Paul Magrs

Very mixed reading bag to catch up on. At least in terms of genre and style, it is. I happened to love all three of these books. In fact, in setting about compiling my list of favourite reads of the year yesterday, I realised how very few stinkers I’ve actually put myself through this year. I think I’ve been listening to the bookshop hype less. I’ve been avoiding big stores and definitely I’ve been avoiding newspaper reviews. So I think this has had a happy effect on my reading.

Now I’m Writer in Residence in two places at once!

We’ve reached Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on the MA Children’s Lit class. We were pretty unanimous in our love for the book – then and now. Everyone in the group had read it at some point in their childhood. Our memories of both movie adaptations were very strong and it was interesting to go back and see what *wasn’t* actually in the book. There’s the whole temptation / betrayal sub-plot to do with the everlasting gobstoppers. That’s when you get that wonderful moment of changeabout for Gene Wilder in the original movie – the way he suddenly turns on Charlie.

Hope you can come along! I’m reading at Manchester Central Library on the evening of Thursday December the tenth at 6.30pm! (NB Slightly earlier time than I’ve been telling everyone.)

Here’s something else I love to collect, as well as Found Photographs. In recent years we’ve scoured and haggled our way through Car Boot Sales of the North West of England. Now we’ve got this strange collection of paintings in the hallway. Paintings that no one loves – not even their original owners. What gets me about these is that they could easily have vanished forever.

They’re bad – of course they are – but in a quite touching way. Often Outsider Art comes about when the artist has no training at all. They’re pootling along in their own messy, merry way and producing work quite unlike anything else on Earth. Car Boot Sale paintings like these are a bit different. They are reminders and remnants of a stranger’s one-time hobby or fad. Or it might have been an abiding passion. But it’s gone now, and someone’s flogging off their works for a few pounds.

Anyone else collect this stuff?

Here are two, for now.

I seem to gravitate to snowy scenes.

The first is Snow Hovel, as I call it. It’s clearly meant to be an idyllic wintry retreat, deep in the woods. Cosy and nostalgic. But the weird geometry of that house makes you queasy, if you stare long enough. There are queer dimensional instabilities in this snowbound Grimms Fairy Tale world. I like their urgent wolfhound, dragging the old couple home. But what’s with their strange pig-child? He’s wearing suede knickerbockers and a pork pie hat. He’s staring blankly at the painter. It makes you feel like shouting out a warning. But I’m not sure who to.

The other’s a more conventional and suburban scene in South Manchester. Someone here’s had a few classes, you can tell. I love the atmosphere of this. It reminds me of skidding home on frozen slush with shopping bags, at that point in the day when it starts getting dark mid-afternoon. And I always wonder whose house that is bang in the middle. The artist’s family? There’s someone dashing over the slippery road towards it. Another figure struggling through snow towards home.

I’d love to know who painted these.

I’ll post more soon.

I never really minded the Famous Five. I grew up in a time when they were massively unpopular. Elitist, snobby, old-fashioned, racist and the rest of it. And it’s easy to see where some of old Enid’s shortcomings are. But I loved her books, I didn’t care what anybody said. I’d devoured Noddy at three, pre-school, book after book. In infants’ school I’d loved the Faraway Tree books and the Wishing Chair. Strange to think how Blyton’s held up as some kind of jingoistic and retrogressive figure. As a reader it always seemed that she was avid for the different and the exotic. The Faraway Tree books always seemed to be about travelling elsewhere, to other places and – yes – respecting other cultures and beliefs.

We were talking about Blyton a lot in my MA class this week. Most of us had grown up with her and we talked about that sense of being addicted to her books. I read the Secret Seven and Famous Five a little later than most – maybe nine or ten years old. I was in that typical boy thing of loving to read series and working my way through a whole collection. I was the same with the Target Doctor Who books and the James Blish Star Treks and various other things. And I liked the endless repetitions of the Famous Fives. It’s a comfy holiday thing: they get together in their vacations for reunions and adventures. They do the same old stuff and the reader doesn’t groan when the same picnics, the same clues, the same kinds of villains recur. We get the pleasure of recognition, of feeling safe in this world.

Some wonderful stuff came out in the seminar about exposition. About how Blyton saves most of it for the dialogue, so that the characters themselves tell us what’s going on. Just as kids playing games do. Narrating their own stories as they improvise them. And there’s something very improvisational and on-the-hoof about Enid’s writing – banging away, six thousand words a day, a book every fornight – her typewriter on her lap in front of the drawing room fire. You really get the sense of someone having a lovely time, with complete confidence, making it all up as she goes along.

