You - Nuala Ní Chonchúir

You was a complete delight to read and is the latest offering from Irish writer Nuala Ní Chonchúir. Nuala is an Irish short fiction writer and poet, born in Dublin in 1970. Her short fiction includes Nude (2009), To the World of Men, Welcome (2005) and The Wind Across the Grass (2004). She has won many literary prizes, including RTÉ Radio’s Francis MacManus Award and the Cecil Day-Lewis Award.

In 2009, her pamphlet, Portrait of the Artist with a Red Car was one of the four finalists in the prestigious UK Templar Poetry Pamphlet competition. To say that Nuala is a writer who is going places, in a literary sense, is something of a understatement: her short story collection, Nude (2009), is currently shortlisted for the 2010 Edge Hill Short Story Prize - results due this week - so fingers crossed for Nuala!

I'm delighted to have you on the blog again for some scones and morning tea - milk or lemon? - and the scones are, of course, freshly baked - there's some freshly potted strawberry jam too. Congratulations on the publication of your first novel, 'You'. It's a riveting read!

Oh milk for me, Barbara, and a brown scone, thanks; with dollops of jam, mmmm. Thanks for having me over to Dundalk.

I’m glad you were riveted to You; it’s amazingly nice when someone says they like something you’ve written.

Firstly, I'd like to ask you how you came to the decision to use the second person. In reading the book, I found that voice deeply compelling; it seems to speak to an inner child in me in a way, as well as getting across the girl's angle, so was this a deeply concious decision or one that you came to more quickly/intuitively?

I have an unnatural grá for the second person voice, really. When I start to write a story, it often emerges in the second person (it’s like my head thinks it’s the first person). I find it a very comfortable voice to work in and I’ve written several short stories in it. So doing the novel in the second person was a very instinctive thing for me. It’s not a conscious act at all – I just love it, as both writer and reader. I like its peculiarity, its distance and, paradoxically, its intimacy.

This sort of leads me into the next question: telling the story from the point of view of the child allows for a slower reveal than if we'd seen it from an omniscient narrator's point of view; we've got to work a little harder as readers to put together the pieces (which is appreciated from this reader's pov). How much thought do you put into how the reader will perceive the story?

You know, I never think about the reader per se. When I edit, I obviously aim for clarity for the reader’s sake but she is not in my head as I write. So how the story is perceived doesn’t come into my writing equation. I don’t workshop my fiction so usually the first inkling I get of whether something has worked or not is from an editor’s perspective. And I prefer it that way.

The child’s voice is a device, like any other literary device, and I like its limitations. There’s only so much a child will understand and as the writer you have to be aware of that. And tread carefully.

There's something about the fact that the girl's name is avoided, which reminded me of the narrator of Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca (although your narrator is much more feisty!), who is never named, but takes other people's names (i.e her husband's name but not her own - Mrs de Winter). How important are names in your creation's worlds?

Names are huge for me and not openly naming the novel’s narrator was deliberate – she has nicknames instead e.g. Little Miss Prim. (I know her real name, though!)

I find naming one of the most joyous aspects of creating characters and often their entire personality will hinge on their name. I am like a blackbird, foraging for names all the time: in newspapers, in TV credits, in spam etc. My husband brought home a new cookbook the other night and the author’s name was so quirky and cute, I’ve stolen it for my list of character names. I like odd and memorable names. I love the way Dickens used names in his fiction, and Annie Proulx is a consummate namer.

Barbara, thanks a million for hosting me today and for the delicious home-baking; it’s been lovely chatting to you. Next week my virtual tour brings me to England to the home of short story writer and novelist Elizabeth Baines. I'd love if some of your readers would join me there.

It's been a real pleasure, Nuala. To readers out there who haven't managed to get/read You just yet, it is stocked in all good bookshops in Ireland, or can be ordered directly from New Island - postage is included if you live in Ireland!

Guess who's coming tomorrow?

Nuala Ni Chonchuir and her debut novel You will virtually drop by for a quick cup of tea and jammy scones tomorrow.

She's busy in West Cork this week, tutoring a creative fiction workshop, but she'll find time in her day tomorrow to answer some intriguing questions on voice.

The Magpie Has Landed...

... in Dundalk. It's a great pleasure today, to welcome Elizabeth Baines' Flying With Magpies tour to sunny Dundalk on the east coast of Ireland, with her new novel, Too Many Magpies.


