Breakfast At Libraries: March 2011

Tuesday, 29 March 2011

The Ninth Life of Louis Drax by Liz Jensen

Louis Drax has always been accident-prone, ever since he nearly ‘got Cot Death’ as a baby. He’s also Disturbed, so he tells us, and apparently not helped by his weekly visits to his hated psychiatrist Fat Perez. Louis’ interests are wildlife, Lego, poisons, rapists and his hamsters, all of which are called Mohammed and all of which he kills, believing there to be a special Right of Disposal which allows owners to take their pets’ lives if they exceed their expected lifespan. Now, nine-year-old Louis is in a coma after a horrific accident, and his father has disappeared. With only a sinister, bandaged man called Gustave living in his head to keep him company, Louis co-narrates the novel with his doctor, Pascal Dannachet, a man on the brink of falling desperately in love with his mother.

The Ninth Life of Louis Drax is a tense, taut little novel – I read it almost in a single sitting. Every character in the novel is deeply, infuriatingly flawed, frequently to the point of being unlikeable – and yet Jensen’s writing is so masterful in its manipulation of the reader’s perceptions that we still care about them. Precocious, sly and vindictive, Louis is a chilling creation, but things, and people, are not quite as simple as they appear. Least of all Louis himself, in fact, who, even when locked into a deep coma, is still the driving force behind the story. Louis might seem confused about certain things – after all, he’s barely nine years old, and the mysterious behaviour of whispering adults and their semi-concealed secrets is surely hard for a little boy to comprehend – but maybe, just maybe, he understands more than we think. If only he could find a way to communicate...

Apart from Louis as a narrator, what really succeeds is the manner in which the Drax family's secrets are gradually exposed. Jensen could so easily have gone for the big 'twist' reveal every time, but instead, the narrative scratches steadily and persistently away at the truth like an archaeologist painstakingly uncovering a long-buried Bronze Age skeleton. It’s an effective approach that builds the tension slowly and makes this deeply unsettling book hard to put down.

Monday, 28 March 2011

Diana Wynne Jones, 1934 - 2011

I discovered that Diana Wynne Jones had died through Neil Gaiman's Twitter feed. All credit to Mr Gaiman, who was a close friend of hers, for letting people know that she'd gone, but it seemed inadequate. Why hadn't I heard the news on the radio? The Ten O'Clock News? Why wasn't the internet crawling with obituaries? It seems horribly disproportionate that someone whose work enriched my childhood to such an extent, and whose books continued to bring a little bit of magic and wonder into my life right up until today, who has had such a huge influence on the way I write and the things I write about, could pass away with so little fanfare.

I've been reading Diana Wynne Jones' intricately-plotted fantasies since I was about seven or eight. The Ogre Downstairs, her third novel, was the first of her books that I read. It's a clever, darkly comic tale about a dysfunctional step-family and an almost vindictively bewitched chemistry set, but it's more than that. It's also the story of how all the characters come to understand each other a little better in the chaos, and learn to look beyond themselves and see things from others' points of view. And this is a theme that you'll see a lot in Diana Wynne Jones' work: people muddling through as best they can, trying to make sense of the anarchically entangled mysteries around them, and terribly mismatched individuals finding a little scrap of common ground.

I honestly can't think of another children's author who creates such beautifully-drawn, three-dimensional, likeable characters. Her knack of making you like people who are really terribly flawed, showing you that there is a little part of them that's ultimately well-meaning, is second-to-none. So many children's authors resort to black-and-white portraits of good-or-bad. Diana Wynne Jones' magical worlds and bizarre people are never so simple. They're complex, ambiguous and real, as are their relationships. She excels in creating characters with an awkward, unconventional, irresistible charm.

