Let it be: Doug Worgul's Thin Blue Smoke

I just had a week off work, which was nice. I also took a couple of weeks off from writing fiction, which was odd. Don’t worry, I’m not ill. Yesterday I pulled a rather nice flash piece out of the bag.

I had intended to post a bonfire night-themed story up here on the fifth or sixth, but didn’t get round to it. Maybe next year. The moment’s passed for now.

So there’re lots of things I haven’t done during my week off. What I have done, along with seeing some farm animals and visiting NT properties, is finish reading Doug Worgul’s Thin Blue Smoke (which Aliya raved about on this very blog way back when).

Take note. This is a very very good book and I urge you to go out and get a copy and read it. It is is about barbecue, blues (there’s a cameo by BB King) and God, a little bit. Primarily the book’s about love and redemption. So yes, it’s a good solid book, with the chapters consisting of subtly nested short stories. Top notch. Buy it.

What I was struck by when I came to the end of it though is how my understanding of the editing process interfered with how I appreciated the book’s conclusion. Thin Blue Smoke is pretty much constructed from these wonderful chapters that work as standalone short stories. David Mitchell did something similar with Black Swan Green, but Doug’s book is far more tightly plotted and due to this, for me, the achievement is more remarkable. Add to this the spot-on prose, the connoisseur’s appreciation of barbecue and of Christianity and the outstanding characterisation and all is well with the world.

But then, right at the end of the book, I felt like the rug was pulled out from me a little. The ending is serviceable enough, and perfectly plotted. I’m still happy to recommend the book profusely, but the ending (and I’m talking the ending of the book proper and not the epilogue, which is fine) smacked to me of editorial interference. But here’s the rub—Doug tells me this wasn’t the case. The ending is all his and fits with his original vision for it.

My perception was probably coloured by my feelings that the subplot about a criminal jars a little with the tone of the rest of the book, and lends it a certain ‘commercialibility’(I’m sure some marketing and books sales people somewhere use that non-word on a daily basis), but probably more than that it was being aware as I am of how the original version of Aliya’s Light Reading ended and that changes were made to what was can only be described as the blackest possible comic ending, to one with an eye on the potential of a suggested series. After much hard work and one and a half books written, Aliya recently announced that, actually, given market forces, the series is a no-go. Think of something else. She’s fine with it. But the irony is her book was tampered with—weakened in my opinion—to shoehorn in the opportunity for a series that never materialised. Knowing this made me wondered if any such tampering had gone on with Thin Blue Smoke.

I love the fact that as a writer it’s hard for an author to keep me satisfied. I look for the holes and slip-ups in voice and technique and it’s when a book—a book like Doug’s—is capable of being enjoyed by me without a single consideration of the technical process of writing, I know it’s a very good book indeed.

I like, for instance, Laura Lipmann—she of the spiderweb of coloured cord fame from the article Aliya linked to that’s on the WSJ site—and Jason Pinter well enough, but the cracks in technique are yawning ones in comparison to Doug’s writing, and down the scale slides to Mr Brown…

So there should have been no suspicion, really. Yet there was. And my enjoyment, my satisfaction at reaching the book’s end, was marred.

So know this as you go off and buy this grand book (there are plenty of turtles in it too, if you like turtles—I’m kind of ambivalent about them, but if helps shift a few copies), the book is the book the writer wrote. In all it’s glory, and should be enjoyed as such.

Thanks, Doug.

In limbo

My new manuscript—which from now on I’ll refer to as RD—is finished and has just been set loose on unsuspecting publishing types. While I wait for a response, I’ve tentatively started another book in a similar vein, in the hope I can find a publisher for RD and that they’ll want more of the same, only different.

Like RD, this new book will be fairly complex and no doubt quite difficult to write, but short and probably it’ll be described as ‘literary’. (To give you an idea, Aliya read and critiqued—very very well—RD, and subsequently described it as Ian McEwan mixed with Richard Adams (that’s the fellow who wrote Watership Down). A description I can live with quite happily. In return I attempted to compare the Lena and Pru mysteries with a mix of authors and plumped for Andy McNab meeting Alexander McCall Smith down a dark alley. Can anyone else more widely read than me come up with a better comparison?

Anyway, I digress. As well as starting the new difficult-to-write-Ian McEwan-Richard Adams affair (longhand), I’ve also begun to write another book: what I think is a really strong concept for a sprawling—in that there are a minimum of about a dozen primary players—spec fic book (straight to screen).

I guess I wait to see what happens with RD before committing to one more than the other. In the meantime Aliya and I are writing another story together. Well, when she gets back from Wales.

nb That's not me limbo dancing by the way

Voicing concern

I read an article a few months back about the potential disappointment inherent in going to see a favourite author read from his or her own work.

This really depends on the author. As any regular reader of this blog will know, Aliya is splurging forth podcasts like there's no tomorrow. And a good thing too. When I first heard her read, her tone matches that of her work, so everyone's a winner.

Historical novelist Gregory Norminton is by happy coincidence a trained actor. A few years back at the launch of Book of Voices we had three authors doing a reading in the middle of a RFH exhibition (with visitors unrelated to the launch milling about and making noise), but the promised microphones didn't materialise. The two authors up after Mr Norminton visibly struggled with the reading, but Gregory, who was up first, waltzed it. And of course his booming Shakespearean delivery perfectly matched his Elizabethan-set story. It was a lot for the other two to live up to in all honesty.

My own voice doesn't quite match up to the inner monologue of my 'reading voice' for my own work, although I'm happy to read aloud work by other people. I suppose I'm not so bothered about wrecking their work with my sound, as listeners will know it's not the sound of the author. Story-telling, rather than story-reading, is easier said than done with some types of fiction, and I guess that's part of it.

I guess a similar point can be made about author photos, which other than a marketing tool, serve little purpose--like the voice--but to have a reader pre-judge the work.

Judging a book by its author

I’ve recently agreed to make the odd contribution to the Big Blog of Marvel, a new blog commenting on all things magical realist. The founder, Tamara Sellman, has asked for a picture and bio, which a lot of places do now, but which set me thinking. On Serendipity we do the same, and the magazine somehow seems to have one of the finest-faced bunch of contributors around. I promise this isn’t intentional. I don’t go around asking good looking women to submit stories, but that doesn’t stop them from doing so. (In fact, the people I have actually approached for submissions tend to be big fellas with beards, a lá Jeffrey Ford and Steven Savile). As well as the Pootle herself, there are an increasing number of others: Phyllis Anderson, Maria de la Rosa, Joanna Gardner, Julie K Rose, Kate Aton-Osias, Flavia Baralle, E Nesbit (okay, so she didn’t actually submit her story, but she fits in with the crowd)…

There was an article in one of the literary supplements a year or so ago asking whether we choose books based just as much on the way the author looks, as the blurb or recommendations. One of the examples given was of Peter Høeg, author of Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow. I can’t say I bought the book myself for Pete’s striking Nordic looks (I bought it because I liked the cover), but I think this is a valid point. I mean, would you buy a book written by this man. No, I thought not. Seriously though, Steve Redwood submitted a really old picture of himself for the publicity shot for Prime’s edition of Fisher of Devils, as he was worried that not being a Hollywood-faced thirty-something with Zadie Smith and Toby Litt for pals would somehow impact on his success. The thing is, I’ve a feeling he might be right. The only other option is for him to put on a few pounds around the waist and grow his beard out a bit. Am I wrong here? Don DeLillo seems to make a point of not wanting his image used to market his books, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a picture of Michael Chabon either. Are they both really ugly, or do they just have a level of literary integrity and a lack of ego missing in most writers?