Things I heard Simon Mawer say

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'The Glass Room', 1968, Arthropods, Czech Centre, Czechoslovakia, HG Wells, Hitchhiking, Man Booker Prize, Mendel's Dwarf, Moody Blues, Oxford, Prague Spring, RAF, Simon Mawer, Warsaw Pact, Zoology

This week I heard the author Simon Mawer speak about writing: specifically about his novel Prague Spring, but also his other Czech-based books The Glass Room and Mendel’s Dwarf. Prague Spring is set against the events in Czechoslovakia in the fateful summer of 1968, leading to the invasion by the armies of the Warsaw Pact.

Four things of writerly interest in my mind from that talk:

He was asked what effect having The Glass Room shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009 had for his career. It benefited hugely, he said, sales went right up, though not as much as if he’d won! He was easy about not actually winning that year, he assured us, though he was just a bit galled when Hilary won it again two years later …

One good thing about being a novelist, he told us, is that you can reinvent your own life. The example he gave was how in the summer of 1968 he had hitchhiked around Europe with a male friend. When in Bavaria they had discussed whether to cross into Czechoslovakia, then enjoying the best days of the Prague Spring, but had decided to go to Greece instead: a decision he had ever since regretted. In Prague Spring two of his main characters set out from England to hitchhike across Europe – a male student (as he had been) James, but this time with an attractive female companion, Ellie; and this time events lead them to cross the Iron Curtain (and thus into the story) rather than go to the Italian sun as planned.

He used more of his own direct experience in James and Ellie’s story. When he and his friend had been hitching they were given a lift by a German lady harpsichordist who interrogated him where he was studying, and when he gave the name of his Oxford college she asked if he knew a particular law professor there, whose friend she was. In Prague Spring he retells this story, with James and Ellie meeting a lady cellist who, likewise, is a friend of a don at his Oxford college.

Perhaps less commonly for novelists, Simon Mawer has a scientific background: his degree was in zoology and for many years he worked as a biology teacher. This shows in a remarkable simile in one of the extracts he read to us on Tuesday: a Russian tank lost in the streets of Prague is likened first to a Martian in HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds but then, more uniquely, to a reptile or arthropod, the muzzle of its gun being a proboscis, which “shifts back and forth, as though sniffing the air, perhaps even trying to work out where the humans have gone.” Not an image that would have occurred to those of us with English literature or history backgrounds, perhaps.

In thrillers, he reminded us (and in whodunits, come to think of it), everything that happens must be related to the plot. But life, of course, isn’t like that. Lots of things happen that don’t link up with anything else. But in a novel you can explore these, and tell them for their own sake. One bizarre episode that features in Prague Spring but is not essential to the plot is the appearance of the Moody Blues. They actually were in Prague at this time, and the day before the Russian invasion they were filmed performing on the city’s famous Charles Bridge. Their appearance in the novel adds colour and interest and tells a true story, and you’re glad it’s there, but in a thriller you’d be wondering what its significance was.

(You can see this surreal performance on YouTube – go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4_xCA4IO7U , to see these Brummies miming Nights in White Satin to adoring fans on an otherwise empty Charles Bridge for a Franco-Belgian TV programme. It’s strange to think that 24 hours later that area was busy with invading soldiers.)

Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction Dept: In his interview Simon Mawer asked us to reflect on the fact that once the invasion happened, the British Embassy somehow arranged for the Moody Blues to be flown out of the country, apparently in an RAF transport plane. How was it, he asked, that in all the chaos and busyness of those events, someone managed to persuade the new Warsaw Pact controllers of the country to allow an RAF plane into Czechoslovak air space to evacuate a group of British pop singers? Would you dare put such an unlikely happening in a novel?

The interview was organised by the Czech Centre at the Czech Embassy in London. Simon was interviewed by Prague-based journalist David Vaughan, followed by a lively Q&A session with the audience.  Thanks, Czech Centre!

Prague Spring was featured on this blog at https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2018/12/10/prague-spring/ and The Glass Room at https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2017/08/15/the-glass-room-revisited/ . You can listen to all of Simon Mawer’s talk at https://soundcloud.com/czech-centre-london/simon-mawer-prague-spring .

-mongers all

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Etymology, Fish, Iron, Radio Kent, Scare, War

How many mongers are there? That’s the question I heard asked of the listeners to Radio Kent today. The only items dealt in, or monged, that the folk in the studio could think of were:

Fish

Iron

Scare

and War

A strange selection. Can you think of others?

What’s the etymology?

The Grammar Conundrum

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British Library, Churchill, conjunctions, Devyani Sharma, Eleanor Trafford, Geoff Pullum, Jane Austen, John Mullan, Lucy Dipper, Marcello Giovanelli, Oliver Kamm, prepositions, split infinitives

If you no longer think it’s wrong to split an infinitive, or stand a sentence with ‘And’, or end a sentence with a preposition, do you still hold back in your writing because some of your readers might think you’ve made a mistake?

Should you care that they’ll think the worse of you, and stop reading your book or, worse, not buy your next one?

These thoughts were prompted by my attendance at this year’s English Grammar Day at the British Library on 3 July. It has a focus towards teachers, but is an excellent annual occasion for anyone interested in grammar. A message in recent years has been that several of what we thought were rules of grammar simply aren’t – they’re either plain wrong or just preferences of usage.

