Paul Magrs

…is Denis Gifford’s ‘Monsters of the Movies’, published by Carousel in 1977. This book served a similar function, for me, to The Observer Book of Birds. It was my alphabetical checklist of horror movies: my I-Spy of Terror.

For a long time this was my favourite record in the world.

Autumn’s started a bit early, it feels like, in Manchester. I was there when it switched over – going into town yesterday on the train to see Paul Burston give his reading at Taurus bar. It was a beautiful, blue, augusty day when I set off and the heavens opened when I got to Canal Street. But I don’t mind the rain in Manchester. Makes it seem even more like Venice than it already does, racketing up and down Canal Street. Before the reading I went off to do some writing in Via Fossa, one of my favourite bars. Having Guinness in the stormy afternoon, under chandeliers in a gallery made of old church fittings. Writing a good argument scene between Brenda and Effie.

Apart from an afternoon having coffee and book-hunting in Didsbury, I spent most of yesterday reading and mulling things over.

My new cover’s up on Amazon, so I guess it’s okay to show it here. Hope you like it. Let me know! I can’t wait for this one to come out. Brenda book four, already! It gets published on the very day I turn forty. ‘Twelve Stories’ is published by Salt books at the same time.

Who are all these experts?

Recently I heard a writer give a talk and she was cross about readers’ reviews on Amazon. Who are all these people? These experts? What qualifies them to write this stuff?

They’re consumers, I guess. They’re paying out their cash and that’s all that’s needed to qualify anyone to be an expert these days. Being a consumer gives you the power and the right to say what you want, it seems.

I could see the writer’s point, though. Those Amazon reviews stick around. They stick to your book. When other sites cut and paste the details, these reviews – fond, intemperate, foul – cling on, like a little trail of stardust.

The writer who complained said she didn’t mind when she got reviewed in a Sunday paper say, by another novelist, and they slagged off her work. At least they knew a bit about it. They knew something about the craft. The online-retail-site reviewer doesn’t have to know much about anything at all.

I’m in two minds about all of this, as usual.

On the one hand, reviews online can be really annoying. Hastily typed out, easily damning, thoughtless, silly. Look at the pompous tone of this quote – plucked at random from an Amazon review of a newer book by the man who wrote the ‘Borribles’ trilogy. I just love the casual mock-expertise of this, and the awful mangled metaphor…

‘I have to say this now, but Foxes Oven is as good as anything I have ever read. It may be that MDL had his fingers in too many pies (writing style wise) to forge a reputation as a great novelist, but this is an amazing book.’

I also strongly dislike that middlebrow assumption that different styles and fingers-in-pies means a dilution of a writer’s talent or a waste of his or her energies and potential. That’s exactly what people who don’t or can’t write generally think. (Writers like to keep busy! They have lots of ideas! They have to make a living! Also, they get bored easily and like to try out new stuff, in my experience anyway.)

On the other hand… I’m not sure I want to give reviewing over to the pro’s in the papers, either. Just look how many long reviews of novels are written by the same old farts, parping on about another bunch of old farts. Dancing the two-step down the decades, farting as they go, changing partners, reviewing each other, fart-arsing about, and trumpeting praise for each other…

Or those tiny reviews in the ‘paperback round up’ pages, where someone seemingly reads a bunch of pages at random, copies out the blurb and adds a few smart-arsey remarks…

They’re always saying the books pages are being squeezed smaller and smaller in the Sunday papers. I’m not sure I’m bothered. They usually depressed me anyway. All those weighty and worthy history books. Those serious-sounding novels (‘It’s about exile, memory, loss and desire…’) Those horrible interviews with someone looking pained and cradling their head in their hands.

I suppose I’m thinking about this because I just wrote a review for this blog today, of Anne Tyler’s latest. I published it and thought, ‘WHAT AM I DOING? I HATE REVIEWS!!’

I still don’t know what I was doing. Trying to get to the bottom of why I felt a little nonplussed and let down by reading a new book by my favourite novelist? It wasn’t for a commission or anything. I just wanted to do it.

I once tried reviewing for the papers. I hated doing it and I think I probably wasn’t any good at it. It made me feel jumpy and weird. I got too interested, if that makes any sense, in saying what I really meant, and saying what I really thought.

I do like writing about books, and talking about them, obviously. I like the way blogging and reviews on blogs can become more like a conversation. A bit like a two dimensional salon. Maybe I prefer proper readers, thinking aloud, and talking to each other. I like ideas bouncing around, like in a seminar or a workshop.

Also, when I write in first person, about something that bothers or perplexes me, I’m told it can come across as a bit of a rant. Does it? Is it? Am I banging on again..? Answers on a postcard.

I love Anne Tyler’s novels. I’ve read them all and some of them, such as ‘Saint Maybe’ three or four times. I’ve even hunted out things like ‘The Good Housekeeping Book of Short Stories’ because it had a couple of rare pieces by her.

