The Solitary Review

Dark Castles -- now out on Kindle

The city of Estre has fallen. A lone traveller sets off, bearing a sacred scroll. His only companion a faithful dog – but is his friend more than she seems?
Sophia the librarian just wants to paint, but she’s having visions of a dancing wolf. The horizon is burning, and a formless creature has done something to Time.
Then there’s the wanderer with many names, and none. And the Monks who Run.

A novel of journeying, arson, and dogs. 

 

 

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Review of M John Harrison's "The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again"

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I feel that I'm somehow supposed to give a good review because, y'know, M John Harrison. Amazing writer he may be but this novel left me with a feeling that I'd seen most of it before, probably in Iain Sinclair (question: did M John Harrison invent psychogeography? He may have done). Character lives a peripatetic life in Mortlake, SW London. And how peripatetic: walking to Kingston and round back to Barnes via Richmond Park is what he does for normal - that's around 18km depending on the route. So, over ten-mile walks he thinks nothing of. He also engages in joyless-sounding sex with two different women, falls in with a medium who seems at one point to have murdered her husband and he disposes of the body. This is not ok. If the husband had murdered -her-, this would now be a crime novel.
Victoria, the other principal char, is more interesting. She flees London and heads for Shropshire (MJH doesn't name the town but I'm presuming Bridgnorth as it's on the Severn gorge not far from Telford, although at one point a character gets a train to Shrewsbury). There she has a nice life but as is common with these characters dominated by others; she also (is it her) finds it all a bit Brexity. West Midlands (of which Shropshire is a part) is pure Brexit territory; I suspect Brexit happened while Harrison was writing this novel as it isn't mentioned until near the very end.
Is there some kind of correlation between West London and the West Midlands? I'm sure there is. Being in Hammersmith (by the Bridge or Brook Green) one day and in Birmingham the next is not unusual.
Then there's the Water Babies thing, and that gives TSLBTRA a whole new aspect. Starting with a drunk seeing green babies in a pub toilet and culminating in a character diving into her lawn like it was a swimming pool, Charles Kingsley's unpleasant and traumatising (well it was to me as a child) novel sits as a kind of background radiation to TSLBTRA. Translucent glowing children abound. People hand copies of that unpleasant book about.
A lot of it is about rivers really, and that isn't mentioned; a tale of two rivers, with Victoria by the Severn and Shaw by the Thames. Secret connections and influences are what MJH is all about. The book, unlike a river, just doesn't really go anywhere. The flaneux (my preferred spelling; neither male nor female, and 'eux' is a form of the French word for 'they') does not wander idly; but then again, the journey not the arrival matters. Finish lines not finish times (but there's still a line). Not all who are lost, wander.

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To the Wood we Came

a short fiction featuring Paul Nash and the War of the Worlds.

Few would have imagined, in the early years of the twentieth century, that humankind was being observed from afar, as a researcher observes the teeming of minuscule creatures underneath a microscope. And that slowly and surely they drew their plans against us.

Few, including the lean, asthmatic man who right now is sitting in a clearing in the woodland prosaically kinown as The Wood. He has a sketchbook on his knees and a 4b pencil in his hand and dreaming all the time of Weymouth, or the south coast around Purbeck, or his beloved Wittenham Clumps, fallen to the terrible rain of a Martian war-machine.
The Wood isn’t what it was; clumps of red weed swarm up the ancient oaks and the hornbeams, the elders and the beech. Infection, he thinks. Why is it always infection? Humankind is an infection on the surface of the Earth. Perhaps the Martians were the solution, like the barbarians.

“Waiting for the Barbarians” is one of his wife’s favourite poems. She has, after all, Egyptian connections like Cavafy himself. Dear Margaret. The only good result of his time at the Slade (“why do I have to do life drawing? I know what people look like”) was meeting and marrying her. But she, now, is somewhere on the south coast, probably in Weymouth, far from the war machines and their death rays, far from their building of a new world.
There is a sudden chuffing rumble and a metallic shriek and for a startled moment Paul thinks the Martians have found their way here; but it is only a train, hurtling along the nearby railway line, probably getting out of London. There have been so few trains lately that to hear one is a shock.

