Paul Magrs

Back in time for Hallowe’en…!

here’s a few nice reviews of the Brenda books. Here’s Next Read: http://nextread.co.uk/2009/10/28/review-something-borrowed-by-paul-magrs-headline-review/#disqus_thread

But what’s that? I do what? Over-indulge myself..?

And another nice one from Book Chick City: http://www.bookchickcity.com/

Happy Hallowe’en everyone! Here at home we’ve had episode one of ‘The Daemons’ already tonight. We’re toying with watching Peter Cushing in ‘The Uncanny’ (Fester’s choice, since it’s about cats) and I’ve just been informed by J. that we get the right channel for Most Haunted Live…! Bliss!

The pics above: I reckon that’s Effie in her racier days, attending one of Sheila Manchu’s strange parties at the Hotel Miramar. And in the other one she’s visiting the Abbey with a certain gentleman friend…

Here’s another piece of Brenda crit – from ‘A Pile of Leaves’ (link in the sidebar):

“Shelley’s novel (Frankenstein) has a lot of things twisted up in it. Fear of the Other, the child, the father, the scientist, God’s retribution on the irreligious, and even of the self. It’s that particular insecurity Magrs draws on for the black comedy, the melancholy, even real emotional drama, of his fabulous character Brenda, bed and breakfast proprietress and (long since thrown-over) bride to the Monster. As well as recalling the tone of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, there’s something private about Brenda’s voice. It comes as a direct response to Herr Doktor’s manic confession, and Brenda’s drive to create comfort, to make a corner of the unheimlich town thoroughly homely, is as touching as it is funny.

“It also makes sense, a new sense, of the original story. Whilst obviously prefiguring the Zombie narrative, in a way, it’s a reverse-possession story – the bodies of unfortunates and criminals are imbued with innocent, semi-feral, childlike minds. Their inheritance is a numb, random collocation of limbs, and a numb, random morality which produces them but can’t protect them, won’t even help them to create identity beyond that of test subject. The fact that Brenda is given not just a long and eventful life, but also a choice, a choice of life, and happiness, makes Never The Bride a generous and clever extension of the narrative, and if it could have been taught alongside Frankenstein itself, it would have been a good addition to the course.”

A handful of further found pictures… and a reminder that tonight I’m reading at Lancaster Litfest at the Storey Auditorium at 9.30pm. There’s a best-costume competition, Christmas trees – and a preview of ‘Hell’s Belles’ from yours truly.

What do you think of this set of photos? George looks like he’s embarked on a life as a writer and existentialist, having left Bury or Preston way behind him. He’s got a duffel coat and a packet of Gitanes and a whole headful of ideas. He’s had this photo taken and copies made so he can send it back to the family at home. What would they think of him? Swanking along, down by the Seine? That’s his family, out for a Sunday stroll in town. His parents and his wife’s parents and his wife herself. They’re having a summit meeting. They’ve come together – even though they’ve never really got on – and they’re going to discuss the problem of George. George who’s absconded and is abroad, practising his ennui.

When I was quite little and starting to show an interest in history and stories my Big Nanna fetched out all of her newspapers from the war years up till the Queen’s Coronation. I pored over them. The pictures and the text, trying to make sense of it all. I loved the adverts and the funny little mentions of things in the corners of pages. Later that same day, we visited the other grandparents and my Little Nanna couldn’t believe that my Big Nanna was letting me dwell over this old fashioned, morbid stuff. What did the bairn want with thirty year old newspapers? She let me cut out a few photos I liked (crowds at the King’s funeral, which I pasted into my Silver Jubilee scrapbook), and then binned the rest of the papers.

I was always someone who loved looking at other people’s old photos. Going through old albums, trying to piece the stories together. Our own family albums seem a bit threadbare in places, what with one thing and another. Some of the pictures I’ve inherited from my Big Nanna’s side are filled with unfamiliar people. In photos from only forty years ago, the faces are starting to become unnameable, unknown. The stories and connections haven’t lasted as long as the visual record.

