Veggie Books: The New Goodbye

I've watched Neil Ayres' The New Goodbye go through a number of incarnations, and each time it's become a little bit stronger. Now, available from this week as an E-book, it's absolutely right. And it's wonderful.

With the sounds of cutlery and pans coming from the thin galley kitchen Vicente had disappeared into, Mila scanned a cheap CD tower of records. She found an R&B compilation and fed it into the player. The opening bars of Sam & Dave's Soul Man filled the apartment. In the kitchen, Vicente was dancing as he cooked and emulating the guitar fills as best he could with his terrible singing voice. Mila went to stand by the kitchen door.

'Ham, mushroom and onion. Hope that's okay.' He had already laid salad out on a wooden chopping block about a foot square: avocado, red lettuce, tomatoes, diamonds of cucumber and a handful of cress and some mint leaves, with lemon juice squeezed over it all. Mila hadn't eaten since breakfast and the smell of the omelette frying caused her stomach to growl. She drank a large mouthful from her glass in an effort to quieten it.

'Hungry?' Vicente said, teasing her with the fact this hunger would be satiated imminently.

'Peckish', she admitted.

'Here then.' Vicente flipped a browned omelette out onto the wooden block and picked up the neck of a bottle of olive oil and two forks wrapped in paper napkins. 'Let's go and eat.'

He carried the block into the lounge. Sam and Dave had given way to Nina Simone. Mila and Vicente sat on a soft and deep-seated sofa and Vicente set the food down between them.

'Bon apetit.'

'Looks good.'

'Thanks. So long as it tastes that way.'

They ate without speaking, each manoeuvring across the plate to meet in the middle at the heart of the omelette.

'Go ahead,' Vicente said.

Mila waved her arm to gesture for him to have it, but knocked the bottle of olive oil over. It had begun to glug over the skin of her thigh before Vicente had managed to right it. He held up one of the paper napkins.

'Here, let me.'

Mila didn't move, just let the towel soak off some of the oil from her skin and then massaged the rest in. Vicente pulled the towel away. The oil had soaked through to his palm. He put the paper down on the wood block and licked at his hand. Mila watched his tongue flick out a couple of times to caress the skin.

'If that works for you,' she said, upturning the bottle and letting the rich gold liquid pour out and run onto her lap, 'I'm sure it would work for me.'

Neil has a wonderful sense of tempo to his writing. It's always about the speed at which events happen, and he can slow a moment to a stroll through tender emotions. I admire his writing enormously and I think he deserves to be read more widely. So buy it now at an absolutely bargain price, and enjoy reading a story that's about the reality of being human.

Veggie Books: The Liveship Traders Trilogy

If you're a fantasy writer with organic leanings, then you've got a difficult choice to make. Are you going to call an orange an orange?

I've recently finished re-reading Robin Hobb's Liveship Traders trilogy, and enjoyed it very much this time around too, being a sucker for dragons and talking boats and stuff, but this particular sentence from Book One caught my eye:

From others came Kwazi fruit, whose rind yielded an oil that could numb even a serious wound and whose pulp was an intoxicant with an effect that lingered for days.

Made-up fruit. Way more exciting than real fruit. I think we should have more imaginary vegetables in books, personally. I'm going to put a tribblat in my next literary effort. My character will eat it and fall into an unpleasant dream about sharks. Tribblats attract sharks, you see. Tribblat trees grow on the shore and their full boughs hang down low over the water in summer. Then my character will awake to see a tiger shark make a twenty foot vertical leap to pick a particularly tasty tribblat with its teeth.

This will all be subtext, of course.

Veggie Books: Live and Let Die

I'm reading the James Bond books and enjoying them very much.

When I write - bear with me, because this might not make a lot of sense - I try to create a square. That is, I want the plot, the characters, the detail and the imagery to all receive about the same amount of attention, to have the same length to them in my mind's eye, to create a rounded effect. A square to make a circle, if you see what I mean.

Ian Fleming creates a weird shape. It's a bit like a rhombus. There's a lot of plot, moving very quickly. There's a tremendous amount of exact detail in some areas. But the character line of the shape is barely there at all. It's all about the physical description - Bond has thick black hair that falls as a comma over his forehead. He has a long scar on his face that gives him a piratical look. But we find out more about the baddies' backgrounds than we do about Bond's. And the weird thing is it really works. The mystery of Bond works because of the glamour of his life. The glamour only works because the detail of his lifestyle - the cars, food, drink, locations - is so precise that we believe it. The lifestyle only works because only the mystery that is James Bond could live that way. It makes a very strange shape, but all the sides do add up.

Here's Bond's breakfast in Jamaica in Live and Let Die:

Paw-paw with a slice of green lime, a dish piled with red bananas, purple star-apples and tangerines, scrambled eggs and bacon. Blue Mountain coffee - the most delicious in the world - Jamaican marmalade, almost black, and guava jelly.

Yum.