Pat Barker on How Writers Work.

 Very interesting interview in Winter 2018 Paris Review with prolific British writer Pat Barker.

I particularly liked her comment about how she began to think about writing about war.  Her grandfather had a bayonet wound in his side.  "...I would ask him what it was, but it must have been difficult for him to answer that question, since he never spoke about the war.  I can't remember what he said--there was the wound and there was silence, so there was a mystery, and that is what usually sets a novelist going.'

And the zinger, the core of creating fiction:


"People are always saying, Oh, I know a wonderful story, but you don't want a wonderful story, you want a little something that you can turn into a story.  You need a gap. You need mystery? "

French Exit: Maybe a Turn-off to Miss....

Patrick deWitt's French Exit a strange book! Thankfully, it's not as gruesome as his The Sisters Brothers, but at least there he addresses some interesting things, among them the mythology of the West and the damage done by mining. Here we've got a mother and son couple who've gone through billions and now find themselves reduced to retreating to a borrowed apartment in Paris.

Poor them!

DeWitt's novel reminded me a little of Boris Vian's cult favourite L'Écume des jours (called, improbably, Froth on the Daydream in its English translation) in that the characters move through a number of adventures in a dreamlike Paris, heading toward an irrevocable ending. If deWitt were inspired by Vian, he is not alone: En attendant Bojangles (Waiting for Bojangles in English) by Olivier Bourdeau also shares an uncanny resemblance with Vian's book.

But playing the game of literary sleuthing is not enough to give deWitt's book more than a passable rating. Maybe better to read Vian and be done with it. Or better yet, go to Paris and live your own quirky adventure.

(This French Exit, is not to be confused with Brexit, by the way, and I'm looking forward to some sharp-tongued Brit writing a satire about what's happening in the UK at the moment.)

Raging Storms, Raging Hormones in a Very Dark Tale

Once again the library discussion group where I'm filling in for the leader this spring turned up a very interesting book.  I would never have picked this up, since I don't read mysteries very much, but I've very glad I was introduced to Peter May and his characters on the Isle of Lewis, one of the Outer Hebrides off the coast of Scotland.

We are plunged into the mystery with a gory scene of two teenage lovers seeking a quiet place who discover a disemboweled corpse swinging from the rafters of an abandoned boat house.  Within one short chapter, May gives us a taste of the main themes of the book: hormones and fundamentalist religion, wild weather and wild men, fathers and sons. Then the story itself opens as Fin Macleod, a detective based in Edinburgh, is called to investigate the murder on the island where he was born and from which he could not wait to escape when he turned 18. 

Alternating between Fin's first person memories of his childhood and adolesence and a third person recounting of the investigation, May does a masterful job of maintaining suspense, giving us an intimate look into life on the Isle of Lewis which is like many other places on the edges of 21st century society (I was reminded of Appalachia), and conveying the anguish of a man who has lost a son.

The weather and the sea play an enormous role in the story, and here May's writing is compelling.   Ultimately, though, it becomes almost tedious, since May, like many other mystery writers, succumbs to the temptation to fill pages with detail that are only somewhat related to the yarn they're telling.  (And here I'm thinking of Louise Penny, whose delightful Armand Gamache stories contain too much about the good food eaten in Three Pines!)