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I can’t resist this. If you’ve read more than one of these blogs, you’ll know that I often mention Flaubert. Well, I recently read Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace by Kate Summerscale. It’s a fascinating read about adulterous goings-on (or maybe not) in Victorian England. I was reading it on my Kindle and seemed to be getting to the end but was a bit puzzled to see that the percentage showed that I was barely half way through it. (I wish they had a way of doing pages instead.) Anyway, the reason for this was that the second half of the book is a reproduction of the famous translation of Madame Bovary by Eleanor Aveling-Marx, the youngest daughter of Karl. The reason for including it was that Emma Bovary was also an adulterous Victorian wife. But then, so was Eleanor.

Anyway, I read a few passages of the text and the translation’s not great. This is no surprise because it’s very, very difficult to convey the complexity of Flaubert’s style. In fact, Eleanor herself wrote: ‘Certainly no critic can be more painfully aware than I am of the weaknesses, the failures, the shortcomings of my work’. But a passage very near the beginning reminded me of just how much more you get out of the text than the story. There’s all sorts of stuff going on.

When the book starts, for example, the narrator is a classmate of Charles Bovary. ‘We were in class, studying,’ writes Flaubert, ‘when the headmaster came in, followed by a “new fellow”’. That’s the opening sentence, the ‘new fellow’ is Bovary, so right away, there’s a challenge for the reader. The narrator’s also a character in the story. He then goes into minute detail of what Charles looked like, what he did, how his father and mother met, what their marriage was like, and yet, after a few pages of this, he writes ‘It would be impossible now for any of us to remember anything about him’.

What? After all that detail? And with a few hundred pages more to come about the intimacies of Emma’s life, with all her adventures, thoughts, dreams and shattered illusions? And all this from one of the boys in Charles’s class?

Clearly, Flaubert was a rubbish writer. He obviously hadn’t been to any creative writing classes and learned about narrative arcs, head-hopping and all those other essentials you need to understand in order to write. And yet he’d taken five years to write the book, walking up and down his ‘shoutery’ in the garden reading the words out loud to get the rhythms exactly right, and spending days agonising over punctuation and searching for ‘le mot juste’. He’s the guy who, later in the book, writes ‘human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars’ which, when you read it aloud in the original French, is itself like a piece of music.

No, he obviously knew what he was doing, so why did he make such obvious ‘mistakes’? He’s supposed to be a stylist par excellence so where does that linguistic clumsiness come from? Well, the passage near the beginning I mentioned helps to show what was going on. But this blog’s already long enough, so I’ll put that in another one..

I’ve been tagged in The Next Big Thing by fellow writer Heikki Hietala, author of the excellent, many-layered Tulagi Hotel and so I have to tell you all about my next book by answering these questions and then tagging five other authors about their Next Big Thing. So …

What is the working title of your next book?
Hmmm, first problem. The book could be one of three and I never have even a working title until I finish. It’s always the narrative that suggests the titles to me.

Where did the idea come from for the book?
OK, I said there were three; two are sequels (to The Figurehead and The Sparrow Conundrum) and the third is the final one in my Jack Carston series.

What genre does your book fall under?
History, Humour and Crime, in that order.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
This could get complicated so let’s stick with Carston. He’s middle-aged, attractive but getting a bit grumpy, so Alan Rickman, and for his wife, self-assured, GSOH, the brilliant Olivia Colman.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
His compassion for people and his awareness of the limits of his role as a cop lead to drastic actions and his leaving the police service.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Self-published. The industry is changing ever faster.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
I haven’t started it yet, but the average is about 4-6 months for the first draft, then the same for the subsequent editing.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Crime is so disparate that there are plenty in the range of sympathetic, atypical detectives. I don’t think my books follow a traditional pattern and in this case, Carston will certainly overstep the bounds of his remit, so I have to pass.

Who or What inspired you to write this book?
I don’t like the word ‘inspire’ much but I’ll play along. It was the character himself and the natural progression he’s followed through the five previous books. (By the way, the same is true of the two sequels I mentioned. It’s always the characters who dictate what needs to happen, who insist on being given more room.)

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
A liking for Carston the character from reading one or more of the other books in the series. The fact that this is where the journey through them has led him. Or maybe the thought that the darker bits will always be counterbalanced by humour.

And now, just to show how cutting edge I’m not, I have no other writers to recommend to you yet because most of my friends seem to have been tagged already, some of them ages ago..

A lot’s been written recently about reviewing – from the ‘Sock Puppet’ controversy to the many anonymous trolls which/who seem to lurk everywhere. I thought I’d add to it by a sort of double review: the first a reviewer’s assessment of my own work, the second my review of that review. It came in the form of a 4 page card from one Isla Kirton. She’s at primary school and she’s the granddaughter to whom I referred in a blog way back in June.

Her first page is non-committal but already introduces a disturbing element. It seems to depict the reviewer, the reviewer’s brother and a long, thin, bespectacled person with a book, which is obviously me. The sun is shining, giving the opening a positive spin, but the reviewer’s dress – the only real splash of colour – is an arrowhead in disquieting red, the colour of anger, heat, blood; the colour referenced by Marlowe’s Faustus when he cries ‘See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament’. Already then, under the surface of the review, there’s an unsettling implication that all is not as it seems. (The thinness of the bespectacled giant is no doubt a satirical reference to my girth.) On each face there is a smile, my own no doubt indicative of a certain smugness, the others revealing a knowledge of what is to come.

And what does come next is a stark, seemingly unambiguous symbol. Once more, no words are used. The reviewer is disarmingly direct. In the middle of the heart, an ugly, evil tear suggesting that the time is out of joint. What can it mean? That love is a fiction? That her liking for my work needs to be qualified in some sinister way? Or simply that it has a dodgy aortic valve? Its elongated shape adds yet another dimension to the critique it represents. It is clearly an inverted teardrop which ends in a pair of buttocks. This is reviewing at its most complex.

But then comes page 3 and, for the first time, words. But what words – enigmatic, mystical, seeming to evoke global truths (‘In the earth live some herts’), reversals in Nature (‘In the leevs live some trees’), and then, bringing the referential framework right down to the personal level and hinting at a rhyming game we played when I last visited her, the seemingly artless ‘In mummys live some tomees’ – a clear reference to gestation, with ‘tomees’ signifying wombs.

And then, the power of the gap in the narrative, the wordless space between her gnomic pronouncements and the true start of her critical analysis. It’s a space in which the reviewer pauses for breath, gives the reader time to absorb the mysterious, complex frameworks she’s constructed, before her direct appreciation of me as a ‘grate writer’.

And yet, the greatness of her critique, its teasing ambiguity, even as she expresses her love, is continued in the intrusion of that one little word ‘it’. On the surface, ‘I hope you get better’ is a clear ‘Get Well Soon’ message, but ‘I hope you get IT better’ begs a question. What ‘it’? My writing? The valve? The recognition she thinks I deserve?

But, as one turns over to the final page, her breathtakingly assured mastery of the medium is clear. In both words and image, she delivers her conclusion. The small figure sitting at the computer table is her, representing my readership, tiny and existing at a level beneath that of the greatness of my works, with the larger screen suggesting perhaps that it is time for those works to be adapted for the cinema. 

It is a master class in criticism..