I bought some supplies in a nationally known store the other day. I won’t identify the store, but the words “Marks” and “Spencer” appear prominently in their name. The cashier waved the goods across the barcode reader, and then asked me for £24.13. Unusually for me, I had actual cash money on my person, so I proffered a £20 and a £10 note. The cashier opened the till, and gave me 87p. I said “Erm, I think I gave you £30.” She shot back, rather too quickly “No, you gave me a twenty and a five.” “Oh,” I said, beginning to doubt it myself now, “I thought I gave you a tenner as well as the twenty.” At this point, she rang furiously for the supervisor, who waddled over at leisurely pace. I said that I might well have been mistaken, and she said again that it was definitely a fiver, because she had to put it in a special drawer. A very brief conversation with the supervisor then ensued. The supervisor tapped in something on the till, the till opened, and the cashier handed me £5 and my receipt. The supervisor, who hadn’t even acknowledged my presence, waddled off. I said to the cashier that if there wasn’t a £10 note in the wrong place, I would accept that I’d been wrong. No, that wasn’t possible: I had to accept the extra £5. No-one said it, but the underlying implication was that I’d tried it on, and they would just write off the loss. So now, I feel guilty at having extracted £5 from this enormous company. What struck me was that, in the olden days, the cashier would probably have put the notes in a clip on top of the till while she rang the purchase up, so it would be very clear what had been tendered; and she would also have probably said “Twenty five pounds” when I gave her the money- two checks to ensure that the transaction was transparent. I’m still not sure whether she was right or I was. The upshot is that, if I use that store again, I will always pay by card. And my favourite charity is £5 richer.
Chez Topsyturvydom, we are very pleased to see Charles Lambert occupying the guest slot over at the mighty Normblog. Charles has chosen Christopher Isherwood’s little known book The Memorial, which I must admit I don’t know. I would be curious to read it though, as Charles has whetted my appetite with this description: “It’s an odd amalgam of faux-modernism and the traditional novel, as though Isherwood still hasn’t made up his mind what kind of writer he plans to be: Virginia Woolf or Hugh Walpole.” Still trying to imagine what a combination of Walpole and Woolf would look like…
My car is being repaired. The insurance company phoned to say it should be ready on Friday. You might predict that such an exchange would go: Company person: Mr Spence? Just phoning to say your car should be ready on Friday. Me: OK, thanks. In fact, it goes like this: Emily (for it is she): Hello, this is Emily from Megacorp insurance speaking. May I speak with Mr Spence? Moi: Yes, speaking. Emily: Is it all right for yourself to give you an update on your car repair, sir? Me: Yes, please do. Emily: OK, first I need to go through security. Can you confirm your full name, please? Me: Robert John Spence Emily: Great (she thinks it’s great that I know my own name?) Now, can you give me the first line of your address? Me: 3 Acacia Avenue Manchesterford Emily: And the postcode? Me: MZ56 OPQ Emiy: Fantastic. (she thinks it’s incredible that I know my own address?)Now I have to inform you that all calls may be recorded for security and training purposes. Is that all right for yourself? Me: (wearily) Yes.(thinking- what if I say no, I can’t be recorded, as I believe that a part of my soul will be taken away from me?) Emily: OK, now I am phoning to update you on the current position with your car. The current position is that….(long pause whilst she searches for something on screen) your car should be ready on Friday. It may not be ready by Friday, but Honest Joe’s garage are telling us it should be. Me: Oh, right. Emily: Are you satisfied with that update, sir? Me (under my breath): Ecstatic. (Louder) Yes, thanks. Emily: Is there anything else I can do for yourself, sir? Me: Please go away. (I didn’t really say that- I said No, thanks. Goodbye) End of call. That’s what I call service.
It’s a somewhat sobering fact to reflect that I have been a Richard Thompson fan for forty years now. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen him play, but I always come back for more brilliant guitar work, darkly disturbing songs, and a surprisingly well-developed stage patter. His voice has deepened and matured with the years, too. He really is a pretty good singer these days. So, no surprise that ‘er indoors and I hastened to the Lowry recently to see RT’s “A Thousand Years of Popular Music” show. You might think it perverse for such an accomplished singer songwriter to perform a show containing no songs of his own, but Richard has fashioned a rare treat in this show. How many people, do you think, could sing and play in a single evening everything from medieval plainchant to madrigals, early opera, music hall, thirties jazz and sixties rock? The guitar playing is mind-boggingly proficient, it goes without saying. The accompaniment on this occasion is provided by chanteuse and occasional pianist Judith Owen and percussionist Debra Dobkin. and they make a very fine noise together. They finished, not with Britney’s “Oops I did it again”, which he’s used in the past, but with something by Nelly Furtado (during which, as a way of turning the wheel full circle, Richard included a verse he’d translated into Latin). Not everything came off -Judith Owen is much better at Cole Porter than Purcell – but you have to admire their chutzpah. It’s not really a history, of course: medieval times to Victorian are covered in the first half, and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are featured in the second, so it’s weighted towards more recent stuff. The show is available on CD and DVD, and is a must-buy for RT fans. A flavour of it can be had by viewing this bizarre video, from the Black Cab sessions web site, where, somewhat surreally, musicians play whilst being driven around London in the eponymous black cab. Barmy idea, but it works.
