Five years ago today, the old Whitechapel library closed its doors and made the controversial move a mile down the road to a shiny new glass cube called the Idea Store. The anniversary of this shift in library ideology is particularly resonant at the moment, considering the government’s recent pronouncements on the future of free books for all. Libraries face a tough time over the next few years, and some commentators seem to think they’re unlikely to survive it, at least not looking like anything we might recognize now. It’s a worrying time for those of us who love and use our libraries.

The old Whitechapel Library

The old Whitechapel library played a crucial part in the literary history of this fluid, immigrant-fuelled eastern fringe of the City of London. The library, its beautiful red-brick façade crouching over the entrance to Aldgate East tube, was founded in 1892 by the prolific Victorian benefactor of the working classes, John Passmore Edwards. It was an important local institution for the Jewish community in the area, nicknamed the University of the Ghetto, and many writers who grew up in the area were regular visitors, using the library as an escape, and its books as an education.

Artists Mark Gertler and David Bomberg and the poet Isaac Rosenberg were regulars, later to be known as members of the Whitechapel Boys. The playwright and poet Bernard Kops hid from the realities of poverty and overcrowding in the reading rooms, later writing a poem as a tribute. “A loner in love with words, but so lost / and wandering the streets, not counting the cost. / I emerged out of childhood with nowhere to hide / when a door called my name / and pulled me inside. / And being so hungry I fell on the feast. / Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East.”

When Whitechapel library closed, the playwright Arnold Wesker, who used the library as a boy, was one of the critics of the move. “Whitechapel Library blazed the way and excited my love of reading books. It was a safe space with a reference room where old men read newspapers they couldn’t afford to buy. I owe the library a debt and lament its passing.”

But the thing is, Wesker’s description of that library, and Bernard Kops’s vision of it in his poem, could both apply equally now to the Idea Store. At the time, news reports on the Idea Store were sniffy about the fact that it promoted itself as being “next to Sainsbury’s”, as if the whole concept equated borrowing a book to buying a pint of milk. But what’s wrong with being next to Sainsbury’s? Supermarkets are generally in convenient places – why shouldn’t books be too?  Slap bang in the middle of the straggling and chaotic market that runs down Whitechapel Road, the Idea Store is in the heart of the community it serves. The doors are open, and the glass frontage means you see what you’re going in to. It’s not intimidating, it’s busy and buzzy. The ground floor is crowded, but as you go upwards into the building the floors become hushed and peaceful, with readers relaxing in chairs and at desks. Here are Wesker’s old men reading papers they can’t afford, side by side with students and other readers of all kinds. By the fourth floor, with its café and spectacular views over the City, I’d decided this is somewhere I’d happily come to read.

Perhaps change is a good thing for libraries. I love the musty, hushed beauty of Victorian libraries, but I also recognize that they risk becoming irrelevant to many people in the 21^st Century if they don’t change with the times. That’s not to say that books are irrelevant – far from it. Libraries have over 12.6 million active borrowers a year, and books are still at the heart of what they do. But it’s not all they do. They’re a crucial part of local communities, and that’s not just down to the dusty tomes.

George Orwell wrote that bookshops attract ‘not quite certifiable lunatics’ because they’re ‘one of the few places you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.’ Never mind the lunatics – we all need somewhere we can loiter without pressure to move along or make a purchase. People need somewhere they can go and ask for information, knowledge and help, and feel confident it will be given to them, for free. The library is that place.

The most worrying thing for me about the current plans for the future of libraries is the idea that they might become virtual spaces, where we order our books online and get them through the post. One of the crucial things about a library is that it’s a place you can visit. You can go there, talk to a librarian, sit down, read and spend time. You can take the kids and let them get their hands on books, make their own choices, listen to stories and join in. A friend of mine who works in a library seems to spend most of her time being something like a cross between a Citizen’s Advice Bureau, a social worker and a psychologist to her customers. Bernard Kops wrote about the library as a refuge and an escape, which wouldn’t have really worked if he’d been ordering his books on the net.

So, whether it’s an old red-brick building or a glass-fronted replacement, whether it’s run by paid staff or volunteers, whether it has shelves full of books or rooms full of terminals, a library needs a building, a real one. We shut the doors at our peril.