I'm so very sad to hear that Diana Wynne Jones has gone. I owe her a lot. Without Diana Wynne Jones I'd probably never have written some of my very earliest longer fiction, handwritten in notebooks in green biro in my early teens. More importantly, without Diana Wynne Jones I'd never have spent that summer's afternoon aged 11 lying in the garden reading the eerily beautiful, confusing, haunting Fire & Hemlock, a book which had such a profound effect on me that I dreamt about it for months afterwards and still read at least every couple of years. I'd never have read Howl's Moving Castle, which provided me with several hours of perfect, much-needed fairy-tale escapism at a point in my teens at which I was at my lowest ebb. And I'd never have discovered Chrestomanci, my first literary crush, when I was eight.

So, thanks Diana Wynne Jones. You'll be terribly missed.

Diana Wynne Jones 1934 - 2011

Thursday, 24 March 2011

Far North by Marcel Theroux

Far North by Marcel Theroux is a dystopian novel set in Siberia. Narrated by Makepeace Hatfield, the last remaining settler in a city in the Far North that was formerly populated by modern pioneers, it's a relentless and largely bleak tale of loneliness and desperation. And yet, somewhere within it glows a little flicker of hope that shines weakly through the winter darkness.

Many reviewers have likened Far North to Cormac McCarthy's The Road; I haven't read The Road yet so I couldn't make the same comparison. I did, however, see strong echoes of Orwell in Far North, not just in the harsh dystopia of the setting, but in the stark, precise, economic prose. Theroux's writing is sharp and clear and never wastes a word; Makepeace herself is thrifty and hard with an underlying tenderness, and the language of her narrative reflects this perfectly.

The novel is peppered with sudden revelations - some big, some small, but most of them blunt and startling, delivered with Makepeace's characteristic pragmatism. What we never learn from Far North, however, is exactly what has happened to the world. We don't know what caused this sudden de-population of the planet, this mysterious near-holocaust that has left a tiny number of survivors scraping brief and joyless lives from the wilderness of northern Russia. We don't know how some of those survivors came to be enslaved in forced labour camps in Alaska, where Makepeace spends five years; we don't know what the mysterious healing jars of light are that the prisoners find in 'the Zone', the abandoned city contaminated with genetically-engineered anthrax bacteria, and we don't know whether this substance is miraculous or sinister. There are mutterings about radiation, but there are also mutterings about climate change and refugees - it's never clear. Neither is it clear whether Makepeace's suspicion that somewhere normal civilisation is still thriving is correct, although this is more understandable because Makepeace, of course, don't know, and she narrates the story. But she would, surely, have some knowledge of what sent the starving, desperate refugees from Europe and Asia to the pioneer cities of the Far North - she was there when they began to come, after all, and saw them destroy the order of the Quaker frontier established by the likes of her parents. I'm all for ambiguity in novels, and some of the ambiguity in this novel works beautifully, but there were details I felt were unrevealed purely because the author himself couldn't come up with an answer.

Far North opens with hope, and the possibility of new life, but this, as repeatedly occurs throughout the novel, is snatched quickly and brutally away without ceremony. The end, however, re-kindles the flame. I couldn't go so far as to say the ending is uplifting - in truth, none of the book is - but it is satisfying, and there's a lot to be said for that.

One more, trivial, thing to say about the novel: the cover art on my Faber & Faber edition is ghastly. Makepeace Hatfield is a tough, weatherbeaten, disfigured survivalist who easily passes for a man and whose face is marked with acid burns. She spends most of the novel either trekking half-starved through the Siberian wilderness or labouring in a prison camp, wearing stinking clothes, and winter garments either stolen or cobbled together from animal skins. Why, then, does the front cover show the face of a woman in a fur hat who looks like she could star in Dr Zhivago? I look forward to a day when ugly people are on book covers. You know. Looking like the actual book characters, rather than models. Just saying...

Sunday, 20 March 2011

Hyddenworld by William Horwood

Hyddenworld is the first in a quartet of novels by William Horwood about the 'hydden' - the small people who live undetected alongside humans in their own 'hydden' world. This isn't a new idea, and that was actually what appealed to me. I'm not a great fan of high fantasy but I do have a long-held fascination with the long-established folklore that suggests that humans share England with another species of people, and that there are secret portals between the two worlds, or perhaps, the two consciousnesses. That, primarily, was why I picked up Hyddenworld.

