The Reader Online

by John Flamson, Director of Strategic Partnerships & Development, University of Liverpool.

I read this book recently, after being advised to get in touch with my feminine side(!). The Saffron Kitchen (2006) by Yasmin Crowther, is a tale of an Anglo-Iranian household, one woman’s journey and the impact on those around her.

It has a slow-burn pace but like a good symphony, leads you somewhere. And that somewhere for me was a renewed understanding of the enduring need to belong and the agony as well as the glory of being generous of spirit. Not bad for someone who received it reluctantly from someone who dubbed it as ‘a woman’s read’!

For the second in our Reading Back series we go back to Issue 14. Spring 2004. Philip Davis, now editor of The Reader, recommends Mrs Oliphant’s great novel Hester. Who reading the magazine back then could have imagined that the events of the book – a nineteenth century financial crisis, complete with greedy bankers and a run on the bank – could happen again, let alone just four years into the future? Suddenly, Hester is a novel absolutely for our times and for the moral and financial predicament in which we find ourselves.

(Hester is an Oxford World’s Classics paperback, edited by Philip Davis and Brian Nellist, and is available here at The Reader Bookshop.)

The Reader Recommends:

AN UNKNOWN MASTERPIECE
Margaret Oliphant, Hester

Philip Davis

Hester is a magnificent novel whose story and characters are guaranteed to keep the reader turning the pages from first to last. The principal character, Catherine Vernon, is what we would now call a career woman: an unmarried Victorian lady who has become chief executive of a bank, the family bank which she stepped in to save when her cousin John had brought it to the edge of ruin. He then absconded to France. At one time, it had looked as if she might have married this cousin, but he jilted her for a more beautiful young woman. From then on, the disillusioned Catherine has devoted her life to the bank, along with a host of poor and dependent relatives whom she houses and supports. We first meet this formidable Catherine when she is 65, and though she is beginning to take a back seat in the business of the bank, she remains the matriarchal centre of her provincial world and, indeed, the protagonist of Margaret Oliphant’s long-neglected novel of 1883.

So why isn’t this novel called Catherine and who is Hester? Hester is the fourteen-year-old daughter of cousin John. We first encounter her on her return from the family exile in France, her father now dead, her widowed mother seeking refuge in Catherine’s family charity. Hester doesn’t know the story of her father’s disgrace. A firebrand and a spitfire, she is already a proud and powerful young woman, determined to find something to do in the modern world. The one woman she knows who has really achieved something is, of course, Catherine. Although she admires her, Hester also resents Catherine, for her power and her control. Too alike to get on well together, they are like an older and younger version of each other. Anyone interested in the paradoxical love and hate, life and death conflicts of young and old will be absorbed in the deep psychological realism of Hester.

It is not called Catherine, because increasingly as the story develops, it is clear that the future of the modern world must lie with the younger people. But Hester herself is not the centre of the novel either, precisely because she is young and unformed – and because in this novel the character of the young is all too conventionally rebellious against the conventions of the old. Margaret Oliphant is expert at seeing both sides, in putting herself and her reader in the place of both characters almost simultaneously. The reader doesn’t quite know who to feel for most, because the author has thoroughly immersed us in life’s complexity. As one of the book’s older characters magnificently puts it: though ‘right and wrong, are like black and white’, the things that baffle us ‘are those that perhaps are not quite right but certainly are not wrong’.

The third major character in this novel is the young male relative to whom Catherine increasingly yields the running of the bank. Edward Vernon is the one person left whom she trusts, like the son she never had. He is her faith, her religion. And yet, secretly resentful of his benefactress, he threatens to repeat the old story of cousin John, by privately gambling his customers’ deposited money on the fortunes of the new Stock Exchange. It is Edward who drives the desperately compelling plot of this novel in a new modern world of money and of sex, combining as he does the pursuit of wealth with the pursuit of Hester herself. What happens virtually kills Catherine. In another story, in the happier parallel existence that shadows this book, Hester would have been Catherine’s daughter by cousin John – and that is partly why Catherine resents her.