I love the fact that not a great deal happens and when it does, it happens rather wistfully, and often inbetween chapters. Months, sometimes years pass between chapters and we pick up with the characters when they’re being older and a little bit (maybe not) wiser. And when we see them they’re doing things like cutting the grass or having a terse, difficult family visit or an argument in a supermarket aisle.

She often has these diffident, quiet men at the centres of her books. Often they’re men who’ve had to grow up early for various reasons, and have had responsibility thrown upon them. They have other, wilder siblings, who dither in and out of the action. There are often middle-aged women, mothers and wives, who get up one day and walk away from their lives. And there is usually a ditzy, slightly unkempt younger woman who turns out to be the most capable one of all.

As the years have gone on (she started publishing in the mid-sixties) Tyler’s characters have grown older with her. Looking back to the books of the 60s and 70s, some of those people were having rackety lifestyles: they were making life up as they went along. Nowadays she’s less interested in the hapless young and is mostly writing about more sedentary older people. Or the younger people from back then, thirty, forty years on. Hence Liam, the 61 year old would-be philosopher in the new novel, ‘Noah’s Compass.’

Like other men in Tyler’s books – especially Macon in ‘The Accidental Tourist’ – he’s a man who has drifted away from his family, his home, his ties-to-life. Even his memories are eluding him. He has a chance of coming back to life, of returning to the thick of it, when he hooks up with the younger, eccentric ‘professional rememberer’ Eunice. He overcomes his embarrassment at her inexpert attempts at being herself – and falls for her.

Of course, I love being in Tyler’s world. I always do. She writes scenes of toe-curling, gut-churning domestic embarrassment and unsentimental warmth that I envy and adore for their simplicity and their truthfulness. But… this one book leaves me a little bit hollow, I think. I feel like we have arrived at the end of the story. This is the epilogue to the great long family romance of these characters.

We get a parade of tricky daughters and curious ex-wives and so on… but only in passing. There’s a lovely flashback to the doomed first wife, back in the 70s… this pale creature who let it all go to hell. But we only see glimpses of these dramatic highpoints. Tyler’s books use to let us dwell in the past a bit more. She used to take us there. Plonk us right in the middle of it. Now we’re just picking up the echoes.

At the end of the book Liam has a memory suddenly come back to him. One that makes him laugh. An absurd Christmas morning scene, back from when his wife donated their tree and all its ornaments to a neighbour. All through the book he’s been wanting his memory back. He’s been adrift (hmmm… and the title came over a bit pushed too, I think). So he gets a memory that he isn’t expecting – and it’s a happy one, and a lovely note to end on.

I guess it’s all about not raking up the shitty memories and being glad the scars heal up… which is laudable. She’s telling him – and us – it’s better to move on. But I liked it better when she was sending us back to the start and bringing the past to turbulent life all around us.

First – thanks to Bret M. Herholz for letting me reproduce this lovely drawing of his. It went up on his fab blog yesterday – a Goreylike illustration in anticipation of ‘Hornets’ Nest.’ I’ve said, I’d love to see him do some glimpses of Brenda and Effie’s world in this style. His blog is well worth a look.

Speaking of Hornets’ Nest, the BBC have created a mini-site to promote this five part Doctor Who audio series I’ve been involved in. It’s at bbcshop.com/hornetsnest.

We’ve had a quiet week back home after our week in Paris. J. was taking hundreds of pictures and I was reading and we walked miles as usual – popping into places like the Pompidou to see the Kandinsky exhibition and visiting the Rodin museum for the first time. The latter was a wonderful oasis on the hottest afternoon of the year, with leaves already falling and the sun lighting up the marble till it was see-through. We ate outside nearly every night in a series of fancy restaurants and we sat in the Jardin de Luxembourg and read and drank coffee. That’s one of my favourite places in the world – it’s dead peaceful under those plane trees, even when the park is heaving with Parisians and visitors. All week I was reading Murakami’s ‘Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’ and I was completely absorbed by it. It’s sat waiting for me for years, this book. I don’t know why I never got round to it till now. It really feels like descending into the impossibly deep, perplexing well that the main character gets into. He sits at the bottom to try and figure out where he’s up to in this surreal mystery story involving missing wives and cats, cursed houses and people getting skinned.

I found it a very disturbing novel in lots of ways – but also one of those books with a unique atmosphere that you want to stick with. I was carrying it with me wherever I went. Reading the final chapters on the moving walkway as I mooched through Charles de Gaulle airport on the way home.

I love the spooky, implacable logic of Murakami’s writing. He makes the weirdness of it all seem so inevitable and right. I like the calmness of it all.

Right now I’m reading Sheila Hancock’s book about John Thaw and loving her writing – crisp and tart and heartfelt. And I’m eager for the new Anne Tyler… and hoping to get some writing of my own done this week…

I’ve read PG Wodehouse for the first time. I don’t know what put me off before. Thoroughly enjoyed ‘Thank You, Jeeves.’ I love the lack of description. Somewhere in the book Bertie Wooster describes why he isn’t bothered bunging a whole load of titivation and scene-setting our way and I kind of agreed with him. I love all his free-standing dialogue and the way it all rattles along. I was reading it – somewhat inappropriately – at the Goth conference, between papers and talks.

