Portable characters

Elizabeth George is one of my ‘re-read’ authors. To get into that elite club the author has to have written a series of novels in a genre I enjoy, in a setting I find comfortable to abandon myself to. The novels have to have layers, psychological, social and motivational. They have to be well written, grammatically and structurally intelligent, but, more important than that, they must introduce complex, three dimensional characters who appear on a regular basis so they become ‘portable’ (a word that stays with me from the last MOOC.)  This ‘portability’ I would probably have described, before I read ‘Reading a Mind,’ as the characters that are rounded, incarnated in flesh and bone with recognisable foibles and quirks; the ones that step out of the page and accompany me into my daily life often becoming friends. 

Phil Rickman does it with the Merrily Watson series, but also with the stand-alone supernatural thrillers he wrote before he happened across Merrily. The characters he created in his early novels do sometimes show up again in a new story. I like that. It creates a whole new universe for me. Merrily is his most constant protagonist now, the C of E Deliverance Minister, and single mother of Jane, her ever-questioning, defiant teenager who rebels against her mother’s relationship with God and the Church and thus speaks for readers like me who have little time for the church and no belief in a god. 

It was Elizabeth George who started this train of thought, so, back to her novels. She is American and, as far as I can tell, an afficionado of the women writers in the Golden Age of crime. She puts in place many of the ingredients of those early novelists: the elegant, well-bred and desirable old-Etonian investigator; the ways of the English aristocracy; the English country house; the English countryside. Her descriptions of the levels of English society are somewhat clichéd. Cancel that - they are VERY clichéd. For example, the DCI assigned to Lynley (Old Etonian trying to escape his onerous family duties as an Earl by having a ‘real’ career in the police force,) is drawn rather in the manner of an old family retainer. Working class, scruffy, overweight, an inveterate,  junk food eater, her socialist hackles are raised against this floppy-haired, Saville Row clad, entitled driver of a classy car, but she comes to recognise his talents, and thereafter is constantly loyal and dependable. It would not be too strong to say she worships the ground he walks on, as all good old family retainers must. 

In her early novels I felt George was labouring her use of long words (I can NEVER enjoy the use of ‘rebarbative’ except as irony.) When I re-read these I suspect her of trying to lend an air of English usage that isn’t natural to her in order to reinforce the Englishness of the experience the reader is getting. Maybe she feels she is emulating the way we English speak. Maybe she is simply trying to give literary gravitas to her work. I find it less obvious in the later novels as she gains confidence in what she has created. 

My only other grievance is her treatment of the group of people who appear regularly, and around whom the subplots form. She gives them such a terrible time, a positive snowball of disasters. It’s quite distressing. I would be happy of they had some luck for a change.

Despite my grumbles, these novels give me great pleasure. The dialogue is believable. The plot are well-constructed and intriguing; the hooks and the fins (see next entry) keep me absorbed and the wide variety of personalities involved is highly enjoyable. 

Give me fever.....

I’ve been hors de combat for seven days now with a mean version of flu. I thought it was a normal, if nasty, cold and comforted myself through one day by expecting the next to bring an improvement. Instead, each morning I’ve woken to find a new crisis camp has been set up in previously untroubled territory. This has been happening in disordered progression around my body: throat, trachea, head (sixty sneezes a minute) and finally the lower labyrinthine reaches of the lungs where it is now lodging. Each way station was accompanied by much fever and sweating and altogether it’s very depleting.

There’s still been plenty to occupy me. I have had to cancel, or announce my non-attendance, at all the events that were happening this week: two writing workshops, (one which I VERY much wanted to go to;) the normal two writer’s meetings; a birthday tea party; a birthday brunch party; a visit from a friend who was planning to stay overnight on her way to visit her son in Aberdeen, and we had arranged to have coffee with another set of friends....... In short that was to have been a bigger week for my social calendar than all the other weeks so far put together. Maybe that’s why I caught the dratted virus. I tend to prefer a quieter life.

