Out of Time by Monique Martin

A few weeks ago I was looking for light entertainment, easy to read and not necessarily wholly serious. Out of Time by Monique Martin proclaimed itself a time travel mystery and was free to download from the Kobo site so I decided to give it a go.

Simon Cross is a (British) professor of occult studies at a Californian university. On the fringes of interdisciplinary research – meaning none of the departments really want to claim him – he’s content as a crotchetty loner. His graduate student Elizabeth West does her best to smooth the ruffled feathers he leaves in his wake and is sure there’s a good man in there somewhere, but so far he’s resisted all her friendly overtures. An accidental time hop to 1920s Manhattan means they have to get to know each other better as there’s no-one else to rely on when they get the chance to get a bit more practical with their occult researches than either of them was planning on.

As a piece of escapist fun the novel is fine, as long as you don’t mind feeling like you’ve opened a Mills and Boon in error at the start. There’s mystery, danger, romance (quite a bit of that actually – if I’d been paying attention to the Kobo categories I would have spotted historical romance as well as historical fantasy), ancient artefacts and the odd paradox. On the whole, it was an enjoyable romp which probably wouldn’t stand up to too much scrutiny, but the same could be said for many other time travel novels. Personally I found it a little romance-heavy so not quite my cup of tea. Not that good SF novels never have a will-they-won’t-they subplot or main characters in a relationship, but the approach and the language used here did make me think of an out and out romance novel and for that reason I doubt I’d read the others in the series.

Words as art

The other night, Gideon Coe (BBC 6Music DJ with excellent musical taste) had a quiz where you had to figure out the album from a word cloud made from the lyrics. This set me off making clouds from Iron Maiden lyrics, which was great fun using the nifty online tool (where you can play around with colours, font, layout etc) at Wordle. Then I wondered what a short story would look like that way, and since I have a selection of my own to hand, I tried it with Last Night in Las Vegas, and here’s the result:

Not only does that look like a film poster for something cool and sixties, but it almost turns the story into poetry (come on, I did say ‘almost’). It’s amazing how it makes you look at the story in a different way, gives you an idea what’s going on and highlights themes. It could catch on as a form of ‘trailer’ for novels or short stories . I’d certainly consider using it that way – any readers or writers care to share their thoughts on the idea?

 

In the epistolary tradition

Looking for light, easy reading on the recent (sunny!) bank holiday I reached for a book a friend gave me last year. It had that pleasing newness that I rarely experience (reading mainly ebooks and second-hand or library copies), and it was slim (230 pages). Just the size and form a paperback should be, somewhere in the recesses of my idealised memory.  The book itself was actually two even slimmer (non-fiction) volumes in one: 84 Charing Cross Road and its sequel The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff. I zipped through the first with little effort and a sort of drowsy amusement in the early evening sunshine, and instead of starting the sequel, I began to think.

84 Charing Cross Road consists of the letters exchanged between Helene Hanff (a writer in New York) and the staff (and assorted relatives) of a bookshop in London, at irregular intervals between 1949 and 1969. In one sense it’s mainly made up of orders for (usually antiquarian) books but because of the length of time, and the familiar tone of Hanff’s letters from the start, there is a certain amount of friendship that grows up, and there are glimpses into various lives at a particular point in history. There’s also a mild curiosity as to whether she ever gets to visit England, and the bookshop in particular, as plans are made and money is saved along the way.

Lazing in the last of the sunshine I began to wonder how the book came into being. Who thought that the reading public would enjoy reading the correspondence (some of it missing, as this is real life and papers go astray) between a writer and her favourite bookseller? Not that I’m knocking the book, it was just the thing for the mood I was in on Monday evening, but in 1970 when it was published there wasn’t even the curiosity value of history (typewriters! The Coronation! Postal orders!) wrapped up in it so what was the thinking behind it? Is it just that the reading public are scandalously nosy and can’t resist a peek at someone else’s letters?

Plenty of novels have been written as an exchange of letters, but in my personal opinion the form works best for comedy. Not necessarily laugh out loud comedy, but the kind of thing that’s easy to read, that you want to breeze through with a close-to-permanent smile. It lets both writer and reader get deep into the mannerisms of a character, allows glimpses of other aspects of their life, and lets the reader fill in their own jokes or scenarios based on a passing reference. While I think it’s true that plots too slight to make a good story have been successfully rendered in letters, it’s probably advisable to start with a good plot and work from there.

