Photo by foxpar4.

Blue Sky Thinking

Let’s do this again, ground the planes for a while
and leave the runways to the racing hare,
the evening sky to Venus and a moon
so new it's hardly there. Miss the deal,
the meeting, the wedding in Brazil.
leave the shadowless Atlantic to the whale,
its song the only sound sounding the deep
except the ocean swaying on its stem.
Let swarms of jets at quiet airports sleep.
The sky’s not been this clean since I was born.
Nothing’s overhead but pure blue silence
and skylarks spiralling into infinite space,
a pair of red kites flaunting in the air.
No mark, no plane-trail, jet-growl anywhere.

by Gillian Clarke

You can also read a piece on ‘Poetry in Britain’ by Gillian Clarke today. Tomorrow she will be showcasing two New Poets on granta.com.

Photo by S John Davey.

Google the state of British poetry today, and a surprising world of factions and fashion is uncovered. I have little experience of these movements. I suppose I view British poetry from the centre, placed there by my education and coloured by experience of a life in literature on the ‘Celtic fringe’. ‘Fringe’ is a misnomer. The Celts have never been at poetry’s perimeter. The first known, named poets of these islands, Taliesin and Aneirin, sang their verse in British, the language spoken from south of the Scottish Highlands throughout western Britain to the south coast. Taliesin’s Gododdin, the epic poem about a battle fought where Scotland now borders Northumbria, is still read today in modern Welsh, is still influential. It is the very source and the centre of British poetry.

Arguments about modernism versus the rest, about whether anything new can still be done with the language of poetics, are interesting. However, in the poetry world of my experience, in writing, publishing, editing, reading and listening, in spreading the word in education for children and adults, the question is not what style we adopt, or how we can break and re-arrange English syntax In anthologies of British poetry, women’s voices were a tiny minority, Welsh and other ‘regional’ voices virtually absent. to make it new – and I’m aware I may be missing something here – but what can we say and how well can we say it. I am concerned with how we express our human condition and share it with each other, with who and how many can participate in this ancient art as listener, as reader. I believe poetry is for everyone, sometimes to struggle with, maybe, but mainly to carry by heart wherever we go. Both the simplest of great poetry, our nursery rhymes, and the most dramatic, the language of Shakespeare, have delighted and nourished the populace, the millions, not just an elected, selected few. Of course, poetry must always find new ways to sing, must be fresh, must surprise, must take us by the heart with its song, its imagery, its syntax. But it can still be simple, grammatical, and speak plain English.

What has changed? Until the early seventies, when I published my first collection with a small Welsh press, all such publishers were ignored by the reviewers writing in national newspapers. In the Times Literary Supplement, for example, only collections from the main publishing firms were ever reviewed, a double exclusion. In anthologies of British poetry, women’s voices were a tiny minority, Welsh and other ‘regional’ voices virtually absent. In the long ago of the 70’s the late Adrian Henri once said to me: ‘You’re in two political predicaments, being a woman and Welsh.’ I hadn’t thought of it, but he was right. There were few models for a young woman daring to write poetry. Most anthologies, even that excellent, popular florilegium, The Rattle Bag, published by Faber thirty years ago, edited by two of the greatest poets writing in our time, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, includes poems by one hundred and twenty four men, and eleven women. Wales was all but invisible anywhere in publishing. Schools and exam boards ignored the work of living poets. One excuse was that only quality counted, and so it should be, but we should remind ourselves that those who control and judge art can be wrong. In another age, another country, Emily Dickinson remained unpublished in her lifetime. John Donne was silenced and invisible for centuries.

All’s changed. New poets are coming through all over Britain, and so they should, for there are new things to say, new ways to say them.

It’s a thrill to open a new book and hear the authentic voice of poetry sing from the page. Sometimes an image simultaneously enters the imagination of many poets at the same time. At the turn of the millennium it was angels. This year it is bees, making honey in poems by Jo Shapcott and others, famously in the beautiful collection called The Bees by Carol Ann Duffy. But Sean Borodale’s A Bee Journal is like no other, for the bees are real, and the book is an accurate study of an apiarist’s year, each poem a perfect study, a perfect poem. Kaddy Benyon’s poems are fired and weighted, lit and made dark, by a female physical awareness of the relationship between herself and the world, herself and her mother, her grandmother, the priest, an unnamed gardener. Her poems are salted by a Catholic sense of sin in the Irish tradition, but new. This is heart-lifting stuff. ■

You can also read a poem by Gillian Clarke ‘Blue Sky Thinking’ today. Tomorrow she will be showcasing two New Poets, Sean Borodale and Kaddy Benyon, on granta.com.

The chimneys of Buckland Manor tunnelled up from the depths of the kitchens, through the dark tonnage of stone and brick above. Sliding between walls and driving through floors, the hot channels funnelled heat, smoke and smells as they twisted past receiving rooms and jinked around chambers, wriggled past corridors and galleries, leaving enigmatic traces in the fabric of the house. Purposeless buttresses bulged from walls. Smoke percolated through cracks in the plaster. Certain corners of the house were inexplicably hot and chambers adjoining both the east and west wings were infiltrated by the smells of roasting meat, or baking bread, or soup . . .

The whiffs and stinks came and went. Hotspots drifted, as if the flues of whirling fire and fumes writhed within the massive stonework, splitting and rejoining, rearing and rising until the thick brick fingers broke into the root-stores and apple-lofts under the eaves, driving through the attics where the maids huddled in the depths of winter, pressing themselves to the hot walls and waking to the morning tocsin of ladle on cauldron which resounded up from the kitchens below.

Now that din resounded in the crowded passage where two boys shuffled, wincing and grunting under the weight of a basket of onions.

‘Philip,’ the panting, brown haired boy introduced himself. ‘Philip Elsterstreet.’

‘John,’ John gasped back. The pole dug into his bony shoulder.

‘Just John?’

‘John Saturnall.’

The passage led to a courtyard surrounded by high walls where liveried men rolled barrels, toted crates or trays or walked with After a turn they came to a high arched entrance from which cooking smells drifted. braces of birds swinging from their hands. Others drew water from the well at the far end. Nearer, from a row of curtained stalls rose the sharp reek of ordure. A sour-faced old man was scraping out the nearest bucket into a barrow. John set down the basket at Philip’s signal. Beside a large basket of feathers lay a tray of part-plucked birds. The boy’s faint smile appeared to be permanent. He eyed John’s coat and filthy smock, his sunken cheeks and tufted scalp.

‘Where are you from, John Saturnall?’

‘Flitwick,’ John answered carefully. ‘Been riding with Josh Palewick.’

The boy’s eyes widened. ‘He goes all over. His brother’s the Cellarer here.’

John nodded. ‘I might be stopping here myself,’ he offered casually. ‘Might be joining the Household.’

Philip’s eyebrows rose. ‘The Household?’

‘Josh can’t keep me on forever, can he? It’s hard enough feeding the horses.’

The barrow and its stench approached. The scowling old man who pushed it was Barnaby Curle, Philip told John.

He looked down at the basket. ‘Come on. I can’t lug this lot on my own. I’ll show you the kitchens. You’ll need to know your way around, won’t you? If you’re coming here . . . ’

John looked at him suspiciously then bent and gripped the pole again. Both boys grunted and staggered across the crowded courtyard into the passageway opposite. After a turn they came to a high arched entrance from which cooking smells drifted. Philip led the way, lugging the basket into a vaulted room. The boys dumped the basket next to a table where a stout man with a round face was slicing onions, his knife a blur on the wood.

‘Underneath the bench, Philip,’ sniffed the man. He frowned at John. ‘Who’s the stranger?’

‘Joining the Household, Mister Bunce,’ explained Philip.

‘Who says?’

‘Sir William himself, I heard,’ Philip answered without a pause.

‘All right,’ Mister Bunce muttered. Then he lifted his head and called, ‘Stranger in!’ With this salutation, Philip ushered John into the room.

The kitchen was not as large as John had imagined. A line of tables ran along one wall. At the end, three pots stood over a flickering fire tended by a ginger-haired boy. From a doorway opposite came the sound of water splashing and the banging of pots and pans. A man so expressionless he might have been any age looked out from that room.

‘That’s Mister Stone,’ said Philip. ‘Head of the Scullery. And that boy over there’s Alf.’

‘It’s not so big,’ John ventured. ‘The kitchen,’ he added when Philip looked puzzled. How could all the men in red livery work in here?

Philip grinned. ‘Kitchen’s not big enough,’ he said to Alf who looked puzzled too for a moment. Then he too smiled.

Philip led John across the flagstone floor and pulled aside a thick leather curtain. A deep hum reached John’s ears. A short passage led to some steps and a set of heavy double-doors. As he followed Philip, the din got louder. Then the boy heaved on a handle and the door swung open.

‘This is the kitchen.’

A wave of noise broke over John, voices shouting, pots banging, pans clanging, knives and cleavers thudding on blocks. But he hardly heard the din. A great flood of aromas swamped the noise, thick as soup and foaming with flavours: powdery sugars and crystallized fruit, dank slabs of beef and boiling cabbage, sweating onions and steaming beets. Fronts of fresh-baked bread rolled forward, then sweeter cakes. Behind the whiffs of roasting capons and braising bacon came the great smoke-blackened hams which hung in the hearth. Fish was poaching somewhere in a savoury liquor at once sweet and tart, its aromas braided in twirling spirals . . . The sylphium, thought John. A moment later it was lost in the tangle of scents that rose from the other pots, pans and great steaming urns. The rich stew of smells and tastes reaching into his memory to haul up dishes and platters. For a moment he was back in the woods. His mother’s voice was reciting the dishes and the spiced wine was settling like a balm in his stomach, banishing his cold and hunger, even his anger. He closed his eyes and breathed in the scents, drawing them deeper and deeper . . .

‘Are you all right?’

‘What?’ John opened his eyes with a start. Philip Elsterstreet was peering anxiously at his face.

‘You not going to be sick, are you?’

John managed a shake of his head.

‘Good.’ Philip pointed to a dark wooden board nailed above the door. ‘Being sick’s against the rules.’

Thick pillars supported a vaulted ceiling. Half-moon windows were set high in one wall. Heavy tables filled the middle of the kitchen where men wearing aprons and headscarves chopped, hacked, jointed and tied. Boys lurched between them, staggering under trays and pans towards the wide arches and passage on the far side. At a table near the centre, a circle of men whirled white cloth bundles about their heads as if performing a strange dance.

‘Kitchen’s older’n the house, Master Scovell says,’ Philip went on. ‘The fire’s even older. If it goes out.’ The boy drew a finger across his throat. ‘That’s it.’

At that moment the men whirling cloths all flung them down at once. Out tumbled a heap of bright green leaves.

‘Sallet board,’ Philip explained. ‘Nothing but leaves allowed on that.’

Behind the sallet board, a cook was hauling down trays the size of small cartwheels from a heavy rack mounted beside a tall dresser. John sniffed and the aroma began to uncurl, the flavours separating on his palate, a strange sensation rasping the back of his throat. As John watched, he began rolling them over the floor with a call of ‘Mind yer backs!’ Men and boys swayed aside as the rumbling disks teetered across the room to topple into a pair of waiting hands. A stack of pewter bowls clattered onto each tray which was carried to the far side of the kitchen. There an enormous hearth stretched the full width of the room. At one end, a long-moustached man drew slow figure-of-eights with a stirring-lathe in a pot while his stockier companion wielded a ladle. Fist-sized gobbets of steaming grey porridge slopped stickily into the bowls.

