Ray French, author of "Going Under", "All This is Mine", "The Red Jag"

13/05/05

Nowadays, of course, Barnsley is unrecognisable from the bleak place portrayed in Ken Loach's film. No, really, there are plans to transform into a Tuscan hill town. This all started back in 2002, when prize winning architect Will Alsop was driving through Yorkshire. On spying Barnsley from the M1 he was immediately smitten and asked his team 'Why haven't you told me about this place before?' Apparently it reminded him of Lucca, and saw no reason why it couldn't be given a facelift and made just as beautiful as the walled medieval town in Tuscany. The locals realised this wasn't a wind up when Alsop mentioned the 150 million pounds of European money being made available to reinvent the place. Famous Barnsley resident umpire Dickie Bird was initially very suspicious of the scheme, regularly warning these big shots from outside Yorkshire with their fancy plans to think very carefully before making any changes to 'The greatest little place in the world.' Aye. But more recently, apparently, he has warmed to the scheme. Work is scheduled to start in 2007.

Part of Alsop's scheme is to shine white light through a prism into the sky. This would reflect off the clouds and form a halo, epitomising, apparently, hope for the future and symbolising the change that will be seen in Barnsley over the next 30 years (Alsop has a '30 year vision' for Barnsley). So bog off Ken Loach, they don't want any more of your stereotypical images of the grim north in Barnsley. Don't be surprised if a bitter wind suddenly blows the froth off your cappuccino while you're sitting at that outdoor cafe though.

11/05/05

After yesterday's musings on Czech cinema and 'Kes', I found myself longing to watch it again (while also feeling slightly nervous that if I did I might discover that it's not as good as I thought it was after all these years). A quick search on Google for Kes led me to a website devoted to it at: http:/www.geocities.com/freycinette/Kes.html. Here's the producer, Tony Garnett: 'As soon as I read it, I thought, let's do it... I think too many films made at that time were too didactic and wore their politics on their sleeve. The joy of working with Barry's material was that the characters really lived in their own right. Although they were embedded in historical and political realities they were always ambiguously more than that.'

Sadly, Loach himself didn't stick to these principles, and quite a few of the later films were marred by a didactic approach.

Here's Barry Hines, who wrote the novel and then adapted it for the screen: 'I had taught plenty of pupils like Billy Casper... so it was no great feat of imagination... My brother, who was about eighteen, kept a young kestrel in a shed at the bottom of the garden.'

I watched it on TV when I was about sixteen, I think, and found it an unforgettable experience. Good website, worth a visit.

www.geocities.com/freycinette?Kes.html

10/5/05

'I would have preferred it in Hungarian.'

So said one of the American financial backers of 'Kes', after grappling with the broad Yorkshire accents in the film. But there is actually a cinematic connection between Eastern Europe, Barnsley and the USA . Ken Loach has admitted to finding huge inspiration in the Czech new wave of the mid to late sixties, a movement that was wiped out when Russian tanks rolled into Prague in 1968, putting an end to the liberal regime. He liked the way these directors used non professional actors, filming their stories in a documentary style, taking a critical view of the status quo, and sticking up for the underdog. Milos Forman was one of the Czech directors Loach admired most. Forman was actually in Paris, negotiating a deal for his first American film, when the Russian tanks entered Prague. He moved to America and made 'Taking Off', a comedy about the generation gap. In this film, while the fifteen year old daughter who runs away is a very quiet and gentle soul, and behaves with dignity, her parents, who have no idea who she really is, and are terrified she will become hooked on drugs, end up getting extremely drunk and humiliating themselves playing strip poker. At one point they get together with the parents of other children who have run away and all smoke pot together, in an attempt to understand their missing children, after being shown how to do it by a marijuana instructor. The film was critically admired but a commercial disaster.

