Jacob's Room is Full of Books Page 17

  HM also says that she very often re-reads Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, because it is the perfect book. He is certainly the perfect writer. When I went back to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde recently, my toes curled up with delight, not so much in the story – though that is gripping enough – but in the writing, the style, the shaping of the book, the narrative line and voice … all of that. If ever a creative writing course insists on certain books being read by the students before pen is lifted, those books should include Kidnapped and Dr Jeykll. But I don’t suppose reading anything is obligatory for those courses, which are as thick as autumn leaves on the ground. Writing is the thing. Ye gods.

  A FEW MONTHS AGO some scientists from University College London were here. UCL runs an aquatic life and conservation MA course and has linked up with the local people who are responsible for the river Glaven eel project.

  And it was discovered that we have eels in our pond. Nets were put out one day and inspected the next and there were sixteen eels of various sizes, which was, apparently, a Good Thing, the cause of much rejoicing. I could not see it, especially on finding out that eels migrate and that they may slither about darkly through our long grass at any time.

  Now the scientists have been back, setting their nets again – this time in the company of about fifteen graduate students. Sadly, the nets were empty. Not an eel. Where have they gone? I can’t say I was interested or cared much, though I used to be rather partial to smoked eel. But then I listened to some of their scientific talk, having been about as uninterested in those dark slithering things as it is possible to be, and after I had listened I bought The Book of Eels by Tom Fort. One book leads to another is the rule of life, and this led me back to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner:

  Beyond the shadow of the ship

  I watched the water-snakes:

  They moved in tracks of shining white

  And when they reared, the elfish light

  Fell off in hoary flakes.

  Those were eels. I learned that they start to become silver-white and phosphorescent while they are leaving our pond for the nearby river, and thence on to other rivers and the sea until … until they reach the Sargasso Sea. No, really. The Wide Sargasso Sea. There they spawn, three miles down. Then the older eels die while the young begin the perilous journey back to our rivers, and possibly even my own pond. It takes them up to three years.

  And I thought they were just nasty black slimy things that were here one day, gone the next.

  People have been fascinated by eels for thousands of years, I read, but it was only in the 1970s that someone actually discovered the facts about their life cycle. I suppose one day they will tag an eel from here and trawl the Sargasso Sea for it years later.

  THE BARN OWL has not been around here for a few days. The man cut the meadow for the last time this summer, so perhaps the naked grass means that four-legged owl food has run away. Earlier in the year, when the owl man came to look in our boxes, he did not find any young owls, as he has done in the last two, but in a nearby field he found three babies in a hollow tree. He ringed them, as usual. The one we like to call ‘our’ barn owl, and who often sits on the posts, or even on the washing-line prop morning and evening, often for weeks on end, was ringed by him when a few weeks old. So I reckon we have owl rights. They are such extraordinary creatures, not white in spite of their ghostliness, but a creamy honey colour, darker on top of their wings. Their absolute silence when in flight, the way their heads swivel, the looks they give you – what birds! They are haughty, supercilious, proud.

  Lila was only two and visiting once when the owl man appeared to do his ringing. He brought a white cotton drawstring bag, and came right to the house, by the back door, so that we could all watch. My grand-daughter stared in amazement, her eyes really like saucers, as he drew out the young owl from the bag, inspected it, let it open its wings to their full extent – which even on a baby owl is pretty wide – and then ringed it without any fuss, folded its wings gently together and slipped it back in the cotton bag. Two and a half years later and she still remembers.

  It is a joy that she is now having read to her some of the stories we read to her mother, and often from the very same copies. The most recent favourite is Tales of Polly and the Hungry Wolf by Catherine Storr, which was loved by us all thirty-five years ago. Lila’s father does a very impressive wolf’s voice. And so the same stories are re-born over and again. The Elephant and the Bad Baby, Stanley & Rhoda, Each Peach Pear Plum, Burglar Bill, Mog the Forgetful Cat, The Tiger Who Came to Tea and so on, to My Naughty Little Sister, that everlasting favourite, and now, to my delight, The Magic Faraway Tree.

  The authors get no more money from having precious family copies passed down the generations, but the pleasure in immortality must outweigh that deprivation. Well, almost.

  ‘I HATE HALLOWEEN’, someone wrote on my Facebook page, and I do sympathise. Like so many other things in life, Halloween is not what it was, it is far worse, and involves massive retail sales of horrible masks and black rubber bats, and teenagers banned from buying flour in supermarkets. Bonfire Night was the big thing when I was a child. Mischief Night, as we called Hallowe’en in Yorkshire, was a very minimal affair.

  It is also the season when any theatre playing The Woman in Black is packed, of course, And this is also when questions from students and teachers pour in on a daily basis.

  It has been a set text in schools for many years now and I answer the same questions annually. Some are easy. Some less so. Some impossible and those are the intriguing ones, when I feel I need to have the students in front of me – and the teachers too, for that matter– in order to try and help them understand. But I don’t do school visits any more. I am too old and too busy writing other books to go up and down the country.

