I can be found elsewhere

today, on Katherine Langrish’s wonderful blog, Seven Miles of Steel Thistles, doing pretty much my favourite thing – rambling about fairy tales.

Anyone with the smallest interest in folk tales, myths, fantasy and children’s literature, or just beautiful, thoughtful writing, should check out this blog (and of course Katherine’s books too, the well-travelled Troll Fell and its sequels).

Not only does Katherine herself write so well, she has also invited a humblingly stellar list of guests to contribute to her Fairytale Reflections series. It’s a real honour for me to be included there. Thank you, Katherine!

More travel rambling coming soon…

A Time of Gifts

Patrick Leigh Fermor’s travels were so different from mine. He was always staying with incredibly erudite eccentric aristocrats in decaying castles full of signed copies of Shelley and Horace in the original.

But his description of spending a full-moon night out on the banks of a river somewhere in – Hungary, possibly? I haven’t got A Time of Gifts to hand to check – struck such a chord with me when I read it. That complete joy in travel, absolutely revelling in the newness and variety and just pure interestingness of everything, these unlooked-for experiences as gifts; moonlight and beer halls and meetings on riverside quays and cathedrals and streets of brothels and frog-filled water meadows…

It was exactly what I was thinking and how I was feeling a few days ago, as I watched a monk making torma – yak butter offering cakes – in a dim dusty monastery hall half-way up a mountain, surrounded by ruined houses and tumbling waterfalls; as a nomad family invited me into their tent to shelter from the rain and fed me butter tea with tsampa while a yak with a bell round its neck tried to come inside to join us, and then the rain stopped and shafts of sunlight were lighting the mountains a  brilliant copper green.

I wish I could write about such things with half the joy in language as well as experience that Patrick Leigh Fermor had. He has just died, but it sounds like his life was as old-fashioned and romantic as his books.

It was my wonderful Aunt Ruth who introduced me to his writing – and that’s yet another gift; one of many she’s given me.

Art and happening

There’s a lovely article here about libraries and librarians. I particularly like this quote:

“…people expect art to happen to them. Music and film do that, a CD will do that, but you have to make a book happen to you. It’s between you and it. People can be changed by books, and that’s scary. When I was working in the school library, I’d sometimes put a book in a kid’s hands and I’d feel excited for them, because I knew that it might be the book that changed their life. And once in a while, you’d see that happen, you’d see a kind of light come on behind their eyes.”

I would say that a film can change a person too, but I know exactly what is meant here. Sometimes I’m too lazy to read even a rubbish book, because I want my entertainment to happen to me; I don’t want to invest anything in it. That’s why even a life-changing film doesn’t have the effect a book can have. Its impact might be more immediate, but it doesn’t sink as deep.

In the hostel where I’m staying now in China, the book cabinet is shut with a fat padlock. You can watch a DVD here; the discs are just lying around on a table for people to choose from. Internet access, if you haven’t got your own laptop (but most people have), costs just a few pennies. To borrow a book, however, you have to deposit your passport with reception.

My passport, that document that lets me travel freely round most of the world, in exchange for a bundle of printed paper. Rarely have I been so very careful not to lose the book I’m reading (Patrick Hennessey’s The Junior Officers’ Reading Club, since you ask. Oddly appropriate. I wonder what happened to all the books they read out in Afghanistan – still there, locked up in some book cabinet?)

The girl opposite me in the hostel lounge is watching a Korean soap on her laptop and simultaneously chatting on QQ, the Chinese equivalent of facebook. The boy a couple of tables over is telling his friends back home via skype about eating dog and rabbit brains. Behind me a girl is writing her journal while listening to her i-pod. In the corner someone is watching the DVD of Twilight (yes really) on the TV. And I am tapping away at this.

We’re all together but we’re miles apart, separated by screens and headphones, in our own different worlds of entertainment. To some of us, art is happening. Outside the hostel, China is happening and we are paying no attention.

Divine inspiration

While I’m on the subject of books and respect, maybe it’s time I wrote about the Literature God.

I’ve spent two months or so writing under his shadow, making the traditional sacrifice of blood sweat and tears (actually the blood is usually from a cock’s comb, and stuck with chicken feathers) and the result, I think – I hope – is good. Part two of a novel finished; part three begun and clearly outlined in my head.

