Reading that breaks you, reading that makes you

I picked up Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours solely because of its cover. I’ve never claimed not to be shallow. (Did you know the French equivalent of ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’ is ‘L’habit ne fait pas le moine’ or ‘The clothing does not make the monk’?) I was fortunate that the copy the library happened to own was the copy that happened to be designed to appeal to me most. White background, black rose; the curves and serifs of the tautological title picked out in gold. Perhaps what attracted me most was not the cover but specifically its lack of a cover; its lack of a spine. Its spinelessness. It lies open, naked quires bound with green thread, as though abandoned partway through being finished.

The contents live up to its elegant, adventurous cover. One of my favourite stories talks about the power of reading to break you apart (see below). Oyeyemi is a writer who breaks and remakes your concept of language and how it should work: her prose is as unpredictable and poetic as her plots. In one story about the mysterious and sudden arrival of a young boy: “She had to quickly pop back to the fifteenth century to find a word for how beautiful he was. The boy was makeless.” “Makeless” here, of course, means “matchless”, but in this story it accurately represents this boy who has not been born or made, but simply appears.

The quotation below comes from the story ‘a brief history of the homely wench society’, which concerns two rival societies at Cambridge University. Boys’ club the Bettencourts created a list of the most ‘homely wenches’, and the wenches retaliated by forming their own society. When the Homely Wenches break into the Bettencourt headquarters, they find that less than ten per cent of their books are by women, and begin making swaps by torchlight. One of the replacements they make is for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, which leads to the following conversation:

‘It’s great, isn’t it? It sort of rocks you…reading it is sort of like reading from a cradle hung up in the trees, and the trees rock you with such sorrow, and as the volume turns up you realize that the trees are rocking you whilst deciding whether to let you live or die, and they’re sorry because they’ve decided to smash you to pieces…’
‘But then you’re put back together again, in a wholly different order…’
‘And it hurts so much you don’t know if the new order will work.’
‘It’ll heal. It has to hurt before it heals, don’t you think?’

It makes me feel that reading as a process is a form of kintsugi: where broken pottery is repaired with gold. The repaired piece becomes more beautiful than the original. There we have it: a half-made book, a makeless boy, and reading that tears you apart and makes you again.

‘a brief history of the homely wench society’ is available to read online here.

Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours (Picador, 2016)

The Charms of Frankenstein with Fiona Sampson and Maya Attoun

Visiting Maya Attoun’s Charms of Frankenstein exhibition at the Jewish Museum, London, was a curiously disorienting experience. On arrival, you’re asked to take part in an intriguing ritual before you can engage with the exhibition: putting on disposable red gloves. You feel like a curator preparing to handle a delicate object, or perhaps a doctor preparing for surgery. Once you’re wearing the gloves, you are allowed to touch a copy of Attoun’s 2018 artist planner, and take your tour of the museum. You carry the planner with you, held in front of you in a gesture that makes me feel as though I am bearing a gift, offering it to the objects on display. The planner is affixed to a transparent acrylic tray, like an open and portable display case. The exhibition consists of museum objects, each identified with an individual number drawn on a red stone. Each number corresponds to a number in the planner. The museum objects are labelled only with numbers, so have no historical context with which they can be interpreted. The objects are not arranged in any order that I could see, forcing you to actively search for the corresponding number in the planner. And once you’ve found the number, you are confronted not with an explanation or history of the object, but an image. A delicate, realistic, pencil drawing. You are forced to re-orient yourself by making your own connections. For Attoun, it is these negotiations between object and image, artist and viewer, that are as fascinating as the object or image on their own. Her choices of the objects were, in her words, “aesthetic, visual, associative”. The ever-shifting interpretations provoked by bringing image and object into dialogue with each other, which in my mind, tessellate out with every new association, are, to Attoun, like the figure of Frankenstein’s Creature, which shifts with every new translation or retelling. In her conversation with Fiona Sampson, Attoun draws attention to the fact that in being unnamed, the process of creating the Creature is unfinished, and he is constantly being remade.

