On Ice Palaces and Little Things Like That

Quirks Revisited

Dec 23, 2024

We’re addicted to quirkiness.

Especially in our non-fiction writing.

I wrote about this in October, when the world was slightly more charming and slightly less quirky. The context was an article, ‘Elephants in the Room: The Future of Quirk Historicism,’ by Nicholas Mathew and Mary Ann Smart.

Worth reading in full, even if you’re not interested in the evolving critical approaches of musicologists.

It makes the argument that —

In the wake of this suspicion of close reading, many musicologists became collectors of curiosities, assembling and scrutinizing disparate objects, events, and documents in order to understand how past communities of listeners and practitioners used music, why they created and cared about the kinds of music they did.

And my expansion of this is that all writers are now likely to be collectors of curiosities, because this is what the significant detail is, and this is what show, don’t tell encourages.

If you’re going to use a part to show the whole — the domestic decor to give us the epoch, or a character’s single gesture to give the reader their entire personality — then that thing, whatever it is, better be striking, memorable, quirky.

I was asserting this as a writer, and as a university lecturer who teaches narrative non-fiction, but also out of a suspicion that it’s what editors are after.

It’s what editors see as your qualification for the job: quirk-sense.

Whilst reading Elif Batuman’s brilliant The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (2010), I came across the evidence I’d lacked.

When we join her, Batuman has just pitched a story about a historically accurate reconstruction of an 18th century Ice Palace in the centre of St. Petersburg to an editor at The New Yorker.

And she gets commissioned to write it up, as long as she pays her own travel there and back.

“We really appreciate your undertaking this assignment on your own steam,” my editor told me on the phone. “Just remember, we don’t want a travel piece. What we want is a postcard, a snapshot, with lots of wonderful details. Do you know what I mean? Like if you can get an interview with whoever made the doorknobs — little things like that.”
“Interview whoever made the doorknobs,” I repeated, jotting it down in my notebook.
“Doorknobs are just an example…”

Perhaps, if you’re a non-fiction writer, this is worth having above your desk on a 3”x5” card —

“Doorknobs are just an example…”

The example I always give students are fingernails. If you describe a character’s fingernails, you’ve usually told the reader enough about them.

Elif Batuman’s writing is, itself, a great example of a writer using quirks (literary oddities) to get at something bigger (Russia).

But her chapter on ‘The House of Ice’ is, most of all, about the quest for quirks.

The original Ice Palace was built on the orders of Anna Ioannovna, Empress of Russia after Peter the Great.

Above all things, Anna loved to be entertained…

Here’s a perfect example of a quirk detail —

In her pursuit of conversation, Anna did not limit herself to the human species. She issued the following order in 1739: “It has come to our knowledge that in the window of the Petrovsky tavern in Moscow sits a starling which speaks so well that all passers-by stop to listen… immediately send me a starling of this sort.”

But Anna provides Elif Batuman with dozens of such quickfire nuggets of quirk—

If there was one thing Anna loved more than conversation and hunting, it was jesters… The jester Pietro “Pedrillo” Mira — a Neapolitan violinist who, having arrived in Petersburg with a theater troupe, quarrelled with his Kapellmeister and ended up a jester — was famous for having a wife as ugly as a goat; the joke escalated to the point that he received visitors in bed together with a ribbon-decked goat, beside a bassinet containing a baby goat.

Anna’s Ice Palace of 1740 was constructed to celebrate the wedding of Buzheninova, ‘One of Anna’s servants, a middle-aged hunchbacked Kalmyk woman’ and ‘Prince Mikhail Golitsyn, a real prince who had been convicted of apostasy for marrying an Italian commoner and converting to Catholicism’.

After the wedding and the parade —

[Golitsyn] and Buzheninova were transferred… to the House of Ice, where armed sentries forced them to remain until morning. The newlyweds spent hours running around and dancing, trying to stay warm. (In [one fictional] account, they also turned somersaults, beat each other, banged on the walls, begged the guards to release them, cursed their fate, and broke everything that could be broken.) They were found the next morning on the ice bed, close to death. Anna provoked must laughter among the courtiers by inquiring into the “sweetness” of the wedding night.

Oh those 18th century lulz!

Elif Batuman describes visiting the recreated Ice Palace, and failing to get permission to stay in it overnight (as her New Yorker editor wanted her to).