‘No one will even mention me in the same breath with George Eliot,’ lamented Mrs Oliphant in Autobiography. But Hester should take its place beside the novels of George Eliot. In addition, it is the disguised and transmuted story of the author herself: a caustically rueful but determinedly powerful widow, left in debt by her artist-husband to bring up three children by the earning power of her pen. As a single parent, she felt she had perhaps sacrificed the quality of her work for the sake of her family. But worse, for all that sacrifice, her two boys still went wrong, just as Edward goes badly astray in the novel, leaving the mother wondering whether that too was partly her fault, through the very desire lovingly to protect them. In Hester, Margaret Oliphant turns round on her own motherly concerns, on her own powerful intelligence, and even on her own capacity for satiric bitterness. ‘Human nature may be easy to see through, but it is very hard to understand.’

Hester is bitter, pained, moving and sad, yet also often satirically funny and alive at the expense of its men; absorbingly exciting in story, profound in character and relationships. When you cannot find another novel by George Eliot or Elizabeth Gaskell, when you find yourself vainly wishing that the Brontës had written more, read Hester.

Steven Powell has an M.A. in Victorian Literature from the University of Liverpool, and is currently studying for a Literature Ph.D. on the American Crime author James Ellroy.

Spying is considered too lowbrow a subject for many TV critics. This is a shame as the BBC’s 1979 adaptation of John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy ranks as one of the best television dramas ever produced. Many of Le Carré’s novels have been adapted for the screen, each with varying degrees of quality. Le Carré had resisted selling the film rights to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, as he felt that a television serialisation would be more able to fully explore the book’s rich and complex narrative.

The plot of both novel and film is deceptively simple: George Smiley is a former spy who is called back from retirement to uncover a Soviet ‘mole’ who has reached a senior position in British Intelligence. The complexity of the story derives from the subplots, relationships and timeline which are interwoven around this central premise. Some critics have compared the story to The Odyssey, in that a scorned outsider (Odysseus/Smiley) has to secretly examine the running of the kingdom, testing his subject’s loyalty before disposing of those who forced him into exile and restoring rightful rule. It is an interesting comparison, but one that can be overly reductive in critical analysis. Smiley is diffident and intellectual, hardly a warrior comparable to Odysseus. He often appears passive to his enemies, whilst his achievements are snatched away from him and claimed by glory-seeking civil servants. In direct contrast to the suave, womanising James Bond in Ian Fleming’s novels, Smiley is a cuckold. He is frequently mocked by his colleagues for the indiscretions of his upper-class, promiscuous wife Ann. Smiley is portrayed by Sir Alec Guinness in the mini-series. His performance so accurately conveyed the quietude and exactness of the character that it now seems impossible to imagine anyone else in the role (although James Mason and Rupert Davies have made two decent previous attempts).Le Carré admitted that after watching the mini-series, his writing of the character Smiley was strongly influenced by Guinness’ portrayal.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was adapted into a seven episode format with each episode running to fifty minutes. Its strength lies in its loyalty to the book. In both versions, Smiley pieces together the identity of the mole by sifting through old case files and interrogating or interviewing witnesses. In the novel, these witnesses recall their experiences in long dialogue scenes, but for the film these scenes become explicated flashbacks, wherein the action is seen rather than described. Although the content remains the same, the movement from novel to film produces more dramatically satisfying scenes. The narrative timeline is also reordered for television. The first episode begins with a British Spy being shot and captured in Czechoslovakia in a botched mission to try and discover the identity of the mole. Then it cuts to six months later and the consequences of this event are slowly explained: there has been a huge scandal; Smiley has been sacked as one of the many scapegoats; other officers have been promoted, one of whom is the mole. Now, Smiley is called back to unmask the mole. In the book, the Czech incident does not appear until very late on. There are big elements of the book that feel far more elusive and evasive than the television adaptation, even the fate of the mole is not directly shown, it is only hinted as to what happened, whereas, the adaptation is much more explicit. It also seems more logical that in the television serial the Czech incident should appear at the beginning of the narrative, and then it is gradually revealed episode by episode how it all links to the mole.