As Fiona Sampson explained in conversation with Attoun (far more eloquently than I can regurgitate here), when you put one thing in conversation with another, you have not two things, but three things. The drawings in the planner were completed months before the exhibition opened, and Attoun chose objects based on the already-completed drawings. The planner is rejuvenated by being put in context with the objects, much like the process of rejuvenation and (re)vitalisation that occurs in the creation of Frankenstein’s Creature.

For Attoun, the exhibition is an invitation to the viewer to be creative. It’s a unique way of interacting with both art and museum displays, where the only explanatory stories are the ones we tell ourselves. Her choice of objects destabilises the perceived hierarchy of museum objects: an IKEA napkin holder sits alongside a 17th-century figa amulet. This helped to explain the disorientation I felt in being confronted with a museum display stripped of its explanatory labels. Instead, Attoun’s approach gave validity to my own interpretation. I became fascinated with hands in the exhibition, both the exquisitely detailed drawings of hands in Attoun’s planner, and the hands displayed in the museum objects. Hands appear in the planner not just as objects in themselves, but holding other objects. I was aware of Attoun’s hands as they must have been involved in creating these images, and selecting these objects. I became aware of my own hands, turning the pages of the planner to find the appropriate images, involved in the process of interpretation, and mirroring the hands in the drawings. I’ve always had a fascination for the interaction between bodies and objects, and so this was a new way of engaging with museum objects, art objects, and my body’s role in interpreting them. I was constantly in mind of Frankenstein’s Creature as an embodiment of the object-body paradigm: an animated body made up of body parts that at one point had the status of objects.

Objects, planner, drawings: each is woven through with references to Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. Attoun described how part of her process involved rolling herself up (roling herself?) in the character of Mary Shelley. I loved her drawing of the reverse of Mary Shelley’s portrait, the portrait acting at once as a mirror and a means of seeing through Shelley’s eyes. Sampson described Frankenstein as Mary Shelley trying on different roles, as reflected in the different first person narratives: the role of the Doctor (the creator), and the Creature (abandoned and searching). In a way, in her biography, Sampson also takes on the persona of Mary Shelley. For Sampson, words are the shape of a breath. You can’t say more than what can be expressed in a breath. So you can find Mary Shelley’s breath, her life, in her words. I wonder what implications this has for Fiona Sampson’s own words telling the story of Mary Shelley. How the words of the two, the breath and life of the two, are somehow intermingled within her biography. When I read In Search of Mary Shelley (here’s my review) I was captivated and unsettled by Sampson’s creative approach. The presence of Sampson was more obvious to me in the writing than the presence of Shelley. But Sampson explained how, for her, literary biography tends to focus too much on the biography and not enough on the literary. In her biography of Mary Shelley, Sampson wanted to create something readable. Choosing to start each chapter with a scene from Mary Shelley’s life which was fully inhabited, focusing on every visceral detail, was a way of bringing the reader in, using that as a leaping point for the action that follows.

 

While attending the talk about Attoun’s exhibition and Sampson’s book helped me reorient myself and my understanding of both, I left feeling more comfortable with having been disoriented. Not knowing where I stood in relation to the objects, the drawings, even Mary Shelley’s life, was part of a process of foregrounding my own interpretations and experiences. Next time I visit an exhibition, I’ll be aware that my own agency in interpretation can rely not on being provided with external context, but in the context I bring to the act of interpreting.

Images of Maya Attoun’s work can be found on her instagram and website (where the planner is available to purchase). Fiona Sampson’s In Search of Mary Shelley was published this year by Profile Books. The Jewish Museum‘s current exhibitions, Roman Vishniac Rediscovered and Remembering the Kindertransport run until February 2019.

 

Literally life-changing letters: the story of Albert French

Archival “discoveries” of supposedly long-lost or forgotten documents seem to occur with surprising frequency. Often, how far this is a genuine “discovery” is dubious – if the document in question has been carefully preserved by an archivist, if it has even been catalogued, how far are you discovering something versus bringing it to the collective attention? The other week, though, I had the pleasure of hearing about a genuine archival discovery. Roger Kitchen of Living Archive MK treated an audience at MK Central Library to the story of his “chance discovery” of a bundle of letters, an event he described as “literally life changing”. Roger told us how, while helping with furniture removals in 1975, he purchased a box of encyclopaedias. Hidden at the bottom of the box, he found a bundle of letters from the 1910s. Captivated by the patchy narrative told within the letters of a young soldier from Wolverton, Roger set about trying to fill in the gaps in his story.

