Just Richard Flanagan and I, Having a Chat…

Blimey where have the last two weeks gone? Last week seemed to be taken up with the Green Carnation Prize longlisting meetings and discussions (and all the admin that followed), plus a few author interviews, then I was off back home to the Peak District to stay with my mad aunty Caz and then this week I have been prepping for something else which I can’t talk about yet. This isn’t me trying to be mysterious and coy. I am just waiting to find out what is what. Anyway…

One of the interviews I recorded last week was with the lovely Richard Flanagan for You Wrote The Book, well he only went and won the Man Booker Prize this week! I thought being a bookish lot you might like a listen to it maybe, perhaps? If so the link is here.

I will be telling you all about The Narrow Road to the Deep North on Sunday but in the interim let me just say it is quite, quite amazing. I still can’t quite shake it. Kim of Reading Matters has been telling me to read him for ages and I have wanted to read this one in particular since I saw it discussed on The First Tuesday Book Club with Jennifer, Marieke, Jason and co. I can certainly see what all the talk has been for.

So have a listen if you fancy it. Just because I am nosey though, what are your thoughts on the Booker prize this year, both the lists and the new rules?

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He Wants – Alison Moore

There are some books that leave you feeling both completely uplifted and utterly devastated, all at once. I know it sounds implausible, such a dichotomy of emotions, yet these books are often the ones that leave us feeling the most enriched by the experience. Alison Moore’s He Wants is such a book.

Salt Publishing, paperback, 2014, fiction, 192 pages, kindly sent by the publisher

Lewis is a man who seems to be stuck in a rut. He is at the end of middle age yet not quite on the cusp of old age. He goes and looks after his father, Lawrence, at the old people’s home and yet his daughter, Ruth, comes round every morning to look after him and deliver soup that he actually doesn’t want. He has recently retired as his role as an RE (religious education) teacher yet having been widowed sometime a go he has no one to share his retirement with, just time and his own thoughts. He spends most of his days at home apart from when he goes to visit his second favourite pub, and that is probably how he will go on spending it. What Lewis isn’t expecting is a blast from the past, in the form of an old friend Sydney, to turn up one day and Lewis’ comfortable, if boring from the outside, life is shaken up.

As we follow Lewis through his day to day existence, often veering off on one of his nostalgic moments, we build a picture very much of the everyman. It is not that Lewis has not had dreams and desires, or that he has failed to accomplish many of them. It is more that Lewis is a man who has been happy in the village he was brought up in, happy to following his father’s footsteps to be a teacher, happy to fall in love and marry a good woman and just live the life he leads. No matter how conventional. It is not that he is ineffectual, he has just been happy with his lot and has never questioned otherwise. Suddenly seventy or so years have gone by and life has been perfectly fine and good, is that not enough? As he spends his time thinking about the past, the choices he has made, what could of been and also about the future and what may or may not lay ahead, should he have lived life a little more on the edge of his seat, has he wasted time?

When the school recruited a new librarian who was a single lady of Lewis’ age, Lewis became a big reader of whatever classics the library carried. As he returned each of these books at the end of the loan period, he attempted to discuss them with her, but each time, Edie, eyeing the Austen, the Eliot, the Woolf, would say, ‘I haven’t read it. It’s not my sort of thing.’
On their first date, they did not talk about books; they talked about food, what they had or had not eaten in their lives. ‘I’ve never had beef Wellington,’ said Edie. ‘I’ve never had black pudding,’ said Lewis.
When Lewis and Edie had been courting for a year, Lewis’s father asked if he planned to marry Edie. He asked again, many times, over the years, saying to Lewis, ‘What are you waiting for?’ They had been a couple for seven years before Lewis finally got around to proposing. After a three-year engagement, they married in the summer of 1977.

This is where the main theme of the book comes to the fore. All the different versions we have of ‘want’ in our lives. All the things we have wanted in the past, the things we didn’t want but somehow got, the things we wanted to ask for but were too shy or scared, the things we thought we wanted but actually didn’t, what we want for and from others, the things we want to forget, the things we want right now at this moment, the things we want for the future. Moore wonderfully describes all these things as Lewis assesses his life, even by the chapter titles throughout like ‘He does not want soup’, ‘When he was a child, he wanted to go to the moon’, ‘He wants a time machine’. All these thoughts and wants are covered by Moore in under two hundred pages, it is quite marvellous.

Aging and the world moving on around us while we stop and contemplate or just stop full stop, is also another major aspect of the novel. Lewis sees with his own eyes that once Edie died the world just carried on around him and without her, how can that be? As I mentioned before he is also at the end of middle age yet not quite on the cusp of old age, looking after yet being looked after too. Yet what defines old age, do we really have to pop to the shop and only buy beige when we hit a certain birthday? I loved this aspect of the novel which often adds a real sense of emotion, as we see Lawrence’s decline in the home, and yet some hilarious moments as Lewis tries to grapple with the real world.

