Infinite Space

2012 - forthcoming events and publications

2012-01-04T09:03:00.000-08:00

A great deal has changed in my circumstances in the past year. In September I took up a post as Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. This meant leaving Edinburgh, where my wife and I have been so happy, but Manchester is a vibrant place and we're excited to be establishing a new life here.

The teaching post - my first permanent one at a university - is part-time, so I hope to continue working on my next novel, The Devil's Highway, as soon as I have found my feet in this(excellent) department.

Other writing and editing projects continue to take up my time. I recently completed a short story for Comma Press's forthcoming collection, Biopunk, and am working on another Comma commission for a second collection of original stories, provisionally titled Ten Years Asleep. I will post more about both books in the coming months. Comma Press is a truly brilliant small publishing house that focuses on the short story, and I'm delighted to be working with them.

In September this year, the boldly independent Oneworld will be publishing Out of Chaos - stories for our shared planet: a collection of specially commissioned short stories, written by major UK authors, responding to our ecological crisis. Royalties on the sale of the book will go to the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition. I am editing this book, and will post about it and its creation at length. Suffice for now to say that, after five years' work on the project, I and Mike Robinson, CEO of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, are delighted to see publishing light at the end of the tunnel. The book's contributors include A.L. Kennedy, Toby Litt, Joanne Harris, Alasdair Gray, Liz Jensen, Janice Galloway, Adam Thorpe and Lawrence Norfolk.

As well as seeing Out of Chaos into the shops, I will be launching a book of my own. The Lost Art of Losing is a collection of aphorisms written in a fit of enthusiasm (for the form, and doubtless my own opinions) in 2010. Vagabond Voices, another brave independent publisher, plans to bring the book out in May. More anon; but to tide any blog visitors over, versions of what will appear in print can be sampled here.

On the public appearances front, I look forward very much to discussing literature and climate change at TippingPoint in Newcastle on 22 February. I will also be teaching a course on 'ecological writing' at the Peak Districts's Quaker Community in Bamford between 7th and the 12th May. If a combination of nature walks, close reading sessions and writing classes appeal to you, why not book a place and join us? You don't have to be a Quaker, though the chance to experience the community adds to the experience.

The above is a somewhat rushed summary of my professional hopes and projects for 2012. I hope the year proves a fruitful and peaceful one for all of us.

Kikinda surprise

2011-06-17T04:02:00.000-07:00

Oh dear. More than a year has passed since I last updated this blog. In that time I've had the immense good fortune of getting married, have written half of a novel (on which more later) and managed, with help, to get a major charity book project off the ground. However, for this first post of 2011, I want to write about a literary festival devoted to short fiction - a particular love of mine as writer and reader - which I will be attending at the end of the month.

My invitation to Kikinda Short 2011 came out of the blue, as far as I was concerned, from the pioneering Manchester-based publisher, Comma Press. Comma describes itself as a "not-for-profit publisher promoting new fiction and poetry, with an emphasis on the short story". Their authors include the award-winning Adam Marek and David Constantine - the latter perhaps one of the finest exponents of the short story in the UK, and a fine poet and translator in the bargain. So it was rather an honour to hear from Ra Page and Jim Hinks that they'd suggested me, alongside Bernard MacLaverty, to represent Scotland in the Kikinda line-up of writers. (The fact that, on the nationality front, I'm an Anglo-French hybrid and Bernard M is from Northern Ireland seems not to trouble anybody.) Being the sort of fellow who likes attention, I enthusiastically accepted the invitation.

Serbia may not, yet, be a mainstream tourist destination for west Europeans, but I have particular reasons for looking forward to the trip. My grandfather, Harold Norminton, taught at the British Council in Belgrade in the 1950s, where he became a friend of the poet, Miodrag Pavlovic. I heard many anecdotes, over the years, about those years under Tito, and my grandfather's volitional faux pas when it came to the ideological sensibilities of his hosts. Also my father, who was at boarding school in England at the time, spent his holidays in Yugoslavia and the country, as it was then, made a real impression on him. Finally, given Serbia's unhappy recent history, I'll be very interested to meet people who have experienced life under dictatorship and are now, as writers and artists, trying to reimagine a democratic and tolerant society.

The festival, for those of us invited from across Europe, will begin in Belgrade on 27th June, followed by a trip north to the border town of Kikinda, where we will be hosted for several days of readings and other events. It's always a pleasure to meet fellow writers (we're not all conceited gits) and I'll be intrigued to experience the Pannonian Plain, which has been compared by someone who knows it to the Russian steppe - a flat, agricultural land with sayings like, "If you want to see the next village, stand on a pumpkin". Also, as a bad birdwatcher, I'm hoping to glimpse the odd black stork or Syrian woodpecker.

I have to confess to knowing few of the writers with whom I will be sharing a platform. This isn't surprising, given the low status of short fiction and the virtual non-existence of literature in translation in the UK. Who knows: perhaps, language permitting, I may make some discoveries!

* Please note: the image is of Kikinda's coat of arms - a charming representation of a Turk's head impaled on a Serbian sword. This does not represent the blogger's attitudes towards the former rulers of the region, but it does remind him of an anecdote told him by his grandfather: that, in 1950s Yugoslavia, each nation spoke in whispers of its immediate eastern neighbour as 'Turks'. Thus, to Slovenes, the Croats were Turks; to Croats, the Serbs were Turks, etc. Perhaps, with the seemingly inexorable rise of Erdogan's Turkey, these sorts of emblems and slurs may have to be revisited, as trade always wins out on stereotypes - or at least sweeps them under the profit carpet.

A noble synonym for fool

2010-04-24T04:06:00.000-07:00

I am currently finishing work on a new translation of Gustave Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas. The book will be published by Oneworld Classics in October, and you can preorder your copy here.

It was only after his death that Flaubert's 'dictionary' - a compendium of lazy, received opinions that contributed, in his mind, to the bêtise of the French bourgeoisie - was discovered among his papers. Ploughing my way through this funny, sometimes maddening document has not been without its dangers; for as Flaubert himself discovered, to keep company with sloppy thinking is to be infected by it, to come face to face with one's own propensity for thinking and speaking in clichés. Like his novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet, the project of the Dictionary was unfinishable: for there are always new thought-turds to add to the midden heap of received opinions. And as we watch our media grappling with another general election, and grit our teeth at the platitudes that pass for political discourse, we could very well sit down and begin our own, 21st Century compendium...

The science is as settled as science ever can be

2010-01-10T08:16:00.001-08:00

So why is the 1% receiving so much attention?
Could it be something to do with dirty PR?

Guest post from my sister

2009-12-07T14:22:00.000-08:00

Today my family and I went on a demonstration. We joined the Wave in central London. This is not our normal Saturday activity but nor was it for anyone else around us, and that was what was so remarkable about this demonstration: families with buggies, children with their faces painted, the retired, the old, the young, nuns and priests - the ordinary people of Britain were on the streets. Some 60,000. What possible cause could entice fathers to abandon their son’s Saturday footie? Students to abandon the college bar, middle England to abandon their gardens? Is it the frustration, the feeling of imminent crisis; the sense that time is literally running out? As demonstrators banged sticks in a rhythmic ticking of time, posters passed reading “there is no planet B”.

“Make more noise!” pleaded a policeman as we walked passed the Houses of Parliament. “We’re a rather genteel lot” I replied apologetically. “Yes but they won’t hear you, stop being so British” was his response.

There you have it: apathetic, navel gazing Britain is moving, albeit quietly and leaders take note. The message is simple – the time is nigh, no second chances, no half-way measures. The solutions exist but they require political will from our leaders. It is time for them to put aside personal political and national interests and to act unanimously for the good of the planet.

Leaders of the world show us you deserve the positions of authority you hold – mankind is watching.

Natalie Lindsay

Denial is not a river in Egypt

2009-11-03T10:28:00.000-08:00

As we head towards probable stalemate at Copenhagen next month, it seems important to ask ourselves why we can't find the political will to save ourselves. One of the reasons, it seems to me, is that those countries which are hindering progress - chiefly Canada and the USA, where Republicans are acting disgracefully as usual - have the lowest levels of public understanding of the climate crisis. In the States especially, a recent opinion poll showed a steep decline in the number of people who believe that human behaviour is causing abrupt climate change.

This confusion about the science has been created, as a matter of policy, by vested interests in Big Carbon that want to stall all efforts to change course. They have been ably abetted by ideologues on the hard right (Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and in the UK such scientific luminaries as Melanie Phillips, Nigel and Dominic Lawson, the repulsive Christopher Monckton and any number of half mad bloggers for the Daily Telegraph), who are in turn given a wealthy and pervasive media platform to spread their disinformation and pseudoscience. In the USA, I'm thinking especially of Fox News as well as the Wall Street Journal and countless radio stations. In the UK, nearly all the rightwing newspapers and tabloids take editorially 'sceptical' lines: not surprising when you consider that Paul Dacre, editor of The Daily Mail, the Barclay brothers who own The Telegraph, Rupert Murdoch who owns The Sun and the pornographer Richard Desmond who owns The Express, are all of them ideologues with a reactionary agenda. One has only to google the words 'global warming' to find a vast array of websites intent on denying reality, or bamboozling readers with scientific research that curiously lacks any of the peer-reviewing that is a basic prerequisite of responsible scientific research. Well you might say, gadflies and contrarians have always been with us. Alas, the denialists matter because they are most effective at muddying the waters on the greatest threat facing humanity - and the consequence is that politicians, never the most courageous lot, are thoroughly lacking the moral courage to act in our children's interests.

All of which is by way of a preambling plug for my article on the website of Prospect Magazine. In March I found myself in St Andrews debating three of the more vicious climate change denialists in the UK. It wasn't an edifying experience; but it's necessary work, and you can read more about it here. Or even join in with a comment: I will attempt to respond to all serious posts on this most vital of topics.

Here comes the flood

2009-10-08T05:17:00.000-07:00

My short story, ‘The Fortress at Bruges’, will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Wednesday 4th November at 15.30. The story, commissioned by Emma Harding, is read by the distinguished young actor (I can write ‘young’ because he’s three years my junior) Stephen Cambell Moore.

‘The Fortress at Bruges’ is set in a Flanders of the future: perhaps a century from now. Although it imagines a city on the edge of a risen sea – a museum piece in the globally warmed world our elected leaders seem incapable of averting – it is not concerned so much with depicting that world as investigating what living there might do to people emotionally. As the world alters out of recognition (as is already starting to happen in Australia), how will we respond psychologically to becoming foreigners in our own land? And won’t our ancient human impulses to find love and material prosperity come to seem, well, petty in comparison to what we have done?

On the scenario front, ‘The Fortress at Bruges’ is based on solid predictive science; it is harrowingly conceivable. Large swathes of Belgium and the Netherlands (not to mention western England) lie close to sea level, so that a sea-level rise of two metres would leave millions of hectares under water. Google has a useful, if rough-and-ready, simulator. This picture demonstrates the high risk of permanent land loss due to rising and expanding seas. Large parts of Holland (the bits under the broken white line) are currently below sea level, kept dry by an elaborate system of dykes and flood defences. The cost, however, of building ever higher and more resistant defences will most likely become prohibitive. One of the responses, already in practice in the UK and elsewhere, is managed retreat. There are good summaries on this process here and here. Unfortunately, while managed retreat has economic and wildlife benefits under the present, relatively slow, rate of sea-level rise, if as seems more and more likely the ice shelves of Greenland and – heaven forbid – Antarctica undergo substantial melting, managed retreat may become a full-scale evacuation. I’m thinking for analogy of 'the miracle of Dunkirk' – the site of which, in such a scenario, will go the same way as the land around Bruges.

Blogging the future

2009-10-08T04:34:00.000-07:00

As our society hurtles helter-skelter towards a pretty unpleasant future – droughts, floods, resource wars, the unstoppable rise of Simon Cowell – the need grows ever more urgent for artists and storytellers to engage with our crises, both to reflect them and to think up alternative models of behaviour which might, by our imagining them, have a chance of coming into being. In my own small way, I am trying to contribute to this cultural adjustment by writing stories and novels that engage directly with the coming upheavals. If this sounds grandiose to you, I’d be the first to agree; but we all have a part to play in getting to grips with the new reality we are creating, and there is a growing movement – as varied and disparate as the world itself – of writers and artists engaged in that process. The internet is, of course, the forum where the ferment is taking place. Over the coming year, it is my intention to write about a different blog each month. For October, I would like to draw attention to spring coppice, the blog of a friend of mine, Abbie Garrington, who as well as being an intrepid explorer of uncomfortable tropical places is devoting her academic research to ‘twentieth century and contemporary literature, with a particular interest in nature writing, environmental protest fiction and literary representations of climate change’. As well as posting well and interestingly on a host of topics, she has the merit of doing so far more frequently than I do. Please visit Abbie’s blog; and while you’re there, check out her links. You’ll get no work done for hours.

Free readings at the Edinburgh Festival

2009-08-05T11:21:00.000-07:00

Last year was the wettest, most sodden festival in history: a sort of end-times carnival of the arts. 2009 looks set to be rather more clement and already the usual tents are up in the Meadows, my girlfriend has been presented with her first flyer and a giant purple cow has been tipped over on Bristo Square. Yup, it's that time of year when Edinburgh's population doubles, enterprising citizens rent out their flats to amateur dramatic companies dreaming of glory for their cabaret version of King Lear, and I spend more money than is sensible on all sorts of edifying - and some not so edifying - events.

Last year I had a new novel to sell, which took me to the Edinburgh Book Festival proper. This year I haven't got a new book but that hasn't stopped me securing a few reading 'gigs' - which brings me to the purpose of this post. If you're around and able to make it to any of the following events, do give them a try. Each one is absolutely FREE!

WEST PORT BOOK FESTIVAL

I'll be reading with my friend, the very excellent poet and novelist Mike Stocks, at Edinburgh Books on Thursday 13 August at 7.30 pm. Poems, stories, polemic (maybe) and drama all in one, watched over by Clarence.

EDINBURGH BOOK FRINGE, WORD POWER BOOKS

Edinburgh's (still, just) only independent bookshop, the invaluable Word Power Books, will be hosting me and the dauntingly brilliant Alan Bissett on Tuesday 18 August at 2.30 pm. Come and see Alan perform excerpts from his new novel, Death of a Ladies' Man. I can't think of a novelist more skilled at interpreting his own work. You'd be a fool to skip this. As indeed would I.

EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL BOOK FESTIVAL

There will be two opportunities to hear me read my short stories this year in Charlotte Square. Both events are scheduled for Monday 24 August.

At 10 am I will be reading at the Writers Retreat. This is a short, 10-minute taster to set you up for the day.

At 4 pm I will be performing in the Festival Bookshop.

Do come along to any of these events. There will be chat, drinks (in some instances) and opportunities to order my forthcoming short story collection .

