Tag fiction

The Bees in the Chimney – 3

Laurel Lindström Leave a comment

“Do you know what you’re doing?” The beekeeper looked at her with raised eyebrows and tried to ignore how unexpectedly sexy she looked in a beesuit. The tight gathering at the waist; a makeshift belt had hanging from it a hive tool, a bee brush and a rag. The belt was a length of thick string with loops she’d fashioned into it. Penny didn’t look up but answered, “no, not really, but I thought it time to try. I’ve watched you so often.” The beehive at the bottom of Penny’s garden had been in place for some weeks now, ever since the swarm had arrived in her chimney and she’d had the local bee wrangler come to deal with them. She hadn’t expected someone quite so tall and wiry and she found Mr Westerham a little intimidating.

The plan had been that once settled the bees would be moved elsewhere, say to his house or to a local apiary. But he’d kept coming to check on them and unawares she’d found random reasons why they should stay a little longer. And here they were. And here he was too. Again. She’d worried about the weather at one point, but he never did get to the bottom of what the weather had to do with it. Bees are bees. They go with whatever the weather is, wherever they are.

Sweating slightly, she was shoving the thin metal edge of the hive tool under the hive roof to get it loose enough to remove. She’d seen him do this many times. From afar it hadn’t looked that hard. Despite her new, super impenetrable beesuit she was less confident than she had expected. She prodded cautiously at the proposis seal the bees had worked into every possible gap. It was much harder to break than she’d expected. Her special gloves were a bit too big and their rubberised layer meant her fingers couldn’t move properly. She shoved a little harder with the hive tool and heard the cracking sound of propolis coming away from the two surfaces it was gluing together. She loosened the hive’s roof and with a beaming smile dropped her hive tool and grasped the roof’s edges with both hands and lifted it. 

“Oh,” she said breathless, stepping from foot to foot, looking about her, her mind a blank as to what should happen next. He reached over and took the roof from her, leaning into her warmth and sensing her worry. He leant the roof against the hive stand and stepped back, saying “now you’ve got to do the same with the crown board, but that’s much easier.” And he turned and headed back to his car. “Yes” she said, “the crown board,” watching him move up the garden on long lean strides. She pried off the thin layer of wood sitting between the roof and the bees, and less stressed put it on the ground against the roof.

She was held in the breath of thousands of honey bees, their propolis, honey, pollen a complex mingling of summer intoxications. Now in his beesuit Mr Westerham was back, peering over her shoulder into the hive. The scent of him reached slowly into her senses. In the unexpected light the bees were momentarily agitated and their sound rose loud and a little angry before settling slowly  back to a steady hum. “What next?” she said as he drew in closer, taking her hive tool in hand to reach for the first of the several frames hanging in the top box of the hive. As he reached over she felt herself pulled slightly closer to him as the tethered tool reached top stretch. She felt herself breathe in a drowsing blend, at once exhilarating and soporific. His hand on hers guided the hive tool to loosen the frame as he whispered “you take one side and I’ll get the other.” The clumsy gloves didn’t help, but together they lifted a small wooden rectangle, heavy with summer, heavy with honey and she let out a small gasp amazed at what she was sharing. Standing still, holding a frame full of honey and watching the bees calm and busy, shaping their spaces for winter stores and for new bees. He too was held still in a space he didn’t quite recognise, beekeeper or not.

Shuttered

Laurel Lindström Leave a comment

The dust blowing in from the Sahara was turning everything orange. Joe could barely see the tops of the hills from his little window, and the gold of the dust shimmered as the sun crept up behind the houses. The colour reminded him of a traffic light’s glow, the warning one, the one that meant put your foot down. But here in this remote place there were no traffic lights and no need to hurry. Here life was lazy, slow. This he knew, so he didn’t put his food down and instead turned away from the light. But his fingers were clenching and an urgency pushed at him as he filled the kettle and put the toast on.

In the distance he heard the putt-putt-putt of a fishing boat coming in and wondered how long it would take her to get home, how long before the toast started to burn, the tea to stew. He could hear the sound of voices drifting up from the shore, but he couldn’t see the people. He couldn’t see the man lifting crates of dead fish onto the quai. He couldn’t see her jump out of the boat and turn away from the boat, the man and the crates. But he thought he could picture them in his head, her, the captain and Mattia. Mattia. Tall and narrow, classic Roman nose, receding hairline hidden under a grubby beany. His large hands are worn and crabbed, his voice mumbly and infrequent. He walks ramrod straight, muscular, intimidating. He fascinates Joe.

Joe had only met this man a few times, but each time he had studied him carefully. He was to be Joe’s model for the romantic hero in Rock of Sorrows, Joe’s novel. An engimatic Italian speaking English with a lazy accent, waving his hands with every phrase, sucking on his cigarette. Seductive beyond the random scowls and silences. But getting this man onto the page was proving harder than Joe had expected. He wasn’t sure where to start. Joe was having the same problem writing his main character’s love interest, he just couldn’t find the thread. The plot and narrative arc were also more of a challenge than Joe had anticipated, so the writerly journey was going very slowly. Sometimes he couldn’t even spell.

