( Henry James) “I have been a child, but i have never been on a quest for

buried treasure.” Here is, indeed, a wilful paradox; for if he has

There are short story writers and then there is William Trevor. A simple yet devastating truth. Reading his story 'Friendship' from his 1996 collection 'After Rain' just now, I just shook my head at the sheer knowingness and acuity of a writer who can move a story from an opening prank committed by two children against their father involving cement and a golf bag, to the ending of a life long friendship because one woman knew too much about the other, resulting in the satiation of an inflexible husband's pride through sacrifice.


Trevor's writing wears its recognitions modestly. It is not 'weighty' in terms of tonality and compression and yet seems to say all there can be to say on a subject, so that the story has to mean finally what is means. Once known, once filtered out into the world through language, experience has to be experienced within the shapes by which it is birthed and then governed. Having said this, Trevor's story does not render 'life' as some non-optional, ill fated strait jacket, yet the enclosure of Trevor's words vividly delineates the parameters by which we greet, acknowledge and even silently hate each other. How perfectly Trevor captures the subtle, gladiatorial combat between a wife, a husband and a best friend here:

'Margy's going to make us her paella,' Francesca said, and Margy knew that when Philip turned away it was to hide a sigh. He didn't like her paella.He didn't like the herb salad she put together to go with it. He had never said so, being too polite for that, but Margy knew.'

'Oh, good,' Philip said.

Margy's point of view privileges her insight into the unspoken tensions between this small group of three. However her innate fairness also preserves the autonomy of both Francesca and Philip. We may all recognise the placatory bridging 'gift' of Francesca's justification of Margy's presence through the promise of the paella. She is a wife who has become accustomed to shaping strategies to preserve the status quo, yet we also sense her vulnerability and the strong possibility that Philip is not the man she should have married, nor the man she will ever love enough to feel anything other than temperate care.

The quiet, possiibly complacent irony of the word 'good' reminds me of an alligator in waiting! The mask of polite detachment adopted by Philip seems cold enough for secret cruelty and the intelligence of Trevor, prevents this being a sexually charged combat for Francesca's love, fought over ( like James' Wings of the Dove) by Philip and Margy. This is more ordinary, more carefully and unexplosively entrenched, yet still, by the end of the story, nonetheless isolating and upsetting, for the coldness of Philip contaminates everything. The simple repetition of the pronoun 'he' subtly emphasises the phallic precision of Philip and his anti-playful view of the world, which confines his wife to a life of feminine apology, opposes Margy's bohemian offering of 'her paella' and outrages his sons into imaginative and practical anarchy!

Reading may confirm things that we have known or lost or hoped for. We  come across a parade of arranged words and something magical may happen, something that we hear and  feel as much as read. This meeting of the senses transforms a moment into something more plastic, more stretchy, more alive and we are changed by this encounter, having the words  here. to recognise who and what we are and can be. It is as if the very 'pulse' of certain writers anchors us to another way of knowing, another 're-sourcing' of ourselves.

Years ago, after starting at Liverpool University by the back door ( via the ring and beg late admissions' system) mySpanish teacher Mrs Wyness (who was by far the most intelligent and firm of all my sixth form teachers ) told me to read Garcia Marquez because he was special and because she thought I needed something new.

At some point I did read his Autumn of The Patriach and felt it rather bloody, hyperbolic  and crazy and it was a good while later before i started to read him again and found Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude. I also read many of his short stories and here, as with D H Lawrence, I found the best of Marquez without becoming exasperated by his art which with the longer pieces sometimes feels like trickery: too flashy, too self conscious, too knowingly brilliant.

So here in 'Death beyond Constant love' the terminally ill Senator  Sanchez on his yearly pilgrimmage for votes, finds the woman of his life and what we hear and feel as we read, is the rhapsodic irony and desperation of this meeting.

Death has taken all the familiarity out of his world and rendered it alien. the world goes on, indifferently counting time to his death when it will carry on without a tear. Yet right in the middle of his final tour he finds a woman whose beauty makes him sabotage even the remaining respectability of his normal happy life before his terminal  prognosis. Marquez makes us sympathise with the Senator even when he seems shoddy and even violating,  because the narative mirrors and matches his awareness of his own collusion in his own destruction, his own desire to live more than he has ever lived; dangerously, desperately and finally:

'Then she laid his head on her shoulder with her eyes fixed on the rose. The senator held her about the waist, sank his face into woods-animal armpit, and gave into terror. Six months and eleven days later, he would die in that same position, debased and repudiated because of the public scandal with Laura Farina and weeping with rage at dying without her.'