Paul coughs bitterly. Always a cough, always a cold, always wheezing. Even night-time in the desert wouldn’t have helped; but dear Margaret encourages him to move on, place to place. Some places are good, meaning he is inspired to paint, and others less so. There seems no formula for a good place versus a bad.

He shelters in wreckage embedded in the trees, something between the legendary Vedovelli V-class aeroplane (The Phantom of Issy-les-Moulineaux, so called by ace reporter Jacques Beauregard due to its being glimpsed around the airfield being tinkered on but never once actually seen to fly) and the equally legendary WSK-Mielec Belphegor, which to his surprise did reach production. I suppose in a command economy you do what you’re told. By all accounts many are still in regular use … as chicken coops. Useless as aeroplanes the wingless fuselages are ideal for your cluckers and layers.

Both planes were record breakers in their own way: the Vedovelli, possibly the largest flying machine in the world at the time, although ‘fly’ it scarcely did, has gone down in history as the weirdest, an over-engineered behemoth that appears to defy Euclidean geometry. The Belphegor on the other hand was the only from-the-outset jet-powered biplane and the slowest operational jet aircraft, as solid as a brick outhouse and better used as one (or a chicken coop, q.v.).
Paul contemplates the wreckage which partakes of these two machines equally; product of some Martian mind perhaps that had only the birds to go on and heard the wind in the wires, launching itself aloft on this strange new world they were building until it crash-landed in a dead sea of wrecked mechanicals.

He sneezes. Some new contaminant, perhaps, unbelievable desolation raining down from the stars, the very reason he gave up on those people with their depressing self-hatred years ago and became a wanderer around the south and west of England while as dear Margaret agreed he was temperamentally better suited to France. And yet had he gone to France he would have missed the Wittenham Clumps; no quick trains back up to the Home Counties for him. Now the Clumps are shorn of their vegetation and their very shapes are wrecked; but could he cast off the shackles of home and go to Paris, say, or the Cote d’Azur? It seems unlikely. He surveys the tangled wreckage around him and the shorn-off trees in this part of the Wood and thinks it a silver sea forever breaching on the safe soil of South London.And given the state of his lungs a new contaminant will probably kill him before long. He imagines the shapes around him rebuilt, equivalents for the wrecked tripods, the leafless trees.

Something shifts in the wreckage beneath him where he sits. He moves, stands up quickly, thinking he has disturbed a fox, something roosting in the tangle below. He coughs again, abruptly, and there is a scurrying from within the broken fuselage, if you can call it a fuselage. Something tentacular and almost completely void of energy flops limply into the dim sunlight; followed by another which waves in the air and collapses back like wrack dragged into the undertow.
There’s someone in it … people in it!
And Paul is face to face with a Martian, its oval-eyed, teardrop-shaped head lolling up at him and its breath wheezing and hissing as the rain begins to fall.
I know how that feels, old friend, he thinks.
He knows the creature beneath him is dangerous; and yet that it will not survive. Not just an enemy; The Enemy. Is it like a bear, able to lash out with a dying paw and smash a fragile human skull; or is it truly sinking back, powerless, into the primordial dark whence we all came and into which we must all go? The tentacles grip the broken controls of its flying machine and the V-shaped lipless mouth twists and hisses something.
You have not survived, he thinks, and perhaps, neither did I.
Paul reaches for the tentacle nearest him and grips it, half expecting perhaps the Martian to seize him around the throat - though only humans have ever done that to him - and choke the life out of him.
What, more than usual?
But as he does so the huge eyes close and the creature slumps back into its machine. Paul knows when something is dead, he has seen it often enough during the war against the Martians, and he is seeing it now.
A bird calls once from a branch and flaps off into the leaden air against a silvery sky. Paul lets go and walks through the wood, his thoughts tormented and as dark as the shadows between the trees.
Far away a train puffs asthmatically along, heading for the ruins of Woking and beyond them, the sea at Portsmouth.

We are building a new world.

Notes:

This story first appeared on "Archive of our Own" (AO3), a publication of the Organisation for Transformative Works.  The title "To the Wood We Came" is from a book I remember from that old fusty school library, but no trace of it have I found. I would think it's a quote from Dante - "In the middle of our life I came to a dark wood where the way was lost" but who was the 'we'?

