Slime balls and fire balls, it's Under the Mountain

Like the director's sister, my daughter tried out for the part of Rachel (the film not the TV series), but was too young and didn't have red hair. It was too late, she was already smitten by the Maurice Gee book, the upcoming movie and the passion of the director, Jonathon King, whom we heard speak at Te Papa. She's been waiting to see Under the Mountain the movie ever since and the two of us went along tonight and really enjoyed ourselves.

The script is smart and funny, the red-headed twins [apologies for not knowing their names] are fantastic together, their cousin and his girlfriend are nice comic relief, Sam Neill does a good turn as a fading fire-maker, the setting [Auckland] is pretty damn cool with the water and the volcanoes... and there is a nice contemporary feel to the movie from the million dollar plus seaside concrete home to Rach reading Elizabeth Knox's The Dreamhunter to the cuz having a poster of The Flight of the Conchords on his wall....

I had some quibbles with the slimy aliens - it felt abit late 70s/early 80s to me. I know Gee wrote them like that, but getting these slimeballs onto the screen three decades on could have led to a facelift [perhaps a digital one? deal to all that dripping? but then again the die-hard fans might have objected.] And I also felt there needed to be a bit more happening than there was - more glimpses of the baddies, more bad guesses, more creeped out kids, more chasing..... Issy, on the other hand, had no quibbles. Oh and we both love that scene when Rachel turns into a great ball of fire and unites with her flaming bro.

If you didn't follow the link above.... Jonathon King's sister is award-winning writer Rachael King who writes on her blog about her love for Under the Mountain, and her brother's success with the movie. And it is a success, I reckon - a great Christmas/New Year/Holiday movie to take the whole family to.

One for sorrow, two for joy: Magpie Hall

Dora says nothing but sinks back into silence, concentrating on distilling the pain of the needles. She is so much more comfortable this time; now she reclines on a chaise longue, with her arm resting on a small table beside it

Henry has allowed McDonald's apprentice to tattoo him, a small picture of a spider on his leg, and so far the boy is making good progress; husband and wife lie side by side and now and again take each other's free hands. Dora feels a current pass between them - the shared experience creates something that sparks and crackles like electricity. McDonald feels it too - she knows he does. He shifts and sighs in his seat, glancing at their interlocked fingers. If he thinks them strange he says nothing - it is not his place after all..... [Magpie Hall]

This is the scene I have stuck in my head on finishing Rachael King's new novel Magpie Hall. It is powerfully evocative of the whole relationship between Dora and Henry - the growing attraction, the need to 'illustrate' their love on their skin; and more than that, on Dora's part, to somehow ink her skin with the desire that is bursting inside her but that she cannot express due to societal strictures. A desire for Henry, for adventure, for an independent life.

It is the late 1800s and Henry has bought and renovated Magpie Hall - a transplanted gothic castle in the Canterbury plains - for his new wife. Their stories are told in the third-person as the novel unfolds, but the main narrator is Henry's unhappy great-great-granddaughter, Rosemary, who has come to stay and write in Magpie Hall, which has been vacated after her loved grandfather died. She has inherited the taxidermy collection begun by Henry and continued by the grandfather, and she has also - it seems - inherited a love of tattoos. There are a number of skeletons in the Magpie Hall cupboards - not least what happened to Dora [was she drowned or murdered by Henry?], and then there's the story of Henry's cabinet of curiosities that went mysteriously astray.

There is another insistent secret that pushes its way into the story via ghostly sightings and some bizarre events, which seem to come straight from the pages of a Bronte novel. And this is no accident, as we know by now that Rosemary is writing a thesis on Victorian gothic novels: Wuthering Heights looms large in reality and by suggestion. Everything simmers away, until suddenly, the novel is turned on its head, and we discover the truths, or what we think are the truths, behind the ghosts and the gossip. At the same time, nothing is necessarily reliable ...