I had gone on to wonder if there were any good versions using emails rather than letters, when I remembered one of the most consistently funny radio comedies in recent years (I haven’t read the books), Ladies of Letters by Carole Hayman and Lou Wakefield. Part of the appeal is undoubtedly the marvellous delivery from Patricia Routledge and Prunella Scales but the writing is strong as well. There have been a number of series now but the core is the long-standing friendship between Vera and Irene, which allows them to get away with saying all sorts of outrageous things to each other, and of course using email means there are the inevitable missives written in haste or anger, late at night after a little too much sherry, and the ones sent before they were finished or riddled with typos.

Not only did 84 Charing Cross Road provide a couple of hours’ light entertainment this week, it’s got me fired up to try an epistolary story. I suspect it might be harder than it looks.

The Moon of Endine: free sci-fi werewolf comic

I don’t always put the comic/graphic novel stuff on this blog but it occurred to me that readers here might be missing out because they ‘don’t read comics’. Mark Pexton’s art is (in my biased opinion) pretty special at times, and if you’ve enjoyed any of my sci-fi or fantasy stories you might like the one about werewolves on a frontier planet. So try our comic The Moon of Endine which (like we did for Boys Don’t Cry) we’re now making available online for free under creative commons license CC BY-NC-ND, though you can still buy the print copy over at our comicsy shop or at Forbidden Planet and Travelling Man in Leeds. You can download the pdf if you like, or just sit and page through it here (it opens up a full page when you click on it)…

Writing nooks and studies

A couple of weeks ago I was asking about writing rituals and favourite places to write (or to read), in a post called Favourite Haunts. Coincidentally, a very similar topic has come up at the Telegraph Short Story Club this week, and it’s fascinating to read about everyone’s surroundings. So if you’re nosy, looking for inspiration for your own writing corner (or for a story about writers), or would like reassurance that you’re not the only one writing at the kitchen table with only a crusty brown sauce bottle for company, get yourself over there. You can also read about my study (in my original post I was talking about the library I often write in during my lunchbreak) – I’m sure that’s enticement enough.

If I blog about tweeting, then tweet this, will I be stuck in an infinite loop?

Prompted in part by Louise Doughty’s recent post at the Telegraph SSC where she asked if any of us tweet, I’ve finally taken OneMonkey’s advice and joined Twitter (@JYSaville, since you ask). So far I’ve resisted the urge to tell the world what I had for breakfast, when I’ve poured myself another cup of tea (if I did that, I’d never have time to write anything else) or what colour I’m painting my nails. In fact, so far I haven’t said anything.

In the last few years while I’ve been aware of Twitter, I’ve dipped a toe in every so often without signing up. I’ve looked at Neil Gaiman’s page or friends who’ve already taken the plunge, and I could never get beyond the impression that this was a jumbled transcript of all the different one-sided phone conversations heard on a bus during a long journey. None of it made any sense, I found it hard to tell who was saying what to whom, and I couldn’t understand the appeal. Then I read something in an explanation of Twitter which suggested it was an information-gathering system in which you could immerse yourself and filter out the bits of interest. Suddenly it doesn’t matter who’s speaking, if I overhear that magazine X is now looking for stories on theme Y I can just go investigate. It’s a nudge in a particular direction. And if someone insists on talking about their preferred biscuits I can ignore them for now, until Twitter starts to make some sense.

I’m not what you’d call a social animal and I haven’t gone out of my way to build up networks while blogging; if people stumble across my blog and enjoy bits of it that’s fantastic, and if someone takes the time to comment I’ll respond, but that’s about as far as it goes. With Twitter it’s all about following – how can I gather snippets from those eavesdropped conversations if I’m not having them directed my way? It wouldn’t even let me finish signing up without following at least 8 people. However, I’m already reconsidering following Neil Gaiman because he seems to retweet hundreds of things (where does this man find the time to write?!) and it’s just confusing. I’m trying to follow people that either stay roughly on topic or just don’t say much at all, for now. Far from being a modern mobile user of social media, I’ll be checking Twitter maybe once a day at home, and probably not for long. If wading through all the accumulated tweets since the last time takes up my whole writing slot, that somehow misses the point.

