The break-up

This was written for a cycling short story competition. Sadly pipped at the post but the theme was The Bike and it had to be done in no more than 1,000 words.


The break-up

Time was already against him as he unlocked the garage door and stepped into the gloom to pull his bike out from the tangle of wheels and pedals belonging to his children's brightly coloured smaller versions of his own mud covered hybrid.

The bike has been a bargain at just £104 on eBay, although he had been forced to drive from South East London to Colchester one Thursday evening to get it after winning the auction. A small but solidly built man had opened the door and shown him into the lounge where a bike resembling the small thumbnail he had seen on the web stood waiting leaning against the stairs.

"I got it a year ago for £300 expecting to get into cycling. I tried it but didn't like it. Most of it's brand new," he said as he wheeled the bike towards the door.

"Oh just one thing," he said once the bike was well clear of his house, "you might want to have a look at the back brakes. They might not be safe."

Then the door was closed and the two of them were alone. It was a dark autumnal night and despite not being able to see most of the finer details he couldn't take his eyes off the bike.

Before this investment he had been using a mountain bike purchased for £15 in cash at Deptford market. That bike had ended up being confined to three working gears with a tendency for the chain to slip going uphill when the slightest pressure was exerted on the pedals. It could have been fixed but it could never be justified on the grounds of throwing good money after what had been such a dodgy choice of two wheels.

That left him with a restricted budget and the internet. Surfing night after night hoping that he could stumble across a bargain Bianchi or a mis-labelled and under bidded on Specialized it became clear there were many others doing the same.

His final choice, a Trek 7100X hybrid, had the gears, the brand name brakes and components and looked the part. A combination of blue and silver he could already see himself gliding along London streets as he headed too and from work.

It was love at first ride and compared to the mountain bike the pace was higher and the ride was smoother. Slipping into the Lycra and riding to work had never felt so enjoyable.

But coming back from work one day to pick up the bike at Forest Hill station revealed a buckled wheel as a result of a van reversing into the bike shelter adding to problems he had already experienced with the brakes that he had been warned about.

He had to pay the bike shop to fix the wheel and the brakes and despite misgivings about the experience he tried to get back onto the saddle and rekindle that love affair. A few months later he happened by pure chance to cycle into the riots in Peckham High Street, as the masked youths swarmed across the road, they knocked again the bike and the back wheel buckled again. The costs of fixing the bike mounted up past the amount it had cost to get in the first place.

Squeaks, bottom brackets wearing out and chains slipping on the nasty home climb up Shooters Hill started to undermine the riding to work experience. As he was over taken by thinner, lighter road bikes with riders resplendent in team jerseys, enjoying clip in pedals and smooth rides he began to dream of buying a better bike.

It was now just a question of striking when the sales were at their height and as he pedalled along he could picture himself cutting an impressive figure on a lighter bike that would make him whizz to work in record time.

Pulling the Trek out of the garage was something that he now did with a heavy heart. The bike had not done anything wrong, had only let him down due to accidental damage, but now he had dreams of being a better rider and this bike could not take him there.

Soon he knew he would be closing the garage door on the bike for the last time.

"It's not you. It's me. I've changed and I'm sorry but I don't want the same things anymore."

A bit of creativity

I have been doing a bit of creative writing recently when the urge hits. I'm not a vain person - far from it, I have self esteem issues if anything - but thought that this blog would be a good place to post them.

So for those that stumble across the next couple of posts let me apologise in advance for what my seem to be self indulgence. It's just this is a good place for me to store things.

Comments

I've not really been blogging much since milo was born. But spam comments keep coming and beeping in the inbox. The best thing seems to be to switch comments off so that's what's going to happen for the time being.

book review: Kiera's Quest by Kristy Brown

Young adult fiction has to do a couple of things to work well. It needs to grab you from the off and it needs to maintain a pace until the end.

This does both as a story of parallel universes unfolds with evil trying to destroy good. Only Kiera can save the day but she knows very little about witch queen's and orphaned princes and has to get up to speed quickly.

