Furious and Curious: Alice's in Wonderland through others' eyes

Speaking as somebody who has, erm, walked a solitary path in terms of taste and favourites for most of his life, I do get excited when I find someone who shares my love for something, or follows a recommendation. It’s not a straightforward excitement – like other kinds of love, it’s bewildering: we see things through a new set of eyes, we see ourselves in another light. It’s almost worse than when we meet someone who hates our favourite thing. ‘Of course you don’t like it,’ we say, ‘That’s my special thing – how could somebody like YOU like that?’ somebody like you = someone who’s not me. The reverse of this is stranger: ‘You like x like I like x? But how can somebody who isn’t me have something so much in common…?’ and so on.

Yes, maybe I ought not to worry about it.

It was fantastic last week for a friend to say she had read The Proof of Love, the winner of 2011’s Green Carnation Prize. If you’re going to get excited about making recommendations, you might as well go all the way – draw up a longlist, cut it down to a shortlist, and finish with an overall book of the year, and Catherine Hall’s novel was so disquietingly beautiful and sad. I wasn’t surprised that Nessa loved it too – it was a consensus decision after all, we had all fallen for it in one way or another. But what a thrill to know Nessa had followed those characters into that green-gold summer in the Lakes, gone through Catherine’s and Spencer’s and Alice’s eyes into the mystery and agony of that story.

I was more thrown this week when Jon finally – after seven years (eight in March, in fact) of nagging at him – finally read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He bought it on Kindle for a ha’penny or something, and last Sunday started reading it – and loving it.

My love of Alice goes too far back for me to quantify – it’s just something I’ve always known, probably because it’s like a mutating flu virus: the story breeds other versions of itself and has its own ancestors. I loved the Disney cartoon first (when I was about three, ITV had a Disney Christmas and we taped loads of their movies for constant rewatching – Alice and Dumbo on the same tape, irresistibly swathed in cheesy adverts). I’ve still got my first copy of the books, a pair of miniaturised hardbacks [pictured above!] in a cardboard slipcase – and I remember Dad enjoying telling me about the real Alice Liddell, the sort of detail which makes a story endlessly fascinating. One holiday, we visited her grave in Lyme Regis – never underestimate the Campbell fascination with mortality.

There is even Dodgson’s manuscript version, of course, a love letter in longhand, the hand-drawn picture behind the cameo photograph. Which forms that naïve excitement that behind any story there is something ‘real’. I believed, of course, in the antic power of the text itself, with its dream gardens and satiric surrealism. I thought its main strength was its strangeness and trace of melancholy (this is stronger in the Looking-Glass) – but Jon surprised me.

He thought it was hilarious. I heard him laughing aloud at the Pig and Pepper chapter, and then he read aloud Alice’s first conversation with the Cheshire Cat – and I was surprised to find he was right. After watching Alice wrestle with a giant piece of tinned tongue in Jan Svankmajer’s version, and all those serious looking images of Alice Liddell dressed as beggar girl, I had forgotten how laconic Carroll’s dialogue can be, how Alice reacts to extreme flights of surrealism either with laughter of her own or with down-to-earth practicality.

When a baby turns into a pig in her arms, and runs off into the bushes, Alice gives the Victorian equivalent of a shrug and a Miranda-style look to camera: ‘It probably would have grown up into quite an ugly child anyway – but it makes quite a fine pig.’ It seems to have helped that Jon pictured her as his five year-old niece, Tilly.

And now he’s made me see her differently – not as a disconcerting literary device or mouthpiece for Carroll’s suppressed self, but a well observed young girl who somehow remains self-assured, despite not knowing who her self really is (not necessarily a trick Alice Liddell would have been without).

Laughter comes from her ease in the company of adult-figures who strain to impress their authority and dignity upon her, to the point of making themselves little boys once more, needy, petulant and angry. Jon tells me the words ‘curious’ and ‘furious’ occur with surprising frequency: these are the Wonderland adjectives, but they don’t scare Alice. Even nightmare can’t cut her down: she has the benefit of perspective.

What a treat to see an old love afresh, to realise it’s as curious and furious as you remember, and has more in it still to find…

Night owls ... The Owl Service, by Alan Garner

When I read Alan Garner's Owl Service the other week, rattling home from the fern rusted, valley washed landscape of the novel, it must have been the third time that I'd read it, and still I couldn’t quite follow its ideas and gauge exactly what was happening. Not even with whole scenes of characters explaining the situation to one another. There are few scenes without a conversation of some kind: the book's full of chatter and precise body language, but meaning is patchy, understanding is rare, even and especially between speakers in the same language. All this communication does is show us, the reader, how little is being said – the difficulty of communication.

