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A magazine for lovers of all things books.
Citation preview
codex.WorldBookDay
Reviews
Interview
SAMUEL BEST
:THE RUBY
SLIPPERS
:THE BLACK
EYED BLONDE
:SHOP FRONT
I
WANNA
BE LIKE
YOU
Aye
Write!
The best bits of
Glasgow’s
International
Book Festival
welcome...
04Oh, I wish I were
James Bond...
This is the first issue of CODEX., your guide
to the latest book releases and events
happening up and down the country. This issue
is all about new novels, one of Scotland’s
biggest book festivals and celebrating World
Book Day in style. Settle back, readers, and
let the words flow.
World Book Day passed in a
literary whirlwind on March 6th.
In honour of our favourite
fictional role models, industry
professionals share whose shoes
they would love to fill for 24
hours.
Cover Story:
Memories from The
MitchellThe highlights of
some of the most popular events
at Aye Write!, Glasgow’s annual
book festival held at the
Mitchell Library.
06
CONTENTS
13
11
Reviews
Author
Interview
A look at some recent
book releases,
including the latest
Philip Marlowe novel
and two author debuts.
Exciting new author
Samuel Best talks to
CODEX. at the launch of
his new book, Shop
Front.
(Find a review of the novel
on page 13.)
Front page photo credit: Nicky Gibson
a day in disguise
"I would be Mrs Hawkins, the
outspoken heroine of Muriel
Spark’s post-war novel A Far Cryfrom Kensington. An overweight
young widow, Mrs Hawkins is
something of an agony aunt,
inviting confidences both from
the people she works with in an
eccentric publishing house, and
from her companions in the dreary boarding house where she lives. I
admire her wit, her perceptiveness, courage and commonsense. If you
want to lose weight, she advises – having at last done so herself – eat and
drink half of your usual intake. If you are unhappy, go to Paris, and so on.
Entertaining but also kind, she would be great company for the day – and
long after that too."
Rosemary
Goring
Literary
Editor,
The Herald
4Photo credit: Kirsty Anderson
World Book Day descended upon us on March 6th and
with it came legions of children and teachers
trooping through school gates kitted out as various
dynamic characters.
Soldiers, spies, witches and detectives: book-based
inspiration opens up a massive scope for the
imagination. Our literary heroes have a huge impact
on us, especially as children. Whether you relate to
a character's personality or idolize their ideals,
there are few among us who wouldn't like to at least
try a day of walking in their shoes.
So why let the kids have all the fun?
Professionals from the literature industry have
commented on whose life, given the chance, they would
like to lead.
"Last year for Book Week
Scotland we created an app which
allows you to discover which
literary character you most
resemble. It turns out that the
character I most resemble is
Zaphod Beeblebrox from TheHitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
“Not very flattering.
“However, the character I’d most like to be is Becky Sharp from one of my
favourite novels, W M Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. Becky is a fraudster, a very
engaging and resourceful one, who is far more intelligent than the men
who surround her. An expert at manipulation, she makes her way from very
humble beginnings to the very apex of society, using the absurd vanities of
the upper-class men who pursue her to rise in society. If this all seems very
cynical – it is; but those who know the novel will also know that principally,
Becky is a great deal of fun, and is certainly one of the greatest female and
comic characters ever created in world literature."
Marc Lambert
Chief
Executive,
The Scottish
Book Trust
"It would definitely have to be
someone from a crime novel and
my choice would be Miss Marple
as I love the characterisation of
her.
“On the surface she is genteel,
dotty and old fashioned BUT
underneath this she is strong,
shrewd and ruthless.
“The way Miss Marple is described changes throughout the stories but
she always remains an appealing character to me. Someone whose life
has been insulated in many ways but shaped by world events (World War
One) she also has a strong bond with her many nieces and nephews as
well as past employees. In her debut novel, The Murder at the Vicarage,
she is described as 'the worst cat in the village' as well as 'dangerous.'"
