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the flame alphabet

The Flame Alphabet may be the most disturbing book I’ve ever read. The fact that it is beautifully written only adds to the nasty queasy feeling one is left with at the end. The sense of being made complicit in a series of cruel acts. I’ve never read a book which contains so much that is wrong and off and weird in the most unpleasant ways. Oh, but it is brilliant.

The subject of the novel is language. When language becomes toxic and lethally unspeakable, unhearable, and unreadable, all relationships fall apart, and love itself becomes impossible. Society breaks down, and the post-apocalyptic world is characterised by an inhuman desperation to re-connect with one another. That’s a very basic summary of the plot. The strangeness of the setting, the twisted Heath Robinson-esque contraptions deployed by the narrator in his efforts to cure himself of language illness, the secret cult of the Forest Jews who listen to sermons through flesh-like ‘listeners’ attached to cables underneath the earth, the scripts and signs that are also diseased – this all makes for a very odd novel full of thematic richness. But the most disturbing elements of the book are to do with parenthood, with fatherhood, to be precise. And in many ways, the novel is traditional – it has a protagonist and a plot, a beginning, middle and end. Yet there is something absolutely surreal and estranging about the writing that washes you up somewhere very far from home.

This novel made me feel slightly sick, if I’m honest. I appreciate that this is a meta-message – language is toxic – but mainly, I just feel a bit ill.

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mind your language?

I was involved in a pub discussion the other night about whether certain extremely offensive words are okay to say and use, if you are not personally offended by those words or sitting next to someone who might be. One side of the argument claimed that words are neutral – if they hurt, it’s because of the speaker’s intention to hurt/the hearer’s allowing the words to hurt her. Another side was saying, words have power and meaning that they carry with them, regardless of who is speaking. A question was raised as to whether it’s possible to subvert the meaning of such words, or whether they should be unspoken and neglected until they fall out of usage.

My opinions don’t completely line up anywhere in this argument. Of course words have power of their own – some words carry a great deal of history and meaning with them. And we know that intentions aren’t all that matter – it’s the reader/listener who completes the meaning. So writers/speakers do have a responsibility to consider that the words they are using mean more, lots more, than they may want those words to mean. That’s why claiming the ‘right’ to use a word, just because it is a word in the language, isn’t as straightforward as it might be. People talk about freedom of speech – but what do you do when your freedom of speech forces another person/group of people into silence, or into inhabiting a marginalised position? I don’t know the answer to this.

On the other hand, powerful words derive their power from real social relations. There are highly unpleasant words used against women, for example, but getting rid of any of these words doesn’t eradicate misogyny. If there were no misogyny, there would be no hateful words used against women, and words which are now vile to us may persist but would no longer be vile.

There is also the question of context. Who is speaking, and when, and why? A group of women might use all sorts of language amongst themselves that would be offensive/threatening/nasty when used by a group of men, or called out in the street, or graffitied on a wall.

More convincing than any of this, for me, is the fact that I cannot speak some words without feeling faintly repulsed. The words themselves are toxic. You can see them having a physical effect on people who hear them, too. Something happens when these words are summoned into conversation. Something physically happens to people – they react bodily. That’s not a political argument, and more level-headed rationalists would probably dismiss it as twaddle of the worst kind. But it is true. A word aimed at you can make you shrink back, can make you cry, blush, fill you with adrenalin. Some words really hurt.

I’ve been reading ‘The Flame Alphabet’ by Ben Marcus, a novel in which the whole of language is toxic, where language can be used as a weapon to injure, sicken and kill. Children are immune to the toxicity of language, and it is they who hurt and kill their parents and others around them. Their motives are not really explored, and I suggest that this is because it’s motiveless to an extent. The children don’t make war on their parents for any rationalised reason. They do it because they can’t help it, because they must use language, must speak, and must say whatever they want to say. I’m interested in the idea that language has an existence of its own, like a virus that seeks to perpetuate itself by any means it can. If that is the case, our discussions about language are kind of pointless, except in that they keep reproducing language, which is only thing language itself cares about.

 

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time will tell

So I was given an an assignment I really didn’t want to do. Write a diary entry from the perspective of your eighteen year old self. I didn’t want to do it for a number of reasons, none of which I care to rehearse here, all of which can be boiled down to, ‘stop taking everything so seriously, George.’

