In many ways, their mothers treated the corpses as though they were still alive: they groomed them, swatted flies away and made high-pitched screams of distress when they accidentally dropped the bodies. But there were telltale signs – occasional flinching, for instance – showing that they knew the infants were dead.

I always seem to be coming across articles like this. It seems that the more research we do, the more we discover how sophisticated animals are. Yet the way we treat them is often based on the old beliefs: they’re not like us, they don’t feel pain, they don’t understand loss, etc etc. Surely at some point behaviours have to change – or at least we’ll need to come up with new justifications for doing what we want to do.

“Writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.”

—Red Smith

(On reflection, not sure if this is inspirational or scary. But I like the quote.)

“I write a little every day, without hope and without despair.”

—Isak Dinesen

(For this quote, and a few others I’ve used recently, thanks to Crazyhorse Journal)

This time around, I read the book from start to finish, and I have to say it was much better. The context of his life story helped to put the advice in perspective, and it was also good to think of Stephen King not as the massively successful bestselling author he is now, but as a guy trying to cobble together a living working in a laundry and all kinds of other places, and then getting a phone call one day telling him the paperback rights for his first novel Carrie had sold for $400,000.

I was still standing in the doorway, looking across the living room toward our bedroom and the crib where Joe slept. Our place on Stanford Street rented for ninety dollars a month and this man I’d only met once face to face was telling me I’d just won the lottery. The strength went out of my legs. I didn’t fall, exactly, but I kind of whooshed down to a sitting position there in the doorway.

Later he tells his wife Tabby about it:

I took her by the shoulders. I told her about the paperback sale. She didn’t appear to understand. I told her again. Tabby looked over my shoulder at our shitty four-room apartment, just as I had, and began to cry.

Another part of the memoir that I liked was seeing how, throughout his childhood, little Stevie King was attracted to horror stories, but his teachers, seeing his writing talent, told him to write proper stories, more literary stories. It’s apparently something he’s been hearing from critics ever since, but he’s stuck to doing what he likes and has been very successful at it. I think it’s an admirable example. I also think it’s interesting that someone as successful as Stephen King still feels the need to justify himself in a book on writing. It comes across several times in the book, this feeling of having to explain why, even though he’s not a real, literary writer, he still has a worthwhile opinion. I found it quite astonishing.

Another thing I didn’t know about was his alcoholism. He said for a while he justified his drinking by saying writers have to be sensitive to the world, and you have to drink to handle the existential horror, and besides, he could handle it. Then one day he realised he couldn’t, and it got to the point where his family had to intervene. He uses the desk in his room as a symbol of the change he made after he sobered up – before, he’d had a monstrosity of an old wooden desk, right in the middle of the room, and afterwards he had a small desk in the corner, with a living room suite in the middle where his kids could come and eat pizza and chat to him. This leads into his first piece of writing advice:

Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way round.

Theoretically I agree with this advice, but I also note that it often comes from people who became successful by being obsessive about their art. Would they have been so successful if they had always put life before art? I don’t know. I think when you’re starting out, you have to pour a lot more into your art because it’s a lot harder to get a break. But I agree that at some point you do need to find a balance.

The rest of the advice is good stuff, dealing with the mechanics of writing, such as grammar, plot, character and so on. I have read quite a lot of writing books by now so not much of it was new to me, but probably the first time around, ten years ago, I got more out of it. Even now it’s good to re-read things like that as a reminder. Bad habits creep in easily.

One thing that really stuck out for me was when he gave an example of editing a manuscript, and was explaining why he cut out a part that, although it was good, slowed things down too much.

Certainly I couldn’t keep it in on the grounds that it’s good; it should be good, if I’m being paid to do it. What I’m not being paid to do is be self-indulgent.

This is beautifully expressed, and I have said it to myself a few times already as I edit the manuscript of my next novel. There were several paragraphs that I’d kept in, even though they didn’t feel quite right – they just seemed too good to cut. But with King’s advice in mind, I cut them, and trusted that I would come up with something equally good to replace them. The “kill your darlings” advice is something I’ve heard before, but something about the way he expressed it really resonated with me and allowed me to cut more freely and counter the “But it’s good…” voice in my head.

The book ends with an account of King being hit by a van as he’s walking along the edge of the road. The paramedic told him he’d be fine – later, after King had recovered, he admitted that from the extent of the injuries he’d thought he was a goner. I was expecting a little more insight to come out of this brush with death, but there was nothing in particular. He just slowly recovers and starts writing again. The book was written over several years, with the accident in the middle, and so perhaps it’s not surprising that it’s a bit disjointed. Overall there were more than enough good insights to justify the re-reading.

This book tells the story of Azeddine, a young doctor who, during a brief stint of compulsory military service, is captured by the Polisario and kept in a POW camp in the desert for more than twenty years. Thomas Hollowell does a great job of telling Azeddine’s story, making us feel the raw injustice of it. He tells us all about Azeddine’s family, his hopes and his plans. The military service was only supposed to be for a few months before he continued his career, and so you really feel the terrible injustice when the village he’s stationed in gets attacked and he is captured. At first you hope he’ll escape, and then the hopes become more distant, and then twenty years have passed and his life has gone by.

There’s plenty of good, lively description, and you really get a sense of life in the camp. Hollowell says the account is based on a true story, and he spent months interviewing the protagonist Azeddine. The account has been fictionalised, however, in order to bring it to life. Some scenes come from other books and articles. I’m glad that he says this up front and so it’s clear what’s what, but I can’t help feeling that it would have been better to stick to the facts (maybe that’s just the old journalist in me speaking). Azeddine really was imprisoned for over twenty years, and that’s a powerful story that doesn’t necessarily need spicing up with extra fictionalised episodes. Of course, real-life people are not always great interview subjects, and I can sympathise with that. Sometimes you just don’t get the material you want or suspect must be there – people don’t remember, or don’t want to remember, or talk in generalisations when you want them to be specific. Still, as powerful as this was as a fictional account, I feel it would have been more powerful if the author could have pushed for enough real-life details to tell it entirely as a true story and said in his foreword “All of this happened exactly as it’s written.” The fictionalisation thing always leaves me wondering exactly what’s real and what’s not.

