Storm in the Heart

The wind is high, and cold rain is being driven against the glass. The streets are awash with water. It is angry weather, pained weather. Sorrowful weather. It is also powerful weather, renewing the earth.

Today, I will be accompanying someone I love very much as she says her final farewell to someone she loves very much. In that sense, today’s blustery storm is entirely appropriate weather.

Love, once shared, can never die. Nothing severs it; nothing ends it. It is not tied to the physical presence of a loved one, but it is a presence of its own, a presence which envelops and protects, and a presence which endures. Remembering someone after they have died is a remembrance of love, both the love they offered you in life and the love you had, and have, for them; in that moment of shared love, they are with you.

In that love, they will never leave you.

And love does not come to an end.

Image: comesitbythehearth.blogspot.com

 

 

Many Ways

Yestereve, as my husband and I sat reading Proust and Kafka side by side on our antique leather sofa, one of us happened to switch on the demonic gogglebox in the corner of the room, purely by accident of course. The programme which appeared on it was entitled something like ‘X-Idol All-Singing All-Dancing Contest Factor’ and it featured several people who were very (very!) young performing popular musical hits in front of a panel of judges.

I’m sure you know the type of show to which I am referring. Don’t pretend you don’t, because – frankly – nobody believes you.

My better half and I looked a little like these two fine gentlemen as we watched…
Image: muppets.wikia.com

I wasn’t paying full attention to the screen, because I was lost in a book (in fact, this is true, but I don’t expect you to believe it); however, after a while I put down what I was reading and started to focus on the TV. It wasn’t because I was so intrigued by the cutting-edge, brand-new, thrilling format of the show (zzzz….), but because I couldn’t believe the way these young, talented people were talking about themselves.

‘This is my last chance,’ some of them sobbed. ‘I’ll never be able to do this if I don’t get through today.’ ‘My whole life depends on this.’ ‘I don’t know how I’ll go home and face my family if I don’t succeed here today.’ ‘I want my family to be proud of me.’

Image: onesinglevoice.com

I felt so sorry and sad to hear them talk like this, and I couldn’t understand why they were putting such pressure on themselves. I was horrified most of all by the fact that they were all so young.

I remember being sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. I remember how I was desperate for life to start, and how I felt like every second spent not doing what I wanted was a second wasted. I remember having dreams and ambitions and drive, and I remember more than anything wanting to make something of my life, to get away from everything I’d known up to that point and move to another place, begin a new existence, and meet new people. I can completely understand the urge, at that age, to get started, to stop wasting time, to break into the thick of life and immerse yourself in it. It’s an exciting time, for sure. But what you lack at that age is any way of knowing how much time you have, just waiting for you to turn it into something amazing.

I just wish someone would take those young people to one side and remind them that there are a million different ways to reach your goal, and not winning a TV show is not the death of your dream. I also wish they’d try to explain to them that, when you’re sixteen, you can literally do anything you want. Your life is barely begun, you have so much time, and you can shape your future whatever way you choose. I also wish that the young people concerned would listen, and understand – I know, when I was that age, the advice of anyone out of their teens was considered less than worthless. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth hearing, though.

All the contestants on this particular show wanted to be professional recording artists, and all of them were hoping that their individual skills would be good enough to see them advance through the competition to the ultimate prize of a record deal. I’m sure some of them also wanted to take advantage of the expert mentoring offered to them by the established artists who take part in the show, year after year, and – perhaps – some of them just wanted to be on TV. These contestants are not people who have been working for twenty or thirty years in the business, who have struggled to fill venues, who have played in bars to audiences of four or five, who have had to put up with catcalls and abuse, who have lost bookings, put every penny they have into their career, and live their lives on the road. They are not people who have been worn down by the industry, who have had every last drop of their youthful idealism ground into the dirt by the relentless effort of trying to make it, and who have given their music career every ounce of their devotion and effort. Those are the kind of people who might be able to say ‘This is my last chance’ or ‘If I don’t make it on this show, I know the dream is over,’ and from whose lips it might sound legitimate.

For a person of sixteen whose only prior experience is singing in their bedroom into their hairbrush, the concept of ‘last chance’ shouldn’t even come into play.

