Here you go. "The Orphan and the Mob": A free, award-winning, and slightly rude story, to celebrate “The iHole” making the shortlist of the BBC International Short Story Award

Gareth Allen's fine drawing (from Jude in London) of a totally different and entirely fictional prize ceremony, at which Jude is borne aloft

Woo-hoo! as Blur so eloquently put it.

My story, "The iHole", has been shortlisted for this year’s super-special, one-off, BBC International Short Story Award. (This is the literary equivalent of qualifying for the 100 meters final at the Olympics. Only with fifteen grand for the winner instead of a gold medal. And you don’t have to run, thank God.)

The ten shortlisted stories, by such splendid writers as Deborah Levy, Lucy Caldwell, and MJ Hyland, are being broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and are (or will be) also available for two weeks as free podcasts from here, and published in this book here.

So, to celebrate all that, I'm giving away my best short story that ISN'T "The iHole".

“The Orphan and the Mob” is a serious comedy, about an orphan who desperately needs to go to the toilet. (It’s also an allegory of 20^th century Irish history, a visual pun on The Wizard of Oz, and quite a few other things, but shush, let’s not frighten the children.) It won the BBC National Short Story Prize in 2007 (at that time, the largest prize in the world for a single short story), and was broadcast twice on BBC Radio 4. It represented Ireland in the Dalkey Archive anthology, Best European Fiction 2010. It also forms the prologue to the novel Jude in Ireland (which the Sunday Tribune chose, in 2010, as their Irish Novel of the Decade).

OK, enough of that; you can lash into it online below. If you like it, please do tell me in the comments. And if you REALLY like it, buy the Jude novels and find out what happens next. (My long-suffering publisher, Ben, has, at my request, set the e-book prices particularly low, to entice and seduce you.)

Any questions? Ask them in the comments below, or mail me here. In fact mail me anyhow, say hello, and I’ll tell you what I’m up to, and send you the odd free story and poem.

Enjoy...

-Julian

The Orphan and the Mob

-Julian Gough

         If I had urinated immediately after breakfast, the Mob would never have burnt down the Orphanage. But, as I left the dining hall to relieve myself, the letterbox clattered. I turned in the long corridor. A single white envelope lay on the doormat.

I hesitated, and heard through the door the muffled roar of a motorcycle starting. With a crunching turn on the gravel drive and a splatter of pebbles against the door, it was gone.

Odd, I thought, for the postman has a bicycle. I walked to the large oak door, picked up the envelope, and gazed upon it.

                 

         Jude

The Orphanage

         Tipperary

         Ireland

         For me! On this day, of all significant days! I sniffed both sides of the smooth white envelope, in the hope of detecting a woman's perfume, or a man's cologne. It smelt, faintly, of itself.

I pondered. I was unaccustomed to letters, never having received one before, and I did not wish to use this one up in the One Go. As  I stood in silent thought, I could feel the Orphanage Coffee burning relentlessly through my small dark passages. Should I open the letter before, or after, urinating? It was a dilemma. I wished to open it immediately. But a full bladder distorts judgement, and is a great obstacle to understanding. Yet could I do justice to my very dilemma, with a full bladder?

         As I pondered,  both dilemma and letter were removed from my hands by the Master of Orphans, Brother Madrigal.

"You've no time for that now, boy," he said. "Organise the Honour Guard and get them out to the site. You may open your letter this evening, in my presence, after the Visit." He gazed at my letter with its handsome handwriting, and thrust it up the sleeve of his cassock.

I sighed, and went to find the Orphans of the Honour Guard.

…

         I found most of the young Orphans hiding under Brother Thomond in the darkness of the hay barn.

         "Excuse me, Sir," I said, lifting his skirts and ushering out the protesting infants.

         "He is Asleep," said a young Orphan, and indeed, as I looked closer, I saw Brother Thomond was at a slight tilt. Supported from behind by a pillar of the hay barn, he was maintained erect only by the stiffness of his ancient joints. Golden straws protruded from the neck and sleeves of his long black cassock, and emerged at all angles from his wild white hair.

         "He said he wished to speak to you, Jude," said another Orphan. I hesitated. We were already late. I decided not to wake him, for Brother Thomond, once he had Stopped, took a great deal of time to warm up and get rightly going again.

         "Where is Agamemnon?" I asked.

         The smallest Orphan removed one thumb from his mouth and jerked it upward, to the loft.

         "Agamemnon!" I called softly.

Old Agamemnon, my dearest companion and the Orphanage Pet, emerged slowly from the shadows of the loft and stepped, with a tread remarkably dainty for a dog of such enormous size, down the wooden ladder to the ground. He shook his great ruff of yellow hair and yawned at me loudly.

         "Walkies," I said, and he stepped to my side. We exited the hay barn into the golden light of a perfect Tipperary summer's day.

         I lined up the Honour Guard and counted them by the front door, in the shadow of the South Tower of the Orphanage. Its yellow brick façade glowed in the morning sun.

         We set out.

…

         From the gates of the Orphanage to the site of the speeches was several strong miles.

We passed through Town, and out the other side. The smaller Orphans began to wail, afraid they would see Black People, or be savaged by Beasts. Agamemnon stuck closely to my rear. We walked until we ran out of road. Then we followed a track, till we ran out of track.

We hopped over a fence, crossed a field, waded a dyke, cut through a ditch, traversed scrub land, forded a river and entered Nobber Nolan's bog. Spang plumb in the middle of Nobber Nolan's Bog, and therefore spang plumb in the middle of Tipperary, and thus Ireland, was the Nation's most famous Boghole, famed in song and story, in History book and Ballad sheet: the most desolate place in Ireland, and the last place God created.

         I had never seen the famous boghole, for Nobber Nolan had, until his recent death and his bequest of the Bog to the State, guarded it fiercely from locals and tourists alike. Many's the American was winged with birdshot over the years, attempting to make pilgrimage here. I looked about me for the Hole, but it was hid from my view by an enormous Car-Park, a concrete Interpretive Centre of imposing dimensions, and a tall, broad, wooden stage, or platform, bearing Politicians. Beyond Car-Park and Interpretive Centre, an eight-lane motorway of almost excessive straightness stretched clean to the Horizon, in the direction of Dublin.

Facing the stage stood fifty thousand farmers.

We made our way through the farmers to the stage. They parted politely, many raising their hats, and seemed in high good humour. "'Tis better than the Radio Head concert at Punchestown," said a sophisticated farmer from Cloughjordan, pulling on a shop-bought cigarette.

         Once onstage, I counted the smaller Orphans. We had lost only the one, which was good going over such a quantity of rough ground. I reported our arrival to Teddy “Noddy” Nolan, the Fianna Fáil TD for Tipperary Central, and a direct descendent of Neddy "Nobber" Nolan. Nodding vigorously, he waved us to our places, high at the back of the sloping stage. The Guard of Honour lined up in front of an enormous green cloth backdrop and stood to attention, flanked by groups of seated dignitaries. I myself sat where I could unobtrusively supervise, in a vacant seat at the end of a row. When the last of the stragglers had arrived in the crowd below us, Teddy cleared his throat. The crowd fell silent, as though shot. He began his speech.

         "It was in this place..." he said, with a generous gesture which incorporated much of Tipperary, "... that Eamonn DeValera..."

         Everybody removed their hats.

         "... hid heroically from the Entire British Army..."

         Everybody scowled and put their hats back on.

         "... during the War of Independence. It was in this very boghole that Eamonn DeValera..."

         Everybody removed their hats again.

         "...had his Vision: A Vision of Irish Maidens dancing barefoot at the crossroads, and of Irish Manhood dying heroically while refusing to the last breath to buy English shoes..."

         At the word English the crowd put their hats back on, though some took them off again when it turned out only to be Shoes. Others glared at them. They put the hats back on again.

         "We in Tipperary have fought long and hard to get the Government to make Brussels pay for this fine Interpretive Centre and its fine Car-Park, and in Brünhilde DeValera we found the ideal Minister to fight our corner. It is therefore with great pleasure, with great pride, that I invite the great grand-daughter of Eamonn DeValera's cousin... the Minister for Beef, Culture and the Islands... Brünhilde DeValera... to officially reopen... Dev's Hole!"

         The crowd roared and waved their hats in the air, though long experience ensured they kept a firm grip on the peak, for as all the hats were of the same design and entirely indistinguishable, the One from the Other, it was common practice at a Fianna Fáil hat-flinging rally for the less scrupulous farmers to loft an Old Hat, yet pick up a New.

         Brünhilde DeValera took the microphone, tapped it, and cleared her throat.

         "Spit on me, Brünhilde!" cried an excitable farmer down the front. The crowd surged forward, toppling and trampling the feeble-legged and bock-kneed, in expectation of Fiery Rhetoric. She began.

         "Although it is European Money which has paid for this fine Interpretive Centre… Although it is European Money which has paid for this fine new eight-lane Motorway from Dublin and this Car Park, that has Tarmacadamed Toomevara in its Entirety… Although it is European Money which has paid for everything built West of Grafton Street in my Lifetime… And although we are grateful to Europe for its Largesse..."

         She paused to draw a great Breath. The crowd were growing restless, not having a Bull's Notion where she was going with all this, and distressed by the use of a foreign word.

         "It is not for this I brought my Hat," said the Dignitary next to me, and spat on the foot of the Dignitary beside him.

         "Nonetheless," said Brünhilde DeValera, "Grateful as we are to the Europeans...

         ...we should never forget...

                  ...that...

                           ...they..."

         Fifty thousand right hands began to drift, with a wonderful easy slowness, up towards the brims of fifty thousand Hats in anticipation of a Climax.

         "...are a shower of Foreign Bastards who would Murder us in our Beds given Half a Chance!"

         A great cheer went up from the massive crowd and the air was filled with Hats till they hid the face of the sun and we cheered in an eerie half-light.

         The minister paused for some minutes while everybody recovered their own Hat and returned it to their own Head.

         "Those foreign bastards in Brussels think they can buy us with their money! They are Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! You cannot buy an Irishman's Heart, an Irishman's Soul, an Irishman's Loyalty! Remember '98!"

         There was a hesitation in the crowd, as the younger farmers tried to recall if we had won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1998.

         "1798!" Brünhilde clarified.

         A great cheer went up  as we recalled the gallant failed rebellion of 1798. "Was It For This That Wolfe Tone Died?" came a wisp of song from the back of the crowd.

         "Remember 1803!"

         We applauded Emmet's great failed rebellion of 1803. A quavering chorus came from the oldest farmers at the rear of the great crowd: “Bold Robert Emmet, the darling of Ireland… "

         "Remember 1916!"

         Grown men wept as they recalled the great failed rebellion of 1916, and so many contradictory songs were started that none got rightly going.

There was a pause.

All held their breath.

         "…Remember 1988!"

         Pride so great it felt like anguish filled our hearts as we recalled the year Ireland finally threw off her shackles and stood proud among the community of nations, with our heroic victory over England in the first match in Group Two of the Group Stage of the European Football Championship Finals. A brief chant went up from the Young Farmers in the Mosh Pit: "Who put the ball in the England net?"