‘End of breakfast service,’ said Philip. ‘For us, I mean. Them up there are still stuffing their faces.’

He gestured up at the ceiling with a dismissive look.

‘Up there?’

‘The Household. We don’t have much to do with them down here. Except feeding them, of course.’

All around the kitchen, the cooks barked orders: ‘Water here!’ or ‘Sharpener!’ or ‘Dressed and in!’ Then an under-cook or a boy would run over to deliver something, or take it away, or lend a hand in another of the kitchen’s inscrutable operations.

Beyond the tall dresser John glimpsed a passageway and the foot of a staircase. Across the kitchen, flanked by stacks of firewood, a great chimney breast rose above a gaping hearth. Then a new scent wafted past John’s nostrils: sharp but rich. Nestled in straw in a wooden crate on the nearest bench lay a dozen or more fruits, bright yellow with waxy finely mottled skins. He had seen them in the book, but now he stared.

‘Ain’t you never seen a lemon before?’ Philip Elsterstreet asked.

‘Course I have,’ John muttered. ‘I just didn’t know.’

‘Know what?’

John hesitated. ‘I didn’t know they were yellow.’

Philip gave him another odd look. At the far end of the hearth near the arches and the passage, a great cloud of steam billowed up. The smell of fish soup wafted across the kitchen. John saw four men dressed in tunics and aprons step back from the scalding steam. One turned and caught sight of the boys.

‘You two!’ called the short bald man across the kitchen. ‘Come here!’

‘That’s Master Henry,’ whispered Philip. ‘Josh’s brother.’

‘I know,’ said John, trying to remember how exactly he was meant to address the man. Look at their faces, he thought. Or not look.

‘The other three are the Heads of the Kitchen. Mind your tongue. Especially around Vanian.’

‘Who’s Vanian?’

‘In the middle. Looks like a rat.’

The hearth yawned wider as they approached. John stared up at the wheels and chains of an enormous spit. Above a low fire, an array of simmering pots rose rising in size to a cauldron large enough to boil a pig.

‘That’s Master Scovell’s copper,’ Philip told him in an undertone. An under-cook was applying gentle blasts from a bellows to the glowing embers beneath. John caught the strange smell again. Lilies and pitch, thinner than he remembered.

‘Where’s Joshua?’ Henry Palewick demanded as they approached. ‘And that other fellow. Face like a horse.’

‘Ben Martin,’ said John. After a long pause he remembered to add, ‘Master Henry.’

Henry Palewick began questioning Philip on what they were doing in the kitchen where, as Philip and everyone else knew, no one but kitchen-staff were permitted unless by invitation. Not even Mister Pouncey could enter unbidden, as Philip well knew. Not even Sir William himself . . .

The rat-like Vanian flicked shrewd black eyes over John then returned to his discussion with the other two, which centred on a kettle suspended in the cauldron. The whiff of Ben’s parcel hovered under the delicious aroma of fish. Suddenly John felt hungry. The men, he saw, were sipping from a ladle which they passed between them. The tallest of the three slurped and smiled.

‘Whether or not Miss Lucretia consumes it, the kitchen has discharged its duty,’ he declared cheerfully. He towered a whole head over the others. ‘A simple broth is most apt for a young stomach, especially a stomach which chooses privation over nourishment. Lampreys. Crab shells ground fine. Stockfish and . . .’ He sniffed then frowned.

‘Simple, Mister Underley?’ jibed Vanian in a nasal voice. ‘If it is simple, then how is it spiced?’

‘Came in a parcel this morning,’ Henry Palewick offered. ‘Down from Soughton. Master Scovell had it out in a moment. Smelled like flowers to me. Whatever it was.’

‘Which flowers?’ demanded the fourth man of the quartet, in a foreign accent. He pointed a large-nostrilled nose at Henry. ‘Saffron, agrimony and comfrey bound the cool-humoured plants; meadowsweet, celandine and wormwood the hot. Which did this smell resemble?’

‘That’s Master Roos,’ whispered Philip to John. ‘Spices and sauces.’

‘What does it matter, Melichert?’ answered Henry with a weary sigh. ‘It is a broth of fish and lampreys.’

‘Hardly a full description,’ Vanian snapped disdainfully. ‘One might as well ask a laundry maid how to weave a sheet. One may as well ask this boy!’ he concluded contemptuously.

Heads turned. The other cooks peered down. John realised belatedly that Vanian was indicating himself. Before he could retreat, the rat-faced man had beckoned John forward and lifted the lid of the pot.

‘Approach, boy,’ he ordered, then turned to the others. ‘Let us discover how well the untrained palate performs.’ Vanian smirked. ‘Or fails to perform.’

Beads of yellow oil trembled on the surface. A deep orange liquid Beads of yellow oil trembled on the surface. A deep orange liquid shimmered beneath. shimmered beneath. A puff of pungent steam wafted up, carrying a rich salty smell. Lilies hung behind it, and the pitch. But they were blanched, or blended somehow. John sniffed and the aroma began to uncurl, the flavours separating on his palate, a strange sensation rasping the back of his throat. For the first time since Buckland, John’s demon brought out his spoon.

‘Observe,’ began Vanian in a lofty tone, ‘how the broth subsumes its parts into a single liquor, each one transformed. Let us begin with the spices.’ He looked expectantly at John for a moment. ‘No? Then allow me . . .’

‘Mace,’ said John.

Underley’s head turned. Roos raised his eyebrows. Henry Palewick stared.

‘Crushed cumin,’ John continued. ‘Coriander seeds, marjoram, rue. Vinegar. Some honey and . . .’ His voice trailed off. All four Head Cooks were staring at him. Vanian’s black eyes narrowed.

‘And?’

He could smell the plant from the wood. But something in Vanian’s look made him hold his tongue. Before the cook could ask again, a commotion sounded across the kitchen.

From the door, Mister Fanshawe and Mister Wichett approached like complementary red and green islands, surrounded by their clerks. At the rear, trailed a stoney-faced Josh Palewick. At the front, leading the little mob, was the black-haired kitchen-boy. Coake’s gleeful face found John.

‘There he is!’ the boy shouted.

‘Hold him!’ called Fanshawe. ‘Take that boy!’

But none of the kitchen staff moved at the Household man’s order. As Fanshawe’s green-liveried clerks strode forward, John thrust his way between a startled Henry Palewick and Melichert Roos and ran. ■

This is an extract from John Saturnall’s Feast by Lawrence Norfolk, which will be published by Bloomsbury in September.

Granta Britain Special with Lawrence Norfolk, Esther Freud and Andrea Stuart
22 May, 6 p.m. for 6.30 p.m., Bloomsbury Publishing, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP. Tickets £5 for students, £7 for Granta subscribers and £10 general admission. Each ticket includes a copy of Granta 119: Britain.

As part of the launch of Granta 119: Britain, the Bloomsbury Institute hosts a night of reading and conversation with Granta contributors Andrea Stuart, Lawrence Norfolk, Esther Freud and Granta deputy editor Ellah Allfrey. From the legacy of the sugar trade in London to the tale of a young boy who seeks refuge in the kitchen of a manor house after his mother is accused of witchcraft, to the shifting fortunes of actors in contemporary London, the authors explore how British identity is shaped by the sometimes brutal context of historical and contemporary Britain.

This event is part of a UK-wide series of events that mark the launch of the latest issue of Granta magazine and explore the stories Britain is telling about itself today.

Photo by kudumomo.

Our twelve-hour flight from Barcelona to Bogotá’s El Dorado airport landed softly, gliding along the puddle covered tarmac. We were on our way to the Bogotá Book Fair to launch the new issue of Granta en Español dedicated to Colombian writing and spend some time getting to know journalists, booksellers and the literary scene. A chaotic stream pulled us through customs and spilled us out into the chilly, humid air. By Spanish hours it was dinner time but Bogotá follows a new-world schedule where natural light is a box that is ticked on their list of virtues. Bogotá sits on a high plateau in the Andes Mountains at over 2,600 meters above sea level, so people tell you to take it easy, drink plenty of water, avoid sorocho, or altitude sickness. The hotel had booked us in separate rooms, but I was allowed to move in with Aurelio Major, co-editor of Granta Espanol, since he had been given the larger one.

My first peep of landscape came early the next morning, when the jet lag and sounds of traffic pulled me out of bed at first light. The mountains loomed menacingly from the crack in the curtains, a wispy line of cloud hanging just below their lush green crowns, like an old monk’s pate. I sleepily remembered Port’s dream in The Sheltering Sky: ‘It was daytime and I was on a train that kept putting on speed. I thought to myself: ‘We’re going to plough into a big bed with the sheets all in mountains.’

The first day began with the presentation of the issue with Carolina Sanin, Juan David Correa and Nayla Chehade. After the event, a few hip young journalists told us they had been particularly surprised by diaspora writer Nayla Chehades’s fiction on the Lebanese colonies that settled along Colombia’s Magdalena river, because it was a complete discovery for such a strong voice. The excitement of the evening brought us to throw back some Tesoro de Don Julio, mostly because it was there, tequila being such a universal symbol of joy.

The next day saw a conversation with writers Carlos Yushimito, Samanta Schweblin and Andres Felipe Solano from the Best of Young Spanish Language Noveslists issue to a packed house. I was in the A chaotic stream pulled us through customs and spilled us out into the chilly, humid air. throes of a feverish sorocho swoon (I had entertained all the wrong kinds of liquids) when kindness in the form of Juan David Correa brought some coca tea. I followed this up quickly with the equation that two teabags are better than one, without knowing that the other effect of coca tea is that it relaxes the vocal chords . . . Luckily, my occasional fish-out-of-water grunts punctuated a very lively conversation in what I like to think of as an ‘original’ way, although Samanta had kept an eye on me the whole time. I was certainly grateful for a little gender solidarity in a city surrounded by mountains that looked like monk heads.

Later, we headed over to a collective reading by Latin American poets. It had been raining nonstop for a month and though the day had been bright, the sky now felt as if it had moved in closer somehow, full of heavy black roiling clouds. Gargantuan raindrops fell here and there, not with a ‘plop’ or ‘plunk’, but a full on thud! They hurt. In Bogotá they call this kind of rain espantaflojos . . . The lack of air and the closeness of the clouds gave a strange feeling of being pushed up against the world’s ceiling. The squishing sky, I thought, embellishing Paul Bowles and smiled to myself.

The poets read impressive work to a full auditorium, but when Max Rojas, a Mexican poet in his sixties, emaciated, tinker toy legs, slow and deliberate in movement as if at any moment he could just collapse into a pile of dust, began to read I was shocked to hear such a potent voice from such a wasted frame. Poetry can grab you unawares, overwhelm you. The tears came like a hard rain falling. The room buzzed and sniffed. Just like that. He read Elegy as a Scream for a December Afternoon.

nobody waits for you to say goodnight, I am sad, I am looking for Helena
I have looked for her in all the crevices of the afternoon, I can’t find her,
I touch ash and I can’t find her,
I look for Helena, she’ll never come, tell her to come, she will never come,
call her until the moss grows over your throat
call her until your throat becomes moss, she’ll never come,
say her name, repeat it until your tongue falls off,
say it until your teeth fall out, she will never come,
only the silence creaking in the stairway accompanies you,
the sound that comes suddenly to say that nobody is there . . .

