I read a good amount this month. As you’ll know from last week’s post, and perhaps also Twitter, I was quite busy the last several days of the month so I haven’t yet finished Climbing Days but whenever I have had time I’ve been reading many pages, thanks mostly to the engrossing nature of it.

All books are works of fiction.

The Books

Ashley Stokes (ed.): The End – A collection of short stories inspired by artworks that recreate the old film ‘the end’ frames. Some great fiction here.

Jonathan Ames: You Were Never Really Here – An ex-security agent continues his work for other people and takes on the task of finding the kidnapped daughter of a politician. A novelette; fast-paced, no filler content, couple of hours of reading at most, but the story doesn’t really end.

Louisa Young: The Heroes’ Welcome – Two men who suffered injuries in the war (one mental one physical) return home to their wife and girlfriend who have been affected by proxy. Could’ve been better.

Midge Raymond: My Last Continent – A cruise ship is heading a little too much towards Antarctica and Deb knows that lover Keller may be on board. A good book about a titanic-like shipwreck with lots of information about Antarctica and what we need to do to save it.

Olumide Popoola and Annie Holmes: breach – A collection of short stories inspired by the current refugee camp in Calais. Timely.

Rick Yancey: The 5th Wave – Humans are being wiped out by aliens that are yet to land – or have they already? Strictly okay – I chose to read this because I loved Yancey’s short story in Rags & Bones but it fell very short of expectations.

S J Watson: Before I Go To Sleep – A woman wakes up one morning confused by the stranger in bed beside her, the age of her reflection in the mirror, and an acute sense of disorientation. So good.

My favourite would have to be Before I Go To Sleep; fast-paced until near the end wherein the only reason it’s slow is because you’ve exhausted the possibilities and thus are at that time simply waiting to find out which one it is. I’m not sure I’ll watch the film – I read they changed a lot, is that true? – but I’ll be reading S J Watson’s Second Life at some point. breach was another stand out, though in fact the only book I didn’t enjoy so much was The 5th Wave; I’d hoped it’d be so much more than it was and thought it was a standalone. I won’t be continuing the series in a hurry.

Quotation Report

None this time.

Last month of summer; sad, but I’m hoping to see more of my nephew and enjoy the last sunny evenings.

How has your summer been so far, or, if you’re in the southern hemisphere, how is winter treating you?

This is a long post: I’ve included both an overview and brief notes on some of the talks. And please excuse the blur on the photos, I’ve a bit of fluff on the lens that I’ve tried to edit out as best I can.

I spent last weekend at the Curious Arts Festival, hosted at Pylewell Park in the New Forest. The festival is a boutique celebration of literature, music, comedy, and, on the first evening, opera. Set in the acres of the Park, just beyond the house and its garden, the festival is a casual affair; what is lovely about it and what sets it apart is the relative laissez-faire running of it – once you’ve purchased your weekend or day ticket and set up camp (you can bring your own tent or choose to ‘glamp’) the festival is your oyster. Want to pop on over to one talk but only for a few minutes because actually you really fancy a box of halloumi fries at this time? You can do so because the talk is one of many and you can attend whichever you like, whenever you like.

This runs over into the talks themselves. ‘Shall we begin now or wait a moment?’ Rowan Pelling asked Deborah Moggach as they waited in the audience seats for their session. They were set for five minutes later but no one really minds if things run a bit ahead or behind schedule. There were on occasion problems, such as everyone sitting down for a talk to be told the author would be half an hour late, and the best way to find out where a rescheduled change-of-tent talk is taking place is to walk round the site – but that’s no bother when the site is small. It takes less time to walk about the festival site than it does to walk back to the box office tent. Phone signal is of course patchy, as to be expected.

Twelve event tents and more eateries than you could plausibly sample fill out the area contained by the estate’s small stone walls. A vintage bus, styled or truly old I’m not sure, is at the front, ready to take your breath away as you first enter, and food and drink is helpfully divided by type – coffee and breakfast provided by Tea Sympathy in a lovely bohemian tent, champagne is the bus’s domain, burgers another van, amazing quiche-based pies by Higgidy (you can find them in supermarkets), and the afore-mentioned halloumi fries in another. (There were 10 more food options at the very least.)