The Russian’s codename for the mole is ‘Gerald’, and the Russian Spy who recruited the mole, Smiley’s nemesis in Soviet Intelligence, is known as ‘Karla’: his real name is not known. The codenames created for those suspected of being the mole are derived from the nursery rhyme ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor’. Thus, the four suspects are known as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier and Poor Man. Sailor is deemed inadequate as a codename as it sounds too much like Tailor- a wonderfully subtle point in a novel obsessed with the petty politics of bureaucracy. Le Carré coined new spy jargon for the novel: there are ‘scalphunters’, ‘lamplighters’ and ‘legends’. British Intelligence is known as ‘the Circus’ as it is based in Cambridge Circus, London. The United States Intelligence agency, the CIA, is known as ‘the Cousins’. This terminology is thoroughly convincing in both the novel and the adaptation. Le Carré was even gratified to discover U.S. Intelligence had adopted some of his terms for their own use after the success of his novels. What makes these spy terms particularly convincing is how successfully the story evokes the snobbery at the heart of the British system of Government and Intelligence. The Circus is portrayed as a natural extension of Eton and Oxford, and civil servants are running institutions for their own personal gain rather than the nation’s interests.

The first episode is unique as it features a wonderfully observed pre-credits sequence in which the Intelligence officers, who it is later revealed are the suspects, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier and Poor Man, enter a Circus office one by one. The scene has only one line of dialogue, but so much characterisation is conveyed through little mannerisms such as how Poor Man holds his files or how Soldier chain-smokes. Then, there is a slight trace of mischief in how Tailor holds his cup of tea with the saucer resting on top of the rim. There is something curiously reassuring about the Englishness of their behaviour, although, ironically, one of them has betrayed every official secret of the nation. The credits sequence is also brilliant in its simplicity. The camera focuses directly on a Russian Matryoshka doll. As the doll is opened, each new smaller piece carries an expression which is progressively more irate until the fourth and final piece is revealed to have no face. Then, the faceless doll lies in two pieces on the floor. The symbolism is clear and unpretentious: the mole may be broken by the end of the story, but that is only secondary to the corruption and malaise which he has wrought upon the country. This seems an apt subject for these cynical times, and it concisely mirrored the bitter pessimism that was the prevalent attitude of the nation when the series was first broadcast in 1979. This was the age of economic decline and the Winter of Discontent.Shortly after the series was first broadcast, Sir Anthony Blunt, art advisor to the Queen, was publicly named as being a former Soviet mole.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is the first of three novels written by Le Carré which are sometimes identified as the Karla trilogy or the Quest for Karla omnibus. The success of the TV adaptation prompted the BBC to make a sequel. The second novel in the trilogy, The Honourable Schoolboy, was deemed too complex and too expensive to adapt for television, as it is predominantly set in Hong Kong, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand. It is a shame the BBC decided against making an adaptation of The Honourable Schoolboy, as it is the most outwardly dramatic novel of the three. Thus, the BBC decided to adapt the third and final novel of the trilogy, Smiley’s People. Although they had a superb novel to work from, the television serialisation of Smiley’s People never quite attained the standard of excellence set by Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It is undeniably brilliant in parts, but it feels slightly marred by comparison. The musical score is not quite as good. The credits sequence is not quite as good. The plot is just a bit too complex. Still, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a brilliant novel which has a superlative companion piece in the television adaptation. The adaptation of Smiley’s People is a fine companion piece to the original, and one of the best television productions.

by Steven Powell

Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (Volume 1)

I thought that I knew what Virginia Woolf had to offer from To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway, someone both in retreat and brimming over at the same time, a little too knowing about not knowing. Well, I got her wrong. If you read The Common Reader you’ll find one of the most solid and sane of minds and, for all her Bloomsbury setness, she’s not in the least high-brow. I’d like to claim her as an honourable member of The Reader set too. Here’s how she opens the book:

There is a sentence in Dr Johnson’s ‘Life of Gray’ which might well be written up in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private people. ‘. . . I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.’

[. . .]

The common reader, as Dr Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole — a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of affection, laughter, and argument. Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture, without caring where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure, his deficiencies as a critic are too obvious to be pointed out; but if he has, as Dr Johnson maintained, some say in the final distribution of poetical honours, then perhaps, it may be worth while to write down a few of the ideas and opinions which, insignificant in themselves, yet contribute to so mighty a result.

