Three Books about Outsiders
My stomach is better. But that may be because the ME came roaring in and took over, which is what it does. In this case I think I’d rather be bone tired than sick and dizzy but I’d really rather not be either. But merely tired usually permits lying on the sofa covered in hellhounds* and reading and this is clearly to be preferred over eyes that don’t focus and running to the bathroom a lot. However aside from the considerable entertainment derived from watching Oisin packing up his fancy electronic organ and its 1,000,000,000,000,000 feet of wiring and its 1,000,000,000 component parts this afternoon for the wedding he’s playing tomorrow in a tiny organ-free church, and which I’m sure I could spin out into 1000 words if I had more available brain**, I have done nothing blogworthy today, so I thought I’d suggest a few books for you to read the next time you’re trapped on the sofa with hellhounds.***
WONDER, R J Palacio
Anyone plugged into the kiddie lit world will already know about this one; it’s making a big splash on both sides of the Atlantic right now. It’s about a boy named Augie who knows he’s ordinary—on the inside. “ . . . But I know ordinary kids don’t make other ordinary kids run away screaming in playgrounds. I know ordinary kids don’t get stared at wherever they go. . . . I won’t describe what I look like. Whatever you’re thinking, it’s probably worse. . . . Next week I start fifth grade. Since I’ve never been to a real school before, I am pretty much totally and completely petrified. People think I haven’t gone to school because of the way I look, but it’s not that. It’s because of all the surgeries I’ve had. Twenty-seven since I was born. . . . I’m much stronger now, though. The last surgery I had was eight months ago, and I probably won’t have to have any more for another couple of years.” Even that little snippet should give you an idea how immediately convincing and appealing Augie’s voice is. WONDER is about how that first year in an ordinary school goes for a boy who is only ordinary on the inside. (And then again maybe he’s not so ordinary on the inside either.) The majority of the book is told by Augie, but several other people take their turns: I particularly like his sister, Via.
Here’s an interview with Palacio: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/19/rj-palacio-interview-wonder
MOCKINGBIRD, Kathryn Erskine
This came out in 2010 and was a National Book Award winner, Young People’s Literature. The back flap about the author begins: ‘As a resident of Virginia, Kathryn Erskine was devastated by the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech. In the aftermath of this tragedy, Kathryn was driven to understand how community and family—particularly families with special-needs children—dealt with this violent event, and how our lives might be different if we understood each other better.’ . . . Um. So, this is to tell any of you who either have or would have instantly put the book back on the shelf before you caught a fatal dose of worthiness, that it’s a good read and a good story—that the moral rises gracefully and organically from the story. And furthermore, it’s funny, although most of the laughing hurts. Caitlin, the ten-year-old narrator, has Asperger’s. Her mother died when she was three years old, but her older brother, Devon, has always explained the world to her—but now her brother is dead too, as the result of a horrifying event like the Virginia Tech shootings, and her father (and small blame to him) has gone to pieces. It’s Caitlin who has to figure stuff out, and help both herself and her dad figure out how to go on without Devon.
“ . . . The librarian won’t let you take the Physicians’ Desk Reference home even if you hide it in the middle of thirty-two books. She says you have to leave it in the reference section so others might enjoy it. I don’t think I should have to leave it in the reference section just so others might enjoy. I know I will enjoy it. But she says that’s not the point. She never does tell me what the point is but Devon says sometimes you just have to do what a teacher or librarian says even if you think it’s stupid. Also he says you shouldn’t tell them out loud that you think it’s stupid. That’s a secret that stays in your head only.”
http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2010_ypl_erskine.html
IN THE SEA THERE ARE CROCODILES, the true story of Enaiatollah Akbari, (by) Fabio Geda (translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis †)
This came out last year. All three of these books nail you with voice right off: ”The thing is, I really wasn’t expecting her to go. Because when you’re ten years old and getting ready for bed, on a night that’s just like any other night . . . with the familiar sound of the muezzins calling the faithful to prayer from the tops of the minarets, just like anywhere else . . . I say ten, although I’m not entirely sure when I was born, because there’s no registry office or anything like that in Ghazni province—like I said, when you’re ten years old, and your mother, before putting you to bed . . . says, There are three things you must never do in life, Enaiat jan, for any reason. The first is use drugs. . . . Promise me you won’t do it.
