‘The President’s Hat’

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Antoine Laurain, food, France, Francois Mitterand, hats, Paris, perfumes

An ingenious way of combining short stories together to make a novel: I’ve much enjoyed The President’s Hat, by Antoine Laurain (first published in France in 2012, and in translation in England in 2013).

The book tells the stories of the various unrelated people who one way or another come into possession of a hat: in each case, after they do their lives change. Spoiler alert: what follows does reveal some of the action.

Disgruntled accountant Daniel Mercier is treating himself to a seafood platter in a crowded Paris brasserie, when he is asked whether he would mind three newcomers taking the spare places at his table. He agrees and then, to his amazement, President François Mitterand (no less) and two companions sit down, eat and talk amongst themselves. Daniel subsequently finds that whenever he eats an oyster he hears the words “As I was saying to Helmut Kohl last week …” When they leave, Daniel finds that the President has left his hat behind. He takes it. His life changes for the better.

Short story writer (hurrah!) Fanny Marquant is the next owner, after Daniel accidentally leaves the hat on a train. A problem in her love life is resolved, and she is inspired to write a prizewinning story (hurrah again!).

Perfumier Pierre Aslan [sic] is the next wearer of the hat. This brings us extraordinary descriptions of scents of all descriptions, and of the perfume-making process. How the hat affects Pierre, or how it itself gives rise to a new scent, I’ll leave you to find out.

Upper-class Bernard Lavallière is next, and here we move between his conservative, rich milieu and Paris’s trendier, lefty artistic community. In the course of his story we attend a ghastly dinner party in the first world and an equally awful reception in the second.

The stories are sewn together by Daniel Mercier’s efforts to locate and retrieve the hat. And just when we think it’s all over, we get a bizarre twist in the epilogue.

I found this book great fun. And very French: I can’t recall any novel in English revelling to anything like this extent, over and again, in the sheer pleasure of eating good food. And the settings and the sense of Parisian life seem so true.

The translator is named just as ‘Gallic Books’. Well, my congratulations to the she, he or they whose identity/ies lie behind that. And my thanks to my sister who gave me this book as she liked it a lot and thought I would too.

So if you have some short stories that might add up to a novel, see whether you can come up with an ingenious linking-up idea like this.

Gallic Books, RRP £8-99, ISBN 978-1-908313-47-8

 

‘The Elements of Eloquence’

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Bible, Dashiel Hammett, Elvis Presley, Lennon & McCartney, Mark Forsyth, PG Wodehouse, Philip Larkin, Procol Harum, Rolling Stones, Shakespeare, ST Coleridge, Wordsworth

“‘I wandered lonely as a cloud …’ Clouds are not lonely. Especially in the Lake District where Wordsworth wrote that line. In the Lake District clouds are remarkably sociable creatures that bring their friends and relatives and stay for weeks. … It’s not that Wordsworth didn’t know about meteorology, it’s that he did know about metaphor.” (Mark Forsyth)

I distrust books that have blazoned on the cover, “I laughed out loud”. But in the case of The Elements of Eloquence – How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase, I did too. My fellow travellers on the train to Rochester pretended not to notice.

In this book Mark Forsyth explains figures of speech (39 in all) used by writers good and not-so-good over the last 500 years, with examples and comment. Shakespeare, the Bible, William Blake, Leonard Cohen – they’re all here. This is a great read in its own right, and also a mine for the writer aspiring to write better.

Take Merism. This is when you don’t say what you’re talking about, but instead name all of its parts, as in “For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health”, when you could just say “in all circumstances”…

Or Polyptoton, the repeated use of one word as different parts of speech or in different grammatical forms, eg Lennon & McCartney’s Please Please Me. Or the Bard in Richard II – “Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle”.

Enallage, a deliberate grammatical mistake – “Love me tender” works where “Love me tenderly” wouldn’t. Unadverbial Elvis.

When Mick Jagger, singing of his honky tonk woman, tells us that “She blew my nose, and then she blew my mind,” he is demonstrating his use of Syllepsis, where one word is used in two (or more) incongruous ways.