Those who have read William Horwood's other novels, which include Duncton Wood and Skallagrig, will know that he has a track record of writing beautifully about myth and folklore, both real and invented. Hyddenworld is no exception, weaving human and hydden mythology (and geography) skilfully together in a rich tapestry that is by turns lyrical, exciting, thoughtful, unsettling and occasionally hilarious. Horwood tells the story simply, but with the right level of well-chosen detail, and his characters and the landscapes they inhabit are vividly brought to life. The hydden characters, in particular, are worthy of comparison to the creations of Mervyn Peake. Tweed-clad genius Bedwyn Stort, who once survived a period trapped in a lift shaft by memorising and eating a national railway timetable page by page; obese aesthete Festoon and his loyal chef and soulmate Parlance; bitter, vengeful, dangerously ambitious Brunte - each and every one of them is a gem.

Some reviews have pointed out that the human characters, Katherine and Jack, are rendered less richly. This may be true - certainly they lack the larger-than-life eccentricities of the hydden. But their love story, central to the plot, is no less touching and significant for it, and I found that I cared deeply about their fate. Perhaps they don't talk or behave quite like normal teenagers, but that's because they aren't. Although there is an authenticity to the stumbling, awkward start to their relationship, this isn't meant to be social realism and the story demands that there is a hint of otherness about them both.

Hyddenworld isn't always the fastest-paced novel, particularly in the first half of the narrative, but not once did I feel that the story dragged. Although the narrative does more or less stand alone in terms of plot, I was certainly left wanting more - but of course, this is the first in a planned four-book series, so that's as it should be. Apparently, each of the four novels will be themed around the seasons, with the first being spring. Anyone who knows me is well aware that I'm really not a hot weather person, but in the case of the Hyddenworld quartet I'll make an exception and admit that I can't wait for the summer.

Thursday, 17 March 2011

My top ten children's book heroines

So, it was International Women's Day last week. That apparently triggered this article in the Guardian, lamenting the sad lack of adventurous, swashbuckling heroines in adult fiction. I agree, and it's an ambition of mine to write something that makes a tiny attempt at helping to redress this balance. After all, I grew up reading children's books that were full of inspiring female characters, and I am firmly convinced that those girls helped me become the woman I am today. So, in the spirit of it being, er, just-over-a-week-since-International-Women's-Day, here's my Top 10 female characters in children's literature.

1. Pippi Longstocking (Pippi Longstocking,by Astrid Lindgren)

When I was about five or six, my mother and I used to read Pippi Longstocking together, and Pippi immediately became my idol. A little girl with superhuman strength, she lives alone with her horse (which she can lift with one hand) while her pirate father sails the seven seas, and her presence invariably invokes anarchy wherever she goes. I loved her sense of humour, her outrageous lies and her cheerful ease with her own outlandish appearance - unmatched stockings, a patchwork dress and bright red hair in plaits that protrude horizontally from either side of her head. I particularly loved the scene in one chapter where she sees a sign in a pharmacy window asking 'Do you have a problem with freckles?' and marches into the shop to say that she doesn't. 'But... but... you're absolutely covered in freckles,' the assistant points out. Yes, Pippi agrees... but she likes them, thanks, and thinks it's terribly rude that anyone might suggest they were a problem.

Pippi's refusal to be patronised, sidelined or controlled made me love her then and I still love her now. A cracking role model for all little girls who want to live alone and be a pirate when they grow up.