A Flood of Flash Fiction

There is still time to get your submissions to FlashFlood before the April 17th deadline. I had a piece called Alone Again Or (set on a spaceship, named after a Damned song. Yes I know theirs isn’t the original but it’s my favourite version) accepted, and I believe anapirana also has a piece appearing for Issue 3 on Friday April 19th. FlashFlood seems to be associated with National Flash Fiction Day, which this year is June 22nd, so I’m not entirely sure where April 19th comes into it. However, the point is that on Friday there will be a release of flash fiction (less than 500 words) over at FlashFlood, and it should be worth checking out if you like your entertainment broken down into small, easily scheduled chunks to pick at during the day.

While I’m mentioning acceptances, I may as well give advance notice of a sci-fi story called Self-Aware and Living in Bradford, which will be in Kzine issue 6, due out towards the end of May. This is the story about the female-slanted android that I was tempted to include in The Little Book of Northern Women, but didn’t.

Favourite haunts

As a rule on my lunchbreak I spend as much time as I can in the library near where I work, writing. I get 45 minutes there if I’m really being efficient with my time, but even half an hour is plenty of time to get words down or ideas flowing (preferably both). I go there because it’s relatively peaceful, even when it’s busy (which it often isn’t) and aside from people-watching there are few distractions. I sit as far from the shelves as I can to stop me idly reading titles, and there are no ground-level windows in the room I favour.

I noticed myself seeking out a writing space by looking for well-padded chairs, one lunchtime (some seat-cushions have been worn into the grooves of other people’s buttocks over many years, and some of the chair frames wobble alarmingly or lurch if you touch them) and wondered if the more ‘writerly’ thing to do would be always to sit near the Anthony Trollope novels, or books relevant to the topic I’m writing about at the moment.

It got me wondering about other writers’ rituals. Or indeed readers’ rituals. Where do you always sit to write, or to settle down and read, if you can? The corner of the coffee shop where you can watch new arrivals in the ornate mirror on the adjacent wall? The travel section of the library, where you can dream of faraway places? The basement of the local bookshop where there’s a comfortable armchair and you know that the staff will forget about you and leave you in peace? What about inside your house – do you have a quiet attic room, a study or a shed, or are you facing away from the TV you’re trying to block out while the rest of the family watch it? Do you need to have the cat in your lap, the dog at your feet, a view to glance out at from time to time? It’s sheer nosiness on my part, I guess, but I’d love you to leave me a comment and let me know.

The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy

A crime novel a little off the beaten track for me, but I enjoyed the film LA Confidential, so when I saw that novel plus a couple of Ellroy’s others in a charity shop, I thought I’d give them a go.

The Big Nowhere is not for the faint-hearted, though I did appreciate as I read it that some events were put across in a couple of matter of fact sentences, when in a more salacious setting they could have been lingered over in awful detail. Even so, there’s a fair bit of violence, some nasty murders and a couple of forensic scenes, not to mention bizarre sex crimes. I kept marvelling at the fact I was still reading, but the power of the writing and characterisation was such that I had to know how it all worked out, I had to know who was responsible for what.

Set in the first days of 1950 in Los Angeles, The Big Nowhere follows a murder investigation seemingly linked to gay men, and an investigation into Communist activity in the motion picture industry, at a time when being gay or being Communist were about equally likely to turn you into a pariah. This is the scuzzy underside of the city, rife with corruption and blackmail, victims no-one cares about, and rivalry between city and county police. It seems there are no good guys or bad guys, only bent cops and gangsters with half an eye on justice. Sometimes they’re the same person.

It’s a complicated novel, the pieces of the puzzles so intricate that I occasionally had to re-read to make sure I’d got it straight before I moved on. On the whole it had an urgent tension to it that kept me reading, but every so often the police procedural aspect of it slowed me down (lists of names, licence numbers, addresses that people read out over the phone to each other, for instance) but I’m not sure how else you’d be able to do it so that the reader sees the information and can put two and two together at the same time as the character. It has a gritty, dirty feel to it, and was depressing in places but I like the fact that it didn’t have a neat uplifting ending with all loose ends tied. Once I’ve cleansed my palate with something uproariously funny, I’ll be back for more of Ellroy’s harsh urban style.

