Guest review by Graeme Fife: YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE MAD TO WORK HERE by Dr Benji Waterhouse

"Waterhouse’s exposé of life on a very fragile front line is to be praised and read." 

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday. His new novel, Memory's Ransom, a compelling wartime story, is published by Conrad Press. 

He gave the little wealth he had

To build a House for Fools and Mad:

And shew’d by one satyric Touch,

No nation wanted it so much.

On the death of Dr Swift, by Jonathan Swift

O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven.

King Lear

The old word for mental hospital was asylum (Latin form of the Greek for ‘refuge, safe haven’) and ‘loonies’ came from lunatics, those deluded people who raked at the moon’s reflection in a pond hoping to dredge up some silver, otherwise ‘moonrakers’. ‘Mentally disturbed’ is more sensitive if not so catchy.

Some time in 1903, a visitor arrived at an asylum in London and asked the official at the front desk if the clock on the wall was right. A man sweeping the floor of the entrance hall intervened: ‘Don’t be daft,’ he said, ‘it wouldn’t be in here if it was right.’ That man was Dan Leno, celebrated music hall comedian and pantomime dame, known as ‘the King’s jester’ who had recently suffered a breakdown and was, temporarily, confined in an institution also known as a ‘bedlam’ that contraction of the Bethlehem named for St Mary near Elephant and Castle, a mental institution which charged visitors a fee to come in to watch the antics of the poor deranged inmates.

A young woman I knew in my teens used to say ‘I’m mad,’ giggling at some unconventional, frivolous, even childish thing she had just done. We may know what she meant but it’s not what she said and madness is no laughing matter. Somehow the apparent absurdity of reviewing a book, even so good a book as this, about mentally unbalanced people is a touch daft but, curiously, when I had been through a particularly stressful period for reasons needless to dilate on, reading this book uplifted me because Waterhouse is honest, compassionate and understanding and (I find) very funny. Not about the patients, no no, but in making jokes at his own expense, his failures and misreadings, and the sheer craziness of the system in which he and many others have to operate, the pressures and the impediments to efficiency, the lack of funds and facilities merely to take care of the very ill and needy.

The very words loony – which he clinically disavows – and concomitant loony bin betray our own reserve and shying away from mental illness and it’s an affliction which should give us all pause, every one of us. For that reason alone, read this book. I resist anyone telling me ‘this is funny’ because tastes differ. However, what Waterhouse does and with singular good humour – who knows how, given what his working life demands of him? -is to lay bare the plight of the many people whose reason fragments leaving them adrift and deluded by crazy ideas and with some difficulty I hold off from mentioning even one; better no spoilers, though some of the predicaments he describes stretch credibility taut to breaking.

No wonder that doctors resort to gallows humour, as do soldiers faced with imminent threat of death. Sometimes patients, too. Consider the poet Christopher Smart’s unwitting humour in the poem Jubilate Deo, possibly written inside Saint Luke’s asylum:

I will now consider my cat Jeffrey.

Waterhouse reins in, reserving his humour as a softer cushion for his continuing anguish, transferred from those he has to treat; the threat – sometimes carried out - of violence, the self-defence training which has to be part of his capabilities.

Even the Old Testament, not an obvious source of material for a stand-up comedian chimes in with the notion, in Proverbs, chapter 17, v 22: ‘A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.’ So there.

Care, consideration, cash…no such thing as a nostrum but these would all help and Waterhouse’s exposé of life on a very fragile front line is to be praised and read. We of sound mind need it and should be thankful. The weird jump-cut cinema of dreams is the most imbalance that most of us have to contend with.

You Don't Have to be Mad to Work Here is published by Penguin.

More of Graeme's choices:

Thebes - the Forgotten City of Ancient Greece by Paul Cartledge

Emperor of Rome - Ruling the Ancient World by Mary Beard

Guest review by Caroline Pitcher: ABSOLUTELY & FOREVER by Rose Tremain

 

"How to capture and lock away this feeling? She would write it as fiction and experience it afresh. Luckily for her readers, this is what Rose Tremain has been doing ever since."

