The delights of Jekyll and Hyde

Here's my kitchen bench in the morning. A book, reading glasses, the Faber diary, a coffee in my favourite Fulmer cup and - just out of shot - a laptop for quick clearing of emails. I like to stand at the bench first thing as I do too much sitting the rest of the day. The sad thing is the rest of the day isn't going to hold the joys of novel-writing as I have too much paid work to do: poems and reviews to mark for the Massey Uni students I teach, an article for an Israeli newspaper about researching The Blue, and finishing off an essay for local lit mag JAAM which has its deadline tomorrow.

I love doing all these things but I love doing them on a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, or the weekend, but unfortunately deadlines - and a lack of focus on my part in the latter part of last week - mean it's got to be today, Monday.

At least I've had time for a little research for the novel today. It's the small book you can see in the photo - a clean 1963 Thomas Nelson edition of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - bought at a local book stall yesterday for a dollar. A dollar! I've never read it, and now I am writing a novel which explores the theme of the double, I keep falling over references to Jekyll and Hyde. Stevenson's story is more about a divided self than a double, really, but in a strange way the double in literature is a divided self: two people who are the same and yet different, who aren't meant to be together by the laws of nature, and whose natures/personalities seep into and change each other.

Many fiction writers keep away from fiction that follows the same themes as their own, some even avoid fiction per se while they are writing. I personally find that whenever I hit a difficulty in my writing, reading a damned good novel gives me clues on how to deal with the problem and move on. Although I am still struggling with reading novels which use the same themes as mine - the seepage between one like thing and another can happen in fiction too often without the author realising - on the other hand, it can provide a richness in terms of reference and serve to push a writer off into other unexplored directions having seen the lie of the land. So I'm hoping for the latter with my one dollar book, but am still deciding if I can go the next step now and read Dostoevsky's The Double and Saramago's The Double.... Okay, so there is such a thing as too close...

Meanwhile, I am loving Stevenson. What fabulous story-telling, dense characterisation and atmosphere, carefully laid suspense. Here's what I've just read on the page over from the one shown in the photo:

[Background: An elderly man has just been murdered by Hyde in the street. A maid witnessed it. Mr. Utterson is a lawyer and the novel's point of view and a letter addressed to him was found on the body of the murder victim.]

This was brought to the lawyer the next morning before he was out of bed; and he had no sooner seen it, and been told the circumstances, than he shot out a solemn lip. "I shall say nothing till I have seen the body," said he; "this may be very serious. Have the kindness to wait while I dress." And with the same grave countenance he hurried through his breakfast and drove to the police station, whither the body had been carried. As soon as he came into the cell, he nodded.

"Yes," said he, "I recognize him. I am sorry to say that this is Sir Danvers Carew."

"Good God, sir," exclaimed the officer, "is it possible?" And the next moment his eye lighted up with professional ambition. "This will make a deal of noise, " he said. "And perhaps you can help us to the man." And he briefly narrated what the maid had seen, and showed the broken stick.

Mr Utterson had already quailed at the name of Hyde; but when the stick was laid before him, he could doubt no longer: broken and battered as it was, he recognized it for one that he had himself presented many years before to Henry Jekyll.

Excerpt from Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by R.L. Stevenson

Feeding the Fish

Apart from feeding the fish - I just love this little widget - I have been feeding my novel. Scrawled words in the A4 moleskine notebook are starting to find their way into the laptop again. See the picometer on the right to see the way it's crept silently upwards after months of languishing.

Of course, the exodus from the moleskine isn't a direct thing. Words have a habit of changing as they move around, and they leave some of their number behind and gather in others I had no mind to include. But the wonderful thing is Precarious is swelling again, pinking under the skin, back to life. And I am deeply excited.

Yesterday, I had an epiphany about the motivation of the main character - I weary of novels and films where the character's motivation is always grounded in their life's experiences - bad and they act bad, good and they act good - you know the drill. In The Blue I let the reader decide whether the way the characters acted was entrenched in their natures or wrenched from them as a result of what befell them. I still don't know myself but I have my suspicions. For Precarious, I wanted something else to shape why my character is a precarious person in terms of her identity - and yesterday I got it.

The idea had been forming after a chance remark made by a customer in the bookshop the other day. One of those comments which spills with story and you long to know more. But the customer had to leave before I could get more out of her. Little did she know she left the story trailing behind her, and I caught the end of it, pinched it off and put it in my pocket.It is simply the most perfect reason for how my character - Nicola - acts. Now I can start laying out the clues. The first one was laid this morning ... a woman comes into the shop (a dress shop in the novel) and ...