Great stuff. Rachael King spins a good yarn, and one that has a powerful aesthetic. Like her first novel The Sound of Butterflies, she chooses elements that both fascinate and repel and blends them with the morbid, the erotic, the eerie and the exquisitely beautiful. There is the same fascination with collecting and obsession and science, and with the stuff of illustration - how to show and hold and remember those evanescent things: love and beauty?

My favourite things:
*the tattooing - what makes someone want to be inked, and the history and detail behind it - Rachael's descriptions are visceral and exciting
*the taxidermy and its links to the controversial work and logic of Buller: kill to preserve
*the historic story especially the emergence of Dora's character
*the subtle references to the Bronte novels
*the twist in the tale - unreliability in the narration of a story is always compelling, I think, because it most accurately represents the stuff of story-telling

My not so favourite things: 
*I didn't engage with modern day Rosemary or feel much empathy for her - she is too self-conscious for my liking and not quite convincing enough
* I felt the Bronte material fell heavily on the page at times - for example, meeting masculine young 'Sam the farmhand' who hunts rabbits etc made me feel like there was a long (Ha)worthy finger pointing and saying 'He's one of mine!' [Not by name but by nature.]
*I wanted more of Dora.

And here's where you need to understand how unreliable I am at this point in the review - because I know Rachael, I was terribly excited by Magpie Hall so I read it quickly and through a lurgy-induced haze [see previous post]. I don't think I had all my wits about me when the whole novel was turned on its head, and, frankly, I'm still trying to work out all the references and clues - there are some hugely satisfying links between the two stories.

I think I really need to re-read Magpie Hall properly to 'get' it all, and I may have been too hard on Rosemary and young Sam ... So take what you will from this. There's certainly no getting away from the fact that it's been a blast - there's just the sort of uncertainty I like in fiction, and material that changes the way I see things.

'Two for joy' it is, then.

Book cover and web links in previous post.

Magpie Hall Launch must have been Mighty Mighty

I'm guessing the Magpie Hall Launch at Mighty Mighty in Wellington last night was a humdinger. Rachael King doesn't do events by half-measure and she was promising surprises. I couldn't be there because I have the Dreaded Lurgy - a lurking, lung-clogging lethargy [isn't Lurgy the exact right word?] Oh, I was disappointed! Still am. However, I toasted Rachael's book with a bowl of chicken soup, and proceeded to get down and read as much as I could of the reader copy I'd gleaned from the bookshop where I hang out - oops, sorry - work every Friday. I'm about half way through and really enjoying myself. This woman knows how to tell a good yarn [Sound of Butterflies was her first novel - winner of the Best First Book of Prose at the Montanas that year].

On Facebook, I called Magpie Hall NZ Gothic Erotic, and here's why: there's an old manorial house, leering magpies, faces at the window, old silk wedding dresses, hired help who shoot rabbits and are happy to jump in the sack, gorgeous tattoos on men and women, skeletons in the closets, stuffed animals watching every move ... and there are echoes of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights! Spooky, really, after my last post... Meanwhile, I gather Magpie Hall is on sale from tomorrow! Go here to Rachael's brand-new rather lovely website to find out more about it.

Sovereign to my whims: writing character 2

Okay, okay. My few but fabulous blog followers have objected to my nicking Neil Gaiman's tips on writing character in the previous post. I have explained that Gaiman's thoughts are merely a hook to haul in the blog-reader - and there at the end, nicely condensed, are my thoughts on character.

But it seems that's not good enough, or perhaps it's just not enough. I talked in an earlier post about a lecture I gave at Massey University here in Wellington about writing character in fiction, and to illustrate it I showed a photo of a real estate sign in Wellington which said For Lease: Character and pondered on how easy it would be to be able to lease such a thing for a novel or story... [Btw, when I took the pic the little green man on the crossing lights magically lit up like a character ready to lease! He's visiting again in the top corner of this post.]