Every day there would be a sonnet-a-thon session where various people on the line up would read 30 or so sonnets at a time so that by the end of the festival the entirety of Shakespeare’s output in this regard had been spoken aloud. There was the morning news hosted by Paul Blezard and people from The Week, bedtime stories for the children, and the music and comedy finished up the evenings. Children of all ages are welcome as are dogs and whilst there are no events for dogs – the yoga is for the adults – there is plenty for the children. As Lucy Rose, who performed on the Friday evening recounted, “this is the poshest festival I’ve been to.” There was even a cricket match going on.

I would recommend this festival to those who love the idea of a festival but not the reality of the famous ones. The Curious Arts Festival is a good option for those who prefer the thought of something more laid back, quieter but still fun, and truly for all the family. Everything is so close together that the first afternoon I was there I was confused by how silent and unpopulated it was – turns out everyone was still in their tents and caravans (you can bring those, too) because it was only a minute walk from accommodation to events.

Here are my notes:

Deborah Moggach, writer of the book that was turned into The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and Rowan Pelling, did indeed decide to start their talk right away. Speaking of her newest work, Moggach cited three global inspirations of which I caught two: Africa – some have phones, others have no electricity and have to charge items at stores; China – couples are increasingly infertile due to the pollution; and Pimlico – where the heroine lives. She said that the job of a novelist is to get behind the story we show the world and that you’re always trying to earn the freedom to write what you want to write. She’s always an extra in her films; she thought the The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel was terrible.

Celia Imrie arrived to talk to Paul Blezard. I’m not the target audience for her work but I was introduced to Dinnerladies during childhood and so greatly looked forward to seeing her. Imrie has set her novels in Nice; she has a flat there and considers it the most beautiful city in the world. Her fiction work arose from an event she attended in the city at which she met the Editor-in-Chief of Bloomsbury who suggested she try fiction since she had a memoir under her belt. She prefers having finished it to being deep in the process. She loves the feel of a real book and doesn’t have an ereader. There weren’t many books in the house, growing up: “I feel I’m still catching up,” she said. Of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which Blezard couldn’t not ask about, she said, “Can you imagine being sent a script set in India with that cast?… I couldn’t not go to India.” Due to the presence of Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, they were all spoiled when filming on location, which was lovely, but then they’d leave the gates and there would be a girl with cabbage leaves sat on the floor. The experience was sobering.

Following this were S J Watson and Renee Knight. Knight’s Disclaimer has been published in 30 languages. The premise came fully-formed to her but she didn’t know what the secret would be. The book took 18 months to complete, from first draft to final edit. Knight doesn’t like the term ‘chick-noir’, citing it as rude, though she acknowledges that it was a good way to market books at the time. Neither author believes in genre, Watson feels it’s restrictive and Knight says it’s easy to defy it.

Before Watson’s book, Before I Go To Sleep, was acquired by the publisher, his agent had asked him where he ‘was’ in it. He came to realise there was a bit of him on every page. He hadn’t realised it was a psychological thriller; once that was said to him he figured the idea was to improve the manuscript with the genre in mind. We feel the story more if it’s closer to home – realising the person one trusted isn’t worthy of that trust – said Watson. It’s the chill factor, said Knight, it’s something you can imagine happening to you.

I didn’t get a good photograph of the next author, so here’s another festival shot. Joanna Cannon, author of The Trouble With Goats And Sheep, and agent Carrie Plitt, spent some time discussing mental health. Cannon wrote her book in part to give a voice to people who live on the periphery of life. She’s always been interested in people who aren’t accepted for their difference, and interested in psychiatry (her day job). She spoke of the ‘strange criteria we use to judge people’ and how it is to be at the end of that judgement. For her her character has to come first: “I’d rather we look at them as people, not diagnoses”.