Utz: a play on BBC Radio 4

2009-07-01T13:01:00.000-07:00

One of my very first paid jobs as a writer was in radio. It was an adaptation of E.M. Forster's short story The Machine Stops , which was broadcast on BBC Radio Four in April 2001. I loved the experience, especially the studio recording: a sort of time-limited, by-the-seat-of-our pants collective endeavour. I hoped to get other commissions, but subsequent pitches for radio plays were turned down by the BBC and, when I got my first novel published, I decided to concentrate on fiction. Then, in 2007, I bumped into the play's producer, the delightful Marilyn Imrie, at the Edinburgh Book Festival. She suggested that I send her some new pitches; which I did. One of these was for a dramatisation of Bruce Chatwin's last novel, Utz. The BBC is a sucker for anniversaries and 2009 marks the twentieth anniversary of Chatwin's too-early death. This, and the Communist context of the Prague-set narrative (it's twenty years, too, since the Velvet Revolution; something Chatwin did not live to see) helped secure a green light for the proposal.

You can hear the end result on BBC Radio 4 this Saturday at 14.30.

The play features Jack Klaff as Utz, Sam Kelly as Orlik, Daniel Weyman as the narrator and Pam Ferris as Marta. Oh, and I make an appearance as a plummy Oxford don. Can't think how I ended up with that role...

Books go SPLAT

2009-06-05T14:28:00.000-07:00

An exciting and impressive venture, this:

Celebrating its 7th anniversary in 2009, the Warwick SPLAT Festival, is a non-profit annual week-long celebration of Student Performance, Literature, Art and Theatre. Since its inception in 2003, it has brought together diverse and creative individuals who have created the first and largest student run arts festival in the world.

I am chuffed to have been invited to read and speak at SPLAT this year. As there will be creative writing students in the audience, I think I could most helpfully spend my time warning them about the BLOODY HORRIBLE MESS that publishing has become in the UK.

Squeezed by profit margins, the evaporation of books coverage in newspapers, the desperate plight of independent bookshops and the recession, a culture of paralysis seems to have overtaken publishing houses (they weren't exactly dynamic in the first place). And writers like me probably shouldn't complain too loudly, as any number of publicists called Tarquin and marketing assistants called Cressida have lost their jobs in recent months. In fact, the only people who seem to be flourishing in the book world for the moment are celebrity ghostwriters.

Great days for Jordan, terrible times for people who actually read.

Still, periods of transition are always painful, and the ubiquity of readers' blogs and book groups testifies to a continued enthusiasm for good writing. The model is still vague in my mind, but something akin to the organic movement and the growing concern for locally-sourced produce is going to have to emerge in literary culture. The flog-em cheap supermarkets and promotion-stuffed book chains will continue to kill off diversity unless readers become aware of their power as 'consumers' to affect publishing for the better.

This country needs a 'farmer's market' approach to book-selling: bringing readers and writers together, so the latter can sell their wares without distortion. At the same time, a national campaign to support our local, independent book shops, which are capable of catering to the specific tastes of their communities, is sorely needed. In short, the greening of food culture may offer a blueprint for a healthier publishing industry. We have to do something; because as things stand I don't have high hopes for the future of Warwick's young writers.

I'm gonna git you Succour

2009-05-11T09:33:00.000-07:00

Times are hard for writers, as they are for just about everybody, and short stories are especially hard to sell. Most publishers won't even touch a collection, while the number of publications interested in quality short fiction seems to dwindle year on year. Succour Magazine is boldly holding out against the tide. One of my stories, 'Kutb', appears in the latest edition: 'Fantasies'. You can buy your copy here.

Victorian Verb

2009-05-07T07:03:00.000-07:00

On Friday 8th May, I will be joining Barnsley’s finest, Ian McMillan, on a Victorian-themed episode of Radio 3’s ‘The Verb’. My contribution to the programme, ‘The Chronic Omnibus’, is a tribute to (and possibly a pastiche of) early science fiction, or scientific romance, as the young H.G. Wells liked to call it. I will be acting opposite Ewan Bailey and sitting around a table with Toby Litt and Ergo Phizmiz. Tune in for a night of gruesome poetry, music hall banter and the deep weirdness that is ‘point balling’.

Authors what I like

2009-04-19T03:00:00.000-07:00

This brief article was written for the blog of Norman Geras. You can see the piece in its natural habitat here

Having come somewhat late to fiction (until the age of sixteen I had eyes only for factual books and graphic novels), I am a fickle and somewhat promiscuous reader, tending to have several titles on the go at once. I hope never to lose the daunted excitement, bordering on greed, with which I contemplate my own and other people’s bookshelves. Against this literary flightiness stands my completist tendency: if I develop an enthusiasm for an author, I will try to lay my hand on everything he or she wrote, including the late jottings and every scrap of juvenilia (it was to escape readers like me that Kafka urged Max Brod to light his literary bonfire). My habits, then, may be those of a browser – prone to diffusion, distraction and caprice - yet there are certain key authors to whom I find myself returning again and again.

A tendency towards earnestness in my own writing may be attributed, at least in part, to an adolescent enthusiasm for Camus, whom, since I am half-French, I read in the original. Camus led me to the Absurdists (a love of theatre predates my more sedentary habits) and of these Beckett was clearly the most intriguing. The poetic cadences of Waiting for Godot retain their fascination for me, yet the plays have paled in comparison to Beckett’s early and middle (or, as he might have put it, ‘middling’) prose. I still recall the excitement of my first encounter with such stories as ‘The End’, ‘The Calmative’ and ‘First Love’. They were unlike anything I had read: a thrillingly grim antidote to the realism which had, until then, seemed to me the normal mode of ‘literary’ fiction. Beckett may have written himself into a cul-de-sac, but I found his prose liberating: it showed me what could be done with the most unprepossessing material.

Martin Amis (yes, like most literary young men I went through an obsessive Amis phase) writes in his memoir, Experience, about his loathing for Beckett’s prose. His own literary masters are, famously, Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov. I admire Bellow, but it is Nabokov whom I consider the greatest stylist (that I’ve read) of the last century. Nabokov is famously unrivalled as a descriptive writer: the almost ecstatic precision of his best prose is both a challenge and a warning to other writers to make the reader’s imagination sing. Beckett, by contrast, is not a visual writer. The compelling quality of his prose is musical; it is the music, composed of echoes and repetition, which makes even his bleakest imaginings weirdly consoling. It may seem incongruous to declare Nabokov and Beckett my literary heroes: they appear to be polar opposites, the former all visual splendour, defiantly and aristocratically optimistic (life, for all its pain and bafflement, is for Nabokov a great gift), the latter negative, obsessive, teetering on the edge of despair and extinction. Yet it is this very opposition that I find instructive. They are the bookends – so to speak – of my tastes and values as a reader.

For all that I love to read, I do so very slowly. I hear the text in my head and this, along with good pitch and my training, long ago, as an actor, have left me with a preference for ‘aural’ writers: those who have a true ear for dialogue and compose fluid, musically calibrated prose. Anthony Burgess – unsurprisingly, given his musical talent – had a good ear; Doris Lessing does not. Bellow, Updike, Roth and many other modern Americans, whose prose is so inflected with demotic speech, all have excellent ears. Their writing demands to be read aloud; and this perhaps more than anything explains their influence on the post-war British generation of novelists against which my generation measures itself.

Most values contain a degree of contradiction. J.G. Ballard is in many ways cloth-eared – certainly when it comes to characterisation. Yet I declare myself an avid Ballardian, captivated especially by his earlier visions of drowned, desiccated or otherwise terminally transformed Earths. Ballard is a brilliant and obsessive cartographer of imaginary worlds; a younger novelist who has a comparable talent (and a more varied prose style) is Jim Crace, every one of whose novels carves out new and strange territory. There is neither religious nor, very often, temporal consolation to be found in Ballard or Crace. I find their works bracing: disturbing yet also perversely jaunty. Then again, I listen to The Smiths to cheer myself up.

As I hinted at the beginning of this very brief reader’s profile, I am prone to strong but movable enthusiasms. For this reason I would like to flag up some authors who have recently excited me: Maggie Gee, in The Flood, and Sarah Hall with The Carhullan Army, have both engaged vividly with the consequences of climate change. Alasdair Gray and Russell Hoban are intermittently great visionaries and always intriguingly eccentric. David Mitchell and Andrew Miller – two authors with whom until recently I shared an editor – are major talents whose every work my partner and I must possess. I have long admired the Czech writers Milan Kundera and Bohumil Hrabal. Lastly, I collect a few contemporary French writers who remain virtually unknown in translation: the miniaturist and stylist Pierre Michon, Eric Chevillard (a playful descendent of Beckett, Pinget and Raymond Queneau) and Pierre Bergounioux, whose remarkable essay ‘B-17 G’ I hope one day to translate and persuade, say, Granta to publish.

Broon and Hoon! Shitting on your toon!

2009-01-16T07:44:00.000-08:00

The bumptious Geoff Hoon put the final nail in the coffin of New Labour's environmental credibility yesterday when he declared - without a Commons vote - the government's approval of a third runway at Heathrow. If built (and the Tories have said that, if elected, it won't be; but can we believe them?), the new runway will make Heathrow the single biggest source of CO2 in Britain. That's about 27 million tonnes a year - equivalent to the emissions from 4 coal-fired power stations. Such a development will lay waste our attempts, supposedly enshrined in law by the Climate Change Act, to cut our contribution to global warming. It will shatter the lives of hundreds of people whose homes will be destroyed to make way for the planes. It will make the lives of hundreds of thousands of Londoners and others living under the flight-paths (that means the whole of my family) almost unbearable. The decision goes against moral and economic sense: recession and Peak Oil, anyone? And perhaps most damagingly - as I have to hope that direct action, civil disobedience and legal challenges will prevent this hateful prospect from becoming a reality - it further undermines the resolve of our nation to change. What hope is there of effecting a behavioural shift when the most powerful body in the land ignores its own rhetoric? Indeed, why the hell should people reduce their ecological footprint when binge flight culture and its proponents at BAA can wreck the planet at will? Like many environmentalists, I struggle to convey the urgency of the crisis we face and the necessity for personal action when all that people hear from government is doublespeak and hypocrisy. My outrage is feelingly expressed by the wonderful Emma Thompson and the truly Honourable Member for Hayes and Harlington, John McDonell MP.

There will be an heroic struggle to prevent a third runway. It is already uniting people from very disparate backgrounds: a truly popular and democratic attempt to save ourselves. As someone who grew up under Heathrow's planes and knows intimately how they shatter the tranquility one needs to live a decent life, I will continue to post on this battle in the months and years to come.

Janril hubbert, Vera shruggled

2009-01-09T12:54:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year! to any visitors of this too-infrequently updated blog.

I have a cheerful, futuristic short story in this month's LITRO - the excellent free literary magazine. LITRO can be picked up by Londoners at certain Underground stations. Get your copy today! Alternatively, for those of us benighted enough not to inhabit the Great Wen, the story can be read online, here.

2009 looks set to be a difficult year: madness in Gaza, the credit crunch, last-chance climate change talks in Copenhagen, and only one Barack Obama to go around. Here in Scotland, I will be doing my very small bit to chip in on the last of these great challenges, having been invited by the University of St Andrews Union Debating Society to support the motion that 'this House would enact a Green Revolution'. Details are still scarce concerning the other debaters, though I do know that the charming Lord Christopher Monckton will be one of my opponents.

I will be spending 2009 - with any luck - writing my new novel, as well as working on a radio play for BBC Radio 4, and trying to find a publisher for a short story anthology featuring a tremendous line-up of British writers (who've already pledged to submit work), challenging readers and writers alike to think up the future we fear and the future we might create for ourselves, with a bit of courage and vision. I pledge to keep this blog better updated on progress - or the lack of it - in all these areas.

Vote! Vote! Vote! for Bruno Jackson

2008-10-17T14:45:00.000-07:00

Exciting news! A new literary prize is being set up by World Book Day, and Serious Things, my latest novel, is on the longlist. You can help put it on the shortlist by voting, and maybe posting a comment, on their webpage. If you feel so inclined. Here's how WBD puts it:

Thousands of books are published every year, and only a small percentage makes the mark that it should.

The World Book Day team asked publishers large and small to submit books they thought deserved to reach a wider readership – most specifically those that would make good subjects for discussion, those that don’t merely entertain, but give greater food for thought.

From the many submissions received, we have selected fifty titles we feel fulfil the criteria. Each and every one brings something different, refreshing and stimulating.

This is an opportunity to vote for your favourite book on the list, so that we can find The Book to Talk About 2009.

Despite getting some excellent reviews, Serious Things has failed to find many readers, chiefly because the big retailers haven't put it on their promotion tables. Indeed, in Edinburgh Blackwell they haven't got a single copy. This sort of thing is not uncommon for 'literary' fiction.

I'm quite proud of my novel and would love more people to know about it; so if you've read and liked it, please vote and/or post a comment (which is a kind of vote) here.

The Verb LIVE

2008-09-28T05:16:00.000-07:00

On Friday night I had the pleasure of joining Ian McMillan and guests on stage at the Radio Theatre in BBC Broadcasting House.

For a week, thanks to the marvels of modern technology, it will be possible to 'Listen Again' to the programme here.

My story - 'At prayer in the madhouse with Kit Smart' - imagines a meeting between the 'mad' poet Christopher Smart and Samuel Johnson. If you would like to read more about Smart, intermittently trusty Wikipedia has a page. I would recommend at least dipping into Smart's remarkable Jubilate Agno. The most accessible (or do I mean intelligible?) section of the poem is usually anthologised as 'My Cat Jeoffrey'.

Do click on these links soon. Come Saturday 4th October, it will no longer be possible to hear the broadcast online.

Serious Things: Audio Book

2008-09-18T13:25:00.001-07:00

My latest novel, Serious Things, is available to buy as an unabridged audio book.

Follow the link to the website of WHOLE STORY AUDIO BOOKS to find out more. Alternatively, you can straight to this page and buy a copy.

What gets found

2008-08-29T14:57:00.000-07:00

It was with great pleasure that I received this morning the September/October edition of Resurgence. It is always a happy moment when this ecological journal ('at the heart of earth, art and spirit') lands on the doormat, especially so this time, as a short story of mine appears inside. The theme of this celebratory 250th issue is indigenous cultures around the world - how such peoples, the true stewards of our imperilled biosphere, can offer ancient solutions to 21st Century crises.

Resurgence is a valuable publication that deserves a wide readership. It understands that our environmental crisis is moral and intellectual as well as scientific and economic. It also knows that eulogy can be more effective, as a spur to action, than elegy - even if sometimes it seems impossible to do anything other than lament what we're doing to ourselves.

If you've never seen Resurgence, please visit their website and download a free, trial copy. Or even better, take a subscription. It is a good thing.

Connery and me

2008-08-29T14:47:00.000-07:00

So the Edinburgh Festival is coming to a close, and the city seems rather empty and forlorn. The sun has emerged, too, now that the people have gone.

I've been extremely fortunate to get a reviewing gig for the Times Literary Supplement, which has involved seeing as many shows as I can, absolutely free. My impossible attempt to summarise the past month ought to appear in the forthcoming issue.

On the subject of Edinburgh, a friend drew my attention to a recent article about the International Book Festival. Asked by the Independent about fees paid to performers, the organisers insisted that Sir Sean Connery had received the same payment as "an unknown author from Toll Cross". I'm pretty sure that means me; less sure whether to feel chuffed or downhearted.