For Caroline Pitcher, writing is like living lots of lives. Mariana and the Merchild, written by Caroline and illustrated by Jackie Morris, is published by Otter-Barry books. Recently Graffeg have brought out new editions of Caroline's Lord of the Forest, illustrated by Jackie Morris and The Winter Dragon, illustrated by Sophy Williams. Now Caroline is dreaming further life stories from her favourite novel, Mine.

Fifteen-year-old Marianne falls for eighteen-year-old Simon with his dark flop of hair, with the kind of love that Simone de Beauvoir says `takes up all thoughts, all instants, it is obsessive, tyrannical.’ Certainly it dominates Marianne’s life `absolutely & forever.’

I have read many moving, lyrical and beautiful novels by Rose Tremain and loved them all, especially The Road Home, Music and Silence, Sacred Country, The Colour, and Merivel (which has possibly the filthiest scene I’ve read in any novel.) She writes about different times, settings and characters, usually at a good length. This is where Absolutely & Forever is different. It is short. On holiday, how would I cope, without one of her beautifully written worlds waiting for me for more than one day?

Well, Absolutely & Forever is a mesmerising coming-of-age story that stayed in my thoughts for the remainder of the stay, and beyond. It is set among the upper-middle classes `when England was still known as England and not as the You Kay.’ Disgrace afflicts families who fear losing their apparent status. Marianne sounds isolated, with little connection with Mummy (Lavender) or Daddy. Daddy’s face quite puce and stupid-looking from the gin and Mummy complaining that the lumpy grass hurt her ankles. Her boarding school was no retreat. Each morning a thermometer, tasting of disgusting Dettol, was shoved into your mouth by one of the three matrons. The girls sniff yesterday’s knickers before putting them on. Her friend says that parents hate their children because they know that they’re the past and we’re the future.

Marianne’s self-esteem is low, yet her narrative voice is ironic and witty. I had much sympathy for her and enjoyed the spot-on timely settings, of the King’s Road, brimful of creatures in tiny little slanty boxes for skirts and lone guys like gazelles in velvet trews and snakeskin boots. Marianne never quite fits in, despite eating a lot of spaghetti Milanese, getting fat and acne-ridden, drinking red wine and sleeping with well-known photographer Julius Templeman, who humiliates her, saying, `I never told you before, Marianne, but you are actually a lousy fuck.’

Her focussed friend Pet, too blunt and Scottish for Marianne’s parents, is at the brand-new University of Essex in a high grey tower, taking a course which is a `Study of Everything.’ I enjoyed these scenes, especially as I studied at the new University of Warwick a while later. Does this count as historical fiction?

There are excellent characters, such as freckled orange-haired Hugo Forster-Pellisier, his parents Jocelyn and Felicity, as I remembered I had to call them, in their Station Wagon. Hugo is funny and kind and Marianne likes his comforting todger, but she still dreams of Simon. She sees the future as `a life of boredom and shame.’

We read vivid accounts of Paris, a department store in Newbury, a wedding, working as an agony aunt on a magazine, horses, and the beginnings of a writer’s life. No more from me now, except to say that secrets affect the story in a big way. Perhaps nowadays these secrets would be less kept, not hidden, especially between the generations.

Let’s hope so.

Marianne does come to realise, however, that she loves the English countryside with oak trees and hedgerows and narrow English lanes threading towards hills and tumps.

Absolutely & Forever is both amusing and piercing as Marianne tries to find herself in spite of everything, with little encouragement from those around her. "Daddy’s glittery eye blinked and his head jerked upward and he said, Nobody should put their hopes in stories, Mops." It’s not all gloom. When Marianne pauses in reading her story to her mother, Mummy was staring at me. `Go on,’ she said.

Some years before this novel, Rose Tremain published a memoir Rosie – Scenes from a vanished life. It is dedicated to `Nan’ (who showed Rose her how to love) and Rose’s beloved grandchildren. Rose writes of her mother, Jane had no schooling in love…This was the tragedy of her existence. We crept away to Nan’s comforting lair.

