Male writers who changed my life

Girl meets boy!
Girl meets boy! A proof of my 2nd novel hanging out with my OH’s Pynchon

Stevie Smith said differences between male writers and female writers were more obvious if the writing was bad. I’m a big fan of Stevie Smith, but I’m not sure that’s true. Reading blurs and breaks down boundaries and allows us to access the imagined unknown, and to experience many different lives (to paraphrase a line from one of George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones books, the man who reads has many lives, the one who does not lives only once). When I’m reading a book I love, I could be anyone, and so could the writer; there’s only the story. (Perhaps that’s what Stevie Smith meant.)

So why single out male writers for a list like this? Pretty much, to redress the balance – I’ve already blogged about women writers who changed my life (parts I and II – III will come at some point), so it seems only fair.

The male writers who have changed my life

This is a list of writers rather than of books, so the writers I have included have written more than one novel that has made a big impression on me. Hence some major omissions, of which the biggest is The Catcher in the Rye, which I discovered at the perfect time, as a lonely teen in the school library. Also, Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which features one of my all-time favourite heroines.

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I haven’t touched on non-fiction (Al Alvarez would definitely be on that list, and Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy – ‘f*** the begrudgers’ is a useful mantra) or poetry (that would be a long one, with a starring role for T S Eliot and, of course, my OH Ian Pindar).

Douglas Adams. Hitchhiker’s Guide and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe have soaked into my unconscious. I still often find myself thinking about the uniquely biroid lifestyle, or the first ten thousand years being the worst, the second ten thousand being the worst too, and after that, going into a bit of a decline. Or it being too late to worry that you left the gas on when you’re about to watch the universe boil away into nothingness. Or the mark of civilisation being the question, ‘Where shall we have lunch?’ Or about how you might feel safe on an alien spaceship if only you could see a small packet of cornflakes amid the piles of Dentrassi underwear. And so on.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

William Gibson. Discovered mid-90s, browsing in a bookshop. The inventor of cyberspace, no? The kind of cyberspace we’re still evolving towards – a virtual simulacrum of the world we live in, with criminals, hustlers, defended power bases and ghosts. And Molly with the retractable claws… I often think of William Gibson when I see a wasp’s nest, or read about the hyper-rich – he’s brilliant on the dehumanising effect of immense wealth.

William Gibson introduced me to Cornell boxes – years later I saw some for myself and was stunned by how beautiful they were. Sometimes when I see my son, who has autism, set out his toys, I think of those Cornell boxes. There’s something very precise about the spacing and arranging, something numinous, even if I don’t understand it.

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I once tried to write an imitation William Gibson story. It wasn’t very good, as my boyf at the time reluctantly, but rightly, pointed out.

Ian Fleming. Mary Goodnight is the reason I wear Chanel no 5 (though Marilyn Monroe also has something to do with it.) A couple of years ago I wrote a short story called What would a Bond girl do? The story probably wasn’t up to much, but I still like the title.

Around the same time I read the Bond books (early to mid teens) I read a lot of Dick Francis novels, but all I really remember from them is the description of a hungry jockey griddling himself a steak. Also, that 80 hours into learning to be a pilot is the most dangerous time, because you begin to think you can do it and forget to be afraid, which maybe applies to a certain stage of learning in other areas too.

Raymond Chandler. Especially The Big Sleep. Love those slangy, cynical, man-of-the-world cadences – the beaten-up toughness of it. Love the old rich man with the orchids, the sharp dialogue, the ending. When I first read it I didn’t really get a lot of it, but it didn’t matter. And now I’m thinking of Bogart and Bacall. Btw, there is a brilliant essay on how Humphrey Bogart became Humphrey Bogart in a collection of essays by Louise Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood (if you read the book, look out for Charlie Chaplin and the jolly orgy involving paint).

Ernest Hemingway. My dad likes Hemingway and once told me The Old Man and the Sea was his favourite novel. Hemingway was also on an improving reading list that my English teacher gave me, and I read a fair bit aged 16 to 18 and loved it – For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises. The short story Hills Like White Elephants has stayed with me – it catches so clearly the sterile feeling of being with a lover when there is almost nothing more to say. Read The Killers recently – eerily brilliant.