I devoured this book in one sitting: I am a quick reader, but when a book grabs one's attention the way that Too Many Magpies does, I find it extremely hard to put it down.This book was amazing for its exploration of that disturbing sense of guilt that women experience as parents and the build-up of worry and tension in the novel just kept on ratchetting up. I thought TMM was very well written and I loved the opacity of the language; everything adding to that sense of heightened awareness. Anyhow, on we go with Elizabeth's visit.

Elizabeth Baines was born in South Wales and lives in Manchester. She is a prizewinning author of prose fiction and plays for radio and stage. Too Many Magpies was published by Salt in 2009. Previously Salt published her collection of short stories, (2007) which was pronounced ‘a stunning debut collection’ (The Short Review). In October 2010 Salt will reissue her first, acclaimed novel Balancing on the Edge of the WorldThe Birth Machine. She is also a performer and has been a teacher.

About the book: How do we safeguard our children in a changing and dangerous world? And what if the greatest danger is from ourselves? A young mother fearful for her children’s safety falls under the spell of a charismatic but sinister stranger. A novel about our hidden desires and the scientific and magical modes of thinking which have got us to where we are now.

• Elizabeth, you write your main characters very strongly, and the issues and themes that are raised are those that affect women in particular. I enjoyed particularly the voice, that to me was the main strength of the novel; the voice of this woman. How hard is it to articulate a character like the narrator in Too Many Magpies?

Well, to me voice is all-important - to my mind, it's HOW a novel or story is told that is its real essence, and which carries its real meaning. I really can't begin writing until I hear the narrative voice. Sometimes that happens quickly and sometimes it doesn't, I find: you can have the theme and the story and even the characters, but you still can't hear the voice in which the story will be told - whether it's the voice of one of the characters, or of a separate narrator etc, and how precisely that voice sounds. I don't really find that I can do much actively to make this happen: basically I find it's a question of waiting to hear it, and if it doesn't come quickly, you just need to let the novel/story grow in your head. In fact, the voice of Too Many Magpies came to me very quickly right from the start (along with the first sentence that just dropped into my head): that of the main character, a woman trapped in a crisis and fearful for her children. Once the voice comes, I find, you're away, and it feels more like listening than thinking or working anything out. So all in all I found the voice of this particular novel very easy to achieve and as a result I wrote it very quickly. As I say, though, it's not always like that!

• Although the woman is having an affair, I still found I had good sympathy with her. Again this is a real strength of the character’s complexity – how much thought do you give to the development of a character: their flaws, their foibles, their strengths?

Again, once I heard this woman's voice, I had her whole person, so I didn't put a lot of conscious thought into developing a profile of her. I know some writers draw up character profiles with backstories etc but I think I'd find that process distracting and defocussing from the bit of a character's story I'm writing and indeed distancing from characters themselves. As with acting (which I also do sometimes) I need to inhabit the story and the characters rather than stand back from them in the way that I think (though I may be wrong) 'profiling' or 'developing' them would require. You know the actor's saying that if you get the right shoes on you know exactly how your character will behave? Well, that's how I feel about voice: once I've got the right voice I feel I know as much as I need to about the character(s) for the story I'm telling, and with a first-person voice like this one I'm right inside the character's head. I know that in reality it's the converse of this last that's true: the characters are actually inside my head, they are constructs of my imagination, and merely aspects of the story I've made up! But for me it's more a question of daydreaming them than thinking them out. And once you're in that state of 'being inside a character's head' (and as long as there's no overall authorial irony, which there isn't in this novel) you're no longer judging him or her, and so the reader, one hopes, is less likely to judge him/her and more likely to identify. I suppose I must say that I did identify with this particular character in some of the more objective, non-writerly ways - which must have helped! - as naturally I drew on some of my own experience of having children, and, more specifically, the thing that happens to her elder child also happened to mine.

• I found a magical realism element to the novel: sometimes I felt that the setting was real, sometimes I felt that there was a slippage between a created reality and a second created universe (that may be because I was ill whilst reading, admittedly). This added a real sense of urgency to the novel's progress; I wondered how this atmosphere came about?

I'd say this comes from the narrator's psychology and situation. Her problem is precisely how to view the world and how to work out which is the reality, the empirical world of facts her husband works in, or a world of charms and spells and luck and intuition represented by her lover. And she is indeed slipping from one to the other world as she turns emotionally from one to the other of the two men. And there's another level she slips towards, away from them both: the uncertainty which neither world view properly acknowledges.

