The Saturday Morning Post (No. 19)

Here is the third installment of my review/thoughts on Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, which I am treating as a novel in 12 parts rather than a 12 novel series. Rather than dragging this out, I am including the last two omnibus books, i.e. six installments in this review, and will give you my overall review next week.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

A Dance to the Music of Time; Autumn by Anthony Powell

The Valley of Bones  (1964)

The Soldier's Art  (1966)

The Military Philosophers  (1968)

The Valley of Bones covers the first year or so of World War ll. Jenkin is now in the army as a second lieutenant commanding a platoon in a regiment that is stationed in Northern Ireland for training. We meet a mostly new cast of characters, the officers and enlisted men he works with. Most of the officers are not regular army, but civilians like Jenkins who had signed up at the beginning of the war. Some of them are old enough to have served in World War l, or been part of the Territorial Army, a part-time army like the American National Guard. Most of them, however, are finding their way in the army as they go along. For some it is a dream come true, others an escape from a less than successful life, and still others, a long grey nightmare. I found this installment with Jenkins in this entirely new situation more interesting than the usual dinner party/meeting format that characterizes the series. That said, it is still mostly concerned with Jenkins trying to decipher the character and motives of the people, new and old, that he meets in the course of the story.

The Soldier's Art gives Jenkins a new job while still in the regiment stationed in Northern Ireland. In this installment he is an aide to the now familiar, though unpleasant character, Windmerpool from his school days, who is a Major at the regimental HQ. We get some new characters, plus the appearance of another old school pal who shows up. A leave allows him to get to London and encounter yet more familiar characters. By the end of this installment, we are into 1941, with first months of the London Blitz behind us, but London is still experiencing raids nightly. As with all these books, the world outside of Jenkin's focus on people is hinted at with off handed mentions more than even sketched in.

In The Military Philosophers we find Jenkins now working in London working for an Army organization that liaisons with the remnants of the armies of defeated and overrun countries like Poland, the Belgium, etc. As in all these books, exactly nature of what Jenkins does, or for that matter, what the office he works for does is not really fleshed out in any great detail. There is a problem or two, and a trip to meet Field Marshall Montgomery (never named), and a glimpse of the war in London, but mostly the setting gives Powell an opportunity to introduce new characters for Jenkins to deal with, as well as bringing back old ones. This story takes us to the end of the war with Jenkins collecting the civilian clothes that British soldiers are issued at the end of their service.

A Dance to the Music of Time; Winter by Anthony Powell

Books do Furnish a Room  (1971)

Temporary Kings  (1973)

Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975)

Books do Furnish a Room is set immediately after World War ll. Jenkins is working on a biography of one Robert Burton that brings him back to his old, unnamed university, and an old tutor. We meet some new and some old characters there, and he gets involvement with a new publishing house and a new magazine that involves a cast of characters from previous installments. While he is not directly involved in the venture, he is a contributing book reviewer. The main focus of this installment concerns a new character, Trapnel, a rather bohemian writer who writes pieces for the magazine and is working on a new novel. This aspect of the story struck me as something like W Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence, which followed the career of a painter. In our story Jenkin recounts the ups and downs of Trapnel, as he becomes involved with more familiar characters.

The next installment, Temporary Kings, is set a decade later, 1958 to 1959 and opens at a writers' conference in Venice. Here we meet several new characters, including a female college professor and a rather strange American professor who researching the now late Trapnel with a view of writing his biography as his dissertation. Along with these new characters, we meet the usual suspects and explore the various mysteries concerned with the tragic end of Trapnel and his mistress, and the implications of that end in regard to the usual suspects.

The long novel concludes with Hearing Secret Harmonies, once again skipping ahead a decade to be set in 1968 to 1971. In this one some of the characters from the last installment reemerge, as well as a charismatic hippy cult leader. The old characters are dying off and those that remain are so generic now that all that remains of whatever characteristics he described in earlier installments have been lost, at least to me. You would needed to have taken extensive notes to know who these people are and what they did in previous installments. I am going to save most of my thoughts about A Dance to the Music of Time to next week, but I will say here, that I really did not like this particular installment and felt that the book fell off rather sharply in Winter, which characters acting not as you would think they would, give their established characteristics, but as needed by the author, which is something I do not like at all.

But enough, stay tuned for my full review of the 12 book novel coming next week.

The Rosie Project Revisited

The Rosie Project is a humorous novel by Graeme Simsion that I read and reviewed back in August of this year, You can read my review, or a Wikipedia article to learn more about it. You can  also sample it on Amazon or Google books.

The short synopsis is that the story concerns a brilliant Australian college professor who is on the Asperger's spectrum. He decides that he needs to be married. Being both socially awkward and detail orientated, he wants to find his wife in the most efficient way possible; through the various dating apps together with a 16 page survey to be filled out by the women who would like to date him. Needless to say, pickings are few. 

However, due to a misunderstanding, he asks Rosie to a date under the false assumption that she is an applicant. Nevertheless, they hit it off... sort of, and their growing relationship is the basis of the story. 

The book explores the mindset of a person on the Asperger's spectrum, but the author is not on that spectrum. However, a regular reader of mine, who has lived that life, read my review, searched out, found and read the book. He recently emailed me his reactions to the book. I thought that they were entertaining, interesting as well as educational, so I asked him if he would be willing to share his reactions with my blog readers. He has kindly allowed me to publish his remarks - Thank you. 

