As I mentioned in last month’s column I was hoping to have The Dig by Robert Preston as December’s Book Club choice but unfortunately the hard back edition has just gone out of print and the paperback is not due out until May next year, so it will have to wait. Fortunately I have a worthwhile replacement in the form of Dead Men Talking: Stories from East Anglia Volume III recently published by Black Dog Books of Norwich. Readers may remember that I began this column just over two years ago with Line Dancing the second volume in this trilogy.
The 25 stories from Dead Men Talking are divided into three sections – Watermarks, Headlands and Tidelines and include stories from the Victorian period through to the modern day. The former includes an excerpt from David Copperfield where Dickens describes a violent storm blowing into Yarmouth from the sea and two contributions from the more obscure Fenland story teller Chafer Legge whose stories were transcribed in about 1900 by W H Barrett. The latter is represented by new stories from respected authors such as D J Taylor, Elspeth Barker and Philip Hensher. In between you can find contributions from among others Sylvia Townsend Warner, George Ewart Evans, Virginia Woolf, M R James and Margery Allingham.
It is worth going on to the Black Dog Books website at blackdogbooks.co.uk to check out the publishers blurb.
Keiron Pim, books editor at the EDP, recently used the publication of Dead Men Talking to ask the question ‘how possible is it to produce fiction that is both contemporary and manages to convey a sense of life in East Anglia?’ (EDP SUNDAY, Satuday November 17th). In the foreword to Dead Men Talking D J Taylor Norwich based novelist and critic strongly defends ‘contemporary regional literature’ while Peter Tolhurst, the books publisher is more sceptical. What do you think?
The inside of the dust jacket almost provided as much interesting reading as the 25 stories which make up Dead Men Talking. The comments on D J Taylor’s view of East Anglia’s ‘otherness’ by Peter Tolhurst, the books publisher, gave a fascinating insight into the dynamics of local literary life. ‘Regional Literature’ is obviously a literary buzz phrase presently being kicked gently and sometimes not so gently between various local literary players.
I agree with Tolhurst that the ‘old rural culture’ is being ‘drowned out by a ubiquitous esturine whine.’ Surely this is no surprise and is not a completely recent phenomenon. The days of Mary Mann, Chafer Legge and George Ewart Evans are long gone. The East Anglian landscape whether it is physical, social, emotional or political has changed and authors should be encouraged to explore it without needing to be constantly looking back over their shoulders at the good old days.
If writers of fiction are not up to the job of interpreting the modern ‘spirit of East Anglia’ does it matter? There are plenty of other artists who are doing the job instead including painters, sculptors, photographers, nature writers, actors and story tellers and they almost certainly reach a wider audience.
However I believe there are signs of what Mr Tolhurst describes as a ‘serious literary response to the region’s landscape’. Jeremy Page’s Salt (December Book Club) although flawed is an intelligent and magical attempt. In the Reed Flute the underrated Tessa West wrote a wonderfully compassionate account of the journey of an Iraqi grandfather and his granddaughter along the Yare ‘nourished as much by the slow river and the subtle beauty of the Broadland as by memory, hope and faith.’ Maybe because she is self-published Tessa West doesn’t count.
Nevertheless I also enjoy the ‘lightweight’ East Anglian novels by authors which Peter Tolhurst was seemingly too polite to mention by name - Julie Myerson, Rafaella Barker, Esther Freud et al. I’m waiting with almost baited breath for Anthony Horowitz to join the fray.
Peter Tolhurst’s words left me feeling a little downbeat maybe a sense of humour wouldn’t come amiss from at least one of our local literati. I’m sure Keith Skipper would agree!
Kate Gardener
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