25th October 2018 · 4:36 pm

From the Attic 1: The House of Sight and Shadow

Over years of being a literary journalist, books have come into my hands that I haven’t got round to reading. In many cases I never will; but every so often I pick something up to while away a few hours. First in an occasional series is Nicholas Griffin’s ‘The House of Sight and Shadow’, published by Abacus in 2001. (Gosh – a long time ago!) 

Historical novelists rarely forego the opportunity to have their protagonists rub shoulders with compelling real-life characters. So if the setting is London and it’s the early 18th century, there’s a good chance they will encounter the infamous thief-taker, Jonathan Wild, and his cohort, the burglar and serial prison-escapee Jack Sheppard. Griffin has not resisted, any more than did Jake Arnott in his last novel, ‘The Fatal Tree’. Griffin doesn’t use the colourful underworld cant that Arnott relishes, but then his focus is upon higher echelons of society. At first I found it distracting that Griffin’s lead character is called Bendix, like the narrator of Graham Greene’s ‘The End of the Affair’. Then I forgot all about that as the narrative wove its spell.

This Bendix, one Joseph, having been romantically burnt in Paris by a married noblewoman, becomes apprenticed to Sir Edmund Calcraft, an unconventional surgeon based in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Bendix is from a well-to-do family but is unlikely to inherit. Older than the usual apprentice, he retains ideas above his current station, sometimes having to bite back a retort when chided by his master. Still sighing over his lost Comtesse, Bendix finds an outlet for his romantic nature when he discovers that in the other wing, Calcraft is keeping his daughter sequestered from the world. Amelia is unable to tolerate daylight; can her father and would-be lover restore her failing sight despite radically different theories of medicine?

Both men have recourse to the dismal trade of the bodysnatcher, another well-worn trope of historical fiction. Calcraft’s notions are half-magical, half-scientific, as he actively seeks out the corpses of wicked men, with the help of the pamphleteer and novelist Daniel Defoe. I did wonder whether a young man of the period would own quite so many silk suits as Bendix does, and the way he flings golden guineas seems excessive. But generally this feels like an authentic, lived-in eighteenth century London, filled with charm and menace, populated with charlatans and link boys, coachmen and chambermaids, with a plot thematically poised between the light of knowledge and the dark of unreason:

The house, from the western wing to the basement, was bathed in a compromise of light. Neither was it illuminated by the bright candles that usually accompanied the doctor’s work, nor dimmed for Amelia’s muted world. Instead Lemon had placed lanterns with opaque glass about the steps to the basement, so that every ten yards yielded soft orange light as if suns were setting all about the house. 

 

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2nd July 2018 · 1:55 pm

Castle creeping

It’s taken me at least a year to re-read ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’. Of course I’ve read a lot of other things in the meantime, but Ann Radcliffe’s 1794 gothic whopper is an easy book to put down, and I don’t mean that as an insult.

It was hugely popular and influential in its day, and later writers paid it the tribute of parody: Byron, writing from Venice to his half-sister Augusta in 1816, announced: ‘I am going out this evening in my cloak and Gondola – there are two nice Mrs Radcliffe words for you.’ Jane Austen poked fun at the novel in ‘Northanger Abbey’ (1818) while Keats wrote mischievously of ‘Damosel Radcliffe’ and her gloomy trappings. As late as 1840, Thackeray referenced its unlucky lovers, Emily and Valancourt, in the assumption that his readers would know who they were. 

I first read the novel as an undergraduate. That I found it so entertaining and involving probably says a lot about the coursework I was reading at the time, both more challenging and less fun. Because tackling it in 2018, Udolpho is a very heavy read, its three volumes coming in at 672 close-set pages in my edition.

The reason that the book can be laid aside so easily, and picked up again months later with no confusion, is that very little happens to Emily St Aubert, its heroine. Rather it’s a book of intense moods and atmospheres, so leaving Emily to moulder for months in an Italian stronghold while you read a few contemporary novels seems to be doing her, and her author, no injustice.

