So, you all know how I feel about a certain series of vampire books, I didn’t pull any punches and the comments are still rolling on in   Following on from these books the floodgates opened and there’s barely a shelf in teen fiction that doesn’t have some sort of Vamp book sitting on it and I hang my head in despair at the sight of the children’s book chart.  But the word on the street is that Vamps are moving on out and the new hot topic in YA-lit is… Zombies!  So, in order to keep ahead of the game… here’s one I read earlier.

The Forest of Hands and Teeth is set in a dystopian future where Mary lives in a village surrounded by high fences.  The fences are not to keep the villagers in, however, but to keep out the hoards of flesh eating zombies living in the forest beyond, a lot of whom are relatives of the villagers themselves.  Now, just in case there are any anti-zombie people reading this, don’t be afraid… the zombie parts are actually not so gruesome and they don’t make too many appearances, so don’t be put off. They’re a threat throughout the book but scenes of bloody gore and stuff of nightmares are actually quite limited.

For me, the main theme of this book is reaching out into the world and wanting more than just what’s in front of you.  Mary’s mother has told her about the ocean but being caged in the middle of a forest means that these have only ever been stories and Mary has no idea if this is true.  When (as is always necessary in a zombie story) the fence is breached and Mary has to run, she gets the chance to find out of the ocean is actually real.  A group escapes the confines of the closeted village life and follow the myriad of paths that snake through the Forest of Hands and Teeth, trying to stay alive.  There’s a wonderful love triangle situation, a huge question of family loyalty and there’s also a hint of faith… in fact, everything you need for a damn good page turner.  And Mary’s desire to find out if the ocean actually exists keeps her going through some very trying situations.

I loved The Forest of Hands and Teeth, it was compelling, emotional and at times riveting reading.  I’ve seen my fair share of zombie flicks and this doesn’t really compare since the emotions and relationships of the characters are at the forefront of the story rather than the flesh-eating monsters.  And Mary is the kind of heroine you want to read about – she’s feisty, resourceful, determined and she’s got that girl-power thing going on in spades (nuff said!).  But there are still plenty of angsty teen-love moments to keep everyone happy.  I tore through this book in record time and am eagerly awaiting the sequel, The Dead-Tossed Waves which is out in 2010.

A video trailer for the Forest of Hands and Teeth made by student filmmaker Jessica Pilke was a finalist in the Teen Book Video Awards 2008.  And here it is…

Early one morning, sixteen-year-old Will Heller is seen heading into the New York subway. With each passing minute he ventures deeper underground and further from the world of light and reason. Meanwhile, above ground, Violet, the boy’s mother, reports Will missing and seeks the help of Detective Ali Lateef. They soon discover that Emily, Will’s girlfriend and only confidante, appears to have vanished too. Lateef must navigate the city’s tunnels as well as a labyrinth of Heller family secrets if he is to reach Will and Emily before it is too late.

Now, there’s a blurb I could get my teeth into, I thought, when I began to review this book and indeed at the start it certainly lives up to its promise. It’s an exciting mixture of literary journey and detective novel that is found together in fiction all too rarely. And I speak as a lover of contemporary detective novels who dearly wishes that they would be given a higher literary rating than they currently are. So I was already primed to view Wray’s book from a positive slant from the off.

And what an encouraging impression the beginning pages do make. The depiction of mental illness and how it rubs against the world (both for the sufferer and those he or she meets) is one of the great and lasting joys of Lowboy. This, for instance, had me on the edge of my seat (a fair analogy for an underground journey novel, I feel):

“Most things that happened didn’t bother him at all, but others got inside of him and stuck: nothing to do then but cough them up.”

In fact, one of the eye-opening issues here is how closely the inner workings of Will’s (nicknamed “Lowboy” in the book) mind echo the inner workings of our own. Everyday thoughts do sometimes get stuck in our heads, never mind our mental stability or lack of it, and it’s hard to rid ourselves of the burden. (Or perhaps that is just me?…). I also, as a middle-class red-headed woman in her mid-forties, have enormous sympathy with the protagonist’s view of how other people respond to him:

“Sometimes it happened that he spoke perfectly clearly, taking pains with each word, and no one paid him any mind at all.”

Oh yes, I’ve certainly been there but, in my case, I rather suspect it’s my age and gender, rather than any degree of schizophrenia. One assumes. Still, it’s a clear marker of Will’s humanity and the way that the author makes him into a highly sympathetic character to whom the reader can easily relate.

However, personal bias and the delight of finding my own experience expressed so succinctly within a work of fiction put to one side, the relationship of man (or rather boy) and underground system in the novel is intricately and carefully drawn. Consider these lines for their poetry, clarity and hidden complexity:

“The train fit into the tunnel perfectly. It slipped into the tunnel like a hand into a pocket and closed over Lowboy’s body and held him still.”

and

“There was only one tunnel in the city but it was wound and snarled together like telephone wire, threaded back on itself so it seemed to have no beginning and no end.”

Here the train system becomes the only world Will really knows, and the two fused together almost become one further personality, far greater than the sum of their individual parts and experience. It is in the descriptions of Will’s journeys through the tunnels that, in my view, this book comes most fully alive. It is also, interestingly, in these sections that the encounters between people (all of them of course including the escaped boy) are richest and most exciting. Here, for instance, is a glorious sentence or two from the conversation between Will and a Sikh underground traveller:

“The moment of revelation made a leisurely circuit of the car, glittering dimly in the air, then passed away without the slightest sound. Lowboy paid it no heed.”