RIP SUV

2008-06-20T04:22:00.000-07:00

A Strain for the Tsarina

2008-04-25T15:41:00.000-07:00

The following is what happens when you ought to be working on your novel but have found a dictionary of anagrams. (The eagle-eyed reader who counts them all will win a PRIZE!*)

The aspen shook beyond the window panes, and the tsarina waited for the artisan to speak. The man had ridden hard: his back was hurting, his disks on the skids. She watched him eat, crumbs of bread clinging to his beard. At last, the survivor spoke:

‘The raid took place on an arid plain. Natives, angered and enraged, surrounded our wagons. Injustice will bestir tribes, making them biters. Caprese by birth, I am a good escaper. Besides, I’d had the foresight not to overlook that gift-horse. Alas, your notaries, Senorita, did not survive an onrush of Hurons.’

Of the goring of gringos and men who grinned while rending, the artisan said nothing. He would never forget the Flemish himself, nor the pianists cut down, visceral matter sprayed across their claviers.

The tsarina looked at her fellow exiles among the ilexes. She understood that she was ruined yet felt inured to it, knowing that none would come to her aid. ‘Ida!’ she called and her maid entered, the enigma of the gamine altered since last the artisan saw her. ‘This gentleman is our guest,’ the tsarina related. ‘He shall dine with Enid: her appetite has returned since she recovered from the seaside disease.’

Enid, though Parsi, had been raised in Paris and had the ripest esprit for a girl from Kabul. Many might baulk at the prospect, yet the artisan thanked the tsarina, and she in turn ogled him as he withdrew to the lodge.

Left alone with her thoughts, she considered what she had lost. As a girl she had been introduced to Gladstone (like many premiers, he was a simperer) and Queen Victoria herself, who used to eruct in the cruet, and silenced her critics with a regal glare. She recalled how the Tsar, who kept rats, spoke in senescent sentences. How she’d wished he’d keep stum on that smut! And there was that time in Greece, where he had grown nastier on retsina than she had ever known him.

Travel had been her consolation. She remembered Strauss played in Tarsus, tsarist artists playing sittars, an amateur production of Tosca in Ascot. Resident on the Dniester, she had seen priests exorcising sprites. Other incidents came to mind: Seneca summoned in a séance, genial louts from Ealing in the lotus position, how the evening sky reddens in Dresden… Life had been easy with the finest hotels in Europe to receive them! Then, the absence of a bidet had gone on the debit side; now she emptied her entrails above ignoble latrines. She remembered the dormitory she had stayed in upon arrival in the States – a dirty room – and the midwinter weather: wind, rime, wet earth.

The tsarina sighed, recalling New York and the hounds howling over the Hudson, the doorbells of bordellos, the abysmal and balsamy heat of summer. She was a prude, perdu among the American main race: the bathing girls in slight garb, cleanliness at best, all niceness; yet not for her.

Night waned; a bobolink greeted the dawning, and the tsarina could barely keep her bleary eyes open. Fastening her mantel, she refused to lament. The Russian noblesse was not boneless! What options remained to her? Should she marry the artist, Evelyn, who painted evenly those Etruscan centaurs? Or Graham from Armagh, who travelled the world selling enemas to seamen? Ought she to work for R. Ewing (that winger!), the itchiest ethicist in America, who once invited Mahler to Harlem? No: all of them were anodyne and annoyed her. Instead, she would write for a living. Would her subject matter be Classical or Biblical in inspiration? Jason or Jonas? Let her rather tell her own story. Forget those Slavic cavils! Her throne was lost, she had no crones to censor her. She would write her confessions: no fantasy for morose Romeos, nor filth for the midden-minded, but the nostalgia of an analogist, rousing not souring the spirit: a schematic catechism of all she believed in, a literary refuge and mensurable lebensraum for those she had loved and lost for ever.

(* Not applicable to readers of this blog.)

In praise of Lanark

2008-02-29T02:33:00.000-08:00

For all that I'm addicted to words (even the writing on a matchbox will hold my attention in the absence of more interesting prose), it is a rare thing for me to open a book and know, from the first page, that it is going to stay with me for life. Lanark, the first novel and arguably the masterpiece of the artist and writer whom Will Self has called ‘a small, bespectacled, grey bearded deity’, is one of those books which gouges a dwelling place in your imagination and leaves it forever altered. Though comparisons were immediately made, upon its publication in 1981, with masterpieces as famous and daunting as Dante's Inferno and the works of Kafka, it retains a uniqueness and particularity which adds to, rather than merely reflects, the major imaginative milestones of our civilisation.

These may sound to you (they do to me) like absurdly lofty claims to make for anything that came out of the 1980s. Writing the above paragraph, I considered toning it down a little; yet, damn it, Lanark knocks the socks off almost everything written on this little island in the past fifty years, and I know many people who, like me, carry its hooks in their imagination and are unwilling or unable to shake them out.
Literally at the centre of the novel is the naturalistic coming-of-age story of Duncan Thaw, a working-class Glaswegian artist like and unlike Gray. Profoundly engaging in itself, this ‘straight’ narrative is sandwiched between fantastical misadventures in the nightmare city of Unthank, where our hero (who for want of a name takes that of the town) tries to make sense of self, love and politics while struggling with, amongst other things, the threat of apocalypse, frightening metamorphoses, and the depredations of the leviathan that is the deep state. The eponymous character, Lanark, is almost certainly Duncan Thaw in his afterlife; yet if the universe of Unthank at first seems like hell, it gradually comes to look more like a parallel Earth, its ruthless power games and diseased body politic an amplified, bewildering and speeded-up version of the present.

With a book so strangely divided, there is inevitably a danger that one section will please more than the other; yet I find both compelling, and it is a wrench to leave them. At the same time it would be fair to say that Lanark never really comes to an end. It is so huge in scope and so various in content - fantasy, polemic and history - that one has only to start reading again, or to dip in at random, to discover new things and put off, for a time, the sweet desolation of ending.

As this brief attempt to give a taste of Lanark to those who haven’t yet experienced it suggests, it is impossible to summarise or paraphrase this novel. I hope it will suffice to say that, to writers torn between naturalism and the fantastic, Lanark points out ways of achieving not a compromise but a rich fusion between the two. It is a novel that increases the scope of fiction's possibilities. To garble the words of T.S. Eliot on Ulysses: it is a book to which I am indebted, and from which I have no desire to escape.

(This article first appeared in The Independent, Feb 8th 2008)

Cultures of Climate Change

2008-02-19T03:16:00.000-08:00

My partner and I have both been invited to Cambridge University to address the Cultures of Climate Change Research Group on Monday 25 February. Please join us and find out more here.

Reading at Word Power Books

2008-02-12T04:10:00.000-08:00

I will be giving a reading with my friend, the poet and novelist Mike Stocks, at Word Power Books in Edinburgh on Saturday 16th February.

The reading is titled 'Brief is Beautiful'; I'll be reading (very) short stories and Mike will read strictly sonnets only.

The event is free. Please come and join us if you can. Venue and time details here.

Free Story Online

2008-01-29T05:45:00.000-08:00

One of my very short stories, 'Endnotes', has just been published on Guardian Unlimited. Please click here to read it.

Ego and Eco

2008-01-23T10:38:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago I had the great pleasure of being interviewed by Murrough O'Brien for the Independent on Sunday. Shortly thereafter, back in Edinburgh, I was photographed in my flat by Wattie Cheung. You can read the article that resulted here.

More recently, I had the honour of becoming a WWF Climate Witness. That great and vital organisation runs a website dedicated to the climate observations of people from around the world. Please visit it today.

After Hemingway

2007-12-28T10:00:00.000-08:00

In the months since I completed work on my forthcoming novel, Serious Things, I have been writing a collection of very short stories. One of these, 'The Siren of May', was broadcast on BBC Radio 3; another, 'Stills from the Anthropocene Era', appeared in a pamphlet produced at the Camp for Climate Action in the summer.

The longest of the 42 stories is about 850 words long; many are much shorter. Halfway through the collection, however, are 42 more stories that take my mania for brevity to extremes. Their model and inspiration is a boast from Ernest Hemingway that he could tell a story in only six words. It went like this: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

Knowing full well that there is no market for six word stories, I'd like, over the coming weeks, to post mine here. Starting with this select handful:

Christ returned unknown to his executioners.

He let everyone fry: got re-elected.

The identity thief struck by Alzheimer's.

Carbon reabsorbed. Overdid it. Fucked again.

Fearing heartbreak, she died a spinster.

Men, women, children, wept. God slept.

Mirrors, not arrows, killed the Minotaur.

Ulysses, home at last, felt restless.

We found a hedgehog: played football.

What's that smell?

2007-12-16T16:19:00.001-08:00

The Verb

2007-12-12T11:46:00.000-08:00

Don't miss The Verb this week on Radio 3! I'll be appearing alongside writers, academics and the OED-storming Ian McMillan for 'a cabaret of language, poetry and performance'. Sitting in the august studio that brings us Woman's Hour and In Our Time, I will try to speak intelligibly about my story, 'The Siren of May'. This has been recorded for broadcast, so even if I end up sounding like a literary version of John Prescott, at least my story will come out ungarbled. Other subjects for discussion include dictionaries and mottoes... and there's a hilarious 'eartoon' by Peter Blegvad.

Picture from Bali

2007-12-10T04:44:00.000-08:00

From the Bali Climate Change conference, this picture just in of the American delegation enjoying some time out on the beach:

The toad, work (an appreciation)

2007-11-26T11:45:00.000-08:00

My new novel, Serious Things, will be published in hardback at the end of January. Though it’s early days yet, the advance reaction seems positive, with a couple of national newspapers taking an interest and booksellers not troubling their noses with too many wrinkles. I hope to ‘launch’ the book in London, and there may be a reading at the excellent Word Power Books in Edinburgh (I will post details closer to the time).

It’s now more than six months since I finished tampering with Serious Things, and I have to confess that I haven’t started work in earnest on its successor. There are two projects in the pipeline (as well as a completed collection of stories which is still looking for a buyer) but I’ve yet to decide which novel idea to pursue first. One is projected to be a rollicking dystopian fantasy; the other should be quieter and contemporary in setting, a character-driven comedy. I sometimes think I may be running scared from the more ambitious project; yet part of me really fancies, and I hope honestly, the smaller (yet not much less frightening) challenge of a social comedy.

Meanwhile, my great obsession this year has been writing very short stories. There are currently 36 of these Fleeting Tales (the working title of a planned collection) and they range widely in style and form and content. The only rules are that no story can exceed 1000 words (most are about 600 words) and each must tell, or at least suggest, a complete narrative. One of these stories, ‘Gorgon’, I have posted on this blog. Another, ‘The Siren of May’ will be broadcast on The Verb on BBC Radio 3 on 14^th December at 9 p.m. Tune in to hear me talk with the great Ian McMillan about mini fiction and ‘playing with words’!

Paper view

2007-11-26T11:39:00.001-08:00

A recurrent theme on this blog has been my publishers and their environmental policies, so it was with huge pleasure that I received an email from Hachette Livre UK’s CEO, Tim Hely Hutchinson, containing a press release from the corporation. Here are some of the details…

Hachette Livre UK, the largest publisher in the UK, has committed to “working with environmental organisations to ensure that its policies and practices not only protect the environment but also improve it wherever practical”. (This is a major turnaround: until recently Hachette was reluctant to talk to Greenpeace, let alone actively work with them.)

In order to achieve its goals, Hachette aims to phase out “controversial sources of paper fibre”. When practical, preference will be given to using post-consumer recycled fibre. The company is working to ensure that any virgin fibre is certified by the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council).

It’s a tough call to make such a huge shift in policy, so one appreciates that it will take a little time. Nonetheless, the press statement goes on to claim that Hachette is working towards FSC certification on a company by company basis. Little, Brown will achieve certification at the start of 2008, with all other companies – including Headline and my own publisher, Sceptre – following by the end of the year. The overall aim is to move “substantially” all trade publishing to FSC-certified paper by the end of 2009, and to make “major progress” in the same direction for educational and illustrated publishing (a much tougher ask, by all accounts).

Progress doesn’t stop here. Hachette Livre UK has made commitments on ethical trading and recycling from their offices and warehouses, while pledging to cut its carbon emissions by working with the Carbon Trust. Emissions that cannot be avoided are to be ‘off-set’ by contributions to tree planting programmes. (And yes, I know this is a hotly debated policy.)

While running my letter campaign to get Hachette to improve its act, I spoke with Belinda Fletcher, Senior Forest Campaigner at Greenpeace-UK. It reassures me that she has seen fit to write the following for the press release:

“By choosing recycled fibre and paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council for their books, Hachette Livre UK is making great strides towards being a truly forest friendly company. Greenpeace welcomes Hachette Livre UK’s ethical and environmental policy – once implemented, it will be great news both for the environment and for consumers.”

Having written exhorting letters to Tim Hely Hutchinson, I am now in the far happier position of writing him a letter of thanks. Of course, my personal efforts will only have had a small impact; but many writers have expressed similar concerns – which just goes to show that pester power can work.

Three thumbs up

2007-11-26T11:26:00.000-08:00

[The following should be read with a healthy dose of scepticism]

Because I’m an especially sad individual, I spent Saturday morning in my pyjamas watching live-stream footage of the Australian election results. The overwhelming victory of Kevin Rudd is a cause for celebration, and not only for Australians who’ve put up with the repellent John Howard for eleven years. It looks as though the world’s biggest per-capita polluter is finally going to get real on climate change – with the new PM pledging to sign up to Kyoto and attend next month’s Bali conference in person.

Many heads wiser than mine have declared this the world’s first climate change election. Suffering the worst drought in centuries, Australians have woken up, as the rest of are going to have to, to the grim consequences of our carbon-spewing ways; and the cynical inaction of Howard’s Liberals played a part in their defeat, with 69% of voters considering global warming a major electoral issue (the economy came in at 65%).

Will this change of electoral mood be repeated in the USA next year, or in Canada, whose odious Stephen Harper has returned from the Commonwealth Summit in Uganda with the carcase of a proposed climate emissions agreement slung across his shoulders? Here in the UK, Gordon Brown shared a platform last week with the WWF and gave the first indications of serious engagement with the climate crisis. Other, more immediate, disasters soon overshadowed his pronouncements, and of course we must wait and see what, if any, policies we get out of his government. So far, New Labour has been all talk and no walk on the environment, and perhaps we shouldn’t hold our breaths; yet I’ve decided to take heart from Brown’s rhetorical greening, in the hope that, on renewable energy at least, his reassurances are going to carry weight.

On a much smaller matter, there has also been progress in my (now) hometown of Edinburgh. The excellent Steve Burgess, Green Party Councillor, has sounded out his colleagues on the City Council to find broad support for the idea of ‘differential parking charges’ – that is, tagging the cost of parking charges to vehicle emissions. It looks like we’re going to see a feasibility study commissioned: a necessary first step to getting the New Town Tractor brigade to cough up for the damage and danger they cause the rest of us.

Reasons to be cheerful, then; though all that’s happening – one could argue – is that politicians are approaching the point they should have reached a decade ago.

Anglo-Saxon attitudes?

2007-10-23T13:41:00.001-07:00

What is it about the English-speaking world and its inability to get to grips with climate change? I ask this because, when you look at the situation here in the UK, in the US, Canada, and Australia, we Anglo-Saxons (as Winston Churchill consoled himself by calling us) are singularly shit at saving the planet.