Like a burrowing animal or any creature ‘guided by instinct’ to build a home, the common reader grabs this and that from books, whatever comes to hand, and not for the purposes of learning or for artistry but for the more humble and grand purpose of shaping a sense of the world that will let you live. I love how Johnson and Woolf leave our faults intact: ‘worse educated’, ‘hasty, inaccurate and superficial’ and value those very faults for the honest reality-seeking they betray. The result might be a ‘rickety and ramshackle fabric’ and not ‘the real object’ but the structure looks enough like reality to create a space for all that actually is real: ‘affection, laughter, and argument’.

The common reader is a pioneer, an inheritor of Adam and Eve, and it is fitting that somehow, by democracy, genetics or luck, we decide the ‘poetical honours’, which in turn allow the survival of Hardy, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, and the continuing reality of Virginia Woolf, the Psalms and whoever else of all the writers have made it into our home. Art is for using and the use we put it to is reality.

The Common Reader is made up of essays on whatever takes Woolf’s attention and they are illuminating pieces, as in the second essay, ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, where she ascribes the remote utterances of Greek drama to the out-of-doors demands of the audience, as contrasted with Northern Europe’s indoors state of mind:

In fact, of course, these Queens and Princesses were out of doors, with the bees buzzing past them, shadows crossing them, and the wind taking their draperies. They were speaking to an enormous audience rayed round them on one of those brilliant southern days when the sun is so hot and yet the air so exciting. The poet, therefore, had to bethink him, not of some theme which could be read for hours in privacy, but of something emphatic, familiar, brief, that would carry, instantly and directly, to an audience of seventeen thousand people perhaps, with ears and eyes eager and attentive, with bodies whose muscles would grow stiff if they sat too long without diversion.

Her grasp of remoteness gives you a glance at the living (though long dead) faces of the audience, and succeeds in gaining a sense of closeness through intuiting the need of asperity. The book is full of insights like this that put you in place to understand better. There’s Chaucer, Conrad, the Elizabethans, Daniel Defoe, Austen, Eliot and much more. Don’t do without this book any longer! Now all I need is Volume 2.

In today’s Guardian, there is an article about the ‘books we only say we’ve read’ – something that all of us, no matter how well read, are guilty of. Today is World Book Day, a celebration of books and reading, so please do let us know what you’re currently reading and, if you are willing to confess, what your guilty secrets are. Mine? I purchased Don Quixote de la Mancha about three years ago and I still haven’t turned over the front cover. So, let’s celebrate what we are reading, not what we’re not. Here’s what some us in The Reader Organisation’s office currently have on the go:

Clare Williams, Get Into Reading project worker and fundraiser

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy, which is my bedtime read, and Helen Dunmore’s Love of Fat Men, that’s for the bus and train.

Sophie Povey, Get Into Reading project worker

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. I have to make sure I’m on my own when I’m reading it.

Chris Catterall, Business Manager

Strategic Management and Competitive Advantage by Jay Barney and William S Hesterly. (You can’t say it’s not a varied selection of books, can you?)

Lee Keating, Office Administrator

Women by Charles Bukowski. It’s looking at me from my breakfast bar saying ‘finish me’, I do love it though.

Jen Tomkins, Communications Officer

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Beautiful, magical and an epic portrayal of all aspects of the human spirit.

Wendy Kay, Get Into Reading project worker

Lots! Currently on the go are: Melvyn Bragg’s Remember Me,  Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad and John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids.

Mark Till, Arts Administrator Intern

I’m about to start reading The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer.

No darling buds of May in evidence here. Shakespeare’s subject is lust: “Had, having, and in quest to have”. Before consummation, lust is “perjur’d, murderous, bloody, full of blame, / Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust”. And then “no sooner had, / Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait, / On purpose laid to make the taker mad”.

Poor Anne, you might say.

But this sonnet really demonstrates Shakespeare’s technical mastery: his syntactical tricks and tropes generate tremendous rhythm and energy. Reading aloud (as you should be), you can hear his frenzied argument struggling against the confines of the sonnet form, like Man struggling against his own biology. In both cases, there is no escape: only a temporary release of tension in the final clinching couplet.

Now where did I put those cigarettes…?