I never have much of stock in my larder because if I do, when the evening munchies strike, I eat through what’s there like a plague of starving locusts. No self control. My poor daughter was also fighting off this bane whilst still working at putting people right (she has so much more strength of character than me) so once the cupboards were bare I learned how to do my weekly shop on-line and a nice young man came round with bags and bags of goodies from Tesco. I wished I owned a burka for this event. Pasty, puffy, and blotchily flushed is not a good look, and the smell of Tiger Balm must have been almost overwhelming (I can’t smell a thing.) On the whole it was a success. I didn’t mean to ask for a tiny bag of flour fit for a dolly’s shop, and next time I shall order more than one tomato.

Although my eyes have been sore I’ve read six books and watched many DVD’s. I’d just been all through ‘Bones’ for the umpteenth time when the bug hit so I tried re-running ‘Angel’  until it started to get heavy and depressing which wasn’t helping the melancholia caused by miserable neurons so I trawled Amazon to order emergency supplies. A series of Father Brown, The Julia Mackenzie  ‘Marples’; the Matrix (which I have never seen properly, only in snatches;) and ‘Cloud Atlas’ which I watched this evening and think is the best, most interesting, film I’ve seen in a long time. My daughter tells me there was a novel first - As usual I missed it, but shall rectify that. Thank you Amazon. 

Thank Creation for creative people. Especially I thank novelists. Without all this entertainment from the minds of others (and I know enough about the process to appreciate how much effort it has cost them) I would have been going crazy. I already caught myself talking aloud once.

Now that the fever has gone down a notch I’ve started my latest MOOC. This one is put out by Nottingham Uni. and is titled ‘How to Read a Mind.’ The first week was promising. Not sure I’m up to giving a coherent synopsis yet but it is run by a Prof.of Literary Linguistics and appears to be going to take us though the way we use a kind of telepathy to construct the characters of the people we meet in ‘real’ and fictional life. (Which should help to give pointers to creating characters in story form.)

Phrases like ‘cognitive poetics’ and ‘mind-modeling’ have been bandied about. 

I’m looking forward to learning more about them.

These courses are such a gift. It’s amazing that they exist and I’m so grateful. If I had to pay for them I wouldn’t take them because,although there may be useful hints and guidance that will make my writing better, they are mainly interesting for what they are - and that wouldn’t sound like justifiable expenditure.) I’m so impressed by the work of these academics who have by close observation and research been able to locate the stages of assimilation from perceptions to concept (will I find a better word than that?) that the brain goes through when meeting a new person, real or fictional, animal or mechanical (bet you talk to your car!)  

Tables, tarts, and writing projects.

I'm very proud of this seat/desk/table/small bookcase that g'son designed and made himself at school. The top revolves. I can sit on it to use my laptop or have it next to me as a table and laptop perch.  

I'm also rather proud of this tarte au citron I made this morning with french pastry which has to be the easiest pastry I have ever made - no rolling required.

I’ve been neglecting this blog. The reasons are simple. Firstly, I don’t go anywhere or do anything worth photographing or reporting. Secondly I have been focused on reviving, editing, making in all ways better a novel I wrote at least 12 years ago for pre-teens called ‘Turn Right at Jupiter.’ That involved getting friends to drag it out of the dark ages and put it into a form my current laptop can read. Sadly I have lost the floppies on which the two sequels were written but the first book had been put on a CD so - phew!

It’s coming along. I saw things that were terribly wrong with it - over-long sentences, not enough paragraphs, too-long chapters and too little dialogue. Hopefully it is more reader-friendly now. The good folk at the writer’s group have been giving it the once over, a few chapters at a time, as has Sophia, my poet daughter who worked for quite a number of years with publishers.

Soon I shall have to be brave enough to submit it somewhere, and another somewhere, and another somewhere.....   not looking forward to that, but at least it can be done electronically nowadays so doesn’t involve hundreds of sheets of paper, expensive cartridges of ink, and trips to the Post Office.

