The GBR Interview: Emma Donoghue - shapeshifter

A new concept presented itself to me via a tweet the other day (in between Chris Addison and Robin Ince's constant twittering). Musicians have a “jam”. Artists continually “doodle.” But what do writers do? “Word vomit” was presented as a solution, but I’m not sure I like it.

Whatever the term is, all writers must do it. Get ideas and start bashing out some words around it, with no real intention for it to go anywhere or to take any real form – just playing.

Which is why Emma Donoghue’s ideas struck a rather large chord for me when we chatted. “I don't sit down with a format in mind. I try to respond to my material. I listen to an idea and to what it asks me to be. When I began it, I thought Slammerkin [Donoghue’s 2000 breakthrough novel] was a short story. It turned out it wanted to be a novel”

This whole idea struck me right in the forehead. Too many times, people go stright to "novel." They shouldn't. Just start with an idea and follow it wherever it takes you. It might just be a word vomit. Or it mind end up being a radio play.

Here’s a writer who has is bang in the middle of a long and successful career. She’s shapeshifted through turns at being someone who writes straight fiction, historical fiction, short stories, stage plays, radio plays – you name it, Emma Donoghue has had a crack. “If I ever come up with an idea that seems like it’ll work best as an opera, I guess I’ll have to learn how to write an opera.” This was a joke, but I absolutely believe she’d do it.

I believe it because it’s entirely apparent Emma Donoghue loves what she does. “It’s such a pleasure to write. I try to stay open minded, but novels are still my default position. You get to call all the shots. I’m like a child playing when I’m on a novel.” Having recently finished reading Donoghue’s latest volume of historical fiction short stories, Astray (GBR review to come soon...), I can testify that she’s pretty good at spinning mini tales as well.

That’s not to say it’s all easy for her. Astray is a set of stories with such ranging voices, such different feels, that it’s slightly exhausting to navigate. Each story strikes a true tone, so much so that Donoghue has been labelled one of fictions greatest ventriloquists. “That’s not something that comes easily,” she told me. “I do a lot of research into each character, every word needs to be true. I have to work at it, otherwise they they’d all end up as chatty and Irish.” Donoghue is chatty and Irish. That’s why that comment made sense.

Donoghue changes styles, perspectives, eras and method throughout the collection, perhaps an echo of her varied career to date. Successful as that career has been though, she only really arrived at the household-name level in 2010 with the Man Booker nominated Room.

I wondered if Room’s success has started to irk her, like the band with a twenty album back catalogue who are continually forced to sing the breakthrough hit they had twenty years ago. “I’ve thought of that analogy myself,” said Emma, (who I felt I could call by her first name, now that we’d bonded over a commonly conceived analogy). “I’m not sick of it though. It opened up a new audience for me, and I’m still doing readings of it now. In thirty years time, I may be a bit sick of it, but not yet. I knew from the start it was the strongest idea I’d ever had, so I had a feeling it would do well. People really care about Jack [the boy at the centre of Room]. I get letters from people saying they’re just like him, that they can identify with him. It’s been very rewarding.”

I segued our chat awkwardly away from Room and towards something I’ve been preoccupied with ever since Will Self told me he couldn’t care less about the reader experience. I can’t seem to interview an author without asking their opinion of Self’s doctrine. So I succumbed again. “I try not to allow the reader to have any censoring effect. I try to hear them at a technical level. I think of the reader as me, but me who hasn’t read the book yet.” That’s a neat idea. Me who hasn’t read the book yet. I like it. And it seems to work for Donoghue.

My half hour was up. I hastily asked my so what are you reading now final question. “Bring up the Bodies,” came the reply. “Then I’ve got a book by Zadie Smith lined up. And I’ve recently finished another Lee Child.”

I put the phone down with a strong sense of a writer who loves what she does. A writer who continues to find new ways to interest herself in her material. And a writer who isn’t afraid to follow that material into new mediums. A writer, in short, who should be admired for her approach every bit as much as for her talent.

Umbrella - wonderful confusion

Umbrella by Will Self (Bloomsbury: 2012) A novel spanning the century, following an outbreak of encephalitis lethargica in 1918, and the lifelong impact it has to a group of patients in which it has been misdiagnosed. Self uses the disease and its aftermath to explore the destructive capacity of technology and machinery on the human condition.

I have almost zero idea where to start. I really don’t. This is Booker Prize shortlist stuff. I'm getting book review stage fright, and I don't know where to begin. But it seems I have, so I’ll try to go on.

I’ve never read anything like Umbrella before. Which I mean in an entirely positive way. That must be the foremost and loudest piece of praise for this book - it’s original.

Underneath that, it’s a bunch of other things as well, positive and negative. In the pro column we should scribble words like ambitious, beautiful, energetic, intelligent, brave. Our con column should include words like confusing, disjointed, hard-work.

No doubt Self would have a few things to say about these judgements. He probably would balk at Umbrella being labelled brave or hard-work. But it is. It takes an idea he believes in strongly, and sets it out in a form that he is no less committed to. By staying true to both idea and form, he runs the risk of the whole project being drowned in confusing modernist prose. To the normal writer, it’s a huge risk. Letting your great idea into the world in such a fragile form. It’s likely to wither.

But not Self. If I learned anything from hearing him speak in Edinburgh, it’s that he’d simply shrug his shoulders at such risks. He wouldn’t even see it as a choice. The reader experience is not his problem. As far as he’s concerned, this is the true way to represent human experience, so why on earth would he do it any other way.