Emily Cleaver

Old books are ideal for word hunting. Sometimes, opening one is like lifting a stone and surprising the words like woodlice. Non-fiction is ideal, and the more obscure the book, the better the words. In fact, the book itself doesn’t much matter – it’s just a receptacle for its words. I usually don’t even keep the books I collect words from; I reap and get rid. It’s the words that count in this game.

In a secondhand bookshop I found a handwritten shop ledger for a drapers from 1876, belonging to a Master Williams, who wrote his name in a flowery, slanting hand inside the cover. It lists invoices for the orders of cloth going out of the shop. That’s all that’s in the ledger, an everyday thing probably forgotten about once it was full. But it’s a hoard of beautiful words. Here’s a taste of the ones I kept:

In January Master Williams sold shalloon, silk serge and Saxony doeskin, Scotch sheeting, swansdown and India silk handkerchiefs. In February, rough loom, red chintz and Russia duck. In March it was lutestring, lace cardinal and linen huckaback. In April there was calico, cambric and cashmere shawls. In May crimson velvet, Paramatta Cloth, damask and drab moleskin, and in June black crape, bombazine and black moiré. Even to list the words is to start writing a poem.

Word hunting can uncover tiny stories too –in the draper’s ledger, customers spring to life as potential characters for stories. I like to picture the Reverend Steward, who wanted fine white counterpanes and Wilton blankets, standing tutting in the queue behind the more stylishly inclined Reverend E Boyce, ordering a silk umbrella and two pairs of kid gloves. And I think it’s hard not to make assumptions about a Mr. Robert Barnard, who ordered buck-skin braces and mohair socks.

Another word goldmine I found once was something called The Art of Painting in Miniature. All that was left of it were some loose pages held together with a couple of ragged threads. It looked like it might be 18^th Century (the letter s is written as f), and the author, whose name is missing, is informing the reader about the types of paint used for miniatures. The words (with their old spellings) are luscious. Verditer, Prussian, Indigo Smalt, Carmine, Drop Lake, Chinese Vermillion, Indian Red, Gall-Stone, Terra Sienna, Roman Oker, Sap-Green, Lamp-Black and Flake White

And the tiny story is there too, in all its smelly, dirty, 18^th Century detail: “I would recommend my readers to apply to the slaughtermen at the Victualling Office, or any private slaughter-house who will examine the gall-bladders of the oxen, in many of which gall-stones (being concrescences formed in the bladder) are found; by this mode only, will the artist or amateur attain possession of this unrivalled colour in its pure state.”

Sometimes the most technical books are written like poetry. A Catachism of the Laws of Storms, written by a John Macnab in 1884, is a textbook for trainee sailors on how to navigate through bad weather. The instructions are dry and technical, but the words conjure up the terrifying storms themselves, which John Macnab clearly maintained a healthy awe of. He warns against ragged, immense, pyramidal seas, long rolling and wild with their great rotating, spherical squalls and storm-fields, oscillating and overwhelming as they veer and shift on the outer verge, the cross seas hiding calm centres.

I’m never quite sure when my word collections are going to come in handy, but they always do, sooner or later. Flicking through an old notebook and being delighted all over again by bombazine, verditer or images of squally storm-fields usually sparks off ideas for stories, poems or character names. It’s my belief that some of the most beautiful poems and stories were inspired by their authors’ experiences of word hunting. John Masefield’s poem Cargoes is my favourite example – “Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir…” I’d put money on the fact that he came across the word quinquireme at some point in his sea-faring life, (it’s a kind of ship) and the rest of the poem followed, even if it was years later.

If you’ve discovered you own unusual favourite words, I’d love to hear them. Use the #favouritewords hashtag on Twitter to let them loose on the world.

Emily Cleaver

I started with Ted Hughes’s whales, which swim across the surface of the moon, ‘lifting the moon’s skin / Like a muscle’. It’s a beautifully visual poem, its whales huge, mysterious and geologically slow. The poem’s repeated ‘oo’ and ‘m’ sounds echo the whales’ calls.

Sometimes they plunge deep
Under the moon’s plains
Making their magnetic way
Through the moon’s interior metals
Sending the astronaut’s instruments scatty.