The writer’s group organised a workshop with a young woman who writes scripts. She has had plays produced and written episodes of TV soaps. It is always interesting to listen to someone who really knows what they are talking about.  Her talk also covered some of the information I got earlier in the year from a free university course, ‘The Future of Story Telling.’ (All the free courses available on-line now - I could spend my whole time on them, The variety is amazing. I nearly did the ‘Higgs Bosun’ course offered by Edinburgh but decided I wouldn’t have a clue what they were talking about after the introduction so didn’t join the thousand who enrolled.) 

I rather like the idea of writing for radio (which she didn’t cover, but did say it was a much easier and supportive market than the cut-throat world of TV soap and screen.) So many ideas, so little time. Or rather so little time when I’m not feeling sleepy or needing a change of scene. 

To my dismay, disappointment and general displeasure I have missed the wonderful displays of Aurora Borealis that have played above out heads recently. Drat! Once upon a time I had a dog that I walked on the beach in the dark. Then I saw them. Now there is no dog (Dizzy Thursday lunchtime) and the beach is too far away.  Sigh!

White Crow

I'm falling behind with everything at the moment in an attempt to knock some shape into a children's story I wrote ten (or more) years ago. It is far more arduous than writing the thing in the first place and nt so enjoyable but I am grimly determined! (Equally grimly determined to get some humour into it... not sure hat's the right mood to be in....)  Otherwise things are toddling along much as usual. Yesterday I took sandy to see Robocop and eat a very calorific meal.  I wouldn't have chosen Robocop because I saw some of the first one and thought the whole concept too nightmarish to want to repeat (I had bad dreams about waking up in an iron body, rather like the bad dreams I had in my youth about getting polio and being confined to an 'iron lung') but the choice was limited and it was S's half-term. I was secretly relieved to find '12 Years a Slave' had disappeared from the listings. Anyway, the new make is much less dark and brings in some interesting barbs  about the use of robots to 'keep Americans safe.' 

It chimes rather well with a wry comment on West Wing made when hostages had been taken and heavy reprisals were shouted for by the Senate: "Why should American lives be worth more than anyone else's?' 'I don't know, but they just ARE.'

Here's a recently published poem (I haven't been writing poetry lately so there aren't going to be any more for a while.)

White Crow.

Peck at the deviant bird.

Destroy the aberration.

Tear out its feathers. Pierce its flesh.

Make its blood flow.

          (Its blood is as red as our own, but do not notice that.)

Herald of the Apocalypse.

Portent.

To be followed by two-headed calves,

plagues,

and a sudden downpour of bufonidae.

The very antithesis of apple pie.

Of comforting homogeneity.

So peck at the deviant bird.

Destroy the aberration.

The healing power of telling the story.

It’s hard to read accounts of atrocities so in a cowardly way I generally don’t, (I like my meat plastic wrapped in a carton too.) There are somethings happening I know about but don’t want detail. In the copy of the Guardian Weekly, passed on to me a week after its issue date so comfortably historical, I found an article about atrocities that I could - had to - take in. 

A young social scientist in Uganda works for the National Memory and Peace Documentation Centre. His work is to collect stories from the survivors of  unspeakable acts of brutality. Mothers who have seen their children battered to death in front of them; men who have seen their waves raped and the children.. well, I don’t need to go on. 80,000 or more children have been abducted in the service of  armies and six-year-olds armed with stout sticks are marching behind twenty year olds toting AK 47’s to beat to death children and adults unknown to them because they are afraid to do otherwise and because they become hardened to the life. To them it must seem  like the computer games my grandsons play. These children, if they survive or escape are so traumatised their lives will never be free again.

