CLOG DANCING

We went to a talk and demonstration of clog dancing last night. It’s a woman-thing; men don’t do clog dancing. The most noted practitioners are Hexham folk band, the Unthanks and they have a little video that you can watch here.

Although the tradition dates back to the Lancashire mills these days clog dancing is more like Irish step-dancing in which you keep your body completely still and only your feet move. The clogs themselves have wooden soles and leather uppers, laced like conventional shoes. I had always believed that they were a cheap form of poor working-class shoes but the speaker yesterday said no, they were a practical form of footwear for a girl on her feet all day on the wet, damp floor of a cotton mill. She in fact came from fishwife stock and had brought with her an authentic creel, a basket for carrying fish. The quayside would also have been a wet environment and wooden clogs, an ideal type of shoe.

The steps are limited: heel-clicks and toe clicks; clicking the feet together in both glancing movements and hard stamping actions and then kicking out to produce a gliding, shushing sound on the return. The tunes too are quite simple although she alleged that one could clog dance to any kind of music.

What she did say was that once she put on a pair of clogs she just had to get up and dance. Like the clogs took over. Didn’t Chic make a disco record about that?

CULTURAL APPROPRIATION

In Everything I Never Told You which I reviewed recently, I mentioned briefly my thoughts about Kiri being part-Japanese. As a first-time author everything one does the first-time around seems clever and interesting; my creative writing tutor, John Seymour didn’t guide me away from that early decision to make her part-Japanese so I ran with it and arguably, am still running with it. In Riccarton, I wanted conflict. It is conflict that drives plot. A man walks across the road. There is no one else around, no traffic. Yawn. He gets to the other side. Yawn. He walks along the pavement. Jeez. It starts to rain. Yawn. Coming towards him down the middle of the road, he sees four tigers and he knows they have spotted him. Conflict.

For a couple of hours when I was writing my early draft, I considered making Kiri Judi, a half-Pakistani whose mother, her water-engineer father had met in Pakistan. I am pretty much the only person I know who has actually ever visited Pakistan but we had recently returned from a long holiday in Kyoto and I was full of it; couldn’t get it out of my mind so, so dazzled by Japan and its contradictions. And making Kiri Kiri simply fell in to place. Could have made her white middle-class but there was a gift there of conflict, so that was the way I went.

There is a review somewhere on Goodreads suggesting that I am guilty of Cultural Appropriation; that it’s a convenient prop. It’s possible. I am not Japanese. I am a white middle-class male. Unlike Celeste Ng, who is part-Chinese and therefore can never be accused of Cultural Appropriation.

When I think of cultural appropriation, I suppose I think of fashion or music videos where an exotic culture is misappropriated just for the sake of doing something different. I think the fashion industry does quite a lot of cultural appropriation, one way or another. I don’t mind. Rihanna has a music video out at the moment where she is some kind of Indian princess, and yes it is to quote, ‘untethered from meanings of religious and social significance’. Don’t care. And Beyoncé has done something similar, arguably a message to black women: if you want to be beautiful, light skin, light eyes and blonde hair is the way to go, no matter what clothes you are wearing. Don’t care. All little black girls love her; she is a role model for millions of women, white or black but not because she is light-skinned and beautiful.

I am sure many people will say I’m overstating the case and talk about how political correctness is ruining everything. After all, it’s just a book, right? I think there probably is a penchant for western artists to commodify exotic religions, culture and fashion but honestly, if there is anything going on in Riccarton Junction, it is cultural appreciation, not cultural appropriation.

RECENT READS

ROOM [By Emma Donoghue]. Went into this having read no reviews or seen the film and really not knowing a thing about it. My fave reviewer, Claire Diston had recommended it strongly.

As everyone except me now knows, it is about a woman locked in a room somewhere in North America with her five year old kid. The narrator’s voice is that of the five year old. Everything is seen through his eyes. His life is boring, stunted, deprived obviously and his narration is taken up with the endless repetition of mundane daily tasks: eating, reading and re-reading the same five books, television, games and exercises. All in a room eleven ft square. So it pretty quickly becomes a boring, repetitive book; there are only so many childhood thoughts to interest the reader.

He is precocious. His mum teaches him to read and write way beyond his age-level and of course this would be a likely outcome of an intense one-on-one relationship between an intelligent young woman and a bright kid where there are no other distractions. In fact knowing no other life the kid, Jack, is full of five-year old curiosity. A bit too much for me and the voice became irritating ‘Wonderland’ about a third of the way through particularly set my teeth on edge and the whole thing is too long.

But there are some brilliant set-pieces in it. Old Nick’s little speech on how lucky they are is a terrific piece of writing; parking Ma is very, very clever although the reasons for the parking don’t ring true at all; the escape is good, some reviewers have a problem with it but she [ED] could have done this in twenty different ways so what does it matter. Jack is oblivious to the heroic efforts that his mother makes to protect and entertain him but these are obvious to the reader; one still thinks the world that one lives in is normal and it will always represent home to you.

Also, I loved the way that no-one ever says, ‘I love you’. Most excellent.

I hadn’t realised that Emma Donoghue specialises in writing novels using real lives and real stories as source material. She researches, then writes her version. In interviews, she says that it wasn’t the confinement story that interested her it was the later adjustment to the outside world she wanted to engage with and in fact the novel is very clearly divided in two, the capture and imprisonment then the release and the adjustment.

Just a bit too long. I can see what she is doing, building, building, building showing not telling but it goes on for too long.  

EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU [By Celeste Ng]. The New York Times Best Seller. Amazon America’s No1 Best Book 2014. Another utterly humourless American writer.