I think I'll leave it there.

Oh, and if you haven't worked it out yet, click on your cursor to feed the fish.

This ain't a song for the broken-hearted.

We were on the highway from Quebec City to Ottawa. We'd been driving for hours and for much of the way we'd been in the middle of a blizzard which had whited out everything except the power poles. Black ice had made the Cherokee rental car slide badly but Alastair with his Indiana Jones hat on had wrestled it back each time, and Caroline had kept things calm with that gentle Canadian way she talks about things, and every now and then handed out homemade cookies. Gaby and Issy screamed at the top of their lungs when the car aquaplaned and slept through the rest of it, Nicky snapped away with Caroline's camera (odd shots of dilated nostrils and the whites of eyes), and I just did a lot of talking, I guess, and filming snow-ploughs and glimpses of men fishing through the ice.

After four hours or so, we were nearly on the home stretch - tired, cramped, bored. I slid an unknown CD into the slot and pressed play.... and up it came: the rough-edged listen-to-me sound of Bon Jovi, and a song that is more than a song it's an anthem about being well and truly alive despite life's vicissitudes. And we all sang along, or rather shouted, despite the ice and the under-pressurised wheels of the car, despite the bitter cold, despite the distance travelled. And we played it over and over and over until our voices were hoarse, too, and - adapting a line from Elizabeth Bishop - victory filled up that rented car.

So often we look back and see things differently given what has happened in the meantime. But how can that be? Each one of us experienced the drive from Quebec City differently, there's no doubt, but we all felt - I think - that we were on a mission, brought together because some of us were family and the rest of us cared enough. When Bon Jovi played in the car that day, the last vestiges of whatever it was that separated us were forced out of the window and we became something overlapping and noisy: that open highway, Bon Jovi talks about. We can't ever go back to the trip in mid January 2009 with the blizzard and It's my Life blaring, but each time I play the song, I am inside the car again, feeling the marvellous thing we became; and it seems to me that the experience is independent of us all, and of all we've done since and will continue to do. Complete and unassailable. Alastair, Caroline, Gaby, Issy, Nicky, me and Bon Jovi.

I dedicate the song to Alastair and Caroline for all those reasons.

It's Monday - I must be writing...

...but the son studying music at uni has had his lecture cancelled so he's home all morning swotting for an exam on Monteverdi, and the rain means the son who is a builder's apprentice can't work at the building site so he comes home and flicks on the latest NZ rapper on Youtube and calls me over to have a look, and daughter is home sick from school with a cold and is on the couch nearby reading ... so instead of a quiet house and space to think, I have this:








Actually, the rapper video isn't half bad. And right now, everything is quiet again. The builder has driven the musician to his exam in town and the Jane Blonde fan is in the bath.

Oh but here's the dog, silently but eloquently asking for a walk.

The First Touch of Light

A bitter-sweet review to deliver on Radio NZ's Nine to Noon show this morning. In front of me was Ruth Pettis' highly accomplished novel The First Touch of Light [Penguin 2009]. Ruth Pettis is the pen-name for Dianne Pettis who died last year aged 53. Her first novel Like Small Bones was shortlisted for a Commonwealth Prize and readers who loved it have been waiting for her second novel, and now here it is - also, regrettably, her last.

I met Dianne twice in Wellington four years ago when she was studying fiction and poetry at the International Institute of Modern Letters. She impressed me with her sensitive and poetic approach to writing fiction, and her determination to learn as much as she could about it and to keep writing despite a diagnosis of cancer. I was wrestling with The Blue at the time and made sure I read the perfectly-formed Like Small Bones.

Dianne went back to live in Dunedin shortly after that and, like me, became a book reviewer for the Nine to Noon show. I was stoked when she was slated to review The Blue in 2007 because I knew by then she had a very fine understanding of what made a book tick. It was one of the best reviews I had, and certainly the one delivered with the most passion. The only thing was, Dianne was very sick even then and her voice was terribly strained - almost at a whisper. She'd worried she wouldn't be able to do the review, but she did it, over the phone propped up in bed, straining to get the lovely words out. I am forever grateful to her for that.

So here now: The First Touch of Light. The full review can be heard here.

In brief: It's 1940 and George enlists to go and fight in North Africa and Italy in WWII. First he marries Ellen and this is the small misstep on which a tragedy unfolds. George is traumatised by the war - written in superb detail by Pettis - and doesn't write home. Ellen suffers from this and the four years he's away devastates their relationship. Ten years on Ellen leaves George. Fifty years on, the daughter Beth goes to Italy to see where George spent the war and try to understand him better. The novel is about the terrible tensions in a marriage and inside an ordinary man, and the extraordinary circumstances that caused them. There are three voices: George, Ellen and Beth's, and the reader moves seamlessly between them and the three different times.

