Alice Munro wins in every way

Amazing news about Alice Munro just out. Thanks to the alert Bookman Beattie for finding it. Beattie's Book Blog has more. And so does The Guardian - including comments from Jane Smiley who declares her, like Mary Poppins, 'practically perfect': 'Her thoughtfulness about every subject is so concentrated.'

It also appears the Canadian short story writer - a favourite of mine - hasn't hung up her skates after all. Look what's out in October this year. I can't wait.

Crack your cheeks!

Been feeling rather wind whipped lately? I found this fantastic video by David Frampton on The Wellingtonista blog which shows what we've been treated to here in Wellington.

Storm in slow motion from David Frampton on Vimeo.

And below is the quote from Shakespeare's King Lear that my blog title comes from. I love this scene on a stormy heath! The language itself drenches and rages and cracks. Saw a wonderful production of Lear at Te Whaea in Wellington a couple of years back. The simple staging and raw acting were utterly compelling and embraced the real storm raging outside. Sitting near the front, we felt seriously weather blasted.

Lear: Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man!

P.S. Funny I should write about storms on the day my most stormy child turns 18. You always know when he's in the house, this boy of mine, it shakes on its piles and creaks at the seams. Most buildings are too small to hold him, really. He drove teachers mad, and us....well, we're managing on the medication. He always got top marks for 'leadership' at school, and 'You're not the boss of my shoes' was a fave phrase which premiered when he was five years old. He was always looking at the moon, even in the daytime. He's social to a fault. He's as strong as Atlas, and so gentle when he sees someone or something that's hurt. And oh, he's fun - he makes us laugh a lot. And scream. Yes I screamed when he drove blithely through a red light in town today [he swore it was amber]. He still gives me the biggest cuddles and lifts me up in the air. Happy Birthday, Adam.

Pick-on-me-meter

That Picometer is starting to get to me. No, it's worse than that. It's one of those bullies that pokes you in the ribs hard and makes nasty little comments in your ear - you've written how much? - what percentage of the book? - it hasn't gone up since when? w-h-e-n? That pointed mouth jabbing like a beak - forward, back, forward, back. It's picking on me, everytime I open up my blog [see right hand column.] Which was the whole point, and the reason I shouldn't complain. The thing is I have been a little - shall we say - 'distracted' lately and not focused on getting novel stuff down on the computer, but I have written pages and pages of Precarious in my moleskine cahier (A4) - word stats unknown. I really have. So yah-yah to you, Picometer. You don't know everything.

Speaking of the wonderful moleskines [used by Ernest Hemingway, Picasso and others], I realised last week that my moleskine notebooks [as opposed to the cahier] had filled up again with those scrawled notes writers are compelled to make - things seen, heard, thought about: all useful when you sit down to write. To fill the gap, I had taken to scrawling notes for the novel inside my diary and on odd scraps of paper, an approach which hinders my writing because these things get scrunched up and lost and forgotten about. Inside a moleskine, not only are my scrawls easy to find when I need them but they are elevated somehow on that heavy, creamy paper into the useful/fabulous/felicitous/prescient etc etc and therefore worthwhile additions to a fermenting novel. Without my moleskines I am thinner-skinned when the Picometer begins its bullying, because I am not sure I have all that much to be going on with. Here they are - I like the plain cardboard covers [second from the back] the best.

So last week, I went to one of my favourite stockists of Moleskines in Wellington - Vessel in Victoria Street which sells pottery mostly, including my favourite Steve Fulmer and Paul Melzer cups - and asked for my usual pack of three slim cardboard moleskine notebooks. No, they didn't have them, but they did have these bright shiny new plastic-covered, super-bright Moleskines called Volant. The blue ones shown here, and a pack in LIME GREEN.It took me a while to digest, the future of the whole novel seemed to hinge on getting the usual three-pack; I stared and poked, and tried to think straight. I told the lovely woman at Vessel that the Volant books are clearly a sop to the popular market - for people who think their notebooks need to be SHINYand LIME GREEN instead of USEFUL and LEGENDARY. I said I was taking a big risk switching to them. Who knows what would happen. I sighed a lot and asked to see if the back of the new bright moleskines held the signature envelope to put things in. No, it didn't.

So I jiggled around for a bit, thinking of the time - I had somewhere to get to - and the whiny Picometer, and the novel languidly waiting to be written. Then I made a decision and bought a pack of two Volants - notebook size - and a two-pack of the mini Volants [just to see].

So far, I've filled up half a dozen pages, no trouble, in each. The paper's the same, thank goodness, and I suppose the Lime Green is kinda cheery on these bleak winter days. So now I am armed next time the Picometer starts its reedy rant.

I feel better already.

Singular

I reviewed this book on Radio NZ National today in just over six minutes. It could have done with an hour. 'Next time!' said host Kathryn Ryan. Oh , if only. In fact, Kathryn was cursing the time taken up by the musical link between the 10 am interview and the book review because Singularity is one of those books that takes you in so many directions it is worth spending time on.

At this point, if it didn't give away too much information, I'd show you my 'map' of the relationships between the characters in the Singularity stories, and between that and Grimshaw's masterly collection Opportunity that won the Montana gold medal last year and sold by the truckload. Instead, I'll just have to talk you through it. There are essentially five key characters in Singularity and Emily is the nexus, perhaps even a kind of protagonist, because she is the link between the two families that pop up in various guises through the book. The other main characters are her brother Larry, Simon [the doctor in Opportunity who watched an ant climb up a speculum and into a woman's vagina], Simon's brother Ford, and Reid who was the undercover cop in Opportunity [the collection and the title story of the same name.]