Vague references date the novel as taking place towards the end of the 16th century, though the tender sensibility of the novel’s heroine better fits the time of composition. When Emily, a young noblewoman of Gascony, loses her mother, travel is recommended for her grieving father to distract him from his loss, and the pair set out on a meticulously and romantically described journey to Provence. On the way, they encounter a seemingly rootless young man, Valancourt, who dogs Emily’s footsteps. When the elderly St Aubert dies on the journey, Emily has to throw herself on her sole remaining relative, her disagreeable aunt, Madame Cheron. Upon marrying the severe Count Montoni, Madame banishes Valancourt and sweeps her niece along, first to Venice, where a rich, annoying suitor is proposed, then to Udolpho, Montoni’s formidable perch in the Apennines. It swiftly becomes clear to both women that they are prisoners, and that something very sinister has happened to a previous countess within the castle walls.

All the ingredients are now in place: a terrifically saturnine villain, a helpless heroine, secret passages, ghostly phenomena, murderous plots, vertiginous ramparts, damp dungeons and, wafting over the castle at intervals, spectral music. Outside is little better with troops of soldiers and packs of wandering banditti thronging the forests.

There are two obstacles to a modern appreciation of Emily. One: she is deeply religious, earnestly praying and seeking guidance from the Almighty, while trusting in some deeper divine purpose behind her losses and trials. This you just have to go with. Two: she’s an amateur poet, apt to stop at intervals and pen lengthy, derivative screeds of verse about the sea, the mountains, love, death, even what she’s been reading. A perusal of The Iliad, for example, brings forth 18 quatrains beginning thus: ‘O’er Ilion’s plains, where once the warrior bled, / And once the poet rais’d his deathless strains…’ These you can SKIP!

Stuck in the castle for hundreds of pages, Emily has even less to do, but fortunately possesses some very positive traits to keep the reader going. Though always mindful of the dignity her social position entails, when roused by the malevolent Montoni or his ignorant wife, she can deliver a stinging moral rebuke or defiant riposte worthy of Austen. This spikiness saves her innocent charm and conventionality from being merely bland. Emily’s dialogue with her maid, the babbling Annette, is also a shaft of light in the narrative. The maid is Emily’s chief line of communication with the wider world of the servant hall and beyond, but Annette is incapable of clearly delivering a vital message without a tumble of irrelevant information. It’s not hard to see that, too, influencing Austen.

But the chief glory of the novel is the lengthy descriptive passages providing, for readers deprived of European travel due to the Napoleonic wars, ravishing glimpses of unimaginable sublimity, grandeur and glamour. To skip these would be to miss the point of the novel, which aims to slow us down to an almost breathless, meditative state of rich receptivity. Emily is a heroine who has almost nothing to do apart from think and feel. In today’s fast-moving world, she feels like an antidote.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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20th April 2018 · 8:32 pm

Victorian Vamps

My chat with Joanne Harris (Oxford Lit Fest, last entry) prompted me to dig out an early of hers that I’d never read – ‘Sleep, Pale Sister’ (Transworld), a slice of Victorian gothic that preceded ‘Chocolat’, the novel that made her famous. ‘SPS’ takes for its background the world of the Pre-Raphaelites, and more generally the most sickly, unhealthy and weird elements of Victorian art.

Harris’s fictional artist is Henry Chester, whose passionate love of a young girl brings to mind both Ruskin (mentioned in the novel) and Lewis Carroll. He marries Effie, his prepubescent model, as soon as it’s decent, having used her to inspire many poignant images of abused femininity. Henry is an extraordinary creation, filled with lust and self-loathing, and projecting the blame and shame of his desires on to his innocent wife, whom he subdues with laudanum and oppressive care. More worldly but perhaps no less dangerous is the raffish painter Mose, who also becomes captivated by Effie and drawn against his will into the fraught Chester household.

Effie discovers she can escape from the pressures of Victorian womanhood by a form of astral travel, defying the bonds of flesh entirely. This uncanny ability attracts Fanny Miller, the seductive and calculating madam of a brothel frequented by both Henry and Mose, and a plot is laid to punish Henry for a terrible crime committed long ago. It’s a terrifically creepy story pitting female seductiveness and cunning against male brutality, with twists and turns that culminate in a shocking denouement in Highgate cemetery. A drugged and dreamy narrative of sexual obsession, it’s thoroughly gripping and so steeped in its era that you can imagine every single one of Chester’s fictional paintings.