Anyway, enough rambling. I thought as an offering to blogland, I'd throw up here the handout for my character lecture. It says everything in an orderly and precise fashion with a support comment by a writer after each point. I could try and write this out in lucid prose, but really, I don't have the time right now, and this seems to do the job. Apologies if some of the comments are a bit enigmatic. Feedback welcome!

A LIFE OF THEIR OWN – Writing character in fiction

1. Focus on the character traits you want revealed and when.
Richard Ford: Shed the responsibility towards what your character should do, and make them do what you want them to do.

2. Use a number of ‘blinks’ rather than long steady stares.
Stephen King: I don’t need to give you a pimple by pimple, skirt-by-skirt rundown.

3. Avoid clichés. Challenge your ideas about what a character should be.
David Mitchell: A bank robber shouldn’t be tough, mean and scarred, they should be gay and Welsh. That’s a good fresh bank robber.

4. What you omit about the character is as important as what you show.

5. Let your characters escape their author. Give them dialogue and voice.

6. Layer your details bit by bit through the whole story until the character emerges.

7. Pay attention to how people think and act and feel. Characters should be verifiable and authentic.
Damien Wilkins: Men swear more when women aren’t around.

8. Make your characters dynamic, not static. They need to move and change.
Guy de Maupassant: He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway.
Annie Proulx: Give them work to do. We all work in one way or another.

9. Use situations and other indirect ways of revealing character e.g. describing someone’s room or using an image (a birdlike woman can peck and flap.)

10. Be curious, let your characters surprise you. The more surprising they are the less knowable they are - which makes them more like people you’ve met.
Rachael King: The best piece of writing advice I ever got was to not make readers wonder what will happen next to your characters, but to make them wonder what they will do next.

Grace Paley: Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.

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.

A Palin by any other name...

Okay, this is nothing to do with books but I couldn't resist it. A US blogger has created the Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator. Here's the blurb: 'Sarah Palin has picked out an All-American set of names for her children. There's Track, Trig, Bristol, Willow, and Piper. Ever wonder, what would your name be if Sarah Palin was your mother? Well now you can find out!'


Here's what the name generator told me:

Mary, if you were born to Sarah Palin, your name would be: Tank Dent Palin. Who knows, Tank Dent Palin just might be president one day!

Hmmm - sounds strangely appropriate. My husband Ian comes up with the more exotic sounding Mole Valdez Palin. I also ran a couple of my other blog regulars through just to see ...

Graham, if you were born to Sarah Palin, your name would be: Steam Fangs Palin

Vanda, if you were born to Sarah Palin, your name would be: Strangle Thicket Palin

Rachael, if you were born to Sarah Palin, your name would be (wait for it): Strangle Thicket Palin

Now that's just spooky. Have a go.

And for more interesting insights into the Sarah Palin phenomenon try this blog by an Alaskan 'citizen who is paying attention.' Amongst other things there is this interesting post: Is Palin an Albatross?

A Man Reading Women's Fiction

Author, blogger and self-confessed 'grumpy old woman', Rachael King has been musing on the number of people - especially men - who prefer to read fact to fiction, and how many men are turned off by women novelists.

Enter US writer and house-husband Rob Hardy whom I tripped over on the internet just now. He not only reads women novelists but has been reading a stack of Virago Classics (see author images above) and delighting in what he calls the 'out-of-body experience', of getting inside and empathising with lives different from his own and yet connected by the 'thread of dailiness and domesticity.'

This month, Rob Hardy delivered a paper on this very subject to a fascinating-sounding women's literary study group in Minnesota called the Margaret Evans Huntington Club. Begun in 1876, it has met on Monday afternoons ever since. The club spent four years in the 1890s studying Greek Tragedy! Before you hear more from Mr Hardy, here's a quick excerpt from one of the club's monthly reports (February 1897):

Mrs. Cooper's paper on Iphigenia as the typical Greek maiden was beautifully written and read. She represented Iphigenia as speaking, telling her own story as we learn it from the drama. Each paper was followed by informal discussion of the topics treated.

