Ali Mercer

Writer

Tag: reading

The cover of Stop the Clock

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Here’s the final cover of Stop the Clock, my debut novel, which is due to be published on August 16. Let the printing presses roll!

I really hope everybody likes it… I think it’s a beauty. You know that moment when you finally make it to the café, and get to sit down with your cappuccino and have a read? (For me it would probably be a latte, a chocolate brownie and The Fear Index by Robert Harris, which is what I’m reading at the moment.)

It’s just such a luxury: that little bit of time. That’s what this image makes me think of. Also, I like her pink nail varnish!

My other half tells me that in France, they have historically had a quite different attitude to the whole business of covers, and been quite high-minded and gone in for plain white with a title on – though apparently this is beginning to change. Personally, I think the cover is part of the fun of owning the book. Here’s a shortlist of five other covers I really like – you’ll probably remember them, because they’re all the sort that stick in your mind:

  1. Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding – the slightly sepia-tinted chick with the curls and the fag
  2. One Day by David Nicholls – so good! The silhouette of the lovers’ profiles
  3. Riders by Jilly Cooper – a model behind looking very fetching in white jodhpurs
  4. The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger – the red high heel turning into a devilish trident
  5. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières – anyone who was in London in the mid 90s will remember when this jolly blue-and-white cover, which looks like a naive painting, was absolutely everywhere on the Tube.

The cover of my other first novel, which I wrote when I was at primary school, has suffered a bit from the passage of time, but you can still just about make it out – here it is!

the cover of my other first novel

Lace: the comeback queen of holiday reads

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Lace by Shirley ConranAs school’s nearly out, here are my top three holiday reads of all time:

  • Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (which I read in Fuerteventura, 1995)
  • The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (New Zealand, 2000)
  • And… last but not least… Lace, by Shirley Conran (Cornwall, 1999).

If you’ve never read Lace, you’re in luck, because according to this week’s Grazia it’s being re-released this summer. So now a whole new generation of readers will meet Maxine, Kate, Judy and Pagan, and Lili, the film star who gathers them together in New York in 1978, and demands to know: ‘Which one of you bitches is my mother?’

There’s lots of glamour and wealth in this novel but a hard edge too; it doesn’t shy away from the sordid, though it doesn’t luxuriate in it either. It’s a big fat page-turning saga, with much more of a sense of history and place than you might expect, given its reputation as a bonkbuster; there is a whole lot more to it than sex. Its characters don’t just wear beautiful clothes and pursue high-flying careers; they belong to their times, and the times shape their lives.

The brief prelude, featuring a thirteen-year-old Lili, is pretty grim, and gives you just enough of a glimpse of her tough past for you to understand why she is so hostile when she meets the four women later on. And then you’re swept back to a Swiss finishing school in 1948, to meet the four women in the early days of their friendship, already with some foreknowledge of the troubles that lies ahead… I hope that makes it sound like a good read. It is!

Big 1980s reads: A Woman of Substance and The Thorn Birds

Lace came out in 1982, though I didn’t read it till much later. The book that made most impression on me around the time Lace was published was Barbara Taylor Bradford’s A Woman of Substance, which came out in 1979.

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A Woman of Substance charts the long climb of Emma Harte from poverty and shame to wealth and power – at a price. She is unmarried, pregnant and still in her teens when she leaves her job as a maid at Fairley Hall in Yorkshire, but goes on to build up a vast international business empire and take her revenge on the lover who let her down.  Now there’s a satisfying story arc – none of this business of marriage being the most a girl can aspire to.

That driving ambition is mainly what I remember about it. Emma Harte doesn’t have all that much luck with her men, and her children turn out to be a quarrelsome bunch, but she doesn’t let disaster lay her low; she comes back fighting and goes all the way to the top, and her motto is, ‘to endure’.

