Review of ‘One Pair of Hands By Monica Dickens

I would love to provide an effective link for this book, but Penguin who published it in paperback originally don’t list it on their website.  However, you can get it from Amazon in electronic or paperbased form.  This was actually the first of a large number of books written by Monica, who is actually the great grand-daughter of Charles Dickens.

‘One Pair of Hands’ is autobiography, recounting the experiences of the author (known to her friends as ‘Monty’) in domestic service, whereas her second book, ‘One Pair of Feet’ (which I haven’t read) is about her nursing career.  Born into a wealthy, middle-class family, Monica had no financial need to work at all.  She hired herself out as what was known in those days as a ‘cook general’ because she was bored by her life in society and wanted to have money of her own.  Her account is therefore that much more valuable because she notices and records things that other servants take for granted.  As I’ve been looking for a primary source on domestic servants in the early twentieth century, this was gold dust.  I learned a lot about what happened behind the green-baize door, even that the green-baize door existed, that cooks were always referred to as ‘Mrs’, how domestic services agencies operated and how important daily calling tradesmen were in a servant’s life.

This book was episodic, detailing, almost in diary form, every post the author held, descriptions of the kitchen and the employers.  She moved between posts very quickly, so was able to describe a range of service set-ups.  She was a plucky young woman.

“You know how to make creme brulee, don’t you. Mrs Dickens?”

“Of course,” said she, reaching for her cookery books and practising three times before she got it on to the table that evening.

As a cook, she worked extremely fast, arriving to do everything from scratch for an evening dinner party, only at four-thirty in the afternoon, putting most of us ‘working’ hostesses to shame.

Monica was totally deprecating, detailing every mistake in hilarious detail and attributing her successes to ‘luck’.  Indeed, I was put in mind of old fashioned British values at their best, that general getting on with it, ‘quietly and without fuss’.  (I think that last bit is a quote from ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’.  How random is that?  It’s late.)

Do I recommend it?  As a source book on domestic service, yes.  Did it keep me amused?  It was a bit samey.  Was it a work of literature?  No, definitely not.  The written style was very much ‘plonk, plonk, plonk’ with more or less every sentence containing an ‘and’ in the middle.   Will I read anything more of Monica Dickens?   Yes, I want to read ‘One Pair of Feet’ about nursing.  Books like this are gems for writers because they give detailed insights into different situations and different eras which the history books, academic articles and papers – let alone Wikipedia – can never do.

The Charlie Britten Cafe-Writing Project

Last Sunday, I tried to write in Starbucks in Chelmsford, only to be turned out at 4.30 on the dot, so on Friday lunchtime I decided to give it another go, in Costa Coffee in Colchester.  I intended to make a few forum posts and observe everything life going on around me.

Well, Dear Reader, my first problem was that, not being a regular customer of Costa, I ordered the Wrong Thing, a veritable BOWL  of black Americano.  As it was one of the few sunny days we’ve had so far, I headed outside, with this full-to-the-brim pudding basin tottering on a small saucer.  Then, in order to sit down, I had to clear one of the empty tables of the cups, glasses and other rubbish left by the previous customer.  That done, I set up my iPad on a cleanish portion, switched it on and searched for a signal, only to be informed that the cafe wifi is only available inside.  Thank Goodness by 3, then.  (I never use up my monthly allowance anyway.)

So there I was reviewing a story on the Sally Quilter Workshop, in which I’m taking part at the moment, when something worth observing sat down at a neighbouring table – two men in their early to middle twenties, dressed casually, like older students, I thought.  As people do, they got out their phones and compared them.  “Oh,” said one, “you get the Nigel Farage feed as well, do you?”  Then they laughed again, a laugh which was conspiratorial, comradely and yet secretive.  “For me, he’s the only one who makes any sense.”

David Cameron, do you ever visit Essex?  This is the youth of today.   This is our future.  Fruitcake, anyone?  

(I feel cheated, Dear Reader.  I expected to be making worthy, writerly observations, not political stuff.)

Writing the Synopsis

I’ve been to Chelmsford today to hear my husband play the cathedral organ.  As it was such a beautiful sunny day, and Starbucks shut at 4.30, I wrote the first draft of this blog post sitting in the grounds of the diocesan offices – hence the picture, which is not mine, by the way.