But then, these young contestants can hardly be blamed for thinking the way they do – all their lives, these shows have been the biggest thing on TV. It’s not surprising that they think entering one and winning it is the ‘only’ path to success. But if someone has every shred of their self-worth and self-belief wrapped up in winning a TV show – which, I’m sure they don’t realise, is primarily a vehicle to make money for its producers, not to make them into stars – and if they’re knocked out of the running, it’s clearly going to have a terrible effect on their mind and their mental health. I find that thought chilling, and very sad.

I know some contestants enter these shows year after year after year, and each time they ‘fail’ their confidence takes another knock. Eventually, they won’t have any self-belief left, because they’re trying to succeed in an environment which is not geared towards helping them to achieve what they want. Not winning a competition like this is not ‘failure.’ Instead of pouring their hearts into entering the same competition again and again, I wish some of these young people would just make music, if that’s what they want to do. Record yourself performing and upload it to YouTube. Set up an artist’s Facebook page, Twitter account, Tumblr blog, whatever it takes – and build an audience. Get gigs. Get paying gigs. Buy more equipment. Put a band together. Go on the road. Find a friend who’s good at computing, and ask them to make you a website. Find a friend who’s arty, and get them to design your merch. All of this can be done – and it’s amazing how much people want to help when they see you chasing your dream, and working for it. When I was a teenager, all of this could be achieved, too – but it was much, much harder. Nowadays, the internet makes all things possible.

Not winning a TV show which is designed to make money for everyone but the artists who pour their hearts into it is not, decidedly not, the only way to make it in the music business. Every single contestant on those shows has it within themselves to make a success of their career, if they’re willing to put in the effort and use a little imagination. It’s never ‘too late’. It’s never their ‘last chance.’ Their families are already proud of them.

All that pressure, all that stress, and all that incredible emotional pain they’re inflicting upon themselves is damaging, horrible to watch and utterly unnecessary. We’re in the middle of Mental Health Week, and so there’s no better time to remind people that there are lots of ways to get there, and they have plenty of time to make the journey.

Also, I’m never watching another TV talent show. I’ll happily stick to Proust and Kafka from now on, thank you very much.

Image: 123rf.com

Book Review Saturday

Today’s book review takes as its subject a book I’ve mentioned before on the blog, and one I’d been looking forward to for ages before I managed to pick it up last weekend. It’s the latest work from one of my all-time favourite authors, a writer whose books for me are always an automatic buy; I knew I’d love it before I’d even introduced my eyes to the opening lines.

So, really, this review is more of a love letter to the author.

And that author is Neil Gaiman.

Image: thesundaytimes.co.uk

‘The Ocean at the End of the Lane’ tells us the story of a lost and bewildered man, returning to the landscape of his childhood. As he begins to immerse himself in the lost people and places of his past, he tells himself – and, of course, the reader – a story about a pivotal summer in his life, the summer he was seven years old, and what happened to him. As he narrates, bits and pieces of his memory float back up to his consciousness; it’s like he has suppressed his memories underneath a layer of ‘growing up and moving away and making a life for yourself,’ but that summer remains at his core, a slumbering seed waiting for the right time to bloom.

The narrator is not (as far as I remember) given a name – the book is, of course, written in the first person, so this isn’t a problem for the reader. As an adult, he seems quite jaded, a little disillusioned with life, a man who has put a failed marriage behind him and whose three adult children have grown and gone and left him to deal with the trauma of a family funeral alone. Attending this funeral is the reason he has returned to his childhood home, and he drives – at first randomly, and then with purpose – through the small village in which he grew up, and eventually out onto the narrow country roads that lead to his house, the house his parents built, and in which another family are now living. He drives further down the lane – deeper into his memory and himself – and winds up sitting beside the duckpond at the heart of Hempstock Farm, the pond which Lettie Hempstock, a girl he hasn’t thought about for forty years, once told him was the ocean.