Forman was apparently severely depressed when he was approached by a couple of producers to direct 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.' One of those producers was Michael Douglas, whose father, Kirk, had bought the rights for the film many years before after falling in love with the book, written by Ken Kesey. Kirk Douglas longed to play the lead role of McMurphy himself, but couldn't get the backing, allegedly because the money men were too nervous of it's anti-establishment message. By the early seventies times had changed and the money was finally available, but Kirk was too old to play the part, and so it was offered to Jack Nicholson.

Forman was regarded as a strange and risky choice to direct such a major project in the seventies. A depressed foreigner with one flop to his name and one of the pioneers of something called the new wave, which sounded suspiciously arty. It's easy to imagine the reaction - 'What is he, some kinda Polak? A Czech? Where the hell's that? Never heard of the guy - can't we find an American?' But of course 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' was a huge critical and commercial success. That it was a Czech director who produced such a chilling portrayal of what was, basically, a totalitarian regime, is surely no coincidence.

Loach's admiration for the Czech new wave helped shape his approach to filming a story set in Barnsley. Forman drew on his experience of living in a communist regime to make a film about a mental institution in the USA, which was widely seen as a commentary on the state of American society. How strange that a film by a former Art House foreign director, using a largely unknown cast (apart from Nicholson), became one of the most famous and admired American films of the seventies. And 'Kes', according to Krystov Kieslowski, the brilliant director of 'The Decalogue' and 'Three Colours', was widely admired in Poland. Connect, always connect.

9/05/05

'Anyone that evil cannot be American.'

The anthrax scare of 2001 in the USA was immediately assumed to be the work of Islamic fundamentalists. Some time later, when reports pointed to rightwing Americans being responsible for spreading the spores, this was George Bush's response.

8/05/05

Reasons to hate four-wheel drives no 832 - On average, once a week in the USA someone driving an SUV will back into and kill one of their own children, unable to see them behind their huge vehicle.

5/05/05

I am running creative writing workshops for sixth formers who are taking English Literature. They are a really nice, lively bunch who produce some very interesting work. But when I started the session by asking which writers they liked, they couldn't think of a single one. 'Reading is boring' I was told. They read, apparently, nothing but the set books, and these are deemed wanting.

This is bad news for an author - where are all the future readers going to come from? Do videos, dvds and computer games spell the end for books? Are young people glued to the internet ever going to consider shelling out for a paperback? Are we all, in short, doomed? It was predicted that records, cassettes and cds would put an an end to live music. Similarly, gloomy pronouncements about the publishing industry are nothing new (Socrates predicted that as more books were produced, it would mean the end of conversation). Let's not panic. I struggled to find books that really gripped me when I was seventeen and eighteen, but by the time I was in my mid twenties, reading fiction had become a very important part of my life.

3/05/05

A friend very kindly offers me the use of her flat in London while she is away on holiday next month, knowing that I am looking for somewhere I can get away from it all and finish my novel. The only problem is, she warns me by email, there is building work going on next door during the day and it can be very noisy. In fact sometimes she has to shut herself in the cupboard to get some peace. Oh, and the neighbours upstairs have a very young baby that wakes up crying in the middle of the night. Still, she hopes that this won't put me off and concludes by asking if I knew where Seneca lived? I confess that I don't, and ask if I should. She informs me that he lived above a barber's shop in ancient Rome - at the time it was fashionable for men to have their armpits plucked and he wrote while listening to their screams of pain. So there, only wimps need peace and quiet in which to work.

6/04/05

I came across this quotation from Albert Einstein, which would not seem out of place in a book on Buddhism:

'A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, "The Universe", a part limited in time in space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest and dearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in it's beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.'

Admirable sentiments and especially poignant, I think, coming from a man who was haunted in his later years by the knowledge that his scientific genius helped contribute to the creation of the atomic bomb.

29/3/05

At a crucial point in my second novel, I have recently turned to non fiction as a way of relaxing. I have just finished Stuart Maconie's entertaining book 'Cider With Roadies.' Here's a typically hilarious quote from Morrissey that he includes:

'I am forever chained to a disused railway station in Wigan.'