So of course it’s a rather unhappy, even anguished novel, full of jagged edges. We’re in an old house where the air is thick with disdain. The family on holiday are a bad fit, and the mother and son brought back to the house as serving staff only antagonise one another. Being reunited with a figure from the past is traumatic for the boy's mother; a spark of romance between son and holidaying daughter is smothered by hers; their atmosphere of conspiracy is wrecked by her step-brother’s contempt.

And out of this friction builds a wild energy, and the energy finds a form – but what form it takes has a history, has several stories, stories about stories and about creation – and the responsibilities of creation, even of parenthood.

And then there’s the giant owl...

Perhaps what surprised me again, what always surprises me, is that this piercingly sharp novel of class conflict, inheritance, adolescent sexuality and the life of myth is never as subtle as I expect. I go into it each time thinking the force that possesses Alison, as she sketches obsessively at an old pattern on a plate, the force that whips up a storm, is so unnameable and elusive that it might be explained by some atmospherics and a strong imagination. But there is definite enchantment in this novel, something unearthly and frightening. It might not actually be a giant owl, but something is on the attack – and Huw the Flitch knows far more about it than I’ve realised before.

So perhaps I should find it easier to understand the nature of that gathering energy, the form it takes. There is a complex idea about possession to The Owl Service, a beautiful idea – which is something to do with being possessed by our own fascinations, our own reading. When Alison is sitting out on the lawn with a copy of The Mabinogion, what is happening? What is drawing her to the text, and what is she drawing from it? Is it altering the way she reads, this translated text? Is it translating her into a new edition of itself: a living force seeking an appropriate language?

Three readings in, I wonder whether Garner might not have bitten off more than he could chew – not that he doesn’t chew it, but the result is perhaps over-rich, over-complex, and Alison’s catastrophic act of reading is given less attention than the overall dissonance of the house. It needn’t have been such a novel of ideas, I suppose.

It is still a thrilling, fascinating read, and I love the fact that it’s short enough for us to give it the rereading it deserves. A read to be wary of, if Alison’s experience is anything to go by. What happens if you write too many academic papers about a novel like The Owl Service? Do you get cut down by winging copies of Weirdstone of Brisingamen? The Puffin Service...?

Competition Time: The Sea Egg, and secret magic…

Back in the blog, where I belong. But it’s been such a busy week! Last weekend I was staying with Rosie in her lovely house, overlooking Caernarfon and the Isle of Anglesey. Falling asleep on their sofa I felt transported to a higher realm – geography and distance meant nothing, but I felt way above wretched city life on their green hill.

I’m a town mouse, I think – much as I can revel in the peace and power of a mountaintop, I’ve always dreamt of losing myself in city streets. I was reading about town and country temperaments during my stay, in the rather naffly titled The Magic Stone by Penelope Farmer, better known for Charlotte Sometimes.

It’s a tale of the changing landscape of the 1960s. A new housing estate brings an East End girl into the life of one who only knows the countryside. Their brothers battle ever violently, but the girls are drawn together by a small stone that may or may not be the one Arthur first pulled his sword out of. They argue and envy one another in fairly naturalistic fashion, but they also share moments of ecstatically heightened sensation which unite them. Later, we see that the stone has helped the incoming girl adjust to her new surroundings – when they visit London, it does the same for the other. But it’s a subtle, ambiguous magic, and the ending is downbeat.

On the way home, I re-read The Owl Service, a novel deserving a proper blog all to itself. In fact it’s part of a plan I’m hatching with my friend Rosie, but more of that then. But goodness, what a novel: so intricate, so terse, so demanding, so strange.

Last week I told you about the Lady Stardust competition, and decided I wanted a competition of my own. Well, it’s maybe a bit ambitious, but I’m taking my inspiration from Puffin Post, the club magazine for Puffin fans of the 60s and 70s. That’s full of competitions, set by people like Yehudi Menuhin’s wife, Diana, or Peter Dickinson, where you have to compose sea shanties or cautionary tales.

The prize this month is a copy of The Sea Egg by Lucy M Boston. After my birthday last year, I found myself with an extra copy of this little children’s novel, and wondered what I should do with it. It’s an American edition from 1967.

