Resistance by Owen Sheers

I read this as I have enjoyed some of Sheers' work in the past, and as he was doing a book signing at the shop where I worked over the summer I thought I'd better read it.

Resistance quickly became my crappy holiday read. It was mildly interesting and didn't require any deep thought to get through it. I didn't enjoy it hugely, but equally I felt like I should finish it.

It tells the story of Sarah Lewis and her neighbours in an isolated Welsh valley during an imagined Nazi invasion of Britain during the Second World War. An German patrol comes to the valley for mysterious reasons, and ends up staying there. Meanwhile, the husbands of the women of the valley have gone missing, leaving in the night soon after the first wave of invasion. Whilst worrying about their husbands, Sarah and her neighbours must swallow the unsavoury fact that if they want to keep their farms running during their husbands' absence, they will need to bury the hatchet when it comes to dealing with the occupying patrol.

I think the reason this book didn't really click with me was that such a large proportion of it describes the women's rural labours and the landscape - this is not a book of action. Also, the human relationships on which the whole plot hinges didn't ring true. The old creative-writing adage of 'show not tell' may be cliched but I felt as if Sheers would have done better in applying it more meticulously. Instead of letting the plot, character formation and dialogue speak for themselves, at times I felt as if I were being lectured; it felt a bit contrived and 'try-hard' at times. For me, it certainly lacked the spark of Sheers' poetry.

However, the film of Resistance is soon to be released, and despite it being my crappy holiday read, I can't deny that Sheers has achieved the dream of many people - his first novel has been turned into a film, and he will quite possibly make megabucks, despite the fact to me Resistance was disapointingly lack-lustre.

Three +Three Project

I've got a new project on with artist Rosanne Jedly (see her very cool website at http://www.rosannejedly.com/), in which we inspire each other with our poems/paintings to create new works.

The idea is that eventually this will be published in a little pamphlet, with the paintings and poems next to each other and interweaving. This isn't about creating photoetry (haven't seen an example that works yet) or illustrating a set of poems; it's more about a dialogue between two artists working in different media.

Each piece will work on its own, but our intention is to inspire each other to create something that we might not otherwise have thought of.

The project is called Three + Three, and the intention is that we each select three pieces of work from the other's repertoire and create something new inspired by each of these three pieces.

So far I have written three poems based on Rosanne's paintings (although I intend to write more and then choose the best). They are 'After Oil Seed Rape Field', 'Smoking Hot Woman' and 'Rap' and I'm really pleased with the work so far. Of my poems, Rosanne has so far selected 'The Satellite Rabbit' from a series of poems, and 'Echo Speaks', which you can see on ABCtales (http://www.abctales.com/story/arfellian/echo-speaks). However, she's at a bit of a disadvantage in this, as what with waiting for the layers of paint to dry etc. it takes her longer to complete a painting than it does for me to get a poem reasonably polished off!

Anyway, I've been working with Rosanne in her studio, and also putting together a basic MS Publisher document to give us an idea of how the pamphlet could work, and to check the quality of the photos we've been taking. So far though it seems to be coming on really well! I'm very excited about this :D

I'm loving writing from Rosanne's pictures as well. I've written from pictures a couple of times before but nothing on this scale, and the paintings are really magnificent. Rosanne uses layers and layers of colour built up to create amazing compositions, most often portraits of her 'spirit people'. I think this project has given a depth to my work and a focus that I haven't experienced before. So bring on more 'artistic dialogues'! I'm loving it!!

Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernieres

Just finished this 600-odd page book this evening, after perhaps two weeks since I first started reading it.

Birds Without Wings tells the various entertwining stories of the people of a small Anatolian town called Eskibahce in the Ottoman Empire, in the years preceding and following WWI and the Turkish War of Independence. In Eskibahce, as all over the empire, people of different religions and ethnic groups live side by side and mostly peacefully, uited by the Turkish language, and with friendships and intermarriage making these different groups inseparable in places. Each chapter reads almost like short story, detailing key events in the lives of the people of Eskibahce, including the games of the towns children, the unlikely friendship between the Orthodox Greek priest and the town's Imam, and more sinister events such as an attempted stoning and the exhumation of a corpse.

Alongside this, the tale of Mustafa Kemal, aka Ataturk, is interwoven, as the people of Eskibahce find themselves caught up in a world where the distinction between Turkish and Greek becomes seemingly more important and leads to all sorts of trouble. The story is told through multiple voices, including an omniscient 3rd person, and through several of the characters, both as they live the events of the book, and as they look back on them in later life.

I really loved this book. de Bernieres presents colourful, flawed but likeable characters, and I found the stories of life in Eskibahce charming and moving. I was gripped by the sense of inevitability brought in through the reflective passages and the inclusion of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's rise to power, and really wanted to find out what would happen to the characters.

The charming and often humourous exploits of Eskibahce were eventually replaced by sensitive but honest and horrific details of the events of the decade of war that the people of the Ottoman Empire faced in the early twentieth century. Some of the stuff included - in just enough detail to be shocking without being too horrible to read - was unimagineably awful, and opened my eyes to a side of fairly recent history that I had no idea about before reading this book.

I found that towards the end of the book the narrative of Ataturk's rise to power took over a bit. This was necessary to explain what would eventually happen to the Eskibahce characters, although I felt that it dominated a little bit too much and that, despite Bernieres' drawing in of the novel's characters in places, this section of the book could have done with a more human element, to bring it down to a human level and to make it a little less dry. I started to wish that I could read something else at this point, although the end of the book was worth the wait and I couldn't put it down until I had devoured every word.

An important aspect of the book that I haven't yet mentioned is de Bernieres' writing itself. I have never read him before but it strikes me that he writes extremely well. Characters are excellently drawn, humour and poignancy are both handled deftly and sensitively, and his choice of language is an absolute lexical feast. Despite using such rarified words as 'mommixity', 'foofaraw', and 'dunderpate', de Bernieres' prose remains highly readable, and even when I didn't know the exact dictionary definition of a particular word (particularly some Turkish terms), the language is handled so beautifully that the meaning is still clear and the words delicious. de Bernieres uses them sparingly, always using the perfect word for the occasion, whilst visibly revelling in such nuances of language. Beautifully written.

A really fantastic read. de Bernieres writes fantastically well and in Birds Without Wings has created a moving story about the highs and lows of being human in the face of adversity. A great book.

More Ruth Padel and some Louis de Bernieres

Read another two collections by Ruth Padel recently - Rembrandt Would Have Loved You and Fusewire. Rembrant was a lovely read. It was obviously an earlier collection and Padel's sensual style was a bit less developed but I still absolutely loved it, the love poems and use of the kind of scene you see in paintings by the Dutch Masters as an image was absolutely lovely. Fusewire is even earlier, and very politically-focused, particularly on conflict between Britain and Ireland. For this reason I didn't identify with it so much - I'm young enough that I haven't even been taught about the Troubles in school, let alone remember them - although I loved one poem in particular, 'Desire Paths of Sarajevo', which juxtaposes scenes of genocide and suffering with the comfort of love and the tenderness/violence of sex.

I recently bought Pascale Petit's 'The Treekeeper's Tale' and Carol Rumens' 'De Chirico's Threads' (I love De Chirico, the half-cartoon, half-sci-fi, surrealist style of his and the beautiful scenes of Hector and Andromache) and even though I am dying to tear into them I am holding off so that I finish Louis de Bernieres' Birds Without Wings, which I am absolutely adoring (any book that is compellingly readable but still contains the words 'mommixity' and 'foofaraw' is OK by me). L'Etranger is lying in a corner gathering dust. I am trying to forget to feel guilty about this.