There are Transferred Epithets, when the adjective is applied to the wrong noun, as in Wodehouse: “His eyes widened and an astonished piece of toast fell from his grasp.”

We all know Hyperbole: Dashiel Hammett on a private eye: “He … could have shadowed a drop of salt water from Golden Gate to Hong Kong without losing sight of it.”

Philip Larkin’s most famous line, we learn, is an example of Prolepsis, when you use a pronoun before saying what it stands for. We don’t know who They are, until we’re told they’re Your Mum and Dad. Doesn’t work the other way round, does it?

‘The Fourteenth Rule’ – Mark Forsyth’s own term – is that a number can give an apparent significance. The “sixteen vestal virgins” in Whiter Shade of Pale work so much better than “several vestal virgins”.     The Spirit that follows the Ancient Mariner’s doomed ship does so “Nine fathoms deep”.  (What was so special about 54 feet down?)

And many more, as they used to say on compilation albums …

Great entertainment, and you’re learning while you laugh! Published in 2014 by Icon Books Ltd, ISBN 978-184831733-8 RRP £7-99

 

‘Lowering Awareness’

Tags

David Bowie, Fragments of Love, Matt Chamberlain, Show and tell

I admire poets’ imagery, and their ability to convey such meaning or feeling in a few words (not my own forte, so I’ve not attempted to write any since school). That’s why I liked Jane Dobson’s Fragments of Love collection so much (see https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2016/11/24/a-poem-that-was-published-in-the-times/ below).

And that’s why I like Lowering Awareness, new from Matt Chamberlain.   It’s an interesting mix: some moving, some comic, some so descriptive.   Comic ones include ‘Give Me A Bell’, ‘Show And Tell, What The Hell?’ (which should be read by every reception class teacher!) ‘Porridge’ and ‘Toblerone’.  Then there’s the atmospheric and sad – ‘Stained Beauty’ (about Saddleworth Moor) moved me a lot. Loss – ‘Absence’ and ‘Far Away’ are two examples. Lancashire and Kent – both are evoked. Tribute is paid to David Bowie.

Read and reread, it’s worth it.

ISBN 978-1511655118 RRP £5

 

Self-publishing: mixed emotions

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Mary Stewart, self-publishing

 

Holding your published novel in your hands for the very first time is supposed to be a thrilling moment for an author. But the thrill is shot through with a brimming dose of alarm.

Some authors may be immune from the quaking fear that their book is, after all, a muddled affair, full of mistakes and should never have got itself printed. Learning that Mary Stewart, that brilliant writer of romantic thrillers, burst into tears when her first novel was published (see September’s post ‘Her publishers refused to pulp it’) is a great comfort. She can’t have worried about mistakes or the quality of her writing – her novels were published by Hodder & Stoughton – but even the validation of a traditional publisher wasn’t enough to overcome her dread of being exposed.

With self-publishing, the unnerving sensation of ‘putting oneself out there’ is inevitably more intense. However much valuable feedback is offered by a helpful and talented writing group, this is not the same as the confidence-giving validation of an agent and traditional publishing house. Thoughts that belong to two o’clock in the morning creep into the mind: might sympathetic, friendly groups become deluded, thinking members’ work is better than it is?

But I am still glad I have taken the plunge to self-publish my second novel Of Human Telling. I hope that it is at least good in parts, like the curate’s egg, and brings pleasure to its readers. It certainly looks and feels as nice as All Desires Known. People might even like to buy it for the cover alone, with its beautiful painting by London artist Anne-Marie Butlin.

Alexandre Dumas – man of action

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Action sequences, Alexandre Dumas, Catherine de Médicis, Charles IX of France, French Wars of Religion, Henry of Navarre, Lionel Davidson, Marguerite de Valois, Raymond Chandler

He can write a mean story, that Alexandre Dumas.

Action scenes – they can be difficult to write, for some of us. How to construct them, how to keep them going? Raymond Chandler said that if you don’t know what should happen next in your story, have a man come into the room with a gun. Advice from the master.

