SUGAR MONEY by Jane Harris Reviewed by Adèle Geras + an interview with Jane Harris.

Jane Harris, in her acknowledgements at the end of SUGAR MONEY, tells us of her love for the work of Robert Louis Stevenson and anyone reading this novel will notice the influence. On one level, the book is an adventure story: a dangerous mission, a journey across seas in a rust bucket of a vessel with a rackety and drunken captain; obstacles, perils, dreadful suffering, suspense, and through everything, like a chain of gold, the touching love between two brothers.

Lucien is our narrator. He's a lively, optimistic, chatty teenager and devoted to his elder brother, Emile, who is pining for his own lost love, Celeste. Lucien works for Father Céophas, on Martinique and the two brothers are sent by him to Grenada to bring back 42 slaves,  stolen by the British.

What begins as a typical 'ripping yarn' changes as we progress through the book, into something a great deal darker and the horrors of slave owning are not glossed over. What carries us through is the voice of Lucien which is  the main achievement of this novel. 

Jane Harris is the most astonishing ventriloquist. It's hard enough to write in the first person when the character you're writing about is more or less talking in a language like your own, but here, the mixture is rich and strange: Créole and an unusual Caribbean English which seizes the reader at the start and carries her through the book, enchanted by the humour, the poetry and eloquence  of the young narrator.  This is a case of 'show' rather than 'tell' and only by quoting a passage can I hope to give any of the flavour of the speech.  Here is a passage from quite near the beginning of the book: 

"All at once I became aware that - from his place at the tiller -  Bianco was watching me close-close.  A kind of uneasiness settled across my heart, for I dislike the way his pale eyes seem to stare into my soul. Jésis-Maia! In haste I turn to face the prow.That way I could keep lookout for sharks and make sure that Emile slept safe. I had no fear of the Béké, not one iota, but if he could not get sight of my countenance then that was an added bait and bonus."

This is a full-tilt, richly- patterned and thrillingly exciting story, brilliantly told. 

And now, here are the questions I have asked Jane Harris to answer.

1) The voice in this book is that of a young boy who is also a slave in Martinique a very long time ago. The novel is about slavery, at least in part. Have you had any criticism on account of 'cultural appropriation?' How do you deal with such criticism?

I knew that the notion of cultural appropriation might be an issue from the moment I had the idea for the book. With this awareness, I asked various friends of colour whether they thought I was insane to even tackle the subject and they told me that yes, I probably was insane (ha ha!) but that it wouldn’t matter – as long as the book was good enough. So, I had my task clearly delineated for me from the start: I had to write an extremely good novel. 

My personal opinion is that an author ought to be able to write about any subject. I tend to write about characters on the margins, people who have no voice. I’m not much interested in kings and queens etc. Every novel I write is making a point, even if I don’t wear my politics on my sleeve. I felt there was an important story to be told in Sugar Money and I felt compelled to tell it. However, I never forgot my white privilege and did my best to honour the subject matter.

Only one reviewer so far has seemed to be criticising me for writing about slaves and slavery, albeit in a veiled way. You asked how I deal with it. I suppose I just accept that people have their own opinions or their own reasons for being critical. In sum, it’s up to individual readers to decide whether I’ve written a successful novel or not. 

2) Are you a slow writer? I say this as someone who wanted another book from you the minute I finished Gillespie and I. 

Well, that’s nice to hear! I suppose I am a slow writer. Historical fiction requires an enormous amount of research, not all of which appears on the page – and what does appear on the page has to be carefully hidden. In addition, my first two books were very long, so that took more time. Also, I’m incredibly anal, so I rewrite endlessly. My motto is, you can have it good, or you can have it quick. I’d rather have it good. All good things are worth waiting for. 

Lastly, real life has a habit of getting in the way of writing, ‘the stuff of life’ etc., which (in my case, over the past decade) has caused many delays.

3) The research you've done is eye-watering. Can you tell us a little about that? Do you enjoy research? 

I do love research but it’s time-consuming. I’m thinking of tackling a contemporary book next, just because it will be much easier not to have to carry out the scale and depth of research that I’ve done for the past three books. To write a good historical novel, one has to hold up every word and phrase, every sentence, every fact, every detail, every assumption, every idea, in order to check whether it’s correct for the period. Of course, I accept that it may be necessary to research a contemporary book, but if (say) I live in Manchester and am writing about contemporary Manchester, it’s just obvious that far less research is required. So, although I adore research, I’d quite like a break from it!

4) What does your writing day look like?

It depends what stage of the process I’m at. When I’m actually writing, I start as soon as I wake up (that could be any time between 5am and 8am) and carry on until about 5pm or 6pm, with regular breaks every hour or so to check messages and social media.  