Those of you who have ‘known’ me online over the last few years will know that I have been writing a novel for a very long time  – since 2008, in fact.  In my first post on this blog (which I bet you don’t remember), I reported that I had stopped writing The Novel for the time being because it was losing its punch.  This was always a tactical withdrawal, not a defeat.  When I discussed picking it up again with my amazing online mentor, Anne, I was expecting to be asked for a plan, the very thought of which terrified me.  But no, she wanted a synopsis.  (“Really, Anne, are you sure?  I mean, I’m not going to be sending it to any publishers or agents for a very long time.”)  Oh yes, she was sure.

I once blagged on an online writing forum that it should be possible to summarise a short story in one sentence – two, at a pinch – so, therefore, I ought to be able to run through  my novel in 400 words, oughtn’t I?  Well, Dear Reader, I sweated blood.  The problem – or the beauty of it, depending how you look at it – is that, when stripped down to synopsis size, every inconsistency and slightly dodgy bit in the plot stand out like sore thumbs.  Over and over again, I had to explain  that mc did something because… then she met an obstacle… which she resolved… like this… in a way that made sense and sounded convincing in a few sentences.   Oh, and what is it about her character that makes her interesting?  She’s motor mouth, isn’t she – but can she conquer it?

Composing that 400 words took me three evenings, with the largest part written late on Thursday evening when, suddenly, everything started to fall into place.  It’s not perfect yet by any means, but I feel more confident about doing a rewrite than I have done for a long time.   So, if you are about to start a novel,  do write the synopsis first.

Meanwhile I’m really enjoying ‘One Pair of Feet’ by Monica Dickens.  For several months, I had been looking for a book about servants in the early part of the twentieth century, as part of research for a story about women who ‘take in washing’.  So thank you very much, Fiction Fan, for pointing me towards this one.

Review of ‘The History Boys’ by Alan Bennett… and More

(http://www.faber.co.uk/catalog/the-history-boys/9780571231737)

Well, Dear Reader, here I am reviewing ‘The History Boys’.   I’m sure everybody else  has seen the film.  I don’t do films.  (Unlike one of the characters in THB who was instructed to say he enjoyed ‘film’.  Another character inevitably asked him if there was only one movie he liked!)

‘The History Boys’ should have pressed all the right buttons for me, seeing as it was about grammar school boys being prepared for Oxbridge exams in the 1980s.  I was a grammar school girl myself and I applied – in vain – to Oxford in the 1970s, to read history actually.  (My father, who had attended Cambridge at the time when you could just pay to go there, wanted it, and I was never particularly bothered.  Manchester suited me fine.)  The boys’ preparation was carried out by Mr Hector, who rides a motorbike and affects eccentricity and touches up the boys, and Mr Irwin, modern, serious and ruthless.  There were parts of it that were witty, and many more which were iconoclastic, particularly the idea that to get into Oxford or Cambridge you had to stand all accepted viewpoints on their head and argue the opposite, in order to stand out from the rest.  For example (I quote from the text):  “The Holocaust… it has origins.  It has consequences.  It’s a subject like any other.”  Although the two schoolmasters came out as distinct characters, the boys all blended into one, and there was only one female character.

Did I enjoy reading this?  Not particularly, although I was aware that it was well-written and thoughtful.   Did I laugh?  Not once, Dear Reader (although I think I was supposed to).

Tomorrow I go to see this play performed at The Mercury Theatre in Colchester.  Why didn’t I wait and see the performance?  You may think my answer strange but this is it.  Because I don’t like surprises.  I wanted to know what it was like beforehand, so that, if there were parts of it I found demanding, I could work through them in my own way.   This is why I don’t like film…s.  I don’t want some actor doing all the interpretation for me.  I love (reading) Dickens, but I find dramatisations of his work all wrong, too dramatic, hamming up the gory and unpleasant bits (like the catch in ‘Magwitch’s’ throat in ‘Great Expectations’) to the extent that you can’t follow the story.  Dickens always knew how far to go, whereas many other writers will wring the last drop of emotion from the reader.  Why should we enjoy being made to cry?   I don’t.   Am I alone in this?

When I’m writing,  I am in control.  I know how far I’m going to go with the horror, tragedy and emotion.

Book Reviews, Lack of

I try hard to make my posts interesting, relevant, witty, topical and otherwise SEOgenic, but this one is going to be boring.  Writers spend so much time writing to please… no, charm… editors etc that we have sometimes to allow ourselves some space to be ourselves and let go.  Dr Johnson wrote that ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money ‘  (Wikiquotes) but the truth is we don’t always.  To be spare you, however, this post will be short.