I’m very drawn to other people’s snaps. In various junk shops and tabletop sales I’ve bought bags and boxes of other people’s ancient photos. I can’t bare the thought of them becoming landfill some day. These unique pictures. Look at these three examples, all of which came from a miniature suitcase I bought in an antique store in the Yorkshire Dales last January. The thing was stuffed with about a hundred years’ worth of photos, and a few letters and post cards. It was a kind of novel in kit form.

I love the faces in photos like this. The looks that people give each other when they should all be facing front and smiling for posterity. Look at that goofily grinning lad in his long socks and suit and tie, standing beside the tall girl in the wedding photograph. And the groom who, at first glance, seems to have hold of the page boy’s ear. I’m intrigued by the lady at the very back, obviously standing on a scullery chair and wearing the fanciest hat out of everyone in the family. Her face is mostly in shadow. You can see she thinks she’s a cut above the rest.

I wonder if everyone in the suitcase belongs more or less to the same family? If it’s a multi-generational saga I paid seven pounds for, and rescued from the brink? The case was shoved amongst heaps of old comics and enyclopedias. It had been opened and ransacked and cast aside.

That living room looks like it’s the 1960s now. Anaglypta walls and pictures framed in white plastic. The staring eyes of the man in the armchair are a bit worrying. Everyone’s staring or smiling in different directions. It looks like an older sister has come to visit. Who’s is the teddy? It looks a bit worn. Maybe she’s brought it for the kid. But that woman on the arm of the chair cradles it oddly like a baby. The bear looks bemused.

That couple on the Prom look a bit mithered to me. They should be enjoying themselves, but it looks like they’ve had words. Are they brother and sister? Or a couple who’ve grown to look just like one another, with same dark eyes and concerned grimace? Old-fashioned-looking people, my Big Nanna would have called them. Smart-looking and togged up for a day in the sea air.

Anyone else collect stuff like this? And pore over the minutiae? Is it just me? Is it morbid and strange like my Little Nanna said?

Just recently I’ve given up on reading a couple of things that were dragging along. I don’t feel guilty about that anymore. One of them was 500 pages and I was about 50 from the finish and I thought – well, I know how this is going to end. Another I was halfway through and it was so bleak and boringly, self-consciously horrific – though nicely-written – I just put it on the pile by the front door for going back to the library.

And got on with other stuff instead. Rereading ‘The Secret Garden’ for my workshop and seminar this week on the MA course. This time just about everyone loved discovering or rediscovering the book – after mixed results with the Eve Garnett and the Edith Nesbit. We talked about life-affirming books and the importance of novels in which there are no out-and-out villains. Novels which resist the temptation to demonise and see things very simply.

So, that was a pleasure to reread. I’ve just picked up Susan Hill’s memoir of a year spent rereading, “Howards End is on the Landing” (which actually is on our top landing table – see illus.) I love reading about people’s reading habits, and that’s one of the reasons I enjoy bookish blogs. This book’s like one extended one, in many ways – with Susan Hill roving through the stacks of books in her house. I love the way the shelves and cases themselves get mapped out for us. I kind of want a Tolkienesque map in the endpapers, showing just where that row of Observer books lies, or those Penguin reprints…

Something very engaging about the idea of not buying new books and going all greenish with the ones you’ve already got, clogging up the house. As I’ve said before, our house is rammed full. They’re tottering everywhere and all out of order. And the cellar’s chocka, too.

At the station yesterday – held up going home – I was making up rules for days spent book-shopping. Rules which might include making sure you take with you a couple of carrierbags of books you’ve finished with, to pop into a charity shop as your first port of call. Only then are you allowed to buy anything new. That might work. I mean, look at that to-read pile in the corner of my tiny study. (The pic with the hedgehog lamp).

