on her spindle - mairead byrne

Happened upon the BEST prose poems by Mairead Byrne - taut, stimulating, visceral. Oh yes that! Where language pants and you pant too, can't breathe and neither can you ...  

... The man, in his dying throes, is pinned by the surrounding crowd. He feels their hot pressure, their hunger for his life. They are winding it out of him on their spindles....

From State Pathologist by Mairead Byrne.  

The communion of reviewer and reader

I have started reading the latest Rose Tremain to review it for The NZ Listener . It's called Trespass and it's nabbed me in chapter one with evocative language, a compelling character, tension that builds and then screams at you.... But of course, the jury's still out. Terrific beginnings do not a novel make. Nor terrific middles. In my experience of reading novels and manuscripts for review over a decade or so, where most novels fail is the end. They either build to nothing, or fall away rapidly to nothing, or drift like a rudderless boat....

... I doubt Rose Tremain will drift. I have great faith in her. I reviewed her novel, The Colour, for Radio NZ some years back. Set in NZ, after she'd visited here for three weeks for a writers' festival, the novel is an astonishing read about a couple of early settlers attracted to the gold in the rivers. Much was made by some reviewers of the vole that popped up in the protagonist's garden, but it didn't bother me much (we don't have voles in NZ). What was more important to me, was the magic this visiting author had created on my own turf - the marvellous detail that grounded it, the language that allowed it to fly. Here's one image I cannot forget: the settlers' house on the Canterbury Plains with white cotton sheets hung to create rooms.  Billowing cotton rooms. So beautiful but so flimsy, not the stuff of a settled life.

I have developed some of my own rules of reviewing over the years, not least that a reviewer shouldn't approach a book on a personal mission (or a mission from God for that matter) - whether I like it or not is not really the issue. Will readers like it - not all readers (that's impossible) but are there readers who will like this book? Why? And in putting up a hand to review it, is the reviewer likely to be one of those readers? Ideally, yes.

Sometimes on radio, I'll blurt out, 'I loved this book'. But I try not to, I really do.

It's also good practice, I think, to throw in at least one solid quote from the book in any review. This way readers can hear the voice of the writer directly and judge the book for themselves. For radio reviews, I like to try and read aloud an extract, if possible given time constraints. I also believe it's important to research the author and the book - where does it stand in the writer's oeuvre, what is s/he trying to do in this latest outing?

Oh there's more, but it's late, and Melodie's screams are drawing me back to Trespass. One thing occurs to me, though, I realise I am talking here about the reviews and manuscript reports I do for money. My blog reviews are clearly more an act of love with a distant tang of 'personal mission' about them. For a start, I tend only to put up positive reviews on here. Right or wrong? Hmmm, food for thought.

Anyway, here - quoted in the New Yorker - are John Updike's tips on reviewing. It's good to see we are 'on the same page'. Not that it's necessarily the only way to go ... but it seems to me reviewers, in this country anyway, too often swim around in their own fish bowls, catching glimpses of themselves in the glass - and this kind of statement, accept it or reject it, can at least provoke discussion and hopefully improve the job we do.

Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never...try to put the author “in his place,” making of him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end. 

[from Updike's “Picked-Up Pieces” 1975)

The First 12 Years are the Worst

Below is the inimitable Anne Enright on her ten rules for writing fiction, courtesy of The Guardian . She and I shared the same hotel at the Auckland Writers and Readers Week. I ran into her at the front door, and we talked a little. She's very spiky and funny on stage and her Booker book The Gathering is spiky and dark on the page. Her descriptive powers are heavenly. So here she is, predictably spiky and honest about writing ... and in the same article you'll also find  Atwood, Gaiman, Ford, Franzen and others.  


Anne Enright's Ten Rules for Writing Fiction

1 The first 12 years are the worst.

2 The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.

3 Only bad writers think that their work is really good.

4 Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.

5 Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.