It’s something of a shame therefore when Wray has to leave these moments in order to concentrate on the outside world. For this novel is not just about Will himself. We have two other main characters who also jostle for position: firstly, Will’s mother, Violet, whose primary focus is to track down (apologies – pun not intended) her missing son before any accidents can occur. I found her to be a fascinating character, but in some ways she felt shadowy, as if she is not being given enough to do within the text. Halfway through the novel, I did actually pause and wonder if Violet – and indeed Will’s girlfriend, Emily – were almost characters that needed their own separate book, as they didn’t entirely appreciate having to share it with the menfolk. Or that like Will (and indeed myself), and to paraphrase the author’s own text, they were trying to ‘take pains with each word but no-one was paying them any mind at all’. Or perhaps that the author himself wasn’t giving them the space to be as full and as human and as important as they deserved. Even for instance when the moment of revelation about Violet comes towards the end of the book, I didn’t feel particularly surprised or gripped by it, and I wondered if this was because she hadn’t been fully explored as a character. Similarly, I did especially feel that Emily needed a larger stage. After all, who wouldn’t want to know more than is hinted at here about the inner workings of a girl who was nearly murdered by her boyfriend Will and then is still eager to go on the run with him? I would have loved to have discovered her drives and motives, but I didn’t seem to be given the chance. It felt as if Wray had only just started to pinpoint perfectly the dark edginess of this fascinating young woman when the story moved on and I felt Emily had been abandoned.

Meanwhile, the other major character, the detective Lateef, is also intricately introduced when we first meet him as a cipher-obsessed, whisky loving loner with a fascination for missing persons’ cases and a deep-seated embarrassment about his name. And yes, I do realise that a lot of what I’ve just written makes him sound like a typical fictional detective, something explored by author Mark Billingham in his article on detective fiction and, indeed, Billingham describes modern literary detectives as “men who like a drink and listen to music and have love affairs”, which is in some part who Lateef is. But due to the power of Wray’s writing he has an edge and a wit that I admired and that sets him apart from the crowd.

The only problem I had with him – well actually I had two problems – was that he doesn’t really seem to do enough. He and Violet attempt to track the missing boy across the city, above and below ground, but in some respects the chase feels quite leisurely. I’m not utterly convinced that if you have a potentially dangerous missing boy loose in New York you actually have any time for calm conversation, deep moments of consideration or even for falling in love, but I appreciate this is a literary novel and so the demands of the crime genre may fall a little by the wayside at this point. Still, it did feel slower than it could have done.

The other problem I had with Lateef – which is linked to my first problem – was that I felt he would be better served in another kind of a book. This connection between detective and literary fiction, which I mentioned earlier, is indeed interesting and there must be a way of successfully and fully combining the two genres across a whole novel without the characters losing out that doesn’t involve using an historical setting, but I’m not convinced Wray entirely manages it here. It’s a brave attempt, but for me it doesn’t quite hit the mark.

There’s another issue concerning writing format that I’d like to raise. When I reached the end of Lowboy, I was fascinated to look back and see where in the book I’d made marks of passages or issues I wanted to write about in this review. About 90% of the phrases I found exciting appeared in the first twenty pages and I lay awake wondering for some time if in fact Wray would be better served as a literary short story writer rather than a novelist. I appreciate the man has been nominated for awards for his previous novels so I’m playing with fire by daring to ask that question at all, but as a reader I was most fully engaged with the story and characters in those first twenty pages and over the remaining 230 or so pages I became slowly but surely more disengaged. Some of that is probably due to the fact that I got used to the quality of the writing, but some of it isn’t. It was almost as if Wray himself had shrugged his writing shoulders and said: oh well, I’ve started and I’ve got to finish; I understand I’m good and I can do it with my eyes shut but really I’d rather be elsewhere …

I wonder also how Lowboy would have been if the novel had been told as interconnecting short stories in some fashion with a deep and individual focus on all the characters’ responses to this one event of Will’s escape, so each person was given the full centre stage for a while. All those wonderful people Will meets on the trains could have been included here too. That I think might have been truly exciting.

Forgive me therefore if I sound too negative when far greater reviewers than I have praised this book to the heavens already, and I’m sure Wray has a great writing future to equal and excel his already well documented writing past, and sections of his writing certainly sing here. But I do wonder if these days up and coming writers are being too quickly shoehorned into the novel road when really their literary journey might lie somewhere else. Much like some of the characters of Lowboy indeed. No matter what the market may demand.

Lowboy by John Wray (Canongate Press, 2009). ISBN: 978-1-84767-151-6

For Vulpes Libris’ recent interview with Jamie Byng of Canongate, click here.

[Anne is way too argumentative for her own good. For more information on how to avoid her or to discover the current status of her police record, please click here.]

Comrades,

I cannot – as I had hoped – post about Alma Guillermoprieto’s Dancing with Cuba today.  I am afraid that in this case there are no overenthusiastic dogs, no dodgy Argentine internet connections; I can’t even blame the cat Koba, and he can be blamed for most things.  No, the truth is that I tried to formulate a review of this extremely slippery book and failed.  I turned it this way and that, but by the time I found a successful approach my brain was trickling out my ears and it was too late to write a coherent review.

I weighed up the pros and cons and concluded that it was probably better to post an apology than to write something crappy.  In the meantime, I’ll leave you with another, more impressive public apology: Fidel’s speech on the failure of the ten million ton harvest, as rendered by Guillermoprieto.

He repeated several times that there were problems with the harvest, that the possibility of not reaching ten million had to be considered, and then suddenly, in what appeared to be an uncontainable outburst, totally unexpected by anyone in the audience, Fidel said: “But if you want me to tell you in all clarity what the situation is, it’s simply that we’re not going to make it to ten million tons.  Simply that.  I’m not going to beat around the bush.”

My review of Dancing with Cuba, unlike the ten million ton harvest, will appear soon.

This lovely photograph of Fidel is a work for hire created between 1952 and 1986 by one of the following staff photographers at U.S. News & World Report: Warren K. Leffler (WKL), Thomas J. O’Halloran (TOH), Marion S. Trikosko (MST), John Bledsoe (JTB), or Chick Harrity (CWH). It is part of a collection donated to the Library of Congress. Per the deed of gift, U.S. News & World Report dedicated to the public all rights it held for the photographs in this collection upon its donation to the Library. Thus, there are no known restrictions on the usage of this photograph.

