Maggie in Historia magazine

Our Maggie, winner of Historia Magazine’s Unpublished Novel Award, is featured in this month’s edition of Historia.

Read the article here…

9 June 2020 By Maggie Richell-Davies

How I won an award and stopped being an unpublished novelist

Maggie Richell-Davies is the winner of the first HWA/Sharpe Books Unpublished Novel Award. She tells Historia about her now-published novel, The Servant, and her journey to publication by Sharpe Books: “Be persistent,” she advises. “But above all find competitions that put your story under the nose of someone who loves the past.”

Where do good ideas come from?

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Cheltenham Literary Festival, Franz Kafka, Ian McEwan, Jean-Paul Didierlaurent, Metamorphosis, Pulp fiction, Ros Schwartz, The Cockroach, The Reader on the 6.27

Where do good ideas come from?

Sometimes you read a book with a strikingly original and simple idea; you then think, “Well, of course, I could have thought of that if I I’d tried,” but the point is YOU DIDN’T.

Two examples from books I’ve just read:

The Cockroach by Ian McEwan. We know Kafka’s Metamorphosis, which opens with a man waking up to find he’s a giant insect. Why not reverse that? Have an insect who wakes up to find he’s turned into a man? Brilliant. And when we learn that that man is the British Prime Minister, who is leading the country into a whole new economic system that merely a few years back was advocated only by people who were thought crackpots …. Well, you can finish the sentence. A topical satire and, as I’ve said, a great and simple idea. (Unfortunately I’ll have to return the book to my sister who lent it to me, as she got it signed by the author at the Cheltenham Literary Festival.)

The Reader on the 6.27 by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent is the other (translated from the French by Ros Schwartz). Here the simple idea is to have a central character who loves books but is compelled to work in a factory that destroys them. This is an appalling place where books are pulped. They are devoured and converted into a disgusting slush by a dreadful and dangerous machine into which our hero has to climb each day as part of its maintenance. And each day he rescues a page from whatever book is going into its maw, and reads it to his fellow-commuters on the train to work the next morning. They love it. The other characters are grotesques, all with some often bizarre link to books and writing. (Fortunately I was given this by a friend so can keep it. Thanks, friend.)

Wondering what to do with that gift card you got for Christmas? You could see if you like as much as I did what these writers made of these original and simple ideas.

The Cockroach by Ian McEwan, published in 2019 by Jonathan Cape, ISBN 978-1-529-11292-4 RRP £7-99 (it’s only 100 pages)

The Reader on the 6.27 by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent, translated by Ros Schwartz, published in 2016 by Pan, ISBN 978-1-5098-3685-7 RRP £8-99

21 August 1968

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1968, Bielefeld, Brezhnev, Czechoslovakia, Dubček, Invasion, Nigel Peace, Prague Spring, Radio Prague, Simon Mawer, Warsaw Pact

Historic events are often tragic but can form the setting for so many stories.

On 21 August 1968 the armies of the Warsaw Pact invaded their partner in the socialist bloc, Czechoslovakia. Thus ended the hopes of the Prague Spring, and then came ‘normalisation’ (Orwell would have been proud of that neologism), which put the Czechs and Slovaks back in their place behind the Iron Curtain for the two decades until 1989.

Two novels published this month focus on these terrible events. There will be several others!

Prague Spring is by Simon Mawer (author of the remarkable novel The Glass Room, reviewed on this blog at https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2017/08/15/the-glass-room-revisited/). Two English students, Ellie and James, are hitch-hiking in Europe and are in Czechoslovakia at the key time, while Sam Wareham, working at the British Embassy in Prague, much in the company of Czech student Lenka Konecková, is discovering the world of Czechoslovak youth. But the Russian tanks are assembling … (Published by Little, Brown; ISBN 9781408711156)

Broken Sea: A story of love and intolerance is by Nigel Peace. It’s a love story set against the background of 1968. 18-year-old Roy has met Czech student in Wales and falls in love, but she feels she must return home. Their love develops, but can it last? Lives are so changed by the events of 1968, and are too many things kept secret? (Published by Local Legend; ISBN 9781910027233)

At this date fifty years ago I was staying with a German family in Bielefeld in West Germany. I recall vividly their alarm at the news of the invasion: would the Russians stop at the Czechoslovak border or carry on into West Germany? Fortunately for my hosts they stopped.

If you’re interested in the politics of it all, there’s a 12-minute piece on Radio Prague about the negotiations between Dubček and Brezhnev in the period leading up to 21 August – go to https://www.radio.cz/en/section/czech-history/kieran-williams-a-week-before-the-invasion-dubcek-still-believed-he-had-time.

