Starting Again

So, after a break of, oh, about a week (and not even a break as such, since I spent it doing taxes, trying to learn a little Spanish in advance of the Argentinian trip, getting back into the habit of writing these blogs, and preparing an introduction for a special Scorpion Press edition of James Lee Burke's The Glass Rainbow, which caused me a great deal of stress and worry as, well, it's James Lee Burke, and I didn't want to mess it up) I sat down and started work on the next Parker book.  In truth, I was rather looking forward to it.  I've had an idea in mind since I finished The Whisperers, and writing Hell's Bells, the sequel to The Gates, allowed that idea time to grow and develop, so by the time I sat down and began writing I was pretty fired up.  

That didn't last long: 5,500 words.  It's not so much that I've hit a snag, as that I need to reconsider how I'm going to write the book.  For the first time, I began writing a novel entirely in the present tense.  It's also in the third person, which is fine, but part of me enjoys inhabiting Parker's consciousness, and to do that properly I should really stick to the first person.  Yet another part of me enjoyed exploring how others view him, as I did in The Reapers, and now I'm slightly torn.  What's the best way to tell this particular story?  Plus I'm avoiding the issue by writing this piece about it, although I prefer to look upon it as writing down my thoughts.  No, it's avoidance, really.

  Usually, these technical aspects of writing don't give me pause.  I've generally gone on instinct and, in the case of the Parker books, that's meant the past tense, first person, with a little dipping in and out of the consciousness of others.  I wonder if that's cheating, though?  Some time ago, an artistic movement calling itself the New Puritans (well, 'movement' is somewhat exaggerating its nature, as it was really just a bunch of young blades who'd watched rather too many Dogme movies) briefly spawned in Britain.  It came up with a 10-point manifesto - every good movement needs a manifesto - which could basically be summed up as 'Keep It Simple', although as an act of public service I've reprinted the original tenets below:

1. Primarily storytellers, we are dedicated to the narrative form.
2. We are prose writers and recognise that prose is the dominant form of expression. For this reason we shun poetry and poetic licence in all its forms.
3. While acknowledging the value of genre fiction, whether classical or modern, we will always move towards new openings, rupturing existing genre expectations.
4. We believe in textual simplicity and vow to avoid all devices of voice: rhetoric, authorial asides.
5. In the name of clarity, we recognise the importance of temporal linearity and eschew flashbacks, dual temporal narratives and foreshadowing.
6. We believe in grammatical purity and avoid any elaborate punctuation.
7. We recognise that published works are also historical documents. As fragments of our time, all our texts are dated and set in the present day. All products, places, artists and objects named are real.
8. As faithful representation of the present, our texts will avoid all improbable or unknowable speculations on the past or the future.
9. We are moralists, so all texts feature a recognisable ethical reality.
10. Nevertheless, our aim is integrity of expression, above and beyond any commitment to form.

Of course, one of the difficulties with the New Puritanism was that it equated simplicity with clarity of expression, which doesn't necessarily follow at all, as well as being more than a little pretentious.  I knew at least one of the founding members of the movement, and quite liked him, but I wasn't going to have any truck with much of what he and his friends were proposing.  Apart from the distinctly ambivalent attitude they displayed toward genre fiction, which suggested that they didn't really understand what genre fiction was, or did, and, by extension, may not have been entirely clear on a lot of other types of fiction either, their reluctance to use all of the literary tools available to them smacked rather of Luddism.  "Vow to avoid all devices of voice."  Really?  How do you propose to do that, then, as the mere act of putting words on a page in narrative form is surely a 'device of voice'? "Published works are also historical documents".  Are they?  All of them?  Are you sure?  Anyway, these are old arguments, for the New Puritanism never really took off.  There were some interesting moments in an anthology of stories assembled by the writers in question, but it was hard to shake off the feeling that they would have been more interesting had they not been written according to the restrictive practices of New Puritanism.  

I'm not really much for Puritanism, in any form, but when it comes to writing something of what they were proposing may have touched a sensitive spot with me.  If I start in the first person, should I stick with it?  Is it entirely fair, in novels that are ostensibly structured around the consciousness of a single character, and told from that character's perspective in the first person, to dip in and out of the consciousness of other characters when the central character can't possibly have that knowledge?  Would my books be better if I were to restrict myself to that single viewpoint?  

Hmmm, probably not.  After all, there is a game being played here between the reader and the writer: Parker is my creation, my construct, and behind his voice, and his consciousness, is my own consciousness, just as it lies behind that of every character in my books. On one level, the reader chooses to ignore my presence as part of a pact agreed with the writer, or is made to forget it if the quality of the work is of a sufficiently high standard.  In the end, I guess I can do what I want as long as it ultimately serves the purposes of my work.  It's a 'device of voice', one of many in my books, and one of the many tools at my disposal.  