In the latest in our occasional series “In Conversation with …” we’re delighted to welcome actor Richard Armitage to Vulpes Libris.

After working steadily for many years as an actor – both in the theatre and on television – most notably in Sparkhouse and Cold Feet – Richard came to sudden prominence in 2004 with the breakthrough role of Victorian cotton mill owner John Thornton in the BBC’s highly-regarded dramatization of Elizabeth Gaskell’s classic North and South.

In October of last year, he joined the cast of  Spooks as Lucas North, and has recently met his end as Guy of Gisborne in the BBC’s iconoclastic take on Robin Hood.

He recently very kindly took some time out of an insanely busy schedule to answer a few questions for us:

~~~: o :~~~

VL: First of all, welcome to Vulpes Libris and thank you very much for making time to talk to us.   Straight on with the first question – what, if anything, did you read as a child?

RA: Tolkien – Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit;  Roald Dahl – Danny the Champion of the World,  James and the Giant Peach;  Steven King – IT;  CS Lewis.

VL: What do you enjoy reading now – for pleasure, rather than in connection with your work? And what are you reading now?

RA: Most reading time is tied into work related research so for Spooks, lots of Frederick Forsyth, John Le Carré, and Robert Ludlum.

Biography:  I’m currently reading Heath Ledger’s biography, Michael Gambon’s A Life in Acting and Blake by Peter Ackroyd.

VL: I’m interested in how an actor reads. Do you find you can detach yourself from what you are reading, or is your professional self ticking over, wondering what an adaptation would look like, or how you would play the protagonist? Is there any sort of writing that you can lose yourself in, and forget you are an actor?

RA: I would never try to ‘detach’ from what I am reading, the goal would always be to engage and relate. ‘Forgetting I am an actor?’ I always try to forget I am an actor especially when acting. I have a visual brain so any stimulus will charge my ‘acting batteries’.  The best writing is when one gets lost firstly in a character and then in that character’s journey through a gripping plot. That’s my kind of book. My story-hungry brain does go for ‘plot’ but if a character is detailed and layered then the plot can take a back seat. I look for inspiration when reading characters for research – details, thoughts and actions but mainly ‘sensation’, which is unique to each reader and changes according the reading environment. I prefer to read fiction for research rather than a factual textbook even if the latter is more accurate. I am a story lover.

VL: The great Question of the Age – Spoilers: Where do you stand? Do you want to inflict a lingering death on the person who tells you whodunnit, or are you a final-paragraph-peeker?

RA: Spoilers are the bane of my world. I just don’t get why one would want to spoil the ending. It’s like hunting for Christmas presents and then having to feign surprise on Christmas day. The reader is setting himself up for disappointment. Also one makes a judgement on what the ending may be and without ‘the journey’ that judgement is clouded, but worse than that, once you have decided, through ‘reading a spoiler’, that the ending is not what you wanted, then it’s almost impossible for the unfolding of the story to actually change the judgment you have made. It’s like a jury member privately deciding in advance a guilty verdict, despite overwhelming evidence. I say ‘don’t do it’. Do not seek out your Christmas presents, they may not even be for you, then how disappointed will you be! However, some people believe the frenzy of expectation, prompted by being fed little crumbs of spoiler, can have a good effect.  I am dubious. Incidentally, I was part of the ‘Don’t show the Sheriff’s finger Twitching’ campaign on the Robin Hood shoot … we lost!

VL: Now, you were born on August the 22^nd and your given name is Richard. I believe those two facts are not completely disconnected – and that there are plans afoot for a bit of Richard III rehabilitation. Can you tell us a little more about it?

RA: I was named Richard being born on the anniversary of Richard III’s demise at Bosworth; one of my father’s favourite novels is The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon Kay Penman, and I read this many years ago. In recent years it has lead to a tentative interest and line of research into the rehabilitation of this story. As an actor, it’s a project I would love to achieve. I believe it is a great story, a socio-political thriller, a love story and a dynastic tragedy. My challenge is to convince commercial producers to see beyond ‘history lesson’, but I strongly suspect that this will be a long way off, probably outside of my ability to play the role, but I wouldn’t rule out playing another role, I may even be producing by the time someone wakes up and realizes the potential for this project.

VL: Did you know that your portrayal of John Thornton launched several writing careers? I’m thinking specifically here of Phillipa Ashley, Rosy Thornton and Elizabeth Hanbury – because they’ve all had books reviewed on Vulpes – but I’m sure there are others. They started writing fan-fiction inspired by ‘North and South’, then went on to become published authors. That must feel a little odd. Good – but odd?

RA: I certainly don’t feel odd; many contemporary writers have been   inspired to write novels based on ‘Classics’. The inspiration you are talking of, which launched these writing careers is the same inspiration that gave Sandy Welch the desire to adapt Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel, and it was both Gaskell and Welch that facilitated my interpretation of John Thornton.  Much as I would love to take credit for ‘launching writing careers’ the credit is Gaskell’s.

VL: I think you may have had a just a little to do with it, but never mind … we’ll move swiftly on to the next question. One of the interesting aspects of your acting is your insistence on the importance of a back-story for your characters. You seem to take delight in creating this background and exercising your imagination on where your character has come from and what makes him tick. Inside the actor, might there be a writer waiting to come out?

RA: Possibly. Although, I work backwards from someone else’s framework. When I write my character biography, it takes the form of a diary/novel, which moves between first and third person, sometimes second. Its good to talk ‘to’ your character, as well as ‘for’ and ‘about’. But this is all research, and the moment when it comes alive is when that research turns into the character, and that character goes out into the big wide world and collides with other characters (often the facets created in the biography are designed to cause chaos when this happens, like planting a few explosions inside the character).