Next, I went back to an early example of whale-lit: Jonah’s Biblical encounter, which already contains all the motifs of the genre – swallowing, fate, death, rebirth and existential angst. In the whale’s stomach for three days and nights, Jonah shouts at God to let him out. “Out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice.” God obliges, after Jonah makes some rash promises about keeping the faith. The whale vomits him up and then sadly disappears from the story, which concentrates on the frankly less exciting Jonah.

Then I listened to some whale folk-songs. Once people worked out how to build boats big enough to catch whales, but not quite big enough to be safe from being capsized by them, they started singing about the perils and pleasures of whaling. One of the best-known whaling songs is the Greenland Whale Fisheries, first sung in the 18th Century and covered loudly by The Pogues on our playlist. I love the rhythm of the lyrics, even without the music.

The harpoon struck and the line played out,
With a single flourish of his tail,
He capsized the boat and we lost five men,
And we did not catch that whale, brave boys,
And we did not catch that whale.

Next, I read the story Mocha Dick by J. N. Reynolds. Now, I already knew that Herman Melville based Moby Dick on a real incident – the wreck of the whaleship Essex in 1819. (The First Mate, Own Chase, published an account of the disaster, also a brilliantly horrific read.) But I’d always assumed that the characters were fictional, any resemblance to persons living or dead coincidental. Turns out I was wrong – Moby himself was based on a real whale, Mocha Dick, who roamed the Pacific in the early 1800s. Like Moby, Mocha was white, and notorious for capsizing boats with his tail. Mocha wore a jaunty headdress of barnacles, which apparently gave him a ‘rugged’ appearance, which he accessorised with 20 broken-off harpoons sticking out of his back.

Reynold’s story is about the final slaughter of Mocha Dick by Nantucket ‘blubber-hunters’, which you can’t help feeling is a bit of a waste of a good whale. (I guess that’s what Melville thought too.) Reading it, I tended to side with the whale – “… in impotent rage, he reared his immense blunt head, covered with barnacles, high above the surge; while his jaws fell together with a crash that almost made me shiver; then the upper outline of his vast form was dimly seen, gliding amidst showers of sparkling spray; while streaks of crimson on the white surf that boiled in his track, told that the shaft had been driven home.” The description of the ‘cutting in’ of the whale’s carcass after the kill, and the 100 barrels of clear oil and gruesomely euphemistic ‘head-matter’ collected, reminded me unpleasantly of that TV whale dissection.

Then I dabbled briefly with D.H. Lawrence’s poem Whales Weep Not, which is about sex and obsession, the whales rolling through the sea and joyfully mating. It didn’t really do it for me, until I found a recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it to a whale-song backing, which made my week. (His intimate whisper of “there they blow, there they blow” has to be listened to.) It’s on the playlist too.

Then I remembered the marvellous opening to Rudyard Kipling’s Just So story, How the Whale Got His Throat – “In the sea, once upon a time, O my Best Beloved, there was a Whale, and he ate fishes. He ate the starfish and the garfish, and the crab and the dab, and the plaice and the dace, and the skate and his mate, and the mackereel and the pickereel, and the really truly twirly-whirly eel.”

Kipling follows the biblical theme of being swallowed alive by a whale – the man the whale swallows, who is a person of “infinite-resource-and-sagacity”, uses his broken boat and suspenders (”do not forget the suspenders”) to give the whale its sieve-like throat.

But searching for Kipling brought me right back to Ted Hughes– he also tried his hand at a creation story about the whale in his children’s collection How the Whale Became, which I’d forgotten about entirely. Reading it again, the images were as odd as they were when I was a kid – a whale growing as a plant in God’s back garden and being pulled up by the root and thrown in the sea because he’s too big. His anguish at his fate is still rather upsetting. “’Help, help!” cried Whale-Wort. “I shall drown! Please let me come back on land where I can sleep.’”

That brought my week of literary whales to a close, with the feeling that whales are paradoxes: gentle, but with the power to crush up a boat, monstrously ugly but breathtakingly beautiful. They’re so inscrutable, insatiable and different from us that they make versatile symbols for everything from fate and obsession to the power and mystery nature itself.

