Alice Walker?…)

But it creates another link, this obsession with books and reading. I was lying in bed this morning looking at a wall of books full of impenetrable words and thinking if my late father-in-law had not been so interested in books, then my husband might not have decided to study bookselling. He might not have got a part time job that turned into a full time job in the Waterstone’s in Amsterdam. He might not have decided to apply for a transfer to Piccadilly and give English bookselling a go. He might not have decided to stick around. He might not have ended up sitting next to me at our induction day for our new job in a new shop. And, ultimately, our small dude, our little blonde reader who constantly says ‘I read it myself, Mummy’ might not exist.

All of which is a bit soppy. I tend to write my blog when that same small dude is not with me because it is only then that I have time to have thoughts that aren’t uniquely centered around him and his care and to think about writing something longer than a tweet. But then, because he’s not with me I am always in a slightly heightened emotional state. Probably means I will be a soppy blogger until at least he goes to University.

So, back to the books.

I’ve put in a photo of some Agatha Christies so that you can play the ‘try to guess the title’ game.

The photo of the cardboard boxes shows all the WWII books that have been accepted by the Dutch Institute of War Documentation. My husband packed these up and labelled them.

‘What does that stand for?’ I asked, pointing at the WOII.

‘World War II.’

‘Why the ‘O’?’

‘Wereld Oorlog. World War.’

This is the kind of thing that pleases me. My husband speaks English so well that I somehow forget he has access to a whole other way of doing things.

I’m sure when I was a little girl eating Edam cheese I would never have thought I’d be in an attic in Edam, listening to my Dutch husband translate his labelling of war books.

One final thing. Did you know that Edam cheese only has the red wax abroad? Yes, it signifies for export. So, all the Edam we eat here is very different indeed. Just yellow. Another thing I’d never have known…

His, His or Her, Their – Julian Barnes II

‘What should I read first of his other books?’ asked lots of lovely people today about Julian Barnes.

I had a wonderful day today. I felt high and happy about the Booker, And lots of people were very nice about my Booker blog post.

The answer, as with all book recommendation, lies in the reader. What is it that you want? Want sexual jealousy? Then go for Before She Met Me. Coming of age? Metroland. France, French stuff? French kissing, French letters, French toast? Well, most of it but Flaubert’s Parrot is the one that most floats my bateau. Short stories? Tricky. I’ve a fondness for Cross Channel (see? It’s that French thing again) but The Lemon Table is good if you’re interested in ageing and fear of death and the last story in Pulse is a very fine thing indeed. (Go buy it. Read the bit about the herbs. If you don’t think it’s a staggeringly good piece of writing then I’ll eat my chapeau.)

So, as I’ve probably just shown, I hope not too annoyingly, I could bang on about Julian Barnes all day and I put a ‘joke’ into my blog post that only a similarly obsessed enthusiast would spot.

In Talking It Over (want heartbreak? Then, oh Lord, yes) the first chapter is called ‘His, His or Her, Their.’ One of the narrators, Stuart, opens the book by talking about a grammatical disagreement between him, his best friend and ‘great pedant’ Oliver, and his wife Gillian.

Stuart says to us: ‘I don’t know what you think about everyone followed by their. Probably not very much, no reason why you should. And I can’t remember how it first came up but we had this argument.’ And he tells us about this argument. And it is brilliant and horrible because, somehow, in these seven pages where Stuart talks about grammar and his wedding day we get such a foreshadowing, such a bitter knowledge that what is to come cannot be good…but it is just a man talking about grammar.

So back to my ‘joke’. I wrote the below sentence, not on purpose, but then decided to keep the ‘their’ as a bit of a tribute joke that I din’t think anyone would notice.

The new winner of the Booker prize was fulfilling the tradition that the winning author always comes back from the ceremony at the Guildhall and puts in an appearance at the party hosted by their publisher.

It should be his or her, obviously. Or should it? Can I refer you to pages 1-7 of Talking It Over for an informed debate on the matter.

 My friend William sent me this message about my post on our Open University forum. I’d posted saying that I’d written an ‘extremely soppy’ piece and would be glad to know what people thought.

It is very soppy but justifiably so.  It is a good article.

There is a ubiquitous grammatical error at the end of the first paragraph: for “their” read “his or her”.