2. Nancy Blackett (Swallows & Amazons by Arthur Ransome)

Swallows & Amazons always strikes me as being the thinking child's Famous Five. Much like the Famous Five, the Walker children are allowed absurd freedom, and sail their own boat, the Swallow, to an island in Windermere and camp there alone for the entire summer; their father having given his permission for this in a telegram that reads "BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS. IF NOT DUFFERS, WON'T DROWN", and to put this into perspective, the youngest Walker is six years old. Unlike the Famous Five, however, they make their own entertainment rather than stumbling across some nasty unshaven working class men who are up to no good - and that's where the Blacketts, Nancy and Peggy come in. The Walkers see themselves as empire-building explorers or Royal Naval officers, but under Nancy's captaincy the Blacketts have positioned themselves firmly as pirates. Nancy is tougher, stronger, more dynamic than John, the captain of the Swallow. Her boat, the Amazon, flies the Jolly Roger and, taking control of her own identity, she refuses to be known by her real name, Ruth - pirates, of course, must be 'ruthless'. Nancy is the daring one, the decision-maker, self-reliant and independent. John Walker, ever-sensible, dismisses her suggestion that they could live on Wildcat Island all year round, but as a reader, I always got the impression that Nancy could manage it perfectly well. Apparently Ransome named one of his own yachts The Nancy Blackett, as she was his favourite of all his characters. I say good call.

3. Mildred Hubble (The Worst Witch by Jill Murphy)

Clumsy, untidy, hapless and rarely in the correct school uniform, Jill Murphy's Worst Witch and I had rather a lot in common when I first encountered her as a little girl. Attending the cold, blustery mountaintop boarding school, Miss Cackle's Academy For Witches, Mildred and her plump tabby cat, clinging spreadeagled and yowling to her broom like a furry limpet while the other cats sit upright with elegance and poise, stumble from catastrophe to disaster on an almost daily basis. Inept though Mildred is, she always does her best, always sticks up for her mates and loves her ridiculous cat to bits. The splendid illustrations of Mildred, dark hair escaping from its plaits, shoelaces trailing and a perpetually worried expression on her face could easily be me aged nine; like Mildred, no matter how hard I tried, I was a dyspraxic klutz who tripped, dropped things, got lost in corridors, was incapable of holding on to my own possessions and looked like a Victorian urchin by morning play-time. Mildred helped me remember that there's more to being a girl than neat hair and dainty deportment... and that you don't necessarily have to be Little Miss Sporty or Action Girl either. And for that, I am forever grateful.

4. Mary Lennox (The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett)

Small, thin, sour-faced, spoilt and 'as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived', Mary Lennox might not seem like an appealing character in the least at the start of The Secret Garden. Her sense of entitlement is high and, orphaned in India after the death of her frivolous and largely uninterested parents, she struggles to adjust when she is dispatched to the crumbling Gothic manor house on the Yorkshire Moors under the 'care' of her mostly absent uncle Archibald Craven, a widowed hunchback rendered helpless with grief by the death of his wife some years previously. But her tight-lipped stubbornness gives her a natural survival instinct, and her curiosity about the odd goings-on in the house and the walled-up, overgrown secret garden she discovers, abandoned for a decade, shape the rest of the story and ultimately, repairs the relationship between a neurotic, emotionally-neglected, hypochondriac little boy and his father. Mary herself learns many a lesson during the course of the story, thanks to the kindness and patience of some of the people she meets, but this contrary, obstinate little girl also changes life at Misselthwaite Manor for the better.

I must give Mary extra credit, too, for appearing in one of the most terrifying opening chapters to any children's book I've ever read. All credit to the Edwardians: I can't imagine a book aimed at 9 year olds today opening with a little girl discovered waiting patiently for someone to come and look after her in a house populated solely by the dead victims of cholera.

5. Cassandra Mortmain (I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith)

I was not a teenage girl who read romance. Ever. If more romances were like I Capture The Castle, I might have, though, because from the very first line ('I write this sitting in the kitchen sink...') I was charmed and captivated at the age of 14 or so by this novel's cast of well-meaning eccentrics. But it was Cassandra, the 17-year-old narrator, who really won me over. Cassandra loves her unconventional family but never shies away from their many flaws - and she rarely shies away from her own, either. She's practical and resourceful and not above scheming, but ultimately, her heart is in the right place. When I was her age, I felt like I could be friends with her; now, in my 30s, I feel like I want to look after her, to give her a break from her endless quest to keep her impoverished family's heads above water. Either way, I admire her, and the dignity with which she accepts the bittersweet ending to her story is admirable and touching.