Review of the week (it’s been an exciting one)

Apart from the release of my short story collection The Little Book of Northern Women (more of which in a moment), I’ve been listening to the new BBC radio version of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. Richard Mayhew helps a girl in a London street and finds himself caught up in the disputes of London Below, with its fiefdoms and tangential relation to the London Richard’s familiar with. I enjoyed the TV series when I first saw it on DVD a few years ago, but it’s true the radio series had more scope and is therefore in some respects better. There’s a well of darkness in Neverwhere that can only fully be dredged when your imagination’s supplying the images (I was picturing most of the characters as they appeared in the TV series, but they weren’t being confined to scenery I’d actually seen them in). It remains a good story, which is the main thing, and though I knew the plot I was still finding it tense and unsettling at times.

The overwhelmingly positive reaction to The Little Book of Northern Women, which I self-published via Amazon at the weekend (though it should be easily convertible to non-Kindle formats; I’ve got it as epub on a Kobo) has given me a thrilling few days so far. Kelvin Knight has become a one-man publicity campaign on my behalf, a role which I neither asked nor expected him to play, but which is much appreciated. The other stalwarts of the Telegraph Short Story Club have, as usual, been most encouraging as well, tweeting and generally shouting about the new book’s existence. So far, the feedback has been good and people have been enjoying the stories they’ve got round to reading (which for some eager people is all of them), but I would love to hear what anyone else thinks of the collection or any of the stories in it – you could leave a comment here or write a review somewhere and point it out to me.

The Little Book of Northern Women, released today

The short story collection I promised back at new year is now available at last for the princely sum of 99p (or whatever Amazon translate that to in other currencies – it’s available on all Amazon sites) for 9 stories, 8 of them previously unpublished. The Little Book of Northern Women is, as the title suggests, a collection of stories in which women from the north of England feature rather prominently. Those women are young, old, middle-aged; coping with oppressive mothers or the passage of time; gentle, angry, strong, defiant, bemused. Some of the stories are light-hearted, others quite dark, set in the 1930s, 1980s and more recently. I decided to stick with non-genre stories (though I was tempted to include one about a female-slanted android in Bradford), but just because the central characters are all women, I sincerely hope the package doesn’t seem unpalatable to male readers.

As with Wasted Years, the e-book is DRM-free, which means (among other things) that if like me you don’t own a Kindle, you can convert the file to something more compatible with your hardware (epub for a Kobo, in my case). I’ll leave you with the cover image (featuring a photo my Nana took of her Nana), and I’d love to know what any of you think of the collection.

Magic Kingdom For Sale – SOLD! by Terry Brooks

An enjoyable, light-hearted fantasy novel that I’d somehow missed, by a well-known name in the genre.

When I was a teenager, Terry Brooks novels were everywhere, and it seemed to me that every one I picked up was book 7 of the Long-Winded cycle or part 2a of book 4 of the second quintet of the High Fantasy Epic. Undoubtedly if I look now I’ll find he’d only written four novels by then but in a way it doesn’t matter. The point is, I avoided his work. I associated him with Anne McCaffrey and David Eddings (both of whose prodigious output I had dipped into on the recommendation of a friend with whom I have overlapping reading tastes) and I assumed he wrote the sort of po-faced high fantasy I couldn’t stand, slightly wet with an unsubtle moralistic overtone, spread over a dozen volumes.

On the basis of Magic Kingdom For Sale – SOLD! it seems I may have been wrong (it does happen occasionally). It was a quick and easy read, laced with humour (by no means comic fantasy, but definitely not always straight-faced) and with a few original twists to its comfortable tale of dragons, fairy magic and quests.

Ben Holiday is a lawyer in Chicago with a successful career, millions in the bank, a flash apartment (this being the 80s, that means a lot). Trouble is, his wife died a couple of years ago, he’s staring 40 in the face, and he’s beginning to wonder what the point of it all is. The answer’s either suicide or a long break from his old life, so the advert in the Christmas catalogue offering a kingdom (complete with dragons, fairies, wizards and knights) for a million dollars seems too good to be true. And we all know what they say about things that seem too good to be true.

It hasn’t made me rush off to read all those Terry Brooks books I dismissed out of hand all those years ago, but if you’re a high fantasy reader who also doesn’t mind the odd Terry Pratchett or Tom Holt, you could do much worse than to read this novel. (If you’re wondering how come I picked it up in the first place, a friend mentioned it then I noticed it in the library a couple of weeks later and thought why not).