         Older farmers, further back, added bass to the reply of "Houghton! Houghton!"

         I shifted uncomfortably in my seat.

         "My great grand-father's cousin did not Fight and Die in bed of old age so that foreign monkey-men could swing from our trees and rape our women! He did not walk out of the Daíl, start a Civil War and kill Michael Collins so a bunch of dirty foreign bastards could..."

         I missed a number of Fiery Words, as excited farmers began to leap up and down roaring at the front, the younger and more nimble mounting each other’s shoulders, then throwing themselves forward to surf toward the stage on a sea of hands, holding their Hats on as they went.

         "Never forget,” roared Brünhilde DeValera, “that a Vision of Ireland came out of Dev's Hole!"

         "Dev's Hole! Dev's Hole! Dev's Hole!" roared the crowd.

         By my side, Agamemnon began to howl, and tried to dig a hole in the stage with his long claws.

Neglecting to empty my bladder after breakfast had been an error the awful significance of which I only now began to grasp. A good Fianna Fáil Ministerial speech to a loyal audience in the heart of a Tipperary bog could go on for up to five hours. I pondered my situation. My only choice seemed to be as to precisely how I would disgrace myself in front of thousands. To rise and walk off the stage during a speech by a semi-descendent of DeValera would be tantamount to treason, and would earn me a series of beatings on my way to the portable toilets. The alternative was to relieve myself into my breeches where I sat.

My waist-band creaked under the terrible pressure.

         With the gravest reluctance, I willed the loosening of my urethral sphincter.

…

         Nothing happened. My subsequent efforts, over the next few minutes, to void my bladder, resulted only in the vigorous exercising of my superficial abdominal muscles. At length, I realised that there was a fundamental setting in my Subconscious, and it was set firmly against public voidance. To this adamant subconscious setting, my conscious mind had no access.

         Meanwhile, the pressure grew intolerable as the Orphanage Coffee continued to bore through my system.

         I grew desperate. Yet, within the line of sight of fifty thousand farmers, I could not unleash the torrent.

         Then, inspiration. The Velvet Curtain! All I needed was an instant's distraction, and I could step behind the billowing green backdrop beside me, and vanish. There would, no doubt, be an exit off the back of the stage, through which I could pass to relieve myself, before returning, unobserved, to my place.

         A magnificent gust of Nationalist Rhetoric lifted every hat again aloft and, in the moment of eclipse, I stood, took one step sideways, and vanished behind the Curtain.

…

I shuffled along, my face to the Emerald Curtain, my rear to the back wall of the stage, until the wall ceased. I turned, and beheld, to my astonished delight, the solution to all my problems.

Hidden from stage and crowd by the vast Curtain was a magnificent circular long-drop toilet of the type employed in the Orphanage. But where we sat around a splintered circle of rough wooden plank, our buttocks overhanging a fetid pit, here was elegant splendour: a great golden rail encircled a pit of surpassing beauty. Mossy walls ran down to a limpid pool into which a lone frog gently ‘plashed.

         Installed, no doubt, for the private convenience of the Minister, should she be caught short during the long hours of her speech, it was the most beautiful sight I had yet seen in this world. It seemed nearly a shame to urinate into so perfect a pastoral picture, and it was almost with reluctance that I unbuttoned my breeches and allowed my manhood its release.

         I aimed my member so as to inconvenience the Frog as little as possible. At last my Conscious made connection with my Unconscious; the Setting was Reset; Mind and Body were as One; Will became Action: I was Unified. In that transcendent moment all my senses were polished to perfection.

         I could smell the sweet pollen of the Heather and the Whitethorn, and the mingled Colognes of a thousand Bachelor Farmers.

         I could taste the lingering, bitter grounds of the Orphanage Coffee, and feel the grit of them lodged in the joins of my teeth.

         I could hear the murmur and sigh of the crowd like an ocean at my back, and Brünhilde DeValera's mighty voice bounding from rhetorical Peak to rhetorical Peak, ever higher.

And as this moment of Perfection began its slow decay into the past, and as the delicious frozen moment of Anticipation deliquesced into Attainment and the pent-up waters leaped forth, far forward, and fell in their glorious swoon, Brünhilde DeValera's voice rang out as from Olympus

         "I

          hereby

                  officially

                           reopen...

                                    Dev's Hole!"

         A suspicion dreadful beyond words began to dawn on me. I attempted to Arrest the Flow, but I may as well have attempted to block by effort of will the course of the mighty Amazon River.

         Thus the Great Curtain parted, to reveal me Urinating into Dev's Hole: into the very Source of the Sacred Spring of Irish Nationalism: the Headwater, the Holy Well, the Font of our Nation.

…

         I feel, looking back, that it would not have gone so badly against me, had I not turned at Brünhilde De Valera's shriek and hosed her with urine.

…

         They pursued me across rough ground for some considerable time.

…

         Agamemnon held my pursuers at the Gap in the Wall, as I crossed the grounds and gained the House. He had not had such vigorous exercise since running away from Fossetts' Circus and hiding in our hay barn a decade before, as a pup.

Now, undaunted, he slumped in the gap, panting at them.

         Slamming the Orphanage Door behind me, I came upon old Brother Thomond in the Long Corridor, beating a Small Orphan in a desultory manner.

         "Ah, Jude," said Brother Thomond, on seeing me. The brown leather of his face creaked as he smiled, revealing the perfect, white teeth of Brother Jasper.

         "A little lower, Sir, if you please," piped the Small Orphan, and Brother Thomond obliged. The weakness of Brother Thomond's brittle limbs made his beatings popular with the Lads, as a rest and a relief from those of the more supple and youthful Brothers.

         "Yes, Jude..." he began again, "I had something I wanted to... yes... to... yes..." He nodded his head, and was distracted by straw falling past his eyes, from his tangled hair.

         I moved from foot to foot, uncomfortably aware of the shouts of the approaching Mob. Agamemnon, by his roars, was now retreating heroically ahead of them as they crossed the grounds toward the front door.

         "'Tis the Orphanage!" I heard one cry.

         "'Tis full of Orphans!" cried another.

         "From Orphania!" cried a third.

         "As we suspected!" called a fourth. "He is a Foreigner!"

         I had a bad feeling about this. The voices were closer. There was the thud of Agamemnon's retreating buttocks against the door. Agamemnon stood firm at the steps, but no dog, however brave, can hold off a Mob forever.

         "Yes!" said Brother Thomond, and fixed me with a glare. "Very good." He fell asleep briefly, one arm aloft above the Small Orphan.

         The mob continued to discuss me on the far side of the door.

         "You're thinking of Romania, and of the Romanian orphans. You're confusing the two," said a level head, to my relief. I made to tiptoe past Brother Thomond and the Small Orphan.

         "Romanian, by God!"

         "He is Romanian?"

         "That man said so."

         "I did not..."

         "A Gypsy Bastard!"

         "Kill the Gypsy Bastard!"

         The Voice of Reason was lost in the hubbub, and a rock came in through the stained-glass window above the front door. It put a Hole in Jesus and it hit Brother Thomond in the back of the neck.

         Brother Thomond awoke.

         "Dismissed," he said to the Small Orphan sternly.

         "Oh but Sir you hadn't finished!"

         "No backchat from you, young fellow, or I shan't beat you for a week."

         The Small Orphan scampered away into the darkness of the Long Corridor. Brother Thomond sighed deeply, and rubbed his neck.

         "Jude, today is your eighteenth birthday, is it not?"

         I nodded.

         Brother Thomond sighed again. "I have carried a secret this long time, regarding your Birth. I feel it is only right to tell you now..."

He fell briefly asleep.

         The cries of the Mob grew as they assembled, eager to enter, and destroy me. The yelps and whimpers of brave Agamemnon were growing fainter. I had but little time. I poked Brother Thomond in the Clavicle with a Finger. He started awake. “What? WHAT? WHAT?”

         Though to rush Brother Thomond was usually counter-productive, circumstances dictated that I try. I shouted, the better to penetrate both the Yellow Wax and the Fog of Years.

"You were about to tell me the Secret of my Birth, Sir."

         "Ah yes. The secret..." He hesitated. "The secret of your birth... The secret I have held these many years... which was told to me by... by one of the... by Brother Feeny... who was one of the Cloughjordan Feenys... His mother was a Thornton..."

         "If you could Speed It Up, Sir," I suggested, as the Mob forced open the window-catch above us. Brother Thomond obliged.

         "The Secret of Your Birth..."

         Outside, with a last choking yelp, Agamemnon fell silent. There was a tremendous hammering on the old oak door.

         "I'll just get that," said Brother Thomond. "I think there was a knock."

         As he reached it, the door burst open with extraordinary violence, sweeping old Brother Thomond aside with a crackling of many bones in assorted sizes, and throwing him backwards against the wall where he impaled the back of his head on a coathook. Though he continued to speak, the rattle of his last breath rendered the Secret unintelligible. The Mob poured in.

         I ran on, into the dark of the Long Corridor.

…

         I found the Master of Orphans, Brother Madrigal, in his office in the South Tower, beating an orphan in a desultory manner.

         "Ah, Jude," he said. "Went the day well?"

         Wishing not to burden him with the lengthy Truth, and with both time and breath in short supply, I said "Yes."

         He nodded approvingly.

         "May I have my Letter, Sir?" I said.

         "Yes, yes, of course..." He dismissed the small orphan, who trudged off disconsolate. Brother Madrigal turned from his desk toward the Confiscation Safe, then paused by the open window. "Who are those strange men on the Lawn, waving blazing torches?"

         "I do not precisely know," I said truthfully.

He frowned.

"They followed me home," I felt moved to explain.

         "And who could blame them?" said Brother Madrigal. He smiled and tousled my hair, before moving again toward the Confiscation Safe, tucked into the room’s rear left corner. From the lawn far below could be heard confused cries.

         Unlocking the safe, he took out the letter and turned. Behind him, outside the window, I saw flames race along the dead ivy and creepers, and vanish up into the roof timbers. "Who," he mused, looking at the envelope, "could be writing to you...?" Suddenly he started, and looked up at me. " Of course! " he said. "Jude, it is your eighteenth birthday, is it not?"

         I nodded.

         He sighed, the tantalising letter now held disregarded in his right hand.  "Jude… I have carried a secret this long time, regarding your Birth. It is a secret known only to Brother Thomond and myself, and it has weighed heavy on us. I feel it is only right to tell you now... The secret of your birth..." He hesitated. "Is..."

My heart Clattered in its Cage at this Second Chance.

Brother Madrigal threw up his hands. "But where are my manners? Would you like a cup of tea first? And we must have music. Ah, music."

         He pressed Play on the record player that sat at the left edge of the broad desk. The turntable bearing the Orphanage single began to rotate at forty-five revolutions per minute. The tone-arm lifted, swung out, and dropped onto the broad opening groove of the record, nearly dislodging from the needle a Ball of Dust the size and colour of a small mouse.

         The blunt needle in its fuzzy ball of dust juddered through the scratched groove. Faintly, beneath the roar and crackle of its erratic passage, could be heard traces of an ancient tune.

