[caption id="attachment_877" align="alignright" width="300"] Val McDermid[/caption] Val McDermid is not a women to be bothered by the gothic macabre of tombstones, as an encounter in an Edinburgh graveyard reveals. The location was chosen by The Guardian’s culture reporter Hannah Ellis Petersen, and “came from the misguided belief that an author who has spent her life writing about murder might feel at home surrounded by graves. It turns out that the atmosphere of the place is completely lost on her”. McDermid is bothered, it turns out, by things which shape the lives and well-being of her legion readers: not truth and justice in their ethereal forms but the day to day effects of social injustice and gender inequalities on individuals. “If I was a 16-year-old now, I wouldn’t be going to Oxford, that’s for sure, and therefore wouldn’t have had any of the opportunities that opened so many doors for me back then”, McDermid says. “I really worry we are heading more towards the Victorian ethic where those who have the capacity to claw their way to the top will do, and the rest will be sweeping the shit out of the doorway. We’re going back to Bleak House”. McDermid is well-known as an activist, speaking out on such issue as Scottish independence, equality and social cohesion but, as Ellis Petersen notes, she doesn’t use her crime novels to expose her politics directly. There’s a fabulous mid-interview retort from McDermid: “Once you start murdering MPs, where do you stop?” As Sian Busby’s McNaughton – a novelisation of the story of Daniel M’Naghten who in 1843 shot the civil servant Edward Drummond in the back, mistaking him for the then Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel – demonstrates, even attempting to murder an MP can have far reaching, and not necessarily progressive, consequences. A Scottish woodturner, M’Naghten had paranoid delusions – at trial his prosecutors and defence agreed on this– and was held not guilty on grounds of insanity. The verdict spawned a raucous outcry from the press, Parliament and the Queen (Victoria had herself been subject to assassination attempts) against the court’s leniency, and led to the retrograde ‘McNaughton Rules’ as the standard test for criminal liability in relation to mental health. Had ‘ the rules’ been applied to M’Naghten himself, he would probably have been found guilty and hanged rather than spending the rest of his life confined first in Bethlem and then Broadmoor. It would be another 100 years before anyone could again successfully argue in a UK court that an offender was not criminally responsible if the crime had been committed as a result of a mental defect. This isn’t to say that McDermid denies a place for politics in her fiction. As she wrote in an article (also published in The Guardian) earlier this year “these positions don’t usually hit the reader over the head like a party political broadcast. If it is not subtle, all you succeed in doing is turning off readers in their droves. Our views generally slip into our work precisely because they are our views, because they inform our perspective and because they’re how we interpret the world, not because we have any desire to convert our readership to our perspective. Except, of course, that sometimes we do”. Nor is it a responsibility she wears lightly. Speaking of the perceived disconnect between politicians and the public, she reflected: “When people lose trust in politicians, they need to find it elsewhere. Maybe, because they trust writers to tell some kind of truth buried in the fictions, we’re being listened to in a way we rarely have before. And that’s a scary thought”. Splinter the Silence (published today in the UK under the Little, Brown imprint – the hardback edition contains a bonus short story), sees the popular psychological profiler Tony Hill team up again with former DCI Carol Jordan to investigate a series of apparent suicides linked to the most modern, cruel and criminal phenomena of cyberbullying and abuse over social media, the dark and disturbing side of humanity exposed under the anonymity of internet trolls. [caption id="attachment_879" align="alignnone" width="300"] McDermid with J K Rowling[/caption] McDermid tells Ellis Petersen that she found the online violent and sexist abuse levelled at her friend J K Rowling when Rowling aligned with the ‘no’ campaign in ahead of the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum “profoundly depressing”. She points to an “instinctive misogyny….when a woman says something that in any way erodes on white male privilege…The vileness of the abuse is astonishing…[W]e have felt over the past 20 years that feminism has made steps forward…So I was thinking things had changed, that the next generation of men weren’t as institutionally misogynist as the previous were. And then suddenly the internet came along, and gave them a platform to voice their feelings anonymously. And boy, did the bile come out”. Most of the pre-publication reviewers of Splinter the Silence have revelled in the return of one of McDermid’s most popular characters. Little, Brown herald it as “her most gripping, chilling, suspenseful novel yet”. There is a splattering of reviews (all positive) on Goodreads already, among them one from Liz Wilkins who comments that the “series has not even shown a hint of growing old, the quality, readability and just sheer addictiveness of it grows with every single novel and Splinter the Silence is no exception”. Few (Barry Forshaw, writing for The Independent, aside) have commented on the inherent feminism underpinning of the storyline. Yet is exactly this which lifts McDermid beyond readable into the re-readable echelon. Sir Walter Scott drew a distinction between ‘ephemeral’ novels which supply ‘the regular demand of watering places and circulating libraries’ and those which deserve ‘an attention from the public far superior’. Writers who more usually attract the accolade of great as measured, say, by the Nobel Prize or Man Booker judges or academic acceptance by within the perambulatory literary canon are often constrained in their ability to do immediate good – to entertain or to influence - by a tiny readership. McDermid’s writing inhabits that difficult space between Scott’s extremes of easy popularity and serious profundity, making her one of today’s most important writers. She is, of course, also a phenomenal story-teller. Val McDermid's Splinter the Silence is published in the UK today, 27 August 2015, by Little, Brown.