 

Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells – and a story of splendid ladies

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Charlotte Bartlett, Disgusted Ladies, Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, E M Forster, Tunbridge Wells, Votes for Women

The expression ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ may have entered the English vocabulary in the 1950s onwards as a byword for middle class conservative moral outrage, but this elegant spa town in the south east of England has a habit of regularly cropping up in literature well before that. We find references in Dickens’ Bleak House, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Fanny Burney’s Camilla, and Jane Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon for a start.

It’s often depicted as the residence of genteel aunts and maiden ladies – a favourite being Charlotte Bartlett in E M Forster’s 1908 novel A Room with a View: ‘I am used to Tunbridge Wells, where we are all hopelessly behind the times’.

But not all of the good ladies of Tunbridge Wells were like Charlotte Bartlett then, any more than they are now. Just published by Matador is Disgusted Ladies by local author Anne Carwardine. It tells the fascinating story of how the town was home to a series of ordinary yet extraordinary VOTES FOR WOMEN campaigners – remarkable and courageous women who were disgusted for all the right reasons.

Tunbridge Wells in 2018, a hundred years after women were given the right to vote: no longer disgusted but still a town with a distinguished literary presence, past and present…

 

 

 

‘Catching the Wind’

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Faith, Forgiveness, Kent, Melanie Dobson, National Archives, Sussex, Tonbridge, Traitors, World War Two

I’m impressed by the structure of the novel I’ve just read, Catching the Wind by Melanie Dobson.  It’s in split time – in the 1940s and in the present day, and I found myself really wanting to know what would happen next in both stories.  Much careful planning must have gone into the plotting – it doesn’t read at all like ‘seat of the pants’ composition.

In World War Two 13-year-old Dieter and 10-year-old Brigitte run from their homes in Germany to escape the Gestapo.   After a terrible journey they manage to get to England, but are soon separated.  Dieter promises Brigitte he will come back and find her.  However, he is interned and can’t do so.  Brigitte finds herself in a most dangerous situation, exploited on a rich man’s estate and at risk from people who may be Nazi sympathisers.

Today, now aged 90, Dieter has become Daniel Knight, a successful businessman in America.  He has tried without success to keep his promise and find Brigitte.  He recruits Quenby Vaughn, a young American journalist living in London, to try once more.  She is working on another assignment, investigating possible espionage and subversion for the Germans in Britain in WW2: a possible link with Brigitte leads her to agree, despite her having to work with Daniel Knight’s arrogant lawyer Lucas Hough.

We follow Brigitte’s story in WW2 and, in parallel, Quenby’s search for her in 2017.  Quenby is strengthened in her search by her Christian faith: however, in her past she suffered a dreadful wrong, and she has to wrestle with issues of forgiveness.  And there’s a twist in the tail that quite caught me by surprise.

The novel is set largely in Kent and Sussex, as well as in London and North America. It’s interesting to see ourselves with an outsider’s eye.  The author is American, and I met her last year when she was in this part of Kent researching for this novel.  She describes the nearby town of Tonbridge thus:  “The town centre was a paradox … , modern storefronts mixed with the medieval past.  A river ran through town and lapped against the foundations of old shops now housing establishments like Subway and Starbucks.  And an abandoned old castle perched on a grassy hill, overlooking the town.”

I found it salutary to learn of the activities of British pro-German saboteurs and spies in WW2.  The Author’s Note makes clear that what we read in Catching the Wind is based on what she found in the National Archives at Kew.   So our idea of the nation all pulling together, backs against the wall, united against the common foe, is not entirely true.  Fortunately for us the traitors’ efforts were insufficient …

Thanks, Melanie.  I enjoyed it.

Catching the Wind, by Melanie Dobson, was published earlier this year by Tyndale House Publishers, ISBN 978-1-4964-1728-2  You can order it through Waterstone’s, for the equivalent of $14-99, with no postage and packing: it might take 2 weeks or so to come to Britain from America.  It’s also available online from Amazon, or from the publishers at http://www.tyndalefiction.com.  The author’s own website is http://www.melaniedobson.com.

‘Catching the Wind’

Tags

espionage, Kent, Melanie Dobson, Secrets, World War Two, Writing discipline

Delighted to have my copy of Catching the Wind, the latest novel by Melanie Dobson, the author who impressed me so much last year with her discipline of 2,000 words a day (see https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/2000-words-a-day/). Much looking forward to reading it – it’s in split time: it’s partly in WW2, partly now, partly in between; there’s espionage, secrets deep in the past, betrayal, a man’s search for the Brigitte from whom he was separated over 70 years before – and locations round here where I live in Kent. Thanks, Melanie.

(https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2016/08/15/shadows-of-ladenbrooke-manor/ described my enjoyment of another of her novels with a British setting. Catching the Wind looks as good …)