In town, we visited a vintage bookstore called La torre de Babel. There was a flawless mirror placed in a way that it looked like Borges’s infinite library. The owner, sixty-something, with a white mushroom-cap pouf of hair and yellow teeth, came to greet us. Surrounded by a bevy of rubicund choir-boy clerks, he said he had something to show us. Aurelio and I were with a few other men who had accompanied us. With a strange expression on his face that didn’t bode well for me, the owner introduced us to a dusty eighteenth century Italian book of aphorisms.‘They are so interesting’, he smiled coyly, ‘they show the way a culture thinks. For example (the punchline after his fifteen minute setup that I will spare you all): ‘women are much more attractive when they keep their mouths shut.’’ Perhaps I should have been flattered over such hard work for such a commonplace insult? I didn’t say what I was thinking, lest I prove him correct, and so quipped: ‘You know what they say in Spain: men, like bears, the uglier, the more attractive.’

look at your body sinking in the mirror,
look at your body sinking behind your scream in the mirror,
you will sink after your body and after your scream, in the body of Helena,
hidden in the mirror

In hindsight what I would have liked to do was quote Max Rojas, pointing at the mirror in the infinite library: I wasn’t able to do so at the time because his poetry anthology had sold out at the fair. Despite the news that came of the frivolous ‘Bourbon’ King Juan Carlos of Spain hunting elephants as his country collapses, despite the impending doom that was the elephant in the room – our conversations with poet Darío Jaramillo and poet Rafael Cadenas and Venezuelan editors both in exile and living in Caracas about what will happen after Chavez; despite everything, poetry still has power. There is comfort in that thought. As I was writing this, Samanta sent a note to say that she had dreamt about me. In her dream she had a fever but didn’t know how high it was and so she asked me and I told her, ‘Your fever is very high. You see? We all come down with things . . . ’ ■

Our humour ripens as the barley falls. It’s safe to spread the gossip noisily, it’s safe to bait and goad. Who’s sharing wives? Which bearded bachelor is far too friendly with his goat? Which widower (they look at me) has dipped his thumb in someone else’s pot? Which blushing youngsters are the village spares, that’s to say those children who’ve been conceived in one man’s bed and then delivered in another’s? Who’s making love to apple tubs? Who’s wedded to a sack of grain? Nothing is beyond our bounds, when we are cutting corn.

This is an extract from ‘Enclosure’ by Jim Crace in Granta 119: Britain. You can pre-order a copy or subscribe and receive four issues a year of the best new writing.

You can also see Jim Crace at the following event:

Visions of Britain: An evening with Granta and Jim Crace
15 May, 6.30 p.m.,Waterstones, 128 New Street, Birmingham B2 4DB. Tickets £3, redeemable against a copy of Granta bought on the night. Free entry for Granta subscribers. Contact the store for purchase.

Jim Crace is a master stylist and a gripping storyteller. His story in Granta 119: Britain is a gossipy and ribbing tale of barley farmers in the 16th century who face an imminent future of sheep farming as a result of the Enclosures. From the dream of a leisure society to dark omens of change, Jim Crace will read from and discuss this timeless tale and his other work with Granta deputy editor Ellah Allfrey. Readers of Jim Crace will not want to miss this event, which gives an early look at his forthcoming novel. This event is part of a UK-wide series of events that mark the launch of the latest issue of Granta magazine and explore the stories Britain is telling about itself today.

Tania James is a novelist and short story writer whose ‘Lion and Panther in London’ is featured in Granta’s Britain. In her latest collection, Aerogrammes and Other Stories, out this May in the United States, James opens a window onto a world marked by loneliness, obsession and wild animals. Granta’s Saskia Vogel speaks to the author about writing from a child’s perspective, Mary Swann’s ‘The Deep’, and the author’s alleged anger issues.

SV: ‘Lion and Panther in London’ tells of two brothers from Lahore who come to London to seek their fortunes as wrestlers. They find themselves confronted by the oddities of life in London in 1910, including crowded living spaces and ‘the sort of fare that would render them leaden in body and mind’. Tell me a bit about the genesis of this story and how your idea of Britain influenced it.

TJ: I came across an old book called Strong Men Over the Years, a rare and remarkable account of Indian wrestlers around the turn of the century, including Gama the Great and his brother Imam. I was actually doing some very dry research on the Indian Students’ Movement, but that book was lively, comic, nostalgic and completely addictive in its illustration of these Indian superheroes.

I only had a vague idea of Britain, let alone London in 1910. But ‘Strong Men’ brought certain details to surface, such as the wrestlers’ total bafflement over the Western suit – why would anyone wear something so snug and restrictive? The more I understood about these wrestlers and their very rigorous way of life, the more freedom I felt in rendering their environment, and how they might be at odds with it.

Your story ‘What to do with Henry’ moves from the perspective of a young boy who finds a baby chimpanzee and sells it at a market to the mother who purchases it, then to chimpanzee and so on. In fact, each story in the collection unfolds in a striking and unexpected way. What is it about the short form that appeals to you?

I do love how the short form allows for some risky moves. For example a I like that children have their own way of seeing, their own elastic vocabulary for explaining the world story can be the perfect vessel for a particular voice, or a chorus of voices, which would be harder to sustain over the course of a novel (I’m thinking of Mary Swann’s ‘The Deep’, for example). Certainly novels can and should take risks but maybe I feel more freedom in the short story form because if it fails halfway in, I don’t feel an urge to toss myself out the window.

In the collection, many of the stories have a child as a protagonist. What is it about children’s perspectives that you find compelling?

There’s a Chekhov story ‘A Trifle from Life’, which follows the perspective of a little boy named Alyosha and ends by referring to the ‘great many things for which the language of children has no expression’. I like that children have their own way of seeing, their own elastic vocabulary for explaining the world, before their minds have been entrenched with other people’s perceptions.

Your stories often engage with South Asians in the United States and a dissonance between the two cultures. Why are these stories important?

These stories are important to me, not because they happen to be about South Asians, but because they’re circling around a certain strain of loneliness that goes deeper than cultural dissonance, that has to do with the yearning to connect with someone else, or with some unreachable vision of home. That experience isn’t uniquely specific to first – or second – generation immigrants; it’s universal, and thus compelling territory for fiction.

‘What to do with Henry’, ‘Lion and Panther in London’ and ‘The Scriptological Review’, a story about a boy who compulsively analyses handwriting: each of these explores a different world. What comes first – an encounter with scriptology or the story idea? And what kind of research is involved?

A handwriting analyst studied my signature and told me I had latent anger issues, as evidenced by the tiny hook in my T. That seemed a little nuts to me, but slightly possible, so of course my imagination began to wander in that direction. I started looking into handwriting analysis – the technical term is graphology – but I didn’t delve too deeply into any real study. I was more interested in a guy who makes up his own kind of convoluted logic. Explaining that logic, in his voice, was probably the most entertaining part of writing the story.

You’ve published Atlas of Unknowns, a novel, and Aerogrammes is published in May, as is your story in the Granta. What’s next in store?

It’s a long way off, but as of now, it’s a novel involving wild elephants and those who tangle with them.

What’s the best advice you’ve received as a writer?

Write the story that unsettles and excites you, that keeps you coming back to your desk. ■

. . . and our party begins.

Today, we launch Granta: BRITAIN.

Read our new issue to find the clues and name the guests at the tea party – or join the celebration at our events across the UK.

One Sentence Story Competition

Photo by Mykl Roventine.

Fleeing Complexity

Irby in the Marsh

The fire spread quicker than the little bastard was expecting. ■

By Jon McGregor and taken from This Isn’t The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You published by Bloomsbury on 2nd February 2012 at £14.99. © Jon McGregor 2012.

Inspired by this story Granta launched a tweetable (140 characters) short story competition which closed on 2 May. We received scores of entries and today we announce the winner and runners-up, as judged by Jon McGregor. The winner will receive a signed and stamped copy of his latest novel, This Isn’t The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You and Granta 119: Britain.

Note from the judge:

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading through the cracking selection of stories that Granta readers have sent in for the ‘Fleeing Complexity’ story competition. My choice of the winner and runners up is a very personal one: what I’m looking for in a piece of fiction as short as this is something that gestures very simply towards a much larger story. Many of the entries which fell short of what I was looking for were trying to cram more detail and closure into the sentence than was needed, which tended to make them somewhat unwieldy. Also, some of the entries were more than one sentence long. But the winning story, by Cassie Gonzales, is right up my street: sinister, funny, suggestive, and very, very simple. Excellent.

WINNER

It was my turn to wear the dead boy’s glasses. ■

 Cassie Gonzales

*

RUNNERS UP

2ND PLACE

The locked bathroom door would not hold and the window would not open. ■

solchica ‏ @solchica

*

3RD PLACE

Cyanide may smell like almonds but it doesn’t taste like marzipan. ■

 Sam Thewlis

*

4TH PLACE

Bombs fell but my grandmother kept combing her hair. ■

By Slavka Jovanovic

*

SPECIAL MENTION FOR

Frying Complexity

The fryer readied faster than a little batter suggested. ■

Cynan Jones @cynan1975

*

SPECIAL MENTION FOR

All night the fish dreams of leaping clear of the water. ■

Aseem Kaul

The latest issue of Granta Britain, which features Jon McGregor and Cynan Jones, is out now.

Come and join us at one of our launch events in London, Edinburgh, Belfast and Birmingham tonight.

Photo by robad0b.

People always ask ‘Where are you from?’ But in the 21st century, this question is not about the passports you hold. This is why I’ve given up on the short, geopolitically precise answer, which is ‘Bulgarian Kiwi Brit’ – no one knows what to say next. Somehow, bringing up Lord of the Rings or the Bulgarian umbrella murder doesn’t seem right. And anyway, this short answer doesn’t address the unspoken questions-within-the-question, such as Where do you really belong; Goodness, how did your accent get like this; Are you here by choice, necessity or accident; and Oh, I see, you’re one of those people who’ve been around the world but can’t be happy anywhere? Well, I used to be. Now I live in Britain and I’m not. So, here is the long answer – instead of a love letter to Scotland.

For each one of us, there are three types of place in the world:

1. Neutral: you go there on holiday, enjoy and return home without regret. Nothing important will happen to you there. It’s not the place itself that is neutral of course – every place on earth has a charge – but we are concerned with the chemistry between you and the place. It is like meeting someone whose name or face you soon forget.

2. Places where you are destined to be ill at ease, in some subtle but incurable way not unlike a dysfunctional relationship between two people who bring out the worst in each other. There are several ways of being out of joint in a place, and one is called homeland (being born in the wrong place). Another is called emigration (moving to the wrong place). The obvious cure seems to be further travel, physical and mental. To be in a suspended state. To be simply away.

3. Which takes us to the third kind of place: the magic place. Paul Bowles summed it up in his aptly titled memoir Without Stopping:

Like any Romantic, I had always been vaguely certain that sometime during my life I should come into a magic place which in disclosing its secrets would give me wisdom and ecstasy – perhaps even death.