Joe suppressed the nagging sense that maybe he wasn’t a writer after all, that it was just a vanity. He heard the door bang and called to Cathy “How was it?” He poured the tea and buttered the toast as she kicked off her sandals and threw her jacket onto the little chair by the door. Warm air drifted in as she tossed a couple of red mullets into the sink. They narrowly missed a bowl half filled with the dank remnants of yesterday’s washing up. They floated sadly on greasy grey water.

“Oh it was as lovely as usual, although the sea was a bit choppier than I like”. Cathy smiled up at Joe, open eyed, loving and gave his arm a little squeeze. But Joe had drifted off thinking again of what he could do about his novel, how to make his version of Mattia a bit more talkative, more friendly. He aimed a sincere smile at Cathy, and almost made it. “He’s an interesting guy, that Mattia”. In life Mattia wasn’t particularly interesting, he was just quiet. Joe was sure he ought to be mysterious and sexy in the book, but how to achieve it? Joe handed Cathy a mug of tea, watching as she slid into her chair and blew gently at the steam. It wasn’t really tea weather, not really a tea climate even but, being English, tea was always the answer no matter the question. The question was hovering but it hadn’t yet arrived.

 “Did you manage to get anything written last night?” she said conversationally. She really did want to know, want to hear that his book was progressing. Joe considered a small fib, a couple of details to give Cathy reassurance, but not necessarily the whole story. There was no story to tell. “I’ve got the structure outlined, I think”. An easy lie. Structure was something someone had said was important for a novel. He wanted to understand it so much, but writing Chapter 1 at the top of one sheet of paper and The End at the bottom of another surely didn’t count. Cathy’s late night fishing trips gave him extra time and space to write. The emptiness of night, the silence and aloneness, it was all supposed to create the perfect writerly atmosphere. And for Cathy it was wonderful to be out on the sea in the dark, waves slopping at the boat, creaking sounds and random splashes, silent fishermen.

When Joe and Cathy had first asked Mattia and his father if she might come out on the boat with them, the two men had been baffled. They couldn’t understand if they had misunderstood and if they hadn’t, why she would want to. “It’s very late at night, we go”. Mattia’s father had said with each hand holding fingers to thumbs and his wrists rising up and down. “What you want to do in the dark, on a stinking fishing boat?” Cathy earnest and intense was hard to resist. “Sometimes I want to be out on the sea in the dark and quiet and we don’t have a boat of our own. I won’t be any trouble. We have Euros for the fuel”. 

Joe had stayed in the background during the curious negotiations, pondering the idea of including the father in his book as well as Mattia. He gave a little cough and expanding on what Cathy had said, gave it a sort of patriarchal stamp of approval. “Yes, we’re happy to help defer any additional expense you might incur”, he concluded, smug and superior in his excellent use of the English language. The two Italians looked at him for a moment, and recognising a fellow male, but not entirely understanding what he had said, nodded. “Okay, we do this. You come tonight at three, we go. €50. Okay?”. And they returned to their boat, muttering and gesticulating with the occasional glance over their shoulders at Cathy, waving and beaming over her shoulder as she and Joe walked away.  

That was two months ago and not much of Rock of Sorrows had made it onto the page, not even a structure. But he was pleased that Cathy gave him those extra hours to work in, flattered that she made sure he had a fully charged laptop and phone, pencils and notebooks. He had been content to sit there with an oil lamp casting gentle light over his random notes and sentence scraps. But there weren’t many more words now than there had been at the start of the experiment. And the struggle was getting too much, despite the online forums with other writers in other time zones working on similarly tricky dilemmas. Those conversations had started out being very stimulating, with story prompts, advice about narration and how to make the show-don’t-tell thing work. But it hadn’t been as easy as Joe thought to put any of it into practise. Instead he was getting bored with listening to people whinge about the costs of self-publishing, the impossibility of finding an agent, artificial intelligence and recalcitrant characters and dialogue.

“Let’s see where you are? Can I read what you’ve got so far?”. Cathy bright eyed and caffeinated was searching the desk, fingering notebooks and looking at him expectantly. Silence. Joe turned away, went to the window and opened wide the shutters. He saw the orange dust shrouding the tops of the hills as he let in the broadening day. He put the notebooks and his pencils in a drawer, smiled a rueful smile and gently pushed down the lid of his laptop.

Glow

Laurel Lindström 1 Comment

The sea, the sea, the sea, the slowly swelling sea. She looked up from her book to see if his boat was coming in yet. They should have been back in port by now. Evening light was lingering slowly grey across the risen waves as they pounded the harbour wall. From her viewpoint halfway up the hill, warm and dry in her sea facing room, she could see no boats coming in, just the churning feathered and unrelenting waves.

Startled and cricking her neck as she came too suddenly awake, the thumping on the door chorused in sync with the booming wind hitting the house and calling a warning. On the doorstep stood her lover, wet and weeping. “What’s happened, what’s the matter? Come in come in out of the wet and tell me what the matter is, what’s happened. You’re crying. What’s happened?”