However, I do spend a lot of time promoting my books and so on, and there can be periods of weeks and months when I’m not writing at all. I’m not one of those writers who can write ‘on the road’. I need to be at home, living like a hermit. Most of this year has been spent finished then proofing and promoting Sugar Money, plus organising other aspects of my life, for instance, moving home.

5) Can you tell us a bit about what you're doing next?

I’d love to but – as I said above, other than that I’m hoping it will be contemporary - I haven’t decided yet. 

6) Please tell us about the kind of book you like to read, and/or any writers you admire.

I tend to prefer fiction to non-fiction, and realism to magic realism or fantasy. I love short stories as well as novels and I do like fiction to have a sense of humour, even if it deals with weighty subject matter.   

I don’t really enjoy formulaic, plotty novels. However, I love clever novels that pay some attention to character and narrative, as opposed to the kind of stream-of-consciousness thing I enjoyed when I was younger which now feels a bit lazy to me. 

Having said that, if a non-realist novel is good enough, I can be transported by it, and if an experimental novel is hard-working and captivating enough, then I’m on board. 

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Jane’s best-selling debut, The Observations, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and chosen by Richard and Judy as one of 100 Books of the Decade. Her novel, Gillespie & I, was shortlisted for the National Book Awards. Jane’s work is published in 20 territories. Sugar Money is her third novel.

THE INVINCIBLE HENLEY by Penny Dolan

A week or so ago, browsing my ragbag poetry shelves, I opened up “Criminal Minds” an anthology by Anne Harvey and found this poem, a version of a poem by Villon. The canting style reminded me of cockney thieves and robbers, and those highwaymen on Shooters Hill:

To All Cross Coves

Suppose you screeve? or go cheapjack?

Or take the broads? Or fig a nag?

Or thimble-rig? Or knap a yack?

Or pitch a snide? Or smash a rag?

Suppose you duff? Or nose and lag?

Or get the straight, and land your pot?

How do you melt the multy swag?

Booze and the blowens cop the lot.

Fiddle, or fence, or mace, or mack;

Or moskeneer, or flash the drag;

Dead-lurk a crib, or do a crack;

Pad with a slang, or chuck a fag;

Bonnet, or tout; or mump and gag;

Rattle the tats or mark the spot;

You can not bank a single stag;

Booze and the blowens cop the lot.

Suppose you try a different tack

And on the square you flash your flag?

At penny-lining make your whack

Or with the mummers mug and gag?

For nix, for nix the dibbs you bag!

At any graft, no matter what,

Your merry goblins soon stravag:

Booze and the blowens cop the lot.

The Moral

It’s up the spout and Charley Wag

With wipes and tickers and what not.

Until the squeezer nips your scrag:

Booze and the blowens cop the lot.

The verses aren’t by the everyday Anonymous, but by a Victorian: William Ernest Henley, who was born in Gloucester, England, in 1849, and I wanted to know more about this man who seemed so fascinated by rollicking language.  It became an oddly circular investigation.

As a child, Henley had poor health, developing tubercular arthritis at twelve.  The son of a bookseller and publisher, Henley was at Gloucester's Crypt Grammar School when a new headmaster, T.E. Lawrence, arrived.

His mission was to improve the standing of the school, and so he was keen to inspire his older Crypt pupils with a love of literature. As Henley’s father had died, Lawrence took a particular interest in the boy’s struggles, encouraging him to write poetry, and eventually to study at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

 
Henley’s illness had persisted. In 1868, aged 19, his left leg was amputated below the knee and from then on, he wore a wooden leg. 

Aged 24,  and with an almost gangrenous right foot, Henley was admitted to the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh.

There, Joseph Lister, the pioneer of sterile surgery, performed radical surgery and saved the limb, although Henley had to endure more painful treatment for another two years.   

During this period, Henley met Robert Louis Stevenson and the two young men formed a very strong friendship. 

For a few years, the two worked, planned projects and encouraged each other as they attempted to make their living as writers, and it was Henley, working as a journalist and reviewer, who arranged a publication deal with Longmans for Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses.” 

Henley himself became editor of “The Scots Observer” and, later, of “The New Review”. As editor of the “Magazine of Art”, Henley lauded the work of new artists like James McNeill Whistler and Auguste Rodin. He encouraged writers like Conrad, Yeats and HG Wells, was friends with Rudyard Kipling and J.M.Barrie. Henley’s only daughter Margaret Emma, who called Barrie her “fwendy-wendy, became the origin of Wendy in “Peter Pan” although sadly, aged five, she died.

Now, as I gathered all this information together, I had been imagining a faint, slight fellow with a romantically aesthetic look. I was wrong. Henley acted no invalid. Stevenson wrote this about Henley:

“A man of great presence; 

he commands a larger atmosphere,

 gives the impression of a grosser mass of character than most men. 