The reference to Covent Garden made me cry, because the last time I was there was in a box at the Royal Opera House with my mother, and now she’s dead.

 I hate Julian Barnes, but I still liked your article.  I have read two of his books, and they made me want to pluck out my eyeballs and roll them in broken glass.  For some stupid reason he plays the unnecessary part of Simenon in the otherwise flawless BBC adaption of four Maigret stories, and his voice makes me want to cringe.  But I understand completely the way you feel about him.

I liked this. I like William. I like the way he expresses himself. I like that he corrected my grammar. I like the way he talks about his dead mother. And, and again I could bang on all day about this, I love the very fact that reading is an individual thing. He doesn’t rate my author but he understands the way I feel about him. How brilliant is that?

I was talking to my very lovely boss, Jon, today after he read my post. He was telling me that he too remembers first reading Metroland, that it was part of the Graham Swift/Ian McEwan mash up that formed his introduction to contemporary literature as it did mine. We were sitting across from each other realising that 20 years ago the same books were changing our worlds. ‘Waterland’ we shouted at each other, ‘Butterflies.’

‘Are all Julian Barnes’ books good?’ Someone asked me today.

Good question. Actually, not. England, England and Porcupine don’t do anything for me. Nor did Arthur and George, though lots of other people liked it.

So, it’s all a matter of taste. Another friend at work, also called Jon, is reading the new Joseph Heller biography.

‘Catch 22 is one of my total fails,’ I said, ‘Tried several times. Awful, unreadable nonsense for me.’

‘It’s my favourite book of all time,’ he said, slightly sadly.

So, if you want to see why I’m obsessed with Julian Barnes rather than Joseph Heller then read the first seven pages of Talking It Over. If you don’t like those pages, if you don’t want to read on then I’ll eat another chapeau or give you your money back.* Or maybe I’ll just accept that you could be one of the many people out there who might be more suited to something else. You could try Catch 22.

What I know for sure is that those seven pages capture what it is that I love about Julian Barnes as a writer, much of which I talked about in yesterday ‘s post. It’s a busy old world and I don’t want to waste your time. You could have a sconce at those pages standing in a bookshop. Do it. Give him seven pages worth of your time. If you don’t get it, that’s fine.

Tell me what it is that you like. Send me into a bookshop on the seven pages test. I’ll do it….

*Terms and conditions apply (Joke – pinched from the Catch 22 enthusiastic)

A long way from Scunthorpe…Julian Barnes wins the Booker

There was a beautiful  moment last night. I was standing in a crowd of bookish types in a passageway in Covent Garden sipping wine and chatting to a colleague about the recent antics of our children when a hush descended. We looked up. Julian Barnes was walking down the passageway. The new winner of the Booker prize was fulfilling the tradition that the winning author always comes back from the ceremony at the Guildhall and puts in an appearance at the party hosted by their publisher.

Julian Barnes is my favourite living writer.  I could probably leave the ‘living’ out of that sentence. Jane Austen is my favourite non-living writer (seems somehow rude to Miss Austen to say ‘dead’.) If I was on that desert island and had to choose between his or her complete works, if the God of shipwrecks was kind enough to offer me a care package, I would choose his. Because you don’t just get the novels. His non-fiction is wonderful, his journalism is wonderful, even his collection of cookery journalism is wonderful.

I remember first reading Metroland when I was at sixth form in Scunthorpe. It influenced my decision to study French so that I too could go to live in France for a year, a thing which seems commonplace to me now but at the time was quite a big deal. The other reason why I wanted to learn French was that I wanted to be able to read Madame Bovary in the language in which it was written. And the reason I was so keen on Madame Bovary was because of Flaubert’s Parrot and so it goes on. I remember using the woodworm narrator in The History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters as an example of defamiliarisation in my first essay at university. It was about Russian Formalism. I can picture it now, hand written in purple ink.

So, I’ll credit Julian Barnes for my early Francophilia. Another obsession I share with him is death. I don’t credit (or blame?) him for that. People tend to be obsessed with death if they feel they have seen more than their fair share, if they feel unfairly exposed. That’s a mealy-mouthed sentence. I am obsessed with death because I feel unfairly treated by it. But I feel consoled by Barnes’ writing on death. It is the best of his writing I think, curious, probing, gently interrogative. There is a well mannered embracing quality to his work. This is a man who understands people, I always think. This is a writer who understands me. He performs the magic trick, the alchemy that the best writers do: Everything between us drifts away when I read him. It is just him talking to me.