Back to the topic promised in the heading:  why no book reviews recently?  I can assure you that I haven’t stopped reading, nor have I spent over two weeks reading the last book posted up here.  I feel I’m writing too many book reviews and that, if I’m not careful, this will cease to be writing blog.  The other issue is that I haven’t read anything recently which I can give a positive review.  I wrote some time ago that I would be unstintingly honest in what I said about each book, but, on the other hand, I don’t want to pan another writer’s work – even the work of an established author.  I am just a scribbler (hardly a successful one), not an academic literary critic, who has spent years studying literature.  So my silence must speak for itself.

No, Dear Reader, I did not like what I saw:  involved and convoluted sentences (containing brackets) – and em dashes;  spelling and grammar mistakes; and words omitted.   Aren’t books proofread anymore?  Characters lacked… er… character, or were wooden caricatures.  Often none of the  characters in a whole novel were likeable, although every one contained some interesting insights.  Plots were muddled and unconvincing, ending far too quickly – suddenly, everything was all right again – although descriptive passages in all of them were well-written.   Next Tuesday, I’m going to see ‘The History Boys’ at The Mercury Theatre in Colchester, so I’m going to read the play first.   I may – or may not – write a review.

Can We Have Our English Language back, please?

“You must call it an ‘eraser’.  If you call it a ‘rubber’, someone will think you mean a contraceptive.”

“Really?”

“Really.  And what did you call your cat just then?”

“Pussy.”

You think I don’t know about double-meanings?  As someone who teaches IT in an FE college, largely to sex-obsessed, hairy boys, I know that any word or phrase can be made to be about sex,  if someone wants it to be, and sixteen year old boys mostly do.  So, are we going to allow the nudge-nudge-wink-wink people to take over our language?  Or the politically correct brigade,  who have issues with ‘blackboards’ and would reduce our whole vocabulary to ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’, ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’.  Of course, some words and phrases really are offensive, but these linger on, like  ‘retard’, ‘inbred’.  It also appears to be quite OK to shout out, ‘Oh God’ or even ‘Oh fucking God’, and I, as a Christian, am supposed to turn the other cheek.

I’m so glad I work in IT with geeks.  We don’t pussyfoot around.  We’re hard enough to have our hard drives… until cloud solutions take us over completely, I suppose… and we used to have floppy drives too.  When we want to show you what’s happening on our computer, we send you a screen-dump.  Generally, we use Google as our search engine, but, if we fancy a change, we might use Dogpile.  Anyone who cannot deal with it is a section on an html document – in other words, a div.   Or, as they say in the Conservative Party, a ‘swivel eyed loon’.

The Sayings Knowledge Base

“She looks like death hotted up.”

“Where there’s no sense, there’s no feeling.”

“Communism is a very good idea but it doesn’t work.”

Do any of these sayings sound familiar to you?  These are examples of the sort of expressions I heard every day as a child from my mother and grandmother.  Many of them underpinned a mindset which was very different to the way we view things now.  Nobody in 2013 could get away with something as ill-thought out as the third one above, but this saying (or something like it) was voiced a lot in the 1960s and 1970s.

At the time these forms of words were dropping into my little ears,  I supposed that people had always said these things and always would do, and, moreover, the same expressions were being used the world over.  Alas, times moved on and, without my realising it, many of these colourful expressions fell into disuse, although some still carry on.   Language is a living thing.  Other evocative turns of phrase have appeared eg ‘Mother of Battles’, which came about as a bad translation of something Saddam Hussein said in Arabic.

This matters a lot to writers.  If you are creating a story set in another age, you need to get a handle on phrases and expressions used at that time.  Some don’t, even (sometimes I think particularly) the bigger names.   Not only does using the right sayings give your story the right ‘feel’, but it helps anchor characters’ thought processes into the age in which the story is set.   So, can you look up such things?  In books?  On the internet.  No.   There are dictionaries of slang and also many websites which list period slang, as well as regional slang, but, as far as I can see, no databases of English sayings listed according to era or generation.

On the other hand, you may know different.  If so, please let us know.

In the meantime, I’m starting to build my own knowledge of knowledge base of English sayings.  Here are the few I’ve collected so far.  (Most are self-explanatory, but explanations are required where they might be required.)

On Eating and Food

You’ve got to eat a spec of muck afore you die.

On Courtesy

Age before beauty.