“I promise.
“The second is use weapons . . . never pick up a gun, or a knife, or a stone, or even the wooden ladle we use for making qhorma palaw, if that ladle can be used to hurt someone. Promise.
“I promise.
”The third is cheat or steal. . . . You must be hospitable and tolerant to everyone. Promise me you’ll do that.
“I promise.
“Anyway, even when your mother says things like that . . . and starts talking about dreams . . . if you hold a wish up high, any wish, just in front of your forehead, then life will always be worth living . . . says all these things in a strange low voice . . . it doesn’t occur to you that what she’s really saying is, Khoda negahdar, goodbye.”
Enaiatollah is an Afghan boy, from a tiny village. His mother has brought him to Quetta, a town on the Pakistani border . . . and left him there. Alone.
You get that far, and you have to read the rest, don’t you? You have to find out why, and what happens.
People are different. No they aren’t, they’re the same. And Enaiat’s mum has the right idea.
* * *
* Who are, fortunately, willing to trade an abbreviated hurtle for more sofa time.
** Yes I have been applying myself to SHADOWS. At one-quarter speed. Siiiiiigh. At least when you’re watching someone else coil up 1,000,000,000,000,000 feet of wiring no one is measuring the speed of your watching.
*** I’ve found that knitting over hellhounds is not really very satisfactory. Well, you can knit squares. But very long leg-warmers trail over said hellhounds and cause restiveness.^ Or possibly this is merely an indication of my lack of experience. Or my lack of spinal flexibility. Although speaking of squares . . . I’m going to have to start carrying around two knitting projects in my knapsack. I’m getting tired of fixing the mistakes in my leg-warmers that I made while knitting at stoplights. I still have to look at what I’m doing for ribbing.
^ And yes, I am severely tempted to design my own hellhound coat with attached leggings. But that will have to wait till I know enough what I’m doing to do . . . something that no one who knew what she was doing would do.
† Because translators don’t get enough credit. Says the woman working on (maybe) her second hundred words of Japanese.
A Day in Which Almost Nothing Happens But I Rattle on Endlessly Anyway
Happy Leap Year Day.
Because we were a little short of hurtling yesterday I took hellhounds well out of town on one of our epic walks this morning. It’s one we haven’t been on in yonks and yonks and they’ve relocated the freller which you aren’t really allowed to do with legal public footpaths but at least it’s still there at all. The best relocated ones are when we’re three-quarters through the long loop back to Wolfgang and we do not want to turn around, and Sleeping Beauty’s hedge rears up in front of us. The standard bad-attitude farmer’s tactic is ploughing right up to the edge so you have nowhere to walk, but you can at least flounder on. Worse is the electric fence set three inches from the hedgerow. We’ve negotiated a few of these too, with hellhounds on strangle-short lead and clearly wondering what’s sent me off my nut this time. Chaos nonetheless managed once to sting himself and he turned around and looked at me reproachfully, the ungrateful cur. Possibly my favourite is the dog-impassable stile. I don’t like lifting forty-odd-pound hellhounds over these things* and there’s one chest-high one** that is a nightmare. I haven’t been that way in a while, to see if the frelling city council was sufficiently buried under infuriated dog walkers to have had the wretched thing altered. Arrgh.
But I digress. I never got very lost and the available paths were perfectly adequate, they were just kind of in the wrong places. And there’s one long stretch of open field where hellhounds were blistering away in all directions, checking back with me a good half a second before I panicked***, and blistering away again. This meant by the end of our epic walk . . . I wasn’t quite looking around for poles to rig a travois†, but I was beginning to wonder if it would come to that.