When the computer is ready, Lewis opens up his email, finding new messages in bold. Someone he knows – a friend of his or someone he’s acquainted with – keeps sending him pictures, but Ruth says he mustn’t open them, he mustn’t look. ‘That’s not a friend,’ she says. One email says he is due thousands of pounds, but there is a link he must click on to claim the money, and he daren’t. ‘Incompetent in love,’ says another. He does not want cheap Viagra or SuperViagra; he does not want bigger, harder, longer-lasting erections. He does not want a nineteen-year-old Russian girl or an Australian virgin who wants to talk. He doesn’t not want a replica Rolex watch or a fake Gucci handbag.

He Wants is also a book which both makes the reader work with it. Moore doesn’t think we are stupid, she wants us to be a part of it all and form our own opinions as we fill in the gaps. The way in which He Wants is constructed is neither linear, nor is it a case of alternating between the present and the past. Each chapter hops skips and jumps between different parts of Lewis’s life until towards the end when we have built up the picture, little clues being handed to us here and there, and can work out where it’s all going? Or do we? As with The Lighthouse you might get a surprise or two as you read on.

It almost seems lazy to compare He Wants with The Lighthouse further, as they are very different novels in many, many ways. Yet Moore’s writing does some of the same marvellous things in both. Firstly the wonderful ‘did I really just read that?’ moments where something really shocking or revealing will happen in the middle of what seems such a pedestrian (which sounds so wrong as the story and writing are anything but pedestrian, but you know what I mean) memory or seemingly insignificant act. We have to read back to believe our eyes. She works wonderfully with the everyday and making it darker and edgier whilst all the more realistic at once. She also might just leave you to go off and work it all out; I will elaborate no further as I do not want to spoil what is just a wonderful and brilliant reading experience.

He Wants will easily be one of my books of the year. Alison Moore’s writing is so deft in so many ways it is hard to try and do it justice, or without spoiling any of the many delights, twists/surprises and ‘did I just actually read that then?’ moments which the novel has in store. So I will reiterate what I said at the start, He Wants left me feeling both completely uplifted and utterly devastated, all at once. It is a perfect example of the sort of book I want to be reading. I loved it.

If you would like to hear more about the book, you can her myself and Alison Moore on this episode of You Wrote The Book. Have you read The Lighthouse or He Wants and if so what did you think? I am very much looking forward to reading Alison’s short story collection, The Pre-War House and Other Stories, in the non too distant future.

When Savidge Reads Grilled Jennifer Saunders…

How is it Christmas Eve already? I hope you are all getting in the festive mood? I have already scheduled something fun and festive for tomorrow, as I am not going to be logging on the internet all day as a) I will be with loved ones b) I will most likely be drunk by about 10am – it is the only way to get through Christmas for me. But before I go all bah-humbug I thought today I would do a couple of posts of Christmas Eve cheer, the first is absolutely fabulous and the second rather spookier.

First up though is something very special as a few months ago I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with Jennifer Saunders. This was to record the Christmas special of You Wrote The Book, but actually ended up with me spending a few hours in London’s Capital Building whilst Jennifer recorded various interviews and shows for the radio etc. and had a good old natter in between recordings and takes, before recording the episode which you can listen to here.

When Simon Met Jennifer

It has got to be one of the highlights of my year, if not one of the highlights of my life as I am a HUGE fan (not quite as much as The Beard who has never been so jealous, hopefully I didn’t go too fan boy) and Jennifer was absolutely bloody lovely darling. There was much laughing to be had, so I thought I would share it with you all if you have a spare fifteen minutes in the pre or post-Christmas – enjoy!

Mini Review Madness Part II; Ruiz Zafon, Kelly, Harris, & Le Guin

So as Christmas is now less than a week away (eek) it means that New Year is less than a fortnight away and in an attempt to try and have written about nearly all the books I have read this year I thought  would write a couple of catch up mini-review posts. I would love to give them all a full review but I am running out of days to do that and all of the books have been featured on one of the three podcasts I co-host or host so links for more on them are available below, so really you get even more out of these than you would a normal review, sort of…

Marina by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, hardback, 2013, YA fiction, 296 pages, kindly sent by the publisher)

I am a huge fan of The Shadow of the Wind and having read Marina, which was published in Spain before it but has only recently come out here in the UK, I am really keen to read it all over again (and indeed might next year) because all the best bits of Ruiz Zafon’s last YA novel made me think of it. Initially this is the story of Oscar and how he finds the mysterious Marina on one of his escapades from the school gates on the edges of Barcelona where he boards. However a mild mystery of a woman in black and an unmarked grave, which Marina instigates they try and find out about, leads them to a much darker mystery and takes them through and under the streets of Barcelona. Sounds good doesn’t it and often it is. There are some wonderful ‘monsters’ and dark chilling moments yet I found myself rather distant and often uninterested in the tale of Oscar and Marina and much more so in the one involving a dark love story from the past. Ideal if you love Ruiz Zafon, or if you have a younger reader who might not be ready for The Shadow of the Wind and so could do with something in the interim.