Her first day involving certifying a death, working as a doctor she found she had to process things that happened and so started a blog; that’s where the book came from, the positive reaction to the blog encouraging her to write a novel. She would write at odd hours, at lunch, because she didn’t have the head space after work. She set her book during the 70s heatwave because there needed to be something that caused difficulties that led to communities pulling together. The title of the book wasn’t supposed to sound religious but she did say, “religion to me is something that brings people together”.

Andrew Miller: “When I’m writing I feel engaged in the world in a way I don’t when I’m just mooching about.” He wanted to write a book wherein you wouldn’t know what it was – this is his current novel, The Crossing. He spoke of writing courses, how he worries that people will write defensively rather than vulnerably as a result of them. Echoing many thoughts thus far, he said it’s a pity books are divided by genre and by awards. That said, of awards he noted that even if you just win one, you can cite that on your book covers forever. As for writing advice he said not to rush stuff out – “writing doesn’t have to happen quickly and it’s better when it isn’t.”

Here’s something interesting about Louisa Young: she grew up in J M Barrie’s house; her family owned it for around 100 years. The information in her book about war veterans came from her grandmother who wrote about reconstruction surgery, information Young saved up for 25 years before she sat down to write. She said that her character, Riley, is the boy she’d have liked to have been if she’d been male. A tomboy, a biker (though she was indeed a biker and rode a Harley Davidson).

Pettina Gappah’s book, The Book Of Memory, was inspired by her own experience as one of the first black kids in Zimbabwe to integrate into an all-white school. Zimbabwe was the last colony to be freed – Georgina Godwin noted they never had apartheid and Gappah added it was a half-hearted one because there weren’t enough white people there to run everything so black people had to be included for some things.

We had a false sense of luxury growing up, said Gappah, when Godwin spoke of two rooms in houses, the second called the spare. Initially the wealthy people were white but as time has moved on more black people are living well; Gappah spoke of the replacement of the white middle class with a black middle class that was modelled on it. I wanted to write about race without writing about race, Gappah said (which reminded me a little of Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird and ‘passing’), so I wrote about a black albino, a person who looks white without the privilege that comes with it.

Until 1982, black women in Zimbabwe were considered minors. They couldn’t open bank accounts, they needed a guardian. Even though women can now marry without permission, this hasn’t happened on a cultural level. I’m high on that scale, said Gappah, because I have a PhD, but then I have a child out of wedlock and that’s not good… though that shows I’m productive!

Someone once advised S J Parris to have a day job whilst writing otherwise by her third book she’d be writing about writing a book as that would be her only experience.

Parris – AKA Stephanie Merritt – spoke about character Bruno. In true life, in medieval times, he was asking questions of the Catholic church that they didn’t like. He’s celebrated now as a pioneer of free thought; he was the first person to suggest the universe is infinite. He questioned the divinity of Christ. That he is a spy in her books is down to artistic license – historians think it unlikely in reality. She spoke of word disparity – no one knew about ‘paranoid’ or ‘hysterical’ until the 19th century, so if you need to use the idea you have to find another way to say it.

Lastly, here are a few notes from Dan Richards’ discussion with Carrie Plitt. Richards’ talk about his book, Climbing Days, was compelling and very funny, and I wanted to stay ‘present’ and not distract with scribbling – we were a small group. (The book is a biography/climbing/history mash-up – it’s about the writer’s great-great-aunt Dorothy’s life as a mountaineer in the early 20th century and his journey to find out about her and follow in her footsteps. It’s my current read and I highly recommend it.)

• As an Edwardian lady, Dorothy had to get her brothers to learn to climb, so she would be able to go climbing herself. She left them far behind on trails because they weren’t really suited to it.
• When climbing together, Richards’ dad decided to jettison the heaviest items in their pack, which the writer later realised was the food; so they ate soup with snow, a small bit of chocolate, and a bag of prunes that had survived the jettisoning.
• Richards and his dad were not prepared for the realities of the climb. The writer said that there’s nothing more shameful than almost killing someone because you do something you shouldn’t be doing… like climbing, for example. You need the right insurance for a helicopter or you won’t get one when you need it.