  The thing they do not quite get – and why would they, we all have to come to it for the first time – is that the book stands by itself. In a sense, the author is irrelevant. Certainly, the author does not have all the correct answers, as if this were a maths exam. Teaching that the text stands alone is really teaching deconstructionism and an awful lot of high-flown nonsense got sucked into that original, rather clear idea. The other problem is that I tend to be shadowy and vague when it comes to certain things in novels and the precise date when they are set is the first. My editor always calls the period in which I set some books ‘Hill Time’. Strange Meeting, being about the First World War, is easy. But I suppose the main events of The Woman in Black must happen somewhere between 1918 and 1929. Or perhaps between 1900 and 1914? I actually do not know. And I wonder how much it matters. But they are very persistent. They need chapter and verse.

  I suppose it is both obvious and disappointing to young readers to point out that this is a story, an invention. That none of it actually happened. That these characters do not and never did and never will exist. I made them up. Because they want to know about things that are outside of the book, in another part of those characters’ lives, about which I have not written, and know nothing. ‘What happened to Kipps after his wife died?’ ‘Why didn’t Jennet kill her sister’s child and no other?’ ‘Why did she allow her child to be taken out in a pony and trap with just the nanny? (He probably wasn’t even wearing a seat belt)?’ I do not know the answer to any of these questions, and I feel I am chickening out when I say so, but if they are to understand anything about fiction/stories/novels/literature and how they work, they have to grasp this. It seems obvious to me, but I have been reading and writing books for over fifty years and I have a degree in English. They are just beginning. I must remember that.

  The favourite question, of course, is, ‘Where did you get your inspiration from?’

  I flounder. I waffle about the ingredients of the classic English ghost story when really I ought to just say ‘God’ and leave it at that.

  I WAS REMEMBERING TODAY how Stephen Mallatratt (who adapted the book as a stage play) and I used to laugh about it. We laughed out
of surprise and a sense of the unlikely. We laughed out of pleasure and amazement and sheer disbelief.

  We had expected the play to run for six weeks in Scarborough, over Christmas. When it eventually opened in the West End, the laughing started, and it went on. Stephen kept all the stats – how many performances, how much money – and would ring me up a couple of times a year to give them to me. Then the incredulous laughter would begin. When it opened in Mexico City, we laughed more. When it did five years there, we were hysterical. Japan … Australia … Broadway … We were aching. It did very well in Japan, which has a long tradition of ghost stories in their culture. On Broadway it bombed. Twice. And Germany. The Germans just don’t get it, but the Scandinavians do. The French don’t. India does. And so on. When ticket sales were rocky for a time, we sobered up a bit, but then, as well as playing in London, it started touring the UK, which had us on the floor. I so remember that laughter. I doubt I have ever laughed so much.

  And then Stephen died.

  There has never been anyone else to laugh with about how unlikely it has been in quite that way.

  ‘WHEN THE TIDE IS SHOWN at 9 on the table, it will generally overtop the car park.’

  The car park goes by a better local name – the Carnser. The Norfolk word for a heron is a Harnser, hence …

  It overtopped the car park and the road and almost went up the hotel drive. I had not checked before I drove down through Blakeney, where men were rescuing boats that bobbed about in the middle of the road, and not a centimetre of car park visible. That only happens a few times a year and, so long as it is not any worse, it is always worth a look. The tide was just on the turn and draining away rapidly, the water silvery and slippery as fish, and a few people even crabbing where the cars ought to be. Blakeney crab, reared on bacon. There was a brisk breeze and big moon through last night, which helped to swell the tide.

  There are probably whole libraries full of books on the subject, but I read a new one recently: Tide: The Science and Lore of the Greatest Force on Earth by Hugh Aldersey-Williams, which was fascinating and very informative for anyone interested in tides in general and those on the North Norfolk coast in particular. The author spent twenty-four hours alone on Blakeney Point while two tides came and went, and his almost minute-by-minute record of even the tiniest things he observed makes awesome reading – so awesome I am tempted to follow in his footsteps. Just not quite tempted enough.

  Living by the North Sea again, after having been born and spent the first sixteen years of my life beside it, I feel that tides have been in my blood and bones from the beginning. The link never leaves one. The most astonishing thing of all is that you can buy booklets of the tides tables for a whole year ahead and, indeed, I think they are mathematically predictable for much longer – probably until the end of time, other things being equal. A surge, such as the dangerous and terrifying one we had here four years ago, is never predictable though. Other factors – wind strength and direction, the phase of the moon, and so on – all have to combine to make the perfect storm.

  This morning’s high water was a baby by comparison.

  THE TREES HAVEN’T TURNED PROPERLY yet, there is just the flick of a yellow brush stroke here and there. Until there is a frost, there will be no New England scarlet and gold.

  One of those days when there is nothing I want to read. Everything I pick up is wrong. Old favourites. Meh. New titles. Meh. There has to be something.