So, back to the passage way. He walked down. We cheered. He smiled, a lovely rather shy smile.

‘Have you ever met him?’ Asked Tom from his publishers, ‘Would you like to?’

I shook my head in a weird way. I’ve had a few opportunities to meet him over the years and have always edged out of them. I tried to explain to Tom. I’m too keen on him. I’m too much of a fan. And I think if I actually met him then as well as being a dribbling monosyllabic sycophant, I would feel too connected to my younger Scunthorpe self, to the unhappy death-obsessed girl who stayed up all night writing essays in purple ink. The danger that I might want him to understand me outside of the alchemy of the writer/reader relationship is too great.

And I was happy where I was. I went back to talking to Ian about the cute things our children do.

One of the things I told him is that my little boy has taken to asking me if I’m happy.

He did it this morning. I was halfway through writing this when he called out. I went into his bedroom.

‘Waking up, Mummy.’ He said. ‘Wee wee coming.’

After we’d dealt with that, he looked up at me, ‘Happy, Mummy?’

I always give it thought when he asks me. I thought about it.

‘Yes, I am.’ I said, ‘Mainly because of you.’ But also, I thought, because I stood in a passage way last night and saw Julian Barnes’ Booker winning smile.

My Scunthorpe self would simply not believe it.

Please, if you haven’t, read his books.

War, Sex and The Blue Bicycle

The last three nights I’ve spent my dream time being parachuted into resistant France and evading capture by the Gestapo. This is all because when I was in Holland recently helping my husband sort through his Father’s enormous collection of books I came across a Dutch edition of The Blue Bicycle, published first as La Bicyclette Bleu in France.

I told my husband how much I’d enjoyed reading this war trilogy when I lived in France.

‘It’s like Gone With The Wind,’ I said, ‘but set on a vineyard in the second world war.’

Not only did he bring the Dutch edition back to England, possibly hoping that one day my Dutch might be up to it, but also scoured the internet to buy me English translations so I’ve been rereading them this week.

I last read them in French about fifteen years ago when I lived near Caen, a city that had been largely destroyed at the end of the war. Just up the road was Arromanches where the mulberry harbours used to disembark the DDay troops still sat in the bay.

There was evidence of the war all around. There was a tank called Charlie One on the beach near my flat, the next street along was called ‘Avenue du Six Juin.’  Within a short drive were cemeteries, English, Canadian, American and German. All with their own atmospheres and varying degrees of humility and triumphalism.

The cafes had little signs in saying ‘Welcome to our liberators’ to attract the war veterans, though even fifteen years ago it was more likely to be the offspring of the American soldier who was visiting rather than the solder himself.

And I never had any sense that this welcome was genuine, it soley existed as a marketing tool and I often felt a bit sorry for the people, mainly Americans, who believed it and who’d be trying to tell the bored and disdainful patron what their Daddies had done in the war.

So, the books themselves are a riveting read and I’ve raced through them at the rate of one a night. They aren’t quite as well written as I remember, though that may be because I’m reading them in translation. The sex is a bit odd. The heroine, Lea Delmas, a sexier and less selfish version of Scarlet O’Hara spends a lot of time thinking about food and sex. Pourquoi pas? We may say, but quite a lot of the sex starts with a struggle that she then enjoys which made me feel a bit uncomfortable. And I’m interested that I didn’t notice that about the books before. Maybe it sits a bit better in French, maybe I did notice but didn’t remember, maybe I didn’t care? I’m  not sure.

But it has made me think about why I like war literature so much, and particularly WWII and I think it is a bit because I like to absorb my history through fiction but also because of the way that normal behaviour is suspended. ‘We might all be dead tomorrow, says Lea after a rather improbable threesome with the Lefevre (Tarleton) twins who have adored her for years. And she’s right. People, characters, behave in a more interesting way when they have less of a concept of consequences.

Had an interesting twitter conversation recently with someone who prefers the first to the second world war as a fictional setting and it prompted me to think about why I am the other way around. I think it is because women have more to do by the time the second world war rolls around.

I want to carry on about other better and more easy available WWII books but I need to go to work. I am not at war, normal behaviour is not suspended and I need to go and earn a crust. More later…