It transpired that the letters were sent by a young man of Wolverton, Albert French, and recounted his experiences as a soldier in the First World War. They were sent to his father and sister, living on Young Street (now demolished, but where Asda is now). Roger was able to find out that Albert was an apprentice fitter between 1913 and 1915 at Wolverton Works. His record card, held by MK Museum, shows he “left without notice” on 16th October 1915. Two days later, he was in London to enlist. While training in Essex, the tone of the letters is clearly optimistic, with Albert writing, “I shall rise like the early morning dew”. But the emotional trajectory of the letters takes a downward turn as Albert makes his way to Belgium and the realities of war sink in. “There are some soldiers who have the opinion that this war will be the end of the world”, he writes. Even faced with the brutal realities of war, Albert seems to carefully guard his feelings from those at home with some careful understatement, “now I’m here I don’t want the war to last too long”.

I am still alive and kicking, and in the best of health, and getting on quite all right. I can tell you it isn’t like home at all here, rather dull. I don’t bother about the shells and snipers’ bullets very much. Still, if you keep cheery you are all right. The war will have to end sometime, won’t it?

After a return to Wolverton on leave, the letters hint at potential romance: “I might as well tell you that I rather took a liking to Violet while I was home and I hope she writes to me. My mate did not think much of my photo, I wonder what Violet thinks of it? My mate said I looked about 14, and not much like a soldier.” Remarkably, Roger manages to track down Violet’s brother, still living in Wolverton. And here, another discovery to be unearthed: the very photo Albert’s letters talk about. We might never know what Violet thought of the photograph, but at least in sending it to her, Albert ensured that, decades later, we would know what he looked like.

Another letter gave away a clue to Albert’s history. His sister wrote to him in 1916:
“Dad and the boys send their love, you will soon be sweet 17 and never been kissed on the 22nd of this month. Well cheerio and keep on smiling. I will close now with all my fondest love. Hurry up and send me a line as you know you owe me one.”
The letter was returned, unread. The reason is revealed in the final two letters: “I regret to have to report the death of your son C7259 Rfn. A. French, who was killed by machine gun fire, whilst with a working party June 15th 1916.” It transpired that Albert had been killed just a week before his seventeenth birthday.

Even knowing the ending of this story already, hearing the full context of Albert’s life and letters shocked and moved me. The letters track a young man’s – a boy’s – journey from Wolverton to Essex to Belgium, from optimism to an early death. It’s easy to share in the sense of anger and betrayal expressed by Albert’s brother, when he was later interviewed by Roger: “He shouldn’t have been there, should he.”

Albert’s extraordinary story prompted further research, books, a play, songs, and a campaign to get his age of death marked on his gravestone in Ploegsteert, Belgium. The date of his death is marked, too, as part of the MK Rose. His letters give us an insight into the stories of so many young people whose lives are cut short by war. In many ways, we are lucky to be able to tell his story as fully as we can. And so Albert French stands in for so many un-named, unknown, and forgotten, victims of war.

Visit the Heritage MK website to find out more about Albert French’s story, or find out more about the work of the Living Archive. If you want to support the work of archives of Milton Keynes, fill in this survey to express your interest in a city archive.

Falling in love with Milton Keynes

This year, while working with Living Archive MK, I was invited to edit a selection of interviews with residents to compile into a book. Milton Keynes: The People’s Stories has just been published (and is available from the Living Archive website) and pulls together stories about history, culture, and sport, as well as the everyday reality of living and working here. In celebration of 50 years of Milton Keyes, Living Archive interviewed more than 50 people, including those who helped build the city, were born here, lived here before MK existed, or have moved here recently. Each shares a unique perspective on a sometimes misunderstood town. As someone who has only lived here a couple of years, editing the book was an opportunity to get to learn about the area through the people who know it best. I thought I’d share a little of my own story, and how editing the book has changed my view of Milton Keynes.