This is one of those books that sucks you into its world and makes you reconsider your own. Kind of. A fairly quick read that's highly absorbing, I can understand why so many people think that it's brilliant, but I only found it good, not great. I can see how there is something for everyone here: the ambitious mum, the suffocating disappointed father for whom one’s best is never enough; the cold shoulder at every turn; the teasing at school. I guess it has struck a chord with a lot of Americans, although it’s all a bit OTT for me; seriously, would such intelligent parents [a Harvard lecturer; a doctor] behave as stupidly as these two? If I had had parents like Lydia’s, I would have bludgeoned them to death long before I reached my sixteenth birthday. Some excellent writing however, here for example while they still think Lydia might be alive:

. . . a slit gapes in the lining of the bag. A small tear; small enough to slip by the busy policemen, intended to escape an even sharper eye: a mother’s. Marilyn works her hand inside and pulls out an open package of Marlboros. And, beneath that, she finds something else: an open box of condoms. She drops both, as if she has found a snake . . . 

And here:

'. . . but I didn’t want her to be just like anyone else’. The rims of her eyes ignite. ‘I wanted her to be exceptional’.

It wasn’t really like that for me. I had plenty of childhood traumas but over-ambitious parents weren’t on the list.

I wanted to say similar things about Kiri in my first novel, Riccarton Junction although I made her half-Japanese, not half-Chinese. Except, from the outset I decided to make her teenage life a success, with kind and loving parents whereas Celeste Ng has gone the other way and made Lydia’s life one of torment and failure, with impossible, problem parents. I wanted Kiri to benefit from being half-Japanese, in her beauty but also her mystical mum whereas there seem to be no benefit at all to being half-Chinese in Everything I Never Told You. Perhaps it would have all been less bleak if she had set it contemporaneously with i-phones and Facebook, instead of the 1970’s.

ANCILLARY JUSTICE [By Ann Leckie]. Winner of the Hugo Award. Winner of the Nebula Award. Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award . . . the only novel according to the blurb to have won all of science fiction’s most prestigious awards.

It’s a space opera, but it’s not for me.

It is about Breq, a soldier, a spaceship, a zombie and his search for a weapon that will allow him to take out the Lord of the Radch in some far future when the galaxy is ruled by a tyrant who thinks nothing of killing whole planets and populations and then storing the dead bodies for future use as what? Storm Troopers, wreaking ever more destruction.

Its decades since I read any science fiction. Dune, probably which I remember devouring as a teenager but which I re-read about ten years ago but had to throw in the towel because . . .  because I couldn’t be bothered with it. Couldn’t be bothered remembering who was who and whether this minor character was worth the effort or was she a major character and I needed to remember that she was the sister of the uncle of the general that was killed five hundred years earlier on planet Zog . . . And this is the same. Every character’s name starts with the letter S: Seivarden; Skaaiat; Shinnan; Strigan. I just don’t have the temperament any more.

When I was younger, I was a genius. I had an amazing IQ: 156 or something, applied to join Mensa: what is the next number in sequence? 0 3 4 5 6 10 12 15? And all that stuff so I loved Dune and its cast of a thousand characters, the sandworms and evil interplanetary villains but I’m an adult now. I thought I would give Ancillary Justice a try but in the end . . . and I didn’t skim it . . . I read every word, it defeated me.

And it is utterly humourless. Three humourless American books in a row. Enough.

ZAHA

 

So sorry to hear of the sudden death of Zaha Hadid one of the greatest architects of her generation.

HAPPY VALLEY

I liked the first series of Happy Valley; bit melodramatic, women talking, talking but some terrific characters behaving realistically. Wasn’t too sure the concept could stand a second series but I decided to give it a go.

It is finished now and I must admit I thought it was pretty great. Blew most recent Hollywood Oscar winners out of the water; real issues sensitively handled as opposed to some back-of-an-envelope what’s the word, treatment conjured up while lying on a California beach. The writer/director who is called Sally Wainwright wrote for Corrie back in the day and you can see her theatrical background and training: people meet one another coming down the stairs or in the canteen and unlike me, she is not bothered at all by plot-holes. If two people have to meet, they meet; if there is a relevant item on the TV News it comes on just as they happen to be watching the television; if two weeks ago someone buys a set of Scalextric, it has been captured on CCTV; violent rapists meet their just deserts, no trials, no evidence-based enquiry, just blown away. And this curve ball: ‘He also said he didn’t do that Vicky Fleming one ... and he told his mother, he wouldn’t have had to have done that last one if people hadn’t kept thinking he’d done that Vicky Fleming one’. Yeah? Really? Daryl said that, and Alison reported it while semi-comatose?

And yet: it shows, shows, shows. Never tells. Its intricate plots and subplots work because they are always  tempered by the unity of Wainwright’s vision, by the way she somehow tethers everything, no matter how wild or extreme, to boring, humdrum reality. As Rachel Cooke notes in her piece in The Times, she shows an almost 19th-century sense of the endless connections that exist between people who grew up together in a small town. An early scene, brilliantly and powerfully realised and barely two-minutes long was the moment when Catherine’s sister, Clare, bumped into Neil Ackroyd , a boy she’d known at school. She was pleased to see him, and he was, apparently, pleased to see her, but even as she glowed, having asked him round for tea, you felt uneasy. The invitation was too easily given, and too easily accepted, and she talked of him too enthusiastically afterwards, as if she was a teenager again.

At the very end . . . that tethering. Catherine wondering if there is bad-blood in her grandson, ‘ . . . a Pit-bull; a Rottweiler . . .’ and would she blow his brains out in some future scenario.

And not a word spoken.

Who else is writing stuff like this? Chasing authenticity? Certainly no-one reclining on a beach in California.