He did come into that place, and so do his characters. For him and them, it was North Africa. Where was my magic place, I wondered, aged eight, as I stayed up late reading Scarlet Sails by From where I stood on the chipped balcony of Block Number 328, the world was a distant rumour, radio static, something that happened in books. Alexander Green. It is the story of a girl waiting for a mythical ship with scarlet sails to appear and take her away. Green’s stories were set in places with names like Zurbagan and Caperna, and his characters were called Longren and Azole, which is why you wouldn’t guess that he never made it out of Soviet Russia, except in his imagination. I stood on our concrete balcony and surveyed the thousands of lit-up squares on the thousands of identical high-rises on the outskirts of Sofia. Not a scarlet sail in sight.

Tinkling with trams and punctuated by Orthodox churches, Sofia lived in the shadow of chestnut trees and late totalitarianism. It held on to its belle epoqué remains under the onslaught of brutalist architecture and big-fisted proletarian monuments that soon became chipped, like our Block Number 328 where my sister, my mathematician parents and I lived as cheerfully as we could. We had an orange Skoda, and my father spent every weekend lying under it, in between writing research papers, while my mother made birthday cakes without flour; milk or sugar – such things were reserved for the Bright Future.

From where I stood on the chipped balcony of Block Number 328, the world was a distant rumour, radio static, something that happened in books. I was ten, and already writing poems about railway stations and sailing away. On dangerous adventures, like The Sea Wolf by Jack London. To misty Scotland – or was it England? – with Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles; to Rome with I, Claudius; to America with Charlie Chaplin’s My Autobiography; to Italy with Michelangelo’s The Agony and the Ecstasy.

Five years later at Sofia’s Lycée Français, I devoured Albert Camus’s L’étranger and felt the murderous hammer of the Algerian sun on that beach. Clearly, Mersault’s story was written especially for me – a Bulgarian teenager throbbing with hormones and alienation. Then I forgot the question and the alienation, because the Berlin Wall suddenly fell, and in the resulting rubble our family was catapulted in an unexpected direction: the West. Or rather Down Under, where an academic job materialized for my father.

In my atlas, New Zealand was two small splashes at the bottom of the Pacific. Magic was imminent: palm trees, dolphins, smiling natives. New Zealand was going to be like my illustrated edition of Robinson Crusoe. Hyperventilating with disbelief, we waved goodbye to everyone we knew, crossed the timeline on a one-way ticket, and arrived at the bottom of the South Island with a container of books and a piano. The news hit us instantly: this was not the tropics (it was snowing), the people looked like sunburned Scots, and we were at the end of the world. For years, we huddled together for comfort and got on with the business of psychic survival, as emigrant families do. We tried not to look back because we couldn’t afford to. Instead, we got our New Zealand passports, took to eating ‘fush and chups’, learned to sing ‘Po Karekare Ana’ (my dad on the accordion), and lived in a big house with a garden – my parents’ post-brutalist dream come true.

And yet something was missing. It was as if we’d stepped off a cliff and were floating in some Pacific ocean-carpeted waiting room to the afterworld. Through my late teens and twenties, I wrestled with the feeling that my real life was unfolding elsewhere, far from here. Here was burnt tussock and killer sun, flowers that reminded me of nothing and beaches that went on forever but were too cold or dangerous to swim in. Here were friendly people who loved rugby and the outdoors. Here was weatherboard suburbia that stretched like an infinite Legoland, and Japanese cars that shone in the sun with a migrainous glare. I moved from Dunedin to Wellington to Auckland, longing to feel part of something. But that something remained in my head.

In Tahiti, where I spent a month on a university scholarship researching my old favourite Albert Camus, I found myself swimming further and further from the beach. One afternoon I swam so far that I lost sight of the shore. I could see the triangles of sharks’ fins ahead – they came out at dusk. Perhaps I was on a swimmer’s high, but my deep desire was to keep going until I met my destiny, whatever that was. I felt more connected with the water than with the land. Back at the beach, I realized what had just happened. This is what living in the Pacific was for me – a death wish on hold. I didn’t know how to fix it, except by running away, again.

In Marseille, where I spent a year dodging work as a language assistant in a college, I found myself living alone by the sea and writing my first novel. It was set in Bulgaria and New Zealand, and it was raw and angry about both places. Something strange was happening: I was discovering the imaginative pull of distance, but this time as a writer. The further away I was from a place, the more vividly I imagined it, the more real it became to me. And the urge to write it into being over rode the natural urge to live in the present.

Presently, the faded stone forts, old-world brokenness and bleached afternoons of Marseille pulled me in like a distant memory. I was certain that I had already seen the Castle of If where the Count of Monte Cristo was imprisoned. I felt closer to the Arabs The Berlin Wall suddenly fell, and in the resulting rubble our family was catapulted in an unexpected direction: the West. with their shambolic markets, the Foreign Legionnaires with their unhappy eyes, and the quick-tempered Marseillais who spat and pissed on the pavements than I had ever felt with the wholesome outdoor-bound Kiwis and Aussies. It dawned on me now: the magic place is not just about the landscape and the buildings, it’s also about the people who grow from the place. Something in me – the old, grubby part of my soul – plugged straight into Marseille, and for the first time in my life, I felt like I was actually living. Then my visa expired, and I returned to New Zealand, Europe-sick and plotting my next escape. But not before I started writing a historic novel set in France and Greece.

I spent my Wellington days inside a bare rented room, surrounded by maps of the Mediterranean and books on Greece. I was living in a continuous state of ‘internal emigration’ – which is what I’d done as a child, with my books. It’s when you feel more at home inside your head than in your environment. Result: you spend as much time as possible inside your head. I’m sure there is a psychiatric term for this, but I was too busy planning my move to Greece at the time to stop and comprehend the fact that it was enough to write a novel set in Greece; moving there would be overkill, even for me.

In any case, the mad plan was dislodged by the news that my first novel was short-listed for a prize. I went to Delhi for the award, and overstayed by two months. I considered moving to Delhi, then got into trouble. I was out of control. Where best to go when you’re out of control? Buenos Aires of course, at the worst moment of its financial collapse. I spent a month dancing tango and taking notes. The economy was bust, people were crying in the streets, the tango clubs were full, and naturally, I considered moving there. But I went to Berlin instead, for a year’s writing fellowship during which I aborted a novel set – of course – in Paraguay and Argentina. I lived in the Jewish neighbourhood Mitte and walked along the vanished Wall which criss-crossed the city like stitching. At least here, everything was real, even the ghosts who followed me like limping dogs. Berlin was like Sofia, except more so. I was reliving, every day, in the first person singular, the collective past of the twentieth century. Not something to put a spring in your step. So when my visa expired, I went home.

Home. Where was that? Home can be your mother tongue – that was gone, I was writing and living in English, making my imaginative home there. Home could be your father’s house – and in fact, I was living with my parents in Auckland again. But when you’re thirty and living with your parents, it doesn’t feel so much as home as arrested development. I needed to strike out again. I hadn’t given up looking for the magic place that would give me all those things that Paul Bowles found in the Sahara.

I went to the Sahara. I photographed some dunes, drank tea with the Berbers, visited the Hotel Continental in Tangiers where the opening and closing scenes in The Sheltering Sky are filmed. The closest I found to ‘wisdom and ecstasy’ was when I was visited by some intestinal parasites and a strange desert flu. Afterwards, I read every single book set in Morocco that I could find in English and French, starting with our old friend Paul Bowles and ending with Tahar Ben Jelloun’s story of a political prisoner who lived underground for twenty years.

My arrival in Edinburgh seven years ago was almost a blind date. Ever since a short visit with my parents as a teenager, I’d remembered the city as a castle on a rock atop a purple ocean.

This time, my happiness was instant, a destiny fulfilled. The castle was still here – everything was still here, because nothing changes here except in memory. I loved the way chimneys cast shadows on sunny afternoons, the way buildings were made to precede you and outlive you while housing you, as if you too will live forever. The haar that crept in from the sea. The cemeteries bumpy with centuries of flesh. The way locals asked ‘Where do you stay?’ and my neighbours invited me for a ‘fish supper’. The way nobody is too interested in you – a great British quality, this live-and-let-live discretion – and yet you end up talking with strangers in shops, because Edinburgh people have time. The worn stone steps that lead to unexpected passages of time. The palatial smugness of Morningside and the smashed-up people of Leith; the lanes where today’s best ideas were written down by men who walked through excrement because Edinburgh was not so big on hygiene. The sense of being in the centre of things yet not in the eye of the storm, an hour from London and Europe, a radio button away from the BBC, less than a century away from an empire . . . And you were simultaneously living in two countries, like a matryoshka doll, which was ideal. I was far from the concrete balcony of my childhood, but not so far that I felt removed from myself. I stayed.

I had arrived in Edinburgh not knowing a single soul – except the man I came with, who was a kindred lost spirit. He never stopped being a lost spirit, which is why our four years together came to an abrupt end that resembled a car crash. Overnight, he disappeared from my life and into a new identity. I was tempted to pack up the wreckage of my Edinburgh life, bury it and put a cross on it somewhere discreet, like the top of Arthur’s Seat, then go some place completely new where nobody could guess where I came from and what I carried inside.

But my destiny was here; I knew it in my bones. I dug my heels in even deeper in Edinburgh. I stayed, all over again. But a city was not enough any more, I had too many painful memories there and I needed to feel at home in this whole country. I needed space to house my past, as well as my future. I bought a car and drove deep into the Scottish Highlands.

I plunged into a wilderness of giant shaved hills that spoke of distant devastation, and dark forests that sometimes looked indigo. I needed space to house my past, as well as my future. I bought a car and drove deep into the Scottish Highlands. I swam in lochs and walked by rivers. Sky that moved every second. The sheep were scattered like tombs. The wind had a voice I understood. The stone houses grew from the land. This was an ancient, human landscape whose imprint I already carried. Here were the changing colours of my childhood seasons. The blue line of the sea ahead, like a promise. The stoical faces of the people. This place was the northern continuation of me. Strangely, in this remote bit of the continent, everything important felt within reach: the sky, the ocean, the past, the end of Europe and the beginning, the city and the opposite of the city, the life of the mind and the life of the body. I felt geographically complete.

‘And now,’ Bowles writes, ‘as I stood in the wind looking at the mountains ahead, it was as if I were drawing close to the solution of an as-yet unposed problem. I was incredibly happy as I watched the wall of mountains slowly take on substance, but I let the happiness wash over me and asked no questions.’

I had already spent a lifetime asking those questions. Now, I had an answer.

These days I live in the Highlands with someone who is deeply rooted in the place and, like the place, has the wisdom to accommodate my history. I will never stop travelling of course, because I never want to abandon the world. Just as I hope the world doesn’t abandon us if politicians with doughy faces and dated ideas have their way and Scotland breaks away from the Britain that makes it such a perfect home for the likes of us – the people who have left the fear and loathing of nationalism in the rubble of the twentieth century, and believe that borders need to open, not close, so that we can be more, not less.