Thomas More’s Utopia

I’ll refer to it as Thomas More’s Utopia because, despite the modern meaning of the word, it wouldn’t be for everyone. For a start, they have slavery. However, given it was written in the 16th century there’s still a lot in there to learn from, and if you replace the word ‘prince’ with ‘prime minister’ I would endorse a big chunk of his advice to anyone ruling a nation (Messrs Cameron and Osborne, please take note. Or perhaps someone could give Ed Miliband a copy).

If you’re not familiar with the book, it’s couched as a conversation taking place between More and a well-traveled man who has found through vast experience that the most contented and best-governed nation in the world is the (fictional) nation of Utopia. He then explains to More and his friend why it is that Utopia is so great, and how it differs from England or other European nations of the time. This includes its justice system, foreign policy and welfare system, parts of which are now in place, parts sound ludicrously old-fashioned, and most of it I’m sure would have been thought mad (or subversive, or both) in the 19th century, let alone the 16th.

I believe it may have been written in Latin, so possibly depends on the English edition you get hold of, but I found it surprisingly easy to read, of great historical interest, and it shone a light on the great constants of socialist thought (for Utopia is a recognisably socialist nation, for all its oddities of antiquity).

Utopia is a book I vaguely intended to read in my late teens, but put off by the idea that it might be hard to read because of its age, and potentially long and dry (it turned out to be neither), I never got round to it. Being of Yorkshire birth and ancestry, naturally the prospect of free e-books piqued my interest so when I did get my e-reader a couple of months ago, I went straight to the online repositories of out of copyright books. A combination of resurgent interest thanks to Jonathan Rose’s book (The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes), and the ease of carrying several long books at once, plus a novel for light relief, means that I’ve been reading all sorts of books I never quite got round to at nineteen, as well as ones that weren’t on my radar back then. I’ve particularly been enjoying John Ruskin lately, and for that alone I salute the rise (but never the domination) of the e-reader.

A constant drip wearing away the stone of literature

No, I am not referring to myself as a constant drip. The title is supposed to conjure images of gradually breaking down a formidable structure. Keeping on chipping away. Little and often. That sort of thing.

Since I got my e-reader for easier, lighter reading material on the daily commute, I’ve been leaving the doorstop books for reading at home. Except the daily commute is my main reading time, and for a while I wasn’t getting very far. Then I took to reading a chapter last thing before bed. Half a chapter while dinner’s in the oven. A couple of pages while OneMonkey’s left the room mid-conversation to let the cat in. Before I knew it, I was zipping through.

As ever I pounced on the lesson in there: this applies to writing, too. We can’t all write full-time (we wouldn’t all want to), but I’ve found before that it’s possible to get a surprising number of words on the page without it taking you away from other activities too much. Most of the time, I’m lucky enough to be able to write at lunchtime. If I’m quick about getting to the library I can get 45 minutes of solid writing in, without much in the way of distractions, and if I do it regularly so I can pretty much remember what I’d written last time, I can watch the wordcount grow quite quickly.

If you’re prepared (by which I mean, have suitable writing materials to hand and have thought a bit about what you want to say next) you can write a paragraph while you’re waiting for the kitchen timer. Or sitting outside your child’s after-school activity (or if they’re older, outside the party they swore they’d be ready to leave at ten). Or in the doctor’s waiting room, at the bus stop, during the interval at a theatre, in a long post office queue, or in the last fifteen minutes before bed. Each time you write, it might not seem like much. Eventually though, it could become a novel.

Ultra-short crime

There’s only a couple of days left to enter CrimeFest’s Flashbang competition, it’s open till midnight on Friday 1st March. I haven’t yet come up with a 150-word crime story I’m happy with, but I did enjoy reading the winning entries from last year, particularly the clever approach of the winner, Iain Rowan. Frankly it’s enough to make all my efforts feel a bit lame, but there is still time for inspiration to hit.

There’s more to a good story than plot

This week’s exercise at the Telegraph SSC is to write the plot of a story you’re writing (or have written) in only three sentences. It’s harder than you might think, and the results can make what you thought was a good story sound flat and lifeless. Take for instance my story A Fate Not Shared: Naomi and her toy rabbit are taken to their new house by her parents. Naomi and Rabbit explore while the grown-ups talk, and they discover a forgotten old lady in a bedroom. Naomi expects her father to put things right but instead he leaves her with the old lady, taking her mother and Rabbit away with him. If you read the story you’ll see if it matches your expectations (it might or it might not, it depends what images my three sentences conjured up for you).