I never would have chosen to live in Milton Keynes. Before moving here, I’d been in Oxford for five years. Living there, you’re confronted with hundreds of years of history every time you round a corner. You could go and see a different play/concert/lecture/[insert your own cultural event here] every night and still miss out on as many events. During this time, Milton Keynes was the mysterious place of concrete and roundabouts that I had to pass through on journeys between Oxford and Cambridge on the dreaded X5.

View of the approach to the City Centre from the south, 1980. Courtesy of Living Archive MK.

I was all set to settle in London or Durham or somewhere else suitably ancient to become an archivist or artist or something else suitably cultural. And then, quite unexpectedly, I fell in love. Even more unexpectedly, I fell in love with a boy from Milton Keynes. A year or so in, we were spending so much time and money travelling between our two homes that it was just logical to move in together. And that’s how I ended up living in Milton Keynes.

Initially, as I commuted into London to study, I didn’t spend that much time getting to know the area. I was familiar with my flat, the train station, and the short section of redway in between. It was still the place of concrete blocks and roundabouts and not even 50 years of history. But now it was also my home. I had to make a concerted effort to get to know Milton Keynes. It was like being set up on a blind date where initially you don’t click. But you keep making polite conversation because it would be rude to leave before you’ve even finished the first drink. So, stuck here at least for the moment, I gave Milton Keynes a chance. I remember finding out about MK City Orchestra and feeling like I’d been shown the cultural light at the end of the concrete tunnel. As an impoverished student, I could barely afford the tickets, but going to that concert was a symbolic gesture of my commitment to this new-found cultural side of Milton Keynes. More such moments arrived, and I found out about the heritage organisations, the galleries, the independent cafés that I thought didn’t exist but were actually just hidden away. I began to look at the town differently. I saw how handsome its parks were in the soft green light which filters through its many trees. How the concrete blocks were the result of the passion and ambition of a group of extraordinary people. How the town had been built on a bedrock of hundreds of years of history. And slowly but surely, I fell in love.

The People’s Stories collects not just the stories of the interviewees, but also their photographs © Nicky Kenny

The People’s Stories is a fascinating project, and has opened up rich veins of history I never knew existed. I’ve learnt about how important art and landscape were to those initial city planners, and how special bylaws enabled the building of the redways. I’ve heard stories of the Bowl being built the wrong way round, and the concrete being delivered for the concrete cows. Stories of all those pioneers, 50 years ago and today, who, when they don’t see something they want, just…build it. They make it happen. I know there’s still much more of Milton Keynes for me to discover, but it’s been a privilege to get to know it through the stories of its people. It’s no Oxford or London, but that’s not a bad thing. It’s the fact that Milton Keynes is different that makes it special, and that makes its residents proud to live here. And given that I’ve written the book on it, I can now say I’m proud to call it home too.

Milton Keynes: The People’s Stories is available from the Living Archive website for £7 (plus P&P).

 

 

“See’t shalt thou never”: King Lear at the Duke of York’s

A plea to directors to look to their sightlines following a trip to see King Lear at The Duke of York’s Theatre

What a privilege to see the great Ian McKellen as King Lear the other week. A simple but striking set, superb acting, and as ever, an extraordinary play. Except here’s the rub: how much of King Lear did I actually see? No, I’m not harking back to the 2007 RSC Lear, in which McKellen infamously bared all. I am referring to sightlines. The tickets I purchased, at no small cost, are labelled on the ATG website as “slight viewing restriction from curve of auditorium” (and there were other tickets labelled explicitly as “restricted view”). But my view was so restricted as to inspire this 500-word rant. On entering the auditorium, it turned out that “slight viewing restriction” meant I could see maybe 60% of the main stage. That was before the audience came in. With 3 rows of people in front of me, that view narrowed to roughly 50%. And the thing is, the people in front of me, in those “restricted view” seats, kept on craning their necks, leaning forward, and even standing up, so that they could see. At that point, my visibility of the stage was, well, 0%.

With nothing to see but the audience members in front of me, I was painfully reminded that the word “audience” ultimately derives from the Latin for “to hear”. But etymology didn’t enhance my experience of the play (and anyway, the Greek theatron is literally a “place for viewing”). I have purchased restricted view tickets at other theatres, and it has never affected my enjoyment of a play so drastically. I’m lucky – I know the play well enough to know what is happening even without seeing it. But for someone unfamiliar with the text and its language, being able to see is vital to understanding what is going on, and, by extension, actually enjoying the experience.