POSTSCRIPT

I spotted this tweet from Chris Brookmyre shortly after I posted this article.  Seemed appropriate...

Britain's most dangerous woman pictured alongside Nicola Sturgeon. pic.twitter.com/V5Y8Gu8Cx5 @valmcdermid @NicolaSturgeon

— Chris Brookmyre (@cbrookmyre) August 27, 2015

     

It's Sunday evening, yes? So time to kick off the shoes, put away the day's cares and get out a good book to read.  But before you do, to get you in the mood, here's a really fun tribute to reading books, in the form of a parody of the (brilliant) song All About That Bass.  If you love the physicality of a paper book, this is most certainly to for you. Put together by the good people at The Book Man, my thanks are due to fellow ibooknet members Catherine at Juxtabook and Mike at a Book for All Reasons, and in turn to Shephards Confident, for sharing this. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz4tjFG2W98&w=560&h=315] Now, for me, kindles and other e-readers have their place, but these are girls are definitely after my heart!

Kirsty Lang called the Seine 'the only river in the world that runs between two bookshelves'.  It is the Bouquinistes, booksellers who offer used, second hand and antiquarian books, who make it so.  Today these seductive 'merchants of the mind' are a familiar sight along the banks of the Seine in Paris, an exhilarating one for those who delight in the hunt of book collecting, and a honeypot for tourists and visitors seeking immersion in Parisian street culture or just a souvenir to take home. The Bouquinestes pursue their trade along the right bank of the Seine from the Quai du Louvre to the Pont Marie and on the left bank from Quai Voltaire to Quai de al Tournelle, their stalls mingled among those of stamp, coin, ephemera and comic dealers, and others selling old prints, engravings and journals, offering a dazzling array of secondhand and collectible books and hours of fascination for the treasure hunter. Paris peddlers called 'libraries forains' are thought to have begun to offer used books along the banks of the Seine sometime around the 16th century.  Purveyors of new books treated them with hostility, fearful that they would undermine their own trade. Similarly, the civic authorities were suspicious of the fledgling bouquinestes. Their activities could not easily be subject to official censorship and they were therefore considered a potential source of radical influence and dangerous.  In 1557, during the Wars of Religion, the libraries forains were accused of being thieves and of selling forbidden Protestant pamphlets, embarrassing and troubling to both the government and the church. Their numbers were increasing at the beginning of the 17th century, and some of them saw the opening of Pont-Neuf in 1606 as an opportunity for public readings, musical entertainments and open-air shows.  Edward Fournier wrote, in his 1862 history of Pont-Neuf that the "This famous bridge was not content to be the most varied and the most gigantic of open-air shows, it was also a huge reading room ... the books were there in multitude and along parapets spread like the double radius of the largest libraries".  The libraries forains often used wheelbarrows to haul their bookish wares from spot to spot and sold them from trays fastened to the parapets of bridges over the river with leather straps. After a series of attempts on the part of the authorities to control their activities, a 1649 settlement finally prohibited stalls, and any other display of books, on the Pont Neuf and travelling booksellers were driven out of the city, and could only gain re-entry under licence.  The prohibition held for a while but slowly the booksellers returned to Pont-Neuf and the banks of the Seine, quietly tolerated by some regimes, deterred, persecuted or removed by others.  In 1721 Louis V forbade the display of books on pain of fines and imprisonment and in 1756 all trade on Pont-Neuf was banned.  Under the more moderate regime of Louis XVI, booksellers again returned to the Seine.  