Matin Provost’s film Où Va La Nuit , based on my novel The Long Falling , opens in cinemas in France and Belgium on May 4th. It features Yolande Moreau in the lead role. Here’s a trailer.
Où Va La Nuit
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Category Archives: Things happening
Things to read and do
This week’s issue of The New Yorker has a new story of mine called Goo Book . The issue is dated April 11th but it’s out now (April 4th). Apologies to those of you who were expecting it last week (or the week before), but world events intervened and The New Yorker was understandably pressed for space.
There is also a brief Q&A on The New Yorker website about the story which you can read here .
The current issue of Zoetrope All-Story also has a new story called Rothko Eggs . The version printed in the magazine has some errors that crept in during a copy edit. There isn’t a huge number of them, but they do affect the flow of the story, and one on the last page alters the ending. So Zoetrope have put the correct version of the story up on their website, and you can read it here . Ideally, go and buy the magazine – there are some great photographs in there by Mark Romanek; there’s a David Means story; there’s other fiction by Johanna Suskind and Frances de Pontes Peebles; there’s an old Raymond Carver – then print off my story from the website and stick it in there using glue, Sellotape or spit.
I wrote a review of Kevin Barry’s début novel City of Bohane for the Irish Times, and that came out on Saturday. You can read it here .
Finally, I’ll be in Dublin next weekend for the Franco Irish Literary Festival , which takes place at Dublin Castle. This is the second time I’ve attended this festival – it’s a great opportunity to meet and hear writers from France and Ireland (and elsewhere). I’m doing a Café Littéraire on Friday 8th at 6pm with Philippe Forest and Julia Franck; and a Literary Brunch at 11am on Sunday 10th with Claude Arnaud, Eric Fottorino, Virginie Linhart and Micheál Ó Conghaile. All events take place in the Coach House in Dublin Castle, and are free and open to all. Come and say hello.
Edinburgh
I have moved to Edinburgh. After nearly 12 years in London it suddenly seemed time to get out, and I left almost immediately. Moving is horrible. If you do it very fast at least the pain is concentrated and quicker to fade.
The main reason was financial. Edinburgh is really not at all a cheap city. In many ways it’s as – or more – expensive than London. The cost of essentials such as cafés and buses and heroin do not compare favourably to London. But in terms of rent, it is much cheaper. And my rent in London was getting spidery, fisty, rank.
There were other reasons. The Met is deranged of course, institutionally, but there are amongst its ranks some clever detectives still, and one in particular was making progress on the Forrester Road episode from the summer before last. I believe I sealed things off before leaving, a cauterising iron on the landlord for example, the shifting of the boxes out of storage and into the attic of a house in Bounds Green one afternoon while my friend who lives there was at the dentist. He never goes into the attic. I’m pretty confident that my move north won’t have left a trail. Although what I did in Burton-In-Kendal services when I was taking the van up the M6 was fucking stupid. Luck limps after me.
Edinburgh is a relaxed city. I am still settling, still getting used to its layout, its atmosphere, its peculiar demography, its noises, odours, tastes. But it feels, especially now, clipped out in darkness and a light cold, the right place to carry on my work. The alleys and closes, the stairs and steps and graveyards, the tenements and mansions, the hills and views, the stone and the stone and the stone. It is an excellent hall for me. A walk in the small hours across the Meadows and up into the lanes around the Grassmarket yields possibilities at almost every pause.
In December there was snow, so obviously it was far too dangerous to do anything at all. Which was a pity, as I’d done nothing since September. But after the thaw at the start of this month I have been out amongst the elderly of Morningside, the students of the Old Town, the bankers of Charlotte Square, and the schoolchildren of Bruntsfield, my eye and my hands like slithers and flays, icing the cuts with the kiss of a million little prickling daggers, ringside on a circus tragedy, mothering and fathering a magnificent goodnight, send in the frowns, etc.
They don’t know what’s going on. It’s a privilege. For all of us. And gloriously entertaining. I giggle in the narrows and the stone makes a song of it. It is wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.
My flat is small, but it has a pleasant outlook, and though the electrics are eccentric and the plumbing ancient, it serves. I have made no friends. My isolation is solid as a lamb. I have switched broadband supplier, to BT, who are expensive and neurotic. I don’t recommend them. I hope to write more regularly to the blog now, perhaps about the books I have been reading, perhaps about aspects of my life unsuitable for other platforms. About books I think, for the most part. I am continuously startled and overwhelmed by great books. They strangle me and I am happy I am happy I am happy here.