I think writing is solitary; I like the interaction of a scene with another character. That’s why you will never see me in a one-man show.

VL: Can I take you back to Sparkhouse for a few minutes? (For those who don’t know, Sparkhouse was a grim but fascinating three-part series written by Sally Wainwright, and loosely inspired by Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights – but with the two lead roles reversed … the ‘Heathcliff’ role was played by Sarah Smart and the ‘Cathy’ role by Joe McFadden.) Your character – John Standring – was a sort of amalgam of Isabella and Hareton. Did you read Wuthering Heights beforehand, and if you did – was it a help or a hindrance?

RA: I did read the novel, in fact I had read it many times before, and listened to Kate Bush!! The derivation of the character was less interesting in this instance, what was more useful was Brontë’s vision of that landscape, literal and metaphorical, the major themes in the novel, the wilderness and the madness. I didn’t try to locate John in Brontë’s novel and Sally was keen that there were no exact parallels. There was an elemental feeling from the novel, which had most impact on me.

VL: Casting a quick eye down your CV, I have to say there’s a bit of a lack of jolly, cheery characters. John Standring, John Thornton, Guy of Gisborne, Lucas North … not exactly little sunbeams, any of them. The only recent exception was Harry Kennedy – who married the Vicar of Dibley. Now, I believe that in life you’re actually quite a cheerful soul – more like Harry than Lucas – so, are you drawn to darker characters because they’re more interesting to play … or are you just not offered happy chappies?

RA: I think I am drawn to darker characters because I am quite a cheerful person; there are more questions to ask of these characters. Having said that I think even when playing Harry Kennedy, my biography was quite dark, he was running away from something, from the dark to the light, and he found Geraldine! I think once an actor has been relatively successful in a genre, they are asked to repeat it. I try not to do this, but if the character is appealing then it’s worth exploring. I always look for good within bad and vice versa. That’s what appeals to me about Richard III. The villain, the hunchback, child murdering, usurping monster – I want to try and find the man who loved Anne Neville, passionately, from childhood until death, who was inconsolable at the loss of his only son and who put in place the ‘even handed’ judicial system, which we enjoy today; and then have him ‘slaughter’ the Princes in the Tower. It’s all about contradictions.

VL: Can we talk about Guy of Gisborne for a minute? After waiting two years for him to do something with that extremely large sword, he went and ran Marian through with it, which was a bit startling, to say the least. You said at the time that after that, he more or less had to die … and he did. Were you satisfied with his departure – and will you miss him?

RA: I always maintained that Gisborne was only interesting when he wasn’t getting what he wanted. Give him what he needs and it’s over. In simple terms, as one of the baddies of the piece, which was essentially aimed at youngsters, he really did have to suffer for the suffering he had caused. I am glad he was able to free himself from the burden of his actions and to die a noble death. I will miss him but that’s why it had to end, I would have hated to grow tired of that character, he was hard work to play and needed a lot of ‘concessions’. Much has been said critically about contradictions within this character, but it is my belief that much of our expectations of dramatic characters especially written for TV are paradoxically unrealistic. We expect them to be perfectly formed, that they are for example ‘always bad’, somehow linear. I believe that this is what leads to a stereotypical realization of that character, for if we look honestly to ‘life’, for realism, then we have to accept that is its possible for a man to kill the woman he loves, in a crime of passion, regret this till the day he dies, despise the man she truly loved, and yet still find a way to friendship with him. As I have said before, I don’t think it is unrealistic to believe that a serial killer can return home to his wife, who he loves dearly, tenderly kiss his newborn daughter good night, it’s just hard for us to accept. One of my great mantras is that ‘characters are at their most interesting when they are behaving out of character’, so when actors say:  “my character just wouldn’t do that”, I always say ‘well see what happens when you ‘make’ them do that!’ I had to instruct myself like this quite frequently with Guy of Gisborne, which is why he became interesting to me. He helped me to develop as an actor, for this reason.

VL: Whither Richard Armitage? Can you tell us what you have lined up next?

RA: A new 6-part TV series, a film, and a stage play based on a novel, which became a 60’s film classic. (Answers on a postcard please!) Hopefully, Spooks 9.

VL: “A stage play, based on a novel which became a 60’s screen classic” …  well, that’s nothing if not intriguing …  If – just for the sake of argument – the bubble burst tomorrow and your ‘phone stopped ringing … do you have any second or third strings to your bow? You’re a musician, I think?

RA: I am totally prepared for the phone to stop ringing; in fact I am probably going to disconnect that phone before it has a chance to ‘not ring’. I have a strong need to direct, but I would also like to produce. If I could turn back the clock, I would certainly be behind the camera.

VL: It’s become a custom on Vulpes for us to ask our guests to name their five favourite books – and give reasons. The floor is yours. Just be sure to give it back …

RA: The Lord of the Rings: the best adventure novel for a 12-year-old boy. A ‘road movie’. I was playing one of the Elves in a school play at the time (researching even back then).

Danny The Champion of the World: the first book where I realized I wasn’t reading words to make sense, just imagining the story in my mind.

The Sunne in Splendour: Slightly over blown but much needed antithesis of Shakespeare’s villain,

North and South: I don’t think I need to say why with this one.

Crime and Punishment: Intellectually aspirational read, which turned into a fascination with dark characters, (read this whilst prepping to play Macbeth at drama school, researching the nature of the guilty mind and the unraveling of a good man who does a bad deed, which then escalates into the creation of a full blown violent criminal).

VL: Good choices and interesting reasons …  thank you very much indeed.  And good luck with Richard III.

~~~: O: ~~~

Richard may be contacted via United Agents.  Our thanks to them for their help with this interview.

(Much as I’d like to take full credit for all of  the above questions, the intelligent ones were actually supplied by my fellow Book Fox Hilary … M.)

