Book Review : The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis

I loved these books passionately as a boy. I loved everything about them : the adventures, the characters, the magic, right down to the different colours of the covers and the line-sketches accompanying the text. I loved Aslan and Mr. Tumnus and the indomitable Reepicheep. I wanted to live in Narnia.

Recently I've re-read them to one of my own children. She enjoyed them very much too. I, however, found big problems with them. Perhaps it's a mistake to re-read books like this. Still, much as it pains me to say it, these are tainted works of fiction. Partly it's the religion thing of course. I'm one of those people who was surprised to learn that these are works of Christian allegory. I felt cheated when I did so (by which time I was an adult) but, well, at least my childhood enjoyment of the books hadn't been marred. Now, the Christianity just grates. It is generally fairly understated, to be sure, and there is plenty of non-Christian mythology in there too. But sometimes the theism just bashes you on the head. I found myself actually getting annoyed at the creationist section of The Magician's Nephew.

Of course, there's more to the Narnia books than all this. These are imaginative books, for sure, with exciting plots and well-drawn characters. Seeing Narnia from its beginnings in The Magician's Nephew right through to its end in The Last Battle is still marvellous. The way Narnia and our world interact is a lot of fun too. And Aslan is great, if you can put it out of your mind that he's "really", you know, Jesus or God or whatever.

I watched an interesting BBC program recently entitled The Narnia Code which set out Dr. Michael Ward's theory that the seven books of Narnia each correspond to one of the seven "planets" of mediaeval cosmology (um, that's the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn.) Actually, the program was only interesting for about ten minutes; then it just wandered off into more tedious (and very unbalanced) theist propaganda. Do you see a theme here? But still, it added some interesting depth to the books. It was almost enough to make me want to read them yet again. Almost, but not quite.

Because there are other problems too. The Horse and His Boy is downright racist at times. It will be amusing to see how much they tone that down when they come to make the film of the book (if they ever get that far). The Last Battle - which I recalled being gloriously elegiac - is in fact very dull and silly. No doubt some great moral and religious point is being made with the extended parable of the donkey and the ape and the false-god thing. I couldn't be bothered to think about it. It's just dreary until the very end.

So, the ten-year old me loved these books. The older me thinks they're alright, but flawed. They're not as good as Harry Potter or anything, but they're alright.

Meanwhile, perhaps as a result of rereading these books, I have recently become religious myself. This will come as a surprise to anyone who knows me. But I have lived in darkness all this time and now have seen the light. I have become a follower of the one true God, The Flying Spaghetti Monster. I couldn't be bothered to go to services or anything though ...

Book Review : The Road by Cormac McCarthy

This is a marvellous book.

It is, on the surface, a simple tale. A man and a boy travel along a road in a post-apocalyptic world. It is never spelled out precisely what has caused the devastation, but everything is burned, ruined and relentlessly bleak. The two characters struggle slowly forwards : starving and filthy, in constant fear of the “bad people” who would take all their belongings and, most likely, kill them for food.

The prose style is fragmentary; the text is divided into small snapshots that, while they do lead on from one another, could each almost be a self-contained piece of prose-poetry or flash fiction. The writing style is sparse and matter-of-fact. There are few characters and few descriptions of the charaters that there are. In fact McCarthy more or less ignores many of the writing-advice rules on how a book “should” be written. Hurrah for that.

He also ignores many of the rules of grammar too. He doesn’t use quotation marks for reported speech. His use of apostrophes is strangely patchy. He always writes “cant” for “can’t” but then will write “he’ll”. Whether there is some deeper significance to this I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s to do with how the old order and rules have broken down. It certainly had the effect of grating constantly on a grammar-fascist such as myself ...

But. If all this makes the book sounds like it's hard-going then fear not. It is in fact a completely compelling read. The temptation to read just one more paragraph/snapshot is constantly irresistable. Each becomes like another footstep on the journey the two are taking. The effect is hypnotic and once you become acclimatized to the approach, you simply don’t notice it.

