Two fellow members of the East Coast Writers’ Group have had books published recently.

Alan Campbell’s third novel, God Of Clocks, has garnered some good reviews, notably these ones in Strange Horizons and Scotland On Sunday.

I reviewed his first novel Scar Night, here.

Poet Jane McKie’s second collection is called The Sun Is Green. Her first, Morocco Rococo, won an award for best first book.

Galabank 18/7/09: 19/7/09

Dumbarton 1-1 Queen Of The South (6-7 on pens.)
Annan Athletic 3-3 Dumbarton (4-2 on pens.)

You can’t draw inferences for the oncoming season from pre-season games. Last season we didn’t win many pre-season encounters and it turned out well.

I must say, though, that while at the end of last season I couldn’t wait for the new one to start, as it has approached I have become more and more wary.

We have two games against higher opposition to kick off the new term; Morton in the Challenge Cup on Sunday, and Dunfermline in the CIS on Aug 1^st. The only consolation is that they are both at home.

There’s a friendly against Middlesbrough tomorrow night too, a Stirlingshire Cup tie versus the Shire to squeeze in next midweek and the squad is by no means settled. We don’t seem to have a left back. I hope things don’t fall apart.

Penguin, 1998?
Translated from Spanish by Gregory Rabassa.

The first sentence of this book reads, “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” I blogged about it here. While the Colonel is an important character, as this could be described as a family saga he is not the main one, the book is not his reminiscences. And we don’t get to the ice till page 18.

This is characteristic of Marquez’s approach. Chapter after chapter begins with a revelation of sorts that takes pages later in the narrative finally to be reached – a tic which can be annoying till you come in the end to expect it.

Not till p 402 do we encounter a rationale, “A century of cards and experience had taught her that the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would go on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle,” by which time we are winding down to the end.

Throughout this story of the town of Macondo and of the Buendía family who founded it there is an enormous amount told rather than shown, and not much in the way of dialogue. Given the propensity for children to be named after previous family members it can also be difficult to keep track of who exactly is who among the plethoras of Aurelianos, José Arcadios and Amarantas. Certainly all of human life is here, not to mention sex and death; but the characters don’t understand one other at all well. As a result the word solitude tolls regularly throughout.

Added to the mix is the magic realism. One character suddenly ascends to heaven and it’s not remarked as unusual, another comes surrounded by clouds of yellow butterflies, it rains non-stop for four years, a child is born and has a pig’s tail, several thousand people are killed by the army and their bodies carried off by rail to be thrown into the sea and barely anyone remembers. This episode may be one of induced mass amnesia, though. There is also a woman who, Miss Havisham-like, shuts herself away in her house for decades until she dies. Dickens as a magic realist; now there’s a thought.

For anyone who might find it a stumbling block I should mention that the translation was into American English.

One Hundred Years Of Solitude is not an easy, nor at times comforting, read. The struggle against governments of various stripe – and the powerful forces which back them up – is presented as unavailing even when they are apparently willing to compromise.

Marquez’s thesis is perhaps best illustrated on p 408, “…they must always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.”

I’m glad I’ve read this as I felt that my unfamiliarity with Marquez was an omission to be remedied but it all does seem rather a long winded way to say, “carpe diem.”

Proof that the word Raith has/had a wider use than just for the name of the local football team.
This was the Raith cinema and is now some sort of church. It’s situated in Links Street in what is known as Linktown, which maybe once was a separate entity from The Lang Toun but now there is no gap between them and it’s just another part of Kirkcaldy.

The curly flourishes on the entrance are about all that makes this Art Deco, but their Eastern influence is one of the hallmarks of Deco styling (cf the Hoover Factory and India of Inchinnan.) Those apart it’s a pretty bog standard barn of a cinema building.
I’ve no idea what it looks like inside or if there were any Art Deco detailings in the interior.

Do you suppose that when folk exited the cinema after watching a musical they were dancing in the streets of Raith?

See a similar photo at the Scottish cinemas website.

Curiously just along the same street from the former Raith there is another unusual religious building; for Scotland that is. A Coptic church. You can occasionally see the priest in Kirkcaldy High Street, in his full beard, ecclesiastical hat and black robes.

I featured the real Nirvana’s Pentecost Hotel recently. After the posting I began to think about songs featuring named hotels in their titles. There aren’t all that many that came to mind. Hotel California, obviously, and Heartbreak Hotel. A quick scan of You Tube – up to page 16! – only revealed Procol Harum’s Grand Hotel as one I hadn’t heard. (I’ve listened to it now and it’s a bit overblown.)
The only other named hotel song I can remember is this from Mike Batt. From the sublime (Nirvana) to the bathetic.