When she is ten, Rose loses her father, her home and welcoming school to a cold boarding school in Hertfordshire. Like Marianne, she feels stifled and yet finds her way out. She longs to be destined to be something, and fortunately has a memorable moment, a summertime epiphany when she was thirteen or fourteen, a profound feeling of wonder, a fleeting sense of the marvellous, which in its intensity, was almost a visionary experience. It slips away, leaving desolation. How to capture and lock away this feeling?

She would write it as fiction and experience it afresh.

Luckily for her readers, this is what Rose Tremain has been doing ever since.

Absolutely & Forever is published by Vintage.  

Advent Books part 3 - and that's a wrap! Festive greetings to all our followers!

 

The final days of Advent bring us more great recommendations. Christmas greetings to all our contributors and followers!

Which have you read? Please tell us in the comments!

Reviewed by Cindy Jefferies: "In 2012, Hassan Akkad was a refugee from Syria, where he had been imprisoned and tortured for protesting against the regime. His story, including the perilous journey across Europe in 2015, as borders began to close, was told in the BBC series Exodus, our journey to Europe, some of which he filmed himself. The programmes won a BAFTA for Best Factual Series in 2017, by which time he had settled in London, spending a while with a family who hosted refugees through the charity Refugees At Home ... His excellent English meant that he was able to travel around the country, speaking about his experiences. Now he has put all this down, and more, in this challenging and moving book. It is a story that needed to be told."

Reviewed by Jane Rogers: "The book started life as four lectures presented at the University of Chicago, and it retains the lean essay structure, with each part pursuing a specific line of argument as to why humanity has failed to engage with the climate emergency. He calls that inability ‘the great derangement’. Why do we continue to live as if the earth’s resources are infinite? Why do we burn coal, drive petrol cars, take flights, drill for oil, heat our homes with gas and destroy trees across the world, from the Brazilian rainforest to the ancient English woodlands being felled for HS2? We know these activities will cause catastrophe for our grandchildren. What is wrong with us?"

Reviewed by Simon Mason: "Temple’s love of language is evident in the urgent, evocative writing which strips away inessentials. What’s left are shrewd, concentrated descriptions (‘wicked-eyed gulls’, ‘the beach tightly muscled’) and bursts of dialogue which capture the sounds, moods and evasions of taciturn Australian men who live in danger."Story-lines, as likely to be personal as investigative, spiral outwards and continue to proliferate even at the end. Though its virtues are literary, its plot grips like a thriller. Its immediate focus is crime but its deeper enquiry is into human nature. It asks Who are we now, and by what appalling path did we get here?"

Reviewed by Philip Womack: "One of the worries many authors have about the increasing professionalisation of the writing life - creative writing courses, residencies, prizes, university posts and so forth - is that everything will shape into a corporate blandness. Writers are becoming a kind of bureaucrat, efficient administrators, reliable colleagues to the Academy. Workshops hone away rough edges and controversial ideas in prose and poetry; large publishers, worried about reputational consequences, discourage eccentricity.

Plug is a delicious, delirious antidote to all that. There is something impish about him, a kind of naughty nature spirit thrust into the world of the mundane. His optimism in the face of disaster is a tonic."

Reviewed by Celia Rees: In recollection, it seems a much longer novel, so much is contained within it and much of that actually goes on within the reader’s own head. The elliptical style, the sudden changes, the refusal to provide any easy explanations mark it as a true Young Adult novel defined, not by content, but by narrative sophistication. There is nothing easy about it but it is utterly compelling. Challenging in the true sense, it makes demands on the reader and demands to be read and read again.

Reviewed by Sara Collins: What really sets Goon Squad apart for me is the shape-shifting quality of its prose. From powerfully lyrical (Egan describes Sasha’s urge to pilfer an unattended wallet as feeling herself “contract around the object in a single yawn of appetite”) to character conjuring (“I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery”) to sucker punching (“Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?").

