Weighing in at a whopping 670 pages, the Lost Symbol made me feel like I was sitting through the longest History lecture of my life. Dan Brown has certainly done his research, and he wants to tell us ALL about it. Even worse, the book’s major conflict was resolved on page 605, meaning the rest of the book was really just a tagged on epilogue.

Three years ago, I read that Dan Brown was taking longer than expected to write his follow up to The Da Vinci Code. I wonder now if his publishing company were so relieved to receive the manuscript, they didn’t bother to edit it properly because they were anxious to get it out on the shelves. And of course, 670 pages gives a book a big spine presence on book shelves.

So I wouldn’t recommend The Lost Symbol to anyone. There are much better thrillers out there that won’t weigh you down so much. But if you’re really stuck, may I suggest my old History lecturer’s book on the Magna Carta. At least in that book, the bad guy sticks around until the final chapter.

The problem is, it’s also my family’s favourite gadget of all time, for the games and Sudoku Apps and for the easy web browsing experience. I’m having to fight for the right to use it.

Although I love it (and won’t hear a word said against it), that’s only the first of two main flaws that I’ve so far spotted in my theory that the Ipad will aid me with my writing. The other is that the children aren’t the only ones who like all the Apps. There’s so many out there, the Ipad can do and hold so much it’s like trying to work in a toy box. Yes, I could do my writing, but I could also read The Times, check my e-mails, go on Twitter or Facebook, browse the Internet, play chess, or Risk, or even marbles.

I do far more writing with a pen and notebook, to be honest. But I have far less fun.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

(I must remember to delete that signature sometime soon, or people might think I’m showing off. Heaven forbid!)

Themes of loss and bereavement, following your dreams, love and revenge intermingle with elephants and lions, pirates, magic, Secret Service shenanigans and a thrillingly sleight of hand climax.

Harry Houdini pops in and and out like, well, like an escape artist, but the real hero is Charles Carter, whose life Glen David Gold has heavily romanticised. This is to the book’s benefit, because the Charles Carter presented here is tremendously likeable - witty, enigmatic, confident yet self-doubting.

The mystery at the heart of the novel, the death of President Warren Harding, is presented as sleight of hand, but it wasn’t what kept me reading; what kept me reading was Charles Carter, and the world of magic through which he moved. The secrets of stage magic that are revealed are a fascinating bonus to a great story.

I’m looking forward to reading Sunnyside, Glen David Gold’s second novel, which places Charlie Chaplin at centre stage.

When I finished reading Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks last night, I felt vaguely cheated. The book was billed as “A James Bond Novel,” with the author tag: “Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming.” 

Other writers have taken up the 007 mantle between Fleming and Faulks. John Gardner wrote fourteen Bond novels (and two film novelisations), but never claimed to be writing as Ian Fleming, so felt able to ignore literary criticism like he did not “have Ian Fleming’s vocabulary.” He also felt able to put his own stamp on Bond.

Raymond Benson then wrote six Bond novels and several short stories. Like Gardner, he never claimed to be “writing as James Bond.”

Sebastian Faulks, in this first (and hopefully last) attempt did many things right with Devil May Care. His villain, Dr Julius Gorner, with his monkey’s paw and hatred of all things English, IS a Bond villain. Scarlett and Poppy really ARE Bond girls. But James Bond is NOT himself. He’s physically and emotionally vulnerable, his attempts at banter with Moneypenny are disastrously clumsy and in some ways he’s politically incorrect, while in others, such as his refusal to take Scarlett to bed, he’s been metrosexualised. He’s also not as cold as Ian Fleming’s Bond. Devil May Care contains frequent references to his cruel eyes, but Ian Fleming backed up those cruel eyes with actions and attitudes. Sebastian Faulk’s Bond seems like a rather pleasant fellow.

Unfortunately,Faulks’s effort also falls down with the plot, which appears to end around page 330. yet the novel is 394 pages long. There’s a (short) villainous last gasp, but those last sixty pages feel as though they’ve been tagged on for the sake of giving the book a thicker spine.

And so I felt cheated in a way I don’t think I’d have felt if the publishers hadn’t claimed that Faulks was “writing as Ian Fleming.” If this had been Faulk’s own take on the character, then I’d have felt less dissatisfied. But I don’t feel like I read either an Ian Fleming novel or a Sebastian Faulks one. What I read fell short of both.

So it’s just as well I bought it on a special “Buy One, Get One Free” offer. I’ll treat Devil May Care as the free one, and hope to get my money’s worth out of the other book (Ravens by George Dawes Green).

“What? None of them?” I asked.

“None of them.”

“Have you tried all of them?”

“No. But the ones I’ve tried, I don’t like.”