The story is a wonderful evocation of the love and devotion that exists between man and boy. The two of them spring from the page, their tender relationship in the face of all the horrors very powerful. The story is told completely from the man’s perspective – apart from one moving passage towards the end - but McCarthy suggests an enormous amount of insight into the boy’s mind with the simplest of words, such as the repeated exchages of “Okay? Okay.”

As I writer, one of the things I took from the book was an understanding of how successful a complete commitment to a singular, even unpromising vision can be. As I say, there are few characters and little plot here, and a writer with less self-belief would surely have been tempted to give up on the idea as too short or too shallow at an early stage. But it is in the realisation of the events in the story; the concrete details and the desperate actions of the man and the boy that make the book so successful. The writer's commitment to his vision makes the book work.

Overall, then, a very highly recommended book. What’s more, just to annoy those who “only read proper fiction”, I think this wonderfully literary work pretty clearly qualifies as SF too …

42 Magazine

I submitted a short story to 42 Magazine back in March but to date have had no response or acknowledgement. Chase-up queries have gone unanswered. It's no huge deal as I'll happily submit elsewhere but they don't appear to be active or responding. Submit with caution.

Can I Call Myself a Writer Yet?

This blog is subtitled "On Being a Writer". I prevaricated over the wording of this for a long time, trying to decide if I could justify describing myself this way. Should it say "On Becoming a Writer" for example? The Aspiring Writer?

Similarly my profile says I became "a writer" (note the cautious use of quotation marks) when I sold my first piece of work. But, again, is that right? Is a writer just anyone who writes, or do you have to have a certain level of success to be able to use the label? Something published? Something published you got paid for? A novel (or equivalent) published? Or do you have to earn a proper, family-supporting income at writing to use the term? It's a grey area. After all, most "real" writers don't manage to make a living solely with their keyboard.

Perhaps it's enough to have one or more sales to a "pro" market as defined by people like the SFWA? I've been lucky enough to have a few of those. But the truth is I still can't bring myself to mention the term "writer" when people ask me what I do with my time. Perhaps it's because I just know the next question will always be, "Oh really? What have you written?" To which I always mumble something about the short stories and poems they won't have heard of whilst secretly regretting saying anything. In my dreams they then say, "Oh, you're the Simon Kewin? I love xyz of yours ...", but that's never happened. Yet.

I'm not even sure at what point I would start describing myself as a writer. Or even, more grandly, as an author. Perhaps it's just a matter of self-belief and I should be more assertive and aspirational. I'm a writer, godammit! The truth is, so far, I can't bring myself to.

I'm fascinated to know how others feel about all this. At what point do others in the process of becoming writers describe themselves as such?

Time to Write

I came across a recent post, Not Writing, Just Being, on Sara Crowley's A Salted blog today.

Gosh it strikes a chord. "I cross one thing off and add two or three" describes perfectly where I've been for weeks. Little or no writing being done, lots of everything muscling in instead. It's just incredible how much family/work/house stuff rushes in to fill the time supposedly set aside for writing. "I haven't written for a few weeks. I should never stop, stopping fucks me up" : that's just it exactly. As is "Whispering somewhere in me is the idea that maybe I just shouldn't have started." And, well, best you just go and read what Sara has to say.

Posts like Sara's are fantastically reassuring. It's not just me. It's the same for everyone. Of course. I'm willing to bet most writers are the same : guerilla writers, appearing briefly from the undergrowth of normal life to bash out a few sentences, a few words even, before having to hurry away, minds still blazing with unrealised ideas. Never finding the time for a proper, full-on assault, always in danger of being wiped out.

Today I just ignored some of the stuff that needs doing - I swear it's all sent by a shadowy group of religious zealots intent on preventing any more works of art from being created - and got back to working on Engn, the "next novel". Didn't do a vast amount - just some editing on the opening chapter - but still it felt wonderful.

Not writing soon becomes a habit. But so does writing. It's easy to forget that.