I read my birthday copy of The Sea Egg in Budapest last August and didn’t tell you about it, but it’s a beautiful and odd story about a merboy found by two boys during their summer holiday in Cornwall. Beautiful because of its effortless way with atmosphere: her Children of Green Knowe has to be one of my favourite books in the world, and The Sea Egg evokes a similar spirit of fascination with place – the feeling that a place can hold us, so that our attentiveness and our wondering at it are inseparable from it. There isn’t a history and then us, or a natural history and then us studying it: there is just ongoing story, and the magic of it (particularly the occupation of a place, the charging of it with human experience) is ours too, though hard to share.

Well, you can win my other copy (the American edition) but here’s what you have to do: write me something with the title Secret Magic. That’s what The Sea Egg (and so many of my favourite books) is about. Keep it short - less than half a side of A4 – but make it whatever you like: story, poem, confession, invention. It should be, ideally, something you’ve never told anyone before. Please send your secret magic, with an assumed name (just because) to me – by February 25th: nicholas dot m dot campbell at gmail dot com! Give it a go!



Have a lovely weekend, folks!

Spot-The-Bowie Competition...

Look up! Obverse Books are running a competition this week, and it’s all to do with that picture, Paul Hanley’s wraparound (rather sumptuous) artwork for the forthcoming short story collection, Lady Stardust. As you will see, the world of transtemporal adventuress Iris Wildthyme has been mixed in with that of astral troubadour and arch genrebender David Bowie, this being the theme of Lady Stardust, which involves Iris in a series of adventures prompted by songs such as 'Cracked Actor' and 'The Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family'.

The question is, how many Bowie references can you identify in Paul’s artwork? Stuart Douglas says: ‘Some of them are very obscure and some a bit tenuous (so list everything you think might be a reference!)’. The prize is a copy of Lady Stardust itself, which promises to be quite something I think, especially with George Mann and Iris’ creator, Paul Magrs, among the writers.

The email to send your list to is: bowie@obversebooks.co.uk

I’ve been reading about Bowie myself in preparation, though I don’t think I’m anywhere near able to spot everything. I’m still at that nice point in getting to know someone when all the images and ideas are in freefall around you, and rather overwhelming, and you don’t really know whether this part of the story follows that one or vice versa. It’s quite different from the experience of growing with an artist – keeping faith with them (or not, in some cases, though hope springs eternal for the next album, or their comeback in ten or so years’ time…)

I haven’t written on here for a bit because do you really want to know about all those Christmas reads now (The Christmas Bower, The Winter of the Birds, etc)? Err.. no! Time has moved on.

And since then, I’ve been trying to get back in the swing of things – reading archaeological misadventures such as The House on the Brink (with the rather terrifying ambulatory log), The Secret World of Polly Flint (Moondial, only with a dog in a boat), Whispers in the Graveyard (both moving and hokey), and just this week, Sand by William Mayne, another triumph of tremendous atmosphere, uncannily convincing depictions of child identities, and barely any plot at all.

And I’ve been trying to write something for a friend – more about that later – and it’s had me in coils, trying to say what I want to say, trying to be exact. When you don’t sound like yourself, and you can’t say what you want to say, and you don’t know where you’re speaking from, it can be quite dispiriting. You have to know what place you are speaking from, and it MUST NOT be your arse. (As I wrote this I had an email from him: ‘ feels a bit vague/weak to me’)

It’s a rainy day in South London, and I’m glad. I love a grey day, rain on the window, or marching through it with my rather unwieldy umbrella. I sometimes think that’s how the air ought to feel – textured, full of points. When the wind blows and weather is in the streets we are reminded of all the invisible things right in front of us, coming up…


(I quite like the idea of a competition on the blog, don't you? Shall I run my own next week?)

Deepening visions ... Edward Burra at the Pallant House Gallery

Right: if you’re able, you’ve got nearly a month to go and see the retrospective of Edward Burra at the Pallant House gallery in Chichester. It finishes on the 19th of February and, as Rachel Cooke says in this review of the show, it’s drawn from so many collections, public and private, that it’s unlikely to be assembled in one place again for a long while.

Admittedly, there will then be that nice surprise of spotting an artist you like in a crowd of strangers, like finding you’ve a friend in common, and there can be something overwhelming about several rooms of one person’s life work; we went to one on Miro last year and had to skip a couple of rooms or stay there all day. But it’s so exciting to delve deep in the turns and B roads of someone’s ideas, and Burra’s developed in such unexpected ways – from the faces and colours and the atmosphere of story that in his street and café scenes, to his surrealist satire and wild English landscapes, to his spectral motorways, busy with translucent figures.