6 Try to be accurate about stuff.

7 Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you ­finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.

8 You can also do all that with whiskey.

9 Have fun.

10 Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not ­counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.

Just slippery or down-right nasty? The unreliable narrator.

A fantastic article in The Guardian listing fiction's top ten most unreliable. This is something I explored in The Blue leading to a 'twist' when the 'truth' is revealed - I found laying and re-laying the threads through the loom of the novel and then weaving them together until they became a single, hard carpet of story, hugely satisfying. And when I say 'carpet' I mean one of those enormous, richly-coloured Turkish rugs that are rolled out for you beside a dusty roadside in Capadoccia. I especially liked writing from the point of view of someone who appears to be one thing but is in fact another, and I'm exploring this further in my second novel which is still in the works. I like the slipperiness and how language creates that slipperiness - offering up partial truths and lies as a certain type of reality. I like the way this makes readers trust nothing about what is in front of them, and work to get underneath the carpet pile, to find the warp and the weft. None of my characters are as nasty as the slipperiest of characters in Guardian writer and novelist Henry Sutton's Top Ten Most Unreliable, but who knows, maybe one day.... Thanks again to the indefatigable Bookman Beattie for his link to Henry Sutton. 

Best Heartfelt

How staggeringly hopeful language is. Driving my son to work in the early morning, through the light industrial area, I spied Best Engineering and Heartfelt Furniture. I've driven past them many times before, but this time, with the sun a pale rose and Best Engineering still shut to the world,  it struck me that without Best and without Heartfelt what would those businesses be? Don't those words reach out to grasp your elbow, don't they look you wetly in the eyes? Aren't they the receptacles of dreams, the stuff of fairytales? (Is that Pinocchio I hear in there?)

On the other hand, perhaps Mr Best owns the engineering firm and never thought twice about calling it what he did; even so, there's still surely something marvellously hopeful about Best Engineering. It's like pinning your flag to the mast, naming a son. And if there was (is) a Mr Best, he must have smiled to himself when the sign was hoisted over the roller door. You can't deny the felicitousness of the surname - the blessing it gives.

On a bit further, and there's that property on the corner where the gangs used to live, or at the very least they lived in the property behind it. It was hard to tell. I do remember a black flag and, I don't think I'm imagining it, barbed wire. But here it is now, all cleaned up, and on the high fence there's a real estate sign the height of a large child with red letters that cry out: 'Location, Location, Location.'

Language is largely about hope, surely, and about wishes and dreams and stories and what we want things to be. Otherwise we'd just have pointed.

Mary Poppins and Lawrence Durrell and the fine art of sorting

There are days like this when the wind blows a certain way and you expect to see a woman with bright beetle eyes and an umbrella sailing calmly towards your front door. Everything seems skewed, up-ended, even.  It could be the wind that's doing it, blowing relentlessly like that. But it could also be all the review books and manuscripts that are packing out my head (not my own, I read other people's manuscripts and write publisher reports).  They're all good reads so far - and if they're not 'good' they're at least, stimulating and edgy - so I'm in that lovely but crowded state where my head is a railway station of characters and ideas, insights and phrases, and it's hard to know where everyone else stops and I begin....

And there are other things too - we have family here from Canada, the lovely people my daughter and I stayed with just over a year ago in an Ottawa winter, and visitors always skew your ordinary everyday life, because they're not in their ordinary everyday lives. You do different things while they're here, and you can't help but take on some of their excitement about ordinary things, and remember when you were the one in that enviable state of travel, which makes you feel a little - to take the title from a terrific new George Clooney movie - 'Up in the Air'. His character never settles and does ordinary things because he's always flying around the country - Mary Poppins-like - on business. Popping in and out of real lives, touching them, only slightly, causing mayhem, flying away. Needless to say, he eventually realises this is not an ideal way to live a life.

