I've just finished reading Simon Winder's book The Man Who Saved Britain, a kind of cultural history of post-war Britain seen through the eyes of a James Bond fan. It was occasionally interesting, if rather long-winded, but it was deeply marred by bad grammar, eccentric punctuation, and some cringe-inducing misspellings that, had they occurred in a schoolboy essay, would have resulted in immediate and lengthy detention for the culprit.
Some of the errors were just bewildering. The following sentence can be found on P159: "Even passing minor villains like the Mexican would-be assassin in Goldfinger, with his single, immortal line, 'You like pretty girl - go jig-a-jig' (managing to convey in six words an entire squalid personality), have a truly Dickensian air." Now which six words might they be, exactly? The sentence to which he is referring has, even allowing for my poor mathematical ability, eight words, or seven if one is being pedantic and counting the two uses of 'jig' as one word. Perhaps 'a' is not being counted as a word, which might - I stress 'might' - allow us to make up the requisite six, but the sheer effort involved in trying to work out a formula by which that sentence could claim to be true rather spoiled the act of reading it to begin with.
I don't usually criticise books in this way - after all, I've confessed to the fact that errors creep into every text, my own books (hell, even these blogs) included - but there were so many in this book that the experience of reading it began to feel like being hit over the head with a small hammer every couple of pages. Mr Winder, you might be interested to learn, works in publishing, and the book is published in the UK by Picador, an imprint that has built its reputation on literary fiction and quality non-fiction. Nevertheless, nobody - not Mr Winder himself, and not his publishers - seemed to feel that it was worth the effort to properly edit The Man Who Saved Britain. It cost me €22 in hardback, and for €22 the least somebody can do is make sure the book is presentable to the reading public.
The reason why I bought this book was because, as a boy, I was a big fan of Ian Fleming's James Bond books. Fleming was the first author whose books I devoured, seeking them out in second-hand bookstores and sales of work, usually in battered Pan paperback editions with often fabulous covers. (My particular favourite was the cover of Thunderball, which had two holes bored into it to resemble bullet wounds in skin. As a bloodthirsty nine-year-old boy, there were few greater pleasures than to be able to poke my fingers through those two wounds. And you wondered where my books came from . . .)
In particular, and this is one of the few areas in which Mr Winder's book becomes less of an apology for liking Fleming in the first place and more of an attempt to engage with the reasons for his popularity beyond the shores of England, I was fascinated by Fleming's villains. I had never before encountered creatures so grotesque: Goldfinger, Blofeld, Irma Bunt (Blofeld's lesbian sidekick in On Her Majesty's Secret Service and You Only Live Twice), From Russia With Love's Rosa Klebb, with a poisoned blade in the sole of her shoe . . . They were like ogres and trolls from fairy tales, and were often, truth be told, much more interesting than the Bond of the books.
True, I haven't read the Bond books for many years, and Mr Winder's book imbued me no great urge to return to them, although I can't quite figure out if that is a flaw of The Man Who Saved Britain or of Fleming's original novels. I expect that it's a little bit of both. To be honest, I can't recall very much about the books at all beyond their villains, and I suspect that even those memories are coloured somewhat by the films that followed. I do seem to remember that a lot of the women in the Bond books had some minor physical disability: a boss eye, one leg shorter than the other, that kind of thing. As a pre-teen boy, I expect that whatever such shortcomings in the Bond women suggested about their creator probably went over my head, although even then I can recall being vaguely aware that there was something, um, unpleasant underlying a great deal of Fleming's work.
But those wonderful villains stayed with me, and I think they influenced me when I came to create some of the vile creatures who inhabit my own books. Characters like Pudd, Brightwell, Faulkner and Adelaide Modine share some of their ancestry with Fleming's creations. After all, most writers, if they are honest, will confess to being, in part, the sum of the writers whom they themselves have read. I have frequently admitted the debt that I owe to Ross Macdonald and James Lee Burke. Fleming's influence is less pronounced stylistically, but is no less important for that, especially given the pleasure (if that's the right word) that a lot of readers have taken in the villains who have cropped up in my books.