Perhaps that bathetic should have been pathetic after all. Or is that too harsh?

Remember my prediction that Barack Obama would be plagued by Republicans questioning his right to be President from the moment of his inauguration?
I was taken to task by someone in a comment for the temerity of my suggestion.

However, I have now been borne out not just once, but twice*. And he’s only been President for six months!

*For, apparently [thanks to Almax for alerting me to this – unfortunately Alastair's (extremely good) blog is restricted to 35 readers] there are folk saying Obama wasn’t born a US citizen and so is an illegal commander-in-chief. They are called Birthers and want to see his birth certificate.

This is part of what Almax wrote:-
“In the land of the cranks free there’s now a certain amount of steam behind a campaign based on the proposition that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States and therefore cannot constitutionally be President.

The proponents of this view are called ‘Birthers’ and they have taken to erecting billboards like the one above, demanding to see the President’s birth certificate.
The latest development is that one of the Birthers, United States Army Major Stefan Frederick Cook has, via his lawyer, the superbly-named Orly Taitz, filed legal proceedings in the District Court of Georgia, for a restraining order to prevent the Government deploying him to Afghanistan.
While there might be lots of good reasons for not going to Afghanistan (eg I’m scared, mammy), here is the one advanced by Cook and Taitz -
‘Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States and is therefore ineligible to serve as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Armed Forces.
Cook would be acting in violation of international law by engaging in military actions outside the United States under this President’s command. … simultaneously subjecting himself to possible prosecution as a war criminal by the faithful execution of these duties.’
Barack Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961. Hawaii became a US State in 1959.
Here is the birth certificate in question, which naturally Birthers say is a fake.

Well, that might be a fake, but slightly more awkward is this August 1961 entry in the Honolulu Advertiser -

Some Birthers say that Government agents engaged in time-travel shenanigans and recently warped themselves back to ‘61 to insert this notice ex post facto.
America? Dontchaluvit?”

In the greatest democracy in the world^© it would seem some Americans are not democrats at all. Even with a small d.

What?

No. I’ll just have a black coffee, thanks.

It’s a busy season for Writers’ Bloc and a good time to get your spoken word fix. Here’s a heads-up for the next six weeks: charity, poetry, dirty punk, sad songs and twenty-two solid nights of free spoken word.

Thursday 16th July: Oxfam Bookfest @ the Jazz Bar, 8.30pm – 11.30pm

Some Bloc regulars — Andrew J, Gav, Stef and maybe even the elusive Hannu will appear with Ron Butlin and Jenny Lindsay as part of Oxfam’s national Bookfest. http://www.oxfam.org.uk/books/

Shortly thereafter:

Look out for “When The Sun Turns Green”, Jane McKie’s new collection published by Polygon. Celebrating the points at which the everyday intersects with magic, the poems explore ultrasounds and ley lines, wind farms and grandmothers, fighting hares and water monsters, sculptures and Sussex dialect. All in a day’s work for our Jane.

Saturday 18th July: Freak Power 72 — Hunter S. Thompson tribute night, Henry’s Cellar Bar, 11pm. 5 pounds/4 concessions.

Filthy garage punk rock’n'roll with Acid Fascists, The Brutes, The Fnords, Davey Sloan and some intoxicated writers of your acquaintance, reading from Hunter S. Thompson’s work to celebrate his 72nd birthday.

Saturday 8th – Saturday 29th August: Underword @ Fingers Piano Bar, 7.50pm-8.40pm, free entry.

Bloc’s own Gavin Inglis has assembled twenty-two different nights of spoken word for the Fringe this year, every single one free. Dip in for an extended session by some of your Bloc favourites, and discover new voices from Edinburgh and further afield. Come every night.
Full programme now up at: http://underword.co.uk/

25th August: Venus Carmichael @ tePOOKa

Is this the last ever performance for Andrew C. Ferguson’s tribute act to the troubled hippy chick Venus Carmichael? Step behind the Big Red Door and find out.

PS Publishing, 2007

Even without the dedication on page 1, knowing the author and reading this book’s title I would have guessed that this might be an hommage to Michael G Coney.

As a standard to aspire to this is aiming high. Coney is (or was; he died in 2005) one of my personal favourites among writers of SF. While never being too obvious about it Coney’s emphasis on characters has been followed by Brown throughout the latter’s career. In Starship Summer, explicit echoes of Coney abound. The story is clearly Brown’s, though, and not in any way a pastiche.

