My experience of ships is that on them one makes an interesting discovery about the world. One finds one can do without it completely.
– Malcolm Bradbury

O how I love a good literary scandal. It’s indecent of me, I know. But I’ll never forget my jubilant dance around the Port Douglas newsagency on the morning the Courier Mail broke the news that the so-called Helen Demidenko’s vile, amateurish and virulently anti-Semitic The Hand That Signed the Paper was not, after all, a semi-biographical masterpiece by a young woman of Ukrainian descent who confirmed her ancestry by turning up to collect her many awards in a relentless array of peasant blouses.
No. It was a vile, amateurish and virulently anti-Semitic piece of crap by the daughter of an English taxi driver called Darville.
Weeks passed before a few writers realised that the few good passages in the book seemed familiar – because they’d been lifted from elsewhere. Further evidence of incompetence. If you’re going to knock off someone’s work in Australia, don’t pick on Thomas Kenneally – choose an author nobody’s ever read. She kept at it, too, though why any editor in Australia ever trusted her again, I don’t know. She’s not even very good. Not to mention the taste in clothes.
Loved the Norma Khouri scandal too. At last a publisher took the view that misrepresentation of yourself and your text is a contract breach. The moral: never trust anyone in a peasant blouse.
Poor old Random House. Now it’s happened again.
The Smoking Gun has published the comprehensive results of a six week investigation into the “memoir” of James Frey, A Million Little Pieces. In it, Frey apparently tells his true life story of alcoholism, drug addiction, crime and time in prison. But somehow he forgot to mention it was fiction.
Smoking Gun alleges that:

Police reports, court records, interviews with law enforcement personnel, and other sources have put the lie to many key sections of Frey’s book. The 36-year-old author, these documents and interviews show, wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw “wanted in three states.”

I haven’t read the book (too much vomiting for me). But Oprah Winfrey has. She found it so moving, she named it as her Book Club pick and catapulted it into the charts. Presumably this made him a very rich man – he’s sold almost as many copies in the US as Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
In the TV interview, Frey told Oprah:
“I was a bad guy. If I was gonna write a book that was true, and I was gonna write a book that was honest, then I was gonna have to write about myself in very, very negative ways.”
Oprah was misled. You can’t blame her, though some commentators have. It’s clearly a very moving and popular book – but it’s not true. Doubleday/Random House are standing by their man for now. But I wouldn’t want to be the person who answers the phone when Oprah calls.
New York literary agent and blogger, Miss Snark, is interesting on the matter. “We knew,” she admitted today. “We all knew. And no-one did anything.”
Meanwhile, the New York Times, which knows the feeling only too well, says there’s more scandal to follow.

Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.
– Victor Hugo

I tried to be good last week and read some Improving Novels, after months and months of non-fiction, research and kids’ books.
It started promisingly enough, with Conspirators, by Michael Andre Bernstein. It’s been described as Proustian, and it is indeed a faceted gem of a book: faceted in many senses; densely and carefully crafted, its core able to be viewed from many perspectives, all slightly obtuse. Proust without quite so many semi-colons, perhaps, although Bernstein’s grammar and punctuation are impeccable and engrossing (if you watch comma placement as a spectator sport, which I do).
It’s a complex thriller, really – perceptive and unflinching, populated by an entire community of interesting, if not likeable, characters, slowly entrapping the reader in a compelling web of court politics and revolutionary cells, anti-Semitism and Messianic prophecies, and capturing the lumbering Zeppelin that was the Austro-Hungarian Empire before it crashed and burned. Over it all, at least in the mind of the know-all reader, hangs that stultifying fog of foresight: these bright, if silly, young revolutionaries will all soon be dead in World War One; this thriving Jewish community will be gone in another generation.
Things went a little downhill after that, with Elizabeth Knox’s Billie’s Kiss. I expected much of it, with all her awards and fellowships, and locals here raving about every new book. I admit that Daylight has been sitting in the To Read pile by my bed for a year – you have to be in quite a specific mood for a vampire novel, and I’ve never quite got there. Still, I launched into Billie’s Kiss with enthusiasm, and then found myself laughing out loud a few times in the first few chapters at jarring metaphors and ill-considered adjectives. But finally the plot carried me along through its currents, all Edwardian sideburns and sullen Scots islanders. Again, it becomes something of a thriller, and again the war clouds hang low. I read it in one sitting, which can’t be all bad, but finally felt let down by some rapid plot resolution and the tying up of character loose-ends which could have happily been left frayed.
That was the end of my experiment. I promise to try harder. But then I couldn’t resist the temptation of Richard Holmes’ Footsteps, following the travels and travails of RL Stevenson, Mary Wollstonecraft in Revolutionary Paris, and Shelley’s final years in Italy. The Wollstonecraft chapter led me on to Brian Dolan’s Ladies of the Grand Tour, and then the idea of Paris under siege made me pick up a pop history of the Comet Line, Freedom Line, paying tribute to the Belgian, French and Basque people who risked their lives to rescue airmen shot down over Nazi-occupied Europe.
Now it’s back into the welcoming leaves of Jan Morris, with her final volume in the Britannia triptych, Farewell the Trumpets. That makes me happy.
But the more I read, the more books I urgently have to write, so I might just stick to Who Weekly from now on.