We all know about the Bush administration and its craven assaults on the environment. With just over a year left in office, the Chimp King is doing his darnedest to throw bones to his buddies in the polluting industries: blowing the tops of mountains in Appalachia, vetoing any progressive bill that comes from Congress, fighting international efforts to slow climate change, turning the EPA into a federal opponent of state attempts to reduce transport emissions… the list of infamy goes on and on.

But Bush isn’t alone in being ready, for the profits vested interests, to destroy our future. Stephen Harper, the Canadian Prime Minister, was happy this week to announce that his country had no hope of reaching its Kyoto targets; indeed, greenhouse gas emissions have risen by an appalling 32% since 1990! Harper, a good (read: bad) Canadian Tory, has consistently put the short term profits of Albertan oil above the needs of his country.

As for Australia: well, it looks like we might finally see the back of the odious John Howard, who is currently trailing Kevin Rudd six weeks before a general election. Until we do (and I won’t believe it until Howard has taken up a consolation seat at the Heritage Foundation in Washington), we can only look back at eleven years of bigotry, inaction, and waste. Howard, like his friend George, has refused to sign up to Kyoto, and until very recently continued to pretend that global warming had nothing to with Australia’s ‘once in a thousand years’ drought.

But these are all nasty, right-wing politicians, right? Surely our own, New Labour government doesn’t belong in their malodorous company? Alas and alack, Gordon Brown is proving to be worthy of his surname, as he wriggles out of his predecessor’s commitments on renewable energy, steadfastly ignores the demands of a growing number of businesses for governmental assurances on green investments, and balks at the prospect of spending even the tiniest fraction of money his own advisor, Sir Nicholas Stern, insists must be spent if we are to avoid the ruinous consequences of man-made climate change. Why is it that a country with the largest renewable energy potential in Europe is lagging far behind Germany, Spain and even Latvia? What do the other countries have that we don’t, other than foresight, courage and political will?

Ah, but political will is what’s missing throughout the Anglo-Saxon world. Hooked like the most abject of junkies on an unsustainable model of laissez faire capitalism, endowed with a remarkable capacity for self-deception and blind to the vast potential for economic prosperity embodied in what Germans are rightly calling a Second Industrial Revolution, the Axis of Albion seems unequal to the task of building a sustainable future. Is it because sod-you libertarianism is too deeply entrenched in our culture? Will progress forever be hobbled by our ferociously reactionary media, as dominated by the like of Rupert Murdoch, Paul Dacre and the reclusive Barclay brothers? Readers of this blog – if there are any – will be used, by now, to my pessimism about our species’ prospects of making it through to a third millennium. I hope to God my prognoses are mistaken and that we get through the bottleneck. But even if we do, what chance that future historians won’t view with contempt the environmental crimes of our present ‘Anglo-Saxon’ leaders?

Gorgon

2007-10-23T05:35:00.000-07:00

As far as we in the hills are concerned, the reign of the gorgon began with rumours; and I half believed them, for though the stories had grown more horrible with every telling, yet they had the partial authority of witness. Someone had found the devoured limbs, the discarded viscera: a shepherd perhaps, or a goatherd, stumbling upon the petrified mother, the eaten child. But this was at a time of high prices, when every merchant’s thoughts were with his shipments of grain. Talk of monsters was bad for business: it made buyers cautious and kept out foreign trade. When a messenger ran, bloodied, into the city with tales of fresh horror, some called for a levy of troops to meet the enemy; but these excitable individuals were put in their places. We could not afford to waste time and resources on hypothetical threats from unproven sources.

‘If there is a gorgon,’ an elder said, ‘and I am sceptical on that point, then country folk have our deepest sympathy. But really, don’t come to us that have ridden out plagues and sieges complaining of a little local difficulty. We have enough on our plates not to worry ourselves with mythical creatures.’

At first it was easy to ignore the gorgon: her victims, though ever more numerous, were unknown to us and of little significance. None can gaze on that hideous face and survive; yet it takes a strong constitution to look, not in the gorgon’s eyes, but at the simple fact of her existence. Those who did, and shouted warnings in the streets, were regarded as troublemakers: it was the sort of thing our enemies would have us do. This did not prevent dreamers from thinking up impractical solutions: tinted-glass helmets, or a complex and hopeless device using blades and mirrors. Sceptics viewed such efforts with contempt; the gorgon was a natural phenomenon, they argued, and it was presumptuous to oppose a daughter of Gaia. Others conceded that her depredations might make life more uncomfortable for us and that the only solution was to build higher walls around our villas and to hire mercenaries to guard the hillsides. These things were done; and eventually the tide of refugees abated, knowing that nothing awaited them on the heights save the sharp points of cold iron.

The countryside emptied and famine stalked the city. Another hunger followed; but at first the wails of grief were confined to the poorest hovels. We felt sorry for the victims, of course, but a quick death was preferable to slow starvation and besides, no earthly appetite is insatiable. There were many in the hills that put their faith in our enemy’s indigestion. Yet the gorgon returned, again and again, to ever more empty streets, and soon the serpents on her head were flicking their tongues towards our homes.

For the first time, we in the hills feel directly threatened. Some are indignant about this; others are given to weeping and prayer. Every day we must pay the mercenaries more to keep them from deserting. Naturally, those with the means are looking for ways out; but we chose our hills for the security they offered – the sea on one side, the city on the other. We are trapped in a prison of our own making. Very soon, one bright morning, we will awake to find the soldiers gone.

I look at my children and wonder which will be the more merciful: teeth or stone. That I can write these words does not make them any easier to bear.

You don't need a weatherman

2007-10-02T03:05:00.000-07:00

Re-reading King Lear recently, I was struck by these famous lines from the 'blasted heath' scene. As so often with Shakespeare, they seem to have a prophetic bent.

Poor naked wretches,

whereso'er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these?

O! I have ta'en
Too little care of this.

Sustainable paper for my new novel!

2007-07-18T10:21:00.000-07:00

I have written before on this blog about my attempts to green up the act of my otherwise excellent publishers*. Well, there seems to be some positive movement, and perhaps my letter campaign has contributed a little to it.

According to someone I work with at Sceptre, a new Hachette committee has been set up "to develop a group policy on corporate social responsibility for ethical and environmental matters, such as paper sourcing and recycling."

Now this may sound like greenwashing but I'm going to suspend my scepticism and take it as a sign of progress. I no longer doubt Hachette's good intentions, merely their resolve.

To keep the company on track, I know that a growing number of Hachette authors - some of them 'important' - are making noises about the sustainability of their books. One of Britain's best-selling writers told me that he has made it a contractual condition that all of his titles should be printed on FSC paper; that is, paper made from sustainably managed forests. Another novelist of my generation - a justly celebrated one - has written to Hachette's management expressing his concerns, as have Victoria Finlay and the philosopher A.C. Grayling.

Of course it isn't possible for a company as large as Hachette Livre UK to change its wood-pulp purchasing overnight; and the company continues to lag behind its competitors. But even from my relatively humble position, I have been able to secure a promise that my new novel, Serious Things, will be printed on FSC paper, complete with logo accreditation.

Let's hope other authors apply the same pressure.

Then we can start to push for more books to be printed on recycled paper!

* (see 'Paper Tigers', 22 April 2007, and 'Of motes and beams', 5 December 2006)

Short story actually in print!

2007-07-05T17:51:00.000-07:00

It's appallingly difficult to get short stories published these days, so any success needs to be heralded. After spending a week in Greece last year, I wrote a short story set there eight hundred years ago.

The story of a false and true Fool of God, 'The Hermit of Athos' appears in the current issue of The London Magazine. It can be ordered online:

http://www.thelondonmagazine.net/

Freedom to Fry

2007-07-05T13:46:00.000-07:00

Is the ‘war on terror’ also a war on Terra? This is the question asked by Barry Sanders, an American academic I met last year in Paros, in his article ‘The Green Zone: the Worst Lie of All’.

Establishing the environmental impact of the US military’s operations in Iraq is no easy matter, and Barry had to do some careful rooting around to research his article. What he found out is pretty hair-raising.

Here are a few facts and figures. It helps to remember that there are human beings beneath them.

The Pentagon estimates that in March and April of 2003, US and British forces used between three and four million pounds of armour-piercing shells that contained depleted uranium. “One military official,” writes Sanders, “equated it with the fallout from 250,000 bombs of the size dropped at Nagasaki”.

Depleted uranium weapons leave a radioactive dust that contaminates plants, land and people. DU was used indiscriminately near and in heavily populated areas, yet “the (US) military refuses to allocate any money for its cleanup and, unlike the British, refuses to disclose the grid coordinates where it has used depleted uranium.”

The UN estimates that four million pounds of residue from spent munitions made with DU has settled over Iraq. The depleted uranium isotope has a half-life of 4.5 billion years.

And what about global warming? The Department of Defense is the largest consumer of fuel of any agency of any country in the world. “For just the first three weeks of combat in Iraq, the Army calculated that its branch alone would require more than 40 million gallons of fuel, an amount equivalent to the total fuel used by all Allied Forces combined during the four years of World War II.”

Using the DoD figure of 144 million barrels of petroleum product for the fiscal year 2004, “we get 6 billion, 48 million gallons of fuel, or close to 70 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide pollution.” This excludes fuel consumption in Afghanistan and fuel consumed by the US Navy!

There are no serious attempts being made by the US military to evaluate its contribution to global warming, or indeed other environmental problems. Worse still, the Pentagon is pushing Congress to exempt the military from the nation’s environmental laws. As Karen Wayland, legislative director at the National Resources Defense Council says, “The Pentagon’s push for blanket exemptions from federal health and pollution cleanup safeguards makes a mockery of national defense. Using national security to sacrifice our nation’s environmental security will endanger our health, leaving us less safe.”

Whose interests, exactly, is the US military defending? Increasingly, it seems, the nation is serving its creature. And yet there are voices within the military establishment that are beginning to speak about the vicious circle of environmental degradation and conflict. Climate change, by the Pentagon’s own estimation, is a “threat multiplier”, the consequences of which – through resource scarcity – will lead to more wars. American citizens and soldiers alike would avoid, if at all possible, the multiplication of threats. And yet, for the military-industrial complex, the catastrophe of climate change would be a positive: guaranteeing perpetual expenditure. Maybe the 860 permanent US bases in over 100 countries of the world are preparing already for this grim and self-generated future?

Arise, Sir Salman!

2007-06-22T07:47:00.000-07:00

All too predictably, Islamic extremists have reacted with gleeful outrage to the news of Salman Rushdie's knighthood. I write 'gleeful' because there is something orgiastic about the 'spontaneous' demonstrations that have taken place in Karachi, Kashmir (whose sad fate Rushdie has so beautifully fictionalised) and, um, Regent's Park. There is no need to wonder how many of these 'defenders of Islam' have actually read The Satanic Verses: reading a work of fiction is an individual act and so, by definition, inimical to the mob.

Riots in Pakistan and elsewhere are nothing new. Nor do they have much to do with faith. They are, rather, a perfect example of what Aldous Huxley termed 'downward transcendence', offering the thrill of belonging, the exaltation of righteous anger and the sanctionable release of sexual tensions. All repressive societies need safety valves to contain the pressure of the discontent they brew, and the mullahs are only too happy to have a bone to throw to their followers. Hating a novelist whose work you've never read is easy; hating the people who govern and control you is difficult and, potentially, dangerous.

But I don't want to heap invective on the mob: it is only behaving as mobs do, to the collective discredit of our species. No, what most amuses and infuriates me is the reaction to such behaviour in our conservative press.

Back in 1988, when Rushdie was sent into hiding by Khomeini's fatwa, many right-wing opinionati in this country were loath to defend the author's rights to life and freedom of expression. Not, you understand, because they didn't believe in those rights for people of the requisite political and racial persuasions, but rather because Rushdie was a foreigner and an intellectual whose Satanic Verses was savagely critical of Thatcher's Britain. Rushdie may not deserve to be murdered, these columnists seemed to opine, but he did rather ask for it.

Eighteen years on, the same bad faith is still alive in the Daily Mail. Ruth Dudley Edwards cannot comment on the literary value of Rushdie's fiction, chiefly because she hasn't the wit to read it. (Nothing will endear a columnist to Mail readers more efficiently than a display of philistinism.) The real reason for denying Rushdie a knighthood, according to Ms Edwards, is that he has consistently sniped at Britain and 'British values'; he has not shown sufficient gratitude to that same country for upholding those values by protecting him from assasination; worst of all, he no longer lives here but enjoys the high life in Manhattan with a wife who is far too good-looking for propriety.

Personally, I don't think Rushdie has been much cop as a novelist since The Moor's Last Sigh. But his remains one of the great imaginations working in the English language and he deserves to be feted for his earlier novels - not least Shame, whose scathing portrayal of a corrupt Pakistan may have as much to do with that country's current fervor as any religious grievance.

Oh, but speaking of grievance brings me to the point of writing this post. There is, in the Islamic world, a cult of it which fuels terror and keeps that world in its benighted condition. Rushdie has long recognised that the cult must be abandoned if there is to be a decent future for the world's Muslims. Normally, right-wing columnists blame the Left for adding to this sense of grievance. On the evidence of the Daily Mail, at least, j'accuse the unusual suspects!

Where I'm At Again

2007-06-08T14:36:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me that, although this is a writer’s personal blog, very little of it is either personal or about writing. There is a lot of stuff about climate change – I’m somewhat obsessed with it – but even so that isn’t (or shouldn’t be) the central preoccupation of my waking life.

So I have decided to make an effort with the other stuff – to give visitors (if there are any) a sense of what it is to be me: an earnest, slightly portly, thirty year-old heterosexual obscure novelist.

The first item on the agenda is that I have just moved, properly and with much of my clobber, to Edinburgh. My little house in Hampshire is home to a young couple whose rent payments are just about my only reliable income. It has been a pretty tiring business and expensive: if only I’d learn to use a lending library. My girlfriend, mercifully, is not as acquisitive as me (in fact she’s rather a minimalist), so I’ve been able to bring up about two thirds of my books, along with pictures, clothes, computers and a surprisingly large amount of underwear. We’ve set me up in an ‘office’ overlooking combined tenement gardens: about an acre of ash trees and burgeoning scrub, with sparrows and starlings nesting in the walls and fat wood pigeons shitting on the goose-grass. It is a lovely, shifting green and full of incident for a bird watcher who isn’t unhealthily preoccupied with spotting rarities. My working day consists of lengthy sit outs in front of a screen, occasional trips to the research library and pleasant strolls about the Meadows. For all the anxieties of writing, I’m aware how lucky I am to be free to pursue my own projects, scarcely known or read but, for the present at least, getting by. And in excellent company.

On the writing side, I have completed ‘post-production’ on Serious Things. My editor, the scarily perceptive Carole Welch, has sent me her questions and queries and helped me knock the manuscript into shape. Now I am waiting to see the galley proofs. The opportunity to make substantial changes has gone. And thank goodness, since the text leaves me cross-eyed after so many months of work. Anthony Burgess once compared writing a novel to burrowing for months underground, only to surface and be bashed on the head by a critic. That last detail is something I still have to look forward to.

So what next? Well, I intend to take a breather, writing articles and short stories and maybe finding a part-time job until I decide which of three ideas I intend to focus on. One has to be sure one can stomach two years in the company of fictional people before embarking on a project. Just like in real life, I suppose.