David Conway has moved to the planet Chalcedony to get over the death of his daughter for which he feels to blame. He buys a starship (which the man who sells it describes as being more like an atmospheric craft) from a scrapyard to use as a dwelling and is quickly drawn into the vendor’s social circle. The ship turns out to be “haunted” by a holographic projection of one of the Yall (aliens who originally built and operated the craft and who also erected the striking feature of Chalcedony, an enigmatic, towering Golden Column which has become the focus for pilgrims of various stripe.)

As this last implies Brown’s theme of religion is again to the fore, as is his fondness for characters with a past they are trying to escape, or an affliction that distances them from others, and (another Brown trope from his early career) we also have an artist with fading powers.

The book (a limited edition of 500) is sumptuously produced with its cover painting embedded into the (hard) binding. The spaceships depicted thereon do more resemble downed World War 2 bombers than the typical representation of interstellar voyagers. All is revealed, however, when Conway’s new home finally flies.

The spaceship scrapyard is an almost Ballardian touch – starships have been replaced for interstellar travel by Telemass, a technology akin to the SHIFT mechanism I deployed for the same purpose in A Son Of The Rock. (I merely make a comparison here. This sort of thing has become part of the tool kit SF writers can use to move characters across galaxies; I’m not suggesting Brown filched it from me. He has used a similar concept before.)

As is Brown’s wont, the focus is on the characters – the SF stuff is background, but background which heightens, and in one case alleviates, their dilemmas and problems. Yet there is still a large quantity of plot in the 120 pages.

I’m sure Brown won’t mind me saying he does not manage quite to achieve Coney’s sublime heights but Starship Summer is nevertheless a worthy effort.

I’ve not posted much about the philosophy or mechanics of writing, only implied things in the course of my reviews of the books I have read in the past eleven months.

There have of course been the Linguistic Annoyances posts but these have been mainly about general misuses of English and not particularly writerly.

Now, though, I have read a first sentence which demands comment.

To begin: there is foreshadowing (essentially the dropping of clues) – a necessary element if you’re to be fair to the reader. Some writers eschew this subtlety in favour of more or less telling you what’s going to happen (not good in my opinion.) Then there is just cheating.

One of a book’s first paragraphs that I well remember is from Robert Silverberg’s “Kingdoms of The Wall.”
I quote:-
“This is the book of Poilar Crookleg, who has been to the roof of the World at the top of the Wall, who has seen the strange and bewildering gods that dwell there, who has grappled with them and returned rich with the knowledge of the mysteries of life and death. These are the things I experienced, this is what I learned, this is what I must teach you for the sake of your souls. Listen and remember.”

This paragraph does several things. It lays out – in its first twenty five words! – the SF discontinuity from our world, it introduces a degree of jeopardy, it promises adventure and revelations, it offers redemption to its world’s putative readership and, by extension, to us. If you’re intrigued, get yourself a copy and read it. (Read any Silverberg from his mature period, you won’t be disappointed.)
However, the paragraph doesn’t foreshadow as such, it tells. It is close to, if not over, the border of cheating. Yet somehow we know the author is in full command of his story and we are in safe hands.

Now consider:
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

An author must gain our attention, of course, but isn’t this a little extreme?
Yes, this might make you want to read on to find out why and how Colonel Buendía (presumably the main character) faced the firing squad, and the relevance of the ice. Yes, the author is definitely in full command and clearly knows what he is doing, but…

It’s cheating. The writer hasn’t yet earned the right for us to continue. He hasn’t engaged us with the character or his situation. It doesn’t matter even if the whole novel concerns the character’s reminiscences in the moments before the order to fire, the enticement is artificial, a shortcut to the involvement with the character that it is the writer’s job to engender over pages of close encounter. In a way we are being short changed here. As we also were with the Silverberg extract, since the narrator addresses us at one remove.

And there is another danger with this sort of thing. I quoted the second extract to the good lady and she remarked she wouldn’t bother with continuing to read a book that started in such a way. There would be little point, because the tension has gone.

Even if, which I suspect in this case, we are being deliberately misdirected (especially if we are being misdirected?) it is still a cheat.

The second quote is of course the opening to one of the most celebrated novels of the twentieth century. One I am finally in the course of reading.

It has been said that ordinary writers may plagiarise, but great ones steal. Perhaps great ones cheat as well.