And if it wasn’t for this retrospective, I would never have noticed Burra’s name, never recognised that the men in zoot suits and the café crowd (recognisable from several Penguin Modern Classic book covers) was one and the same with that skull in a soldier’s helmet, the mud-coloured landscape, that they were all united in one slowly deepening vision. I would never have seen the delight in those early ones, the queer pleasure in soldier’s glutes, the celebration of Mae West’s tiny glinting eyes (all eyes in the exhibition are alight somehow, as if signalling some occult possession), I would never have seen those Neo-Romantic landscapes (yes, back to those favourites of mine – and Burra was a friend of Paul Nash’s, as well Conrad Aiken, father of Joan, and George Melly too – very well connected for someone who lived in Rye) which in their blue-grey-green misty superimpositions, resemble more obviously even than those of Graham Sutherland, the covers to those spooky children’s novels of earth magic, Cooper, Garner, Gordon.

Funny that book covers seem relevant, given there’s little evidence in this show that he was involved in illustration. But he did consume all sorts of supposedly lowbrow culture, horror movies and HP Lovecraft and, according to his biography, schlock (I had a look to see if he was a Doctor Who fan, but the only thing anyone is certain he watched was Poldark). I’m sure these cultural cross-currents are much more common than critics like to admit – particularly when it comes to images of the British countryside which, in the 1950s, became less acceptable in modern British art and increasingly utilised in historical drama and Hammer horror. And a taste for genre hokum runs right through the Surrealist lineage back to Magritte and Ernst.

I hope Pallant House has a couple of Burra’s in its own keeping for when I return and have a good rummage round the rest of the place: Steve and I were careful not to dilute our rich, deep draft of Burra with Peter Blake, Duncan Grant, Ivon Hitchens etc It’s an treasure house of strange and beautiful things, and hidden away down a side street away from the shops and cafes. If I was a town planner in Chichester, I’d want to be leading tourists and shoppers astray a bit more, perhaps by gilding the pavement slabs leading from the mundane world to the doorstep of Pallant’s wonderful one. It might take us a while to find it again – but it will be worth it.

The old year out, the new year in

This year we’ll be at home, and just us two. We’ll have something nice for dinner and then, at TWELVE, we will rush to our respective doors – him at the front and me at the back door, maybe, and open them and beckon the new year in out of the cold, and usher the old year cheerfully out into the back garden with the cats and fallen leaves.

I made a list yesterday on the bus home (returning from visiting friends in Oxfordshire) as we swished through the night rains: New Year’s with people who’ve since gone off or come back, people who I’ve fancied or fallen out with, parties in pubs or clubs, and the way I was more/less: timid, excitable, optimistic, drunk.

I kept diaries some of those years but more often not. The last two years I’ve blogged – though such a lot falls outside the entries here. I don’t even have a list of my reading independent to my blog, which for the first time strangely took charge of me a little. What with this new bout of study at Roehampton, and the Green Carnation, I found myself reading all sorts of things I couldn’t have predicted.

And doing unpredictable things and making new friends, for all sorts of reasons. You just never know! But I tried to make the most of it, and do feel lucky. To varying degrees, illness got in the way this year, barely for me but more for friends, the body asserting itself over the plans we lay. Well, then there’s the imagination. You have to keep that alive, in the face of the earthly, mortal world. And we’re back to books.



Highlights of my reading this year; others do top tens, but that’s too hard for me, especially not duplicating authors (besides, you know I make it up as I go along – please myself – blah blah). And let’s put the Green Carnation shortlist to one side, because I don’t want to use up six choices on them, and they are all fab.

But Jeanette Winterson and John Waters didn’t make the leap from long- to shortlist, and I adored their memoirs this year, both books about battles for identity, for eccentricity and not taking the easy route; both are full of energy and good humour.

These last few New Year’s Eves, Jon and I have gone and bought new books to take us into the unknown (a new book is still a treat for me, a hardback especially – I read a lot of library books and yellowing ancient paperbacks). Last year I bought The Local, written by Maurice Gorham and Edward Ardizzone, a beautifully reproduced pre-war celebration of the pub: wise but unpretentious, warm without sentiment. Full of protest at the passing of fashion, that futile anxiety any place we call home is marked with.

Also illustrated by Ardizzone, and also gorgeously old-fashioned, The Nine Lives of Island Mackenzie is still there twinkling away in my head, which is one of my ways of judging a good read. It made a lovely bedtime read, like Joan Aiken’s Half Past Eight O’Clock, the story of the ancient telephone call being the most sublimely perfect bedtime story ever, for my money.

