Horsemanship for Health

When there is so much truly passionate fiction out there, it intrigues me that books like Fifty Shades of Grey are taken at all seriously. I wonder why people want to read the books, not for the story-lines surely? Perhaps they want to know what all the fuss is about? For that, they need read only the newspapers or watch the documentaries about the best-selling phenomenon.

Without a doubt the books have tapped into the zeitgeist. Yesterday, I was in my local hardware store buying an awl to dig out muck and small stones from horses’s hooves when I overheard this exchange between what looked like a daughter and her elderly mother.

  Daughter: You should have got them.

  Mother (distressed): I know I should have.

 Daughter (impatient): We could go back; they’ll be closing soon.

Mother (glancing over the door knobs): I should have got them there and then.

Daughter (smug): I’ve read all three.

Immediately I knew what they were talking about.  It was how they were talking that I found remarkable. Their tone was matter-of-fact. They needed to get the books because they were on offer; they might have been discussing a three for two deal on washing powder tablets rather than the latest in steamy fiction.

The books appeal not because they are steamy, but because they are cheap; you can pick up all three for less than a tenner at Asda. So, they are ideal easy entertainment. You get to read something titillating without feeling shameful and at the same time you get to know what everyone is talking about. Fifty Shades is the book equivalent of television shows like the X-Factor: fast, formulaic, fun. You can zip through them in a couple of days and be talking or texting or face-booking about them in the same week. I suspect that most people enjoy discussing the books more than they enjoy reading them.

What puzzles me is the level of attention the books have been given by the serious newspapers. When Primark sells out of a popular pair of jeans, it is not news, so why should it be news when a book sold along the same principles has massive appeal? Surely, it cannot be because of the ideas? If my encounter in the hardware store yesterday is anything to go by, most people have snapped up Fifty Shades because everyone else has. This impulse to follow the current trend is almost irresistible and unremarkable.

Some cultural commentators have claimed that the Fifty Shades craze indicates that Britons are becoming less uptight about sex. This is nonsense.  At work on a stable yard one rare sunny day last week I watched a woman hitch up her dress to tan her legs and settle down with her copy. Her manner was nonchalant. We acknowledged she was having her coffee break and left her to it.

Reading about other people having kinky sex is not an expression of your own sexuality. Talking about what you have read is not sexy. Curiosity about what other people get up to is one of the traits of being human. Everyone is interested in everyone else. Light a bonfire and throw on a few crackling sticks and invite people to sit beside it for almost free. Who could resist that invitation? Once you’ve got people in a big huddled group, feeling warm and cosy and safe, then you can tell them any old story. Fifty Shades is the opposite of thrilling. The spotlight of attention means it is  almost guaranteed risk-free. That is why it sells and sells and sells.

During my writing life I’ve been equally inspired by men writers as I have by women. Unlike some readers I’ve encountered, I don’t make a special case for female authors, by which I mean I don’t tend to seek out certain titles because they are by women. Maybe that makes me disloyal to the writing sisterhood.

I’m more interesting in good writing for its own sake. When I find a good writer, then I am loyal. Casting my eyes over my bookshelves I see, though, that I am biased. On my shelves there are more male writers than female. My favourite writers are male. Among them I count the Irish writer Colm Toibin, whose wonderful novel on Henry James, the Master I can read over and over again. William Fiennes is there too with the Snow Geese and the Music Room.

I love these writers for their clarity, their sensitivity, their subtlety and the sheer poetic beauty of their work. One year I met William Fiennes at Dartington and gushed in the signing queue that I found his prose ‘utterly sublime.’ He took the compliment graciously: ‘It was worth coming all the way down here just to hear that.’ I know from interviews that he works hard on his style so that when you read him there is not a ripple to disturb, not a single false note. What agonies, what discipline and sheer devotion it takes to write so effortlessly well. Writers of Colm Toibin’s and William Fiennes’s quality spoil it for everyone else. After spending time with them, I’m unable to read clumsy work.

What do I look for in style? The sentences must be smooth and clean. There must be no attempt to impress me or manipulate me. I cannot be seduced. I must above all be moved. I must feel something while reading that either makes me think in a new way or engages my sympathy so that I feel as close to the characters as I do to my own friends and family. If I read a novel or non-fiction piece set in another country, I must immediately want to go there. If I read a description of food, I must immediately want to eat it.  I want to fall in love.