         Brother Madrigal returned to the safe and switched on the old kettle that sat atop it. Leaving my letter leaning against the kettle, he came back to his desk and sat behind it in his old black leather armchair.

         Unfortunately, the rising roar of the old kettle and the roar and crackle of the record player disguised the rising roar and crackle of the flames in the dry timbers of the old tower roof.

         Brother Madrigal patted the side of the Record Player affectionately. "The sound is so much warmer than from all these new digital dohickeys, don't you find? And of course you can tell it is a good-quality machine from the way, when the needle hops free of the surface of the record, it often falls back into the self-same groove it has just left, with neither loss nor repetition of much music. The Arm..." He tapped his nose and slowly closed one eye. "...Is True."

         He dug out an Italia '90 cup and a USA '94 mug from his desk, and put a teabag in each.

         "Milk?"

         "No, thank you," I said. The ceiling above him had begun to bulge down in a manner alarming to me. The old leaded roof had undoubtedly begun to collapse, and I feared my second and last link to my past would be crushed along with all my hopes.

         "Very wise. Milk is fattening, and thickens the phlegm," said Brother Madrigal. "But you would like your letter, no doubt. And also... the Secret of your Birth." He arose, his head almost brushing the great Bulge in the Plaster, now yellowing from the intense heat of the blazing roof above it.

         "Thirty years old, that record player," said Brother Madrigal proudly, catching my glance at it. "And never had to replace the needle, or the record. It came with a wonderful record, thank God. I really must turn it over one of these days," he said, lifting the gently vibrating letter from alongside the rumbling kettle whose low tones, as it neared boiling, were lost in the bellow of flame above. "Have you any experience of turning records over, Jude?"

         "No sir," I said as he returned to the desk, my letter shining white against the black of his dress. Brother Madrigal extended the letter halfway across the table. I began to reach out for it. The envelope, containing perhaps the secret of my origin, brushed against my fingertips, electric with potential.

At that moment, with a crash, in a bravura finale of crackle, the record came to an end. The lifting mechanism hauled the Tone Arm up off the vinyl, and returned it to its rest position with a sturdy click.

         "Curious," said Brother Madrigal, absentmindedly taking back the letter. "It is most unusual for the Crackling to continue after the Record has stopped." He stood, and moved to the Record Player. The pop and crackle of flames was by now uncommonly loud. Tilting his head from side to side, he nodded slowly. "It is in Stereo," he said. "There are a lot of Mid-Range Frequencies. That is of course where the Human Voice is strongest... I subscribed for a time to the Hi-Fi Gazette."

         Behind Brother Madrigal, the Bulge in the ceiling gave a great Lurch downward. He turned, and looked up.

         "Ah! There's the problem!" he said. "A Flood! Note the bulging ceiling! The water tank must have overflowed in the attic, and the subsequent Damp is causing a Crackling in the Circuits of the Record Player. Damp” (here he touched his temple twice), “is the great Enemy of the Electrical Circuit."

         He was by now required to Shout on account of the great noise of the holocaust in the roofbeams. Smoke entered the room.

         "Do you smell smoke?" he enquired. I replied that I did. He nodded. "The Damp has caused a Short Circuit," he said. "Just as I suspected." He went to the corner of the room, removed a fire-ax from its glass-fronted wooden case, and strode to beneath the Bulge. "Nothing for it but to Pierce it, and relieve the pressure, or it'll have the roof down." He swung the ax up into the heart of the bulge.

         A stream of liquid metal poured over him, as the pool of molten lead from the burning roof found release. Both ax and man were coated in a thick sheet of still-bright lead that swiftly thickened and set as it ran down Brother Madrigal’s upstretched arm and upturned head, encasing his torso before pooling and solidifying in a thick base about his feet on the smoking carpet.

         Entirely covered, he shone under the electric light, ax aloft in his right hand, my letter smouldering and silvered in his left.

         I snatched the last uncovered corner of the letter from his metallic grasp, the heat-brittled triangle snapping cleanly off at the bright leaden boundary.

         In that little corner of envelope nestled a small triangle of yellowed paper.

         My fingers tingled with mingled dread and anticipation as they drew the scrap from its casing. Being the burnt corner of a single sheet, folded twice to form three rectangles of equal size, the scrap comprised a larger triangle of paper folded down the middle from apex to baseline, and a smaller, uncreased triangle of paper of the size and shape of its folded brother.

         I regarded the small triangle.

         Blank.

         I turned it over.

         Blank.

         I unfolded and regarded the larger triangle.

         Blank.

         I turned it over, and read…

gents

anal

cruise.

I tilted it obliquely to catch the light, the better to reread it.

gents

anal

cruise.

         The secret of my origin was not entirely clear from this fragment, and the tower was beginning to collapse around me. I sighed, for I could not help but feel a certain disappointment in how my birthday had turned out.

I left Brother Madrigal's office. Behind me, the floorboards gave way beneath his lead encased mass. I looked back, to see him vanish down through successive floors of the tower.

         I ran down the stairs. A breeze cooled my face as the fires above me sucked air up the stairwell. Chaos was by now general and Orphans and Brothers sprang from every door, laughing, and speculating that Brother McGee must have once again lost control of his Woodwork Class.

         The first members of the Mob began to push their way up the first flight of stairs, and, Our Lads not recognising the newcomers, fisticuffs ensued. I hesitated on the first-floor landing.

         One member of the Mob broke free of the mêlée and, seeing me, exclaimed "There he is, boys!" He threw his Hat at me, and made a leap in my direction. I leapt sideways, through the nearest door, and entered Nurse's quarters.

         Nurse, the most attractive woman in the Orphanage, and on whom we all had a crush, was absent, at her grandson's wedding in Borris-in-Ossary. I felt it prudent to disguise myself from the mob, and slipped into a charming blue gingham dress. Only briefly paralysed by pleasure at the scent of Nurse’s perfume, I soon made my way back out through the battle, as Orphans and Farmers knocked lumps out of each other.

         "Foreigners!" shouted the Farmers at the Orphans.

"Foreigners!" shouted the Orphans back, for some of the Farmers were from as far away as Cloughjordan, Ballylusky, Toomevara, Ardcrony, Lofty Bog, and even far-off South Tipperary itself, as could be told by the unusual sophistication of the stitching on the leather patches at the elbows of their tweed jackets and the richer, darker tones, redolent of the lush grasslands of the Suir valley, of the cowshit on their Wellington Boots.

         "Dirty Foreign Bastards!"

         "Fuck off back to Orphania!"

         "Ardcrony Ballocks!"

         The sophisticated farmer, who had seen The Radio Head at Punchestown, was hurled over the balcony, and his unconscious body looted of its shop-bought cigarettes by the Baby Infants.

         I appeared, in Nurse’s attire. The crowd parted to let me through, the Young Farmers removing their Hats as I passed. Some Orphans shouted "It is Jude in a Dress!" but the unfortunate sexual ambiguity of my name served me well on this occasion and allayed the suspicions of the more doubtful farmers, who took me for an ill-favoured girl who usually wore Slacks.

         At the bottom of the stairs, I found myself once again in the deserted Long Corridor.

         From behind me came the confused sounds of the Mob in fierce combat with the Orphans and the Brothers Of Jesus Christ Almighty. From above me came the crack of expanding brick, a crackle of burning timber, sharp explosions of window-panes in the blazing tower.

The Mob would not rest till they found me.

My actions had led to the destruction of the Orphanage.

I had brought bitter disgrace to my family, whoever they should turn out to be.

         I realised with a jolt that I would have to leave the place of my greatest happiness.

         With a creak and a bang, the South Tower settled a little. Dust and smoke gushed from the ragged hole in the ceiling through which the lead-encased body of Brother Madrigal had earlier plunged. I gazed upon him, standing proudly erect on his thick metal base, holding his axe aloft, the whole of him shining like a freshly washed baked bean tin in the light of the setting sun that shone in through the open front door at the end of the corridor,. 

         And by the front door, hanging from the coathook in his skull, his posture more alert than his old bones had been able to manage in life, was Brother Thomond. The bright yellow straw that burst up out of the neckhole of his cassock and jutted forth from his black sleeves was stained dark red by his old, slow blood on its slow voyage to the floor.

         And in the doorway itself, hung by his neck from a rope, was my old friend Agamemnon, his thick head of long golden hair fluffed up into a huge ruff by the noose, his mighty claws unsheathed, his tawny fur bristling as his dead tongue rolled from between his black lips to eclipse his fierce, yellow teeth.

         What was left for me here, now?

         With  a splintering crash, a dull movement of air through a long moment of near-silence, and a flat, rumbling, bursting impact, the entire facade of the South Tower detached itself, unpeeled, and fell in a long roll across the lawn and down the driveway, scattering warm bricks the length of the drive.

         Dislodged by the lurch of the tower, the Orphanage Record Player fell, tumbling, three stories, through the holes made by Brother Madrigal himself, and landed rightway up by his side with a smashing of innards.

         The tone arm lurched onto the Record and, with a twang of elastic, the turntable began to rotate. Music sweet and pure filled the air and a sweet voice sang words I had only ever heard dimly.

         "Some...

         Where...

         Oh…

         Werther…

Aon…

         Bó... "

         I filled to brimming with an ineffable emotion. I felt a great... presence? No, it was an absence, an absence of? Of... I could not name it. I wished I had someone to say goodbye to, to say goodbye to me.

It is a sad song, I think.

         The record ground to a slow halt with a crunching of broken gear-teeth. I felt a soft touch on my cheek, then on the back of my hand.

         I looked down to see the great ball of Dust, dislodged from the Record Player's needle during the long fall, drifting the last few inches to the ground.

I looked around me for the last time and sighed.

         "There is no place like home," I said quietly to nobody, and walked out the door onto the warm bricks in my blue dress. The heat came up through the soles of my shoes, so that I skipped nimbly along the warm yellow bricks, till they ended.

         I looked back once, to see the broken wall, the burning roof and tower.

         And Agamemnon dead.

                  END        

Jude's continuing adventures, on Amazon...



Jude in Waterstones - a new and exciting adventure for Jude, with an unfortunate ending

Two copies of Jude in London

Waterstones are the biggest book chain in the UK, with 296 shops. They sold five hundred million pounds worth of books last year. I’m very happy about that, because I write books. In fact, Jude in London, my most recent novel, came out in paperback this month. The Observer just named it their Paperback of the Week.

The paperback is the cheaper, mass market edition. It’s the one covered in great reviews of the more expensive trade paperback, or hardback, from a year earlier. The paperback is how you reach a mass audience.

I’d had a busy year since Jude in London first came out. The kind of busy year retailers like; one that raises your public profile, and brings new people to your work. My second BBC radio play starring Jude — The Great Squanderland Roof — had picked up roughly a million listeners. My stageplay starring Jude (The Great Goat Bubble), had sold out its run, every ticket, every night. The novel itself had been shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize (former winners: Will Self, Ian McEwan, Howard Jacobson…) It was even shortlisted for the Guardian's anarchic anti-award, the Not The Booker Prize. And, since Jude in London first came out, I’d written the long narrative at the end of Minecraft. (Winning every award going, Minecraft was Time Magazine's Computer Game of the Year for 2011). Given that Minecraft had by now sold nine million copies, my work had quite possibly had more readers than that of any other quirky literary novelist this year.

