Prehumous fame

Josh Lacey got in touch today. Good to hear from him and I hope to meet up with him when I get back from the Lakes.

Malcolm Hardy brought the manuscript of his book round yesterday evening. There is a great deal of trepidation on both sides during the exchange of a manuscript. It is a tough thing for a writer to give up the work. But it has to be done, of course. You can't be a writer without a reader. Unless you die and have all that posthumous fame. But do you want posthumous fame, or do you want, er, prehumous?

Before I read Malcolm's tome, however, I will have to read the revised manuscript of The Dead of Winter, which came in the post today. Helen Szirtes has cast her beady eye over it and I need to see what she has to say. It's always worth hearing.

The editing process on a book is a tricky thing, as I've said on more than one occasion. You can look at your own work too long, and simply lose the ability to read it naturally or with any enthusiasm. I find it best to have a break and come back to it afresh. So when it goes away to be scoured, I do not look at it at all. I try not to think about it even.

Luckily I have such a terrible memory, this is not a problem for me.

Big ants

I had a long chat to Tony Bradman today on the phone, ostensibly about a thing I hope to be doing for OUP - Tony being the lead author on that project. I've never met Tony but this is the second long telephone conversation we've had, in which we seem to have established a long list of similar enthusiasms and inspirations.

I mentioned to Tony that I had just read Cormac McCarthy's The Road and it was no surprise to discover that Tony had also read it and had a minor obsession with it. It is a haunting book. Images from it keep popping into my head and I suspect that they will for some time to come.

Tony hadn't come to the book as a Cormac McCarthy fan, like I was. He had tried to read All the Pretty Horses and had not got on with it. I suspect he will have another go. All the Pretty Horses is a brilliant book and I am still traumatised by Cities of the Plain, the third in that trilogy of novels.

The Road is a beautifully written thing that is almost an antidote to the nightmarish cultural eradication the book envisages. If someone can write like this then surely there is always hope that, whatever the evidence to the contrary, the human race can be better than it seems to want to be. Science may hold the answer to the problems facing the world, but has also been the cause of many of them. Culture is the thing.

Without culture there seems to be little point in human existence. In Alice Roberts' excellent recent BBC TV series The Incredible Human Journey, a case was made for art being the deciding factor in the human race's supremacy over the neanderthals (technology having previously been thought to be the key factor). Art gave a form to belief and bonded us. Of course you could argue that it was belief that bonded us and that art merely articulated that belief. But without articulation beliefs are in a constant state of flux. We defined ourselves with the creation of sculpture and wall paintings. And stories, surely.

Without culture, human beings are just big (and comparatively inefficient) ants.

Norman invasion

We had to get up hideously early this morning because my son was off to Normandy with the school. They are going by coach and ferry so they needed an early start. Alarms were set for 5 am and we turned up bleary-eyed to watch all 100+ kids get assigned to their groups and their teachers and their coaches. And then they were off. Bonne chance France.

We have not yet given in to the idea that all children over the age of eight have to have a mobile phone or they will spontaneously combust, so we will have no contact with our son for five days. I hope he enjoys that feeling of detachment. I know I did when I went away with my school. I think that is diminished if he could phone us every evening. We'll hear all about it when he gets back.

It was also our wedding anniversary today, so though we felt shattered, we decided to go for lunch in Lavenham to celebrate. And a very fine lunch it turned out to be.

Uncle Montague's nether regions

I have been asked to remind everyone that Uncle Montague's blog - Uncle Montague's Nether Regions is being updated. Apparently the old fellow was having some sort of problem getting his posts finished and there has been a huge backlog. He is gradually filling in some of the enormous gaps. To be fair, he does have other things on his mind, poor chap.

I noticed one amusing entry where he chides David Roberts for drawing Uncle Montague to look like Max Schreck in Nosferatu. The strange thing is, that though he and David have never met, as far as I'm concerned David has the old devil bang on.

Loser (continued)

So once again I lose. Six award nominations for Uncle Montague. Six! And not one win. Come on. That can't be right surely.

The shortlist for the Calderdale Book of the Year (primary section) consisted of me (for Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror), Matt Haig for Shadow Forrest, Tom Palmer for Foul Play, Brian Keaney for The Haunting of Nathaniel Wolf and Joshua Lacey for Bearkeeper. Matt Haig was the winner. Well done to him. No, really (mutter, mutter, mutter).

And thanks to all the librarians and staff at the library in Halifax for organising the event and looking after us so well. Well done to the children for sitting through such a long day with such a great attitude. Everyone was really excited but also incredibly attentive during the author sessions and there were lots of great questions.

I arrived in Halifax in a terrific rainstorm yesterday evening and checked in to find a note at reception from Josh asking if I wanted to join him for something to eat. I'd met Josh a few years ago at an author event in Heffers in Cambridge (during another rainstorm) when he was promoting A Dog Called Grk. I bought a copy and my son was henceforth a big fan of the Grk books. Josh is such a nice guy. And I'm not just saying because he might check this blog.