The world of Marquez always involves the relationship between sexual desire and smell. Here the senator knows he is alive because his sensuality tells him so. The body is not sanitised nor removed from the earthy realities of aliveness. And it is this earthy vitality that triggers the first direct expression of mourning for his decaying self. 'weeping with rage at dying without her.' Sometimes as I posted somewhere else on this blog site, only rage will do.

In Chapter four of David Almond's The Savage, the narrator Blue expresses the seemingly incidental event of his own inclusion in his Savage story. I love the emphasis on the 'without really thinking' for it is as if some unconscious impulse creates a version of himself within his fictional narrative and I wonder how far it is this unconscious aspect of  his own characterisation which allows his own form of resurrection through writing and painting. It is as if he has left or let his unconscious self to deal with something his conscious self has strugggled with.

In certain NLP processes subjects can simply 'let' parts of the self metaphorically shift and renegotiate the very terms of any conflict or difficulty. There need be no 'conscious' intervention or discussion. It is like a trust game with our unconscious creativity and our training to control our knowledge and source of knowledge is subverted by the wilderness creativity of the Savage and the Savage-Blue.

And of course as soon as I type that I recall Almond's earlier Kit's Wilderness and the game of death and the special sight when the dead can be seen again, like Jess in The Savage, walking and dancing:

'On the brightest days, when the sun pours down and dances on the river and the air begins to tremble, I see Grandpa and Grandma before me. I follow them. I walk beside the river with my friends. I know that as long as there are others to see us, we will walk here together forever. ' ( Kit's Wilderness)

'As long as there are others to see us.' How strangely Almond's novel beckon to each other. How many times in The Savage are we watching characters watch other characters in natural settings where the past and present seem to meet each other, interfacing the textures of one emotional landscape with another. Does this also suggest that if we are not somehow 'seen'( even if we are as esrtanged and lonely as hopper or Askew) then our souls' existence(s) cannot endure?

We are forced by the demands of daily life to inhabit landscapes of conscious awareness yet this impulse like the 'scribbling' at the origin of the text seems to emanate from an unconscious place where censorship and repression have no say or sway. It is as if the experience of scribbling has released the a sort of creative resolution to the emotional impasse acknowledged at the beginning of the Savage. The seamless shift too from missspellling to more conventional type face and presentation confuses slightly too until we remember that the Savage is a retrospective creation and as such, knows far more at any point than it can reveal.

Blue allows his represented self to experiment with other roles and behaviours. He allows himself to play.He transforms himself into a poet and 'had  Jess dancing and skipping and singing with the sun in her hair and butterfiles fluttering round her head.'  The choice of the verb here reveals the fictional authority of Blue. Jess's vulnerable state  is liberated temporarily from pain through this magically real dance. In Marquez's One Hundred Yeaars of Solitude there are butterfiles...( More)

I fell in love with Tennessee Williams when I was meant to be studying Victorian literature. My tutor Steve Newman was poorly and I could not get overly excited about a mini course on social realism and was pining for Dickens. Liverpool University had a superb Extension Studies programme and so I signed up for American Literature in Southport with a brilliantly exacting tutor of the old school who introduced me to Gatsby and Blanche Dubois. Such introductions last a life time and I remember reading A Streetcar named Desire and feeling my whole mood and body take on a new speech, a Southern heat as the play insinuated and then stormed its way to one of the most unbearable scenes in literature. Even now I find the last scene makes me turn away as Blanche is carried away to a mental asylum and I wonder if this act of turning away makes us as culpable as Stella whose eyesight and hearing remain resolutely selective throughout the play? If ever there was a text that explores a 'ruin'd chapel' it's A Streetcar named desire! And of course such ruination is exactly what Stell and Stanley crave in their own sexually voracious ways.

For Blanche's refusal to 'see' the threat of her situation as interloper in the sexually coodependent world of Stanley and Stella seems more flailing victim than arrogant invader and rereading this yesterday I was riveted by William's brilliance at recognising the destructive potential of shared housing! I kept wanting to shout 'get on that bus Blanche..leave town now!' as everything inside and outside Blanche starts to collapse upon her. When Blanche says: 'I,I I' in her famous 'death speech' near the opening of the play, Williams is capturing her faltering grasp of identity, her rage at being left by Stella to cope, and the devastation of all her losses where she has been reduced to the neurotic, needy 'vampire' we meet when she steps off the streetcar. The listing of her losses allows a Southern Vista of despair, of hopelessness and faithlessness to open up before us. Far from being finished or even finished with, Blanche's past is ever present. Only Stella can 'do' the future in the play and that is her survival as well as her heartlessness. Stanley is ever present to his own presence. This render him magnetic and profoundly disturbing, visceral and monstrous by turns.

