Paul Magrs

Salinger’s novel is our Book Club choice for March and I’ve just finished it again. I don’t know how many times that makes it now, that I’ve finished this book. I first read it when I was sixteen. It was a craze we all got into in my A Level German Literature class. It was a very small group, maybe six of us and my friend Nic brought in Catcher one week and it went round all of us in pretty quick succession. I remember our teacher telling us he’d read it one night in a single sitting, and he couldn’t believe that he had never read it before. I had the same feeling, even at sixteen: of wanting to have discovered the book sooner. We should have been talking more about Schiller and Kant and other German stuff, but we spent class after class talking about Salinger.

Our German lit teacher was great. I think it was his first job. He was funny and talked with a broad Geordie accent. He had a word processor at home. It was the first time anyone I knew ever had a word processor and he had to explain the very point of it: that it let you keep files of your words and so you could change things around. He even read what turned out to be my first completed novel and liked it. He took it home and typed it up for me, even.

Anyway: that was me at school at 16. These past few days I’ve been revisiting Holden Caulfield and those nights before Christmas when he absconds from his old school. The book is nothing more, really, than a series of inconsequential encounters with a gallery of characters who look at him with a range of reactions from concern to outright scorn. Holden is by turns desperate, charming, loud-mouthed, show-offy, despairing and needy. He rackets about the streets of midtown Manhattan for a couple of out-of-control days and nights, slouching about chainsmoking and wearing his red hunting cap back to front. He’s desperate for company: he rings up old girlfriends, dances with bored strangers, meets up with ex-schoolmates, visits ex-teachers and wakes up his younger sister, Phoebe, in the book’s most touching moments – when he finds himself a stranger in his parents’ own appartment.

This time what was different for me in reading ‘Catcher’ was that since my last reread – back three years ago – I’ve actually been to New York. I’ve wandered all those streets and across Central Park and I’ve been just about everywhere Salinger mentions in the book. Not in some programatic way, as a kind of literary tour: just because you can’t help it. His footsteps are all over the place and within the human-scaled confines of those canyons and neatly-plotted acres, you can’t help crossing his path again and again.

Something else that stood out on this read was how often he becomes aware of the loudness of his own voice – often when he’s drunk and ranting about something that his fellow interlocuter would rather not be hearing about. I love the way he rails against the phoniness of the world – usually quite justifiably – and then sinks down in embarrassment as much as he does despair. He’s a well-brought up kid. A very mild rebel, really, who just wants to do good things. But even the record he buys his sister is something he smashes into smithereens clumsily on his way to see her.

When I reread all four published Salinger books in 2007 it was Catcher that retained its charm the most. The stories and the novellas that revolve around the various members of the Glass family had far less interest for me than they used to. But still part of me hankers over those books that I’ve imagined Salinger writing for years in his seclusion. Wasn’t it that ex-girlfriend who wrote a memoir about their time together, who said he was keeping all these unpublished manuscripts in a safe? I would still love a whole load of new books to come out posthumously. It’s a fan completist gene thing, I guess. I feel about Salinger and Salinger’s secret writing like I do about the Loch Ness Monster or the Yeti. Yes, it might ruin the mystique and the novelty, but I’d still love to see them some day, too.

It’s out next week in the UK, published by Simon and Schuster – my new teen novel!  Here’s the blurb…

“It’s the 1980’s and David has just started secondary school. He’s becoming a teenager, but still hanging onto the rituals of childhood, particularly his addiction to Doctor Who, sharing the books with his best friend and neighbour, Robert, and watching the TV show. But time moves relentlessly on, and Robert starts rejecting the Doctor in favour of girls, free weights and new music. Against a backdrop of Bowie, Breville toasters and trips to Blackpool, David acknowledges his own abilities and finds his place in the world.”

Yeine Darr has been summoned from the North to the strange city of Sky in order to meet her grandfather, who happens to rule the world. In this luxuriously decadent elevated metropolis she is soon drawn into the nasty intrigues and jealousies and horrible backstories of the characters she meets there. This is world of gods and monsters and at first it seems as if Yeine is to be a pawn in the games played between her slimy cousins.