I wanted to imagine Paul Nash if his war was the Martian War and not the 1914-18. The reference to the wrecked aircraft, as well as evoking his painting 'Totes Meer' (Dead Sea) is anachronistic in bringing in the 1970s-vintage Belphegor but I wanted to mix that reference with the equally peculiar Vedovelli (1910-12).
Of course it's all a reference to the pandemic, what with viruses ravaging the population, and also possibly Brexit, sealing our Paul in the UK despite his affinity for 'La France.'
Paul's wife Margaret Odeh is an interesting character and some time I mean to do a Wikipedia page for her.

The Long Summer of Hammersmith now out on Kindle

Shadow Walker Book 2, The Long Summer of Hammersmith is now out.

Alexander Hodge made a pact to see the future. Now the future is coming for him. A creature that lived in the shadows is breaking loose.
Josie Brooks has a job to do: a pub to renovate. But what is living in the upper room? And why can she see a long-demolished school from her apartment windows?
As the 20th century draws to a close, strange things are happening in West London.

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This is the novel I initially wrote in 1998 in a very unsatisfactory form, then revised while living in Birmingham (2011-15). When the original version was written I was still living in West Kensington and as one of my readers said, "Hammersmith [and West Kensington] is really a character in the book". An area with so much history and so many illustrious people having lived there, is going to make its presence felt in the text. This novel is in a way a love letter to the district I lived in for 24 years, and the first place I lived on my own.

 

Bruce the Numbat would like it known that he is not a thylacine.
“I’m not a thylacine,” Bruce announced, from his burrow near Wooloomatjara. “If you think I’m a bloody thylacine you’re a drongo.”
Nonetheless alleged sightings of the so-called marsupial wolf, extinct since the early 20th century, are often reported in the area and can mostly be tracked to Bruce and his family. Suggestions that he has crafted a thylacine mask and wears it to wind up humans are apocryphal.

Walking on the Bones

"Walking on the Bones" is now out as an eBook on Amazon

Vee Pynegar lived in the damp house. At first she drew stories for children, but the longer she lived there the more the dark found its way in. In the end she fled.

Talitha Jumby has a missing husband, a new lover, and a stack of manuscripts she found in her shed. She could never resist a mystery.

And something that came to Earth millennia ago is waking up.

 

"Shadow Walker" Book 1: Walking on the Bones

On Being where You Are

This originally appeared in my "36 square metres" blog back in 2012.

On being where you are

I had a few dates with a woman I met via an online dating service. But simply being of a similar age and in the same part of town doesn't mean we have anything in common. Anyone who's fairly self-reliant is simply going to ask themselves “does this add anything?” and the answer is very often going to be 'no'. I first asked myself this during a one-off date with a nice enough single mum in Hampton, a year ago. I'm not looking for validation and certainly don't need to force myself into a couple in order to find it. One woman I corresponded with via that dating service wondered what I was doing there as my life seemed involved enough anyway.

It seems to me that a lot of men still look to be 'validated' by women at a time when those women have successfully established that they don't need to be 'validated' by men.

I've twice had close male friends of mine, within the same little group who've known each other for decades since we were fellow-teachers, describe the three of us as 'pathetic' and 'l***rs' because none of us were in a steady sexual relationship with a woman at the time. But I don't measure self-realisation that way, and we men do ourselves (and women) a disservice by trying to. Nor do we help ourselves by using words like 'sad' to describe single men. There is a perception that while single women have plenty of connections and a life that doesn't involve coupledom, single men are exactly that – on our own.

One of the things I've done recently is join a choir. A very much fun thing to do, being one of those local choirs that doesn't need auditions or the ability to read music. But the membership is predominantly female, and several of the men attending were spouses or other family members of the women. Why? Do all those men who would otherwise join, work such long hours that they can't take part? I doubt it. I'll reiterate: choirs are fun and a good thing to be in.

