Q&A: Celia Rees interviews Mary Hoffman about DAVID: THE UNAUTHORISED AUTOBIOGRAPHY

 

"That’s what I like best, when writing historical fiction, lots of facts to draw on but a great big gap where you can create the story."

Mary Hoffman discusses her newly-reissued novel with Writers Review's Celia Rees.

Celia: David was originally published as YA, then re-published as an adult novel. Did you make any changes in the text to transition from YA to adult and where do you feel its real home lies?

 
Mary: It’s a tricky one. The original edition was published as YA, as you say, but reviewed in the UK press and on radio as an adult novel. My usual co-edition partners in Europe found it a bit too “adult” for their YA lists and I’m not convinced it was then seen by the adult editors and rights people in those publishing houses. We’ll never know. So I thought it should be re-issued with a better cover as as an adult novel. I made only minor changes to the text. I was told at the Bologna Book Fair this year that YA fiction is mainly read by 18-25-year-olds now anyway. So I think it may be that recent category “New Adult."

Celia: You have achieved remarkable success in a long writing career that has seen 90 books published for ages ranging from pre-school to Adult. What would your advice be to someone just starting out?

Mary: It’s 125 now! My first book was published 50 years ago, amazingly. But the publishing scene is so different now I don’t think my experiences would be relevant to someone just starting out. My advice based on what is going on now would be:

• Read widely. There was never a half-decent writer who wasn’t a voracious reader.

• Don’t give up the day job. The average annual earnings for a writer in the UK are £7K and that average is reached by including top sellers.

• Don’t write unless you must.

• Be professional, not a hobbyist, even when it is not your paid job.

• Be prepared to write many drafts.

• Try to get an agent; you will be more likely to be published if you have one.

Celia: You have an unusually wide range from picture books to adult novels. Do you have a favourite age to write for and what is your favourite genre?

Mary: What I like best is when the idea comes bringing its right length and format with it. I know now when an idea is going to be a picture book or a longer work of fiction but that took a while. My role model is the marvellous late New Zealand writer Margaret Mahy, who wrote from picture books to YA - all of the highest quality. I usually have more than one book on the go simultaneously, but whichever one I’m working on at the time is my favourite book and genre.

Celia: Your love of Italy shines through much of your YA and adult fiction. My favourites are your Stravaganza series, set in different Renaissance cities. Would you be tempted to write more of these novels, set in other cities?

Mary: I had outlines for a further six cities, characters and plots, but the publisher didn’t want more than the original six. Each book took nine months to a year to research and write and I needed a publisher’s advance to live on while I wrote them so self-publishing wasn’t an option.

Celia: Your love of Renaissance Florence and your ability to capture the life of the city are most evident in David. What made you want to write about the creation of one of the world’s most famous statues by one of the world’s most renowned artists? Did you ever feel in any way daunted by the task that you had set yourself?

Mary: Two things. I wanted to re-create the feeling of what it was like to see an iconic work of art for the first time. The Mona Lisa features in the book too, while it is being painted! And secondly, we have masses of information about the statue: the contract for it, the minutes of the committee meeting about where it should be placed, how it was moved from Michelangelo’s workshop to the Piazza della Signoria etc. But nothing at all abut the model, not even if there was one. That’s what I like best, when writing historical fiction, lots of facts to draw on but a great big gap where you can create the story.

Celia: Lastly, the inevitable question; would you care to share with us what you are working on now?

Mary: I don’t want to jinx it by revealing too much but I am about two chapters and an epilogue away from the end of the first draft of a historical novel for adults, set in the 14th century. Not Italy this time but England. I am obsessed with the Plantagenets and it is the first in a proposed trilogy. But it is uncommissioned, even though a senior Churchman believes in it so completely he has offered to host the (entirely notional) launch in his building in a certain Cathedral close! We shall see.

Most people of my age have retired but the “r” word is banned in our house. Remember what I advised about needing to write? It's who I am. I can’t imagine a day when I’m not writing, editing, proofreading, publicising or talking about books - oh yes, and reading them.

David: the Unauthorised Autobiography is published by Writers Review Publishing.

Celia's Miss Graham's War is published by Harper Collins - read the Q&A here.

The other two launch titles for Writers Review Publishing are Judith Allnatt's The Poet's Wife and Linda Newbery's The One True Thing.

Q&A: Jane Rogers interviews Linda Newbery about THE ONE TRUE THING

 

"So much depends on the juxtaposition, and what I want the reader to think, wonder, predict or piece together at any one point."

Linda answers questions from our regular contributor Jane Rogers.

Jane: Congratulations, Linda! Re-reading this book (Jane read an earlier draft) transported me back to the beauties of Wildings and filled me with admiration all over again, for your clever plotting and beautiful descriptions of nature. I’m interested in the way you can shift between writing for children, and adult fiction. In your best-known book for young readers, Lob, you conjure a beautifully innocent child’s view of the world, where love of nature and a powerful imagination are the key ingredients. And that book appeals to adult readers too, because we all have a nostalgia for that kind of innocence.

In complete contrast, The One True Thing is a very grown-up novel, in its exploration of a whole range of sexual relationships: Bridget and Anthony’s marriage shifts through passion and intimacy to downright hostility and back, via infidelity, to a benign accommodation with one another; we learn of Meg’s lesbian love affair with Carrie, who dumps her for a man; there are hints of incestuous attraction between two other characters. How conscious are you of your readership, as you are writing? And does a story always present itself clearly to you as either YA or adult?

Linda: The One True Thing was never going to be anything other than an adult novel, and that's true of my work in progress, too. With teenage fiction there have been times when the boundaries (if there are boundaries) have been less clear: for example with Set in Stone, which I began as a YA novel but for fairly sophisticated readers, and with the hope (which I always have) that it would be enjoyed by adults too. Sometimes I find that a story wants to go in a direction I hadn't planned at the start, and that's what happened with Set in Stone, which caused some controversy when it won the Costa Children's Prize. Some argued - and I'd agree - that it isn't a children's book. But the eligibility for that category does include age groups up to and including YA, so the same could and probably has been said of other winners more suitable for the upper end of young readers. But I won't write any more YA - my focus now is on adult fiction, alternating with stories for young children. 

Jane: The creation of Bridget’s garden is at the heart of the book. Did you have to do a lot of research, or were you already a gardening expert?