Patrick Gale. I read my first Patrick Gale (Notes from an Exhibition) last year and could happily spend the next working through everything else he’s written. Look out for A Place Called Winter, out next month – I was lucky enough to receive a proof copy.

Notes from an Exhibition by Patrick Gale

Patrick Gale’s novels give me a feeling of space and light: new people, new territories, illumination. He’s also a damn good storyteller. When his characters do unexpected things, or have unexpected and sometimes terrible things happen to them, you’re left thinking – yes, that’s how it is, that’s the truth of it. He knows what makes people tick.
A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale

Raymond Carver. Bought mid-90s, collected short stories, after Short Cuts came out. Shining example of what can be achieved by being lean and spare. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love stays with me – an inspired sideways glance at the question of what love is, up there with James Joyce’s The Dead. Also the one about the three men who go fishing and find a body. And Cathedral.

James Ellroy. How do you find writers you love? Movie adaptations don’t hurt. I bought LA Confidential after seeing the film. Read the first page, thought what’s a shiv? Soon found out, read a load more. Big, ambitious books with amoral heroes – he shares some qualities with George RR Martin: an eagle eye for the workings of power; a desire to tell stories about bad people with a bit of good in them, and good people with a bit of bad in them; and an interest in twisted families.

George R R Martin. Nearly at the end of season 4 of Game of Thrones as I write. George RR Martin has a spectacular ability to create real people in a fantasy world. Intensely believable and often terrifying. Grim to think that pretty much any of the dark stuff in the books has really happened sometime, somewhere – and a relief when humanity’s more redemptive qualities come through: courage, integrity, resourcefulness, self-sacrifice, a sense of humour in the face of overwhelming odds, loyalty, vision, love.

Neel Mukherjee can do it all – his fiction is funny, profound, vivid, sweeping, and revelatory about how and why people do the things they do. After I’d read The Lives of Others I felt I understood more about why terrorist atrocities happen than when I started – it was an education. I’m very much looking forward to his next. The extract that appeared in January’s Granta was startlingly, shiver-inducingly spooky.

The Lives of Others

D H Lawrence. I read lots of DHL aged 16-21. (He was on the improving reading list too, and, later on, the degree syllabus.) The end of Sons and Lovers is one of my favourite endings of any novel – more affecting, to me, than the arguably more celebrated ending of The Great Gatsby. One of the endings of Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others hits the same note: poignancy and exile, moving on and out into the world. And I like Ursula at the beginning of Women in Love, like a daffodil with all the growth going on underground, before the shoots come up for everybody else to see – and Mrs Morel with the lilies in the moonlight, her brute husband left behind indoors.

OK, so that’s my list. I know as soon as I post this I’ll be troubled by omissions – other names and books are occurring to me as I type, clamouring for inclusion – but you have to start somewhere…

Swift homage to Tolkien, in passing – The Lord of the Rings had pride of place on the bookshelf in my mum’s house and we painstakingly taped the radio adaptation. My OH recently acquired a bit of the recording and it’s still brilliant.

As a girl in the 70s I had dungarees with workmen’s tools embroidered on them and Richard Scarry books illustrated with all the primary colours. If I was a kid these days, I’d have been much more likely to spend my days in a pink fairy costume reading a pink book about pink princesses. I really, really wanted to be a fairy, ideally called Lavinia – I definitely wasn’t a tomboy – so probably I would have been quite happy with this, at the time anyway.

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the wannabe Lavinia fairy

Looking back, I’m glad that my 1970s childhood didn’t indulge my pink princess tendencies, and that I read Richard Scarry as well as Beatrix Potter, Enid Blyton and Edith Nesbit.

In praise of Bond. James Bond

I haven’t managed to see Skyfall yet… though I very much want to as I am a big Daniel Craig fan, and I feel I owe something – some kind of loyalty, perhaps – to James Bond. Not so much to the films, perhaps, though it’s hard to separate out what the ongoing life of Bond owes to his various on-screen incarnations from the part played by the books. But it was to the books that I turned as a teenager – and here’s what I learned from them.