Maybe I'll go back over those early words and rework them.  I'll see how they sound in Parker's voice.  Then again, by moving away from him, and changing the tense, I gave these early pages of the book a very different feel from anything that I've done before.  They're sparser, perhaps, but also more lyrical.  It may be that this voice will suit this particular book, as it's so very different from The Whisperers.  It will be a brooding novel, with very little violence.  But would the present tense bother readers?  It takes a while to adjust to it, as most of us are more familiar with books written in the past tense, but it has its rewards.

Early days, and already so many questions . . .

THIS WEEK JOHN READ

Paul Newman: A Life by Shawn Levy

AND LISTENED TO

Common One by Van Morrison

Butterfly OST by Ennio Morricone

A Secret Wish (25th Anniversary Edition) by Propaganda

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Lost in Translation

I think I've discussed the subject of translation before, but it cropped up again this weekend when a nice journalist from the Sunday Times informed me that I was big in China, or, at least, that The Book of Lost Things was big in China. Apparently, it has sold very well there, just as it sold well in the earlier Taiwanese edition, for which I toured in Taiwan and thus subsequently ended up eating an unidentified rectum, a culinary encounter dealt with elsewhere on this site.
I suspect that The Book of Lost Things did well in these territories because it's a book dealing with fairy tales, and myths, and the importance of stories in our lives, and there is a universality to such subject matter. The appeal is perhaps stronger in countries with a very old oral tradition of storytelling, and an ongoing fascination with mythology, but then that covers a great many countries, which may explain why The Book of Lost Things seems to be the novel of mine that has enjoyed the widest appeal in translation.
The relationship between an author and the translated edition of his or her work is an odd one because, of course, the translated book is not going to be quite the same as the book that was originally written. Even if a literal translation from one language to another were possible, it would probably be unwise, as it would lead to a book that read less like a novel and more like a technical manual. One of my early translators in a European country seemed intent upon translating my books in that way, without any feel for the prose or any creative aspect to the translation, a fact that was pointed out to me by readers as I didn't read in the language in question. It may have been that the translator viewed the job of translation simply as a technical exercise; that, or the translator may have been afraid of altering a single word of my deathless prose for fear of sullying the innate beauty of my words. In retrospect, I suspect that it was probably the former.
Another difficulty for the author is that there is no way of knowing just how much of the original intent has been lost, either accidentally or deliberately, in the course of the translation. In one territory, Angel and Louis, the criminal associates of Charlie Parker in my series novels, have had their sexuality quietly airbrushed. In my novels, they are gay. In this particular translation, they are two gentlemen who happen to live together, a bit like the beloved British comedians Morecambe & Wise in their television incarnations. What can I do about this? Not a lot. Territorial sensibilities probably played a part in the change, or it may be that the relationship between the two was completely misunderstood. I could complain, but that would probably get lost in translation too, and the damage has rather been done. By this point, a number of the novels have appeared in the country in question, and it might surprise readers to find that, after four or five books, Angel and Louis could apparently no longer contain their affection for each other, and felt compelled to express it to the world.
When it comes to translations, the author has to trust the publisher, and hope that a sympathetic translator is found. For the most part, these tend to be writers themselves, and often poets. For example, I have a terrible feeling that my Bulgarian translations are probably better written than the original English versions, given the talents of the translator involved, and this goes for a number of other countries too. Meanwhile, I can't even begin to imagine the difficulties faced by Yue Han and Kang Na Li, who worked on translating The Book of Lost Things into Chinese.
Incidentally, the Irish government, through the Ireland Literature Exchange, assisted with the translation of my work into Chinese. It's a worthwhile, and probably little known, initiative that ensures Irish writers are promoted abroad, and I'm grateful to them. On the other hand, I do wish more foreign writing was available in English translations. One of the banes of my life is my inability to read the work of native mystery authors when I promote my books abroad, since so few of them are translated into English, or distributed here. The situation is improving, aided in part by the increasing popularity of books from Scandinavian authors, but we still have some way to go.
In the end, though, the translator's task is a decidedly thankless one, and most readers probably take the act of translation for granted. The IMPAC award is notable for awarding €25,000 of its total prize money of €100,000 to the translator of the winning book if that book was originally published in another language. Similarly, the CWA this year gave £500 to Marlaine Delargy, the translator of Johan Theorin's The Darkest Room, which won the CWA International Dagger, and it has rewarded translators similarly in the past. It's unfortunate that, while this represents one step forward for the CWA, it doesn't quite make up for the giant leap backward that the organisation took by disqualifying translated novels from the overall Gold Dagger Award some years back. A great many risible excuses were offered for this decision at the time, although they all boiled down to the fact that too many foreign types were winning the award, and next thing you knew they'd all be over here taking our jobs and stealing our women. With the quality of translated mystery fiction showing no signs of decreasing anytime soon, and with a number of foreign mystery authors putting their British and American peers in the shade, it's probably time for the CWA to reassess its earlier decision. If it doesn't, it will start to look like the English language authors are afraid to play against the big boys and girls with the funny accents for fear of being shown up.
A bit like the England football team, then.
Sorry.