Rob Hardy begins his paper by talking about how Pippi Longstocking turned him onto reading.

My first clear memory of myself as a reader comes in the middle of that third grade year. The book was Pippi Longstocking. Of course. Pippi was red-headed, freckled, high-spirited, and mischievous. She was also several things that I was not. She was strong, self-confident, and independent. She had no principal, no parents or teachers to tell her what to do. She lived a life of adventure. She was a girl.

After finding his way into other books and lives 'both familiar and different', Hardy became a stay-at-home father and discovered The Way Things Are by E.M. Delafield - a Virago Modern Classic. This opened up a whole raft of woman writers he'd never heard of before. He quotes critic Elaine Showalter:

Showalter observed that the conservatism of the literary canon “reduced and condensed the extraordinary range and diversity of English women novelists to a tiny band of the ‘great’”— specifically, Austen, the Brontës, Eliot and Woolf.

Showalter noted that scholars and ordinary readers had “lost sight of the minor novelists, who were the links in the chain that bound one generation to the next.” Hundreds of women writers had gone out of print or were otherwise waiting to be rediscovered—novelists like Rose Macaulay, Elizabeth Taylor, Antonia White, Barbara Comyns, Sylvia Townsend Warner, E. Arnot Robertson, Elizabeth Jenkins, F.M. Mayor, Kate O’Brien, Rebecca West, and Winifred Holtby.

Hardy goes onto to say that Carmen Callil responded to this challenge by founding Virago Modern Classics in 1978, 'to make women’s voices heard.'

Rob Hardy's paper echoes Lloyd Jones' belief that novels aren't about escape from life but about learning to how to live in this world (this came out in his session at the Christchurch Writers Festival). Hardy would say this element is intensified in novels by women, and he's not the only one:

I am not alone, among male readers, in finding this heightened sense of sympathy and identification at the heart of the appeal of women’s novels. The novelist Jonathan Coe, writing in the Guardian about Dorothy Richardson, praised her novels for making “readers feel that they had actually lived [a] character’s life, in rich, imaginatively continuous detail.”

The novelist and Tory politician Ferdinand Mount put it this way: “[W]hat is indispensable [in a novel] is a certain quality of sympathy with the characters and their dilemmas. Even when raucously exposing his or her character’s absudities, the novelist must convey some fleeting sensation of what it would be like to be them.” Mount finds this quality, this ability to make us imagine another life as it is really lived, more consistently a feature of women’s writing.

And there's more:

For most of the history of the English novel, writing was one of the only occupations open to women, one of the only ways in which they could make their voices heard outside the nursery and the kitchen. That’s part of it—their writing can’t help but express the immense gulf between the expansiveness of their imaginations and the narrowness of the sphere to which they were confined.

But being confined to that sphere, the sphere of domesticity, they couldn’t help looking around and seeing some of its homely beauty. They couldn’t help seeing that this world of messy children and dirty floors, of broken cookers and tight household finances, was also the real world. More real, perhaps, than anything else.

It's another whole discussion as to why writing that is deeply domestic doesn't figure much on the literature geiger counter, but good on Rob Hardy for letting it figure on his, and encouraging others to do the same.

For now lets return to Rachael King whose husband, she says on her blog, is another male reader of novels by women. She says it might be why she married him. Interestingly, he's also doing a Rob Hardy and has spent much of this year as a 'stay-at-home' father while Rachael writes as Ursula Bethell Fellow at Canterbury University. It would be interesting to hear his views on the subject.

that old blog thing

The computer's been out of action this week getting more 'grunt' and a faster modem. Trouble is I'm having to do my emails at Techdomain (the ones fixing the computer) and haven't been able to post as well. It's been an odd week - the family has talked more, I've read more books and made a real dent in the uni marking, the middle son even baked an apple pie last night to give himself something to do. It was delicious, by the way.