I’ve been thinking a lot about my eighteen-year-old self and where she is now. What happens to our selves as we get older? I mean, in my case, I became incredibly cool and popular, but does that mean my awkward, brash, unloved eighteen-year-old self is gone? Did I eat her? Or did she eat me, and that’s how she got older?

It should be clear already that I don’t have a clue how time works. But if, as the scientists say, all time is happening at the same time, then my eighteen year old self is right now existing just as much as I am. If she is existing now, then do the things I say and write about her affect her subconsciously? Does she have terrible dreams because I keep sending tendrils of story at her? Do I have terrible dreams because she is sitting in another room with a knife? How does it work – are there an infinite number of parallel universes in which every possible version of ourselves exists? That’s what they say, right? Every instant is happening right now, and somehow I am travelling through space, through the membranes between the worlds, and that’s what I’m calling time? If we could stop feeling time, would we be more than we are? Would we be all our selves at once? Or would the universe cease to exist?

Here’s a big question with no useful answer. What’s the difference between time and narrative? Because the way I see it, the only difference between me and my eighteen-year-old self is the story I am telling myself about myself and the world. (And, obviously, that I grew into my good looks.)

Time probably doesn’t work like this at all and I’m an idiot. Although I expect that the people who laugh at me for my unscientific and bizarre notions about time also don’t know anything about how it works or indeed what it is. Even scientists have to admit that time is made of language, and so it is a writer’s prerogative to wonder just how the hell it works, even if she makes herself look silly in the process.

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not dead, just resting my eyes

Currently reading Barthes’ Death of the Author, which is not as much fun as the title would seem to suggest, given that no one actually dies in it. However, it is the prompt for some high dudgeon and dramatic outbursts. I overheard one of my fellow students referring to Barthes as “our enemy – the one who wants us all to disappear…” A very interesting construction to put on this text, the premise of which is unnecessarily obscure, but not especially controversial. He’s just saying, it’s about language, it’s not about you. Get over yourself. Right?

 

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happiness

As of yesterday, I am officially a student again. There’s something a bit ridiculous about that, given that I am so ancient and curmudgeonly and prone to delivering rants about the gruesomeness of students and young folk in general. And yet. Here I am.

There was a get-out-of-jail-free opportunity on Thursday morning when, after being welcomed by the course tutors, and praised for getting places on such an elite and unique programme, my fellow students and I were invited to leave. “No shame,” they said, and they meant it. “Leave before you give us any money.” I thought seriously about the proposition. Was I there for the right reasons? Would I be able to cope with the work? Was I ready for this? The tutors asked us some searching questions, and I, in turn, searched myself for the answers. I promised myself that I would leave if it was the right thing to do, and I would have, too. This is not the right course for everyone – but for me, it’s perfect.

It helps that the Napier programme is so ridiculously awesome. It is unlike any other creative writing course in the known universe. There are no workshops where students critique each others’ work – you can do that in your spare time. On the course, we get feedback from experienced writers, editors and agents. There’s no poetry component, and no literary snobbery. Instead, we are challenged to improve our writing by putting it into theoretical contexts, by experimenting with form, content, genre, style, tone; by focusing on structure, point of view, and all the other nuts and bolts of writing as a craft. No one is asking you to express yourself, find your voice or confront your emotional pain in some kind of voyeuristic pseudo-therapeutic ‘safe’ space. What they do ask of you is a serious commitment to the course, and to your own writing career, and to yourself as a writer. It is incredibly exciting and I feel stupidly lucky that I’ve got the chance to be a part of this.

If you think I’m exaggerating how good this course is, I’m sorry. I’m underplaying it, because I don’t want you to be jealous. I’m going to be a better writer – immeasurably better – and I am off my head with happiness.

 

 

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I can give up any time I want

Hey there! Long time no wotsit! I’m on a train at the moment, so if this all seems a bit wobbly to you, that would certainly explain it.

So. You know how a while ago I was banging on how about the internet is a terrible distraction and how I was going to not have the internet and it was all going to be great? Yeah, well. I have come to my senses and realised that I can no more manage without the internet than I could manage without teabags or eggcups, or any of the other basic human needs. I am currently in a state of waiting/longing for someone to come and hook me up to the world, which is going to happen in about four weeks’ time. Four weeks! I called them and explained how that was too very long and I cry my eye, but they remained unmoved and insisted that four weeks is exactly the same as the ten days they had originally promised me, but that they would certainly ‘log’ my ‘complaint.’ Thank you very much, not. Also, all your trains smell of wee wee.

