Political metaphor

I love similes and metaphors. I’ve just been editing a draft of my new book, and noticing that I use them in practically every other sentence. ‘He looked like a blinded survivor’, I wrote, of a character who has just received an appalling shock. Clearly I don’t see the world as it is, but as it almost is, as it might be; through a sort of double vision in which everything that happens is a comparison to something else.

Alongside the editing, I’ve been reading about recent events in China. It’s a relief, now that I’m out of the country, to be able to open web-pages without wondering if they will be blocked, to do internet searches unhindered by crude word filters.

The friends I made back in China are not so lucky. If any of them are searching sites like weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter) this weekend, they will find the warning coming up even on the apparently innocuous word ‘blind’, that ‘According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, these search results cannot be shown’.

‘Blind’ is not a metaphor. It’s a possible reference to the dissident who escaped house arrest in China two days ago, and who happens to have lost his sight. As far as Chinese official media is concerned, Chen Guangcheng’s escape has not happened. It’s a non-story; a blind spot. His name, or those of his family and friends or the village from which he fled, have disappeared from the media, from on-line vocabulary, along with ‘blind’, ‘embassy’ (he’s assumed to have sought protection in the US embassy), ‘consulate’…

In their place something else has appeared on weibo: a cute story about a little mole who escapes with the help of his friends the mice from some not-very-nice wolves. Lest you miss the point: moles are, of course, famously blind.

Under political systems like China’s, similes and metaphors are not a matter of literary style. They are the only way of telling the truth. When you are not allowed to describe the world as it is, your mind has to find other devious and inventive ways of expression.

We had conversations in China about how repression can lead to great literature; Bulgakov, for example, writing in the Soviet Union his story of a dog’s heart transplanted into a human. The Chinese writers were depressed. Not in China, they said. Not yet. We lack the imagination, the courage…

I don’t think the story of the mole is great literature, but it is, obviously, an extended metaphor. The little tale ends with the mice spreading the news of the mole’s escape ‘but they couldn’t decide whether the escape was a victory, or whether it was just the beginning of more hardship.’

As far as I know, Chinese government censors have yet to block searches on weibo of the word ‘mole’. As I continue to edit my MS for excessive use of simile and metaphor, I am humbled by the use Chinese writers make of literary devices, and I worry for my friends, and for all their colleagues in China.

Another type of shoe

Somebody at the Royal Ballet loves me. How do they know I’m writing a novel about ballet? Because surely they must have had me in mind when they decided to broadcast a whole day of live rehearsals and conversations with the company backstage at the Royal Opera House.

Or else I’m just extremely lucky or (for once in my life) on trend.

Anyway it’s brilliant. There’s that saying, about there being three things so fascinating that you can watch them forever: fire burning, water running, somebody working. I feel like I’ve been watching all three here. The skill and perfectionism and determination of these people; their energy and grace.

When I was a little girl I went to the ballet matinees in Manchester: Coppelia, Giselle, La Sylphide. The audience was mostly other small girls in princess dresses, with their long-suffering mums.

I was in love with the romantic stories, the gauzy skirts. Everything was as utterly impractical as I thought fairytales were supposed to be. I hated hearing the thump of pointe shoes on the stage. It seemed entirely wrong that these floating ballerinas actually weighed something; it was like seeing the strings and pulleys behind stage scenery, or the green screen in movie special effects.

Later I decided traditional ballet was ridiculous, with its old-fashioned mime gestures and daft tights, tutus, tiaras. The strict ballet steps seemed like a strait-jacket, trammelling the natural exuberance and promise of movement. I’d given up princess dresses, and while I still adored fairytales I preferred their dark and violent side. I discovered contemporary dance and acrobatics, and probably didn’t see another classical ballet for fifteen years.

I can’t really remember why I decided to write a novel about ballet. But what fascinates me now is what I hated as a child: how it actually works. The weight of the dancers; the physical effort and skill; what can be achieved within the strict confines of classical ballet. In ballet, I now think, there can be no half-measures. The only ballet dancers really worth watching have got to be exceptional; perfect. It is that demanding an art.