You can listen to our whale song playlist here, if you’re so inclined.

Emily Cleaver

The Bard of Salford was on good form, despite the temperature. Now in his 60s, he still has the style of Bob Dylan, mixed with the dead-pan delivery of Alan Bennett and just the right sprinkle of Bernard Manning. He delivered a stream of curiously old-fashioned stand-up, interspersed with his own brand of rapid-fire performance poetry. His disjointed jokes and puns revelled in an infectious love of language, perfect for a literary festival. (“If you shot a peasant, could you get off on the grounds of dyslexia?”)

John Cooper Clarke, photo by Tim Duncan

Short, simple and deceptively slight in subject matter, his poems work because of the obvious joy they take in the performance possibilities of rhyme and rhythm. My favourites were the frenetic Hire Car, (“Hire car, hire car, why would anybody buy a car, bang it, prang it, say ta-ta, it’s a hire car, baby”) and the brilliantly un-PC ode to sex changes, Crossing the Floor (“Bye-bye Boddingtons, hello shorts, I wear size 9 kitten-heel courts. I’m going to get a vagina … of sorts.”) It’s no surprise that after 30 years performing, Cooper Clarke’s work is still a major influence on modern bands whose lyrics hover between poetic story-telling and music, from The Streets to the Arctic Monkeys.

The ‘Very Best of’ CD I bought after the show has a good mix of Cooper Clarke’s stuff – some straight poetry and some poems performed to music, blurring the lines between the two genres. We’ve been listening to it all weekend at work.

Inspired, I’ve made a start on a playlist celebrating cross-overs between music and poetry. It’s a bit eclectic so far, but I rather like the contrast between Tom Waits talking us through Small Change and the spooky recording of John Masefield’s sing-song rendition of Sea Fever, or the leap from Woody Guthrie’s Washington Talkin’ Blues to Ivor Cutler’s weird Scottish ramblings.

If you have Spotify, you can have a listen at this link. Otherwise, here’s my “Pusic? No, Moetry” tracklisting, for anyone who fancies reconstructing it themselves. Suggested additions welcome…

Pusic? No, Moetry  – A Playlist
John Cooper Clarke – Twat
The Streets – Don’t Mug Yourself
Sir John Betjeman – The Licorice Fields At Pontefract
Tom Waits – Small Change
Flanders & Swann – The Gnu Song
Woody Guthrie – Washington Talkin’ Blues
Ivor Cutler – Life In A Scotch Sittingroom
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band – The Host The Ghost The Most Holy O
Edith Sitwell – Scotch Rhapsody
Langston Hughes – The Story of the Blues
John Lee Hooker – Talkin’ The Blues
John Masefield – Sea Fever
John Cooper Clarke – Evidently Chickentown

by Emily Cleaver

'Chocky' by John Wyndham, Penguin, 1970

In other words, they’ve fulfilled the vision of Allen Lane, Penguin’s founder, who created a publishing house with the philosophy of making great fiction affordable for all. Penguin enthusiasts gathered for a conference in Bristol this week to celebrate the 75th anniversary of that idea, with speakers enthusing about the humble Penguin paperback; by definition flimsy and ephemeral, but a design icon which still resonates today, calling to us from dusty shelves, begging to be read.

They certainly call to me. This week, to mark the occasion, I’ve been lovingly revisiting my modest but slowly growing collection of old Penguin sci-fi editions. I’ve loved Penguin paperback sci-fi since I discovered my dad’s copy of John Wyndham’s Chocky on a bookshelf at home when I was a kid. I was fascinated by the eerie picture on the cover, a fine, white line-drawing on a boldly coloured background of a boy with hypnotic eyes. I read it, and was hooked on Wyndham, and classic sci-fi, for life.