So what we have below is his thoughts inspired by certain passages in the book. The passages he quoted from the book are in bold italics with our guest blogger’s reaction to them below.

Our contributor's observations on The Rosie Project begin with a few general comments on the book and his experiences and then are reactions to specific quotes from the book to further illustrate his points.

The Rosie Project (Simsion, Graeme) The "Rosie Project" is a quite interesting novel, the style is intriguing and funny. I did not like the last part of it. Seems a lot of books of this type end in marriage as the highest purpose in life. It's boring. I started reading the sequel, "The Rosie Effect" but this was a horror. It started where the "Project" ended and I was not able nor willing to continue reading that one. Okay, if readers want babies and mothers the author gives it to them but it's still boring. A few funny dialogues doesn’t help.

Concerning the Asperger Syndrome, what the author has written is correct, but not comprehensive. First and foremost Aspergers are sensitive against influences, like flickering fluorescent tubes, noises or even emotions of other people. I can't work in a room with a malfunctioning tube, let aside with some employee running radio music, and I asked a friend of mine not to use sad emoticons in her e-mails because they cause me depression. I can't stand seeing how a dog or a child is mistreated, I feel forced to intervene. The result might be one of the following.

Overload, Over-stimulation. Everything suddenly is experienced by the person at 100 percent. Noises are as if a bomb explodes, lights cause extreme effects, problems including emotions of other persons can not be kept separate from their own emotions. 

Shutdown. The person is unable to act or react. I watched a cashier who was confronted with a problem she could not solve. She just sat there for minutes, not able to speak. 

Meltdown, panic, a total loss of control, experienced as fight for life. The subject does not feel pain nor understands that he might cause pain and danger to others, risk his own life or might be punished. 

So, I think the author might have observed persons in the autistic spectrum but has no profound knowledge about Aspergers Syndrome nor is he one himself.

"Most diseases have some basis in our DNA, though in many cases we have yet to discover it."

The Asperger Syndrome and being part of the Autistic Spectrum is no disease. I believe that it was important for the human race that a tiny part of them think differently and act differently, e.g. live alone in a hut in the woods and detect how to make fire. As an analogy, scientists have found out that the survival of a stone age tribe might be promoted if some, but not all women live until they are grandmothers, helping to raise the children and providing sound advice from their experience.

"brain function that had been inappropriately medicalized"

You can't medicalize autism. You might apply drugs which have a sedating effect. You must educate the non-autistic part of the people to tolerate autism, e.g. that autists are missing the instinctive behaviour to make eye contact and that this is not a sign that they are lying.

"Now we would have the inevitable small talk. I could have spent fifteen minutes at home practicing aikido."

Now that's a calculation I, being myself in the autistic spectrum, make all the time.

"offering practical advice, but it seemed that she preferred to discuss trivia"

Yep. I often teased my partner she should make notes when I explain something to her. I am not able to discuss trivia.

"It seems hardly possible to analyze such a complex situation involving deceit and supposition of another person’s emotional response, and then prepare your own plausible lie"

Correct. I don't lie unless it's necessary for a good joke. It takes too much time and effort.

"I continued with my presentation as I had prepared it."

Correct. I take much trouble to plan and prepare an activity, e.g. a tour with my bike club. Sometimes I had arguments with my group if suddenly the majority of them voted for changing the plan. Too much depended on my plans, e.g. to take a route where the sun would not shine from the front directly into my eyes.

"Asperger’s isn’t a fault. It’s a variant. It’s potentially a major advantage"

Maybe an advantage for mankind - some think that Einstein, whose strength is said to think things which are inconceivable for other people, was an Asperger. But the individual lacks the support of all other people and often is considered crazy and stupid.

"she put her hand on my shoulder. I flinched automatically. "

That's normal.

"No flexibility?” “Definitely not"

This is definitely a disadvantage of being an Asperger.

"Before I met Gene and Claudia I had two other friends"

Okay, I am a senior so most friends and all relatives in my life have passed away anyway. But today I have four friends which I communicate via whatsapp, messenger or email. In the average I may see them two times per year.

"She told me that her birthday had always been her favorite day of the year. I understood that this view was common in children, owing to the gifts, but had not expected it in an adult"

I don't celebrate my birthdays. Why celebrate when my remaining lifetime just has been reduced by one year.

"Most adults with Asperger’s syndrome don’t know they have it"

I got my diagnosis at 62 years.

"the horoscope readers", "the sports watchers, the creationists", "the homeopaths"

I don't understand them. I am personally suffering to be locked with all of them on the same planet. I only can bear them when I remember I might be responsible for them, e.g. my coworkers while I am between the CEO and them.

"accelerated workout at the gym, achieved by deleting the shower", "Although I was perspiring heavily from the heat and exercise"

Why bother with showering daily if I don't meet people anyway. When I was a child, everybody bathed on Saturdays.

"The correct answer is (c) on time,” I said. “Habitual earliness is cumulatively a major waste of time" 

Can't stand people who come early to an appointment. If I expect somebody for 4 hours P.M., I need my time for preparations, to have ready fresh made coffee by 3:50 and finished setting the table by 3:59.

"How often do you train?” 