 

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26th March 2018 · 11:04 am

Puritans, wit and magic at the Oxford Literary Festival

I made four visits this week to the Oxford Lit Fest, chairing four remarkable authors. This meant a lot of rushing up and down from Paddington, memorising the route: Slough (where I always think ‘Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough / It isn’t fit for humans now’ – gosh, the power of a great couplet!), Reading, Didcot Parkway, Oxford… and back again.

My first event on Saturday 17 was with Frances Hardinge, about her new YA novel ‘A Skinful of Shadows’ (Macmillan £12.99), set during the Civil War. Accordingly our discussion ranged across Puritans, Oxford when it was King Charles’s HQ, witches, spies, trepanning and other 17th century medical procedures. Children ask such great questions. I enjoyed the the plaintive ‘Do you like animals?’ and whether the homicidal goose in Frances’s debut ‘Fly Away Home’ was ‘based on a real goose’? Quite wonderfully, the answer is yes!

The Spring Equinox was an appropriate time to be talking to Joanne Harris about her eerie  fairytale ‘A Pocketful of Crows’ (Gollancz, £12.99), which sees a nameless nature spirit, the carefree brown girl, fall in love with the young lord in the castle, who names and tames her. He’s a fickle blond who’s about to pay dearly for his dalliance. Joanne talked fascinatingly about the roots of the story: an old almanac she picked up in a second-hand bookshop, and a series of ancient ballads which may well provide the inspiration for more works to come. Perrault and the Brothers Grimm also made an appearance in our chat.

On Wednesday I was intrigued to meet super-bestseller Sophie Kinsella, who arrived at the green room with husband and son (now studying at Oxford) in tow. She confessed to be awed at actually giving a talk in the Sheldonian, being an alumna herself (she read PPE at New College). As anyone who’s read her novels would imagine, it was a laugh-filled evening, with Sophie reading brilliantly from her latest novel ‘Surprise Me’ (Bantam, £18.99). As I pointed out, underneath the jokes her heroines frequently have moments of real anguish and despair – in the latest, protagonist Sylvie struggles to come to terms with the death of her father. We talked about Sophie’s time at Oxford and work as a financial journalist that led directly to the ‘Shopaholic’ series. She was fabulous, witty company.

Finally, what can you say about the extraordinary Ben Okri? Other than he always brings a surprise or two. In the corridor as we waited for the audience to be seated, he asked whether I’d help him read a few passages from ‘The Magic Lamp: Dreams of our age’ (Apollo, £16.99), his new book, a collaboration with artist Rosemary Clunie. We ended up reading alternate paragraphs of several of the riddling tales in the book, which certainly kept me on my toes. For these paintings Clunie seems to have used chance and the subconscious in her mark-making, which suited Okri’s somewhat mystical approach to storytelling perfectly. He led the audience into a discussion of Malevich’s painting the Black Square – he recommends looking at it for 15 and a half (or was it 16 and a half?) minutes for it to reveal its wonders. You don’t really interview Okri, you just go with him wherever he wants to go – he’s a true magician.

 

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1st May 2017 · 8:42 pm

Being Kind in Bhutan

I have a particular fondness for yoga transformation stories so a quick look at Emma Slade’s Set Free: A life-changing journey from banking to Buddhism in Bhutan (Summersdale £9.99) immediately appealed. Slade worked in banking as an analyst, living in Hong Kong, flying around the Far East attending high-powered meetings and offering her expertise. (I didn’t understand this bit.) Then one evening in Jakarta everything changed, when she was held hostage at gunpoint in her hotel room. Once freed by the hotel security, as well as suffering from PTSD, she began to feel overwhelmed with pity about the man who’d menaced her.

Something had to give, and it was the elite lifestyle. I imagined either a wealthy background or a large amount of savings provided a (meditation) cushion, because she discovered yoga via a number of idyllic-sounding international trips. Long and lean, she fitted enviably into the poses, yet after a while the yoga lifestyle didn’t quite do it for her either. She split up with her boyfriend and immediately discovered she was pregnant, went back to banking and finally found what she was looking for in Bhutan, a land she had longed to visit. She began to teach yoga there, then to study Buddhism seriously with a lama she providentially encountered. Now she splits her time between being a nun in Bhutan with being a mum in Kent, albeit one with a shaven head and monastic clothing.