When I was in Ilkley for the festival, I met up with Stuart after my workshop and before my reading, and he’d driven all the way down from Edinburgh. We were starving but the first thing we did was find ourselves an amazing remainder bookshop, where everything was 3 for 5 pounds. (One day I’ll write a piece about the joys of remainder bookshops. I don’t care what anyone says – I love them.) He was under express orders from his wife not to go home with more new books. But before we knew it we were both sitting with a pile of purchases in a tea rooms ordering bacon barms and mugs of tea. Completely helpless and hopeless.

Maybe Susan Hill will help me concentrate my various collections down. Winnow out some of the chaff. Maybe. While she picks through and finds the all-time favourites she’s returned to repeatedly, she also spends some time writing about the pleasures of owning books you haven’t read yet. The spanking new novels that sit there enticingly – patient for your attention. (Look at Murakami’s “Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” – a full eight years it sat waiting for me. Its paperback went through two new covers and a change of publisher before I took it down and took it on holiday.) So I’m also being talked into not parting with anything at all. One day that thing that’s sat there will find its moment in your life… perhaps.

J’s always on at me to get rid of some. Then I filled three deep cardboard boxes and put them in the downstairs hall. Waiting for him to drive them to a charity shop… but then I find him digging through the boxes, fetching things back out… ‘Hey, there’s a signed Terry Pratchett in here!’ etc.

Anyway… so I’m enjoying Susan Hill’s book, and the new sequel to Winnie the Pooh by David Benedictus which came in the same Amazon haul… and I’m completely loving rereading “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society”. Soonest reread of all time, this one. I read it in the summer – and now it’s Book Club choice for next month. It’s my suggestion and I’m relishing the chance to revisit the world of those characters. This time, as well as Helene Hanff, it’s reminding me of “Diary of a Provincial Lady”, “Mrs Minniver” and Stella Gibbons in “Cold Comfort Farm”, but that’s okay – I like those echoes. The tone’s not too arch, it’s not too deliberately heart-warming, it’s not too precious or worthy. It lets us make up our minds and draw out the implications from the overlapping letters. It’s just a nicely put together novel and I like it. A keeper.

But then, most of them are.

Panda Book of Horror Line Up

In a house full of music I’d never found a favourite artist of my own. My Mam played vinyl records in my earliest memories. Dylan, Rod Stewart. Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s album, ‘Easy’, all of which I still adore. Later in the Seventies my Mam and stepdad had a music centre in smoked glass, all black and sleek and we had records by Ian Dury, the Clash, Blondie.

But I was a kid who loved comics and books and cartoons. The only records I really had were Disney albums (‘Bobbing Along…’) and that Geoff Love record of disco-ed up space themes.

I had friends who were obsessed with punk, New Wave bands, Goth. Michael learned to play guitar. His sister was in a band influenced by Genesis. They loved dark, gloomy music. At home we loved the charts and had the Top Twenty blasting out of the radio on Sunday nights. We went on road trips to the Lake District with Abba’s ‘The Visitors’ or ELO’s ‘Out of the Blue’.

But I never had a musical hero of my own.

Until I was fifteen and Bowie played Live Aid. In amongst all the sweaty guitarists in their vest tops and sunglasses, here came David. He swished onto stage in a fifties’ style suit with pointy shoulders. A lilac suit. He had on powder blue eye shadow and fuschia lipstick. His hair was teased into a golden quiff.

Of course I’d been aware of him before. Michael’s sister Angela lent my parents ‘ChangesOneBowie’ on vinyl. My Mam had said how unusual she was, as a teenager, liking not just contemporary stuff, but old classics like Bowie, famous from when she’d been little. I was aware of others’ infatuation with him – but how he’d recently gone commercial with his EMI tour and his Let’s Dance stuff and his top ten hits. He’d spoiled himself. He’d been so much better as Ziggy Stardust.

There was a glamour and danger about him. This spikey, queer, alien being.