After ook

2007-06-08T14:31:00.000-07:00

To judge from some headlines yesterday, you might have thought we were saved already. In fact, the ‘climate deal’ reached at the G8 is nothing much to write home about.

Yes, the G8 leaders have agreed to negotiate a UN deal by 2009 (when Dubbya will have buggered off back to Crawford). But there is still no American backing for the fixed emissions targets climate experts say are needed to avoid dangerous climate change.

We have such low expectations of our leaders that a simple pledge to negotiate can be seen as progress.

Still, Canada and Japan have moved closer to the EU’s position, while the announcement ought to buoy carbon markets. At the same time, business in the States is starting to green up its act in the expectation that, sooner or later, federal action will force them to.

It remains to be seen what concrete measures, if any, will be adopted at future negotiations. China and India must be brought on board: the damage their unchecked growth is doing to the planet is enormous. Yet the G8 nations remain, per capita, the largest emitters of greenhouse gases. It is, overwhelmingly, our mess that needs to be cleaned up.

It would seem that Tony Blair and Angela Merkel have pushed the Chimp hard on climate change. But the sacrifice of a hundred Britons in Bush’s war may not have signified a thing. Domestic pressure and corporate greening back home in the U.S. have probably had more to do with… what, exactly? George W. Bush agreeing that a spade is, in fact, possibly, come to think of it, a spade.

Ook! Ook!

2007-06-04T07:24:00.000-07:00

The United Nations Environment Program (Unep) has just produced a report warning of human suffering on a massive scale due to the melting of sea and land ice everywhere. One need hardly bother reading further: anyone with half an ounce of imagination will know the score. And indeed, now that climate change is brutally upon us, it would seem that people worldwide are beginning to cotton on.

In Australia, John Howard has acknowledged the real causes of the 'once-in-a-thousand years' drought that is devastating his country. He is starting (far too late, of course) to instigate meaningful action. And the reason? Most Australians have made the link between global warming and their own suffering and they expect their politicians to help them. If Australian opinion polls are to be trusted, Howard is facing a real prospect of defeat in the forthcoming elections. Let's hope the world can be rid of the sour-faced little git. It will set an important precedent to be heeded in Washington and Ottawa: ignore global warming and you'll be booted out of office.

The American people are also getting real. Thanks in no small part to Al Gore, an overwhelming majority of the population now favours "immediate action" to confront global warming. In late April, a poll conducted by the New York Times and CBS showed that 90% of Democrats, 80% of Independents and even 60% of Republicans want action.

And yet the vast majority of Republicans in Congress continue to serve Exxon and others by refusing to support meaningful policies on a federal level. Meanwhile, the Bush administration is stuffed with half-witted cronies who pretend the crisis isn't happening. And the Chimp King himself is doing all he can to stall international efforts. Just wait and see what guff he comes up with at the G8 summit on Wednesday.

Forget Iraq. Disgraceful as that has been, it's for his stance on climate change that George W. Bush will be remembered as the WORST AMERICAN PRESIDENT EVER.

Paper tigers

2007-04-21T06:13:00.000-07:00

Back in December, I wrote about my publishers and their ecologically unsound paper policy. Here’s a reminder and an update…

Greenpeace is running a campaign to encourage UK publishing houses to stop sourcing paper from ancient forest regions and to develop ancient forest friendly solutions, including the use of recycled paper and virgin fibre certified to the standards of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). Greenpeace has had considerable success with its campaign, with over 40% of the book publishing industry having now introduced forest friendly procurement policies.

Unfortunately, Hachette Livre UK, which controls 17% of the publishing industry, is refusing to join the movement. It continues to source virgin fibre from ancient forest areas such as those in Finland, as well as using pulp from Russia, where illegal logging practices are rife. Hachette is also printing books in South East Asia and has failed to demonstrate that these are not linked to the destruction of Indonesian rainforests.

It isn’t easy for a large company to change its policies; but by making a long-term public commitment, Hachette could send a clear message to the industry that this is the direction the company wants to move in. This is roughly what I wrote in a letter to Hachette CEO, Tim Hely Hutchinson. In his reply he assured me that my next novel, Serious Things, would be published on FSC paper. At the same time, Hachette Livre UK has signed up to a new industry initiative called PREPS. This initiative only commits the company to identifying where it is sourcing its paper fibre and does not commit it to moving towards recycled and FSC certified papers in the long term, as all of the other major publishing houses have done. So there is still much lobbying to be done.

Now it would be fair to say that I am a very wee minnow in the well-stocked Hachette pond. To this end, I have written to more substantial authors asking them to add their names to the campaign. So far, only the philosopher A.C. Grayling has responded and my thanks go out to him. I wait in hope of hearing from some of the others, who include David Mitchell, Kate Mosse, Ian Rankin, Martina Cole, Maeve Binchy and John Le Carré.

A quick update: 24/04/07. This morning one of the best known authors in the UK sent me an email. I was thrilled to learn that he is already an active supporter of the Greenpeace paper campaign and has taken substantial steps to ensure that his own novels are published on 'sustainable' paper. The author's efforts predate mine and were independent of my letter - which just shows that demand for change is real.

In praise of the Governator

2007-04-13T04:19:00.000-07:00

Back in my flying days (I'm grounded now), I had the immense pleasure of spending several months in a writers' colony in Iowa City. My stay there coincided with the special election for Governor of California.

Back in 2003, Bush and his ilk seemed unstoppable, along with their aggressive and environmentally destructive agenda. So it was with dismay that I watched a glib, musclebound Austrian movie star defeat the Democrat incumbent to hand the Republican party one of the most coveted prizes in American politics.

Nearly four years on, I'm glad yet surprised to confess to a change of heart. I never thought I'd write this, but I'm a fan of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

While the rest of his Republican Party continues to pretend that global warming isn't happening, the Governator is pushing ahead with truly bold legislation to combat the crisis. Last year, he signed into law a target calling for emissions to be reduced by 25 % by the end of the next decade. As leader of the tenth largest economy in the world - and the hub of a 'green tech' revolution - Arnie can make a real difference to the way we, and especially the US, respond to climate change.

But Arnie isn't satisfied with legislation. In his own, somewhat peculiar, style, he is trying to make the green movement mainsteam. "We have to make it sexy," he says. "We have to make it attractive so that everyone wants to participate."

Claiming that "for too long the environmental movement has been powered by guilt", Mr Schwarzenegger predicts that it will become powered by "something much more positive, much more dynamic, something much more capable of bringing about major change.

"So the new environmental movement is not about guilt, it's not about fringe, and it's not about being overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem, but it is about mainstream momentum."

The retention of California was the one bright spot for the Republicans in the November elections. Arnie's conversion to the cause of planet Earth was largely responsible. In a very important warning to his party, he has this to say. "Politics plays a big part in the tipping point here. If you are against taking action on greenhouse gases and common emissions your political base will melt away as surely as the polar icecaps, I can guarantee you that. You will become a political penguin on a smaller and smaller ice floe that is drifting out to sea."

Not bad progress, from a man who used to wax lyrical about his several Humvees.

A fool's hope

2007-04-11T14:36:00.000-07:00

After writing about the coming horrors of global warming, I looked about the web for evidence that, despite its narrow-mindedness, our species might be capable of saving itself. This is the battle of our time and its warriors are geek and mild. And no, that isn't a spelling mistake.

See here: http://www.worldchanging.com/

and here: http://www.thewebofhope.com/

also here: http://www.global-cool.com/

and, while you're at it, here: http://www.antiapathy.org/

Summarising the fear, frustration and anger I so often feel, I came across this from Dr Lara Hansen of the WWF:

"The irritating thing is that we have all the tools at hand to limit climate change and save the world from the worst impacts," says Dr Lara Hansen, Chief Scientist of WWF's Global Climate Change Programme. "The IPCC makes it clear that there is a window of opportunity but that it's closing fast. The world needs to use its collective brains to think ahead for the next ten years and work together to prevent this crisis."

"It becomes an economic as much as an ethical priority to defend what remains of nature on this planet -mangroves and coral reefs protect coasts, forests protect watersheds," adds Hansen. "Our societies are dependent upon nature, yet we have undermined it for centuries. Now, with climate change, we are attacking the very basis of the natural world - putting us all at risk."

THE EMERGENCY

2007-04-06T15:09:00.000-07:00

This morning I took a deep breath and sat down to read about the latest report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It is grim, grim reading, which should have people clamouring in the streets. (They won't, of course. They'll be wearing t-shirts and driving their Jeeps to the shopping centre.)

For those of you who have the stomach for it, here's a summary of some of the IPCC's findings.The IPCC's 'Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability Report' ( http://www.ipcc.ch/) was compiled by more than 2,500 scientific expert reviewers, with 800 contributing authors and 450 lead authorities from over 130 countries.

In its first working group report, the 'Physical Science Basis', published in February, the IPCC concluded that it was "very likely" - more than 90% probable - that global warming is man-made.

Global temperatures will rise by between 1.8 degrees Centigrade and 4 degrees Centigrade in the 21st Century (a mere 5 degree global shift triggered the last glaciation).

Impacts of warming include the following probable scenarios:

* 75 million to 200 million more people in Africa will be exposed to water shortages; rain-dependent agricultural yields could fall by 50% by 2020. The costs of adapting to climatic change could be as much as 10% of economic output. In short, the lifestyles of the richest nations will ruin the poorest.

* The Great Barrier Reef will experience 'significant loss of biodiversity' by 2020.

* Eastern parts of the Amazon rainforest will gradually change to savannah from forest.

* Rivers will dwindle everywhere, with impacts felt most severely in China and India, following decreased precipitation and glacier melt in the Himalayas.

* Small glaciers in the Alps will vanish by mid-century. Larger ones will shrink between 30% and 70% by 2100.

* In polar regions, land-based arctic ice zones could shrink by up to a third by 2100. Sea ice will vanish by 2040. Bye-bye, polar bears!

* Permafrost areas may decrease 33% by 2050 - leading to massive releases of methane, another major greenhouse gas.

* If global temperatures rise by 2 degrees Centigrade (on the very low end of predictions), up to a third of all species will face the risk of extinction.

* Huge patterns of flora and fauna shift, with extensive species loss, in Europe, of up to 60% in some areas.

I can hardly believe these words as I type them. It all sounds like science fiction but, God help us, it's science fact. And bear in mind that the IPCC delegates wrangled for a long time over the content of their report, with the world's biggest polluters, China and the USA, objecting to phrasing and seeking to tone down the most dire predictions. With help from the Saudis (of course), they seem to have succeeded. So even these terrifying statistics have been watered down.

Global warming is the planetary emergency. It isn't just an issue among others: it's the envelope in which all other issues are contained. Looking at our reactionary press, our plane-binging, gas-guzzling citizens, it's clear that we in the rich world have a long, long way to go if we're going to confront the catastrophe.

The moral and cultural shift needed is far greater than that which led, 200 years ago, to the abolition of the slave trade. That took decades to bring about.

We, unfortunately, do not have the luxury of time.

One Planet Living

2007-03-29T10:58:00.000-07:00

Two hours or so after writing yet another infuriated blog on the UK's 'response' to climate change, here's a little antidote. Something you - unknown but hoped for reader - can do to save planet Earth.

Please click on this WWF website to find out your footprint and how to reduce it.

http://www.wwf.org.uk/oneplanet/home.asp

The future's in our hands!

HOT (Tony Bl)AIR

2007-03-29T08:59:00.000-07:00

Is the government's talk on the environment just a lot of hot air? The answer, depressingly, seems to be 'yes'.

Provisional figures published by Defra today show that UK CO2 emissions in 2006 were 1.2% higher than a year earlier. They were also 2.7% above 1997 levels: the year when Labour came into power.

In ten years, Tony Blair has achieved f*** all on global warming, even though he considers it the greatest threat to mankind. But it's hardly surprising, given that the government has done almost nothing to tackle emissions. Efforts to secure energy efficiency have been almost non-existent; road emissions are soaring as we drive more and do so in ever larger cars; air travel increases, helped by tax breaks worth £9 billion annually: dozens of times more money than goes into all 'green' initiatives combined.

I'm sick to death of Labour's bullshit on climate change. It's all pie tomorrow: a Climate Change Bill that sets targets for emission cuts decades hence - when today's politicians are long gone and unanswerable for their failures. We cannot continue to pass the buck to future generations. It's our job, now, to avert the worst of climate change. The means to do so already exist, but the will just isn't there.

Bye bye, bonnie Scotland

2007-03-19T04:41:00.000-07:00

For over a year now, I've had the great pleasure of being based in Scotland. The country is famed for its natural beauty. Only this weekend, I was exploring the windswept beauties of the East Neuk of Fife, admiring eider ducks and curlews and oystercatchers.

However, a depressing picture is emerging of a land in seemingly terminal ecological decline. And it's entirely avoidable!

In a new report, the Scottish Environmental LINK umbrella group shows that Scotland will fail to reach the target of halting the loss of species and habitats by 2010 - as promised 15 years ago at the Rio Earth summit. In fact, up to 60% of species could be in decline. With climate change added to the mix of environmental destruction, the future looks bleak for our biodiversity - and, by association, ourselves, as these negative trends may lead to full scale ecological collapse.

The problems are solvable. What's needed is the political will to invest relatively tiny amounts of money in shoring up and extending habitats to help consolidate ecosystems and buffer them against the effects of climate change. Stuart Housden, director of RSPB Scotland, said about £43 million would be enough. This is small change for government, and I have seen for myself how much conservationists can achieve given adequate funding. Agriculture, too, must change, with the present, finite and competitive stewardship schemes becoming generalised and replacing the subsidies which currently fund habitat destruction. The changes would not only benefit wildlife; they will also give us a more mixed, varied and beautiful countryside.

There is a lot of public concern for our wildlife. The RSPB has over one million members, and the Wildlife Trusts have doubled in size since 2000. But this public concern is not matched by government action. A report commissioned by the IUCN last year showed that the EU as a whole is underfunding its own conservation programmes by over two billion Euros per annum. To put this figure into perspective: the replacement Trident programme touted by our wretched government is set to cost between £20 billion and £80 billion!

This, of course, is proof that we are not even beginning to get to grips with our environmental crises. There is a criminal lack of commitment on behalf of the powers that be. And yet we know that investment in the environment works. Rare species like the corncrake and the capercaillie have increased in numbers following sustained and comprehensive conservation programmes. In the rare places where landholders, such as the Forestry Commission, have made a real effort to restore biodiversity, the resilience of wildlife has been demonstrated. Give it a chance and it will come back. But as things stand, government is not giving wildlife the chance it deserves.

So the uphill task is left to small, impoverished groups of visionaries: groups like Trees for Life, which is trying to restore the Caledonian pine forests, or the Carrifran project in the Scottish lowlands. Without such private passion, Scotland and Britain at large would be wastelands. But such groups can have only a limited impact. Government alone can save us; and for the moment, it's barely paying attention.