Sonnet 129

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjur’d, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof,- and prov’d, a very woe;
Before, a joy propos’d; behind a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

by William Shakespeare, 1609

Posted by Mark Till

Reviewed by Alison Walters

The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho is a mystical novel surrounding the life of Athena/Sherine/”The Witch” born in Transylvania to a Romani mother, who is orphaned and later adopted by a wealthy Lebanese couple. Her story is told by the people who knew her including her adoptive mother, her ex-husband, a journalist researching vampirism, a priest, her landlord, a teacher of calligraphy and an actress. They each provide a different view of her, describing not only what they saw and experienced but adding their own impressions, interpreting her through their own beliefs and fears. This is what keeps the story moving forward and engages the reader.

The book starts with the death of Athena. From the beginning, she is a devout member of the Catholic Church. As a child, she sees visions of angels and saints. She is dismissed from the Catholic Church in humiliation and vows never to set forth in a church again. However, she is always looking for ways to fit in on a spiritual level. She finds herself connecting to her spiritual side through music and dance. She shares this new-found spirituality, embraces it and moves forward and is successful with her life. She travels extensively sharing her experiences. Yet one cannot help, but think she is also on a quest to find even deeper spirituality as she befriends a Bedouin and goes in search and finds her birth mother. Even after these encounters she is searching for further fulfilment

She learns the best way of knowing the meaning of life is by learning from one’s student and thus takes on a student. A teacher can only make us aware of our capabilities but finding the right path is up to the individual.

Although she has a good lifestyle her mind is never fully at ease. So she sets out to find answers to the classical question of “Who am I?”. In her quest, she opens her heart to intoxicating powers and becomes a controversial spiritual leader in London. She channels her inner goddess, Hagia Sophia at weekly meetings. Subsequently, she becomes the target of death threats and religious bigotry – a literal witch hunt if you will. As in all areas of life – people fear what they do not understand. She is ultimately faced with the choice of continuing to spread the word or saving the life of her son.

This book is full of religious, spritual and mystical allusions. One concept which stood out is where Athena tries to explain to her mother:

I learned calligraphy while I was in Dubai. I dance whenever I can, but music only exhausts because the pauses exist, and sentences only exist because the blank spaces exist. When I’m doing something, I feel complete, but no one can keep active twenty- four hours a day. As soon as I stop, I feel there’s something lacking. You’ve often said to me that I’m a naturally restless person, but I didn’t choose to be that way. I’d like to sit here quitely, watching television, but I can’t. My brain won’t stop. Sometimes I think I’m going mad. I need always to be dancing, writing, selling land, taking care of Viorel, or reading whatever I find to read. Do you think that’s normal?”

I empathise with this sentiment as I see a human striving to try and completely understand themselves and wanting more in the process. This concept forms an integral part of and epitomises the human spirit. Athena is an extreme example, but you can identify with her as she drives herself forward and seeks to find out who she is.

This is another compelling work by Coelho. As always, Coelho’s stories are about spirituality and the search for inner truth/self and will appeal to those who are interested in the subject matter.

Chris Pak was born and grew up in Hong Kong and is currently completing a P.hd at the University of Liverpool. Apart from sf and music his interests include other forms of fantastic literature, movies, games and photography. He is interested in postcolonialism and environmentalism, which he is studying through the sf theme of terraforming.

Murphy, Michael and Deryn Rees-Jones, ed., Writing Liverpool: essays and interviews (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), pp. 288 + xi.

Writing Liverpool is a collection of twelve essays and six interviews that aim to survey the artistic output and ‘distinctive literary voice’ of Liverpool that Michael Murphy and Deryn Rees-Jones, in their introduction, claim ‘only began to emerge in the 1930s – at precisely the time when the city experienced a sudden and rapid decline in economic fortune’ (1). Published in 2007 it is ‘intended to mark the beginning of what promises to be a new period in the history of the city and its environs’ (2), coming at a time when Liverpool, as we know, had already become a centre of artistic attention as a consequence of its award of Capital of Culture in 2008. Indeed, the editors claim when reflecting upon Liverpool’s famous ‘community spirit’ and its ‘history of social disharmony rooted in religion, race and class’ that ‘The year 2008 may offer an opportunity for the city to pull together; it may equally put previous fractures under renewed strain’ (25). Perhaps this review itself comes at a good time, pointing out as it does a book that allows us to cast a retrospective eye over the last year in the context of its artistic output over the last eighty.