Reviewed by Hazel Gaynor: "Part murder-mystery, part publishing industry satire, Yellowface is a clever, dark, witty, provocative story that I devoured in a couple of days. I’m a very slow reader so this is a very good sign.

Through her two brilliant protagonists, Athena Liu and June Hayward, Kuang not only navigates the moral conundrum of plagiarism, but also addresses complex issues of toxic friendships, cancel culture, and the highly topical question of cultural appropriation that has been raised many times in the publishing industry in recent years."

 

Reviewed by Jane Rogers: "Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, and owns Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore. Elements of the novel are clearly rooted in this biography, since most of the action takes place in a similar Minneapolis bookstore, which specialises in books by and about indigenous people. Tookie is a one off; tough, funny, sarcastic, prickly, thoroughly off the rails (in her early life, at least), and convinced she is unlovable ..."

Reviewed by Paula Knight: "Despite being left with no illusions as to the potential challenges of life in a remote and wild location, I still found myself searching Orkney house prices on the internet for a few weeks after reading The Outrun. The book confirmed a distinct notion that it’s as plausible to suffer loneliness living in close proximity to millions of human beings as it is on a far-flung island with mainly wildlife for company. The latter seems more palatable to me."

And finally: our joint tribute to the much-loved, much-missed Helen Dunmore. Celia: "Helen Dunmore was one of those writers who could do everything, seemingly effortlessly. As well as her prize-winning adult fiction, she wrote for children and young adults and she wrote poetry. It seems wrong to be writing about her in the past tense. She was the kind of writer you thought would always be there to show the rest of us how it is done ... 

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We hope you've enjoyed revisiting our Advent Books. Follow us for more great recommendations in 2025!

ADVENT BOOKS week 2 - revisiting some of our favourites from the last 8 years

Which have you read? Tell us in the comments!

Advent Books Week 2 brings more of our favourite books and reviews. Several of our regular contributors appear here - huge thanks to them and to everyone who sends us their recommendations. There are certainly some great reads here - which have you read, and what's your view? Tell us in the comments!

 

Reviewed by Rachel Morris: "Beautifully written, moves at pace, surges with a bitter poignancy and is laced with a very particular kind of magical realism. It is also strangely defiant and often very funny ... Gardam’s dialogue is to die for – supple, expressive, often startling. She can turn the direction of a story on a sixpence. (Oh, you think quite suddenly, so that’s where this is going.) She has a transfiguring talent, can flood a scene with an ecstatic strangeness, can turn the ordinary world momentarily into something glorious."

Reviewed by Judith Allnatt: "One of Tremain’s great strengths is that she looks unflinchingly at human darkness whilst still maintaining a feeling of authorial empathy and understanding. As did Trespass, The Road Home and The Gustav Sonata, this novel moved me to tears – it is heartrending, compassionate and brilliant."

Reviewed by Jon Appleton: "You could say the book is about Danny Conroy, a man who knowingly allows himself to become the ‘project’ of two strong-willed, passionate women – first of all Maeve and later his wife Celeste. Who, if anyone, is at fault in such a scenario when things don’t work out? (That’s not much of a spoiler, I promise you) ... It’s perhaps her best book but quite likely only till the next one. She’s that kind of writer." (Tom Lake has followed ... also reviewed by Jon.)

Reviewed by Katherine Langrish: "As I reached the end I realised that the writer with whose work I’m most drawn to compare The Golden Rule is Daphne du Maurier. She too told strong stories with strong characters in strong, often Cornish settings: her books live and are loved. Du Maurier has sometimes been belittled as a Gothic novelist, though why ‘Gothic’ should be regarded as in any way derogatory I do not know: frankly what was good enough for Charlotte and Emily Bronte ought to be good enough for anyone. Richly textured, modern, contemporary, literary, The Golden Rule  treads confidently in their footsteps."