And what of the little things like that?

One of the directors, Valery Gromov, took me on a tour of the palace. I was proud of myself for remembering to ask who had made the doorknobs. Gromov stared at me. “What doorknobs?” he asked.

On Writers and their Bottoms

A Theory

Dec 22, 2024

At a neighbour’s Christmas party, last night, I got talking to an amateur cyclist and a former Olympic rower.

The cyclist described an overambitious ride from London to Brighton, just after lockdown, which had taken him three hours longer than expected.

When he got there, just before nine in the evening, all the restaurants were closing due to Covid restrictions. So, as it was a clear night, he bought a Tesco’s sandwich, a bottle of red wine and went to sit on the beach.

Now, you may or may not know Brighton — but the mainly egg-sized stones that make up the beach are an uncomfortable surface at the best of times. Not as bad as Chesil Beach or Shingle Street, but worse than Dunwich and Walberswick. (Always take a thick blanket is my advice.)

The cyclist said, he tried to sit down and found he couldn’t.

Too too painful on his post-ride posterior.

His bum just wasn’t up to that kind of expedition.

And so he lay there, flat on his back, exhausted, and ate the sandwich and drank the wine, and then fell asleep.

And was woken an hour later by a man with metal detector.

‘Oi, mate,’ the detectorist said, and pointed.

The incoming tide had almost reached the cyclist’s feet.

We laughed.

I turned to the former GB rower.

‘You must have suffered a lot from that,’ I said — thinking of his damp-bottomed mornings sculling and crewing on the Cam, the Ouse, the Thames.

Miles and miles of back and forth chafing.

‘Oh yes,’ he said.

Hoping to learn something, I asked, ‘Did you have a name for it?’

‘No, we just called it sore arse,’ he said.

The conversation did not subsequently turn to me, but it should have done.

You writers — you novelists — you really put in the hours on your bums. You sit, and you sit hard. Any tips?

Years ago, I heard an interview with a famous literary agent. I can’t remember who they were, and I’ve never been able to track down the exact quote.

They were asked if they ever envied writers?

God, no, they said —

Writers are like long-distance truck drivers. They spend years and year sitting down, and they end up with these massive fat bottoms — because they have to. It’s the only way they can survive. There’s nothing worse than being a writer with a bony arse.

Which tempts me to formulate a theory of literary genre in which the average length of the works a writer produces is directly proportional to the generosity of the flesh on their gluteus maximus.

To write very long books one needs a very cushioned ride.

Think Honoré de Balzac (see below), JRR Tolkien, George Eliot, Georges Sand, George R R Martin.

All built for comfort.

Clearly, there are exceptions. Skinny maximalists such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, who must have suffered out their wordcounts on harsh hipbones, on aching ischia.

But might this sketch of a theory not explain why Franz Kafka tended to write in fragments? And why sleek Chekhov never completed a novel?

And might it not be extended to practitioners of flash fiction, who simply can’t sit around that long?

If, as Mary Heaton Vorse is credited with saying, “The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair,” then much of the day-to-day Craft of it is dependent on what comes between the skeleton and the cloth.

The agent’s image of writers as long-distance truck-drivers at first horrified me, but I’ve come to see the truth in it.

At school, I was mocked for being bottom heavy.

There was one particular bully who fixated on this part of my anatomy.

Hey, fattie bum bum, he would chant at me, Sweet sugar dumpling.

He was the only person I ever punched.

I landed one on his nose, right outside the Staffroom — because I knew if I did it there, the fight would be stopped in moments.

It was.

But maybe, by drawing attention to my bottom, my bully was inadvertently pointing out my physical qualification to become a long-distance truck driver.

Or…

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On Magic Portals and Doors into Otherwheres

and Books

Dec 20, 2024

I hate reading. It’s boring.

This was me, aged nine or ten.

I only like comics, like Fantastic Four, with the Human Torch saying ‘Flame on!’ And 2000AD, with Tharg’s Future Shocks.

That’s what I’d have said.

I loved television, especially sci-fi programmes like Space 1999 and UFO. Whatever was a bit like Star Wars. But I would happily watch anything for three or four hours, as long as it wasn’t Songs of Praise.

My parents used to threaten me with the fate of Mike TeaVee from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

You’ll get square eyes, they said. Don’t sit so close.