[It strikes me that the key themes in The First Touch of Light are shared with The Blue, except the stressor is a different, earlier war. And in fact, there is a growing body of NZ fiction that explores the business of war and its broader impact on people in this country. Patricia Grace's Tu is another one.]

Pettis' writing in the novel is sublime; from the first word you know you are in accomplished hands. Every word is purposeful, polished, translucent. Dianne loved a line in The Blue about words being let loose from their moorings. No wonder, as this is exactly what she does. She writes exquisitely about the quotidian detail of Ellen's and George's lives, and she also writes the big tragic themes of love, death, war, loss and grief with such freshness that you feel strangely consoled. But oh! it's a sad ending. How I wish there'd been a little light, just a little. On the other hand, I think often on the simple and exquisite nature of those final words.

The Ninja in Nazareth

With my novel freshly translated into Hebrew and about to hit the bookshops in Israel, here are some photos of the original NZ-published version of The Blue taken in Israel by my Hebrew editor Hadas. Those who've been following this blog, will know The Blue has travelled far afield in the hands of friends and other readers and been photographed in Greece, England, India, Antarctica and other exotic locales. If you look down the side column of the blog you'll see the links.

Here is Hadas' email explaining to me where her photographs were taken. Note, Yahli is her five-year-old son.

Saturday we went on a trip to the Galilee (my parents live there) ... On our way we went to Nazareth. There is a Jewish holiday now, called Purim – a lot of candies and customs. Yahli was a Ninja fighter. We walked in Nazareth with our small Ninja and looked quite weird. I don't know how religious you are, but we thought you might like a photo of THE BLUE there – outside and inside the Basilica of the Annunciation – you can chose.

Thanks to Hadas and the small and patient Ninja.

The Blue in Hebrew

The Blue is a Hebrew book from yesterday!

Here's what my lovely Hebrew editor Hadas Matas told me by email: 'I'm proud to tell you the book is ready. It is planned to be in the shops in two weeks – before Passover.'

Hadas and I have been emailing each other for two-and-a-half months now discussing phrases like 'touch of the tar brush' and exploring the words for whales in a culture which isn't familiar with whales. Her emails dropped in on me in the hot Wairarapa in January, in the middle of a Canadian winter, in the streets of NYC and Washington, and back again in Wellington. In the process we've become friends.

For those who can read Hebrew, here's the Aggas Press website. I can only look at it and marvel. The translator was Vered Tochterman. The publisher is Sharon Greenberg.

Thanks to everyone at Aggas for the way they've embraced The Blue. Especially Vered for her skills, Hadas for her keen eye and her personal warmth and encouragement, and Sharon for wanting the book and finding me (roll down the post on the student writers and read the comment underneath.).

I am thrilled.

Best Advice for a Writer

Go here....

Digging the Dirt

Okay - this is how it happens for writers. You're walking along beside the beach with your dog, and you see a digger and a dirt gap where your friend's house used to be and you're suddenly terribly sad, even though the day is exquisitely calm and the the sea is barely flopping onto the beach leaving drifts of lime green seaweed; even though as you walk you have in your head a scene in your book where the two women are talking about the properties of rose petals; even though you can hear a piano faintly; even though your dog is ebulliant with the smell of a dog called Moose.

You're sad because Paddy lived here not so long ago, and it was a cosy house filled with books and shells and paintings, and she had pot luck dinner parties for women friends, and grandchildren who made teepees from sticks, and parties with fairy lights in the garden. And you're sad because she had to leave it, and now it's gone completely, and the new owners will build something smart and shiny with lots of glass.

But then out of the corner of this sadness comes a single insistent thought. 'That's a digger,' it says. 'You need to know about diggers.'

There's a digger in the opening scene of my in-progress book Precarious - one that's left like this after a day's work. The problem is, the scoop of my digger is left at head height. I need it to be like that for very good reasons. So far I've only seen diggers and bulldozers with their scoops left on the ground ... like this one. It's starting to bother me. Is it possible to park a digger and have the scoop left in the air. A bulldozer? These are the sorts of things novelists wrestle with.

What pleases me is that I am wrestling again. There's been a house-sized gap in my writing over the end of year/summer holidays period, due to family things and travel things, and all sorts really. Now at last, I have time. I have given myself Monday and Tuesday to write. I am fencing them off (except for a bush walk with a friend on Tuesday morning.) I am telling everyone and making a note of it on the bottom of emails.