Some years ago, I interviewed James Lee Burke for the Irish Times. Burke is another writer who seems to enjoy using grotesques as villains, and one of the questions that I asked him was why he portrayed them in this way. His answer was illuminating, and put into words something that I had only felt, but could not express adequately, in relation to my own characters. Burke said that he believed there were some individuals who were so morally corrupt that their corruption found a physical expression. It was a perfect, concise reply and I thought, yes, that's their appeal. It was probably their appeal for Fleming too, although he is less interested than Burke or I in the roots of that corruption. Still, Fleming planted that seed in my imagination, and for all the shortcomings of the books and the movies, I am grateful to him for that. I suspect that it probably accounts for my continued affection for his greatest creation and for the fact that, despite its own editorial shortcomings, I rather enjoyed Mr Winder's book . . .
This week John read
The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey Into the Disturbing World of James Bond by Simon Winder
and listened to
Bande a Part by Nouvelle Vague
To Find Me Gone by Vetiver
Bamnan and Silvercork by Midlake
(and Midlake's second album, Van Occupanther, once again, because it's simply superb)
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Sunday, July 02, 2006
A Note on Distraction
I'm currently midway through a new draft of The Unquiet, the next Charlie Parker novel. At this point in the writing, progress slows a little once again. I find that I can only really concentrate properly on revising one chapter each day. If I do more than that, the revisions to the second chapter suffer. On the other hand, time is pressing, so I am trying to do more than one chapter each day, recognising that some progress is better than no progress at all, and it will make the next draft that little bit easier. Still, there is a always a nagging voice telling me that I should be doing more . . .
Then again, life seems intent upon providing welcome distractions and, although I'm reasonably disciplined, I am quite happy to do other things if the opportunity arises. Hence last weekend, when I should have been slogging away at my rewrites, I was in Barcelona, courtesy of my lovely Spanish publishers. Two days of that trip were justified by publicity for the Spanish edition of The White Road (El Camino Blanco, for all you linguaphiles out there), and let me tell you now that the Spanish press ask kind of difficult questions. It's an indication, I think, of the seriousness with which they approach genre fiction, and crime fiction in particular. None of the reporters seemed to have any doubt that mysteries were capable of tackling big themes and that viewpoint was reflected in their questions. Frankly, at one point I openly admitted to wishing that I was a bit smarter so I could provide answers that did more credit to the questions, which moved from issues of race and history, through moral philosophy, and on to the existence of God. The interviews were challenging, and kind of exhilirating, the pleasure dimmed only by my pathetically poor Spanish, an obstacle which required the presence of a very tolerant interpreter to overcome.
Of course, this is just a pathetic attempt on my part to explain away as work a splendid five day break in the sun. Okay, so I did my interviews over two days, and gave a talk at a fabulous little bookstore called Negra y Criminal, but none of those duties hardly counted as work in any real sense, and the event at Negra y Criminal in particular was an unalloyed pleasure. Yet I have to hold up my hand and say that the two days that followed passed in a blur of Gaudi, Picasso, and lots of football and tapas. There, I've admitted it. I feel better for that now. I've let you all down, I know, by not sweating over a keyboard. I'd like to say right now that I'm sorry. I'd like to, but I can't.
But there are other distractions that I can perhaps justify a little more easily. My British publishers are setting up a microsite (a mini-website) to go with The Book of Lost Things, and I've become quite fascinated with the process, in part because it involves deconstructing the book, something that I've never done before in quite this way. Essentially, I've gone back and found the originals of the tales that inspired sections of the book, as well as the little bits of Greek myth, Roman history and British poetry that David, the child at the heart of the novel, uses to create the alternative world into which he is drawn. The originals will sit alongside sections of the novel on the website, and I'll try to explain the connections between the two, and why certain stories and images were chosen over others. In a sense, the creation of the site has enabled me to examine the way in which the book itself was created. In turn, I'm learning a little more about myself as a writer and recognising how decisions that seemed somehow "natural" at the time, for want of a better word, were actually the product of a complex unconscious process. How could it have been otherwise, I suppose, in a book that is so personal to me, and in which so much of my own childhood (and adulthood) has been mined to bring it into being?