This gender imbalance is the opposite of that in the real ale movement – which at least in the CAMRA branch I was in was predominantly male. Almost all the female members were partners of a man in the branch (although in many cases the couple may have got together via a shared love of real ale), and there were no women on the committee for much of the time I was involved with it. This feeds into a CAMRA stereotype which I've seen expressed as 'men with no women in their lives' although most of the guys I knew there had wives or girlfriends, who didn't participate in CAMRA activities. Besides, does anyone say of women who take part in mostly-female activities like choirs or Zumba that they have 'no men in their lives'? I doubt it and anyone saying that would come across as sexist at least. And this doesn't hold for every branch – some branches seem like a stereotype full of middle-aged bearded men while others attract younger people and women, which is perhaps not surprising as real ale or craft beer (which need not be in a barrel) no longer has so much of its 'old man's drink' image. The diehard lager drinkers who originally sneered at 'ale' in that way are now in their 40s, victims of their own drink-related ageism, and finding that the next generation is not necessarily following in their footsteps but is going for the kind of beer they actually like, which very often means small-producer bottled or cask ales.

So if they aren't 'validated' by women, then what does, or should, validate single men? Who seem, if you read the press, to spend their entire time bewailing their single state or berating other single men for same. But at least if you're single you 're (probably) not in an abusive relationship, which is a topic for another piece some time.

But I feel one important step is,

Be where you are.

This includes making your home the kind of place you want to live – and not feeling that it's just somewhere to be for now until you get somewhere better or you get coupled-up (again or for the first time). If you want purple and orange walls, do so.

It also includes making use of the area you live in. The six years I lived in an outer London borough were not my most creative – indeed I felt like I was doing nothing but the day job, and going to pubs, and going to music gigs. (then I lost the day job; what then?) Even the stories I did have published were ones I'd written before I moved. But there were possibilities ever opening. Quite likely I should have got involved with the theatre which opened in the centre of town during those six years. Even just turning up and saying “can I help in any way?” would have been useful. I did however participate locally including teaching older people to use computers at the Age Concern centre; bought into the organic vegetable box scheme set up by a neighbourhood food co-op; joined a community choir (see above) and a handful of other things. And if it's more women than men doing these things, big deal. Women have contended with predominantly-male situations for years. Then again there are many people who participate in things that are more of a non-local community: science fiction fandom, cycling, etc. In my suburban life I took part in local bike rides until I got fed up with that particular group's habit of going offroad, even with road bikes. A cycling injury in the local park when a trail turned out to be steeper than I thought made me even less impressed with that kind of behaviour.

Now that I'm living in Birmingham I'm trying to do just that: writers groups, participation in the local food scene, etc. Doesn't this validate us sufficiently – being part of the community around us? I would respectfully suggest that it does. There are many ways to be part of a community, with or without a family, as part of a couple or not, and nobody is suggesting that anyone has to throw themselves into it 24/7 if they don't want to – once again, make your home your own, retreat to that if it is the time to do so. Go on retreat weekends. Start a blog! Be where you are.

Thunderbird

The sunset sky had led thousands of painters, good and bad and indifferent, to paint it, and given its colours to the clothes and jewelery of the native people who now lived in trailers and on the edges of officially-sanctioned space. The weird shapes of the horizon were stark black against the orange and scarlet and cinnamon splashes of that darkening sky which even now was growing more purple. Night itself would fall like a blanket across the outlands. But none of this occurred to Jed Richmond, who was propping up the bar in the Dead Horse Saloon. A pianist was playing something forgettable, and by the sound of it he’d forgotten some of it too.
Jed was on his third whiskey when the out-of-towners came in. A thin man in a grey suit and glasses and a sandy-haired woman who was probably his wife. He’d heard about these two; they’d been staying at the hotel for a day now but as Jed divided his time between his workshop, his rooms above it, and the saloon, he hadn’t run into them so far.
“Howdy,” said Jed, as they came to the bar.
“Hello,” said the man. He had a Down Easter accent.
“I’m Jed,” Jed said. “What brings you to town?”
“I’m Sam,” said the man, “and this is my wife Rebecca. Pleased to meet you, Jed. We’re looking for birds.”
“Birds?” said Jed. “Well, lemme see, we get vultures and hawks and the occasional eagle.”
“Eagles, eh?” said Rebecca. “How often do you see those?”
“Only after sundown,” Jed said. “Maybe if I’ve had a few of these.” He hefted his empty glass.
“Allow me,” said Sam.
“Very neighbourly,” Jed said, as the barman poured.
The conversation flowed like whisky. After a few minutes Rebecca said,
“Do people ever speak of more, well, unusual things?”
“Such as?” Jed said kindly.
Rebecca frowned.
“You mean the thunderbird,” Jed said, putting her out of her misery. He knew this had been building, knew it as surely as the thunderclouds rose over Dead Cat Mountain. The thunderbird. The ole Indians told stories about it, but most of the Indians were long gone. Something Jed remembered from his childhood, fifty years ago or more.
Rebecca’s eyes glinted and her husband leaned forward.
“No,” Jed said. “Never been seen. Sorry to disappoint.”
“Oh,” Sam said. “But might anyone else ...”
“Fella,” Jed said, “I was born here, lived all my life here, and I know everyone. I’m the carpenter. I make cradles for their babies and coffins for their dead. People talk to me the way they won’t even talk to the preacher. If anyone had seen it I’d know. Sorry to disappoint. Enjoy your stay. Thanks for the drink.”