This is Epic Fantasy – that strange literary mixture of high opera and tag-team wrestling. We are introduced to a wonderfully bizarre parade of characters who aren’t what they seem at all. Yeine spends much of her time figuring out the motives that lie behind everyone’s bizarre behaviour: she wants to know why she was brought here to fight for an inheritance she doesn’t really want, and who killed her mother, who once belonged to this place. She also develops complicated relationships with some of the godlike beings who stalk the mother-of-pearl corridors of Sky. There’s Sieh, the one who chooses to take the form of a creepily articulate toddler and keeps trying to suckle on our heroine. There’s her crabby grandfather, fading fast. And, best of all, there’s the Night Lord, Nahadoth. She finds early on it’s best not to be near him when he transforms into his true nature after dark. Though that’s precisely what she ends up doing.

Yeine begins as an innocent in these games of politics and cruelty. But she listens and learns and there’s a colossal, rather shocking revelation waiting to take her by surprise. When she realises the truth of that, she becomes someone to make all them – gods, grandfathers and snooty servants – sit up and listen.

This is a strange, bloodthirsty, erotic and psychedelic fantasy novel. Thinking about it, I’m inclined to describe it as a Gothic novel rather than anything else. It’s about the girl from outside coming to her new home, back in the family mansion. Here she’s menaced by brooding Byronic monsters and taunted by wicked aunties. She finds she has within her both the potential for corruption and the power to redeem them all. It’s Bluebeard and Dark Shadows… and even Sammi Jo in Dynasty, tricked out in different outfits and trappings.

It’s way too long for my tastes (everything seems to be recently!) but I enjoyed the no-holds-barred weirdness of ‘The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms’.  The scene with Yeine’s enemies transforming slowly, agonizingly into diamond is very nicely done – one of my favourite parts, as are the early scenes with Lord  Nahadoth, when he’s intent on (as it were) putting the willies up our heroine.

It feels like Jemisin takes us to a wholly imagined world and keeps us there, like prisoners. I love this society of skulking double agents and disconsolate deities. I love the contrast between all the slightly abstract fantasy stuff and the ordinariness of Yeine finding her mother’s old apartment, lying on the bed, finding the drawer in the headboard and reading her mother and father’s old love letters. It’s the touching, human moments that give the rest of it wings.

I was pleased to read, though, that in the second volume, we are to begin elsewhere: literally closer to the ground and the lower castes of this world. There feels like a lot of room for exploration here.

I’m back on my ridiculous movies. Last night, late on, it was ‘Cat Women of the Moon.’

Why has no one ever told me about this before?!

It was a delight from start to end. It begins in one of those space rockets from 1953 – the kind that look a bit like a garage interior with a few curtains and some futuristic-type computers with lots of flashing lights. All the men are very military, joshing and squaring up to each other and talking earnestly to Ground Control. But then there’s Helen Salinger – science officer and love interest. As their rocket ship approaches the moon she’s looking slightly mardy and doing her hair and fussing with a compact mirror. I love her New Jersey accent and her barely concealed irritation at being cooped up with all these blokes. As the crew don their nifty spacesuits to explore the moon she’s seen by her captain, slipping a packet of ciggies under her waistband. When challenged she tells him that, yeah, yeah, she knows there’s no oxygen to smoke ‘em in, but just having her ciggies with her will make her feel better. She’s a marvel!

The film then becomes about her weird telepathic connection to the women in leotards who live in an ancient city inside the moon. They have some deliriously silly dialogue about how super-advanced they are and there are some superbly shifty moments as they try to make the earthmen fall in love with them. My favourite was the Cat Woman who imagines lying on a beach drinking coca-cola with her new boyfriend. She looks like she’s never heard of anything quite so exotic.

Of course it all goes to the bad, as these things do. The Cat Women’s attempt to invade Earth is pretty easily – and brutally – foiled. Mostly off camera.  Someone gets clonked on the head with a moon rock. Others get shot as they dash for the rocket.

This has to be my favourite B Movie yet. Its highlight is the FANTASTIC fight scene with the giant spiders and the aggrieved screaming of Helen Salinger. I just love the fact that she stomps through this picture like she’s in a huge mood the whole time.