Over the coming months, I'll be writing newspaper articles on the links between fairy tales and childhood trauma, and on the importance of David's Obsessive Compulsive Disorder to the book. I'll continue to add to the microsite, and to my own website. I'll also continue to write this weekly piece, for it too is a distraction of sorts, but not all distractions are counterproductive or unwelcome. They help to give me a little distance from the book on which I'm working, to put it into perspective, and this column, like the deconstructive process for the microsite, has given me insights into my work by forcing me to examine, and to put into words, things often left unsaid. For that opportunity, and for taking the time to read this column, thank you.
This week John read
Last Ditch House (manuscript) by Shane Dunphy
True Grit by Charles Portis
and listened to
He Poos Clouds by Final Fantasy
Espers II by Espers
No You Won't by The Walkabouts
Then again, life seems intent upon providing welcome distractions and, although I'm reasonably disciplined, I am quite happy to do other things if the opportunity arises. Hence last weekend, when I should have been slogging away at my rewrites, I was in Barcelona, courtesy of my lovely Spanish publishers. Two days of that trip were justified by publicity for the Spanish edition of The White Road (El Camino Blanco, for all you linguaphiles out there), and let me tell you now that the Spanish press ask kind of difficult questions. It's an indication, I think, of the seriousness with which they approach genre fiction, and crime fiction in particular. None of the reporters seemed to have any doubt that mysteries were capable of tackling big themes and that viewpoint was reflected in their questions. Frankly, at one point I openly admitted to wishing that I was a bit smarter so I could provide answers that did more credit to the questions, which moved from issues of race and history, through moral philosophy, and on to the existence of God. The interviews were challenging, and kind of exhilirating, the pleasure dimmed only by my pathetically poor Spanish, an obstacle which required the presence of a very tolerant interpreter to overcome.
Of course, this is just a pathetic attempt on my part to explain away as work a splendid five day break in the sun. Okay, so I did my interviews over two days, and gave a talk at a fabulous little bookstore called Negra y Criminal, but none of those duties hardly counted as work in any real sense, and the event at Negra y Criminal in particular was an unalloyed pleasure. Yet I have to hold up my hand and say that the two days that followed passed in a blur of Gaudi, Picasso, and lots of football and tapas. There, I've admitted it. I feel better for that now. I've let you all down, I know, by not sweating over a keyboard. I'd like to say right now that I'm sorry. I'd like to, but I can't.
But there are other distractions that I can perhaps justify a little more easily. My British publishers are setting up a microsite (a mini-website) to go with The Book of Lost Things, and I've become quite fascinated with the process, in part because it involves deconstructing the book, something that I've never done before in quite this way. Essentially, I've gone back and found the originals of the tales that inspired sections of the book, as well as the little bits of Greek myth, Roman history and British poetry that David, the child at the heart of the novel, uses to create the alternative world into which he is drawn. The originals will sit alongside sections of the novel on the website, and I'll try to explain the connections between the two, and why certain stories and images were chosen over others. In a sense, the creation of the site has enabled me to examine the way in which the book itself was created. In turn, I'm learning a little more about myself as a writer and recognising how decisions that seemed somehow "natural" at the time, for want of a better word, were actually the product of a complex unconscious process. How could it have been otherwise, I suppose, in a book that is so personal to me, and in which so much of my own childhood (and adulthood) has been mined to bring it into being?
Over the coming months, I'll be writing newspaper articles on the links between fairy tales and childhood trauma, and on the importance of David's Obsessive Compulsive Disorder to the book. I'll continue to add to the microsite, and to my own website. I'll also continue to write this weekly piece, for it too is a distraction of sorts, but not all distractions are counterproductive or unwelcome. They help to give me a little distance from the book on which I'm working, to put it into perspective, and this column, like the deconstructive process for the microsite, has given me insights into my work by forcing me to examine, and to put into words, things often left unsaid. For that opportunity, and for taking the time to read this column, thank you.
This week John read
Last Ditch House (manuscript) by Shane Dunphy
True Grit by Charles Portis
and listened to
He Poos Clouds by Final Fantasy
Espers II by Espers
No You Won't by The Walkabouts
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