OPINION - favourite authors.

Who are your favourite authors? Teaching English makes this question a particular minefield – one that I dance around carefully and with a full awareness of context: too dry and you’ll scare off students or, worse still, sound like a liar; too light and you’ll sound flaky and, dear God no, a bit low brow.

There are a number of authors I circle around, every so often one repeats him/herself too much and drifts out and another finds their way in.
 

Cormac McCarthy – anything he writes has got me, certainly for the time being. Maybe, in part, because he embraces genre storytelling and then finds something rich and interesting to do with it, but also because his control of prose is so damn good. I challenge anyone to find a single word they would change in The Road or No Country for Old Men. They were superb films, the Coen brothers doing especially well, but the quality come from the texts.

George R R Martin – so much has been written on his works at the moment that it is difficult to add much of note. If you’re cautious about the label ‘fantasy’ then probably there isn’t a lot I can say that would change your mind, still, take my word for it; you’re missing out on well-formed characters from an author with a real mastery of narrative.

Clive Barker – Is an author often unfairly bracketed because he writes adult stories that, at times, require a strong stomach to get through. That said, ever since I discovered him in my early teens, I’ve kept returning to his short-story writing in moments of creative lapse. A walk in his footsteps, even for a little while, is enough to set me right.

Alex Garland – I love his scriptwriting but I keep getting drawn back to The Beach and the Tesseract. They are wonderful novels that, for an aspiring writer, really show how you can translate your own experiences into a fiction environment.

Peter Carey – having taught True History of the Kelly Gang for a number of years, and returned to Oscar and Lucinda in my own time, there is something wonderfully controlled in the way he approaches his topic. Exploring the language of his characters is particularly interesting and his work is something I always point students towards to understand how you can convey characters through the way they talk rather than what they say.
 

There are more, but these are the ones that leap to the front and, over the next few weeks, between offering stories from my own collections, I will be looking to discuss their works a little more.

Review - Short Story: 'The Fly' by Katherine Mansfield.

A quick read you may never have come across:

'The Fly' by Katherine Mansfield.

Don't be fooled by the fact this story is only a few pages long, treat this tale like the very best poetry and you'll get a lot more out of it. For English students and the casual reader, there's a lot to get out of this piece, not least an understanding of the author's own difficult experiences.

Having lost her beloved brother in World War One, Katherine's pain is writ large in the suffering of the main characters. Set in the years following the conflict, this finds a retired and infirm gentleman (Mr.Woodifield) visiting his older, but still working, employer (referred to only as The Boss). There's is a complicated and subtle relationship, two men who, for various reasons, are still dependent on each other; on some levels they remain friends, but their meetings are more selfish than either would like to admit.

As the story progresses, The Boss is left in his plush office with the memories of his son who died at war. For all his pretences at strength and authority, he struggles with how to cope with the fact that his ambitions for his son have been stolen from him.

Then he sees a fly trapped in an ink blot. The tale is an allegory, it offers multiple metaphorical interpretations and leaves the reader to take from it what they want. Most importantly, whatever you decide, you are left with a sense of unease and sadness at the suffering of those left behind.