The rest of the day was pretty much head down over SHADOWS. No, it is emphatically not going to be done tomorrow. But it is moving along. Just not quite fast enough. I was supposed to go bell ringing tonight but I immolated this desire on the altar of getting paid sooner.††
The good news is that Wolfgang has a brand-new 2012 tax disc yaaaaaay.††† Now all I have to do is remember to put it on. Ahem. The other thrilling news is that someone emailed me the details of the Japanese country cookbook she was morally certain was the one I was quacking about the other night . . . and she’s right. More yaaaaay. This was several days ago.‡ I instantly went on line ‡‡ and found a clean copy, since it’s out of print and I have a deep dislike of cooking through other people’s splashes and maculations, wrote the bookseller a query . . . and didn’t receive an answer. I didn’t receive an answer to my follow-up either. So tonight I capitulated and applied to ungleblarging amazon, which as we know has everything. . . and I now have a second Japanese cookbook on its way.
librarykat
My Japanese mother has to deal with the (she thinks) drastic changes in the Japanese language; she left Japan in the late 1950s after she married my dad. He was stationed there again from 1961-64,
I was there then. Shall we play the silly game of did we pass each other on the street? We were in Yokosuka for the first year and a half— ’61 to ’62—and then Tokyo for the rest.
and since then she’s just gone back a few times to visit family. It’s even worse for the Japanese in Hawaii- their great (and multiple great) grandparents left Japan in the late 1800s, so many Hawaii-born Japanese speak an archaic Japanese, and in dialects that have almost disappeared in Japan.
This sounds a bit like the Appalachians?, where up till recently, since I don’t think there’s much untouched back country left, there were isolated areas where they still spoke the Queen’s English—Elizabeth I, that is, not II.
I remember a co-worker in the library system who hosted a Japanese college student back in 1992 – that student laughed at my co-worker’s Japanese, which was fluent but so old-fashioned the student could hardly understand her. My husband was teased by his great-aunt and cousins when he visited Japan as a teenager; same thing – his Japanese was not only old-fashioned, but also too polite, his cousins informed him.
This is one of the things that keeps stirring in the back of my mind as I plug on through my modern lessons. I don’t remember enough to be able to cite examples but that’s certainly my impression. I’m also sure—well, nearly sure—that I was told fifty years ago that there were five levels of politeness, although you probably wouldn’t need the most extreme two they existed. Modern lessons only even mention three and rarely deal with the third . . . and yet school lessons are always more polite than what you’re going to hear on the street.
When I lived in Japan as a young girl, the kids in the military dependents’ school sang a little ditty to the tune of “London Bridge is falling down” – moshi moshi ano ne, ano ne, ano ne; moshi moshi ano ne, a, so desu ka. 50 years later, I can’t get this out of my head! Apparently it’s called “Denwa Uta” – Telephone Song. Translates roughly as “hello, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh; hello, uh-huh, ah, is that so”
Oh gods I haven’t thought of this in . . . fifty years. Yes. Oh dear. Yes. I was in one of those military dependents’ schools, and . . . well, the other kids sang it. Even then I was uneasy about the whole dissing another person’s culture thing, and I wasn’t sure if that’s what was happening or not.
Funny thing, though, when my mother talked on the phone with her friends, her side of the conversation often sounded just like that!
YES. I loved this when I heard it. But I was always too timid to ask a real Japanese person for details. . . .
* * *
* And to think I complain when hellhounds wish to skip meals.
** What do you do if you’re short? And have three Newfoundlands?
*** This involves standing in the middle of the field whimpering and chewing on your knuckles and remembering the old lurcher rule that your dog will come back, but it will come back to the place it left you, and staring around for two little dots appearing on the horizon and hurtling toward you till you can recognise them as hellhounds. Mine streak up to me, goose me energetically, and stare around hopefully, willing me not to put them back on lead yet.