The narrator’s seven-year-old self tells us about the summer his parents took in a lodger, a South African opal miner who eventually steals their family car and, having lost all his money through gambling, decides to take his own life in it. This tragic event – and it is tragic, and sad, and described by the seven-year-old narrator with all the wide-eyed clarity of a child – would be bad enough by itself, but it is only the beginning of a horrifying sequence of events which will drag in not only the child, but everyone who lives on the lane. The miner’s decision to commit suicide has unleashed a horrifying magical force, a dark and sinister spirit which uses his death as a portal into the human world, and who takes up residence in the fields around the narrator’s house. This spirit, in its twisted way, wants to ‘give people what they want’ – the opal miner died because he had no money, and so, one day, the narrator wakes up choking, his throat on fire with pain. With great effort, he manages to pull out whatever has made its way into his neck. It turns out to be a large silver coin – a silver shilling.

This macabre and twisted way of trying to ‘help’ while hurting is the signature of this malevolent spirit. Luckily for the narrator and his family, though, the family who live at the end of the lane – the Hempstock women of Hempstock farm – are far more than what they seem. Their duckpond is an ocean, the oldest of them remembers the Big Bang, they have powers beyond description and wisdom beyond measure and courage beyond understanding. Lettie, the youngest (though that’s a meaningless term, in relation to these characters), is eleven to the narrator’s seven, and she takes him with her as she goes forth to confront the spirit. Unfortunately, they underestimate it, and their attempts to vanquish it only allow it to create a doorway into the human world, which it can use at will – and the doorway is located through the body of our narrator, our seven-year-old innocent, whose life and family instantly begins to crumble. The Hempstock women must regroup and rethink their tactics in order to fight it, and fight it they do.

This book is an expertly handled mingling of fantastical elements and minutely observed realism. For me, even as a person who adores fantasy and mythology and folklore, and particularly when they’re in the hands of Neil Gaiman, and despite the fact that magic and folklore is at the heart of this story, I felt the book was strongest when rooted in the real. The descriptions of the narrator’s family, and the ways in which this spirit attempts to worm* its way into the fabric of their home life, are so effective because we’ve already seen the love between the members of the family, which makes the coldness and hatred that starts to grow once they’ve been infected by the spirit even starker and more upsetting. The most powerful scene in the book by a country mile is the one in which the narrator’s father, overtaken by the spirit’s power, very nearly takes his son’s life – it chilled me to the marrow. It’s an unforgettable piece of writing.

Writing fantasy is no challenge to Neil Gaiman. The spirit, its manifestations, the horrifying ‘hunger birds’ who must be summoned in order to make an attempt to destroy it, the powers at the heart of the Hempstock family and the thrilling mystery that binds them together, as well as the sacrifices each member of the Hempstock family makes in order to ensure the survival of everyone else on the lane, are all marvellous. But, I can’t help thinking that Neil Gaiman can create this type of thing effortlessly – this sort of writing, this sort of thinking, is not difficult for him. It’s the touches of realism – the marital difficulties between the narrator’s parents, the relationship between him and his sister, the loneliness he feels when nobody turns up to his seventh birthday party – which elevate this book into a higher form of art.

I devoured ‘The Ocean at the End of the Lane.’ I loved every word. If you enjoy excellent writing, wonderful storytelling, superb narrative framing, and a touch of scary magic topped with love, sacrifice and devotion, then this is the book for you.

Happy weekend, everyone. Read well, read often, read wisely…

*If you’ve read the book, please forgive the pun!

Book Review Saturday – ‘Maggot Moon’

The first thing I’m going to say about ‘Maggot Moon’ is this: Do not read it in a public place.

Perhaps I should clarify that.

Public Announcement: Do not read Sally Gardner’s award-winning novel ‘Maggot Moon’ in a public place if you’re anything like me, and you get deeply emotionally affected by the books you read, and you’re prone to showing those emotions, viz. through displays of tearfulness, wailing and/or clutching your napkin to your face and sobbing into it.

I read ‘Maggot Moon’ in a café, and I’m probably barred from it for life as a result of my reaction to this book. I wept, my friends. I wept, in public. Am I sorry? Heck, no.

Image: thebookstheartandme.wordpress.com

‘Maggot Moon’ is a gutsy, unashamed, powerful novel. Its dedication reads: ‘For you the dreamers, overlooked at school, never won prizes. You who will own tomorrow,‘ and that spirit of defiance and combativeness runs through the core of the story. This is a book about those who struggle, and those who make a stand against tyranny and evil, no matter what the personal cost. This is a book about bravery, family, friendship and love – and, most importantly, how not even the most brutal regime can crush these most precious and fragile things.