As she kept saying in the BBC4 biopic this week starring Helena Bonham-Carter: She knew exactly what kids wanted to read. She just knew exactly what to write. (The film was okay. Nicely made. Not much to it. She was awful with her own kids. We knew that already and the film didn’t go much further. It was a kind of Mommie Dearest with jam tarts and lashings of ginger pop.)

Much better is the Duncan MaClaren book, ‘Looking For Enid’, which I read Christmas before last and which set me off and rereading a tranche of Blyton. It’s lit crit by an ex-Enid addict who rediscovers his fanboyishness in a charity shop and seeks out the locations for her books and life. There’s some ropey and unnecessary pastiche (similar to the Laura Thompson biog of Agatha Christie, published the same year – why is it these biographers suddenly feel the need to get all creative on us, halfway through?) but I thought it was a fine book.

It made me go back to Kirrin Island again – and back to my favourite – Mystery Moor.

Something that was said in our MA class this week that rang very true. Growing up on a council estate in the 70s or 80s, the world of Blyton’s islands, caravans and picnics seemed very alien and false. Yes, they were posh and privileged. But that didn’t put you off. It felt like reading science fiction or historical fiction. They were just different, with different stuff around them. So you didn’t feel excluded. It was all about being drawn in and being made part of that gang and that’s what we loved.

This has been released! I meant to say…!

from Big Finish Productions:

Doctor Who: Ringpullworld

(Duration: 60′ approx)

CAST:

Mark Strickson (Turlough), Alex Lowe (Huxley)

SYNOPSIS:

CHRONOLOGICAL PLACEMENT:

This story takes place between The Five Doctors and Warriors of the Deep.

Here’s a bit from a lovely review by Book Chick City. The first review of Hell’s Belle to see print!

I read her ‘Time Traveller’s Wife’ with complete absorption, and it was the same with this. I like her rather pent-up and self-concerned characters. It feels like they could all be pretty hysterical and mad – if they could only be bothered. The word languor pops into my head. They’re busy enough, all these people of hers. They’re zipping about London and through Highgate Cemetary, having spooky and complicated lives… but everything moves so languidly, so carefully for the first 350 pages of this new book of Niffenegger’s.

I love all the dripping trees and gravestones and the researchy bits about the graveyard. The whole book’s steeped in a kind of subacqueous gloom and we drift from room to room of the shared house at the centre of the book. The man beset by OCDs, wrapping everything in bubble wrap and fretting over his cryptic crosswords. The younger fella and his endless research into the dead. And those dreadful twins. I think they’d irritate me in real life, as would their ghastly mother and aunty. I wish the body swapping and Gothic stuff had started much earlier. It’s like being inside of of those shove-ha’penny machines in an amusement arcade… waiting for the huge cache of pennies to drop…

I like the ghost hovering about. I like the technicalities of being a ghost and how they’re dealt with. I loved the scene with the snagging of the kitten’s soul.

It’s Emo Goth. Maybe that’s why it feels a bit precious and coy? The girls loll about in the fancy flat they’ve inherited, reading ghost stories by Henry James et al. I think I was irked by the fact that no one in the book actually has to work or to worry about money. Only the daft old fella in the upstairs, fretting over his compulsions – he does his crosswords and emails them to the Guardian. I’d rather see the Gothic and the spooky stuff happening to people who are in the midst of life, and who are getting on with more ordinary, everyday things. It’s as if, in order to write what feels like an authentically English literary novel, Niffenegger has to import some of the snobbery and poshery that seems to go with most English literary fiction.

But I still liked being inside this story. It’s a silly one in lots of ways. I don’t buy the twist that I’d been warned about on Twitter by various Twitterers. I saw it coming from miles away – and it depends entirely on one character being quite different, actually, to what we had been led to expect. And the plot revelations about her character only added to my feeling that she was being bent out of shape in order to make a punchier climax.

So I’m still a bit torn about it all. It’s a bit like having a good old mope and a sulk about, this book. And I guess that’s what it’s really about, isn’t it – at heart? It’s all about the chance to become a teenager again – literally. And that’s precisely what it felt like.

I’d forgotten I’d written about brain-eating. It was back in 2004 in ‘To the Devil – a Diva!’ The book was about lots of other things too, and I have to say that the brain bit was incidental – if somewhat vivid.