And then, of course, there’s Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds, published in 1977. The Australian outback! The priest! The scene where Meggie has to have all her hair cut off! The dress the colour of ashes of roses! Forbidden love! Why hasn’t someone filmed it? It’s nearly 20 years since the telly mini-series with Richard Chamberlain. You know what, I might just have to go track it down and read it again.

Destruction, revelation, survival: stories about writing

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They say you should write about what you know… and one thing writers know about is writing.

Here are eight novels in which writing, or the desire to write, plays a sometimes destructive, sometimes liberating role. One thing’s for sure, writing in literature is not a fast route to a happy ending. Often it’s done in secret and then exposed. Sometimes it brings the truth to light. Usually, for good or ill, it’s an agent of change.

Look out for artists, actors and musicians in fiction – sometimes they’re useful proxies. Journalists, too.

In my book, Stop the Clock, one of the characters starts writing a newspaper column which causes all sorts of trouble. Her friends think it’s about them. Maybe it is. They don’t like it.

Frost in May by Antonia White

After Watership Down by Richard Adams, this was the second novel that made me really cry. Nanda Grey, a Catholic convert at a super-posh Catholic boarding school attended by lots of aristocratic Europeans, decides to start writing a story, which she keeps tucked away out of sight. She decides to make all her characters really really bad, and into various nameless vices (she doesn’t know much about vice so this requires some imagination) in order for their eventual redemption to be all the more dramatic. How does it work out in the end? If you don’t know, I’ll leave you to find out.

Antonia White wrote another three books about the same character, and they’re all very much worth reading. The last one, Beyond the Glass, describes what it’s like to have a mental breakdown and end up institutionalised, which was something else the author knew about.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

So: a first novel about the writing and publication of a first book, with dramatic results. Skeeter has an impossible deadline to meet, and faces an impossible challenge: persuading the black maids she is meant to be writing about to risk sharing their stories. Still, if Aibileen and Minny help her, maybe she’ll make it…

Peyton Place by Grace Metalious

Until I read this I had the vague idea that Peyton Place was a wishy-washy soap opera. Then I discovered the book on which the long-running TV series was based. Published in 1956, it’s a pretty angry book about a pretty New England town where the falling leaves mask something nasty buried underneath the sheep pen… It’s like the world of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet 30 years later, where evidence of grimness lurks just beside the white picket fence.

One of the central characters, Allison, is a lonely innocent (played by a young Mia Farrow in the TV version) who dreams of becoming a writer. Her mother, Constance, grew up in Peyton Place, moved away, and then returned with Allison. Constance is doing her damnedest to preserve a facade of respectability, even though her relationship with Allison’s father (who worked in publishing) wasn’t quite what she would like others to believe.  And then Allison befriends local beauty Serena Cross, who knows a story worth telling, though for now she’s keeping it to herself…

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

Cassandra Mortmain is hungry and penniless, but she lives in a (rundown) castle and has a journal to write in. She also has a beautiful sister, a daffy stepmother called Topaz (a former artist’s model), and a hopeless father who wrote a cult hit years ago, but now hides himself away and produces absolutely nothing.

Cassandra’s journal is going to be exchanged for a succession of grander volumes as her fortunes change (but at what cost?) This book includes a scene described by Antonia Fraser as one of the most erotic ever written, according to the introduction. (I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say it is not explicit.)

A Life Apart by Neel Mukherjee

After his mother’s cremation Ritwik takes flight, leaving India and his brutal childhood behind for Oxford, where he has a scholarship to study English literature. One evening he is picked up by a stranger; he is afraid, but still goes along with the encounter, which is both vivid and dreamlike, absurd and otherworldly.

When he gets back to his college room a story presents itself to him. What if he were to write about Miss Gilby, the prim Englishwoman who made a fleeting appearance in a film, Ghare Bairey, that he had seen nearly ten years earlier?