The book is narrated in the voice of Standish Treadwell, a fifteen-year-old boy with the reading and writing age of a child ten years younger. He is upfront about the fact that he cannot read or spell, that he sees the written world differently from everyone else, but this is far from being a ‘handicap’, or a drawback, for him. In fact, it is one of his greatest strengths. Standish has immersed himself in language, in the spoken word, and has a natural talent for understanding coded, indirect and hidden speech, even when the words he hears are spoken in another language. In his own words:

I may not be able to spell, but I have a huge vocabulary. I collect words – they are sweets in the mouth of sound. (Maggot Moon, p. 24)

His ability to understand spoken language propels him on his journey, and even saves his life. I loved Standish – the way he thinks, the way he speaks, the depth with which he loves, the courage behind the decisions he makes, and the loyal devotion to his family and friends, all make him a memorable and deeply affecting character.

Some of the phrases in this book are pure Standish – he says things like ‘hare’s breath’ when most people would say ‘hair’s breadth’, or ‘glad drags’ when the more usual way of saying it would be ‘glad rags’; reading his unique take on language made the hairs stand up all over my body. His voice opened up language for me, creating worlds within words and making me see things in a completely different way. It’s a thrilling experience, going along with Standish on his adventure – his unique language and phraseology re-makes the world for the reader, making everything seem slightly off-kilter – and, of course, this is not just for effect. Standish navigates his own world in this same slightly off-kilter way; he is different in a world where being different is a death sentence. We feel his alienation and his sense of being oppressed through the way he uses language as much as through the way he describes his life at school, his treatment at the hands of bullies and cruel teachers, and the gradual picture he builds up for us of the country he lives in, and the regime he exists under.

Many images of oppression in this book are chillingly familiar. The story is set in 1956, but it’s not the 1956 we’re familiar with. It’s an alternative vision, a world we could have lived in. A totalitarian regime is in place, with those loyal to ‘the Motherland’ in charge; salutes and jackboots are the order of the day. Physical violence is common – not only does Standish receive beatings, but there is a terrifying – and stomach-churning – scene near the middle of the book when a teacher takes out his frustration on a student, to horrifying effect. This is not a world which rewards the weak. The Motherland is about to launch a rocket into space, designed to colonise the moon and place a weapon on its surface, from whence to launch an attack upon her enemies; the Obstructors, or underground resistance movement, are doing their best to subvert it. People who show any form of non-compliance (including Standish’s parents) are regularly ‘removed’, and anyone who does not help to spread the Motherland’s propaganda is considered a dissenter. Life struggles on in the midst of all this horror – children go to school to be taught noxious lies and to be brutalised by their instructors; adults try to scrape together a living, nobody trusting anyone else, and the Motherland pushes forward with its military regime at the cost of its citizens’ lives. The world of ‘Maggot Moon’ is not our world, but it is all too easy to imagine.

Standish lives with his grandfather, and befriends Hector Lush, a young boy who, along with his parents, moves in to the house next door. The relationship between the two boys, including their plan to build their own spaceship and discover their own planet where they can live in peace, and their attempts to find a normal space in which to live, and simply be, without fear or pain, is one of the sparks behind the story; the Motherland does not permit the sort of loyalty and affection that Standish has for Hector and the other members of his small family, and so the stage is set for a showdown. As the story progresses we learn that not only are Mr and Mrs Lush not what they seem, but neither is Gramps, Standish’s brave and resourceful grandfather, and when the boys end up embroiled in a conspiracy that goes to the heart of what the Motherland is all about, they receive help from the most unexpected places.

It’s difficult to do a review of this book without giving too much away. Suffice to say that a point is reached at which Standish has had enough of the lies he is being fed, and he makes a decision which will impact not only his own life, but the lives of everyone. He is willing to sacrifice all that he is for the sake of love and family and truth, and when you read this book you’ll know which scene tipped me over the edge into full-on blub mode. I defy anyone to read it and not weep, for the sheer beauty that is Standish Treadwell is not often found in literature, and even less in life.

This is a book to read and treasure, to recommend and pass on, to remember. It is a book to celebrate. Read it, and read it, and read it again.

Happy Saturday! What are you going to read today?