“Three times per week"

At 50, I started training karate four times a week. Not because I wanted to become a superman, but because for Aspergers it is extremely difficult to learn new, rhythmic movements, e.g. dancing, or karate katas.

"I had not been to an art gallery since the tenth of May, three years before"

(Grin) That could be me, telling somebody else or composing an entry in my weblog which my few friends have the password of. Yesterday's entry was: " Kl. Rasenmäher: Messer und Haube abgeschraubt, Grasreste im Motor ausgeblasen und die Luftfilter gereinigt sowie mit Heißklebepunkten wieder eingefügt, den dicken Grasfilz mit zurechtgeschnitzten Hölzchen abgekratzt. Das Messer hatte ich zuletzt am 14.1.23 geschliffen, davor am 19. April 21." Translation (short): "Cleaned the small lawn mower, removed sickle bar and hood, cleaned motor and filters. Last time I sharpened the cutter bar was on 14 January, 2023 and before that on 19. April, 2021".

"I put the herb and vegetable mixture in the large saucepan with the water, salt, rice wine vinegar, mirin, orange peel, and coriander seeds."

My blog entry from yesterday: "Abends zwei Hähnchenflügel, 20min bei Höchsteinstellung 230 Grad, 5min auf dem Gußgrill, weitere 5min drauf belassen". Translation: In the evening I had two chicken wings, 20min at the maximum of 230 degrees Celsius, 5min on the cast iron electric grill, stayed on it another 5min".

"Rosie could leave and life would return to normal"

Correct. I like to have a visitor. Then I am glad if he/she's left and I can return to my routines and planed tasks.

"I went to the whiteboard and started writing up revised preparations"

Yeah, I have plans for everything, daily, week, months, life.

"“Well,” she said, “it’s been an evening. Have a good life.”

It was a nonstandard way of saying good night. I thought it safer to stick with convention. “Good night." I never know what I am expected to say.

"I told him that the flavor didn’t matter, as long as it contained alcohol."

That's my standard line, meant as a joke or to shock people I can't stand.

"being reminded that I needed to try harder to “fit in"

That's what I was told all my life. "Fit in with the onward surge of the lemmings, which inevitably ends in disaster".

"she hardly spoke at all. This made the walk quite pleasant"

I once met a girl with whom I made a trip to a beautiful lake and we watched, smiling, a nutria who had no idea we were there. She hardly spoke at all. She then was my partner for decades and still is my best friend.

"he was large and angry. In order to prevent further violence, I was forced to sit on him".

So funny!

"I am not naturally a dexterous person"

Aspergers never are. That is the reason for: "considerable practice over a long period"

"I diagnosed brain overload and set up a spreadsheet to analyze the situation."

When I told a psychiatrist exactly the same thing and showed her a 30 year old spreadsheet, she immediately diagnosed me with Asperger Syndrome.

"Look at me when I’m talking"

Aspergers can't do that. In the moment where they forget strict to control their viewing direction they won't look at the other person.

"my default assumption is that people will be honest"

Yeah, that was the big problem in my life. I never thought so lowly like some other people. Once I voluntarily maintained a public area bordering at my property. A neighbour asked me what I am doing, adding public property to my own. I never knew that the idea, to steal a little bit of land, existed on earth. Another time, I paid my food in a snack bar and took it to my table. Then I was admonished not to steal the salt shaker. I did not know that there might be people thinking so lowly and are so stupid to believe that somebody would steal a salt shake worth 1 Dollar. I never went to that place again. The are not really my race there, they only look like me.

"With the repeat button on", "Unlike many people, I am very comfortable with repetition"

Of course. If I like a piece of music, why not have it on repeat for some hours or days.

"One sentence per day. Leave out eating, sleeping, and travel.” That made it easy. “Sunday, Museum of Natural History; Monday, Museum of Natural History; Tuesday, Museum of Natural History; Wednesday—” “Stop, wait! Don’t tell me Wednesday. Keep it as a surprise."

SO FUNNY

"How long have you had that shirt?”

 “Fourteen years"

I am quite experienced with turning the collar right side out after a few years so the shirt looks like new again. Have the best sewing machine you can buy for money (Bernina).

" never watch sports. Ever. "

I do sport. I do not sit in an armchair and watch other people doing sports. That doesn't help for better health and there is no exciting combat like, for example, in participating in a basketball game. 

 

The Saturday Morning Post (No.18)

Here is the second installment of my review/thoughts on Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, which I am treating as a novel in 12 parts rather than a 12 novel series. I am going to be a bit briefer in these reviews, saving most of my more general thoughts to when I'm finished reading them, wherever that turns out to be.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

A Dance to the Music of Time: Summer by Anthony Powell

At Lady Molly's (1957)

Casanova's Chinese Restaurant  (1960)

The Kindly Ones  (1962)

These novels can be described as a series of encounters described in great detail with established and new characters over the course of decades. If you are interested in who these characters are based on, there is a web site here that lists them along with photos from real life and the TV series, I believe. The website is also a resource for all things A Dance to the Music of Time and Powell. 