'Art Forms In Nature', Ernst Haeckel

That cover design, for the 1970 edition of Chocky, was created by Harry Willock. He also designed covers for other Wyndham Penguin titles, all equally striking – they have the feel of biologist Ernst Haeckel’s beautiful and intricate line drawings of shellfish, jellyfish and anemones in his influ

Eight hours of strained, silent effort later, and we’d managed half the clues, three of which we got wrong. Cryptic crosswords aren’t one of my strengths at the best of times, and apparently in 1942 their setters expected their readers to have a full-on literary and classical education, preferably at somewhere like Eton. To give a taste of the kind of clues this Torquemada chap revelled in, give this one a go – it’s one of the easier ones: “Creeper formed of Edmund and his son Charles.” (Skip to the end for the answer.*)

By the end of the day, we were cursing Torquemada and his literary machinations. A quick scan through the introduction to the book revealed that we’d stumbled across a piece of crossword history.

Torquemada was the daddy of crossword setters, and the inventor of the cryptic puzzle. Otherwise known as Edward Powys Mathers, he was a scholar, linguist and lover of puzzles and games who enjoyed setting complex verbal brainteasers for his friends and family over dinner to avoid small-talk. (Sounds like a riot.) In the 1920s a crossword craze was sweeping the nation (the first crossword had only appeared in 1913), but Powys Mathers found the straightforward dictionary-definition clues boring, and created the first cryptic puzzle in 1924. He went on to set cryptics for The Saturday Westminster and The Observer for the next 15 years.

A voracious reader with an impressive memory, Torquemada favoured literary clues, using quotations from poetry, plays and the classics. He was fantastically creative with his puzzles. Many were written in perfectly constructed verse, or delivered mini-narratives to their solvers. My favourite in 112 Crosswords is the puzzle where the clues are knock-knock jokes.

Torquemada also created other forms of literary brain-teaser. One of his triumphs was a 100 page novel, included in the 1934 Torquemada Puzzle Book, in which all 100 pages were presented in the wrong order. While each followed on grammatically correctly from the last, the story was nonsensical until rearranged into the right order. A prize was offered for solutions, although only three people ever cracked the puzzle to claim it.

Back in the bookshop, to distract ourselves from our woeful performance with the literary cryptic, we tried to list other books that are also puzzles. There’s artist Kit Williams’s Masquerade from 1979, in which a series of beautifully intricate paintings and a fairytale story hold clues to the whereabouts of a real treasure, a jewelled golden hare which Williams buried somewhere in the English countryside. (The sad story of William’s reluctant celebrity status and the betrayal by an ex-girlfriend which led to the treasure being found by frauds, is worth reading up on.)

Then there’s Alice Through the Looking Glass: Lewis Carroll’s wonderfully disturbing and dream-like classic can be played as a chess problem – there’s even a diagram of it at the start of the book, titled “White Pawn (Alice) to play, and win in eleven moves.”

Of course, literature and puzzles have a long and intimate history. Detective stories are the obvious example, and it’s surely no coincidence that Torquemada himself was an addict of classic detective fiction, reviewing masses of it for The Observer. As a young man, he apparently had two ambitions: to create the perfect epigram, and to be a great detective – for him, the tricks and elegant jokes of language went hand-in-hand with the enjoyment of a narrative puzzle with a murder at its heart. The locked room mystery, perhaps the purest form of detective story, is a challenge to the reader to solve a puzzle – how, given a set of apparently unconnected clues, could a seemingly impossible crime have been committed? The best of this genre, like Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, are elegant mini-puzzles, where all the elements necessary for a solution are laid out for the reader to make sense of if they can, before the detective reveals the truth at the end in an act of mind-bending logic. (The links are there with more recent fictional detectives too – Inspector Morse loves a good cryptic crossword, and they pop up in the plots of more than one of his cases.)

The idea that literature hides a secret which the reader must work to reveal was especially popular with postmodernist writers. The work of Jorge Luis Borges was an early influence on them – his stories are like beautiful puzzle-boxes – intriguing, full of mazes, dreams and riddles, with secrets sliding around below the surface, waiting to be discovered. His story Death and the Compass is a great example of his use of the conventions of the detective story to examine metaphysical issues.

Another early postmodernist, Vladimir Nabokov (also an obsessive fan of chess problems), liked his readers to work for their reward, insisting that the best literature was intricately plotted and complex in style and structure. When teaching Joyce’s Ulysses (which itself, in Joyce’s words, contains “so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant”), Nabokov insisted his students plotted the movement of the characters around Dublin on a map.