Reviewed by Cindy Jefferies: "So who is the master here? Both men inhabit these pages. Characters, whether real or imagined must dance to the writer’s tune. James was a man of the mind, and Tóibín inhabits that mind to stunning effect. No one can truly know what thoughts inhabit the corners of another’s brain, but Tóibín is impressive at conjuring what might have been there."

Reviewed by Penny Dolan: "I read with a growing sense of solutions slowly arriving and wrongs steadily being gloriously righted. All in all, Lessons in Chemistry was a delight and one that made me feel better and stronger for having read it and met such a heroine, which is surely a good thing in a story, especially these days."

Reviewed by Anne Cassidy: "Maggie O’Farrell weaves such a wonderful story from these scant facts that I ended up feeling that I definitely knew more about Shakespeare than I had at the beginning. I wanted his life to have been like this. But while O’Farrell’s plot is convincing it’s the language she uses that sets her work above the ordinary. Of the tutor’s lesson and his two unwilling students she says, “They look towards him, plants turning to the sun. He smiles at their soft, unformed faces, pale as unrisen dough in the light from the window.” A wonderful book which I have thought about over and over since reading it."

ADVENT BOOKS Week 1: revisiting some of our favourites from the last 8 years

 

 Thank you, as ever, to our many contributors - we couldn't possibly do this without you!

During the lead-up to Christmas, we're posting Advent Books - revisiting some of our favourite reviews and books from more than eight years of Writers Review. These can be found daily on Instagram @WritersReview, Facebook, Twitter @WritersReview1 and we're now on Bluesky too: @writersreview.bsky.social.

Hope you'll enjoy them and find some great new reads or old favourites to enjoy. Here are the choices from the first week. Thank you, as ever, to our many contributors - we couldn't possibly do this without you!

Reviewed by Linda Newbery: - our very first post! "Chevalier's ability to present historical events as if they're unfolding in front of us gives startling impact to the characters' bafflement at the 'monster' fossils Mary finds, seen through the lens of nineteenth-century religious belief..."

Reviewed by Adele Geras: "Although at first sight it’s a very simple story, its construction is enormously intricate and the words are put together with such finesse that you don’t realise what skill has gone into the plotting and how brilliantly each revelation is brought to your attention."

Celia answers questions from Adele and Linda:  "There is a definite magic in that first moment when the ideas begin to swarm together ..."

Reviewed by Nick Manns: "An exhilarating book ... open-minded, big-hearted and generous ... Paul Broks has a light touch and is able to guide us through a complex world."

Reviewed by Marcus Berkmann:   "In my opinion, one of the greatest post-war novels of them all, far ahead of anything else that Kazuo has written and liable (if it so moves you) to stay in your head for months if not years after you have finished it."

Reviewed by Yvonne Coppard: "From the tiny amount of information recorded about Lucrezia (Borgia), O’Farrell creates a novel full of tension and suspense."

Reviewed by Graeme Fife: "Du Maurier weaves a careful web of intrigue, the threads of which she untangles with great dexterity. This is adroitly worked mystery and suspense."

SPECIAL FEATURE: Q&A with Jane Rogers about her new short story collection, FIRE-READY

 

"In fiction you can test things out and examine both sides of a question. I write to explore."

Photograph by Linda Newbery

Jane Rogers has written ten novels, plus radio drama and stories. Her subject matter ranges from the past to the present to the distant future. Prizes include the Arthur C Clarke Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Writers Guild Best Fiction Book Award. Jane’s new collection of short stories, Fire-Ready, was published by Comma Press this November. 

Jane teaches writing at all levels, currently running workshops for MsLexia and mentoring for Gold Dust. Find out more from her website. Here she answers questions from Linda Newbery.

Linda: First, congratulations on publishing your second collection of short stories, following Hitting Trees with Sticks (2012). In between, you’ve written two novels and several radio dramas and adaptations, including Clear Light of Day, a dramatisation of Anita Desai’s novel which was broadcast this summer on BBC Radio 4. What draws you to the short story form?