6. Jo March (Little Women, Good Wives, Little Men and Jo's Boys by Louisa M Alcott)

I'll admit right now that I ploughed my way through Little Women wanting to slap three out of the four March sisters. Meg is a boring goody-goody, Beth is a saintly invalid and Amy is a spoilt brat. Jo, on the other hand, is another matter. A cheerful tomboy who hides in the attic and writes stories wearing a special hat on which to wipe her leaky fountain-pen, she's the only sister with an ounce of personality, turns down a marriage proposal from a rich and handsome young neighbour, and sells her own hair ('her one beauty', as Amy points out) to a wig-maker when the family is short of money. When she eventually agrees to marry, it's to a stocky middle-aged German academic who can darn his own socks. I couldn't fail to salute her.

7. Sally Lockhart (The Ruby In The Smoke, The Shadow In The North, The Tiger In The Well and The Tin Princess by Philip Pullman)

OK, so I wasn't a child when I discovered Sally Lockhart; I was well into my 20s. That didn't stop me wanting to be her. Aged 'sixteen or so' at the beginning of the first book, Sally doesn't let patriarchal Victorian society get the better of her. She makes an independent living as a sort of financial advisor; she forms lasting and loyal friendships with men and women alike and most importantly, swashbuckles with the best of them. Never far from intrigue and adventure, Sally is clever, tough and resolute, occasionally unscrupulous and refuses to be bound by the conventions of her time - she bears an illegitimate child by her murdered lover, for instance, and goes on to marry a Hungarian-Jewish socialist. That's pretty much where Sally's story ends... but you just know that she has more adventures to come.

8. Hermione Granger (Harry Potter series by JK Rowling)

If I'd had Hermione in my life when I was eight, I'd have been a happier girl. Not only a strong female character, but also a geek? Why, JK Rowling, you are really spoiling us. I doubt there's much to say about Hermione that hasn't already been said, but she's one of those children's characters that I can absolutely believe in. Fascinated by everything around her and always wanting to know more, Hermione is, of course, known for her intelligence, but there's so much more to her than that. She has a natural and admirable tendency to root for the underdog, a dry sense of humour and a wholly realistic vulnerability with which she fights a constant battle. When girls are being presented with the hideously anti-feminist Bella Swan as a role model in popular literature, we need more Hermiones in our multi-million-selling book franchises, please.

9. Anne of Green Gables (Anne of Green Gables series by LM Montgomery)

Anne of Green Gables is my mum's favourite book and I always associate it with her, so I'm a little biased towards it for that reason, but I must say, Anne is a cracking heroine. Without parents, she spends the first 12 years of her life half-starved in an orphanage or neglected in foster care, but her spirit remains unbroken. Perhaps it's this resilience that persuades Marilla and Matthew, the middle-aged brother and sister who think they are about to adopt a boy to work on their farm, not to return her on the grounds of her gender, but either way, they decide to keep her. Anne has an unfortunate tendency to get into scrapes, a raging temper - in one of my favourite moments, she breaks a slate over her rival's head in the schoolroom when he laughs at her red hair - and an appealing tendency to day-dream with which I could always identify. What she lacks in foresight, however, she makes up for in brains - she ultimately goes on to win a scholarship to a prestigious university. Cheerful though she is, she's certainly no Pollyanna. She's just as prone to moods as the rest of us, and her tearful despair when she inadvertently dyes her hair a fetching shade of green (lesson: do not buy beauty products from door-to-door salesmen) is convincing to any teenager who's ever thought their life would be ended by a bad haircut.

10. Bonnie Green (The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken)

Well, yes, she's a bit spoilt and stroppy. She is also, however, feisty, adventurous, sharp, determined, protective and cunning, is chased by wolves, and spends months surviving with her adored but frailer cousin Sylvia in their friend Simon's goose-cart in this atmospheric alternate-history tale of villainy and adventure. Frankly, what's not to like?