The Singularity stories are knitted together far more than they are in Opportunity. So much so that I spent an hour last night flicking through the book, and then going back to Opportunity, to draw up my 'character map'. Discovering the links is hugely satisfying.

In Opportunity, for example, we saw Reid from the point of view of a young woman flatmate with a crush who - when she is violently spurned - wreaks revenge in a way that is both subtle and dangerous. In Singularity, we see Reid from his point of view, his relationship with a woman who claims he raped her, the ensuing trial, and his reaction to the ex-flatmate's attendance in court. Wonderfully, Grimshaw's stories can also echo real life. The undercover name for the cop accused of rape is Brad Richards....

We get to see inside smaller characters like Viola who 'stalks' the doctor [Simon]; we see her point of view and the motivation behind the way she acted in the first book and the second. In fact, this is the reason this collection isn't some kind of post-modernist novel: each story is self-contained, so it allows even the most minor character his or her day in court, something that would unbalance a novel. At the same time, as I read Singularity it became harder and harder to judge a story on its own merits. Each one is so clearly linked to what's come before and is about to come.

Grimshaw is also a writer of ideas which she threads through the stories, letting them surface and recede and shift, much like her characters. A singularity is the point at the start of the Big Bang, and - I think I have this right - the pinpoint to which we could return when the universe finally expands to its limits and creates a black hole to suck us in. Inside the collection there are all sorts of 'black holes' from Uluru/Ayers Rock which is a kind of absence at the heart of Australia to addiction of one sort or another to a character's migraines. The black hole is also representative, it seems, of threatening nature, the tedium of the suburbs, a physical stasis, an unemotional/controlled personality, and a watchfulness which - in some people - becomes the writer [ there are a few writers in the collection.]

At the edge of this darkness are such things as life, light, ease, children, animals, action, humour, those competent in the world and, possibly, God. These themes tease their way through the stories and are hugely satisfying to track and trace alongside the developing characters.

As I said in the radio review, Singularity is a collection of dark diamond-hard stories, well-crafted with superb language and dense characters. The stand-out story for me was Paraha where Emily (aged eight in this story) and Larry (10) and another small boy battle a difficult bush track and arrive at Karekare Beach to distraught parents. The writing delineates the sheer oppressiveness of the exquisite landscape, and the implacable face of nature, in a way that both chills and thrills in equal measure.

P.S. Congratulations to Kate de Goldi for her wonderful book The 10 PM Question winning the NZ Post Children's Book Awards.

Money for JAAM

Well actually not a lot of money - only $20* - but more importantly JAAM wants something from me: an essay I wrote especially for the next issue's theme of wandering [across genre, ideas, geography etc]. This will be my first ever 'thing' in JAAM and one of the few pieces I've ever had in a literary magazine. After a poem in Landfall in the early 1980s, I went all reclusive about sending off work to be published. I hadn't realised what that sort of exposure meant and I wasn't ready back then to be exposed. Or maybe I was a bit self-conscious or scared or disorganised - or all of these. Anyway, since then I've had some work in online lit magazine Turbine which was very exciting, - and now here's another one of those printed publications: JAAM 27 edited by academic, memoir/travel writer and soon-to-be mother of twins Ingrid Horrocks. I am looking forward to it very much indeed - not just to see my piece in black and white on the page jostling up against poems and fiction and all the rest, as much as to see what Ingrid does with 'wandering'. It's always interesting getting inside that particular head.

*$20 and a copy of JAAM is what contributors are paid.

The trick of words or how to sleep like a dead donkey

Marking student stories this week reminds me over and over of the wonderful story UK writer Jim Crace tells about a donkey in a desert. He tells it by letter to a fictional pesky would-be writer called PJ to illustrate what it is that makes a good writer .The letter was part of a Guardian article which came out four years ago when I was studying for my MA in creative writing and battling with The Blue and needed Crace to remind me that research has a limit where fiction's concerned. [It was Crace who audaciously made up how a dead body decomposes in Being Dead.]

For the whole article by Crace go here. It's a hilarious read. Btw, his other novels include Signals of Distress and Quarantine.

Extract from The Secrets of My Success by Jim Crace, The Guardian 5/02/05

To be a good writer, a confident writer, especially a Fantasist, you do not necessarily need to assemble the mere facts and then allow them to dictate the shape and colour of your work, you must instead do what the dictionary indicates and master the art of lying. And to do that, it is not information you require, but vocabulary. I appreciate your kind comments about my novel, Quarantine, although for the record, you are incorrect to say that I know the Judean desert like the back of my hand and that the depth of my knowledge was displayed in every paragraph. That's what the critics said, too. But actually I only spent a couple of nights in the Judean desert, and those were only to give me the confidence to make it up. I had a professional tour guide up there, a Bedouin called Izzat abu-Rabia, who had a gun on one hip, a mobile phone on the other, and a clutch of languages at his disposal. He spoke better English than the average Anglican bishop. (He made it musical and interesting, in other words.) So this is not a point about language. It is a point about culture.

On the first night, Izzat and I slept out in the desert above Qumran under his Jeep. In the morning, as I stretched the aches out of my shoulders, he asked me, "Well, Jim, how did you sleep?"

I said, "I slept like a log," and as I spoke I saw his eyes narrow with less than comprehension, and, as his eyes narrowed, I looked across his shoulder to see the bald and baked Judean hills stretching away without the benefit of any vegetation. This country hadn't seen a log for aeons. If there were a log then it wouldn't be sleeping. It would be snatched up and put on the fire. Wood smoke was preferable to that of the only other option, camel dung. My log image, like fine wine, hadn't travelled well. It had no meaning in Palestine.