Nabokov’s masterpiece Pale Fire is both a puzzle and a mystery story, of sorts. It takes the form of a narrative poem by a character called John Shade, with foreword, commentary and footnotes by his self-appointed editor Charles Kinbote. But if the reader interprets the indirect clues in the commentary, a story of death, delusion, fraud and double identity is revealed. Nabokov said that the novel was ‘full of plums that I keep hoping somebody will find.’

The post-modernists used the fictional puzzle to explore the idea of literature and language as a web of clues, signs and meanings, where the revelation at the centre of the maze is often the potential absence of any meaning at all. Perhaps it’s significant that the beginnings of this literary theme coincided with the growth of the cryptic crossword.

It’s a sad footnote to the story of Edward Powys Mathers that he himself harboured literary ambitions beyond the clues of his crosswords. He published several critically-acclaimed translations of Asian poetry, but a lifelong struggle with poor health held him back from fulfilling his ambitions as a serious literary writer, a failing which haunted him until his death in 1939 at the age of 47. Having experienced the linguistically beautiful and challenging construction of his cryptic crosswords, it makes me wonder what torturous literary masterpieces he might have produced had he been given the chance.

*(For the answer to the clue, you need to know of the famous 19^th Century father and son actors the Keans, which when rearranged gives the creeper of the answer, ‘snake’.)

Emily Cleaver

Thinking about gangs in literature, as I have been this week after reading the latest Litro, many of them seem to involve kids too. Children’s fiction itself is full of the kind of gangs you’d love to be part of: the criminal-thwarting gangs of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Secret Seven; Peter Pan’s Lost Boys, the gangs of the comic world like the Bash Street Kids or Dennis’s Menaces versus Walter and his Softies; The Outlaws, the gang of four scruffy boys led by William Brown in Richmal Crompton’s brilliant Just William stories, and many more. When we’re kids, gangs are full of the allure and excitement of belonging, and the safety and power of numbers.

But then we grow up and gangs take on a whole new meaning. They become dangerous; now it’s all about exclusion, mob-mentality, power politics and crime. In grown-up fiction, gangs are much scarier beasts, and the tendency of children to form gangs becomes a means of examining the darker depths of human nature – think the grimly inevitable bullying and deadly exclusion from the group in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

I went back to re-read one of the best gang stories ever written, Graham Greene’s The Destructors, a short story first published in 1954. In the empty lots of a Blitz-battered London the Wormsley Common Gang gets up to the usual harmless petty crime, until the arrival of a new boy on the scene. The newcomer takes control and suggests the idea of destroying an old man’s house, one that has survived the bombing, smashing it up from the inside, razing it to the ground, for seemingly no other reason than the triumph of destruction.

The story is about gang politics – how power is gained, held and lost, but it also deals with the potential of the gang to break social boundaries, to make its members do things they never would alone. Gangs have their own hierarchies, codes of behaviour and leaders. They are societies in themselves, putting those in them outside the rules that apply to the rest of us. The Wormsley Common Gang destroy a house designed by Wren, a beautiful house that has miraculously survived the deliberate flattening and destruction of the Blitz – why? Because their leader tells them to; because all the other boys are doing it; because they can.

Blackie, the deposed leader of the gang, asks Trevor, the disturbingly emotionless instigator of the destruction, if he hates the owner of the house. “I don’t hate him. There’d be no fun if I hated him,” is the chilling answer. “All this hate and love [...] it’s soft, it’s hooey. There’s only things, Blackie.”

There’s a paradox here about the power of gangs – together, the boys can rip a house to pieces, smash the furniture and bring down the walls. But in the rest of the world they are powerless – they are poor with not much of a future to look forward to. If the world was only made up of things, the boys would have complete power over it, but it isn’t – their power is futile, an illusion.

It’s a paradox that has increasing resonance today, with the papers  full gang violence, hoodies and bullying. But kids in gangs are also the least powerful people in society. It’s usually their only chance of wielding influence; but their ability to rule or to intimidate only lasts so long as they are in their gang. Outside it they are powerless.

