Obiter Dicta

Thursday January 5^th, 2012

Greetings and condiments of the season to one and all. Since I wrote my last obiter dicta, I have been interviewed twice for the newspapers, done a phone interview on Talk Radio Europe, and been the subject of two photoshoots. (Ah, how readily the word ‘photoshoot’ trips off the keyboard of my little PC!) Already a hardened veteran of these things, I can see why Katie or Naomi find them so taxing and such hard work. The number of times I had to fold my arms across my chest and stand slightly turned to the left whilst facing the camera at the same time THEN turn slightly to the right and do the opposite would have driven a lesser mortal sane. Lift your chin a little. Look straight down the lens. Look over there away to the left. Put your hands in your pockets. Take your hands out your pockets. I’ll tell you this; I’ll never sneer at a supermodel’s workload again.

            It’s all because of The Locked Ward, of course, my little memoir of my time as a psychiatric orderly in the secure unit of a hospital in Scotland which is officially published today. You’ll find a short extract from it elsewhere in me blog, if I remember and I can pick the right extract. The two photographers, one per shoot, were thoroughly nice guys and model professionals, and I got on with them very well. The women who interviewed me were equally pleasant and professional. One came to visit me in my wee hoose in the wilderness, and the other phoned me from London. As yet, the stuff has not appeared in the papers (Scotland on Sunday and The Independent) but I expect them daily. 

            The interview on Talk Radio Europe happened this morning at 9.30. The fact that I am stuffed, choked and loaded with a cold was just an add-on to make me enjoy it the more. Actually, the prospect held little terrors for me. Away back in a previous world, I worked in local radio. Back when I was slimmer. Back when I thought matching check shirt and tanktop was a cool fashion statement. Back when I was a father of a months-old child. (I’m now the grandfather of her 9- and 3-year olds.) I thought nothing then of doing live reads on the air. The phone interview was a throwback to them thar times. It lasted 30 minutes, so was a reasonably in-depth piece. I’m not sure what the audience is for the station. But I have a guaranteed big one on Monday when I do the BBC’s World at One. Am I daunted? I was going to say ‘You bet your ass I am.’ But no, I’m not much daunted. This interview should be shorter and more concentrated. All good publicity for the book.

            So. The book. Here it is, in hardback, 352 pages of it. The Locked Ward published by Jonathan Cape. It’s all my agent’s fault/credit that it’s here. When he suggested I write it, my first reaction was ‘No way. Far too many ethical considerations. Confidentiality is a major problem.’ But he talked me into writing a 25 page proposal, and sent that off to Dan Franklin at Cape, who said he thought it was ‘extraordinary’ and that the ‘writing (was) remarkable’. I wrote it in six weeks. 

            Mind you, I excised a fair chunk of that in the proof stage, but the book worked better for it. All it needs to do now is sell. If it doesn’t, I could be stacking shelves at Tesco this time next year. Sic transit Gloria Munday. Whoever she was.

            Here’s to the next time.

Obiter Dicta

Tuesday, December 20th

I said I would write something of my books of the year.

            I haven’t read a great deal of new fiction this year but what I have read I’ve enjoyed. By and large. The stand-out novel for me was Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. Funny, insightful, provoking, reflective – everything that a good, thoughtful piece of writing should be. The flawed narrator device rarely worked better. And the main female character, Veronica, is beautifully portrayed. She initially annoyed me as, say Miriam in Sons and Lovers annoys me, or Mildred does in Of Human Bondage. But the denouement had me turning back and reading the whole damn thing right through again, so that I could look at Veronica in a completely different, ie, not phallocentric, way. Brilliant.

            I wasn’t surprised that it won the Booker. I read two more of the short list for that: The Sisters Brothers and Pigeon English. I liked both of them well enough but neither over much. The Sisters Brothers starts off well but ended up, to me, like an overlong spaghetti Western. I liked the adolescent characters of Pigeon English and the ending. But it dragged on a tad for me. It could have been done with being 5000 words less. Or fewer. Or both. Similarly, earlier in the year I read Bed, the first novel by journalist David Whitehouse. It’s about a young man who gets so fat, he can’t leave his bed. Simple idea and beautifully done. But I felt it could have been shorter. Clever idea, though, and an engaging style.

            I read three big literary biographies this year, two of which are Edith Sitwell by Richard Greene, and GK Chesterton by Ian Ker. (If I ruled the world, the name Kerr would always have two R’s. On pain of execution.) Both made me turn to writers I had either read very little of (Chesterton) or had read and found not especially to my taste (Sitwell.) The Sitwell biography is, by a league and a length, the more readable of the two, and I grew to like Edith very much. I re-read the Collected Poems and found a great deal that I now enthuse over – especially among her later poems. ‘Still Falls the Rain’ is astonishingly good. The poems for the atomic age – ‘Dirge for the New Sunrise’; The Shadow of Cain’ and ‘The Canticle of the Rose’ are almost equally powerful. But I found delights in the earlier, more mannered, work too, among the ‘Bucolic Comedies’ and ‘Façade’, although reading too much of these at one sitting is like being force-fed Parma Violets. Parts of ‘Gold Coast Customs’ are worthy too.

            Chesterton is a writer I have only skimmed. The Man Who was Thursday and some of the Father Brown stories to be precise. His writing is not much to my taste, although there are felicities abounding in Thursday. This biography is hard going sometimes, with a tendency to the windy and the wordy. There were long passages I just ignored. But Chesterton turned out to be a person I liked immensely – although I have little in common with him – and I will read more of his work. Hopefully, more of his essays and journalism. (The last writer I grew to like via his biography, like that, was Sir Walter Scott.)

            But the big lit biog this year was the new one of James Joyce by Gordon Bowker. Not the massively detailed labour of love that the old Ellmann biography was, this one at least has some new slants on the great man’s life and I devoured it in a week. I will reread Ulysses in its entirety yet again in the New Year. But first I will read Finnegans Wake in its entirety again. I’ve done it once before, in the centenary year of his birth. But its time to walk the multiverse of genius again.

            In poetry, the only book I remember buying is The Bees by Carol Ann Duffy. As I’ve said elsewhere, this poet is the finest stylist writing in English just now. Better even than the great Heaney, and that’s saying something. The fact that she’s Scottish, female, gay and the Poet Laureate just fill me with delight. And so does the collection. The poem about the death of the last survivor of World War I, ‘Last Post’, is stunning.

            And my book of the year is the scintillatingly brilliant How To Be a Woman by the journalist Caitlin Moran. It’s sparky and sassy, extremely funny, heartbreaking and perceptive. And, along the way, it reminds us of the importance of feminism, of how we should never lose sight of its aims, even as we celebrate its successes. One of the few books ever that I wish I’d written. Although I never could have. Read it and see.

Women are the other half of the sky…

Okay. That’s it. No more dicta, obiter or otherwise, before New Year. Apparently, I have all sorts of media interviews and photoshoots lined up to coincide with the launch of The Locked Ward between then and now. I will tell of you of them anon.

Till then, my friend, think of the world…