"OK, Izzat," I asked, "How did you sleep?"

"Me?" he said, "I slept like a donkey. I slept like a dead donkey. If you had kicked me I wouldn't have woken up."

So there's the simple ploy, PJ. Vocabulary. I now understood that if I wanted to dish up a convincing version of the Judean desert without doing any real research, I would only have to remember to turn all my logs into donkeys. The trick of words.

The 10 PM Question: do read this book.

If you love story read this book. If you love a story which has in its arms myth, fairytale, legend, iconic picture book, adult and childhood classics, read this book. If you have a family member who is different from the people in other families you know, read this book. If you love a book which pulses with the chaos of family life - of life in fact - but at every turn reminds you of the wonder there, read this book. If your family harbours a secret, read this book. If people in your family harbour deep-seated worries, read this book. If you like a book which asks the big questions but doesn't try to give answers, read this book. If you want to read a book that buzzes with the possibilities of language, read this book. If you love birds, read this book. If you loved the movie: What's Eating Gilbert Grape? read this book. If you want to read one of our best authors at the peak of her game, read this book. If you want to remember what it is to be 12 again, read this book. If you are 12, read this book. If you want to know what it's like to be 12 in NZ in the time of spaceman candies [no longer spaceman cigarettes] and ipods, read this book. If you want a large dose of de Goldi [insight, wisdom, compassion, humour, intelligence, skill], read this book. If you want to read a book that is already a modern classic, read this book. If you want to meet Frankie Parsons and Gigs and Sydney and Ma and Uncle George and Gordana and Louie and Ray Davies and the Aunties and the Fat Controller and Mr A and Cassino. Oh do, do, do, do, do, do, do read this book.

Stop Press. The Commonwealth Writers Prize was announced tonight at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival. Best Book - Christos Tsiolkas The Slap and Best First Book -Mohammad Hanif A Case of Exploding Mangoes.

Character for lease

If only it were that easy. You need a character for your novel (office or retail) so you call Karl and he couriers one round. Perhaps one like the nice little green man on the right.

Saw this on my way to teach at Massey University (Wellington) and had to photograph it to use in a lecture on 'writing character' today. The little green man appearing in the shot is completely accidental but rather wonderful.

through the resistance

US author Jayne Anne Phillips, praised once by Nadine Gordimer as "the best short story writer since Eudora Welty", believes that the tension of balancing the roles of writer, mother, director and teacher in an MFA program for writers feeds her work.


“Everyday you force yourself through the resistance you are working with and you get deeper into the material. This way you get to stuff you wouldn’t have access to otherwise,” said Phillips.

“My work has to be so deeply compelling that I can put it down and return to it, re-enter it, at another time. I don’t have the kind of life where I can set a (per day) page count or a word count. The tension of needing to do the work affects the intensity of the kind of prose I write.”


Hallelujah for that. I was just thinking today how I am writing too much of my new novel in my head at the moment mainly because I am tied up with too many other things -much along the same lines as Jayne Anne Phillips - and there aren't enough hours in the day. I have many scenes waiting to be put onto paper - varying from those with strong definition that change very little, to those that continually shift and change and blend and re-form much like oil paints on water before you lay white paper on top to create a marbled effect. I guess Phillips is right that when I get to the computer in the key hole of time I am able to make for myself then the writing has to rear up and push its way through - there is no time for mucking around - and the novel sucks in some of this intensity/tension and is able to go deeper than you'd think it would.

Sometimes, though, I delay writing because I still need to think things through. That's certainly happened in the last few days when I have come to realise that the end of the novel [which I always write early on] isn't what I wanted at all. I get it now. This new ending - the one in my brain with a small picket fence around it - is much better than the last one which had a frenetic and desperate feel to it. I had another realisation watching my daughter play netball today - it has something to do with a fur coat and what someone else told me yesterday about a book she loved as a child. Suddenly those two things connected with something else inside the novel and a stray thought I had a while ago - and bingo! Just need to get it down on paper now.

More from the Jayne Anne Phillips interview here.

alone through the gateway entered

"It may be well for a reader to enter the world of literature, to stay there, going from favourite city to favourite city, taking a full share of the good things;it is not well for a writer. To visit the land - yes; again and again; but not to stay, not to set up house within a favourite gateway where the view of the 'world' provided by Dostoevsky,Tolstoy, Shakespeare, may combine to give a lifetime of spectator pleasure. A writer must go alone through the gateway entered or arrived at, out into the other 'world', with no luggage but memory and a pocketful of words, some of which may be like shells crumbled to sand before the oncoming waves, while others may turn out to be jewels - turquoises - that time has shown to be the teeth of the dead mastodons" Janet Frame, Times Literary Suplement, 1964

I saw this in the hallway at Massey University where I'm teaching today. It is included on one of the marvellous Book Council writer posters. Powerful stuff, and it came at the right time - after a creative writing/short fiction tutorial with the usual mix of those who yawn so deeply they can barely read the lines in front of them and those who sit bright-eyed with copious notes, those who run in bare feet so as not to be late and those who trip on the wet steps and text to say they're missing class to get an x-ray (I kid you not), those who write of salt flaking from skin or dancing sheets or 'frightful fruit eaters' and those who don't, just don't. So shells that are sand or jewels that are dinosaur teeth. Only Frame. Oh, and a nice blog post here by someone called Maria Angeles about visiting Frame's house in 2006. An Angeles at my table indeed.