Two identical sounding plots can represent quite different stories. The language, subtext, subplots, and point of view can make a huge difference. One of them might be approached in a humorous way while the other plays it straight. If your writing is all about the feel of the language, the lyrical prose, then a bare bones plot outline might well sound like there’s not much to it.

Conversely, one single story can be summarised in a variety of three-sentence ways. What is being emphasised – the death of the heroine’s mother or the subsequent events that lead from that? Readers will sum up a story in different ways depending on what they took from it, which in part depends what they brought to it (what prism of life they viewed it through). An interesting exercise might be to have a group of people summarise the same story, and see what comes out.

In The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes by Jonathan Rose (yes I’m still talking about that book. It’s a good book, and there’s a lot of it) there’s a mention of working men asking what was the difference between the cheap adventure stories they’d enjoyed as lads (the penny dreadfuls) and the books like Robinson Crusoe, The Last of the Mohicans or Treasure Island that they read later. One of the answers to that might be that there is no fundamental difference, just the snobbery of high vs low culture. Certainly someone without the background knowledge to pick up allusions, or the cast of mind that reads a story on several levels at once, will get the same thing out of both types of book: an exciting adventure story. If there is some fundamental difference (which, having never read any of the penny dreadfuls I couldn’t say) then it’s another reason to think that plot is not all there is to a good book.

The Cult of the Classics

Working men making their own exploration into culture in the 19th century were often stuck in the past as far as their reading material went. They looked to Pope, Milton, Shakespeare, Carlyle etc. All of which I as a teenager, beginning to explore literature for myself, read or attempted to read, or felt guilty for not reading. The kind of books that featured on Sir John Lubbock’s Victorian list of books you ‘should’ have read in order to be considered cultured. Although for working men in the 19th century, reading the whole lot wouldn’t guarantee that. But I digress…

More than 100 years later, for GCSE in the early 1990s, I studied Shakespeare and Wordsworth. We have stagnated, or worse, we are regressing because every year that goes by takes us a year further from the time when any of those works was fresh and new. And as the list is added to (very slowly) the chances of anyone getting through the lot at a reasonably young age grow slimmer.

It is important to know what foundations your culture was built on, but at what cost? If you have to struggle with the language, delve into sideroads of history to understand what was at the time a passing reference to a contemporary person or event, doesn’t that lose some of the pleasure? Which is not to say you shouldn’t do that if you want to – overcoming the challenge may lead to a depth of enjoyment hitherto unknown – but I don’t think it should be expected.

These books or authors were held up at their own times and those just after as the best example of, in Dickens for instance, social conscience in literature. Haven’t we got any other examples yet? If not, we must be doing something wrong.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

I hadn’t heard much about this novel before I read it, but I kept seeing it in charity shops and the library and eventually I read the back because it had an intriguing title, and it sounded like the kind of thing I might enjoy. A historical fantasy novel in which Yorkshire is a key place, and one of the two characters named in the title is a Yorkshireman. Excellent.

English Magic is in a bad way. There are no practical magicians any more, and the Golden Age is long over. Mr Norrell strongly feels it’s time for a revival, but only if it’s done properly. Which is to say, by him. As a curmudgeonly old Yorkshire recluse, he doesn’t seem like the ideal candidate for a trip to London to interest the government in English Magic. Magicians are not quite respectable, so society feels. However, he must try, and when he gets himself a pupil in the form of handsome young Jonathan Strange, the fate of English Magic looks much rosier than it has in a long time. Nothing is ever that simple, of course, and by drawing attention to themselves Strange and Norrell evoke the envy and enmity of some powerful people.

I almost feel bad for saying anything negative about this book; the plot is entertaining and at times tense, the characters are well-drawn and the era is vividly evoked, not least by the writing style. The length, however… Well, the length in itself isn’t a problem (about a thousand pages in the paperback edition I bought), I have books that are as long or longer by Tad Williams and Stephen King. It could be the apparent lack of activity for long periods, but then I enjoyed Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past which is a longer book in which less dramatic things happen at less frequent intervals. I think in my view the very thing that makes the novel so unique has brought about its downfall.