One of the exciting things about being a writer is when your publisher tells you how many copies Waterstones have ordered. It is exciting partly because they completely dominate the retail market for literary fiction in the UK. (If they don’t stock you, your book is dead.) But it is also exciting because I love Waterstones. Theirs are the shops in which I browse, and buy, when I’m in England. Their staff are terrific; friendly and knowledgeable. It’s a special pleasure to ask someone in the fiction section to recommend something odd and interesting. (Last time, in their flagship Picadilly branch — which has eight and a half miles of shelves — I was lovingly introduced to Daniil Kharms.) Their Oxford Street branch is a delight, and its witty Twitter account is a must-follow. Of course, those staff and managers are no longer allowed to order anything. It all has to come from head office. But that means head office can put in a huge order. (Waterstones ordered 12,000 copies of the paperback of my first novel, back when I was even more obscure than I am now.) My hopes were, cautiously, high.

So, how many copies did Waterstones order of the paperback? Two. Two copies. Not two copies per shop. Two copies to share between all 296 stores. That's less than 1% of a copy per shop. That’s… (Does the maths on a napkin)… exactly three pages for each manager. (Hmm. That reminds me of something… It’ll come to me.)

Now, I have no problem with this. I understand that nobody wants to read highly praised novels that have been shortlisted for well-known awards, especially when they’ve been written by award-winning cult writers whose writing gets millions of listeners and readers in other media.

What’s been puzzling me is…  why did Waterstones order two copies? Why not no copies? I mean obviously they don’t like the book. Fair enough. My stuff has a strong flavour that is not to everyone’s taste. Ordering no copies would make sense. But a head office order that comes to only three pages for every shop? Why would they want… wait a minute. (Googles feverishly. Returns a couple of minutes later…)

Hey, did you know that, in the UK, the average person uses three sheets of paper to wipe their backside after a crap? Obviously, some use less, and some use more, but the UK average is three.

So, Waterstones have ordered two copies of Jude in London.

Just enough to give every manager of every shop in the Waterstones chain exactly three pages each…

Hmmm.

They REALLY don’t like my book.

Irish Writer Pardoned For Stealing Pig

 "The pig is rightfully MINE, Sir Terence!" (Photo by Sophie Gough Fives.) Actually, to contradict the caption, (which, on reflection, I realise is more Sherlock Holmes than Bertie Wooster) - I hope Sir Terry Pratchett wins. THIS time...

Well, well, well. My new novel, Jude in London, has been shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. Older readers will understand why I am so surprised (as well as, of course, delighted); younger readers will have it explained to them shortly. It involves dark literary doings, and the theft of livestock. Stick around.

The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction is the one where they give you the prize at the Hay Festival, name a pig after your book, and take your photo with the pig. A great, idiosyncratic prize, with a good track record. The Wodehouse judges discovered Marina Lewycka's A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, they chose Vernon God Little before it won the Booker, and last year they gave the prize to Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story.

This year, it's a very strong shortlist: the other four are Terry Pratchett (for Snuff), Sue Townsend (of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole fame, for The Woman Who Went To Bed For A Year), John O'Farrell (for The Man Who Forgot His Wife), and John Lanchester (for his sprawling financial comedy of London life, Capital). Normally, natural humility would cause any author surprise at being on such a splendid shortlist. However, as regular readers of my work will know, I do not suffer from humility. My surprise at being on the shortlist comes from the fact that, last time I was on it, I disgraced myself so thoroughly that I'd assumed the judges were more likely to put me on a blacklist than a second shortlist.

Back in 2008, the first novel in my Jude trilogy - Jude in Ireland - was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, alongside Alan Bennett, Will Self, Garrison Keillor (of Lake Wobegon Days fame), and Joe Dunthorne. I swelled with pride, chiefly in the region of the head. I blogged about my joy. But... well, at this point I may as well quote from a slightly later blog entry:

"You can imagine then my dismay when I discovered, shortly afterwards, buried in the small print of the Hay-on-Wye festival programme, the odd phrase "Will Self, winner of the 2008  Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize." Winner? WINNER?!?!?!

As the festival program had gone to print before the shortlist was announced, this meant that the prize committee had picked the winner before they had announced, or perhaps even picked, the shortlist. It was a stitch-up. But worse, I had been denied my rightful month of anticipation, tingling, hiccups and giddy excitement.

Also I'd put serious money on Alan Bennett to win. His The Uncommon Reader is a little masterpiece. Something had to be done.

I thought long and hard. The prize is named after that comic god, P. G. Wodehouse, inventor of Jeeves and Wooster. What, I thought would Wodehouse have done, faced with such provocation? Sat in his room and written another comic novel, probably. That's how he reacted to everything, including World War 2. As I was already sitting in a room writing a comic novel this wasn't much help. Action was called for, dash it. So I asked myself, what would P. G. Wodehouse's greatest creation Bertie Wooster do, nobly backed by the genius of his manservant Jeeves?

And the answer came to me as in a vision - as though the ghost of Wodehouse himself whispered in my ear - he would steal the pig.

For if there is one constant in the work of P. G. Wodehouse, from Pigs Have Wings to Pig Hooey, it is that God put pigs on this good green earth to be kidnapped. Not a chapter goes by without somebody chloroforming Lord Emsworth's favourite sow, The Empress of Blandings.

And thus I made my way to the Welsh borders and, with the assistant of my trusty gentleman's gentleman, Jeeves (not his real name, but he would like to remain anonymous for some reason), I stole Will Self's pig.

I sent the organisers this, ah, pignapping video, containing my ransom demands. Tense negotiations continued up until the last minute. They, understandably, did not wish to give the prize to the man who had stolen their pig. I offered, as a very reasonable compromise, to deliver the pig to Alan Bennett's door in London if they would re-award the prize to him. They baulked - Will Self was in the program - his angry fans, denied, might rampage, torching tents, incinerating Gore Vidal in his invalid chair... The intervention of a bishop almost led to a compromise candidate (Joe Dunthorne), but we ran out of time..."

The full story is here. And in this story in The Mail. And in various pieces by Hugo Rifkind, now stuck behind The Times paywall... And The New York Times' arts blog... And in India's Sunday Tribune... I know, I know. And not a thought for my long-suffering mother.

OK, basically, I got a bit carried away. It's always a bad idea for comic writers to leave their padded cells and attempt to do things in a real world for which they are so ill prepared. Still, one learns valuable lessons, which can be fed back into the fiction. I learnt that stealing pigs, for instance, is considerably harder and more complicated in real life than in books. The paperwork for the transfer of livestock across EU borders is shockingly complex. I strongly suspect that PG Wodehouse never stole a pig in his life...

Anyway, it all turned out OK; Will Self kept the title, but I made my point, and I got a pig out of it, which, once converted into wurst and salty bacon, got me through the long Berlin winter.

The only downside, I thought, was that I'd thoroughly burnt all my bridges to the only prize in these islands for comic fiction - pretty much the prize I most wanted.

And thus my surprise at being shortlisted again this week. I think it reflects very well on the people who run the Prize. They have shown true Christian - or Wodehousian - charity. Moral of the story (if there is one): There is greater rejoicing in the literary world over the pig thief who repents, than over the author who never steals a pig at all.

(For those not put off Jude in London by the moral depravity of its author... the free Trust Edition is available from Ben, my publisher, here. You may download it and read it for nothing. If you like it, you can pay whatever you think it was worth. More orthodox editions of the book are available here...)

The Jude in London, Not The Booker Prize, Flashmob Book Club

OK, if you want something meaningful and life-changing to do this weekend (and who doesn't?), you can join this one-off, high-speed, hold-onto-your-hats, Jude in London/Not The Booker Prize, flashmob bookclub. Will the life you change be yours, or mine, or both? We won't know till Monday.

A totally gratuitous topless shot of the author. Wearing a David Shrigley temporary tattoo. Long story.Here's the deal: my publisher and I will let you download my brand new book, for free, here. (It's usually £12.99 in trade paperback, or £4.99 on Kindle). You read it over the weekend, throwing in comments and arguing with each other (and me) in the comments section below. And if you love the book - and only if you love it - you can vote for it to win the Guardian's (in)famous Not The Booker Prize, anytime before midnight London time, this Monday (17th of October, 2011).

If you choose to vote for Jude in London to win the Not The Booker Prize, you'll need to vote in the comments on this page, and write a very short review here to prove you've read it. Also, bear in mind there's several other excellent books on the shortlist for the prize (I'm thinking in particular of Spurious, by Lars Iyer, and King Crow by Michael Stewart), so feel free to check those out, or read and discuss them instead.

And yes, when it's all over, you can pay as much (or as little) as you think the book was worth, directly to me & my publisher Ben. (We'll split it equally between us.) But if you're really poor, forget it, the book is on me & Ben. (I was on the dole for ten years, learning to write. I know what it's like to be too broke to join in the fun.)

So, it's an experiment - we're going to try and assemble a virtual flashmob book club. If you have any friends who might be interested, tell them. And I'll see you in the comments section down below, later.

Just click to go to the download page for the Jude in London Trust Edition

Oh, if you're wondering will Jude in London be to your taste, here's some recent reviews from The Guardian, The Irish Times, and The Cadaverine. (And if you want to go straight to the source and judge for yourself, here's an instant extract you don't have to download, about goats and financial bubbles: The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble...)

If you've any problems downloading the book free from here, just email me at JulianGoughsSecretEmailAddress@gmail.com, or tell me on Twitter (I'm @juliangough), and I'll email you a copy directly.

Have fun, be nice. Enjoy the weekend.

(EDIT: As soon as I posted this, and tweeted about it, the responses began - on Twitter. D'oh! I hadn't thought this through... So yes, we can talk about the book here; but also on Twitter (where I am @juliangough), using the hashtag #judeinlondon. I'll mosey back and forth. Talk soon...)

Help save civilization by reading a funny book

It's not every day you get a chance to help an award-winning impoverished author (er, that's me) solve a major dilemma, while simultaneously helping to humanise Capitalism, revolutionise Publishing, and save Civilization. But today is that day.

Jude in London - soon to be a major bookHere's the background (the dilemma will follow): my new novel, Jude in London, has just been longlisted for the Guardian's Not The Booker Prize. Now, The Not The Booker Prize is the most entertaining prize in the literary calendar; an annual online flame-war-slash-literary-debate that can be very helpful in drawing attention to unusual books. (The prize itself is a mug, worth about £1.50. But the glory is incalculable!)

BUT: For a long-listed novel to make the shortlist, readers have to nominate the book, and post a very short review on the Guardian website (to prove they've read it). The process is explained in detail here.

Here's the dilemma: Jude in London is officially published on September 6th. But the shortlist votes (and reviews) have to be in by this coming Wednesday. As my novel isn't in the shops for another fortnight, I don't have any readers yet to nominate it.