Emily Cleaver

One story sprang to mind straight away though, so I dug it out. D. H. Lawrence’s eerie and discomfiting The Last Laugh is set in Hampstead. I’m not a big fan of Lawrence but I picked up a collection of his short stories on a whim in the second hand bookshop where I work a few months ago and I loved this one. A couple leaving a house late at night are intrigued by a strange laugh in the trees of a nearby park and have an encounter with a being who transfigures their characters and actions that night.

Published in 1928, it picks up on the early 20th Century wave of interest in the theme of Pan, the god with goat’s legs who’s associated with wildernesses and shagging, and who is supposedly unique among the gods because he died. In The Last Laugh Pan returns to the world (well, Hampstead), which has devastating consequences for people wrapped up in civilised concerns. Pan seems to blur the distinctions between humans and animals and right and wrong.

What I like about the story is that it gives a very particular sense of Hampstead as a marginal place, nearer to the wilds of the Heath than the city, somewhere on the edge of things where the countryside and the wilderness aren’t so very far away, and where it’s possible to feel very scared of the dark. Pan is the origin of the word panic, apparently because his presence induces frantic terror in people in lonely spots. That branch snapping behind you, the strange cry that could be a fox but sounds like a woman screaming … that’s Pan, according to the ancient Greeks. And in this story, Hampstead is a lonely spot. Above is the desolate Heath and below is civilisation in the form of “the yellow, foul-smelling glare of the Hampstead Tube Station.” Lawrence’s North London is a place where “… the world seemed empty, uninhabited save by snow and voices.”

I don’t think it’s stretching the imagination too much to say that it’s an area of North London where, late on the right kind stormy, snowy night when there isn’t a bus to be seen for miles, it does seem potentially the sort of place where you might meet an ancient god. I once walked home alone somewhere round there in the early hours and got the willies so badly that I broke into a run for the bus stop and fell flat on my face, giving myself a black eye – which could have been the result of an encounter with Pan, I guess. (It could also have been the result of my earlier encounter with the pub – the jury’s out on that one.)

The end of Lawrence’s story I find unpleasantly fascinating – I won’t spoil it, but well worth tracking down if you haven’t read it.  Now to think of more North London stories…

Emily

I was hoping for a bit of argy-bargy, an audience packed with Shakespeare doubters, maybe a bit of refined academic heckling, but Shapiro seemed to be pretty much preaching to the converted. Nevertheless, it was an interesting hour. For the last hundred and fifty years, an ever-growing list of people, invariably royal, noble, distinguished or exciting in some way, have been put forward as the true author of Shakespeare’s plays.

It all started when an 18^th Century scholar local to Stratford-upon-Avon went searching for books or papers belonging to Shakespeare and drew a blank. The conclusion he leapt to was that this absence of the trappings of a learned man must mean that Shakespeare was not a learned man, and that as only  a learned man could possibly have written the plays, ergo, Shakespeare, son of a mere glove-maker, was an imposter.

It took a hundred years or so for this theory to catch on, but by the 19^th Century the idea that Shakespeare was an uneducated fraud who couldn’t spell his own name, let alone write the masterpieces of the English language, was rife. Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Orson Wells and Sir Derek Jacobi are among the notable names who’ve signed up to this anti-Stratford camp.

Rather than looking in detail at the contenders for the real Shakespeare, Contested Will instead examines why the question exists at all. It’s a weird one – why is the belief that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare so prevalent, and why does it attract such ardent disciples? Is it down to sheer snobbery –the conviction that such brilliant writing must be the product of an educated, upper-class mind? Is it a modern love for conspiracy and esoteric secrets? Or is it because we have so few details about the life of the best-known English writer that we feel compelled to fill in the gaps using the only material available to us – the plays?

The argument seems to come down to the devil in the detail of the plays. How much of what Shakespeare wrote could he have made up, or got from books, and how much would have to come from experience? Could a man who’d never travelled to Italy have written the plays set there? Or, as another case in point, proponents of the Earl of Oxford as the real Shakespeare use the fact that the earl had three daughters and was once captured by pirates as an indication that he’s a more likely author of King Lear and Hamlet than the man from Stratford.

But Shapiro makes the case for the power of the imagination as the truth behind the mystery of Shakespeare’s plays. It’s a reassuring conclusion for anyone who’s ever hoped to write convincingly about stuff that hasn’t actually happened to them, whether it’s setting a story in a country they’ve never visited, writing from the point of view of a murderer, flying to other planets or turning into a werewolf.

