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I went along to the latest in Women On Air‘s series of conversations with writers on Wednesday night. This time it was with Elizabeth Knox, most famous for her book The Vintner’s Luck. I have not read any of her books, but I do have two of them in my ever-growing pile of books to get around to sometime, and having heard her talk I am more keen than ever to get around to them sometime.

The talk was advertised as being about the role of the supernatural in fiction, but in fact Knox spent a lot of the time talking about the broader genre of fantasy, and how it relates to “literature”. It was refreshing to hear a literary giant such as herself talking about science fiction and fantasy without embarrassment, and adopting the notion that SF&F books and writers have something to contribute as a default position, rather than being embarrassments to be hidden away from the sight of decent folk.

The compere started proceedings by commenting on the appropriateness of talking with Knox about the supernatural in Our City O-Tautahi, a wonderful building which originally served as the Christchurch City Council’s Municipal Chambers. (“Christchurch gothic at its best.”)

The compere initially asked Knox to define supernatural, which she broadened immediately to fantasy, and which question she answered piecemeal throughout the rest of the talk.

She talked about how she wavered in her own writing between using fantastical elements and not. She talked about the divide that other people see between literature and fantasy, and wanted to be taken seriously as a writer, and therefore felt obliged to downplay or remove fantastical elements from her writing. While pondering such matters she eventually realised that she was dedicated to fantasy, mostly because of her childhood love of Star Wars, Star Trek, Dr Who and so forth, (“it’s where I come from”) and in particular because of the “Imagination Game” that she and her sisters played obsessively as children. She alluded to this game several times during the talk – clearly it played a big part in the formation of the writer she is today. As kids they invented two enormous ongoing sagas – “supernatural soap operas” – populated with thousands of characters, some of whom they became very familiar with. They would take these characters, forged in the sagas, and place them in new and different and interesting situations and genres.

Knox is of the opinion that writing fantasy enables the writer to be honest about moral questions. That trying to discuss the same questions in realistic fiction risks coming across as didactic.

Knox likes the surprise of being presented with a new set of rules that you can find in fantasy fiction, and she likes following along as the characters in these settings learn the rules of the world they live in. Despite this, she said that she doesn’t like “portal” fiction, wherein people from our world are magically transported to other worlds. She stressed that she personally felt that such rules should be internally consistent to get the best story.

She said that lots of books these days are “catastrophic” fiction, wherein people do horrible things to each other, and she finds this distasteful. (I’m not sure, but this was in the context of discussing moral questions in fantasy, so I think that she meant that catastrophic fiction was a subset of realistic fiction.)

She has decided that what she likes to write is “Fantastic Naturalism” – strongly imagined worlds with natural and social structures that feel real but aren’t.

And of course, when it comes down to it, she “just likes making things up.”

She talked a bit about the ubiquitous vampire books, claiming that our stories of creatures that live forever derive from our fear of not being important enough in our own lives.

When asked about her foray into Young Adult fiction, she said that it had been “crazy mad successful”, not least because Stephanie Meyer blogged about her. She said that the paperback edition of Dreamhunter sold out in twelve hours. She also claimed that 20,000 copies of the audiobook version of one of her books were downloaded illegally, which she doesn’t mind – she sees it all as good publicity. And the producers of the Twilight movies have optioned one of her books. She claimed that “nerdy hyper-intelligent teenagers” liked her book Black Oxen, but that others struggle with it.

When asked about writing to the market, she claimed that she never made mercenary decisions, she simply wrote what interested her. She said that people frequently congratulated her on her canny acumen, “as if I’d thought it through!”

She talked about her current project, an epic fantasy in a world that doesn’t resemble ours very much. There are no zombies and no elves in this world, but there are creatures that are both zombies and elves. Or something.

She described fantasy as being the bastard sibling of modernism. She explained this by basically blaming modernism for the splitting up of fiction into “Literature” (good) and “Fantasy” (bad), giving examples such as Shakespeare being free to write about fairies in the pre-split literary world. She conceded that there is lots of bad fantasy around – but that of course there is lots of bad literature too. She said that literature “literary fiction” is a genre and is no better than fantasy – it just claims the moral high ground. She reckons that the best fantasy today is being published as Young Adult.

After the main talk she gave a reading from her latest book, The Angel’s Cut, which featured the surreal image of a angel with his wings cut off falling from an airplane, instinctively trying to deploy his missing wings before remembering to deploy his parachute instead.