It’s true, of course, that the internet is an awful problem for writers. Then again, a lot of things are awful problems for writers, not least the fact that they feel compelled to make stuff up and pretend it’s really really serious and true. Why should I pick on the internet as being especially bad? When there it is being really useful, and having Eastenders on all the time, and making nice pingy noises when I have an email. I’m so sorry I ever doubted you, the internet.

Because of the lack of internet, I have been forced to read more books than normal, which also means I’ve had to buy more books than normal, as most of my books are still in boxes in another country. Here’s a few of my favourites from the last fortnight:

The Beginner’s Goodbye – Anne Tyler. If you don’t already know Anne Tyler’s novels, then I feel very jealous of you. Start with The Accidental Tourist, or perhaps Saint Maybe.  But you must definitely also read her new novel, which is quite beautiful and brilliant. The opening line alone is worth the cover price, but what I loved about it most was the devastatingly cool way she used a first person narrator to tell both sides of a marriage. So clever. The novel also has a strong speculative element, which I liked a lot.

The Driver’s Seat – Muriel Spark. It pisses me off that the writers’ museum in Edinburgh is obsessed with those three old farts: Scott, Stevenson and Burns. No one cares about Walter Scott, although his monument is rather impressive. And as for Robbie Burns! All I can ever recall of his is “Nine inches will please a lady,” which is simultaneously wrong and deeply unpoetic. I don’t really understand why the Writers’ Museum doesn’t seem to care about all the amazing Scottish writers, such as Muriel Spark. This novel (novella, really) is a very sinister and disturbing crime story, turned inside out. Muriel Spark had a great talent for creating unpleasant people, but in the end, your sympathies are turned very much around.

So I Am Glad – A L Kennedy. Oh. This woman can write anything, everything, and knocks pretty much all other Scottish writers into a cocked hat. ‘So I Am Glad’ is a comedy, but it’s also very touching, and is peopled by completely real yet utterly preposterous characters. The narrator is absolutely believable, even though her story is deeply suspect. I don’t want to give the plot away – not even the premise – because it is so deliciously bizarre and unique. Just read it.

The Silver Wind – Nina Allen. Her style rather reminds me of Christopher Priest – which is a pretty big compliment as far as I’m concerned. These five interlinked stories about people’s obsession with time creates an intriguing puzzle of a novella. A shame that the mystery is somewhat dampened by an indulgent and unnecessary epilogue. Then again, it’s rare to find a really clever and interesting novel that deals with time travel and parallel universes, and this is a real treat.

What are you reading? Feel free to recommend something in the comments.

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how to paint a dead man, by sarah hall

Everything that Sarah Hall writes is luminous with genius. Her fourth novel, How to Paint a Dead Man, concerns the intertwining lives of four people, disconnected by place and time. Their stories take place adjacent to one another, are intimately connected, but never share the same temporal geography. For all its vibrancy and currency, its earthy people and gripping stories, this book is essentially a meditation on the nature of art. There is an exuberant and joyful celebration of the inner life of the artist, a basking in the mysteries, a revelling in beauty. It is a book full of love and loving, not at all cynical, alive with feeling.

There is something magical, too, in the way that Sarah Hall traces chains of coincidence and synchronicity: connections that are subtle, too oblique to be noticed, but which exert their power nonetheless on each of the characters’ lives. The people in this book are defiantly, irresistibly alive. Their deaths are tragedies, and yet, as the clever structure of the novel suggests, their deaths are not  the end of them. In the perspective of the novel, art is life, and art survives death.

Hall’s writing in her first novel, Haweswater, put me very much in mind of Alan Garner and, sometimes, Ted Hughes. She understands the landscape intimately, physically, historically, and her people in Haweswater seem to rise out of the land, seem to be hewn from rock themselves. How to Paint a Dead Man is a more polished novel, more sure-footed and wider-ranging, but it still has that same organic, natural magic. There is something wildly exciting about writing that is so confident, so daring, so unafraid of its own themes and emotions. If you want a novel that makes you feel brave about writing, I recommend this one.