Jane reads alot of books, and particularly likes quality fiction by Indian authors (Vikram Seth, Rohintan Mistry etc), so she is a reader. Nevertheless, her prejudice against American authors seemed wholly unjustified. So I leapt to the moral high ground.

“Have you tried John Steinbeck?” I asked. “Ernest Hemmingway? Annie Proulx?”

“I read The Shipping News.”

“And?”

“Didn’t like it. All those fractured little sentences,” she said, in fractured little sentences.

I prepared for another onslaught of quality American authors, but then hesitated. After all, I don’t read books by many Indian authors. A Suitable Boy, yes (loved it, and agreed with a review by the Times that said: “It will keep you company for the rest of your life”), but not many others. Which is strange, because the ones I’ve read, I’ve enjoyed. Probably more so than many books by American authors.

The result of this conversation?

I’ve decided to read more books by Indian authors.

And Jane? She doesn’t like American authors, and that’s the end of the story.

Image’s Original Source: http://www.njla.org/

As a child, I devoured mystery and detectve stories: The Three Investigators (the name Jupiter Jones has stayed with me ever since), The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, The Hardy Boys, even Nancy Drew. Somewhere along the transition from childhood to grown up reading material, I moved to other genres: science-fiction, mainly, and then on to thrillers and fantasy. Apart from a few books like The Oxford Murders and Death on the Nile, I have seldom returned to mysteries. I rarely even watch them on TV.

But this week, I’ve experienced two very different mysteries: a Stephen King novel called The Colorado Kid and Colombo: Prescription: Murder, a play performed by the Middle Ground Theatre Company. 

The play was based on a television drama of the same title. The actor who played Colombo, John Guerrasio, perfectly captured Peter Falk’s mannerisms and idiosyncracies (”Oh, just one more thing” brought a cheer from the audience). But the play would not have been a success if Colombo hadn’t solved the mystery. If, instead, it had ended with a baffled Colombo shaking his head and saying, “I guess we’ll never know whodunnit.”

(SPOILER ALERT!)

However, that’s exactly how The Colorado Kid finished. Stephen King justified this lack of closure by repetatively having the characters explain that mysteries often don’t get solved - that’s why they’re mysterious - and then, in the afterword, by saying…well, much the same.

This lack of resolution gave the story a lazy sense of complacency; in the same way the final book in The Dark Tower series failed to resolve Roland’s story, so The Colorado Kid failed to resolve the Colorado Kid’s. King justified his Dark Tower ending by saying, “It’s the only one I had.”

But for the Colorado Kid, he claimed he had plenty of endings up his sleeve - he just chose not to play them. Why, though? It didn’t give the story an exciting Italian Job style cliffhanger; rather, it left me faintly irritated, as I often am when someone hasn’t done everything I’ve paid them for.

To finish my mystery splurge for the week, I watched Scooby Doo with my kids today. After Fred’s explanation, the unmasked villain snarled, “And I’d have got away with it if wasn’t for you pesky kids!”

And the mystery was completed.

42

Clearly, that question isn’t going to solve the meaning of life, but what they have in common is they all wrote books that, as a teenager, I reread countless times, and they’re all dead.

Douglas Adams died far too young. Never the most prolific of authors, he would surely have written several more novels if his heart hadn’t given way. His books were part of the reason why I was determined to travel. If I couldn’t see the universe, I could see the world. And nearly all of my ideas for stories have been inspired by my travels.

Athough not as sharply as Douglas Adams’s, David Gemmell’s life was also cut short. Now, he was a prolific author, having written over 30 novels. He once said, “No one gets out of this life alive.” He knew  smoking would probably be the death of him, but when he tried to quit, he claimed the quality of his writing nose-dived. He died aged 57, shortly after a quadruple heart bypass. From him, I learnt the value of a fast plot. he once said he doesn’t care about detailed room descriptions - only what happens in the room.

Although David Eddings started writing relatively late in life, he wrote twenty-seven novels before he died aged 76. So while his life wasn’t exactly cut short, it could perhaps be argued that any author’s life is incomplete if they leave behind an unfinished novel, and Eddings was, apparently, working on a novel when he died. He wrote epic fantasies with repetitive plots, but his characters made them work. Although stereotypical, they were immensely likeable, and their banter was frequently hilarious. From him, I learnt the value of creating sympathetic characters who liked each other; after all, if they don’t, how will the reader?

So: what do Douglas Adams, David Gemmell and David Eddings have in common?  They might not have have helped me learn what the question is to the meaning of life, but they all taught me important lessons about writing.

Incidentally, Terry Pratchett, although thankfully still very much alive and writing, makes a neat little addendum to this post. He recently stated that when he dies, he expects, like David Gemmell, to be found slumped over his writing desk. He then wants whoever finds him, before they do anything else, to save his work in progress on the computer.