Linda: I certainly wouldn't call myself an expert, but I do know quite a lot about gardening and had a clear idea of Bridget's style and approach. I did need to research Chelsea Flower Show garden criteria for the particular year in which two of my characters make a small artisan garden. At the time I was writing the novel, I attended a talk by James Alexander Sinclair, who lives locally and is a Chelsea judge; after the event I emailed him with a few questions, which he very kindly answered, showing me where to find out more.

Jane: Where did the novel spring from? Can you talk us through the inspiration, the starting points? Or maybe I should say, the seeds?  I was fascinated by the precise descriptions of Meg’s work as a stone mason, and I note the book is dedicated to a stone-mason. Can you carve stone? Is this another of your hidden talents?

Linda: I can't exactly remember the starting point - several years ago - but I do seem to have developed a fascination with stone. That started with my late mother's photograph of a caryatid at Copped Hall in Essex, which set me off on The Shell House - Graveney Hall in my novel is based on Copped Hall, inhabited by a fictitious family, but almost destroyed by a devastating fire in 1917, just as the real mansion was. The caryatid, and the sculptor who made it, didn't feature as much as I'd expected, the novel being concerned with a First World War relationship and with a young photographer who discovers the ruins in the present day. So, fairly soon after I'd finished it, I began another novel more focused on stone-carving: Set in Stone. While doing some hands-on research for that one with a local stonemason, Bernard Johnson, I learned to appreciate the beauty of letter-carving, and wanted to have a go. My efforts are very clumsy compared to Bernard's exquisite work (which you can see on his website) but at least I had the tools in my hands and began to understand something of the materials and techniques. I wanted my present-day stone-carver in the new novel to be female, and the character of Meg grew from there, along with how she'd fit around the other characters. 

Jane: What is your writing process? In this novel, Bridget, Meg and Jane all have their own stories and points of view, which are intercut. Did you write them like this, or work on each woman’s story-line separately?

Linda: I seem to have to work like that, moving back and forth in time and/or with intercutting viewpoints - my work in progress has a similar structure, and so do several of my young adult novels (Set in Stone, Sisterland, The Shell House). I don't think I could do it by working on each character individually, because so much depends on the juxtaposition, and what I want the reader to think, wonder, predict or piece together at any one point. When finishing a section from one point of view, I need to leave off for a while, go and do something else, then return (probably next day) with my head in the viewpoint of another character. 

Jane: I hope you won’t mind me saying that I found a lot of you in this novel; yoga, gardening, Extinction Rebellion! 

Linda: Yes, at times while writing I feared that I was using up everything I knew and could write about with authority ... but luckily there are more interests left over (photography, animal activism, an artist I've been intrigued by for many years) for the novel I'm working on now. In The One True Thing, each of the three characters - plus Adam, first appearing as a young artist, who isn't a viewpoint character but is equally important - finds, or tries to find, the activity that gives purpose and meaning to life. Meg is the one who uses the phrase, but it's significant for all of them. 

Jane: I know this novel has been a long time coming to fruition (sorry about the gardening metaphors!) Both you and I, and indeed many other writers, have had trouble finding a publisher for a completed novel – can you tell us the publishing history of this book?

Linda: Sadly, it can be very difficult for an author, even a well-established one, to find a publisher if her or his sales are less than spectacular - and that category includes most of us! Having published only one adult novel before (Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon, in paperback as Missing Rose) I'm not yet established as a writer for adults, and I've heard from you and from other acquaintances that much better-known authors than me are finding it a struggle. The One True Thing was submitted, but isn't what publishers are looking for at present, and even though most praised the writing, characters, etc., they clearly didn't think they could make money from it. Although it's tough being rejected, I never lost the sense that readers would enjoy my novel, so I refused to give up on it. 

I'm grateful to Fiona Mountain, a well-regarded and traditionally published author of historical fiction who I met through a reading group, for telling me how and why she had self-published her latest novel, Keeper of Secrets (which I recommend). When I discussed this possibility with friends Celia Rees and Cindy Jefferies, both of whom have wide experience of the publishing industry, Celia had the brilliant idea of forming an imprint, Writers Review Publishing, linked to this blog. That was a moment of epiphany! I'd felt diffident about publishing and promoting my own book as a solo effort, but being part of an author collaborative would be really rewarding - helping other writers to launch new books or reissue backlist titles that deserve to reach new readers, and all benefitting from joint publicity. It was so liberating to find that everything I needed was available: cover designers, interior layout designers, proofreaders, publicists. It had never occurred to me that I could commision my own audio book, but I've now done that through Audio Factory, choosing my preferred narrator. 

It didn't take long to assemble three of us - Judith Allnatt, Mary Hoffman and myself - to be part of the launch. Both their titles are excellent reissues: Judith's The Poet's Wife tells the story of Patty, the wife of poet John Clare, while Mary's David: the Unauthorised Autobiography imagines the life of the model for Michelangelo's iconic sculpture. Two other well-established writers, Dennis Hamley and Sheena Wilkinson, will publish with us later this year. How we progress will depend on what comes our way - though we already have plans for 2026. Watch this space!

The One True Thing is published by Writers Review Publishing. The cover design is by Owen Gent.

Jane Rogers' short story collection, Fire Ready, is published by Comma Press. Read more here.

The other two launch titles for Writers Review Publishing are Judith Allnatt's The Poet's Wife and Mary Hoffman's David: the Unauthorised Autobiography

Guest review by Linda Sargent: ALL THE BEAUTY IN THE WORLD by Patrick Bringley

 

"A truly life-affirming book full of riches to be savoured ... I loved it."

Linda Sargent is a writer who worked as a publisher’s reader for David Fickling Books for twenty years. She has published short stories and articles and her first novel, Paper Wings, appeared in 2010; she is also the author of Words and Wings, a training guide to creative reminiscence work, available as a free download from her website. Over the past few years, she has been working along with Joe Brady and Leo Marcell, on the graphic novel Tosh's Island, published in October.

In Elizabeth Jennings’ poem, Into the Hour, she writes, “Grief’s surgery is over”, going on to use what may seem a surprising phrase of reaching “the time when grief begins to flower” and how through this process “Grief finds its good way home”. This book on dealing with profound loss, epitomises so many aspects of the poem. When Patrick’s brother, Tom, at twenty-six and just two years older than him, dies it is (unsurprisingly) a shattering blow. In the immediate aftermath, visiting an art gallery with his mother, the author, young and making his way upwards already on the ladder of the New Yorker magazine, experiences a sudden, profound echo of the atmosphere spent during his time by his brother’s hospital bed, “one of speechless mystery, beauty and pain” (p.31). And there he makes a decision to retreat into a calmer and, as it transpires, more healing and sustaining space for himself.