Great style alone does not interest me. There are some brilliant stylists out there whose work just leaves me cold: Will Self, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan are all fantastic writers, but too knowing for me. If the author intrudes on the page, it puts me off. I need to be left alone with the narrative. I can’t bear having someone in the room with me telling me what to think. In this, I’m pretty conventional. That said, William Boyd does get a bit boisterous on the page sometimes, but I love it when he does. I’m usually smitten.

A friend remarked that I tended to adore music in a minor key. He’s right. I would choose Bach over Beethoven any day. This search for qualities of beauty and transcendence and luminosity continues throughout my appreciation of film and painting, sculpture and music. Hildegard of Bingen ‘s pure, soaring sequences have become part of the fabric of my inner life.

That’s not to say that all the work I admire feels the same. The brutality of the film Tyrannosaur was difficult to watch, but I loved it for its honesty and won’t ever forget seeing it. Likewise Roman Polanski’s the Pianist. The work I admire must feel like a whole piece. Toughness and violence I can deal with if it is essential to the narrative.  For this reason I can no longer watch soap operas or horror films.

Now I’m warming to my theme. Dangerous! I want to give this more thought and write about style again next week. Have a good weekend.

Next time there is a lull in the conversation, why not liven things up by asking people to name a woman philosopher? I wonder whose name would emerge?  I’m guessing that Iris Murdoch or Mary Warnock or both might appear on the list. While I have great respect for the ideas of these fine thinkers, the philosopher I wish to champion today is Mary Midgley.

I first encountered Mary Midgley while I was studying at Middlesex University. She came down from Newcastle University, where she taught for half a decade, and gave a talk on meaning, beauty and the nature of reality. She was in her eighties: a precise, snow-haired woman in a plain blue suit. She wore rings and gripped the lectern as she spoke in a clear tone in a wide-ranging talk that was not only cogent and powerful but vivid, illustrating her ideas in delightful associations that included roses, elephants, chimpanzees and dolphins.

Afterwards during questions, the philosopher laughed and parried with her interrogators. She did not seek to score points, but was thrilled that the audience were engaged and brave enough to try thinking hard for themselves. There was no trace of arrogance, almost a child-like sense of wonder. I’ve told you what I think, it’s your turn now, her beaming manner suggested as she listened patiently to comments from student philosophers, gently encouraging when someone came unstuck over a particularly tight knot of theory.  She is the kind of philosopher you want at your elbow (or on your desk) when you are trying to make sense of your own ethics or stance on genetics or science or psychology.

Mary Midgley has devoted her life to trying to put complicated ideas into some sort of sensible order. She has said that all her work is about ‘human nature’ and one of the pleasures of reading her is to follow her line of enquiry that asks: what is a human being and how do human beings look at themselves?

She believes that we are social beings and that our evolutionary success is because we have learned how to get along with each other and form civilisations. According to Midgley, we are first and foremost living beings with needs and desires and beliefs and attitudes. Her position on a purely genetic understanding of human natures is clear: ‘Genes are immortal only in the boring sense in which amoebae are: they reproduce by dividing, so they do not actually die. But then neither do they live, not in the full sense in which more complex organisms do. One crowded hour of glorious life as an individual is worth an age as a gene.’

One crowded hour. I love that image.

My fascination for women in astronomy started when I took a night course at Sidmouth Observatory. On the second week we were treated to a display from the planetarium and I shall not forget the wonder of seeing the ceiling of the lecture hall transformed into a glittering night sky. Only the red dot of the pointer roaming over the constellations, accompanying the lecturer’s presentation, and the whispered conversation of my student companions reminded me that I was still inside.

On cold clear nights we wrapped up in padded jackets and took the telescopes outside. Often a thick sea mist shrouded our celestial viewing, but that did not dampen the enthusiasm of the organisers, a group of women volunteers who had the gift of being able to look through clouds. These doughty women in their sixties handled the observatory’s hefty old telescopes with dexterity, working dials and levers and myriad buttons, keeping count in their heads of the mysterious order of the beautiful instruments.