It’s been a Joan Aiken year: I’ve just read the third Wolves novel and it was great fun, but I had such a good time reading Blackhearts in Battersea that I wonder if any of her books will ever surpass it, it was that full of odd incident, fabulous dialogue and fantastic (in the old sense) action. I also loved her ghost stories this year, and am going easy with her masterful Touch of Chill. She had a brilliant story in the second Virago Book of Ghosts, along with Mary Butts’ With and Without Buttons. In fact that Virago Book was full of surprising treats.

Are you wondering what book I bought to take into the New Year, from the wonderful Bookseller Crow in Crystal Palace? Well, it was The Gate on the Stairs by Lorrie Moore. Why? Because compiling this list made me feel like my favourite reads have been the most fantastical, and like I needed a nicely observed domestic drama for a change.

There was Enter Wildthyme, the first novel for the transtemporal extraordinaire in a double-decker bus, and like those other novels it’s still alive in my head and certain moments come back all the time. Like the strange expedition through a tear in a map, in a bus motoring up a mountain on an alien world, arriving in Hammersmith 1973…

And Titus Groan, with an insane image or conversation on every page. I love it when they’re all gossiping at dinner – you get a taste of every single whisper – and somebody’s so bored they fall asleep and their head bounces off the table with a bang. Somehow the detail stimulates and doesn’t smother the imagination: we’re there.


And there was The Final Programme by Michael Moorcock, which was just like the mad delirious lucid dream that takes you to weird quarters of your own head.

And my favourite read of this year, a novel I wish I’d read years earlier, was Does it Show by Paul Magrs, which was just so masterfully complex, taking us to so many places, with so many voices and viewpoints and eruptions of the fantastic, without ever feeling like an empty exercise. It was full of sincerity and human warmth.



Oh, this was only meant to be quick and here I am writing on into the evening. Nobody will read this till way into the new year, when we shouldn’t be looking back at all. I want to talk about The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, The Dribblesome Teapots, and The Unforgotten Coat. And all the memories stirred up looking back over the blog: Butcher’s Shop bought with a book token, Pink Rabbit inspired by a museum visit, Teapots bought after my haircut, Unforgotten Coat an e-book…

But yes, it’s time to look forward to the new. If you still feel the need for some new year spirit, here’s the song that’s carrying me and Jon into the unknown – a gorgeous folksong rendered perfectly by the Unthanks, who we saw in a church earlier this year, people who work with passion, sincerity and good humour, and work hard, and produce wonderful things to set you on track when your brake-blocks catch fire (that happened to us this year, coming home from Brighton on Eurovision night!). Well, here is Tar Barrel in Dale, and here’s to you and your wishes and surprises.

Best wishes,

x

Ho ho Who ... The Christmas Ornament, by Sarah Hadley

It's Boxing Day. Happy Boxing Day! Jon's up in the frozen North - well, Cheshire - and I'm at home with the Campbells, reconnecting with Oscar the cat and entering a strange sort of zen state with regard to time. Here's a festive treat for you: a special Christmassy adventure for the eccentric Doctor Who, written by my friend Sarah Hadley.

She's embroiled the current Doctor - probably one of the best we've ever had - in a sort of modern take on Meet Me in St Louis, with monsters. (She wouldn't describe it like that but it's my blog, so ha!). And the monsters are old enemies of the Doctor's, from its dark and foggy past... You should be able to download The Christmas Ornament here: http://is.gd/80YAIB

For the Great British Public, Doctor Who is now a Christmas staple, with the mysterious traveller in space and time doing something heartwarming in the snow every Christmas Day night for about six years now. Even if it doesn't always ring my bell, it makes perfect sense: panto and ghost stories being right there in the show's DNA.

And Sarah and I have known one another nearly twenty years, and have met precisely once. We were brought together by a pen pal association for fans of the Oz books: yes, two lonely children with a taste for ludicrous fantasy brought together by the postal service. I used to long for those giant orange envelopes from Sarah, covered in drawings of Jack Pumpkinhead or Jon Pertwee as a Yorkshire terrier, and we'd pull out all the stops at Christmas, writing long letters full of scrupulous document of our lives and fantasy sequences in which we met for coffee or solved mysteries...

So I've always been reading Sarah, and especially at Christmas. And slowly I've seen her stories evolve too. It's funny how different we are, when it comes down to it: she likes those dark tones, the big sf ideas, the relentless rain of Blade Runneresque worlds (though you could also ask her about The Couch Fairy...) So The Christmas Ornament, with its eponymous baubles, is something of a departure for her - but she promises me there is something stranger and darker on the way in 2012. So I'll be watching out for that...