Anyway, I decide I need a photo to help me work out what to do with my fictional digger. So I take the dog back home and get the camera, and then walk along again and photograph the real digger so I can stare at it a while. I guess I'm going to have to call David who owns a business called Tite Site and a stack of small diggers. He likes to read novels and I'm sure he won't mind spending time talking me through the niceties of digger parking.

By the time I leave the building site I've almost forgotten what made me stop there in the first place. That's the writer for you - in any tragedy, there's always something useful to cull.

Water falling in the Golan Heights

Waterfall in the Golan Heights. Photo: Sharon Greenberg from Flickr: [some rights reserved]

Yesterday, it seemed everyone I heard from via email, facebook and blogs was talking about the weather. Hadas Matas who is the translation editor for The Blue in Israel is so relaxed after weeks of chasing me up over translation points, PR material etc for the book that she emailed to tell me there was snow on Mount Hermon. The family got up at the crack of dawn one day and drove for hours to see it. They live near Tel Aviv and Mount Hermon (Israel's tallest mountain) is in the Golan Heights in the north. The children were freezing but Hadas says the trip was worth it.

On the way, they saw the waterfall above. Hadas' husband, Sharon, is the photographer and my Israeli publisher. He's posted some beautiful photographs of the area if you press his name and follow the link.

My brother-in-law in Canada was also talking about snow - this time on Facebook. Mind you it's less of a thrill for Alastair because there's snow in his part of the world for five months of the year. He was heading up to Mont Tremblant in Quebec today to ski with his son Nicky, and it was expected to be minus 33 with the wind chill. I bet they have a wonderful time. Although, Alastair is definitely looking forward to spring and not just for the obvious reasons. He lost his car keys on Tremblant when I was visiting in February - they've told him they might turn up.... in spring.

And two friends in Melbourne reported on Facebook that there is rain over there at last. Andy lives outside the city in a rural area that, he says, hasn't seen rain since December 12. Jennifer - the poet - who is similarly rural in outlook, says poetically, 'it's raining like a bastard! Hooray!'

Long may it last.

In Wellington, today it's sunny and hot with a light breeze. Not a cloud in the sky. Just how we like it.

*

P.S. After I wrote this post, I went for a walk with the dog by the sea. The first person I saw was a woman with small twins in a buggy - I called over: 'Lovely day!' To which she replied, 'It's too hot.' I wonder if she'd rather be up Mount Hermon .... Anyway, this is the view from our house and the beach I walked on with Ruby. Pretty nice I think.

Naming Ned

One Sunday in February I went for a walk with my lovely friend, Alexandra, and her son Ned aged five (pictured). It was a sunny day and we walked down from their house into a small and leafy valley. Every now and then, Sandra would pause and point out something she wanted to show me: a kowhai seedling beside a painted stake; a hillside dense with native shrubs; a young rimu with its narrow sloping branches.

From looking at the path, listening to Ned's chatter, talking about something or other, I had to pause. What Sandra was pointing at came into focus and was framed. I saw it when before I hadn't, and what's more I saw it with her eyes. It grew as I watched it. An ordinary section of bush or a shrub or a seedling took shape, beckoned, became meaningful. Was named.

It struck me all of a sudden that this is what a writer does when she writes a story.

Another revelation came when Ned said, 'I'm going the quickest way' and rushed off to take a short-cut just like the six-year-old Billy in The Blue. I stole the phrase from a six-year-old boy who walked with me on Arapawa Island when I was researching the novel five years ago, but haven't heard it since. Ned's spitting out the exact same words in the same circumstances as a child of my invention was one of those meta-fictional moments which disoriented me briefly.

Of course, the truth is small boys the world over (and whatever era) are black and white, and absolute. So macho and yet so deliciously children. It has to be the quickest way and not merely the quicker way. And I am thrilled to think that Billy - after 18 months or so inside the pages of my book - is still acting the way a real boy should.

Come and hear French novelist Olivier Bleys

On Thursday 12 March 5.50-7 pm
Alliance Française
level 3, 78 Victoria Street, Wellington.

Author of more than a dozen historical novels on subjects as diverse as the construction of the Eiffel Tower, a tulip merchant in the Netherlands and the introduction of the piano to Brazil, prizewinning writer Olivier Bleys will discuss his work in English and read extracts from published and unpublished work (in French with English translation by Jean Anderson).

Olivier is French writer-in-residence at Thorndon’s Randell Cottage here in Wellington which I'm involved with - there is a French writer for six months funded by the French Government and a NZ writer for six months funded by Creative NZ. The next writer up is kiwi ex-pat Kirsty Gunn (Rain, Featherstone).