The compulsion to read an author’s life into their work seems a basic one, as rife among modern authors as Elizabethan ones. Shapiro quotes T.S. Eliot, who commented that he was used “…to having my personal biography reconstructed from passages which I got out of books, or which I invented out of nothing because they sounded well; and to having my biography invariably ignored in what I did write from personal experience.”

And Lorrie Moore, quoted in this weekend’s Guardian Weekend talking to the Guardian Book Club, wondered whether there was a current trend for writers, especially women writers, to be routinely suspected of autobiography, with readers “determined to think of fiction as a mere route to memoir.” Moore’s stories, which often deal with marital breakdown and terminal illness, are frequently scanned for evidence of trauma in her own life, a process Moore tries to steer clear of.

It’s as if we’re getting fiction muddled up with the real-life memoir section at Waterstones, searching it for truth in the sense of what a writer has experienced on a literal level, rather than a deeper and more widely applicable truth that can come out of stories a writer dreamed up.

Personally, I come down on the side of those like Shapiro who maintain that you don’t need to have three daughters yourself to write convincingly about sibling rivalry, or have been kidnapped by pirates to imagine such an event taking place. It’s a case all writers who believe in the capacity of made-up stuff to contain truth should get behind.

Emily

The awards are named after Hugo Gernsback, founding editor of the cult sci fi magazine Amazing Stories, which was pivotal in popularising the genre in the mid 20th Century. (Gernsback has also had a crater on the moon named after him – I mean, an awards ceremony honouring your memory is cool and all, but I think I’d go for the moon crater if I had to choose.)

Over that time many of the big names in sci fi have been recognised, and the list of past nominees makes a To Read list stretching back over most of the history of the genre: Alfred Bester, Fritz Leiber, Anne MacCaffrey, Robert A. Heinlein, Clifford D. Simak, Ursula Le Guin, Phillip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, Brian Aldiss, Kurt Vonnegut, Joe Haldeman, China Miéville and J.K Rowling have all been nominated, to name a few. You can look up past winners on the Hugo Awards website.

You can judge the nominations in the Best Short Story category for yourself – I had no problem tracking down all the stories online for free  (legally, of course). This is a great thing – I doubt it would be so easy to track down other short story prize shortlists. Perhaps it’s something about the science fiction genre which tends to attract writers who are also au fait with websites, blogs, online magazines and e-books and who understand the advantages of making your work available to readers. It meant I read work by writers I’ve not heard of, and probably wouldn’t otherwise have encountered.

It seems a shame though that the five nominees are from only three different sci fi magazines – surely there must be a wider pool of online and print publications to choose from? I can think of several that print great stories – Interzone and Murky Depths, for example.

The entries vary quite widely in quality. The Bride of Frankenstein by Mike Resnick is a mildly diverting but ultimately corny take on an old story, which manages to reheat some of the old clichés enough to give them a vague semblance of life, but not much more than a twitch.

The Moment by Lawrence M. Shoen is more interesting, because it contains a genuinely sci-fi “what if” idea about the relationship between tiny moments and huge stretches of time. But it verges on a Douglas Adams imitation tour of a universe populated by crazy beings and made-up alien-sounding words, which teeters close to losing the reader’s interest at some points.

Bridesicle by Will McIntosh deals with the idea of a future technology that can bring the dead back to life, and what that might mean for the speed dating scene. It’s funny and moving in places, and delivers a nice sense of the claustrophobia of being a brain in a dead body desperate to be reborn.

Non-Zero Probabilities by N. K. Jemisin is a well written story, sci fi set in a colourful present day New York where the laws of probability and chance have gone dangerously wrong.

But Spar by Kij Johnson is by far the most imaginative and intriguing piece, a story that grips you right from the start, partly because it’s so starkly horrible, taking a possible interaction between an alien life form and a human to intimately physical and nasty extremes. But it’s also a meditation on what the differences between two life forms might actually encompass, and what an ability or inability to communicate might mean. It’s also got a great ending, which the other entries rather lack. I think it’s Spar that will stick with me as a story, and I hope it wins.

Emily