Of ants and men

2007-02-14T03:48:00.000-08:00

I grew up in north Surrey, where despite urban sprawl there are priceless, remnnant patches of lowland heath. When I was little, these places seemed of little interest; but my understanding of them grew along with society's. A heath is not a wasteland, fit only for dirt-biking and landfill; it is a unique habitat, created thousands of years ago, on sandy soils, by the slash and burn agriculture of our forbears. Over the centuries, plants and animals have adapted to this ecosystem and many now exist nowhere else. Only on our heaths will you hear the electric static song of the Dartford warbler, or the call, like two flints being knocked together, of the stonechat. In summer, you can listen to the weird churring of nightjars - a species of ground-nesting bird that migrates every year to and from sub-Saharan Africa. The list of special creatures continues, rendering these squat treeless places a treasure trove for biodiversity. Sand lizards, natterjack toads, raft spiders, woodlark, hobbies: all depend on the fragmented heaths for their survival in Britain.

I know a little about all these species; but I must confess that I knew nothing about the red-barbed ant (Formica rufibarbis) until I came across this article on the website of the Surrey Wildlife Trust:

http://www.surreywildlifetrust.co.uk/

"This ant, named because of its red dorsal hairs, exhibits unusual and incredible behaviour. During courtship female winged ants (young queens) will climb to the top of a blade of grass or tall plant stem to attract the attention of males by emitting a scent. The ants also possess an amazing sense of sight and will proceed to their nest entrance in a dead straight line even if obstacles are in their path. Foraging red-barbed ants will also challenge other ant species for food, gripping on and tussling until it can decamp with the prey."

Chobham Common, which boasts the only known colony of these ants in mainland Britain, is a gem of a nature reserve. It is probably the most important area of heath in the southeast (especially after Thursley NNR was devastated by arson last year) which, notwithstanding the affront of the M3 ploughing straight through it, offers a rare taste of wilderness in this most populous of counties. I have walked and birdwatched here for years, and seen how much work it takes to maintain an ecosystem under constant threat from fire, development and litter (let alone the rampant growth of Scots pine). Still, the Surrey Wildlife Trust keeps valiantly at the task of stewardship, and it gives me real pleasure to learn that the ant rescue project being undertaken by the Zoological Society of London will seek to establish new colonies in other areas that are intimately familiar to me: Wentworth Nature Reserve, Lightwater Country Park and Sunningdale Golf Course.

The funding for the species rescue plan is coming from the Heritage Lottery Fund. It may seem a strange investment. Compared to the plight of the Giant Panda, or the Bengal Tiger, a species of ant is hardly likely to set the public imagination on fire. And yet it is a tiny marvel of evolution: a unique and irreplaceable piece of the jigsaw of life. I, for one, will be delighted if the project succeeds and I have a chance - no matter how remote - of seeing a young queen climb to the tip of a blade of grass and lure a male with her siren scent.

Serious Things

2007-02-02T02:37:00.000-08:00

Groan - another doom and gloom post about climate change?

Not this time. Serious Things is the title of my new novel. I finished it on Monday. It now goes through the mill of early readers, who will doubtless inform me that it's incoherent, psychologically implausible, and full of factual errors.

These early readers are important people. The first are my parents. My mother reads slowly and with great precision; she is the more literary of the two. My father, a doctor, comes at things with a scientific mindset. His task is to submit my writing to the Narcolepsy Test. Let me explain. At the end of a hard day at the surgery, my dad is tired. He falls asleep in front of the accumulated atrocities of the 10 o'clock news. I don't blame him for this: I would nod off, too, if I had to apply myself to a proper job. Still, it means that something - a news report or a book - has to be fairly riveting if it is to keep his eyelids parted. My father's task is to see whether my writing can keep him awake. If it succeeds, I'm on to a winner.

My third reader is my girlfriend, who has the unenviable task of reading the typescript in close proximity to its author. Her only consolation is said author's servile, fawning behaviour throughout the ordeal. I am always at hand with cups of tea, pieces of toast smeared just so with butter and Marmite, vigorously fluffed cushions, earnest and thorough foot rubs. Emma puts up stoically with these ministrations. As an academic - and an accomplished writer - she has a great ear for cliches, stock phrases, muddled metaphors. She can sniff out a bum note like the most efficient truffle-hound in Perigord. I am hoping she will not find too many horrors in Serious Things.

After these intimate readers comes the next wave: my agent, Isobel Dixon, who in the gentlest manner possible takes no prisoners, and a barrister pal of mine who is also writing a novel and will no doubt point out to me that the police procedure and legal stuff at the end is all a pile of tosh.

My gratitude goes to these dear people. Along with a plea for pity.

Once I have market-tested my novel, it will be sent to my editor for a final pummelling. And then begins the year-long wait for the indifferent shrugs of reviewers.

For more information about Serious Things (you know, its plot and stuff) please visit my website at some point in the near future.

Eco Decalogue (borrowed)

2007-01-13T04:34:00.000-08:00

Trawling the ecological niches of the web, I came across this list of ten New Year's resolutions on Conservation International:

(Kate Barrett, Staff Writer) We are all creatures of habit. Whether you vow to stop bad habits or start good ones, now is the time to make New Year’s resolutions you can keep. These ten simple tips for creating a healthier Earth are sure to last through 2007 and beyond:

1) Replace your incandescent light bulbs with compact florescent lights (CFLs). Look closely at labels when buying light bulbs. Those marked as CFLs last 10 times longer and use 66 percent less energy than incandescent bulbs. As a result, CFLs save an average of $30 in energy costs over their lifetimes – as much as 10,000 hours, though turning CFLs on and off too frequently will shorten their lives. CFLs also reduce the release of greenhouse gas emissions and are safer because they burn at a lower temperature (100° F) than incandescent and halogen lights, which can burn at temperatures up to 1000° F.

2) Inflate your car tires. When walking or biking isn't feasible, you can do something to better protect the Earth while driving. Take a step in the right direction by inflating your car tires. Pumping them up can improve your gas mileage by about 3.3 percent – a savings of about 7 cents per gallon. It‘s the right thing to do for your wallet and the right thing to do for the Earth.

3) Weigh your ecological impact. It’s far easier than stepping on a scale. Take CI's short eco-footprint quiz to find out if you need to tread more lightly on Earth’s biodiversity. Measure how last year’s habits stack up, and you’ll be well on your way to becoming a full-fledged eco-warrior in the year ahead.

4) Turn down the hot water heater. Set your water heater to 130° F. While you’re at it, throw on a sweater and lower your thermostat for the winter by just three degrees. These simple actions can have enormous positive consequences, preventing the emission of nearly 1,100 pounds of carbon dioxide over the course of 2007. And that’s just from you! Get your friends on board, and the benefits will multiply.

5) Choose your seafood wisely. We can’t afford to wait until 2008. The world’s seafood will be entirely depleted by 2048, according to an early November report in the journal Science. That means the moment to shape up is now. By buying and eating certain types of seafood, you can discourage harmful fishing practices and avoid the more depleted or threatened species. Take a look at Seafood Choices Alliance or Seafood Watch to make smart choices.

6) Plant a tree. It’s not nearly as labor-intensive as it sounds, and it’s a small price to pay for a healthy Earth. Trees soak up carbon and absorb harmful greenhouse gases, but they are disappearing at a shocking rate. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that an average of 32 million acres of forests are destroyed each year. Not if we can help it. Order your tree online at a website like this one: Tree In A Box.

7) Offset your carbon footprint. Carbon footprints are soooo last year. Luckily, CI's new carbon calculator guarantees you’ll be on the cutting edge in 2007. It empowers you to offset your personal impact on Earth’s rising climate. Donate $10 to offset your cross-country road trip, $20 for the upcoming family reunion, or $7 for a domestic roundtrip flight. Your money will help protect the roughly 832,000-acre Makira Forest in northeast Madagascar and prevent millions of tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere.

8) Buy locally produced meats and produce. Sounds like a good idea, but you don’t know where to start? Just type in your zip code on Local Harvest's website to see a list of farms and farmers’ markets close to home, as well as nearby restaurants committed to supporting their neighbors. Buying locally produced food cuts out the middlemen and the vast amounts of energy required to get your products onto store shelves. Most produce in U.S. supermarkets travels an average 1,500 miles before it is sold!

9) Drink more water from reusable glassware. It’s great for your bank account, your health, and your planet. The average American consumed more than 400 beverage bottles and cans in 2006, leaving behind wasted glass, plastic, steel, and aluminum. That adds up to excessive amounts of fossil fuels and hydropower for mining, processing, refining, shaping, shipping, storing, refrigerating, and disposing of those materials. Of course, changing your drinking habits both at home and at work is applicable to just about every other habit, as well. You’ve heard it before and you’ll hear it again: Reduce, reuse, and recycle.

10) Get an early start. Make a year-end gift to support conservation efforts in 2007. It will be money well-spent. CI has received a 4-star rating from Charity Navigator, America’s largest independent evaluator of charities. More than 85 percent of our expenses go directly to conservation programs and only 4 percent to fundraising. And if you donate before the ball drops at midnight on Dec. 31, you can double your impact on conservation in our Chairman’s Council Challenge Fund.

I think, when I have leisure, I may have a try at writing my own 10 resolutions. The most obvious ones, missing here, are to keep from flying (try going by train instead; there's a great website to help you: www.seat61.com) and to drive as little as possible. Also, if you haven't done so already, join a pressure group.

Exxon and the Petrolheads

2007-01-08T04:16:00.000-08:00

Reading in today's Guardian that people are sunbathing in Maryland, I've been thinking, as too often, about global warming. I am, when not writing or fretting, the spokesperson for the Edinburgh branch of the Alliance Against Urban 4x4s. As a result, I've received a fair amount of abuse and silliness from the extremist libertarian Clarksonistas: you know the type, men with small dicks and big cars who resent any attempt to curtail or discourage behaviour that destroys the planet; men who regard pedestrians and cyclists as subhuman obstacles to their achievement of high speeds; men who cling doggedly to any amount of pseudo-science that pretends to doubt man-made climate change

Well, a few days ago I received an email from the Campaign Against Climate Change

(http://www.campaigncc.org) inviting its supporters to join a mass demonstration outside the headquarters of Esso (Exxon) in April. Exxon is the world leader on climate negationism: preferring its staggering profits to saving the planet. The assortment of bullies, inadequates and Pistonheads who repeat Exxon's denial of reality ought to know where their 'ideas' are coming from. I have taken the following material from Campaign CC's email:

Exxon is the ultimate Global Warming Villain

Exxon is the world's largest oil company, making $ 1,000+ a second, and the highest annual profits for a company ever, in 2005 ($ 36 billion);

Exxon has used its vast wealth to back the Bush administration in the US. It has used the influence that that buys it to ensure that the US continues to block progress towards an international emissions reduction treaty – the only realistic way to bring down the global total of greenhouse gas emissions and prevent the catastrophic destabilisation of global climate;

Exxon funds a variety of right wing, neo-liberal, think tanks like the "Competitive Enterprise Institute" which lobby against action to fight climate change, and are influential in shaping Republican party policy;

Exxon is the company most closely associated with the climate and energy policies of the Bush administration in the US, which are identical to those recommended by Exxon;

Exxon has run a cynical campaign of disinformation on climate change, funding a professional "denial industry" that has, in all probability, delayed effective global action on climate change by years. Some elements of that "industry" are identical to those previously funded by the Tobacco industry to undermine the science that proved the health damage done by smoking;

Exxon has a deliberate policy to confuse the science of climate change, exaggerate uncertainties and undermine the scientific consensus. It funds the tiny minority of oddball scientists who question global warming so that they get hugely disproportionate media exposure and appear to represent a substantial body of respectable scientific opinion;

Exxon was even condemned, in September 2006, by the Royal Society for funding bogus science;

Exxon asked the Whitehouse (in a letter published in the New York Times) to remove Bob Watson (whose views they didn't like) from chairmanship of the IPCC (the UN panel of climate scientists) and the Whitehouse did just that;

Exxon recommended that Harlan Watson be appointed as the US chief negotiator at the UN Climate Talks and the Whitehouse did just that. Watson has been wrecking the negotiations ever since;

Exxon marginally softened its anti-environmental stance after the retirement of Lee Raymond as CEO (now employed by Bush to produce a report giving advice on future energy policy !) but continues to fund climate disinformation and remains the mainstay of the lobbying machine against action on climate – not only in the USA but also Europe – see, eg, this article from the Independent from December 2006 at http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article2054654.ece. It funds the "International Policy Network" to argue against action on climate in the UK.

It maddens me that we should still be at the stage of refuting the bullshit of vested interests. The evidence that the world is warming is overwhelming. Whether you live in Ontario or Oklahoma, Oslo or Oxford, all you have to do is stick your neck out the window this 'winter'.

Most staggering of all is the insistence of climate negationists that they are an oppressed minority. This is like the Third Reich complaining of anti-German feeling in 1939 Sudetenland. The truth is that vast amounts of money are being spent to confuse people and further weaken the resolve of governments to act. Most activist groups, by contrast, operate on little or no funds. The Alliance Against Urban 4x4s runs on less money than it costs to buy one third of a new Range Rover! And yet somehow we are the evil elite intent on... what? Encouraging sustainable behaviour.

If you would like to join the demonstration on Good Friday, please click here: http://www.campaigncc.org/

So, farewell then...

2006-12-15T02:08:00.000-08:00

...to the Yangtze River dolphin.

A sad milestone has been passed in humanity's destruction of planet Earth. For the first time, our activities have caused the extinction of a cetacean. The following is taken from the website of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society:

An expedition to document the last remaining Chinese river dolphins has returned after a six week survey which covered the entire known range of the baiji or Yangtze River dolphin. A team of international scientists using both visual and acoustic monitoring techniques made a full sweep of the area but failed to record one sighting, leading experts to believe that this species is now extinct.

The article goes on to explain what it is we've lost.

The baiji represents a loss not just of a species but a whole family of animals which were endemic to the Yangtze River and evolved separately to other whales and dolphins for over 20 million years. The baiji was described as a ‘living fossil’, remaining as it had, unchanged for at least 3 million years since it first left the sea to swim into the Yangtze River.

With China's booming population and its unregulated economic growth, the baiji has succumbed to pollution, traffic collisions, and heavy fishing using explosives. One wonders what the great poets of ancient China - poets such as Tu Fu and Li Po - would have made of the 'new' Yangtze. I doubt they would have seen much 'progress' in its devastation.

Personally, I knew little about the Yangtze River dolphin; but last year I saw one of its relatives, the Irrawaddy Dolphin, clinging on to life in the Cambodian Mekong. We were filming the last episode of Planet Action, and our task was to draw attention to the plight of a species reduced by pollution and over-fishing to a few dozen individuals.

The Irrawaddy is a shy and elusive dolphin - nothing like its gregarious, salt water cousins. The most you may see of it, on the swirling muddy water, is the melon-shaped head, a puff of water, and a two or three second dive back into its element. This was enough to persuade me that we cannot allow such a creature to die out. The loss would not be purely 'biological': it would be cultural, too.

The people who live, in desperate poverty, alongside the Mekong or 'Mother River', feel a strong emotional bond with the Irrawaddy dolphin. They do not want to harm it. A local legend explains how the species came into being. More and more, local communities depend on eco-tourism that focuses on the dolphins.

If the Irrawaddy dolphin is lost, the Cambodian people lose something of themselves. Likewise, every time humanity allows a species to disappear, it is our humanity that is diminished. For we are creatures of the Earth: subject to the same laws of evolution, and the same certainty of mortality, as every other thing that lives.