Adrift in London without a work permit, he continues to pursue the story of Miss Gilby in India in the 1900s. She struggles to establish herself as a companion and English tutor to an Indian woman, and witnesses the unrest and resistance stirred up by Lord Curzon’s partition of Bengal into Hindu and Muslim states.

Miss Gilby, like Ritwik, is a migrant, trying to live in an often unreadable world. But will they both be able to survive the time and place in which they find themselves?

The Ghost by Robert Harris

By the time you read this… what has happened to the writer? If what you write fails to please, or falls into the wrong hands, what’s going to become of you?

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

The first Margaret Atwood I read. Features a story within a story within a story: but who’s telling what?

Why Jilly Cooper’s Octavia beats Fifty Shades of Grey

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The great thing about a paperback as opposed to reading on a Kindle is that it’s really easy to peek and cheat and skip bits. So: I peeked. I had a quick skippy read of Fifty Shades… and I bet lots of other readers, like me, have looked at it more out of curiosity than anything else. And will any of us re-read it? Surely many of us won’t.

So – it’s become a massive publishing phenomenon, and that kind of success puts it in the mainstream, even though some of the stuff in it is almost alien to most of its readers, and likely to stay that way. And it’s in the middle of a mad comment blizzard that shows no sign of abating.

  1. I do get what Suzanne Moore in the Guardian is on about. She sees it as regressive, selling the ‘old fantasy of romance’ etc. But is anyone really convinced by it as a love story? The emotions in it don’t come across as very real to me – they seem to be there as an excuse. Problem is, when feminists take on something like this it’s hard not to end up sounding like puritans or killjoys.
  2. Er, people… isn’t the fuss a little much? There was mention of someone in this week’s Grazia who’s actually scared to open it because she might end up so dissatisfied with what she’s getting in real life… It’s not THAT exciting, and some of it’s quite queasy making.
  3. How very English it all is… Rainy summer… Jubilee… The English vice…
  4. It’s a bit humourless, no? Cf Jilly Cooper’s Octavia, which I read when I was quite young and impressionable, which does seem kind of wholesome in comparison to Fifty Shades. It has a masterful hero, but a lot more character and story, some jokes, and a cute dog.
  5. But isn’t Fifty Shades just the teensiest bit absurd? She’s called Anastasia, for heaven’s sake, and he’s called Christian…
  6. This is fantasy, right? If she was busily submitting to a short fat bald broke bloke called Bob… well, she wouldn’t, would she? And to some extent, it’s a fantasy about money. So the super-rich want to be in  charge? Tell us something we don’t know.

The Fear Index and the inhumanly rich

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I bought Fifty Shades of Grey today, finally, but ended up reading The Fear Index by Robert Harris instead. With a banking scandal all over the front pages, it seemed the perfect time to start on a thriller about playing the financial markets (and what happens when that goes wrong).

Dr Hoffman, who is so far the hero, or anti-hero, is a physicist living in Switzerland who runs an extremely successful hedge fund and has become the kind of rich that separates you from everybody else. When a policeman asks what his company does, he says, ‘It makes money.’ He seems put out that anyone should have the impudence to ask.

When the policeman complains that he can no longer afford to live in Switzerland but has settled in France where it is cheaper, and has to drive in across the border, every day, Hoffman thinks, why should I care? But from the reader’s point of view it’s hard not to sympathise with the policeman as he tours Hoffman’s grand but unhomely property. Especially when he reflects that he’s probably going to have to work in his retirement to make ends meet, something neither his father nor grandfather had to do (surely lots of people know that feeling – pension forecasts can be pretty disheartening.)

From the outset, something is out of kilter; something doesn’t add up, and Hoffman knows it and is afraid. Robert Harris is brilliant on the entitled hollowness of the inhumanly rich; Hoffman’s house and office are curiously blank, fortress-like spaces that are designed as an assertion of power to keep the outside out, but can’t quite manage it.