As she discovers what's going on her troubled life is revealed and you feel that she can barely cope with the day-to-day let alone succeding with a quest to save a world from evil.

The chapters fly by with the pace maintained and you are told enough to understand but there are plenty of questions still left unanswered, which will be no doubt answered in subsequent books.

The action plays out around a core of four friends that find that one of their number Kiera suddenly starts acting strangely and winds up talking to a doll she believes is a prince that can communicate with her. She suffers taunts and fights at school as she tries to work out who she can trust as she tries to confide in friends the quest she has set out on.

The idea of trust is the main theme I will take away from this book. In some senses it is a coming of age tale with a trouble teenager finding out that trusting people can be a real challenge. Just as you think you know who is on your side and a friend the goal posts move and you wind up even more vulnerable than before.

I'm not going to reveal much of the story because that would spoil things plus this is very much a story in progress so working out of evil has really been vanquished is a bit of a case of...to be continued.

An enjoyable read that grips you from the off and keeps that pace going until the end. Good characterisation and a strong story set this up as being the start of a solid series.

book review: Finding Soutbek by Karen Jennings

Occassionally you will see children interviewed for some lifestyle programme and they are asked what their favourite subject is. When asked about history sadly some will reply that it's 'boring' or 'just about old kings and dates'. Those statements will be countered by that old quote about not knowing history and allowing horrible things to be repeated.

But history can also be a powerful force providing identity, pride and even hope to people that are struggling to find much good in their current situation but find solace and inspiration from the past. That is one of the themes Jennings is exploring here with the town of Soutbek struggling to find a place on the South African map. Ignored, despite a fire and flood that have devastated half the town, it's a History of the town that provides some hope. It describes the adventurers that first discovered the town and as the book becomes popular the tourism and national interest provides a glimpse into a different future for Soutbek.

Along with looking at the importance of history there is also a strong investigation of poverty and wealth and the condequences for those that find themselves on the dividing line of those two states. The mayor and co-author of the history book are trying to put the town on the map but Soutbek risks division and segregation once the upper town is destroyed in a fire and the inhabitants have to come down to the lower town.

As those from the destroyed homes camp out in the fish factory by the sea and start to litter the town with the smells and sites of poverty any dream of it becoming a tourist destination are smashed.

At the centre of it all is the mayor Pieter who has risen to a position of wealth and influence after a career selling stolen goods accompanied with a determination not to remain in poverty.

He loses sight of what really matters - love and family - and as it all comes tumbling down is left to realise that the family he cared so much for in terms of providing status and wealth, were not particularly interested in either.

This is a slow building story, interspersing the present with the past of the memoirs of Soutbek's founders, but the idea that the town was founded in a spirit of openness and love becomes a bitter irony as the upper and lower town becomes segregated. Bearing in mind this is set in South Africa and Pieter is the first black mayor, there is a great sadness that the have and have-nots have emerged again.

A powerful book that does make you dwell on the idea of your own response and obligation to others. It also underlines the truth that money does not equal happiness.

book review: Walks in the Wheatfield by Richard Jefferies

One of the numerous attractions of reading is the way that a book can transport you to a different world and give you a mental break from the day to day routine of a commute.

This book describes a world completely alien to me as a city dweller. The ways of the country are things I know little about and this is not only a glimpse into a landscape of wheat fields and rabbit burrows but also of the past.

The narrator tells simple stories about his development as a countryside expert in shooting and land management and so you are taken into a world where a day is quite happily spent hunting birds, clearing out rabbit burrows for a neighbouring farmer or simply valuing the importance of wheat.

Not all of the story is easy to follow and it's not always green and pleasant in the countryside, but in terms of transporting you away for a few hours it does the job perfectly.

In some ways it made me think more about the countryside and the jobs undertaken by those that live there alongside the fields, trees and animals. Watching Countryfile or occasionally dipping into the Archers does not deliver quite the same experience.

Along with it being a hymn to the beauty of the countryside this also acts as a requiem for a lost age. Pre-war shooting birds was as far as it went but before long those same farmers would have to take to the trenches and the countryside described here would change even further because of mechanisation.