During the French Revolution, despite the dangers of street trading, the Seine book peddlars prospered, the valuable content of the libraries of the nobility and clergy, systematically looted by the sans-culottes, making its way to their stalls. Napoleon was tolerant to the bouquinestes, who in the early 19th century began to settle in particular spots. In October 1822 the profession was legally recognised for the first time and 1859 a concession was introduced which permitted bouquinestes to trade at specific places albeit under strict conditions.  A little later, in 1891, they were permitted to attach their boxes to railings permanently.  During the Paris World Exposition in 1900, there were thought to be some 200 bouquinestes along the banks of the Seine.  New measures in the 1930s formalised the bouquinestes' trade, requiring them to sell books exclusively and preventing them from operating a second shop elsewhere. Today each of 240 bouquinestes occupies 10 meters of railings long the Seine for an annual fee, making use of 900 distinctive bottle green boxes (the size of the boxes was fixed in 1930) to house hundreds of thousands of books, stretched along 3 kilometers of the banks of the Seine.  Together they make up what is claimed to be the largest concentration of open air bookselling in the world. The banks of the Seine in Paris were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991.

I've spent a glorious morning, fuelled by coffee of course, putting together a few notes on the life and work of one of my favourite illustrators, John Archibald Austen. Austen, born at the end of the 19th century, followed his father and trained as a carpenter.  But enamored by the works of Aubrey Beardsley, he moved to London and retrained as an artist and illustrator (and for a few years, revelled in somewhat Bohemian circles).  I'm lucky enough to have a copy of the 1929 John Lane at the Bodley Head edition of The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, illustrated by Austen , in my collection.  Collectors' notes here.

There’s a treat in store for Middle Earth fans and collectors later this month when one of J R R Tolkien’s earliest prose works, The Story of Kullervo, is released. Kullervo is a tragic character, perhaps the darkest of Tolkien’s creations. ‘Hapless Kullervo’, as Tolkien called him, was orphaned and in the charge of the cruel magician, Untamo. Untamo had killed Kullervo’s father, Kalvero, kidnapped his mother and tried, three times, to do away with the young boy. Kullervo survives through the bond with his twin sister, Wanona and with the protection of the magical black dog, Musti. Sold into slavery, he swears revenge against Untamo; and so the story unfolds. The publishers acknowledge The Story of Kullervo as ‘the foundation stone in the structure of Tolkien’s invented world’. Kullervo becomes a forefather of Turin Turambar, the incestuous hero of The Silmarillion. Loosely reworked from the epic Finnish poem, Kalevala, (which was also the inspiration for a suite of symphonic movements by Sibelius) Tolkien described his story of Kullervo as ‘the germ of my attempt to write a legend of my own to fit my private languages’ and ‘a major matter in the legends of the First Age’. Tolkien worked on The Story of Kullervo in 1913 and 1914 while he was at Exeter College, Oxford, studying English. In a contemporary letter to his future wife, Edith Bratt, he explained that he was "trying to turn one of the stories [of the Kalevala]—which is really a very great story and most tragic—into a short story somewhat on the lines of Morris' romances with chunks of poetry in between". Tolkien didn’t finish the story and it remained unpublished until 2010 when it appeared in an academic journal alongside two drafts of an essay, On the Kalevala. Release by HarperCollins later this month marks the first mass market publication. The Story of Kullervo is published by HarperCollins on 27 August 2015 and will be available in hardback and as an e-book. The story is accompanied by the author’s notes and drafts illuminating his source material for Kullervo. The volume is edited by Verlyn Flieger who was behind its academic publication in Tolkien Studies (Volume 7, 2010, pp 211-278).