Dumas père was another master. And could use his own version of Chandler’s Law to great effect! I’ve just read Dumas’ Marguerite de Valois (La Reine Margot in the original French). A gripping 460 pages of adventure, fighting, skulduggery, plotting, deception, murder, amours and heroism. When one dastardly plot has been foiled, that’s no problem, Dumas just starts another. One action scene follows another.

It’s set in the 16^th century Wars of Religion in France. It starts with the Massacre of St Bartholomew in August 1572, graphically related. Thousands of Protestants have come to Paris for the wedding of the Catholic King Charles IX’s sister Marguerite (she of the book’s title) to Henry, King of Navarre, the leader of the French Protestants. The wedding will, they think, start a period of religious peace. The wedding does indeed take place, but is immediately followed by a massacre of Protestants, instigated by the weirdo King Charles and the villainous Queen Mother Catherine de Médicis: the lowest estimate of those killed was 5,000.

The novel then shows us Henry of Navarre a virtual prisoner in the royal palace of the Louvre and relates his efforts to survive and escape numerous plots against his life. In this he is aided, remarkably, by his Queen Marguerite, despite his open passion for another woman (with whom he spends his wedding night). In the foreground of all this Dumas creates two heroes, young noble gentlemen (La Mole and Coconnas) who during the Massacre do their best to kill each other but who become the firmest of friends, friendship which proves itself in the most desperate of situations.

Other notable characters include King Charles’ jealous and unscrupulous younger brothers, a perfumer-cum-poisoner, an accomplished assassin, and the public executioner whom Coconnas befriends (most usefully, as it turns out). The novel has a splendid selection of the apparatus of adventure stories, such as secret passages, people hiding behind curtains in bedchambers, ingenious methods of poisoning people, a skeleton key, an oubliette, a dangerous boar-hunt, a torture-chamber, lovers climbing in through windows, etc, etc. Wonderful stuff.

One device I see in an exciting thriller I’m reading at the moment (The Night of Wenceslas, by Lionel Davidson, published in 1970) is to have the hero escape from one danger but then almost immediately to find that in fact he hasn’t escaped it … More danger looms: the sigh of relief is short-lived and is replaced by renewed alarm.

So careful plotting is called for. Or, if you haven’t done that, have a man come in with a gun.

Free Novel Writing Workshops

Sarah’s excellent post of November 2, A Helpful Rejection, made me take a close look at the Myslexia website – where I discovered that the magazine ‘s site generously offers free Novel Writing Workshops.

Workshop Three, currently available at the flick of a finger, suggests how to help your reader focus on your leading character in the opening pages. If he’s a baker, for example, might there be a puff on flour on his clothes when he gets undressed?

Why not check out myslexia.co.uk – under the heading Workshops? And although the magazine has its focus on women writers, there’s plenty of relevant stuff for you guys out there as well.

It might also be worth re-reading A Helpful Rejection. I’ve run a copy off to keep in the front of my reference notes folder.

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))

The British Library’s Crime Classics continue to delight

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Belsize Park, British Library, Christmas, College bursars, Cornish coast, J Jefferson Farjeon, John Bude, John Rowland, Kent, London Underground, Mavis Doriel Hay, Oxford, River Cherwell, Sussex Downs, whodunits

Another hurrah for the British Library Crime Classics series!  It reissues whodunits from the Golden Age by authors who have dropped from general sight but who still can give much pleasure.

I found Mystery in White – A Christmas Crime Story, by J Jefferson Farjeon (1937), a most atmospheric piece.   A group of strangers are trapped by heavy snow on Christmas Eve in a country house, which mysteriously has fires burning and food ready, but no-one is home … Then murder is done. I could almost feel the cold, see the snow on the ground outside. A great gift for Christmas for an aficionado of the genre.