So, if any of you would like to read Jude in London, for free, I can send you a pdf of the entire finished book, nicely laid out and readable, today. And if you like it a lot, I'd be extremely pleased if you would post a 150 word review, and nominate it for the shortlist by Wednesday. You're under no pressure to review it or vote for it: only do that if you genuinely like it a lot and think it's worthy of going through to the next round.

There you go. Anyone who wants a free pdf of Jude in London, just ask in the comments below, or on Twitter (I'm @juliangough), or email me at juliangoughssecretemailaddress@gmail.com...

Now, here's the bit where we revolutionise Capitalism. My beloved publisher Ben, who runs Old Street, has conniptions at the thought of a professional-quality pdf of the entire book escaping into the wild before publication. Understandably so - he's sunk a lot of time and money into making a beautiful book out of Jude in London. But I think the future for peculiar writers like me has to be a kind of love-based mutant version of capitalism where you trust your readers, and in return your readers help to keep you alive. Because the free market isn't going to. Bear in mind, I've gone bust and been evicted while writing this book. I've wandered Europe homeless, relying on the kindness of friends (and the occasional stranger) to get it finished. So I, too, would like to see it, somehow, earn me enough to keep going and finish the next one.

So here's the deal: I give you the book for free. You don't have to review it or nominate it. But if you really like the book, if you read all the way to the end and have a good time... I'd love you to buy a copy for a friend. Does that seem fair?

And if you do like it, and buy a copy for a friend, tell me, and I'll tell my publisher, and maybe this trust-based model (where a book is always a present, and yet small publishers stay in business and weird writers get to eat) could take off.

Jude in Tate Modern... A girl! A gun! The Turner Prize!

Here (hot from my inbox!) is a sneak preview of an illustration, and a chapter, from Jude in London (due to be published in September). In the picture, Jude is about to find out if he has won the greatest prize in art - the Turner of Turners. The crowd lift him aloft... his former lover, Babette, flips a golden coin...

No, I won't tell you who is sneaking up behind him with a gun.

For now, clicking on the picture takes you to the first book. Which is also excellent.

And here's some free new book to go with the picture. This is from a little earlier on, before the prize ceremony... Enjoy...

(Oh, by the way, the artist, Gareth McNamee Allen, once did this fine homage to Tayto crisps for my old band, Toasted Heretic's first album, Songs for Swinging Celibates. There's more of his work on his website. Top chap... OK, here we go... )

From Jude in London...

CHAPTER 80

I entered Tate Modern. The floor sloped away and down, beneath a high walkway, and out into one enormous Room. I walked for a long time, until I was in the centre of the Room, and looked around. I was obviously very early, for the Art had not arrived yet. Certainly there was more than enough blank space on the walls for it. It was a room into which you could have fitted Galway City’s great Car Park of the Roaches itself. I had never seen the like. Its scale was inhuman. Yet the Tate Family evidently still lived here, and spent all their time in this room, for their possessions lay all about me. At the far end of the room, and proof I was in the right place, a stage stood before a backdrop of vast, dead television screens. Great lights, unlit as yet, hung above the stage from steel beams.

No doubt the Prize-Giving will take place upon that stage. Oh, I hope they will not be too disappointed that I have neglected to create any Art …

Perhaps I could make up for my failure by helping to get the place ready, before the other artists’ Art arrived. I looked all about me.

There was very little furniture in the room, and that in bad order. The bed in the far left corner was in most need of attention, the sheets crumpled and filthy. The last party had obviously congregated here, for on the bed, the rug, and the surrounding floor, were empty cigarette packets, stubbed butts, vodka bottles and general debris.

Ceci n'est pas un litIt was an easy matter to collect the rubbish, turn the mattress, shake out the sheets, plump the pillows, and remake the bed. This ritual, familiar to me from the Orphanage, soothed. I sang softly as I worked. Too soft a sound to rebound in echo from the bare walls.

The fish tank proved trickier than the bed. Enormous though the tank was, the fish was far too big for it. I estimated the poor creature at thirty-five feet. Presumably, in the way of family pets, it had simply outgrown its accommodation. The older Tate children, who loved it, had themselves, I supposed, reached adolescence, and become too busy to care for it: and the aging parents slowly forgot it, in its forty foot tank in the far right corner. It appeared to have been dead for some time. Bubbles of decomposition rocked it occasionally in the thickening water, as they emerged from the decaying grey flesh. The top of the tank was sealed, which cannot have been healthy for the fish while it lived. Certainly, it made my task of emptying and cleaning the tank more difficult than it needed to be.

Ceci n'est pas un poissonWhen I was finally done with the fish tank, I examined the room in more detail. The place was in a shocking state. The closer I looked, the more shocked I was. The very basics of child-rearing seemed to have been neglected by the Tate parents. Neither the young Tate children nor their many pets seemed to have been adequately toilet trained. There were lumps of elephant dung everywhere. Some had even stuck to the paintings, and dried there. It was a hell of a job to get it all off.

The children themselves seemed to go anywhere. I even found a bottle of urine with a crucifix in it. Sighing, I retrieved our Lord Jesus on his cross, and hung him back up on a clean wall.

I began to clean the handprints and splashes of dried mud off the end wall.

As I worked, others quietly entered the enormous room. Some introduced themselves to me, and shook my hand.

“Judges,” they murmured.

“Brian Eno,”

“Brian Sewell,”

“Brian Balfour-Oatts.”

“Fascinating piece.”

“Please, ignore us.”

“Carry on, carry on.”

They crept into the shadows, murmuring.

“And while dressed as a rabbit! Brilliant!”

“I thought Mark Wallinger’s Sleeper couldn’t be improved on, but by golly…”

“I beg to differ…”

I finished cleaning the wall, and looked around. Still a great deal of work to do, to get the place ready … Unbelievable that a family as rich as the Tates lived in such squalor. Nothing seemed to work. I decided to fix the fluorescent light, which had been flickering erratically since I’d arrived. I tracked the fault to a hidden timer that someone had mistakenly set to turn the light on and off again every minute or so. It was a simple matter to route the circuit around it.

Even their big, new, colour television seemed broken. I couldn’t get any sound out of it. It was showing a rather dull film, about a woman trying to clean a shower. The pictures had gone very slow for some reason, and were in black and white. The whole thing seemed banjaxed. I switched it off.

Then I picked up some old firebricks, which had been left lying where someone might trip. Gasps came from the shadows. Brian Sewell clapped.

I put the firebricks in an old, water-damaged shed. Its overlapping boards and weathered paint reminded me of the lakeboats of Lough Derg. A pleasing warm feeling rose in me.

Now to deal with the graffiti.

The older Tate children seemed to have thrown several parties recently, without the benefit of parental supervision. Many of their friends had scrawled their names, and worse, across all kinds of objects and surfaces. I set to scrubbing. An illiterate fellow called Chris, from County Offaly, seemed to be one of the worst offenders. I was sad to see a fellow Irishman letting the side down. “Ofili” indeed.

Tired, and in need of a break after removing the graffiti, I looked for the toilet facilities. A urinal was mounted in the centre of the room. It was mounted at a curious height, and on its back: but no doubt that was the modern way. Oh, more fecking graffiti… On its rim someone had scribbled their name, and the date or time of the party. R. Mutt. 1917? 19.17? 7.17pm? I carefully scraped it off, before urinating.

Ceci n'est pas un urinoir

(There you go. Feel free to comment below, or explore more of the book for free here.)







World Women in Literature Day

Mr. Jonathan Franzen, author of the acclaimed novel, Freedom, was unable to attend the launch of World Women in Literarature Day.

 BREAKING NEWS: Jonathan Franzen, author of the acclaimed novel Freedom, was unable to attend the launch of World Women in Literature Day.

Philip Roth and the President of America discuss World Women in Literature Day

Philip Roth, author of the great American novels, The Great American Novel, American Pastoral, and The Plot Against America, said last night "It is a tragedy for world literature that Jonathan Franzen was unable to attend."

Women's literature is currently making a big splash in America. News that a woman had won the recent Pulizer prize for fiction was covered by the New York Times, who devoted a full line to it in their initial announcement. In a break with tradition, they even spelt her name correctly in some later editions of the paper (see correction below the article).

David Foster Wallace celebrates World Women in Literature Day. Image courtesy Esquire and the collective unconscious.And the publishing world has been swept by rumours that several female Nobel Prize winning authors from unfashionable countries may be briefly reviewed in two, or even three, American news outlets next year, so long as David Foster Wallace (author of the wildly acclaimed first half of a novel, The Pale King), doesn't release a collection of unfinished short stories, or a facsimile of a notebook.

A spokesman for the American Press Association said last night: "Your mouth is moving but I can't hear you, I think because your voice is so high."

Please click on the three photographs for further information on this story.

The State of Irish Literature 2010

To my slight surprise (and immense delight), my story “The Orphan and the Mob” was chosen to represent Ireland in the ambitious new anthology, Best European Fiction 2010 (edited by Aleksandar Hemon, and introduced by Zadie Smith). The book’s publishers, Dalkey Archive Press, recently asked me five polite questions about the state of Irish literature. I replied with an intemperate rant. A slightly updated version follows below…

1. Are there any exciting trends, movement, or schools in contemporary Irish fiction? Who do you feel are the overlooked contemporary authors in Ireland who should be more widely read and translated?

I haven’t the faintest idea. As is traditional with my people, on achieving the status of Writer, I was strapped to an ass and driven from the City. I’ve lived in Berlin for the past few years. When I was in Ireland, I lived in Galway city, which is on the opposite side of the country to Dublin, where the novelists fester. Galway doesn’t really do literature. And I grew up in Tipperary, in the midlands, where writers were, until recently, killed and eaten. And quite rightly.

If there are exciting trends in literary Ireland, the excitement hasn’t made its way to Berlin yet. Anyway, I don’t believe in trends, movements, schools, and the whole German classification mania. That’s all made up after the fact, to help university libraries with their filing.  Each pen is held by a single hand. But for what it’s worth, none of my Irish friends read Irish books any more.

Indeed, I hardly read Irish writers any more, I’ve been disappointed so often. I mean, what the FECK are writers in their 20s and 30s doing, copying the very great John McGahern, his style, his subject matter, in the 21^st century? To revive a useful old Celtic literary-critical expression: I puke my ring. And the older, more sophisticated Irish writers that want to be Nabokov give me the yellow squirts and a scaldy hole. If there is a movement in Ireland, it is backwards. Novel after novel set in the nineteen seventies, sixties, fifties. Reading award-winning Irish literary  fiction, you wouldn’t know television had been invented. Indeed, they seem apologetic about acknowledging electricity (or “the new Mechanikal Galvinism” as they like to call it.)

I do read the odd new, young writer, and it’s usually intensely disappointing. Mostly it’s grittily realistic, slightly depressing descriptions of events that aren’t very interesting. Though, to be fair, sometimes it’s sub-Joycean, slightly depressing descriptions of events that aren’t very interesting. I don’t get the impression many Irish writers have played Grand Theft Auto, or bought an X-Box, or watched Youporn. (And if there is good stuff coming up, for God’s sake someone, contact me, pass it on.) Really, Irish literary writers have become a priestly caste, scribbling by candlelight, cut off from the electric current of the culture. We’ve abolished the Catholic clergy, and replaced them with novelists. They wear black, they preach, they are concerned for our souls. Feck off.