I’ve been fortunate enough to talk to a couple of ex-Royal Ballet dancers, but today’s broadcast from the Royal Opera House gives such a great insight into all sides of ballet: not just the dancers but the choreographers, repetiteurs, musicians (wow! those pianists), notators (who have to understand the arcane language used to record choreography) wardrobe mistresses and all, working to pull together something as ephemeral as a dance performance.

They’re not going to change the world. You could say what they are doing isn’t important (like all art; like writing a novel), but I think most people would envy them the opportunity they have to give themselves to something so completely, heart and soul.

Oh, and the shoes. I found out that dancers get through two or more pairs of ballet shoes a day. Who makes all those shoes? Hopefully not forced labour in China.

 

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 forgotten part II

Of course, it’s not actually that simple to forget people and events in real life, or when books are based on real life. Characters have a habit of living on in the imagination.

Dream Land, which is a novel about the return of the Crimean Tatars to Crimea in the 1990s, tells largely true stories, many of them heard from friends. I still visit Crimea, and worry about what is happening there. The characters I invented for the book do have a future that goes beyond the last page. I think Safi, the heroine, is married now, and handing on her grandfather’s stories to her children, who are not all that interested in them. Her brother in the book is radicalised by the hardships and discrimination they suffered as teenagers; I’m afraid  he went on to fight against the Russians in Chechnya. I hope he came back. I expect he’s angrier than ever now, campaigning for the rights of his oppressed comrades in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza.

I watched a programme about Palestinian children in Gaza this week. There are some similarities between the situation there and that in Crimea with the returning Crimean Tatars. I was thinking about them as I watched these children talk about what it is like to have to live in a tent with your family, to watch your house being bulldozed right in front of you. To witness the death of your father or your brother, shot by soldiers. To be living every day with the pain of bits of shrapnel in your head.

The future for most of these Palestinian children is almost unimaginable, although they themselves tried to think about it. One wanted to avenge the deaths of his father and brother. Another longed to be free to travel the world. And a third said she wanted to die.

The programme ended, as documentaries and sometimes movies do, with a few paragraphs of information, those bald sentences flashed up on the screen summarising ‘what happened afterwards’. Finishing the story. Those paragraphs informed us that of the two children featured who had leukaemia and were unable to leave Gaza to get treatment, one subsequently reached a hospital in Israel. The other died.

And that’s that. End of the story. Except of course it isn’t, because there are devastated parents and helpless medical workers and border guards just doing their job and furious brothers and opportunist politicians and– and– and–

Stories are the way everyone makes sense of the world. I don’t think it would be possible to live otherwise. The children of Gaza are making their lives into stories – playing games of being stopped by soldiers, of torturing and being tortured, of shooting Israelis. The documentary told a story too, that us lucky viewers could sigh at or feel impotent rage over (and even vent it afterwards on a lovely channel 4 forum for online ranting).

I wish those children were in a book I’d written, so I could invent mostly happy futures for them and then mostly forget about them. But they’re not, and neither are the Crimean Tatar children. In real life, the people I wrote about in Dream Land have built busy, complicated, difficult, unexpected, fulfilling existences for themselves in Crimea. And in real life in Gaza?

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.

Everything has to be called something

I need to name a book, and I’m completely stuck.

I’m stuck partly because it already has a name. I’m not good at titles, and this is the first book I’ve written where I’ve known right from the beginning what I want to call it – It’s a Sweet Word, Kamchatka. It’s a quote from the song ‘Kamchatka’ by Viktor Tsoy and the Russian rock group Kino. The line for me sums up the whole romantic, fantastical dream of a place that drives the characters in the book to their wild journeys. Kamchatka is a sweet word; beautiful and mysterious. Try saying it. How solid it is, how satisfying, how suggestive.

It’s a sweet word that doesn’t, of itself, mean anything. The naturalist Georg Steller, who took part in an expedition to the Russian far East in the 1740s, wrote that Russian explorers called this whole peninsular on the Pacific Kamchatka, after one of the rivers there which the indigenous Itelmens had named after someone who lived on it. It’s hardly an etymology, more an account of laziness (although perhaps slightly better than the names given to the animals Steller saw and recorded on the expedition: Steller’s eider, Steller’s sea eagle…) No one knows what the indigenous people called the land now known as Kamchatka.

