Now that Lord Archer is behind bars, banged to rights as we say here in England, I think I can be of help to him. In my time I have served as a writing teacher in many dark places, including Her Majesty's prisons and Nottingham Trent University. I have a pretty good working knowledge of the inside of a British jug, from max-security slammers like Gartree to those bizarre open prisons where inmates are allowed to pop down to the village post-office or to the local bookies to place an each-way bet. Having taught writing to murderers and thieves alike I can honestly say - and anyone who has ever been involved in prison education will back me up on this - that murderers are a nicer class of people. (Really, most of them are not Hannibal types but domestic murderers grieving at the same time as serving their sentence, whereas the tea-leaves and burglars probably just joined your writing class so they can nick your pen.) But as for Baron Archer of Western-Super-Mare of Mark in the County of Somerset (no I'm not making it up, that is his full and correct title whether he's in prison mufti or not) I have this fantasy of making him rewrite a couple of key scenes over and over. Now, if we could just get his pal Thatcher behind bars for all the things >she< did to the country in the Eighties, that would make a terrific writing workshop.
Just got back from visiting my friends the wonderful Peter and Mary Owens for a summer holiday in Cape Cod where they live on a lake. Sue and I took the savages, Ella and Joe, and they spent all day and every day naked and scrabbling for turtles and fishing for minnows and messing about in canoes, while their skin turned brown. Peter Owens writes superb fast-paced historical adventure novels set on the St Lawrence Seaway and he fancies himself as a dashing nautical type. He took me sailing. Of course, while he was yakking and likening himself to Proust (or was it me doing those things?) he turned the sailboat over.
An interesting experience, capsizing a sailboat. That sinking feeling. I thought everything was normal with the water rushing at the gunwale as we plied the lake at a rate of knots. (I don't know anything about sailing but I thought there was a word for it - heeling or something.) It all seemed rather less sporty when the entire craft keeled over and the mast cracked my head and tossed me into the water. Peter, also in the drink, yelled at me to come round to the other side but the sail ropes had looped my body. It did occur to me that if the boat went down then I was going down with it, but I managed to unpick myself in a panicky moment. We then spent a long time in the water but together we somehow succeeded in righting the boat and getting it back to shore. Me shivering, exhausted and bleeding.
I shan't go sailing with that sod again.
But while in the US I did try to update my knowledge of Native Americans and attendant mythology, but it hasn't been easy. (Once, while on a panel in Corpus Christi the panel moderator passed me the microphone and asked me to speak sagaciously on Native American mythology. Since my knowledge of the subject comes from rather unsound John Wayne movies I declined the invitation by handing back the microphone as if it were a fizzing bomb. You see, my Dad used to confuse me when I was a kid by complaining, during Westerns, about how long it would take him to "clear all the Red Indians out of the back of the TV set" and I wasn't going to talk about that.) Anyway, I was in Wampanoag country so I read up on the tribe, but my reference book told me the tribe was extinct. Not so! A Wampanoag pow-wow was to take place just a few miles from where I was uselessly buggering about on a sailboat. My reference book also told me that the Wampanoag wore no feathers and didn't do the Crow Dance: a good start for the debunking of Hollywood stereotypes. Imagine my confusion when the Wampanoags there assembled were much be-feathered! And hopping about like a whole >murder< of crows. (See, I'm a writer - I know the collective noun for these things!). It got even more mystifying when a chap with a booming PA also recruited us into a hand-holding moment of icky solemnity owing more to New-Age-Enya-music dripiness than Native American stoicism. I almost asked for my money back but the organisers were busy counting the day's takings in the sweat lodge. So I report little progress in my serious studies. Is somebody pulling my leg? Native American friends, please help a Brit out here.
Back home to British type summer strangeness, and Sue and I took the real savages to a magical Alice In Wonderland day at Belgrave Hall in Leicester. At a venue torn from the pages of the original garden party illustrations, the Red Queen disported with Tweedledum and Tweedledee and the rest on a beautiful sunny English afternoon. It could have been the real thing. I sneaked away to listen to a fifteen minute scholarly lecture on Lewis Carrol, to learn that Carrol's diary pages for the three days around the emotional break up between himself and Alice Liddel were torn out. Though the age difference in those times would have presented no obstacle to marriage, the stammering author was not considered good enough a match in the eyes of Alice's social-climbing mother. Perhaps this is the key to the melancholy behind those Alice stories. Those three pages exist somewhere.
Perhaps the hookah-smoking caterpillar makes me think of opium, but publication date for Smoking Poppy in the UK is October 18th (January in the US) and I'm looking forward to its release. The wait has been longer than usual because of my change of publishers from Penguin to Orion/Gollancz. Early feedback has been even better than I could have hoped for, though as I may have said before I believe it is my best work to date. Other news is that my short story collection Partial Eclipse and Other Stories is slated for a May 2002 publication by Subterranean Press.
As for the next one, formerly called Seven Sisters on these pages, I'm closing in on the resolution. I was forging ahead before summer came along with holidays and half-drownings in Cape Cod, but I'm back at it. Glad too that I chose to set this novel in Coventry, as with The Tooth Fairy, especially after hearing that someone at Harper Collins in London had chosen to pass up a novel on the basis that characters from the English Midlands are of no interest to the reading public.
Who are these people in publishing? Toilet paper, secretly and finely coated with chilli powder, would be too good for 'em.
Anyway, as a consequence of this attitude I'm decisively back in the Midlands for the novel in progress, and I've been researching about my home town of Coventry during the terrible blitz night of November 1940. Coventry at that time was a mediaeval and Georgian showpiece town, mostly half-timbered, a more industrial version of Stratford-upon-Avon. Using a special system of radio beams (the X-Gerat system) the nazi bombers locked onto Coventry and dropped 500 tons of high explosives and 30,000 incendiary bombs over a period of eleven hours. 555 people died and thousands of homes were destroyed. It has emerged that in London the authorities knew in advance of the raid. They didn't want the Germans to know they'd cracked the Enigma code, so they chose not to tell the Coventry air-defence units, nor the fire services, nor the ambulances or hospitals, nor the police. They wanted to keep their code-breaking activities a secret until something more important came along. Like a raid on Harper Collins offices, no doubt.
But just to show you I entertain in my heart no vindictive thought towards either German people or to the huns of Harper Collins, I will leave you with a cheering demonstration of recent technology. A review of Dreamside by the splendid Michael Vogl, in German, brought to my attention because I might enjoy a split-second internet translation at the press of a button. This is what came out of the worm-hole:.
>>WAKE UP!!! AROUND SKY WILL, GUARDS IT UP!!! Yes, I white, it is 2 o'clock 18 in the morning, but I must ask a question to you. A very important, it is can lives save, the Ihrige. Are you a luzider dreamer?
Ask? Oh, at 2 o'clock 20 falls it you heavily in the memory herumzukramen.
Please forgive you, it were a little negligent from me. Then I guess/advise you not to sleep no more. No, please, you manufacture the whole not simply with a barschen: "Bloedsinn! " off.
They, in addition, the others had their peace, 13 years long. Then the dream country struck back. Hard! Brutally! Pitying lot! Everything is certain only half so badly and there you says that the luziden dreams occur much very rarely... I require a good night to you and - of course - beautiful dreams. Oh so, a response I must remain unfortunately guilty for you: Am I really located in your bedroom or do dream you that only? <<
Answers on a post-card, please.