On Beauty

You have to suffer to be beautiful.

On Health

An apple a day keeps the doctor away.

He/she looks like death warmed up.

On Going on Holiday

Black week (The week before your holiday.  As all your clothes had been sent on ahead in a trunk, you would have to cover yourself in boot blacking to make yourself decent.)

On the Weather
“It’s looking a bit black over Bill’s mothers.”  (It’s going to rain.)

On Appearances
Dragged through a hedge backwards.  (Very untidy.)

On Wealth
Where there’s muck, there’s brass.

I would love to hear about the expressions you grew up with.  I’m not interested in Biblical, political or literary quotes, or bits of songs, but what ordinary people said to each other, mother to daughter, father to son.   Please send me your sayings, with a note about the (approximate) decade in which you heard it and where (country, region).

Review of ‘The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared’ by Jonas Jonasson

Published by Hesperus Press.

I purchased this in Kindle format, not only because the title made me laugh, but it had been reduced to 20p in one of Amazon’s deals.  At that time,  I had no idea that it had sold 20 million copies, or that, according to Hesperus Press, it is about to be made into a film.

As I’d never read a book by a Swedish author before, or visited Sweden, part of this novel’s appeal was that it opened a window into an unfamiliar country and its residents.  The author kept referring to towns and cities, which would probably be as meaningful to Swedish readers as stations on a commuter line in the Home Counties would be to me and fellow Brits.   I have to confess, Dear Reader, that I didn’t look up the Swedish places on the map.  I didn’t want to, as their exotic names and etymological composition had a charm of their own.

What a read!  What a rollercoaster of a ride!  Start suspending your disbelief from the first page.

The story starts in a gentle fashion, with an elderly man, Allan Karlsson, frustrated by the restrictions of living in an old people’s home. However, the next few scenes set the tone of this work, which was what literary critics might call ‘absurdist’  – although at the humorous end of the ‘absurdist’ spectrum .  It’s what I have always thought of as ‘off your trolley’ writing (my term entirely), where extreme events are connected by a daft logic.  At the local bus station, Allan meets a member of a violent criminal gang lugging around a heavy suitcase and in need of the loo – as you do.  As the cubicles are too small for the suitcase, the crim asks Allan to take care of it, only Allan’s bus arrives while the crim is enthroned.  Well, what would you do?

The first element to this novel concerns Allan’s bolt for freedom and the oddballs he collects around him, among them an escaped circus elephant.  The second is the story of Allan’s colourful life told in flashback; Allan was able to use his skills in making explosives, which he had acquired early in life, to get out of tight spots and he had dealings with Franco, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and many other dictators around in the twentieth century.   Even though the two elements were interspersed between chapters, I was never confused or lost.  Both plots made sense and were tidy and complete.

In many other of my reviews, I’ve noted an ‘mc syndrome’, whereby the mc, being used as a window for all other characters, ends up characterless himself or herself.  However, in this book, the ‘Hundred Year Old Man’ is the one with stacks of  character – cool thinking, resourceful and his thinking ‘off the wall’.  Allan will do what is necessary to survive – even if that means, as it did on one occasion, blowing up Vladivostok.  None of the others are as distinctive as Allan and all tend to loom large for a few chapters then lapse into the background.  Julius, for instance, who figured prominently in the initial stages, was hardly mentioned later on.  Also, rather like an Enid Blyton school-story, all the people in the book became ‘nice’ in the end, even the leader of the criminal gang and the police inspector.

So, would I recommend ‘The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared’ for you to read and enjoy?  Definitely.  And to extend your writing skills?  Yes, to observe how Jonas handled a very complex plot and created an unusual mc.

And, do I think it’s fair that any author should feel pressured to sell his work for 20p, as part of any promotion, run by a multinational corporation which – famously – doesn’t pay tax?  Emphatically, No.  I have to confess that I’m now ashamed of buying it at that price.

Social Networking… a Marketing Tool or a Distraction to Writers?

Don’t ya lurve it?  Don’t ya hate it?

Is it the best platform ever for raising the profile of your writing?  Is it the biggest time-waster ever?

Perceptions of social media vary according to age and gender, with younger females being the keenest and older males the least enthusiastic.  Often, when journalists and bloggers write about the merits of social media, their prejudices come across loud and clear, to the point where you can’t take what they are saying seriously.  So, before I say my piece, be aware that I’m a middle-aged woman and an IT tutor.