That’s all very well, but what happens to the imagination when the spirit stops flickering like the needle of a broken compass? You go inwards more than you go outwards, and the nature of your enquiry changes. It’s not about where to go next, but about where you’ve been, what happened and why. I now know that the practice of internal emigration when there is clearly no need to emigrate further is simply called being a writer. And there is no cure for it. Something else I know: those who go broke searching for the magic place are homeless. What they are really looking for is home. Home not as the place you come from, but the place you reach; home as the place where you understand yourself. That is where the wisdom and the ecstasy are. The death too, one day.

Perhaps you knew this all along. Lucky you. ■

You can listen to Kapka Kassabova read from and discuss this essay tonight (10 May) at the following event:

The Edinburgh Launch
10 May, 6 p.m., Waterstones, 128 Princes Street, Edinburgh EH2 4AD. Tickets £2 (redeemable against a book purchase on the night), free to Granta subscribers. Purchase tickets through events.edinburgh@waterstones.com, in-store or by calling 0131 226 2666.

Granta invites you to Waterstones Edinburgh for a festive evening of readings and conversation with Granta’s online editor Ted Hodgkinson, author Kapka Kassabova, poet Don Paterson and photographer Ian Teh to explore the stories that Britain is telling about itself today. This event also marks the start of a UK-wide events series hosted in collaboration with Waterstones.

You can also listen to Kapka Kassabova read an abridged version of this essay on BBC Radio 4 as part of Book of the Week at 9.45 a.m. tomorrow (11 May).

Katherine met with Keith only on selected evenings. They fucked and drank in heroic silence, which suited Katherine. She lived in fear of him saying something interesting, which might make her fall in love with him; or something horrific, which would shatter the illusion she’d so carefully constructed. He brought her a vibrator as a present: gift-wrapped, with a heart-shaped tag that read, ‘Think of me.’ She donated it, tag and all, to her local charity shop. She never saw it for sale, and wondered often what had become of it. She liked to think one of the elderly volunteers had taken it home one lonely evening and subjected herself to an experience so revelatory as to border on the mystical.

This is an extract from ‘Some Other Katherine’ by Sam Byers in Granta 119: Britain. You can pre-order a copy or subscribe and receive four issues a year of the best new writing.

The planters of the Americas justified their kidnap, enslavement, torture and murder of millions of Africans by espousing pseudoscientific theories that labelled their charges as brutish heathens and their exploitation as an act of manifest destiny. Over time they created a society predicated on race, where skin colour determined the social place and the life chances possible for each individual. In the process, George Ashby and his contemporaries, who had for most of their lives barely conceived that they had an ethnicity, invented a new description for themselves: ‘white’, and used it to separate themselves from the people they exploited, who became ‘black’.

This is an extract from ‘Sugar in the Blood’ by Andrea Stuart in Granta 119: Britain. You can pre-order a copy or subscribe and receive four issues a year of the best new writing.

You can see Andrea Stuart in conversation this evening (10 May) as part of the Britain London launch with Adam Foulds, Jamie McKendrick and A.L. Kennedy at Waterstones Picadilly at 6.30 p.m., on 11 May at the British Library with Jim Crace and on 22 May with Lawrence Norfolk and Esther Freud as part of a special Bloomsbury salon. Full details here.

Image by William Clark, Slaves Fell the Ripe Sugar, 1823. © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. The Bridgeman Art Library.

Cynan Jones is the author of two novels, The Long Dry and Everything I Found on the Beach and this month makes his Granta debut in the Britain issue, with his story ‘The Dig’. It tells of a young boy in rural Wales who, along with his dog, is drawn by his father into a strange world of badger hunting and violence. He spoke to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about why he doesn’t want to be defined as a Welsh writer, the pleasures and challenges of writing short stories and novellas and writing about the growing pains of adolescence.

Photo by Sam Clark / Animal Photography.

The boy had not slept. He was gawky and awkward and had not grown into himself yet.

When his father came to rouse him he found the boy awake with expectation.

Warm, remember, said his father.

The boy nodded loosely in the way he had. The way was to have a minute hesitation before doing things. This came from trying to be eager and cautious at the same time around his father.

He was long and thin and he could have looked languid without this nervousness but instead he looked underdeveloped. When he got out of bed in his T-shirt and shorts it emphasized the awkward gangliness of him. He had the strange selection of muscles teenage boys’ bodies either grow or don’t but the skin on his face was a child’s.

He got dressed and went downstairs. In the kitchen he sat at the table with the kind of extra-awakeness not sleeping can give you He had a low-level excitement running through him. A day off school. and started automatically to spread paste onto the sliced bread. He had a low-level excitement running through him. A day off school. He felt the same illicit closeness to his father as he did when they went lamping and in these times he was capable of forgetting that his father did other things.

His father put the tea on the table and filled the big flask and then they sat and blew on the tea and drank it. Then they went out.

They took the dogs from the run and got them in the car and drove off the estate. The boy found the smell of the sawdust and dog shit in the run hard to bear in the early morning. The smell of it was a strange note against the deodorant he enveloped himself with.

He had not been digging before and was trying to imagine it. He imagined it frenzied and was excited by this. He did not know it would be steady, unexciting procedural work and that it would not be like ratting at all.

He had broken his own dog to rats himself and this gave him pride. When they picked on him in school he kept his pride in this. He hung on to it.

The boy’s father parked up the car and they sat seeing the dog runs and the broken machinery and the boy was momentarily stupefied by the darkness and emptiness about the place.

In the car lights he could see just beyond the runs the bodies of cars like some disassembled ghost train littering the field.

The big man heard them pull up outside and saw the car lights catch and reflect on the mesh of the run and came out to them. The boy had a brief inarticulate awareness that his father shied a little when he saw the big man come from the house. He hadn’t seen that in his father before. The boy thought the man looked like some big gypsy.

The man leaned into the window and the dogs in the back came alive at this new presence and set off a yapping, which set off a yapping in the dog sheds beyond. The car was full of a deodoranty smell that got into your mouth.

They yelpers? asked the big gypsy.

They’re good dogs, said the boy’s father.

It stinks, said the man. It’s a girl’s bedroom.

The big gypsy looked accusingly at the boy and the boy felt himself redden. He felt the nervous flush go up in his throat.

They’re good dogs, said the boy’s father.

We can’t have them hard-mouthed, said the man.

No. They’re good dogs, the father said.

We can’t work with hard-mouthed dogs, the big gypsy said. The big gypsy was looking at the terriers, taking them in. The boy could feel there was a grown-man tension.

Then his father said: They’re not hard-mouthed, mun. They’re good dogs.

There were three terriers in the back. One was the big Patterdale, Jip, thirteen inches at the shoulder and a solid fourteen pounds. He was about as big as you’d want for a badger dig without being too tall in the shoulder to suit the holes. It was why the man had called the boy’s father, thinking of the big boar.

What’s the pup? said the big gypsy. He nodded at the boy’s dog and the boy felt the redness on his throat again.

He’s just along, said the boy’s father. The big gypsy looked at the pup.

He’s not going down, said the big gypsy. He had to take the badger and there was too much risk the young dog would not be able to hold him. The boy felt this shame and the crushed feeling from school came up in him.

He’s just along, the boy’s father said.

They parked up in the machine yard of the big farm and got the dogs out and coupled them dog to bitch with the iron couplings. This was one of the bigger, richer farms locally and had years ago been one of the manor farms that worked under the big house. You could tell the historical management of it by the wider fields and the way the big oaks were spread out in them.

In the east a powder of light was just coming and in the barn the tractors looked immense and military. At the edges of the fields the trees were still a solid deep black.

They coupled the boy’s pup to the older dog and coupled the gypsy’s older bitch to the big Patterdale. They had to couple the right dogs. Dogs that could work together at rat could fight at a badger dig, as if they sensed the individuality of the process.

They got the tools and divided them up to carry; then they took the big five-litre tubs of water from the van and the bag with the tin drinking bowls and the food and gave them to the boy. They weighed on him immediately. It was crisply cold and with their thin handles the weight of the water bottles burned on his fingers.

They went through the gate and down the lane, letting the dogs run in front of them, passively aware of which dog took the lead of the other as they rooted in and out of the hedgeside at the dying scents laid down in the night.

Mud had gathered in the track and the overnight rain left it wet and the boy, alert and cold and over-awake, took in the sucked sounds underfoot and the clinking of the coupling chains and the body sounds of the dogs as they pushed through the undergrowth of the bank. He was using the gulping sounds of the water sloshing in the tubs as a kind of rhythm to walk by.

The thin light was beginning to increase and the few bean-shaped flowers on the gorse stood out with unnatural luminosity. The men’s feet went down hard and solidly in the lane, but the boy constantly tripped on the loose stones the winter’s rain had brought down, as if he didn’t have enough weight to himself.

They went off the track and whistled the dogs in as they went over a field, the lambs prone and folded next to their mothers. Some of the smaller lambs wore blue polythene jackets against the rain and they looked odd in that first light and overprotected.

The boy could hear the ewes crunching and one or two faced the dogs and banged a foreleg on the wet ground, giving a thump that sounded like kicking a ball. He wished he could play, really play, but In the east a powder of light was just coming and in the barn the tractors looked immense and military. he was clumsy against the other boys. He loved the idea of himself playing and his inability was just another little cruelty. Even now, he looked out across the lightening field and saw himself catch a high kick, the crowd of trees a fringe of spectators coming to their feet as he took the ball. But then – the school field, the ball smashing off his fingers to the laughter of the other kids, the teacher’s shouted scorn. That was the reality of him and it brought up a wad of sick and anger.

They worked their way down through the topped reeds that stubbled the slope at the base of the field and stopped by the brook and the boy set the water down. They put the dogs to lead. His pup was shaking a little with excitement.

He’s got rats somewhere, he said. The sentence came out on the swell of pride and he realized it was the first time he had talked in front of the man.

The man lifted up a tub of water and unlidded it and took
a rough swig.

Keep them in, he said. The bank’s snared.

The mink had made their way up from the fur farms by now. They were not indigenous and so it was righteous to kill them. They took out the fish and the waterside birds, even kingfishers from their nests in the burrows, and had annihilated the watercourses as they came up.

It was as well to be able to produce something they could legitimately hunt if by chance they were stopped. It would explain the dogs. In reality, though, they should shoot the mink to make it look like they’d run it into a gun.

The boy was made thirsty by the river and wanted to drink but he did not like the idea of drinking the water after the big man had drunk from the tub.

In the relative openness of the lane and across the field the dawn light had been enough, but here things closed in and they checked the snares with the torchlight.

Bar the one, the snares were empty. The boy heard the dogs whine with the scent of something and the man signalled them to hold back and the boy put the water tubs down and stretched his fingers. Then the boy heard the dull crack of the mink’s skull and for a while did not register what the sound was. The man had hit it with a foldaway spade.

They went on. The water had become convincingly heavy to the boy now. The scrub began to encroach the bank until it was thickened and difficult to pass and after a while they cut away from the stream. It was heavy going but somehow the big man had mobility in it and seemed to fit into the countryside in a way the other two did not.

The dogs sniffed in and out of the torch beams ahead of them and the men pushed through the sprawling holly as they drove into the wood. Every now and then they disturbed something, and there was a clatter in the branches or the tearing of undergrowth as something fled. The wood thickened. Everywhere there were branches down and in the strange beams of light some looked animal and prehistoric.