Life rarely leaves us to deal with just one problem by itself. It seems to have little respect for singularity or tidiness!! For as this thing called 'life' dismantles some of our most familiar and trusted structures,  then another 'event ' often coinicides and we are left emotionallly and spiritually stranded, trying to re-orientate ourselves in a world whose words seem alien and disempowering. . When I first read David Almond's novel The Savage I was immediately caught by his narrator's early declaration about his hero the Savage:

'He lived in a cave under the rooined chapel.'

Something about this choice of habitat resonated straight away. It immediately began to live on in my memory, like a recalled adventure. The phrase has a pulse-  I can hear its truth somehow! For why  should Blue's fictional response to his grief  about his father,involve  his protagonist living in a cave under the 'rooined chapel'? Because there is something intuitively right, something revelatory about the idea of a 'rooined chapel'. There is something  deeply and arrestingly romantic about such a place - even the misspelling serves to intensify  the raw emotional impact of such a space. For if fiction mirrors life, then Blue's instinctive  realisation about the predicament of his character must originate from his very own experience, or more importantly perhaps his expereince of his experience.   And thus Blue's savage dwells in a place where the very architecture of 'home' has collapsed, suggesting that faith has been lost, degraded, or destroyed. Such a 'home' therefore invites some form of rebuilding and this is I feel what the novel attempts to do,  through the healing activity of writing. 

Blue's sense of 'home' has been rocked by the sudden death of his beloved father and he feels disorientated, perhaps trapped within a 'cave' of sorrow and faithlessness, where his youth and vulnerability leave him exposed. Something has to happen to shift this physical and spiritual feeling of incarceration and hurt. The conventional advice from his counsellor makes him feel 'stupid', even  worsens his condition and he makes a spontaneous decision to 'scribble' out something different, something 'Savage' , something  unlawful and ironically his own.

Everything in this scribbled story however apparently accentuates the differences of the Savage's situation from that of his creator Blue. Even the colour of the pictures are green, intimating a raw naturalness that communicates the feral, uncivilised life style of the Savage, whose 'rooined chapel' seems to stretch out beyond the physical limits of the building, embracing all that is beyond Blue's regulated world. The Savage's 'freedom' is a collage of natural images and elated words, which transmit a child like exuberance as well as intimating a lonely existence where 'savage' solitude is inescapable. Into such a world Blue places Hopper, the local bully who has brutally mocked Blue's grief and even claimed some supernatural part in his father's sudden death. When I first read this novel, I don't think I recognised the impact of such a narrative choice on Blue's part. when Moira pointed out the powerful significance of placing Hopper within Burgess' Wood, a place which may be situated within the broader confines of the 'rooined chapel', then Blue's father's expressed certainty that Hopper is also a figure of pity, came back to me. Instinctively Blue knows that he cannot address his suffering without exploring the significance of Hopper in his world, as Hopper's vengeful antipathy to Blue debilitates Blue and makes it imperative that something should be done about him. Writing is therefore a release and expression of Blue's savagery about his father's death and Hopper's heartless exploitation of Blue's sorrow.

What is unexpected  of course, is  the impact of Blue's storytelling upon this negative relationship. Almond is making it very clear that the stories we tell about ourselves and others, have an enormous effect upon our lives. Stories shape and then reshape us. The 'rooined chapel' is a place where Blue's story about his Savage meets the Savage's story about Blue! I am not sure if this meeting is even just a reversal of the real. It seems powerfully congruent and deeply satisfying. It rebuilds our faith in the imagination and elevates the story to a sacred level in a way, for the Savage's pictorial narrative of Blue and is family exists in the cave-chapel, illuminated by the Savage's light , made out of a 'burning branch' which reveals that which had been hidden but not lost within this world of the apparently 'rooined chapel.' But I am leaping ahead of myself with my enthusiasm for this tale. Let me return to the interloper Hopper and find out what he is doing in this place.  

When I gaze at the images of Hopper 'wanderin' in the wood I am struck by the hollow-eyed, 'grim reaper' like aspect to his representation. I also wonder why Hopper is actually there, by himself, 'wanderin' in this place, suggesting he needs tiem and space for solitude, for escape and reflection.  And if this place is an extension of the 'roooined chapel' then is Hopper 'just' a violating interloper or is there something else going on?