It has been said of his presence that it could be felt in a room you entered blindfold. 

There is something boisterous and piratic in his manner of talk.”

This description led me on to the piece of the Henley story that I like the most, one that I did not expect. 

W.E. Henley with his piratical manner - and his wooden leg -  is thought to be the model for one of Stevenson’s strongest characters:  Long John Silver, the infamous mutineer and pirate of  "Treasure Island."

How glorious! Suddenly the poem that started my investigation, Henley’s rumbustious "To All Cross Coves" made sense after all. 

Then, as happens, I discovered another  surprising Henley link.  While I was tracking down my “cove”, I heard items in the news about the military Paralympics that were taking place in some of the still existing Olympics venues. 


 Now, when young Henley wrote his poems at Crypt school, trying to survive all the difficulties that life was throwing at him, he wrote these lines, in a poem with the title "Invictus".

“I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul”.  

So the determined, wooden-legged, sometime-invalid Henley was the poet who inspired the passion that led to the recent Invictus games. How very circular an investigation I'd been on! ( I am avoiding a certain range of male perfumery, although perhaps Henley would not mind . . .)

And, meanwhile, I have another reason for posting this post today. 

Henley – an Englishman who lived in Edinburgh  – and Stevenson the Scot were once close friends. Although they fell out, mainly because of slights and misunderstandings and wives, the two men missed each other to the end of their days, and grieved over the lost friendship and what might have been. 

Tomorrow the Scots vote whether to become Independent. They choose whether to break away from the United Kingdom. At one level, I know it is all about politics, economics and logic and  the Scots are free to choose as they wish. 

However I, living in Yorkshire, have no say in the matter, other than the thought of Britain being divided fills me with unexpectedly real sorrow. I am not sure I trust any "hand of history" men. Good wishes to all, no matter how the day goes.

Penny Dolan

Blinding with Science or Charming with Curiosities? by Katherine Langrish

When one is writing historical fiction, problems of language often arise.  I don’t mean just dialogue, though that’s a perennial one which is solved in different ways at different times.  It was once thought colourful to go all faux-archaic and bespatter your characters’ speech with thees and thous, but the result was usually unfortunate: ‘Tush, tush, child, fie on thee for a wayward wench!’ Robert Louis Stevenson referred to this style as ‘tushery’: he tried it himself in ‘The Black Arrow’, but never thereafter, writing to his friend Henley,

The influenza has busted me a good deal; I have no spring, and am headachy. So I turned me to-what thinkest 'ou?-to Tushery, by the mass! Ay, friend, a whole tale of tushery. And every tusher tushes me so free, that may I be tushed if the whole thing is worth a tush. The Black Arrow: A Tale of Tunstall Forest is his name: tush! a poor thing.


Most historical writers now aim for an unobtrusive modern style, on the sensible grounds that ‘old fashioned speech’ sounded modern to those who used it.

But the other linguistic problem is what to do about obsolete or technical terms. Some time ago, friends of mine were having a conversation about words their editors had asked them to alter, or at least explain, in case children might be puzzled by them.  Among these were ‘colt’ (young male horse), ‘merlin’ (small hawk), and 'jesses' (the straps attached to the feet of a hunting hawk). When I was writing about Viking ships in ‘Troll Blood’, I was asked to weed out or explain much of the nautical terminology – ‘reefing a sail,’ for instance, and ‘a lee shore’ and other sailorly commands such as ‘luff’ or ‘jibe’.

Fair enough, you may think: we don’t want to be obscure. But do children really stop in their tracks – or worse, derail – when they come across an exotic word they don’t understand?  I doubt it. When I read an unusual word as child, one of four things would happen:

(A) I would semi-skip over it.  This is the best option for things like: “‘Luff, you lubbers!  Haul on those sheets!” roared the captain, as the sail went aback”. I didn’t have to know the exact meaning of the words; I could see that the ship was in difficulties and the captain was worried, and that was enough.  Luff and lubbers and aback, and their ilk, got stuffed into a mental category of ‘mysterious words that sailors use’.  (As does ‘ilk’, in fact, which I’m very vague about.) And that’s pretty well where they still are. 

(B) I would pick up the meaning from the context.  On reading that the Flopsy Bunnies fell asleep because lettuce is ‘soporific’, I didn’t go to the dictionary, neither did I make a conscious mental note that soporific must mean something to do with making you sleepy; the word merely took on a contextual colour, or flavour, which I would recall the next time I encountered it. Children are good at making these associative leaps because this is how they learn their own language anyway. It may lead to the occasional misapprehension, but such things are generally cleared up by experience.

(C) I would ignore the word entirely and carry on, which is what I still do if I’m reading The Waste Land or, say, a 19^th century literary essay with bits of original Greek poetry dropped in here and there.

As a last resort:

(D) I would carry the book to my mother and ask, “What does this word mean?”

All four of these options are legitimate and I believe we ought to make sure children feel OK about using them. A healthy reader is like a healthy cross-country runner whose steady pace is not broken by obstacles and stumbling blocks.  A confident child reader should have the toughness and elasticity to leap over the odd unusual word and keep going.  And how are they going to acquire that confidence if every text they read has been raked and weeded? 

Real pleasure can be got from working out the meanings of obscure words and phrases.  Here is an example which may remind us adults what it's like to read something peppered with unfamiliar words:

Vincent was the first of Matthew’s two sons to reach Darracott Place, driving himself in a curricle to which were harnessed two magnificent black geldings, randem-tandem; and by the time Richmond, who had been looking out for him, let out a halloo and exclaimed, ‘Here’s my cousin at last! Oh, he’s driving unicorn! He’s the most complete hand!’ even Mrs Darracott, with whom Vincent was no favourite, felt a measure of relief.

The Unknown Ajax by Georgette Heyer

First of all, I have no idea in what way a curricle differs from a phaeton or a barouche or a landaulet or any of the other carriages Georgette Heyer frequently alludes to, but I get the point that the type of carriage Vincent drives is as important as the type of car he would drive if this were set in today’s world. If her editor had told Heyer that all these technical terms were just too confusing, and had made her stick always to the generic word ‘carriage’, the book would be poorer. I might never have realised that carriages weren’t just a way to get around, they were status symbols, indicators of character.  I would have a less nuanced view of the Regency world.

Second, knowing that a tandem is a bicycle built for two, I deduce that ‘randem-tandem’ means the horses are harnessed one behind the other rather than side by side.  This sounds flashy and difficult to manage, and sheds more light upon Vincent’s character and his young cousin’s admiration. As the book is not a fantasy, ‘driving unicorn’ does not for one moment fool me into believing that Vincent is actually driving a unicorn. Instead, I gather it to be a slang term for this same arrangement of the team, and Richmond uses it to show himself both knowledgeable and appreciative of his older cousin’s expertise. ‘A complete hand’ isn’t an expression in use today – a moment’s thought suggests that it comes from card games – but in context its meaning is obvious. Vincent is in control of his team and his life. He holds all the cards…

Heyer is magnificent at this kind of thing. It’s not tushery, either, because it works; it doesn’t get in the way. Instead of divorcing us from her characters, Heyer draws us in to share their world. Here’s an indignant young man complaining about the behaviour of the spoilt beauty he’s been trying to prevent from running off:

“She said she was going off to spout her pearls that instant, so that she could be gone from the place before you reached us!  She’d have done it, too!  What’s more, I wish I’d let her!”

            “I don’t wonder at it.  But you did not – which was very well done of you, sir!”

            “I don’t know about that,” he said gloomily.  “…The thing was, she’d put me in such a tweak by that time that I was hanged if I’d cry craven! Told her that if she tried to shab off I’d squeak beef – what I mean is, tell the landlord who she was and what she was scheming to do.  So then she threw the clock at me. That brought the landlord in on us, and a couple of waiters – and before I could utter a word, the little hussy was carrying on as though she thought she was Mrs Siddons!  Well, she’d threatened to tell everyone I’d been trying to give her a slip on the shoulder if I wouldn’t let her leave the room, and by God, she did it!”

            “Oh no!” exclaimed Miss Trent, changing colour.

The Nonesuch by Georgette Heyer

Could this be any clearer?  Well, it could.  ‘Spout her pearls’ could be altered to ‘pawn her pearls’ for instance. But though I’ve never heard of ‘spout’ as a synonym for ‘pawn’ (or maybe 'sell'), the general meaning is clear, and the slang gives much more character to the young man’s speech.  The really difficult bit – ‘if she tried to shab off I’d squeak beef’ is glossed, ostensibly for Miss Trent’s benefit – and ‘a slip on the shoulder’ is also glossed by Miss Trent’s embarrassed reaction. The dramatic actress Mrs Siddons is presumably still well enough known for the allusion not to be obscure, but even if a reader hasn’t heard of her, it shouldn’t matter. The context does the job. It’s fun – it’s exhilarating – keeping up with Heyer’s lively stream of eighteenth century colloqualisms.

Instead of worrying about individual words and their supposed difficulty, let’s teach our children to throw themselves into a story and keep going to the end, in spite of the odd word they don’t quite understand.  Learning not to be afraid of strange words is exactly like getting down the length of the swimming pool without minding the odd wave that hits you in the face. 

You discover your own ability, and it’s more fun that way.



Picture credits:
The Black Arrow - cover, 1888, Wikipedia 
The Unknown Ajax - Heineman 1959, cover by Arthur Barbosa
The Nonsuch - Heineman 1962, cover by Arthur Barbosa