From working with the hunts the big man knew most of the land roundabouts. The hunts called in the terriermen to bolt their foxes, or sometimes to dig them out if they had gone to earth, and in the country covered with the dogs he’d had more than a chance to scout the land and get to places most people would never go. He had noted the vast majority of the local setts, and the information was a paying commodity for him, and he checked the setts regularly in the way a herdsman might his flock.

Some of the setts he knew of had been there for generations, and in other districts he had heard of those, particularly in the more impregnable places, in the harder chalk soils and rocky hillsides, that went back centuries.

Each clan of badgers had a group of setts, swapping between them periodically, sometimes with the seasons, and he needed always to know which of these was occupied. He tried not to take badgers from the same clan too regularly, to allow the family groups to recover and breed, and in this it was like he farmed the animals to ensure there were always badgers to be had.

They staked the dogs some way from the sett and poured them water and took a drink themselves. The boy had a queer feeling about the man’s mouth being on the water and still did not want to drink it.

The trees had opened up a little and you could see the light finally coming through. There was a moment of greater coldness, like a draught through a door, and the boy felt an unnerving, as if something had acknowledged them arriving there. They had made a lot of noise moving through the wood and when they stopped they heard the birdsong and the early loud vibrancy of the place.

First dig? said the man.

The boy nodded, with that hesitancy. They could hear the dogs lapping and drinking at the water bowls.

The big man had been up to the sett the afternoon before and seen the heap of freshly scuffed soil and the drawn-out bedding outside the entrance. The sett was on a slope and looked to head deep in and there was much undergrowth and thin sycamore on the cover.

He’d gone out a little from the entrance and found the dung pit that in the colder weather was often close to the sett this time of year. Everywhere there were branches down and in the strange beams of light some looked animal and prehistoric. The fresh spores looked soft and muddy from the badgers’ predominant diet of earthworms. In the mud around were scrapings and footprints and from their impress he knew it was a big full-grown boar. A sow would put up a better fight if she had cubs to defend, but there was something more competitive to the size of a big forty-pound boar. They wanted a spectacle.

On the nearby trees were the unhealed scars where the badgers had cleaned their claws and rubbed off the dirt from their coats.

The main hole’s up there, said the gypsy. He gestured up the slope. We’ll put in the dog, he said. He meant Jip, the big Patterdale.

His own bitch was by his feet, with her distant, composed look against the other dogs.

I want to put her in next. He indicated. Better be a dog goes in first. He was thinking of the big tracks and the possibility of the big boar. A bigger dog would have more chance up front. They knew if you put a bitch down after a bitch, or a dog down after a dog, there were problems most times; but if you changed the sex the other usually came out with no trouble.

The boy’s father nodded agreement. He was checking the locator, checking the box with the handset.

The boy was thirsty and looking at the water, not wanting to open the other tub in front of the man.

Take him round and block up the other holes. I’ll do the other side.

The gypsy brought out the map he’d drawn of the holes and went over it with the boy’s father. The gypsy asked the boy if he understood and the redness came to his throat under the zipped-up coat collar; but he was feeling the rich beginning of adrenalin now. He was dry and thirsty and had a big sick hole of adolescent hunger but he could feel his nerves warming at the new thing and began to feel a comradeship of usefulness to the man.

They unwound the sheets of thick plastic and went off and systematically blocked the holes with stones and sheets of plastic and laid blocks across the obvious runs with heavy timber and then went back to the dogs. Then they went up the slope with the two first dogs and gathered around the main entrance and stood the tools up in the ground.

There was old bedding around the hole, the strange skeletal bracken starting to articulate its colour in the grey light. Jip started to bounce on the lead and strain for the hole as if he could sense the badgers. The strewn bracken might have meant the badgers had gone overnight, but from the way the dog was behaving there was a fresh, present scent.

The boy looked at the dog straining on the lead and could feel the same feeling in his guts. He felt the feeling he did before the first rats raced out and the dogs went into them.

The boy’s father knelt with the excited dog and checked the box and collar over again and Jip let his enthusiasm solidify into a determined, pointed thing and stood stockily facing the hole, a determined tremble going through him.

The boy’s father studied the locator once more and checked the signal, then they sent the dog in.

The boy was not expecting the delay of listening for the dog. He could feel his stomach roll though. He could feel a slow soupy excitement. This was a new thing. Then deep in the earth the dog yelped. Then again; and his father was instantly by the hole, prone, calling to the dog, calling with strange excitement into the tunnel.

Stay at him, boy. Good Jip. Good Jippo.

The boy glanced at the man as his father called this out, as if it had revealed what he was thinking about the way the man looked. But the big gypsy seemed to be rapt, a pasty violence setting in his eyes as he listened and watched Messie, his bitch, solidify, focus. Finally, the dog let out a low whimper of desire.

You could hear the barks moving through the ground now and they came alternately sharp and muffled until they seemed to regulate and come with a faraway percussive sound.

The big man moved across the slope. He seemed to swirl in some eddy, then came to a halt, as if caught up on something.

The big man moved again, listening, and the boy’s father tracked across with the locator until the two men stood in the same place, confirming the big man’s judgement.

Here, he said. They brought up the tools and they started to dig.

It was very early spring and the bluebells were not out but made a thick carpet that looked newly washed and slick after the rain. They cut through this carpet and cleared the mess of thin sycamore from the place and the big gypsy cut a switch and bent it into a sack mouth and laid the sack down by where they would dig.

The ground was sodden with rain and sticky and they worked with the sharp foldaway spades, cutting through the thread roots. The smell of rotted leaves and dug-up soil strengthened. When they came to a thicker root, they let the boy in with the saw. Then they started to dig for real.

The big man swung the pick and the father and boy shovelled. Within minutes the boy was parched with thirst and hunger and
could not shout properly when they called constantly to the dog below. He was dizzy with effort. He was afraid of not being able to keep up with the men. As the hole deepened they shored up the sides of the hole with the plastic sheeting and the work steadied to a persistent rhythm.

The badger was going nowhere and it was not about speed but persistence now.

After two hours they stopped for a drink and ate some of the paste sandwiches. The big man ate nothing. The dry soil on the boy’s hands was tide-marked with water from the blisters that had torn and were flaps of skin now and there was a type of dull shock in his back. He had been expecting more action, not this relentless work, and he didn’t understand it.

The dog had been down for two hours and had continually been barking and yelping and keeping just out of the badger’s reach for that time.

Every so often, the boar rushed the dog and the dog retreated and the badger turned and fled; and Jip went after him through the tunnels and junctions until they reached the stop end.

Then the badger turned and ran at the dog again. It was nearly two and a half times the weight of the terrier and armed with fearsome claws Jip started to bounce on the lead and strain for the hole as if he could sense the badgers. and a bite that would crack the dog if he landed it properly. But the dog was quick and in his own way very dangerous. Jip kept barking. Yelping. The badger faced him down and every now and then turned to try and dig himself into the stop end. But then Jip moved in and bit his hindquarters, and the big boar swung round again in defence.

In the confined tunnel of the sett, the constant yelps were deafening and confusing like bright lights in the brain of the badger and it was unsure what it could do. It was then a stand-off. A matter of time.

They sent the bitch in and Jip came up. He looked like he was grinning. His mouth was open and flecked with spit. The dog was exhausted and thirsty but gleamed with the event somehow and when they took off the box and collar, steam came into the morning air off his body. The boy was confused that they ignored the thick obvious blood that came out of the Patterdale and spread down its throat.

The boy kept looking nervously at the exhausted bleeding stubborn dog. The fresh blood seemed a synthetic colour against the dun-green slope.

Messie’s good, said the big man. She’ll hold him for the rest.

The boy sat and held his blistered hands against the cold metal of the foldaway spade. He had gloves but he did not feel he could wear them. Steam rolled off from the plastic-flask cup of tea and it came off the body of the injured dog. Steam came too off the lifted soil, but no birds came as they might to a garden, as if they knew some dark purpose was at work.

The man’s bag hung on the tree and the head of the mink protruded. The boy looked at it. The mouth was drawn and the precise teeth showed. He thought of one of his earliest memories, of his father holding a ferret and sewing its lips together so it couldn’t gash the rabbits it was sent down to chase. The mink had the same vicious preciseness as the ferrets.

Get your dog on it, the man said. The boy immediately felt the redness at being talked to by the big man.

He nodded.

She on rats?

The boy nodded again. He had a panicky lump in his throat.

Good rat dog should take mink. Start them early.

The boy felt the swell of pride come up and mix strangely with his nervousness at the man.

Nice dog, commented the man.

They’d gone through finally into the roof of the tunnel and it looked now like a broken waste pipe and it was mid-morning when they lifted the terrier out. There was still an unnerving composure to her, a kind of distant, complete look.

The boy did not understand the passivity of the badger and that it did not try to bolt or to struggle. He had to develop an idea of hatred for the badger without the help of adrenalin and without the excitement of pace and in the end it was the reluctance and non-engagement of the animal which drew up a disrespect in him. He built his dislike of the badger on this disgust. It was a bullying. It was a tension, not an excitement, and he began to feel a delicious private heartbeat coming. He believed by this point that the badger deserved it.

The big man was in the hole alone now, his shape filling it. The boy’s head pumped hotly from the work and finally his nerves sped.

Have a spike ready, his father said.

Then the badger came out. It shuffled, brow down as if it didn’t want to be noticed. It sensed them and looked up and the boy looked for a moment into its black eyes, its snout circling. The boy was expecting it to have come out snarling and fighting with rage, but it edged out.

It had been trapped in three or four foot of pipe for hours and it edged out until it was by the opening and the big gypsy took it.

He got it round the neck with the tongs and it struggled and grunted and then the man swung it up and into the sack with this great output of strength. Then it kicked and squealed and you could see the true weight and strength of it and the boy didn’t understand why it hadn’t fought at first, at the beginning.

The badger scuffed and tried to dig and the big man punched the sack and the badger went still. At this, the boy felt a comradeship with the man again and a sense of victory, holding the iron spike there in readiness, as if he was on hand.

We’ll hang him while we fill things in, said the big gypsy, stop him trying to dig.

They filled in the hole. Threw in the old roots and stones they’d dug out and finally put back down the sods of bluebells. The place was slick with mud and trodden down and the ground of the area looked like the coat of a sick dog.

The big gypsy looked at the sack hanging from the tree, at the sack-like weight of it.

It was the second time he’d dug a badger for the gang. That first time, Messie had been just a pup. He thought of the money. It was The badger was going nowhere and it was not about speed but persistence now. worth the risk. He made a point now and then of taking in a badger he found genuinely hit on the road to the Veterinary Investigation Centre and he carried the receipt slips in the van to produce if he was stopped. But that worked only for dead badgers, or to explain the hairs they might find. He had to move the live badger and it wouldn’t matter what else was in the van if they stopped him.

The big man reached into his bag and took out the mink and threw it to the boy. Its damp weight and the limp, sumptuous ropiness of the animal surprised him as he caught it. The mouth was drawn and he could see the precise teeth.

You can keep him, the big man said. They’re vermin here. It was like a payment for things.

The boy felt a glow of pride and the sudden warm teamship with the man that was alien to him and which he had difficulty with. His father looked at him with a strange grin and the redness came to him then.

He lifted the mink’s lips to see the needle teeth. They were like sewing needles.

He looked at the needle teeth and felt the fur of the rope-like body. The electricity was gone out of it.