Jane: Thanks Linda. I think of myself really as a novelist, and I find the short story form extremely challenging. Very occasionally there's an idea which presents itself immediately as a short story (like the title story of Hitting Trees with Sticks), and that is great. But more often, it’s a question of endless revision and cutting and battling to actually locate the story in the mass of ideas and words of a first draft. As a reader, I used to think stories were slightly inferior to novels; then I read Alice Munro, and I realised that a really well-crafted story can contain as much as a novel, if the writer is skilful enough. But it is a different craft from writing a novel. I suppose I have written in lots of different forms; radio, TV, adaptation, novel and short story – I quite like a challenge! At the end of the day, I tend to feel more confident about my novels than my stories.

(By the way, off topic, I know many people now disapprove of Alice Munro so strongly that they have stopped reading her. Yes, it seems she behaved badly in her personal life. But quite frankly, if we stopped reading authors who have behaved badly – well, as King Lear says, Who shall ’scape whipping?)

L: One striking thing about this collection, and of your novels too, is the range of subjects and genres you cover. Here we move from the present to the near and more distant future; some stories could be classed as sci-fi, cli-fi (climate fiction) or even veer towards horror (Clearances) while others are tender explorations of domestic life and relationships, one of which, Treasure, I suspect comes from your own experience with a grandchild. A thread that links them is the struggle of ordinary people to find purpose in life, to make space for themselves, to appreciate everyday pleasures. Some are bound by duty or by the restrictions of lockdown; in more than one, the birth or prospect of a baby offers hope and a glimpse of uncomplicated innocence.

How did this collection come about? I see that several have been published before, while most are new. How did the idea of a new compilation come to you? Fire-Ready is the title story – was that always your choice of title, and does it suggest a unifying theme?

J: It’s a good question, and to begin with I couldn’t really figure out if this was a collection or not. I certainly didn’t sit down to write a collection – the stories have accumulated over years, and I was not able to find many common themes between them. My editor, Ra Page, was helpful here, because he identified four interlinked themes; the climate emergency, activism, and aging and relationships with children. Together we eliminated the weakest stories, and he suggested I write an additional cli-fi story, to even out the balance. So I have spent most of my writing time for the past 4 months working on the opening story, Hope. 

I was surprised when I realised how many are about parents (or a single parent) and children, but then I realised that in fact that is a central theme in several of my novels.

And re the title – I hope it does suggest a unifying theme. The term is actually used in Australian government warnings about bushfires. Farms in the path of fires have to be made ‘fire-ready’, that is to say, with sprinklers on the roof, shutters, reserves of water, an underground spot where important documents can be securely left, and so on. And more generally, characters in some of the other stories are trying to make their homes or lives ‘fire-ready’, in the sense that they know they will be tested.

L: For one of your Writers Review contributions, you chose Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, in which he asks: ‘What is it about climate change that the mention of it should lead to banishment from the preserves of serious fiction?’ In the eight years since his book’s publication, that’s changed, with books such as The Overstory, Orbital and The Deluge featuring on shortlists. But still, fiction that portrays the climate emergency in the context of ordinary present-day lives seems rare. Some of your stories do just that – Fire-Ready, set in Australia, sees Kayla preparing for the very real threat of wildfire, while others look at likely changes to society and adaptations in our behaviour. Climate concerns run through this collection but without dominating – did you feel that the balance between bleakness and hope was important?

J: Like many people, I am haunted by the climate emergency, and the thought of the devastated world we are leaving to our descendants. I set out to write a novel on the topic, soon after reading The Great Derangement. To begin with I read as much future fiction as I could find, and quickly realised that novels which simply focus on a very bleak future are simultaneously depressing and rather preachy. There are a lot; I could give you a list of titles not to read, but that would be cruel! Two which deal with the topic much more imaginatively are Bewilderment by Richard Powers, and The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Both highly recommended. There’s no point in writing doom and gloom, everyone knows it and it doesn’t make anything better. I don’t think I was trying to create a balance between bleakness and hope (though I am glad if that’s the effect!) I think I was trying to examine specific situations through the minds and experiences of my characters. Human beings are wonderfully adaptable, so that even in bleak situations, hope and joy can be found. For example, in Hope, the child Kara who has been evacuated from a no-longer-viable Earth, is thrilled by the sight of distant stars and galaxies in deep space. As individuals, we feel pleasure as well as pain, and good writing describes individual experiences which are universally recognisable.