At the start of At Lady Molly's Jenkins is working writing scenarios for the film studio. Starting in 1927 a certain number of films, initially 7.5% raised to 20% in 1935, that were shown in Britain had to be made in Britain or its Empire. They usually where the second film on the program, and many of them were made quickly and cheaply just to fulfill the requirement. In any event, a friend from the studio takes Jenkin to Lady Molly's house where people seemingly gather every night to socialize. Here he meets several new or previously minor characters, as well as one or two of the usual suspects. From this first gathering flows several more extended encounters with various people connected one way or another with that night.

His affair with the married woman is over at the start of this installment, and by the end of it, he has encountered the woman who I believe is related to Molly that he is going to marry - knowing so at first sight. She is one of the youngest of a large family which he knows at least some of the members. There is a  tangle of inter-family relationships  throughout this series, a tangle that I can't hope to untangle, and don't bother trying. As I said in the previous post, I just go with the flow.

With Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, we start with a rather confusing back track in time in order to introduce some new characters; a composer, Moreland, and his musical friends before taking up the story some time after At Lady Molly's. Jenkins is now married and his wife is recovering from a miscarriage. Once again the story consists of several gettogethers this time with his musical friends, a party or two, and an introduction to his various eccentric in-laws. We're now in the late 1930's with the civil war in Spain going on. Every once in a while one of his old schoolmates shows up, including Wnderpool, usually rather disastrously. As it has become the pattern with these stories, much of the action is describing various gatherings, large and small in exhaustive detail, with much musing on the characters, old and new that he meets at these gatherings.

We take another trip back in time at the start of The Kindly Ones, this time back to his childhood in 1914. His father is an army officer and they are living in a "haunted" rented bungalow near Aldershot where is his father is stationed. We are introduced to the various servants and their various idiocentric behaviors, This chapter comes to a head when, while entertaining the Cello playing General Conyers and his wife, who we've meet previously, and waiting for the unwelcomed arrival of Uncle Giles, one of the servants, who having seen a ghost that night, has a nervous breakdown. Uncle Giles brings the news of the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand sparking the first world war. 

We then skip ahead twenty five years to the waning days of peace before the start of World War ll, and a gathering once more featuring the composer Moreland who he backtracked to introduce in Casanova's Chinese Restaurant. And once again we have a series of meetings of various sorts with old and a few new characters, with the story ending at the beginning of World War ll and Jenkins, the narrator looking to get into the army.

I realize that I am being rather uninformative in these reviews, in part because of the nature of these stories; not much happens beyond the house parties Jenkins, our narrator, attends, plus a whole lot of reflection on the lives of the people he meets at these affairs. The fact that Jenkins says next to nothing about his life, I think detracts from these stories, since all you are left with this rotating cast of characters, never on screen for all that long at any one time.

More next week.

Writing Season

Well, the leaves are turning and writing season is upon us. I took the spring and summer off from writing fiction. When it's warm enough to be outside, I want to be outside, not inside at my desk. Oh, I maintained my habit of writing by spending an hour or so every morning writing my two blog posts a week, so with that habit still intact, it will be simply a matter of switching over to writing fiction and spending a bit more time writing... Once I have a fiction story completed in my head to write. 

I'm working on that, having spent the idle spring and summer daydreaming a potential new story. I have a setting, a situation, named characters, and even five pages of notes to remind me of what I had dreamed up with, though they will be largely obsolete if and when I start writing, since the details of the story change week to week, day to day. But even with months of thinking about the story, I haven't been able to organize my many little scenes and ideas into something resembling an actual story. And to be honest, I'm far from certain that I will be able to. Nor have all the characters really come into or stay in focus. And while you don't have to know everything before you start writing, and indeed, some writers know next to nothing about the story when starting, past experience has taught me that I need to know not only the beginning, and the end, but the middle as well. And to be honest, at this point, I don't even have the end clearly in mind.

The fact is that this time around, I'm determined to have a complete story, one with a beginning, a middle, and an end solidly in mind before I start setting it to words on a screen. In the recent past, when I reached the middle of the story I thought I knew, I discovered that I had merely done a lot hand waving over the middle of it, content with only vague ideas about what to do when I got there. They proved so vague that I couldn't put words to them, forcing me to stop and work something out in greater detail, breaking the flow of writing. This time I'm determined to have the entire plot in my head; indeed, I might even write a bullet point outline down before I start so I can write straight through the story without getting lost in the middle. However, with summer of daydreaming, the fact that I've not built that complete story in my mind suggest that this story may not end up going anywhere. Always a very real possibility.

As for the story that I do have in mind, it would be released a straight "Fiction/Literature" category story, though with no pretense to being literary fiction. This time around I'm deliberately not aiming at any specific genre, even though it will have elements of fantasy/science fiction, mystery, and romance in it. Indeed, it will be step further away from genre writing than the Girl on the Kerb. 

I'm thinking that the story will reflect the types of stories I've been reading and enjoying recently; that is to say small, slice of life stories where things happen, but there is no strong, over arching story line, i.e. no Hero's Journey or epic quest. It will probably have a mystery for an underlying driving force. And while the story is set, in my mind, in my usual "universe", on a planet settled by Homo Stellar humans with their 200 year life spans. That event is in the distant past, suppressed and distorted into myth. The setting will be my usual Edwardian era type with a mix of old and new technology.