Olivier's currently working on a contemporary novel set in New Zealand about an astronomer, a meteorite and an art exhibition…

All welcome, refreshments provided.
RSVP to 04 472 1272 by 10 March appreciated.

See you there!

famous blue amphibrachs

Note problems with blogging last night meant this post ended abruptly without the famous blue amphibrachs - this has been rectified... scroll on down....

While I was in Canada, Leonard Cohen was here in Wellington. My friend Heather texted me while he was playing to say it was the gig of the year if not the decade. When he was singing Famous Blue Raincoat, she had tears in her eyes. I had tears in my eyes knowing I was missing it. The clip above is from the Bucharest concert last year because it's a pretty clean close-up version.

Did you know that much of FBR is written in amphibrachs? These are metrical feet used in Latin and Greek prosody. An amphibrach consists of a long syllable between two short ones e.g.

It's four in/ the morning,/ the end of/ December
I'm writing/ you now just/ to see if/ you're better
New York/ is cold, but/I like where/ I'm living
There's music/ on Clinton/ Street all through/ the evening

Red Mole on the Front Lawn

One of my favourite non-fiction writers – Martin Edmond – wrote this stunning piece on the way thoughts spin when you return to spinning on the lawn as a child, and this wherein the author goes on a long car ride - listens to a lot of old music and reveals Ezra Pound's reaction to Eleanor Rigby. Keep scrolling down the blog to the next post 'sparked' by driving past an Australian bushfire.

Where this man’s mind goes …. There are times when it’s some of the closest writing to the way I think I’ve ever read.

It’s addictive – I start, mean to skim one piece, and end up reading post after post on this wonderful blog. His collection of essays Waimarino County & other excursions (Auckland University Press, 2007) was short-listed in the Montanas last year. You can read more about this talented former Red Mole, poet, playwright and essayist here.

I had a great night in Hope, by the way. More on that later.

Appearing in Hope

The Blue and I are appearing at the Greenhough Vineyard in Hope tonight as guests of the Friends of Tasman District Libraries. I am very excited as this is my first event in the top of the South Island where The Blue is based. I am looking forward to talking about the book and reading from it (I never tire of reading TB out loud...) but I also want to hear from readers in this part of the world what they thought of it.

And I'll be able to catch up with an old and dear friend who lives close by. So with a bit of sun, it looks a perfect couple of days coming up in Hope.

If you're in the area, come along to: Greenhough Vineyard, Paton Rd, Hope on Thursday 19 February 2009 at 7.30pm. Tickets $20 available from Tasman Libraries. This fundraising event is generously sponsored by Greenhough Vineyard and the wonderful NZ Book Council!

The Blue in Washington

Here's The Blue by the Washington Memorial, held in position by my friend Laura who lives in Washington DC, and who is connected to the writing of the novel because she was my Italian expert. My lovely character Gunner is of Italian descent and utters the odd phrase learnt from his father - alla fine del mondo being one - and Laura was happy to check them for me.

She, her husband Leo and family left Italy thirteen years ago to live in NZ before shooting through to jobs in DC. In the four years they were here, our two families became great friends. Our children were similar ages, Laura and I had our third babies close together, we all loved good espresso coffee and Laura's pasta. And while we finished off bottles of red wine, the children played dress-ups, ran wild in the garden and cooked pancakes wearing roller blades (the children not the pancakes!)

We had Christmasses and birthdays together, my family learnt some Italian, the Italians learnt Kiwi, I learnt to cook a risotto - Laura an apple crumble, the men tramped the Tararuas (sounds all very 1950s really...maybe it was), we buried two placentas and planted a pohutukawa together (nope, that's definitely 1990s, given our whakapapa.)

Salad days.

It was hard when the Italians left NZ. Although they have visited us, we haven't - until now - managed to get over there to visit them. It was so good to see their home in Georgetown and get a feel for life beside the Potomac.

Every now and then people send me a photograph of The Blue in some exotic spot around the world and I put it up here. It started with a friend visiting Greece and blossomed to include Antarctica, India, and Qatar. The links to these photos and their accompanying stories are down the right hand side of my blog.

Anyway, there I was visiting exotic spots in Canada and the US last month with not one but three copies of The Blue in my suitcase (for gifts, random publishers I might meet on the train, exotic photos), and somehow I managed to forget to take any one of them plus camera to all of the key landmarks on route - the frozen St Lawrence, the world's biggest skating rink in Ottawa, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the White House ...

Finally, in DC on our way to the airport I grabbed a minute in front of the Washington Monument. I wanted the White House but there was a road block and lots of traffic, so I had to plump for the Monument instead. Only a day before, the grass around this giant needle had been covered with ice and the hill had looked like something on another planet, in fact it was icy all the way down the Mall to the Capitol; but on the day of the photo the weather was milder, the grass bare and brown.

My daughter and I had walked the Mall two days before when it was crisp and icy, Issy crunching in her chucks while I strode beside her on the asphalt and tried to imagine the two million people who'd stood on its 1.8 kilometre length that month to watch Obama's inauguration.

As we approached the Capitol, bells at a church somewhere started to ring out America the Beautiful and behind us the sunset glowed rosy pink and that pure stretch of ice shone pink too. A few people walked by on their way home from jobs as government officials or staff at museums but mostly there was no-one - just us - the bells tolling, the ice shining, famous monuments standing at ease as if they were any old monuments in any old town. It was surreal.

Speaking of monuments, I was not as taken with the triumphal Neo-Roman monuments as I thought I'd be, and even the Greek-style doric columns of the Lincoln Memorial seemed too much to my eye - too huge for a start, and housing a massive 19-foot figure of Lincoln who is rendered godlike by his size and weight. See the man, it says, triumphant Man.

I prefered the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial nearby. A wedge of polished black granite below the level of the earth, it struck me as eloquent and authentic, and a living monument where people still go to trace their relatives' names, where names are added and changed, where history is still working its way out, and more than anything where Man is not triumphant nor is he the centre of things.

Rather, he is one of many thousands of names, the depth of half a thumb, one beside the other. Small, easily lost, forgotten, found again if lucky. A cross (missing in action) to a diamond (dead). Ordered to march the march by the same country that adores the giant marble statue and the doric column, the super-sized burger, the multi-millionaire child celebrity, the President as super-star.

But perhaps there's a new order now.

Scott from Long Island was watching Issy and me take photos of each other in front of the White House on our first day in DC. Scott is a black man with a gentle, considered way of talking, and he was there to pay tribute to the newest President of the United States. 'For the first time there is someone in the White House who thinks like I do and acts like I do,' he said. 'He looks at home on the basketball court and in the Supreme Court.'

Scott seemed very happy about having an ordinary-sized man in that big white house. We looked through that fence together hoping to catch sight of him jogging or something, but all we saw were squirrels. When Issy and I left, Scott was still standing there looking thoughtful.

Dream Days in the Hotel Existence

I want to talk about happiness and well being, about those rare, unexpected moments when the voice in your head goes silent and you feel at one with the world.

I want to talk about the early June weather, about harmony and blissful repose, about robins and yellow finches and bluebirds darting past the green leaves of trees.

I want to talk about the benefits of sleep, about the pleasures of food and alcohol, about what happens to your mind when you step into the light of the two o'clock sun and feel the warm embrace of air around your body.

I want to talk about Tom and Lucy, about Stanley Chowder and the four days we spent at the Chowder Inn, about the thoughts we thought and the dreams we dreamed on that hilltop in southern Vermont.

I want to remember the cerulean dusks, the langurous, rosy dawns, the bears yelping in the woods at night.

I want to remember it all. If all is too much to ask, then some of it. No, more than some of it. Almost all. Almost all, with blanks reserved for the missing parts.

The beginning of the chapter Dream Days in the Hotel Existence from The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster [Faber, p. 166]

It's not often happiness jumps out of the pages of a novel like this. As poet Bill Manhire says - and he's quoting others I believe - 'happiness writes white'. It is simply not interesting enough to jump from the page; it struggles to its feet and then falls back again helplessly blending with the white of the paper. All too often we skim over hapless happiness to get to the more colourful and various stuff of misery. I like the way Paul Auster unselfconsciously rounds up joy and makes it vivid.

Today, after a very rough start, I had unexpected moments of happiness. There were no robins or bluebirds or mild June weather, but there were yelps of excitement with friends over a wonderful discovery, high-fives with a daughter who's been offered something she's dreamed of for years, a son home for pizza who might have a job at last.

And there was a cerulean dusk. The sky blending with the sea, and people swimming and a ferry docking, and a languorous, liquid light.

It's a perplexing, strange and beautiful place Hotel Existence.

Like Twenty-one Elephants

When I was in New York last month - a wide-eyed first timer - I was told the story of P.T. Barnum walking 21 elephants over the Brooklyn Bridge in 1884. It was a stunt to prove the safety of the audacious new suspension bridge built to link Lower Manhattan to the then City of Brooklyn. Unlike the elephants, I didn't get to cross the bridge - too much to do in Manhattan and too little time with a daughter with stars in her eyes - but I have put it top of my list for next time.

The main reason for crossing the bridge is one of my favourite writers: Paul Auster, whose The Brooklyn Follies I read while away. Park Slope, Brooklyn, is one of those places I think I know well because Auster has served it up to me so brilliantly in novels and screenplays (remember the joys of Smoke?) But a place is never quite as you imagine it to be is it? I thought I knew Manhattan thanks to Woody Allen, Sarah Jessica Parker, Jennifer Aniston, De Lillo, Wharton, James, Auster etc, but having been there now I know I know it better, or rather differently. I can see the geography more clearly for sure (see the casual way I can drop in a phrase like 'Lower Manhattan') and between the lines of a book set in NYC I can now take in with little effort the concentrated-jostling-multi-lingual-cheek-by-jowl-living-in-the-canyons-skyward-thrusting-angst-energy-hubris thing that defines it.

And Park Slope is part of that, right? Well it is and it isn't. The 'isn't' is what I know and don't know. And what I don't know doesn't materially matter, this is fiction after all. When I open the pages of a book set in Brooklyn it will always be in my Brooklyn - as sketchy or as detailed as I want. It would just be nice to underline the writing of an Auster book like Brooklyn Follies with glimpses of the real Brooklyn. The 'oh yes' moments I got reading McGrath's Ghost Town while in Manhattan.

The Brooklyn Follies is a terrific novel. One of those stories which rolls forward with only brief glances backwards - a tale told by the protagonist as if he's reading from the book he's writing (in this case a collection of stories of human folly). It begins 'I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn....' Nathan is 59 and suffering from lung cancer and a life he'd rather forget. In Brooklyn, random events and chance meetings with people that include a slippery bookshop owner, a depressed nephew and a runaway nine-year-old help Nathan forget. And he writes it all down ...

So there it is: the usual Auster meta-fictional story-telling where the character is the author ... to a point... and the reader doesn't always know what is story story and what is real story, and the author directs and sums up what's happening like one of the Brothers Grimm, or - as he puts it - the Ancient Mariner. Nathan is also one of those dudes Auster likes to write about that has had setbacks and for whom random stuff and strange coincidences are a transformation of sorts, there is the democratic cast of characters Auster readers have come to love - each person with a story that's given space and is worth hearing, there are those long conversations which can become speeches and range from banal to philosophical, there's the author's constant playfulness with identity and the stuff of family, and the sudden breakouts from the momentum of the story to lay out out clearly on the page what is good in this corner of the planet. Finally there is his love of place: Brooklyn.

Some of the reviews I've read (spoiler alert on the linked review - last para gives the end away) think Auster is taking the easy route with this his tenth novel and simply ticking the boxes. Well, you see, I read Auster because I like the boxes he ticks. Very much indeed.

Which is why I want to cross the bridge. It's not just about real glimpses of a place I haven't been, it's a fandom thing - seeing where these excellent books have come from, what inspired them. Breathing the same air. My friend, David, tells me there's a bookshop in Park Slope Auster hangs out in, and I might just spot him there. Better start saving.

Not a ghost town

I read Ghost Town - Tales of Manhattan Then and Now by Patrick McGrath in New York City and finished it off in Washington. It is the first fiction in the Bloomsbury series The Writer and the City which includes Peter Carey on Sydney and John Banville on Prague. McGrath gives us three short pieces set in different times in the life of NYC.

The first tale is about a woman who spied for George Washington in 1776 when lower Manhattan was destroyed by the British, the second is set in the 19th century and involves a small scandal that descends on a wealthy merchant of Dutch stock and his family at a time of Irish immigration, and the third story is set in the wake of 9/11 and involves a psychiatrist and his patient and a woman who's lost someone in the tragedy.

I heard McGrath read from the book when he was in Wellington for the Writers' Festival and he charmed the audience with his avuncular story-telling. I bought it to read in NYC and enjoyed the stories of an early Manhattan all the more for having walked with my daughter in Battery Park and around the Tribeca area. The story called Ground Zero was a stronger piece for me because I'd been to Ground Zero. It's a strangely unspooky place - a building site now with workers and machinery moving in and out, and down one side, people making their way to the train station and home.

