landingtree

31/03/2023

Today I read half the reading packet for next week's seminar. This is our convener's packet, which will serve the rest of us as a blueprint when we do ours: each student in the class will lead a couple hours' discussion on some craft topic of our choice. This one is about structure, how novels can be thought about synesthetically or formally. Pip Adam's piece is about how she learned to revise her books by thinking about them as though they were buildings – not a metaphor that ever gets her as far as allegory, she says, she can't tell you which bit of the book is the living room or anything like that, but a useful way of thinking in contrast to her previous metaphor, which had been jenga blocks, most bits of the book depending on most other bits and the whole thing liable to collapse. The novels she writes now have walls that aren't structural and walls that are, so she can knock bits out of them safely. This lead her to run 'The Writing Workshop Where We Don't Write,' in which people took drafts that weren't working and were invited to think them through in colors, or flavours, or by moving around the room. As someone who says he's writing a book structured like a series of walled gardens, mainly because that seemed neat, but who doesn't necessarily have any idea how to actually do that, this is useful to think about! My sense of structure is very ad hoc, is not inherently synesthetic, and is limited to what I can hold in my head at a given time, i.e. less than a novel, which is also something Pip Adam discusses here. Part of the point of images like the building one is having something that will stay in place when you look away from it.

Also in packet: bits of Eleanor Catton, who structured The Luminaries by detailed astrological charts and sections of decreasing size, and Patricia Grace, who structured her Potiki according to a genre of formal speech called whaikōrero, which moves in a circle, beginning by introducing a speaker and ending by handing off to the next.

This evening I also read a good chunk of You Should Come With Me Now, M. John Harrison short stories. One of my classmates' work focusses on memory, alienation, loneliness; I don't know whether they'd love M. John Harrison or find that he wants to deny them everything they're looking for in that material. This is my most fluid Harrison reading experience yet. I just like these a whole lot. Whether that's because I'm on his wavelength now, or his wavelength has changed, I'll only learn if I go back and try rereading Things That Never Happen, several of the stories in which I once hated with a passion.

The stories here are very short, some of them flash fiction. Two so far have been banal satires about Elf-lord Eldranol, a name calculated to sound as much like a medicine as like Tolkien. I can no longer read this banality as fully directed at what it seems to be, not when the story before one of them is so forthcoming in its exposition about the practice of digging up dead members of the British Royal Family, and then has a character say to another, “All of this is so hackneyed and played out.” I'm interested to see where Eldranol goes in the rest of the book. He isn't sufficient. Nor were the elf-lords he's a mockery of. I think Harrison is saying both these things. He's so willing to let you completely miss his point that whenever he does surface something fully, it makes me wary. He probably knows I've got that. It probably means he isn't going to give me any more of it.

Stories that stick with me especially: 'Entertaining Angels Unawares', (so full of sex and death symbols you just know Harrison isn't going to let them resolve the way you'd think), 'Yummie' (like all this book's stories, a ghost story, but this one, twined with heart surgery, chillingly right out there about it) and 'Cicisbeo'.
An example: in the story 'Cicisbeo', a man is retreating into his own attic, moving more and more of his stuff up there. In a story by an author of Weird Fiction, this could mean anything. The attic could be anything. I expected from the first that the attic would be larger on the inside than the outside, perhaps a whole world, perhaps an outlandish series of rooms; surely I've read that story several times. But when the narrator finally gets up there, it's with the line, “I got a confused idea of a much smaller space than I had expected, most of it curtained off by heavy tarpaulins which sagged from the roofbeams.” The attic is resolutely something an attic in a house could be. But reader and narrator still can't see what's in it. All the details could belong to a house, but might not. Later we get “Around [the tarpaulins'] edges I glimpsed the eerie white flicker of a butane lamp, or perhaps one of those portable fluorescent tubes.” Again, it's normal enough to seem part of reality, without his knowing what it is. In giving us two options he also gives us a doubt of indefinite extension. Maybe it's neither. He detects 'A smell which reminded me of old-fashioned house-gas', something which belongs to houses – yet doesn't anymore. When the fantastic element comes to light it is inextricably intertwined with perfectly normal events pertaining to relationships and houses, and only exists for a couple of sentences.