News of another death in music today. Orlando “Cachaito” Lopez, the bassist for the Buena Vista Social Club died in Havana. It was a joy to see these superb musicians in concert in Liverpool a few years ago. Sadly, Lopez is not the first of that group to die. I feel privileged to have caught them in that marvellous Indian summer, largely brought about by the work of the estimable Ry Cooder. The group were the subject of a film by Wim Wenders. We will not see their like again.
Sad to hear today of the death of Blossom Dearie, whose work I have admired for years. She was still working in her late seventies in a New York club. A very evocative voice, by no means technically brilliant, but somehow appropriate for the songs she chose- and her piano accompaniment was always brilliantly judged. Here, someone has put on Youtube her version of the fine Michael Barr song “Try Your Wings” with lyrics by Dion McGregor, from her Verve album of 1957 (and my favourite) “Give Him The Oo-La-La” Its visual accompaniment is from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, one of my favourite films, with the peerless Audrey Hepburn.
I was interested by this article. The poster has been a fixture, and a talking point, in my office for a few years now. It never fails to intrigue the visitor. I saw it on a visit to Barter Books, and ordered it from them, before the avalanche of interest they report. What’s the attraction? It’s simple. And it’s true.
This was the top story on BBC News website today. When are we going to get over this obsession with celeb royals? Maybe they should be giving more attention to this. And all hail Ed Stourton, for skewering the desperately feeble “Chief Operating Officer” on the Today programme. That this came the day after the return of £6 million a year Woss to the airwaves simply added to the impression of a corporation that really needs to sort itself out.
Topsyturvydom is proud to hold this leg of the virtual tour for Charles Lambert’s The Scent of Cinnamon. This is Charles’s second major publication, following his novel Little Monsters. First, a biographical note: Charles Lambert was born in Lichfield, in 1953. After going to eight different schools in the Midlands and Derbyshire, he won a scholarship to the University of Cambridge from 1972 to 1975. In 1976 he moved to Milan and, with brief interruptions in Ireland, Portugal and London, has lived and worked in Italy since then. Currently a university teacher, academic translator and freelance editor for international agencies, his occupations have included kitchen hand, shop assistant, medical journal editor, guidebook writer, receptionist, teacher of political science, and journalist with ANSA, the Italian news agency. He now lives in Fondi, exactly halfway between Rome and Naples, a stone’s throw from what was once the Appian Way.
The Scent of Cinnamon has been well received- Scott Pack went so far as to say that “the majority, the vast majority, of people who routinely enjoy the Richard & Judy books would wet their knickers (or pants, but let’s face it, it would mainly be knickers) over the title story of this book.” Well, up to a point, Scott… Where I would agree is that these stories are all exquisitely crafted, showing the same attention to the telling detail that was such a feature of Little Monsters. And if anything is going to restore the popularity of short fiction in this country, it must be the publication of stories such as these, by turns humorous, surreal, disturbing, but always memorable. Here’s a short question and answer session I conducted with Charles:
RS: You mentioned when we corresponded that you are working on a novel that might loosely be described as detective fiction. In The Scent of Cinnamon, at least one story, “Moving the Needle Towards the Thread”, might be said to have some of the characteristics of that genre. Are you attracted to genre fiction? I wondered if you like to subvert it, as, say, Gilbert Adair does.