A very interesting talk from a fascinating person.

Update: Helen Lowe also blogged about the event.

After several aborted attempts, Operation LAPSE2 finally happened on Sunday. Our friend Lou owns a 20ha block of hillside land out on the peninsula. It’s a great place, and gets better the higher up you go. But it’s a steep climb, and so we don’t do it very often. In fact, only once a year, in the Loulandia Annual Picnic and Summit Event. This year three of us made the ascent: Lou, Andrew, and myself.

We had tried a couple of times over the the last few weeks to go, but the weather didn’t cooperate. Finally Sunday dawned fine and clear. Well, fine-ish and clear-ish anyway. And so the decision was made to attempt the hike.

During LAPSE1 we went up the central ridge, using a track previously hacked through the gorse by Lou. However in the year since the gorse had won the battle and claimed the track back, and so Lou took us up one of the side ridges. It was very, very cold when we arrived by car at the bottom of the hike. Just as we left it started to rain too. At first the going was very wet underfoot, as Lou took us along the floor of a small valley which is normally completely dry, but which on Sunday was a swamp trying to become a creek. One or two fantails joined us for this leg of the trip, flitting about us near to the ground. Once we reached the double-row of pines growing on the edge of her land the going was much better. The pine-needle litter was soft underfoot, and the giant trees protected us from the worst of the wind and the rain. It was, however, very, very steep. Andrew charged up the slope like a mighty mountain man, while Lou and I trudged along behind, trying to pretend that we were deliberately taking our time so that we could observe the interesting local fauna and flora.

But the trees ran out soon enough, and we were back into the elements and trudging up the steep, tussock-and-scrub clad hillside. I’d forgotten how steep it was. Boy it’s steep. So, so so, steep. Holy crap it’s steep. As well as being steep (did I mention that it was steep?), the footing was rather treacherous: there isn’t a formed track, the tussock was wet, the rocks slippery, and the grasses hid numerous foot-trapping holes. The steepness combined with the treacherous footing meant that our leg muscles were constantly straining in unfamiliar ways to keep us upright.

In the higher reaches of the climb we came across two giant gashes in the land, where enough water had collected to make the land slide away down the hill. Crossing these was great fun, although it was very muddy and boggy. Actually, because it was very muddy and boggy.

Just as we got to the top the rain stopped and the sun came out, and so we got to enjoy our lunches in good conditions.

At the top Lou wanted us to cross a barbed-wire fence so that she could show us the view on the other side of the top ridge. Andrew and I held the barbed-wire strands apart for each other, and we very gingerly and very slowly passed through the fence, cautiously trying to avoid the barbs. Then Lou went through the fence, in one smooth and quick motion, as if it wasn’t there. “Bloody townies,” she muttered.

The weather started to close in again as we started the descent. It being very wet underfoot there was lots of sliding-down-tussock-on-bums and not so much of the actual walking downhill stuff.

By the time we got back to the car for a well-earned cup of coffee and a chocy biccie, the tops were completely shrouded in mist.

It was a fantastic hike. I actually think it was more fun in the wintry conditions than last year’s ascent in sunshine. I’m really looking forward to LAPSE3 – I just hope my legs have recovered by then.

!UNEXPECTED CAKE!

I went tonight to see a talk by John Connolly, the Irish crime novelist. These events usually take the form of a “conversation” between the writer and an MC, but in this case, once the MC introduced Connolly, he was off. He talked for an hour solid, scarcely pausing to draw breath. He was very funny and entertaining, and had a lot of interesting things to say, but his tendency to wander off on tangents and to repeatedly interrupt himself as something more interesting came to mind made it hard to take meaningful notes, and he spoke so fast that I occasionally had trouble understanding unfamiliar names of people and places. It was a very fun evening.

Connolly started off by posing the question: Why do we read mystery fiction? (Throughout the talk he used “mystery fiction” and “crime fiction” interchangeably, despite accepting that they were different.) Do we read for plot or for character? He concluded that we read for character, and it’s the characters – not the plots – that stick with people long after they’ve finished a given book. He accused us in the audience and readers in general of being disloyal – to writers. We are, he maintained, loyal to characters, not to writers. We readers form relationships with characters, not with writers. And he asserted that mystery fiction tends to maximize these relationships with characters. And writers can earn a good living by exploiting this fact.