I reached Broadway and headed south toward the site. Across from City Hall the phone company was digging up the street. A sanitation truck went by, its yellow lights blinking, spraying water to keep down the dust. More barriers, the familiar NYPD trestles, painted blue, stencilled, familiar.... Not far from the Brooklyn Bridge I came level with the ruins. all that had once been familiar was strange to me now, and it was not easy to know what I was looking at. Down a side street -was it Fulton, or John? - I saw a high building torn open, its innards sheared off and spilling out, twisted beyond recognition and starkly illuminated by that unearthly blue light...' Ground Zero, Patrick McGrath

There is some great writing but there is something lacking in the three stories. They first two feel to me like compressed novels with an 'and then and then' quality about them. The third story feels richer more complex but still lacks something essential. Issy and I have just spent the day in Universal Studios driving through Jurassic Park and avoiding special effects in Backdraft so the brain isn't up to analysing what that essential thing is right now. Later perhaps.

Anyway, New York is itself a rich and complex place. Overwhelming at times. Exhilarating. And exhausting. But I barely touched the surface, and I'd love to go back for more. I didn't get to Brooklyn where Paul Auster lives and writes and where novels like The Brooklyn Follies are set. I didn't get to really explore Greenwich Village or SoHo although I glimpsed where Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen got their first breaks. I didn't go to the Metropolitan Art Museum or eat in Little Italy or Chinatown. Or stand outside the Chelsea Hotel.

What Issy and I did was wonderful: Central Park, a Broadway Show, Times Square at night, the MoMA. We ate in diners where breakfast was $1.95 (including coffee). We stood on the top of the Rockefeller Centre and saw the top of the Empire State Building. We went downtown to Ground Zero and the Statue of Liberty. We went window-shopping on 5th Avenue and bought some ear muffs from a street vendor. Most of all we watched New Yorkers walk and talk in the dark and gleaming canyons they call home.

Magic.

The Wonder of Alice

I am still in Canada - until tomorrow. And I am still reading the inimitable Canadian author Alice Munro who recently hung up her skates because she'd apparently said all she had to say. Here's a slice from her short story collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage which I bought the other day in an Ottawa bookstore:

'I did not think of the story I would make about Alfrida - not of that in particular - but of the work I wanted to do, which seemed more like grabbing something out of the air than constructing stories, The cries of the crowd came to me like heartbeats, full of sorrows. Lovely formal-sounding waves, with their distant, almost inhuman assent and lamentation.

This was what I wanted, this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be.' Family Furnishings

In the story Family Furnishings, Munro has a character who comes to the point where she knows she wants to write. The description above is what she feels writing is, and being a writer is. It could be my thoughts on the matter.

This is the first time I've read Munro's work in Canada. Suddenly, stories which mention Ottawa or Quebec or the thawing of the snow or a field of corn resonate differently, feel different. Even the voices I'm reading sound different here.

One day they were out in the fields of stubble playing with my father's dog whose name was Mack. That day the sun shone, but did not melt the ice in the furrows. They stomped on the ice and enjoyed the crackle underfoot. Family Furnishings

There was no fence. The cornfield just petered out into the yard. She walked straight ahead into it, onto the narrow path her arms like streamers of oilcloth. She had to remove her hat so they would not knock it off. Each stalk had its cob, like a baby in a shroud. There was a strong, almost sickening smell of vegetable growth, of green starch and hot sap. Floating Bridge

What hasn't changed is the way Munro is able to write the fine filigrees of feeling, and the equally fine shifts in those feelings. The way she makes a feeling an event, an event a place, a place a person, a person a feeling, and on it goes.

It seemed to her this was the first time ever that she had participated in a kiss that was an event in itself. The whole story, all by itself. A tender prologue, an efficient pressure, a wholehearted probing and receiving , a lingering thanks, and a drawing away satisfied. Floating Bridge

Munro's good on kisses. She had a great kiss in her collection Runaway that helped me write a kiss in The Blue. She also knows just when to open something out, to let it breathe and gain weight, and be suddenly bigger than, weightier than the sum of its parts.

What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given. Floating Bridge

And all this because Munro must listen to those distant sounds of 'inhuman assent and lamentation', really listen, and then suddenly - like a insect-eating bird - grab them from the air. Swallow that humming. Make it into words.

One guesses that for the character of the writer in Family Furnishings she listened to a sound already swallowed.

And the minute I heard it, something happened. It was as if a trap had snapped shut, to hold these words in my head. I did not exactly understand what use I would have for them. I only knew how they jolted me and released me, right away, to breathe a different kind of air, available only to myself...

To finish with, here are some photographs from the Rideau Canal today in Ottawa. Minus 34 degrees C with the wind chill and yet there were so many people skating on the ice, all ages and backgrounds (it's free), wrapped up tight, together.

There isn't much noise except the scratch of the skates, the odd snatch of conversation in English and French. But there is that wave of sound Munro talks about - the sound humanity makes at its best one cold Saturday out on a canal.