To put this in context, he said it at a time when we were seriously being asked to believe that the vile and obnoxious Spandau Ballet were the height of style and relevance. It is both very funny (how could you take such a man seriously?) and also, in a very tongue in cheek way, a vow of allegiance to the north at a time when Thatcher was intent on bringing it to it's knees. And Mozza said this, when various vacuous pop stars who had never showed any evidence whatsover of a social conscience before began emoting over Band Aid:

'I detest it all. It says that the responsibility for solving hunger and world poverty lies with an eleven year old girl in Wigan.'

Considering how incredibly moving those newsreels of the suffering in Africa were and how much good Band Aid did, it was a very brave, not to say very foolhardy thing to say, and it makes me cringe even now to read it. And yet... when I see how some of the more revolting 'celebrities' involved in Red Nose day carry on as they do, this is pretty much exactly how I feel today.

Band Aid was a wonderful thing in many many ways, but while the admirable Bob Geldof both then and now talked about the issues with great intelligence and obviously genuine compassion, I always felt that many other rock stars (e.g. Queen, who stuck two fingers up to the Anti Apartheid Movement and played Sun City in South Africa for huge piles of dosh) were happy to jump on the bandwagon as a pretty cynical career move. What many of us wanted to see was evidence that they were putting their hands in their well lined pockets, as well as cajoling schoolchildren to contribute their pocket money. But back to Mozza - Maconie recalls that every time Morrissey was on the cover of the NME in the early 90s it's sales rocketed. But also, apparently, those sales often outstripped those of his latest single. It seems that there were more people who wanted to know what Morrissey had to say about virtually anything you cared to mention than people who actually bought his records. Morrissey may often appear pompous, paranoid and precious and he may, indeed, not be the man we think he is, but at least he's not Sting and for that we should be truly thankful.

8/3/05

We've all found doing the Four Fathers events very moving. First of all it's really quite strange to find yourself reading from an account of your relationship with your father, then going on to discuss what you've written with a room full of strangers. But we've found that the audience then respond with memories and reflections of their relationships with their fathers, which makes it really something special. I suppose the events have become a kind of safe space to discuss these issues, a place where no ideology is pushed, no easy answers offered, but where people are just able to share their different experiences.

And how times have changed - one elderly woman recalled asking her father his first name when she was eight or nine years old and the horror with which the question was greeted. She had been brought up to address him as either Father, or Mister Smith (or whatever his surname was) and to know and use his first name was regarded as highly disrespectful. She was pleased though, to see her own children enjoying far greater intimacy with their sons and daughters, which was nice.

After doing a clutch of dates recently, there is now quite a gap before the next one in Skipton and the four after that are spread across several months. Here's the list of dates so far:

5 April - Skipton Library

26 May - Coliseum Theatre, Oldham (part of Oldham Literature Festival)

14 June - a library to be confirmed in Bolton

18 June - Eccles Library

19 October - Off The Shelf Festival, Sheffield, venue to be confirmed

3/3/05

Yesterday was World Book Day and I did an event with Tom Palmer and John Siddique at Manchester Central Library as part of our Four Fathers tour (for details of this and to download the collection for free, go to wwwwww.route-online.com). On the train afterwards a group of noisy, drunken teenagers got on at Huddersfield. One guy starts expressing his opinions in a particularly loud and strident manner.

'Man U - they're a gay team.'

and

'Coronation Street - that's a gay programme.'

Then

'The Darkness - they're a gay band.'

One of the girls asks 'Are you a homophobe?'

'No' he replies indignantly, 'I'm a heterosexual.'

File under 'Youth Of Today'.