You won’t want to believe these are true, but if Miss Snark says so, they’re true. Gasp in horror, shriek, wince, and snort coffee out your nose at these excerpts from stories submitted to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. Then go double-check everything you ever wrote.
My favourites:

Out of the dark void came what looked like a giant rabbit followed by small rabbits which had looked as if they had undergone a mutation with three ears and 2 tails. They discovered they were on Rabbitania.

Jake was not a man to show much emotion, but he found himself supressing the urge to smile out loud.

They were human in every way but they owned the necks, heads, facial expressions were that of a chicken.

Ashala’s head felt like vermicelli slowly slipping off the platter of her sholders.

It’s excruciating. But hilarious. The spelling and all other quirks are original – remember these next time you use the right-click Word thesaurus:

The afternoon was very calm but consolidated. The birds were singing but were not blithesome.

“Stand slow!” a voice rang out with hollow ubiquity.

Indulge in the complete agonising experience here (and if you’re a writer or interested in getting published, Miss Snark’s is the blog du jour).

When I flew out of Melbourne on New Year’s Eve it was 32 degrees (that’s Celsius) at 9am. 44 bushfires were burning further north.
I get very confused at airports. I forget where home is. Deep in my being, home is Melbourne. But for the past seven years, it’s been elsewhere – the place where my partner is, where I live, where my books and stuff are waiting, where I work. But I forget.
This is nothing new. It was worst when I lived in Sydney and shuttled back and forth to Melbourne for work all the time. I’ve often tried to get on the wrong plane in those middle of the night transits in Dubai or Singapore, not quite awake and heading in the wrong direction.
At the weekend I remembered to stand in the correct check-in queue, even though it was only 7am, but by the time I got to the counter, my mind had wandered. Airports do that to me.
“And where are we off to today?” asked the Qantas man.
“Melbourne,” I said, confidently.
“You’re already in Melbourne,” he said gently.
“Oh, well – must be the other place.”
“You need to give me more of a hint,” he said. He’d probably been working since 4am. They were checking in four flights at once. “The possibilities are Japan, Shanghai via Sydney, Auckland or Hong Kong.”
“I’ll take Auckland,” I said, even though I’m desperate to go to Shanghai and Hong Kong’s one of my favourite cities.
I blame e-tickets. You don’t have a bit of paper that tells you where you’re flying, or, more importantly, tells the weary airline staff which flight you’ve booked. Well, I might have printed it out but it’s … somewhere. I need it pinned to my lapel, like Paddington Bear. If only I could figure out which destination to write on the label.

Back home everyone said I didn’t have any talent. They might be saying the same thing here, but it sounds better in French.

– Jerry (played by Gene Kelly), An American In Paris.

I’m flying to Melbourne today to see my family. Here in Auckland there’s a gale force wind and it’s been raining all week. You’d never know it’s summer. Across the Tasman, three states have declared total fire bans and bushfire season is well underway.
A few years ago, I lived in the bush south of Sydney. On Christmas Day a huge firestorm swept through the National Park, burning three quarters of it (that’s a lot of trees – a lot of animals). I was in Melbourne, as usual, for Christmas lunch, and watched the fire front get closer to my house – on the TV news.
So on Boxing Day (or maybe it was the day after) my brother drove me back from the beach house in the middle of the night to the airport, I jumped on a plane, and went back to Sydney to defend my home.
Our town was blocked off by the fire. I had to leave the car across the water and get a ferry. By then the fire front was visible from the roof, heading our way. The sun was blood-red, like Mordor. I was the hobbit.
One day I’ll be able to describe what it’s like to choose a suitcase worth of your life – just enough to carry – and make the decision to leave everything else: thousands of books, paintings, memories, stuff. I’ve got a lot of stuff. Your grandmother’s sewing machine. The painting you did aged five that Dad had framed. Photos – hopefully someone else has the negatives. Gifts from lovers, from children, from friends. I’ve written before about choosing one book to save.
I had time to say goodbye. I had time to clear up the bush debris and soak the grass and climb on the roof with the hose to fill the gutters with water. I had night after night on watch, eyes streaming with the smoke, endless repetition on the fire warnings coming over the radio, endless hosing and raking and covering windows.
The fire stopped outside town. We were saved by a wind change and some very brave and dauntless fire fighters. We were driving through it for days, as the fire brigades mopped up: flames right next to the road, smoke spewing everywhere, until it rained at last.
It’s no coincidence that I’ve been writing a story about the Great Fire of London for the last few months, about random flames, power, smoke, ferocity and dread.
So my thoughts are with everyone in that town tonight (since the bush will have just grown back enough for the leaf litter to have built up again) and every other town facing the possibility of an inferno over the next few days.
As we say in Aussie, avagoodweegend.
The blog will be off the air while I deal with a roast lunch and plum pudding (probably in 35 degree heat, but we’re used to it).

There’s an article on Slate right now which summarises some fascinating theories on why kids love fantasy (and therefore, why it’s OK for kids to love fantasy, so the Pope can stop worrying about Harry Potter).
The crux of the argument is that theorising and fantasizing are similar processes:

… Cognitive science suggests that children may love fantasy not because they can’t appreciate the truth or because their lives are difficult, but for precisely the opposite reason. Children may have such an affinity for the imaginary just because they are so single-mindedly devoted to finding the truth, and because their lives are protected in order to allow them to do so… The point is not that reading fantastic literature or playing fantastic games will make children smarter or more well-adjusted or get better grades in their chemistry classes…
But, still, since it’s Christmas, we might indulge in a moment or two of sheer childlike pleasure in a beautiful reality. The spirit of possibility and play that leads children to read the Narnia books and watch the Harry Potter movies, and to just imagine, is at the heart of what it is to be human.

Einstein would agree, I’m sure, since he saw theory as inherently creative and imaginative. So, perhaps, would Tolkien.
As if to back this up, the New Yorker this week serendipitously features an interview with Philip Pullman, focused on his views on religion (with a nice bit of anti-Narnia spleen-venting thrown in for good measure):

In Lyra’s world, the Bible isn’t quite the same as ours: when Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, the first thing they see is the adult form of their daemons. “But it en’t true, is it?” Lyra asks of the story. “Not true like chemistry or engineering, not that kind of true? There wasn’t really an Adam and Eve?” Lord Asriel tells her to think of the story as an “imaginary number, like the square root of minus one.” Its truth might not be tangible, but you can use it to calculate “all manner of things that couldn’t be imagined without it.” The metaphor is not just cunning; it helps explain why Pullman, a champion of science, writes in the fantastic mode.

Well, well, well.
The much-maligned Enid Blyton strikes back. This week, British adults voted her Famous Five series as their own favourite books for children.
The series – which started 63 years ago – pipped Chronicles of Narnia to win first place in a national poll (by YouGov, commissioned by the National Literacy Trust). This is in spite of a couple of decades of derision directed at Mrs Blyton and her creations, and all the current hoo-ha about CS Lewis’s Narnia stories.
In announcing the result, John Ezard in The Guardian still couldn’t quite bring himself to be gracious:

The Famous Five are a group of clean-living, well brought-up middle class children who take pride in being “jolly good sports”. Their adventures, fuelled by their inexhaustible addiction to ginger beer, lemonade and sandwiches (“Oh goody, cucumber,” said George), were dismissed as hopelessly outdated and irrelevant by librarians and others in the 1970s.

Blyton’s gentle fantasy, The Faraway Tree, came third, followed by Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Both of which, you imagine, ought to have had a bit of a boost from Hollywood in recent years). Blyton also took 16th and 17th place in the top 20 with the Secret Seven adventure series and the Malory Towers girls school series. There’s no mention of my personal favourite, The Secret of Killimoon – my mother’s old copy had some critical pages missing, and I nearly cried with the anguish of never knowing what had happened in them.
The Famous Five were Julian, Dick and Anne, plus their cousin Georgina (George) and dog, Timmy. It’s fair enough to say that it’s hard to tell Julian and Anne from Peter and Susan in Narnia, or any of them from the Secret Seven, but George may well be responsible for me never ceasing to be a tomboy. Still, we won’t hold that against poor Enid. I’m sure she didn’t intend it.
In defence of Enid Blyton, although I find it hard to read the books as an adult, at least her Five and Seven characters had interesting adventures – a new mystery to solve every time – and they were smarter than the police, brave and energetic, cycled everywhere, and never had to be saved by grown-ups. They were never sappy like dumb old Nancy Drew. They had dogs, which is always good, and big appetites. I remember most vividly the descriptions of High Tea which always came at some point towards the end and sounded terribly grand. “What’s jugged hare, Mum?” I’d ask. “Can we have that for dinner? Can you please make scones? It’s an emergency.” The Famous Five might not have had the grand scale of Lord of the Rings but they were ripping good yarns, well told.
It must be said that adult memories of cherished childhood books are sometimes more faithful to the experience of the reading adventure, than the text itself. My bet would be that the order would be different if all those who voted had to read the books again. But never mind. The people have spoken, and here’s the list:
Top 10 books
1 Famous Five
2 Chronicles of Narnia
3 The Faraway Tree
4 The Hobbit
5 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
6 Black Beauty
7 Treasure Island
8 Biggles
9 Swallows and Amazons
10 Lord of the Rings

Anyway, what’s wrong with being a jolly good sport?