† It’s pretty warm. I could have lashed my coat between the poles. With a combination of the bits of green garden string I always have in my pocket^ and the wire from my frelling mono earpiece which would then give me the excuse/impetus to buy another one preferably that does not make me crazy. I’ve been complaining about listening to one stereo earphone for months—listening to chaos theory or Japanese language lessons this way isn’t bad, but listening to music is dire—because I like to have some warning when we’re about to be mugged by off-lead Fluffy, which requires one ear free to detect the panting breath and thundering feet of approach. I haven’t been able to find anything plausible online in the UK^^ and then Peter strolled into the local ironmongers a few weeks ago . . . and came home with a mono earpiece. Calloo callay. Except it’s one of these gods*&^%$£”!!!!frelling D-ring things that fits entirely over your ear AND I HAAAATE IT. Between glasses, earrings and hair there isn’t room for it anyway. ARRRRRGH. But I do hear Fluffy coming, and I’m not always standing on the wire to the other earpiece after I’ve bent over to pick up freshly delivered crap and the wretched thing has fallen out of my pocket again.
^ Except occasionally when I want one and there aren’t any
^^ America is apparently rotten with mono earpieces, well how nice for you
†† Also it’s a last Wednesday of the month which means that Wild Robert has a practise for us scum at some arbitrary tower while Forza is taken over by demiurges and celestial beings. This month’s arbitrary tower is in New Zealand or something. I didn’t think I could drive that far.
††† I know you can do it online. I already said I knew you could do it online. I don’t want to.^ Especially when I have a perfectly good husband who walks past the post office every day because it amuses him to buy his newspaper in person rather than have it delivered. Although I hadn’t known, till you and Nadia told me, that the database would already know that Wolfgang is insured, even if I’ve lost the damn form.
^ And ‘old’ is a relative term. In my case it means I’m old enough to say ‘I don’t want to’. This middle-class first-world society I, and I assume most of you, live in is wildly overloaded with stuff to do, learn, experience, understand, seek, puzzle out, encounter, participate in, organise and reorganise your life by and blah blah blah blah blah. I don’t want to know how my computer works. I just want it to start when I turn the key in the little hole. Etc. If Peter stops walking past the post office to buy his newspaper every day, I promise to learn to get my task disc online.
‡ I’m still waiting for A SIMPLE ART to arrive. Don’t worry. You will be the first to know.
‡‡ See? I’m perfectly capable of going online when I’m sufficiently motivated.^
^ This didn’t do me a lot of good with the mono earbud however.
More Japanese
Well I’m NOT buying the book on Japanese cooking because they frelling CANCELLED my order. And you know why they cancelled it . . . ?
I got the flat official notification from amazon first and assumed it was just that it had been sold to someone else fifteen minutes before I’d ordered it. In the used-book world this happens all the time, of course, because there’s usually only ONE copy available. But then I received an email directly from the bookshop. They’ve cancelled it because the book is TOO BIG AND HEAVY to ship overseas: the postage is prohibitive.
What the frelling hell has gone wrong with the world, and specifically the international postal system, that we can no longer ship books ANYWHERE in the world?* We’re talking total screaming meltdown here, epic tantrum, total refusal to accept reality and the status quo. There’s a lot I don’t like about our modern world** but some things are supposed to be SACRED. Ready availability of shipping for the written word is supposed to be one of them.***
Meanwhile . . . I came to the end of my beginners’ Japanese audiobook on Pooka today. They have a web site, but I bought it from audible.co.uk:
http://www.audible.co.uk/pd/ref=sr_1_6?asin=B004FTSX4M&qid=1329955490&sr=1-6
And I got to the end, pressed the button and . . . ahem . . . started over at the beginning again. I have nothing to compare it to, of course, since I had (maybe) ten words of Japanese going in†, but it seems to me a very good introductory course. It kept my ricocheting interest††, at any rate, and I’m not the easiest audience. It gives you native speakers doing little as it were real-world conversations using the vocabulary for that lesson and then an American fluent in Japanese and a Japanese native speaker who teaches it having little chats with each other about Japan and Japanese as they do a breakdown and reiteration of what you’re supposed to be covering. You can’t—well, I can’t—possibly absorb the amount of information they’re flinging at you†††, but I found you can at least grasp it, so you would have a hope of memorising/inward-ing it if you put the necessary time in.