Now, I know this production started off in Chichester’s Minerva Theatre. The difference in these auditoria is striking, even just in terms of capacity. Looking at reviews, it seems that some of the staging, such as the walkway through the stalls, is designed to bring some of the intimacy of the much smaller Chichester to the Duke of York’s. But even with such attempts, it didn’t feel like the blocking had been sufficiently reconfigured to account for the new sightlines.

 

By all accounts, it’s an excellent production. the reviews are very favourable – but I doubt the reviewers were sitting in the Upper Circle. Certainly, the acting is excellent, the production values second to none (the storm is beautifully rendered). But I can’t tell you what I thought of it, because ultimately I was never immersed enough to feel anything.

The day after we went to see Lear, Ian McKellen injured his leg and was unable to perform. Instead, he sat on the stage and chatted to the audience for 90 minutes. A number of people tweeted the experience, and one particular thread caught my eye.

Apparently, McKellen said, “if you can’t see Lear’s button when he says ‘pray you, undo this button,’ to Edgar, the theatre is too big for Shakespeare.” I’m sorry to say that not only is your theatre too large for us to see the button, a proportion of the audience can’t even see you. Please, directors, think of your audience in the Upper Circle who just want to see a play. Look to your sightlines.

A fresh (and female) take on an old tale: Betsy Cornwell’s The Forest Queen

In many ways, The Forest Queen is a fairly standard, though very good, adventure story. It is, in essence, a gender-reversed retelling of Robin Hood. Sylvie runs away from home with her childhood friend, Bird, and sets up camp in the forest. As she rebels against the injustices enacted by her brother, who is the acting Lord of the Manor, she gradually attracts a band of rebel brothers and sisters.

And yet, there is something in the subject matter and sensitive writing that lingers with you. This is not a gender-reversed retelling for the sake of doing something new. Every detail – of Medieval life, of day-to-day arboreal existence, the realities of childbirth – is described with a visceral clarity. One example of such detail is the image of Sylvie lying on a tree branch, enjoying the breeze as it stirs the hair on her legs. Such a small thing, but it stayed with me. Firstly, because it’s a lovely moment of calm in amongst the running about and rescuing and rebelling. But also because it normalised the idea of a pseudo-Medieval woman, living in the forest, not shaving her legs. This shouldn’t be refreshing, but it was. I remember being baffled when I watched The Croods, because all the cavewomen were so smooth. Armpit hair in a children’s film was apparently taboo.

There’s a great deal of darkness to be found in Cornwell’s writing. The book deals with rape, abuse, and suicide, but such themes are sensitively handled. This darkness made it seem appropriate for an older audience than it is perhaps intended for. While dark and twisty feelings are not a shortcut to character depth, they certainly help here. All the characters are convincing, with no question of their female iteration being a mere gimmick. It took me a while to warm to the central character and her defensiveness even though this characterisation was justified. But I did warm to her, and she became a hero you could really rally around.

I read and enjoy a lot of young adult fiction, but aspects of this novel felt like they would satisfy the recommended audience of 12+ more than they could satisfy me. I sometimes found the dialogue a bit simplistic and lacking in realism. While I was invested in the romance, the tension felt contrived – barriers preventing the two characters getting together were entirely self-inflicted.

Overall a very enjoyable forest romp with unexpected depth. And how can you say no to a female Robin Hood?