All in all, it has been a good move I think. I read a lot of Barraclough, and Michael Mercer, and when the moon is out I hiss at its face like an axe.
Mercier And Camier And Faber And Me
Faber have begun to publish their series of the complete works of Beckett in newly edited editions and in a "unified design". And they look good. Rhys Tranter, who runs the wonderful A Piece Of Monologue site has kindly tipped me off that on the back of the new edition of Mercier And Camier is a quote from me. This is a lovely thing. It makes me feel quite pleased with myself. No no, Sam, please, don’t thank me, I’m happy to help.
I’d like to think that Faber have used me in an attempt to appeal to a younger, hipper audience. It’s more likely that I’m the only writer who’s ever bothered to write anything about Mercier And Camier and they had no choice. The quote is from an article I wrote for The Guardian ages ago, and you can read it in full here .
The Long Filming
A French film production of my first novel The Long Falling starts principle photography in Northern France and Belgium this week. It’s directed by Martin Provost , who made Séraphine , which starred Yolande Moreau – who also takes the main role in the new film. The two of them have, as I understand it, been the driving force behind getting this project – a difficult sell, I’d have thought – off the ground. The novel has been adapted to a French/Belgian setting, and names and other things (including the title) will change considerably. I don’t know anything about the adaptation. I didn’t want to, and didn’t ask. But these are talented film makers, and I’m very glad it’s them, and I wish them well.
I’ve lost count of the number of times books of mine have been optioned over the years. The first time it happened I took a deep breath, thought about the money, and tried to keep a close eye on what they were up to. But I soon realised that film options are a weird sort of futures trading and have little to do with the actual business (never mind the art) of making actual films. It has become quite a welcome, modest, source of income for me. Film makers get in touch, offer money to have exclusive rights to try and develop a script and raise more money to film it, I say yes, they pay me, and then they can’t get it together and after a year is up, maybe even two, they disappear. Suits me.
It suits me because I don’t really want anyone to film my books. They are books. Novels, mostly. Complete unto themselves. They are not blueprints for art in another medium. Why can’t film makers just make films? Do they not have ideas of their own? It puzzles me. Making art might be thought of as a sort of elaborate, public cleansing ritual. It’s odd and unsettling to have some guy come along and climb into your dirty bathwater.
And I can’t be the only reader who gets pissed off when Hollywood comes stamping all over a novel that means something to me. When I love a book, I dread – and I really do mean dread – that some bastard will film it. And worse, that the film will be a commercial success. That characters and scenes and ideas that are alive inside me in complex non visual ways involving language and tone and a carefully, skilfully evoked atmosphere, will turn up as squashed, horrible, crushed reductions all over the television or the radio or the sides of buses.
Most recently for example, The Road . I have no idea if it’s a good film or not. I really don’t care. The point is that that man and his son have lived in my head since I read the book, and my emotional attachment to them, and to it, is so deep and genuinely meaningful to me, that the bits of clips that I glimpsed before I could hit the remote, the bits of useless special effects that suddenly appeared on the TV during ad breaks before I realised what it was, the face of Vigo Mortensen being anguished on posters, have – despite my vigilance – somewhat spoiled the life of the book in my memory. Where it lives as a world, a feeling, built on the language of Cormac McCarthy and the material of my own imagination and experience, and where it should be allowed to live on – without being subjected to a jarring translation into mundane specifics.
Next year, god help us, we get the Tintin films. You have no idea how depressed this makes me. Really. When I was about eight, my Dad bought me a copy of The Black Island in Dublin city centre. I read it in the car on the way home and it changed my life. Seriously. During my teens I learned more from Hergé about how to write than I did from any other writer. (For a superb account of just how good the Tintin books really are, I can thoroughly recommend Tom McCarthy’s Tintin And The Secret Of Literature .) And I lived in those books. Part of me still lives in them. To this day, when I take to my bed, it’s The Calculus Affair, Tintin In Tibet, The Seven Crystal Balls , that I take with me. Most of all it’s The Castafiore Emerald – one of the very few almost perfect books – that sustains my imaginative life. I have smuggled bits of Hergé into every novel I’ve written. Sometimes people notice, and it thrills me.