The result is a book that’s both vital and difficult to untangle. It jumps from character to character, time to time, setting to setting - all without warning or sign posts. He doesn’t even start a new paragraph when he shifts his voice, will go from 1918 to 1971 in the same sentence, leaving it up to the reader to figure out what’s going on.

Not "Umbrella" - it's "For Gavin"

To begin with (and for most of the book in fact) it's utterly confusing. You never master it (at least I didn’t), but I did gradually become comfortable with the it. Persevere, and it has a strange effect. It begins to achieve a feeling of the “continuous presence” that Self harps on about. You slowly begin to see all parts of the story at all times - not as a list of events, but as a whole tangled up confused ball of experience. A bit like the Tralfamadorians, for those Vonnegut fans amongst you (of which I’m sure there are tons).

So that’s the style. But what about the content? I’m totally certain that I missed a lot of the content. I’m sure there are major parts of the story that flew right past me as I was sweating with furrowed brow trying to un-pick the style. But some bits came through. I got the gist of what was happening, and there were some vignettes of experience that shone out.

It may be because I was just so pleased to be understanding a bit of the plot. Will Self has that effect on you. He makes you rejoice in any brief seconds when you feel you're starting to understand him. He makes you feel you're spending a moment or two on equal terms with an elite brain. But whatever the reason, when a section struck home, it did so brightly and beautifully and terribly.

And the ideas that Self explores are worth the struggle too. They become clearer as you get towards the end. Self allows himself to explain them more overtly, and when you put the book down, your mind is racing with thoughts of machines and people and life and death and family and meaning.

I feel I’ve just explained all the pro column. I haven’t really gone into the cons. I don’t want you to think this is a rewarding book which just needs a little effort. That’s not true. It needs a lot of effort. It needs the same commitment that Self has to the style. Yes, the rewards are there. But are they worth it? Do you have the time to earn them? When push comes to shove, would you rather just curl up with a bit of Grisham instead?

Gah! I’m torn. I think you should go read this. I think it’s important and it’ll introduce you to new ideas and styles. But I also think that all of that comes at a price, one that most of you probably don’t have the time or energy to pay.

How do I put all of that into a score between one and ten?

6 GBR

That’s how. Sit right on the fence. Just north of the fence really. But that feels about right.

Next week, something less dense. I promise.

Will Self at the Edinburgh Book Festival - a secretly nice guy

Will Self - nice guy

No book review this morning I'm afraid ("awwww"). Instead, my evening with Will Self...

It seems the Edinburgh Book Festival is the place to come out.

Wilbur Smith came out as a modern man.

And then, to a crowd full of people on a Sat evening, Will Self came out as a nice man.

I love that. When you go somewhere expecting one thing and something completely other is delivered. I (like you guys, I’m sure) had a certain image of Will Self, pieced together from his various TV appearances and a handful of attempts to wade through his fiction. The man asking Self the questions at the Edinburgh Book Festival (the impressive Stuart Kelly) put it best when he said many feel Self writes fiction “purely as part of the ongoing art experiment of being Will Self.”

In short, I thought he was pompous.

I was (again, and pleasingly) wrong. Self gave a warm performance, discussing his new book, the Man Booker Prize long listed Umbrella.

He was friendly – he signed books long after the event, thanking each audience member for coming and hoping they enjoy the book.

He was thankful – he spoke on how privileged he was to be doing a job he loved, and how he was very aware how many people aren’t as lucky.

He was modest – he freely admitted he was a London peasant, living a mile and half from where he was born and having “never really gone anywhere much.”

Will self - reading complete with
hand actions

He was passionate about his work – as he read portions of Umbrella to the audience, he did so complete with stage accents, hand gestures, a singing voice. He left his vanity by the door, and he dived into his work in a way I didn’t think he would.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t an entirely different man from the one you think you know. He was fiercely uncompromising, admitting he has no idea what readers of his book will think and that he doesn’t spare a single thought about reader experience when he’s writing.

He also dismissed mainstream fiction (which, by Self’s definition, is pretty much everything) as relying far too heavily on conventional structures that don’t properly reflect the “continuous present” of real experience. He aims to more truly represent the messy nature of existence by showing how people and times and consciousnesses bleed into each other in real life (which, when he explains it, makes way more sense than when I explain it). And he admitted more than once that he is an “ideas driven novelist”, more concerned with exploring ideas than plot.

None of this is a bad thing, of course. It simply shows Self to be a man who believes strongly in what he does, and can’t bring himself to do anything different. Ask me last week, and I’d have said that was intolerant, selfish even (no pun intended). But hearing Self explain his thinking made an admiration grow in me. He can’t bring himself to do anything other than what he does because he doesn’t believe anything else is worthwhile. He’s looked at everything else, realised none of it is enough for him, that most of it simply presents false realities, and so he’s rejected them. He has belief, and he sticks rigidly to it.

The event then opened to questions from the floor. Cue an opening question that was insanely intelligent and observant. Cue a second question that brought in comparisons to Blake and questions of modernity. Then cue an embarrassed silence as no-one wanted to follow that. I wanted to ask about the Booker prize, if it was something Self cares about, why he thinks Umbrella is his first to be long listed, but after those first two questions, it all sounded a bit vacuous. So Self got up and read again instead.

I spoke with him as he signed my copy of Umbrella afterwards. He said he felt the talk was all a bit flat, clearly more sensitive to his audience reaction than he’d perhaps admit. I explained why I thought the audience had been cowed into silence by the first two questioners. It seemed to make him happier.

Then again, he may have simply been being nice.

(A review of Umbrella will be coming to GBR soon...)