The introduction to Writing Liverpool contextualises Liverpool’s literary output by outlining its central position in the propagation of the slave trade and by indicating that ‘the city was from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century more associated with trade than art’ (1). This is claimed to be the main factor for Liverpool’s ambivalent multiculturalism. With the influx of diverse cultural groups such as Irish, Asian, Chinese, African, Jamaican and American groups new ideas and experiences flow through one of England’s major ports and begin to influence the artistic output and identity of the city. From the 1930s and more obviously in 2008 it has become more and more difficult to pin down a coherent voice and a stable identity for Liverpool.

These diverse influences are insightfully examined in many of the essays. The influence of the American Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or the ‘Wobblies’, on George Garrett’s writings and his political activism is examined in Joseph Pridmore’s “George Garrett, Merseyside Labour and the Influence of the United States”, where he claims that ‘Liverpool’s status as a thriving port ideally situated for trade between Britain and the United States made for a lively (and often illegal) traffic between the two countries’ (33). In Paul de Noyer’s “Subversive Dreamers: Liverpool Songwriting from the Beatles to the Zutons” de Noyer acknowledges that ‘though it’s undeniable that the transatlantic seaport was unusually accustomed to jazz, blues and country influences’ from America he identifies the main factor in the Beatles’ and Merseybeat’s distinctive sound as residing in Liverpool’s status itself: to be from Liverpool was to feel ‘a certain self-consciousness about the city’s identity, [which] was to be at one remove from standard English reality’ (241). Andy Sawyer in “Ramsey Campbell’s Haunted Liverpool” notes that Ramsey Campbell’s experience with images from American science fiction and horror pulp magazines, ‘fused with others from cinema and prose fiction, seemed to express and exploit his inner fears’ (167) and he makes much of the influence of the American H.P. Lovecraft’s work upon the formation of Campbell’s own style, which eventually becomes rooted in the potential horror of Merseyside’s landscape.

Nor is the examination of cultural influence upon Liverpool’s own distinctive voice limited to America. Sandra Courtman examines how ‘recent black arrivals to Liverpool joined with descendents of Irish immigrants to create a forum for creative expression’ while also recognizing the paradox that ‘there were feelings that the racial divide in Liverpool was intractable’ (195) in “‘Culture is Ordinary’: The Legacy of the Scottie Road and Liverpool 8 Writers”. She notes how the FWWCP encouraged ‘the racially and ethnically excluded to meet and write about a liminal existence’ (196) and how the ‘Scottie Road writers’ group acts as a powerful conduit for this disaffection’ (198). Courtman’s essay then moves towards a discussion of the founding of the Liverpool 8 group, ‘with contributions from Cheryl Dudt, of Asian descent, and Liverpool-born black, Levi Tafari’, who is interviewed in this collection. She notes the relationship between the Scottie Road and Liverpool 8 community writing groups and quotes David Evans’ comment that ‘The two groups remained distinct however, though whites came into the L8 group’ (203).

The theme of the liminal is the subject of Ralph Crane’s essay “The Liminal Presence of Liverpool in the Fiction of J.G. Farrell where he also highlights ‘the humour that pulses through the veins of the city’ and ‘the idiosyncratic ways of seeing things that are characteristic of the Liverpudlian, [which] are evident in all Farrell’s writing’. Farrell himself left Liverpool for Ireland at an early age yet retains a connection with the city as ‘Liverpool was the gateway to England he passed through in September 1948′ and through ‘the Liverpool-Dublin ferry [which] would remain a presence in his life and also in his fiction’ (90). Indeed, in the subsection entitled “The empire triptych: Liverpool as a gateway to empire” Crane examines Farrell’s questioning and critique of empire and colonialism from a liminal or third space, ‘an ambivalent position, somewhere between colonizer and colonized’ (96). Farrell is himself connected to another Liverpool writer also discussed in this collection: he read the manuscript for Beryl Bainbridge’s A Weekend with Claude, which was published in 1967 ‘and thereafter Farrell laid claim to having discovered Bainbridge’s talent’ (91). Bainbridge’s own life and work is discussed in Helen Carr’s “‘Unhomely Moments’: The Fictions of Beryl Bainbridge’ where Carr draws attention to the fact that her work has been overlooked in academic circles because ’she has never written in ways which fitted in with what was fashionable at a particular moment’ and claims that ‘Bainbridge is undoubtedly a writer of the Liverpool diaspora, but so far that’s not been a critical category’ (79).