I always find holidays good for reading! I've just been up at my mother's, where some thought had gone into making sure we had a four for five hundred, and there was a new pig, and the nights were so cold I became a person who likes hot water bottles for the first time.

A Dissolving Ghost, by Margaret Mahy.

This is an essay collection which I was very pleased to happen on in a bookshop a year or so ago, I didn't know she had one. Mahy's voice – and it was her speaking voice, many of these were given as talks or interviews – is delightful, suggesting strongly that she would have been fun to have tea with. I convinced my mother to read this book by laughing out loud every few pages, and someone would ask why and I'd read out the paragraph. Mahy has read widely, is sparkling, pragmatic though not exempt from accidentally setting her car on fire, generally excited by the world; she ends a talk called 'Beginnings and Endings' with T.S. Eliot, but begins it by starting to plan the talk and immediately having to pause to clean up the house in a hurry so that when her housekeeper arrives to do the cleaning she won't seem to be living in a pigsty.

I think the tipping point for my mother asking to read the book may have been when I read out Mahy's description of Kate McCosh Clark's The Cradle Ship, in which a pair of twins ask their grandmother where babies come from, and she tells them not to ask because it's rude, but they ask their mother anyway, and so she transforms into a fairy and takes them off to board the Cradle Ship to Babyland, where the rules of nature can be safely explained under her wise guidance – her husband coming along so that he can recite poetry if they end up needing some.

That's from a survey of NZ children's fiction in the early 20th century; others of the seven essays here are about Mahy's thoughts on truth in fiction, her early life, and her writing process, how she wants to appeal to the child like herself who reveled in elaborations and adult nods and winks, without excluding the child who doesn't. (She refused to cut the bit in The Pirates' Mixed-up Voyage where a parrot talks about determinism, but restructured another book completely so as to reduce its dependence on pi).


The New Animals, by Pip Adam

I need to hurry off to boardgaming now, so don't have time to write properly about this book. It's the first thing in ages that's sunk me down all the way into it and I emerge in a peculiarly altered state and go walking barefoot in the rain. Set in Auckland. Protagonist Carla is a hairdresser for a fashion company run by a trio of entitled men who think they're disrupting the industry but are mainly just disrupting the lives of all their employees. Everything is prosaic and falling to pieces a little. Carla has a dog she's incredibly cruel to; the dog has become a problem too large to be faced square-on – the book skips around between streams of consciousness – one of the fashion company men has an interior monologue consisting so completely of positive self-talk that it becomes clear almost at once he's incredibly anxious about how everything's going – Carla's best friend is no longer her best friend and neither of them know what to do about it – nothing's been the same since Carla got back...

Where did Carla get back from? Why will no one talk directly about where Carla got back from? It doesn't seem to have been overseas. In all the friendly, entangled, vexed life they're having, as Carla, Elodie the bright makeup artist whose verve nobody else can quite understand, Sharona who does most of the work which her bosses in theory should be doing, Duey who is a better hairdresser than Carla and has kept her life stable at some personal cost, go about the business of making a stupid job work, where Carla went to is a looming question, and the title of the book is always in play: how literal is this going to end up being? What exactly has happened?

Underscore: do not read this book if you don't want to read about cruel treatment of dogs. I highly recommend it otherwise, I am going off to find her other novel soonest.

And now I am late for boardgames and must hurtle, but another good thing about being back from holidays (I'm not quite going off to get Pip Adam's other novel soonest) is that I can resume Sherwood Smith/sartorias's A Sword Named Truth, which I'm very much liking but which was too large to take on the plane, and I had to pause at a tense point close to the end, with many young monarchs in danger or poised to do unwise things.