23/02/05

Returning to the subject of John McGahern, it is very interesting now to read what Anthony Burgess wrote about his first novel, The Barracks, when it was published in 1963. 'Nobody has caught so well the peculiar hopelessness of contemporary Ireland' - hard to imagine someone writing that about a novel set in Ireland today. This is Colm Toibin, on life in Ireland in the 60s and 70s: 'When I was growing up in a provincial town there was nowhere more dreary than Ireland and nothing more dreary than Irish writing.' But McGahern changed that for him, and many others.

There are plenty of people in their twenties who fondly imagine that Ireland was always a vibrant, interesting and fun filled place (I've met quite a few who thought that in the last couple of years). The reality was that for a very long time it was, as my relatives often said, 'a bleddy awful hole.' The disastrous policies of De Valera had resulted in economic stagnation, leading to huge waves of immigration, and the repressive and narrow minded Catholic Church ruled with a rod of iron.

McGahern himself suffered at the hands of the church. His second novel, The Dark, was banned for obscenity. It touched on child abuse, and so outraged The Archbishop of Dublin that he demanded McGahern be sacked from his job as a school teacher. He received support in public from parents of the children he taught, but to no avail - in those days, if an Archbishop wanted somebody sacked, then he would be sacked. McGahern moved to London and, in the time honoured Irish fashion, worked on building sites. He drifted into supply teaching, before he eventually began picking up writing work. He was just the latest in a long line of Irish writers who had been banned in their own country, and ended up being lionised elsewhere.

Indeed, at the time of the ban other writers apparently assured McGahern that the controversy surrounding his sacking was a fantastic opportunity to generate publicity and sales for himself. But his response to a plan by friends and supporters to mount a campaign against Ireland's draconian censorship laws by focusing on his case was to remain silent. 'I was secretly ashamed. Not because of the book, but because this was our country and we were making bloody fools of ourselves.' After The Dark was banned he didn't publish another book for five years.

21/02/05

A few weeks ago I taught a residential schools week for The Arvon Foundation in Shropshire, with my friend Tom Palmer. They were a talented and livley bunch, those young people from St Albans CE School in Birmingham. They were also very lucky to have two such great teachers. The exercise that got the week off to such a good start was one in which they worked in groups of three to create a character, which they then developed in various ways over the course of the day. By drawing attention to the character's contradictions and problems, their secret fears and desires, possible storylines were soon thought of. Fun to do, it also showed that the question of which comes first, plot or character, is actually a false distinction, that they are, in fact, inextricably linked. It did not take them long to grasp what F Scott Fitzgerald meant when he said 'Plot is character and character plot.'

It is often said that an exciting plot is necessary to keep the reader turning the pages, but a really vivid set of characters can be just as engrossing. Many fictional characters are part of our shared cultural experience:people will discuss the characters from their favourite books, films or TV programmes as if they were real people. I particularly like the story John McGahern told about his first novel, The Barracks. When it was published, a local butcher offered him money to put someone he knew in his next one. He wanted McGahern to portray a customer he didn't like in such a negative way that he would be ashamed to show his face in the town after it came out (which actually links in to an old tradition in Ireland - the Gaelic poets were often paid to write portraits of people that would ensure their public shame and humiliation). Needless to say, McGahern refused, but it's another example of just how powerful fictional characters can be.

And if you like novels with very memorable characters, then I highly recommend McGahern's Amongst Women, which introduces the unforgettable Moran, the ageing patriarch at war with his family and himself. I can't think of any novel that I have read in the last ten years that has made a stronger impact on me.

9/02/05

There is a long queue for the check out at the supermarket. I notice a copy of Men's Health, and the strapline FANTASTIC SEX! YOU'LL HAVE TO FIGHT HER OFF. The thought of a load of Spotty Normans eagerly buying the magazine so that they can read the hot sex tips and have to fight off gangs of gasping women makes me smile. The woman in front of me notices what I'm looking at and gives me a scornful, disapproving look. I think a.) That this would make a good scene in an early Woody Allen film. b.) It dawns on me that some people might consider me a Spotty Norman.

ray french