The Penguin Blog

Hackney time

I've lived in Hackney for almost nine years now. That's 31 years short of urban magus Iain Sinclair's 40 in the borough. In Hackney time Sinclair puts me in short trousers.

Like Sinclair, I am also an interloper. I came to London in my early twenties, and I've put down roots. My daughter was born in Homerton Hospital just eight weeks ago; so for me there will for ever be a connection to Hackney.

And it is the connections people have with the borough that drive Sinclair's book, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire.

On Saturday, I got the chance to join an Art Bus tour organised around Sinclair's book and his relationship with three Hackney artists. We met up at the studio of the Dickensian-named Oona Grimes in Finsbury Park. Grimes has provided the interior illustrations to the book. She and Sinclair first collaborated together over a shared interest in the Elizabethan magician Dr Dee. Her studio contains two enormous presses and large, heavily stained housings for her acid baths. You get the sense that there's industry in her artistry.

I leafed through her wonderful a is ..., which consisted of a series of prints of imaginary cities, from A–Z. Samuel Butler, Tarkovsky, Borges and others were represented. That was our leaping-off point. The fake, the contrived, the unreal. We got on the bus: suitably steeped in mythology it was time to hit Hackney.

The Art Bus was an old Routemaster which puttered off through Stoke Newington. On board they were serving gin and tonics. We were promised music, and there was: a single iPod and a pair of headphones made its way along the upper deck.

Our first stop was in London Fields. Even before we got off the bus it was clear something was happening. There was white and blue police tape everywhere. There were solitary policemen standing by said tape to ensure we obeyed its implied injunction not to cross it. Iain Sinclair led us away from the tape and the police to what looked at first sight to be a garage. It was an artist's studio. I noticed later that the tape seemed to surround the studio, like we'd somehow got inside the cordon without being noticed or having noticed. Boundaries dissolve in Sinclair's company.

Jock MacFadyen's work reminds me of the paintings of Peter Doig. Large canvases, hypnotically vast spaces. MacFadyen's works are also confections. He takes buildings, places and transports them. Sinclair told us he was interested in the retrieval of sorts that the paintings had become. Many of MacFadyen's paintings show buildings that no longer exist. These are ghost buildings, they survive only on canvas, filtered through MacFadyen's imagination.

We piled on the bus for what would be my last stop. Into Hackney Wick where we visited an artists' commune (much to their indifference) and then across the road to Mother Studios. Both the commune and the art gallery lie on one side of the Hertford Union Canal; on the other side lies the Blue Wall, which protects/conceals/hides/obscures the Olympic building site.

We had an audience with the artist Stephen Cornford, whose work was on display in the Elevator Gallery. His spinning guitars were both violent and unsettling, but he was reassuringly friendly and told us of his previous project which was to trespass all over the Olympic site while evading the security. He liked the fact that this private land had been bought for the nation, but liked less the reality that though it was considered to now belong to all of us we weren't allowed on it. The contradiction appealed to him and he set out to explore it. The Blue Wall is more of a challenge than the white and blue tape.

The Art Bus was heading off to a bistro, but I was heading home to my partner and my daughter. Along the canal, with the Blue Wall to the east, I watched the sun set over Hackney in the west.

Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter

.............................................................................

Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing reportabuse@penguin.co.uk

..............................................................................

A very early shout out

If I could write like anyone in the world I think I would maybe like to write like David Vann. Each word in a sentence feels like it’s been weighed and measured to such precision, it’s as if they could be set in stone; at the end of what seems to be every paragraph there is a moment of epiphany that makes you stop and think ‘Amazing! How did he manage to get to that?’ There are moments of such pure and emotional power that I had a genuine physical reaction: at one point I read fully three pages with my mouth open in shock. I’ll guess you haven’t heard of him, not because I’m very cool or anything but because up until late November last year I hadn’t either, and we don’t publish his debut book of fiction, Legend of a Suicide, in this country until October this year. 

Let’s be honest with each other: I’m a publicist and you probably don’t trust me. My job is to cajole, nag, bully and create – here’s an ugly word – hype for things I want you to buy. Distrust can be good, though, as it can help to create healthy scepticism. The best journalists are healthy sceptics, who insist on making their own mind up about something. The best I can do is try to get them to take a chance on even taking the time to make their mind up, rather than just dismissing something out of hand. The best way to do that is through – here’s a nice word – enthusiasm. Doesn’t everyone love enthusiasm? Well, maybe not all the time. Let’s be realistic. But in my job it’s very helpful and, with David Vann and this book, I am 100% ain’t nuthin’ but the truth enthusiasm, hence this very early shout out. 