But let us accentuate the positive, for the love of the Lord:

I do like Kevin Barry. His collection There Are Little Kingdoms had something special about it. Hints of glory ahead. (I gather there will be a novel. I’ll be buying it with cash money.) And from a few years back I loved Mike McCormack’s first book, the story collection Getting it in the Head. I always felt Mike McCormack had the great, demented, Irish small town heavy metal novel in him, he just needed to get it out. Then this week I discovered, from a very reliable source, that he’s finished his next novel, Pilgrim X, and it’s a post-apocalyptic Western set in the west of Ireland. Hurray! Exactly what Irish literature needs right now. I hear there’s a strong Scandinavian death metal vibe off it. This has all the signs of being his major breakthrough, and breakout.

For me, the only writer to grab the Celtic Tiger by the tail and pull hard while the tiger roared was Ross O’Carroll Kelly, the pseudonym of Paul Howard. And that was a newspaper column. (Collected every year into a new book – read them all if you want to understand Ireland’s rise and fall. No other writer caught it while it happened. The best, funniest, and most historically important run of Irish satirical journalism since Myles na gCopaleen.)

The Irish writer that most excited me recently was Diarmuid O’Brien, and he writes unproduced television scripts. Very funny, very Irish, on the edge of the surreal, a nice mixture of  WB Yeats and UK sitcoms. Padraig Kenny is another very funny, passionate, interesting guy trying to do interesting things with TV and radio scripts. (He has already managed to turn his Twitter rants into an artform.) Tommy Tiernan is Ireland’s most philosophical voice, but he has chosen stand-up comedy as his way of delivering his philosophical prose. Tiernan has read everything by Beckett, and everything by Lenny Bruce, and combined them. On the right night you will end up on the floor weeping tears of laughter and recognition as he takes Ireland apart. I remember reading Graham Linehan when he was only 17 and writing for Hot Press, and thinking, this guy is the funniest writer in Ireland. Of course, he got no recognition or encouragement in Ireland, so he went to London and co-wrote Father Ted, and Black Books, and now writes The I.T. Crowd. (Two days ago, as I write this, he won the British Comedy Award for writers.) The guy’s a genius, but he’s been working out of London, with UK broadcasters, since his early 20s, so he has no reason to address Ireland. (We had other geniuses, a decade or two back, but we didn't want them either. Cathal Coughlan tried to tell us who we were, spewing poetic vinegar with Microdisney, then sulphuric poetry with Fatima Mansions, but we didn't want to listen. Don't get me started on Cathal Coughlan, I'll cry.)

But then, why would our funniest, most original voices want to join a pompous, priestly, provincial literary community?  I’m pretty sure the best of the new, young Irish writers are writing for film, TV or computer games. Of course, anyone decent then has to go to England to get anything made. Another problem with Ireland is that its national broadcaster makes civil service television. Raidió Teilifís Éireann have never made a good comedy, they hardly ever make decent drama, and they treat writers like shit. Any work that has to go through an official Irish institution is slowly castrated by committee. All of those things are set up wrong. Our national theatre, The Abbey, is a weird, dysfunctional machine for setting fire to money. There is an almost total disconnect between the plays the Abbey puts on and the nation they are supposed to represent. (It does put on work by good playwrights: but with a thirty year delay.) Its most recent director, Fiach Mac Conghail, is doing his darndest, but turning round around The Abbey is like trying to do a wheelie in an Airbus full of American tourists. As an Irish playwright, you’ve a far better chance of getting your first play put on by the Royal Court in London than by any theatre in Dublin. Culturally, Ireland is a failed state. The fact is disguised because the UK and the USA have taken up the slack, and given our artists an outlet. But Ireland herself has, for example, never made a television program that anyone outside Ireland would want to watch. Given the quality of our writers, and the size of the global English-language TV audience, this is an immense national disgrace. (Just to repeat, everyone involved in Father Ted was Irish - but it was made by the British broadcaster Channel 4.) I know and like many of the individuals who work in RTÉ, but it is institutionally incapable of using the talents of its people, and it is institutionally incapable of change. Its news and sports coverage are excellent, the rest of it should be shut down. At the moment it’s a machine for wrecking talent, and the talented people inside it would be much happier under almost any other system.

The only area where Irish writing is thriving in Ireland itself is on the internet, because it’s a direct connection, writer-to-reader. Blogs captured, and capture, Ireland in a way literature  no longer does. Sweary Lady was brilliant (on her Arse End of Ireland blog), right through the Celtic Tiger years. Kav wrote the great Kav’s Blog. (Sweary and Kav both moved on to the Coddle Pot group blog…) And the quality, and quantity, of the swearing was and is very high on the Irish blogs, with guys like Twenty Major. The Irish swear better than almost anyone else on earth, bar maybe the Spanish and a couple of countries in Africa. That’s another area where I think recent Irish literary writers  – with the honourable exception of Roddy Doyle - have failed us badly. Ireland’s great lost playwright, Kevin McGee, was a master of the kind of swearing that had you desperately poking your inner ear with a biro to try and remove the images from your head. However, he was let down by professional theatre, moved into writing television soap operas (and translating the classics), and seems to have abandoned the stage. Who will swear for us now? Who will let rip the savage, guttural, primal utterance – half Yeats poem, half Guinness fart – required, DEMANDED, by the current state of Ireland? {EDIT: Probably Kevin Barry. Since this was first written, his apocalyptic story Fjord of Killary has appeared in the New Yorker, gracing its fragrant pages with North Galway lines as pinpoint accurate as these: 

“Fuckers are washin’ diesel up there again,” John Murphy said. “The Hourigans? Of course, they’d a father a diesel-washer before ’em, didn’t they? Cunts to a man.”

“Cunts,” Bill Knott confirmed.}

But I am biased, unstable, bitter, twisted, and living abroad, so don’t rely on my judgement. I’m sure there’s millions of brilliant writers in Ireland, I’m just mysteriously missing them every time I go there and look. In fact, aware of this, I outsourced the search to Twitter and asked who were the overlooked or neglected Irish writers that I’d missed. Here were the suggestions I got back, to balance my bile:

John MacKenna, Tomas O'Crohan, Mark O' Rowe (playwright and screenwriter), Antonia Logue, Sean O'Reilly, Vincent Woods (for “At the Black Pig's Dyke, the most underappreciated Irish play in the past 20 years.”), Gavin Duff, John Moriarty, Mike McCormack.

In an enjoyable and robust Twitter debate, Rosita Boland of the Irish Times took issue with the idea that O’Rowe, McCormack or O’Reilly were overlooked. This is a fair point, as all three do get excellent coverage in the Irish Times and on RTÉ, and O’Rowe has a powerful, thoughtful patron in Michael Colgan of the Gate Theatre.

Others on Twitter (some of them from lands far from Ireland) suggested Philip O Ceallaigh, Ken Bruen, and Dermot Healy, but it’s hard to think of these excellent, award-winning and acclaimed writers as being “overlooked” in any meaningful way.

As for Irish language writers – I’m not qualified to judge. They could all be geniuses for all I know.

2. Who are the contemporary European writers from other countries that are writing compelling fiction?

I’d only be bullshitting you if I tried to answer that question. My pitiful French, street-German, bar-Spanish and school-Irish are not remotely good enough to make literary judgements. I can barely mangle my way through comics in any of them. So, for me, all of European mainland literature is at the mercy of the quality of its translators, which makes me reluctant to judge. For all I know, I should be praising the translator, not the original writer. If you read my first book in Swedish, you would think I was a genius. If you read my first book in German, you would think I was a fool. So it goes. In fact, I strongly suspect that the Swedish translator of my first novel is a better writer than me, and wrote a better book. Molle Kanmert’s emails asking me questions were far funnier than mine, and the Swedish version outsold every other version. Someone sign her up for a novel…

3. Do you want your work to be translated? Why or why not?

Of course I do. I want readers. I want to be understood, I want to be misunderstood, I want to get into fights, I want to swim in the Dead Sea, I want to die in my swimsuit, I want to visit Siberia (but leave again), I want to butt in on your national conversation, drink your national drink, shoot and stuff your national bird, eat your national icecream, kiss your poets and pat your dogs and weep at the airport as we hug each other and exchange email addresses and our respective national varieties of flu.

4. Are there enough publishing outlets in Ireland for contemporary fiction? Is there a market for literary fiction in Ireland?

Well, we have the usual situation that arises when you share a language with a larger neighbour. A perverse, S&M relationship. You fight your oppressor & occupier for 800 years, get your freedom, then immediately ask  them for a publishing deal. Just as Bosnian writers seek Croatian publishers, Irish writers seek English publishers. Of course, English publishers seek Irish writers, so it’s a healthy, wholesome S&M relationship. 80% of Irish novels come out of London publishing houses. There’s always a slight tension in that relationship, of course, because some of your jokes and references won’t be understood by your publisher. But London publishers are very good at making sure that doesn’t become a problem, and that the integrity of the work is protected. They have to navigate the same issues with Welsh and Scottish and Indian and Australian novelists, so it’s not a big deal. There are a lot of small, very noble but very undercapitalised Irish publishers, but they have great difficulty hanging on to their writers if a UK publisher offers a decent advance. Or any advance at all.

We don’t really have a problem with lack of recognition, lack of outlets. The best Irish writers get recognised, usually in London first, after which the Irish literary establishment falls into line.  Ireland very, very seldom discovers its own writers first. Roddy Doyle had to take out a bank loan to publish the Commitments in Ireland. After which, he was picked up by an English publisher.

That has an interesting effect, though. Knowing that you are addressing sixteen UK readers for every one Irish reader, in a very mild way your book goes into translation in your head, as you write it. Most Irish writers will deny this, but I think it’s true. Of course I was born in London to emigrant Irish parents, so I feel equally at home, or not at home, in both places.

5. Given a choice, would you prefer a faithful, literal translation of your work or an interpretive re-imagining of it? Why?

An interpretive re-imaging, definitely. I don’t think a “faithful, literal” translation of my work – of any work - is even possible. If a translation were to be literal, it wouldn’t be faithful, and vice versa. Any decent writer is playing with nuances, rhythms, echoes, soundstuff that will evaporate in any literal translation. I like a lot of layers. Puns, resonances, double-meanings, Tipperaryisms, things my mum says at Christmas. Often the point of the sentence hasn’t anything to do with its literal meaning at all.

I use deliberately “wrong”, literal translations of phrases from the Irish language sometimes myself, because they sound fecking great in English. Friends of my dad would still say “I walked several strong miles”, and that is straight out of the Irish.

The Jude books are deliberately written in a stilted, old-fashioned, formal English, of the type spoken in Ireland a century ago. It’s the first-generation English of speakers who learnt English in school, from books, because their parents spoke Irish at home. For me this is a very rich form of English, because you can let the underlying Irish thoughts, structured in Irish grammar, burst through now and again. There is always a nice tension in the speech, as though Jude is walking on linguistic stilts, and has to be careful. He is trying to be terribly precise with a language he doesn’t really control or own.