The working title of this piece is Chateau Claire and the premise is that our narrator finds that he is the heir of a once important family he never knew he was related to. With the death of an unknown great aunt, he comes into the possession of the the title chateau on Summer Isle. The story will recount the changes his life that ensue from this event, as well as a mystery surrounding this great aunt.  At present I've played out lots of little incidents in my mind, come up with lots of ideas for plot points at the beginning, but things peter out after that. I haven't been able to bring them all together into a cohesive story that would keep readers reading it. I expect I'll keep working on this story until the end of the year, but since it takes me three to four months to write the first draft of a novel, and several more to revise it, I will need to start writing it by the new year for it to be my 2024 novel. At the moment it is very much a bird in a bush. If I don't have it in hand by then, it's on to plan B.

Plan B is to return to and finish writing A Passage to Japara. That story, currently at 45K written is half or more done. It is currently aground on the reef of two major scenes that I've yet to invent original enough details for to make them worth writing. I have to believe that, if motivated enough, I could come up with those scenes, and get the damn story afloat, written and done with. However, at the moment it is Chateau Claire that holds my interest, though I have a feeling Passage to Jarpara has the best chance of being released in 2024. Who knows? It could be neither. I'm not under contract, so I don't have to write anything.

Stay tuned.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 17)

Well, with the Blandings Castle saga behind me, I have decided to embark on yet another saga, this one quite different. It is, however, also set in England and it covers the period from 1921 to the 1960's. I'm talking about Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time series of twelve novels, or a novel in twelve parts. The twelve books in the series are often divided into four "seasons" of three books each. These three book omnibuses are how I purchased the books - and yes, not having learned my lesson with the Lonesome Dove saga, I purchased the entire series from Abe Books in one go. 

The blurb says that the "...sequence chronicles the lives of over three hundred characters and is a unique evocation of life in twentieth century England. It is unrivalled for its scope, its humour and the enormous pleasure it has given to generations." As someone who finds Britain in the first half of the last century as my favorite place and time, this sounded like a series right up my alley. I came across it in the Axillary Memory blog of James Wallace Harris, and you can read his far more thoughtful reviews of the books;  here, here, and here.

In this installment I will talk about the first three novels/installments of the series A Dance to to the Music of Time: Spring. that I have read to date. I will keep any insights gained from reading further books to when I read them, or the final entry, however far I get. Thus, what you read here is only how I viewed the work after reading Spring. My impressions may change as I go along.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

A Dance to the Music of Time by Nicolas Poussin 

First some notes on how I'm approaching this project.

I will treat this as one novel in 12 parts. Having read the first three novels, I think that each "novel" does not stand on its own very well, and since reading them in order is essential, as characters introduced in the first book, appear and reappear throughout the stories, Without their context from the previous books, their situations would not make a great deal of sense. And since I am treating this as a single novel, I will grade it only after I have read all of the books, or when I  stop reading them, whichever comes first.

I'm reviewing these novels in sets of three, as published in the omnibus versions I purchased. They are designated by the four seasons, and each three novel set seems to cover a decade or so. I am going to treat each of the three "novels" as installments in the 12 part novel. I don't know how many installments I will read back to back without a break. We'll find out.

The stories seem to be semi-autobiographical. Semi in that from what I've read about the author in Wikipedia, the first three stories somewhat reflect the course of the author's life. I suspect that he took people and incidents from his life to use and manipulate to create this work of fiction. For example, while the author went to Eton, the narrator of these stories, Nicholas Jenkins, certainly did not. That said, both went to university, (unnamed in the book) and both worked for a publisher of art books, and both wrote a novel while doing so. So yes, there are parallels, ones that we might explore later on.

The concept of the story is inspired by the painting above. It is a work by Nicolas Poussin entitled A Dance to the Music of Time, painted around 1634-36 The idea is that just as the dancers begin to dance in a circle, and then, one by one each leaves the circle to dance alone before returning to the circle, so do the people one knows, entering and leaving one's life off and on throughout it. There is no doubt a lot more symbolism in the painting, and certainly in the books, but I have a feeling that most of that goes over my poor head.

A Dance to the Music of Time: Spring by Anthony Powell

This volume includes:

A Question of Upbringing  (1951)

A Buyer's Market   (1952)

The Acceptance World    (1955)

These three books or installments cover the time period from about 1921 to 1930 - the final installment mentions the "slump" which I take to be the stock market crash of 1929 in the States. They cover this period like a stone skipped over a still pond; each book is divided into 4 or 5 chapters, each concerns on a certain narrowly focused incident or situation - a dance or a dinner party. Months, if not years, separate the events described within each book, with the intervening period mentioned only in passing. Thus, we are treated to a series of snapshots, rather than any sort of narrative of Britain of the time.

A Question of Upbringing begins with the narrator, Jenkins, in an unnamed boarding school where we are introduced to a cast of fellow students, and other characters who will reappear regularly through the following years. After school he is sent to France to live in a boarding house to learn French, then attends university. 

In Buyer's Market and The Acceptance World we find that he has moved to London and is working for a publishing company that publishes art books. By the end of this set, he has published his first novel, though it is mentioned only in passing, and is carrying on an affair with the separated wife of someone who he once met briefly. 