The book is comprised of five stories that book-end a novella, all inter-connected and with a clear progression. The more I’ve thought about this, the more I’ve realised it’s a different way of writing a novel.  The more I’ve thought about this, the more I’ve realised what a shatteringly good work it is. A colleague here said that when he finished it he went downstairs to his flatmate and, completely unbidden, told him step by step every detail in the book; it was so vivid to him it felt as if he’d lived it. Another texted me with a completely unquotable but extremely visceral reaction to a particular moment in the book. While this may tell you more about my homelife than you need to know, I’ve found myself having to read out sections of the book to my girlfriend, while she tries to get on with doing, you know, actual stuff, because I’ve been so struck by their clarity and brilliance. And it’s not as if she’s going to have to pay for a copy. I’m sure I could even stump up for one for her parents. If it’s Christmas or a birthday. Maybe. 

The book was published late last year, only in the States, by the small but venerable University of Massachusetts Press, and we’re hoping that, on this side of the Atlantic, it will be loved by people in the same way that the New York Times or the San Francisco Chronicle loved it. If you like American fiction, if you like Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, Anne Tyler, Cormac McCarthy, if you like stupendous writing from anywhere then you have to read this book. I’m not telling you Next Big Thing So Go Tell Your Kids or Die Trying; I’m just saying that if you like great books I think you will love this. It’s wonderful, it’s moving, it’s literature. It’s Legend of a Suicide by David Vann, and it’s a little way off at the moment, but it’s well worth the wait.

 

And, because it’s the 21st century, if you’d like to hear more about this book as it gets closer to publication, then ping me @joethepublicist on twitter. I don’t know what I’m doing on there yet but I could maybe update you and stuff like that.

Joe the Publicist

.............................................................................

Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing reportabuse@penguin.co.uk

..............................................................................

Around the World in 80 Books: the fourth leg

Blimey, this travelling lark is slow. I'm sorry I seemed to forget Southern Europe - I'm not going to Germany next at all. Poor old Italy. With its wealth of literature, from feline to flagellatory (always fond of literature that portrays Odysseus as the rotten fibber he truly was), I'm afraid I lumped for something altogether less translated.

Third stop: Italy. Or... the Roman Empire. So, lots of Europe, but mainly centred around Rome.

Book: I, Claudius, by Robert Graves

View Larger Map

I'm not sure why I haven't read this already. Maybe it's my mother-in-law's habit of referring to it as "One Clavdivs"*, which is v. v. pleasing but leads me to expect some kind of Wodehousian educational hoot, or maybe it's the clunky jacket on the edition I owned as a youth; either way I'm enormously grateful to Naomi Alderman for suggesting this as my Italian destination.

The Penguin blurb describes this as "one of the most... gripping historical novels ever written", but somehow I feel that this doesn't do it full justice. Rather than merely being a juicy and salacious novelization of Rome, it's mannered, and dry, and genuinely feels as if it's been translated, but really thrives on all these things, and lacks any of the fustiness or distance that translation could sometimes entail. It's funny, and frightening, and despite the fact that I couldn't sketch that family tree if you paid me (although I don't think I'm alone in that), I found all the characters to be incredibly well-drawn and unutterably fascinating. It's a page-turner, and, most importantly, features passages like this:

"'The cook's a genius,' they are all thinking. 'The mullet with piquant sauce, and those fat stuffed thrushes and the wild-boar with truffles - when did I eat so well last?... Ah, here comes the slave with the wine again. That excellent Cyprian wine.' ... And everyone says, thinking of the thrushes again, or perhaps of the little simnel cakes, 'Admirable. Admirable, Pollio.'"

'Thinking of the thrushes again'? If I was served fat stuffed thrushes, I wouldn't just be thinking of them a few minutes later, I'd be stuffing the chef into my bag and locking him in my own kitchen. Mmmm... tiny cooked birds...

Conclusions as a traveller:

Probably not the right country to marry your first wife's new son's second cousin's grandmother. A little too much poison knocking about to ensure the wedding ceremony didn't go off without at least one guest collapsing and dying, and tricky to ensure that you weren't your own sole inheritor.

I am so excited about hitting the rest of Europe. Germany, if all goes according to plan, will be my next-but-one stop, and then I'll try to thread up through Scandinavia. Thank goodness I didn't throw out my moonboots.

Sam the Copywriter

*This is the same mother-in-law who told me about Poe's Raven almost being a Parrot. Then she said, "Lenore! Nevermore!" in a parrot voice. Boy oh boy, it made me laugh, but I will never be able to read Poe again.

.............................................................................

Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing reportabuse@penguin.co.uk

..............................................................................