L: The hope in many of the stories comes through a kind of epiphany, and I love the way you show these – not in any flash-of-light sense but more a kind of quiet acceptance, especially for your older characters. More than one of these is faced with a rearrangement of their life following release from the duty of care to a relative or partner – situations I feel sure will resonate with many readers.

J: Yes, there’s quite a lot about growing older – I guess the topic is on my mind, now I’m in my eighth decade! Again, I’m interested in the pleasure, or relief, of letting things go in older age – as well as the grieving for the past. ‘Letting things go’ is probably the story I am most pleased with, because I was afraid readers might find it quite mad that my protagonist can happily lose himself for hours in sounds from the distant past; but so far the responses have been very positive.

L: There’s humour too, in Weeping Beech and in The DNA of Bats. You must have given a lot of thought to the ordering of the stories?

J: Ha. Indeed. And since I carefully ordered them, they have been re-ordered so many times by my editor that I honestly can’t tell if it works or not. Readers will have to let me know!

L: I want to ask about the final story, The Night Before, without giving too much away. Anyone who’s campaigned (as we both have) with Extinction Rebellion has been told, in connection with roadblocks etc, “I like what you do but not the way you’re going about it”. But what actually does make the kind of difference needed to confront the climate emergency? Your character here, Szandra, is on the brink of doing something most activists would (fortunately) baulk at – but can such an action be justified? She’s questioning herself about that, right up to the abrupt shock of the ending. Can you tell us how this story took shape?

J: It began as a ‘What if?’ What if you were asked to do something which is really dangerous, which will have tragic consequences, in the service of a cause in which you believe passionately? I love the fact that you can explore an idea in a story, test it out, see how far you can go. I have been asked if I agree with or condemn the characters’ plan in that story. And the answer is, neither. That’s not the point. Any more than I agree with or condemn Jessie Lamb’s action, in my novel of that name. The point is to honestly explore an idea, an action, the potential consequences. In fiction you can test things out and examine both sides of a question. I write to explore.

L: More generally, how does a short story idea come to you? Does it arrive in your head complete, as it were – I mean the shape of it, the point? Or do you discover that through writing?

J: It really varies, from story to story. That’s one of the maddening things about writing, isn’t it? It never gets any easier, you have to re-invent the wheel each time. I usually have a sense of what’s at the heart of the story, but how to reach that, or, as you put it, ‘the shape of it’ – that is something I have to work out as I go along.Weeping Beech, for example; my idea was for a tree surgeon who couldn’t bear to fell a beautiful tree. So he was conflicted. Gradually, as I worked on it, the conflict became externalised, and his opponent became, not his own appreciation of the tree, but a retired parks and gardens employee who knows all the old trees in the town. Other characters came in to take sides, and I was pleased (especially with the nosy neighbour!) because the story became funnier.

L. The reader learns to adapt quickly to each new story: learning not only about the characters and their relationships but about where we are in time, how society has changed and how new rules and conventions dominate their lives. You’re adept at conveying these things without overwhelming the reader. Does beginning a short story feel very different from beginning a novel?

J: You have to establish the world of the story very quickly – so yes, that is a difference. In a novel the reader is usually content to be drip-fed information that builds a picture of the novel’s world, and in fact, in a novel, that slow release of information can be part of the suspense. What’s fascinating is how little the reader needs, to understand they are in a different time and place. And that’s something I’ve learned through cutting my stories. For example, in Daytrip to Glastonbury, the opening paragraph describes the coach journey towards Glastonbury along recognisable A roads. But the coach stops at Wells. ‘From Wells the only way was by boat.’ Suddenly the reader is transported to a future where swathes of the country are underwater. No date or backstory is needed.