The other great film I’ve seen in the past week was Two Way Stretch – a British comedy from the Fifties starring Peter Sellers and an incredibly young Bernard Cribbins. It’s a prison escape story with some lovely bit parts and cameos for actors such as Irene Handl and Beryl Reid. We were prompted to watch it by the death last week of Lionel Jeffries: who appears here as a scary sergeant major-type prison warder.

The film has a touch of that Ealing comedy sophistication in the plotting and complications (especially of the breakout and jewel heist) –  but it’s blended with some real Carry On silliness and rudeness, as when the posh ladies visit Governor Maurice Denham’s vegetable garden to examine his prize marrow.

Maybe this will set me up to explore a few more of these Fifties comedies. Any suggestions..?

This is the final instalment of a trilogy reinventing the myth of Robin Hood. I’ve always been quite fond of Friar Tuck as a character and it’s good to see him occasionally take centre stage here – he’s a gluttonous pacifist, insisting on peace talks and pies and ale at every turn.

This is a gutsy version of Robin Hood set in Wales during a particularly bloodthirsty span of its history. The Greenwood here isn’t some mystical and pastoral idyll as it is in some other tellings (Rosemary Sutcliff, Roger Llancelyn Green, Richard Carpenter), it’s a dirty and cold place that people can’t wait to get away from. It’s a last resort. And Robin – or Rhi Bran y Hud, as he is here – is a furiously determined deposed king, keen to get his status back. Most of the characters are here, still present from other incarnations, but they’re all pretty earnest, grim, and set upon righting wrongs with the utmost expedience.

Lawhead writes a lovely action sequence or two. Those are pretty essential in any version of Robin Hood. These are visceral and exciting, as they should be. My favourite sequence was the false manhunt, when Bran is impersonating a Spanish nobleman for the sake of villainous Lord Huw, and suggests that they set the imprisoned king of North Wales free, in order to hunt him down. It’s a tricky and nailbiting strategy and typical of this resourceful character. It was good to see him delight in the disguises he adopts – it brought a bit of lightness and fun to the book.

I especially liked the epilogue, with the grandson of Alan a’Dale performing the ballad for King John, some years later. In Nottingham, he’s adapted the tale to local places and characters and so we get a glimpse of how legends shift and change in their specifics over time. The book presents us with a speculated truth that sets the myths in motion, but it also allow us space to see that there can be many versions of the same story through history.

I liked this a lot: I liked its darkness and gruffness and – even though the novel’s quite long – its swiftness. As I’m finding with other books recently, I was less interested when we went off for chapters with characters who weren’t in the main cast. I could have done with more Merian, I think. She proves herself to be as brave and bright as any of the characters and gets a little sidelined here.

Bran – or King Raven, as he sometimes is called here, with his cloak and birds’ head mask – I found very intriguing. I’d have liked to have understood him a bit more as a character by the end. But maybe he is supposed to remain unreachable to us. With his cape and mask, dark motivations and noble cause for justice at any cost, Lawhead’s Hood reminds me of the Batman. He’s a very un-cosy, subdued superhero – our first, perhaps.

The second half of Horwood’s novel sees his major characters propelled into the Hyddenworld proper. We spend much of this long sequence underneath Birmingham, in the parts its human inhabitants aren’t aware of. Not an alluring prospect… but there is some macabre excitement in this part of the book, amongst the dark, sluggish canals and strange palaces and public houses. I loved the brief episode with the Tomters – the half ginger moggy / half pitbull terrier creatures keen for human flesh. And I like the touching scene in the subterranean Turkish bath, when Jack feels unselfconscious for the first time about the livid burn marks on his back. The chapters in the Hyddenworld are luridly lit like Arthur Rackham illustrations, and some of the grotesques we meet down there wouldn’t disgrace Mervyn Peake. (Did i really see the news or imagine it? The other day, some blog or other promising a fourth Gormenghast novel? Hope so, but I digress.) The most wonderful character in this sepulchral underworld is its king, Lord Festoon – the obese gourmandising ruler of Brum, who at one point escapes with our heroes via hot air balloon. All of these best bits of the book feel infused with that very British spirit of whimsy. Whimsy of the Beatrix Potter or Kenneth Grahame sort: the kind that some put down as simply arch or twee or childish. But whimsy always seems to me to be, in essence, rather savage and morbid, too – and there’s plenty of bloodshed, violence and danger here.

So it’s this half of the book that steps up the drama and separates our hero and heroine and, of course, we can’t wait to see them reunited by the end. It’s Jack and Katherine who deserve and gain most of our affection and attention and, I must admit, I found myself frustrated when they weren’t onstage. Some chapters I found a little dull, and some of the secondary characters didn’t leap into life forcefully enough. Festoon is great and so is Bedwyn Stort -the amazingly resourceful and ingenious Hydden, who finds the route through the submerged henge that will take our characters back and forth between the worlds. The chapter where he has to quickly teach himself to swim as he makes this soggy discovery is pretty exciting – but I found some of the adventures of the lesser characters far less involving.

A problem for me is that our two major characters are the children of destiny and have little agency in this tale. They are simply led along by the grand events unfolding around them. Jack and Katherine are ‘wyrd’s fools’ we are told at one point: that is, victims of fate and prophecy. This can alienate the reader, I think, if we feel that they’re merely being pulled along in the current and not making decisions for themselves. I think I wanted them to be more dynamic and the book to be leaner and less languorous than it is.

The atmosphere is gorgeous and I’m fond of some of the characters and  I think that will keep me coming back for the next season’s volume. Summer next year, I suppose. If it could just lose some of its self-conscious grandiosity and some of the repetitive exposition and be content to give us a rollicking adventure story, then I think there’s the beginning of an epic I might get fond of. Fond enough to stick with, hopefully.

I was really keen to get stuck into William Horwood’s new, much-hullaballoo’ed fantasy series, ‘Hyddenworld: Spring’, the first of a mystic blockbuster quartet. I loved his Duncton moles (though, if memory serves, I only read the first in the series) and I thought his Willows sequels were fantastic.

‘Hyddenworld’ presents us with one of those set-ups in which the ‘old ways’ and ‘the little people’ carry on, in the shadow of the contemporary world… hiding away from the eyes of most of humankind and carrying out epic struggles of between good and evil; hiding and finding objects of great power and dashing about between stone circles and ancient woods on the back of magical horses. I love all that stuff of course – and bits of the present volume are reminding me of Robert Holdstock, Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, the Borribles and even the Wombles.

There’s a grand, epic feel to this and some fantastic storylines put in place very early on: the bad little folk and the good little folk are together put on the alert by the spirit of Spring to watch out for the coming of the boy who will be ‘giant born’ – a little person brought up by humans. We see the boy, Jack, being placed in the care of a family, in whose tragic destiny his fortunes are immediately enmeshed. There is an amazing sequence involving a car accident, planned by the shadowy bad guys. It’s a blazingly visceral sequence. There is the old professor and his wife, too, in their house in the middle of all the mystic sites… both of them in the know about the epic storylines happening all around them. I loved the chapter in which old Arthur Foale is startled to get a phone call from one of the little people. It’s actually rather moving – this confirmation that the world he’s researched and surmised about is actually true – and ringing him up!

For me, though, the opening half of this book takes a little while to settle down. I think this is due to us seeing both the Hyddenworld and the human world almost simultaneously: both are as fabulous and as mundane as the other. Maybe that’s true in the reality of this book, but I would have liked to creep up on that understanding. I’d have preferred to start in the human world, I think… and gradually made aware of the magic around the motorways circling ‘Brum’… and to be let into the future legend of Jack only after we had met and got to know him as a character. I think beginning with the slightly portentous stuff about the fate of the universe places quite some distance between the characters and the reader.  Added to that we have abrupt time jumps of ten years (just when I was getting into it!) and switches of point of view and the sudden, annoying removal of the old professor bloke, who we had got to like, bumbling along on the hillsides with his maps and compasses and his vindicated beliefs…

The writing is beautiful, and the characters are eventually given space to breathe. The scenes with Mrs Foale, Jack and Katherine as Katherine’s mother nears her death are just lovely. I loved Jack running up the hill to the white horse to meet Imbolc – that was a lovely moment in which the magic world is seen to physically touch the human world.