Lucy Santos
Director,
The Crime
Writer’s
Association
5Photo credit: Courtesy of The CWA
7
Aye Write!:The Best
of the FestCODEX. editor Eleanor
O’Neill brings us her favourite
moments from Glasgow’s 2014
Book Festival.
I had a melancholy introduction
to Aye Write! this year, settled in
the main theatre and listening to
memories of one of the late
greats.
Iain Banks, beloved writer of
science fiction and hard-hitting
drama, passed away in June last
year. The conductor of his last
ever interview, Stuart Kelly,
hosted this event in his memory.
Smiling, he recalled Iain’s
insistence that his cancer was
caused by a cosmic ray from a
dying star light years away.
“It took a sun exploding to get
rid of me.”
Easy to believe, especially as
the next hour brought him to life
again on stage through the
anecdotes of his old friends.
Ron Butlin led an emotional
reading of The Quarry,
commenting that with “nothing to
lose”, Iain felt free to let rip in his
last book. He proceeded to
demonstrate with a character’s
colourful tirade about Boris
Johnstone.
Next Ken MacLeod went on
to discuss Iain’s poetry,
something hitherto not
generally a pastime made
public.
While he was describing the
writer, calling him a
“compassionate consumer of
violence in other places”, it
struck me that there is
something fundamentally
heart-wrenching about
listening to the words of a
dead man from the mouth of a
8
life-long friend.
Andrew J. Wilson then opened
a discussion on Iain’s science-
fiction work under ‘Iain M.
Banks’.
The event left off lamenting the
plans Iain had for a culture novel
that never came to fruition.
In the man’s own words:
“Mortality is a side-effect of life.”
William MacIlvanney drew a
packed room on Saturday night,
hardly a surprising turn out for
the much-honoured author of
Laidlaw.
So honoured, in fact, that the
audience were treated to a
lengthy list of his many awards
and William remarked that they
were all on par with being quoted
at in pubs and being told he was
“a great wee writer” by a woman
he once met on Renfield Street.
William then took us on a trip
down memory lane to his life as a
young writer in Kilmarnock and
echoes what many an author has
said before about the profession
being a lonely one.
The conversation is thereafter
directed towards his writing itself.
William is one of numerous
home-grown writers who narrate
their books in Scots and he gets
a laugh with his description of the
style.
“It’s like English in its’
underwear.”
Before the end of the night, he
announced plans for three more
books, including an addition to
the Docherty trilogy.
Liz Lochhead, the current
holder of the Scots Makar title,
spent a good deal of her talk
discussing her inspiration,
including predecessor Edwin
Morgan.
This came after her statement -
“I’m not the best poet in
Scotland.” - drawing loud
protestations from the crowd.
The rest of the evening was
filled with poetry and laughter, Liz
reciting with hardly a glance at
the pages in front of her and
myself being brought back to my
school days with a few rhymes
echoing familiar from the English
classroom.
She was also unafraid to
interact with her audience,
chastising us at one point for
fawning too much.
“You really don’t need to clap
each individual poem; they get
very jealous of each other.”
A highlight was the bilingual
Kidspoem/Bairnsang (written in
English and Scots) that she
gleefully reveals is generally her
first port of call for poetry
readings in England.
A S Byatt (or Dame Antonia)
took part in the Books That Made
10
Me series of events that called
well-known faces from different
walks of life to name a few titles
that shaped their lives.
The Booker Prize winner had
an eclectic bunch of novels to
explain, going from the inclusion
of The House on Pooh Corner as
her moment of realising she
could read to a collection of
Proust, read entirely in French to
spite her academic advisor.
“It was at that moment I knew I
was a novelist, not an academic.”
she laughed.
There were also tales inherited
from her mother, Asgard and theGods and the works of the
metaphysical poets. This was
‘intelligent reading’ she always
enjoyed because it was not
strictly ‘meant’ for her.