The Literature Degree

Last week I attended my degree ceremony, when I was formally awarded my BA (Honours) in Literature (First Class) by the Open University. Not that I'm bragging!

I'm not normally one for pomp and circumstance, but the whole ceremony - in the splendour of Ely Cathedral - was pretty wonderful. Inspirational really. I'm definitely feeling more inclined to go on to do an MA in Creative Writing now. Not that the Open University course actually exists just yet. But the degree means a great deal to me - much more, for example, than the science degree I did at full time University when I was 18. That was just, you know, something that allowed me to have a happy three years mucking around and pretending to be a grown-up.

I was reminded, again, how wonderful an institution the Open University is. When it started - forty years ago now - it was dismissed by elitists and reactionaries as a ridiculous idea. A university without formal entrance requirements! But, of course, it's been an incredible success. The courses are fantastic. Hard work though ...

I count myself very lucky to have had the OU available to me.

Book Review : The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

I enjoyed this, but not as much as I expected to.

Jasper Fforde’s books have a host of promising plot elements : humour, intrigue, imagination and an obsession with the literary. Most strikingly, there is the “speculative” notion that characters from fiction and reality can interact. Effectively, thanks to the “prose portal”, books become alternative worlds into which real characters can stray. It’s a familiar enough affectation (I could point to my own short story Lost in a Good Book), but a lovely one.

In this book, Thursday Next, the heroine, has to deal with the efforts of ye archetypal baddie to corrupt first Martin Chuzzlewit and then Jane Eyre. The conceit is that if you “get inside” the original manuscript and change events then, erm, all other copies of the book will change too. There’s some time-travel going on too, perhaps in an attempt to suggest how this could actually happen.

The world in which Fforde sets events is based on contemporary Britain, but it’s very different place in some ways. Jane Eyre, for example, has a different ending, where Rochester doesn’t marry Jane. Thursday, as well as pursuing her villain, manages to alter the text of the book to one that will be more familiar. It’s a sweet idea.

Still, as I say, the book didn’t grab me as much as I thought it would. It was often, for some reason I can’t put my finger on, rather dull. You know when you find yourself rereading a paragraph for the third time because your attention has wandered? That kept happening. Perhaps it’s just me. Also I kept spotting POV (point of view) bugs. The book is written in the first person (like Jane Eyre) but a few times the narrative strayed into omniscience before snapping back into first-person when Thursday showed up. Odd. Perhaps it’s some literary joke I’m missing.

But, an entertaining enough read. I’ll certainly seek out the others some time.

The Eyre Affair

Farewell Authonomy

I finally deleted Hedge Witch from Authonomy today.

I never really got it. I guess it works for some people but for me there's too much social-networking involved to get anywhere with it. I'm supposed to be writing, not chatting ...

Abyss & Apex, Shimmer ...

I've had a couple of rejections just recently - hey ho - but each of them has demonstrated how fine the respective magazine is. One was from Abyss & Apex for The One Thousand One Hundred and Eleven Gates to Faerie, and the other from Shimmer for Her Long Hair Shining. Each response was timely, polite and encouraging, in stark contrast to recent experiences with other magazines. I wholeheartedly recommend both as places to submit to.

It's just a shame they aren't all like this. I've heard nothing back from 42 Magazine in nearly three months, for example. Now I know things can move slowly in the publishing world. But at the risk of repeating myself I'll say it again : writers are too often treated disrespectfully. For some markets, it seems we're just a nuisance or a resource to be exploited or ignored. Very quickly as a writer you learn to just accept this, but I don't think we should. The more information about good and bad markets that is available to writers, the better.

One way in which writers cope with these occasional problems, I think, is to simsub - i.e to simultaneously submit a piece to multiple markets - even when magazine guidelines explicitly forbid it. This has the effect, I'm sure, of annoying editors and clogging up slush piles even more. It's wrong, but sometimes you can understand perfectly well why writers do it ...