For music, amongst others there was Lucy Rose, as said, and Jake Issac, who was amazing. On the comedy front, amongst others, there was Chris Martin – yes, someone asked if he was from Coldplay – and Zoe Lyons. A lot of laughter was had.

My thanks to Kate for inviting me, also the team at the box office, the wonderful people working at the Waterstones tent, the Tea Sympathy tent, the Higgidy pie van, and the people who very kindly offered me a lift up the road on a swelteringly hot day.

The rest of my photos:

Some have check-lists. Others just a particular passion.

Publisher: Text Publishing
Pages: 306
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-1-925-35548-2
First Published: 21st June 2016
Date Reviewed: 4th July 2016
Rating: 4/5

Deb works as a naturalist. She’s rarely at home, instead spending most of her time studying penguins and teaching tourists, travelling to Antarctica and spending nights there. On one such trip she met Keller, an ex-lawyer who had signed up as a dishwasher in a bid to get to the coldest continent; he had persuaded her to let him tag along on explorations. Speaking now of the past, Deb interweaves these stories with the one in which a cruise ship has veered too close to the ice – a ship Keller happened to be on at the time.

My Last Continent is an oft-epic tale of Antarctic exploration, the damage of tourism to that environment and the effects of very real dangers, complimented by an at times very moving love story.

Dealing with the storytelling first, the story jumps this way and that way in time – the only constant is that you know you’ll be heading back to the story of the ship wreck and that that story will command the end section of the book. The structure means you know a disaster will happen – the ‘present day’ chapters, for want of a better term, are labelled in terms of days before the tragedy and the rest of the chapters move about on a very flexible time scale, any when from ‘six months until shipwreck’ to ‘twenty years before shipwreck’. This means that it’s difficult to get a sense of where exactly you are in time because the structure is so jumpy, but it’s not a loss overall. Yes, you may be confused by, for example, Deb mentioning Dennis in a particular chapter when you’d thought he’d not arrived in her life by that time, but as the main event is that shipwreck, it’s not much to worry about.

As you know how the book will end (you know what’s happened to Deb and Keller before Keller is introduced in person) this book’s romantic element is focused more on the journey than any result. This works in Raymond’s favour; whilst you as the reader may feel you can pull back somewhat from being enveloped, knowing how it will end and that you’re reading of Keller in the past also means that Raymond can throw caution to the wind. Would Deb and Keller’s story sound, yes, sad, but also too… mushy… in another book? Perhaps. But here it works. That’s not to say we’ve Titanic – Jack and Rose – levels of romance, because we haven’t. Raymond’s dedication to the research element of her story, and her non-tourist characters’ dedication to their work, has a very grounding affect on the romance.

Let’s look at Raymond’s dedication to the facts – in My Last Continent we have a book that sports a lot of info-dumping, but in this case the result can be considered a unicorn, that word now used as much to describe things that are miraculously unique as much as it describes a mythical animal. When you consider fiction normally, info-dumping is bad because it tells us things we could work out on our own – just tell us the basic details, we can add the dining room and picket fence all on our own. We know how people eat, sleep, bathe. But as Raymond is talking about Antarctica all bets are off – how many readers have been to Antarctica? It’s a case of knowing Raymond has info-dumped but truly being able to gloss over it because it’s interesting. We need the world building. (This said there are a couple of conversations that push it a bit too far, conversations that are obvious devices, that could have done with a rewrite.)

The information serves a second purpose. Beyond helping you form a not-so-stereotypical image in your head, Raymond is concerned about conservation and the impact human exploration has on the wildlife and climate of Antarctica. She doesn’t preach – what she does most is to show the effects. Her story, which effectively casts you, the reader, as a passenger on the journey along with the fictional tourists who will come to be aware of the problems. Sometimes you’ll know about the problems because Deb’s talked about them, other times your ever-expanding knowledge will clue you in itself. So this means that you are reading a work that sits on the fence between fact and fiction and is obviously heavily tuned towards teaching, but this lesson doesn’t over-burden. And that’s all down to Raymond’s crafting of the romance.