My point though, is simply that the boy detective and his friends are fully alive in my imagination. They live and breathe and speak there, and the colours of their world and the tones of their voices, though not fixed, move within an orbit created by the skill of Hergé as a writer and an artist, and by my own experience of reading about them, and my childhood and my youth and my life, and that inner world is precious to me, completely precious and valued and loved; and next year, with a deluge of advertising, breakfast cereals, action figures and nauseating celebrity interviews, that bastard Stephen Spielberg is going to fuck it all up, and no matter how much I try to isolate myself and ignore the whole horrible thing, my beautiful inner world is going to be violated by Jamie fucking Billy Elliot Bell and Andy fucking Gollum Serkis, and Nick fucking Frost and Simon fucking Pegg. And even if these people (all of whom I, annoyingly, quite like) create something marvellous, it won’t be my marvellous – the one me and Hergé created – and I’d really rather that the whole project was hit by a shooting star, an Inca curse, something, anything, that shut it down now and forever.
I’m not sure there’s anyone quite as emotionally invested in The Long Falling as I am in the Tintin books. But I know there are people to whom it means a great deal. I hope you won’t mind the film too much. If you think you will, I hope you can avoid it. I’m sure that won’t hit the takings too much.
The truth is that I needed the money. And I am sufficiently removed from the book that it doesn’t tug at me at all. To be honest, I can’t remember much of it. If I watch it (and I suppose I will at some point) I probably won’t be able to spot many of the changes. And I would be lying if I didn’t say that I am sort of intrigued at the idea of a bunch of people running around the Belgian countryside acting out scenes I imagined all those years ago. And I love Grace, and I hope they realise that …
Actually, it seems that it does tug at me. Because I remember things now that I had forgotten. Maybe I won’t watch it. I don’t know. I really don’t.
If I was rich, I wouldn’t allow anyone to make films of my books. But I’m not. Sorry about that.
Count Me Out
This morning, two letters. One is from the Pope to the people of Ireland. You can read about that vacuity elsewhere. The other is from me to the Diocese of Westminster, formally declaring my defection from the Catholic Church. The timing is entirely coincidental, but I like it.
It’s a very long time since I was anything other than a relaxed, contented atheist. I avoid religious ceremonies of all kinds as much as I can, and have tried to be ecumenical in my anti-religious thinking. But, I’m Irish. I was baptised into the Catholic Church. I was educated at a Jesuit school from the age of 8 to the age of 18. I received communion and was confirmed into the Catholic Church. I went to a Catholic University. It’s hardly surprising if most of my atheism is, so to speak, Catholic atheism.
While I haven’t claimed the Catholic Church as mine since I was a teenager, the Catholic Church continues to claim me. And you, if you received a Catholic baptism. The superb and straightforward website www.CountMeOut.ie explains how the Church continues to count us, the baptised but long gone, amongst its congregation. And it helpfully provides the resources for putting an end to this by formally ‘defecting’ from the Church. Though focussed on people in Ireland, it will be useful to Catholics anywhere who don’t want to be counted as Catholic any more. In my own case for example I printed off a PDF they supply, and addressed it to the diocesan office where I am resident along with a cover letter I wrote myself. In due course, I expect, some poor, miserable priest whose job it is to deal with the hell-bound, will write to me with a confirmation that I am no longer a Catholic.
I probably would never have bothered doing this if it wasn’t for my unfocussed feeling of disgust and anger over the recent child abuse scandals. Defection is a small but practical stand against what would otherwise be a detached, distant horror. And I can’t really think of a better word for the widespread rape and sexual abuse of children by priests of the Catholic Church, which has been, over generations, systematically covered up by the hierarchy of the church, up to and including the current Pope, Joseph Ratzinger. (For a decent summary of just how entangled Ratzinger is in this, have a read of Christopher Hitchens. ) This cover up involved moving rapists and abusers around rather than reporting them to the civil authorities. As a result it led to the creation of more and more victims, and more and more suffering. This litany of facts, which reads at first like the berserk plot of a particularly distasteful Dan Brown novel, is now so well established and documented that I frankly, honestly, cannot understand how little has been done about it. I cannot understand why many bishops in Ireland remain in their jobs. I cannot understand why they, and others, including Sean Brady, have not been arrested on suspicion of, at the very least, not reporting a crime. I am baffled as to why an international police investigation has not been launched. I genuinely don’t understand it. The Catholic Church hierarchy is morally vacuous. As Johann Hari has pointed out , if it it were any other sort of organisation, it would not be tolerated. It would have been shut down.