A New Town like Aycliffe is the perfect place to grow up dreaming about a character like Bowie. It’s sort of sterile and culture-less. You have to make your own distractions. Make up your own fantasy life. There was one book about him in the tiny town library. The market in our town precinct was on Tuesday and the bloke there sold bootleg cassettes of Bowie gigs: three pounds a time for all of this jumbled, precious noise.

At home I dug through the million cassettes in racks in our house. I found a compilation my stepfather had made. A bit of Hunky Dory, bit of Aladdin Sane. My favourite bits of both albums, as it turns out. All the outrageous stuff with Mike Garson’s piano going full tilt: all the stuff that sounds like vaudeville cabaret stuff on Mars. To me at fifteen, listening properly on headphones, and absorbing myself in his lyics, in his world, Bowie was like some glorious, faggy, draggy macabre clown. Slightly reptilian, chilly, unearthly. His voice like no one else’s. Decadent, carefree, bonkers. He was building a whole world in these songs: a land of prairies and ruined cities. Touches of Ballard, Eliot, Waugh, and Ray Bradbury. He had a charming gleefulness and there was a nostalgia in his music… but it was nostalgia for a time we hadn’t even been to yet.

That tape of highlights from the early Seventies was the first time – in a house of music, of vinyl and tape – that I felt I had found an artist of my own. Within a year I’d heard everything of his up until that point. Within a year I was trying to convince myself that the soundtracks to ‘Labyrinth’ and ‘Absolute Beginners’ were worth saving up for, getting excited about. Within two years I was standing in the rain at Roker Park, watching him do the ‘Glass Spider’ live… waiting for a glimpse of something that would take me back to that moment of first listening to that bright orange home-recorded cassette.

Nothing ever does take you back to that moment, though, in things like this, it seems. Maybe ‘Hunky Dory’ does. I bought my first vinyl copy of that album the week after Live Aid, upstairs in Boots in Durham. That was when shops like Boots had record departments. They were like a cross between boutiques and laboratories, with everything kept in protective plastic sleeves.

Maybe there’s still magic and fairy dust trapped in the grooves of that record. I can still put on ‘Hunky Dory’ and be back in that land of prairies and cabaret bars in dark cities and laughing gnomes with Warhol wigs on a radioactive beach and manic clowns playing grand pianos in bombed out cinemas, or drag queens in New York with their bippety boppety hats.

We got loads of entries to the competition to win copies of my new Brenda and Effie novel, ‘Hell’s Belles’, which is published by Headline on November the twelfth. Here are my five favourite entries, all of which completed the sentence:

‘I want to travel to Whitby to meet Brenda and Effie because…’

The winners will receive their copy of my new book pretty soon!

*

Anthony Townsend:
I want to travel to Whitby to meet Brenda and Effie because…
… a holiday just isn’t a holiday without them. I long to be alongside them, unmasking those pernicious purveyers of paranormal delinquency that frequent the Yorkshire coast. Or a cuppa and some cake would be nice.

*

Jon Bishop:
I want to travel to Whitby to meet Brenda and Effie because…
…I need a quiet break! Starting the day with coffee and cake at ‘The Walrus & Carpenter’, later lunch at ‘The Christmas Hotel’. Teatime supper at ‘Cod Almighty’ ending up in Brenda’s attic drinking spicy tea, and not a single adventure in sight!!

OR WOULD THERE BE??

*

Ali McNally:
I want to travel to Whitby to meet Brenda and Effie because…
…If we met we’d be friends. I’d lend Brenda my blackest eyeliner, Effie’d covet my massive boots. We’d grab fish&chips; in salt-tangy air with snakebite&blacks; to shake our hair under April Skies returning to the B&B; where beautiful PVC-clad boys serenade us with Poe and dream of sunrise.

