Download A Short Story

As I continue to burn in the white heat of new technology and Harold Wilson haunts my dreams, I wake in the morning with all kinds of dumb ideas. My latest is a downloadable short story and so it has come to pass. It's called "Hole" and I wrote it for the Verb on Radio 3, but as that's no longer available to listen to online, I thought I should turn it into a pdf and upload it so you could download it and read it or even print it out for posterity (huh?). Anyway, it's a very small file and it's obviously free so go and do it now....

The Third Programme

That's what it was in those glory days when the BBC ruled the world and all quaked before its well-spoken might. Now they'll even let chancers like me on there. But the good news (in relative terms, I guess - i.e. relative to me) is that The Verb broadcast a new short story by me on Friday night. It sounded dead good and what have you in that it were read by a proper actor, like. You can listento it here. Personally I could only sit through the first sentence I spoke before I had to turn off, but in that brief moment I realised a transcendent truth. I do not speak like a man with a beard...

Not (radio) Waving But...

Was on the Book Panel with Simon Mayo on Radio 5 Live yesterday. All in all an odd experience but nowhere near as traumatic as I was expecting. You can listen to (or even download...) the podcast here for the next week.

Alternatively, there's a brief interview with me and a new short story by me being broadcast on the Verb tonight between 9.45pm and 10.30pm on Radio 3.

Better Late..?

Having been utterly crap at maintaining this blog over the last few months, it's now my duty to inform you (if there is any 'you' out there) that my new book is published this week.

What else can I tell you?

It's called "The Heritage" (though originally it was called something else).

As you can see it has a rather marvellous cover courtesy of Alex Kirby at Faber.

As far as I know there haven't been many reviews of it yet but Marianne Brace wrote a very nice piece for the Independent a couple of weeks ago.

I'm on Radio 5 Live with Simon Mayo on Thursday afternoon along with Anne Enright (the fear, the fear) and on the Verb on Radio 3 on Friday night, where a genuine actor will be reading a new short story by me (links to follow when I have them and if it's not too humiliating...).

Let me see... Oh yes, it's half price at Amazon but I hope is available elsewhere, too.

Anyway, I guess that's it for now. More news to follow, as long as I can remember my password this time...

Balloon Boy

Pynchon pulls off a remarkable sleight of hand in "Against The Day". Having spent one thousand pages hinting that the book is in accord with the basic idea of the Edwardian era as an Age of Innocence destroyed by the Great War, he spends the last 80 pages (the last 128 pages if you want to be accurate about these things) building something altogether more moving and powerful: a book not about innocence lost, but innocence retained. Maybe no more than you should expect from a sixties post-beat trapped in the court of George W, but a really beautiful statement of principle and intent nonetheless. The resistance not just to the vicious corporatism of the Scarsdale Vibes of this world but to the easy nihilism of the tired Leftist and the scared liberal, the call to (loving) arms, the final belief in solidarity and friendship, for all these reasons "Against The Day" is the most uplifting book I've read this year, in fact for years. It makes me laugh to think that some rubber-skulled critics could only see the hot air and not the clear skies above.

Still More on Bolaño

I read "Amulet" by Roberto Bolano over the summer in the US New Directions edition because no one has chosen to publish it in the UK yet. There's something interesting about this fact.

"Amulet" is a first person narrative told by Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan living in Mexico City and the self-proclaimed "Mother of Mexican Poetry". The key event in the book is the occupation by Mexican troops of the university in 1968. Auxilio is on the loo at the time (reading poetry) and is missed in the troops' round up. She stays in the toilet without food for the 12 days of the occupation and becomes legendary because of it. The rest of the book mashes together the memories of her life after that date with the hallucinations she has as she lies on the bathroom floor. In doing so, one becomes the other and she sees a version of her future (which has since become her past) as she lies there. Through this device, time in the book collapses in on itself in such a way that her final vision (the youth of Latin America marching into a pit singing a beautiful "ghost-song") becomes (I'd guess the idea is) eternal - or, strictly speaking, timeless. (If there's a difference?)

There's obviously something about Bolano which makes UK publishers nervous, so we are gradually edging towards his more esoteric (by which I mean his less straightforwardly realist) works. We started with "By Night In Chile" and "Distant Star," proceeded to the short stories of "Last Evenings On Earth" and now "The Savage Detectives" has just been released (which, admittedly, I haven't read yet). They are all excellent books, but so far the second half of "Amulet" is the most remarkable thing I've read by the man. I hope this side of his writing doesn't get lost in an attempt to present him as a less spiky, odd, difficult and beautiful writer than he actually is.

(On the other hand, is this just standard paranoid 'underground' - or in my case, wannabe-underground - thinking? Perhaps there's a perfectly good reason involving rights or the difficulty of selling what is a very short novel? Perhaps the editor in question thinks "Amulet" is so important that he/she wants to lay the groundwork for it in the UK? And is the reason I think I prefer it actually influenced by the fact that it's relatively unavailable over here? All I can offer in my defence is that it isn't because of the cover - which is absolutely horrible).

Viva Vulgarity!

Fiddling around with the idea that sections of "Against The Day" are built out of a series of pastiches of specific works of Victorian/Edwardian science fiction (the Vormance Expedition episode built from the opening of M.P.Shiel's "The Purple Cloud", the time machine sections paying open homage to H.G.Wells, the sand-ships something straight from Verne) I thought I'd better see if anyone on the net had already suggested this. Which, of course, they had. But in the process I found Michael Moorcock's review of the book, which was not only immensely entertaining but also contended that, talking in general, "the novel [will] not die if it [can] rediscover vulgarity". I'm no fan of polite books, or books that are sophisticated for the sake of sophistication, or novels that only deal with the common failings of "uncommon" (i.e. middle class intellectual) men. So I was rather taken with this manifesto. It's worth remembering that "Ulysses" was condemned as "base, vulgar, vicious and depraved" and that both "Slaughterhouse Five"and "The Grapes of Wrath" (along with many others) have at various times been cited, burned and banned in American states for their "vulgar" language. A little like complaining that the music is "too loud" when it's just too unfamiliar, I wonder if the accusation of vulgarity in literature is applied whenever a book has the power to shake its reader. Which may be a different point to the one Moorcock was making, but adds up to the conclusion that wherever you see the word "vulgar" being bandied around, there's probably something worth reading.