CL: Yes, I am attracted to genre fiction but, bluntly, I’m not very good at it. What tends to happen on the occasions I set out to work within a genre is that, without wanting it, I find the writing wriggling off towards something else. The story you mention is a good example. The set-up – a corpse, a murder, a murderer, a sort of confession – certainly has the characteristics of, if not quite a whodunit, a whydunit, if you like. But what happens as the piece develops is that the narrator begins to find her own certainties questioned, so that by the end of the story what began as self-justification is crumbling in her hands and she no longer has an explanation for anything, least of all her own actions. The story has become, willy-nilly and regardless of its quality, ‘literary’ fiction in that it lends itself to, indeed necessitates, more than one reading. The Number Worm also looks like a pure genre piece – a classic horror story – before veering off into (and it’s been criticized for this by one irate SF/fantasy reviewer) ‘psychological metaphor’ (quite apart from its nodding salute to a story that has almost established its own genre, “Metamorphosis”). I’m a great admirer of certain genre writers, like Stephen King, say, or Ramsay Campbell, or Ian Rankin, and I have a special place in my heart for Patricia Highsmith, who has, I think, influenced me as much as any other writer, but these are all people who are challenged and stretched by the genre they’ve chosen to work in, rather than writers like, say, Patricia Cornwell, who stay within their genre for less creative reasons (I hesitate to use the word money). I also like and admire the work of Gilbert Adair, but I wouldn’t see my use of genre as involving the kind of very knowing operation he performs so skilfully in his Christie-inspired novels. The book you mention, by the way, has already broken free of its detective fiction moorings and is heading off who-knows-where… Right now, a study of what it means to be lonely might be a more accurate one-line description.
RS: We touched on your relatively late emergence as a writer in our interview. Many reviewers have commented on the sense of craftsmanship and maturity in these stories. Has it been an advantage to do your apprenticeship in private as it were?
CL: Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers, talks about the numbers of hours a person needs to devote to a certain activity before becoming proficient in it. I haven’t read the book, but I think he suggests a minimum of 10,000. That would work out, roughly, as three hours a day for ten years, or one hour a day for thirty. In these terms, I’m definitely proficient, which, for me, means being aware of what I can do and of which limits I can profitably push against. Having said that, the stories in the collection cover a fair number of years and I hope they’re all both well-crafted and mature, though I’d like to think that some of the newer pieces were, if not better, perhaps more sparely written. It’s noticeable that the most recent work of, say, Bob Dylan and Alice Munro– to take names out of a mixed-genre hat of personal favourites – has a feeling of being stripped back, and I’d tend to say that maturity is also a process of freeing the text from what’s inessential and decorative. I hope that I’m doing this. As far as conducting my apprenticeship in private goes, I can take no credit for this at all. From the very start, I did everything in my power to go public and I’d still be happy to see a novel I wrote over 15 years ago sitting on readers’ shelves. Over to you, world of publishing.
RS: You’ve lived nearly all your adult life as an exile. Do you still feel as if you belong to Britain, and has your sense of place been affected by your long absence? Your novel Little Monsters moves easily between British and Italian settings, and there’s a similar breadth of setting in The Scent of Cinnamon.
CL: I’m not sure I’d choose the word ‘exile’ to describe myself, though I might if the alternative were ‘ex-pat’. I don’t feel exiled, by myself or anyone else, from Britain. At the risk of alienating readers of Private Eye or the Daily Mail, one of the papers incidentally that reviewed Little Monsters most enthusiastically, I’d like to think of myself as European and equally at home in both the UK and Italy; but that wouldn’t be true either, because what I feel is not-quite-at-home in both, which I think is the state I was aspiring to when I first left Britain. Bilingual speakers are said to achieve 100% proficiency in neither language. I’m not bilingual, though I wonder sometimes about my linguistic competence in English and Italian, but I’m certainly bicultural, by which I mean twice incomplete. I’m made aware of this most strongly when I watch programmes like Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and discover that the first few questions are the ones that flummox me: I’d need to ask the audience. More seriously, I’m not sure how far I actually have a sense of place. In the sense of feeling rooted, or the need for that, I have very little. I had a fairly nomadic childhood, if only within the confines of the Midlands (from Lichfield to the Pennines, with quite a few stops in between), I’ve moved around quite a lot in Italy as well, and I’m beginning to look forward to the next country, whichever that might be. What I do have is a strong visual memory, which comes in handy, a strong curiosity in the minutiae of other people’s lives (a faculty that people who don’t have the excuse of being a writer call nosiness) and a sort of reckless belief that I can write about anything if I try hard enough. Transmitting the feel of a place, or time, is often a question of reducing detail to a minimum. There’s nothing less convincing than a sense that the author is ticking stuff off on a checklist of local colour: what I call the Bakelite ashtray syndrome. The thing that makes Penelope Fitzgerald’s other places so utterly convincing isn’t the precision of her attention – which is extraordinary – so much as the sparseness of detail. There’s a moment in Innocence when she talks about one of the characters buying school exercise books from the local Upim and it’s perfect. and all that’s needed to fix a world.
Thanks, Charles for those illuminating answers. Now, gentle reader, buy the book!
