Category Archives: Reading

Arandora Star

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Finished the Arandora Star (Maria Serena Balestracci) at last. A very moving account of the less than glorious rounding up of enemy aliens in WWII, sending them to camps in or around England or even to Australia or for the most unlucky to Canada on the Arandora Star. The ship was torpedoed. It was unmarked, had too few lifeboats and rolls of barbed wire impeding escape. A large proportion of the enemy aliens were Italians, they had emigrated and settled in Great Britain, many had children born in England, Wales or Scotland, some of them serving in the British Armed Forces. They were often middle-aged or even elderly. Some of the other aliens were Germans and Austrians, many of them elderly, many of them refugees. No attempt was made by the British authorities to determine if any of these men posed a national security threat. 446 Italians lost their lives leaving widows and children behind who never had an explanation, or apology, or a body to bury. Balestracci has researched the whole subject over many years and bought some comfort to the still grieving relatives.

One of the strongest consequences of such a catastrophic piece of mismanagement and injustice, especially for relatives left without explanations, is the lasting pain and knock on effect on communities. It is now 70 years since the event, yet it is clear that people are still suffering. It is difficult not to feel depressed about the new resentments and years of suffering being created under the umbrella of war on a daily basis.

Sad post, but I am glad I read the book and for those relatives Balestracci contacted, there have been great benefits in making sure the Arandora Star and its victims are not forgotten

coincidence

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On the TV last evening a program about a right-wing group at the beginning of the WWII. The consequences of their treasonable behaviour are linked to the rounding up of all ‘enemy’ aliens and their internment. At the same time I am reading the sad story of the Arandora Star (Maria Serena Balestracci), torpedoed on its way to Canada while carrying 2000 or so German and Italian internees, many of whom lost their lives. These internees were for the most part harmless individuals well-integrated into British life. They had been given very little time to leave home, with minimal goodbyes and often even the arresting officer thought they would be back the next day. Such unnecessary suffering, lives torn apart pointlessly, it is maddening how often humans create misery for each other.

writing worries

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One of the concerns I have with this blog is that it will eat writing time, rather than contribute to my writing life. I made an effort today to work on differentiating characters in the much revised draft of my third novel. It has improved immeasurably over the last couple of years – but how long should I engage in this ‘finishing’ process. I was aware of over-familiarity as I worked today and begin to wonder if I shouldn’t just self-publish. This novel, along with the WWII letters & memoir project, has been in the finishing stages for over a year now. When they were both out of my hands on a recce recently I got so excited and involved with my new project, I realised how much I was missing that buzz of pulling in new ideas and images. For a month or so, I was alive with input, sensing music differently processing words differently, now I am back in that other – but equally necessary – ‘finishing’ phase.

Writing, like my earlier careers in sculpture and scientific research, is project work. I like that. I like moving through the phases: creative; engineering; labour; finishing and peer review. Each is good to start and great to finish; none of them are so pleasurable when the record gets stuck in the same groove.

On the other hand, the only qualification that seems essential to getting published is a certain level of bloody-mindedness that refuses to accept defeat. I’m not suggesting that you don’t have to learn to write as well as possible first, but it is clear that being able to write is not, by itself, going to get you to publication. I have an instinct not to start a new project until the previous one is wrapped up, so I have at the very least to get the fiction  – Border Line – launched before I can enjoy the playtime of my next project.

Hmm, this morning I was reading this book about a year in music (1853), Berlioz, Liszt, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner etc all composers still famous today, battling away with daily life, but alongside them many others equally, or more, famous in their day and known only to specialists now. There are others too, some perhaps with as much potential, getting nowhere. They are all earning a living conducting, playing, writing or something else – but not composing. No one has it easy and luck and bloody-mindedness strike me as on at least an equal footing with talent.

This is a dull post, but I planned to think aloud – so there we go. And thinking aloud, I am sad about the choice of new pope. Not that I have any feeling about the church as such, and he seems a generally pleasant guy, but he is clearly not going to release the stranglehold the Catholic church holds over women and men’s health. I had a passing hope that an enlightened pope would allow contraception to his followers. I suppose it was naive to expect that they would think about the fate of the world and the living.

steep learning curve

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Much achieved today. Thanks to EG and friends Alan and Mike, I finally sorted a name for this blog. Thanks to help from specialist Chris a few days ago, I can more or less find my way around it. Still SO much to learn!

Yesterday had a one-to-one lesson from Apple and managed to retain enough to sort out my emails and add a web address that I have only been able to access through the web until now.

Alternating hailstorms with mass attacks on the bird feeders by great variety of birds. All the usual for us – sparrows, chaffinches, robins, dunnocks, pigeons, goldfinches blue-tits, coal-tits and great-tits – our new comer is a bright yellow siskin feeding on the Nyger seeds.

