Writing In Lockdown – The Stone Circle

Living in Lockdown is very much like living in a dark perpetual present with the feeling of death all around. But in this state I find my mind wandering back to other ‘presents’ which – I realise now - were to prove to be the roots of a whole range of novels. This is been hammered home to me in the last year as I worked on the stories in the Kaleidoscope collection - each fictional story set at some point in my 50 year past and rendered in the telling as the present. On reflection all my novels emerge from a sense of the present in the past: rendering the past as though it were the urgent, vibrant present. (The fictional stories in Kaleidoscope are  full of these urgent allusions. See right.)

 

And recently I have discovered -  in deep-diving into my 50 years of notebooks - how much my own present is bedded significantly in my own past. As well as this I am struck by how much an enduring sense of place has always featured in my writing.

I am not unique. I know that many writers clearly operate in the past in the present. And they add meaning to their fiction by their deep sense of place.  There are eminent examples of this – for instance we have Pat Barker bringing to present, urgent life the time of the Trojan wars and Hilary Mantel reliving for us turbulent Tudor times which have so many parallels in the present day.  

Anyway  the deep dive into my notebooks (from about 2008) I have discovered my poem called The Stone Circle. And now it occurs to me that in these stones crafted by human hands the present lives of the makers thousands of years ago still endure and add meaning to our contemporary lives. Certainly they have to mine.

 The Stone Circle

This stone circle was  formed 
by the chip chipping of men with skilful fingers.

And now it survives although though
 their string has withered  and their chalk 
has crumpled

Its original purpose was for,

 people coming  from miles around, to meet
at moon-rising to exchange their goods - 

and cream the profit from  
their surplus.

They sit here still, ghostly,  

in this green place surrounded by hills.

It mirrors the sun, which burns
  up there, not  acknowledging
 its puny planets.

ps. In writing this now I am reminded of lunchtimes in my Northern working class school when I escaped the pressures of the schoolyard and wandered around nearby graveyard making up stories in my head about the people whose names I read on the stones. I was nine years old and knew then I would be a writer. A working class writer, It seems they are trending now...

The Complex Attraction of World War One Novels.

I have been working my way through novels inspired by World War One for a discussion TOMORROW in Durham’s Belmont Library which I have signalled here on the blog a while ago (Scroll down…) . I hope our discussion will tomorrow surround the almost perpetual dynamics of those events for succeeding generations of readers and writers.  

The list of possible reads is almost impossibly diverse – from Willa Cather to Pat Barker, from Jaroslav Hasek to John Boyne.

Of course Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy sets the marker for modern fiction as a literary illumination of the impact of trench warfare on individuals. Then there is ...

Willa Cather’s 1921 novel One of Ours – which drew misogynistic criticism in its time – was a surprise and a delight.

Jaroslav Hasek’s Good Soldier Sweik reminded me how comedy and irony can enhance our understanding of an individual‘s experience of the madness of war.

John Boyne’s very readable Absolutist, like The Lie, (See

below), visits the emotional territory of the friendship between two young men and the now not so forbidden territory of homosexual friendship at that time. It also brings conscientious objection into the fictional mix of this very readable novel. (My Novel Riches of the Earth also reflects on the experience of a conscientious objector as well as the individual experiences in and over the trenches of the Somme)
My Favourite Novel to date is Helen Dunmore’s novel: The Lie

 ‘A soldier, “clagged in mud from head to foot”, appears at the foot of Daniel Branwell’s bed. It is 1920 and the war is now over. But Frederick, his closest childhood friend, has been making such night-time visitations ever since Daniel failed to rescue him on the French battlefield. In her unnervingly ambiguous new novel, Helen Dunmore presents a haunting that wavers between ghost story and a study of war trauma.’  Benjamin Evans in The Telegraph

I find The Lie hard to summarise. It is not a typical ‘World War One Novel.’

 In The Lie one person’s highly personal story is  revealed in retrospect: Daniel’s experience of war and its impact on his life is seen through the prism of his experiences in the trenches. A persistent ghost   dissolves the past and the present into one.     

This is a delicate love story between two men of different classes at a time when even officers in the trenches had their ‘soldier servants’ – not yet called ‘batmen’. This relationship survives the war as, in the present; the dead Frederick’s sister becomes Daniel's surrogate for Frederick.

The Lie is a novel of character

-       - of the present Daniel in his post war torment

-        - of Daniel the soldier at annihilating war,   bewildered when his intimate childhood friend becomes his office

-        of the two boys in their self-defining childhood, lodging with us the differences between them and their impact of each on the other

-        of Daniel’s deluded present when he encounters death and ritualises burial, fatefully breaking social taboos in the post-war world.

The Lie is a novel of a haunting

The layers of Daniel’s heartbreak and tra gedy beat under the subtle storytelling made manifest in the story by Frederick’s ghost. The Lie at the centre of his story which is in one way the saving of Daniel is also his undoing.

Th Lie is a novel of place

-      -  of the stinking despairing territory of the trenches and no-man’s land

 -  of the life-enhancing green routines of a Cornwall village – a boy’s paradise and then the location of haunted post- war terror.

The Writing

In novel after novel Helen Dunmore demonstrates her subtle ability to chart the threatening psychological universe of the personality under stress. Perhaps the sustaining inspiration of World War One seems perpetually to function as a demonstration of the brutal end of innocence right across the European landscape.

As Stephanie Merrit says in her Guardian Review: ‘Any account of the Great War is littered with the stories of young lives wasted, but in this novel Dunmore has wreaked tenderness out of tragedy, so that the reader is left with the sense that something beautiful, however fleeting, has been salvaged from the darkness.’

I hope you find time to read or re-read some of these novels. Their relevance resounds today when we reflect on the nightmare experiences of both soldiers and civilians in the succession of Middle East conflicts  Might we recognise that  as another world war of the Twenty First Century kind?

-         

Brilliant RTW Celebration of our Winning Writers

Laughter and  great conversation  at last night's Room To Write celebration for the winners and shortlisted writers in our

Room to Write Short Story Competition.

Today, from Ruth Henderson, short-listed writer, to us at  'Room to Write':

Dear Avril, Wendy and Gillian. Thank you for a lovely time last evening, it was good to talk to all the short listed writers, there's always a new friend to make. Listening to why the judges liked a particular story was so interesting, I'm looking forward to reading them all. ...You were all so kind to me, seeking me out to talk about my work.  it was obvious all the judges really had read every story, and, although I'm sure Pat Barker was kind to all of us, I was thrilled when she spoke to me with such knowledge and understanding of my story. so once again, many thanks and i wish success to you all and continuing prestige for Room to Write'                                           Ruth

Sally Wylden - , short-listed writer - talking to Pat Barker

Writers Eileen Elgey and Liz  Gill celebrate in style

Our Winner Christine Powell in the peace garden
at  the Lafcadio Hearn Peace Garden at Lafkadio Hearn Centre
at Teikyo University at Durham

Novelist Pat Barker who presented the prizes talking to two winners
Christine Powell and John Adams

rachel cochrane in earnest conversation with writers. Rachel
 will record the winning stories for her broadcasting website   

Ruth Henderson - short listed writer - in conversation.
Behind her Mike Daley Bursar  of  
Teiko University of Japan in Durham. 

In the centre here writers Kitty Fitzgerald and Carol Clewlow . With her, hand chin, middle distance, is short-listed writer Isabel Costello,

Me taking a breather  
(I am smiling inside, honestly!)