He was a small man, Jason, and he moved with a strange sideways gait, thanks to a legacy hurt, a childhood injury that didn’t heal right, something to do with a slide as she recalled. She always noticed this movement and its curious irregular swing. It never changed. A constant, a strange sort of comfort. But the tears, the tears were not a constant, nor a comfort. She watched as he dumped rain slickers, boots and hat on the hall floor, splashing sea and rainwater onto the narrow walls where the water droplets slowly dribbled into corners and wept away into the carpet.

“Come in by the fire and tell me what’s wrong.” She pictured a run over dog, damage to the boat or a landslip that might’ve overcome her beehives. She was a little alarmed to see him go straight to the booze cupboard and pour himself a stiff one. Then he stood, staring out at the darkness and watching the rain hurl itself against the windows. Sparks as she threw another log on the woodburner before closing the door swift and tight against the surging heat. “Jason, what is it? Please.” She was starting to feel urgent, a more than anxious foreboding rising up inside, almost to nauseousness. She watched him sip his drink through the tears and choking gasps. The choking gasps might’ve been the whiskey: Jason didn’t drink. Even more cause for alarm as he contiued to sip and wheeze.

By now the storm had overwhelmed ocean, sky, hillside and all the rooftops, pathways and trees. Nothing was beyond its reach. Everything the storm touched was held in a tight and noisy and deadly embrace. Everything was teased with its terror, with rising fears that this time the weather might win and somehow take them all. She often told herself this, that it would one day take them all, that the weather would be the ultimate winner. But this was a silliness and she focused again on Jason. As Fiona leaned in close to him she felt fear tighten its grip and she knew it wasn’t the boat or the bees. “What happened?” she whispered, her round face tight and drawn of colour despite the woodburner’s warmth stretching throughout the room. “I was watching for your boat, but I must’ve nodded off so I didn’t see you come in.” Jason swallowed the last of his whiskey and slowly reached out with great deliberation to put the empty glass on the little table beside him. His face was very red and his tears were slowly falling. His eyes downcast and he picked at random bobbles of wool on his jumper. Then he took her hand and tried to look at her through the tears. Her eyes were wide with anticipation and her face pale with unsaid understanding, despite the warmth of the room. She knew. She was calm. But she needed the words. “It’s Callum isn’t it? It’s Cal. Where is he?” “Gone.” Jason sobbed and put his free hand over his face, clutching Fiona’s hand tighter and trying to keep his shoulders from rising with his buried sobs. “He went overboard with a huge swell we didn’t see coming and we got him out but by the time we did, in fading light and with the ring and the boathook and even a net we got him out, we didn’t lose him but it was too slow, we were too slow; he was too long under the water, he was too long without air, he drowned in front of us and the sea just kept pulling and pulling at him and we kept trying to get him in close to the boat and he fought and struggled and reached out for us but the sea kept burying him under, kept on and on and on until there was nothing but the bulk of him, dead and us still hanging on to the net. We lost the boathook and the ring. Nothing worked, nothing worked to keep him above the water. But we got him back. The sea couldn’t take him, but it was too late for Callum. Too late.” An overwhelming torrent and Jason fell sobbing into Fiona’s lap, buried under waves of sorrow and the horror of his last few hours.

Fiona sat very still stroking her lover’s wet hair and damp back. She noticed he was sodden through and that a soft mist rose from his crumpled body as the spirit of the sea drifted up now to claim her in a steamy caress. Her heart seemed to have stopped in her chest and her breathing was blocked. As night and storm slowly faded across the hours, the lovers were still stiff and still and silent as the morning light stretched into the room and eventually roused them.

Then to face the horrors of police, inquest, funeral, and all the ancillary processes of death. And then six months later what Fiona and Jason did next. What they and Callum would have forever, together. A window. A stained glass window in the village church that would memorialise Callum and all the other sailors the sea had claimed. 

She said loud “I want the window to be blue. I want it to be of sea and sky, of dawn and dusk, of what is beneath and above the surface, of truth and of turmoil. I want it to be modern and old, a luminous link between what is and what was, something ancient.” A little confused Jason nodded his agreement as the artist took notes and smiled a gentle understanding. “What was he like, Callum?” she said looking from one to the other. That neither of them could answer straightaway was at once a little puzzling and somehow encouraging. The artist tried a different tack. “You want this window to memorialise Callum, yes?” Jason this time with a sudden blurt, “no, no, not a memorial, a celebration of the sea and those it has claimed. A celebration of glory, of wonder and of life.” Fiona squeezed his hand. “Yes” she said, “that’s it, a celebration so that every scrap of light that shines through your work will be like a new light, a new life.”

The window took some time to complete, but it was finally installed one sharp winter morning, with a ceremony and blessings and the trappings of holiness. The watching sea glittered proud and beautiful whispering to a gleaming sky and the light of life. The small gathering stood back to hear the whispers and watch life’s glow reach into the church, illuminating all that it touched. Life. Immutable. Endless.