There are gleeps and lacunae of course. But I liked that the teachers sounded like real human beings with a clue about what people need to know to use the language, and I liked that they try and tackle a bit of informal language and slang, and that they spend a lot of time trying to give you an idea of what the differences in the cultures are that are going to have immediate impact on you trying to speak Japanese to the Japanese. Overall I recommend it—with the caveat that I have no way to check how accurate the information is. But most of the little stuff, the inconsistencies and confusions that have tripped me up, I’ve been able to look up in—ahem—hard copy books I’ve bought.‡
Two things remain awkward. One of them is that if you go to innovative language learning dot com‡‡ and try to download your programme notes . . . well, I had problems, and I’m still having problems, although when I’ve emailed them they’ve answered, and I hope they will this time too. And the notes themselves are a little messy, although some of that may be The World vs. The Printer interface which in my experience is always more or less aggrieved.‡‡‡
The second problem . . . arrrggglllrrrrrggggaaaugh. The second half of your lessons follows someone who is supposedly an American businesswoman through a trip to Japan. Okay, I get it that they want a native Japanese speaker playing this woman—or let me say she sounds like a native Japanese speaker—so that us clueless learners are hearing Japanese as it should be spoken. This is fine. And I’m willing (mostly) to swing with some of the inconsistencies this tends to throw up—the stuff she knows (she says ‘um’ in Japanese, for example, which according to the lesson notes is ‘ano’ although it’s not in my dictionary) is a little erratic. But the actress playing the role does it in this breathy hysterical little-girl manner that is UNBELIEVABLY ANNOYING. Not to mention that it makes her sound not at all like a businesswoman—especially, let’s say, an American businesswoman who might conceivably be trying her hardest to appear cool and professional in a country a trifle still notorious for being traditional in terms of gender roles. ‘Ashley’ is so annoying that . . . I may not make it through the second half of the programme again. I’ll have to go back to quantum physics or something.
* * *
* And while we’re at it, note that this is, or would have been, coming from the States, and postal rates are worse in the UK.
**Starting with, oh, just at random, the relentless and persistent ads for losing belly fat and wrinkles, for whitening your teeth, and the latest range of bad judgement and missing the point that is the New New Twitter. I even like Twitter. But it is run by aliens who don’t like humans and are in a bad mood all the time.
*** However my beginner’s kanji book did arrive. Yeep yeep yeep yeep.
† I now have at least twenty. Unfortunately they’re not the twenty I need for SHADOWS.
†† I will, I hope, pick up another 2% on this second go-through.
†† Barring incidents of aggressive off-lead dogs
††† Sometimes you do wonder who’s making the editorial decisions. There’s a lesson toward the end where an American visitor stays with a Japanese couple at their home. We’ve already been told firmly that if you visit someone you must take a gift.^ This woman does not appear to have brought a gift for her hosts. The two teachers chat about this at the end of that lesson. Why didn’t someone just write a gift into the script?
^ This is one of those things that was true fifty years ago. From my extremely unreliable memory, the thing that has changed the most is formality levels—which is echoed by some of the recent forum comments.
‡ Which I’m not giving a live link to because it has an OBTRUSIVE voiceover introduction that I can’t see how to turn off
‡‡ All right, I’m old fashioned. I wanted them on PAPER so I could write notes in the margins. I understand how to write notes in the margins on PAPER.
Peter Dickinson
They certainly are too smart to be lost. I admit it’s tricky about the language, but we’re all still reading Charles Dickens—and Mark Twain, who is regularly subjected to gratuitous attempts to clean him up, which of course ENTIRELY miss the point. When Dickens was a racist, he meant it.*
I remember reading THE GLASS SIDED ANTS’ NEST for the first time** not long after it came out, which means I was still a teenager. It totally blew me away—I had at that point never read anything that was such a combination of sharp intelligence and, well, thrills, it being a murder mystery and all. I read all of the Pibble books, and (nearly) all the rest of Peter’s adult novels, some of them genre mysteries and some of them not, pretty much as they came out***. What can I say. He’s a brilliant writer.† And maybe I’ll go on about this some more some other night, when I haven’t already written enough words to make a blog post and when I haven’t put myself back an hour I needed for SHADOWS by inadvertently starting to reread GLASS SIDED which I had responsibly pulled off the shelf merely to check the original pub date. . . .