RosyB talks about her first event as a published author at The Borders Book Festival in Melrose and tells us why when it comes to festivals small really can be beautiful.

And if you pop over to Strictly Writing, you can read a slightly tweaked version of the talk she gave.

*photo copyright Colin Hattersley

The Fantasy

There you are. Spotlit on a stage. Some reverent interviewer raptly attending to your every word. Someone in the audience coughs and is booed into silence by your fanatical followers.

“Well, Jenny, “you hear yourself say, self-deprecatingly. “I never even thought I would write a modern cult comedy classic, but – you know – if people want to call it that – well – who am I to stop them?”

Afterwards, you sit in front of a snaking queue of people, unable to scrawl across the books quickly enough, fending off comments like, “ Your book changed my life. I learnt to love again,” or “I laughed so hard it cured my acne”.

Some people fantasise about being on Top of the Pops or – by the look of our stats this week –  getting stuck in a lift with Richard Armitage…But some of us are rather sadder than that. My fantasy was to publish my novel and be on Newsnight Review before the age of forty.

The Borders Book Festival is my Newsnight Review.

The Reality

You wake up on the morning of the event and the realise – “I am going to have to talk for EIGHT MINUTES. Unaided. How on earth is that going to happen?”

This is the time you turn to the support of your nearest and dearest. What a mistake.  It is one thing to imagine oneself pontificating fluently to a cheering crowd…it is another to stammer your way over the breakfast table in front of your non-writerly parents and  virtually-illiterate boyfriend. The three of them sit stony-faced and you feel the terror rising. Then, the icing on the cake, you are just about to set off to your FIRST EVER FESTIVAL as an published author, you turn your car keys in the ignition and…nothing. The battery is completely dead.

Nooooooooooo!

What should you do?

Rush around in a blind panic yelling at anyone related enough to you or who cares about you enough to put up with it of course!

Fling your speech across the room in temper. Shout at anyone in range about how unsupportive they are. Throw your car-keys on the floor, and yourself, after them, to roll around kicking and screaming  in a tantrum…

Then, borrow your parents car.

We made it with 15 minutes to spare.

Not that I had much time to spare before we were due to appear in our event. I met up with fellow debut authors Andrea McNicoll who had just won the impressively titled 2009 Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Award for First Book for her debut novel, Moonshine in the Morning, only the night before and Anna Richards, author of the audacious Little Gods. Along with calm Chair, literary agent Jenny Brown, we headed for our tent.

Tension, I find, has to go somewhere. Usually it’s my hands shaking like a pneumatic drill but this time it was my feet twitching away. I looked down and noticed mine weren’t the only feet twitching as the three debut authors tap-danced their way through the event. Each of us described our experience of getting published – Anna amusingly talking about the double-edged sword of redundancy to a writer and Andrea describing how her work was picked out of an anthology by an agent and I…well, you can read my talk on The Life of an Unpublished Writer (or something quite like it) over on Strictly Writing today.

As is the case with events, It all seemed to pass in a blur. Thankfully, the audience were rather more receptive to my speech than my stony-faced relatives at the breakfast table, which helped me forget my nerves.

Afterwards we emerged into the light like moles from under ground, and went off to sign books. It is strange being on the other side of the signing table. I remember how in the past I’ve been shy of approaching writers at signings – usually slinking off to buy a book sneakily behind their back in case they think I’m trying to suck up to them or something. How laughable that seems now. As a writer you are dying for people to come up to you, talk to you, say any old stupid thing as you sit there on display next to your magnum opus. “Please talk to me,” you feel like crying. “Please please please, be my friend. I’m harmless. Really. I’ll love you forever.”

Then, suddenly, it was over.

Breathe out.

I found myself let loose, in the grounds of Harmony House with an author’s pass on a beautiful sunny day surrounded by nice people and interesting events. How much better does it get than that? I decided to go exploring.

THE BORDERS BOOK FESTIVAL

The Borders Book Festival – nothing to do with the bookshop I hasten to add – is located in Melrose, in the Scottish Borders in the most idyllic surroundings you can imagine. There’s  a romantic ruined Abbey on one side;  a leafy river walk the other and the festival itself takes place in the beautiful grounds of Harmony House – an elegant Georgian National Trust property swooning with flowers, yawning lawns and all that is sleepy and summer.

The difference with smaller festivals – both a punter and a writer -is that it really isn’t that difficult to feel like you’re part of things. Audience members came up to me later in the afternoon to talk about the event and one can literally bump straight into the likes of Ian Rankin and Hardeep Singh Kohli (in a magnificent lime green turban) although if you are stupid and tongue-tied like me, you suddenly get totally engrossed in your Borders Book Festival programme or find yourself riveted to some non-thing happening in the other direction rather than dare say hello.

Julia Donaldson and her husband Malcolm entertained children who had come for the day. Some very brave soul donned the Gruffalo outfit in the heatwave and went about making little kids cry (Ok, this wasn’t the intention, but one little girl just refused to see the funny side of the cuddly monster, with its impressive array of tusks and spikes, waving at her and saying hello).

As a writer, it is a great opportunity to meet other writers. And it is all so relaxed and friendly that this happens totally naturally. Most of the writes were staying at the house, making it very social and an opportunity for interesting conversations over dinner and drinks.

The other advantage of smaller festivals for the audience-member is more unexpected. In a funny way the smaller range of events means you end up discovering stuff you otherwise might not have tried. Rather than swooping in for one or two famous writers – picking and choosing only the things already familiar to you, there is the potential to discover real gems. I ended up buying more books from The Borders Book Festival than other festivals I’ve attended as an audience member – the fruits of which I hope will appear on Vulpes at some point in the future.

Not that the festival lacked for big names: Michael Palin, Joan Bakewell, Rory Bremner, Vince Cable and John Fortune were all there this year.