The volunteers were proud of their ‘charges.’ One night I watched a stout woman shut down a telescope switch by switch with a fluent grace. Her face glowed as she came down the iron steps. She looked utterly at ease in the strange environment of the observatory with its shuttered domed roof, zodiac painted walls and emergency power lights. She caught me watching her:  ‘I do so love putting them to bed.’

I was stunned, not only because of her nonchalant competence, but a few moments earlier I had seen through the same now slumbering telescope the planet Jupiter and its four moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, gleaming like tiny seed pearls from a black satin sky.

Since then I’ve often thought that astronomy would be the most perfect job. It’s contained and yet expansive. You work both inside and outside and with intelligent colleagues. Astronomy has known parameters and follows a scientific method, but beyond the technology and the expertise, beyond the stellar photography there is the vast plateau of the unknown.

My pitiful qualifications ruled out any serious career options in science or anything else for that matter. I didn’t know how to study at school. I wasn’t settled enough and too many subjects overwhelmed me. I passed all my ten O levels, but would have preferred even then to specialise. Maths and Physics intrigued me, but I needed more time than most to get my head around their foreign language.

One of the joys of writing is that I can delve into disciplines that are closed to me professionally. The Beautiful Truth has two central women characters: Krystyna, who fights for the Polish resistance and becomes a history professor, and Catherine, a Cambridge astronomer.  The beauty and order of astronomy gives meaning and purpose to the shape of Catherine’s life, which on a personal level teeters on the brink of chaos.

Women and astronomy have a long association. In the early 19th century, American women astronomers were recruited at the Harvard Observatory because they had the patience to do the tedious work of computing data. They were also prepared to work for far less than men. The earliest woman astronomer is believed to be Hypatia of Alexandria, a mathematician, inventor and philosopher, who lived around the late fourth century. Brought up and educated by her father Theon, a renowned astronomer and philosopher, he wanted her to become an ideal daughter and human being.

Hypatia gave lectures in Alexandria, wrote books on mathematics and designed astronomical instruments. One of her pupils was Synesius of Cyrene, who became a high ranking Bishop. He sought her advice and wrote letters mentioning her.  Hypatia’s name is immortalised in the moon mountains between Mare Tranquillitatis and Mare Nectaris .

Next time I am out with my binoculars I must have a look.

I was among the crowds gathered along Sidmouth seafront to welcome home Olympic rider Mary King. People waved flags, blew horns, cheered and lifted their babies to get a good look at Devon’s very own member of Team GB as she danced down the High Street on her medal-winning horse Imperial Cavalier.

Mary King was radiant as she waved and smiled through her hero’s welcome. Imperial Cavalier, smooth as butterscotch, was understandably bouncy but not rattled by the noisy attention. His coat was so immaculate it appeared steam-ironed. He was unreal, a creature from a dream. I found myself longing to simply sit on him.

‘Mary, Mary,’ the kids were shouting as they ran to catch up with her. Their excitement at seeing her was contagious. People were reminiscing, sharing anecdotes from the Olympics and enjoying seeing in the flesh a part of Team GB’s success. The relaxed ease and sense of fun and festivity lasted even after Mary and her horse had completed their lap of honour and been granted the freedom of the town.

Mary is not a hero because she has represented her country at the Olympics and carried home well-deserved medals. What makes her a hero in my eyes is the fact that she is a woman over fifty who is in her prime. She has worked hard to achieve her dream of competing at the highest level. At fifty with her track record of wins it would be easy to look back over past successes and think: I’ve done enough, I can rest on my laurels, but her decision to push on, to give more is what elevates her and makes her performance extraordinary.

About a year before she began training for the Olympics, Mary King was working her horse at home when she fell and broke her neck. Many people might have viewed that as a sign that the London Olympics was out of reach but not Mary. The flame of a home Olympics was a beacon that spurred her on. That act of courage and determination alone makes her a hero.

During the Olympics there were mutters about riding being an elitist sport. Only the privileged surely could afford to reach those heights? But Mary doesn’t own her horse in the same way that a Formula One driver doesn’t own his car. She is sponsored and supported as are many other athletes. Training at her level means she has had to be resourceful. By her account, it has not always been an easy ride. In interviews, she has talked about her series of ‘unglamorous,’ low-paid jobs, including working as a cleaner.