There are other reasons too for my Mary Poppins day. My year is starting differently from usual - less paid work 'out there', more stuff here at the new Mac computer, no car because my son trashed it ergo more bike rides and bus rides .... So I'm having to adjust my pace. I have to say the long rides on the bus remind me of the joys of long rides in the London tube aeons ago: people in crumpled suits, stoic, sweaty, anxious, tightly packed, and I'm in one of those boiler suit things I used to wear to work at the radio station in Shoe Lane, and the rich language of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet is spilling from the tatty library book in my hands like melted butter from burnt toast. None of which helps me now, really ....

Anyway, to ground myself in the midst of this up-ended, 'up in the air' feeling - I have dusted the shelves in my house and sorted out a few drawers, and done the same thing to my blog. I've only just discovered blogspot's letting us have pages now - so I've flicked most of the stuff I used to have in the side column into separate pages - reviews for The Blue, my other writing, my own reviews/books I recommend etc. Look there, to the right. All neat and tidy. As satisfying as an orderly drawer.

And now, I will do that thing that never fails to set things back on an even keel. I'll walk the dog. That wind's still doing it's thing, however, so I won't take the brolly. Just - in - case...

Dickinson and the power of the dash

i

In one day, to find Emily Dickinson not once but twice. First, this book which promises to shed light on  the fraught life behind this elusive poet who published two handfuls of poems in her lifetime and left behind 1800 of them unseen and unheard [thanks to blogger Gondal-Girl for directing me to this]. And then I came across two illuminating posts from US poet and teacher, Mark Doty, on the way Dickinson uses dashes and ellipses instead of a host of words...

Because we're reading Dickinson, I've been thinking about the remarkable powers of wrenched or unexpected syntax, and the ways in which meaning is disrupted, complicated, and made multiple by the sheer power of ordering sentences. [Mark Doty]

He's talking about this sort of thing:

Tis this -- invites -- appalls -- endows --

Flits -- glimmers -- proves -- dissolves --

Returns -- suggests -- convicts -- enchants --

Then -- flings in Paradise --

[from Poem 285 by Emily Dickinson]

Go here for more from Doty, and then here  for a subsequent post where he quotes Heather McHugh from her book Broken English:

Where a lesser writer might try to comprehend the world by adding more and more words to his portrait of it, Dickinson allows for it, by framing in opposites or absents, directing us to what is irresoluble or unsaid, Where the addition of a word would subtract even one of the cohabitant readings in a text, she leaves the sense unsteady and the word unadded, What critics sometimes lament as cryptic or obscure in her work proceeds, I think from this characteristic reticence - a luxurious reticence, a reticence which sprouts and branches meaning in many directions, the way more exhaustive (less ambiguous) texts cannnot...

I simply need to read more Dickinson. 

The Lacuna

Isla Pixol, Mexico, 1929

In the beginning were the howlers. They always commenced their bellowing in the first hour of dawn, just as the hem of the sky began to whiten. It would start with just one: his forced, rhythmic groaning, like a saw blade. That aroused others near him, nudging them to bawl along with his monstrous tune. Soon the maroon-throated howls would echo back from other trees, farther down the beach, until the whole jungle filled with roaring trees. As it was in the beginning, so it is every morning of the world.

The boy and his mother believed it was saucer-eyed devils screaming in those trees, fighting over the territorial right to consume human flesh. The first year after moving to Mexico to stay at Enrique’s house, they woke up terrified at every day’s dawn to the howling. Sometimes she ran down the tiled hallway to her son’s bedroom, appearing in the doorway with her hair loose, her feet like iced fish in the bed, pulling the crocheted bedspread tight as a web around the two of them, listening.  [The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, Part 1]

This rich, colourful, clever novel is a door-stopper at 500 pages and an immensely satisfying read. Kingsolver believes that writing is a political act and a marvellous article in The LIstener (Feb 6-12) explores this. She says: 