It’s like the summer house where the journalist stays in The Ghost, which is secluded and detached from the outside world to the point of being like a prison, and also unreal.  He was another lonely figure trying to figure out whether there was really anything to justify his unease. It ain’t paranoia if they’re really out to get you… and in Robert Harris novels, they usually are, though you might just survive long enough to find out why.

The first Robert Harris novel I read was Fatherland, which is a great What if? story: what if Hitler had won a war, and the Holocaust had become a secret, and someone had then found out about it? After that I wanted to read more. His books are always about power – how people with power use it to try to control what other people know, how they respond to threats to their power, and what it’s like trying to work or communicate with powerful people and hold onto your integrity (and not come to a sticky end). They’ve got a real authority. You know he knows what he’s talking about.

The books on my windowsill

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Which books do you choose to have in the background if you’re a newbie writer and someone is coming round to your house to take a photo of you for public consumption? Here’s what I ended up with on the windowsill by my desk:

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. This has got such an amazingly addictive natural flow – I read it when I was writing Stop the Clock in the hope that some of it would rub off. So, ladies, who are you going to choose: the hot stuff with the motorbike who’s good at fixing things, or the remote, touch-me-not brainiac who plays the piano (and is stinking rich)? If only you could have both. Or alternate. Which Bella kind of does. Smart girl!

Stop the Clock by Alison Mercer. I’m hoping that people will find this book has a big heart but a bit of bite too. And some surprises… One of my friends missed her tube stop because she was too busy reading it. I hope others will find it as hard to put to one side as she did (though without being too inconvenienced as a result).

Daughters of Jerusalem by Charlotte Mendelson. I love this book, the characters are great and it’s beautifully written. There’s a spiky dumb sister, a brainy fed-up one, a rogue lech, a put-upon wife and an overblown academic who gets his comeuppance.

The Art of Fiction by John Gardner. My tip to anyone who is considering shelling out a fortune on a long creative writing course would be first to buy all of this man’s books on how to write, plus Stephen King’s On Writing, and go on an Arvon course, which is a week long, and see how you’re fixed after that. As John Gardner taught Raymond Carver, I’m inclined to take his advice seriously. He’s very peppery and expects you to do your work. (He used to lend Raymond Carver a space to write in, too.)

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. The book is really quite unexpected in places – there’s a scene that surprised me when I re-read it, where they go on the piss in London and end up in a brothel, or at least, a ropey club with girls who are interested in cash gifts. And then they do a runner and drive the wrong way up a road and end up getting nabbed by the old bill. It’s a shame that it’s sometimes perceived as glorifying fey posh youngsters in cricket whites when the sadness and yearning in it is about loss of family and friendship and youth, and trying to find or reclaim something from general disaster. But the imagery from various adaptations sticks!

Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. Elegant prose, the seduction of wealth, youth, sex, cocaine, searching out and laying claim to the people and places you want to belong to, being on the inside and the outside at the same time. One of my very favourites out of the books I’ve read in the last five years or so. I read it on the Oxford tube coming into London through Notting Hill – will never be able to see those big creamy houses and private gardens without thinking of this book.

Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle. A friend gave me this recently and I was completely charmed by it. The crumbly old castle and hunger and eking out the candles, the girls dreaming of escape, the useless old dad who just isn’t helping, the devoted swain who is nevertheless not quite the ticket… It follows a year through the seasons, with ever grander notebooks as the narrator’s fortunes change… it’s immediate and dry and funny, and magical and pastoral at the same time. Would be a terrific book to read if you were stuck in bed with flu, or bored of mummy porn and wanted something that is about sex but not explicitly.

Lynn Barber’s Mostly Men. I would hate to be interviewed by her. But she’s brilliant.

The Faber Book of Reportage, edited by John Carey. First-person eyewitness accounts of moments in history. Good for reading if you’re a bit stressed, as most of the moments are actually quite unpleasant, and make you glad not to be there.

OK, enough from the pile by the windowsill. More books to come! They are everywhere in our house, even in the kitchen cupboards.