The flash of blinding light

Two things of great importance happened today – you’ll understand that I am operating on a significantly more minimalistic scale than most other people, so if you don’t fall off your seat in shock I hope you’ll forgive me.
 
First, in the early evening, I finished reading Vesna Goldworthy’s excellent novel Monsieur Ka. It had been recommended to me by my friend Paul as perhaps having an interesting way of dealing with two competing narratives in a novel. Essentially, and I am trying not to have too many spoilers and only scratching the surface of my description of the novel, a French woman living in post-war London finds a job as an assistant to an old Russian man living in Chiswick. While they both are émigrés, only he happens to be Count Karenin, the son of Anna Karenina, whom Tolstoy immortalized in Anna Karenina. It is, of course fiction, as was Tolstoy’s novel. Having seen the effect that Tolstoy’s novel had had on the Karenin family, she decides to write his memoir. He tells her the story, which she later transcribes.
 
The way it is done is completely unnoticeable. Things like that seem easy to readers, but in fact they are bloody difficult to achieve. A seamless transition from one time and place to another in a novel requires thought – more thought than I was apparently prepared to put in at first. I had a series of devices in mine, including a box full of books left by my central character’s deceased agent – but had been struggling to make the connection between the worlds of 21st century Canada and a small island off the north-west coast of Weimar Germany.
 
Reading the book did what all literature should do: it sparked an idea. And, later, as I sat down to write, it seemed to work. The link from one period to another flowed as easily as an 83-year-old central character walking across his garden to his neighbour’s. His neighbour had written the books in the box. This releases the historical side of the story from its musty container in a New York storage room, where it has been waiting since I first saw Jan Petersen in my mind on my balcony in Fourth Avenue in 2001.
 
Paul Bryers, it should be said, is a teacher of creative writing at a good university and an author of some renown. Apart from putting me off writing for two years (by suggesting my writing wasn’t yet perfect – the cheek of it) after my first start in 2017, he’s been very supportive. My favourite of his novels is Prayer of the Bone – but his best-sellers have been under the pseudonym of Seth Hunter, a series of naval history novels featuring Nathan Peake (The Winds of Folly, The Flag of Freedom, etc.) If you are a fan of historical fiction, then I’d recommend giving him a try. He’s in the Patrick O’Brian genre.
 
I’ve been trying a martinet approach to my writing of late – remembering Anthony Burgess’s words on the craft of writing: The craft of writing is hard work: people like Hemingway talk about ‘engagement with a character’. The only engagement you need is the between your arse and the chair. – and it has seemed to work. Essentially, I have told myself to stay in the chair for two hours and focus on the task ahead. No getting up to make coffee or stretch my legs. After the two hours, I gave myself permission to do what I want – anything I want – and the rest of the morning or afternoon or evening session is mine. This is the advantage of being without Internet of course. While it has its obvious drawbacks (to send an email or post this blip I have to write it out, save it as a Word document, close the laptop, pack it up and wander down to a café, hope the Internet is working, buy a café con leche, transfer the text to an email, and hit send or post), it prevents me from checking email every five minutes, reading The Guardian on line, watching football highlights on Dazn, surfing endlessly, going to IMDB to see who that actor was in Midsomer Murders (it is invariably Ronald Kirkup) and, when writing, doing ad hoc research to see (among other things) what colour uniform the OrPo might be wearing in rural areas of 1938 Schleswig-Holstein. I can check those things later. When they have been written, for example. What I am coming to realize is that either I have been a slave to the Internet or I have become addicted to it. Hello, my name is Ottawacker: I am an addict.
 
Back home, first thing in the morning, I check my email (admittedly to see if any work has come in – the life of the translator and editor is time sensitive) – and while I do switch off after going to pick up Ottawacker Jr from school, for that entire period of time, it becomes a crutch. It is an interesting concept, this addiction line. I mean, I don’t really think I am addicted to it, but it can become, without realizing it, your one source of contact with the outside world. It operates in the same way Amazon does: it makes your life easy. And that is deadly.
 
Anyway, I said two things of importance happened today (and that goes without discovering that Manchester United had beaten Manchester City: if neither Liverpool nor City wins another match again this season, which the way things are going might be possible, we can win the league by losing against Everton in the Merseyside derby). (Oh, and another one, the Premier League are considering banning all people over 70 from going to matches in an attempt to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Apart from this being the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard, my 82-year-old uncle, in whose apartment I currently am, has missed only a handful of games since he started going in 1946. What the Premier League doesn’t understand – do they not know their audience at all? – is that he would rather go to Anfield to see Liverpool win the league, catch the virus and die than being prevented from going to the game and not catching the virus. I can see him turning up at Anfield with his ticket dressed in shorts, putting on a high-pitched voice and pretending to be a schoolkid rather than missing the match. It would be like the scene from The Life of Brian where the women want to go to the stoning but are banned from doing so. Everywhere you looked, men over the age of 70 would be dressed in clothes befitting teenagers. “Is there anyone OVER 70 here?” asks a suspicious match day steward, who may or may not be John Cleese. “No,” say 10,000 old men in a deep voice, which rises in timbre and tone until they reach the appropriate pitch. “No, no, no, no…” “Right then.”)
 
God, I have started quoting Monty Python. It is time to stop.
 
The second thing of importance was the purchase of a pint mug (or Jarra ingles) and an alarm clock. The pint mug, before Mrs. Ottawacker starts asking why I can’t keep on topping up my beer glass like I do at home, is for my coffee in the morning. I have a filter and a kettle of boiling water. This makes it much more convenient when you have forbidden yourself from removing arse cheeks from chair (and a pint of coffee in the morning is essential – actually, two pints is better, so I am going to make my second one now). The alarm clock, bought for the great cost of 4.50 € from Super Estrella and which worked well first time around, is to help me get up in time for the flight to London on Friday. That flight will be a game day decision as to whether I go or not. My friends are relaxed about my bringing coronavirus in with me – I am incredibly careful, wearing in essence an astronaut’s suit for all public outings – but I am perhaps a little less convinced about my not bringing it back with me.