middlemarch

I was going to write a blog about confessional literature - in the wake of the controversy over Rachel Cusk's book, but in the end events took over and the affair is no longer topical. I suppose what I would have said is that for me fiction writing is about creating something new, and that my writing is as distinct a part of myself as any other work would be - teaching, medicine or administration. Of course I use material from life in my writing, but it's a transforming process, I hope.

I hung about on the edge of re-reading Middlemarch rather as if I was deciding whether or not to take a dip on a cold-ish day. Do I have enough time? Wouldn't I be better reading something new. I think the answer is, I do have time. I'm fifty pages in and of course I see in it now so much that I missed when I was twenty when I remember consuming the book in great, greedy chunks. Her writing, at least about Casaubon is so sly, and about Dorothea so raw, that almost every line is a lesson on how to explore human nature.

What that book has, is a sense that all the characters are absolutely three dimensional, and that there is all of life going on beyond the pages. So few books have that wonderful richness that the reader is engaged with available cell.

Captain Scott

To the Scott exhibition at the Natural History Museum. Scott has always been part of my psychological makeup along with Nightingale and the Brontes. Oddly enough, despite having a grandfather who was gassed (but survived) in World War 1, in out family it was Scott who was talked about - and read about in the Ladybird Books, not those millions of doomed young men who died a few years later in the trenches. Scott was the acceptable face of sacrifice and heroic failure. It's a truism, of course, to say that we would scarcely think about him had he survived that trek - although this new exhibition shows the scientific importance of his endeavours.

Two things struck me. The first is how very much the expedition was governed by money. They went to earn money, they had to raise sponsorship - and the question arises - had they not been burdened by quite so many crates of Huntley and Palmers biscuits, and had more Pemmican instead, might they have survived. And of course Scott's last, haunting words: For God sake look after our people, are all about money.

And the second - also a bit of a truism - is how much Scott was a writer - even a fiction writer. He was processing his experience as he lived it, as a novelist does. His diaries are agony because they reveal a man trying to justify his failure by creating art. He writes so eloquently - his words are unforgettable - even in his last moments, he is crafting his experience. Of course, a different kind of a leader would have led a wholly different expedition. But what mistakes can be attributed to the fact that he was something of a poet?

the authorial voice

Have just been reading Death Comes to Pemberley. Of course I'm a fan of Jane Austen, and likewise PD James, but the problem with this book is that the two writers are polar opposites. The essence of Austen, if I could be so bold, is character and interaction and feeling. The essence of PD is the unravelling of motivation and the gradual exposition of dark forces. Never the twain.

The result is a dead book, which just isn't interesting either as a take on Jane Austen or a murder mystery. And this is more to do with the absolutely precious and unassailable nature of a fine author's voice - I'm talking about Austen and PD James here - than with anything else. It's that elusive thing that all writers talk about - finding a voice. What does it mean? It means finding the medium through which my stories can be told - and finding the stories that match my medium and my voice. It means a perfect blend of character, plot, and narrative style. It's a struggle, it's elusive, and when it works, it's wonderful. I defy anyone to produce a really good sequel to Austen. How could you, if you weren't Austen? And why would you want to?

Be yourself. Write, yourself.

black and white

Paul Simon sings 'everything looks worse in black and white' (Kodachrome)...actually, I don't think that's true. I think different, rather. These thoughts on colour are inspired by a weekend in which we saw The Artist - and then it snowed. Snow is so weird the way it alters the familiar so dramatically, but more, is the one thing that grinds us to a halt. Changes lives, overnight.

I liked The Artist, especially the chinking of the glass on the dressing table and other quirky reflections on sound - less convinced by the wallow of self-pity. Hey. You have a beautiful girl and a dog and a promising career, what's to put a gun in the mouth for? (Well, not fond of dogs, myself).

But have been reflecting on colour, in the light of my current read - still A Fine Balance. Such a wonderfully detailed book - and in all the right ways - it's texture, rather than detail, perhaps. There's this entire world buzzing away in the background to the story of two brothers struggling to survive. Their personal lives work on a minute scale - what they eat, what they think. I realise that when I'm dissatisfied with my writing, it's often because it's thin. That wonderful sense of depth and colour and texture is lacking.

Back to work, then. And ultimately, it's about having the confidence to plumb the depths of the imagination. My Evelyn throws a party. I think back to flats I've shared, the dankness of the kitchen, woodlice in the cracks between lino and floorboard, a cupboard which you never really own, as a short-term tenant because there are other people's smells of must and spills in it.

Now, I'm getting there.

On suffering

Do you know Auden's poem on suffering - Musees des Beaux Arts - in which he talks about suffering going on at the edge of our ordinary lives, such that we almost fail to register it.

I've been reading two novels about suffering: the first, Jonathan Buckley's Telescope, in which the narrator, though fatally ill, presents us with a delectably calm, wry tour of family life. His suffering is almost a footnote, but the book is steeped in a sort of wistful acknowledgement that life is going on, but not the sick man's. Not a hint of self-pity but it is a wonderful sideways look at life - a bit like what Icarus might have seen, before he hit the water.

And then I've begun A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. Fifty pages in and hooked. Here is wonderful, engaging, intimate story-telling - people's small, insignificant lives in the foreground, mighty events just noted in the background, although their ripples can strike at any moment. And that's why I disliked reading, and couldn't watch Birdsong. That writing is the polar opposite of Mistry and Buckley.