He claimed that readers want “the same thing, only different” year after year. So, he posed, how does the mystery/crime novelist avoid atrophy if they are producing the same but different, year after year? Some writers don’t avoid atrophy. “I’m not going to mention any names Patricia Cornwall.” He then launched into what I considered to be an ill-advised discussion of where he thinks Patricia Cornwall has gone wrong. He said she had signed The Devil’s Pact – a six book contract, and that she’s tied to a series she’s tired of.

He claimed that Robert Parker has also atrophied, by never letting his character grow old. (The character was in the Korean War, and yet is still a young man in the 1990s.) At this point he launched into a hilarious aside about one of Parker’s characters: Susan, whom he claimed was one of the most hated characters in all of fiction, and that if the readers of the world could conduct a metaphysical assassination – having someone turn up in the books and kill a character unexpectedly for no in-book reason – it would be of Susan.

He claimed that James Burke tried to avoid atrophy by starting a new series featuring a new character, but that this was just the old character in a new hat.

When he first started thinking about this problem, Connolly decided to write a collection of short stories to allow him to try out different voices. Now he deals with the atrophy problem by writing his Charlie Parker books under contract, but alternating each contract book with a stand-alone book unrelated to the series. This allows him to keep trying new things, while allowing him to come back to the series each time refreshed.

Connolly said that the only duty the writer has to the reader is to not waste his or her time. He said that there is no such thing as a ‘guilty pleasure’ when it comes to reading. Reading for entertainment is not a guilty pleasure. He asked how many people had read The Da Vinci code. About three quarters of the audience raised their hands. “It’s like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in here,” Connolly quipped. “Hello my name is John and I haven’t touched Dan Brown for 18 months seven days.” If you like Wilbur Smith, don’t be ashamed. In fact when he was a young man Connolly read lots of Wilbur Smith, because there were frequent smutty bits. He would go to the book shops and find that the Wilbur Smith books had their spines cracked in such a way that they would fall open at the smutty bits. He has never forgotten one such line, “She gasped at the sight of Tom’s wondrous man-thing.” Even since he was wanted to ask Wilbur Smith what was so wondrous about it: did it light up? Play a tune? Many years later when he was asked to interview Smith, he chickened out of asking the question.

Nowadays of course, bookstores contain whole sections of erotic novels. He told the story of looking at the spines of books in the erotic section of a bookshop. Each book had a symbol on the spine, so that you could easily identify the perversion contained within. He said that he didn’t even understand some of the symbols – such as the gas mask. “What? There is WW1 trench porn?”

Connolly talked about ebooks, concluding that physical books were under no threat from ebooks. He pointed out that no-one ever felt affection for a CD: people switched from vinyl to CD to digital download just because it was more convenient. But books are different: people form associations with particular books, they act as markers in a person’s life. Books are like sharks and spiders – they have not needed to evolve because they are perfect. He thought that there might be a market for ebooks in genre fiction, as people tend not to want to reread genre books.

He gets annoyed when people stuffily claim that they never read fiction. He would like to hang such people outside libraries (“like Mussolini and his wife”) with signs around their necks saying “I Don’t Read Fiction”.

He reads 100 books a year, and talked a bit about the problems associated with this. If he were to hang on to every book be bought his house would collapse around his ears, and people would say, “That’s how he would have wanted to go.”

His friend Lee Child keeps his books hidden from view in his house, as he feels it’s pretentious to have thousands of books on display – an attitude Connolly can’t understand. He claims to judge people by the books on their shelves. He reckons that even if someone spent their time saving blind kids in Bombay, if they didn’t have books on their shelves he wouldn’t like them.

He claimed that big volume buyers like himself keep the publishing industry going, and mentioned his despair that people in general buy so few books that someone who buys five a year is considered a large volume buyer.

Connolly says that has been criticized for putting supernatural elements into his crime fiction books. “It’s just not the done thing in crime fiction.” He laid out an argument in defense of his position that I didn’t really understand. He claims that crime fiction grew out of rationalism, and that what is expected of crime fiction is a solving of the crime based on rational steps. He said that in real life it was possible for the rational and the anti-rational to co-exist. (I never quite got a handle on what he meant by ‘anti-rational’.) Anti-rational is not the opposite of rational, irrational is. As an example of this co-existence he talked about a woman in real life who murdered her children in a calm and methodical way. He says that he has talked to many police officers, psychologists, and doctors, who deal with people who do these appalling things, and none of them have ever been able to tell him what evil is.

In crime fiction, you’re not supposed to have the rational and the anti-rational together. Crime fiction hates miscegenation – the creation of hybrids.

