Adam Foulds came in to school on Thursday and read from The Broken Word (Sunday Times review here, Guardian here). Earlier this term, I read the poem in one sitting: it’s not difficult to do this, but it was, in any case, simply not a poem I wanted to break off from reading. It is very disturbing, not least because of the contrast between the quality of the telling and what it has to tell. Hearing so much of it read affected me greatly and, in winding up the reading, I slipped and called Adam ‘Robin’ — as his reading had melded in my mind with Robin Robertson’s also dark reading from earlier in the term.
Adam talked afterwards about the LRB review which lies behind the poem. You need a subscription, but the review, Bernard Porter: How did they get away with it?, discussed two books, David Anderson’s Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire and Caroline Elkins’ Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. Adam spoke about how Porter’s review, and then the two books themselves, shook the sense he had grown up with that, on the whole, and despite some shortcomings, British colonial rule had been a good thing. He had, he said, shared the ambient complacency about British rule. Porter’s review put it like this: “The accepted view of Britain’s decolonisation hitherto has been that it was done in a more dignified, enlightened and consensual way than by other countries – meaning, of course, France. It will be difficult now to argue this so glibly.”
Ambient complacency is a potent phrase, is it not?
Something else — unrelated — that Adam said after the reading also struck me: novels ‘take a group effort’. (His previous book is a novel, The Truth About These Strange Times.) They are so long — they can grow so ‘thin and wispy’ — a writer needs the collaboration of others to bring a novel into the world.
Of course, every author is different. Writing in The Observer’s Book of Books (a slim volume, given away free with the paper in May this year) about how he works as an editor (and drawing on his lengthy experience in publishing), Robin made just this point. His short piece should be read in full, but I can’t find it online. Here are some excerpts:
… an editor’s eye shouldn’t pass over a text too often for fear of losing the very objectivity the writer lacks. During a first read … I’m always watching myself for the first signs of inattention; any time that I’m stopped or distracted means there’s probably a problem in the text … If any changes do need to be made, I’d always ask the author to make them. After all, it is their book, and at this stage it’s still a thing in flux … You have to encourage the writer to see the problem, not just tell them there is one. Editing is about reading and listening attentively … I’ve always considered editing to involve quite a large degree of pastoral care.