Thank you Elizabeth for such an interesting insight into this intriguing novel. For those who want to follow this interview up, you can read about Too Many Magpies on the Salt website; you can watch Elizabeth talking about her novel; and you can hear Elizabeth's podcasts too.

Next week, the Flying With Magpies tour lands at Vanessa Gebbie's Blog, and the last date of the tour is at Eco Libris. All thanks to Elizabeth and the Salt publishing crew.

The Shadow of the Wind

Talk about a book that brings you somewhere! I'd recently found this book sheltering in one of the many bookcases that are scattered around the house. I picked it up and read the first few pages - I was hooked pretty quickly too.

It's a Gothic tale set in Barcelona between the second world war and the sixties but encompasses a history that comes before that - confused? It gets better. The book's protagonist Daniel Sempere finds a book in a Cemetery of Forgotten Books whose story and writer gets under his skin so much that Daniel sets off on a long quest to find out why this book and others that the illusive author has written are being systematically destroyed, and additionally where the long lost writer has disappeared to.

The main genre of the book is Gothic with a narrative style reminding this reader of so many 19th century novels of the Literature course AA316 last year: Madame Bovary, The Portrait of A Lady, The Woman in White, Northanger Abbey, Middlemarch etc. In other words a rich literary allusive treasure trove of a book. The writing is at times very evocative: the opening description of a dawn scene in Barcelona describes the light as pouring over 'Rambla de Santa Monica in a wreath of liquid copper.'

The Shadow of The Wind was one of those books that really encapsulates and simultaneously investigates the sensation of reading, where a book grips your imagination so much that you are reluctant to 'lose the story's spell or bid farewell to its characters.' Places and characters are described and built up so well that this reader felt like she'd spent a good while in old Barcelona, during the reign of fear of Franco's time.

I know I come late to the party with this book, discovering it long after the fuss has died down about it. But I really enjoyed all the tricks - especially since I've just finished the prose part of my Creative Writing course - the techniques being illustrated in the writing of Carlos Ruiz Zafon, and so ably translated by Lucia Graves.

Coven of One - Review - finally!

We are used to thinking of novels like Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice as the über typical bildungsroman, or novel of personal development, where the feisty heroine endures hardship and attains maturity rewarded by their just desserts. But what happens when you combine the esoteric genre of fantasy with the bildungsroman? Coven of One by Kate Bousfield is one answer.

After the intriguing prologue, the scene is set with Dorcas Fleming, the heroine, about to graduate from her thoroughly long education and embark on her first witching placement. Life is only just beginning for Dorcas, as she is despatched beyond the normal boundaries of her known land. Initially, the pace of the novel reflects a rural perspective: nature is lovingly invoked without being overly wordy and the slow build up to Dorcas’ departure is justified by the incorporation of additional exposition which is essential to later plot development.

Bousfield’s created world holds intact for the most part in her novel. The successive trials and tribulations of Dorcas’ sojourn with the heathen unbelievers of the foreign land are not only entertaining but explore our own deep-seated beliefs about the ‘other’ in society. What happens when seemingly opposing forces come together within a feminine context? Rather than war, there is resolution through communication, understanding and good old-fashioned feminine wiles, as Dorcas wins the confidence of a deeply mistrustful community through the women-folk first.

Coven of One as a debut novel reflects a world carefully crafted from imagination and reality, with a superb writing style and a sure voice. All characters are vividly painted: most especially Dorcas. Bousfield draws on sea-lore, herb-lore, witchcraft and much, much more in this novel. Without giving too much of the plot away, it is enough to say that although this novel fuses realism with fantasy, it is neither too clever, nor superficial, it bears re-reading and the dramatic climax of the book is well executed.

Following Dorcas’ development to emotional maturity through this ‘other’ world definitely enhances reader’s enjoyment. Fantasy works on a level that some readers may find difficult to reconcile with fiction set in the contemporary world. But sometimes the imagined fantasy world created, reaches from the ordinary world we inhabit to beyond it, credibly stretching our notions of what is possible. Magic can, and does happen in real life (although that may depend on your own point of view) and perhaps that is the best satisfaction of all.

This is highly recommended reading for a wide range of age groups, whether a young adult or more mature reader. It is to be hoped that Bousfield’s imaginative world houses other characters and novels for the future! Available from Opening Chapter.