The first estimate for repaving the drive now in. This is the Rolls-Royce version for removing enormous ancient concrete slabs and more recent buckled block paving, adding new drainage channels and giving many layers of membrane and double underlays etc. It all come to a whopping £8,300 when you add in the VAT though we could have half of it done  for around £5000. This firm would do a brilliant job, but the cost is gulp-making and we are very much hoping that the more local man will come in with a more reachable sum. I am tempted to plan some DIY options, though I could no longer lift the old slabs myself.

Bought a replacement copy of White Teeth the other day, hoping to learn a little from the language. In my draft novel I have a Londoner and I am struggling to get his speech out of the middle-class white idiom without heavy stereotyped overtones.

As I feared this blog has a sort of delta style flow. I hope the categories would help me streamline but not so far. No doubt I will learn

too many books again

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2.3.13 Picked up the new book that EG gave me at Christmas, 1853 A Year in Music, by Hugh MacDonald for my morning tea-in-bed read. I am once more involved in too many books. I still have 40 odd pages to go of the Scott Fitzgerald, which I am now reading in my after lunch research slot. I should be reading the Arandora Star at this time about the interned British Italians lost on this ship in July 1940. This will unwind over the next few days.

Fitzgerald

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28.2.13 Nearly finished the Scott Fitzgerald. Apart from the depressing inevitability of the story, there is the strangely un-modern use of adverbs and adjectives – very luxurious – I wouldn’t dare. Also this visiting of every nuance of what people are feeling or might be feeling, or might seem to be feeling is very slow and steamy way of going about life.

Scott Fitzgerald

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25.2.13 This morning I returned to the other book I was reading, Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. A few chapters in I felt unenthusiastic about reading the rest of it.  There is no secret about where the novel is heading – downhill. However in the last weeks the style has grown on me. All the minute dissections of what individuals might or might not be feeling – always digging for another layer of truth.

Larsson and Gillies

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24.2.13

Finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Stieg Larsson) last night, but the story lingers and I read the paper this morning expecting to hear about financial shenanigans. Finished The Barbed Wire University (Midge Gillies) today. What admirable detailed research. I think the follow-up chapter looking at the men’s later careers following their unnatural experiences is very important. I enjoyed the acknowledgements too. I wonder what happens to the men released from Guantanamo.

too many books

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23 February 2013

I am reading too many books at the same time. Midge Gillies The Barbed Wire University, Maria Serena Balestracci’s The Arandora Star (only started this) and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. They all, rather depressingly, deal with man’s inhumanity to man, and almost exclusively the ‘man’ dealing the inhumanity equals men. The receivers can be either men or women. The first two are non-fiction and everything within them is well-researched and as true as the author’s can make it. Stieg Larsson’s crime thriller is fiction, but there is no doubt that the gross crimes he depicts happen, though probably in a less sensational manner.

As a human I am weary of the failure over historical time to reduce, never mind eliminate, the appalling things people do to each other. I also, admire the constant thread of of decent, courageous men and women whose lives and actions throughout these stories.

As a writer I am fascinated.

The Gillies book, is rather solid, scholastic reading. All the mundane detail of how men tried to survive prison life in Europe and the Far East in WWII are gathered together and laid out with methodical and humane clarity. This is not always exciting, but it is psychologically telling. We have voracious brains, we cannot cope with doing nothing (see Daniel Bor’s The Ravenous Brain). Except when reduced to dying skeletons, men and women compulsively seek to feed their brains by some means or other. Even the dying skeletons appreciated being read to as they lay rotting on bug-ridden bamboo slats in unimaginable heat and pain.

I am curious that music played such an important part in men’s survival (see Daniel Levitin’s Your Brain on Music). In every forces prison camp (Gillies book does not deal with the Concentration Camps) in WWII in both Europe and the Far East men cobbled together musical instruments and sang, even in the worst of times. Both Guards and men listened to music.

The Larsson book has a lot of lessons for a writer. The dry journalistic style makes every word sound so true. The content is also often mundane e.g. all the contents of a bookshelf methodically listed, but the hanging threads of the stories and the sensationalistic content of some of the protagonists’s behaviour, make it a heart-beating, un-put-downable read. It is also an emphatically male style of writing. The good guys (and girls) have sex on tap without any strings attached, mostly initiated by the women. The girl with the dragon tattoo has skills beyond any normal human – she can masquerade as anyone, with any accent, obtain any document, or crack any computer. I don’t quite buy her, but all is fair in fiction.

My own writing, in contrast, comes across as mild and optimistic. I abhor cruelty and violence and detest aggressive people. I don’t really enjoy reading books which cause my heart to beat at double speed, or make me feel sick. I think the mostly decent people I write about exist and are as real as the people in Gillies or Larsson’s book. I think there is immense courage needed in, say, caring long-term for a sick person or living with a mental illness. I think making music or art that makes individuals feels better about life is as worthwhile as, say, chasing and catching criminals.