I never believed in the ‘no preposition at the end of a sentence’ rule, because of Churchill’s famous demolition of that ‘rule’, and also having learned German at school and seeing how in that cousin language it is in fact mandatory to end many sentences with prepositions. But it has taken me till now to accept that it’s wholly acceptable to gaily split an infinitive.   And that starting a sentence with a conjunction is fine if it suits what you want to say.

The problem comes with your less enlightened readers. Will they mark you down?

I recommend the English Grammar Day – it costs only a few pounds, so look it up on the BL website (www.bl.uk). To show you the range of subjects covered, this year the speakers were Devyani Sharma, of Queen Mary University of London, on the development of English across the world, eg in India and Singapore; Lucy Dipper, of City University in London, on ‘Grammar in the speech and language therapy clinic’; Marcello Giovanelli, of Aston University, on ‘Knowing about language: what, why and how?’; Eleanor Trafford, who teaches English at Bradford Grammar School, on ‘Getting your clause into grammar in the secondary classroom’; the splendidly argumentative Geoff Pullum, of Edinburgh University, whose talk was entitled’ ‘If doctors knew medical science like writing critics know grammar, you’d be dead’; and Oliver Kamm (pictured), who writes in the Times on grammar every Saturday , on ‘Grammar guidance in the media: the search for certainty’.

The day finished with an ‘Any Questions’ –style panel discussion chaired by the always entertaining expert on Jane Austen John Mullan.

One of Geoff Pullum’s themes was that many of the so-called rules of grammar are the inventions of ill-informed people. Oliver Kamm argued that the persistence of these rules is largely the fault of ill-informed pundits in the media.

This was all liberating. But it doesn’t answer the question of whether the writer should worry about those less liberated readers …

Grammar gripes: less and fewer

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Amazing Grace, Elvis Presley, Ian Power, John Newton, Sol3 Mio, St James

I used to fuss about less and fewer. I applauded M&S (was it them?) when they introduced a ‘10 items or fewer’ lane at checkouts to cater for those of us who deplored ’10 items or less’.

But I’m weakening. The other day I was listening to Elvis singing ‘Amazing Grace’, and then the next day I heard it again, beautifully sung by Sol3 Mio (listen to them on YouTube if you don’t know them), and of course it contains the lines

“When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’d first begun.”

If John Newton can say less instead of fewer, and produce one of the greatest hymns ever written, then who am I to carp? I know that less fits the metre and fewer doesn’t. But I no longer think it matters so much.

But you may disagree …

The unanswerable question is whether it matters to your reader, and if it does whether that puts your reader off reading you any more.   And if that happens whether it matters to you.

Patron saint of pedants: St James the Fewer (tweet yesterday from Ian Power (@IHPower))

Writer rushes into burning building to save two finished novels

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/37395526/writer-rushes-into-burning-building-to-save-two-finished-novels

I think we all know how he felt.

Note to self: email finished novels to own address.  Twice.

To medal or to podium?

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medal, neologisms, Olympics, podium

Every four years we have to get used to two new verbs: to medal and to podium. Those of us who feel we disapprove (even if we’re not sure why) can comfort ourselves with the thoughts that (a) they are used, and it’s usage that counts in English, and (b) they only seem to be in use when the Olympics come round.

But as they are verbs, how are we to we spell their different verbal forms?

‘Medal’ is easy. We can look at ‘pedal’, and using its forms we can get to

• He, she or it medals (What kind of Olympian qualifies as ‘it’? Best scrub that.)
• We are medalling
• You medalled.

These sound right, and they look right.

But how do we conjugate ‘podium’?

• He or she podiums: fine.
• But are we podiuming, or podiumming?
• Have you podiumed, or podiummed?

‘Podiumed’ looks as if it ought to be pronounced poh-dee-oomed, and ‘podiuming’ as poh-dee-oo-ming. But the double ‘m’ in ‘podiummed’ and ‘podiumming’ looks bizarre.

Is there a word in use we can copy, like ‘pedal’ for ‘medal’? How about ‘drum’? That would take us back to ‘podiumming’ and ‘podiummed’. Which get worse every time I look at them.

One answer is: Fortunately these are synonyms, so if you really have to write one of these sporting neologisms, use ‘medal’.  Only use ‘podium’ in speech ….

Killing your darlings

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BBC Radio 4, Poisons, whodunits

Crime writers beware … Especially if you’re half of a whodunit-writing duo, appearing at a literary festival, and you’ve just killed off your successful sleuth, famous for his knowledge of poisons. Let last night’s short story on Radio 4 in their ‘The Crime Writer at the Festival’ series be a warning. ‘A Marriage of Inconvenience’, 14 Minutes, available on I-Player at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07m4v8n for the next 29 days.

We can manage this…

I came across the following quote from the poet, novelist and critic Randall Jarrell:

…a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it…

(From The Unread Book, which I can’t find a link to anywhere.)

I found this strangely encouraging.   I suppose the trick is to make sure it has exactly the right thing wrong with it…

Treasures on the radio

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BBC Radio 4, Charlotte Bronte, Ian McKellen, Seamus Heaney, Virgil

This week on Radio 4 in the mornings you can hear a chunk of Virgil’s Aeneid, translated by no less than Seamus Heaney, read by no less than Sir Ian McKellen. And then, a mere 45 minutes later, you can listen to nothing less than Jane Eyre.

Thanks, BBC.

Sign of success

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Balliol College, J.K. Rowling, Oxford

Last Thursday I was sightseeing in Oxford.  I went into the hall of Balliol College at the same time as some Japanese tourists, who exclaimed, “Harry Potter!”

JK, your reach is global.