Now many ordinary people are proud of her. She was gracious as she thanked her support team all of whom were beaming as they sailed in her wake. She seems like an ordinary mortal. I almost can’t believe this, but when I mentioned to one of my friends that I’d seen her in Sidmouth, he casually announced that he remembered her at school. We went to the Kings School in Ottery St. Mary. She was in the year above us and known then as Mary Thomson. He’d played her at badminton.

‘Very good she was, too.’

I can remember the moment I decided to be a writer. Sitting cross-legged on a dusty parquet floor in a school hall l looked up and saw a young, blonde woman with glinting cat-like eyes and thought: I like her earrings. Not exactly earth-shattering. But the young woman was Fay Weldon and she had given up her time to come into a Devon school and talk to us low-ranking second year pupils.

I don’t remember a word she said. I was in awe, but not intimidated. She made writing sound like fun. I’ve since met Fay Weldon and was able to tell her that she had inspired me. She had lit a spark by showing me it was possible to be young and female and live a writing life that could be enjoyable.  

‘I must have been just starting out then,’ she said and gave a cackling laugh, crinkling those famous eyes. ‘How wonderful!’

Fay Weldon gave me a sense of possibility, a place to aim for, an aspiration. It would take me years to work out what I wanted to say and how best to say it, but I knew that I could be a writer.

While I was in self-training I didn’t read many books about writing. I have the kind of mentality that wants to please and would have diligently read my tutor-authors and tried to put their advice into practice perhaps working against my own grain. I knew that I needed to work out what kind of writer I was and that took a lot of experimenting. For a while I was going to be a poet and then a short story writer, mostly because I was scared stiff of tackling a novel, but once I had started to research my first novel The Avalanche, about a pianist who commits a crime in his sleep, I knew I had found my natural home.

I adore research. I like the adventure of following ideas and leads and trying to piece them together. I would have enjoyed working as a detective, or at least the detectives in fiction or film. One of the best parts about writing The Avalanche was attending court cases at the Old Bailey and meeting the psychiatrist Dr. Peter Fenwick who generously allowed me access to papers at the Institute of Psychiatry and read parts of the manuscript. I like to include real people in my novels and gave him a cameo role. Blending fact and fiction is for me the way to keep things fresh and I think it lends authenticity to the work.

One book that I wish I had known about, though, is Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande, first published in 1934. I heard about this through a recommendation by Hilary Mantel whose advice was to read it and then do everything Brande suggested. Irresistible.

There is much wisdom concentrated in a book of less than 200 pages. Some of the book has dated but there are pieces that remain timeless such as Brande’s insistence that honesty is the source of originality. Reading her is a bit like having your strict aunt or godmother round for tea. I love her slightly bossy tone and the way she lets you get away with nothing.

‘If you can discover what you are like, if you can discover what you truly believe about most of the major matters of life, you will be able to write a story which is honest and original and unique. But those are very large ‘ifs,’ and it takes hard digging to get at the roots of one’s own convictions.’

Hard digging indeed.

I didn’t know that meeting Krystyna would be so momentous. At first I was wary of this strange Polish woman with her waist-length faded blonde hair, smoky dark glasses and frayed yellow coat. When I noticed her marching across the Planty I immediately made plans to leave the bench and find somewhere else for my sorrow. But something made me pause and wait for her.

Maybe it was curiosity. I was certainly in need of distraction. Maybe it was exhaustion. I hadn’t slept much the night before and all I could think about was leaving. I had an afternoon to fill and then, to my relief, I would be going home. Krystyna gave the impression that she had all the time in the world. ‘What a pity, you can’t stay, but never mind we can still talk.’ That was the important thing: conversation, the kind that goes beyond courtesy. The kind that takes place in a concentrated space of time. A true connection.