Museums of the Mind

And to conclude my whistlestop tour of the English cathedral cities, to Norwich. This time a meeting which meant I blew through Norwich on the fringes of time. Not a city preserved in aspic, but a rushing about, windy, well-signposted city blending ancient (cathedral), not so ancient, Jarrolds department store, and new (hideous multi-storeys and ring-road etc.)

What I loved was the rather nutty, very crammed, very busy castle/museum/art-gallery which contains a teapot collection, a Matisse, stuffed birds, Anglo-Saxon brooch pins and a rather nasty prison museum, detailing the scheming, blackguard-ly murderers who were interred there and subsequently hung. Now that is a museum. It's a museum like the contents of my mind. A right old hotchpotch of history. I've been reading Musees des Beaux Arts by Auden, where he makes the point about suffering going on in the background, while ordinary life continues. And so teapots and torture, immediate past trampling on distant past, a taste for taxidermy replaced by a taste for - well, different forms of recreating nature. It's all there, all the time. Human memory.

York and the past

While a cruise ship was being wrecked off the coast of Italy, I was travelling up the East Coast of England to York to attend a friend's wedding.

I'd visited York several times, most notably to research my novel, After Mary, which centres around the life of Mary Ward, the 'female' Jesuit who founded a religious order, whose family was embroiled in the Gunpowder Plot, and who notably walked from France to Rome several times in her life in order to petition the pope. The Bar Convent, in York, has a museum about the Catholic recusants who resisted all attempts to stop them saying mass - it includes a priest's hole and the preserved hand of Margaret Clitheroe, who was crushed to death under rocks for her refusal to give evidence in court.

In York history is barely concealed beneath the surface. After the wedding we went to evensong in the Cathedral. I felt like a flake in the history of that place. And yet that's precisely why I love to write about the past - the fact that our lives are so multi-layered - that in my head, at that moment in the cathedral, was my friend and her wedding, and Mary Ward, and that book, and the Cathedral and the music, and the tragedy of a cruise ship, and Margaret Clitheroe, all present in one moment.

Bristol

I spent the weekend back in Bristol, with the three women I met when I was 18 and we shared first rooms in a student house together, then a flat in Royal York Crescent. The flat was extremely chilly and run down, the crescent glorious.

We were saying how odd it was that we remembered so little of the views, but what we remembered most were feelings. It was like pressing a little button from time to time. Here, on the bridge, was where I came one night when I was feeling particularly displaced or lovelorn (and they asked me in the toll booth, if I was all right, because people who run panting up to the suspension bridge so often weren't). There, on that bench, was where one of us went to reflect glumly on the lack of a job. Here's where we revised in the sun, feeling so oppressed and as if exams would go on forever. This is the walk we took every day down to the library, in that odd, dreamlike state that comes when you have a whole day of study ahead (or not-study).

It is very strange to have a weekend so full of feeling and endless chat. And its what fuels the writing, I suspect, those very intense times, in which feelings old and new are so near the surface. It's what I aim for in my fiction, an intensity of emotion which draws the reader deeper and deeper inside the book.

New Year Resolution

My worst ever was to resolve to have a cold shower every morning. Lasted two days during which I didn't shower because couldn't face cold water. This year I have come up with a writing resolution. Diversify. Write more, different, non-novel, to exercise the old literary brain cells a little more.

I've been reading An Equal Music by Vikram Seth. I loved the combination of music and literature (the former being the subject, the latter the medium) though I grew a little tired of the first person narrator in the end - very self-centred. It made me think that it doesn't matter what one does to improve the writing, as long as it's creative. It's like switching on a lightbulb listening to Schumann - or Dylan, for that matter. Or watching a film or a play. Or walking in the January sunshine. Or writing a letter or a bit of a dialogue or a blog.

And one more creative dynamo - turn off the computer and the mobile. Walk away from the desk. Just spend days cooking and talking and reading. In other words, have a Christmas holiday. As soon as I turned on the computer this morning the adrenalin started pumping. Yes, we're off, it's a new year.

The beauty of slow burning

I always get a little prickly when someone says: If I had a bit of time, I'd write a book. First, it feels like an encroachment on my territory - I never say, If I had a bit of time, I'd be a brain surgeon. Secondly, it feels like a covert attack on my own process of becoming a writer. It's taken decades. And I still don't think I'm there. Writing is a craft, and a very difficult one, I think, and like anything that requires skill and knowledge and experience, those fifty thousand hours are required.

I spent the weekend with a group of close friends and family celebrating my son's eighteenth birthday. I rejoiced, then, in joys of building and nurturing relationships. These people, who know me so well, warts and all, and whom in return I love as much are a symbol of all that really matters to me. Last night I went to sing carols with my theatre group - again, decades of belonging. As with community so with writing books. It takes time. And nurturing, and sometimes the sense that this digging deep and keeping faith is a replacement for something much more buzzy and exciting just round the corner. I'm constantly fighting the feeling that I should be doing something more pressing, more immediately effective, that will make more of a difference.

Part of the human condition, I suppose, never to be satisfied. To know that there'll always be someone else, or somewhere else, or something else that could have occupied that hour or year or lifetime. But I think, for now, as I sit at my very old desk (dining table inherited from a friend of my grandmother's), looking out at very old allotments, I'll settle for roots, and slow-burners.