Too Much Cholera, Not Enough Magical Realism

After being stuck in a k-hole with it for weeks, I've finally managed to get to the end of Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and sadly I'm not overly impressed. I got into that horror zone where it becomes a chore to get through a book, when you stop being excited about having the opportunity to read and it begins to feel like work. I thought Marquez was the South American version of Gunter Grass or Salman Rushdie in the Magical Realism stakes, and that was exactly what I wanted to read, but it turns out that Cholera barely has any magic in it at all, and is instead a very loooong reflection on love and ageing. Well, it's only 4oo-odd pages, but it felt a hell of a lot longer to me. It's not a bad book, and the first fifty and last fifty pages are very good, but I just didn't find it that gripping, and because I was expecting Magical Realism I was very disappointed. Maybe I should read One Hundred Years of Solitude instead, that's meant to be a more magical one.

It's got me interested in the idea of British Magical Realism, but I don't know if any novels exist. Would it even be possible to have a UK novel in the style, or to get British people to enjoy a home-set one? For me, a lot of the joy in the style is in the exotic settings of the books, usually in societies tinged with mysticism (for someone born in the UK) that accentuate the fantastical qualities. Would a book like this set in the all-too-familiar setting of little England work? I suppose it would: the British isles is swarming with fairies and witches and history that could spill into an everyday British tale and magic it up, it's just hard to imagine it striking a chord in the same way that a trawl through the history of newly-independent India can.

Birmingham: A City of Thrilling Literature

I'm reading Love in the Time of Cholera at the moment, which is proving to be quite an arduous task with lots of stuff going on in my life (getting married in two weeks!). The book is mostly making me pine to go back to South America, as the city-setting reminds me a lot of the wonders of Lima and Cusco in Peru, places littered with bustling little back-alley shops with buckets of meat hung out the front, and wild dogs mooching around looking for a feed. These are places ripe for readers to get lost in: whether you've visited anywhere similar or not, the settings are so vibrant they eat you alive and you have to live in them until you stop reading and they spit you out. More and more I find that I'm choosing the books I read based on their settings, and I particularly love cities, both places I've already visited and those that I've never been to. It makes me wonder if my novel's setting of Birmingham, the drabbest city I've ever seen, is really going to spark the imagination of readers. I don't think I've ever read a novel that sets even a second of its action in Brum; perhaps the history of literature is trying to tell me something.

In fact, the only book I can think of that is set around here is The Rotter's Club by Jonathan Coe, a Birmingham-born writer who wisely sets most of his work in London. Maybe I should read that and see if there's anything of Birmingham that Coe doesn't cover that's worth committing to the page. I'm thinking maybe I should set my book in a better city, but there must be something about Birmingham that makes it important to house my story. I just hope the setting can inspire people to pick it up, to think "ooh, wow, a book set in Birmingham, that sounds like a thrilling place for characters to live", and then travel from all over the world to stare at the wonders depicted in my novel, such as the horrible Broad Street. It's the kind of place that becomes very small and dull after a couple of months of living here, but surely it's got to hold enough interest for an unfamiliar reader to live in, especially if I can convincingly get the Brummie accent onto the page.

The Missing Piece of the Puzzle

I read The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler recently to try and immerse myself in a good example of hard-boiled detective fiction so I'd be able to write some myself, and found that Chandler, rather than just being an example of a good detective writer, actually defined the genre, and any offbeat noirish detective yarn that's been imagined in the past seventy-five years has his fingerprints all over it. It's wicked stuff, with the main character, Philip Marlowe, careering from one sun and booze soaked scene to another, often with little idea of what he's doing, but always managing to come away with another clue to solve his case.I really enjoyed it, and I'm now looking forward to reading some of the other Marlowe novels.

The Big Sleep is a very cinematic story, and those qualities make it completely recognisable when you live in a world in which tv channels are stuffed wall to wall with detective dramas of varying quality. Marlowe seems to be the blueprint for many a sozzled tv detective, and his slightly surreal adventures are the perfect base for a million different stories. It was only halfway through The Big Sleep that I noticed the similarities to The Big Lebowski, one of my favourite films, and looking it up I found that the Coen Brothers had loosely based their story on Chandler's novel. And just like all of the thousands of screenwriters and authors that have taken inspiration from Marlowe, The Big Sleep has given me a lot of help in continuing my own series of surreal detective stories. Just a pesky horror story to finish off and I can carry on with it.