Sometimes the games I play with the various versions of English are fairly explicit, as in the case of this head injury in Jude in London:

           “Their noble Tipperary speech reminded me of my mental catastrophe. I looked up from my book, and took the opportunity to experiment with my deformity: I spoke a Catholic thought, and it came out Church of England: I praised a fine All-Ireland semi-final performance by the Tipperary Under-21 hurlers against Kilkenny; and from my mouth came alien speech of an F.A. Cup semi-final replay at Villa Park.

           Sweet Mother of Jesus, I thought, astonished, and

           “Queen of Heaven!” I said.

           Christ on a bicycle, I thought.

           “Good Lord!”

           Holy fuck.

           “Blessed Union!”

           I gave up the attempt to accurately express myself, and returned to my book.”

I must be a real bastard for translators, because increasingly I like to back-engineer scenes so that a crucial line of narrative, thrown up by the action, is also a line of poetry by Yeats, or a line of dialogue is also a line of Joyce, or Kafka, or is made out of Radiohead song titles. They can be tricky to spot - most of my native-English readers miss most of them. And I also use the misunderstandings and gaps between American English and English English and Irish English to generate jokes and misunderstandings, and moments of unease.

A single English word sings in many voices, and I like to set off a couple of them, and make my words sing harmonies with themselves, or beat each other up. I doubt if anyone but me gets the half of it, but I think readers find pleasure in it anyway. I remember a woman on a blog quoting her favourite piece of my writing. She said she couldn’t put her finger on why she liked it so much. Well, I could. It was the end of a chapter, and I’d written it in iambic pentameter. Because it was laid out like prose, she hadn’t consciously registered the formal rhythm, the internal rhymes. But subconsciously, she got it...

That makes me sound too much of a word wizard – I should also say that most of my sentences are extremely straightforward attempts to get a character through a door in such a way that the reader understands it without having to read it twice, and I don’t always even succeed at that.

{EDIT: OK, I'm getting Repetitive Strain Injury from putting in links to all these bastards, enough for tonight. Hope you enjoyed it, if you got this far. I'll link a few more lads tomorrow. Your comments are very welcome.}



Covering Will Young's Buttocks With Butter

Will Young covered in butter

Well, that was a splendidly enjoyable reading in Kaffee Burger on Wednesday night. A lovely crowd, and excellent questions afterwards (except for Clare's one about bondage). One is always delighted with a crowd that contains both one's parents and Momus. (Giving the evening the air of a disturbing teenage dream.) I do like the way you can stay on in Kaffee Burger after the reading to catch the band, then the disco, and dance till dawn. (Though I wussed out, and only danced till 3.30am.)

I have just been contributing my opinion to a row on the Guardian's Books Unlimited about Will Young's fitness to judge the National Short Story Prize. I may as well cut 'n' paste my contribution in here too... Feel free to head over, and add your own thoughts...

I'm probably slightly biased in favour of the National Short Story Prize, as I won it in its second year.

But Alison, I think you are completely wrong when you say

"What's the point of having a literary prize if it isn't judged by someone with some kind of literary knowledge/qualifications?"

Wrong on two levels. The prize isn't judged by "someone", it is judged by a team of five. It's the overall balance of the team that you have to consider. I hope you agree that a team of, say, five professional semioticians would be very high in literary knowledge and qualifications. But they'd make for a lousy, unbalanced team of judges.

A short story contains a lot more than just literature. I note that the Guardian have linked, just below these comments, to an account of my 2007 win, headed "'Tipperary Star Wars' wins National Short Story Prize". Now, the team of judges in my particular year included the magnificent A.S. Byatt. I'm sure she got my references to Yeats, and to Voltaire's Candide. But I have no idea whether or not she got my story's references to, say, the Eurovision Song Contest, or knew what I was on about in lines like - "A brief chant went up from the Young Farmers in the Mosh Pit: "Who put the ball in the England net?" Older farmers, further back, added bass to the reply of "Houghton! Houghton!""

Yet I do know that the judges read and reread the stories, discussed them, and were unanimous in their final decision. And I believe a good range in age, sex, class, nationality, and experience of both life and literature can make for a richer collective decision.

This year, Margaret Drabble, for example, who was born before World War Two kicked off, needs a great deal of balancing in certain important areas. So, of course, does Will Young - but between them, there are very few references that they won't be able to explain to each other.

Last of all, but very important; a short story is not designed to be analysed by professionals. It is created to be read by human beings. If a short story, after several rereadings and much discussion with Margaret Drabble and others, still fails to make a connection with an intelligent young man who has read Ulysses, then it has on some level failed.

Will Young is OK by me as a judge (and no, I've no story entered this year, so I'm not covering his buttocks in butter with any selfish intent).

However, if you want a tip for a potential future judge from the pop world who likes his short fiction literary: I met Morrissey in a hotel in Galway when I was a teenager (long story). I happened to be holding a copy of James Joyce's Dubliners. "Dubliners!" he exclaimed. "Oh, you've read it?" I said. "Read it? I have it tattooed all over my body," he said.

Me Waffling On Today

Forgot to mention, I'll be talking about the short story, and the BBC National Short Story Award, on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, later today (Friday July 4th 2008) at the maythesweetlordhelpus hour of 7.20 in the morning. (There's a seven-twenty in the MORNING as well? Who knew?)

Totally forgot to mention it in time for anyone to actually tune in, sorry. This is not because I'm blasé, it's because I'm totally untogether (and find it hard to believe anyone would be interested in my opinion of the short story).

 I will be talking for about ten seconds, probably, so you missed nuthin'.

On The Run In Croatia

I am currently on the run in Croatia, after an unfortunate pignapping incident got slightly out of hand...  I'll post properly soon, if possible, but I hear footsteps on the stairs... got to go now...

Don't worry, Will Self's pig is safe and happy, though jetlagged, and perhaps a little hungover...

Stealing Will Self's Pig

It is not often an author is driven by circumstances to steal another author's pig, but recent scandalous events forced my hand.

 Some of you will recall my glee when I was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize a few weeks ago, alongside such old and new stars as Alan Bennett, Will Self, Garrison Keillor and Joe Dunthorne.

A noble prize, previously won by books such as Vernon God Little, and A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian, the winner is showered in champagne and given a pig at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival in Wales, just over the border from England. (You don't get to keep the pig, but they name it after your book, and take your photo with it, to the great amusement of future generations).

You can imagine then my dismay when I discovered, shortly afterwards, buried in the small print of the Hay-on-Wye festival programme, the odd phrase "Will Self, winner of the 2008  Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize." Winner? WINNER?!?!?!

As the festival program had gone to print before the shortlist was announced, this meant that the prize committee had picked the winner before they had announced, or perhaps even picked, the shortlist. It was a stitch-up. But worse, I had been denied my rightful month of anticipation, tingling, hiccups and giddy excitement.

Also I'd put serious money on Alan Bennett to win. His The Uncommon Reader is a little masterpiece. Something had to be done.

I thought long and hard. The prize is named after that comic god, P. G. Wodehouse, inventor of Jeeves and Wooster. What, I thought would Wodehouse have done, faced with such provocation? Sat in his room and written another comic novel, probably. That's how he reacted to everything, including World War 2. As I was already sitting in a room writing a comic novel this wasn't much help. Action was called for, dash it. So I asked myself, what would P. G. Wodehouse's greatest creation Bertie Wooster do, nobly backed by the genius of his manservant Jeeves?

And the answer came to me as in a vision - as though the ghost of Wodehouse himself whispered in my ear - he would steal the pig.

 

For if there is one constant in the work of P. G. Wodehouse, from Pigs Have Wings to Pig Hooey, it is that God put pigs on this good green earth to be kidnapped. Not a chapter goes by without somebody chloroforming Lord Emsworth's favourite sow, The Empress of Blandings.

And thus I made my way to the Welsh borders and, with the assistant of my trusty gentleman's gentleman, Jeeves (not his real name, but he would like to remain anonymous for some reason), I stole Will Self's pig.

I sent the organisers this, ah, pignapping video, containing my ransom demands. Tense negotiations continued up until the last minute. They, understandably, did not wish to give the prize to the man who had stolen their pig. I offered, as a very reasonable compromise, to deliver the pig to Alan Bennett's door in London if they would re-award the prize to him. They baulked - Will Self was in the program - his angry fans, denied, might rampage, torching tents, incinerating Gore Vidal in his invalid chair... The intervention of a bishop almost led to a compromise candidate (Joe Dunthorne), but we ran out of time.

This, of course, left them one pig short for the prize ceremony. And thus it was that, as you may have read in the Guardian and Bookseller over the weekend, Will Self was not awarded his pig. I was wondering how they would get over this, and so I attended the ceremony in disguise. The organisers, rather anticlimactically, pretended an outbreak of pig disease had kept the pig away, and they showed a video of a pig instead.

And so the situation rests.  The pig is in a safe place, and receiving the best of care.  For now.

It is to be hoped that the organisers of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize will give in to my very reasonable demands and re-award the Wodehouse Prize to Alan Bennett. Otherwise, I'm afraid they will get their pig back sausage by sausage.

Harsh, I know, but when you mess with the affections of six comic novelists, somebody's going to get hurt. 

Senile Dementia versus Penile Dementia - the Queen and Jude battle it out for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize

Well, it seems I have been shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, alongside Alan Bennett (he wrote The Madness of King George!), Will Self (he wrote Great Apes!), Garrison Keillor (he wrote Lake Wobegon Days!), John Walsh (he once wrote in the Independent that I looked like a member of the Proclaimers!), and Joe Dunthorne (he wrote the extremely acclaimed first novel Submarine, and is only eight years old!)

Very very exciting. Previous winners include DBC Pierre, for Vernon God Little, Jonathan Coe, for The Rotters' Club, Jasper Fforde, for The Well of Lost Plots, and Marina Lewycka, for A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.

 They do not insult you with money, either. Bollinger give you a shitload of champagne, Everyman give you sixty volumes of PG Wodehouse in hardback, and the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival names a large pig after your book. What a year you could have, reading Wodehouse, drinking Bollinger, and... er... whatever it is that you do with pigs.

Unsurprisingly, for it is marvellous, I had picked Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader as one of my Books of 2007. I even bought my mother a copy for Christmas. Now he and I rub shoulders on a shortlist. My mother is delighted. I can only hope that none of the others bought their mothers a copy of my book for Christmas, considering how filthy it is. Personally, I hope Alan Bennett wins. His book is far more suitable for the nation's impressionable youth.

I have always argued that comedy is superior to tragedy, and this excellent shortlist proves my point. The tragic is a rather narrow genre, the comic is infinite. What other prize would place a story about a refined elderly lady reading books, in competition with the adventures of a Tipperary orphan with two penises who urinates on a politician while a mob of fifty thousand enraged farmers burn down his orphanage? Now, that's what the people want to see in a literary prize - senile dementia versus penile dementia.