Meanwhile, the Kino song isn’t even about the peninsular; it’s about a St Petersburg boiler house where Viktor Tsoy worked in the 1980s, called, for no reason that I know of, Kamchatka. Everything has to be called something.

For me, as for my book characters, Kamchatka is a word that’s weighted with promise. But if you’ve never heard it before, never had anyone sing you the song, never pored over maps of coastlines half-way across the world, then maybe it’s just obscure. That’s why my publisher feels my book needs a new title.

I’ve been listing words and phrases in an attempt to sum up what the book is about and find a new name:

Bears. Journeys. Running away and coming back. Fish. Dreams. Shamans. Exploitation. Poaching. Memories. Friendship and family. Misunderstanding. Discovery.

Kamchatka.

The power of words over the imagination.

For the book’s main character, Masha, there are two words which define her story. There’s a word which other people call her mother; a name that she knows is bad even though she doesn’t really understand what it means. And there’s the name Kamchatka. The first word sends her away from home, the second one takes her on a huge journey. That’s the power those names have over her imagination.

So you see, it’s important to name things correctly. Maybe somewhere in that thought is the title I’m looking for…

here is Viktor Tsoy and Kino singing ‘Kamchatka’:

Thank goodness books have a life of their own

I’ve been mostly disheartened by the elections to the Oxford Poetry Chair and finding out that Derek Walcott has harassed female students. And I’m even more disheartened by the impression that among the (mostly, but not exclusively, male) literary Greats, sexual harassment is still considered to be just a peccadillo, entirely forgivable if not almost inevitable in a writer of genius. I’m aware that many female students would regard it in pretty much the same way – however much we try to legislate it, what counts as harassment will always be to some extent personal to the one on the receiving end as much as to the one doing it – but the bottom line, as I see it, is that a teacher who equates award of grades with personal relationships is abusing his or her position of trust, and literary genius does not make that behaviour excusable.

I’ve been reminded of all this by a TV programme yesterday – ‘Storyville: The Genius and the Boys’. It was about the scientist Carleton Gajdusek, who spent years in Papua New Guinea researching a degenerative brain disease among the native people; as a result he discovered the cause of mad cow disease, for which he won the Nobel. He also adopted about 50 boys from Papua, brought them to America, and, it turned out, abused some of them.

It was a fascinating, sad and non-judgemental programme which deserves more comment than I’m giving it here, but I saw some parallels with Walcott (not that I am saying harassment and child abuse are at all the same thing, although neither do I consider harassment an innocent peccadillo). Here, instead of writers, were so many eminent scientists falling over themselves to defend Gajdusek, talking about how true brilliance is always unconventional or simply refusing to engage with the human consequences of his behaviour, as though great scientific achievements and therefore their makers exist in a separate world above and beyond the rest of us mortals.

The question both cases raise is, how far can we separate great achievements in art or science from the person making them? I don’t know much about science, but it’s something I’ve thought about in literature – I think as a feminist it’s impossible not to, when so many great books and writers from over the centuries ignore, disparage, disdain, infantilise or demonise women (and yes, I know we have to take them in historical context). An appreciation of literature pretty much requires that you make a distinction between a work and its maker, otherwise a person of any principle would find it hard to enjoy anything much. One example: Le Morte d’Arthur, which I love and admire. If the historical records are true, its author Thomas Malory was a rapist and a thief. The contrast between what he wrote, all about chivalry and honour, and how he apparently lived is vast. I couldn’t begin to defend his behaviour on the grounds that he is a great writer, but I still think he wrote a great book.