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck – a book review

Laurel Lindström Leave a comment

Published in 1945, Cannery Row breaks with Steinbeck’s earlier models in that it is a series of sometimes disconnected stories, rather than a cohesive narrative with an obvious story arc. At first glance it appears to be a very dense novel of allegory and tenderness, looking like another story of a dissolute group of men. They’re slightly devious, definitely unreliable  and all of them victims of something: a physically abusive wife, frustrated ambitions, laziness and alcohol. Cannery Row looks like it’s a tale of male friendship and yet it is not. The women have their own cohorts: the women working for Dora the local madam and the middle class busy bodies who try to exert power over the bars and brothel. As with Tortilla Flat the author is showing us an Arthurian allegory, based on life in a particular locale. He presents the bit of Monterey, California where the daily sardine catches are processed and canned in dedicated canning factories. This part of Monterey is long since gone: Cannery Row drifted into redundancy due to overfishing and now it’s a tourist destination.

The Cannery Row of 1943 as John Steinbeck tells it, is home to a group of apparently decadent characters: “the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junkheaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses”. In his novel’s first paragraph John Steinbeck tells us what to expect of his novel. In telling us this, Steinbeck’s opening paragraphs are reminiscent of Shakespeare’s prologues to Romeo and Juliet and Henry V. We’re told the set up.

Steinbeck’s story progresses slowly and he explores his themes through different narratives. Money is a big deal. And death and rebirth. Then there is love and kindness and of course human frailty. In a letter to his friend Carlton A. Sheffield in September 1944 just after Steinbeck had finished Cannery Row, he says he wrote the book with four levels. Tantalisingly he doesn’t say what those levels are, but I think he means as a simple set of stories, as an allegory, as a picture of Cannery Row and as an antedote to war. Despite its creation date (he began the book in 1943), there are no references to World War II at all in Cannery Row. The only military reference is the dawn walk of a pair of soldiers with their girlfriends, welcoming the rising sun: “… and the men lay down and put their heads in the girls’ laps and looked up into their faces. And they smiled at each other, a tired and peaceful and wonderful secret.” Beauty not destruction, even though the men are soldiers.

So what is this short novel about? First of all money. When Mack and the boys embark on an expedition to collect a few hundred frogs that Doc, owner of the marine biology lab, will sell on, they have no money for fuel. Nor do they have a vehicle. They persuade local grocer Lee Chong to let them take his derelict car which he got in return for clearing a groceries debt. The truck doesn’t go and of course it has no fuel. Doc arranges for fuel and the boys fix the truck up well enough to get to the place where there are lots of frogs. Except the truck’s frailties are such that it can only get up hills, if it is in reverse. After several mishaps, including one of the boys ending up in jail, they have their frogs. They return triumphant to Cannery Row and throw a party for Doc in his lab. Doc arrives home long after his party is over, his lab trashed and the frogs escaped to local culverts, ponds and streams. But in between the boys arriving home triumphant with their frogs and the ill-fated party, the frogs have become a trading currency in the neighbourhood. No winners where financial greed is concerned. The boys throw another party for Doc and this one he does make and enjoy, despite the second party ending up much like the first.

And then there’s death. No Steinbeck story would be complete without a violent death. In Cannery Row it comes early with the suicide of a local man indebted to Lee Chong. By handing over an abandoned building he owns in Cannery Row before blowing his brains out, the man settles his debt to the grocer. The boys suggest that the building is in need of protection from vandals and fire, so they should stay there for a nominal rent. This is never paid, but the boys move in and turn the old fishmeal store into a home they call the Palace Flophouse. Death and rebirth.

A little glimpse into the life of a gopher flips this around. A whole chapter is dedicated to a gopher, sleek and handsome and in the prime of life. He diligently builds a home for his mate who never materialises, even though his burrow “was a place where he could settle down and raise any number of families and the burrow could increase in all directions”. Eventually he gives up, abandons his lofty palace and moves to a nearby garden known for putting out lethal gopher traps. Death finds us all. Doc exploring Pacific tide pools discovers the body of a lovely young woman “wedged between two rocks”. He chooses to not claim the bounty: “will you report it? I’m not feeling well,” he tells another man on the beach.

Love and kindness are common themes in the work of John Steinbeck and in Cannery Row it’s part of almost every subplot. Lee Chong is generous and patient with people he knows are out to rip him off or steal from him. When he’s persuaded to lend the Mack and the boys his truck: “Lee was worried but couldn’t see any way out. The dangers were there and Lee knew all of them. ‘Okay, ’ said Lee”. Doc’s endless patience with the boys even though he knows there’s an agenda somewhere. Between shifts, the women of the Bear Flag brothel take soup out to local people ill with the ’flu. Despite the exhuberant trashing of his lab, Doc helps cure Mack’s puppy of distemper. Having noticed that he only has a grubby blanket for his bed, the whores sew a quilt for Doc’s birthday. The cruelties in the book, such as the likely fate of Frankie, a mentally frail young boy, are necessary counterpoints to these and many other expressions of love.