The out-of-town couple had gone. Jed Richmond walked his weary whisky-fogged way back to his rooms. Sitting in his small living room, with its solid homemade furniture, he leafed through his old photograph album.

There were the pictures of his grandma and grandpa, outwardly stern but with eyes twinkling with mischief; his pa as a small boy with the driver of a train holding him on the footplate; pictures dad had taken in the war, doomed young men with rifles and knapsacks.
And the centre piece of the collection.
A sepia picture. Four men standing outside a barn, spade-bearded in the late 19th-century style, two of them holding old guns of the type still used by hillbillies.
And behind them, pinned against the wall of the barn, the outspread wings and lifeless body of a bird. The wings must have had a span of thirty feet. The head was twisted back in death, its hooked beak like a condor’s, designed to feed on already dead flesh; the eyes closed. The plumage was dark, and the photograph was clear enough to make out each of the great long wing feathers.
Jed smiled. He reached into a drawer and took out a feather; iridescent purple and black and green, he drew it softly across the back of his hand.
Sometimes at night he could hear them calling.

(c) Chris Amies 2013

Coffeeology W6 - Cafe Review

Coffeeology W6

Clearly an old house, likely mid-Victorian with its high ceilings and wooden floors, though this is every inch a cafe there is of the quirky pub about it, the nice and modern sort of pub where you have beers called things like “You Made that One Up.” Several sections – brisk tables in the front with the bar, low couches behind. On one of those couches I sat and had cortado and courgette cake and drowsed as though I had been in one of those pubs, but this is 2019 and instead we have coffee and people come in to work on That Novel in the back room with its animal pictures on the walls.

And further back another room with its own coffee bar. And beyond that back room a garden.

Who lives in a house like this? Well I do, sort of, having exiled myself from the fabulous beast where I used to live, and which felt more like an long-unseen old relative than a place when I wandered past it on my way here towards Great Church Lane and Broadway.

Coffeeology’s website (https://coffeeology.me.uk/pages/coffeeology-london-locations) informs us it’s in Chiswick but long years of wandering informed me that Chiswick doesn’t start till you’re at, or past, the Ritz Cafe (there since 1983 at least) to its west.

Cortado and courgette cake £5.80. Very palatable. Hot dogs and vegan treats and prosciutto, and salmon salads on the menu. The Pink Crush sounds epic (although the name sounds like a drink, it’s really an eat).

Would I return? My dreaming self informs me that it still lives in West Kensington, and it is no walk up King Street to Kings Court and little Coffeeology kindly beneath its wing. My waking self is nearer Richmond and they have another premises in that town.

 

Coffeeology

308 King Street
W6 0RR

Website

Belphegor!

Now available for Kindle -

Belphegor: Chantecoq and the Phantom of the Louvre

There's a ghost in the Louvre! Reporter Jacques Bellegarde isn’t convinced. What kind of ghost murders a guard and sends threatening notes signed “Belphegor”? An ancient mystery surfaces in Jazz Age Paris.
Another thrilling case for Chantecoq. King of detectives, master of disguise.

A new translation of Bernede's classic novel of strangeness and crime. A tale of cunning disguise, narrow escapes, skullduggery, terrible poetry, and dogs.

Buy "Belphegor" at Amazon

Jack Sprat

Jack Sprat was a cat who lived with one of my friends. He sadly passed away recently aged about 15 (we're not sure). This painting is from a photograph taken in April 2017.

Acrylic on canvas panel, 30 x 23 cm