Me and my literature-loving friends used to play the game, if you could invite any writer, living or dead, to your dinner party, who would you ask? I can still think of many I’d invite because I’m sure they’d be wonderful company with witty, fascinating, beautiful, profound and challenging things to say. But if I were to invite only those I think I would actually like, as well as admire, as human beings rather than just as writers… the list gets a lot shorter (in fact, after a brief ponder I’ve come up with just one: Anton Chekhov). But in the end, for my ideal dinner party of writers I’d rather have their books for company, or the characters from their books, because I think great literary creations, like scientific discoveries, stand alone from the people who made them. That’s why I still love Walcott’s poetry.

A noodle is domestic with cheese

…and a tomato is ardent. No, I’m not quoting Daniil Kharms but the English translations on a Kiev restaurant menu.

Collections of signs and menus like these, in bad English from around the world, are an easy way to make people laugh. But, like the footage of animals doing ridiculous things which now seems to be a staple of international transport settings, they sometimes make me a little uncomfortable because I’m laughing at something that never intended to be funny and my premise for finding it amusing is that I am superior (there’s an argument that all humour is based on that premise, but let’s not get into that right now…)

Several of my books and stories feature dialogue or narrative from non-native language speakers, but I find it hard to write so that it’s believable and generally I’m very wary of it in literature. There is such a fine line between ridiculing incorrect or non-standard language usage and rejoicing in its (not always inadvertent) creativity. It’s a little like the difference between pidgin and creole; the point when a limited mastery of languages becomes a whole new language in itself.

After being laugh-out-loud amused by the first couple of chapters, I got intensely irritated by the Ukrainian narrator’s eccentric English in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. I didn’t think it shed any real light on the story or the character; it was essentially a cheap joke at the expense of all those foreigners who can’t speak English properly (needless to say, the American character in the book can’t speak a word of Ukrainian).

I admit I laughed often enough at my pupils’ mistakes when I was teaching English, but I also know what it’s like to live in another country and struggle with its language. Some days you feel like a lost ten-year-old, you feel as though you’re crossing an endless marsh, jumping from word to recognised word like stones and tussocks sticking out of the great morass of incomprehension. Some days it’s just such perilously hard work you can hardly bring yourself to leave the house to buy milk since who knows what you’ll come back with – a red face, a feeling of total inadequacy, or three litres of something completely undrinkable.

On other days, it’s a license to play, and to play the fool. I’ve made some pretty surreal linguistic mistakes myself (requesting cat soup for lunch in Czech, or a small horse to stir my coffee in Russian). Non-native speakers and writers can make such unexpected poetry. I’ve been wooed and won myself by English ‘mistakes’: how could I resist someone who calls a dung beetle a poo roller, a windmill a house with spinning wings?

Writing yourself out of the doldrums

More thanks, this time to the children from Macclesfield Library reading group and Middlewich Primary School, who I met last week to talk about Riding Icarus. It’s so great to have an opportunity to meet such enthusiastic readers and many budding writers. As always, there were lots of wonderful questions; I think this time my favourite was “When you’re angry does your writing come out angry too, and when you’re happy do you write happy things?”

How much does what ends up on the page reflect what’s going on in real life?

If I’m in a really bad temper, I find it hard to write at all – unlike during my angsty scribbling teens, when the number of pages I wrote increased exponentially with the badness of my mood. Back then, I was writing to escape into an alternative world that was way more satisfying than my own.

These days, I like to think that what I write is less of an escape, and is more independent of how I’m actually feeling. Although a novel overall surely reflects the author’s overall worldview, when you’re in the middle of writing one you can’t write in a tragic scene every time he doesn’t call or the train is late, or alternatively decide that everyone’s going to live happily ever after on the final page just because you got invited to a party on Saturday (well you could, obviously, but I’m not sure the results would be worth reading).

A good writing day for me is one where I’ve got completely into the internal logic of the book and can see what the next development should be (happy or sad) and how I should write it irrespective of whether I think the real world that day is a good place to be or a miserable slough of despond.

So, I guess my answer would be: no; I can write a sad scene when I’m feeling bouncy (easy!), and a cheerful scene when I’m grumpy (though that’s harder). On a really good writing day, a cheerful scene I’ve just written might even spill out into real life and I’ll end up feeling that the world isn’t actually a slough of despond even though he didn’t call and the train was late; it’s full of sunshine and balloons.