“I was always deeply bothered
by the idea that women should
write solely about the emotional
sphere because my emotions
cannot function unless my
intellect is functioning.”
She left an impression of a
formidable woman with a deep
appreciation for satire and the
fantastical elements of life.
A joint event featuring Aye
Write! veteran, Christopher
Brookmyer, and new author,
Barry Phillips, revolves around
the connection between games
and books.
Christopher has their audience
in hysterics over scary reviews
his books have received abroad
and leads in to talking about his
role developing a new computer
game.
He has written the story for
Bedlam, a gory science-fiction
multi-platform that will be
released later this year.
“It starts off as all good sci-fi
should: in an industrial estate in
Stirling.”
More laughs. Barry then took
over to talk about his novel that
started as a surreal parody of a
Lee Griffiths blog.
“I’m a literary chancer. i wrote
weird stories on the internet and
now I’m a published author.”
His extract from The TartanSpecial One was a hilariously
odd mix of 80s music jokes, yeti
men and psychopathic
footballers.
Finally, Alisdair Grey held a talk
ahead of the release of his new
book, Alisdair Grey: Of Me andOthers.
“My last book was my life in
pictures. This could be called my
life in prose.
“It is not an autobiography. It is
a collection of essays arranged
slightly chronologically.”
The artist and writer explained
how the book winds through from
school day stories to encounters
with eccentrics like Tommy
Sheridan and up to the present
day.
Despite a crackling PA system
and whining feedback, he held
the audience amused and rapt,
rounding off my time at Aye write!
with a smile.
11
Barely an hour to go until his first
book launch and Samuel Best is
ready with a friendly smile, if a bit of
a shaky one too.
Huddled away in a corner of
Waterstones and surrounded by
promotional materials for his book,
he laughs a little when asked if he’s
nervous.
“I just hope some people come.
Otherwise there’s going to be a lot of
wine left over to drink.”
His debut novel, Shop Front, hit the
shelves April 24 and eager friends,
family and curious minds gathered to
hear what it was about.
“Shop Front is the story of a young
English graduate called Ben who
leaves university in Glasgow with a
good degree, expecting to go on and
get a good job. But in this economy
he can't find work, so he ends up
moving back home to Linlithgow with
his mum and dad and gets a job
stacking shelves.
“He looks down on the job quite a
lot but makes friends with the team of
workers there, though they are in a
world of trouble themselves. They're
involved with a local gang in a violent
argument and Ben finds himself
dragged in.
“I imagined basically the story of a
graduate who couldn't find work and
thought 'how can I make this as bad
as possible for him?' and things just
Photo credit: Nicky Gibson
Life and Strife(Hons)
A Degree in
kind of spiralled from there.”
Shop Front speaks to a disenchanted
generation of
university
graduates,
waving their
degrees at an
unsympathetic
job market.
Less than a
year out of
university
himself, Sam
drew on his
own experiences to breathe life into the story.
“I grew up in Linlithgow, I came to Glasgow to
do Creative Writing and Journalism at university
and I wrote Shop Front in the six months I was
unemployed after graduating. I was writing it as a
kind of 'I hope I don't end up like this'.”
So would his friends and family recognise
themselves in his literary characters?
“In a way... Ben was, to some extent, me. I like
“Ben was,
to some
extent, me.”
12
to think he's a lot more snobby than I am but
he was written largely from my point of view
and my experience working in a shop. There
are stories in it that are fairly based on
customers and the parts about the train tracks
through Linlithgow but there's no one who
could read this and go 'that's you' because I
think that's a dangerous route to go down. Niall
looks a lot like a guy I know but that's about it.”
Inspiration came from other places too. Like
all the best writers, Sam is an avid reader,
even going so far as to edit a literary
magazine, Octavius, with a team of other
graduates.