So here I am, posting here (quickly) at Techdomain, and Becky who is putting the bits of my computer back together is giving me hard looks. I said I'd be quick and I think over an hour has passed since I started trudging through my emails.

Anyway, here's a quick tip: try Rachael King's blog on.... blogging. She's taking part in a panel on the topic at the Christchurch Writers' Festival which includes ace literary blogger Mark Sarvas. I'll be down there to read from The Blue at the New Writers' gig on Sunday morning (Sept 7) and to chair a session with Lloyd Jones at 4.15 that afternoon straight after Rachael's panel on blogs - in the same room too.

I'm looking forward to meeting some of my South Island readers while I'm down there, and it would be nice to catch up with Rachael, too, and South Island writers like audacious crime writer Vanda Symon (when she writes a post entitled 'Dying for a Salad' you know it's not about a hungry vegetarian..... )

Eating my words

This gorgeous thing is a word cloud of my novel The Blue. The sound you can hear is my words being eaten. Only yesterday I suggested Rachael King's new hobby was a little bizarre, but a brief squizz at Wordle and I was smitten. Within seconds it had eaten the whole manuscript of The Blue and burped up this (click on it for a fuller picture.)

It's like one of those Michele Leggott poems which you make your own way around - anything goes and, strangely, any variation works. In this case, whatever combination and shapes the words make expresses appositely what's in The Blue.

I love
Ed and Friar with said in between butting into a vertical Lilian,
and
air mother see men water,
and
whale moment,
and
boy looking need another still sea.

I could spend hours analysing it (surely it's the shape of an island, or perhaps a whale?) I'm surprised about three things at this early stage: why none of the whaling terms or equipment etc are mentioned e.g. 'harpoon', why 'chicken' isn't there and neither is 'Arapawa Island'. Or maybe they are, I just can't see them yet.

Sorry, Rachael (pardon me while I swallow). I'd love to see the word cloud of The Sound of Butterflies.

A love story

Okay so I stole this from my friend Fifi's blog, but that's what happens in blogland. Anyway, writer Libba Bray has written a love story with the love object being the novel she's writing. It is laugh-out-loud funny and every writer in the midst of that particular love story should read it forthwith.

I'm thinking of people like Rachael King whose relationship with her second novel is very hot and cold at the moment. And after you've read Libba Bray you'll realise why. Rachael's on the rebound. She dumped another work-in-progress for this one. No wonder it's messing with her head. Her latest post is all about word clouds and some bizarre idea of feeding the whole of her first novel into this word-cloud maker ...

And when you've finished with Libba, read Fifi's struggle to write anything at all one especially cold bleak day. It was the evil bus stop that dampened her ardour, the poor darling.

And all of this while I am finally flirting again with my second novel in a haze of post-Montana adrenalin and approval. As Libba puts it: 'My book is so, so clever! Seriously. It was only our third date and it brought me fresh metaphor. '

And how to write in the midst of things

Nicola Barker's writing desk, according to The Guardian's Writers' Rooms series, isn't in a study at all but in the corner of the living room. It's a beautiful wooden piece surrounded by an idiosyncratic collection of things.

She says: 'I got the carpenter who made it to cut a small indentation into the table part, so I could slot right into it. It's made from some old stairs. And it has loads of little cupboards in front full of interesting stuff - letters and rosary beads, faulty discs, stickers and whatnot. As I work, my dog, Watson, insists on positioning himself under my chair. '


And Barker wears industrial ear muffs!


I'm interested in Barker's work space because a) I haven't read but am drawn to her 800-plus page novel Darkmans which is a subversive take on what language is and does (I gather) and debates amongst other things the "absurd idea that language has these gaps in it and that lives can somehow just tumble through", and b) I wrote The Blue in the midst of things on an old kitchen table in the corner of the family room accompanied by a piano, 2 guitars, a stack of old board games, a wooden castle, a noticeboard, a filing cabinet and the dog's bed. All pretty tidy but all very much there.