In China since the earliest times, progress and success and the keys to the kingdom have depended on a firm grasp of literature. In the palaces of the rulers, flowery poetry and calligraphy written by the Emperor himself – not his weapons, his armed might – took pride of place hanging over the thrones and in pavilions as proof of fitness to rule.

And in distant valleys in Yunnan, a province to which officials who displeased the emperor were exiled, temples were built by village sons who successfully passed the imperial exams and became civil servants. The upper rooms of those temples contain shrines to the God of Literature, pen in hand, foot on a dragon’s head, challenging gaze looking forward to ambitious futures, to flights of fancy.

There’s something  surreal about this. China’s relationship with creativity and inspiration is far from straightforward. For further reading, I recommend ‘Five Letters from a Eastern Empire’ in Alasdair Gray’s Unlikely Stories, Mostly.

This is a country that has always had a double-edged respect for Literature, because it has always equated it with Power.

Lost [in] libraries

The peak tram was vertiginous fun. The temples beloved of police and Triads, full of huge hanging spirals of incense and piles of offerings, were atmospheric as Cantonese gangster movies. Riding the rolling Star ferries over the harbour put historic grubby glamour into a trip across town. But what I liked best about Hong Kong was the central library.

Nine wonderful modern floors of space and hush and books books books. Escalators gliding silently up and down; glass lifts. A great coffee shop. Lots and lots of people, from teenagers in old-fashioned school uniform doing their homework to pensioners reading newspapers to toddlers leafing through picture books with their nannies, from Filipino maids writing e-mails home to hopeful foreigners printing out their CVs to literature-starved travellers devouring novels as if there was no tomorrow…

Of course I’ve been starved of English books after eight months travelling. And then there’s the fact that on the shelves I found not one but two copies of a really quite obscure book I’ve been wanting to read for ages as research for the novel I’m working on. But it was clearly not just me who found it a comfortable, useful, inspiring, peaceful, educational haven from the madness of Hong Kong. I wanted to curl up under a less-visited shelf and sleep there.

It’s a legacy of the British in Hong Kong that I found so many English books alongside the shelves and shelves of Chinese ones. Meanwhile, back at home, the British are busy closing down half their libraries.

When I was living in Brent, London, I was lucky enough to have two libraries to choose from. One was small and cosy and friendly, full of mums and toddlers of numberless nationalities, and old people reading crime novels in big print. The other was big and I have to admit, I didn’t like as much; the staff didn’t seem to know much or really care about the books; and then they introduced an electronic loans system which didn’t work properly and which made it far too easy to just lose your loans and never return them. But that library was incredibly busy. EFL classes, workshops on CV-writing and job applications, extra coaching for school kids, launches for this that and the other. Always full of children of all ages who didn’t want to or couldn’t go home – and at least some of them reading books. Always a babble of a hundred different languages and accents (this library was never silent). From the point of view of pure, quiet, old-fashioned respect for books, I didn’t like it all that much, but I went there pretty much every week because as a microcosm of living and working and playing (and sometimes reading) Brent society, it was fantastic.

I’m a long way from Brent now but I am depressed and very angry at the decision of Brent council to close six of its libraries, with apparently only the most spurious logic to back up that decision and an arrogant disregard for what local people want.

What will happen to the spaces that were donated to the people of Brent to use as a community for free? What will happen to all the books?  Maybe they’ll be shipped out to China, where both councils and people still seem to appreciate them (and the power they have…)

Just over the border from Hong Kong in Shenzhen is a vast new library, even bigger and busier than the Hong Kong one. Shenzhen has one of the youngest, most varied, and most upwardly-mobile populations of all Chinese cities. People come here from all over the country to get rich – and to get self-educated.

In the English language section of Shenzhen library I found worthy Communist Chinese literature translated into fairly unreadable English, whole sets of Classics, and a selection of very intriguing titles such as The Transvestite Achilles, The Empire of Stereotype, Dracula and the Eastern Question, Beyond Arthurian Romance…

Charmed Life

I don’t know if she had one tucked away somewhere. The ones she wrote about usually caused their owners a good deal of bother, but they played a big part in my childhood imagination.