Of motes and beams

2006-12-05T09:21:00.000-08:00

'Why beholdest thou the mote in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?' St Matthew ch.7, v.3

Okay, so why am I coming over all Scriptural?

The truth is, I am a hypocrite. Jesus, if he returned amongst us (and had a degree in environmental science), would doubtless berate me for double standards.

You see, I am an environmentalist but I'm also a novelist. I write and publish books and those books are made out of wood pulp. What is the origin of this wood pulp? It's a question I've been slow in asking. Today I finally bit the bullet and spoke to Beverley Fletcher from Greenpeace's Forests campaign.

Greenpeace has been working flat out to persuade the publishing industry in Britain to print books on recycled and Forest Stewardship Council certified paper. So far, some big names have signed up, including Random House, Bloomsbury, Penguin and (yes) even Rupert Murdoch's Harper Collins. My publishers, however, have not signed. Hodder Headline is, in Ms Fletcher's dispiriting opinion, 'the renegade of the industry'.

Hodder is owned by Hachette, which in turn (oh that beam, that bloody beam) belongs to Lagardere, a major French media and armaments company. (My one defence for this is that my sales are so bad that I'm doing my bit to bankrupt the multinational from within.) Hachette has shown itself to have all the environmental conscience of Dick Cheney. So Hodder Headline, in turn, is skipping its moral responsibilities and won't collaborate on the Greenpeace project for a more sustainable publishing industry.

But - I hear nobody object - the little writing at the front of the Hodder books seems to reassure us. It says: 'Hodder Headline's policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products and made from woods grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.'

Now you don't have to be Terry Eagleton to do an effective bit of practical criticism on these statements. All paper is 'renewable' but that's not the same as renewed. All paper is 'recyclable' but that's not the same as recycled. As for the assurances about logging and processing, countries have wildly differing environmental regulations. Quite a lot, actually, have no regulations worthy of the name.

The whole point of using recycled paper is that it reuses existing wood pulp. As for FSC certification, it is regarded by all environmental groups as the only truly reliable, international standard. All forests that grow are sustainable (that insidious postfix again) but most forests, at present, are not sustainably managed.

Does it matter? 40% of UK publishing is working towards greener paper sourcing; but Hachette UK represents a staggering 17% of the industry.

So what can I, one of the least commercially valuable authors in the Hodder empire, hope to do to change things? Well, I'll be badgering my editor. I shall also write to the big guys in Hodder and Hachette, pointing out how unreasonable they are being.

Can an appeal from me change their attitudes? Almost certainly not. But there are plenty of Hodder authors who have more clout - from John Le Carre to Stephen King and David Mitchell. If I get a crap response from the powers at the top, I may have to appeal to my fellow authors to bring about the much needed change of policy.

I will post on this issue in January, when I am due to hand in my new novel. How wonderful it would be if Serious Things (scheduled for publication early in 2008) came out on recycled or FSC-certified paper.

To find out more, click here: http://www.fsc.org/en/ and here: http://www.greenpeaceactive.org.uk/detail.php?id=206&cat=300

'Apocalypse now? We'll talk about it later'

2006-11-18T04:13:00.000-08:00

So the latest round of intergovernmental wrangling on climate change has come to absolutely nothing in Nairobi. Vast amounts of CO2 have been pumped into the atmosphere to get environment ministers to the Kenyan capital - only for them to agree to get together again in 2008.

Meanwhile Australia suffers a 'once-in-a-thousand-year' drought; eastern Africa is parched then disastrously flooded; what's left of Sumatra's rainforests are difting in smoke over Singapore and Kuala Lumpur; the American southwest is drying up; the icecaps are melting... the list of present, let alone future, disasters just gets worse and worse.

The present generation of 'statesmen' are criminally lacking in courage, will and principle.

We've got George W. Bush in Washington, who has presided over the destruction of a great American city (New Orleans) and refuses even to acknowledge the cause of the disaster. Until last week's Democrat takeover of Congress, the chair of the Senate Environment Committee was Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma, who has called global warming 'the greatest hoax ever perpretated on the American people'.

We've got John Howard of Australia, who gurns with mock sympathy at the plight of farmers driven to suicide by his country's drought, yet refuses to sign Kyoto, continues to fund massive levels of industrial pollution (per capita, Australians are the second most environmentally destructive people on Earth), and wages all-out-war on environmental groups that attempt to draw attention to the crisis.

We've got the supposedly enlightened European Union, which last month revealed that only TWO member countries are on target to achieve its (woefully inadequate) emissions targets.

Meanwhile, we've got China and India pushing to industrialise at breakneck speed... and a developing world whose development is held hostage to the greed and inaction of the industrialised world.

Sorry: there isn't a silver lining here. The present generation of politicians, in failing to get a grip on global warming, are at best allowing the present and future deaths of millions of human beings. Those - and they are still numerous - who continue to use perverted science to deny the reality of the crisis, must be considered actively culpable in the disaster.

The evidence is irrefutable: ECOCIDE IS GENOCIDE.

The men who run the world are genocidal criminals.

Nobel Intentions.

2006-10-27T05:21:00.000-07:00

Back in May, I took part in an international gathering of writers on the Greek island of Paros.

The New Symposium – convened by the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa (whose alumni include this year’s Nobel winner, Orhan Pamuk) and the Fulbright office in Athens – concluded four days of deliberations on the Greek island of Paros with a shared cry of alarm over the state of the planet.

The subject of this year’s symposium was ‘the Commons’, defined by the author and entrepreneur Peter Barnes as what we inherit and must pass on undiminished to our heirs – the sky, water, public lands, culture, science, customs and laws, rituals and rites, the airwaves, seedbeds of creativity, and so on.

Sixteen writers from ten different countries found common ground on the subject of global climate change and other planet-threatening issues. As a result, they have issued an open letter to the Nobel Foundation calling for the setting up of an annual prize for services to the environment. Signatories to the letter will be publishing it in their own countries – contributing to a truly international call for action.

Here is the letter:

Open letter from the New Symposium to the NOBEL FOUNDATION

calling for the foundation of an annual prize for services to the environment

WE, a colloquy of writers and thinkers from around the world, have gathered on the Greek island of Paros to discuss the commons: those things, natural and cultural, that human beings hold in common and upon which we all depend. Though our deliberations have revealed differences on some issues, we have found common ground with regards to the global environment.

Our climate is being dangerously destabilised; population growth and development threaten the very resources upon which populations depend; the rate of species extinctions is one thousand times the natural rate. Collectively, we are failing to live up to the principles of sustainability as set out nearly twenty years ago by the UN’s Brundtland Report which calls for ‘development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’

We have a duty of care to preserve the biosphere and to pass it on undiminished to future generations. The Nobel Foundation has already recognised this ethical imperative, most notably in its decision to award the 2004 Peace Prize to Wangari Mathaai for her work with the Green Belt Foundation. Ms. Mathaai understands that environmental destruction leads to scarcity, and that scarcity leads to conflict. The formula applies beyond east Africa: as the world’s resources dwindle, the dangers of regional, even international, conflicts over what remains intensify.

While we applaud the awarding of the Peace Prize to Wangari Mathaai, we believe that our environmental crisis needs particular recognition: for conflict is not its only consequence. Increasingly severe droughts, famine, hurricanes and floods are claiming more lives every year. The number of species facing extinction is rapidly rising. The grounds of all our achievements – in international law, science, the arts and commerce – will give way if we cannot save the global commons. We believe that the Nobel Foundation can assist environmental protection and inspire in the world’s citizens a global environmental conscience by founding an annual prize for services to the environment. Such a prize might be open to researchers and thinkers, to activist individuals and organisations, and to corporations that are at the forefront of green technologies and sustainable development.

The New Symposium has been assembled from many nationalities. In like manner, a Nobel Prize for the Environment ought to draw attention to the many ways in which different societies attend to a diversity of ecological problems. At the same time, the prize must be universal in its resonance, asserting that, whatever else may divide us, we are united in our duties towards the only home we all share.

The New Symposium

Paros, Greece, May 2006

(From the United States: Diana Cates, Lewis Hyde, Ruth Margraff, Barry Sanders, Scott Russell Sanders. From Greece: Stratis Haviaras, Alexis Stamatis, Anastassis Vistonitis. From Brazil: Giselle Beiguelman. From the United Kingdom: Gregory Norminton. From India: Rustom Bharucha. From Indonesia: Ayu Utami. From Israel: Amir Or. From Kenya: Yvonne Owour. From Romania: Magda Carneci. From Sri Lanka: Ameena Hussein.)

Pester power

2006-09-22T05:09:00.000-07:00

Clutching at straws this may be; still, we should celebrate small victories.

I have been lobbying my MP, the Conservative James Arbuthnot, about the environment for about a year now. My letters on climate change and calling for a Marine Bill have always been courteously answered; but Mr Arbuthnot has been rather non-committal. On climate change especially, he has tended to hide behind his Party's review of energy policy as a way of doing nothing.

Then last week I sent him an e-mail urging him to add his name to the Parliamentary Early Day Motion in favour of urgent action to fight global warming (see EDM text below). I made it personal, pointing out the scale of the problem and his good fortune in being able, as an elected MP, to do something about it.

This morning, Mr Arbuthnot e-mailed me back: "Thank you for your email. I do appreciate your continuing concerns overthis matter. You will be pleased to hear that I have reconsidered and after a good deal of thought have decided to sign EDM 178."

So well done the Right Hon Member for North-East Hampshire! Proof that lobbying politicians can make a difference...

CLIMATE CHANGE EDM (24.05.2005)

Meacher, Michael

That this House agrees with the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser that climate change is a threat to civilisation; welcomes the cross-party agreement in favour of major cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, and particularly in carbon dioxide emissions, by 2050; believes that such a long-term target will best be met through a series of more regular milestones; and therefore notes the Climate Change Bill that was presented by a cross-party group of honourable Members in the final days before the General Election, and hopes that such a Bill will be brought forward in this Parliament so that annual cuts in carbon dioxide emissions of 3 per cent. can be delivered in a framework that includes regular reporting and new scrutiny and corrective processes.

Planet Inaction

2006-09-20T04:36:00.000-07:00

Planet Action, the 'eco-reality' series in which I was a participant, has been screened around the world: in Europe, in Asia, in Australia and Latin America. It seems viewers in the United States may not be so lucky. A source informs me that executives at Animal Planet US are hesitating to broadcast the series because it is "too intelligent and too slow". Though Animal Planet commissioned the series on the understanding that it would be about conservation, it seems that subject is just too "worthy" to merit a screening.

There is a chance the series may yet make it on TV in the US - though it will be heavily truncated, or else farmed out to another, less lucrative channel. I will update as I learn more. It is a bitter disappointment to those of us who made the series. The WWF does vital work to save species from extinction - including the one known as homo sapiens sapiens.

If only we had wrestled more crocodiles...

Грегори Норминтон!

2006-09-09T08:51:00.000-07:00

This week I had the pleasure of being interviewed by the Russian magazine, Knizhnaya Vitrina. AST in Moscow has proved my most loyal publisher, translating not only my novels but also - forthcoming - my first collection of stories. So my gratitude to the Russian reading public. Spasiba!

What does the term ‘historical novelist’ mean to you? Is it a reputation or a label?

The ‘historical novel’ is, more than anything, a marketing term. As such it is rather confining. I have written two novels set in the historical past: Arts and Wonders and Ghost Portrait. Though both touch on real events, the central characters are invented and their dilemmas apply equally to our own age. The Ship of Fools is a fantasy, or set of fantasies, inspired by the paintings of Bosch and Bruegel. Anybody hoping to learn about life in Medieval Flanders will find it a most frustrating read.

If the term ‘historical novel’ means anything, it is the fictionalised account of historical fact. I am not in that business. My current project is set in contemporary Britain, while a future novel (if I ever manage to write it) imagines a trip into outer space. My short stories include what marketing types would call ‘speculative’ and ‘historical’ fiction, as well as ‘horror’ and more conventionally ‘realistic’ narratives. The problem is that publishers need to define an author, to market a ‘product’ rather than facilitate the expression of an imagination. So labels are imposed and those who refuse them are kept in obscurity. Contemporary writers I most admire flit between genres and resolutely ignore that grim dictum (the ‘socialist realism’ of a narcissistic and confessional culture) only to write from direct experience.

You said in one of your interviews that ‘getting reviews for fiction is becoming increasingly difficult.’ Does it mean that the art of criticism is generally disappearing or that you personally lack attention towards your work?

The sale of a book is to a large degree determined by the number of reviews it receives. My third novel was barely reviewed and its sales have been dismal as a result, even though I consider it my best work. But this is not just a personal gripe. The majority of writers in Britain work in relative or total obscurity, and the sheer volume of books published annually ensures that only a minority will see their work reviewed. At the same time, there appears to be a growing trend for reviewing non-fiction over fiction. Newspapers are in the business of fact and interpretation; they are not over-concerned with works of the imagination.

The art of criticism is not dead, for all that. But it is increasingly confined to specialist publications. This means that fiction has a diminishing profile in the mainstream media and only a small number of titles (winners of literary awards or the beneficiaries of expensive marketing campaigns) find a readership. Perhaps the growth of online magazines, reader forums and (in the real world) reading groups will rescue us from this law of diminishing returns? I, for one, long to find ways of finding an audience without the costly mediation of marketing people.

In your first novel, The Ship of Fools, you offer your own interpretation of the famous Bosch painting, whereas in Ghost Portrait the narration itself offers such vivid descriptions of Nature (mainly) that one might assume you are a landscape painter at heart yourself.

I regard my first three novels as a kind of trilogy, with painting as the uniting theme. The Ship of Fools pays homage to Bosch and Bruegel: characters from their work are given life, so to speak, on the page. At the same time, as an affirmation of creative freedom, I wanted to go back to the prehistory of the novel and so Rabelais plays an important part, along with English writers such as Swift and Lawrence Sterne: experimenters who played with and invented a new form. Ghost Portrait was a very different enterprise. Like Arts and Wonders, it has painting and painters at its centre. Whereas The Ship of Fools is hermetic and ‘artificial’, an intertextual game, Ghost Portrait is a naturalistic work, an intimate portrayal of long dead people. It marks my return to England and to a tradition, present in art and music as well as literature, of celebrating the English landscape. It is a rural novel. It is about sight and perception. It is also about the sense of place: how one house can be many houses over time, experienced anew by each inhabitant. Fools sprang from books and paintings, Ghost Portrait from explorations of the North Downs – that narrow vein of chalk hills in the south-eastern county of Kent. Nathaniel Deller’s home is a composite of actual country houses; a close relative of William Stroud’s post-mill still stands in east Surrey. As for the revolutionary Diggers, they did indeed attempt to create a colony on an area of heath quite near my childhood home. I was, then, writing about landscapes that I knew intimately. For that reason Ghost Portrait is a very ‘personal’ novel, even if it set three centuries before my birth.

‘Failure, though it doesn’t pay the bills, can be an effective tutor.’ You wrote this about the novel you abandoned for being ‘lacklustre and directionless’. Was this the first time such a thing has happened to you? What did you learn from that ‘tutor’? Have you any intention of going back to that unfinished work one day?