It’s an amazing story and what’s most remarkable about it is the personality of Slade herself. She is an exceptional individual who never seems to think of herself as such. Clearly one of the awkward squad, she writes movingly and unselfconsciously about her personal struggles. She just doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere she goes (while obviously being very high-functioning). That is until she sits down in a Bhutanese shrine room and sinks into deep inner peace. Not that the training sounds anything but gruelling.

Appealingly, she says that Buddhism is ‘Kindhism, really’ and reveals that she just wanted to learn to be a kinder person. Touched by the simplicity of life in rural Bhutan, but appalled by some of its privations, she set up a charity to help special needs children (details at www.openingyourhearttobhutan.com). Funds from the sale of the book go to help them. Beyond that, it’s simply a great read.

 

 

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15th February 2017 · 8:05 pm

My Literary Valentine

In the past for my annual evening of Valentine-inspired readings, I’ve featured Anti-Valentines (enjoyably bilious) and Legendary Lovers (Abelard and Heloise, Ovid, Elizabeth and Leicester). But if I was pushed to explain the theme this year, perhaps I’d have to call it ‘It’s complicated…’ All the speakers showcased work expressing the pains, paradoxes, problems and precarious joys of emotional life.

I began by reading a story, ‘Survivors of Ben’ about a disparate group of women who get together to plot revenge on a perfidious ex. A couple of people said afterwards, ‘That would be a great premise for a film.’ I said before beginning that I hoped nobody would identify too much, either with the shamelessly manipulative ex or the various girlfriends, stuck fast in rage and hurt. But it seemed to strike a chord with some listeners…

Next I invited poet Hannah Stone to read from her first collection lodestone and to preview her follow-up, Missing Miles, out later this year. Her poems match emotional weight with intellectual poise and a certain critical distance; they are finely crafted and nuanced, yet always accessible. She also talked a little about the lively-sounding Leeds poetry scene, and her academic work in the field of eastern Christian spirituality, which informs some of her poetry.

The wonderful Paul Burston was next, reading from his latest novel The Black Path, a crime novel with a female protagonist and thus something of a departure from previous novels such as Shameless and The Gay Divorcee. He spoke about his research about life in the military (part of the novel is set in Camp Bastion), which ended up profoundly shaping the plot. We had a bit of a laugh at the irony of him being nominated for Welsh Book of the Month, given the irreverent treatment of his hometown Bridgend. And the reading, from a section where a married, straight soldier finds a younger squaddie catching his eye… well, let’s just say it’s complicated.

After the break we were lucky to have a brace of Feinsteins; first Adam Feinstein, talking about his recently updated and reissued biography of that most romantic of poets, Pablo Neruda. We like to think we’ve had a few colourful characters in the club over the years, as related in Writers, Lovers, Soldiers, Spies, our recently published ‘History of the Authors Club of London, 1891-2016’. But we have nothing on Neruda, friend of Picasso and Lorca, diplomat, poet, ardent but not always successful lover, man of action and even fugitive, once escaping over the Andes on horseback. Wow! Adam gave a terrific introduction to the man and his work, and read, thrillingly, a poem in the original Spanish.

And on to our headliner, the legendary poet, translator, biographer and novelist Elaine Feinstein, reading from her new book The Clinic, Memory: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet). Had she ever written a true Valentine’s poem, she mused? Her elegant pieces ranged over love, marriage, resignation, wry acceptance and heartbreaking loss, with a lovely poem looking back at her time as an undergraduate in Cambridge with its fondly remembered (raise of the eyebrow) extra-curricular activities. It’s a rarity for this mother and son to read at the same event, so it was a delight to have them both on the bill, reminding us – she a Russian specialist, he a noted Hispanist – how much our literature feeds off other cultures and how diminished we all are when international doors begin to close one by one.