The only other thing that didn’t work so well for me was the interspersing of Hollowell’s own narrative of his time in the Peace Corps. Particularly in the early chapters, I found myself wanting to skip over them and get back to Azeddine’s story, which is so compelling that you don’t want to be interrupted with details of the Peace Corps application process. Azeddine’s struggle is such a vivid, desperate, life and death struggle that Hollowell’s reminiscences inevitably seem petty by comparison. Perhaps this contrast was deliberate, but I would have preferred just to hear Azeddine’s story. I’m not saying Hollowell’s own story isn’t interesting or worth telling – it’s just that for me it didn’t stand up side by side with Azeddine’s. Nobody’s really could.

So overall I enjoyed the book, and learned a lot more about Western Sahara than I knew before. I was drawn into the characters and some of the descriptive passages were very good. The book was clearly well researched and the details really added to the story, giving a clear and vivid picture of the brutal life as a prisoner of war in the Sahara Desert. I rooted for Azeddine all the way through, and read quickly to the end, always a good sign. The reservations I had were not major, and I would recommend this.

“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”

—Flannery O’Connor

There are lots of lies and secrets and betrayals, but most of all there’s a sense of missed chances. There’s a phrase that really stuck in my mind, “If we could see and choose”. Meaning that all the characters had ideas of themselves as young men, ideas of who they wanted to be. Jack wanted to be a doctor, Ray a jockey, Lenny a boxer. But then things got in the way: the war, family, health, and a hundred other reasons why things didn’t work out the way they should have done. If we could see the way everything would pan out and choose based on the outcomes, things would be very different. But we can’t. We choose based on what seems best at the time, or easiest, or what other people want us to do. And sometimes we don’t really get to choose at all. And so our lives are not what we would have chosen, but what we end up with.

The novel, which won the 1996 Booker Prize, is written from multiple perspectives. The voice of each character is believable, with working class language and speech patterns (the opening line, for example, goes “It aint your regular sort of day”). This book is a good reminder that language doesn’t have to be correct to be beautiful. I think it’s quite hard to do it well, and if you get it wrong then too much dialect of any kind can be quite annoying. The only other book I can think of where I liked the dialect and found it not only believable but beautiful was The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Graham Swift, like Walker, manages it perfectly: even though he went to the same posh public school as I did, and Cambridge after that, there’s never a moment when his Bermondsey slang rings false.

It’s a maudlin kind of book, again appropriately – not just because of the death at the centre but because of the pubs that feature so heavily throughout. It feels like the sort of story you’d be told by an old man sitting at the bar nursing his half-finished pint on a slow Tuesday afternoon in one of those old-fashioned pubs where there’s no music or TVs to drown out the melancholy thoughts that quiet drinking can bring on. You can feel the longing in the characters, sad and resigned to what their lives have become but still remembering what they would have done, if only they could see and choose.

The reality, of course, is that nobody thinks of himself as evil. We might think others are evil, but for our own actions there is always a justification. It’s the way human beings operate: we act, and then our brains go into overdrive telling stories and rewriting history with ourselves as the heroes. The main character in this book, former dictator Stoyanov, is no different. He has been a dictator for decades, has spied on his own people, jailed those who opposed him, stifled freedom of expression, etc etc. But in his eyes, he was serving his country, building Socialism, doing what needed to be done. As he writes in a letter to the new government:

I have done everything in the belief that it was good for my country. I have made mistakes along the way, but I have not committed crimes against my people. It is for these mistakes that I accept political responsibility.

Reading this book, in fact, I was reminded of Tony Blair’s resignation speech:

Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right. I may have been wrong. That is your call. But believe one thing, if nothing else. I did what I thought was right for our country.

Blair, of course, was democratically elected and did not infringe his people’s freedoms in the way an Eastern Bloc dictator did. That’s not what I’m trying to say. I just mean that in many people’s view, including mine, he committed serious crimes while in office. Whichever way you look at it, he’s certainly responsible for many thousands of deaths. There’s even a campaign to have him arrested. But he retells the story to make himself the hero. I may have made mistakes, but I honestly tried to do the right thing. Listen out for it – it’s a common line people use when they’re accused of doing wrong. I’ve probably used it myself a few times.

The other characters in the book are well fleshed out as well, from the prosecutor to the random people watching on TV. Everyone has their ambiguities, their own personal mix of higher motives and blatant self-interest. The trial delivers a verdict, but fails to deliver what people really want, because what they want is unattainable. An oppressive regime affects the whole society for generations, corrupts and co-opts ordinary people, blurs the distinctions between right and wrong. Justice is hard enough to attain in a simple criminal trial. When it’s an entire nation’s policies for half a century that’s being put on trial, it’s not surprising that the results often fail to satisfy.

So Barnes does a good job of bringing out the complexities of a particular political moment. His writing is also very engaging, very smooth and elegant right from the beginning. The plot was not the most compelling, because it basically just follows the trial, and apart from a few twists and turns along the way, you know more or less where things are heading. Thankfully it’s a relatively short book, otherwise I think it could have started to drag. But at the length it is (138 pages), the interesting characters, clever observations and elegant prose were enough to sustain my interest. I definitely want to read more Julian Barnes books now, with A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters being top of the list.

“I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes at 10:00 o’clock every day.”

—William Faulkner