She inspired me because in that moment she saw the value of exploring what we might have in common. I was far too preoccupied to care. Wrapped in my own concerns, I just wanted her to vanish. It makes me wonder now how many other times I’ve made quick exits to avoid what I think is going to be inconvenient or embarrassing. I’m not saying that every time I’ve been wrong –  quite sensibly I don’t wish to connect with every stranger – but I’m sure there is much I’ve missed along the way. Of course not every bag lady turns out to be a fallen aristocrat. 

Krystyna’s act of generosity inspired a novel. She has no idea of this. When we met in Poland ten years ago she was probably in her late seventies and it is quite likely that she has since died. Do I take more of an interest in people now as a result of meeting her? The honest answer is: no. I’m still looking at the world through my own lens and that is mostly necessary. Empathy for all would be pointless and exhausting. Not long after I returned from Krakow, I went to a talk about meaning and time given by the philosopher and writer Jonathan Ree. It was his view that the greatest gift any human being can give to another is the gift of time. I remember how he opened his hands to illustrate the point and I also remember a subsequent meeting at his cramped university office when he listened to me without interruption.

When my first afternoon in Krakow ended I tried to pay for the coffee and ice cream I’d shared with Krystyna. She refused. She also waved away the spare zloty from my purse and seemed baffled at my protest that I no longer needed the currency.

Her smile was gracious. ‘Maybe you will come back.’

The close of the Olympics has made me wonder about the nature of inspiration. It is easy to see how the supremely fit superstars of the track and field can inspire a new generation. I salute their courage and tenacity. I’m indebted, though, to a half-blind woman in Poland who started me on what was to be a life-changing journey.

A few years ago in Krakow, I met a woman on a park bench. I was breaking my heart over yet another unsuitable man. The woman’s name was Krystyna. She listened while I sobbed incoherently and after my self-indulgent outpouring told me her own story.

While she talked we wandered around Krakow, crossing the wide market square with its distinctive cloth hall lined with tourist stalls offering amber, wood carvings and toys; we passed jewel-like churches, prayer boards fluttering in the breeze, eventually ending up down a cool cobbled street where we stopped for coffee and ice cream. Krystyna had lost her home during the war. A manor on the outskirts of Warsaw, the house had been taken by the Germans and after the war claimed by nuns. She had no papers to prove ownership and no means to reclaim the property.

She spoke of facing near starvation during the war, of living with perpetual fear, of falling in love after the war, of daring to feel again, of music and of literature. Her voice was girlish as she remembered joyous times.

Her husband had not been faithful to her, but she had loved him and that was what had mattered most to her: that she had loved with all her being. He had died. Now she was alone, her sight was failing, and she lived in a grim block of flats used by drug-addicted prostitutes and their clients. What struck me about Krystyna was her intelligence: she was fluent in at least half a dozen languages, her resourcefulness: she spent her days in the park and in coffee shops to avoid time in the flat, and her courage: she acknowledged her losses with humour, irony and grace. That afternoon my own heartache lifted. I returned to London feeling renewed and hopeful.

I wrote to Krystyna, using large font, but never received a reply. Engrossed in my philosophy studies, I completed my degree, started teaching and finished a book I had begun in Africa. Later, I moved to Devon. My novel set in Zambia was published and I wrote another set in Vienna. During a meeting with my editor and agent to talk about the next project, they asked for a new place, preferably a city, somewhere with atmosphere, history, romance.

‘Krakow,’ I ventured. ‘I’ve always wanted to do a book set in Krakow.’ Now I realise how naive I was to think that I could just ‘do’ a book about Poland, for as soon as I started seriously reading and researching I knew that I would have to face head on the Polish experience of the Second World War.

Nearly three years later I had enough material for five books. For authenticity, I had tried to use first-person accounts of the occupation and resistance. I needed, though, a character strong enough to carry it all. Krystyna emerged. Not the Krystyna I had met on the park bench, but a character who had something of Krystyna’s strength, resourcefulness and imagination.

Each novel I’ve written has demanded more of me than I think I can give. Krystyna’s spirit kept me going through what was a tough write. I moved home three times during the writing of The Beautiful Truth and didn’t unpack until I’d finished my third draft.

Here, I’m going to writing more about how I work, about ways of looking at writing, about ideas and people who inspire. Each week or so I will choose a theme and write a short, but thoughtful essay. I do hope that you will join me and comments are welcome along the way.