Favourite quotation:
“High in the trees of Woodshire Forest on a sunny day, the light doesn’t seem to come from above you at all. Light springs out of the leaves there, a round robin of tree and sky: it streams off every twig, drips into the edges of each ebbing shadow until the whole canopy floods with gold, until the air itself smells like light, bittersweet and fresh. You can drown in green sunshine up there.” (loc 17-20)

Betsy Cornwell, The Forest Queen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018)

With thanks to Betsy Cornwell and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt via NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Murder with a light touch: Sophie Hannah’s The Mystery of Three Quarters

My rather patchy knowledge of Poirot comes from watching David Suchet’s excellent interpretation, so I cannot judge this book on Christie authenticity or how it might fit into the Poirot cannon. Nevertheless, I would consider myself a Poirot enthusiast, so it was with great excitement that I embarked on my first literary Poirot adventure. Normally a purist when it comes to chronology, I was pleased to find that this works perfectly well as a standalone from both Christie’s books and Sophie Hannah’s more recent contributions. The Mystery of Three Quarters has everything I’d expect from a great Poirot story – obviously murder and intrigue – but also puzzles, the charm of the 1930s setting, eccentric characters, and exquisite moustaches.

Returning home from luncheon Poirot is accosted by a woman who claims to have received a letter from him accusing her of murder. Affronted, Poirot attempts to explain he has sent no such letter, and knows nothing of her or the supposed murder. He is as much a victim as she is. Over the next few days, Poirot learns of three others who have been sent the same letter, accusing them all of committing the same murder. Every letter is signed “Hercule Poirot”. Poirot is hooked, so sets out to clear his name and to find out if there is indeed a murderer among the four.

Poirot, as usual, is several steps ahead, but Hannah leaves enough clues that you feel as if you almost have enough information to solve the mystery yourself. This was a refreshing change for me, as too often with contemporary crime fiction I can’t get invested in solving the mystery myself, because I know some final revelation in the last few pages will be what clinches it – information I had no chance of working out on my own.

Though the subject matter might be dark, Hannah has a light touch and there are many humorous moments that help you skip through the pages with ease. I did feel Hannah held our hands just a trifle too much – quite simply, both showing and telling what was going on. I don’t mind recaps and summaries – they help me keep track of what we’ve learned and what we need to find out. But there seemed to be a tendency to over-explain where I would have preferred to make connections for myself.

I didn’t feel anything was gained in switching between Poirot’s third person narrative and Catchpool’s first person narrative (who, it turns out, is the narrator retelling Poirot’s narrative too), but I appreciate this may be traditionally how Christie’s stories are written.

Overall, an extremely enjoyable read; light, intriguing, and pleasingly puzzling.

P.S. More Fee, please. She features heavily at the beginning, but disappears, leaving behind only her cake, which is a great shame.

P.P.S. As an aside: there is great significance surrounding a typewriter with a broken lower case ‘e’ key. Why then, at the very end, does Edward Catchpool comment on the unbroken ‘E’ in his own name? Upper case ‘E’s have not been mentioned at all in the mystery of the broken typewriter!

Favourite quotation:
“Poirot removed his hat and coat with less care than he usually took, and handed both to George. ‘It is not a pleasant thing, to be accused of something one has not done. One ought to be able to brush the untruths aside, but somehow they take hold of the mind and cause a spectral form of guilt – like a ghost in the head, or in the conscience! Someone is certain that you have done this terrible thing, and so you start to feel as if you have, even though you know you have not. I begin to understand, Georges, why people confess to crimes of which they are innocent.’” (loc 141-146)

Sophie Hannah, The Mystery of Three Quarters (HarperCollins, 2018)

With thanks to Sophie Hannah and HarperCollins via NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The magic of memories: Peng Shepherd’s The Book of M

My review of Peng Shepherd’s The Book of M is comprised more of feelings than analysis. The book is so full of satisfying little surprises that I am reluctant to reveal anything more than what is explained in the first few chapters. So here it is, a selection of different ways to write, “I think The Book of M is brilliant.”

On the surface level, The Book of M is about a pandemic loss of memory. Across the world, people begin losing their shadows. With their shadows, they lose memories. And as they forget their past, they forget who they are. So The Book of M is about a world in crisis, but it’s also about love, and about what makes us human. About how we, as a race, react to tragedy and to chaos. About hope, fear, and magic.

The Book of M follows four separate narratives, Naz, an Olympic-level archer from Tehran; Max, who records her memories on a tape recorder even as they slip away from her; Ory, her husband. And the amnesiac, the one with a middle but no beginning, who lost his memories but kept his shadows. “What can you lose and still be you?” is the question asked by Peng Shepherd that rests at the heart of The Book of M. It’s full of the darkness of what can happen when we lose our humanity, our memories, our personal histories. But it’s also hopeful.