(Not this man, that’s for sure!)

• Ernest Hemingway.
• Photograph’s original source: George Kargar, Time Life, Getty

A review of a Dean Koontz book the other day accused Koontz of pretentious overwriting, but concluded that the book was still worth a shot - especially for fans of the great man.

I have to confess that I do agree with the reviewer. I’ve read loads of Koontz books, and he certainly can overwrite a scene. His weather personifications can be particularly heavy-handed. Yet he does manage to carry it all off with a deft touch. His characters (well, the good guys) are always sympathetic and their banter can be funny. His villains are reliably deplorable, and his stories - despite the overwriting - move along at a fair clip.

So who else is guilty of “pretentious overwriting”? If we presume that great authors (Charles Dickens et al) are not pretentious because all later authors have pretensions to write like them, the list is, I’m sure, huge. To some extent, pretentious overwriting is the author playing with language, trying to find as many different ways as possible of connecting words within sentences: Guy Gavriel Kay, China Mieville, probably any writer who has ever used a simile, metaphor, adverb or adjective. Anyone who isn’t Ernest Hemingway or Elmore Leonard, in other words.   

But surely we should want writers to be bold, to not all try to imitate Cormac McCarthy. Fiction writing records explorations into the imagination. Some writers might see a series of hard nouns: pebbles in a stream, as Hemmingway once said. Others don’t. They see ethereal, hazy images: shimming iridescence trickling over rainbow rocks. Personally, I see pebbles in a stream, but I’m glad other writers see differently.

What writers do have to be careful is pretentious underediting, however. By all means, write the descriptions and convoluted character introspection. But don’t let it obstruct the story, the race to the last page. Upstairs, I have 950 A5 notebook pages of the first draft of a chess novel waiting to be culled. When I’ve typed it up, I hope it will be 350 A4 pages. And when it’s edited and proofed to the nth degree, I’m aiming for 250 pages. Somehow, I doubt there’ll be any room for weather personification.

 Image’s original source: http://www.iwm.org.uk 

Like the children I visted the museum with, I suffered from not having read any of the five books in the exhibition:

• War Horse by Michael Morpurgo
• The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier
• Carrie’s War by Nina Bawden
• The Machine Gunners by Robert Westall
• Little Soldier by Bernard Ashley

Each gallery within the exhibition brought one of the books to life, explaining the author’s writing process, the historical contents and some of the key features of the book. In the War Horse section, the role of cavalry horses in World War One was explored. In Carrie’s War, there was a lifelike model of the kitchen table where the children could…well, sit down. As if they were at a real kitchen table. There was also an air raid shelter to crawl into, some big blocks to build with and an interactive quiz about The Silver Sword But there was nothing that really excited the children.

Admittedly, my expectations for the exhibition were, like the entry price, rather high. I hoped that it would be interesting for me and, because it was about children’s books, be fun and informative for the children - and would also inspire them to want to read the books.

Diane Lees, the Director-General of the Imperial War Museum, publicised the Once Upon A Wartime exhibition by saying: “…focusing on these extraordinary fictional accounts of conflicts is an innovative and, we hope successful, way of helping children, and adults, understand the experience of war.”

In that aim, I suppose the exhibition was a success. We all left the exhibition with some level of understanding of the experience of war. But as a writer and a father, I hoped it would have another goal: to inspire children to want to read.

And perhaps because sitting at a kitchen table wasn’t quite as exciting as the exhibitors might have hoped, the fun factor that might have brought about that inspiration just wasn’t there. Everything was stylishly wrought, and the objects were all clearly displayed, but it wasn’t interactive enough to retain the interest of non-readers.

The BBC’s For Crying Out Loud was all about crying. Why do some people cry more than others? What makes us cry? Are we emotional illiterate if we don’t cry? The investigator, Jo Brand, used to be a psychiatric nurse, so that qualified her to lead the programme - at least in the producer’s mind.

As is often the case with these sort of documentaries, the programme would have been perfectly timed at thirty minutes, but at sixty it felt a bit of a stretch. So much so, the programme felt compelled to inflict upon us Loss,  a group of costumed, masochistic onion cutters who meet in a small, enclosed space and revel in the tears the onions produce. Since the tears caused by onion cutting are not the same as those caused by real loss, there seemed no real point to this segment; even Jo Brand seemed embarrassed when she emerged from the pretension.

There were other speculative excursions into crying: chats with friends in Dulwich, with Jo Brand’s mother, with a comedian, with a writer, with an actor; a visit to a workshop where people tried to make each other cry, apparently through staring.

In thirty minutes, with perhaps a more qualified presenter (Professor Robert Winston or some such), this could have been an informative and educative programme. At sixty minutes, and as much as I like Jo Brand, it bored me to tears.