See this book for what it is: an almost perfect escape into an idyllic past balanced with real life creeping in at the edges.

book review: The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas

What holds most crime books together is the personality of the detective leading the hunt for the killer. Think Morse, Holmes or Maigret and you get the picture.

Here you are introduced to the eccentric and distracted jean-Baptiste Adamsberg who seems to ignore most of the usual conventions of detective work strolling around and in a Colombo type way getting under the skin of those he feels are involved in the crime.

The crime in question here takes time to build with objects found in Paris in the middle of a chalk circle. As the circles become something of a cause celebre it goes from being something strange to something much more sinister once a woman is found in a circle with her throat cut.

From that point on the tension mounts as the police look to crack the case. But at the heart of it causing a fair amount of frustration is the gentle Adamsberg who takes his time before fingering the culprit based on a series of observations and a wonderful insight into human character and motivation.

The real measure of if a thriller with a recurring character has grabbed you is if you would answer in the positive to the opportunity to reading more. In this case I would although crime is a genre that you tend to dip in and out of and sometimes you want the detective in charge to feel some of the tension.

In many ways what makes this more of a rounded book is not just the style, the characters but the distinctive French voices coming through. Translated by Sian Reynolds from the French there are mentions of regional attributes that Adamsberg brings that add to his profile.

Of course Paris itself also plays a role here providing a background of rain washed cobbled streets to the circles and the murder.

A good read and the name Adamsberg may well appear again on this blog.

some oldies

before I manage to finish something new i'm going to try to get round to posting some of the reviews of books i finished a while ago but never got round to sharing thoughts about. I have at least ten of these so hope to get those up over the course of the next couple of weeks to at least provide something 'fresh' to look at.

hello again

apologies for the absence but having another child has rather changed my reading routine. In some ways it's not a lack of sleep but just the change of having another little life in the house. This time around, knowing it's going to be the third and final time, has had more of an emotional impact than I expected. Each moment is precious and even when you are not with the little chap your mind wanders and reading has been difficult to non-existent.

Apologies for that and hopefully things will get back on a more even keel because I have a handful of books people have been kind enough to send that I really must review soon.

From the Mouth...

This is late in the day but the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (IFFP) was awarded to Blooms of Darkness, which I reviewed recently.

Personally I would have liked to seen the Sjon win or New Finnish Grammar with Blooms of Darkness a bit of a Marmite book for me. I guess you either liked it or didn't but the judges must have done.

Having been a member of the Shadow IFFP prize, which was a real honour, it was interesting to have a debate and see which way we came down on our own choice of winner.

The choice of the panel, which included excellent must-follow bloggers, was From the mouth of the whale by Sjon.



The chair of the Shadow IPPF Stu over at Winston's Dad, summed up the reasons for that book being chosen

"We all liked and some of us loved this book no one really had a bad word about it ,I think from when ever any one of us judges read it we feel for it as a book and Sjon’s voice .We felt Sjon had captured through Jonas eyes the 17th century Iceland so well ,this was helped by Victoria's translation that through its usage of older languages and grammar gave it a feel of a book that had just been unearthed not a modern book .A worthy winner for the fist  shadow IFFP winner 2012."

book review: The Great Fire of London by Peter Ackroyd

Having read some Peter Ackroyd before the technique of overlapping history in different parts of London is not something unfamiliar.

But this was the first time he tried it in his debut novel and this sets up what he later on perfected as a style that would become synonymous with him. A few years ago in his London series on television he explained the ley lines and the way that London seems to hold history like a sponge.

What happened in some parts of the City hundreds of years ago still echoes today and in Ackroyd's world has the power to influence the present.

A film maker plans to make a modern day take on Little Dorrit and starts hunting round the old site of the Marshalsea prison. Other characters - often as bizarre as those that populated Dicken's books - are introduced and a cocktail of doom is mixed slowly as the filming begins.

Although Little Dorrit is a work of fiction there is a passage where a professor with a reputation for Dickens explains that it was a method of portraying reality and the conditions and world that are described in that novel - with the great poverty and the grimness of the debtors prison - existed for real.