But the big discovery of the festival for me was Diana Athill. Now in her nineties, Diana was one of the most respected editors of her generation – working with a dizzying array of big name writers including Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, VS Naipaul and Jean Rhys. Funny, wise and incredibly inspiring, her event was less a straight book event as a moving celebration of old age. Maybe celebration is the wrong word – it sounds too cutesy. An inspiring yet clearsighted  assessment of old age then. Diana Athill makes you almost yearn to be in your nineties –  to find the world and its changes as fascinating as she does, to be so gracious and thoughtful facing up to the end of your life. Plus she’s very funny about sex. And talks about death with honesty and without fear. Which is rare and incredibly powerful.

Needless to say I rushed off instantly and bought her book.

The events continue well into the night – including story telling in the romantic ruins of Melrose Abbey, but my festival experience was rounded off by a saunter along the nearby river Tweed with my boyfriend and (very enthusiastic) dog.

A beautiful little festival in a beautiful place. What more could you ask for?

I’ll definitely be going back next year.

——

second photo halfway down post, copyright Adrian Gould

RosyB is a member of Vulpes Libris and author of comedy novel, Sadomasochism for Accountants.

With a title like that, I was expecting a strident book full of forceful opinions with an array of historical examples. Instead, it was a lot of name dropping and a distinct lack of commitment to all but the core idea. While I did learn stuff, at the end, I was disappointed by the lack of substance in the book, there was so much more he could’ve done with it.
While the book slants towards America, it has global implications. He defines a demagogue with a strict 4 point criteria, based upon popularity with the masses and circumventing the law. He lists a number of demagogues past and present, but only explores a few. The historical ones, such as Hitler and Cleon of Athens, are used mainly to show how they affected various philosophers and political scientist/commentators. He avoids labeling any American presidents as such, despite saying that Bush and Andrew Jackson came closest. But Senators Joseph McCarthy and Huey Long definitely fit the bill. The latter was a sort of Depression-era Robin Hood, making me curious enough for further reading on him. There are more leaders which are listed as demagogues, but aren’t expanded upon, unfortunately.
The author maintains the seeds of demagoguery are within democracy, and only the vigilance of a knowledgeable citizenry will prevent it. This is done by a strong grounding in constitutionalism, which he defines as not only a document, but a form of behavior, “…the culture that fights concentrated authority, it is a constant warning, in the peoples’ hearts and minds, to those who would be strongmen.” He uses the writings of such varied sources as Plato, de Toqueville, Hannah Arendt and Walt Whitman as backup.
In the middle of the book, Signer loses his way, going off on comparisons of the two Bush presidents and political commentators, Irving Kristol and his son Bill. This sets him off on a rant about current American neocons and their “foreign policy of arrogance”, most notably in Iraq, with their view of democracy as a metaphysical idea. While I agreed with this, it had only a distant connection with the main focus, especially since he danced around Bush’s own demagogue-ish tendencies.
Towards the end, it’s as if the author ran out of steam & becomes repetitious. He never brings his theory to a conclusion, nor does he suggest possible actions to thwart demagogues already in power. Despite an intriguing premise and a riveting cover, the book does not fulfill its promise, leaving the reader feeling let down and frowning.

Palgrave Macmillan 2009 272 pp. ISBN-13;978-0-230-60624-1

Jackie, a lifelong liberal, is a wildlife artist. You can see her work here

To represent the utter fabulousness of this week’s Book Fox offerings, for today’s image we give you not just any old fox but a Firefox* (yes, it’s more commonly called a Red Panda but for today’s purposes it’s a Firefox). Take a deep breath and be still your beating hearts because we have some amazing items this week, including a write-up of Rosy’s experiences at the Borders Book Festival and an interview with a very well-known actor.

Monday 6th - Jackie goes all political with Demagogue in which Michael Signer asks what makes a demagogue and then names names.

Tuesday 7th - RosyB “does” her first festival as an invited writer – the Borders Book Festival in beautiful Melrose in Scotland – and tells us why she thinks littler festivals can be particularly rewarding.

Wednesday 8th – On Wednesday, we have the fourth in our occasional “In Conversation with …” series, when actor Richard Armitage talks thoughtfully about the important books in his life, history’s favourite double-dyed villain and the redemption of Guy of Gisborne … among other things.

Thursday 9th – Kirsty dances around Dancing with Cuba.

Friday 10th - Anne sifts through the shadows of John Wray’s Lowboy but doesn’t find quite what she bargained for.

Saturday 11th – Eve is back with another review of a YA book.

Sunday 12th – Lisa enjoys profanity with Trevor Byrne’s Ghosts and Lightning.

*I spotted this Firefox roaming around Newquay last week and thankfully I had my camera at the ready. What a beauty.

(Okay, strictly speaking it was roaming around Newquay Zoo.)

Reading was my first love. In the interim between my fifth birthday and the day I discovered alcohol and boys (discoveries that, as I remember it, both occurred on the same thrilling day) I was a bona fide bookworm. I was the sort of child who jumped feet first into a book, much like those chirpy souls leaping into that street painting in Mary Poppins. Reading wasn’t just a cerebral activity: on opening a novel I experienced the sort of adrenaline rush and stomach butterflies that others might reserve for bungee jumping. I was a greedy reader and I gobbled books with an insatiable appetite. I read at meals, during home haircuts and I even read as I walked to school, occasionally walloping straight into unforeseen lampposts. I read on holidays, I read sitting on uncomfortable black rocks whilst my brothers fished for mackerel, I read on the back of my dad’s bike as he peddled up and down dale. I read first thing in the morning and last thing at night, and when I slept I dreamed about my books. Twice-weekly trips to the library were more exciting than any shopping trip for clothes or toys could ever be. I read the Famous Five books in consecutive order and then backwards. I read the library’s selection of classics in a haze of elation, and found that I couldn’t get enough of Austen, Eliot, the Brontës and Hardy. Around this time my family started to notice that my vocabulary had expanded to include several irritating phrases including ‘pray tell’ and ‘I do not cough for my own amusement.’ Then I read all the American teen books I’d ever received for birthdays and felt sure I would never fit in at Sweet Valley High. Finally I discovered The Lord of the Rings, which filled a lonely summer that stretched between ages twelve and thirteen with such excitement and heightened emotion that I have never quite recovered from it. I was inconsolable on the day I finished the appendices at the back of The Return of the King. I felt bereaved, because I had not just lost a book, I had lost a world. So I read it again. Reading took me away from rainy Sunday afternoons when there was only cricket or snooker on the telly and showed me exotic lands and offered hot glimpses into earth-shattering love affairs. Reading was quite simply the best thing ever. And then when I hit fourteen, I stopped.