May the best book win. Or, failing that, my one.


Indeed, I do believe that Jude: Level 1 is the first book featuring a hero with two penises to be nominated for a major UK literary award. Of course, it merely follows the American success of Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize with a hero who had both a penis and a vagina.

In the everevolving literary world, are two sets of genitals the new one set of genitals? Will the next Booker winner be a realistic, psychologically nuanced, slightly depressed novel featuring a funeral at which a dark family secret is finally revealed and it turns out to be sex abuse yet again, but with two penises?

We shall see. 

Review Jude: Level 1 by Wednesday, and win a €100 book token

 

Should have mentioned this weeks ago, forgot.

Start magazine (which covers arts and culture in the south-east of Ireland) is running an open competition to review Jude: Level 1.  Reviews can be up to 600 words long, and should be sent to startmagazine@eircom.net . The best review will win a €100 book token, and will be printed in the summer issue of the magazine.

Closing date is the 16th of April, so not a lot of time left... 

And the Ossian for Rudest Book goes to...

 

Thank you Kevin, Siobhán and Ariel for the congratulations and comments on my last post...

I did indeed get given a nice piece of bog oak, Kevin. Apparently it's called an Ossian.

The award (and I will probably give myself RSI typing this out in full), is one of the annual NUIG (National University of Ireland Galway) Alumni Awards. Mine was the AIB Award for Literature, Communications and the Arts.

Met some very interesting people there. The other award winners included Gráinne Seoige of Irish-language TV fame, and Séamus Brennan, the current minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism (the ever-mutating government department which inspired the Ministry for Beef, Culture and the Islands in Jude: Level 1). As you can see above, I flirted outrageously with Séamus, while grilling Gráinne on the leading political questions of the day.

A fun night out, and Aengus has sent me many other nice pictures, which I do intend to put up on the site... But, right now, I'm more excited by the goings-on in the credit markets. You don't normally see the words "wild and inexplicable" popping up on the front page of the Financial Times...

France, Berlin, Plymouth

I've been in France for the past couple of days, working on a really interesting potential stage version of Jude: Level 1. More on that, er, next year probably. It's far, far too early to talk about it now. (But shag it, I'm all excited...)

And after touching down briefly in Berlin, I'll be off to sunny Plymouth, where I read on Tuesday, November 13th (2007), as part of the launch of Short Fiction, a handsome new book/magazine/thing published by Plymouth University Press, and edited by Anthony Caleshu. I've a couple of very, very short pieces in it, one called "Latin Lover" that comes in  at a brisk 100 words exactly, and another called "Three Monkeys", which sprawls over an expansive three hundred words.  More on that launch and reading here...

If you're in the area (that's Plymouth, England, down the left-hand edge of Europe...), it's free, and I gather I'll be reading with Kevin Barry, author of the splendid There Are Little Kingdoms, which just carried off the Rooney Prize. (I hope he reads the one set in the amusement arcade.) Come one, come all.

So I'll try and tell more tales of Berlin porn, answer questions about the Irish language, recommend great books for teenaged boys, and catch up on all the other things I need to do around the website late next week... Enjoy your weekend...

Julian Gough in the Guardian, and at Small Wonder. (Busy week for the lazy lad.)

I wrote a piece in today's Guardian about the increasingly pervy relationship between the short story and the novel. Feel free to read it, comment on it, ignore it, as you wish.

Why was I writing about the short story, you ask, given that I know bugger all about it?

Because on Saturday, September 22nd, at 4.30pm, I'm reading at the Small Wonder festival with James Lasdun, last year's winner of the National Short Story Prize.

Allow me to plug it shamelessly, because it is run by good people, and the Guardian forgot to print the festival dates or website address at the bottom of my article... Small Wonder is the only festival devoted entirely to short stories, and it runs from 19-23 September, at Charleston near Firle, East Sussex (in England, which is part of Europe...)

Their website with all the info is *here*.

Lots of interesting writers will be there: Monica Ali, Lucy Ellmann, Esther Freud, Etgar Keret, James Lasdun, Yiyun Li, Jon Snow, Colm Tóibín, Fay Weldon...

My hot tip for Small Wonder (apart from me and James Lasdun) is Lucy Ellmann and Etgar Keret, 7.30pm on Thursday. Should kick literary ass.

American Gods, and London literary novelists

I just read a book review, in Saturday's enjoyable and infuriating  Guardian Review, which throws some interesting light on what's wrong with the modern literary novel, and with modern literary criticism, and with the modern literary ghetto. (A ghetto that doesn't know it's a ghetto: a ghetto that thinks it is the world.)

The review is by Kamila Shamsie (author of Broken Verses, a literary novel, published by Bloomsbury). It is of The Opposite House, by Helen Oyeyemi  (also a literary novel, also published by Bloomsbury... but that incestuous connection isn't the main problem, thought it does reveal a lot about the tiny size of the British literary pond).

This is the first line of the review: "The Opposite House is not the first novel to suggest that migration is a condition, not an event; but it may be the first to contend that the condition afflicts no one so profoundly as the gods." 

Now, I couldn't quite believe that was her opening claim. But it was.  She really thought that her stablemate at Bloomsbury was probably "the first to contend" that migration "afflicts no one so profoundly as the gods". And editors and sub-editors had let this stand.

Which means that nobody involved in the whole process was aware that Neil Gaiman had spent nearly six hundred pages, in his novel American Gods (which is not "literary", nor published by Bloomsbury), writing about nothing but how migration profoundly afflicts the gods.

Now, American Gods is not an obscure book: It is recent (published in 2001). It was immensely successful (a New York Times bestseller in both hardback and paperback, a best-seller all over the world). It was very, very widely reviewed (my current paperback edition contains four densely-packed pages of rave reviews, which range from the Washington Post through William Gibson to The Independent).  And it has won about as many awards as a book can win. It lifted not only both of the biggest science fiction awards (the fan-voted Hugo, and the writer-voted Nebula), but also the main horror award (the Bram Stoker Award), as well as the Locus Award for best fantasy novel. A novel by a British writer, set firmly in modern America, it crossed genre boundaries. It found a huge readership.  It could not have made a bigger splash.

But American Gods is not a "literary novel", so it is perfectly acceptable for a literary novelist, reviewing a literary novel which is (among other things) trying to do the same thing as American Gods (but years later, on a much smaller scale), to totally fail to mention it. Not only fail to mention it, but to claim that the idea may well have just been invented by her fellow Bloomsbury novelist.

I  don't mean to pick on Kamila Shamsie by pointing this out. The fault is in the literary culture, it's certainly not Shamsie's. Her review is a perfectly honourable and fair-minded review from inside the literary tradition.  Anyone that the Guardian was likely to ask to review  The Opposite House would have done pretty much the same. And if Kamila Shamsie hadn't boldly said "but it may be the first to contend that the condition afflicts no one so profoundly as the gods," she wouldn't have revealed the limits of her reading (always a brave and dangerous thing for a writer to do). Most current literary reviewers are just as limited in their reading. (And most SF reviewers are also stuck in their ghetto: and most crime reviewers: but they at least know they live in a ghetto, and that what they read is a genre. The problem with the literary novel is that it is becoming a genre again, and doesn't know it...)

I am discussing Kamila Shamsie's single, revealing line in such depth, not because it is unusual, but because it exposes something absolutely typical. Literary novels are reviewed only in terms of other literary novels, by people who do not read outside that ghetto, and who are quite unaware of how tiny a world they inhabit. (Though surely a London-based, literary novelist, published by Bloomsbury, who finds themselves reviewing a London-based, literary novelist, who is published by Bloomsbury, must start to get the vague feeling that their world is shrinking alarmingly.)

If you don't know either book: Helen Oyeyemi's book (set in the modern world), in dealing with a troubled modern woman also deals with the Yoruba gods, including Yemaya, "who", according to the review, "has travelled with her believers to different parts of the world, including Cuba.." One of the most powerful sections in American Gods deals with exactly those Yoruba gods, coming with their believers to the Caribbean islands. But then, Gaiman's American Gods tries to deal with pretty much all the ancient gods, struggling to survive, as belief in them dies, in the modern Americas.

American Gods is an epic attempt by a British writer to write the great American Novel. It isn't perfect (a perfect novel is an oxymoron), but it blows almost everything in the literary pages of the Guardian Review out of the green water and high into the blue sky.

Helen Oyeyemi may well have written a wonderful book, I don't know.  Kamila Shamsie may well be a thoughtful reviewer, and a fine literary novelist in her own right, I don't know.  But a review of The Opposite House should at least mention American Gods. The contrast would be useful, interesting, revealing. An intimate story, in contrast with an epic. A woman's story, in contrast with a man's. But two books by ambitious writers, dealing with the same idea; displaced gods, struggling to adapt in our modern world. You can't  ignore the writer who did it first, just because he wasn't published by Bloomsbury.

A literary culture that can't connect these dots has serious nerve-damage.


 

Intolerable writing conditions

The worst thing about success is that it is intensely boring to read about. As I lie about the house here in Berlin, sipping champagne from the slipper of Kate Moss, while scratching that difficult-to-reach itch in the small of my back with the stiletto heel of Heidi Klum, I am in agony, LITERAL EXISTENTIAL AGONY, wondering what to blog about. "Tell me again your fascinating Theories of the Comedy, Julian," whispers Heidi in my ear, and I swat her away with her own discarded... what on earth is that thing? So tiny, how does she... Dammit, I am trying to Think.

How can a man be expected to write under these intolerable conditions?  How I yearn for the good old days, when I was homeless, my belly rumbling, writing Jude by flickering candlelight, in a cardboard box, under a bridge.

Wish I'd never won the bloody  National Short Story Prize.

Toasted Heretic on the Late Late Show

One of the more peculiar side-effects of my winning the National Short Story Prize has been the appearance of my venerable old band, Toasted Heretic, on Ireland's oldest and most venerable television chat-show, the Late Late.

After a brief interview (where I was asked about the prize, modern Ireland, and Jude: Level 1), I wandered across the studio to join the rest of Toasted Heretic and we played "Galway and Los Angeles",  which was originally a hit single in Ireland in 1991. (It peaked at number 9. It was also Single of the Week in the dear, departed (Allan Jones/Chris Roberts era) Melody Maker in the UK. In France, an import copy was played by Bernard Lenoir on French national radio until the grooves wore flat, though the single was never officially released there.)

 The performance is up on Youtube.

A strange but enjoyable evening. Everyone who was ever in Heretic played, so it was the full wall-of-guitars line-up  (seen previously only on the Now In New Nostalgia Flavour tour): me on vocals, Neil Farrell on drums and sampler, Declan Collins on lead guitar, Aengus McMahon on electric rhythm guitar, Breffni O'Rourke on  acoustic rhythm, and Barry Wallace on bass guitar.

Let us draw a silken veil over the debauch which followed, in the Westbury Hotel.

I've been talking to Aengus, official photographer to the band (ie the only guy who had a camera in the old days... now a very successful professional photographer), and we're going to stick up a bunch of old Toasted Heretic photos here in the next month or two. Watch this embarrassing space...