I partly did that to ensure I wrote only in school hours (and in the middle of the night) and fled back to daily life when the children came in the door. Now they're older there's a little less pressure to do that, so I've turned the upstairs spare room into a 'study' for this second novel, but it's not as appealing (less cosy I suppose, and the office chair is rubbish.)


It becomes more appealing when the kids are all home, the electric guitar is getting a work out, Youtube is bleating hip hop, the Sims are doing their thing on the PS2 and the dog needs a walk.... Then I might just trot up those stairs, pull on my 'Colin' cardigan (it belonged to a late friend and helps me write) and close the door.


Or I might take the dog for a walk.


It would be interesting to hear about other NZ writers' rooms. Rachael King admits to working best when things are higgledy-piggledy.

And see the previous post about Virginia Woolf's solitary writing splendour in the 'writing lodge'. Still sounds like she could have done with those ear muffs.

The Sound of Butterflies

Author Rachael King has an interesting post on her blog about writing a list to help write a novel.

She uses it like notes on a whiteboard to remind herself of the mood she's trying to create. It's attracted some attention from other writers in the blogosphere who have gone off and done the same thing.

(I like the idea that blogs are the equivalent of conversations at the water cooler for people like writers who work alone.)

Actually, Rachael's blog attracts interest from other writers full-stop because it offers up the mind of a curious, intelligent, practical writer and gives generous insights into the business of writing. At the moment she is writing her second novel as Ursula Bethell fellow at Canterbury University. The picture is the cover of the German translation of her first novel The Sound of Butterflies.

Inspired, I sat down and wrote a (preliminary) list for Precarious, my second novel.

concrete bridge
fishing
joy
standing upright
falling down
chicken man
flotsam
weaving
stalker
choral singing
watching
what you see
envy
yearning to be

And here's Rachael's

And the rest of her blog here.

Heroic pen-pushers

Graham 'Bookman' Beattie comments on the post below this one on the quaint way writer Roger Morris appears to be writing a novel by hand. He wonders if there are many other writers who do this now.

Scroll down and take a look at the link - it's a little home-made movie of Morris scribbling in a notebook (remember those?) with an unbudgeable cat on his shoulders. Commenting on Morris' blog, kiwi author Rachael King asks fascinated: 'Do you write longhand first, or are those just notes? Or are you just pretending to write for the camera?'

Morris hasn't replied yet so we are none the wiser. It doesn't look like a trick. He seems quite relaxed about the method of writing but perplexed by the cat.

Responding to Bookman Beattie in the comments, I threw Michael Ondaatje's name into the ring as a pen-pushing author. I also mentioned Richard Ford but said I didn't know for sure. Anyway, a quick google clears it up. A fine article by The Guardian's Phil Hogan in 2006 describes Ford at home, including his writing den. Here's a snippet:

'..... Ford emerges cheerfully from the house in shorts, a plaid shirt, Converse All Star basketball boots ('I love these,' he says. 'I have two pairs') and what look like hand-knitted socks in purple and green. A bird takes off from somewhere high in the pine wood that borders the path. 'That's an osprey,' he says as it flaps out to sea.

We wander down to the boat shed, which is kitted out with a desk, an old armchair, a bed, a kettle, a bookshelf, oars, ropes, buoys, a barrel and a wood-burning stove for the winter months. There's a big wall map, too, of the New Jersey suburbs, where the Frank Bascombe books are set. This is where Ford writes, by hand, on unlined sheets of A4, transferring it, when he can be bothered, to a computer. He shows me the melted table top where during the Herculean editing processes of the past months an upended halogen lamp scorched its way through 350 pages of draft typescript, though miraculously his proof marks in the margin were intact. 'I felt I'd dodged a bullet there,' he says.'

To read the rest go here.

Are there any others out there? I've certainly tried penning it from time to time - and like the way the words flow with less self-editing - but oh I do love a computer.