It is perfectly paced and plotted. It’s unpredictable, and full of surprises that make you stop in your tracks. And yet whenever the story takes a new twist you can’t help but think “oh yes, of course that had to happen”. It’s that feeling of the last jigsaw piece slotting into place. Because it’s full of perfectly curated surprises, I’m unwilling to reveal more than the bare minimum of what will encourage you to make these discoveries yourself. Expect heartbreak, bravery, magic, the universal appeal of stories, and an investigation into what makes each of us, as individuals, who we are.

It defies categorisation. Yes, it’s post-apocalyptic, and bears a passing resemblance to the brilliant Station Eleven, but it’s unlike any post-apocalyptic novel I’ve read. It contains its own particular brand of imagination. There are elements of magical realism, and of fantasy.

This is one of those books I had to keep reading, cramming reading into stolen slivers of time on tea breaks, bus rides, and the late hours of the night. I’m sure I’ll re-read it, and wish I could experience reading it again for the first time. But I hope, too, never to forget it.

Favourite quotation:
“When he reached the other side of the long, silent walk, he didn’t recognize anything at all. Washington, D.C., looked nothing like Washington, D.C., anymore. What remained was a city that had been lit on fire down to the last crevice and then doused with winter death. Black scorch marks covered everything. The roads, the earth, the sides of buildings, the roofs were all the same burnt darkness. And from the sky, a perpetual rain fell, a kind of freezing drizzle that felt heavier than water as it settled on him. The city would have glimmered, charred onyx overlaid with diamond, if not for the dark gray clouds that trapped all light. He was a tourist at the end of the world.” (loc 1986-1991)

Peng Shepherd, The Book of M (HarperCollins, 2018)

Thank you to Peng Shepherd and HarperCollins via NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The Author’s Effects: Objects, Literature, and Death

In preparation for September’s Literary Festival, MK Lit Fest have been running a series of taster events. Last night MK Gallery hosted Professor Nicola J Watson of the Open University and her audio-visual installation on literary tourism. Her engaging talk, ‘The Author’s Effects’, took us on a tour of authors’ homes and hideouts from Petrarch to J. K. Rowling. She looked at the rise of literary tourism in the 1780s, the objects left behind by writers, and our relationship with them. Watson has visited 100 literary museums worldwide in the pursuit of The Author’s Effects (and it took me until I got home to realise that this was a pun on ‘objects’ and ‘impact’…).

I jotted down some notes on her talk, intending to tweet about them, but 140 characters quickly became 500 words. So here are a few thoughts on The Author’s Effects:

It wasn’t until the late eighteenth century that the author’s effects really began to be preserved. Of course, for authors who had died before the eighteenth century, they had to be retrofitted with objects appropriate to their lives and writings. Shakespeare’s chair is a good example – there are at least five of them claiming to have seated the bard.

Local man William Cowper (of ‘Amazing Grace’ fame), was at the forefront of this new literary tourism, and the number of objects you can see that belonged to him at the Cowper and Newton Museum is astounding. This was thanks in part to people following in his footsteps on his walks, which he laid out in his poem ‘The Task’.

There’s a long history of magically multiplying relics, like Byron’s hair (which was most often the hair of his dog), and I couldn’t help but think of Shakespeare’s mulberry tree, from which an entire shipload of objects has been made over the years.

One of the most captivating objects is surely Petrarch’s cat, embalmed and displayed in an elaborate marble tomb, with a verse declaring that Petrarch loved his cat more than he loved his muse, Laura. The thing is, the cat was a joke, installed long after Petrarch’s death in 1635, in reference to a famous picture of Petrarch with his cat in his study. But the joke is long-lived – by the time Byron visits, the cat is authentically Petrarch’s, and even today, you can read about how Petrarch loved his cat so much he had it mummified. Watson has already written about the cat in her excellent blog: “What interests me about this cat is what sort of joke it is. It’s a joke on the cultural investment in the rather notional love of Petrarch for the ever unattainable and unattained Laura (at best a sort of stalking, one could argue). But it’s also a joke at the expense of the cultural desire to possess the material traces of the (relatively speaking) immaterial — myth and story, words and sentiment. It is, above all, a meditation on the desire to re-embody the disembodied – to re-body Petrarch himself.”

