L'arbretrary

Back to books, and back to Barbara Comyns - she appears in the 50 Books with her excellent, surreal novel Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, and I previously read an autobiographical novel Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, which is told through the childlike voice of a naive young wife and mother - and I couldn't resist The Juniper Tree when I discovered that it was adapted from a tale from the Brothers Grimm. One of my pet interests is myths turned into domestic literature i.e. the fantastic transferred to the everyday, contained so that it plays out through human emotions rather than the mystical or extreme.

I didn't know 'The Juniper Tree' (by Brothers Grimm) before I read The Juniper Tree (by Barbara Comyns... this is going to get confusing...) and I think it's best to approach it that way. Reading about the Grimm's tale on Wikipedia afterwards, I was stunned by how Comyns managed to work the tale into the novel, weaving aspects in subtly and artistically. I could appreciate this in retrospect, but if I'd known the tale beforehand then the plot would have held no secrets. Whether or not you know it, I urge you to seek out The Juniper Tree.

Bella, estranged from her mother and with illegitimate young daughter Tommy in tow (yes, daughter), takes up work in an antique store in Twickenham. In the first paragraph, she encounters a mysterious woman:

'I noticed a beautiful fair woman standing in the courtyard outside her house like a statue, standing there so still. As I drew nearer I saw that her hands were moving. She was paring an apple out there in the snow and as I passed, looking at her out of the sides of my eyes, the knife slipped, and suddenly there was blood on the snow. She turned and went into her house before I could offer to help.'

As the blurb writes, the first glimpse of Gertrude Forbes is at once fairytale and sinister. Gertrude and her husband, Bernard, befriend Bella - she becomes a regular visitor at their large house, complete with extensive garden and juniper tree. The Forbes' long for a child; Bella longs for friends and love; Tommy longs for a family. Longings collide and events grow gracefully macabre.

Having read three novels by Comyns, I am astonished that they all come from the same pen - they are so different. The Juniper Tree doesn't have the vulnerability of Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, or the surreal humour or Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead; in their place is a haunting domesticity - everything calm on the surface, but an awareness throughout that the relationships between each character simmer with potential change and tragedy. The majority of the novel can be read as a simple domestic tale, until a twist which cannot be ignored towards the end, but the whole work is fraught with an intermingling of the fairytale and the sinister. The Brothers Grimm tale, read either beforehand or subsequently, brings out even more layers in The Juniper Tree. I don't think there is any other novelist I've come across who writes so subtly the disturbing and the domestic, or whose oeuvre is so brilliantly varied. If that is not too bold a statement to make on the basis of three novels.

Couldn't leave the narrative there...

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don't know where they have put him!"

So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. Then Simon Peter, who was behind him, arrived and went into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus' head. The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen. Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.)

Then the disciples went back to their homes, but Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus' body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.

They asked her, "Woman, why are you crying?"

"They have taken my Lord away," she said, "and I don't know where they have put him." At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.

"Woman," he said, "why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?"
Thinking he was the gardener, she said, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him."

Jesus said to her, "Mary."
She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, "Rabboni!" (which means Teacher).

Jesus said, "Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, 'I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.' "

Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: "I have seen the Lord!" And she told them that he had said these things to her.

[John 20: 1-18]

Good Friday

Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, "Dear woman, here is your son," and to the disciple, "Here is your mother." From that time on, this disciple took her into his home.

Later, knowing that all was now completed, and so that the Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said, "I am thirsty." A jar of wine vinegar was there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus' lips. When he had received the drink, Jesus said, "It is finished." With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

[John 19: 25-30]

Who Knows

Someone asked why I don't blog more about what I do want, as compared to writing about what I don't want.


The answer is actually straightforward. Just as writers should write about what they know, so should agents represent the types of books they know. I'm what is called a generalist. My reading interests are broad and eclectic, and I therefore feel comfortable representing varied genres in both fiction and nonfiction. Sure, I have my preferences, but I really do feel comfortable handling almost anything (with the exceptions being very traditional romance, erotica, poetry, short stories, novellas, and picture books).



That being said, there are some subjects that just don't appeal to me on a personal level, whether it's because I'm burned out on the subject, or because I feel that it hits too close to home to represent. But whatever the reason, since I truly believe that I need to be as passionate about the work as the author, I've turned down projects that were extremely well-written with a strong publishing viability if I didn't love them. Agents that do sign up authors and projects without feeling that emotional connection typically are the same ones that will bail on you if it doesn't sell after the first five submissions.


So what I can do is from time to time fill you in on things that I know I won't be able to represent passionately. For now, this includes books about the election, religion, the Middle East, business leadership books, and the Peace Corps.


BTW, I've got nothing against the Peace Corps. I've just gotten way too many submissions involving this in the past few months.

An Update on Queries

I' m still far behind on any queries sent by mail in the past few months, but if you included an SASE I will respond to them all eventually. Again though, please remember that I won't be accepting or responding to mail queries that arrive after the end of the month.

As for queries sent via my electronic submission form, I am up to date on responding through yesterday. If you have not heard from me, and you used the submission form, my best guess is that you filled it out incorrectly or have a spam blocker that prevented my response. Feel free to resubmit if you like.

Finally, a point of clarification. I don't respond to all email queries - I only respond to those queries sent via my website submission form. I delete the rest.

I've had a few people suggest that my new policy is draconian. It may well be, but in return you are guaranteed 100% a response within a week. I think that's a good trade off.

Thriller Award Nominees

Here are the nominees for the 2008 Thriller Awards:

Best Novel
No Time for Goodbye by Linwood Barclay (Bantam)
The Watchman by Robert Crais (S&S)
The Ghost by Robert Harris (S&S)
The Crime Writer by Gregg Hurwitz (Viking)
Trouble by Jesse Kellerman (Putnam)

Best First Novel
Interred With Their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carrell (Dutton)
Big City, Bad Blood by Sean Chercover (Morrow)
From the Depths by Gerry Doyle (McBook Press)
Volk's Game by Brent Ghelfi (Holt)
Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill (Morrow)

Best Paperback Original
The Last Nightingale by Anthony Flacco (Ballantine)
A Thousand Bones by P.J. Parrish (Pocket)
The Midnight Road by Tom Piccirilli (Bantam)
The Queen of Bedlam by Robert McCammon (Pocket)
Shattered by Jay Bonansinga (Pinnacle)

Winners will be announced at Thrillerfest on July 12th.

Wednesday Wednesday

There are a couple of books due for review on here, but my mind has gone on holiday, and so we'll take a wander through my day instead. It started, as every day has for the past week, with oversleeping - my alarm clock has become something of a mission statement rather than an itinerary i.e. an ideal which nobody really anticipates will be put into practice for the foreseeable future. Fortunately (!) the person with whom I walk to work was ill, and that meant I could take the shorter route...

...And so I arrived at work at 8.55am. And headed into a morning of sticking stickers on books, and scanning barcodes in books, all the while thinking scholarly thoughts, such as 'which Neighbours character would I most like to return' or 'I wonder if the Chinese takeaway will be open tonight'. Nothing too learned for Stuck-in-a-Book.

This afternoon I became a qualified Microsoft Outlook user - an outlookist? A positive outlook? I've used the term so much now that I'm starting to think the programme is called something else... y'know, the emailly one. Which I never use, because I have Yahoo. (Incidentally - an issue of pronunciation... do you say "yarr-hoo" or "yah-hoo"? For me, the latter is the search engine; the former is a hoodlum.) We're working our way through the European Computer Driving Licence, and I am now qualified to use Word, Excel, Outlook and the Internet. Jealous? Thought not.

Home, via the Christian Bookshop to buy Easter presents, and Chinese food before heading out to Book Group... for a book I hadn't even got around to getting, let alone reading. Oops. It was quite fun to sit and listen to people talk about a novel which I knew less than nothing about - by the end of the meeting I had surmised that it was set in 1919 Egypt; a strongly patriarchal family; stern and hypocritical father; small boy who couldn't eat fast and was only allowed to eat between his father finishing and the servants clearing away; someone else had a divorce... full marks and a cuddly toy to anybody who can correctly identify the novel?!?

I'm off home to Somerset tomorrow, and so must now pack...