THIS WEEK JOHN READ

Nobody Move by Denis Johnson

AND LISTENED TO

The Five Ghosts by Stars
The Creatures in the Garden of Lady Walton by Clogs

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What Are You? I'm A Writer . . .

This week I meet with my British publishers to discuss, among other things, Hell's Bells, the sequel to The Gates. It's done and dusted, at least at my end, and has now been read by various people, so the lovely limbo feeling that comes with having delivered a book but not yet having received any feedback on it, whether positive or negative, has now dissipated. The next stage in the process - editing, rewriting, arguing about covers, and discussing the positioning of the book in stores - will now begin, and none of that is really very much fun at all. The latter, in particular, is necessary but frustrating, increasingly so as I find the desire to experiment in my writing growing stronger.
When I began writing, I was intent simply on finishing the first book. I hadn't really considered a future in writing because, while I might have hoped that Every Dead Thing would find a publisher, I probably secretly believed that it wouldn't. I was as surprised as anyone when that book was picked up, and I remain surprised that I am still being published over a decade later. There's a part of me that remains convinced it will all fall apart, that my sales will tank and I'll be cut loose by my publishers. In part, that's a natural fear of failure, along with the self-doubt that is the flip side of the act of egotism involved in writing a book and expecting people to pay to read it. It's also the spur that makes a writer try harder with each successive book. It's like clambering up a hillside that is always crumbling beneath your feet: if you don't keep moving forward and up, then you're going to fall a long way.
But when I signed that first contract for Every Dead Thing and its successor, Dark Hollow, I didn't know what kind of author I would become. Given the nature of the books that I had written (Dark Hollow having already been finished before Every Dead Thing was published), it would be natural to assume that I was going to be a mystery writer, although even then the novels were blurring the line between traditional mystery fiction and supernatural fiction. After writing four Parker novels, I wrote two books that were more explicitly supernatural: Bad Men, and the collection of supernatural ghost stories and novellas entitled Nocturnes. Writing those books determined the direction of the next Parker book, The Black Angel, which embraced the uncanny more wholeheartedly than the earlier Parker books. But even as I was writing that book, I was planning The Book of Lost Things, which tends to find itself variously shelved in fantasy, literary fiction, and alongside my mysteries. Meanwhile, the idea for the book that subsequently became The Gates had been there since the second novel, but I couldn't quite figure out how to make it work at that stage, and it was only in 2008 that I eventually set about writing it.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that, even at an early stage, whatever identity I was going to assume as a writer was not fixed. Now, if I'm known for anything, it's probably as a mystery writer, but then there are a lot of people who have read The Book of Lost Things yet have no particular interest in reading the mysteries, so for them I'm simply the guy who wrote a strange book about grief, loss, and fairy tales. With The Gates and, God willing, Hell's Bells, there will be younger readers who will only know me as the guy who writes books about a boy and his dachshund fighting the Devil and his minions. This is all very well, but it causes terrible problems for my publishers, and for bookstores. Flitting about from genre to genre brings with it a risk of confusing one's audience and, to use a horrible phrase that crops up on such occasions, of diluting one's brand. The pressure to conform is generally unspoken, but it's there nonetheless.
If I'm asked what I do, and assuming I can't avoid answering the question, I'll usually reply that I'm a writer. Inevitably, the next question asked will be 'What do you write?' As the years have gone on, the answer to that question has grown more complicated than it once was and, I suspect, is destined to grow more complicated still. Down the line, I have ideas for books that don't really conform to any genre. At least one probably qualifies as, for want of a better term, literary fiction. If and when I write it, it will probably have to be out of contract, but that's no bad thing: all of the non-Parker novels have been written out of contract, and I quite like the freedom that this arrangement brings. All I can hope is that my publishers will be sympathetic toward it, and, if they choose to publish it, will be able to convince booksellers to be sympathetic in turn. Even if it's not published, it will still have been worth writing. I will have written it because I wanted to write it, because it was important to me to do so. The Parker novels are equally important, but in a different way: the relationship between them and the non-mystery novels is symbiotic. The non-mysteries inform and enrich the Parker books, and the Parker books buy me a little of the time, security, and, I hope, editorial tolerance necessary for me to be able to write the non-mysteries.
Looking back to early 1998, when Every Dead Thing was bought by Hodder in the UK, and Simon & Schuster in the US, I realise that at no point did I ever sign a piece of paper specifying the type or writer I would become, or was expected to be. Then, as now, I thought of myself simply as a writer. No, that's not right: I was not yet a writer. I had written, but I was not yet a writer. I was in the process of becoming one, and I still am. I love writing mystery fiction. I love writing the Parker books. I'm curious about the possibilities of genre fiction, and not only fiction in the mystery genre. In the end, I suppose I'm curious about the possibilities of fiction, period.
And what kind of writer, formed or unformed, does that make me?
A problematical one, I fear . . .

THIS WEEK JOHN READ

Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis

and listened to

The Suburbs by Arcade Fire
La Ballade of Lady & Bird by Keren Ann & Bardi Johannsson
The View From A Hill by The Owl Service

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