It was books that were a bit like Star Wars that pulled me into reading.

I can’t remember going to a bookshop with my parents, so most of what I ended up acquiring came from cardboard boxes under foldaway tables at summer fêtes and bring and buy sales.

I think that’s where I discovered —

Which I’ve reread, in the last few days.

And though I am very grateful to Diane Duane (along with Isaac Asimov and Alan Dean Foster and Gene Wolfe and J.R.R. Tolkien) for helping get me into reading, I have to say it’s not very good.

I’ve reread The Lord of the Rings a couple of times, and wasn’t disappointed. It still works on me, with its ongoing dialectic of cold/hungry/threatened and cosy/full/safe. And I plan to revisit Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, the first Star Wars spin-off novels — which I found completely confusing, aged eleven.

But as I reread The Door into Fire, I wondered what I’d ever liked about it.

Yes, it has a troubled hero who is promised great magical power but struggles to master it. (A bit like Luke Skywalker.)

Yes, there is some questing, some lovemaking, some feasting.

But it’s a strangely inert and expository book. Much of the action takes place in dream sequences — though these are drug-induced dreams. And a great deal of the hero’s struggle is thuddingly psychic.

What’s best about it, seen from now, is how open it is to queerness. Many of the main characters (male, female, spirit) have satisfying and loving sex with one another. It’s no biggie.

The most important romance, Herewiss and Freelorn, is male-male.

As with Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius books, there’s a definite sense that big characters are going to have big appetites, and heterosexual monogamy just won’t do it for them. Humans are too protean for that.

What’s also impressive is the — I’ll have to call it visionary gusto of the worldbuilding. Whenever magic is being done, Duane is at her best.

As we join Herewiss, he is about to cast a big spell, an illusion to scare away a besieging army —

He started small. Fyrd began to slip out of the dark mist, moving down on the besiegers with slow malice. Great gray-white horwolves snarling softly in their throats, nadders coiling sinuously down toward the hold, spitting venom and shriveling the grass as they went. There were dark keplian, almost horse-shaped, but clawed and fanged like beasts of prey; destreth dragging scaled bodies along the ground, lathfliers beating heavily along on webbed wings and cawing like huge, mis-shapen battle-crows. Herewiss made sure that his creations were evenly distributed around the army. In a flicker of black humor he added a few beasts that had lurked in his bedroom shadows when he was young, turning them loose to creep down towards the campfires on all those many-jointed legs of theirs.

Yay.

I can imagine teen-me loving this.

But about halfway through my reread, I began to doubt whether I’d have got so far when young and impatient.

There are slow bits followed by slower bits. There’s backstory and more backstory, often given as infodump around the campfire. There’s a lot of rather forced plotguilt over a brother’s death.

The prose is clean but rarely thrilling. (Even at the time, I knew Gene Wolfe’s The Sword of the Sorcerer was better written. I saw things more clearly through his gorgeous sentences.)

However, when I came to the climax of The Door into Fire, I realised that I must have read the whole thing — because Herewiss and his companions eventually reach a castle far out in the wasteland. It is misshapen, vast, and has many corridors and many doors, and each of these doors opens out into another dimension.

“We could look at the view,” Herewiss said, and started down the hall. He looked into the first door he passed — …
There was no room behind the door. The stone of the doorsill was there, hard and solid under their hands as they reached out to reassure themselves of it; but through the opening cut in the glittering gray they saw a mighty mountain promontory rearing upward from a sea the colour of blood. Pink foam crashed upward from the breaking waves and fell on the rose and opal beaches; the wind, blowing in from the sea, stirred trees with leaves the color of wine, showing the leaves’ flesh-colored undersides. The mountain was forested in deep purples and mauves; a cloud of morning mist lay about its shoulders.
Herewiss reached out, very slowly, and put his hand through the doorway. After a moment he withdrew it, rubbing his fingers together.
“It’s colder there,” he said, “and damp. Lorn, this is it. Doors into Otherwheres — ”

Years later, when writing my paranormal adventure, Lilian’s Spell Book, I used this image. In fact, the novel starts with a door into fire —

In the very heart of the fire — I could see it clearly — there stood a figure. I thought for one mad moment that it must be my husband, and that he must be burning to death. But the figure stood there, quite calm, quite still, completely unaffected by the furnace-like blaze surrounding them. I could see them through the open doorway that, for some reason, wasn't burning. The fire did not come that far.
Perhaps I should be clearer. This was not a figure made of flames. This was the outline of a figure where the bright flames left a darker gap. And the gap went all the way to the bricks of the far wall. It was almost as if there were a person-shaped tunnel running through the whole infernal room, from front to back. And there was nothing there to burn, I was sure. This room of our house was totally empty. It was the air itself that seemed to be on fire.
The light from the burning room scorched into the backs of my eyes. How long before the fire spread? How long before our beautiful old wooden dreamhouse was razed to the ground? But still I didn't turn and run. Still I stared into the light.

