I have set up a new site, www.andrewblackman.net, and will be blogging there from now on.
Pages
-
Recent Posts
Archives
A book about resistance to change. It starts with everything stuck: the Wopulds still owners of the family board-game business as they have been for a century, Alban still obsessed with his childhood love for his cousin Sophie, still stuck in self-destructive rebellion, and his mother’s suicide when he was two years old still a mystery.
As the book progresses, things slowly begin to change, even though most of the characters fight to keep things the way they are. An American company bids to take over the company, and Alban makes discoveries about his mother. The clues to the resolution of the family issues were, for me, a little too obvious, so that about halfway through I guessed more or less what would happen. But still the ending was well handled and satisfying.
In any case, I don’t want to give away the resolution of these issues, but the way Iain Banks resolves the more political side is interesting and can be described without giving away too much. Alban has rejected his family and everything they stand for (the board game they’re famous for is called “Empire!” and they’ve partly sold out already to the US company, which Alban associates with US policies of war, extreme capitalism and globalisation). He ‘cuts off his nose to spite his face’ – he is homeless in a Perth council estate, having worked as a forester where he cut off his own finger (accidentally) with a chainsaw. At the end he goes on a walk near Garbadale and, while on the mountaintop, realises that “Some hopes and ambitions were mainfest only as a direction, not as a destination. Maybe the trick was to realise you were involved in a process, not aiming at a completely achievable end result, and accept that, but travel hopefully anyway.”
The narrative jumps around abruptly between times and places, progressing in the “present” while also weaving in episodes from Alban’s childhood and early adulthood. There’s usually no pretence of a reason for the flashback, such as a character remembering – it’s just done abruptly, like a cinematic jump cut. Mostly it works, although a couple of times the tenses seem confused – can’t find the examples now, of course!
I particularly liked that although most of the story is told from Alban’s point of view, he is described at first from the outside, first from his cousin Fielding’s perspective, then from that of Tango, the man he is staying with in Perth. It immediately creates the sense of Alban as a slightly mysterious, unknowable character, and this feeling persists through the rest of the book, even as we are told much more about him and given access to his thoughts. It’s a clever device, and the book is full of similar effects. If the clues to the ending had been a little less heavy-handed, this would have been an excellent book.
My short story Night Bus was recently published in issue 13 of Smoke: A London Peculiar. Among all the young, drunk people on the top deck of the night bus, one quiet, middle-aged man stands out as different, and starts to attract unwelcome attention.
What if the “delusions” reported by patients during psychotic episodes were not symptoms of a disease, but valid descriptions of their experiences?
Laing describes schizophrenia as a kind of journey into the inner self, one that is misunderstood by people in the “normal” world and labelled as madness. Why do we misunderstand it? Because we are so alienated from our own inner worlds that we cannot comprehend someone else’s experiences there. Indeed, we are so alienated that even the thought of going there scares us, threatens us. So we lock people up and call them crazy.
I don’t know nearly enough about schizophrenia to know whether this view of schizophrenia is correct. I am a complete layman. I know that Laing’s views have not been accepted by mainstream psychiatry, which has, in the 40 years since he wrote this book, simply gone further down the road of clinical diagnosis which Laing criticised so vehemently.
Still, I was fascinated by his description of psychotic episodes as a kind of misunderstood spiritual journey back to something we’ve lost. After quoting a lengthy and fascinating first-person account of a psychotic episode by a former sailor called Jesse Watkins, Laing concludes:
“We can no longer assume that such a voyage is an illness that has to be treated… If we can demystify ourselves, we see ‘treatment’… as ways of stopping this sequence from occurring. Can we not see that this voyage is not what we need to be cured of, but that it is itself a natural way of healing our own appalling state of alienation called normality?” (emphasis in the original).
Laing uses the analogy of a formation of planes. One plane may be out of formation, and viewed as abnormal, but in fact it may be the formation of planes that is off course and the solitary plane that is going in the right direction. Laing sees society as being off course in major ways, and so individuals are put in a “double bind” – they find themselves subject to so many contradictory forces that in some circumstances a psychic break is the only way to cope. He is scathing about the “normal” person, who is so worldly, has forgotten about childhood and dreams, has no idea of the inner world and consequently is a “shriveled, dessicated fragment of what a person can be.” He sees this as contributing to the insane state of society:
“The condition of alienation, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.”
The book is one of those cobbled-together affairs – one chapter was a lecture here, another was an essay there. They’ve been edited into a whole, but not a particularly coherent one. The ideas in the book are fascinating, and in places, particularly towards the end, the writing was clear and even beautiful. But some parts were tangential or even impenetrable to me. The book’s opening chapter, with long explanations of how I do not experience your experience, but I experience you as experiencing, and experience myself as experienced by you, etc., etc., etc., etc., almost put me off. I’m glad I persevered, though. The payoff came later in the book, in the form of fascinating ideas that set me thinking in new ways.
The editing is finished. The book is at the printers. An enthusiastic blurb appeared on the Legend Press website, so presumably they’re happy with it too (or perhaps they’re just happy it’s at the printers).