Give him a shake tonight. The big man nodded at the pup. Good rat dog be good on mink.

The boy’s father was panting and looked brightened. The boy could see the sweat on his father’s head through the very short hair. The adrenalin was coming in the boy now and he looked at his pup and swelled with pride. He felt a warm cruelty, standing there on the beach of soil.

I’ll start her tonight, he said to himself. ■

This story is taken from Granta 119: Britain. You can pre-order a copy or subscribe and receive four issues a year of the best new writing.

The first two issues of Granta Italia (Work and Sex), have featured well known writers from the English language editions of the magazine including Salman Rushdie and Téa Obreht and Italian authors of renown including Giorgia Vasta and Walter Siti, alongside more up and coming talents. However, for their third issue, Granta Italia decided to feature previously unpublished writers, the result is Che Cosa Si Scrive Quando Si Scrive In Italia (What We Write About When We Write About Italy). Granta Italia editor Paolo Zaninoni spoke to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about the joys of uncovering new talents and why age doesn’t always matter when it comes to writing good prose.

TH: Is this new direction an attempt to uncover a fresh generation of Italian voices?

PZ: It most certainly is. There is an increasing amount of room for young authors in the Italian publishing scene, with regular reviews of first time writers in the newspapers. However, we wanted to take this one step further and focus solely on this group of writers. In doing so we wanted to sound out new territory.

You’ve collaborated with a number of prizes and writing schools in a bid to help to broaden your search. Were you encouraged by what you found and do you think that Italy has a vibrant young reading and writing culture?

We were surprised by how mature and how different the voices we found turned out to be. Each of these writers have very distinctive styles of their own.

Image from ‘Retratti’ by Martino Pietropoli.

The photo essay in the issue is particularly striking, partly because it is also a debut photographer, but also because the faces of the young ragazzi are all obscured. Is this in part a comment on a generation that is in some ways in danger of being lost amidst an economic and political collapse?

Our brilliant photo editor Federico Del Prete has selected a series of stunning faceless portraits that remain open to interpretation. I think his and the young photographer Martino Pietropoli’s idea was not just to describe a generation but also to involve the spectator in the creation of meaning.

Where you surprised by the issues that this new generation of writers are focused on? Can you talk a little bit about the kinds of concerns they raise?

I am happy to say that I do not feel our authors set out to reflect their age or their epoch: they are not into literature as sociology. In this issue there are stories of love, death, friendship, work and above all, a strenuous concern for writing good prose.

Many of the contributors are quite young, several in their early thirties. Yet many write with a great deal of authority and precision about the difficulties of domesticity and family life. Do you think that whilst experience can be a vital asset for a writer, many can also produce their best work when they are young?

I am not sure that age is the point here. I guess you could say that literature is as good a fuel for writing as life itself, and that most of these authors have obviously been absorbing some very good literature.

There is a touching story here (‘Martino’ by Chiara Marchetti) which is in part about a woman who is mourning the death of her pet cactus. Are short stories able to illuminate these kinds of little disasters that can otherwise be overlooked?

The story is touching and exquisitely written, and one of the virtues of a good short story, and certainly of Chiara’s, is the ability to focus on small, slightly off-key details that lend meaning to the whole – not just the pet cactus, but a haircut, the lighting of a cigarette.

Can you tell us what the next issue is likely to be?

We are toying with a few ideas, one including an Italian city.

The latest issue of Granta Italia features: Luciano Funetta, Chiara Marchetti, Roberto Risso, Piergianni Curti, Danilo Deninotti, Francesca Mazia Esposito, Martino Pietropoli, Michele Di Palma, Mari Accardi, Leonardo Staglianò, Stefania Bruno, Laura Taffanello, Nicola Ingenito, Angelo Lippolis, Ferdinando Morgana, Domiano Zerneri.

John Freeman will be in discussion with Paolo Zaninoni at the Circolo dei lettori for the launch of the new issue, this evening (7 May) at 9 p.m. More details here.

Egg Thieves

A ‘halcyon’ is a mythical bird, often identified as a kingfisher, said to calm the wind and waves from its floating nest, and so was a natural choice of protagonist for my work, where I often fuse the fantastical and the everyday. Here, the pictures show the viewpoint of a female kingfisher as she searches for nesting sites along the length of London's Regents Canal which runs along my commute from flat to studio.

When I first conceived of ‘Halcyon Song’, I was reading James Joyce’s Ulysses and wanted to make a project that similarly described a daily, familiar journey of some sort. From this, I developed the idea of the kingfisher’s search for a nest taking place over the course of a day, and this day being a microcosm of her world and a greater search for home and for meaning.

By Justin Coombes.

Repose

Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Somewhere

The Fall

Where The Heart First Opens

You can see Justin Coombes’s work in the new issue of Granta, Britain.

Competition: In this issue of Granta, Claire Shea brings us an image of a post-it note memorial in Peckham, Anthony Rush captures the mist lifting over a disused barracks in Omagh and here Justin Coombes takes us on a journey along Regents Canal, through the eyes of a kingfisher. What does your Britain look like? We'd love to see this country we call home from your perspective. Send us pictures of your Britain for a chance to be showcased by Granta online. Entries should be posted directly to our Tumblr. The top three will be chosen by Francesca Sears and Adrian Evans of Panos Pictures and published on granta.com and our associated social media. The three winners will also receive a copy of Granta 119: Britain. Competition closes on 14 May. By submitting your work you are thereby granting permission for it to be published, if selected by the judges.

They were late finishing, but the barman had already called the lock-in. Everyone stayed. It was just the band in the snooker club, sitting around the tables; a few bare-chested, his dad among them, his sodden T-shirt stuffed into his bag. Stevie sat next to his dad, and he could feel the heat off him, his skin and his jeans, his red ears. There were a lot of red ears round the tables; eyes down and stop–start conversations. Heads trying not to turn to the bar where Shug was talking with the guest. Or anyhow listening while the guest spoke, frowning serious, and then laughing at his jokes.

A bucket went round the room. Stevie had seen a bucket go round after practice before, collecting coins for sick kids or band funds. But there were no coins going in it this time, only notes, and Stevie saw his dad tuck the fiver back into his pocket when the bucket came closer. He threw in a tenner: didn’t want his blue standing out among the brown and purple.

This is an extract from ‘Hands Across the Water’ by Rachel Seiffert in Granta 119: Britain. You can pre-order a copy or subscribe and receive four issues a year of the best new writing.

You can also see Rachel Seiffert at Granta events in Belfast on 10 May, Glasgow on 15 May, Bristol on 17 May, London on 21 and 22 May and Dublin on 7 June.

They find a clearing that contains the last few broken branches of a den they built earlier in the summer where they drank Tizer and smoked four menthol cigarettes which Sean had stolen from his mother’s handbag. Let’s do it here. Sean finds a log to use as a shooting gallery and sends Daniel off in search of targets. He climbs the boundary fence and searches among the hawthorn bushes which line the hard shoulder, coming back with two empty beer bottles, a battered plastic oilcan and a muddy teddy bear with both arms missing. He feels exhausted by the heat. He imagines standing on the lawn at home, squeezing the end of the hose with his thumb and making rainbows in the cold falling water. He arranges the objects at regular intervals along the log. He thinks about the child who once owned the teddy bear and regrets having picked it up but doesn’t say anything.

Sean raises the gun and moves his feet apart to brace himself. A deep cathedral quiet. The traffic stops. He can hear the shuttle of his own blood.

This is an extract from ‘The Gun’ by Mark Haddon in Granta 119: Britain. You can pre-order a copy or subscribe and receive four issues a year of the best new writing.

Illustration by Judit Ferencz.

Dog Days

Blizzard died. I’m remembering
his limitless affection;
how he constantly gave you the chance to open your heart,
to thaw some of the ice around it;
how I failed to respond; knowing I should, but unable,
as if some crucial defeat would thereby be registered,
though even as I complained about him tramping mud all over the house,
or filling the snow in the yard with piss stains and frozen turds
or getting his muzzle full of porcupine quills,
or jumping bang through the screen door, or licking the butter,
or costing a fortune in pills and shots;
how, behind my posture of annoyance, behind my frosty hostility,
I knew him to be a princely spirit, magnanimous;
knew it from how he greeted me after every rebuff
with his jumps and nuzzles;
every day saying ‘this is your chance to show love . . . ’
Why couldn’t I show it?
Why this sense that good as it might have been,
it would also have been a violation of the natural order
or my own personal order?
I see him,
trotting ahead in the woods,
the big white plume of his tail bobbing up and up
like an irrepressible fountain, then vanishing
as he thundered off after a squirrel.
When he slept, his flank would start quivering;
he’d draw back his ears and his muzzle, and moan with delight,
chasing the squirrel again in his dreams.
Once, while I lay on the couch, flattened by depression,
he came and placed his paw in my hand,
and made a pitiful, pitying baying sound.
I did feed and water him, even cleaned up his shit once in a while,
but always with a dutiful air, an aggrieved look of martyrdom
as though afraid our household would collapse
if someone in it didn’t preserve a certain stiffness,
a certain chilliness in regard to the purely creaturely.

By James Lasdun.

You can also see James Lasdun reading and in conversation with Tania James at a Granta Britain event in Boston, MA on 24 May.

Wrestling in England, Mr Benjamin explains, has become something of a business. Wrestlers are paid to take a fall once in a while, to pounce and pound and growl on cue. After the match, the wrestlers and their managers split the money. Occasionally these hoaxes are discovered to great public outcry, the most recent being the face-off between Youssouf the Terrible Turk and Stanislaus Zbyszko. After Zbyszko’s calculated win, it was revealed that Youssouf the Terrible was actually a Bulgarian named Ivan with debts to pay off.

Illustration by Daniela Silva.

This is an extract from ‘Lion and Panther in London’ by Tania James in Granta 119: Britain. You can pre-order a copy or subscribe and receive four issues a year of the best new writing.

You can also see Tania James in conversation with other Granta authors at events in Washington DC on 16 May, Chicago on 17 May, New York on 22 May and Boston on 24 May.

Every former colony gets the nostalgia it deserves, its own longing for some relic of the departed empire or some compulsion to recreate its more outlandish idiosyncrasies. In Mexico, it’s the baptismal chapels encrusted with gold stolen from the ancestors of the infant whose tiny forehead is being sprinkled with holy water. In North Africa, the boulevards and cafes that signal, This is not the medina! In India, the Dickensian office culture, from the paper-choked bureaucracies of the post-independence years to the present-day call centres staffed by twenty-first-century male and female Bob Cratchits reading aloud from scripts to panicky or impatient voices halfway around the world.

We in the United States were British subjects for such a relatively short time, one might think that less of the mother country would have rubbed off on us and remained. In theory, we should have been comparatively free, to make ourselves up from scratch, to invent a style and fantasy unique to a nation of exiled cultists, grifters, cowboy entrepreneurs, deported convicts, slaveholders and slaves. And in a way, I suppose, we have.

Yet a base-level Anglophilia is constantly thrumming on, or just under, the surface of our culture, a nostalgia fueled by that particularly American strain of a deadly sin: British country-house real-estate envy. How it thrills us to imagine ourselves as the residents of a dwelling plucked out of our childhood fairy-tale books and adolescent fantasies. How elegantly those spires and towers rise above the local mega-mansion that we may have been coveting, and how effortlessly those rolling green lawns shame the vulgar bougainvilleas of a Beverly Hills movie-star hacienda.