Monday, 7 March 2011

Revelation by CJ Sansom

I often enjoy crime fiction. I also often enjoy historical fiction. Unfortunately, when the two come together, I often find the results clumsy and absurd - I mean you, Ellis Peters and Lindsey Davis.

Consequently I had a few doubts about picking up Revelation, CJ Sansom's serial killer mystery set in the dying days of Henry VIII's reign. However, references to the Bedlam lunatic asylum, the aftermath of the Reformation and the Book of Revelation won me over. My fascination with mental illness, heretics and the Devil apparently know no bounds.

I'm delighted, then, to say that Sansom knocks spots off most of his historical crime fiction rivals. His detective is a lawyer, Matthew Shardlake, a hunchback approaching middle age. I enjoyed the observant, perceptive, introspective Shardlake, who narrates the novel, although at times he is perhaps a little too enlightened for a man living in the 1500s, to the point where I couldn't always find him entirely believable. I also liked his pragmatic and wholly convincing assistant, Jack Barak, whose troubled marriage forms one of the story's subplots, and Guy Malton, the Moorish physician. Less successful, perhaps, were one or two of the other characters - the various officials, working for Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, seemed rather interchangeable to me - but mostly, even the minor ones are expertly realised.

The main plot - essentially a whodunnit with a number of twists - has a remarkably high and increasingly grisly body count, beginning with Shardlake's close friend (and former love rival) Roger Elliard. Realistic? Well, no, not really. Entertaining? Absolutely, with a lot of racing across London on horseback and brushes with death to boot. It also explores the nature of obsession and includes some fascinating insights into life under a capricious dictator of a monarch who veers from religious conservatism to radicalism and back again with each wife, and expects his subjects to do the same. The killer's victims are lapsed Reformers and their deaths appear to have been staged to symbolise events from St John's visions of the apocalypse - so what's the killer's motive and who will be his final victim? And what's happened to Shardlake's client Adam Kite to drive him into a religious, prayer-obsessed fervour that could see him burned as a heretic? Moreover, where does the new fashion for false teeth come into it?

As an entertaining read I couldn't fault this. The writing's not perfect - I could have done without some of the clunkier bits of historical exposition, personally - and the plot is certainly far-fetched, but the setting is incredibly vivid, sometimes almost viscerally so, and so are most of the characters. Next time I go on holiday and I need a good plane-journey read with all the most satisfying tropes of a classic detective story seamlessly worked into an intelligent historical novel with a bit of substance, I'll definitely consider picking up another of the Shardlake series.

Sunday, 6 March 2011

Sometimes, fools need to be told they're fools

A 9 year old girl called Jessica recently wrote an article in First News, a newspaper for children, about library closures. Here's what she wrote:

"Books are special. You can read amazing stories and learn about history and different places in the world. I use two libraries to help me with my homework and both are being shut down. I hope you understand that you are making a big mistake."

Roy Clare, head of the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council reacted to this piece as "..froth without substance. After all, when tearful teenagers wrote to the PM about the break up of Take That more than a decade ago, No 10 couldn't fix that either."

Hmmm. A child pointing out that library closures will damage her education and reduce her chances of increasing her awareness of the world around her doesn't sound like 'froth without substance' to me.

The MLA, of which Mr Clare is head, says this about libraries:

"Public libraries make a measurable and substantial contribution to local economies, and help to bridge social divides. They support well-being, encourage reading, spread knowledge, contribute to learning and skills and help to foster identity, community and a sense of place for people of all ages, backgrounds and cultures.

"They provide a unique resource for informal learners and support formal learning throughout people’s lives. They are centres of creativity opening up a rich world of inspirational works by great writers and artists."

But apparently, when a nine-year-old says almost exactly the same thing but in simpler (and more powerful) terms, that's "froth without substance".

If you are concerned that the head of the organisation which is supposed to be championing libraries is a) a man who would sneer at a nine-year-old with genuine and valid concerns about her education and b) apparently believes that the closure of libraries will have no more effect on a child's life than the break-up of a pop group, please do email him and tell him at

Thanks to Si Spencer for bringing this to my attention.