So this is my attempt to catch up with the month’s reading.

Another new discovery – someone I’d never gone near – was Ngaio Marsh. But I’m trying to fill in some empty stretches in my crime genre reading and found ‘Tied Up In Tinsel’ hilarious. It’s proper Golden Age detective and feels wonderfully pastichey and filled with grotesques. There’s some lovely savage, comic business with a knitting bag early on. I read somewhere that the Marsh books are fun till a third of the way through, until the Inspector turns up, and that was kind of true. There was a wonderful morbid gleefulness about the whole thing.

Noel Streatfeild I hadn’t read before, either. ‘The Growing Summer’ was a Puffin-book find in a charity shop in Lancaster. (I love collecting up elderly, frangible Puffins and rescuing them.) It’s one of those summer-holiday kids’ books, which begins with everyone being taken off Elsewhere – often the coast – and having to muck in and get used to newness. I loved this one. The ludicrous, seemingly uncaring Aunt Dymphna in her man’s hat, and insisting on taking the kids out lobster hunting by the full moon… It’s a wonderful period piece.

Another Puffin saved from the brink – Betsy Byars’ ‘The Cartoonist’ – about a kid who goes to his attic and draws endless comic strips while his family get all dysfunctional downstairs. I’d have loved this as a kid, I just know. As it was, I still revelled it. Line by line her writing is gorgeous – just as Streatfeild’s is, but in a completely different way. It’s casual, swift, filled with non-sequiturs. Her protagonist really thinks like a kid. And Byars makes it seem easy, writing like this.

Something I love: writing that makes it seem like it’s easy. That doesn’t draw undue attention to its own cleverness – it doesn’t have to.

What else? E.F Benson’s autobiography, found for two pounds in that marvellous bookshop on the seafront on Morecambe. (One of the best second hand bookshops in the world.) Lovely story about how Henry James couldn’t recognise people on the street. In Rye he spied a woman tottering towards him. Who she was he had no idea. ‘I made the rest of it into rissoles,’ she told him and sloped off sharply. He was most put out, until later, at home, he remembered she was his cook and she was on about yesterday’s leg of lamb.

Some lovely stuff about bishops and vicars and siblings cracking up and everyone in the family being gay and writing novels all over the place. Benson’s like an old friend. I love how he describes James (his mentor and benefactor) composing a whole novel in his head and walking around with it, carefully packed and ready to offload into the ear of a secretary. The whole book would be ‘creaking beautifully’ like a leather portmanteau.

I was let down by Michelle Lovric’s third Venice novel, ‘The Remedy.’ I loved the first two – the one about the painter who has wild affairs with Casanova and then Byron. And the one about the printing press. But this third one left me a bit cold – possibly because it was overwritten. It felt sticky. And the plot was too twisty-turny for its own good, perhaps. Too long, definitely – but most novels are just now.

The Jojo Moyes novel I’m finishing just now – ‘Foreign Fruit’ – is definitely too long, but it’s held me. A split-level novel set at the seaside (I love seaside books, I realise) in the fifties and the present. It involves characters who for various reasons come to Arcadia, an art deco house on the south seafront. The bohemians in the fifties cause various scandals and in the present the place is being done up as a swish hotel. There are lovely criss-crossing love affairs, intrigues, secrets, all sorts. The best of it is in the evocation of this run-down and small-minded locality. I love the touch of DH Lawrence in the early chapters, when the two girls go to encounter the louche world of Arcadia back in the fifties – they’re like Ursula and Gudrun in ‘Women in Love’ for a chapter or two. Too much time is spent on some of the misery in the present day – Daisy being left with the baby and the decorating business by wet husband Daniel. That strand feels like it could come from any contemporary saga. But on the whole it’s good. I’d read her again. I like the way Moyes will crank things up for the end of a chapter and having Just the Wrong person turn up at Just the Wrong Moment. She does it about three times to great effect. (I wonder if she grew up, like me, enraptured by the episode endings of Dynasty and Dallas? That gorgeous soapiness is here, definitely.)

Anyway – enough! Too long. That’s covered about two weeks of reading. I can’t go through all of it. Just pick out some threads from what I’ve been devouring recently. I’m enjoying books that really take you somewhere and steep you in an atmosphere, but without laying it on too thick. I love characters who are allowed to get larger than life and even turn into parodies… who can suddenly take your breath away by telling the absolute truth. I’m enjoying juicy, succinct dialogue that sounds like I can hear it drifting over from the next table or over the hedge, easy as anything. And I’ve no patience at all with stuff that sounds too composed, too heavy, too fancy for its own good.

Now I’ve got to work out which books to pack to take with me on holiday.