Pauline Fisk Asks What Makes An Author Electric?
I’m asked to read a book that comes highly
commended. The author is visiting
Shrewsbury for an event in the town library, and I’m invited to attend. I’m a
cussed so-and-so who knows what she likes when it comes to reading - and it’s
more often than not not
the book that someone recommends. Despite all this, however, I decide to give
the book a go. Then, me being me,
I forget all about it. A couple of weeks later, I’m reminded by the Library
Service that the book’s still waiting to be picked up so, feeling sheepish, I
go to collect it. After all, the library is almost next door. [That was one of the selling points
when I bought my house.] It’s not
as if I have far to go.
I find the book waiting with my name on it. A
librarian hands it over and my heart sinks. The author is coming to
town, and I’m bound to be introduced and what am I going to say to him if I
don’t like his book? Just because it’s published by the same publisher as mine
doesn’t mean it’s going to be any good.
The cover’s a pinkish-red with a cartoon-type black silhouette on it. I'm not sure about that. I've never much cared for cartoony-type covers. I slink away only slightly mollified by the word ‘river’
featuring in the title. I’ve had wild swimming dreams from childhood onwards,
many featuring rivers, and have even written a series of novels about rivers
myself.
Heading for the entrance, I turn over the book and
read the blurb on the back. Imperceptibly something tightens
inside of me. I can feel it
happening. Something is stirring. The word ‘souls’ is mentioned - and I’m a
sucker for souls. Then there’s the word
‘enter’, which in connection with the word ‘water’ has a certain
resonance. Then the numbers nine and fourteen get a mention and - for what
reason I can’t begin to know – they suddenly take on an auspicious glow. Just a handful of words, but they’ve
done what blurbs are meant to do.
I’m in.
I make the short walk home reading all the way. By the time I shut the front door
behind me, I know the author’s history and what he’s written before. I take the book upstairs
and attempt to settle in the sunshine on the sofa by the window. But by the end of the first page of the
Prologue, I have to break off to email the library service:
Can you arrange for me to interview this man?
How do I know when a book just might happen to be special? How
is that information conveyed at such speed? Is there a scent that blows off the
paper? An electric charge when the page is turned? A secret code embedded in
the print? Whatever it is, by the end of a couple more pages I’m getting the message. I read, put
down, pick up, gaze into space, read again, get up, walk about. I’m being drawn in too fast here. I have to do things like this to slow
down. Galloping through a book may be fun, but equally fun
is savouring the ride.
In the end, I abandon the sofa and head down to the local coffee shop on Castle Gates where
I can sit invisibly in the window behind plate glass. This is one of my favourite places. There’s better coffee to be had here
than anywhere else, and I love the fug of voices and tinned music, and the
cheek-by-jowl sense of all Shrewsbury passing the door, either uphill to the
shops or downhill to the station. Sitting in the window with a book clutched in
my hand I always have a great reading experience. Now, even more so, I feel at the heart of something.
A storm is blowing up through the pages and I’m caught in its eye, in
that still, small place where the voice of the author is like the voice of God,
and whatever he’s whispering I know I have to hear.
Do you want to know how special this
book is turning out to be [I'm on Chapter Four now and it still looks great]? When I do something that usually only happens when I write, I know I'm really enjoying a book. I'm talking about reading out loud. If you’re
an author, do you do it too? Do you beat out your writing aloud, sentence by
sentence and word by word? This is
something I’ve done so often, and for so many years, that I’ve become
completely unaware of the low, growled mumble coming out of my mouth. In fact, I’m doing it now as I write
this post, and I know I was doing it in the coffee shop earlier on. Even when I
forced myself to shut up, my lips still mouthed and the words still came out silently.
This is a real compliment to my as yet unnamed author
because usually I read at scanning pace, pounding down the lines, jumping from
paragraph to paragraph, photographic in my clamour to devour the story and
answer the question what happens next. It’s a
rare book indeed where the words are so powerful in the way they’re placed that
I don’t give a damn about the next page. But that’s what’s happening today.
I hit the Prologue running, and slowed down by the end of Chapter One. By half way through Chapter Five, I was reading out loud. And now that I've reached Chapter Six, I’m
putting down the book more and more in order to savour. How can I let this book be read [past tense]? How can I let reading
it become something I once did [more past tense]? How can I hold onto it as something I’m discovering
– and continue to discover - in the here and now? How can I keep
it in the here and now?
I remember reading Lord of the Rings for the first
time one summer holiday, sentence by sentence, fuelled by Smarties [at eighteen I was still a big kid], mumbled out loud under my bedcovers, refusing to come
out until the whole book was done.
It’s how I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, falling asleep at night
with it in my arms like an adult comfort blanket, reading and reading, holding
onto and holding onto as if the experience of reading meant as much as the
book itself.
I’m not saying this book is on a par with either of
these. Of course I'm not. This author may have moments when he sounds like Flannery O’Conner and
Tim Winton rolled into one [with a bit of Ray Bradbury thrown in for good
measure], but his photograph is of a young man, successful maybe and hungry for
more, but with his greatest triumphs yet ahead of him, I suspect.
What I am saying though, is that my coffee’s cold. The sun’s
moved round. I’ve been at this seat by the window for some time now whilst whole swathes of people have come and gone. And here I am, feeling that old
excitement again, losing myself in a world of
someone else’s making.
This is what a good book does. I don’t even know if it’s worth telling
you what this one is called.
Everybody’s experience of what makes a good book is so different. One
person’s Gabriel Marquez is another’s, oh, I don’t know, Daphne du Maurier. A
couple of months ago I wrote an article that likened books to works of art
hanging on gallery walls. I was
writing on the subject of the value we put on words, and this seems to have set
off something inside of me. I’ve been thinking about words ever since, and the
value we put on books.
Certainly I’ll buy this one on Kindle before handing
it back to the library. It may yet
disappoint me - who knows how this author will pull off what he’s begun – but I
want a copy anyway. Sometimes I rattle on about e-books and the future of
publishing, about authors’ rights and readers’ rights and all of that. But behind my words, like silent
sentinels, stand the books. Wherever they come from, in whatever format they’re
read, whatever their genre, whether they be funny, painful, joyous or bleak –
what a world we live in that renews itself by means of books. How privileged we
are as readers to have access to them, and may we always do so [there are
battles here that need to be fought]. And how privileged we are as authors to
have written or be writing them. How privileged I am. Whatever form of publication my books
may take, it only needs one reader to react the way I’ve just done to
Peter Murphy’s book, and I'm an electric author too.
PS. ‘Shall We Gather At The River’ is published by Faber & Faber. Will I still be raving by the time I finish reading? Let’s hope so because the interview’s fixed up.
PS. ‘Shall We Gather At The River’ is published by Faber & Faber. Will I still be raving by the time I finish reading? Let’s hope so because the interview’s fixed up.
Comments
(Though I'm not entirely convinced that 'everyone's experience of what makes a good book is so different.' We are not as individual - or unique - as is currently customary to believe.)
Have you read Murphy's first novel? I've decided to begin there, since it's much cheaper secondhand!
http://mytonightfromshrewsbury.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/we-are-shrewsbury-in-hmp-shrewsbury.html