If you received a Catholic baptism and are now an atheist, or a person of no religious beliefs, or a ‘lapsed Catholic’, I hope you’ll think about defecting via www.CountMeOut.ie . If you remain a Catholic, please, at the next mass you attend, when you recite the Nicene Creed, consider the line We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church and consider the implications of your personal solemn endorsement, given what the Church has been involved with in your lifetime. If you still wish to stand up and proclaim your faith in it, then shame on you.
Authoring the future.
The stand off between Amazon and Macmillan over the last few days has been covered all over the place by people with a firmer grasp of the economic and legal ins and outs of what’s going on than I possess . But. This is not going to be the last such confrontation. For reasons that are all about technology and business – and have next to nothing to do with writing – the shiny spotlight of new gadgetry, and all the money that powers it, has turned its heat on the world of book publishing. Of all things.
(And I do mean books. I don’t mean newspapers and magazines, which are a separate business. And one in which the application of new technology makes more sense. While there are cross overs and tangled interests, the similarities tend to be red herrings.)
The books business has operated on a fairly predictable, if complicated, model for a long time now. There are subtleties and oddities, and I’m simplifying somewhat, but basically …
1. The author writes a book.
2. The author hands the book to an agent.
3. The agent finds a publisher for the book.
4. The publisher has the book edited, designed and printed.
5. The publisher markets the book to retailers and readers.
6. The retailers buy the book and present it to readers.
7. The reader buys the book.
8. The reader reads the book.
In an ideal world, steps 2 to 7 would not exist. In the world of new technologies – of Amazon, the iPad and iBooks, of the Google Book Agreement – steps 3 to 7 are in a mess, scrambled, being fought over, argued about, and written off and on again as everyone tries to find the right combination that will keep everyone employed.
Notice anything? It’s pretty much certain that ten years from now, those 5 steps from 3 to 7 will have been cut down to maybe 4 steps. Maybe even 2 or 3 steps. We are approaching the ideal world.
The only essential steps in this process are steps 1 and 8. If I want to pay my rent, step 7 is good too. And in order for step 7 to happen, some of the other steps are going to have to stay in place in one form or another. But the process is going to shrink. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
Mostly the debate about what to shrink and how is being had between publishers and retailers. Agents are a canny lot and are keeping a watching brief. Readers are interested, and are vaguely hopeful that when the dust settles they might have some cool new ways of reading books, and that it might be a bit cheaper. Authors are worried. Authors are always worried of course. But in this instance, how worried should we be?
Publishers certainly need to worry, particularly the big ones. Traditional retailers don’t need anyone to tell them that they need to worry. But non traditional retailers, Amazon chief amongst them, need to worry too, and from their actions over the last week, I think they know it. Neither of these two giant cogs in the process want to give way. So inevitably the pressure is being forced outwards. Readers are feeling it (or, are being asked to feel it by Amazon’s pricing games), and authors are feeling it – mostly by being told that the days of big (or any) advances are over, and that royalties aren’t going to improve either, sorry about that, and that we should shut up and be grateful that anyone does us the honour of publishing us in the first place.
This is bullshit.
Retailers and publishers are non-essential. New technology means that I can, in theory, sell you my new book on this website at a price that suits both you and me, and cut out the middle men. But I want to be a writer, not a businessman, and you want the enjoyment of browsing your local bookshop and stumbling over my book there, all nicely presented. So, I employ a middle man. But why on earth would I need two middle men?
Authors have power.
It’s very difficult to convince any but the biggest name authors of this. Most of us feel that we have no power whatsoever. This is because we tend to forget, indeed we are encouraged to forget, that we are, to use the iLanguage, the ‘content providers’. And what is content? King. Without us, there are no books. No books, no business.
It’s difficult to do anything with that. It’s difficult to organise a bunch of isolated, solitary social misfits. But it’s not really necessary. Agents form a strong, though admittedly not comprehensive, bodyguard. They act of behalf of individual authors rather than some greater ideal, but they know what side their bread is buttered. The generality of agents’ work is done to the benefit of the generality of authors. They are, after all, a non-essential step as well, and they know it.
And within publishing there is a core of people who know full well that the business is about writing, and that what serves the writing will in the long term win out over what serves the process. These people are clinging to door frames maybe, but they’re there. And they’re right. And the wrong ones who have replaced their colleagues will not last.
I’d argue, and I don’t think it’s a controversial argument to make, that publishers and retailers have done a pretty good job of diminishing quality over the last, say, fifteen years. They’ve become involved in the chase for big money phenomenon books; they’ve invested in non-writing celebrities and have tried to contrive titles to appeal to perceived markets; they’ve sacrificed long term modest sales authors in favour of one off high sales ones – part of the misguided strategy of focussing on titles, not on writers; they’ve taken discounting to an absurd level – seeming to misunderstand the very nature of what it is they’re selling, believing books to be as amenable to regular bulk buying as ready meals. They have, and it’s a generalisation that doesn’t have to contend with very many exceptions, behaved bloody stupidly.