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19th September 2016 · 1:39 pm

Shorelines – Estuary Festival 2016

I spent the weekend at an arts festival in an extraordinary venue – the imposing Tilbury Cruise Terminal on the north bank of the Thames, where the Windrush docked in 1948. Shorelines, the two-day offshoot of Estuary 2016, which runs to 2 October, also had one of the most fun approaches to any festival, with many choosing to arrive via the jaunty little ferry across the Thames from Dartford.

I was going to Rachel Lichtenstein’s book launch on the Saturday afternoon but arrived early to catch some other events and installations. The whole thing was so enjoyable that I returned on the Sunday (the ferry was laid on specially). The first thing most visitors came across (apart from the constantly clanging crossing bell, an art installation much enjoyed by kids) was John Akomfrah’s magisterial 2010 film Mnemosyne, playing in the vast, haunted space of the Old Railway Station. An anonymous figure trudges across a snowy landscape, intercut with scenes of the early experiences of the Windrush generation in Britain, and quotes from Milton, Pound and other poets. It’s hard to convey how powerful – and beautiful – this immensely dignified piece is.

In the Departures Hall, with its brick pillars and vaulted ceilings like an Renaissance exercise in perspective, Rachel chaired a talk about the bizarre-looking sea forts which dot the estuary. On the panel were Dartford artist Stephen Turner, who lived alone on one of the rusting structures for six weeks, Chloe Dewe Mathews, who makes art films about them, and the hugely entertaining Prince Michael of Sealand, with his ruffianly tales of being armed to the teeth, repelling boarders to his family’s pirate radio station. He needs to design himself an official uniform though, with gold braid and a bicorne hat.

Professor Patrick Wright gave a virtuoso talk on the East German writer Uwe Johnson who settled on the Isle of Sheppey and became obsessed with the wreck of the Richard Montgomery, a wartime ship stuffed with bombs which would obliterate Sheerness if it ever went up. The tale of the Estuary is filled with mystics, eccentrics and artists. Then Rachel read from her new book Estuary, many of whose interviewees formed part of the festival programme, and the evening ended with rousing sea shanties to the accompaniment of a glass of Prosecco.

I would have loved hear Syd Moore’s talk on ‘Seawitches and Sirens’, about Estuary myths, but didn’t arrive in time on the Sunday morning. But I did catch Travis Elborough’s talk about the history of the Garden City – Gravesend was apparently once going to be developed into an elegant resort town and he had the slides to prove it. I bumped into Rachel who told me Deborah Levy had cancelled (she had been going to give a talk on To The Lighthouse). Normally this would be a disappointment but my immediate response was, ‘Great, I can go on a boat trip then.’ (Free Thames Clipper tours were a terrific feature of the festival.)

Poet Philip Terry read from his unnervingly stripped down Estuary ‘Quennets’, a conceptual ‘join-the-dots’ form eschewing simile and metaphor, moving on to evoke the Berlin Wall in more of these curious list poems. His upbeat delivery helped a lot. I popped into Anne Lydiat’s barge Rock moored on the lower landing stage to find myself right in the friendly artist’s living room.

An absolute stand-out was the talk by Horatio Clare and Rose George on ‘Inside the Invisible World of Shipping’. Maersk, the company which hosted both of them (separately) on epic journeys, is apparently as big as Microsoft but nowhere near as well known. They read enthrallingly from their books, George about sailing through the piracy zone near Somalia, Clare more poetically about the enigmatic character of the sea. Intriguingly they had very different experiences due to gender; while Clare felt his boat had a professional cameraderie where sexuality was put on hold for the duration, George evidently felt more tension and ambiguity aboard.

Despite the cramped quarters, the loneliness and the boredom, it was clear neither would have missed the experience for the world. ‘If you have a couple of grand to spare and a couple of weeks, go to Panama on a container ship,’ enthused Clare – with George pointing out that the famous canal is just ‘a ditch in the desert’.