(You can read on here.)

This was my magic portal, my door into an otherwhere.

But it had been a long struggle to get to this point.

With Lilian’s Spell Book, I’d finally written a magic portal novel — though there had been plenty of interdimensional fun in Dead Boy Detectives. Here are Charles and Edwin following a cat through a magic mirror —

Credit: Mark Buckingham for Vertigo Comics.

Even as I was reading Diane Duane, back in my early teens, I was thinking of writing my own fantasy epic.

I started one, and got fourteen pages in.

My problem was, I didn’t know how to get my character through the portal and off on their adventure.

I wasn’t satisfied with any of my solutions.

A door into another dimension seemed too lazy. It had been done.

I thought of having a door in a tree, but that was Alice in Wonderland. Or in a mirror, but that was Alice Through the Looking Glass.

After a very short while, I became disheartened, and stopped writing the epic.

It was only years later that I finally accepted that if, as a storyteller, you need a door into another dimension, then you might as well bloody use a door into another dimension.

However, there was a more brilliant solution, and Philip Pullman had the genius to come up with it.

Instead of a magic doorway, he had The Subtle Knife — a way of cutting a portal in space itself.

Lyra imagined she could see Will’s soul flowing back along the blade to his hand, and up his arm to his heart…
“I felt something there,” he said to Giacomo Paradisi. “The knife was just slipping through the air at first and then I felt it…”
“Good. Now do it again. This time, when you feel it, slide the knife in and along. Make a cut. Don’t hesitate…”
This time it was easier. Having felt it once, he knew what to search for again, and he felt the curious little snag after less than a minute. It was like delicately searching out the gap between one stitch and the next with the point of a scalpel. He touched, withdrew, touched again to make sure, and then did as the old man had said, and cut sideways with the silver edge…
He kept careful hold of the knife, and put it down on the table before giving in to his astonishment. Lyra was on her feet already, speechless, because there in the middle of the dusty little room was a window just like the one under the hornbeam trees: a gap in mid-air through which they could see another world.

Of course, books were always the real magic portals.

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An epiphany story or not?

Dec 19, 2024

This is my new fascination.

Well, I’ve been thinking about it for a while — in the context of climate protest.

What’s effective and what’s ineffective in getting the message across?

Phoebe Plummer and Amanda Holland, The National Gallery, 14 October 2022.

But now I’ve started to think about it more generally, and then — as a result — more personally.

It’s fine to go around believing most other people are wrongheaded, and that they need to become more like you are.

Behave as you behave.

Believe what you believe — including that bit about all the other other people being wrongheaded.

But if you start to examine this, you fairly soon start to wonder when was the last time you yourself changed your mind?

Over anything, big or small.

If you expect other people to change, then you have to be prepared to change yourself.

What is it that makes someone change their mind?

Here’s the question I’ve been asking students recently, in workshops and masterclasses —

When was the last time you changed your mind?

And then, as a follow-up

What was it that made the difference?

I often ask this when I am teaching epiphany stories.

In them, by the end, often during the final sentence, a character experiences a shift in their relationship to the world.

Here are the final words of Raymond Carver’s story ‘Fat’:

It is August.
My life is going to change. I feel it.

But does this really happen? Aren’t epiphanies just a literary convention — a way of getting out of narrative that doesn’t involve some corny action?

That’s the question I’m trying to ask. That’s what I say to the students —

Have you ever experienced anything like an epiphany?

When you last changed your mind, when you had that realisation you’d been mistaken before, did it come suddenly? Was it because of something you saw or read? Were you looking out of a window at an ordinary tree on the street? Were you having an argument that you didn’t admit you’d lost, but thought about afterwards, and saw through it into a new way of thinking?