Raymond doesn’t draw too many lines. Whilst she points out that tourism is a problem, her tourist characters are mostly people who want to help, through their discovery of the problems en route. Many characters are there to show how dangerous the continent can be. As much as tourism is a problem, she says in subtext, these explorers are here and whilst they’re studying they aren’t immune from that label themselves.

In reading My Last Continent you’re signing up for a romance in snow that’s anything but a winter wonderland. You’re signing up to a book that’s not quite fiction. You’re signing up for a book that’s not a relaxing read. You’re here to learn. But for all that you get an excellent introduction to Antarctica, a fast-paced story, a good romance, and knowledge you can take with you beyond the last pages.

I received this book for review from FMCM Associates.

Related Books

Speaking to Midge Raymond about Forgetting English, and My Last Continent (spoilers included)

Charlie and Midge Raymond discuss the current situation in Antarctica and the balance of keeping it clean whilst allowing research and tourism, environmental and climate changes in the same location, and being followed to the toilet by a penguin.

If you’re unable to use the media player above, this page has various other options for listening.

Reading Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun, I went on one of those rabbit hole reading sprees, so far that when I clicked back from a tab to one of the other many tabs I’d opened, I couldn’t remember how it was related. Then I did remember; I’m recording some of those tentatively-related findings here, too.

Orkney has a lot of Neolithic history to it. There are tombs and homes and a big tourist attraction on the ‘mainland’, Skara Brae, a settlement under the earth made of stones. A lot still remains and there are even items of stone furniture. Coastal erosion in Britain means Skara Brase is now very close to the shore (one hopes it can somehow be saved) but at the time of use it would’ve been fairly inland.

Along with a bit more astronomy, which I won’t detail as I’ve already covered the subject in another post, was fata morgana. Named after the legendary witch, fata morgana is a sort of cloud phenomenon wherein reality is reflected wrongly on the horizon. It changes the look of boats, sometimes making them look airborne, other times making them longer than they are. The blurry mirage changes over a short period of time.

My rabbit hole discovery started with a lack of geographical knowledge – I knew the Orkneys were above Scotland but where were they exactly? Once I’d read enough of Liptrot’s book to have the location to pat (below the Shetlands, not to the west – that’s Skye), and to have learned some of the names (‘mainland’ – capital: Kirkwell – Papay Westray, Stronsay, North Ronaldsay), I started to wonder about the islands more… northerly. Beyond, or above, however it should be termed, the Shetlands, come the Faroe Islands.

The Islands are more populated than the Shetlands and are considered part of Denmark. I liked the photographs of the cities and towns but what interested me most was the article on Faroese literature. The islands have been populated for centuries so stories are not new. In medieval times stories were passed down orally; traditional songs were finally written down in the 1800s.

Faroese literature, in the way we use ‘literature’ now, has been around for the last 100-200 years, which Wikipedia says is down both to the isolation of the islands and to the local language not being standardised until 1890. As with many tales of history, the ruling country’s language was promoted more. The Wikipedia page is quite something, have a look at the chronology!

Of the Danish-language contingent, famous authors include one William Heinesen who wrote a book called The Black Cauldron – from what I’ve read it seems the most likely of his works to be recognised overseas. Looking at Heinesen, who was born at the turn of the nineteenth century and lived to 91, we have someone who wrote about the capital of Faroe, Tórshavn, and placed it at the heart of his work. He wrote about destruction and creativity, about contrasts. Britannica says, ‘he combined elements of tragedy, comedy, satire, allegory, and social criticism to explore such themes as the harshness of nature and the rights of the individual as opposed to the collective good’. He rejected his nomination for the Nobel Prize as he believed it would be better to give it to a Faroese writer who wrote in the language of the islands – “If it had been given to me, it would have gone to an author who writes in Danish, and in consequence Faroese efforts to create an independent culture would have been dealt a blow”. Considering he was restricted in his language choice at the time, having to write in Danish, I think it’s a particularly awesome gesture. (The Prize went to Elias Canetti, a Bulgarian Brit who wrote in German.) Heinesen’s house on Faroe has been turned into a museum; perhaps due to his relatively recent passing it remains largely unchanged.