As an example of how strange the “rules” of crime fiction are, he talked about the vast mystery-only bookshops in the United States that stock every kind of mystery/crime novel. He claimed, for example, that there are whole sections of “cheesecake mysteries” – which is not a euphemism, he meant mysteries involving the baking and eating of cheesecakes. There are whole sections on “cat mysteries”, wherein sentient cats set out to solve a murder – usually that of their erstwhile owner. (He sidetracked to point out how ridiculous this is – a real cat whose owner has just been murdered would just eat the owner. “Cats are alligators with better hygiene.”)

Finally he talked about why he sets his books in the United States, even though he grew up in and lives in Ireland. He said that, when he was a kid, Irish writers were expected to write stories set in Ireland, involving “Irish” things such as Catholic guilt. But he found that he didn’t like reading that stuff, and instead spent his time reading the American crime authors. And so when it came time for him to start writing, it was natural for him to set his stories there. “But you take who you are with you,” and so he says his novels are not American novels.

After the main bulk of the talk, Connolly invited questions from the audience.

He was asked about The Gates, his first Young Adult book, and in what ways writing for YA was different from writing for adults. He claimed that he made no intellectual compromises to kids: “You can patronize adults, but you can’t patronize kids.” He said that adults live in a world of shades of grey, while kids live in a world of black and white, and believe in right and wrong, and that therefore he had to be sure to keep the good and evil in his book clearly separated.

In response to a question about the writing life, he said that he did not find writing easy, and that at about 20,000 words into any new project he hits The Wall, and is consumed with self-doubt, and becomes sure that the book is rubbish and he should throw it out and start again. It’s especially hard to push on when he hears the siren call of the “better idea”. But he claims that there is no such thing as a bad idea – there are just problems with execution. He said that self-doubt is part of the process, and that writers are simply people who finish books, nothing more.

After the Q&A, Connolly signed books, taking the time to shake people’s hands and find out a bit about them. When I went to get my book autographed, a part of the conversation went like this:

Me: May I take a photo of you for my website?

He: Sure. What’s the website?

Me: Just my personal one – not anything anyone has ever heard of.

He: Until you go to the shopping center and start shooting that is. Then everyone will visit your website, and they’ll say things like, “You see? The clues were there all along.”

Crime writer to the end!

I went to see Verdi’s Aida tonight, performed by Southern Opera and the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra. Aida has a reputation for being the best opera spectacle on the planet – when fully staged. This version was “in concert”, meaning that there are no sets or props, and the soloists just stand at the front of the stage singing. I was hesitant about going because of this, but I thought I would give it a go. I had hoped that at least the principals would be in costume or something, but no: they were all in standard concert attire. Given that a) it was sung in Italian, b) there were no sur- or sub-titles, c) I’m not very familiar with the opera, and d) the principals weren’t in costume, it was initially hard for me to work out who was who: which guy was the Pharaoh, and which the King of Ethiopia? Which woman was the slave girl and which the princess? I got it figured out in the end.

Despite all this, I was very glad that I decided to go, as the music was just stunning. There were lots of stirring marches, even if I didn’t know what I was supposed to be stirred by, and lots of gorgeous arias. The soloists ranged from pretty darn good to just plain astonishing. They managed to fill the auditorium and hold their own against the orchestra. Powerful stuff.

I just hope one day I get to see a fully staged version.

Ginkgo held another of its vegetarian banquets tonight, and a group of seven of us went along. It was very scrum, with lots of interesting things to try. Here’s the menu:

Gentlemen Broncos is a very strange movie about an awkward young man  (Benjamin) and his dream to get his Science Fiction epic The Yeast Lords published. Benjamin goes to a writing camp where he meets his hero, established SF author Dr Chevalier. He also makes a couple of friends among the other aspirants. (Well, as close to friends as the poor schmuck ever gets anyway.) His desire to be published is mirrored by his mother’s desire to sell her line of truly awful night attire, and, to a smaller extent, by his friends’ desire to establish themselves as serious film makers.

Much of the film is hilarious, such as Chevalier’s smug pomposity, and the runway show of Benjamin’s mother’s designs. But much of it falls flat too.

What spoiled it for me were the sequences which should have been the crowning glory of the movie: scenes from The Yeast Lords. The film shows two different versions of the story, but in none of these sequences could I see Science Fiction as it is written today – not even in caricature. If these scenes had been much, much, much closer to how bad Science Fiction is actually written, then the movie would have been much funnier and much cleverer. What’s the point of spoofing something when devotees of what is being spoofed can’t even recognize what is supposed to be being spoofed in the spoof?