* * *
* I’ve recently written an introduction^ to a Classic Work of Fantasy Literature^^ that has exactly this same problem and I knew going in that I was going to be blunt about it. Here it is, I would say, and there’s no rationalising it away. But I love the book anyway and I hope you will too. Fortunately the editor agreed with me. And this is my take on this kind of thing: there probably are exceptions, but as a principle I would say that you don’t mess with what the author wrote. Introductions, notes, flap copy, author bios and so on can annotate what needs it. Again there are probably exceptions but generally speaking you’re already aware of historical context by the time you run up against something that makes you go ‘oh dear’—at which point you decide whether you can roll with it or not. Generally speaking I will roll with racism and sexism—both kinds of sexism, genderism and sexual-orientation-ism—and, er, classism, that’s (say) a century old or more . . . and diminishingly put up with it the nearer it is to the present day. I will pretty flatly not put up with it in any writer my age or younger, which means there are great swathes of modern literature, including F&SF^^^, that I won’t touch with a barge pole and, in some cases, make me froth at the mouth and wish to kill things.
I’m also aware that Twain’s hands aren’t clean either. He was still a man of his time. But I believe he was genuinely sending up the dishonesty and cruelty of the society Huck Finn found himself at odds with. Do you play the Who would you like to have a cup of tea with? game, about characters in books? (The rules of the game say they would cooperate. Whether you’d get along with them or not however is open to delicious speculation.) Who in HUCK FINN would you like to have a cup of tea with? Me, it would be Jim. Huck himself is only second.
^ Which is another story. Due to Circumstances Beyond My Control I found myself doing this at the end of January. Yes. This January. It was Stimulating. Not in a good way.
^^ I’m not sure I’m allowed to talk about it in public yet, and I can’t check till business hours tomorrow and I want this piece about Peter to go up NOW. I’ll certainly tell you when my intro comes out.
^^^ I’m a bit puzzled that Fowler+ says ‘whereas fantasies keep their timeless appeal, crime novels are subject to changes in society and language.’ What? Do we have to cite any examples past . . . oh, say, HP Lovecraft? ( . . . Edgar Rice Burroughs? Robert E. Howard? . . . JRR Tolkien? I can’t read Burroughs or Howard any more, but I still read Lovecraft, who is grotesquely racist++, and Tolkien, who doesn’t get his knickers particularly in a twist about miscegenation+++, but all of whose good guys are white and a lot of whose bad guys are swarthy.) And on the other side of the genre fence I don’t believe either Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers would win any awards for prescient political correctness and they’re still in print and, I believe, much loved.++++
+ Whose own books are a lot of fun and great reads, especially for those of us with a penchant for tangents.# The Bryant and May series is London as You Have Never Seen It Before (and Rather Hope It Stays Between Book Covers). http://www.bookreporter.com/authors/christopher-fowler
# ahem. ::whistles::
++ I belong to the faction that believes that part of why Lovecraft’s best creepy stuff is quite so effectively creepy is because he was so creepy a human being, with a menagerie of private demons. This makes me sad. Again, generally, I want to believe that the healthier a human being a writer is, the better they write. So if Lovecraft hadn’t been a sick dude maybe he’d’ve written The Great American Novel.
+++ Unless you want to count Saruman’s experiments with orcs, but that doesn’t give off miscegenation fumes to me. I could be wrong.
++++ Although not by me.
** AAAAAUGH. . . . And I’ve just spent the past hour reading . . . well, the first hour’s-worth of it again. Several things strike me, very much as they struck me thirty-odd years ago: how frelling intimidating I find it^: too clever by half, with both an intellectual sparkle and a creativity to scare me silly. The murder victim is—was—the chief of the remains of a primitive (black) New Guinea tribe who were moved to London to save what was left of them, by a (white) British woman who is nonetheless a member of the tribe. (In what manner she is a member of the tribe is one of my favourite bits. She’s also the character I want to have a cup of tea with.) This tribe, the Kus, are fully developed, with a history and a society, with rituals and habits and points of view, and these are totally fascinating.
The other thing about this book—and, for me, about all of the Pibble books—that glares out at you like a searchlight is how unpleasant most of the people are.^^ To me—and to the teenage American I once was—the reason the author gets away with the ‘wog’s and the ‘nig’s is because the people who use these terms are underlining their own reprehensibleness. ‘Wog’ and ‘nig’ may have been in common usage in England in 1968—I wouldn’t know—but I’d bet on it that you weren’t demonstrating the finest flower of humanity by using them.
^ I’m . . . what? I’m married to the author? You’re joking, right?
^^ Peter has kind of a line in scintillatingly unpleasant people. Most of the time I’m dazzled and drawn in and riveted by how plausible they are and how well the author understands them+. Every now and then they just make me cry.
Pibble himself is a case in point. I don’t like him. I never liked him. I don’t want to have a cup of tea with him. But I like his bitter, skittery mind, his own awareness that his self-deprecation is half-real and half-resentful, and that (I would say) there’s a deep depressive streak underneath it all. Yes. I get this too well. That I don’t like him makes this mix of comprehension and aversion all the more effective, all the more evocative, to me-the-reader.++
+ hmmm.
++ Favourite Pibble novel? Probably SLEEP AND HIS BROTHER. But really I should reread all of them to be sure. . . .
*** Up through into my era, that would be.
† I didn’t discover his kids’ books until I was well dug in to the murder mysteries—over a decade later, in fact, and after BEAUTY was out and I was working in the Little, Brown children’s department, and lo, on their shelves, a row of Peter Dickinson novels.
There Is Hope*
I was climbing through eight hundred years and forty-six thousand miles of church history this evening, which is the system for gaining access to Forza’s ringing chamber, and thinking, you could want to join this tower for its scenic approach alone. Or possibly as an exciting addition to your fitness programme. I dragged myself through the last arrow slit, which is at the top of a spiral staircase so tight that even the outsides of the steps are only long enough for Flower Fairy feet, and collapsed fainting on the floor . . . next to Charlotte, who, by her gasping breaths, had clearly only just arrived before me—and who is also a visitor. Maybe you get used to it. Maybe the members have a secret lift.
I had spent a good bit of today telling myself briskly that I was going to Forza tonight** and that it was just another tower and the years, the miles, the thirty-seven bells and the Rhode-Island-sized ringing chamber*** are all incidental. Then I got there. I suppose the fact that your first view of it, every time, is from the floor with a red haze of oxygen deprivation and lactic acid build-up clouding your vision, may have a demoralising effect. I lay there tonight thinking, well, I did bring my knitting . . . †
And I did not get off to at all good start with a bell rope in my hands. Which is to say I once again made a drooling foozle of Grandsire Triples. ARRRRGH. It was so drooling a foozle that even standing behind someone ringing it accurately I still couldn’t see what was frelling going on. I’m going to develop a complex. I can ring it perfectly well †† in other towers. But put me in an 800-year-old abbey with a ringing chamber you need satnav to negotiate and I lose my mind.††† ARRRRRRRRRRRRRGH. If there had been a sword I’d’ve fallen on it. You’d think in a ringing chamber the size of Rhode Island there would be at least one sword hanging on the wall somewhere, wouldn’t you? But nooooooo. Just peal boards,‡ notices,‡‡ and handbells.§ So I crawled away and hid in a dark corner.‡‡
I was hauled back out again by a call for plain frelling hunt on ten. I can’t do ANYTHING on ten. Ten is too many, even when it’s just plain hunt. The thing about ten is that you have to hold up and wait, every frelling blow, because there are so many other bells in the row to ring before it’s your turn again. So it’s bong and then you stand there with your arms over your head thinking you could have got half a row of knitting done while you’re waiting§§, and then it’s bong again. Also there’s always a bit of necessary speed control adjustment—not only do you ring more slowly going out than going in, you also ring closer over smaller bells and with more of a gap over bigger bells.§§§ When there are ten of the frellers all of this is very exaggerated, which makes it additionally difficult for notable foozlers like me.