Suddenly I could spend weeks listening to one music album on repeat whilst staring at a poster of Kurt Cobain. I started painting my toenails black, dying my hair purple and fantasising about various rock concerts I couldn’t afford to attend. I skipped school and to my amazement I got served alcohol in bars. I drank cider by the litre and puked it up behind bus stops. I didn’t even look at a novel for months on end. I think even at the time I knew I had lost something. It wasn’t the loss of innocence that niggled me, it was the loss of my reading. But I was so busy trying to be a grown-up that I ignored what books could offer me.

At university I did an English degree but reading just wasn’t quite the same. I had lost my reading mojo, and where books had once been the be-all and end-all, they had become mere objects to help pass a few bored minutes in the bath or at the beach, and the classic texts that I had once loved with a passion were obstacles that needed to be surmounted in order to get a good grade. Reading was quite pleasant in its way, but I’d have rather been at the campus bar.

Writing my own novels initially took reading away from being a simple pleasure and morphed it into a complex activity ranging between market research, competitor appraisal, awe, ecstasy, and misery that I couldn’t write anything as wonderful as the offerings of my favourite authors.

I sometimes wonder if other people have lost the urgency and all-consumingness of their early reading passion, or if they still feel the same excitement for a book at age fifty as they did at age ten. Personally, I doubt that I’ll ever reascend to the giddiest heights of my early reading love, but the summit is, at least, in sight and a certain book blog with a funny Latin name is responsible. For the past eighteen months Vulpes Libris has filled my evenings with book after book, and the next time someone asks me why on earth I spend so much time reviewing novels without even getting paid for my efforts, I’ll probably blather about helping fellow authors get review coverage or the wonders of free books, but I’ll secretly be thinking that through book blogging I’m rediscovering my reading mojo, and to me that’s payment enough.

*Calling all bookworms, past and present, (of course including my fabulous fellow book bloggers: Kirsty? Lizzy? John? Stewart? Simon? Lynne?)* Have you experienced marked changes in reading excitement? Did adolescence remove some of the wonder of reading? Or are you still reading with the same passion as ever? I’d be fascinated to hear if anyone else has experienced peaks and troughs in their reading life. Thoughts welcome, as always, below.

Despite several recommendations from various sources, I never managed to read a David Lodge book before but I hope this won’t be my last.

Therapy. Definition: remedial treatment of mental or bodily disorder.

Laurence Passmore, a 58 year old sitcom writer, known to everyone as Tubby, experiments with all kinds of therapy in an attempt to find a solution for his bodily disorder, a mysterious pain in his knee diagnosed by his doctor, Nizar, as IDK, Internal Derangement of the Knee or by another of his therapists as I Don’t Know.

‘We watched the video of my operation together…It was a brightly lit, colored, circular image, like looking through the porthole of a submarine with a powerful searchlight. “There it is, you see!” cried Nizar. All I could see was what looked like a slim silvery eel biting chunks out of the soft underside of a shellfish. The little steel jaws snapped viciously and fragments of my knee floated off to be sucked out by the aspirator. I couldn’t watch for long. I always was squeamish about violence on television.’

His mental disorder is even harder to define and diagnose; a general sense of unhappiness and malaise unjustified by his apparent success in life. Tubby is well-off due to the popularity of his TV show ‘The People Next Door’, has a long-standing marriage to an independent, sexy woman, as well as a platonic mistress, ‘which is a sort of therapy too, I suppose.’

He undergoes physiotherapy, cognitive behaviour therapy, aromatherapy and acupuncture but nothing seems to erase his sense of ”dread’. It sounds more like what I suffer from than ‘anxiety’. Anxiety sounds trivial, somehow. You can feel anxious about catching a train, or missing the post. I suppose that’s why we’ve borrowed the German word. Angst has a sombre resonance to it, and you make a kind of grimace of pain as you pronounce it. But ‘Dread’ is good. Dread is what I feel when I wake up in the small hours in a cold sweat. Acute but unspecific Dread.’

The style is a first person patchwork of stream of consciousness sprinkled with vignettes written by Tubby from the perspective of others in his life, a self-description and a short memoir. What makes it work so well is that Tubby is an enjoyable companion who, as in an explanation from his wife of why she married him in the first place, is fun to be with. He has an appealing habit of stopping to check out words and their origins and in one of these excursions he discovers Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher whose pessimistic approach to life rings a chord with him. But just as Kierkegaard gives him a new appreciation of the state of marriage, Tubby’s wife decides to leave him.

In shock, Tubby finally has a concrete reason for his melancholy and tries to find understanding and ultimately therapy in a desperate but fruitless search for sex, a spontaneous trip to Denmark in a crusade to find Kierkegaard and eventually embarks on a pilgrimage through Europe to find his first teenage love again. In a touching short memoir of Maureen, this lost love, Tubby recalls the selfishness, the joy and the insouciance of teenage love. When he does find her she has aged and lost that right breast that he had loved as an entity by itself to cancer but his renewed relationship with her brings a contentment and acceptance that he had not found before.