My words echo thus, in your mind. But to what purpose

I discovered T.S. Eliot in the sixth form. I remember opening a book of his poems while I was babysitting for the neighbours, and feeling the immediate painful thrill of words like small darts hitting home here and here and here.


I fell in love with Eliot, dear reader, and bought his Collected Poems 1909 - 1962 the following year. Sometime after that - I don't know when - I lost it. Last week, my friend Whena Owen gave it back to me [picture above] wrapped up in an old dress pattern. Apparently her brother, Dylan, was cleaning out his bookshelves when he found it and found my name in the front, and underneath excerpts from Eliot's poems written in fountain pen with curling daisies instead of full-stops (eek). Whena and I were at school together and flatted together once, too, so somehow the Collected Poems of T.S. had migrated into her shelves and then into Dylan's.


My excitement at getting the book back was partly about the book itself and partly about what it had gone on to become for me in the intervening years. You see, when I wrote The Blue I deliberately wrote several passages which reflected the key literary influences of my life - in style, ideas and/or content. One of them is Eliot. Others are Janet Frame, Katherine Mansfield, Rupert Brooke, Virginia Woolf and Witi Ihimaera. The connections aren't at all obvious and I don't expect people to make them - and oh, when I read this I think how pretentious it all sounds - my motivation was primarily to slip in a small tribute to each of those authors and poets and partly to satisfy myself. I hoped that some readers might make the links sub-consciously or consciously and that would give them a deeper understanding of the text itself, and some insight into the shady places from which my writing springs.

Okay - if you're still reading - where is Eliot in The Blue? First of all, you need to read the extract at the start of this post which comes from Burnt Norton in The Four Quartets by Eliot, and the one below from the same poem. Then read the extract from The Blue at the end of this post about the wedding of Lilian to Ed. It occurs straight after WWI and 20 years before the story opens, but comes near the end of the novel as a memory. The Blue extract is enhanced by knowing the Eliot link, I believe. The theme of all time being 'eternally present' and therefore there being no point in 'disturbing dust on the bowl of rose leaves' is critical to what unfolds in The Blue. Readers of the Four Quartets will also know the bird is likely to be a deceptive thrush, and will know lines like these: 'Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind/cannot stand too much reality', and all the rest....

How marvellous it was to open my old creaking copy of Eliot's Collected Poems and find them there: the garden, the gate, the excitement of the children, the bird calling - all as I remembered them, and as I had written them into The Blue in one way or another [rose bushes become pine trees, the children become silly, trilling Jeannie etc.] There's also a complete change of rhythm in The Blue at this point, and the point of view switches from limited third person to second person, with two possibilities: either Lilian is talking to herself and/or the author is talking to Lilian, or both.

THE BLUE [2007] Extract from Chapter 25

Back a step. Back a step up the path. Back up to the small gate of the small churchyard and make a decision there not to enter. To turn at the sound of the small birds, to turn at the smell of the pine trees, to turn at the first crunch of the gravel, and leave quietly, without fuss or hurt. If you had to go in, you fool, you, Lilian, you should have turned back at the first small gravestone, and if you didn’t turn then, there was a point on that path where you could see him and he couldn’t see you, and you knew with sudden clarity that there was nothing there that was familiar. If it hadn’t been for Jeannie, giggling behind you and running into your back like that, you might have turned at last and, seeing the gate there and the small gravel path, you’d have known what to do. As it was, he’d heard that silly trilling friend of yours, and looked for her and saw you, Lilian, in your borrowed silk georgette and red fox, and come forward, trussed in his uniform, his head dipping bashfully and his large hand out. He’d waited outside to introduce you to his Best Man, the cousin you’d heard so much about, who had even written you a letter or two. And there he was stepping out from behind him, a shorter, stockier man in uniform, too, but filling it differently, with thick black hair and ruddy cheeks, older than Ed by a few years, his eyes an astounding blue. Ed clasped his hands together, and waited to see that you liked him.

You remember how slowly it unfolded, the cousin stepping forward and removing his soldier’s hat and taking your hand in greeting and saying your name in a way you’d have usually thought of as familiar but in fact was less insolent than that. And then he said nothing more, although he looked as if he wanted to. Jeannie came forward, wishing he would smile at her like that, but he didn’t. He took her hand instead and kissed it, and Jeannie chortled, silly girl, and showed her crooked teeth.

‘Come on, Owen,’ said Ed, looking pleased at the way it had gone. And they went inside the church, the two of them, to wait for you.

©Mary McCallum

A Year of Blogging

I realised when I did a video-conference on 'authors who blog' with Rachael King that I'd been blogging for a year! It seems longer - but no, I started in April 2008. So in honour of that I've inserted a section into the right-hand panel with all the subjects I've blogged on. It's a bit long to have it there all the time, but it's kind of wonderful to have it up for a day or two. Like a flag declaring my interests, passions, obsessions around The Blue and books and writing, and then there are those loose threads, stray thoughts, glimpses of other things flapping around too ...

I'm off to the bookshop now to sell a few books, and to - frankly - be a bit overwhelmed by the number of books out there, new ones every week. Sometimes, one more book from me seems like a stray snowball in an avalanche.

The Winter Vault transcends

THE WINTER VAULT by Anne Michaels [Bloomsbury]

This is the review I wrote for Your Weekend magazine's Anzac Day 2009 edition. I found it in the letterbox and took it with me rolled up in my bag to read while I waited for the ceremony at the local Anzac memorial to begin. An apposite book for that particular day and for me, still fresh from a winter in Canada.