  And then, lo! This week’s Grazia magazine is here and, what do you know, it is all about the Kardashians.

  ALMOST EVERY WRITER I have known or read on the subject of being a writer says that they had a childhood full of books, and that if they were lonely, sad, cross or in trouble, they always turned to a book, often a much-loved one. They found consolation, companionship, solace, escape, excitement and inspiration in books, they spent as much free time as they could in libraries, had special reading places – often hidden ones, where they could not be found or interrupted. It was either that, or the old standby, under the bedclothes with a torch. Books did something for them which nothing else could do, not family, siblings, friends, games, the movies, television …

  A young friend of mine came visiting when she was about nine and, as usual, went to the bookshelves, found what she fancied reading and settled herself on the kitchen sofa. There was not a squeak out of her, also as usual, but when I went in there, she said, ‘Don’t you think it is very strange?’

  I looked over. She was holding her book up.

  ‘The cover’s quite nice but otherwise it doesn’t look very interesting, does it? I mean, if you came from Mars and had never seen a book, you wouldn’t get excited by this, would you? Not like you might over toys. It’s just a lump of paper covered in card and, if you open it, it’s all the same. Black marks on every white sheet. If it didn’t have a picture on the front you wouldn’t look at it again, would you?’

  I agreed.

  ‘But,’ she said, ‘just think … Inside this there is a whole world, a whole lot of people, a whole lot of things happening, a whole lot of places you want to go to and … well, there’s all that. And if I hold it upside down all those things somehow fall out of it. Do you see what I mean?’

  THE OLD ADVICE about not buying a book for its cover is no longer good. I have often done so and rarely regretted it, because cover design has improved by miles in the last decades. I have sometimes not bought a book because of its title, though, and even more because of the blurb. Blurb writing is one of the most difficult of all book skills. It has to give the flavour of a book, address the exact audience which would most appreciate it while not alienating the others, synopsise without giving too much away – especially not a surprise ending – explain the book, refer to its author’s previous work … Entice, excite … All within 150 words or less.

  So it is not surprising that sometimes blurbs get it wrong. I was put off by both the title and the blurb of Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty. ‘On’ anything sounds like a nineteenth-century essay by William Hazlitt, preachy, dull, without human reference. The blurb explains that the author was paying homage to E. M. Forster’s Howards End (the hero of On Beauty is called Howard) and that it is about two rival academics who have both written books about Rembrandt. Together with the mention of hip-hop and teenage American rappers, it did not seem like my sort of novel. I would not like to have been given the job of writing the blurb for On Beauty myself, mind, trying to gather all the multi-farious threads together into a crisp outline, leaving out nothing important.

  Anyway, I ought to know better by now. I have enjoyed many a novel by simply picking it up and starting to read it from Chapter One, Page One, Line One, deliberately avoiding any blurbs, introductions or descriptions, on front cover or back. I should have done the same with this.

  Yes, it is indeed about rival academics writing about Rembrandt, and their teenager kids engaged in popular culture. It is about American families and multi-culturalism … In fact, if I think about it, I still do not care about the subject matter – there is so much in it that I would never knowingly read about. Yet I discovered that it is a rich, dense book, that it rings true, that these people are real people, known and understood through and through, though sometimes alien. That it is witty and wonderfully well written, intelligent and learned, even if some of the cultural lessons come across as lectures. Doesn’t matter. No fine novel is flawless. Look at Dickens. It is some feat to write a novel about people of the sort in whom I am uninterested, set in a country to which I have never been and feel no affinity with, about a subject that I find tedious … and have me engaged from the first, absorbed in the whole, looking forward to reading the next slab.

  On Beauty is also a campus novel. Malcolm Bradbury, Mary McCarthy, David Lodge, Kingsley Amis, Alison Lurie … all have written telling, involved, disturbingly accurate examples, and now Smith jumps in, with wit and a bullshit-ometer like a precision tool. Her observations are spot on – as they would be, given that she is
now an academic herself, in America. Having been married to a university professor for four decades plus, I can vouch for the accuracy of the internecine squabbles, not to mention rivalry, showmanship and one-upmanship. But recording conversations and repeating them on the page is easy. Digging below the skin and the voice timbre to the person beneath is only easy to get wrong.

  Zadie Smith has that thing without which all writers ultimately fail – an ear for how people speak, what they say as against what they really mean, their intonation, the smallest shades of difference between speakers that indicates education, class, age, intelligence, social adeptness. She also has an eye for detail which, though not always quite as important, makes fiction live.

  There is little doubt that she has her own measure, knows her own worth and always has. She is secure in her writer’s skin and you cannot buy that sort of confidence.

  I have now to read her last two novels – I read her first, White Teeth, when it came out in 1999. I do not know anything about the others, being someone who rarely reads the book review pages of newspapers, so I can start at Chapter One, Page One, Line One and wait to be surprised. Without reading the blurbs.