Novelists Roma Tearne and Alison MacLeod read brilliantly from their novels, Tearne’s The Last Pier being set in a fictional seaside town, and MacLeod’s Unexploded in wartime Brighton. Tearne’s novel was prompted by the freakish coincidence of finding old photographs of the same family in two junk shops in different towns, and wondering what had happened to them in between. An informative Thames Clipper ride around the Port of Tilbury meant I had to miss Lavinia Greenlaw’s talk, but that’s just as it should be – a good festival has far too many gems for one person to take in. I haven’t even mentioned the various films, artworks, walks, boats and kids’ activities.

A final ferry trip took me back to Dartford where I just had time to pop into the bright scarlet Lightship LV21 temporarily moored there. It’s a fascinating vessel to explore, with a film about Pocahontas (who had links with Dartford) showing in the very bowels.

I only had one criticism of the festival overall – it needs more CAKE. Lots more cake. Just what you want after a heavy afternoon of artistic saturation. At least there was a beer stall…

 

 

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3rd August 2016 · 11:06 am

Dirty, Pretty Girls

Emma Cline’s debut The Girls has created a stir this year, having gained a huge advance, a film option and high-level praise. The reviews, while appreciative, were somewhat muted and having read the book (no, devoured it) I can understand why.

‘She’s a better writer than Donna Tartt,’ a publishing friend said, adding that the story itself only merited a ‘so what’. I feel a tinge of regret that such a high-level literary style is married to such grungy subject matter, even though that very disjoint is no doubt the intended effect.

Cline has transposed the story of the Manson family to a fictional cultish commune, moving the location to the hills outside San Francisco. The Manson figure is the enigmatic (rather too enigmatic – he is underdrawn) Russell, and standing in for Dennis Wilson, the Beach Boy who briefly befriended Manson before backing away, is the unappealing Mitch Lewis, bloated and befuddled.

As the title indicates, Cline’s main focus is ‘the girls’, those endlessly puzzling, grinning, hand-holding murderesses whose breezy court demeanour appalled the world. In the months before going to boarding school, the 14-year-old protagonist, Evie, becomes embroiled in the cult, initially enthralled by Suzanne, one of Russell’s acolytes. Evie’s background is firmly and finely drawn: the wealthy divorced parents with too much going on in their own lives but who genuinely if uselessly seek to provide the unhappy girl with some structure and life skills. It’s a nice touch in a novel filled with unappetising men that her mother’s new boyfriend is a good guy.

The story is told from the perspective of Evie in middle age, now a drifting, unfulfilled person, still wistful about the big dreams that led her to follow the mad hippie guru in the first place. Prurient new acquaintances are slightly disappointed that she is relatively taintless of the group’s despicable crimes, even as they look down on her as a moral pygmy. Not much has changed in the years since the murders – men are still awful. The undercurrent of the book is Evie’s rage at the predicament of teenage girls in a masculine world, even as she acknowledges that being drawn/coerced into sex acts with Russell was not entirely unpleasant.

The trouble with even such slight attempts at mitigation, though, is a basic moral truth. Many, perhaps most teenage girls will suffer like Evie: the slights, the frights, the gropes, the creepy guys, the sad recognition that the world was never made with them in mind. But they don’t go on to commit or condone mass murder.

Also, although standards of hygiene were probably a little different in the Sixties to now, the description of the state of Russell’s ranch is so queasy-making that it gives the odd impression that a greater sensitivity to filth might just have inoculated Evie against the evil she embraces so gleefully.

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5th May 2016 · 6:40 pm

Dread in Venice

I love occult-themed novels and novels set in Venice, so it’s amazing I’ve had Amanda Prantera’s The Cabalist (Bloomsbury) kicking about for so long. Prantera is due a renaissance – it happened to the wonderful Deborah Levy so why not her?

Prantera’s writing has a flavour all its own: intellectual, playful and distinctively creepy with its investigations into the darker sides of the psyche. In The Cabalist, Joseph Kestler, the nature of whose life-obsession is only gradually revealed, has returned to Venice to die. Terminally ill, he is seeking a fit custodian for his magical researches, but also fears a final showdown with his magical nemesis, the horrific Catcher. Can Kestler deposit his manuscript in some archive before the Catcher takes advantage of his weakened state to steal and destroy it?