“I read a lot of different stuff, especially with
running Octavius and getting submissions. But
I'm really into dark crime fiction and a lot of the
Scandinavian crime writers right now. I wasn't
when I was writing Shop Front. I was reading a
lot of Scottish authors like Doug Johnstone and
Alan Bissett who writes from the perspective of
Falkirk and there was a nice locality there. I
look up to Alan a lot. Maybe the crime
stuff was sneaking in to the
background but mostly local stuff.”
It is definitely impressive that he had
the time to write a book at all,
nevermind in the space of six months.
“The majority of Shop Front was
written, lying on the floor of my
girlfriend's room, typing. I wrote it in
short stories, just little blocks that I
turned into chapters. Doing it in
increments worked really well for me.
“Going to study Creative Writing is
what made me seriously consider
being an author. It wasn't just
something to do in my spare time,
people actually made a career out of it.
Through university, I started to get published in
places and it all went from there. It probably
wasn't until I actually left that I thought I really
needed to do something like write a book.”
Incredibly, Sam has also penned a follow-up
to Shop Front already.
“It's going through the editorial process so it
might change but it takes one character, Niall,
and takes place about a year and a half after
the end of Shop Front. He goes to Europe with
a group of mates and, similarly, they have a
horrible time. It all goes downhill for them.
“I wanted to take Niall out of Scotland, which
he's very passionate about, and put him in a
different environment. He meets and has a
semi-relationship with an American girl, who he
thinks is super-cool just by virtue of being
American, and there's nothing romantic about
them but they talk a lot about the differences
between their countries and Niall starts to see
Scotland in a different light.”
And so with this promise of a sequel on the
horizon, who should pick up his book to read?
“I think graduates might enjoy it. They can
relate to that fear of leaving university not
having anything and the attitude that you'll do
well if you go to uni when that's not really true.
And anyone who has a job, really. That there's
a lot more to life than what you do runs right
through this book. But anyone! Everyone
should buy this book!”
Shop Front is available for purchase on
Amazon.co.uk and in all good book retailers.
Photo credit: Nicky Gibson
“I look up to
Alan Bissett
a lot.”
13
Title: Shop Front
Author: Samuel Best
Summary: This debut novel tells the story of Ben, a recent
graduate who, prestigious degree in hand, is forced to move
back in with his parents and take up a menial job at the
local supermarket. Disenchanted by his lack of options,
Ben’s life spirals into a car crash of violent ambushes and
hospital rooms you can’t help but watch unfold.
Thoughts: Shop Front will strike a chord with students
anticipating their first steps out into the big bad world.
There are familiar comments from parents and peers alike
that hit pretty close to home. aside from that, Best
provides an interesting societal commentary on gang
mentality in small towns and on the peculiarly Scottish
cultural phenomenon that is being a patriot and still
managing to hate where you come from.
Title: The Ruby Slippers
Author: Keir Alexander
Summary: When an old woman is hit by a van in the St.
Patrick’s Day Parade, her relatives uncover a piece of
movie history she has secreted away. As more of Rosa’s sad
past is revealed, other stories become intertwined with
the mystery of the ruby slippers.
Thoughts: The Ruby Slippers has themes of misunderstanding
and lost treasures running through it and keeps a
melancholy tone throughout. The narrative occasionally
struggles to hold interest through frequent changes in
perspective but overall the book offers a bittersweet
story that will leave you genuinely touched.
Reviews
Title: The Black Eyed Blonde
Author: Benjamin Black
Summary: When a beautiful woman walks into Philip
Marlowe’s office with a pretty smile and a lover to find,
the private detective can’t resist her charms. But what
starts out as a simple case kicks off a domino effect,
plunging Marlowe into the ruthless world of Bay City’s
upper class.
Thoughts: The Black Eyed Blonde is Black’s attempt to echo
the noir of Raymond Chandler. He mostly succeeds, the
narrative being appropriately heavy handed with metaphors
and a protagonist fancying himself as a philosopher.
Still, the plot has merit and the style eventually helps
to draw the reader into the gritty 50s world.