Human frailty and agency in all their manifestations permeate Steinbeck’s work and especially Cannery Row. Every decision we make or avoid has consequences, from drinking too much to not drinking enough. In Cannery Row, everyone’s choices are resolved one way or another, from Lee Chong’s greed and willingness to accept frogs as money, through to Frankie’s theft of a $50 clock and subsequent arrest. 

In less than 40,000 words of dazzling prose there is all this and much more. Cannery Row is short but it’s extremely dense, and that’s the novel’s power. Brevity masks the hugeness of story telling that makes Cannery Row an intensely powerful novel, both in its own time and for our own.

A book review: Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck (published 1935)

Laurel Lindström 2 Comments

Written forever ago describing places and people that can no longer exist in America, and yet so very contemporary. Reviews of Tortilla Flat have been coming out off and on for nearly one hundred years. I haven’t read any of them, but surely they also say that this short novel harbingers the Steinbeck of Nobel and Pulitzer. In Tortilla Flat we can already hear Steinbeck fast becoming a master craftsman. He’s only 33 years old but his authorial voice is loud and clear. Tortilla Flat is an early work, barely a novella and in this book Steinbeck flexed muscle and bone as hard as his Tortilla Flat characters avoid doing so. You could read it as a mysoginistic series of gruff clichés, except that the male friendship group Steinbeck describes is so tenderly drawn and they are such lovers and respecters of women. Or maybe they just fear them? Steinbeck’s female characters have such agency, even Señora Cortez who is barely 25 and has 9 children. She’s not entirely sure why and doesn’t much care who the fathers are. She and her mother thrive and her children are healthy and strong.

Tortilla Flat isn’t a single narrative but a series of little tales, written pictures, whatever you want to call them. John Steinbeck doesn’t be doing with the show don’t tell school of writing so championed by Ernest Hemingway. Steinbeck’s characters don’t need to be shown because his loving portrayals tell us who they are, he describes them so tenderly, so beautifully. And anyway I think the show don’t tell thing is a feint for writers too scared to let their imaginations loose on character. No risk of that with Steinbeck.

Tortilla Flat is set just after the first world war. It’s a series of windows we look through into other peoples’ lives. The lives we’re shown are those of a group of paisanos living in the hills behind Monterey, California. A muddle of Mexican and Italian, paisanos are the people of Tortilla Flat, liiving in their own, separate community. The paisanos live on the edge of a remote blob of America. Their world is anchored and yet separate, a collection of disparities that’s what made America America in the early 20th century. Tortilla Flat is one of countless communities that look to their common interest but only loosely connect themselves to others and no one much bothers. The sense of federation is far away and the government some remote entity that has little to do with day to day existence, day to day survival. 

In 1935 when the book was published America was recovering from a remote war that touched its local worlds from a great distance. An abstraction only made real when American soldiers came back, or didn’t. Several of the paisanos in Tortilla Flat are war veterans who came home to nothing and drift back into lifestyles of indolence and grift with no complaints and no expectation for much of anything. They live in the woods, on the beach, go with women as it suits. Upon his return from the war Danny discovers that he has inherited two houses in Tortilla Flat. The first one almost immediately catches fire and burns down. The second one Danny moves into along with a couple of his friends who share his lifestyle and values. They gradually accommodate more friends, a bunch of dogs and spend their time telling stories on the sun-warmed porch, and working out how best to get the next gallon of wine and something to eat. Occasionally they go with local women who just as occasionally decide they are in need of a man for a night or two. Chickens go missing and other peoples’ goats get milked. Children are fed and lovers wax and wane.

The story is not so much story as a space Steinbeck creates through the intense interiority of his characters. What a word. I mean that Steinbeck tells you what characters think, why they think as they do, their subtle and sincere rationales for their actions. Pilon, the logician and rationalist, cares only about what makes most sense to achieve his goals with the minimal moral compromise. And he considers the implications of actions and inactions, mostly concluding that he should do as he wants because his motivations and expectations are pure. In the movie of Tortilla Flat Spencer Tracey portrays Pilon as a bit of a rogue, trying to make him lovable but conniving. It doesn’t much work and I don’t think he hit his mark at all. Pilon is, as all the friends are, roguish in his way. But he has a deep sense of connection to those he cares about, especially to Danny. Danny is best described as feckless, a little thick and more concerned with his next thrill than anything else. But Pilon does care, he isn’t just a devious idler a “cunning mixture of good and evil”. All this Steinbeck tells us so beautifully: “Pilon was a lover of beauty and a mystic. He raised his face into the sky and his soul arose out of him into the sun’s afterglow …that Pilon was beautiful, and his thoughts were unstained with selfishness and lust.” 

These men are heroes in their world, champions for each other in word and deed, like medieval knights. They are not at all bothered with the urgencies of facing life’s challenges. Poverty or dispossession are not feared and these men are not pathetic curiosities. These men care about very little and their lives are shaped by small and easily satisfied wants: enough to eat, enough wine to drink, enough love, the occasional fight. We learn humility reading this book so long after it was written and in a world that is so very far from the gentle one Steinbeck shares. The love for that world and those people shines through every line.

Tortilla Flat is a masterclass in fiction writing and it has every marker for what John Steinbeck would come to be most associated with: the wonder of our everyday ordinariness, the need for kindness, survival and our responsibilities to one another and to our world. 

Byebye blurbs

Laurel Lindström Leave a comment

Once upon a time a blurb was a short description of a book on the flyleaf or the back that told you what the book was about. Over the years the blurb has turned into something much less helpful. What passes for blurbs today are short endorsements of a title, usually by other authors. They often include words like “brilliant” or “heartfelt” or “tour de force”. Nowadays gushing single-sentence guff counts as a blurb.

But modern blurbs are a waste of space, time, energy, eyetime. I’ve thought this for a long time and have mourned the loss of proper back-of-the-book summaries of stories. Now in a move author James Folta describes as “dazzling” publisher Simon & Schuster is dropping the requirement for authors to provide blurbs.

You’ll see at least one blurb on most books, but some have many, many supposedly authorative people offering effusive praise for a title. I managed one blurb for The Draftsman (thank you John Walsh), a debut novel. But successful authors are pushed to come up with as many as possible from names as lofty as possible. Why? Do readers really care if someone thinks a book is written in “effervescent” prose, or if it’s just “impossible to put down”? Or if the author has created a “tour de force”? It might as well be a tour de france or a divinely juicy sandwich you can’t stop chomping on. And should prose be effervescent at all? A nonsense all of it.

What authors want is readers and what readers want is a short summary of what the book’s about. How hard is that to get? What’s maybe more interesting is why publishers think that a bunch of mostly meaningless peer comments are of interest to readers. Is there a belief that if Salman Rushdie or JK Rowling has been arsed to supply a blurb for a book, that potential readers will be induced to cough up and buy the thing? Actually maybe that’s it. Perhaps publishers believe that readers are sheep, inclined to follow the lead of authors they respect. And that’s just silly. So many of the multiple blurbs splattering today’s fiction and nonfiction are written by people most readers have never heard of, because they are produced by the cognescenti of the book scene. It’s another example of the cosy closed world of friends of friends of agents or of colleagues in publishing who might be flattered to be asked. Or who are helping out as insurance for the future. Maybe it’s about protecting the exclusive inner shrine that is is today’s publishing business.

Harvesting blurbs is a soul destroying task for authors and their lexical supply chains. Far better to spend the time on more imaginative forms of promotion, working with alternative distribution channels, massaging the egos of booksellers and librarians and the trade press. Even writing the next book. Anything has to be more rewarding than blurb collecting.

Simon & Schuster’s “dazzling” move is a first, at least a first by a big name publisher. Sean Manning, Simon & Schuster’s president and publisher wrote in Publishers Weekly he’s “decided that beginning in 2025, the Simon & Schuster flagship imprint will no longer require authors to obtain blurbs for their books.” He also said that “this kind of favor trading creates an incestuous and unmeritocratic literary ecosystem that often rewards connections over talent”. This is spot on for an industry that trades on its history as nurturers of the contemporary socio-political et al voice. It’s all very precious, a cosy, protected space. 

More likely Mr Manning has made his decision because he recognises that it’s a waste of salaried peoples’ time collecting blurbs and that they really make little difference to potential buyers. He surely also understands that in today’s oversaturated market, publishers don’t need such unreliable tools to sell books. And besides AI can generate all the tempting whimsy you could possibly want, along with all manner of fictitious author identities, life stories and of course books. And who amongst readers will really care if the next Jilly Cooper title was AI generated. Jilly might but I bet her fans would be thrilled to get the next Rivals, say Rivals II or maybe Rivals: next generation? They’d buy it blurb or no blurb. And as to the AI thing, they just won’t care.

The Draftsman in brief

Laurel Lindström Leave a comment

Martin Cox left school at 16 with stellar grades. But too traumatised to progress any further academically, he instead took a low-paid, low-skilled job in a local drafting office.

Over the course of a couple of years Martin progresses in skill and appreciation of design and structure. He is an engineering genius and when he makes recommendations to change a patent application his life is turned around. He becomes very rich, but Martin Cox is a damaged man, a man whose past has left deep and abiding scars. He’s high-achieving, autistic, and craves routine and consistency in his life, yet he lives in chaos. He cannot relate to other people and is barely even aware of his own identity or his considerable limitations. Child abuse is not unusual in modern fiction, but a mother’s abuse of her son in the name of love is less common. Its legacy is rarely addressed.

When Martin Cox buys a house in the countryside, it is the first time ever he has spent any time out of London. He is slowly intrigued by the landscape and the history of the property. He starts to learn more about the original house, about the wartime hospital, about the school and about a young woman and her Canadian airman. As he becomes more fascinated, Martin starts to grow away from himself and towards others. He gradually comes to recognise the damage he has suffered at his mother’s hand, and even to care. His relationships become a source of healing, first the connection with his boss and later with his business minder. But these relationships are unclearly defined. The ambivalence with which the writer addresses Martin Cox’s sexuality is deliberate, a device to keep the reader guessing and a reflection of Martin’s own uncertainty and confusion.

Martin’s fascination with his house and its landscape, the local history, the wartime realities he learns more about as the book progresses, lead him to a mystery. As Martin’s sense of identity develops the reader sees his unacknowledged and unrecognised victimhood, mirror the solution of a mystery that only becomes apparent in the book’s climax.

The Draftsman is a compelling and highly original work of fiction. Readers come to understand Martin’s curious obsessions, contradictions and motivations through the course of the book. Martin’s logic, extreme orderliness and control are his default, but they mask his capacity to care or love. These limitations are a function of his mother’s unwelcome attentions.

© Laurel Lindström 2024

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Trial

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And error. The journey wasn’t improving and her map-reading skills were clearly nonexistent. The blind date had been fine, but what could go wrong in a Mexican restaurant where they served margueritas in glasses so big you could barely lift them. But this, finding a party somewhere in Santa Monica, was different and here they were on the 10 looking for the exit by trial and error. “I know exactly how we get there,” she’d said when she suggested this Santa Monica excursion as a second date. They’d met downtown, driving their cars on the 110 to the 10 stopping for coffee and leaving her car at a Denny’s somewhere off La Brea. He was driving and she was reading the map on her ’phone. He should’ve known this wasn’t going to work. She’d been a bit confused getting them back onto the freeway, so they’d ended up taking Apple Street running parallel to the 10. Slowly. 

He knew the way to Santa Monica, but chose to support her agency. It seemed only fair. On the surface street he took advantage of the dawdling pace to glance at her. He was wondering what had made that first date so great. Was it the voice, slightly drawling, peppered with pauses as she stared at the ceiling in search of the next words. Or was it the soft gleam of such very pale skin, almost translucent and unworldly in this dessicated Californian climate. Or was it that endearing vulnerability that made him want to wrap her up in his arms and just hold her forever. Or was it just tequila and lust. Libidinous joys had been sparse of late.

That voice, still gentle and sympathetic, was getting annoying. It never got out of second gear; he was trying to confirm that her friend’s baby shower was down on Second Street in Santa Monica. But the drawl was almost tidal in its relentlessness, so he tried hard not to show his exasperation and to be conversational in an eh-huh, ok, uhmmhmm, sort of way. And now they’re facing another navigational challenge, cruising within spitting distance of the 7B on ramp at Washington Boulevard, but her directions take them not onto the 10 but to Venice Boulevard running parallel to the freeway. Again. Her concentration on her ’phone meant momentary suspension of her droning voice; he could finally tell her, “listen, I haven’t been quite on it with you. I told you I’m not from LA. True. But I have lived here over 10 years. I can tell you we need to get on the 10, so I’ll take it from here. Okay?”. Those big baby blues turned on him as she slowly twisted in her seat and lowered her sunglasses from the top of her head to the well-sculpted bridge of her nose. She said nothing as he took the Culver Junction and got them back onto the 10 heading finally at a decent clip in the direction of Santa Monica and the now questionable joys of her friend’s party. A baby shower? Really? What was he thinking?

They crossed the 405 in silence and when he asked if she was sure about Olympic she said nothing. He took the exit and made a U turn at 14th to pull up in front of Tacos Por Favor. He knew Mexican was a fave food and he knew he’d gotten them back on track. He knew too that her calculations for how long the journey would take were wildly inaccurate. From where they were on Olympic would take them about fifteen minutes max to get to the party. They had almost an hour to spare. “We’ll be there way early. I need to eat. I think you’ll like this place.” She said nothing, wrestling instead with Google and its confusing maps. “So are we staying on Olympic,” she ventured, not moving. He was standing in the sharp sunshine, doing his best to keep focused on why he was bothering with this vague and annoying woman. But there was something in her winsomeness, her trial and error approach to getting somewhere. The Santa Ana wind was starting to pick up and he fancied he could already smell the hint of smokey air from distant fires. She was out of the car and looking at him with an equivocating expression; sunglasses up, brow slightly wrinkled, eyebrows raised, the mouth a quizzical pout. He melted a little. “Let’s go inside, let’s order; and I can explain.”

A prison visit

Laurel Lindström Leave a comment

The women were gathered around the steps in the creeping cold of a November Saturday, waiting for a heavy black door to open. The shadowed air was damp and clinging. False lashes were wilting, tight blonde pony tails were limp. A handful of long black spirals, laquered and permed had lost their spring. Only the botoxed lips and the fingernail claws were holding up. Some of the women were holding small children, some had slightly less small children in pushchairs. Some women were pregnant, a desolate cast to their faces. Jolly grandmas with lots of missing teeth were making jokes and smoking. Grim faced male friends and brothers kept their faces tight and unnavigable. They waited at the foot of the stone steps, slightly apart from the women and fidgetting from foot to foot.

In front of them all the high flintstone walls of the prison tipped forwards against the sky, looming and threatening to fall and engulf them at any moment. Somewhere inside their men were waiting, some keen and impatient, anxious to discuss what would change when they got out. Some were bored and unrepentant, disinterested. Some were annoyed that visiting hours, the visiting 90 minutes, coincided with the footie on the telly.

Behind the thick locked door the black and white uniforms, faces carved, colourless and set were waiting. And the keys on long chains, the security cameras, the registration forms, the sniffer dogs, weapons and id scanners. The curious atmosphere of routine boredom and habitual watchfulness. And time, flaccid and loose, moves patiently along the confining walls and corridors, leans lazy against hidden ceilings, hides in corners and under the furniture. It distorts the days and nights to create a new continuum.

The loneliness of the women, their patience and confusion, their anger and fear keeps company with time’s distortion. Inside in the waiting rooms, it is too warm, too close. The hovering testosterone of angry young men blisters the air and pock marks our sights and conversations. The slow tango that happens most Saturdays is not a scene we want to see, to share. It’s not a scene we can truly share with the regular visitors, or with their children. But we try to do it anyway.

We all go through the complicated security, sadly simple for the women who do it every week. We all put our stuff in lockers and throw tissues and chewing gum in the bin as instructed, because they are not allowed. We all go through the scanners and let the sniffer dogs do their thing. We all listen to the stern warden who tells us that smuggling drugs into the prison will get us a long prison term. Her voice is strict but also bored and as she calls the names of the women who can go through to the next stage, she jokes about not needing to repeat her other reminders. They try to laugh politely except the granny who guffaws and declares,  “alright darlin’ we got it first time around”. Except that the man they are visiting, did not get it the first time around and now here they all were coming to see him again as he waits out his fourth term in prison. Petty thefts and drugs and some violence. He didn’t get it in goes one to four, so five when it comes may be his chance to make a change. All a mistake, granny says.

A little boy of four or five smiles through all this and plays on the floor with the toy farm and its plastic animals. He asks his patient mother endless questions and she answers soft and indulgent, makes him sit beside her and holds his hand tight. He asks me where I live and I tell him and I ask him where he lives. He asks his mum and she tells him and he tells me with a proud smile, rolling the name of his town around his mouth for the first time and then again as he laughs through the word. He repeats it and repeats it and I laugh and his mum tries to laugh too. Tries hard to crack her golden face and stop the welling eyes from overflowing. She reaches for her little boy and folds him tight against her shoulder and he laughs and laughs as her tickling fingers caress him. He has no idea that he’s all there is to keep her from screaming her fear, her loneliness and her shattered belief that it wasn’t meant to be like this. And it wasn’t. It never is.

…so here is me trying to write romantic fiction

Laurel Lindström Leave a comment

The wind drove lonely clouds across a lowering sky and an icy rain was falling. Esmerelda pulled her shawl tight around her and hunched her shoulders. She leant into the wind, against the cold. She knew that somewhere in this desolate landscape she’d find the house. She knew that somewhere in the house, she’d find him. Would they let her see him? Would they know why she was there? Would he?

Ten years ago she could remember the way across the moors to the house. But that last time was in a summer of love and sunshine and so much had happened since. And there was so much more that was coming that Esmerelda daren’t take the chance of losing her way. She had to see him, she had to tell him about Elly before it was too late. She couldn’t risk getting lost, so she stuck to the road. Eyes down, one foot in front of the other, relentless and dogged along the sodden track.

The rain was coming down more heavily and it was getting dark. Off in the distance she could see the lights from the Hall. She trudged on determined, cold and so very alone as the dusk deepened and the wind picked up. To comfort herself Esmerelda took refuge in memories dragged up from the depths of her being, from somewhere deep amongst the shards of her broken heart. Simon had loved her, this she knew. Simon was coming for her this she knew too. Until things changed.

The certainty ended when she encountered a wayward hussar on the run from his regiment. He had told Esmerelda a different story when he had begged shelter. In a cavernous kitchen deep in the bowels of a big house, Esmerelda was getting food ready for the family. They were due to return to Harehurst Hall within hours and the whole house was in an uproar of preparations. She was humming softly and for a few brief moments, she was blissfully alone in the kitchen stirring a steaming pot of casserole. The hussar must have been waiting for his moment, the moment when Esmerelda was by herself. Drifting in and out of consciousness he had staggered in towards the warm, falling across the scullery threshold exhausted and hungry. An unexpected and filthy mess had fainted on Esmerelda’s immaculate floor. 

Esmerelda gave a small scream of surprise, dropping her spoon into the depths of the stew. Hot gravy was splashing on her apron and burning her hands. At the sound of her cry the hussar roused himself and looked up, peering at her through tangled wet hair, his blue eyes bleary and bloodshot. He was wild with unspoken fear and looked about the kitchen in terror, lest someone else come into the room. But the rest of the staff were busying themselves elsewhere, anxious to be ready for the telltale sounds of hooves and wheels on gravel as the family finally arrived home. Esmerelda could see that this pathetic wretch could do her no harm. She could see that the poor man needed food, warmth and shelter. He was doing his best to whisper something and she thought she heard in his garbled mumbling something about Simon. She drew a sharp breath and hurried to shut the main kitchen door, locking it sharply. 

… to be continued (or not).