As I mentioned above, these snapshots which comprise the format of the novel usually cover a single episode in his life and their immediate ramifications. We are treated to a view of life in British upper society, though as the son of an army officer, Jenkins' status is rather undefined. Apparently he comes from a family good enough to be invited to the dances of the upper class. We also get glimpses of the artsy society and left wing political activity. As an eligible bachelor he is is invited to the dinners and balls of "The Season" where the daughters of the rich are formally introduce to society to begin their quest for a suitable husband. Along the way we are introduced to many more reoccurring characters from different parts of his life. If, like my wife, you are need to take notes to keep the characters straight in a mystery story, you might want to have a notebook handy when reading these stories, as they are claimed to have a cast of 300 characters. I just go with the flow, the main characters are on stage often enough, and the side characters, are, well, side characters.

As for Powell's writing style, a passage more or less at random will illustrate it: "That illusion, such as a point of view was, in due course, to appear - was closely related to another belief: that existence fans out indefinitely into new areas of experience, and that almost every additional acquaintance offers some supplementary world with its own hazards and enchantments. As time goes on, of course, these supposedly different worlds, in fact, draw closer, if not to each other, then to some pattern common to all; so that, at last diversity between them, if in truth existent, seems to be almost imperceptible except in a few crude and exterior ways: unthinkable, as formerly appeared, any singe consideration of cause and effect."

In short, this is literary fiction. While my selection might have been chosen for its meandering depths, much of the writing is along the same lines; wordy and thoughtful. No doubt there is a lot of food for thought in these stories, if you care to invest in the time to extract it, though I must confess that my eyes rather glaze over upon coming on passages like this, content to merely get the gist of it. If that. Que sera, sera.

Because this is a first person narrative, Jenkins spends a lot to ink pondering what is going on in all other characters' minds, and in their lives, throughout the story. Indeed the major focus of the stories is speculation on what other people are thinking, why they are doing what they are doing, and what they hope to accomplish, as he encounters them off and on over the years. I will say that the third novel, written several years after the first two, moves at a somewhat brisker pace than the first two, and I have hopes that future installments will have a bit less naval gazing and more dialogue in them. 

My initial hope with these books was to get a sense of Britain in this time period, and I suppose I am; a sliver of it from a certain class of people. Even so, it is interesting enough. My biggest complaint so far is that there has not been one glimpse of joy in the stories he choses to tell, and not a lot of humor, that I can detect, anyway, so far. However, we have only begun and anything can happen as it goes along. 

A small point; in one of the episodes, Jenkins, after attending a ball, runs into an artist friend and his girl helper late at night, and he is invited to join them to get a cup of coffee at "the stall by Hyde Park Corner," where they meet another friend of Jenkins. Many years ago I painted that very stall by Hyde Park Corner, base on a photo in the book, The Spirit of London by Paul Cohen-Portheim (photo #101 2 A.M. At Hyde Park Corner.) I have reproduced my ink painting below.

Coming up next week: A Dance to the Music of Time: Summer

The Girl on the Kerb Experiment

 

Six months ago I released my 2023 novel, The Girl on the Kerb. Until this book all my books had been released as either science fiction or fantasy. I used SF mostly as a setting for the story. By doing so, it allowed me the ability to write the story I wanted, as I wanted it, without somehow shoehorning it into a known time and place. Even though my stories were set in the future, many of the settings I chose to use have been reminiscent of life in the first half of the 1900's. I seem partial to that historical period, perhaps having read a lot of stories set in that time period. The Girl on the Kerb was no exception. Though set in the far distant future, the society was reminiscent of the 1930's, with radio, newspapers, trains and cars, but no cell phones, internet, and personal computers. This being the case, I decided to release the book based not on its setting in the far future, i.e. as SF, but on the major plot element of the story, which is to say, as an espionage novel. 

There were both pluses and minuses in doing this. Let's look at them.

On the plus side, I was pretty sure that my regular readers would find the book no matter what category I released it in, so that I did not expect to lose many, if any, regular fans. On the other hand, by releasing the book in a new genre, I could potentially reach new readers. And some of these readers might go on to read more of my other books.

In the minus column there were several points to consider related to these potential new readers. Espionage is not a standalone classification. It falls under the "Thriller" classification, i.e. Thriller/espionage, and Thriller/adventure. I hadn't written a thriller in The Girl on the Kerb unless there is a "cozy thriller" sub-genre. This meant that hardcore thriller readers were not going to find many of the things they usually look for in a thriller; violence, guns, death, sex, and high stakes. In addition they would be on unfamiliar ground, since the story was not set the familiar modern world but in the future. The question was/is how would they react to these twists in the genre? There seemed a good chance that I could annoy at least some of the regular readers of the genre and risk being hit with low ratings as a result. I decided to take that risk.

So how has it gone, after six months?

First off, it enjoyed some very unexpected sales. I can't definitely assign this result to releasing it as an espionage novel, it is probably serendipitous, but I never sold so many books in the first month as I did with The Girl on the Kerb. I released it as I usually do; free everywhere except on Amazon, where I priced it at $3.99. I had the ebook up on preorder for a month, and sold 17 copies at that price in the first week, which was very good for a book of mine. However, within a week Amazon caught wind of the free price elsewhere and decided to match the free price. This was fine with me. I used to let them know about my free prices elsewhere just to get them to do that, but I don't bother any more. Anyway, the switch to free resulted in the sale of several hundred books in a couple of days, which, in turn, seems to have caught the attention of Amazon's promotional algorisms and they must have promoted it somewhere, somehow. It ended up selling 2,610 free copies on Amazon in April. Sales tapered off after that, of course, with monthly sales of 165, 193, 76, 108, only to spike again in September with 864 free copies and 2 at full price (i.e. non-US sales). Which means that in its first six months, I've sold a total of 4,035 copies on Amazon and the book has remained on the upper half of Amazons top 100 free thrillers in its categories ever since release. All told, I've sold over 4,600 copies to date. My usual releases may sell around 1,000 in their first year, at best. Did this have anything to do with its release category? Somehow, someway, I think it does, but I can't prove it.