Which brings us neatly on to some other issues with embodying dead authors. The author needs to be sufficiently dead not to get in our way when we’re snooping around their house, but they must also be ever-lasting. Any reminder of their mortality, of their humanity, must be carefully negotiated. The clothes Wordsworth died in, for instance, were displayed on a standing mannequin in the room where he died – creating a rather unsettling effect. Now they are displayed elsewhere, more associated with a day in the life than the moment of death.

When Roald Dahl’s writing hut was dismantled and reassembled, all of his papers and objects were painstakingly preserved and placed in the correct location. But as well as picking up pens and photographs, they also collected up the dust in the hut (let’s face it, Dahl’s dead skin), and scattered it over the reassembled hut before sealing it off.

You might not want to think about Agatha Christie on the toilet, but it’s ok – the toilet seat can be connected to her writing. She took it with her when she went travelling with her archaeologist husband to Mesopotamia, where she wrote, among other things, Murder in Mesopotamia.

J. K. Rowling admitted that she had signed a bust in the hotel room where she finished writing Deathly Hallows: “JK Rowling finished writing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in this room (552) on 11th Jan 2007.” The Balmoral Hotel have now turned this into a pilgrimage site in its own right (and you can pay £965 a night to stay there yourself). I was struck by the difference in reaction between her admission of graffiti and Ian McEwan’s admission of taking a few pebbles from Chesil Beach, which sat on his desk while he wrote On Chesil Beach. When he admitted in an interview that he had taken the pebbles, Weymouth and Portland borough council “invited” him to return the pebbles. Rowling gets a tourist site made, McEwan gets threatened with fines.

 

And finally, what of the future? Watson thinks analysis of literary tourism will revolve around selfie culture. That and tuning in to a live-stream of authors as they write – watching in real-time the author’s words as they appear on the screen. Which, trust me, if you ever wanted to watch me type and delete and re-type this blog, would be a very dull thing indeed. But then, I’m not J. K. Rowling, or Nicola Watson.

Nicola J Watson’s book, The Author’s Effects: A Cultural Poetics of the Writer’s House Museum, will be published next year. You can view more of MK Lit Fest’s events on their website.

Quotation of the month – Portobello books

This month’s quotation comes from Blanche Girouard’s Portobello Voices. It tells the story of Portobello Market in the unique voices of its traders. From antique dealers to costermongers, butchers to tin pan players, each person tells the story of their lives, collections, and relationship with Portobello.

I was inspired to read this because I am editing my own book of oral histories, Milton Keynes: The People’s Stories. Being guided by the words of others is a fascinating way to create a book, and it’s a huge privilege to be able to share their stories and their memories of Milton Keynes. Having spent hours cutting interviews to make them suitable for publication, I am impressed by how effortless this book seems. Each chapter tells an engaging story, and yet doesn’t feel edited at all. Girouard has perfectly preserved the voice of each trader, so that it feels each is speaking from the pages directly to you.

“You could get a modern reprint of that book but it’s rather nice to actually have an original. Because you can actually, viscerally, experience it the same way that somebody did nearly four hundred years ago. That, to me, is interesting. And there’s nothing like the smell of an old book. They smell differently from century to century because of the paper that was used, the leather that was used. I always think the older books have this lovely kind of organic aroma to them; they’ll smell vaguely of smoked meat. But by the time you get to the nineteenth century they stop making them with rag paper and make them with wood pulp and the leather was tanned at high speed in very acidic conditions. And in the nineteenth century they had gas lighting which put sulphuric acid into the atmosphere which reacted with the tanning agents in the bindings of books and the stuff that was used in the wood pulp paper, which is why that deteriorates so quickly. I’ve had occasions when I’ve opened the covers of a book and parts of the pages start falling out like confetti because the books have essentially rotted. Whereas I’ll show you one here…This book will be celebrating its five hundredth birthday next year and look at that paper – it’s as tough as nails!” Nicholas, Antique Dealer

From Blanche Girouard, Portobello Voices (The History Press, 2013), p.37.