Our fellow shortlistee, Brian Keaney, was also at the hotel and having found his room number we went to collect him and went for a meal in the dining room. Publishers and agents should never allow authors to meet because when they do, there is invariably a long and sustained bitching session about all aspects of the writing business. All except the writing itself, of course. Writers love writing. Or they should.

I was alone among the three of us in thinking that it was in any way odd that adults (who weren't parents of children of the appropriate age, or teachers, or librarians or other children's authors) should read children's books in preference to adult novels. This did not strike me as especially controversial, but it was interesting to hear two intelligent adults state a contrary view. Brian wondered why I wrote for children - as if by saying that I preferred, as an adult, to read adult literature, that I was somehow denigrating children's literature. But I really wasn't.

There are some incredible books for children and I love writing for them. I love their enthusiasm and I know how important books can be in the life of a child. I would die a happy man indeed if I wrote just one book of the quality of say, Tom's Midnight Garden. I am against age-banding and I am happy for anyone of any age to read any of my books. But I do definitely write them for children. And though I do read a lot of children's books, I do so because I work in children's books, not because I buy into the notion that children's literature is the 'home of the story'. I do not share that distrust of the modern novel. And even if I did, there are just so many classic novels I have yet to read. Adult fiction is not 'better' than children's fiction. But it is different for a reason.

Speaking of which, the tediously long rail journey from Cambridge to Halifax (four hours, two changes) did at least provide me with a good chance to read a novel from cover to cover. Cormac McCarthy's The Road has been on my shelf for a while and I've taken a couple of nibbles at it in the last few months. But this is a book best swallowed in one, I think. It is so bleak, so merciless, that I'm not sure that I would have kept going. In a post-apocalyptic America, a father and son walk south under perpetual cloud through a dead landscape covered in ash, trying against all the odds to avoid starvation and the attentions of the 'bad guys'; trying to survive with their humanity intact .


That doesn't sound like much of a review, I grant you, but if you love Cormac McCarthy's writing - and I do - then it doesn't get much better than this. And I would also make the point that the interaction and dialogue between the father and son is perhaps the most convincing I've ever read. Without that at its heart the book would fall apart.

In children's literature we talk - obsess even - about plot much of the time, but there is also the strange alchemy that occurs when the way a book is written seems to shimmer and take on a life of its own. McCarthy does divide people - some will not get past the absence of speech marks or apostrophes - but his work excites me in a way that few other authors do. It is a tough book to read, but its worth it. McCarthy is right up there with any great writer you care to mention. And this book is up there with any classic novel you can think of - of any genre, of any period.

My one warning would be that if you are a father of a son then be ready to cry.

Midday crisis

Francis Mosley got in touch yesterday and showed me some recent paintings. I also had an email conversation with John Clark who also sent some pics of his recent work. It all makes me very eager to get some of my own painting done. Andrew and Lynette, my other studio mates, are away in Australia for the month and it means I have the place to myself (John mainly coming in before he goes to work at Sony).

Francis asked me if I was showing any signs of a mid-life crisis and I said no (with the caveat that I have been in a perpetual state of crisis since I was a teenager) but then promptly became incredibly depressed.

I have a bit of rule with myself that I try not to worry about things I can't effect, but I don't always maintain discipline on this and yesterday was one of those days.

There is something about receiving bad news, as I did yesterday, that makes trivial things even more annoying. Or at least that is the effect it has on me. I lose what little patience I had with the nonsense of life and then get angry with myself for letting it bother me. And depressed if I have made the mistake - as I often do - of mentioning that annoyance to someone else.

I remember reading somewhere a long time ago that people who think the world is inherently fair are more likely to be depressed than those who take a more jaded view. I certainly don't think the world is fair (and I do not suffer from depression as a rule) but I do make the mistake of thinking that everything can be resolved by talking. It can't. In fact talking often makes things worse. In fact many of the world's problems could be resolved if all those in positions of power simply shut up for a couple of years.

The great Jules Feiffer called one of his collection of strips cartoons The Explainers. That's what I am - I am an explainer. But explaining can often be just another kind of complaining.

But hey, I'm an artist and I'm a writer. It goes with the territory. We are screwed up so you don't have to be.

You're welcome.

Calderdale children's book (or rather books) of the year

I should have mentioned that we were at the annual concert of pupils organised by my son's piano teacher, Anne Marsh-Penton. As usual it was held in the chapel at Churchill College (with its beautiful John Piper windows) on a lovely summer evening, with cricket being played in the distance, long shadows and great globes of mistletoe in the trees outside. The quality of the playing from the young performers was very inspiring. I always come away with the urge to learn.

I'm off to Halifax tomorrow for the awards celebration for the Calderdale Children's Book of the Year. I have not been able to find anything about who else is on the shortlist, but it is a little confusing as the Calderdale Children's Book of the Year was awarded to Sally Nicholls in June. It seems I am in the primary age range category (though they both seem to be called the Calderdale Children's Book of the Year). Confusing, no?

Perhaps all will become clear on Wednesday at the event. I hope so. I'm staying overnight tomorrow, attending the event, and the coming back Wednesday. The journey is rather convoluted and involves three changes. It takes about four hours.