October, 2005

Put the coins back

Achill island delivered its promise again. Here's one fairy-tale event: we went to a corner of the island where there is a holy well situated half way up a steep cliff side. The location was stunning: a silvery beach and awe-inspiring rock formations. The savages demanded pennies to throw in the tiny well, and after they'd done that & made their wishes we all sat down for a few enchanted moments to take in the view. In a distracted sort of way Ella was fingering the mossy rock and grass beside her, looking out to sea, when she realised that the earth had delivered something into her hand. She let out a little gasp of surprise and showed me what she'd picked up. Two very old very blackened pennies. It was as if the well had taken her wish-coins and returned two old ones. This was so much like a dream I was already going what does it mean? what does it mean? (A habit I can't seem to stop and Suzanne sometimes has to remind me that certain things don't actually mean anything.) Then Joe found a blackened penny, too. Could they keep them as a souvenir? Yes, why not. Then they found another one. And another three. And another... twenty. And then they were running around like gleeful little orcs picking up hoards of coins from the slopes.

It was too much like a strange dream, but then that's the magic if Achill island. Of course what had happened is that the rain had washed a hole through the basin of the well, flushing out all the wishing coins down the slope. We made the savages put the coins back, which they did, reluctantly giving in to the idea that we shouldn't make off with all those people's secret wishes, now could we? And anyway I told them, this sort of thing happens every day on Achill island: it's why it rains so much.

Meanwhile back home I was wishing we still had political parties in this country. What a spectacle it was. The labour party "conference" in the process of "debating" Iraq. I remember the days when a political debate meant someone armed with conviction mounting the podium and taking on all-comers: they spoke passionately, sometimes eloquently and above all with fire in the belly, timing their delivery to either stoke up their supporters or to round on hecklers, often at the same time. It was a political art that grew out of Methodism in the churches and soap-box oratory outside the factory gates. Arguments and political careers flourished or withered in the market-place or at the hustings. These were the recruiting grounds for the Labour Party, rough and boisterous but settled by gritty integrity and an immediate contact with the people on the streets. One person spoke for, one person against in a process of adversarial grinding, which, if it often created more heat than light at least made you realise how important the issues were. Now we get the stage-managed soft-lighting piped-music auto-cued on-message soundbite, where the worst thing that can go wrong is that a frail eighty year old man who has slipped through the selection process for attendance at the conference can mutter the word "rubbish" from the back of the hall. What did we see? Three "stewards" with pie-guzzling physiques actually dragging the poor old bugger from his seat. My God we have come a long way. And they wonder why half the population can't be bothered to vote. It isn't a conference any more at all. It's just extra free TV time for the media-savvy lip-glossed carpet-baggers who run the Party. These things are the instruments of democracy and they've been whisked away from us without anyone's permission.

The thought of democracy disintegrating like this somehow reminds me that I have a friend whose jeans disintegrated at a Labour Party activists meeting, back in the days when being a Labour Party member meant you were opposed to things like social injustice and private education. At the time it was fashionable to bleach your jeans to create a marbled effect in the blue denim. (Not that I ever went in for this frankly bourgeois distraction, comrades, which was fundamentally unsound and indicative of the incipient self-implosion of capitalism blah blah... continued on page 122) Though I imagine Tony Blair did. Anyway, my friend Dave couldn't persuade his Mum to bleach his denims so he did it himself with disastrous results. Rather than rinsing the super strong bleach out of his jeans he just hung them out to dry...and then wore them for a visiting lecture by Milton Arbefarkle the Trotskyist theorist. In the small assembly comrades were heard to mutter words about the peculiar smell in the hall, but they soon piped down when Milton Arberfarkle rose to the lectern. Dave's legs meanwhile were itching like crazy. He kept scratching his thighs through the denim and the itching was getting worse. Then to his horror, just as Arberfarkle was revealing the seven indicators of the inevitable collapse of capitalism, Dave's jeans de-threaded before his eyes. All that scratching made them literally fall apart, and they continued to do so as he got up and left the meeting, trying to keep some of the rotting rags in place. Arberfarkle broke his talk off momentarily to regard this spectacle of a comrade hastily departing the room with strips of denim flapping around a pair of red chafed legs.

They wouldn't allow that in the Labour Party today. They'd see the metaphor in it for one thing.

I delivered a new YA novel to Faber. It's in the vein of TWOC, but different, with a young girl protagonist. It's called Do The Creepy Thing. I've enjoyed writing these YA novels and they've turned out rather better than I expected. I've never underestimated children's writing, and I wasn't sure I had what it takes, but the permission to approach them as crossover-reads takes the patronising and down-writing tendencies away. TWOC surprised me with the attention it received, even getting a write-up in the Times Educational Supplement. As a former teacher I never would have thought schools would go in for it; but on the other hand teachers are much more aggressively looking for material to engage disaffected students, so maybe that will work.

The question is whether to do more YA. The thing is I know I've been using these projects as a means of deferring a big decision about my next novel. I'm at a crossroads and dithering, and the more the dithering goes on the harder the decision seems. It's all about the kind of novel I should write next. It's not writer's block - at least I don't think it is, but this is how these things can start - because I'm not short of ideas. In fact I've got too many ideas. It's about not repeating myself. Personally I think Limits Of Enchantment is the best thing I've ever done, but that's because as a writer I can see the compression of issues, whereas I think some readers mistake compression for smaller range. Keep going and I'd be writing poetry, which would be a dreadful place to wind up. Oh for a muse of fire! Anyway, you haven't come here to listen to my problems, have you? No, you want beer and skittles, right?

What does that mean? Beer and skittles? What does it all mean?

Don't know, but I hope to find out in Madison Wisconsin, where I'm Guest of Honour at the World Fantasy Convention November 3-6. Why don't you get yourself along. http://www.worldfantasy.org/2005/ It's but a short distance from where you live. I'm really looking forward to this cos I hear Madison is a very civilised place boasting the most voracious reading habits of anywhere in the United States. It's also very far north. I expect to wrap up warm and to gorge myself on intelligent conversation.

But before that is another birthday. How in the name of Intelligent Design did that come around so fast. I know I keep complaining about it but really, I'm getting dizzy. I'm also reminded of a supernatural face-reader (I'm not making this up: this woman told your future by reading the lines in your face instead of your hand, and I once published a story about it. Yeh, pretty bad one.) that I encountered when Suzanne and I were living in Greece. Without knowing anything about me she told me I would be a published writer. She also made some pretty loose predictions concerning fame at 50, wealth, success and the admiration of men and women. Ah the wishing well, the rain, the flushed out coins!

Better stop dithering then.

Graham Joyce can be contacted by emailing graham@grahamjoyce.net