David Lodge captures very well that very modern anxiety of feeling purposeless in our lives and the desperate search to fill the void we persist in gazing into. Tubby finds part of his therapy in his relationship with Maureen although, (and this is one of the few things in the novel that I wasn’t entirely convinced about) I found the tying up of this particular loose end a little pat. Maureen is in a sexless marriage to Tubby’s old rival from the past, Bede, but she cannot leave him because of all the ties life has created between them. In an arrangement that seems to suit all three, they travel on holidays together while Maureen and Tubby have occasional, comforting sex which is a form of therapy for both of them.

Although less obvious, I thought David Lodge gave a inkling in his novel of another powerful form of therapy: humour. Throughout the novel, he walks a fine line between making Tubby a object of ridicule or pathos and making his predicament banal and self-indulgent but he succeeds perfectly. Tubby is very likeable and not least because he refuses to take himself too seriously. Just before he delves too deeply into his existential problems of life, he manages to stand back and laugh at himself and this keeps him firmly on the right side of pretentiousness.

For those who would like a life-tonic laced with a healthy dose of wit and intelligence (and don’t we all need that) then I strongly recommend Therapy.

Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); First Thus edition (July 1, 1996) 336 pages ISBN-10: 0140249001

Are you dangerous? Can you imagine one moment of your own violence resulting in a person’s death? How would you react if you made one terrible mistake and faced serious punishment? If you’ve ever considered these questions, I suggest you get your hands on a copy of Maria Hyland’s This Is How.

Patrick Oxtoby is a tidy, quiet, handsome oddball. He has been dumped by his first proper girlfriend and he can’t deal with the pity and concern of his family, so Patrick runs away to a seaside town where he will work as a mechanic and live in a respectable boarding house. This is where Patrick will break free of familial bonds, old patterns and where he will become his own man. Except it doesn’t quite work like that because in a moment of anxiety and frustration, Patrick applies an adjustable wrench to a sleeping head.

And throughout the book the reader is presented with plenty of emotional wrenching, because while Patrick’s chosen murder weapon is easily adjustable, Patrick isn’t. Patrick is an outsider who lacks the knack for being happy. He doesn’t simply meet and chat to people, instead ‘he gets a chat going’ or he ‘gets a good mood up’. There was a lot that was familiar to me in Patrick: his detailed observations of the world, his self-consciousness when interacting with others and his quiet reserve. It is almost as if he has that famously writerly distance between himself as the protagonist of his life, and himself as the observer of it. Interestingly, Patrick does not unravel – he does not undergo a transformation for better or worse. He is much the same man at the end of the book as at the start, it is just that he has done something unbelievably stupid in-between.

Stylistically the book is straightforward with Patrick narrating in clipped, dialogue-heavy prose. Plot-wise This is How is straightforward: it is the tale of a man who kills someone without really meaning to, mostly because the victim happened to be quite annoying at times. Yet the whole is psychologically complex. Raskolnikov, our favourite idle student with an axe, had a much clearer motive for murder than Patrick. Patrick reminded me more of the Ancient Mariner, killing an albatross mostly because he shouldn’t. It’s the mad, instant allure of pushing a big red button that says DO NOT PRESS.

Reviewers have mentioned a gay subtext, and homosexual thoughts are present, but I wasn’t sure Patrick was solely supposed to represent a gay man denying his true sexuality. Patrick is so shut down and sexually inexperienced that it’s unclear if he has discovered much at all about his sexual self and preferences. I read Patrick more as an ‘everyman’ at the beginning of his sexual life, trying to figure out who he is and considering new options in new circumstances. The book seems to present us not with a gay/straight divide, but more with the ambiguous sexual possibilities available to any human being.

The novel is particularly gripping in the second half, when Patrick experiences something of the justice system. The book is meticulously researched and the characterisation of Patrick’s new friends is superb. However, I breathlessly awaited Patrick’s psychiatric evaluation which was certain to flag up some personality disorder – after all, this is a man who not only talks to himself, but shouts angrily. The evaluation would land him in a psychiatric ward, I was sure, but the evaluation never came. Initially, I thought this was a weakness of the text, but then considered that perhaps people do commonly slip through the net. I then questioned whether Patrick was indeed mentally unwell, and if extreme loneliness and social exclusion can ever count as extenuating mental disorders. Peculiarly, at no point could I decide whether I thought Patrick deserved his freedom. Matters are further complicated as Patrick shows little remorse for his crime – Patrick seems to regret ruining his own life more than he rues taking the life of another, and his prevailing feeling is embarrassment that he did something so reckless and stupid.

The intriguing title of the book answers particular questions that morph into other questions as we go along. Initially, I looked for the one question that the title answered. Was the book saying This is how (it feels to be an outsider) Or ‘This is how (a person becomes a murderer)?’ Or was it saying ‘This is how (very easy it is to kill a man)?’ At the book’s close, the title seemed to be answering the question ‘how can a sensitive man survive this?’

This Is How isn’t purely a voyeuristic look at a murderer. The reader might question Patrick’s actions and psyche but one also has the unnerving sense that the book is looking back and asking questions of its readers. Is murder not as difficult as it might seem? If the circumstances were right, could anyone murder? Could you? Hilary Mantel’s cover quote suggests that this is a book that ‘aims straight for the truth and heart’ and this summary echoes my own feeling about this incredibly powerful novel. For the insights it offers into complicated parent/child relationships and its exploration of the connection between human marginalisation and violence, This Is How is sure to win prizes. It’s a sad, truthful book, but there is a gleam of light at the end. On the final page there is hope that even after the most terrible mistakes it is still possible to move forward and find another way through.

Canongate, ISBN-13: 978-1847673824, 320 pages, £12.99, paperback.

FOR OUR EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH JAMIE BYNG OF CANONGATE, CLICK HERE.

*Apologies for any spoilers, but I felt it impossible to discuss the book without referring to Patrick’s crime.