Anne Michaels’ writing finds the epic in the intimate and the intimate in the epic in a way that is both astonishing and demanding. At the start of The Winter Vault, Avery is an engineer in 1960s Egypt involved with moving the temples of Abu Simbel so they aren’t drowned by the new Aswan Dam. While local Nubians are forced to leave their dead to drown in ancient graveyards and move to mock villages where they have no history, the temples are moved stone by stone to a place without meaning.

Avery and his new wife, Jean, watch this exodus from their houseboat, exploring each other’s bodies and trading family histories. Among other things they talk about the work Avery did back in Canada when he presided over villages being shifted and drowned to make way for the St Lawrence Seaway. This is a world where people and history are dispossessed by cataclysmic man-made events, and Avery and Jean move inside it unsure what it is they possess, especially when faced with a tragedy of their own.



The neutral authorial voice that characterises this novel shifts back and forwards from factual descriptions of the two river projects to intimate moments more akin to prose poems. These two elements lap at each other to the point that when the statue of Ramses is sawed through in preparation for moving, Jean expects to see blood.



Back in Toronto separated from Avery now, Jean meets a man who helped rebuild Warsaw following the devastation of World War II. The novel focuses then on the stories Lucjan has to tell about his own experience of dislocation and the agony of building a replica city on the bones of the dead. The ‘pact of words’ begun in the desert continues with Jean and Lucjan’s encounters in bed.



Meanwhile, Jean plunges her hands into the frozen Canadian soil and tries to create a garden from her late Mother’s cuttings: transplants too. This is where we hear about the winter vault which provides storage for bodies through the Canadian winter until the earth defrosts enough to allow them to be buried. It is a place of silent ceremony, where death itself is delayed, and somehow made manageable.



Michaels knows about the importance of taking time. At 50, she’s produced three poetry collections and two novels: the Orange award-winning Fugitive Pieces was published twelve years ago. In many ways, Michaels writes fiction like her compatriot Michael Ondaatje – also a poet. There’s the same disjointedness in the narrative, and the concise, freighted language which gives remarkable insights into the human condition. Winter Vault is not always an easy book to engage with, but patience renders up something utterly transcendent.

Lydia Bennet and George Wickham are in a relationship

Pride and Prejudice as it would be if they'd had Facebook back then. Fabulous.

Getting to grips with Gallipoli

At Galli’poli there was no ice. It was stinking hot. The bodies were piled so deep in places they were used like sandbags, and lying there for sometimes weeks in the sun they were bloated and blackened and stunk to the heavens. One day a truce was declared and the men were given eight hours to bury the lot. Word went round that there were five hundred corpses to the acre in no-man’s land.

The stench was one thing, but dragging a rotten body by the arm and finding you’ve left most of it behind was another. It was clear the earth had started claiming the dead and wouldn’t let them go without a fight. The Friar remembered the sucking sound below a sound, like an old lady swallowing tea, the warning creak, and then an unexpected lightness when the arm parted from the body. The horror he felt the first time. The numbness he felt at the end of an hour. Then there was smoko with Ed.

Extract from The Blue [Penguin NZ 2007 ©Mary McCallum]

I didn't expect to write about Gallipoli when I began writing The Blue, but when I settled on 1938 as the date for my novel, I realised some of the male characters would have to have fought there in 1915. And then it became clear to me that I had to take the novel to Gallipoli and write about that place and what happened there because it couldn't be ignored.

The muddle, the horrors and heroism, the comradeship and nascent nationhood that are Gallipoli shaped the life of one of my protagonists, Ed, as it shaped all who served there. Ed is a farmer on isolated Arapawa Island in New Zealand's Tory Channel, but for three months of the year he and other local men become whalers who hunt migrating whales on fast two-man motor launches. In World War I, like many other NZ men, they leave their homes at the 'ends of the earth' to fight in Europe.

Ed also leaves behind a girlfriend, Lilian, who becomes his wife and is one of the protagonists in The Blue, along with Ed's cousin, Owen, known as the Friar.

The extract at the start of this post is part of the larger extract below. The Blue opens in 1938 on the brink of World War II. Here the whalers are pouring over mail and newspapers delivered by the mailboat. The story at this point is told by the Friar. Micky is Ed's son, and Tommy and Gunner are whalers. The Terminus is a Picton pub.

Extract from The Blue [Penguin NZ 2007]


Tommy was the first to speak. ‘Things are getting hot again in Europe.’

Gunner grunted. ‘Yes. Jerry’s up to something. First the Rhineland, and now those troops along the Czech border–’

‘I don’t trust them as far as I can throw them,’ said Tommy.

‘The politicians seem to have it in hand,’ said the Friar.

‘Appeasement is what it’s called,’ said Micky. ‘And it’s exactly what it sounds like. Piss. They should go in and deal with them now before it’s too late.’

The Friar turned towards him, surprised. He wanted to say, ‘What the hell do you know about it?’ But seeing the way Micky's face was clenched, he said, ‘Who have you been talking to?’

‘It’s all those newspapers he gets to read while he’s waiting for the fish to fry,’ said Gunner. ‘It’s given him opinions.’

The Friar coughed, Tommy laughed; Micky stood up, muttered something, kicked the box he was sitting on and walked off.

‘Now listen– ’ started Gunner, but the Friar shook his head. Micky had gone, walking to the rocks at the end of the whale station where he lit a cigarette, tossing the smoke up into the air.