Remembering that point is key to the story because in some ways the picture becomes clouded with one woman going to seance and having Little Dorrit visit her. Quite how a fictional character could speak from the dead is a point that blurs the edges.

But blurring the edges is what Ackroyd likes doing and he is control here not just of choosing which parts of the Little Dorrit story to use, much like the film maker in the story, but also of which areas of London will act as the backdrop.

London is a character here with its areas of poverty and neglect coming through into the story as areas that spawn the modern day extreme characters that Dickens would have used. There is Little Arthur who is not quite as likeable as Little Dorrit with his child killing history and Pally his friend who comes across as a simpleton but with a darker side.

As you would expect in a City of extremes along side these people live the normalish as well as the younf bright things that dream of dancing and making films where some of the poor people will make great background extras.

It works as a story but perhaps bringing in the other great London event in the shape of a modern versuion of the Great Fire is slightly unnecessary. It's covered in a couple of paragraphs and feels like it needed more room to breathe as an idea on its own. Otherwise a good read and a reminder that London isn a city of myths and legends where the past touches the future.

book review: From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjon

This starts with a biblical come fairy story and the magical imagery of angels, demons and the supernatural stay throughout. Set in sometime in the 1600s in Iceland it follows the story of naturalist and inquisitive minded Jónas Pálmason the Learned who it turns out has ended up being exiled to an island for his knowledge.

As he recounts what happened to him and why he is on the island you encounter a mind alive to only interesting things and a man who has become a victim of politics and powerful Icelandic families looking to counter his particular line in poetry, naturalism and healing powers.

Interspersed throughout the text are entries from the notebooks that Jónas makes to track the things he sees around him with comments about animals and plants. His experiences - a particularly lively spot of ghost hunting - and his determination to share it land him on the wrong side of those with vested interests in keeping some things mysterious.

Those that trade in narwhal horns describing them as unicorn horns are just some of the people who would fear the self-taught naturalist.

Exiled on the rock having vivid dreams Jónas is not allowed to leave unless someone offers him passage on a boat. This finally happens and he is taken to Copenhagen where he meets a like-minded professor who strikes up a friendship with the old man and then does what he can to release him.

But he remains on the rock mourning a dead wife and those of his children that have died and the imagery becomes even more vivid. Passages where he swims to the bottom of the sea to chat with dead sailors are some of the most memorable and had cinematic descriptive qualities.

There is as much said as not said with this story which is describing a genuine world where knowledge could be a dangerous commodity. Strange self-made religious ceremonies and absolute beliefs in sea monsters and unicorns are views held by many. The problem for Jónas is that pricking those bubbles is a dangerous thing to do.

But you can't help but end up liking the old man. He allows you to join him in his strange world where the real, imaginary and mystical merge and it creates a story that is going to linger long in the memory.

Some readers might find the style a bit of an issue, particularly the styart, but this book is well worth persevering with and rewards those that do.

book review: The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco

You get to the end of this book and its not until you read the bits and pieces that are usually things you skip that you realise the sheer scale of the ambition.

On one level the story is about the nature of conspiracy and how easy it is to invent, embellish and sell to various secret services a lie to further political or personal ends. But on another level it is an insight into what can make someone spend their life hating a section of society and how that hatred can drive them to extreme acts.

The book is written as a series of diary entries by Captain Simone Simonini, a man who has become so well versed at lying he struggles to remember the truth about himself. As he works through his life story you discover a tale of someone that was taught from birth to hate the Jews and distrust and despise those things that he did not understand.

As a result an Antisemitism mingles at moments with other causes, including a fairly regular dig at the Free Masons. But the main character, who is a forger of wills for his day job and an expert at delivering aged documents to help whatever cause he believes in and will reward him, is someone that you don not like. There is little to admire in a man that is so full of hate combined with ignorance imparted to him by his grandfather. Despite moving from Italy to Paris the man continues to see life through a filtered lens that means even when friendships could be cultivated with Jews he snubs that possibility out.