Make no mistake, Tore Renberg’s See You Tomorrow (Arcadia, 2014) is the hardest boiled of thrillers. Brash, gruesome, riveting, bitter and full on, it requires a courageous reader.  It is, as you would expect of a thriller from the Arcadia stable, an action-packed page-turner.  But it’s cleverer and more rewarding than that. It’s a terrifying insight into how people can become bound into a repellent, immoral and perverted code of behaviour which, for them, becomes justifiable, even something to be proud of, as the only means to survive in the a world which has done them no favours.  What emerges is a questioning of the human condition, delivered without judgment, which is intelligent, engaging and ultimately troubling.  Late night reading is not recommended. The sun is shining on Stavanger and it’s hot. Unseasonably hot for late September. Sunlight burns a rare spotlight on the lives of eleven usually unnoticed misfits, left behind by Stavanger’s rapid, oil-funded gentrification.  Among them are petty criminals with a philosophically flawed but pragmatic code of ethics, their lives ringed with heavy-metal and horror films, dishing out brutality in paltry revenge for that which they have received; teenager Sandra, blinded by faith in a God who doesn’t bless her and fatefully repressed by parental, middle-class expectations is infatuated with a bright-eyed and devastatingly handsome local delinquent who refuses to discuss his past; Pal, left behind more than once, is bewildered his own inability to live an ordinary and struggling to keep up appearances and single-handedly bring up his two girls. He’s also a secret and unsuccessful gambler who deals with his mounting debt by tipping bills into the litter bin at a nearby bus stop; Cecilie is awkward, abused and wonderfully powerful but she doesn’t know whose baby she is carrying. Rudi, always super-horny, whose Asperger’s-like tendencies compel him to over-value routine and under-value the ability to stop talking, proves much of the darkly comic humour: one might think of him as a lovable rogue, if he didn’t enjoy dishing out ritualistic violence quite so much. Jani, hilariously, haphazardly tries to use his own mangled version oil-rich corporate conglomerates’ management techniques to his dangerously pathetic local gang of four. Over the course of three days their stories continually collide, causing explosions which propel them off course, all of them, scratching and scrambling to regain a small portion of control. There’s so much about the bonds that bind people and the casual cruelty that breaks them apart. Out of it comes a relentless narrative which will revolt the faint-hearted and reward thoughtful thrill-seekers. Renberg has acknowledged William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) as an influence on See You Tomorrow. The parallels in style are obvious – interlaced narratives told from different perspectives; short, sharp chapters, constantly challenging the reader to keep up and work it out. But there is something deeply intimate about Renberg’s style – his benevolent interest in characters, his sympathy for their circumstances, all wrapped round with the sometimes comforting and sometimes confrontational sounds of music and poetry – that makes See You Tomorrow distinct. I never know where I am with Faulkner.  Renberg gives signposts! At one point, as I closed the book (I had to occasionally, just to catch my breath) it struck me that fellow thriller-seeker Liz Barnsley would love this book. I quick stop over at her blog, Liz Loves to Read, proved me right. She gave it “Five shiny 'do not miss this book' stars and an elephant”.   I’m not sure about the elephant, but See You Tomorrow is certainly 550 pages of zestful verve for which the phrase page-turner might have been invented. About Tore Renberg Tore Renberg burst onto the literary scene in 1995 with a blow-away collection of short stories, Sleeping Tangle, winning the prestigious Tarjei Vesaas Debutant Prize. Two of his novels have been turned into films.  He is a respected literary critic and broadcaster in his native Norway.  See You Tomorrow is the first of his works to be translated into English. See You Tomorrow by Tore Renberg, translated into English by Sean Kinsella, was published in the UK by Arcadia Books in October 2014.