The Friar watched for a moment and then turned back to his paper. There were no two ways about it, the boy unsettled him. How old was Micky now – sixteen, seventeen? Ed hadn’t been much more than that when they’d gone over to Gallipoli, and the Friar ten years older again – still young in anyone’s book. There they were, two cousins who’d lived within a mile of each other on the same island all their lives, vastly excited at going somewhere, anywhere at all, and as green as they come.

Micky talked about showing Jerry the door, but what did he know? Only as much as he’d seen at Anzac Day parades in Picton at that memorial like a kids’ castle. Glorious Dead above the gateway. What did Ed call them once? Leftovers at attention.

Ed had trouble getting along to those parades; he always had some excuse or other. The Friar remembered the boy Micky there, and his mother, and the disappointment in the cut of her mouth. Galli’poli. That’s how Ed used to say it. Like ‘gallop pony’. He used to have a funny way with words that had he’d lost as he’d got older. Iris would tell people how he was so painfully shy he didn’t talk until he was four and then when he did the words had just poured out.

That was a huge exaggeration: words had never poured out of Ed. What did happen, and the Friar was there when it happened, his cousin started talking one day in whole sentences as if he’d been doing it all along. He was looking out of the window and he’d said to the glass in front of him, ‘The weather’s turning, there’s a storm on the horizon.’ It was an odd thing to say for a person who hadn’t said a known word before that moment. His mother stood there as if frozen. She couldn’t speak herself for a matter of minutes (and that was a record for Iris), then she’d made such a fuss you’d have thought she’d just discovered her silent child was a genius.

That first sentence showed Ed had started as he meant to go on. He would only speak when he wanted to, and what he said did not always fit into other people’s idea of a conversation. The Friar remembered arriving at Gallipoli and Ed and him looking at the narrow beach and steep cliffs and the firing going on from the Turks and the men dying front of them.

‘Welcome to Galli’poli,’ said Ed.

‘Give me The Terminus any day,’ said the Friar.

And they both had a laugh, and some of the other diggers joined in. It started up a bit of banter until someone put a stop to it. Ed didn’t banter; he just kept his eye on the beaches. From that moment, he called Galli’poli as he saw it – or heard it – which seemed a vaguely subversive thing to do at the time. What was going on in Ed’s mind when he did that was anybody’s guess.

Then there was that phrase of his: ‘Tootsies up.’ He used it when a fellow was shot in front of them and lying there toes to the heavens. Ed had got it from one of the stretcher bearers who came to treat trench foot. You could hear them calling it up the line so you’d know to remove your boots and socks and wait your turn.

The Friar remembered the boy collecting ice to boil so he could wash their feet. It can’t have been Gallipoli then – it must have been the Somme, which came later. The two boys – no older than Micky – had each carried a tin, one cut down on one side to make a foot bath, the other unmarked.

‘What’s in there?’ said Ed.

‘Smell.’

And both Ed and the Friar had leaned forward together and inhaled at the mouth of the tin.

‘It’s a sweet one,’ said Ed, his eyes closed.

‘Sweet,’ said the Friar.

‘I don’t know about that,’ said the taller of the stretcher bearers. ‘It’s whale oil. The best bloody thing for trench foot aside of getting your feet back home and into slippers beside a roaring fire.’

‘Or up your missus’ nightie,’ said the shorter one.

‘It’s a sweet oil,’ said Ed, irritated, his eyes still shut. ‘It’s made from a newly killed whale and it’s still fresh.’

'I don’t know about that, but it does the trick. Now then, tootsies up.’

Ed had sat quietly while his feet were washed and the whale oil applied. Then it was the Friar’s turn, and still Ed said nothing. Afterwards they’d both sat for a while not looking at each other. When the Friar glanced across at Ed, his face was stricken, and he knew he’d been back home too. It was strange the things that did that to you, and smells were the worst. The whale oil had taken them both back to Fishing Bay at the start of the season: the chug of the boiler, the stink of boiled whale, a creeping breeze, sharing a smoke down by the ramp, a child singing somewhere, Iris bringing scones. All so utterly -- words escaped the Friar -- nothing would do, really. So utterly.

‘Tootsies up’ came later then.


At Galli’poli there was no ice. It was stinking hot. The bodies were piled so deep in places they were used like sandbags, and lying there for sometimes weeks in the sun they were bloated and blackened and stunk to the heavens. One day a truce was declared and the men were given eight hours to bury the lot. Word went round that there were five hundred corpses to the acre in no-man’s land.

The stench was one thing, but dragging a rotten body by the arm and finding you’ve left most of it behind was another. It was clear the earth had started claiming the dead and wouldn’t let them go without a fight. The Friar remembered the sucking sound below a sound, like an old lady swallowing tea, the warning creak, and then an unexpected lightness when the arm parted from the body. The horror he felt the first time. The numbness he felt at the end of an hour. Then there was smoko with Ed.

His cousin had trouble rolling his cigarette, and the Friar, despite the numbness, had felt a small surge of shock. Ed had got the shakes – his hands weren’t steady, and there was a slight tremor in his lips and around his eyes that made the Friar think of their grandfather. At last he licked the thing down and smoked it hard and fast, rolling another one while he finished the first. He was better at it this time. The Friar had no problem filling and lighting his pipe. He held his hands out flat in front of him to see, but there they were as always – as steady as a rock.

They’d said nothing to each other while they smoked, but stood there looking out from the scrubby hills, out from the cross-hatch of trenches and corpses and lines of exhausted men to a distant stretch of sea. The view was not unlike the view from Stony Knob on Arapawa; either way they were at the ends of the earth. In this case, hell was behind them, waiting. At home, well, it was heaven, wasn’t it?

Ed spoke at last. ‘What are we doing here?’

Did his voice shake too? The Friar thought so. That morning he’d watched his cousin stand in front of a sliver of mirror and shave his chin with soap and only a capful of water. The Friar could see a congealed cut on his cheek, and a rash where the skin had been scraped too hard. Ed’s hand had been steady holding the razor, but since his brother had died in Snipers’ Gully he’d had been less resolute somehow, less certain of himself, so he’d shaved the skin three or four times when once would have done. He was barely twenty after all.

The Friar went to put his arm around Ed with the intention of calming him. The gesture was a clumsy one and Ed pushed him away. ‘Piss off.’

The order came down that they should stop trying to move the decomposing bodies but scratch shallow trenches beside them and roll them in instead. Twenty at a time into single graves less than a foot deep. It would be temporary. There’d be reburials. Ed and the Friar tied singlets over their mouths and moved as fast as they could. The Friar made sure Ed stayed close.

Not too long after that, when the area between their trenches and the Turks was littered again, a shell had landed in a body near where Ed was standing. He’d been splattered from head to toe. It was days before he got down to the water to give himself a proper clean. He was a live corpse, he joked. His cheek had started to twitch by then in a manner which made it look as if he were finding the whole thing immensely amusing. It had unsettled the men.

That was the day they’d started calling him Lucky.

There’d be some in Arapawa would still remember that, many who wouldn’t. Only a few knew where it had come from. Not Micky, not the boy’s mother. He doubted Ed had said anything. And now it didn’t matter because the name had quickly fallen into disuse once they’d returned home. The shaking had stopped too, as far as the Friar could see, although Ed still lapsed into what some of the boys called his ‘thousand-yard stare’.

The land they’d cleared during the truce was never taken. The dead came back with the first rains.

The Friar watched Micky walk back towards them. The quality of light and the high polish on the water made him a silhouette. But the Friar knew without seeing the bruised look to his eyes and the way his hands were on the verge of shaking, and he felt a swell of anger towards the lad. He had a family, a mother who cared for him more than she cared for herself, a girl, all of his limbs and a whole life ahead. The Friar wanted to stop him then and there, hold tight to his arm and point to the picture-book day. He wanted to ask the boy what on earth could possibly be as bad as all that. What, on God’s sweet earth.

From The Blue [Penguin NZ 2007 © Mary McCallum]

On the library shelves

I'm at the Barn - our place in the Wairarapa - and out of internet contact. But sometimes I creep to the small library with painted brick walls and a small, dynamic Scottish librarian and use the free WiFi. At the moment, the small dynamic Scottish librarian is selling Girl Guide biscuits to two German back-packers, so I'm guessing she's also involved with Girl Guides.

After coming here on and off since Xmas to use the WiFi [I'd deliberately not activated the wireless connection on this laptop until then], I finally introduced myself today. She knew the name and The Blue and explained it wasn't the sort of novel people took to easily at first, something to do with the whale on the cover and people not being sure about the whaling ... but once persuaded, the locals have been enjoying The Blue and told their friends etc and now, apparently, it rarely makes it back to the NZ Fiction shelves. Once it's returned, and is waiting to be shelved, it goes straight out again. Yippee.

My library readers have been wonderfully supportive of The Blue. It is still requested around the country and people tell me of waiting lists. Shortly after The Blue was published, and when I was worried about sales, I'd go to library websites and get such a buzz to see the books were out, and even more of a buzz later to see it was requested by people.

I think my excitement is added to by being the daughter of a librarian. One who could never believe the problems I had getting books back to libraries on time - the fines - the lost books - the way I nearly didn't get my undergraduate degree conferred because I had logged up such a huge fine at the university library.

The Blue seems like a way of redeeming myself. Instead of shaking their heads and giving me chilly smiles, librarians welcome me with open arms now. I've spoken at a number of library events, and one wonderful library at Palmerston North bought something like 28 copies of The Blue and encouraged all its readers to read it.

My Mum seems very happy about that.

Sentences that sing

JOHN BANVILLE:

It all starts with rhythm for me. I love Nabokov’s work, and I love his style. But I always thought there was something odd about it that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Then I read an interview in which he admitted he was tone deaf. And I thought, that’s it—there’s no music in Nabokov, it’s all pictorial, it’s all image-based. It’s not any worse for that, but the prose doesn’t sing. For me, a line has to sing before it does anything else. The great thrill is when a sentence that starts out being completely plain suddenly begins to sing, rising far above itself and above any expectation I might have had for it. That’s what keeps me going on those dark December days when I think about how I could be living instead of writing.

John Banville - Irish author of Booker-winning The Sea, and The Book of Evidence and others - is the latest author interviewed in the Paris Review about the act of of writing. Banville doesn't write draft after draft but is driven, it seems, to polish each sentence as he goes to achieve prose that has been described by De Lillo as 'dangerous and clear-running'. Banville says that when he finishes a sentence, it's finished. More of that interview here.

John Banville's method is mine. It is painstaking and painful - obsessional really - but I cannot change it. And I think that's because building a novel for me is like building a house: each piece of wood needs to be measured and sawn and sanded and nailed or bolted into place in exactly the right way so the next length of wood can be put in place beside it ... and so it goes. Of course, for a building there are exact plans, which is where the analogy falls down. I build not knowing exactly what it is I am building.

Worth twittering about

I am enjoying this book so much that when I got up for my morning coffee, instead of checking my emails I read MISCONDUCT. Bridget van der Zijpp is a kiwi and this novel - her first , out last year - was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. The NZ Listener picked it as one its Books of the Year and made a fairly strong case for considering it thinking woman's chick lit.

If Bridget J has an older wild-child Aotearoa cousin, Simone is it. Saying this in no way disparages van der Zijpp. Her eye is sharper than Fielding’s, her writing edgier, her sensibility welcomingly wry rather than witty.. [The NZ Listener review]

Yes - sharper, edgier, wittier - constantly surprising, a terrific sense of the seaside town it inhabits, and a wonderful cast of characters drawn with sympathy and insight.

The publisher's blurb and more reviews here - good on Victoria University Press for taking the time to put reviews up on its website - and some interesting-looking bookclub notes here.

I am also still excited about The Blue being published in Israel. It should be in the shops there now - my translation editor, Hadas, told me Passover was the time and it was still Passover when I last checked. Two copies of the wonderful book plopped into my letterbox a couple of weeks back wrapped in brown paper. I forgot to mention it here but I don't know how I could. Holding them was a transcendent moment.

One more thing: oh yes - oh no - oh dear - I am a twitterer. Don't know how it happened - I think I wanted to read someone's twitters and ended up... well, joining... the same way I joined Facebook, really. I feel a bit ambivalent about it because I can see it's another time-consumer masquerading as a time-saver, and it is - as the pic below shows - very 'pick me, pick me'. So who knows if this is a long term thing for me. Meanwhile, down underneath my blog roll on the right somewhere are my twitters for time-being. If you have nothing else to do ...

Happy Easter

When the world steps in

I visit a number of blogs that I like. The ones I enjoy most have something to say about books and writing. They are wide-ranging, generous, refreshed regularly and possess something of the character of the person writing them. Dropping by is like reading a terrific newspaper column or having a conversation with a very interesting person.

There are usually hints at the real life that surrounds these blogs - mention of a husband, a knitting project, trees being cut down across the road, strawberries in the garden. A photo of a dog and a stick. A well-fed cat on a cushion. A view from the window. Where the eye falls. But only a hint.

Generally, I don't want the life stories of these people I visit (although there are some who captivate me - always exceptions -- here's one.) The thing is, I have family and friends and lives enough jostling mine. But for those bloggers who don't confide, there can be a moment when that changes. It's usually a crisis of some sort which forces the change and it can be a shock to the blog-reader like me who comes for the usual take-out to find something altogether different. It takes a moment sometimes to realise what's happened, to realise the person I have come to rely on has been derailed and is talking about it with me.

Children's/Young Adult writer Neil Gaiman broke from writing about his books and his wide-ranging life as a writer [with asides about the lovely white dog above, and a daughter who visits] to talk one day about the sudden and devastating death of his father. I read it and some of the follow-up posts and was hooked by the story of this man and his family, and moved and devastated for Gaiman whose blog I usually go to for stuff about books [and my dog has a crush on his dog.]

Justine Picardie - an author in the UK - has a regular post she does entitled 'Bibliotherapy: What to read ...' and she offers up a review of a book to cover a particular circumstance eg. 'What to read in an English January...' '...when you're trying to stop drinking...' '...when you're not going to the party...' They are clever, well-written, amusing reviews. The suddenly one day she writes a post entitled: 'What to read when your husband has left you for another woman' and underneath she has no review just this: 'Any suggestions? All help gratefully received, on this rainy black night in february...'

Some people commenting after the post seemed to know what had happened, but others flicked up some fun reading suggestions by such as Fay Weldon and Sylvia Plath. And then the penny dropped. Picardie's husband really had left her for another woman, suddenly and unexpectedly, and her grief was profound, and all her blog readers (me included) felt just terrible for her. Food and books were sent by those who knew where to send them including one anonymous donor whose gift of Nora Ephron's Heartburn led to the post being written at last: 'What to read (and what to eat) when you husband has left you for another woman.' And there it was : a terrific review of Heartburn (must read the book now) and a cake recipe. Justine Picardie was back.

There have been other examples of this in my blog roll - Gondal Girl 's heartfelt post about trying to come to terms with a trio of deaths in her family especially one perplexing one, The Paradoxical Cat 's few but incredibly moving lines about the death of her mother, and then there was the time I wrote about my daughter being unwell and put up a photo of her swinging in the air when life was good. I'd given glimpses of my family until then but the focus of the blog was books and writers so I didn't intend to give more. Then there she was.

Why does this happen? Having done it myself, I'm still not really sure. It's as if the blogger believes it would be intellectually dishonest somehow not to declare an emotional derailment. And perhaps it's also that for many of us a blog is, amongst other things, a kind of journal, and when we can't do it justice we feel some sort of responsibility to say why.

Or perhaps the enormity of what's happened cries out to be recorded by one who always records. Or perhaps it's simply that as writers we turn to words to contain this thing, and understand it, and make sense of it, and it's only a small step to then press 'publish post' and create a public container for the grief. 'There it is,' we say, 'only that paragraph, that photo - it's not so awful, so ungraspable after all - and everyone can see.' As if that anchors it somehow.

Or perhaps it's a bit of all those things.

Oh, and my daughter's a lot better now, but I still flick back to that post now and then as a way of confirming that fact, and of recalling another day six years ago when she swung in the air, the camera catching a glorious split-second of joy and sunlight and flung hair.