The Catcher’s room overlooks Kestler’s, so the bedevilled occultist can see how he tempts Venice’s wild cat population with bait on hooks let down from his window.  But what happens to the poor animals in the darkened room Kestler can’t quite see into? Since our glimpses of the Catcher reveal him to be a child, is Joseph mad and deluded, or has a diminutive demon really taken up residence in the palazzo across the canal?

Like the Catcher with his prey, Prantera taunts us for some time with various interpretations of the events, mostly seen through Kestler’s subjectivity. Can he really control animals via whispered cabalistic formulae? Is he mad, or a true magus? Does the Catcher even exist? Prantera wraps up her elegant entertainment with a brilliant flourish which satisfies even as it hints at the unknowable gap between what we think we know and what we only imagine. The arch, Fay Weldon-ish addresses to the reader, drawing attention to narrative tricks, are the only aspects which date the book slightly (it was published in 1985).

The only other novel of Prantera’s I’ve read is Capri File, another dark tale of an outsider struggling to penetrate Italy’s mysteries. An Englishwoman married to an Italian aristocrat strikes up an epistolary friendship with a rare book dealer in London, while confessing to him her suspicions about a local boy whom she thinks has been murdered. And her estranged husband might have something to do with it…

Also on the shelf is the irresistibly titled Conversations With Lord Byron On Perversion, 163 Years After His Lordship’s Death. Missing manuscripts, old libraries, rare books and forbidden knowledge seem to be her themes. She’s well worth a look for connoisseurs of such tales.

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25th April 2016 · 10:12 am

Authors Club Best First Novel Award 2016: The Shortlist

At a lunch last week, members of the Authors Club met to debate the shortlist of this year’s award – always a lively occasion. This year’s discussion was brisk and amicable. Some titles could be discarded quickly, having just squeaked on to the longlist in the first place. Others died harder. Here’s the list, with some commentary to follow.

THE SHORTLIST

Jakob’s Colours by Lindsay Hawdon (Hodder)

The Last Pilot by Benjamin Johncock (Myriad Editions)

The Good Son by Paul McVeigh (Salt)

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley (Bloomsbury Circus)

Belonging by Umi Sinha (Myriad Editions)

Rawblood by Catriona Ward (Weidenfeld)

 

And here’s the longlist:

 

Jakob’s Colours by Lindsay Hawdon (Hodder)

The Loney by Andrew Hurley (John Murray)

The Last Pilot by Benjamin Johncock (Myriad Editions)

The Speaker’s Wife by Quentin Letts (Constable)

The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan (Harvill Secker)

The Good Son by Paul McVeigh (Salt)

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley (Bloomsbury Circus)

The House at the Edge of the World by Julia Rochester (Viking)

The Last Days of Disco by David F Ross (Orenda)

Belonging by Umi Sinha (Myriad Editions)

Mainlander by Will Smith (4th Estate)

Rawblood by Catriona Ward (Weidenfeld)

 

Throughout the year-long judging process, Belonging was the title that most appealed to our members, although on the day there was a dissenting voice (there’s always one!). In one of those weird conjunctions which often occur in prize judging, the hugely impressive The Loney ended up duelling with Rawblood (I liked both). Perhaps the biggest shock was the sudden crash of The Speaker’s Wife, up to then one of the most debated and enjoyed titles. A passionate intervention inspired a sudden reallocation of loyalties. The Good Son and Watchmaker started strong and remained so, garnering a range of positive reports. Jakob’s Colours was the stealth title that crept up and stubbornly refused to be dismissed.

Of the overall submissions, I’d like to highlight two: the exquisite Weathering by Lucy Wood (Bloomsbury), and The Flight of Sarah Battle by Alix Nathan (Parthian). The latter, set in 1790s London and Philadelphia, is that rarity, a historical novel which deals exclusively with those at the lower end of the social order – in this case London radicals ardently seeking political reform, with a particular focus on women throwing off the shackles of conventional marriage, a la Mary Wollstonecraft.

As always it’s a pleasure to read through the submissions and see how many impressive debuts are published each year, although that doesn’t make judging any easier. But our task is complete – it’s over to Anthony Quinn, this year’s guest adjudicator and himself a former BFNA winner, to make the final decision, announced on 7 June.

 

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