Diana Wynne Jones has sadly just died, and Charmed Life is still my favourite of her books. I think it’s near perfect, it’s so well-plotted and so funny and a little upsetting, while Chrestomanci, who, if I remember rightly, possesses the ability to sweep out a room like a very long procession of one person, is an absolutely unforgettable character.

But I loved her uncertain heroes too; Cat in Charmed Life, Moril in Cart and Cwidder, Gair in Power of Three, who discover what every child dreams of – that they possess talents no one else in the world possesses; but also that such talents can bring sadness and (sometimes hilarious) disruption and responsibility, as well as happiness. She was a wise, as well as an incredibly inventive writer.

PS I’ve just found a marvellous essay Diana Wynne Jones wrote about her own sometimes charmed life here.

I’ve been translated

for a few months now, into the new realities of foreign climes…

But here I mean professionally. One of my books, Dream Land, has been translated into French and is available from the publisher Naïve Livres, with a great new cover, very different from the English version.

I am so excited to be in a foreign language! And delighted that the remarkable history and culture of the Crimean Tatars will hopefully reach a wider audience.

Bookstock

Huge thanks to the organisers of Bookstock, for inviting me to take part in an evening of readings and bookish discussion in London on Saturday. There was a wonderfully wide range of writers, a great compere, a fabulously engaged audience and some terrible literary jokes…

Here’s a snippet of me reading from a new novel:

(The title, in case you were wondering, is a literal translation of the Russian name for ladybird. But I’ve been told the book will never be published under this name, since no one buys novels with ‘god’ in the title, and even if someone did want to they’d hardly be able to since it’ll automatically be shelved in bookshops under ‘religion’…)

More video from the night here.

Who has a right to comment?

There’s a really interesting debate here about the merits of analysing young adult books for the beauty (or otherwise) of their prose.

It reminds me of my friend, who was absolutely outraged when I told her that an adult book group had recently read Dream Land and then invited me to discuss it with them. if her book group had chosen a YA book, she said, she would have walked out in protest.

Yes, I have supportive friends.

Her point (I think) was not so much that Dream Land, or any other YA book, is unworthy of serious discussion, but that discussion by adults is a kind of contradiction in terms, showing the book is not doing the job it was written – or marketed – for. As a book for teens, the people who should be reading and discussing it are teenagers themselves.

I don’t myself see why engagement from children and teens has to exclude engagement from adults, although I do think that many well-read adults will read and analyse a book in a different (not necessarily more sophisticated or valid) way than younger readers.

But my friend does have a point about these debates over YA literature, which all too often resemble all the other debates about young people today – i.e. completely lacking in input from the people in question. When an articulate teen does join the fray the response is one of David Attenborough-like hushed awe to a sighting of a rare, theoretically cherished but rather misunderstood elusive beast…

Shhh! It might run away!

Gone but not (entirely) forgotten

A question from the Willesden Green Library reading group, who have just read Dream Land:

is it true, as they’ve heard other writers say, that once a book is finished and published the author forgets it, having long since moved on to the next thing?

I too have heard this, and never used to believe it. How is it possible to forget something you’ve spent so much time and effort over? I thought it would be almost the equivalent of forgetting your own child.

I realise now that’s not the right analogy. Maybe something closer would be the relationship to a former love.

For a time you were utterly obsessed with your love. You knew everything about this person, your life was utterly bound up in them. But then you parted and it ended. Children grow and change in themselves and their relationship with you. Former lovers never do; they are locked away in the time it was and the person they were when it ended. Just as books, once they’re on the page, are fixed in the time you wrote them and the ending you chose for them. Even if they are now off having meaningful relationships with other people…

I’m still on good terms with these former loves of mine. I look back on them with affection, surprise occasionally (that good…?), not too much embarrassment as yet, though sometimes a feeling that it could probably have been better. I’m happy to have the chance to get reacquainted. And it’s fascinating to hear other people talking about them, seeing things I didn’t realise at the time, or never guessed were there at all.

Thanks to the members of the Willesden Green Library reading group for so many insightful comments and questions on Sunday. Also many thanks to Hunting Raven Bookshop in Frome, for organising a book reading and signing on Saturday, and to everyone who came. It’s a wonderful privilege to have a chance to talk to readers about my books.

Right, now I can get back to thinking about the next thing, the new love in my life.