So, while I’m enjoying it, I do find that some of the things it’s doing in order to make itself epic and big are pushing me out of the story, somehow. But then, I always prefer things that start small and unassuming… and gradually build up and up and sneak up on the grand, the earth-shatteringly huge and profound. That’s just a taste thing, I guess.

But I’m halfway through and pushing on in this half-lit, eerie world of gruff fairies and fading spirits. I’ve got a feeling it’s getting into its stride.

Jill Mansell’s books are handy to have around when things are feeling fraught and times are tough. There’s something genuinely uplifting and life-affirming about her novels. I love being in the world she creates and amongst her characters. They seem familiar to me, and real, and as if I already know them. Her latest novel, ‘Take a Chance on Me’ is no exception, placing us right in heart of the small community in the village of Channing’s Hill and giving us access to the deepest secrets of our main cast, zipping along zig-zag fashion, in a tale of two sisters.

Cleo Quinn’s our heroine – a chauffeur for a living and an orphan making her own way in life, watched over by her older sister, who shares some of the book’s limelight. This is because, right from the start of the book, Abbie’s twenty year marriage is rocked by a revelation from the bottom of her husband’s sock drawer.

Do I need spoiler space for this? I guess I do. Science fiction, fantasy, horror and detectives all have spoiler space to protect the reader from juicy plot points. Romantic comedies shouldn’t be spoiled, either. Maybe I’ll tip-toe around the revelations… and let you discover them for yourself. Suffice to say, all the hidden secrets are good ones. And not just sensationalist secrets.  Moving, touching, well-thought out revelations. The issues at stake are ones that you really have to think about, and ponder over how you would feel about it all – especially in the case of Abbie’s story.

That’s an important point about Jill Mansell’s novels – under the fun and the deliciously-observed wit and silliness about the ways that people behave… there’s a real, deliberate intention to investigate why people behave like they do; and to tenderly explore the places they end up living as a result of their actions.

These are people and places that you can easily recognise and feel comfy with: the sassy-on-the-outside chauffeuse with her magenta streaks, forced to drive the boorish Aussie soap star to and from his pantomime each day. The seemingly brattish metalwork sculptor who returns home to inherit the mansion that broods over the village… parading his supermodel girlfriend about and reminding our heroine of her embarrassing adolesence. And the chubby and shy radio DJ who lives next door, who becomes all confidence and charm when he’s on the air – but who crumbles in the presence of his secret love: the lady who dishes up the pub grub.

In all the novel’s twists and turns I don’t think I ever really knew who was going to end up with who in the end. I was happy to go along with it all, knowing that it would all finish up fine. This is a benign world of small embarrassments and sometimes rather brutal shocks, cushioned by the kindness and good nature of ordinary people. I loved the excruciating scenes when the wronged wife checks out the supposed-mistress’s house, only to have her car break down right outside. And she has to spend the afternoon with her ostensible nemesis; the two women finding out they quite get on – and the day ending in a drunken karaoke session in the village pub. It’s all about the mostly-happy consequences of events and complications that seem wholly mortifying and disastrous at the time.

Her women are always sensible – and the ones who aren’t we can gently despair at, and her men are always sexy in one way or another. ‘Take a Chance on Me’ is funny and warm and sometimes scary. Scary in that it ’s all about nearly missing out on potential happiness and / or love through mischance or having too much pride.  I think this novel leaves just about everyone wiser and happier by the end – including the reader – and you can’t ask for more than that.

“After my review of her terrific novel, ‘The Last Stormlord’ yesterday, Glenda Larke wrote me a lovely email:

“Hello Paul,

Paul Magrs wrote a review of my book. I am picking myself up off the floor.
Thank you.
I am so glad you liked it, and thanks for emailing me. I think it is probably the best review I have ever had, and better still, it shows that someone appreciated  everything I was trying to do with the story. Yours is the first UK review out too, so there is that wave of relief that someone out there likes it….