The book is set in the early years of the 19th century, in fact the Napoleonic Wars feature prominently during one part of the book. The author has therefore taken the (at first glance brilliant) decision to write in the style of a Georgian or early Victorian popular novel; the spellings sometimes look odd (chuse, shew rather than choose or show) and the long-winded style with asides into gentle social satire or an examination of manners reminded me a little of Anthony Trollope (which, as regular readers will know, I intend as high praise). However, when it comes down to it this is a fantasy novel, a novel in which the stakes are lives and kingdoms and ways of life, not who will marry whom and when. While it was amusing to read of magic in England in such a commonplace manner, and much as I enjoyed the reply to a question on whether a magician could kill someone by magic (‘I suppose a magician might, but a gentleman never could’), ultimately I found it was too laid-back a style for what was happening.

A magician achieves something not achieved for hundreds of years, he’s alone and it’s dangerous, but because of the style this feat is described almost as though he’s dressing for dinner, and there is never any insight into whether he was afraid or what the consequences might have been. His wife does make him promise not to try it again for a while, but there’s no sense of her being terrified of what might happen. The asides and the scene-setting (amusing dialogues at society parties or in Cabinet meetings, for instance) do help place the story in time, but tension that has built up dissipates during these sections and I’d almost forgotten what jeopardy a character was in the last time we saw him, by the time he turns up again some chapters later in different circumstances.

OneMonkey started reading Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell but gave up after about 300 pages. He said he kept thinking something was about to happen, then it didn’t, and in the end he grew tired of the anticlimax. I persevered to the end of the novel because I wanted to know what happened to the characters (who I had been made to care about), and I was impressed by what had been attempted with the book (the setting and the style), but I confess I wasn’t racing through chapters in a dash to the end, in fact it took me longer to read than any novel has for many years. In short, I want to recommend this book for so many reasons, but I’m reluctant because 9 out of 10 of you will resent me for wasting weeks of your time.

Weather reporting

Elmore Leonard apparently said you should never write about the weather. With pared-down crime writing you might think that makes good sense, and it can’t have done him any harm, but don’t underestimate the effects of the weather.

Maybe it’s just because I’m British, and the twists and turns of the weather are discussed at great length daily, not least by me. I think in any piece of writing the weather can play a part – though I’m not saying every piece of writing should dwell on it, or even mention it.

Think of a place you know well. I’ll take the street I live on, a street I walk down every weekday morning, and back up ten hours later. It has as many different moods as there are cloud configurations over the valley.

• A crisp October morning with breath faintly visible in the sunlight.
• A foggy November teatime, the streetlights doing nothing but tint small patches of fog orange.
• Blue-cast January, silent snowflakes settling slowly on covered paths.
• Muggy August, clouds gathering in late afternoon as the storm promises cool relief.

In each of those cases the street looks and feels different: open and light or closed in, safe or full of hidden dangers, familiar and comfortable or eerie and unsettling. That in turn affects my mood, so imagine what it can do for your characters.

For crime writing the weather has added benefits. Loud wind or rain can muffle thuds or shouts: either nothing is heard at all or witness reports are confused. Bad weather of any kind keeps people indoors, or walking with heads down, either way they’re not witnessing anything. Snow holds tracks (cars, feet, dragged bodies), rain makes mud which does the same. Heat shortens tempers and makes people lazy. And all that’s before you get to the ‘why was he only wearing a thin jumper when he claimed to have walked all the way across town? He’d freeze.’

Monet kept painting Rouen cathedral at different times of day in different weather. Those paintings are all of the same building but they’re by no means the same picture.

Commuters in wellingtons

Snow has come to town this last week, and so far it has stayed. Looking out of my window is like looking into a fairytale; the trees are caked and bowed, the distinction between path and flower-bed lost. There is a frisson of excitement to the morning commute. Will I get to the station in good time, without falling? Will the train be delayed? Will it run at all? Will a passing van going too fast on the main road splash me from waist to ankle with brown slush?

Routine is turned upside down. People are getting the bus because they can’t get the car safely to the main road. Or they’re driving to work because the train’s cancelled. Walking the kids to school because the school bus can’t get through. Hiking boots are called upon, and jumpers not usually considered fit for work are brought into play. Men turn up for meetings in suits, ties, and green wellingtons.

It is at these frayed edges of everyday behaviour that stories form. They crystallise like the winter ice and are just as delicate. Gaze upon them, admire them, memorise their shape. Paint pictures with words and share that frisson of excitement around.