You can hear myself, Kate, Rob and Gavin discussing this in more detail on the third episode of Hear… Read This

The Burning Air by Erin Kelly (Hodder, paperback, 2013, fiction, 355 pages, kindly sent by the publisher)

Possibly one of the best psychological thrillers that I have read this year and one that I didn’t, and won’t write about in too much depth for the fear of spoiling a chilling tale with a nasty twist and sting (or two or three) in its tail. Opening with a letter telling of a deep family secret which we soon learn is written by a woman recently dead, Lydia, we then join her bereaved family as they meet for Bonfire Night, as is tradition, along with spreading Lydia’s ashes. Sophie is recovering from a huge shock to her marriage and also having recently had a baby, a baby who is soon abducted by Sophie’s brother’s new girlfriend Kerry. I won’t spoil the plot any further (though that happens quite quickly on) other than simply saying that if you want a book about deep seated revenge and the darkness it can create then you should read this, as should you if you like a good thriller as this is a marvellous one – surprises will lie in store and you will be gripped to the end.

You can hear Erin and myself in discussion about the book on You Wrote The Book here.

Peaches for Monsieur Le Cure by Joanne Harris (Black Swan, paperback, 2013, fiction, 541 pages, kindly sent by the publisher)

After having utterly adored Chocolat (I love the film but the book is so much better) earlier in the year, I was ready to read everything and anything by Joanne Harris. Instead of reading one of her thrillers, ghostly tales or even The Lollipop Shoes I decided to go with my gut (quite literally as they are my favourite fruit of them all) and read Peaches for Monsieur Le Cure which finds Vianne heading back to Lansquenet-sous-Tannes, eight years after she opened her sumptuous chocolate shop, despite herself. Here she finds quite a different town from the one she left and an old adversary who of all things may actually need her help. Once again Harris vividly captures a town that has fallen ill at ease and out of sync with itself and indeed the world around it. Themes of race and racism, and generally being different, lie at the heart of a book which from the outside seems sweet but has much more going on darkly below the surface. I enjoyed returning to Lansquenet-sous-Tannes and was spellbound (see what I did there) by a tale of Vianne once more.

You can hear myself and Joanne discussing the book on You Wrote the Book here.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin (Orbit Books, 1969 (2009 edition), paperback, 273 pages, borrowed from the library)

Hmmm. This is a tricky one to talk about as in terms of plot I am not sure I really understood the full premise the whole way through as there is so much confusing jargon about why Genly Ai finds himself on the planet Winter where the inhabitants have no gender apart from when them go into heat, or kemmer, and could become male or female. Suffice to say he does end up there and becomes part of a political conundrum that almost verges on war though Winter has never seen a war as its inhabitants are not want to fight either. Thematically the book, once you have worked your way through it, is inspired. The way it discusses political issues, possibly based around the cold war, are relevant now as are the themes of gender and sexuality. I just ended up thinking that whilst it was probably ground breaking in its time, whilst as I said it is still relevant now it would probably be more potent as a short story. It needs to hit you over the head, not have you trudging through snow for page after page after page. I also struggled to find a single beautifully written paragraph. So overall I loved the themes and discussions it raised, sadly though I didn’t love the execution of it.

You can hear myself, Gavin, Rob and Kate talking about The Left hand of Darkness on the latest episode of Hear… Read This

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So that is my second and final mini-review madness of the week and indeed the year. Let me know if you have read any of these books, or any of these authors other works and what you thought of them? Also let me know your thoughts on what you think about mini-review posts like these, is it nice to get a quick glimpse of some other reads every now and again or do you prefer the longer (and they are getting longer) fuller reviews?

You Wrote The Book!

So a week or so ago I asked you all about author interviews and mentioned that I was off working on a solo podcast, whilst very much continuing The Readers with Gavin of course. Well I can reveal that I have finally found a name for it…

Thank you all for your suggestions on here and on GoodReads too. I actually came to mind when I was recording with Patrick Ness as I asked him about a character, who admittedly was only on one page of his new book, that he couldn’t remember and I said ‘come on, you wrote the book didn’t you?’ and it seemed to stick and now it is here for good. So what is it all about?

Well, each fortnight over the coming months I will be joined by a special guest author to discuss their life as a writer and as a reader, from the current novel they have published to the first book they read and everything in between. It is the sort of thing I would love to listen to, and indeed do listen to many shorter versions of as parts of other shows so I have made mine longer, and so I am hoping it might be right down some of your alleys.

The first episode is now live on the website and indeed on iTunes and I felt very lucky indeed as my first guest is Maggie O’Farrell who I am rather a big fan of (I will be reviewing ‘Instructions for a Heatwave’ tomorrow) and who I was beyond chuffed said yes to coming on, she was a fab guest and somehow I managed not to go all fanboy like I was expecting to.

Over the next few weeks I will be being joined by Patrick Ness, Joanne Harris and Alan Bradley. And of course I would love you all to be part of it if you fancied, so if you have any questions you would like to ask the author, or any feedback then you can email youwrotethebook@gmail.com or comment on twitter @youwrotethebook. Yes I know more emails and tweets but it actually helps to keep them separate. Anyway have a listen and let me know what you think, fingers crossed you like it, and also let me know if there are any authors you would love me to try and snag for the show.