For Promotion

When commentators refer to ‘social networking’, they are mostly thinking about Facebook.  According to Digital Marketing Ramblings (accessed 29 April 2013), Facebook has by far the greatest number of users (1 billion active), with Twitter and LinkedIn both on 200 million.  Facebook is a true social media – chat between friends – so it’s use to writers as a marketing tool is limited.  They can exchange writing tips and news, and ask each other specific questions, but using it to promote your work always looks pushy.   There he goes, flogging his book again.  Click on to someone else’s status quick.

Twitter, despite its name, is more serious.  Its short Tweets lend themselves to a ‘look at this, look at me’ culture and users go to Twitter to find promotions.   Clicking on ‘Discover’ and using hash tags are also a lazy search facility.  For instance,  #writing comps produced a lot of useful results.  People go on Twitter when they are looking for something specific, so you cannot use it to advertise your book to the masses.

LinkedIn is Facebook for people in work.  For full-time writers, it is useful for showcasing what you can do, what you have done and for finding out what other people can and have done.   Very serious, very boring, very useful.

Of the others… YouTube is for music, funny videos and many other things, but of limited use to writers.  Writers write.  Would you actually choose to watch some writer’s promotion video?  I don’t think so.

A Distraction

A year or so ago, my students used to be like alcoholics over Facebook. If you asked them to close it, it would reappear immediately. They had to know what messages had appeared in the last few seconds. Now, it’s less of a problem.  Similarly, a friend at church used to post statuses every few hours and, when she stopped doing so, I actually messaged her to ask if she was OK. Now she posts only every few days. I write statuses rarely and I’ve stopped the link which automatically alerts me when a Facebook ‘friend’ puts something up. In my opinion, people are becoming bored with Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media have never caused the same problems.

Of course, individual ‘addicts’ linger on.  I’m sure that a writer who was stuck or unsettled could waste his/her valuable writing time on social media.  Numerous software applications exist to block your access to block to social media while you are working, but it is my belief that we will need them less and less.  If that writer’s friends are not posting so frequently, he/she won’t have anything to read or look at.

Don’t get your knickers in a twist about social media.  Facebook has peaked.  The social media applications are about to become like faxes and brick mobile phones.  They’ll still be there, but will have a much lower profile in future.

Review of ‘The Shadows in the Street’ by Susan Hill

http://www.susan-hill.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=63&Itemid=62

This is Book 5 in the Simon Serrailler series, detective fiction at its best, with well-drawn characters and a sound plot.  This was the sort of book, where, as in Agatha Christie, you have to pick the murderer from a limited number of characters.  (Btw, I guessed correctly!)

This story, as always, centred around the cathedral city of Lafferton.  Much is made of the fact that Serrailler eventually found his man through chance – which he did – but we, as readers, have moved on from wanting a Christie show-down in the final chapter, with everyone sitting around in one room making comments like “I say, Poirot…”  The plot still worked, very well.

Although the crime element concerns the murders of a series of prostitutes, the story touches upon the conflict arising when a new ‘happy-clappy’ dean arrives in the cathedral close.   Unlike many other authors who occasionally feature such things, Susan writes authoritatively about church issues, and with insight as to how church people feel, think and interact with each other.   The prostitutes in the book were also sympathetically drawn, especially plucky Abby Righton, who desperately wanted to give up the game, but couldn’t see how to manage it.

It is noticeable that detectives created in the ‘English school of murder’ tradition  (as distinct from Noir)  tend to have a cosy family set-up – think of Ruth Rendell’s ‘Wexford’, W J Burley’s ‘Wycliffe’, Alexander Maccall Smith’s ‘Mma Ramotswe’ and even Lindsey Davis’s ‘Falco’.   Serrailler has his loving (recently widowed) sister, ‘Cat’, his nieces and nephews, his tetchy father and diplomatic stepmother.  In fact, Cat features far more than Simon Serrailler himself, and I found myself welcoming her on to page each time.  Simon was, I think, supposed to appear remote, but actually comes across as rather sketchy in this story, and, if this had been the first book I’d read in the series, I wouldn’t have got to know him at all.  Other – complex and therefore interesting – characters were (wrongly accused) ‘Leslie Blade’ and the very weak dean, ‘Stephen Webber’, entirely manipulated by others around him.

Did I enjoy this book?  Oh yes.  I love detective fiction… possibly because I could never write it.  Did I learn much from it as a writer?  Well, possibly.