The six interviews included in this collection allow a wide range of writers to give a voice to their take on Liverpool and to articulate the variety of perspectives on a contradictory city. Willy Russell, interviewed by John Bennett, claims that ‘I think that the first writers who come to mind are those from a spoken/sung rather than literary background’ (229) and so draws attention to the essential relationship between the city and the formation of a distinctive voice, claiming as he does that ‘There is something to do with the nature of the spoken language in Liverpool that is as the sky and the light must have been to the impressionists’ (229). Michael Murphy’s interview with screenwriter and novelist Terence Davies extends this range of voices by exploring how his working class Catholic family background and his then unrealized homosexuality influenced his style and is variously expressed in his approach to and in his writing itself. In Dave Ward’s interview with Liverpool-born Levi Tafari, of Jamaican descent, Tafari reflects upon his personal experiences as a member of the black community and he states ‘I think there is a lot of racism here. The black community is still looked down upon and vilified to some extent’ (255). He comments on the rich oral traditions of the Irish, Black and Chinese communities (the last two the oldest in Europe) and argues for an inclusive and personal view of cultural experience when he explains that ‘I don’t divorce myself from the other sides, because I always say that I’m tri-cultural: I have an African root with a Jamaican heritage and a British experience’ (255).

Writing Liverpool explores the diversity of culture and experience in Liverpool from the 1930s without shirking from an illuminating contextualising impulse that connects these writers firmly with the city and its surrounding landscape and to the history that makes Liverpool what it is today. It uncovers the complexity of the connections between Liverpool and its immigrant population along with the accompanying spread of ideas and shows how writers express their experiences with the city from the troubled liminal spaces between stable identities. The editors comment on this in their introduction when they suggest that Liverpool ‘becomes a projection of all that remains undealt with in the continuing negotiation of what it means to be English’ (11). It looks backward from a pivotal moment encapsulated by its Capitol of Culture status, surveying eighty years of writing from a range of perspectives and yet it still looks to the future:

if writing from Liverpool is to continue to matter it will need to re-invent itself in ways that at present appear as indistinct and fragile as the city’s budding transformation from a place that is a shadow of its nineteenth-century self to a city that has ambitions to command the attention of Europe and the wider world. (25)

Writing Liverpool proves itself to be relevant and searching and I would highly recommend it for anyone interested in the city’s claims, printed on T-shirts and other Liverpool merchandise, to being the ‘centre of the artistic universe’. There is no better time than now to read it as we reflect on the city’s response to the 2008 award, ponder its possible repercussions or involve oneself in the project of re-inventing Liverpool.

Posted by Chris Pak

By Ian Olsen

As part of the Chapter & Verse literature festival at the Bluecoat, I attended a session with first-time novelist Jennie Rooney, who read from Inside the Whale and also included a Q & A session. Firstly, I highly recommend you visit such events, they afford a rare insight into the development and motivation of the writer’s creative process. Secondly, the book.

My praise is unbounded I have to admit. This is one of the most beautifully conceived and executed works I have read. It is the tale of Stevie (Stephanie) and Michael: two young people, born in the 1920s, growing, living and working in the Old Kent road area of London; they meet fall in love and are then torn apart by the advent of WWII. Each chapter alternates between the voices of Stevie and Michael, their lives in the present and their reminiscences of the past. Michael is terminally ill in hospital and unable to speak silently revisits the pain and madness of the war and all that it cost him. Stevie’s autumn years see her living back with her daughter and granddaughter. It is also how their lives unknowingly overlap at the periphery after a lifetime of no more than whispers and stolen glimpses.

The language and construction is truly stunning. An unassuming poetic narrative gently leads the reader through a story of very real emotive truism. It concerns the human condition and is rendered without insistence, indulgence or cynicism and always with empathy. It essentially deals with silences or more accurately, with the things we should and wanted to have said; of those moments we can all recall that slipped by almost unnoticed and all too quickly.

I have to say ‘read it!’. Descriptively colourful, emotionally identifiable. Jennie Rooney is what I consider to be good in contemporary British talent. A wonderful and ‘must read’ debut.