The next book, Stormlord Rising, is due out in the UK in September, and all being well the final book, Stormlord’s Exile, will be out in UK in March 2011.

Again, many, many thanks,

Glenda”

I know that feeling all to well – of waiting to see what the world might make of your upcoming publication! So I’m only too happy to have got in there first for this hemisphere. I was also really pleased to hear how soon the next volumes are coming out. There’s only the autumn to wait until – huuray!

Right now I’m settling into William Horwood’s new fantasy epic, ‘Hyddenworld: Spring’, which I’m enjoying. Between fantasy epics I slipped in Jill Mansell’s latest comic romance, ‘Take a Chance on Me’, which I’ll be writing about on here very soon. It was completely fabulous.

When I was in my teens I loved fantasy novels that took you straight into an invented world and completely convinced you of their existence. All their minute particulars were conjured on the page – you got to know about their religions, their eating habits, their seasons and histories and legends. I’m thinking about reading those huge books and series of books by people like Anne McCaffrey, Frank Herbert and David and Leigh Eddings. I was a school prefect at that time and all school prefects had to do was sit indoors on rainy lunchtimes and that was the time I spent living in other, made-up worlds.

Only a few fantasy reading experiences have come that close to transporting me elsewhere in more recent years. Probably Guy Gavriel Kaye’s ‘Tigana’ did. But it seems to get harder to capture that feeling of helpless addiction to the spicy alienness of fantasy planets.

Anyway, the point of all this is that I spent almost a week inside the first volume of Glenda Larke’s new Stormlord series and I really feel like I’ve visited an arid and frightening and wholly convincing land… and I’ve loved very minute of it. This is a world of cities in tiers, doing their best to make the most of water that comes to them. It’s a rough existence of shanty towns, palaces, whorehouses and blistering desserts. The rain is brought to them by the magic powers of their ruling classes, who can manipulate clouds and draw fresh water out of the seas. The trilogy kicks off with the ailing of the last of the Stormlords and the very real threat of no more controlled weather systems and a possible return to anarchy.

This is a splendid set up. A large cast is assembled: lords and ladies, peasants, painters, warriors and orphans. We move so easily from one to the next and – unlike in so many unwieldy fantasy novels – we’re never in any doubt who we’re with and why. We always know what’s at stake for the characters and there are – even in 600 pages – no long, dull stretches of exposition. This book keeps moving and tumbling from one fantastic set-piece to another. We’re saving the lives of giant millipedes in flashfloods… or we’re standing appalled as a whole village is wiped out by the barbaric horde under instructions from our lead villain… or we’re watching as the whole city crumbles under the final onslaught and our heroes prepare to flee… It’s all vast, fantastic, beautifully evoked spectacle… but at the heart of it are characters that we quickly come to love. The girl from the ‘Snuggery’, who hopes to escape to better things – Terelle – is our point of focus for much of the book. It is through her that we view most of the weird rituals and rigmaroles of this antipodean fantasy world. I love all the textures and close-up details of this… the vividness of all that red dust, and the deliciousness of the prized drinking water… the evil chittering and buzzing of the deadly insects – the Ziggers…!

Our other hero is Shale – the boy from nowhere, who is discovered to have the most amazing, unexpected powers. He is the boy born to save the whole world – or so everyone hopes. And everyone sets out to kidnap, steal and manipulate him. A lovely job is done here in showing him growing up – from the boy who witnesses the horrible death of his sister – into someone we could imagine saving the whole of this world through his developing magical powers. We feel his struggle every step of the way. Parallels have been drawn between this series and the Dune novels by Frank Herbert in the Sixties, and I guess that’s inevitable – given the dustbowl world, the scarcity of water, the complexity and the jumbo-sized centipedes. But with Paul Atreides in that series, his ascent into something superhuman seemed to happen in a flash: he evolved too suddenly and abruptly. I never quite believed in him  - or Dune – after he went all mystical.

But, I think, with the saga of this Stormlord, Glenda Larke is writing a material world I can believe in whole-heartedly. I can’t wait for the next volume – when is it?

This first vol comes out in March, from Orbit. Thanks for sending it!