The title of the book comes from the masterpiece conspiracy put together by Simonini where he describes a meeting of Jewish leaders in a cemetery where they plot to take over the world. Even those he tries to pedal the document to can see through the forgery but that doesn't stop it being plagiarised and becoming part of the cultural background of the late 19th century world that Simonini moves in.

He is prepared to kill, lie and steal to get what he wants and even in the time period the story is set against he sees some success for his efforts. The Dreyfus Affair, where a Jewish officer was wrongly accused of pasisng military secrets to the Germans, is a case where proof is lacking but antisemitism manages to imprison an innocent man.

But of course it is what will happen much later with the lies described as fact in the Prague Cemetery document that will sow such hatred in the 20th century.

This is a very ambitious book that covers a fair amount of ground. In parts it seemed to become bogged down and the diary style was sometimes a weakness in that it provided mainly a one-sided view of events.

You are left thinking about the scale of the deception at the conclusion of the book but a bit shaved off would have got the reader more quickly to that moment.

Independent Foreign Fiction prize shortlist

Over the past few weeks I've been reading a selection of books that were longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Along with other bloggers we assembl;ed a shadow jury that would come up with a shortlist of six.

The final list we came up with was revealed by most of my fellow bloggers yesterday ahead of the announcement this morning of the official shortlist.

There are differences, as you would hope there would be with different readers and opinions being expressed, and some of the books that made the official cut were not as popular with us as they clearly were with the other official panel.

As with these things there is always debate about choices and the merits of the individual works. Usually I'm just watching from the sidelines but it has been a priviledge running along in parallel with the process.

Here is the shadow IFFP jury shortlist:

Seven Houses in France by Bernardo Atxaga (translated by Margaret Jull Costa)
The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco (Richard Dixon)
Parallel Stories by Péter Nádas (Imre Goldstein)
Scenes From Village Life by Amos Oz (Nicholas de Lange)
Next World Novella by Matthias Politycki (Anthea Bell)
From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjón (Victoria Cribb)



Here is the official IFFP shortlist:

Blooms of Darkness by Aharon Appelfeld (Translated by Jeffrey M. Green)
The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco (Richard Dixon)
Alice by Judith Hermann (Margaret Bettauer Dembo)
New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani (Judith Landry)
From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjón (Victoria Cribb)
Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke (Cindy Carter)

Please read comments made by the other bloggers taking part in the shadow jury. They have read much more widely than me and have some very interesting views on the shortlist selections:

Winston's Dad

Tony's Reading list

RobAroundBooks

book review: The Names by Don DeLillo

Language, specifically the names of things, is a theme from all angles in this book which manages to unsettle the reader until the last word.

In a nutshell the story follows an American former journalist, now risk analyst, who is living in Greece. James is separated from his wife but they start the story in close proximity working at an architectural dig on a nearby island. The dig is looked after by Owen Brademas a figure who is central to the plot although rarely takes centre stage.

Language comes into the tale straight away because it is a barrier. James is learning Greek but ends up telling lies to the doorman in his building because he doesn't know the right words to describe what he is really doing.

Likewise the communication breakdown in his marriage is exacerbated by his habit in the past of listing his faults and then reciting some of them in strange voices.

What words stand for is something that obsesses Owen and starts to run off on James and then in turn on his film making friend who hears of a cult that kills people that are named in the locations they are murdered. For instance Maud Kolo in Milton Keynes. For a while I thought that the main character James was destined to be dragged somewhere that matched his initials and killed but you come to understand he is more of an observer.

He is trying to read the language, both written and in signs and body language, and come to conclusions rather than becoming the story himself.

As a result he is in an ideal position to watch the ex-pat community, breeze through Greece, Turkey, India and beyond as he gathers risk data and even meet and talk to the cult about their activities.

The book is not always easy to get through and there were times you felt that the hunt for the cult was one that might not be worth the effort. As James heads for India and collects more stories of random deaths you start to suspect that there is no great mystery behind it after all.

Perhaps that is the real lasting impression here, that you can look for meanings too hard in things and sometimes language and words can not really be used to justify base acts of brutality.