I had never read Cheever before and this Vintage collection begins with a tale of reunion where a large family are reunited at some decaying holiday place on the coast. The most surprising ,member of the reunion is the youngest brother nicknamed Tifty, whose derision for his family is represented again and again throughout the story. Finally the narrator recognises that all his brother's energy is directed towards farewells and that such goodbyes reveal an innate sense of moral superiority that patronises and alienates all whom he encounters along life's road. The compression of:

'It was elegaic and it was bigoted and narrow, it mistook circumspection for character, and I wanted to help him.'

gives superb voice to the revelation of the brother's smallness of imagination and spirit. The surprise of the attempt at compassion is thwarted by the cruel consistency of Tifty's derision. The 'savage' then is released from the carefully guarded civility of the reunion and the narrator takes up a sea soaked root and delivers a cathartic blow across his brother's head. All respect for respect has gone. This blow is fierce and 'savage' and marks the conclusion of the youngest brother's relationship to his family. The narrator finishes his narrative with a transcendent, compassionate glimpse of his mother and wife bathing naked in the sea.

'Oh, what can you do with a man like that? ...How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand...

The sea that morning was irridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming - Diana and Helen - and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea. '

The naturalness and grace of mother and wife are communicated in a near mystical prose that celebrates the unique connection between human beings at a special moment in their time and that of the planet. The warmth of the narratorial viewpoint seems a welcome release after the prickly, guarded intimacies reprrsented throughout the rest of the story. Here, the women seem figures of myth; goddesses emerging out of the constraints of some narrow history, perfect figures of natural sensuality.

Ironically it is the act of savage retaliation against the constant negativity of the youngest brother that allows such mystical  expression.

Sometimes as Cheever and Dylan Thomas  both knew- only rage will do!

Would you not like to try all sorts of lives — one is so very small — but that is the satisfaction of writing — one can impersonate so many people.

Surely this resonates with reading too? For Reading allows us to write ourselves anew.  It is a very sneaky business somehow and gives us the privacy to be anybody we choose-  perhaps loosening the ties which bind us to our prescribed identity? 

In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.

Being a shy and often bronchitic child I had lots of fantasy friends. These were not however 'made up' creatures who peopled the stairs and corridors of my young imagination. No, they were the 'real stuff' and legend of the books I used  to devour in bed, full of Robert Louis Stevenson's rapture at 'kaleidoscipic 'images.  There,  I could be freed from the confines of sickliness and  my marked antisociality into  heady worlds of adventures where I could run away to sea and hang out with pirates; fight desperate Knights Templars and even  live on a raft on the Mississipi.

My mother bravely liberated herself from the incarceration of my father's sense of educational superiority through a Saturday Manager's  job at C&A  which she loved and which changed her life forever.  Every Saturday night I would wait eagerly for the return of my mother from Manchester on the 6pm train to Chapel-en-le-frith station which was at the top of a long hill, shrouded in trees and manned by a thin figure more ghoul than Bernard Cribbin. Mum would spend her hard earned cash on fresh fruit from the city centre stalls and books. Books I remember from Pauldens, one of those vast , sprawling department stores that we rarely see anymore, where kids could ride the escalators from floor to floor, hypnotised by the array of fixtures crammed full of things never, ever seen back in the villages we came from. I still associate that time of my life with the darkness of the railway station as I would meet my mother off the train, and can still imagine the slightly musty smell of the wooden carriages as the doors opened and let her off to the guard's whistle. I can still feel the promise of the huge yellow coloured plastic bags as she stepped towards us and the elation of the new book, often hardback, which I was lucky enough to find gifted each week. So much of recalled life then; the eager movement up a darkened wintry lane to meet a train and a book to clean me out of myself!

So I was Ivanhoe for a time, though I could never prefer Rowena to Rebecca who always seemed far more plucky and individual. I am sure I rewrote the ending of that novel many times! There was something uneasily  compromising I felt about Ivanhoe's conventional choice of romantic attachment and this I longed to change despite the resolution of the original ending.

I played at Huck Finn with my brother when we moved to a bungalow with a pylon in the garden( the previous owner had gone mad with it rumours suggested) and a hot flat tarmac garage roof which proved a perfect raft for the Mississippi. I also met Long John Silver and Blind Pugh, the latter who terrified me obviously with his infamous black spot and who even now seems to encapsulate some primal fear about impending mortality. He still gives me the creeps with his hidden, blind eyes and evil talismanic touch which caresses the fearful mind  into self -destruct. Who would dare stay long enough to hear his tapping along the bridge as he comes towards us?