The current scramble for the future of books hopefully lends itself to a refocussing on books themselves. People want good ones. Formats and methods of delivery may change, but people will continue to want great books and great writing. Anyone who misses that point, be they author, agent, publisher or retailer, is going to lose out. Anyone who forgets that it’s about connecting the reader to the writer is going to lose out. Anyone who thinks the authors are the non-essential cog in this process are going to lose out spectacularly.
A future is opening up in which retailers and major publishers will in all likelihood merge, probably bloodily, and will start cannibalising each other’s traditional roles. The biggest book publisher in ten years time could be Amazon. Or Apple. Or perhaps the biggest books retailer in ten years time will be Barnes & Noble. Or Apple. But certainly, something has to give. Probably not Apple.
It may be that big corporate publisher/retailers will become simply an annexe of the entertainment industry, publishing only the brand name authors with guaranteed returns. And that literature will be carried out elsewhere, by smaller, independent publishers working both with old fashioned physical books and their digital counterparts, selling directly online to a worldwide readership. Some would argue that this is exactly what’s happening now.
But I’m not simply whistling past the graveyard here. At least I hope I’m not. Authors are the books business. In all the shouting that’s going to go on (and on) in the next while, listen out for the businesses – be they retailers or publishers or both – who are putting writers at the centre of their plans. They’ll be the ones left standing.
Thursday 2
So, I did next to no work in the middle of the day. I just read through some work and made some notes. It’s more or less been a day off. This is not good.
I went down to Holloway on the tube to have a coffee with my friend Raj. Stop , he cried.
We talked about religion, our parents, Roberto Ballaño, vampires, films, work, our friend Jasper, pencils, and other things I can’t remember.
I took the tube home and it was pretty full but not as full as it was this morning when I took the Victoria line down to Kings Cross.
Things I have learned today :
1. a full tube train smells better – more natural – in the evening than it does in the morning when it’s full of perfumes and deodorants.
2. everyone wants to talk about vampires.
Thursday
Last night I finished a long (20,000 words) short story that I’ve been stalled on for what feels like years, called The Spectacular . I don’t know if it’s any good. I have my doubts. Over the weekend I have to finish off another one – easier, this, mainly because it’s rubbish. They get sent to my agent on Monday. Then it’s downhill through the others, rolling the whole lot up into a nice bouncy ball – hopefully before Christmas. Then I’m going to live on the west coast of Ireland for three months to write a book about sea ghosts. Then I’m going to come back to London and have a breakdown.
This morning I went over to West Ham for breakfast with my friend Jasper. Stop , he cried.
We talked about canons, vampires, computer games, our friend Raj, the Royal Mail dispute, food, getting up in the mornings and copyright. And other things I’ve forgotten. I told him stuff that’s been happening on the news, and he told me a very funny story about Vienetta.
I took the train home from Barking, all through the north east looking down on the city in the chilly sun.
DMSTS
I’m really delighted to tell you that a new story called Do Make Say Think Show has just been published in Zoetrope: All-Story , the "Francis Ford Coppola presents…" art and literature magazine based in San Francisco.The other contributors in this issue are A.L. Kennedy, Han Ong, Sam Shepard and John Krasinski, who writes about his screen adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men . There is also a reprint of that story. The whole issue comes in a great design by artist Rex Ray.
My piece is fairly long, and is told in the first person, and came about after I went to see Do Make Say Think the last time they played here in London. It was a great gig. But also … strange, for me. And that strangeness prompted the story. It also came at a time when I was trying to write about music very directly – about how music feels, and what it does to your psychology. My psychology. This story is really the only piece that I was satisfied with. I just had another read of it now, in the magazine. I like it. I usually hate my stuff as soon as I can’t change it any more. This, for the moment, I still like. It’s full of clumsiness and terrible sentences and stupidity. But I like it.
Anyway. Do Make Say Think are, plainly, inspirational. And it’s nice timing that their first gig in London since the one described in the story happens next month at The Scala, on Thursday October 22nd. There are still tickets available here . I cannot recommend them highly enough. Look out for the twitching, socially incompetent Irishman hovering around at the back of the crowd. Whatever you do, don’t say hello.