In Ireland programs were set up to try to work with people who had seen (forgive me but in contrast) relatively mild horrors to help them get some peace; to help prevent them passing on pent-up rage, feelings of impotence; bile and a longing for retribution. These people do not have that sort of infrastructure in place. As their neighbours are also suffering terrible grief and pain there is no-one they can talk to who can listen and respond.  They have ways of dealing with the sickness in their society. They have stories and myths and rituals. One man in a village has nightmares which cause him to pull off all his clothes and run into the night. He is said to be possessed of a demon. So many dead have been left without the rituals of passing that a corpse should receive and the belief is that they will be unable to find peace so will turn into demons who will haunt the living. We can see it as an allegory for what is ‘really’ happening in their psyche. Probably our way of dealing is little better, but we all use what tools we have to hand.

The NMPDC is sponsoring Deo Komakech to go from village to village listening to people talk and recording their memories. He is not unlike the counsellor they might get in the western world. The people he listens to have affirmed that giving these stories to posterity does help. It can’t cure but it brings some sort of inner peace. They haven’t been unnoticed; they haven’t been existing in some terrible dream in which they are alone; they haven’t been wrong in feeling the way they feel. 

'The West Wing:' Verdict!

Now I’ve watched the whole of ‘The West Wing’ I'm going through for a second time more slowly, which is the way I tend to read books that excite me. Somewhere along the way I changed my opinion about having a quarrel with its niceness. I couldn’t have watched it if the main characters had been as bitchy, cynical and self-serving as their real-life counterparts may well be, so having them as basically good people trying to do the right thing is OK by me. 

I’ve grown very fond of the characters and, whilst I hope I’m not naïve enough to think this is how it is in American politics, at least I have a clearer idea of the process. The series has addressed, sometimes only superficially but probably with acuity, the domestic issues that arise perennially and that has been interesting. Gay rights. English as the official language (goodness - didn't realise that was a problem, but now I know it is and why.) State sponsored prayer (why they couldn’t have the same ‘do it if you like’ attitude of the UK I don’t know.) The Creationists where getting hotted up during the seven years of the series, so that comes up; mandatory minimum sentencing for drug offences which required enforcing because there was at the time a distinction made between powdered cocaine (used mainly by whites as a ‘recreational drug’) and crack cocaine more likely to be used by the black population who were the ones to get the long sentences whereas the daughters of senators destroying their nasal passages got fines and a slap on the wrist. It was therefore seen to be a racist issue.

And so forth. All this, plus the enormous complexity of foreign policy, the necessity to step in between warring (nuclear) factions, and generally try to understand what ‘keep the peace’ actually means when you are as influential  as the (self-styled) ‘Leaders of Western Democracy,’ are, in my untutored opinion, well dealt with.  There are some well-placed barbs from other nations who retaliate when asked to improved their record of human rights, with the obvious question: ‘What right have you to take the moral high ground when you destroyed the indigenous population of this country?’

In summary, accurate portrayal of reality or not, it gives a flavour of the potential chaos of a democratic government, the possible misuse of its power, and the potential chaos and misuse of unfettered personal power in a country without a democracy. The series has character development, humour and wit, intense drama, pathos, tension... it’s  a ‘Hero’s Journey’ sort of tale so it works for me. 

Slinging the noodles for New Year.

The beginning: dough made with Lidl pain flour & water, left for seven hours in a warm place. 

Beginning the slinging - what muscles this man must have!

getting longer..... beginning to double up...

and twisting.... and more slinging...

and hey presto - noodles! The chef has demonstrated on Channel 4, BBC etc and is from along line of noodlemakers in China who created a famous brand.

Marieta was brave to volunteer and proved adept.

The male who volunteered got slightly over-enthusiastic - nearly hit the roof and the chef!

Chloe looks grim but she was concentrating - she made some really neat little dumplings.

...which we ate with a soy sauce and vinegar dipping sauce. Yum.

Two types of tofu here, two types of noodles, seaweed, ginger and daikon. It was beyond scrumptious.

Dr Bisong Guo has her back to us so I got a picture of her beautiful jacket.The Chinese make really desirable clothes, much better than the 'ethnic' stuff that find its way into the cheap shops. This is classy!