*

Ian Potter:
I want to travel to Whitby to meet Brenda and Effie because…
…. at the edge of hard land there’s a town made of stories, where old fictions hide among those seduced by their glamour- the hopeful are robbed of their dreams in the harbour front arcade with no need now for hands of glory, Prussian Blue rinsed old dears, fat on john dory, tut at the young skinny monsters with their Jet black eyes, History and Legend battle politely here, Yorkshire Grit and Kensington Gorey.

*

Jonathan Dennis:
I want to travel to Whitby to meet Brenda and Effie because…
…it shall have a sky of lightning and glitterballs and the streets are paved with assorted chocolates and ice creams, or did I just forget my meds?

*

But well done everyone else as well, and thanks for sending in your emails!

xp

Look at this lot!

I’m doing Lancaster Litfest next Saturday – the 24th October, 9.30pm at the Storey, Auditorium. They’ve invited people to dress up as characters from the Brenda and Effie novels – so you can attend as Frank or Effie or Sheila Manchu or a Christmas Elf or Mrs Claus, or whoever you fancy being. Anyway – now there’s a list of suggestions on their website’s blog: http://www.litfest.org/blog/2009/10/paul-magrs/

with photos!! Look at this lot! It’s like Mapp and Lucia meets the Rocky Horror Picture Show (Not a bad description of the books generally, that!) I particularly like the pic of the surly-looking waitress Jessie, who has had her genes tampered with at the Deadly Boutique. I love the fact that the caption on the Flickr album tells you that Jessie’s waitress uniform may be worn with an ape mask, to represent her periodic regression to a zombie womanzee.

I can’t wait for this..!

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These two favourites in my top ten are both biographies. And, thinking about it now, the thing that links the two and makes them a bit different to most books of their type, is the fact that they’re full of talking. They’re full of life and air and actual voices. A lot of even very good biogs can seem a bit weighed down with research and the fanciness of the author’s style. In fact, that’s been a vogue for a number of years in life-writing, hasn’t it? The show-off biographer who’s there to dazzle us with their own stylishness and brio. The subject becomes just an excuse for some showing off.

But both these books aren’t like that. George Plimpton’s ‘Truman Capote’ is quite extreme in the self-effacement stakes. The whole thing is a vast arrangement of quotes from conversations and written testimonials by those who spent time with Capote. Not a single word of linking text is provided by Plimpton to orient us or to try and tell us how to interpret the quotes or the story we’re piecing together.

He said at the time, I think, that he wanted it to feel like we’re at a party, overhearing all these brilliant conversations. Each chapter feels like a different party – from the early, breathtaking years when Capote is starting out with his short stories and can’t put a foot wrong. I love all the stuff about those residences he did, writing in these fantastic places all undisturbed. (How do you get onto these residencies? Why did I never find out?) All the stuff about the glamorous parties and balls in NYC are amazing. You can see the crash looming before it happens. You can feel the canker coming when he starts knocking about in high society. He’s gone from pretty, brilliant boy to some kind of jester goblin hopping about and bitching on yachts. The ending comes way too soon and it’s like rushing to the end of a breathtaking, suspenseful mystery. Plimpton teases us along with the promised revelation of Capote’s final, mysterious project.

I’ve read that one again and again. I love the swarming voices and the conflicting viewpoints. Why hve no other biographies followed this lead? I’m bored with the measured pace of most biogs. Most biographers are like detectives or doctors, weighing things up, calmly diagnosing. Or weighing in with spurious opinions or flights of fancy, or patches of ‘fine-writing’ of their own. Plimpton chucks us in at the deep end and seemingly leaves us to it.

My other favourite biog has another fantastic maverick for its subject: Serge Gainsbourg. This must be about ten years old, too: Sylvie Simmons’ ‘A Fistful of Gitanes’. This is a book by someone who obviously adores her subject. The fannishness of it all comes through unashamedly. She also uses her original interviews really well, too, in that she lets Jane Birkin take centre stage, verbatim, so much of the time. And so she should. Birkin comes across wonderfully like a batty old aunt, blithely telling us about what they all got up to back in the early seventies. Some of it’s gorgeously outrageous stuff. Simmons writes best about those bits of Serge’s life when he couldn’t put a foot wrong. Every record was brilliant. Every accident turned out to be amazingly fortuitous. He annoys Bardot and she tells him to write her a love song to make up, and he writes her ‘Je T’aime.’ He careers about the place, stumbling drunkenly, spilling his red wine, dropping fag ash everywhere… but everything he recorded seemed sublimely effortless.