So, did I like it? I’m… not sure.

Goemon is one strange movie. It is a huge rambling high-energy big-budget feudal Japan ninja/war movie. The movie starts out as one type of movie, but turns into another type. At first I enjoyed it hugely – with the extraordinary CGI scenery and cityscapes, and the exciting ninja hijinks. This first part reminded me strongly of Zorro and Robin Hood, with the same ‘steal from the rich and give to the poor’ ethos. And in fact I discovered when I got home that Goemon is indeed the Japanese version of this legend, and it is considered the man himself really did exist.

Towards the end of the ninja part of the story, the movie began to lose me, because the ninja acrobatics went from only just beyond what a human could actually achieve, to way, way, way over the top. By the end of this sequence the principals were to all intents and purposes flying, which cut the strings holding up my willing suspension of disbelief, and made me wonder why the hero bothered with walking and horses and stuff when he could just fly everywhere. Another downside of this section was the CGI: for all the money this movie has behind it, they didn’t quite have enough to do the flying ninja scenes convincingly.

Several times you think the movie is drawing to a close only to find it suddenly opening up again into a different but related story. What starts as a small story about ninjas turns into a huge story about clashing warlords. The main theme in this section is, “Will the terrible fighting ever stop? Each warlord deposes the last claiming to want to bring peace to the land, but all that happens is that the fighting begins anew.” This anti-war rhetoric is framed (of course) by savage stylized battles between vast armies. The soldiers of the two opposing armies – facing each other across a nearly featureless plain – are almost caricatures: one army is dressed in black, with the soldiers looking almost like orcs. The other army is dressed in white, with the soldiers looking almost like stormtroopers. And the hero (in red) tries to bring peace by killing everyone.

A strange movie, but great fun.

In 1954 in Christchurch two fifteen year-old girls, Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker, murdered Parker’s mother. After some five years in jail the women were released and both left New Zealand. Their assumed identities were a mystery until, quite recently, Anne Perry (a successful crime novelist) was revealed to be Juliet Hulme. Anne Perry – Interiors is a documentary portraying the daily life of Perry/Hulme, now in her seventies.

The movie theatre was near full, which I guess is to be expected given the local connection. The audience was predominately elderly too, and I couldn’t help wondering if perhaps someone in the audience actually knew Parker&Hulme at the time of the murder…

It was a fascinating glimpse into her life. It was part fly-on-the-wall doco, part one-sided conversation with Perry and members of her small but devoted entourage. This devotion perhaps attains worrying proportions in the form of Meg, Perry’s one friend. Meg, who lives just across the lane from Perry, said that she couldn’t move on until she had made Perry happy. Although the similarities weren’t pointed out, it was easy to see an echo of Pauline Parker’s devotion to Juliet Hulme in Meg’s devotion to Perry. Perry/Hulme is clearly a woman who arouses fierce loyalties in those around her.

Perry spends her days in her gorgeous rambling stone farmhouse in the barren Scottish countryside, working on her novels, being looked after by her brother (acting as her secretary), typist, gardener, driver/odd-jobs man, and two or three dogs. It was interesting to see her work process: she does all her writing sitting in an old leather reclining chair, writing by hand on a pad resting on a book resting on a giant cushion resting on her lap. She gives the hand-written pages to her typist, who types them up on a computer in the wonderful loft/study – a long thin room with steeply-sloping wall/ceilings that are interrupted regularly by skylights. The typist frequently has trouble reading Perry’s handwriting. (“I’ve gotten used to it, but sometimes I can’t make out a word. And sometimes Anne can’t either.”)

Despite her devoted and doting entourage, the film imparts a sense that Perry is very much alone. This seems to be deliberate on the part of the doco makers, as there are lots of shots from outside the house showing Perry inside in a room alone, and long shots of her walking alone along country lanes.

Most of the doco is about her life now, with only occasional veiled references to “that thing that happened”. Right at the end Perry talks a little about the murder, claiming that she was convinced that Parker would kill herself if they didn’t perform the murder, and that she knew it was wrong but felt she had no choice. Whether this was true or an after-the-fact rationalization I couldn’t decide.

Why do giant black spiders dig my bathroom so?

This is just what you want to see when you get up in the middle of the night: