Copy that, ego
who prides himself on being a realist, is involved. He is a monster, but Allende is not blind to his charisma, and the relationship between him and Violeta will take a very long time to be broken. The narrative is full of incident, variety and life, not always convincing.
As I say, Violeta is full of life, a great sweeping story like a river in spate. It makes for enjoyable and undemanding reading. This is its strength. I can’t imagine readers turning it aside because they are bored. For English-language readers, it is agreeably exotic. There is a prosaic realism in the chronicle, happily without any tiresome Latin American “magic”.
Yet its weakness as a novel is equally evident. I use the word “chronicle” advisedly. This is what we are offered, one damn thing after another. What is missing is the dramatic. Everything is told in retrospect. Even the most important scenes are related from memory, often distant memory, with little if any sense of the immediate. It also seems that, in order to travel from one pandemic to another, over a span of a hundred years, credibility is sacrificed. I can’t quite believe in a narrator a hundred years old.
What one misses is the immediate and dramatic big scene. The common command of creative writing schools – “show, don’t tell” – is often tiresome, the word “narrative” having its root in telling. Even so, we could do with more showing, less telling here. Perhaps this is why
Violeta herself is never quite a convincing or indeed interesting character, and her relationship with Julian, especially, is never brought convincingly to life. of fashion, food and furniture and the political overtones.
Amongst the chaos of Swinging London is Barbara, a trainee nurse from Grenada who lives in a neighbouring bedsit to Nicky. She seems the only one with moral certainty, order and a work ethic, who wants to be a doctor.
Towards the end of the narrative there is a shocking revelation. Hadley writes compellingly fascinating characters viewed from every angle. .
I realise I’m probably opening the floodgates here, and the postmen and women round my way may curse me, but I love self-published books; there’s something rebellious and entrepreneurial about deciding to bypass the traditional ways of getting your work in front of an audience and just doing it yourself. As well as the self-published book there’s the DIY magazine, the fanzine, the zine, the chapbook, the pamphlet, the leaflet and the single sheet with a long poem on it that you can fold up if you want to. In one sense, the blog and the self-created e-book have taken over from this kind of publishing but I’m pleased to say that people keen to get their work in print will still, well, get their work in print because the look and the feel of words on paper can’t be beaten.
The main thing about the self-published book, I reckon, is not to be too ambitious with it; in other words, don’t have too many printed because if you want to make your money back you’re going to have to sell them. Sometimes the self-published volume is intended to reach only a very tiny audience and the writer of, say, a family history, has had half-a-dozen copies done to give to friends and relatives. Sometimes a writer has been persuaded by ego or by slick salespeople that there’s no point having fewer than 5,000 printed, which means that you’ll always have 4,970 copies in your spare bedroom until the end of recorded time or until your house falls down, whichever comes first.
Believe me on this, because I’m One Who Knows. Many years ago me and mates Martyn and Paul decided to selfpublish a comic to sell in school when we did poetry gigs there. We figured that books might be too expensive but that the young people would be able to find 50p for a comic. We had a vast amount printed; I can’t recall how many except that it was far too many. We took two big boxes full to a little school in the Midlands and did a performance to a joyous audience of about 200 and afterwards we told the head about the comic. “I’m sure we’ll be able to sell a few,” she said brightly. We sat in the staffroom munching biscuits and had a little sweepstake on how many we’d sell. I said 76. Martyn said 52. Paul, ever the optimist, said 207. The head came back: “We’ll take two,” she said, handing me a pound coin.
The reason I’ve been thinking about self-published literature is that someone loaned me a beautiful home-made book called Sixty Years in the Isle by John J Creaser; it’s a story of farm life in the Isle of Axholme from the 1920s to the 1950s and it’s a valuable social document and if John hadn’t sent it to a printer’s, it would never have seen the light of day and a fascinating story would have remained untold and that would have been a shame. So all hail those who want to publish themselves! Just don’t have too many done…