I had been working on a comic novel set on an American campus at the height of the present Bush administration. It was going to be based, very loosely, on my own experience of living in Iowa City for six months between 2003 and 2004. I wanted to capture something of that (to me) very foreign country where in theory my own language is spoken. After working on the project for about nine months, however, it became quite obvious that, though I had a setting, I did not have a novel. Many minor characters had the stamp of life about them but there was a gaping hole where the central narrator ought to have been. To work successfully, over months and months, on a novel one has to really need to write it. I made the decision to abandon a project that somehow lacked that life force.

It was the first time I had met with such a failure. The experience was oddly bracing, for it taught me viscerally what I should have known about inspiration and compulsion. If you are trying to earn a living from fiction, the necessity to churn out material can be detrimental to good writing. By going astray, you become acquainted with the path you should follow.

All was not lost, mind you, from the abandoned work. I managed to rescue a section which, substantially reshaped, became a long short story called ‘In Refugium’. It has not yet found a publisher.

‘Increasingly,’ you have written, ‘short stories are where my enthusiasm lies, both as reader and writer.’ Why?

I wonder at the decline of the short story in Britain, for it seems to me the perfect narrative form for our age: a fictional package fully digestible in one sitting. The short story, by its brevity, allows us to be promiscuous readers. A good collection (in which each is piece is autonomous yet belongs with its neighbours) takes us through time and space. Yet the proverbial shopper will wrinkle his or her nose at a volume of stories and buy instead some breezeblock of a novel. Madness! It’s buying one story for the price of twelve.

Producing a novel consumes vast amounts of time and anxiety; so writing a short story can seem, at best, a sort of working holiday. Forget stamina: what’s required is precision and concision, the rice sculptor’s steady hand, if you will, and the clockmaker’s squint.

The status of the short story is a wretched one in Britain. Is this because our writers can’t manage the demands of the form? I don’t believe it. The truth is that we are no longer accustomed to reading stories. They have largely disappeared from newspapers and magazine. Until they return to mainstream culture, the passion for short stories will continue to wane; and readers may never discover the speculative fictions of Borges and Ballard, the dark confections of Poe and Angela Carter, or the luminous humanity of Katherine Mansfield.

For my favourites I choose Kipling, V.S. Pritchett (the closest we get to Chekhov?) and Samuel Beckett. Only in Kim does Kipling equal the genius of ‘They’ or ‘The Church that was in Antioch’. Kim of course is greater but only the stories approach perfection. As for Beckett, neither his Trilogy nor his late, negative-knotted exercises offer the compelling cadences and despairing comedy of ‘First Love’ and his three ‘novellas’.

What annoys you most in British contemporary literature? In American? In any other?

I resent the distortions of hype, the banality of ‘relevance’ and the poison of sentimentality. I fear the relentless push of commercialism with its antipathy towards the unusual and the eccentric. I think the best writing in the USA comes from small, independent publishers. In the UK, the disappearance of independent bookshops is a cultural disaster. We also publish too few books in translation.

Could you name the authors and books you have recently read? How do you choose the books you think you ought to read?

I am an avid reader, and a greedy accumulator of books. My reading is rarely planned or schematic: I just go where curiosity, or the enthusiastic recommendation of a friend, leads me. Recently, having moved to Scotland, I have been reading contemporary Scottish writers such as James Kelman, A.L. Kennedy and the great, eccentric visionary Alasdair Gray, whose novel Lanark I cannot recommend too highly. I hope it is available in Russian translation. Fiction is not my only interest. I read books on natural history and the environment, works of history (often following particular obsessions: last year, the Soviet gulags, this year the disgraceful conduct of the West in the Middle East) and quite a lot of poetry. Perhaps I should be a more disciplined reader: I tend to have several books on the go at any one time.

Do you normally attend book festivals? What do they mean to you? Why do you think more and more readers each year flock to book fairs and festivals?

I would love to attend more book festivals: it’s the frustrated actor in me. I really enjoy reading my own work. Unfortunately having a low profile in Britain means that I rarely get the opportunity. I do occasionally go as an audience member (living in Edinburgh enables me to attend the Book Festival in August) but must confess that, unless the writer has a real talent for reading her work, I often end up regretting the experience. On the other hand, festivals are proof of a literary appetite and testify to a strange public curiosity concerning the shape and sound of authors. People who attend such events want to make a connection with the frail or fallible human being who happens to have written a book. For the author who fills the tent or theatre, the size of the audience testifies to the health of his talent.

You took part in all kinds of projects for the television series, Planet Action. What does it mean to you?

Planet Action is a six-part television series, broadcast around the world on the Animal Planet channel, in which seven volunteers travel to different, tropical locations to work on conservation projects with the WWF. A lifelong supporter of the WWF (a remarkable organisation I would urge everyone to join), I auditioned on a whim for a part in the series and, to my great surprise, was selected in May 2005. Eight weeks of sweating adventures followed: fitting satellite transmitters on leatherback turtles in Panama, studying coral reef ecology in Belize, restoring degraded forest in Borneo, creating an eco-tourist adventure to safeguard a patch of Malaysian jungle, building a tiger-proof paddock in Kelantan, and helping to save the dismally rare Irrawaddy dolphin in the Cambodian Mekong. As this list suggests, the whole experience was remarkable – a unique opportunity to see parts of our endangered planet and to do something to raise awareness of our ecological crisis. I have long been an environmentalist (show me another planet we can live on) but my experiences last year have strengthened my conviction that writers have a particular duty to address the greatest challenge of our time: learning to live in a sustainable way on a fragile and finite Earth.

Copyright © Gregory Norminton 2006

Open forum/season

2006-05-04T03:18:00.000-07:00

I would be delighted to open an exchange with viewers of PLANET ACTION. If you have any questions about the series - or want to know how you can help the environment - please don't hesitate to write. Posted comments will (time permitting) receive responses.

PLANET ACTION

2006-05-04T03:06:00.000-07:00

Animal Planet (UK) will broadcast the first episode of a new, 'eco-reality' TV series at 8 pm on Tuesday 9 May. PLANET ACTION is a new departure for the channel (which has a global reach of 180 million viewers). If it's a hit, many more programmes will be commissioned on environmental themes. Anyone in need of reminding why such things matter need only consult the website of the IUCN... (http://www.iucn.org/themes/ssc/redlist2006/redlist2006.htm)

I had the tremendous privilege of participating in the TV series. To find out more, click here: http://www.panda.org/news_facts/multimedia/planet_action/index.cfm

In the last few weeks I've been helping WWF to prepare their media response to the series, and have written this piece...

I am by nature a seated person. I have a talent for sitting, which is just as well as that’s what my work mostly consists of. I am, however, also a worrier. I worry for the planet especially, given that it’s a good one and good planets are hard to find. Sitting down and worrying feed on each other. The more you sit when the world needs action, the more you worry. Conversely, the more you worry without taking action, the more you feel pinned to your seat.

Reasoning thus, I’ve been trying for years to act: locally, as the saying goes, while thinking globally. I’m the press officer for a small conservation society. I volunteer to do conservation work in nature reserves. I cycle to keep my carbon emissions down. And (this is especially good as it doesn’t involve heavy lifting) I’m a member of WWF Passport.

It was through Passport that I learned about a WWF-Animal Planet series to be filmed in Central America and Southeast Asia. The producers were looking for young volunteers to meet various conservation challenges, and in a fit of absentmindedness I wrote in. The project sounded exciting – it was a chance to reach a large and mostly young audience with an important environmental message. But I didn’t expect it would be me sweating it out in the jungle.

I was asked to interview in London. I was offered a place. In a daze of excitement and apprehension I accepted – and two weeks later, perforated by the necessary jabs, I found myself on a remote stretch of beach on the Panamanian coast, crouching at the busy end of an egg-laying turtle.

So began eight weeks of intense, moving, hilarious and sometimes stressful camaraderie. Though I was the only member of the team to have applied through Passport, all of us became passionate about conservation. We were often uncomfortable, sometimes exhausted, and there were the predictable swarms of biting things. Yet the places we visited and the people we met – our local hosts as well as WWF conservationists – were inspiring. Leatherback turtles shared the Earth with dinosaurs; one acre of Malaysian jungle may contain a higher diversity of species than the whole of northern Europe; the Mekong River in Cambodia is home to a mere 100 Irrawaddy dolphins. The beauty and biological importance of the places we were privileged to work in still take my breath away.

I have seen firsthand what excellent work WWF does on the ground. They don’t believe in putting fences round places: poverty alleviation is as much a priority, as communities must develop sustainably if wildlife is to have a chance. The WWF staff we worked with combine the qualities of the adventurer and the scientist. They are humane, passionate and – in some cases – very brave individuals, and we can all help them (even the sedentary ones amongst us) by supporting the WWF, by raising awareness of the WWF’s work among family and friends… and by joining WWF Passport. Online campaigning can really make a difference. Which means that you can, too.

http://passport.panda.org/yourpassport/profile.cfm

Any questions

2006-02-17T06:58:00.000-08:00

My friend, the novelist CLARE DUDMAN, has kindly interviewed me for her blog. Please check it out – and look out for her novels: Wegener’s Jigsaw (One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead, in the US) and 98 Reasons for Being.
http://keeperofthesnails.blogspot.com/2005/08/ghost-portrait-by-gregory-norminton.html

Nunc dimittis

2006-02-17T06:56:00.000-08:00

Much has happened to me since I last posted on Infinite Space. I am half way through my term as Visiting Fellow in Creative Writing at Magdalene College in Cambridge (the wind, as I type, is making an eerily human sound in the sealed chimney of my flat). So far this illustrious-sounding job has involved growing fat on High Table fare, teaching the odd class, and trying to get on with my new novel. The heartening thing about my stay is how curious the academics have proven to be: very little snobbery about, though some old-fashioned reticence. Small talk is not a forte of my hosts but it’s worth setting them off on their chosen subjects. At lunch and dinner, I end up feeling a bit like Melvyn Bragg on ‘In Our Time’: trying to make sense of conversations about paleoclimatology or medieval tort law…

Other news: I will be travelling to Geneva next week to meet the International Secretariat of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and to watch a first screening of PLANET ACTION: the conservation-themed TV series filmed last summer in Central America and SE Asia. My experience of working with WWF conservationists was a daunting and inspiring one. It really is one of the most effective and authoritative NGOs in the world, combining hard science with economic realism, idealism and pragmatism. If you want to watch me (or my more attractive co-stars) sweating in various tropical locations, don’t miss PLANET ACTION on ANIMAL PLANET – scheduled for broadcast in May.

My grandfather died on Burns’ Night, aged 88. Harold Norminton was a linguist, a teacher, a bon vivant. He volunteered to fight in Bomber Command in World War Two even though, as an Irish citizen, he could have sat out the war in safety. In 1945 he joined the British Council and proceeded to spend several decades in South America, India and Europe. He was in many ways a difficult man to get on with; but he loomed large in the lives of those who knew him and was capable of great charm.

Harold’s wife, my grandmother Luce Mercx, died eleven years ago, but her name has been handed on to the newest member of my family: my niece Lucie Jeanne Emilie Lindsay, who was born in the early hours of Monday morning. Congratulations to Natalie and Simon and the boys! The conjunction of a death and a birth reminds me of those strange lines spoken by the shepherd in The Winter’s Tale (III iii): “Now bless thyself: thou mettest with things dying, I with things newborn.”

Where I'm At

2005-12-02T03:22:00.000-08:00

It's now six months since my third novel, Ghost Portrait, was published. The paperback edition will - with any luck - be in the shops in January. Sceptre has decided against the 'period' look, so the cover has a model, pouting prettily, to lure the browsing shopper. Whether this will improve on the hardback's fortunes remains to be seen. The Guardian was the only newspaper to print a review in May.

Getting reviews for fiction is becoming increasingly difficult. Newspapers, particularly the weekend editions, seem to be growing by the week yet there's less and less room, between the travel section and features on how to spoil your garden with decking, for reviews of any kind. Things are no better for distribution: the market dominance of a few, highly centralised, book chains means that diversity is constantly being squeezed. Publishers must pay to get their titles on the 3-for-2 tables; the rest go, literally, to the wall, where only the shopper with intent will find them. Now that Ottakars (which, in Scotland at least, still caters to regional tastes) is about to be snapped up by Waterstone's, the troubles faced by lesser known authors can only be expected to increase.

While waiting for the paperback of Ghost Portrait, I am starting work on a fourth novel. To be precise, I'm starting work again on a fourth novel, having decided to abandon a work in progress - a satire of university life in the American Midwest - which was lacklustre and directionless. A year of writing, then, with only a short story salvaged from the wreckage. Failure, though it doesn't pay the bills, can be an effective tutor. I've learned a lot about my strengths and weaknesses as a writer. Whether I can put those lessons to good use remains to be seen.

Since returning from the tropics (the subject of a future post) I have written a number of short stories. The struggle now is to get them published. Increasingly, short stories are where my enthusiasm lies, both as reader and writer. Kipling did his best work in the form; so did Chekhov and Pritchett. It ought to be the form of choice for our rushed and spasmodic age; yet in Britain there is simply no market for short stories. Magazines like Prospect do their valiant best but the general situation is not a friendly one.

Still, moaning, we plug on...

Current books

2005-12-01T09:37:00.000-08:00

I've spent much time recently in Edinburgh - where, in that insalubrious area known by locals as the Pubic Triangle, there are not only lap-dancing clubs but also fabulous second-hand bookstores. I have, needless to clarify, been frequenting the latter. Amongst the goodies recently hauled back to Hampshire, I recommend Unlikely Stories, Mostly by Alasdair Gray, Ethel and Ernest by Raymond Briggs, and the essays of R.L.Stevenson. Of these last, 'Pulvis et Umbra' and 'A Christmas Sermon' are perfect examples of bravura miserabilism.

On a similarly grim note, I've been reading with great admiration and some wincing Jim Crace's Being Dead. Crace, if you'll pardon a rhyme, writes with astonishing grace about murder, love and decomposition. It's a bracing read, like tackling Beckett, where the only consolation is in the creative act itself. Crace could write about a paper bag and make it interesting. Consider, for instance, this description of waves breaking on the shore, their crest curls wrapped round tubes of air, like brandy snaps. Crace is an atheist (writing his masterly novel, Quarantine, saw to that) and he writes the truth movingly. Should we expect their spirits (of the murdered couple) to depart, some hellish cart and its pale horse to come and take their falling souls away to its hot mines, some godly, decorated messenger, too simple-minded for its golden wings, to fly them to repose, reunion, eternity? Might we demand some ghosts, at least? Or fanfares, gardens and high gates? Or some dramatic skyline, steep with clouds? The plain and unforgiving facts were these. Celice and Joseph were soft fruit. They lived in tender bodies. They were vulnerable. They did not have the power not to die. The whole novel is suffused with writing as feeling yet unflinching as this. My book, then, of the week.

Salutations

2005-12-01T09:25:00.000-08:00

At long last, vanity has got the better of me. I've created a blog - working on the assumption that everyone is entitled to my opinions. Not that I really expect anyone to read them. One day there may be as many blogs as people.

Still, Infinite Space will be a home for my unpublished or unpublishable musings; a place to rant (with, I hope, a modicum of wit) against the manifold lunacies of our age; and a place to air my enthusiasms for books, people, and clever technologies that might save the planet.

Welcome, then, to what I will almost certainly fail to keep up. I hope you enjoy your visit.