So then, have  all those sales led to an increase the sales of my other books? 

Just eyeballing my sales on Amazon in the months prior to April and afterwards, I would say no, they stayed pretty much in the range they had been prior to the book's release. However, since ratings are only now coming in at an increased rate, any effect on the sales of my other books may still be a ways in the future. We'll see.

As to my fears, how did thriller readers react to the The Girl on the Kerb? 

First off, perhaps due to the number of sales, it has received far more ratings in the first six months than any other book of mine. It has about 80 rating at this point, all told, but only three reviews, with only one on Amazon. Currently its star rating is 4, plus or minus a decimal point depending on the source. While I can't complain, it is a tad lower than my usual books. The lower rating is due to it having 5 or 6 one star ratings, as well as a similar number of 2 star ratings, which are significantly more than what my books usually garner, especially in the first six months. Plus, its 5 star ratings are less than the 50% level that I would like to see. Of course there is the "and/or" possibility that the book simply isn't as good as my other stories, but that is something that I can't say one way or the other. Still, I'm thinking that I did annoy some readers and that the lower score is a result of some pushback from regular thriller readers. You have to take the rough with the smooth.

Will I do it again?

Yes. Any book I write in the future (birds in the bush) that is not connected to any of my published SF titles will not be sold as SF, even though they will also be set in the future and likely on another world, as usual. One small reason for this is because I'm so over SF. I'm no longer count myself a SF fan. However, given the results of The Girl on the Kerb, I see no reason not to categorize the story by story type rather than setting, and I think that I have a good reason for doing so with any future book. Trying new things in publishing is almost a requirement, unless you're minting money. I'm not.

So what might be my next non-SF book? Stay tuned for a glimpse of that bird in the bush next week.

The Saturday Morning Post (No.16)

This week we return to a Furrowed Middlebrow offering, with a D. E. Stevenson story; Mrs. Tim Gets a Job. Mrs. Tim is the title character in four books of Stevenson. Mrs. Tim is the wife of a British Army Officer, and as such, is often living on her own while her husband is overseas defending the British Empire. A couple of decades ago, I may have read at least one of the earlier books, but if so I've no recollection of the story. I don't think they need to be read in order, but it probably helps. I chose this title because it was one of the most highly rated titles on Amazon of the Furrowed Middlebrow collection.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Mrs. Tim Gets A Job by D. E. Stevenson  B-

While I enjoyed this story, I think I prefer the writing of Molly Clavering a bit more than that of Stevenson. Perhaps this is because I seem to detect a slight sense of detachment or coolness in Stevenson's writing, making it for me, just a little less engaging. Anyway, this story, the third of four Mrs. Tim stories, is set in 1946. Mrs. Tim, the wife of the British Army officer, Tim Christie, now serving in Egypt, decides to apply for and takes the job of helping run a hotel in the Scottish Border lands, though with a great deal of misgivings. The hotel owner has been forced to turn her ancestral home into a hotel in order to be able to maintain the large manor house. However, this owner is not a people person, being short and gruff with guests, so she hires Mrs. Tim to help her not only run the place, but to deal with the guests.

The story is written in the format of Mrs. Tim's diary entries, making it a first person narrative, my favorite story format. It chronicles the events leading up to her accepting the job, her experiences as she settles into the job, plus the all the various people she encounters on her travel, hotel guests, and fellow employees, each with their own little stories and, usually, romantic problems.

I felt the story ended a little abruptly, as if Stevenson had reached her word count and decided that she just needed to tie up all the the last of the little subplots in play, and call it a day. However, with this type of story, one without any important overarching narrative, allows for this type of ending. 

One feature of stories like this one set in post war England is a glimpse of how long after the war ended that food rationing and a general scarcity of products remained in place. Well into the 50's times were tough in an England exhausted by six years of war. This is in stark contrast to the boom years after the war in America.

The one other thing that struck me in this story was how Stevenson treated the status of Mrs. Tim, either as the wife of a British Army officer, or by birth. She was portrayed as someone who was above the need to work - several of the characters, including her husband expressed this opinion. And while Mrs. Tim went to work anyway, she never seemed to be completely committed to it as a job. It was just something to do in the moment, after she had been turned out of the house she had been renting prior to this and with her kids in boarding schools. For example, she expected to just take the summer off from the job to spend with her two children, as guests at some relative's country estate. Keeping the hotel running in season wasn't her problem. Nice work if you can get it. One of the interesting things about these novels, no matter how idealized the stories are, is the underlying assumptions about class and society held by the writers of these stories. Most of D E Stevenson's heroines never have to work outside of the home and always have servants to do the domestic work for them inside of it, even if some of them have to scrape by on some small inheritance. The title character in Miss Buncle's Book, is an example, she had to make do with only one servant to keep house and cook for her, until she get married. Married, she then employs several servants, a cook, a maid, and a nanny to look after her children. As I said, nice work if you can get it. I suspect they reflect D E Stevenson's own life and attitude.

For my next reading adventure I am staying in the fictional Britain of the 1920's & 30's (and beyond), but hosted not by a writer of light or comic novels, but a writer of literary fiction. Stay turned to see how that goes.

SPFBO Observations; Reflections On My Writing

As I mentioned previously, having entered Beneath the Lanterns in the Self Published Fantasy Blog Off contest netted me a nice review by Liis. There were several things about the review that struck me as interesting. The great thing about reviews like this is that they allow you to see your work from a different angle, with different eyes. This passage struck me as something I never considered:

"Litka strikes me as a confident author. Confident in what he does and how he wants to tell this story. He doesn't need to rely on the shock factor to keep the hooks in the reader."

I never thought of myself as a confident author in the sense that other authors might be less confident than me. I would think most authors write their story and only publish it when they have confidence that the story is good enough, if not great. Undoubtedly a lot of authors struggle to some degree or another while writing that story, but I don't think that struggle is reflected in the finished work. What I suspect the reviewer to be saying is that I wrote, and entered, a book in the contest that does not, in story or style, conform to the current fashion in fantasy. If that is the case, judging from the reviews of other contestants I've glanced over, she would be right. There is reason for this; I am not a fan of current fantasy and have read very little of it, and this was even more true when I wrote the story in 2018.

But perhaps there is a more vague meaning, which may be boiled down to knowing what I'm doing. As an author you need to know what you're doing. You need to know your audience; what they expect, and then deliver what they expect and more, if you can. But the key to writing with confidence is knowing who you are writing for.

I do. And I keep it simple. My audience is me. 

This singularity of focus makes writing a whole lot easier. Knowing what exactly it is that I like to read means that it just becomes a matter of dreaming up a story that appeals to me and then writing it down. It's just that simple... Right. In any event, all this method then requires is a leap of faith that there are readers who like what I like. In the beginning that may have been a blind leap of faith, but over the years I know now that there are some people will like what I like. And that is enough.

I should mention that this is probably not be the best approach to take if you are aiming to write commercial fiction, i.e. stories designed to sell books in large numbers to a large audience, unless you yourself are very immersed in the large audience you are writing for, and thus, know that you and they want in a story. I am sure that there are authors who are lucky enough to find themselves in that position, but I suspect that for many others, to write books that sell in great numbers, they need to carefully study what sells, and then make themselves write books with the potential to sell. Writing for them, is a job. 

Since I don't need or want a job, I write what pleases me, accepting that my work will appeal to a limited audience. I don't know if this is confidence so much as accepting that what will be, will be. I think this in either case, it is a pretty good attitude for most authors. Writing what's in your heart and head, brings out the best your creatively, while at the same time, making writing so much simpler and rewarding, independent of sales numbers. 

This is not to say that I never take my readership into account. I do, sometimes. For example I set out to write the Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventure stories in part because they are set in the same setting as my most popular book, The Bright Black Sea. That said, I wrote them as mystery stories, using different characters and a different solar system, so they were not carbon copies of what I'd written before. I wrote them as mysteries, in part because I had something to say about mystery stories. The one thing I hate about mystery stories is that they almost always revolve around a murder, or two, or three... I don't know if mystery writers are just too lazy to come up with a mystery that matters that doesn't involve someone getting killed, or if murder is what the readers, i.e. the market, demand in mystery stories. Whatever. In my mysteries, since I still write for myself, none of them involve investigating a murder.

Liis also said in the review:

"What might not work for some readers? The Prose. I don't know what it is that makes readers shun lyrical prose these days. It's like an insurmountable mountain that masses, looking for quick and easy gratification, are unwilling to climb. But when you get into the prose, when you start to go with the flow, when you give it a chance the reward is worth it. I wouldn't say this title is overly descriptive, it is exactly what it advertises itself for - an old fashioned novel of adventure."

This was something of a head scratcher for me. I certainly don't think that I write with lyrical prose. Lord Dunsany writes lyrical fantasy. I don't. English for Liis, a Estonian who has lived in Ireland for a dozen years, is a second language, so that might explain it. I try to write in a conversational style, and I will admit that I often use two words where one will do, but I don't know if all that makes my writing "lyrical" as I understand the word, compared to modern fantasy writing.

Perhaps what she meant is that I have a distinctive narrative voice. I would like to believe I do. I try to make the narration flow as if the narrator was speaking to you, the reader. Plus, I am not concerned with taking "unnecessary" words out, like the writing advice I frequently come across tells me to do. So maybe my style is not as lean as the current style of writing, but I can't say for certain, as I've not read a lot of modern fantasy, especially self published fantasy. Most likely my writing reflects the books I love, and many of those were written in the first half of the last century which maybe what makes my writing different enough to comment about

However, this is once again a lesson illustrated in the last post; you write your book, your readers make it their own, and that version may not seem like the one you wrote. But you have to let go of your story. You have to let it, not you, speak to your readers. And the story may be better for it.

But enough of SPFBO. Next week... Writing Season. Stay tuned.