Confessional Cities

20th October

In Waterstone’s sun filled room over Manchester’s Deansgate, Michѐle Roberts and Amanda Craig had a genuine conversation before their audience on 20 October: alternating, passionate and revelatory. Taking it in turns to speak and read, and converse again, they rambled through London’s Strand, the importance of Gaskell, true stories and the reason we read.

It’s clear that both women have passions in common. Aside from the stellar literary record boasted by each, they shared views on the richness of the city, the importance of narrative and a certain cocked ear that comes with being not quite native to their country. Roberts is half French, as her readers will know, and Craig grew up in Italy.

Both women write from a passion for real, personal narratives sometimes drawn from the people around them. Given Amanda Craig’s background in journalism perhaps this should not be a surprise, and it helps to explain the authenticity of the five principal characters in her new novel “Hearts and Minds”. The novel is about the lives of those new to London – those from other countries who are the au pairs, cleaners, waitresses, sex workers, taxi drivers that the city’s other residents lean on every day. The raw realism in the novel is built on Craig’s research. Each of her principal characters is drawn from the stories that Craig sought from others: the young Eastern European women that were candidates to help her look after her children during a period of illness when she could not do so alone, and two women “clearly on the game” at King’s Cross who offered her their stories and many more. Craig’s readers appreciate the honesty in these narratives: one audience member’s question drew Craig to talk about her sense of connection and responsibility to her characters and the people behind them. Writing some of their stories, she said, had been harrowing.

Roberts, too, talked about the importance of other people’s stories. She spoke about her long-held habit of taking walks through cities. Dressed in an oversized Irish tweed men’s coat and thick soled boots, Roberts has trod the streets of London, finding surprising urban narratives on the city’s street corners. It’s like magic, she says. People are yearning to tell you what has happened to them. This phenomenon isn’t limited to the street, either. Norwich taxi drivers revealed their secrets to Roberts week after week as she travelled between her university job and the train station – so much so that Roberts half joked about the parallels between the taxi and the confessional (the wire screen, the velvet curtain...).

It wasn’t just today’s inhabitants whose stories found Roberts, like the high, disorientated Eastern European girl that “cannoned” into Roberts as she passed a doorway on a busy street in Stoke Newington. (Here, incidentally, is where “Hearts and Minds” and “Mud” overlap: both contain a story about a young Eastern European prostitute rammed into a violent life. It wasn’t just Craig and Roberts that were in conversation, Roberts pointed out. Their books were too.) Ghosts, the two women also agreed, walked. For Roberts, Boswell and Johnson still stride London’s Strand, as they do in one of the short stories in “Mud”. And for Craig, Elizabeth Gaskell’s presence is still palpable on the streets of Manchester.

In their books and their conversation, the city is a powerful place: Craig talked about the transformative power of London and the layers of narrative it holds. It changes people, just as people are changed by stories. Asking his teacher at school what a story actually was, Craig’s son was told that it was when something happens to someone so that they are changed. For both women, stories were what happened to people in real life. They were, of course, what happened to characters but also to the readers that follow them. If not improved by what they read, perhaps, they said, people were richer for it, more thoughtful as a result.

by Kathryn Pallant

Kathryn is currently a full time novelist, working towards her MA in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. She blogs as “litgirl” on WordPress.

The Universe, and Everything in It: Patricia Duncker and Barbara Trapido

Waterstones, 16th October.

On the bus to Manchester I was reading Lavinia Greenlaw’s The Importance of Music to Girls. I was struck by the line “This kind of dancing was like gambling for matchsticks rather than money. It had no charge and I felt no flight or spring or joy...”. The description is of the country dancing she learned at school but it could be applied to so much of life. The concept of “gambling for matchsticks rather than money”, of merely going through the motions, is one that fits rather neatly to so much of contemporary literature which can so often be all intellectual workout with no pep or sparkle.

It is a description that could not be applied to Duncker and Trapido, who were introduced last week as two of Britain’s best, and then later, two of Britain’s most intriguing, women novelists. The definition is misleading because the majority of Britain’s best and most intriguing novelists currently are women. Nicola Barker, A.S. Byatt, Ali Smith, Shena Mackay, Sarah Salway, Elizabeth Baines, Hilary Mantel, and, of course, Patricia Duncker and Barbara Trapido, are just a few examples among many. When these novelists write they are certainly not playing with matchsticks, and when we buy their books we are not gambling with our money. (Blimey! That almost sounds clever, doesn’t it?)

When I first read through the Manchester Literature Festival program this was the first event I circled with red biro, marking it as a must-see. Its taking place on Saturday evening meant it became the perfect start to a holiday; the now annual week away from work so I can make the most of the Literature Festival. I was not disappointed. Especially as being a volunteer, writing this review, turning up early meant I got to chat briefly to Patricia Duncker before the reading. We talked about, amongst other things, writing, squid, and Sylvester Stalone’s portrayal of Judge Dredd.

A disparate mix, but not an unfitting one because both Duncker and Trapido write books that are chock full of things, knowledge. They are novelists who are both interesting and interested. Who write about the world instead of preaching to it.

Duncker read from The Strange Case of the Composer and his Judge. It is a dark tale of suicide cults, rationalism, faith, work, and ominous seeming movements in deep space. It is a novel of the universe, and everything in it. Duncker is excited by the concept of “one man’s faith being another man’s horror” and her novel investigates this idea.

Barbara Trapido read from Sex & Stravinsky, a whirling pirouette through several countries and a cacophony of family ties. It is a book of many and various characters; in the readings we got to see a young boy whose life is at the whims of South African politics and a wonderfully convincing teenage girl full of rage for her mother and her Portmerion tableware.

What was especially interesting for the audience was our learning by what incredibly different routes the two authors create their work. In the question and answer part of the event we learnt how Duncker starts with a very definite plotline and researches meticulously, going to watch people at their workplace, while Trapido can find herself at four in the morning stomping around her room acting out parts of her novel-in-progress and how she finds her characters “ways of trying yourself out in different roles.”

However different the methods of production though, the novels that are the end product are both equally brilliant and the readings from them fascinating, fun, and the perfect advert for both the writers' novels and the rest of the Manchester Literature Festival. As Duncker herself said while discussing her own reading habits “if I don’t want to turn the page, I don’t want to read the book.” This is a sentiment that was shared by all those gathered.

After an hour or so of great writing, in a room that I didn’t even know existed, tucked up behind the café on the top floor of Waterstone's, the audience applauded the writers one last time and headed toward the pile of books and the queue to get them signed.

Ten minutes later, I was back on Deansgate, amongst the sirens and the music that had gently drifted up to us as we listened to the readings, my bag two books heavier and my wallet slightly lighter, surrounded by the universe, and everything in it.

by Benjamin Judge

Benjamin Judge is a sort-of writer whose blog Who The Fudge Is Benjamin Judge? Has was shortlisted for two awards at this years Manchester Blog Awards. He also read from his one flamingo against the world novel at this year's Is There A Novelist In The House?