Good New Writing

Simon at The Evening News gave me a copy of Blackmoor by Edward Hogan. Usually the only decent books I get sent to write about are published by Serpent’s Tail. My stint at the paper was fairly short because one can’t write for free forever, but anyway, Simon plonked this book in front of me. “Try that,” he said, or some such. About an hour later he called across our office space, “How is it?”

“Actually, rather brilliant,” I replied. Great, I thought. He’s going to think I’m a sucker who’d say that about anything. He’ll suspect it’s really shit like most of the books sent to magazines and that I wouldn’t know a good novel if it smacked me around the chops after being frozen into a block of ice.

I couldn’t say anything else though, because it is a really wonderful first novel. I thought I’d post my little piece here.


Blackmoor
Edward Hogan
(£11.99, Simon & Schuster)



Despite the course’s international reputation for excellence, a Creative Writing MA from UEA does not give budding authors a free pass to a publishing deal. Most go on to be teachers, pleasure-seekers, backpackers and media hopefuls. Graduate Edward Hogan, now teaching English to college students in London, is rare in his success, joining the likes of Trezza Azzopardi, Andrew Cowan and Tracy Chevalier as victorious alumni. The bulk of Blackmoor, published by Simon & Schuster this summer, was written whilst Hogan resided in the Golden Triangle. Four years later, can he remember Norwich?
“I lived on Havelock Road, in a little terrace house. It was a box room with a mattress on the floor. I drank at The Mitre pub – probably the only person who did. I used to go running up by the university, in Eaton Park. And I worked in a baguette shop near the market – Baguette Express. They let me be a pot washer. It was my job to wash all the pig fat down the sink...”
Hogan’s dogged sense of place results in Blackmoor having a broodingly gothic power. “I’m from Derbyshire and I wanted a chance to explore my roots,” he explains. “Previously I had visited the communities but didn’t know about the injustices. When you live around Derbyshire you see the signs mining still has on the region – poverty, unemployment and addiction.”
Blackmoor tells the story of a partially sighted albino, Beth, and how she is ostracised when strange explosions due to rogue gases trapped in the mines coincide with her puerperal psychosis – postnatal depression – and subsequent bizarre behaviour. The community recoils from her otherworldly presence, isolating her with their superstitious scaremongering. “There was a real place called Arkwright which had to be demolished because of explosive gases seeping from the pit works,” says Hogan. Methane was leaking into houses and the village had to be moved.
On the effects of mining, Hogan is clued up, but how does a 28 year-old Mitre enthusiast write authentically about motherhood?
“Well, I know a lot of women. Making my characters real is the most important thing to me. Writing forces you to try to understand other people; besides, I wouldn’t want to write about myself – boring.
“Of course there is some of myself in it. You pick up details and memories; things that happened to yourself and others. Like when Beth’s son Vincent says, ‘When I was a woman,’ – my brother actually said that when he was little.”
Hogan’s sense of responsibility to his family helped motivate him to do the UEA Creative Writing MA. “I thought I’d better justify all the writing I was doing by making it official – doing something proper. I won the David Higham award and got £5,000 which made a difference.”
Living in London means that whatever the word is on the street regarding the state of the publishing industry, Hogan is optimistic that people are still buying novels. “Everyone’s reading on public transport,” he says. “But I would write even if getting published wasn’t part of it. If it was a popularity contest you’d play football or something, but if you love writing, do it. You have to enjoy the process because the material rewards aren’t that great…”
Already touted as comparable to the Brontës and D. H. Lawrence, Hogan’s prospects look better than most.
“You once said Blackmoor killed Mum,” says Vincent to his father.
It might be said that Norwich helped launch Edward Hogan.

Strawberry Tartt

I’m not supposed to be writing a blog entry right now – I should be job hunting, sorting out interviews for some backlogged freelance work, or at least taking my wet towels out of the washing machine, gathering Jim’s sweetie shop socks from the pulley-maid and replacing them with clean, damp laundry.

Instead I’m eating strawberries from a punnet, cross-legged on my bed.

I’m excited about reading today. This is a Eureka! moment for me, because despite studying literature at university, I’ve always been far more interested in writing than reading. I’ve thought, grimly: better hope other people are more into reading than I am. Leave the hard work to others.

My head is often sandwiched between the pages of a book but this is more about evading real-life responsibilities than being keyed up by the text. I remember my first day of university: the UEA concrete is salty and adult; the carpets speak of academic possibility; our jackets swish-swish against each other in the corridors and it feels like a school outing. In the classroom we are asked what our favourite books are, and I am stuck. “I haven’t yet found my definitive novel,” I say. Others talk of Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeannette Winterson, James Joyce and Kafka.

I found myself enjoying fiction for its absence of what I was looking for – finding it in the gaps, in some kind of relief or inverse. Ballard, for his cold lack of sentiment, television landscapes and ambivalence; Douglas Coupland, for his general lack of sophistication and sophomore arrogance (making me daydream rainbows of prose on the walls as a respite); Thomas Hardy (whose prose can be so perfect and illuminating my copies of his books have pencil marks) for industrious restraint. At times novels have nearly reigned supreme in my heart – Wuthering Heights, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Middlemarch, but then I’ve been distracted by some other vice – the release of a Serge Lutens perfume, or a newfound interest in rum.

On the creative writing MA, friends had a running joke about people who name-dropped Dostoyevsky. Later, at a time I link with the buying of an elliptical machine, I decided to read Crime and Punishment and found it forceful, brutal, despairing, true and important. But not all-encompassing. Ra Page, founder of Comma Press, once told me a novel can’t be perfect. Unless it’s written by Camus.