I suppose both biographies here are about men who rattled about, sometimes disastrously, through ramshackle lives, sometimes damaging themselves and others around them. But who both made the wonderful things they did look easy. These two books about them are filled with that same kind of buoyancy and gracefulness. They’re compulsive reads.

Just edged out of my favourite ten – Maria Riva’s amazing book about her mother, Marlene Dietrich.

Our garden here in Manchester’s surrounded by red brick walls, some of them crumbling a little. There’s a mature magnolia tree that blossoms in March and August, with those flowers that my friend Alicia always says look little china cups and saucers. There are hidden corners and chairs and firs and squirrels everywhere and cats doing pasaggiata along the fences and down the paths. It’s a kind of hidden-away garden, tucked amongst lots of others besides the railway lines south of Piccadilly. Right now it’s too chilly to sit in, and carpeted in leaf mulch and conkers. It’s maybe still warm enough to take out a cup of spicy tea and do some crunching about in the untamed grass for about ten minutes.

I think I love walled gardens and things going a little unkempt because I loved Frances Hodgson Burnett’s ‘The Secret Garden’ so much. When I sit out in ours, any time of year, I get that same sensation of belonging to something and being settled somewhere that Mary gets. It was the same feeling in our garden in Norwich, which was smaller and even more hemmed in and secret. J. laboured like mad to make that into a little oasis. He built trellis fences and mounded curtains of honeysuckle. We had glowing lamps and blazing torches. We had Chilean potato blossom – which was rife all over the city’s gardens, as were passion flowers, dark purple and notched like clockfaces growing on the vine.

Our teacher read us ‘The Secret Garden’ when I was ten. She read out every word and, coming from Yorkshire, did all the accents with great aplomb. She was a teacher very big on nature. We visited woodlands and wild fowl parks. We tramped about down the Burn, picking wild flowers and observing the pertinent features of things. I pored over the Observer Books of this that and the other.

She wasn’t my favourite teacher, the one we had that year. My favourites were Mrs Saferi the music teacher who looked like Barbra Straisand, and Miss Booth who we had the following year. But this particular teacher chose wonderful books to read us. ‘The Secret Garden’ I remember best, but there was also both Dodie Smith dalmation books and two of the later Narnias. All year I was agog at the point in the day when it was time to listen to the teacher reading to us. I loved it and I think it’s partly why I still love hearing people read now. That point in the day when all the maths and science and stuff was finished with and it was time for stories.

Speaking of which – we’re just back from the Whitworth Gallery, and the Northern Salt reading. Very nice to sit and listen to four Salt authors do their stuff in such a lovely setting – those tall windows and the chilly park beyond. I met again some lovely people I’ve met before, such as Elizabeth Baines, Ailsa Cox and Mark Illis. And I met Jen Hamilton-Emery from Salt for the first time, which was a treat. She presented me with the first copies of my book of short fiction, ‘Twelve Stories.’ It was like magic! There it was, twelve years in the making.

Tonight at home we’re settling down with the fire going for a quiet night. J’s bringing in the firewood and battening down the hatches. Time to cook and to feed Fester, who’s jangling all the bling he wears round his neck, and calling for catfood.

Oh! The other picture above is the Raoul Dufy painting I mentioned the other day: my favourite painting in the world, I think. It’s called ‘La Vie en Rose’ – I got the name wrong the other day. I’ve had a print for about twenty years and saw it in the flesh in Paris a few years ago. It was colossal. It was a room big enough to walk into.