The Sussex Downs Murder (1936) is set north of Worthing, in real Sussex countryside, based on the village of Washington near Chanctonbury Ring. Written by John Bude. The Rother brothers run a quarry. Soon after John Rother’s disappearance bones turn up in the quarry, and then in loads of lime sent to local customers. The plot includes delights such as a mysterious runner in a broad-brimmed hat, an anomaly in the amount of petrol in an abandoned car, a false telegram sent to lure one of the protagonists away, etc. Superintendent Meredith is the sleuth on the case.

Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay (1935) is in the sub-genre of Oxbridge murders.   A group of students at the all-female Persephone College in Oxford meet one wintry afternoon on top of the boathouse to form a secret society dedicated to the cursing of the unpopular College bursar: and what should float down the River Cherwell, right past their meeting place, but a canoe containing the said bursar’s corpse ….   Here the traditional detective sent from Scotland Yard is Inspector Braydon. The cast of suspects includes exotic types such as Draga Czernak, a Montenegrin student at Persephone who feels insulted by the bursar; Ezekiel Lond, a misogynist old man who lives in a ramshackle house next to Persephone, and who much resents the sale by his father of the land on which the College stands; and James Lidgett, a farmer-cum-builder who wishes to develop land next to Persephone. Great stuff. For once, I guessed the villain early on.

Those are the three in the series I’ve read so far. Three pleasures still to come are:

Calamity in Kent (1950), by John Rowland, in which a corpse is found locked inside the carriage of a cliff railway at the seaside resort of Broadgate – given me by a ninevoices friend who knew of my liking for this stuff (thanks, Val).

Murder Underground (1934), by Mavis Doriel Hay (she of the Cherwell): the rich but unpopular Miss Pongleton is killed on the stairs of Belsize Park tube station.  I’ve given this to my Londoner daughter as a present. She commutes to work on the Metropolitan Line but as Belsize Park is on the Northern Line she might not hold it against me. I hope she’ll lend it back to me to read in due course.

The Cornish Coast Murder (1935), by John Bude (he of the Sussex Downs): a local magistrate is found shot dead in the house of the local vicar (not in his library, surely?). Looking for something else, I found this in a place my dear wife might be using for storing this year’s Christmas presents, so I have high hopes for Christmas morning! I must put it back secretly.

Thanks, BL. Go to http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/publishing/crime-classics-booklet.pdf for the complete list.

Digging for Words

 

 

‘Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests, snug as a gun…’

 

A quote from that wonderfully evocative poem, Digging, by Seamus Heaney.                  (1939-2013).

Her publishers refused to pulp it

Tags

heroes, heroines, Hodder & Stoughton, Madam Will You Talk, Mary Stewart, Nine Coaches Waiting, publicity, Rachel Hore

Mary Stewart, that wonderful author of romantic suspense novels with exotic settings and a literary flavour,  would have been a hundred years old on 17th September.

Media coverage when she died on 9th May 2014, aged 97, offered a fascinating picture of a woman whose chart-topping novels gave us a new kind of heroine: a so-called ordinary girl suddenly thrown into a dangerous situation and who finds the courage and intelligence to deal with it. As Rachel Hore wrote in The Guardian, ‘Stewart’s stories were narrated by poised, smart, highly-educated young women who drove fast cars and knew how to fight their corner …. tender-hearted and with a strong moral sense.’

But at a time when authors apparently have to be super-confident and go about endlessly promoting their work, it’s especially endearing to read that when she saw her first novel Madam, Will You Talk? in proof form in 1954 she asked her publishers not to go ahead. ‘It felt like walking naked down the street,’ she said. Thankfully her publishers refused to pulp it. She never had an agent – her first novel was a direct submission – and she stayed with Hodder & Stoughton all her life.

It’s more than 40 years since Nine Coaches Waiting, the story of a girl hired to be governess to a small boy heir to a chateau in France for sinister reasons,  was read aloud to me at boarding school. It might have been chosen because of the educational value of the quotes from poets and playwrights adorning the start of each chapter, but we were all enthralled by the enigmatic hero Raoul. For Mary Stewart didn’t just give us heroines we long to be like; she gave us heroes with whom we will always remain in love.