Bárður Oskarsson, whose name has an accent in it I’ve never seen before but I hope I’ve rendered it correctly, is a children’s writer and illustrator from our present day. He started out as the illustrator for his grandfather’s children’s book which is pretty awesome, I reckon, and kept on illustrating for a while before starting to write himself. The New York Times called a recent release “a quietly profound new picture book… about the question of how to react to the death of a stranger”. From the image included and the dollar amount at the bottom, it would seem that contrary to the Wikipedia page, Oskarsson’s work is being translated into English. Of this book, The Flat Rabbit (or Flata Kaninin) Norden says “about ethics and responsibility in a sensitive and compelling way. The subject of the book is akin to Antigone and The Iliad and the challenge is to take care of the dead body of a loved one, even though there is great risk involved”.

Oskarsson’s most famous book is Ein Hundur, Ein Ketta Og Ein Mús, A Dog, A Cat, And A Mouse.

Heðin Brú is another writer with a fair backlist. Older that Oskarsson (Brú died in 1987), this writer is considered the most important of his generation. The Old Man And His Sons (Feðgar aacute; Ferð) is his most famous work, published in 1940 and translated into English in the 70s. Brú also worked as a translator, bringing to Faroe Shakespeare, Ibsen, Dostoevsky and Lindgren amongst others.

Teacher Marianna Debes Dahl has written novels and short stories but seems not to have released any work for some years now. Marjun Syderbø Kjelnæs has been pretty prolific, publishing 17 novels, short stories, and plays since 2000. She has collaborated with musician Eivør Pálsdóttir.

So of course after that I started reading about Faroese music; it was quite a lesson overall.

What have you learned lately because of reading?

Midge Raymond’s book, The Last Continent, which I’ll be reviewing next week, is full of information about Antarctica that, reading her story as well as a couple of articles she had written (I like to research books when possible) led to questions. Chief of these is how Raymond came to know about Antarctica and why she chose to write about it. I’m happy to welcome her to talk on the subject today as an introduction before we get to the book itself. (Photographs courtesy of the author.)

The Last Continent was inspired by my own visit to Antarctica more than a decade ago, on a small expedition ship very much like the Cormorant in the novel. During the journey, two things stuck with me. One was the concern of the shipboard naturalists about the larger cruise ships, carrying thousands of passengers, that were venturing farther and farther south, which was troubling to them because if something were to happen to one of those ships, rescuers could be days away. Given the extreme weather conditions and the distance from hospitals, this is an incredible risk. So I began to wonder what a catastrophic shipwreck in this region would look like.

The other thing that stuck with me was seeing a fellow passenger fall on the ice near a penguin colony. He got right up and was perfectly fine – but seeing this happen reinforced the notion that, at the bottom of the world, you are at the mercy of the conditions and of the few people who are with you.

And of course, the beauty of Antarctica and its wildlife affected me deeply, especially the penguins and their fight for survival as the climate warms. Due to warming oceans as well as over-fishing, penguins have to travel farther for food, which puts them at risk and also means that, during the breeding season, they may not make it back in time to feed their hungry chicks. The storms caused by climate change can also freeze eggs or drown young chicks who don’t have the insulation adult penguins do.

Among the many reasons I wrote The Last Continent was to show how much Antarctica needs our attention and protection. It’s an icy wonderland that is unlike any place else on the planet, and it needs humans to understand its importance and to ensure it doesn’t melt away.

Have you read any books set in/about Antarctica?

Midge Raymond’s previous work includes two books about becoming an author; she has also written short stories. Her twitter handle is @MidgeRaymond.