Ishiguro’s novel and the Merchant-Ivory film version of The Remains of the Day were so popular here that the lovelorn butler played by Anthony Hopkins is still padding the hushed corridors of the American psyche. Not long ago, I watched Robert Altman’s 2001 Anglophilia is constantly thrumming on, or just under, the surface of our culture, a nostalgia fueled by that particularly American strain of a deadly sin: British country-house real-estate envy. Gosford Park, the British-country-house murder mystery given fresh life by Altman’s gifts and by a stellar ensemble cast. The screenplay for Gosford Park, which is played out against the backdrop of two exquisite country manors, was written by Lord Julian Fellowes, a novelist and screenwriter who has now given us Downton Abbey. Having completed its second season, the PBS television series has sparked another surge of Anglophiliac longing – specifically the desire to return to the manor to which we imagine we were born, and where we would still be living had our founding fathers not made all that fuss about a tax on tea, in what would prove to be a nation of coffee-drinkers.

Our post-colonial nostalgia has taken various forms, though there is often an overlap with Disney princess culture: the glamorous dresses, the enchanted castle, the handsome prince, the pumpkins turned into spectacular vintage cars. Once I read an entire article in Vanity Fair magazine trying to figure out what its subject had done; the answer was he’d been married to Princess Margaret’s best friend.

Like princess culture, Anglophilia is easy to commodify and sell. The royal wedding generated more attention (and presumably more prime-time ad revenue) than the Arab spring; newscasts here routinely featured some young woman and her mom who’d traveled from Sacramento in the hope of catching a glimpse of Will and Kate. It is generally well known, especially by the owners of New England luxury inns, that British Victorian décor is at once comforting and arousing, especially to women, though I have always failed to see the comforting or arousing aspects of a narrow bed so high off the floor you need a ladder to reach it.

In any case, our nostalgia for that imaginary past life spikes when things get rough – socially, economically, environmentally, let’s say the weather turns strange. It’s only natural, only human to want to return to a time when we could just all sit back and relax and let the royals decide. Oh, for the days when everyone knew who they were and accepted their social roles, understood what they were doing and appreciated the tea sandwiches without the tea tax. The seasons were the seasons, Christmas, spring, the weather was nice. And everyone, upstairs and downstairs, got to live in a fabulous house.

Perhaps it goes without saying that Americans who entertain upstairs-downstairs fantasies generally imagine themselves to have been part of the upstairs contingent. In that they’re like the intrepid who undergo past life regressions to find out that they were once pharaohs and queens, never pyramid-building slaves.

In 1970, I was out of the country; I remember clearly that in that year of social upheaval and political uncertainty, many letters I got from home featured news about the latest episode of The Forsythe Saga and the hunt for the Manson family. Now once again in our hour of need – looming elections, struggling economy, continued financial scandals, bail-outs and real estate foreclosures – how fortunate we are to have yet another British dynasty rescue us from our dreary or dread-haunted Sunday nights and install us, however briefly, amid all that luscious square footage. It’s no accident that Downton Abbey is named after the star of the show.

Much has been written about the programme that has attracted millions of viewers (almost five million in the US alone) in a hundred countries worldwide. Variant theories have been floated to explain its popularity, beyond the obvious, which is that everyone likes beautiful people and beaded dresses and fancy cars and not knowing if the headstrong lovers are going to get together or not. The looming question of who will inherit the Abbey resonates with Americans who at this point may prefer the antiquated, sexist, vaguely comprehensible laws of primogeniture to the chaotic, heartless and grabby dispossessions resulting from real estate swindles, subprime lending and so forth.

Perhaps the scariest theory is that one reason for the show’s unprecedented success among younger viewers and other habitual Masterpiece-Theater-avoiders And why are the lawns so verdant for so much of the year? It’s why my husband insists on calling the series Chlorophyll Downs. is that the series has made it all right to like rich people again. After all that confusing Occupy Wall Street stuff about the 99 per cent, it’s a comfort to be reminded that Lord and Lady Cawley are model human beings, benificent, generous, gentle, Gandhi and Mother Theresa with a few human quirks. A few weeks ago I mentioned this idea to a rather conservative Downtown Abbey fan, and his response – amusement, consternation, nervousness about the fact that I’d said the words ‘rich people’ in a rich person’s apartment – made me think that this theory might be partly true.

On the other hand, my own fondness for the show has (I can promise) nothing to do with any attraction to, or fascination with, the British peerage. The truth is, I’ve watched both seasons; a few weeks ago, at a Sunday evening dinner party, I found myself reflecting grumpily that I would have had more fun if I’d stayed home watching Downton Abbey, which I caught up with, the next night, on my computer.

By and large, I’m an easy mark for TV serials. When serials work, they can be great; Dickens would have been the first to note the inherent appeal of a form that ritually denies and then satisfies our curiosity about the outcome of a plot. If only in its ability to string us along from week to week, Downton Abbey is a bit like The Sopranos with a castle substituting for Tony’s New Jersey palazzo. It’s got fancier art direction, less sex, fewer people getting whacked, no humour, and fewer moments (actually, none at all) when the writing is as good as it is when Tony’s consigliere Syl Dante complains that his wife is an albacore around his neck.

For me, and I think for many Americans, much of what we find appealing is the Abbey itself. Highclere Castle, near Newbury, is a Victorian Gothic extravaganza combining Cinderella’s palace, the Mormon Tabernacle, Canterbury Cathedral and the Wizard of Oz’s Emerald City. It’s the prize that every character is fighting for, mourning, or resisting. Several books have appeared documenting the history of Highclere, which was built by the third earl of Cararvon, starting in 1838. But nothing on the page can achieve what happens to our pulse when the cameras hurtle us towards the Abbey with all those violins throbbing. It’s like sex, maybe better than sex, many viewers might secretly think.

After a recap of the previous week’s events, the Abbey is the first thing we see, rushing closer. Then suddenly, blam, we’re in the house, like the sperm crashing into the egg, and we watch the rest of the show in a tranked-out post-coital languor in which our televisions, like thoughtful and unobtrusive attendants, are filling our cups with warm milk tea the instant they run out.

We love the house so much we’re willing to overlook a few reservations about details. For example, heating. Residents of inclement climates may wonder how the ladies can wear those diaphanous gowns at Christmastime. Even with the fire in the hearth, isn’t someone else’s nose turning blue? Is this California? And why are the lawns so verdant for so much of the year? It’s why my husband insists on calling the series Chlorophyll Downs.

It’s been remarked that everyone on the show is extremely nice: aristocrats, maids, cooks and butlers and footmen. The only unpleasant ones are the socially ambitious strivers, a few conniving or naive servants who scheme to rise above their station, and the vile newspaper baron Sir Richard, contriving to do the same thing but on a higher and more threatening level. But to complain that the show reinforces conservative and inaccurate stereotypes concerning social class only insults the intelligence of viewers (like myself) who obviously know that. It also misidentifies the problem, which has less to do with conservatism than with subtler and more troubling effects of the stereotypical: the way in which it reduces life to a drama we’ve already seen, a milieu inhabited by people we’ve already met--which means we don’t have to worry much about where we are or who anyone is beyond the social role.

If Downton Abbey is pretty good TV, or even good TV, but certainly not great TV (a category into which I’d put The Sopranos, The Wire, and Homeland) one problem may be that its characters are not only discouraged from crossing class lines but from doing anything that will surprise us. We can count on the precisely calibrated dose of satisfaction delivered by Maggie Smith playing a matriarch who has lived long enough to feel she can fire the censor between her brain and her mouth. We know there’s no chance of anyone uttering anything remotely like the equivalent of Syl Dante mangling Coleridge.

So what keeps us home on Sunday night (apparently there are Downton Abbey viewing parties, but I haven’t been invited) are fairly conventional questions of plot: Will our heroes and heroines succeed or fail? Reconcile or break one another’s hearts? Will the rebel daughter marry beneath her? Who will inherit the power and especially the house? We want to know what the characters will do, but once we have met them, we no longer have any questions about who they are, or what they will say. Whenever someone begins to speak, we can turn the sound off and provide the dialogue ourselves.

That divide – predictability and one-dimensionality on one side, surprise and complexity on the other – is partly what defines the gap between entertainment and art, which isn’t to say that art can’t also be entertaining. It’s what sets a show like Downton Abbey apart from the novels of Henry Green, several of which have certain surface similarities to the PBS series, most especially Loving, which takes place in a castle in Ireland during the early 1940s.

But beyond their country-house setting and their periodic swings between the mistress of the house’s plush chamber and the servant’s quarters, the two works could hardly be more dissimilar. One could compare any scene in Downton Abbey (from the most to the least dramatic) to any scene in Loving, a novel in which the drama is so quiet and, we feel, so lifelike that (unlike in the TV series with its nagging violins demanding our attention) a moment of distraction could mean missing some critical turn in the action. And any such comparison would rapidly reveal the vast difference in conception and execution.

Loving has many extraordinarily complicated and highly nuanced scenes in which the characters seem to unfold, revealing artichoke-like layers of depth, quirks and startling flashes of compassion or meanness.

One of my favourite interludes in the novel is one in which the most abject and frightened houseboy is allowed to accompany the two vital attractive maids to oversee the children playing at the beach; the maids flirt and toy with the young man, as he futilely tries to win their admiration or approval. Another memorable scene takes place in front of the hearth and involves a proposal of marriage that Edith the maid and Raunce the butler alternately drag and cajole each other into, a betrothal so potentially strangulated by the prospective bride and groom’s pride, love, fear and uncertainty that we fear it might not happen – and are deeply moved when it does.

Now that Downton Abbey is on hiatus allow me to suggest that you fill some of those empty Sunday evenings with the novels of Henry Green. Now that Downton Abbey is on hiatus allow me to suggest that you fill some of those empty Sunday evenings with the novels of Henry Green. And let me also suggest that you pause to consider the difference between the high-wire Edith and Raunce are walking without leaving their chairs in front of the fireplace with the melodramatic chain-yankings of attraction and misunderstanding that, through two seasons of Downton Abbey, keep Lady Mary and her true love Matthew apart. Both the TV series and the novel are set during a World War. But while the show confronts its occupants with the moral dilemma about whether to turn the Abbey into a hospital for the war wounded (we can bet they’ll do the right thing) Loving discloses some far more unsettling and provocative truths about the range of responses and reactions large and small, admirable and less so, unleashed by the anxieties generated by war, however distant.

I can close my eyes and visualize the castle in Downton Abbey. But though I have read Loving perhaps half a dozen times, someone could hold a gun to my head and I couldn’t begin to describe the house in which it is set. I could, however, track the nuances of the conversation in which Edith and her Raunce sit in front of the hearth, playing at being the lord and lady of the manor, and in the process discovering the greatest of comforts: that their affection is mutual, that neither is alone in love. Every time I read the book, this moment affects me with an intensity of feeling that all the green lawns, gothic spires and violins in Downton Abbey cannot wrest from the pleasantly narcotized stupor in which I am invited weekly to roam the chilly parlours and steamy kitchens of the high life, and the empire, we left behind. ■

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