I’m very lazy when it comes to reading. Lots of people break into a cold sweat at the idea of ploughing through a book, and if you couple this with a reluctance to ever do what is best for me, I’ve actively avoided a lot of great novels.

I mainly read second hand books now (I don’t allow myself a library card because I forget to return things, and also, I like to read in the bath, on the loo, whilst eating marmite on toast; I often use a book as a pillow) and so am restricted by what people want to get rid of. I’m building up a good Agatha Christie collection, have accumulated a fair stack of Rose Tremain, am perfectly content with the odd Anne Tyler, have my eye open for anything by E. F. Benson or P. G. Wodehouse… When Alex slipped his foot into his trainer after a weekend in wellies at The Green Man Festival, he sighed that it was like a foot bed in comparison. This is how my reading habits have been: soft and safe.

We went to a fete on a village green. People were selling unwanted knickknacks on stalls, and there, for 35p, probably next to some plastic beads and a pin cushion (I don’t recall) was a copy of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. I only had two twenty pence pieces and a five, and Alex shot a disapproving look at me when I put my hand out for the change (“It’s only ten pence – it’s not as if it was expensive.”)



All my pals knew I was reading Rebecca because I couldn’t keep my mouth zipped about it. “You have to read this book,” I enthused to anyone who would listen. “It is tremendous. It is a force.” Here was a book that spoke directly to me; that exhibited a love affair with place without being trite or overly romantic; that pinpointed the kind of inadequacies that spin you out with vertigo; the mistakes we make trying to second-guess the hearts of our bed-fellows; neediness, pride, nostalgia, kismet. It’s a gothic novel, but not fussy or melodramatic. When reading it I got the feeling I was being woven into its fabric by a creeper. The tension is masterful, and I appreciated being able to suck in the ever-lingering, chilly fragrance of the late Mrs. de Winter.

I thought it very apparent that du Maurier must have a complicated relationship with other women, which whilst tender and sympathetic, is also predatory and curdled. Not naming the narrator was a simple device but as I twigged she would never have a name, I nodded, “Yes! This is how I feel.” Before meeting a love who had entertained beginning a romance with a beautiful septuagenarian, I hadn’t felt other women to be rivals. It was his open-mindedness that made me feel pale and ghostly in comparison; any woman, of any age, might make my boy’s heart flutter. For a tripped-out while, it seemed other females were connected with him and not me. I wrestled with this for a short bit, and I recognised it in Rebecca, and also in what I read about du Maurier. It isn’t jealousy or bitchiness, but it’s some kind of sad celebration of how bewitching a person can be to a lover. A resignation I am keen to expose and explore in my own writing.




But anyway, I got lucky once again when I found a copy of The Secret History by Donna Tartt in a £1 bookcase at a friend’s dad’s antique emporium (obviously not an antique, since it was published in 1992.) At times I scoffed at this book, which reminded me of two other first novels narrated by university students, The Rachel Papers, by Martin Amis, and Hallucinating Foucault, by Patricia Duncker: Too clever, too pretentious, too verbose – forgivable, perhaps, in light of how heady and intoxicating the smell of a university library can be, but still deserving of a tut. I find the university backdrop pedestrian, see the reams of Greek references as showy, and find the idea of a bunch of students committing a murder a premise you’d encounter on a below-par creative writing degree. Yet, whilst reading it, I took the book everywhere in the hope I’d snatch a few moments reading time.

I was quite chilled by the book’s lack of heart. The characters were unlikeable and unengaged by each other and it flagged up a question in my mind: Is Donna Tartt a psychopath herself? What other explanation could there be for its utter lack of remorse? It irritated me how characters would burst out laughing at unfunny lines, and the narrator himself, Richard Papen, is one of the blandest vehicles for a story I’ve encountered. I am prepared to concede that this may be a stylistic decision, but I’m too lazy to think it through. My brain will go to just enough effort to note that amorality and nonchalance seem trendy in ‘college writing’. I wondered, has she a heart to go with that fierce, fashionable intellect?


^ I like this image because she looks like Audrey Horne in it. It's probably owned by Knopf/ Random House and is credited to photographer Caitlin McCaffrey on the olemiss.edu site I pinched it from.

I didn’t care about a single character in The Secret History – not Bunny, not Charles – but I did care about Donna Tartt. Now there’s a conundrum for those who don’t believe the author should exist in the text.

Less than a week after finishing it, I found Tartt’s second book (she has only published two to date, and suspects there are just three more in her), The Little Friend, in a charity shop. I nearly squealed with glee.

And this is what has triggered my entry today. I am only a third through it, but so far this has been a fantastic novel – heartfelt (she does have a heart!), refreshingly observed, and so very likeable. I don’t know what formula Tartt is using to determine which literary ‘problems’ each novel will solve (this is all she’s interested in, she says, lying through her wonky teeth), but I am so pleased, so grateful and impressed that she has taken this direction. It shows humility. The Secret History was too uptight and concerned with appearances, deception and reining in desires. In The Little Friend, Harriet, the ballsy girl on a quest to find her brother’s murderer, is brimming with savvy energy.

I like the fact there are little postage stamps of Tartt in the book – ‘his teeth were slightly crooked but in a way that was somehow more pleasing than if they were straight.’

Anyway, it’s making me want to actually read. Then I don’t have to feel so shady about writing in the hope that other people will do the reading bit.