I am relieved and scared. I am also pondering some of the odd little changes made in the name of “house style”. It reminded me of writing for the Wall Street Journal again, where copy editors would go through your story at the last minute adding hyphens in odd places for no apparent reason. When you asked why, they just said “house style”. It was the equivalent of your parents saying “Because I said so.”
I wonder sometimes whether house style really exists. Sure, there’s that 854-page manual they slap on your desk on your first day. But maybe that’s just a decoy: they know you’ll never read it. Perhaps no magazine or newspaper or publishing house really has a house style at all.
After all, there’s no real purpose to it. Why have a house style, as opposed to usual use of the English language? Are you trying to establish your own identity: “Legend Press? Oh yeah, the ones with the odd capitalisation rules.” It makes no sense. Maybe it’s all just an invention.
Perhaps editors just wing it, making up the rules as the mood takes them, and changing them whenever a new cloud passes across the window. Perhaps writers annoy them so much that sometimes they decide to annoy writers. So they change little things, just for fun.
Perhaps “house style” is one of those phrases, like “national security” or “health and safety”, whose only function is to shut off the possibility of rational debate. House style is not a point you can argue. It just is.
Perhaps house style is nothing more than a euphemism. Perhaps “Sorry, it’s house style to do it that way” is simply an editor’s polite way of saying “Shut up and leave me alone.”
Or perhaps I’ve been reading my manuscript too many times, obsessing over too many things that nobody will notice anyway.
Was just going through a pile of old magazines and found this brilliant article by John F Schumaker in the April 2008 issue of New Internationalist. The basic premise is the sentence opening the second paragraph: “It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”
It really wasn’t. How could it be? Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs stated that when basic needs are satisfied, people can move on to meet their higher level needs – intellectual, spiritual, social, existential. Schumaker quotes from 1950s intellectuals full of hope about the “people of tomorrow” and how wise and fulfilled they would be now that their basic human needs had (in the West) been taken care of.
But Maslow’s theory broke down. We are the people of tomorrow, we have more stuff than anybody’s ever had before, and we are so stupid and self-absorbed that we can’t even bring ourselves to care about our imminent destruction of the planet (voting on the X-Factor, now, that’s a different story). We are trivial. We are foolish. We are willfully ignorant. We have the attention span of a hyperactive toddler stoked up on M&Ms. We are lost.
Schumaker is spot-on with his descriptions (”drowning in our own shallowness”, “human potential taking a back seat to economic potential”, “self-absorption on a spectacular scale”) and doesn’t shy away from naming “our dangerously obsolete socio-economic system” as the prime cause. He’s a bit light on solutions, apart from vague-sounding talk of “global consciousness”, but he gives some web links to “culture change” strategists that sound interesting. I will investigate them, if I can muster the attention span.
Just caught a fascinating piece in the Times Literary Supplement about the thousands of Americans who, either out of idealism or to escape the Great Depression, moved to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Many of them were then swept up in Stalin’s purges and ended up in the gulag system. It’s a piece of history I knew nothing about, and made fascinating and very sad reading. The piece is a review – a summary, basically - of the book The Foresaken by Tim Tzouliadis, which I’ve added to my lengthening list of books to be read.
Have been immersed in reading the proof copy of my novel for the last few days. I hate this part. Not reading my novel – it’s not that bad! No, what I hate is proof-reading, editing word by word, line by line, second-guessing myself, looking up each fact, each spelling, each grammatical rule. Writing it the first time is a thrill, and with each new round of editing I lose a little more of that initial thrill.
Anyway, it’s done now. And it wasn’t all bad. It was great to see the book starting to take shape. I like the way the pages are laid out, and I like most of what my editor, Tom, has done to the text. I love the cover design by Gudrun Jobst. It’s all coming together!
My favourite cafe in Crouch End, the cafe where I wrote most of my novel On the Holloway Road, has just put up a notice saying it has fallen victim to the credit crunch and closed down. It was a shock to me. The place was perfect for writing. It had friendly staff, American-diner-style bottomless coffee, good food, big windows to stare out of, convenient plugs for a laptop, and Fawlty Towers tapes playing in the bathrooms. And it was just around the corner.
Also, on reflection, a reason I liked it was that it wasn’t too crowded during the day – perhaps not a good sign. Anyway, I will miss the place.
The betting shop next door seems to have closed too, along with the old furniture shop Myers – and of course our local Woolworth’s has closed, along with all the other branches. The place just up the road selling glass and picture frames has halved in size. Also, worryingly for me, shops that closed a year or even two years ago are still empty. But according to the council, there is nothing to worry about:
Councillor Kaushika Amin, cabinet member for regeneration and enterprise, said last week there was “no discernable increase in the closure of shops” and vowed to monitor progress.
Later on in the same local newspaper article, Councillor Amin says there is nothing much the government can do anyway. Of course not. The free market must run its course. Small businesses must be allowed to fail, towns to lose their character, people to lose their jobs. Government money must be reserved only for truly deserving recipients, like investment bankers.
Anyway, of all the businesses in Crouch End that could have gone bust, I’m sorry it had to be Pick More Daisies. It was a good place. I hope the staff find jobs elsewhere, and that the owner didn’t lose too much. Here, as a kind of epitaph, is the Pick More Daisies philosophy that used to be up on the wall in a big mural:
