British Books

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/18077375

> > A well-known comics writer once told me that the mistake almost every conventional novelist who takes a turn writing comics initially makes is trying to put too many words into a panel. I wonder whether the opposite applies to writers who hop art forms in the other direction: freed at last from the rigid discipline of the speech bubble, they go bananas. > > > >When Alan Moore, the graphic novelist best known for Watchmen, wrote his 2016 novel Jerusalem it was 1,200 pages long. Although his latest book, The Great When — the first in a projected series of “Long London” novels — is a manageable 300-odd pages, the style has something about it of a man who has spent a career writing in a medium where you don’t get to use similes or adjectives much and is now making up for lost time. > > > >So, when a character smiles, we discover that “her smile was sunrise on a renderer’s yard, its dire light creeping into every crevice and uncovering each gruesome spectacle. The corners of her mouth crawled back towards pendulous ears, exposing the magnolia cemetery of her dentition.” > > > > ... > > > > The Great When, then, is both gothic and baroque. But so is its subject: the jostling, chaotic, crosspatch, antic and overstuffed city where it is set. It’s 1949. Moore’s version of postwar London is a landscape of bombsites furzed with wildflowers (“London rocket”), smoky pubs, voluble whelk-vendors, Oxo ads, Lyons Corner Houses and men in fawn raincoats, where a cup of weak tea and a sausage sandwich or a dinner of pilchards on toast is never far away. > > > > ... > > > > The plot kicks off when Dennis is sent to Soho to collect a handful of old Arthur Machen editions from a dealer. He returns to Coffin Ada to discover that, slipped among these volumes, is a copy of A London Walk by the Rev Thomas Hampole. Coffin Ada goes nuts. A London Walk is a book that shouldn’t exist — a book that appears in one of Machen’s stories. It has come from Somewhere Else. And it’s trouble. > > > > The premise of The Great When is that the London we know is shadowed by — or, to be more precise, is the shadow of — a boisterous and dangerous eldritch counterpart, The Great When or Long London, peopled with hallucinatory demigods. The unfortunate or deranged can tumble into Long London through hidden portals when they’re not paying attention. Worse, other things sometimes tumble out. The Ripper murders, we learn en passant, were the result of a “Pope of Blades” (a hideous insectoid thingy) escaping into our London in 1888. The book that shouldn’t exist belongs to that realm, and if it isn’t returned quickly something very bad will happen. The last time a book escaped, the person into whose possession it came was turned inside out. > > > > ... > > > > The cast hops in and out of Long London — and in and out of their wits. It’s a romp, and it’s full of loving attention to the past. That postwar London is deeply imagined and Moore’s literary influences — as well as Machen, he tips the hat to Iain Sinclair and Michael Moorcock in an afterword — are warmly acknowledged. > > > >As for the style, the reader will find of it, I think, what Dennis finds of Machen: “At first, he struggled with what he perceived as stuffiness in the tale’s presentation, although by the time he’d read a page or two, the burnish of its language and its atmospherics had seduced him.” Just like the old pulps that are so close to the author’s heart (torn pages of Sax Rohmer people the gutter outside Ada’s shop), there’s a delirious and generous campness to The Great When. Freed from the tyranny of the speech bubble, you sense Moore is really, really having fun. > > Archive

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/17881805

> >A mysterious cosmic emblem hangs over the entrance to a building in Bloomsbury, at the heart of London’s university quarter. Depicting concentric circles bound by intertwined arcs, it represents the four elements, seasons and temperaments, as mapped out by Isidore of Seville, a sixth-century bishop and scholar of the ancient world, as well as patron saint of the internet. What lies within is not a masonic lodge, though, or the HQ of the Magic Circle, but the home of one of most important and unusual collections of visual, scientific and occult material in the world. Long off-limits to passersby, the Warburg Institute has now been reborn, after a £14.5m transformation, with a mission to be more public than ever. > > > >“We are essentially devoted to the study of what you would now call memes,” says Bill Sherman, director of the Warburg. To clarify, the institute is not a repository of Lolcats and Doges, but of global cultural history and the role of images in society, with a dazzling collection ranging from 15th-century books on Islamic astronomy, to tomes on comets and divination, not to mention original paintings used for tarot cards (about which a show opens here in January). At least half of the books can’t be found in any other library in the country. > > > > ... > > > > The expansion has also enabled the full reinstatement of Warburg’s unique cataloguing system, with four floors each dedicated to Image, Word, Orientation and Action – “uniting the various branches of the history of human civilisation,” as his close collaborator, Fritz Saxl, put it, breaking culture free from the confines of its usual disciplinary silos. There are few other libraries in the world where you might open a drawer of photographs marked Gestures, to find thematic folders labelled Fleeing, Flying, Falling, along with Denudation of breast, Grasping the victim’s head, and Garment raised to eyes (Grief). Warburg’s unusual system might not have caught on elsewhere, but it still provides a powerful way for artists, writers and researchers to make unexpected connections and pursue fertile tangents – preceding our world of swiping through hashtags, links and recommended feeds by a century. > > > >“It’s a building filled with literal magic,” says novelist Naomi Alderman, who has spent much time writing here. “A place to sit amid books that are almost definitely emanating auras of sorcery … One brief stroll through the shelves and I always find some new wyrd inspiration.” The reading rooms themselves are still limited to card-carrying researchers, but through the new exhibition and event programme, the public can finally get a taste of Warburg’s weird and wonderful world for themselves.

> Three screen adaptations of Neil Gaiman’s works have been cancelled or had their production paused amid reports accusing the author of Coraline and The Sandman of sexual misconduct. > >Netflix’s Dead Boy Detectives, based on characters created for DC Comics by Gaiman and Matt Wagner, has been cancelled after one season. Production of the third and final season of Amazon drama Good Omens, based on the 1990 novel by Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, has been paused, according to US website Deadline. > >Meanwhile, development of a Disney film adaptation of Gaiman’s 2008 young adult novel The Graveyard Book has been put on hold. None of the streaming services has confirmed that these decisions were taken because of the allegations, but Gaiman apparently offered to step back from his involvement in Good Omens, according to Deadline.

Previously:

• Neil Gaiman denies sexual assault allegations made by two women

> George Orwell’s archives provide an invaluable insight into one of the most influential British writers of the 20th century, casting light on how he produced his most memorable books, his sensitivity to criticism, and his fears that legal threats could ruin his work. Now the treasure trove that is the extensive archive of correspondence and contracts amassed by Orwell’s original publisher, Victor Gollancz, could be scattered to the winds in what has been described as an act of “cultural vandalism”. > > Crucial correspondence involving the Nineteen Eighty-Four author and Observer correspondent is being offered for sale on the open market, following a decision in 2018 by the publisher’s parent company to sell the archive because the warehouse was closing.

Richard Blair, 80 – whose father Eric Blair wrote under the pen-name George Orwell – is dismayed by the loss: “It’s terribly sad … Once Gollancz material is acquired by private collectors, it could disappear into the ether for ever.” > > ... > > Rick Gekoski, a leading antiquarian bookseller, was asked to dispose of the archive, which included correspondence with Kingsley Amis and Daphne du Maurier, among other Gollancz authors. Last week, he dismissed criticisms of the disposal as “misguided”, saying: “The whole thing was sanctioned by Malcolm Edwards, publishing director of Orion, and it was sold at the request of the board.” In Gekoski’s 2021 book Guarded by Dragons, he wrote: “No one on the Orion board cared where they went, or to whom.” > >He recalled a warehouse full of tens of thousands of volumes as well as dozens of filing cabinets – “rusty and dusty, stuffed with all of the production, editorial and rights files of Gollancz publishers, the vast majority unopened for perhaps 50 years”. > >After he tried in vain to sell the entire archive to various institutions for around £1m, it was divided up between dozens of dealers, private collectors and libraries: “All the board asked us to do was to get rid of as much material as possible… and the rest… had to be thrown away.” > >Jean Seaton, director of the Orwell Foundation, said: “That nobody had opened those filing cabinets for 50 years was because they were idiots and didn’t understand the archive’s value. Why didn’t their board consult experts and historians, who would have understood that they needed perhaps to make some revenue from it, but would have understood the real public worth? Instead, they have dispersed a national archive.”

> It was 1984, and the publisher Macmillan was holding a small event for booksellers, and had invited a tiny handful of journalists along as well. They would be announcing upcoming titles, trying to get the booksellers excited about them. I was one of the journalists, but I only remember one author and one book from that afternoon. The author’s editor, James Hale, was thrilled about a first novel, which Macmillan would soon be publishing, and which James had discovered on the “slush pile” of unsolicited manuscripts. The author had been asked to say a few words to the assembled booksellers about himself and his book. > > The author had dark, curly auburn hair and a ginger beard that was barely more than ambitious stubble. He was tall, and his accent was Scottish. He told us that he had really wanted to be a science fiction writer, that he had written several science fiction books and sent them out to publishers without attracting any interest. Then he had decided to “write what he knew”. He had taken his own obsessions as a young man, his delight in blowing things up and his fascination with homemade implements of destruction, and he had given them to Frank, a young man who also liked blowing things up but went much further than the author ever had. The author was Iain Banks, of course, and the book was The Wasp Factory. > >The story, he told us, began when Frank’s brother, Eric, escaped from a high-security psychiatric hospital, and let Frank know he was coming home. But, Iain warned us, that wasn’t what the story was about. He told us that he didn’t like telling people what The Wasp Factory was about – but he would tell us. The Wasp Factory, said Iain Banks, with a straight face, was about 250 pages. The 100 booksellers and the half a dozen journalists were charmed and won over. > >The book came out and immediately divided reviewers: some of us loved it while some seemed to feel that they had been personally attacked. Some saw it as an updated gothic romance, some as nothing more than a parade of nastiness, viciousness and monstrous things for their own sake. > > In a stroke of PR brilliance, when the paperback came out, it carried quotes from both kinds of reviews on the cover, alternating those that heralded a remarkable new talent, that applauded the book for its imagination and its imagination and daring, with those that stopped just short of suggesting that the author should be locked up before he wrote another novel.

> Neil Gaiman — the best-selling author whose work includes comic book series The Sandman and the novels Good Omens and American Gods — has denied sexual assault allegations made against him by two women with whom he had relationships with at the time, Tortoise Media reports. > > The allegations were made during Tortoise’s four-part podcast Master: the Allegations Against Neil Gaiman, which was released Wednesday. In it, the women allege “rough and degrading sex” with the author, which the women claim was not always consensual. > > ... > > According to Tortoise’s investigation, K did not file a police report. Scarlett filed a complaint to New Zealand police in October 2022. > > Gaiman told Tortoise that the police did not pursue his offer to assist the investigation regarding the complaint, claiming that this showed the lack of substance of the complaint. But New Zealand police told the outlet it made a “number of attempts to speak to key people as part of this investigation and those efforts remain ongoing,” adding that there are “a number of factors to take into consideration with this case, including location of all parties.”

The Tortoise Investigates series

edit: Archive

> Novelist and screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce has been announced as the new children's laureate. > >He will take on the role, which involves championing reading and children's books, from this year until 2026. > >Cottrell-Boyce said he was "so proud" to be the new children's laureate, adding: "Writing and reading has transformed my life." > > ... > > "I write children’s books because I think they help build the apparatus of happiness inside us," Cottrell-Boyce said in a statement. > >"I’m privileged to be part of those intimate, crucial, person-forming moments when people share stories with the children in their lives." > >But he also warned the benefits of children's reading had not been taken seriously enough, adding: "We risk losing a generation unless we act." > >Liverpool-based Cottrell-Boyce said his tenure as laureate would be about "urgency", with the intention of "addressing invisible privilege and inequality". > >"It will be about the increasing number of children in poverty being left further and further behind," he said. > >"It will be about calling for national provision so that every child – from their earliest years – has access to books, reading and the transformative ways in which they improve long-term life chances."