He leaves the New Yorker and gets a job as a Museum Guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Here, over ten years, he meditates on the many works of art held there, from the huge collection of ancient and classical works, paintings, sculptures and treasures from across the world, to more modern pieces, including quilts and furniture. And he takes us, the readers into this world along with him, giving us a chance to explore the pieces in a deeper and more meaningful way. It’s an open way too, he doesn’t preach, he shares. As well as his exploration and linking of art, life and the patterns of grief, the author also forms bonds and friendships in the community of other guards at the Met, a diverse and fascinating group. During this period, Patrick marries and now has two children and these biographical moments are expertly and lightly threaded through. Mostly, it focuses on the importance of having time to reflect, really reflect, on the way art and beauty can provide support during periods of struggle and grief. He manages to bring home the way even the greatest of art can function on this inclusively human level, at one point observing that in the end “all art is local”. He also talks about the “simplicity of stillness” amongst all this art, but adds: “…it is also about the head-down work of living and struggling and growing and creating”. Indeed. A truly life-affirming book full of riches to be savoured and I loved it.

There are illustrations in every chapter by Maya McMahon referencing some of the pieces he mentions. And at the end there is a comprehensive list and links to all the works of art mentioned.

All the Beauty in the World is published by Vintage.

Linda's graphic novel Tosh's Island, with Joe Brady and Leon Marcell, is published by David Fickling Books.

More of Linda's choices:

12 Birds to Save your Life: Nature's Lessons in Happiness, by Charlie Corbett

The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

    

Guest review by Sue Hampton: LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT A MAN I KNEW by Susan Fletcher

 

"Many books today are described as beautifully written but few earn that accolade with such simplicity and poetry." 

Photograph by Mikaela Morgan

Sue Hampton gave up primary school teaching to become a full-time author in 2008, and has now published more than forty titles for adults, including Shutdown and Ravelled and Other Stories, as well as for children and teens. "Having been praised by authors I respect, including Michael Morpurgo, I was booked by about 600 schools to deliver writing workshops, and supported many students with hair loss as an Ambassador for Alopecia UK. I now prioritise climate and peace activism and being a grandma. This is just as well, because schools won't touch me with a criminal record. For the last few years I have donated any author earnings to Extinction Rebellion."

I’ve read it at least five times but still my response to this novel is as passionate as love should be. Experiencing a washday as the story begins, with water rushing on stone and the wind tugging at the line, the reader might feel the weight of a slow, meditative quietness. But it’s deceptively full: a sensual, tender exploration of the ordinary as Jeanne, the warden’s wife at the asylum in Provence, bears through each day’s labour her secret longing and loss. Literature can boast many rite-of-passage storylines built around young protagonists but here the awakening comes late for a mature woman aching for her grown-up sons and long-used to the stone colours of her faded marriage. Used to being unseen, without power or voice. And what awakens her is not the kind of encounter fiction leads us to expect, not that kind of relationship but the symbiosis of art and nature. Because yes, Van Gogh comes to the hospital, but the author knows better than to inhabit his disturbed yet gifted spirit, showing us instead the beauty of a brown moth barely visible on a branch. The writing is in itself painterly, and like the artist’s work stirs the senses while connecting with something profoundly moving about unremarkable humanity.

There is deep sadness here, but the joy is overwhelmingly intense, and this slow, gentle novel delivers masterfully understated drama before the muted but emotional resolution. Jeanne is as ordinary and overlooked as the moth on the branch, yet richly sympathetic and somehow compelling, and as the reader becomes intimate with her, Fletcher gradually creates in her cold husband a man we slowly come to know (as we don’t know Vincent) and understand. With a generous author whose shifts are subtle and whose love embraces flawed reality, the minor characters live too, even when only presented from Jeanne’s perspective. From the starting point of a lesser-known portrait – one of a pair because Van Gogh painted the warden too – Susan Fletcher has opened up the vivid inner life the artist could only suggest, taking us back to the uninhibited girl and sacrificial mother, through the grief and anxiety that seem to her as natural as the weather and as impossible to resist. The Mistral rips through the climax but the work of a troubled painter can also recover and reshape a different kind of landscape between two people.

Reading it for the first time I hoped the author would shun the easy, predictable choices, the corrosively depressing, the sentimental or melodramatic. And she does, with restrained delicacy. There are no misjudgements in arc or tone as she keeps it all as real as Jeanne herself. Many books today are described as beautifully written but few earn that accolade with such simplicity and poetry. I’m a climate protester and it’s been with me in HMP Bronzefield and more than one police cell, where it’s meant a little light and warmth and hope and made a dark world seem worth saving.

Let me tell you about a Man I knew is published by Virago.

Guest review by Penny Dolan: LONG LIVE GREAT BARDFIELD! by Tirzah Garwood

                    

"Tirzah’s unique voice is a large part of the Long Live attraction: she writes in a clear-eyed and personal style, without any idea of intended publication or any need to impress." 

Penny Dolan works as a children’s storyteller and writer. Her last novel for older children, A Boy Called Mouse, was nominated for the Young Quills Historical Fiction Award, and she is currently completing a companion book. She posts on The History Girls, on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure and can be found on Twitter @PennyDolan1.

My choice for Writer’s Review could be called “My Life as the Artist’s Wife” although the author, writing about her experiences during the first half of the 20th Century, would feel far too independent and unsentimental to employ that description herself.

Long Live Great Bardfield! is the autobiography of Tirzah Garwood, the wife of Eric Ravilious (1903 -1942). He is known for his English landscape paintings, which have an airy, dream-like and solitary quality, and for his work as an official War Artist.

I am very fond of his paintings, which is why, in 2015, I visited the Dulwich Gallery’s stunning Ravilious exhibition, where I came across the name Tirzah Garwood. There, among his paintings, and their rare vestigial human figures, were a few small, well-designed woodcuts that definitely rejoiced in people. I saw a collection of small social scenes and domestic interiors, each one sharpened by a strong sense of movement, humour and fun and the name beside them was Tirzah Garwood. I wanted to find out more about him and about her, these contrasting artists.

In 2018, Persephone Press, who specialise in books by early twentieth century women writers, published Tirzah’s memoir as Book No. 119. The manuscript had been prepared after Tirzah’s death in 1951 by her daughter, Anne Ullmann, with the addition of extracts from the letters of family and friends. The title, Long Live Great Bardfield! was Tirzah’s own comment on her life and experiences. 

Long Live arrived soon after the Dulwich exhibition, war anniversaries and a touch of nostalgia had revived interest in Eric Ravilious and in the other young people from the Royal College of Art’s Illustration and Design course. From what I have read, there was an element of class about this particular course at the Royal College of Art. These students were not “fine artists”, expected to teach more art themselves and/or have an income of their own. These students were trained to be useful to publishers, printers, manufacturers and business. They were artists of the then-modern century, whose skills would re-invigorate British design, making their mark, as Ravilious did, in the world of decorative ceramics, printing and book design.

After being praised for her drawings at school, Tirzah studied at Eastbourne College of Art. She specialised in woodcuts, illustrations, pattern designs and marbling techniques although gradually, as her memoir shows, her own work gave way to all that was involved in running a home. She was very much involved in Eric’s work and career, recognising the “stunners” that would sell well at exhibitions, recording, packing and posting his work to the London galleries and often influencing his work. One of his most popular images, Train Landscape, was created by Tirzah making a careful collage of two of his paintings.

Tirzah’s unique voice is a large part of the Long Live attraction: she writes in a clear-eyed and personal style, without any idea of intended publication or any need to impress. She started writing her memoir “for her descendants” in 1942, while convalescing after an operation for breast cancer, giving her own account of their slightly unconventional life together.

The memoir moves, in a kindly, almost gossipy style, from mundane circumstances through to painful incidents and partings. For the reader, the experience is rather like listening to an indiscreet and friendly aunt who is never afraid to mention an intriguing or medical matter or to describe another’s appearances in too-observant detail, even though, at times, you may have heard part of this story before.

In her telling, Tirzah makes it clear how differently she and Eric were brought up. Her father was a Colonel in the Royal Engineers; she describes a comfortably respectable middle-class family, living in various homes in Sussex, surrounded by relatives, siblings, pets and plenty of space. Her education came through relatives, personal tutors, private day schools and at a boarding school. By contrast, Ravilious, who taught part-time at Eastbourne College of Art, was “not quite a gentleman” socially. His father was a failed antique shop-owner turned chapel preacher and Eric had attended what was then called the Municipal School. School. Tirzah, in her memoir, is very aware of class differences and snobbish attitudes, including her own responses. Although honest, they are not always comfortable reading. 

Although, after marrying in 1930, Eric and Tirzah enjoyed life as part of the London art scene, with Eric working on paintings for commissions and exhibitions, he was restless, wanting new landscapes to paint. In 1932, along with fellow artists Edward and Charlotte Bawden, they moved to Brick House in Great Bardfield, a village in Essex not far from Saffron Walden, and became part of the artistic community that developed in that area.

In Long Live, Tirzah is telling her grandchildren about the joys, interests and enthusiasms of that part of her life. While Eric and Edward explore the countryside and coast, collecting ideas and inspiration for their work, Tirzah and Charlotte are designing and producing marbled paper and managing their homes. If your interest is in history or in the role of women, Long Live is a brisk reminder of the rural conditions of the nineteen-twenties and thirties. Tirzah, who had grown up with servants, describes a time when, outside towns and cities, buckets of water were still hauled from wells, coal and logs were needed for fires, and how unendingly hard all the care, cooking, laundry and domestic work could be, whether in peace or during war-time.

Tirzah does not hide the fact that, although she and Eric remained fond and supportive of each other, their personal lives were complicated by other relationships. Eric often returned to London or to the Sussex downlands, staying at Furlongs, an isolated farmhouse rented by a friend. Although Tirzah did visit him there, describing it as a happy place, and appearing in his painting of tea on the lawn, her own life is mostly back in Essex.

She recognises that Eric’s priority would always be his art, and is unsentimental about his achievements and failings, and her own. Yet in her memoir, she makes it plain that:

“If we believed that people should be free to love whom they liked, it wasn’t because we were ceasing to be good ourselves but because we realised the truth of the fact that you cannot stop people loving each other.”

Eric and Tirzah still spend time together. She finds happiness in motherhood, describing, in somewhat stark detail, the arrival of their sons James and John, and their move to another home in Castle Hedingham. Eventually, the threat from Germany becomes war. Eric signs up as an official War Artist and is posted to different naval sites and airfields around the country In 1942, as their daughter Anne is born, Eric leaves for Iceland, eager to paint the North Atlantic convoys and the frozen landscape.

Tirzah’s memoir pauses somewhat after her apparent recovery and changes in style, before being completed through her own and others words. Tirzah married Henry Swanzy, a BBC producer, in 1946, took up oil painting and illustration again, and lived a cheerful and contented life until her death in 1951, at the age of 42.

Re-reading Tirzah Garwood’s writing for this review, I found her words and her positive spirit a great antidote to pessimism, while her tales of domestic life in rural Essex have reminded me that a little less heat in my home is not absolute hardship, and that circumstances are worse, elsewhere, for others.

Best of all is Tirzah’s inspiring attitude, and her admirable wish to find the best in everything.

“I want to write my life while I am still happy. If I read an autobiography, I don’t like to think of the author as a poor old doddering person with one foot in the grave. Two months ago I nearly died myself. I’m sorry to have to mention such an unpleasant subject but I must be truthful . . . The convalescence following it I very much enjoyed and it has made it possible for me to write this account of my life which otherwise I should never have had time to do . . . I am so happy sitting here that I find it very difficult to write at all. The smell of the May wafting over the orchard wall from the outside lane is so strong and lovely that I feel it should be doing me good in some way!”

* * * * *

ADDITIONAL RAVILIOUS NEWS:

Foxtrot Films' 2021 film, Eric Ravilious - Drawn to War, written and directed by Margy Kinmonth, was nominated in the documentary category of the Big Screen Awards in November 2022, and was awarded Best Documentary at La Femme International Film Festival in Los Angeles. The film will be shown in selected Picture House Cinemas around the UK over the New Year period and is also available in DVD format.

THE GOLDFINCH by Donna Tartt

 

"Donna Tartt is a simply wonderful writer: I was captivated by her descriptions of art, the deft characterisations of even the most minor characters, the setting of scene, the insights and honesty."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. Best known for fiction for children and young adults, with titles including the Costa Category winner Set in Stone, she has also published one novel for adults, Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon, and is currently working on another. Her latest title, This Book is Cruelty Free: Animals and Us, is a guide to compassionate living for teenagers and adults.

I didn't rush to read The Goldfinch, having given up on Donna Tartt's The Little Friend after reading about a third. Although that's something I rarely do, I was finding it a chore rather than a pleasure; hence my delay in reading this. Now, though, nine years after publication, I've completed it and am full of admiration.

My reading was hybrid: part reading, part listening to the audio version (wonderfully read by David Pittu). At more than 770 pages it's a brick of a book, too heavy to carry on buses and trains, and this tactic made the length seem less daunting, though before long I was absorbed and by the end felt the sense of loss at finishing that great books can leave you with, and a need to return to several episodes for a second reading.  

Aged thirteen, Theo Decker survives an explosion that kills his mother and dominates his life from then on. Minutes before the catastrophe, the pair had been admiring The Goldfinch, a painting by the Dutch artist Carel Fabritius, in a New York gallery. In the confusion that follows, the boy tries to help a dying man and a strange, intense bond is formed between them, one that will dictate the course of the adult Theo's life. This elderly man, Welty, a furniture restorer, asks of Theo two things: to take the goldfinch painting, and to go to his shop with a warning for his colleague. Welty's charge, a girl a little younger than Theo, is also badly injured in the explosion, and the two will form a close attachment.

The painting's totemic significance stays with us to the end, prompting meditations on the meaning of art, the power of communication, and the sense of loss. Fabritius was himself killed in a gunpowder explosion at the age of 32, and The Goldfinch (Het puttertje in Dutch) may have been in his workshop at the time. It's a small trompe l'oeil painting showing a beautiful but pitiable finch chained by one leg to a wall-mounted box: kept as a pet or ornament, suffering, unable to escape. That Fabritius painted it in the year of his death adds poignancy. In real life it's safely in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, but in Tartt's novel the painting is taken by Theo who for various reasons keeps it, the secrecy weighing heavy on him: "How had I ever thought I would keep it hidden? I'd meant to deal with the painting for years, get it back where it belonged, and yet somehow I had kept on and on finding reasons not to. To think of it wrapped and sealed uptown make me feel self-erased, blanked-out, as if burying it away had only increased its power and given it a more vital and terrible form. Somehow, even shrouded and entombed in the storage locker, it had worked itself free and into some fraudulent public narrative, a radiance that glowed in the mind of the world."

Theo's father having deserted the family, Theo is for a while looked after by the wealthy parents of a school acquaintance, later being claimed when his father reappears and takes him to a haphazard life in Las Vegas. Here he meets Boris, a Ukrainian boy used to fending for himself, until circumstances force a return to New York. Home and employment are provided by the kindly, self-contained James Hobart (Hobie), Welty's business partner, who introduces Theo to the techniques of furniture restoration. The love with which Hobie practises his craft is touching: "Hobie lived and wafted like some great sea mammal in his own mild atmosphere, the dark brown of tea-stains and tobacco, where every clock in the house said something different, and time didn't actually correspond to the standard measure but instead meandered along at its own sedate tick-tock, obeying the pace of his antique-crowded back-water ... In blameless quiet, he buried himself in his work, steam-bending veneers or hand-threading table legs with a chisel, and his happy absorption floated up from the workshop and diffused through the house with the warmth of a wood-burning stove in winter ... " We sense that lasting security, and mutual love with Pippa, the damaged girl, could be Theo's future, were it not for his involvement in dubious sale deals and the re-emergence of Boris with a revelation that leads him into serious crime. 

It's partly a coming-of-age story, partly a crime thriller, and I admit that the convolutions of the latter plot lost me somewhat; I'd struggle to explain in detail who was who and exactly what happened. But, beyond being concerned for the fate of Theo and the painting, this wasn't what interested me most. Donna Tartt is a simply wonderful writer: I was captivated by her descriptions of art, the deft characterisations of even the most minor characters, the setting of scene, the insights and honesty, in this narrative supposedly written by Theo himself. I marked several passages that particularly struck me, but really could have noted something on almost every page - an indication of a brilliant novel. Surely if I return now to The Little Friend I'll find the same qualities there.

The Goldfinch is published by Little, Brown

Guest review by Alison MacLeod: THE FLAMES by Sophie Haydock

 

"Haydock explores both the exhilaration and the pain of life lived outside society’s norms..."

Photograph: Kate MacLeod

Alison MacLeod has written four novels and two story collections, including Unexploded, which was Man-Booker longlisted, and Tenderness. A Book of 2021 for The Spectator and The New York Times, Tenderness is the story of the creation and unexpected aftermath of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. Alison is Visiting Professor at the University of Chichester, where she lectured for 30 years in literature and creative writing. Find out more from her website. 

A painting – like a song, film or dream – is notoriously difficult to convey in words. On the page, it can easily elude the translation across forms. How can a writer evoke the live force of a painting, as we first experience it, across time, on a canvas or in a frame? In this accomplished first novel, Sophie Haydock plunges us into the heat and complexity of Egon Schiele’s art, and offers a remarkable sense of what Schiele’s sister, in Haydock’s story, calls ‘the magic in his fingertips’.

The Flames is the story of a rare and provocative talent cut short by illness; Schiele was just 28 in 1918 when he died of ‘Spanish flu’. But, more than this, it’s a tantalising story of life itself – of life seized and spent by each of its main characters. Haydock explores both the exhilaration and the pain of life lived outside society’s norms.

We are taken to Austria in the early years of the twentieth century. Here, Haydock reveals Egon Schiele, boy and man, largely through the stories and shifting perspectives of his four principal models: his younger sister Gertrude; his ‘muse’, Wally Neuzil (or Vally, as she is here); his wife Edith; and his sister-in-law Adele. Through their eyes, in an inspired story-collage, we discover Schiele’s childhood and his early compulsion to draw. We witness the harrowing descent of his stationmaster father, raging and ill with syphilis, and the poignant aftermath of his death for the Schiele family. Liberation for Egon comes with art school and the influence of his mentor, Gustav Klimt.

A fifth young woman, Eva, will meet the elderly, down-and-out Adele in flash-forward scenes set in 1968, when Eva looks back on the stories of all four women with the appraising eyes of modernity. She is perhaps a stand-in for Haydock herself as she comes face to face with the four women on the walls of a major Viennese exhibition, where she tries to unravel the enigma of each model. It’s a tribute to Haydock’s talent and the depth of her writing that her model-by-model approach never feels exercise-like or schematic. On the contrary, her rendering of the model-as-muse scenario is vivid and intriguingly ambivalent.

Who or what is a muse? A sought-after commodity? A powerhouse of energy transmitted to canvas? An object offered up for the male gaze? Haydock triumphs in nuanced, visceral evocations of the experience of modelling – possibly the best I’ve ever read. She reveals the weary spines, contorted limbs, cold hands, bared thighs and exposed breasts. She evokes, with precision and force, the queasy mixture of sacrifice and self-possession; objectification and intimacy.

The story of Egon’s sister, Gerti Schiele, is compelling. Haydock’s imagining of the incestuous element between sister and brother is restrained, layered and impressively unsensational. Indeed, her handling of it is so skilful I felt she might have dared slightly more in the development of this storyline. Instead, as Egon outgrows his sister, the characterisation of Gertie is flattened somewhat into minor displays of jealousy, and I wondered if something stranger or darker in this material was perhaps short-circuited.

The story of Vally is delivered with subtlety and grit, and she’s a beguilingly memorable character. In her story, too, the dark seams of controversial events – namely, a stint in jail for Schiele and unsavoury accusations – might have been mined a little more, to take us closer to Schiele’s flaws or contradictions. This said, the story of Egon and Vally is tender, fresh and involving – and was my personal favourite.

Throughout The Flames, the period detail is lovingly rendered, a quality that shines above all in the stories of Adele and Edith Harms. I thoroughly enjoyed the window on Secessionist Vienna, with its rigid etiquette, illicit outlets, and battles between commerce and art. At times perhaps, the sisterly relationship between Adele and Edith veers a touch unsteadily between bourgeois predictability and high drama but, in Edith’s story, something radical ultimately emerges. Under the day-to-day pressures of married life, Egon Schiele’s boundless charm and sensitivity give way. He becomes more objectionable to the reader, but more powerful as a character, with sharper, darker contours. We watch uncomfortably as he instructs Edith, his new wife, to masturbate as she poses naked for him. On another canvas, disturbingly, he immortalises her as a stiff, puppet-like figure.

Story by story, woman by woman, The Flames is kindled by mystery, desire, and Haydock’s own resonant prose. It’s an absorbing encounter with Schiele’s struggle, art and intimates, and it reminds us that his work still has the power to startle today, with its uncanny modernity and unselfconscious sexuality. In this auspicious debut, Sophie Haydock brings a striking sense of Schiele’s life and talent, blazing, to the page.

The Flames is published by Transworld.

Alison MacLeod's Tenderness is reviewed here by Jane Rogers.

BURNTCOAT by Sarah Hall, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"There's resilience in the pervading metaphor of the burnt wood whose beauty is enhanced by its near-destruction."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. Best known for fiction for children and young adults, with titles including the Costa Category winner Set in Stone, she has also published one novel for adults, Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon, and is currently working on another. Her latest title, This Book is Cruelty Free: Animals and Us, is a guide to compassionate living for teenagers and adults.

Burntcoat is the name of an abandoned industrial building in an unnamed northern town which becomes the home of sculptor Edith Harkness; also, it's the technique she learns from a Japanese master, almost destroying a piece of wood by burning, then scraping off charcoal to reveal the beauty of the grain beneath.

This is the third novel I've read recently that looks at the breakdown of daily life, and how humans survive when the support systems they depend on are abruptly removed. In Jessie Greengrass's The High House, climate change has led to drastically rising sea levels. In The Stranding, by Kate Sawyer, a presumed nuclear disaster has wiped out the northern hemisphere and much of the south, leaving few survivors. The main scenario in Burntcoat is both familiar and not-familiar: there's a pandemic, there's lockdown, there are fears, masks and empty streets, but this is not the pandemic we're living through now. The quickly-spreading disease is plague-like in its symptoms effects, and it lies dormant but menacing for years afterwards in 'carriers' like Edith, which is where we begin the story.

Celebrated for her work, Edith, aged 59 in the later parts of the novel, has completed a monumental piece which is to be a memorial to those who died, and is making preparations for a lonely death.  We piece her life together: her childhood, her art studies, her meeting with lover Halit shortly before lockdown restrictions were imposed, and something of the years between then and now.

The narrative is unusual in the brevity of its sections and its abrupt shifts back and forth in time, and also because it uses first/second-person, addressing a 'you' we can't at first identify. It takes a while to sort out the various characters, merely names dropped in at first. Dialogue is rendered in italics, without speech marks.

Later the 'you' becomes Halit, a Turkish immigrant working as a chef, with whom Edith has an intensely physical relationship, moving into lockdown with him at Burntcoat shortly after they meet. Although there's this interlude of love, trust and intimacy, Edith's life seems to have been shaped for hardship and loss, so that the austerity of Burntcoat - converted into a vast working space below, living quarters above - is a fitting home. "When I was eight, my mother left and Naomi arrived," she misleadingly tells us; her mother suffered a near-fatal brain haemorrhage from which she made a slow partial recovery, bringing up Edith alone. At art school Edith sets herself apart from fellow students, and wins a scholarship to Japan where she aims to "escape the corset of fine art".

The joyous physicality of sex is set against the decaying of bodies as they succumb to disease; but there's resilience too in the pervading metaphor of the burnt wood whose beauty is enhanced by its near-destruction. "A life is a bead of water on the black surface, so frail, so strong, its world incredibly held."

Edith's character blends defiance and acceptance, her story told with measured calmness. I'm full of admiration for Sarah Hall's boldness and range, and her ability to move easily from close-range to detached observation and back again. Although Burntcoat is a relatively short novel it feels big and expansive. I'll be very surprised if it doesn't appear on awards shortlists this year. 

Burntcoat is published by Faber.

Sarah Hall's The Wolf Border is reviewed here by Cindy Jefferies.

Linda Newbery's This Book is Cruelty Free - Animals and Us is published by Pavilion.

Guest review by Julia Jarman: NOTES FROM AN EXHIBITION by Patrick Gale

 

"Patrick Gale, a writer new to me, beguiles."

Photograph by Linda Newbery

Julia Jarman has written books for children of all ages. Her work includes The Time Travelling Cat series for readers of eight to twelve or thereabouts and the acclaimed picture book, Big Red Bath. She is currently trying her hand at writing for adults ‘to see if I can’.

The pram in the hall is Death to Art, to paraphrase Cyril Connolly. Not for Rachel Kelly it wasn’t! She had four children but they didn’t stop her painting. Nothing stopped Rachel doing what she had to do or wanted to do, not babies, not prams, not manic depression, as it was called in the second half of the twentieth century when most of this novel takes place. Rachel was bipolar but she made this work to her advantage, the highs inspiring work of astonishing intensity, the lows landing her in hospital, but that didn’t stop her for long. She thought the lows, made worse by postnatal depression made the subsequent highs worthwhile. Hence, possibly, the four children.

Rachel was lucky enough to have help, lots of help, from devoted and dutiful husband, Antony; from supportive doctor Jack, also a painter so he understood better than most; and from those four children, all devoted in their own way till, perhaps, they could stand it no longer. I say ’perhaps’ because, though we hear from each grown-up child in turn, we hear only parts of their stories.

There’s Garfield the oldest, not Antony’s son, a lawyer turned violin maker. Rachel was pregnant when Antony rescued her, after a suicide attempt, and took her to his grandfather’s house in Penzance, abandoning his own academic career at Oxford. Next came Hedley, whose devotion lasted longest, possibly because he separated himself a bit, rejecting the Quakerism of the rest of the family, but also because he understood Rachel, being an artist himself. Jack called him ‘the family glue’. Then there’s Morwenna, the only daughter, the one we know least about because she got the hell out of it. Lastly, there’s Petroc the youngest who dies first, but not on his seventh birthday as I feared when I first saw him on the beach, enjoying his special day with Rachel, both of them absorbed by the art they were creating, both heedless of danger. I wanted to yell at her, ‘Look out! Be a grown up!’

It’s a novel about family relationships but it’s Rachel we hear about most. She is central in the book as she was in life. Everyone else circles round her trying not to hinder if not actually help. I’m fascinated and appalled when I read about children who protect their parents from the harsh realities of life, especially abused children. Are Garfield, Hedley, Morwenna and Petroc , neglected by their mother but cared for by their father, abused? Discuss. All the big questions are raised in this novel: nature v nurture, religious belief as practised by The Society of Friends, creativity, morality. I could go on.

I need to say it’s deep and very entertaining. Firstly because all the characters are so real. I identified with all of them and cared what happened and carried on caring when I stopped reading. Secondly, and this follows from the first, a lot happens. It’s gripping. I wanted to know not only what happened next to each character, but also what happened before. And finding out, especially about Rachel, after her death – the exhibition of the title is a retrospective – is fascinating. No spoilers but there were shocks.

Patrick Gale, a writer new to me, beguiles. Rachel the creative artist, her paintings, and the notes about the paintings, referred to in the title, are as real, or more real, than Barbara Hepworth and other artists of the Cornish School who also appear in the novel. Confession: I googled Rachel Kelly to check, but no, she didn’t really exist, but now she does, the product of a brilliant creative imagination. I salute.

Were any children harmed in the writing of this novel? I hope not.

Notes from an Exhibition  is published by Tinder Press

See also: Take Nothing With You reviewed by Linda Newbery

PIRANESI by Susanna Clarke, reviewed by Adèle Geras

 

"I’ve never in my life read a story which so defies reviewing. Summing up the plot doesn’t work. Comparing Clarke to other writers might, but only if you’ve read the other writers."

Adèle Geras has written books for readers of all ages. Coming from Michael Joseph in February next year is her novel Dangerous Women, published under her pseudonym, Hope Adams.
website: www.adelegerasbooks.com
Twitter: @adelegeras

I have been not reading fantasy for nearly 70 years. At school, my friend Philippa was a passionate fan of The Lord of the Rings and all things Tolkien. Every term, she would urge me, “Just try it again, Delly.” I would try and fail. My eyelids would droop after three lines and I’d always put the book aside before I turned the first page. I describe myself as ‘allergic to Tolkien.’ Nothing to do with his books or their merit, but rather to do with me: I’m not adapted to reading them. (I ought to add that I have no such problem with ghost stories or fairy tales or horror stories.)

But I have been eschewing fantasy and science fiction. I didn’t like Dune by Frank Herbert in spite of a boyfriend urging it on me, telling me it was life-changing. I read His Dark Materials because (cunningly!) it began in an Oxford college (which I do like reading about) and then I got sucked in by the daemons, but that’s an exception and there were large tracts of the three volumes which I must admit I skipped over.

One of my most spectacular failures was a very fat book called Jonathan Strange and Dr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. This was a huge hit when it appeared and I couldn’t read it. I couldn’t even watch the TV version…. found the whole thing extremely boring and I have a very low threshold for boredom. If I’m not gripped at once, I give up and I’ve not finished more books than I care to number. If it’s a crime novel, I might turn to the last page to see who did it, but mostly I put the book aside and forget about it.

How then to explain the attraction I felt to Piranesi? It’s all Twitter’s fault. Alex Preston wrote about the book in a way that intrigued me. The reviews were uniformly enthusiastic. Also, I read an article from the New Yorker which explained why Susanna Clarke had taken fifteen years to write a follow- up to Jonathan Strange and Dr Norrell. It was because she was ill from a variant of ME and simply could not. Then I watched her in a virtual event, speaking about Piranesi and I liked her so much that I downloaded it. Of course, there was also the artist Piranesi whose drawings of fantastical prisons I know and admire. I wondered what the connection was between the book and the artist.

Before I sat down to write this, I was reading the newspaper. Piranesi is still number 10 on the Sunday Times bestsellers list. Each book listed there has one sentence describing it. Piranesi’s says: "The resident of a surreal palace is disturbed by news of a new inhabitant."  When I read this, I laughed out loud. Nothing in that sentence is untrue but it’s a world away from the book, and what it’s about and what sort of experience the reader has when she embarks on it.

What I’m going to add won’t add much more enlightenment. I’ve never in my life read a story which so defies reviewing. Summing up the plot doesn’t work. Comparing Clarke to other writers might, but only if you’ve read the other writers. Borges was mentioned in reviews, and by the author herself but alas, I’ve never read his work. I can tell you that the use of capital letters for many nouns is mesmerising and gives the prose an air of undeniable authority and strangeness.

I’m still haunted by Piranesi more than a fortnight after I finished reading it. The ‘surreal palace’ mentioned above is mind-blowing. Hall after Hall, filled with thousands of Statues, which are the whole universe. There are seas running through the Halls and Vestibules and our hero, whose first person account this is, has learned to read the tides and has set out a geography of the place to help him find his way around it. Others have lived there. There are Bones which he tends and respects and these show he’s not the only person who’s ever lived in this place. Once a week, he has a meeting with The Other. Then other things happen and an explication of sorts is provided. This doesn’t lessen the otherworldly feeling you’re left with when you finish the book.

It’s the look of the place, and the feel of the place and the simplicity and poetry of Piranesi’s own narrative voice that I loved so much and which is still resonating in my head. Someone, somewhere is, I’m sure, thinking about how to make a movie of it and I hope very much that this will be an animation; a drawn universe because real flesh and blood humans would reduce magic to the mundane tropes of normal fantasy.

It’s a very short book. Please read it before anyone takes it out of individual heads and puts it up on a screen. To tempt you, I shall quote from it. I am going to open my Kindle and pick a passage at random. It’s the kind of book where you can do that.

“Preparations for the Flood

ENTRY FOR THE TWENTY-SIXTH DAY OF THE NINTH MONTH IN THE YEAR THE ALBATROSS CAME TO THE SOUTH WESTERN HALLS.

With the exception of the Concealed Person, all the Dead stand in the Path of the Flood Waters. On Sunday, I began the work of carrying them to safety.

I took a blanket and transferred all the Biscuit-box Man’s bones into it – all except for the ones inside the biscuit box. I tied up the blanket with seaweed twine, making it into a sort of sack, and I carried it to the Second Vestibule and up the Staircase to the Upper Halls.”

I’m saying it again. Please read it.

Piranesi is published by Bloomsbury.

Lockdown Sunday extra: DAEMON VOICES by Philip Pullman, edited by Simon Mason

"In every chapter there are things I want to store away, remember and use to encourage myself and others."

This is the last of our Lockdown Sunday extras. From now on we will return to our weekly Monday posts.

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. She has published widely for young readers and is currently working on her second novel for adults.

"I find Post-It notes indispensable. They really came into their own when I was preparing to write about this book. The pages of my paperback copy bristle with so many little yellow stickers that its thickness is almost doubled, and it wasn't a slender book to start with." Philip Pullman says this of The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton, and I could say exactly the same of Daemon Voices, except that this is a handsome hardback. In every chapter there are things I want to store away, remember and use to encourage myself and others.

Full of delights and insights, this is a compilation of various lectures, essays, introductions, conference speeches and articles written over thirty years and for various audiences including the Children's Book Circle, the Sea of Faith Conference, the Richard Hillary Lecture and the Finnconn Science-Fiction Convention. Collectively they cover a wide range of subjects to do with writing, storytelling and the imagination. If you've heard Philip Pullman speak, you will hear his voice, clearly, as you read.

I'd intended to dip in and out of this collection while reading something else alongside, but on finishing each piece I was eager for the next, and the other book had to wait.  Among my favourites are those in which Pullman comments on paintings and illustrations, in which he has a keen interest (his own drawings are used as chapter heads in the His Dark Materials  trilogy). I've never before studied  Walter Trier's line drawings for Erich Kastner's Emil and the Detectives as closely as when directed to them by Pullman, though they come instantly to mind when I think of the book; now I see their clarity of line and their compositional skill. How inextricably stories and illustrations are linked in books for both children and adults! It's impossible to think of Swallows and Amazons without Arthur Ransome's own drawings (which is why, perhaps, TV dramatisations often disappoint - the borderland of that magical combination of words and images is destroyed by realism). Who shares my nostalgia for the Rupert Bear stories and annuals, written and illustrated by Alfred Bestall? His name meant nothing to me as a child, but the world (or worlds) he created were fantastical in his own distinctive style. "Bestall was full of fancy," writes Pullman; "I'm sure that's the right word for the special quality of lightness, delicacy, charm that his landscapes, his stories, embody." This is in a chapter called Reading in the Borderland - Reading, Books and Pictures, in which Pullman looks at where we go when we read, and how personal and private it is: "We are each alone when we enter the borderland and go on to explore what lies in it and beyond it, in the book we're engaged with. True, we can come back and talk about it, and if we talk well and truthfully and interestingly enough we might entice other readers into it, and they too will explore it - but they too will be alone there until they in turn come back and tell us what they found there ... "

Another great pleasure of these pieces is the close attention and respect Pullman gives to writers he admires. Awarded the 'Carnegie of Carnegies' for Northern Lights he said that the honour had been given to "the wrong PP", and that it should have gone to Philippa Pearce for Tom's Midnight Garden, which is the focus of a chapter called Narrative Tact and Other Classical Virtues. Here Pullman looks at the currently prevalent use of first-person present tense. (I have my own reservations about that, too. I've used both present tense and first person, but never together; when they're combined I find myself wondering why this character is earnestly telling me everything she does, thinks and sees, recording every bodily reaction, all as it happens and supposedly unmediated.) Pullman contrasts "what we often get now, the immediate, the up-close, the hectic of the incessant present tense, and what I might call the classical style of Pearce's writing, which has a great deal to do with how the narrator does her work." Particularly he examines the subtle ways in which the narrative handles time, in a novel which is of course all about shifts in time; and (with diversions to Emma and Vanity Fair) the flexibility of the free indirect style. "And this is where it gets really interesting, because if it's done well we hardly notice the moments when the point of view shifts from outside Tom to inside Tom, from Tom then to Tom now, from Tom him to Tom us. The movement is performed so swiftly and lightly that it seems the most natural thing in the world, even though really it's a complicated psychological manouevre." But then, who is the narrator? Philippa Pearce, surely? But no ... the narrator is the invention of the author just as surely as the characters are, "and every time I read a book where the author is so miraculously in charge of this ghostly being, ... so uncanny in its knowledge and so swift and sprite-like in its movement, I feel a delight in possiblity and mystery and make-believe."

Then there's the bit about his reaction to first reading Blake's poems: "I knew they were true in the way I knew that I was alive... " and the several times when he tells us he doesn't like fantasy, and a most intriguing question he poses towards the end, in a piece on The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ ... But I'll have to stop quoting; this is getting ridiculous. You'll just have to read the book for yourself, and see what you find there.

Daemon Voices is published by David Fickling Books.