Growing up in an all-female household and going to an all-girls’ secondary school had the effect of making me hopelessly curious about men. But where was I to find out about these strange trouser-wearing creatures? When I got to 17, I finally discovered the answer, which was: down the pub. But till then, I had to make do with books. James Bond became a formative influence, a sort of ghostly proxy uncle, offering, or so I thought, a sneaky insight into what men were really like, and what they wanted.

So what do men really want? Nowadays, I would probably say: a quiet life, with suitable technological entertainments to hand, a comfy sofa and an amenable companion. (Same as women really, no?) But in the world according to Bond, men wanted danger: the lethal ski run, the underwater swim round the villain’s yacht with a Geiger counter in hand, sex with the villain’s girl.

Bond liked to gamble, and drive fast, and drink, and did not like to lose, or ever want to settle down: he feared boredom much more than death, and was not at all domesticated. He didn’t even believe in garaging his car, because fumbling round with garage doors slowed you down and broke your fingernails and, anyway, cars ought to be able to start in the cold.

‘What every man would like to be, and every woman wants’ 

The blurb on the back of one of the Bond books we had at home proclaimed, ‘James Bond is what every man would like to be, and what every woman would like between the sheets,’ or words to that effect. I suppose there’s a subtle, but important, distinction between what one wants (the sofa and a good book), and what one wants to be, or take to bed (the fantasy the book contains).

My attitude to Ian Fleming’s books is muddled up with the image projected by the Bond films. Back in the 80s, when I stayed up late in the run-up to Christmas, sitting close to the telly with the sound turned down low to watch whichever Bond was on that year, the films seemed exotic, glamorous, and, well – sexy. None of which was particularly British – and yet Bond was.

This was the era of Moonraker and Roger Moore, who played it all a little tongue in cheek, not that I was particularly aware of that. I remember the villain with the mouthful of silver teeth, a bit of crocodile-hopping, the soft, malevolent hands stroking a long-haired white cat, and, of course, the Bond girl who slept with Bond and then didn’t wake, because she’d been covered in gold. I remember, also, piranhas in the pool, and one of those classic masochistic scenes in which Bond is pinioned, spread-eagled and about to face damage to a crucial part of his anatomy, although in the end his manhood is preserved.

Even though the image of the books and the image of the films tend to blur, the books have a quite separate life of their own. Here are some glimpses of Bond and his world from the books that particularly stick in my memory (and I can only apologise if my memory has reinvented them):

  • Bond was kicked out of Eton at the age of 13 after being found in bed with a chambermaid.
  • Bond’s secretary, Miss Moneypenny, is helplessly in love with him.
  • Honeychile Ryder in Dr No is not in a bikini when she emerges from the sea. (She has on nothing much more than a belt and a knife.) Her nose has been broken and badly set, and she instinctively covers it up when she sees Bond.
  • There is then a scene involving the sucking of sea urchin spines out of someone’s foot, though whether it’s Honeychile or Bond doing the sucking I really can’t remember.
  • The opening of Diamonds are Forever: very short, something about a scorpion, no Bond in sight. Life is nasty, brutish and short, is the message.
  • Tiffany Case, the woman in Diamonds are Forever: tough, vulnerable, survivor… but a Bond who took to family life wouldn’t be Bond, so even though he falls properly in love with her, she has to be written out.
  • A scene in a health spa in which Bond engages in some rather brutal one-upmanship which leaves a fellow guest with third-degree burns.
  • Patricia Fearing, who was, I think, some kind of therapist at the spa, and ends up experiencing Bond on the back seat of her bubble car.
  • Somebody (perhaps Patricia Fearing? Or Mary Goodnight?) who impressed Bond as potentially more exciting than the other women she was with because she ordered a strawberry daiquiri rather than something non-alcoholic.
  • Bond turning down the option of an emergency suicide pill which could have been stashed in one of his teeth.
  • In The Man with the Golden Gun, Mary Goodnight’s arm smelled of Chanel no 5. Chanel no 5 has been my favourite perfume ever since.