I've always been interested in fictional terrain that urges people to question some of their most basic assumptions, and I think that's why I get called political. But I think of it as using the craft to its mightiest potential. Fiction is creating a powerful sympathy for the theoretical stranger. That's at the bottom of the civil rights movement. Every war in history is about a success or failure of empathy for a different position. So I think all novelists are political. It's just that some of us own up to it. [NZ Listener Feb 6-12]

Until now, I've thought (been encouraged to think?) of the modern author as a story-teller primarily (only) who does not push a position of any sort, let alone a political one, but stands back and lets the reader explore what is there in front of them. And yet you hope that you have created 'a powerful sympathy for the theoretical stranger', of course you do: that particular stranger in that particular story and by extrapolation others, perhaps the real stranger even? ... A political act? Interesting. 

The Lacuna is the story of an unusual Mexican/'Gringo' boy who works for Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and exiled Bolshevik Leon Trotsky in Mexico as a cook and translator. The boy observes and engages with their colourful, political, intertwined lives and secretly (and not so secretly) writes both a diary and a novel. He then moves north to McCarthyist US where he writes, and experiences - as his previous employers had - vilification at the hands of the media. 

The Listener says Kingsolver wrote the novel as a response to 9/11, when she was vilified herself by the media (which is surely represented by the jungle of howler monkeys at the novel's beginning) following an opinion piece she wrote in the aftermath of the Twin Towers for a San Francisco newspaper. She said she was misquoted. 

It was a terrible time, and I thought the best thing to do would be to use it for something beautiful and useful. So I started writing [The Lacuna] in February 2002 because I had to put it on paper or go crazy. [NZ Listener, Feb 6-12]

I understand the burning need to transform experience into fiction - and am thrilled to think of that act as creating something both 'beautiful and useful'! The Listener article talks of Kingsolver's 'penetrating curiosity', and her sense of joy and fun. All of these pervade The Lacuna and make it both an entertaining and a stimulating read. Oh yes, at times the novel sprawls, and at times it is too - what a friend of mine calls -  'fancy pants' (all those diary entries and letters etc to tell a story rather than straight narrative). But the fact remains that Barbara Kingsolver has written a rich and compelling sprawling, fancy-pants novel. 

The ominous and titillating world of failing sight

Dimming sight can make the world a stranger place. Walking past a restaurant in town, the blackboard seems to say in big chalk letters 'Titilate'. Puzzled, I pause and lean in close - it's only 'open till late'. Walking the dog this morning past the place we call the bus garage, and there in big letters against the misty hillside the sign says: 'Ominous'. Refocus. 'Omnibus'. And I am guessing dimming sight was one of the reasons a friend received a text the other day that said 'hand sexing wit grnnr'. She held it up frowning for me to see, 'Does that say what I think it does?' Turns out the sender uses predictive text, and famously doesn't check it  - so I gave it a try on my phone and we found out this very nice middle-class, middle-aged woman with many children was actually sitting at home 'hand-sewing and ironing'.

Icarus bobbing in the water around Barrett's Rock

Icarus crashing to earth during the Wahine Storm, Theseus as a DOC ranger ...  in an Arts on Sunday interview , Vana Manasiadis talks about throwing Greek gods and heroes into a NZ setting and how she mixed that up with the drama and tragedies of her own family in her compelling and intelligent poetry collection Ithaca Island Bay Leaves . Worth a listen.

crepuscular

I am in thrall to The Cloudspotter's Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney - he has opened my eyes to crepuscular light and cloud streets and cumulus congestus. To noctilucent and lenticularis and mammatus. The clouds in the sky are as eye-catching as they always have been, but they have been elevated in my mind by the words that Pretor-Pinney throws enthusiastically at them.

'Crepuscular' is especially crunchy and satisfying, like eating whole crabs, but 'crepuscular light' itself isn't crunchy or crab-like at all, it's expansive and lucent and uplifting, and is known as 'Jacob's Ladder' to the uninitiated because it verges on the divine.