And then . . . it wasn’t too bad. I was actually getting the hang of the holding-up-and-WAAAAAAAITING thing. I tied up my rope at the end without having a last despairing look round the walls for a sword.
I hung around watching people ringing things I should to be able to ring, but probably can’t at Forza.# And then finally, at the very end, I was offered a rope of my very own again, to ring bob minor. Dear miserable gods of ringing and disgrace, I OUGHT to be able to ring bob minor. I ought to be able to ring bob minor dead, drunk, asleep, and suffering severe lactic acid overload.##
And, indeed, I did ring it, despite being alive, sober, awake and maybe a little lactically acidulated. I also did despite the fact that someone else was going wrong, this being the true sign of knowing a method, being able to hold your line when other people are failing to hold theirs. I was not ringing it beautifully, but I was ringing it—and I was ringing it in one of Forza’s horrible queues, and since I was on the four I had several### people on each side, which means you need 358.5° vision like a horse (or a robin).
So. Yaay. There is hope. I will go back next week. Note that I am announcing that here in public. I am going back to Forza for next Wednesday’s bell practise.
And tomorrow I start the third draft of SHADOWS.
* * *
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand . . . look what arrived in the post today:
- I think I may have heard a rumour somewhere that it was published yesterday
* * *
* Maybe.
** After all I had told the blog I was going to Forza tonight.
*** Sure it’s a small state.^ It’s a VERY LARGE ringing chamber.
^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhode_Island
† I have half a leg warmer on my needles. Maybe even two thirds of a leg warmer.
†† sometimes
††† Maybe I have lactic acid build-up in my brain.
‡ My situation was made somewhat more precarious by the fact that the Scary Man was in charge tonight. They have a kind of rotating ringing mastership and you don’t know till you get there on the night who’s going to be beating you with the knotted rope . . . I mean, who’s going to decide what methods to ring and who’s going to ring them, and whapping you up longside the head when you . . . I mean, who tries to wrest a modicum of order out of campanological chaos. I confess to feeling a little fragile about ringing admins at the moment but he hasn’t done anything to me yet . . . except give me bells to ring and say I’m welcome to come again.
‡‡ Full peals are these ghastly feats of ringing endurance, and significant ones frequently get painted on a varnished plank—the names of the method and the ringers, the date, and sometimes the time it took, which is usually around three and a half hours—and hung on the wall of the ringing chamber involved.
‡‡‡ ‘On 18 February there will be a sale of all the umbrellas, bicycles, spectacles, spectacle cases, mobile phones and small children left in the abbey grounds, proceeds to the after-service cake fund, the canons have been complaining about the shop biscuits’
§ I have no idea. If I keep going, I’ll ask.
§§ It’s almost as bad as that frelling stoplight on the way to Nadia.
§§§ Yes. It’s horrible physics. And I don’t think you can even get any of the fun quantum stuff out of it. It’s all that unpleasant fellow Newton.
# I’ve told you on previous devastatingly humiliating evenings I’ve spent there: in the first place because there are SO MANY FREAKING BELLS if you’re only ringing six or eight of them, they’re in a queue, not a circle, which is maddeningly confusing for those of us who are easily confused and are used to ringing in a CIRCLE,^ and also, I assume again because of the frelling SIZE of the ringing chamber there’s something peculiar about the acoustics. Which in my case is to say I can’t hear a thing but a kind of smudgy blast of noise.
^ Remember that you’re always looking frantically around for the next bell to follow. Your sheer frelling depth perception is off if you’re suddenly looking along a line instead of across and around a circle.
## Gemma was there tonight and said to me after, of course we can ring bob minor. It’s ringing it on only one bell that is challenging.
### All right, my definition of several is a little loose.