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there will be hummus

I might be middle-class now, but I didn’t go to university until I was twenty-four, and up until then I had never eaten an olive. I didn’t even know what hummus was. It was pretty shocking to get to university (actually the former Brighton Poly) and see sports cars in the students’ car park, parked there by witless, entitled, eighteen-year-olds. Their parents were paying their rent, too, whereas I ended up with a full time job on top of a grant and a loan and a massive overdraft that it took me ten years to pay off, just to get by. I thought university was going to be a cross between a tripped-out day at Glastonbury and French cafe society of the 1920s, and that I would therefore fit right in, what with my love of night-long intellectual discussions, my penchant for recreational drugs, and my rapidly worsening mental illness. In fact, those things – along with being fairly old and not knowing what hummus was – pretty much made university life harder than I ever expected it to be.

I didn’t do a creative writing degree. I didn’t even study English. If I had known I was going to be a writer, maybe I would have done, but at that time I believed that I couldn’t be a writer. All writers were middle-class white men who ate olives every day and bathed in hummus. Writers were not people like me – women, women who had grown up eating pot noodles, women who couldn’t speak French. It took me a long time and a big leap in confidence to recognise that those weren’t actual entry requirements (unless you were French, which I wasn’t.)  I could be a writer if I wanted to be. No one was even trying to stop me!

So I did become a writer, and for the past dozen years or so, I have been a writer. But I want to be a better writer, and a more successful writer. And I want writing to be the centre of my life, not just something I do in my spare time. So, in September, I’m going to do an MA in creative writing at Edinburgh Napier University. If you google the course, you’ll see why I want to do it. The focus is on professionalism. There’s no sitting in a circle. It’s all dirty work. And it’s in Edinburgh, which is about as far away from my family as I can get without a passport.

I don’t need a course to learn how to write better. No one does. You learn by reading and writing. But this is an opportunity to make a massive commitment to my writing career, and I’m pretty excited about it. Big change is a big, good thing. Bring it on!

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the rock

When it comes to a choice between moving and staying, taking action or standing still, I have always favoured movement. Some people believe in the value of staying put, of being where you are and appreciating it. Maybe they feel that wherever they are is where they’re meant to be. Some people believe that everything is an illusion, so there is nowhere to go and nothing to do, and one must simply be. In that place where you are, maybe you can write or paint or simply watch and listen. It sounds so wonderful, so perfect. So final.

If everything is an illusion, then it doesn’t matter if you move or stay still. You could spend the next 40 years staring at a rock, or you could walk around the whole world, and there would be no real difference. There is no world, and there is no rock, so what does it matter which illusory thing you focus on? But if there is no difference, perhaps it would be more comfortable and sensible to choose the rock.

But some of us, we just can’t see things that way. We are not content with being. We want to become. Better, different, more. (And some of us get stuck, in cities and houses where we don’t belong, with people who are not our people, and we are seized with urgency: we must go now.) If something isn’t working, then let it go. Don’t stay because you’re stuck. Pull yourself up by the roots, start again.

In writing, though, I’ve been trying to cultivate a different way of being. Sticking with it. Sitting with it, even though the natural urge is to move on. I love to start new things! The feeling of starting a new story is so shiny. Short stories are great because you stay just long enough to get the gist, then you move on. And novels are so long. You have to stay in one place for a long time, and just sit there. Staring at the rock. It’s just a big grey rock. The challenge is to see that it is flecked with silver, that it has faces and shadows, that it has history. The challenge is to see that the rock contains the illusion as completely as anything else, including the whole rest of the world.  And then to just keep sitting, keep writing, and keep hoping you haven’t made a terrible mistake.

 

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my god they’re alive i tell you

Some of my characters have started talking to me, in my head. This has never happened to me before. In fact, I used to think this was a totally made-up thing that writers claimed happened to them as a way of trying to explain how they gave their characters words and stories. All a bit silly, I thought. But it turns out, I was the silly one, because here they are. Talking. In my head.

Having voices in your head is not something to shout about, unless you’re a writer or can become a writer in the time between admitting to the voices and your concerned friends and family staging an intervention. It’s actually a fairly odd experience. I’ve heard voices before, but they’ve always been some variation of mine; even the disturbing or distressing voices have always been recognisably mine. Having someone else’s voice in your head, telling you their story – well, that’s just weird.

I know that these characters are my creations, and that what they think is what I’ve created them to think, so their voices are really my voices, after all. But they’re not! Both things are true at once. Silly to try to understand it. Better to just listen and write it all down.