And on the Cloud Appreciation Society's website (set up by Pretor-Pinney) is another marvellous specimen which is more like the one I saw last night across the harbour. Unfortunately, I didn't have a camera to hand to catch it and send it to Mr Pretor-Pinney to add to his sprawling catalogue of cloud pictures sent in by other cloud appreciators.

Picking 'crepuscular' out of my teeth this morning,  I wondered if it was related to the equally resonant 'crenellated'. I mused on the 'teeth' effect of the light and the castle walls ... but looking it up in the Shorter Oxford, as I eventually had to do, I discovered this:

crepuscular a. M17 [f. next + -AR; cf Fr crepusculaire.] 1 Resembling the twilight of morning or evening; dim, indistinct; not yet fully enlightened. M17.  2 Of or pertaining to twilight. M18.  3 Zool. Appearing or active by evening twlight. E19.

J. L. MOTLEY The state of crepuscular civilization to which they have reached. 

Strange how unsavoury it sounds in the example - the exquisite pillars of light I saw are surely not a cousin of this dim, declining thing. But there you have it: 'crepuscular'. Thanks Gav.

lilian

Lilian is the protagonist in my novel, The Blue, and here is a painting of Lilian done by a young friend of mine, Ariana Ponder. Ari - aged 17 - read The Blue for a Year 12 school assignment last year, and had to create a visual response to the book. She is quick to say she's not an artist [she's doing clothing design at Massey University this year], but I am impressed, and touched, by the result.

I like the strength in Lilian's face, and the stoic, slightly shy way she faces you.  There is also a prettiness about her and a sense of Lilian coming from another time. I love the rich blue of the dress and the way the red scarf suggests the more sensuous side of her nature. In my mind, Lilian's hair is darker and messier than this, and Lilian herself is stronger-boned and more weathered by life on isolated Arapawa Island in 1938 - which is not to say my Lilian is the Lilian. The joy of fiction is that it is a private experience and every reader reads a different story.

I also see Lilian's mouth as less sad - but this reading of her relies on an older reader, I think, someone who can see and understand where Lilian's happiness lies within the pact she's made with herself. [I certainly wouldn't have got it when I was 17 - I know that - I'd have read it as a story of loss and grief....] Or am I kidding myself? I'd be interested to know other readers' responses.

The lower section of the painting shows Lilian's youngest child Billy - 'the one she did her best by'. This speaks volumes about her: one hand is closed almost in a fist, and the other rests only lightly on his shoulder. She is both protective of him and not fully engaged. In the same way, Lilian gazes out and gazes inward at the same time. Can you feel the secrets withheld? 
 
Finally, it strikes me that the whole painting has the formality of a photograph, except that Billy is looking away. This is Lilian. This is the stuff of The Blue.
 
Brilliant.Thanks Ari.

Postscript: Thanks to artist/writer Fifi Colston for photoshopping the portrait so it's a single picture rather than two scanned parts...

They also serve who only sit and type

Janet Frame's posthumous novel Towards Another Summer received a review in The NY Times last year [which I have only just happened across] that dealt to what the reviewer calls the 'tedious and condescending debate' about Frame's mental health. The protagonist, Grace Cleave, feels exquisite social discomfort to the point of disability, and much has been made of the fact that publication of the book was delayed until after Frame's death. Many saw this as the author protecting herself, but the NY Times reviewer, David Gates, believes she was trying to protect others, and condemns a rehabilitation physician in 2007 called Sarah Abrahamson who publically diagnosed Frame as high-functioning autistic.

Poets and novelists, who persist in the obsessive-compulsive pursuit of those “interests” of theirs, may seize on that terrifying passage as further evidence that shrinks want to pathologize genius....

Like every writer worth remembering, Frame exploits — or creates on the page, to be absolutely puristic about it — her peculiar sensibility, her private window into the universal.... A writer’s neurochemistry may matter to physicians, biographers and general-­purpose gossips, but it’s not the reader’s business. Frame’s sad, slyly comic fish-out-of-water story needs neither explanation nor excuse, and Grace’s aloneness isn’t a medical condition — it’s a human one.

Which must warm the cockles of the heart of Frame's niece and guardian of her work, Pamela Gordon, who has always said this. Now is the time, surely, to give Frame full recognition for her genius without hissing behind our hands with the next breath in an attempt to diminish that genius. While I haven't hissed exactly, I did murmur something not exactly dismissive of the Abrahamson theory in a Radio NZ review of Towards Another Summer a couple of years back. I regret that now. Discussion of Frame's life belongs firmly elsewhere.

Reading the NY Times review - especially the extracts from Towards Another Summer - makes me want to read the book all over again. The language is as exquisite as the discomfort Cleave feels. Unmatchable.

Full review here.

Instead of waiting, there is writing.

The truth is, I don’t believe all that much in writing. Starting with my own. Being a writer is pleasant—no, pleasant isn’t the word—it’s an activity that has its share of amusing moments, but I know of other things that are even more amusing, amusing in the same way that literature is for me. Holding up banks, for example. Or directing movies. Or being a gigolo. Or being a child again and playing on a more or less apocalyptic soccer team. Unfortunately, the child grows up, the bank robber is killed, the director runs out of money, the gigolo gets sick and then there’s no other choice but to write. For me, the word writing is the exact opposite of the word waiting. Instead of waiting, there is writing. Well, I’m probably wrong—it’s possible that writing is another form of waiting, of delaying things. I’d like to think otherwise.

Roberto Bolaño, Chilean-born writer ['The Savage Detectives'] in an interview in Bomb Magazine with Carmen Boullosa.

hums from the hammock

Still humming from the hammock and the lovely summer days that are like giant hammocks in the way that just 'hang' there, cupping me: dappled, loose-limbed, a little sleepy, doing that thing - that single thing - I want right then to do, or doing nothing. That's fine too. I am three-quarters into my children's novel - and writing there in that summer place was exhilarating. But more on that later. With the discordant clutter of 'real life' calling, oh yes I am back and only humming like wires do after the wind's blown through, here's a quick rundown on a couple more of my a lovely  'hammock' reads:

I haven't read much Marquez and am entranced by the cacophonous, energetic, lush world he builds.

This week's Listener [16-22 Jan] has a fantastic feature on NZ music that has given me a list of stuff to listen to next time I'm in Real Groovy. I especially liked the Chris Knox article as I got 'Stroke' for Christmas with its covers by Knox's musician friends to raise money for his recovery from the disabling stroke he suffered last year.  It's a great tribute to this musician who is not dissimilar to Marquez in his magnetic [manic?] blend of energy and lushness and cacophony. There are some felicitous pairings enjoyed from the depths of the hammock : Boh Runga with 'Not Given Lightly', Will Oldham with 'My Only Friend', the Finn family as The Pyjama Party with 'It's Love',  and John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats with 'Brave' are some of them.

Last week's Listener was stacked with summer reading by NZ writers such as Kirsty Gunn on the Wellington zig-zag as a metaphor for a life lived away from the place she grew up, and Lloyd Jones on the detective work he did in Berlin on the trail of a much-loved children's story. The full text for these goes up online at the end of this week. Recommended. The latest Listener [23-29 Jan] has illuminating interviews with crime writers PD James and James Ellroy, and Tina Makareti's  award-winning essay, Twitch, which struck me as having a singular and astonishing voice.  All credit to Arts and Books Editor, Guy Somerset, for all this.

Here's another book, I've enjoyed dipping into and plan to read properly one day. It's given me the wonderful word 'crepuscular', told me how Mantegna snuck people and animals into his clouds, and explained how only stratus comes down to meet you. Good to know, since we've been waking to fog every morning this week.

Hmm, speaking of mornings, must get on.

Somebody loves us all - yes, it's true

It’s hammock time again – under an olive tree with its nest of tiny voracious birds, beside a tree with three miniature red pears, within a click of the petanque pitch. It should be quiet here because for the past few days, after the fever of family that Christmas inspires, there’s only been two of us left standing, or lying as the case may be. And oddly, for us, there are no children.

But it is not quiet at all, my husband is chain-sawing branches from his olive trees. He calls it ‘pruning’ although it seems a lot more drastic than that. He pauses at each tree and mutters to himself about which branch is the right one to cut to let in the light, and touches them one by one before deciding. It’s as if he’s asking the tree to dance with him, to lift its arms from its sides and open its tired winter body to the splendid Wairarapa sun.

How supple time is in this place, in this sun. It stretches beside me like a yawning cat. I am writing every day – my children’s novel, which delights me, and my bereft Precarious when I can – and I am reading whatever my hand falls upon, and can be easily propped open on my chest in a hammock.

King of the hammock so far is the deliciously joyful, perceptive and funny Somebody Loves Us All by Damien Wilkins. This is a tour de force by the Wellington author written while basking in the Menton sun as last year’s Katherine Mansfield fellow. His joy at having time to write and being somewhere else is evident in this book. But like most ‘exiled’ writers, his mind fell back to where he came from and Somebody Loves Us All is set slap bang in apartment-living central Wellington with segues into Lower Hutt and Petone, and a trip through the Desert Road.

It’s about Paddy who’s 50 and a speech therapist with a regular newspaper column and one recalcitrant patient - Sam who refuses, for some reason, to speak. Paddy's also happily married and the proud new owner of a bicycle. Enter his ageing mother, who moves in next door and starts – with no knowledge of the language – speaking French.

As usual, Wilkins skewers the social stuff – the ways people are when they graze and grapple with each other, especially families. He always gets the mix of wonder and disgust, vulnerability and bullying, knowing and surprise, humour and sadness, vanity and self-loathing that characterise our relationships, but in his latest novel there is more wonder and humour, more surprise and vulnerability. This time, Wilkins nails the emotional stuff, and his novel is more expansive and more satisfying as a result. Definitely up at the top of my 'best of' list for the year. 

What I treasure most of all reading Somebody Loves Us All are those laugh-out-loud moments - oh don’t we need those in a book! doesn’t comedy trump tragedy every time? These hover especially around the relationship Paddy has with his old mate, Lant, who is divorced and single and a demon on a bike. Their competitive cycling relationship made me howl – the question of who has the most sophisticated cycling gear and who can make it up the Hataitai hill first without being killed. Fabulous.

And then there's the mother. Her story is on the other end of the scale. Deeply and marvellously moving. The ending a triumph.

Ho ho hic

Here's our very own household Santa snapped last year delivering [escaping with?] some useful gifts. He's otherwise known as my husband Ian, and this is how we give our gifts on Xmas Day. Santa sits by the tree and gets wiggly Ned and giggly Grandmas and all the rest of the rellies and gathered friends on his red-clad Warehouse-issue knees, as he hands out whatever the tree elf passes to him [this is often Uncle David in an appropriate hat.]

The littlies love it, and so too do the giggly Grannies. For years my Dad did it and he's got the build and beard of a Santa, but a lean Santa with cotton-wool beard and checked boxers over the Santa pants seems to do the trick, too.

Let's hope Santa brings me a lovely book or two - Auster's Invisible would be nice, and so would Damien Wilkins' Somebody Loves Us All. It's been a great year for books for me. I keep a note of the best ones I've read - for review and for pleasure  - down the side column of this blog with links to posts I've written on this blog or reviews done. But I see I've left a few of the heavy-hitters off, and will have to update it in the New Year. Meanwhile, below is an edited and updated list which becomes a kind of 'best of' list of books published this year. Almost all are what I consider four or five star books, with five stars being the best. Some are books I loved just because they hit the right spot [using the 'search' box above left will help you find posts on some of these.]

I know there are some marvellous books that should be on a 'best of' list that I haven't got to yet, and I hope to read them in the hammock over the holidays - Elizabeth Knox's Angel's Cut and Alison Wong's As the Earth turns Silver are two of those.

First, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all who regularly visit my blog and others who just pop by now and then. And a big thank you to those visitors who also write their own blogs which give me so much to think about and enjoy. My side column has links to those as well. Meanwhile, I will try and blog over the holidays from our rural idyll to the north, and I will be fully back on deck around mid January.

O Audacious Book Best Books 2009 
[in no particular order - and all novels unless otherwise stated]
Singularity by Charlotte Grimshaw [short fiction -Random NZ], The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels [Bloomsbury], The Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan, The 10 PM Question by Kate de Goldi [Longacre], The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton [VUP], The First Touch of Light by Ruth Pettis [Penguin], Corvus, A Life with Birds by Esther Woolfson [Granta], Mirabile Dictu by Michele Leggott [poetry - AUP], Novel about My Wife by Emily Perkins [Bloomsbury], Ithaca Island Bay Leaves - a mythistorima by Vana Manasiadis [poetry - Seraph],  Beside the Dark Pool by Fiona Kidman [memoir - Vintage], Further Convictions Pending: Poems 1999-2008 by Vincent O'Sullivan [poetry - VUP], The Blind Singer by Chris Price [poetry - AUP], JAAM 27 - Wanderings ed. by Ingrid Horrocks [JAAM], Netherland by Joseph O'Neill, Etymology by Bryan Walpert [poetry], The Philosopher and the Wolf by Mark Rowlands [memoir - Granta], Magpie Hall by Rachael King [Vintage], Misconduct by Bridget van der Zijpp [VUP], A House on Fire by Tim Upperton [poetry], Too much Happiness by Alice Munro [short fiction - Knopf], Glory by Fifi Colston [children - Scholastic].

A Late Entry read after Xmas - Somebody Loves Us All by Damien Wilkins [VUP]

Postscript. And before I go, I have rather belatedly discovered the astonishing blogging of Jolisa Gracewood - the award-winning reviewer who blew the whistle on the plagiarism in Ihimaera's Trowenna Sea. Her detailed run-down on what's happened with this book is mind-blowing for the sheer scale of its coverage. Check out the previous post, too. Definitely worth a read if you've been following the Trowenna Sea story. Meanwhile, here's hoping Witi gets some time out over Christmas. Peace and Good Will and all that.

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.

Body Thinking - the real sixth sense

Many - most? - all? - writing tutors will talk about using all five senses to write, because it's in the particulars of sensory experience, which is actually the only way that we can encounter the world, that we persuade readers that everything else we've invented is authentic too. So, next time you're imagining a scene, don't just think of the smell of the Gauloises or the taste of the coconut milk, the rattan of the café chair under your thighs, let alone the colour of the doves wheeling around the belfry or the feathery rattle of their wings. Here comes the lover, or the enemy: how does your body feel the move forwards, the spring up, the knees straightening and the ground newly hard under your feet as you stand, with your hand still pressed onto the table, to steady your heart.

More on the need to include 'body thinking' or proprioception in sensory writing on Emma Darwin's blog This Itch of Writing. My daughter is a dancer and she's just been accepted into a select dance crew following an audition on Saturday [she's only 13, but this crew rehearses after school]. I am fascinated by the way her body so effortlessly embraces and remembers movement, and yet she has trouble remembering mathematical facts or even what month it is.

Jostling

There are days when a bus full of people heading off the motorway down a ridiculous ramp - too narrow, surely, too slight - on its way to the crush of the city, fills me with joy. Joy for the jostle of people, the collective optimism that where they're going they will get to, the precarious nature of living and yet how boldly we cling, the way the bus seems, briefly, to take wing.