L. You’ve done a great deal of tuition and mentoring, at Sheffield Hallam and with Mslexia, Faber Academy and Oxford University Department of Continuing Education. What advice do you give to students about writing short stories?

J: Well, I could give you the outline of the five-day short story course I’m going to teach for Faber Academy in the new year . . . But that might be a bit much! I guess the single most important thing is CUT. It is amazing how much you can cut out of a story, and how every cut seems to improve it. All the cliches are true; Get in late, get out early. Cut adverbs. Strip down adjectives. Make every word work. I think short story as a craft is closer to poetry than it is to novel.

L. Finally, what are you working on now?

J: A novel! And it’s only tangentially about the climate emergency.

Thanks for your thoughtful questions, they have really made me focus on the stories and why I wrote them.

Fire-Ready is published by Comma Press.

Read Jane's review of The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh

Guest review by Cathy Cassidy: THE BEE STING by Paul Murray

 

"Raw and messy, sometimes ugly and frightening, sometimes funny, happy, heartwarming and heartbreaking."

Cathy Cassidy is a children's author, writing mainly for the teen and pre-teen market. She has written over 30 books and been published across the world. Before this, she worked as an illustrator, an art teacher, a journalist for legendary teen mag Jackie and an agony aunt. These days, when not reading or writing, she makes bespoke keepsake ragdolls and wanders along the shoreline with her rescue lurcher in tow... Find out more from Cathy's website.

My daughter-in-law, the only person I know who reads more obsessively than I do, challenged me to write something down about every book I read in 2024. Always up for a challenge, I promised I would. I've read new and secondhand books; books from the library and from book exchanges; books given by friends, bought in supermarkets, train stations, charity shops. It's been interesting ... a patchwork of gripping or throwaway thrillers, children's books, music memoir, nature, history, biography. All of that, plus a few genuinely beautiful novels that have left an imprint on my heart.
 
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray is one of those. On the surface, it's the story of a family falling apart in small town Ireland... but it's also innovative, beautifully written and wonderfully nuanced. It hooked me in at once, then went on to push past the boundaries and break all the rules. Do not expect a linear plot, reliable viewpoint or a clearcut ending. Instead, you will get to see inside the heads and the hearts of the characters as scene after scene unfolds, as if written in invisible ink on sheets of tissue paper that pile up, overlap, build the story from many different angles.

At times this all feels like a messy, glorious tangle of threads; whenever the author pulls those threads together, they tangle all over again. Gradually, in spite of this, the story comes into focus and the threads unravel to form a perfectly woven whole. The ending infuriated and broke me ... it made me hope for one thing, then delivered the opposite ... maybe! It stopped short of spelling things out or tying up the loose ends, and I'm grateful for that, for the sliver of hope I could still hang onto.

The Bee Sting made me question what a novel actually is ... how it isn't just the story of the characters, but our own story too. I haven't felt so emotionally connected to a book for a long time. I was enchanted by a make-your-own-rules writing style that felt so authentic, so real, it made me want to throw out every single thing I've ever learned about writing and start again from scratch. The Bee Sting is raw and messy, sometimes ugly and frightening, sometimes funny, happy, heartwarming and heartbreaking. It offers moments of real awe and wonder.

A good book can make you feel that you're on the point of understanding something big, something important and life-changing ... about yourself or about humanity. The Bee Sting did that for me. We read to understand ourselves and others, to live a different life, just for a while, and this novel created a world so achingly real I know I won't ever forget it.

My daughter-in-law said I'd love this book, and as usual, she was right. After reading, I realised Paul Murray was also the author of Skippy Dies, a powerful YA I read ten or twelve years ago ... The Bee Sting is even better. I've loved this reading challenge and the booky dialogue it has opened up... on the recommendations of friends, I've discovered new authors and amazing books, and my to-read pile just keeps growing. The Bee Sting was book 107 ... but I'm not finished yet!

The Bee Sting is published by Penguin.