Birdkill On Air. Will It Fly?

Every Saturday, the Emirates Airline LitFest crew take over the Dubai Eye Radio studio for three hours. They do unthinkable things behind the scenes and bring cookies and coffee into the hallowed halls of studioland, then settle down for three hours 'Talking of Books', a generally unhurried and relaxed conversation about books which usually combines a Book of the Week, a kids' book slot, a 'book champion' slot where a book geek is brought in to rave about their given favourite right now and much general book talkery.

The Book of the Week is read by the team prior to the show and then discussed on air as they share their views and generally dissect the whole thing, effectively a book review by several reviewers at once. Occasionally, they drag the author on air, too, for a light grilling.

You can see where this is leading, right? Right.

This Saturday, they're reviewing my fifth serious novel, Birdkill. It's subtly promoted to the right of this here post and gently highlighted over at my website. As many of you will know, I don't like to make a fuss of these things.

This should be interesting. Birdkill is pretty different, IMHO, to my other books. It's the first time I wrote a book entirely for myself, without a thought for agents and publishers. Its genesis is the first story I ever tried to tell and its inspirations lie in dreams: particularly scenes at the beginning, middle and end of the book. I think it could be harrowing reading for some - it certainly packs a few punches and twists a few earlobes. It's based around a premise which seems a bit mad but which is actually frighteningly real. And it's either about a woman battling a psychic child or a woman going mad. Or both.

My favourite review for Birdkill on Amazon so far came, sadly, with two stars attached. These were more than made up for by the text of the review, which still delights me every time I read it: "This is a cynical negative, depressing book. Everyone decent died. I'm sorry I read it."

Let's see what happens on Saturday, then...

Talking of Books airs on Dubai Eye 103.8FM from 10am - 1pm GST (from 7am UK time) and streams here on this handy wee link. I'm sorry about the advertising, it's not my fault. But do drop in for a listen anyway!

Brexit Last Minute Facts Shock Horror

Me and Bob shake. No hard feelings, mate. You're still wrong, mate.

I was delighted to find myself back in the Dubai Eye 103.8FM studios this morning, I must say I have missed my regular radio slots an awful lot.

The Business Breakfast team brought me on to wrangle about Brexit with a nice chap called Bob, which we did in a good natured sort of way. Here's my argument about why we should stay in the EU, in the hope it might be helpful to someone, somewhere today as the UK casts its votes on staying in the Union. It must be said, there has been all too little coverage from our mainstream media that has championed the causes of context and analysis that so often are pushed as an argument for why MSM is still relevant in our social world. Here are some of the bullet points I used to back up my 'remain' point.

Let's start with the big stuff. Our membership of the EU has made us more wealthy, more healthy, fairer, more free and more secure than if we had been outside the 28-nation bloc. Here's why:

Wealthier

• 1 in 10 British jobs are linked to the EU's single market. That's 3.5 million jobs.
• The UK's exports to the EU comprise some 54% of our total export of goods, some 40% of services. In other words, over half of our nation's trade depends on the EU.
• 300,000 British companies, some 74% of our nation's exporters, operate in EU markets.
• The EU's trade agreements are good for us. There are 46 in place, 70 under negotiation. If you take the example of South Korea alone, our trade doubled between H1 2011 and H1 2012 when our EU trade deal was in place.
• If you're worried about the mad US trade deal, TTIP, so's the EU. That's why it's not being steamrollered through, which is what the US would dearly like to see.

Healthier

• EU environmental legislation has been key to the development of better healthcare practices and keeping GMOs at bay. 
• EU regulations on dangerous chemicals in foodstuffs, the workplace and agriculture have kept us protected against the interests of big business that would have dominated our polity otherwise.

Fairer

• We have equal pay and anti-discrimination legislation and protections in place. 
• The EU's anti-trust, tax evasion and competition laws have protected our businesses from unfair competitive practices. A company like Google has to listen to a 28-nation bloc - would they listen to a lone government in the same way?
• The European Court for Human Rights exists to ensure justice to a standard agreed between our 28 nations to be the highest in the world. 

More free

• We are free to travel, live and work anywhere in the EU. Over 1.4 million Britons do so. To deal with the great canard of immigration, incidentally, 942,000 people of Eastern European nationality and 791,000 people of Western European nationality currently reside in the UK. And 2.9 million people of Indian and Chinese nationality.
• At the same time, we're not part of the Schengen agreement - so our control over our borders remains tighter than that of other EU members.

More secure

• Put aside the fact the EEC, to become the EU, was formed in the aftermath of two bloody world wars and centuries of warring and economic conflict between the nations of Europe. 
• The European Arrest Warrant alone makes us more secure and more able to ensure justice is done rapidly and effectively.

In 2015, we paid £8.5 billion in net contribution to the EU. That's 0.3% of British GDP, a minuscule amount in terms of government spending. That's equivalent to something like 7% of the NHS budget.

And yet it underpins over half our export trade into a zero-tariff hinterland giving us access to over 500 million consumers.

We keep getting shown the 'Norway model' and yet Norway pays more per capita in contribution to the EU than Britain does, is still subject to EU regulation AND legislation and yet can play no part in the democratic process that evolves, agrees and sets those regulations and legislation. It's hardly a win-win.

If we left, we'd see a 'hard border' between the Republic of Ireland and the North. We'd see 10% duty on all car exports from the UK to the EU, which to me just sounds like the death knell for an industry that today has no British ownership whatsoever. And you could say goodbye to those Airbus manufacturing facilities, too.

What about our sovereignty? Our democracy? The European Union IS democratic. If we'd spent 10% of the time and effort we've invested in Brexit understanding our MEPs, voting for them and engaging in dialogue with them, we'd be in a lot better shape when it comes to our participation in Europe. The EU commission proposes legislation, our MEPs vote for it, modify it or reject it in a totally democractic process.

As for our sovereignty, you'd really have to be a Little Englander to put that at the head of your worries. In today's world, we are no longer an Empire or a global power. And we've already given up more sovereignty to our regional assemblies than we've ever given up to Europe.

I've heard 'leave' campaigners talking about how 60% of our laws are made by the EU, but that's never substantiated. The British Chamber of Commerce estimates between 10 and 20% of British legislation is impacted by EU legislation. And as far as I can see, the vast majority of that has been positive for us rather than in any way negative. And by positive, I mean that if the rights of the individual are protected against the interests of big business, I'm for it.

Who would argue in today's globalised, hyper-networked world that isolationism is an option? It's simply not.

Have a nice vote.

Talking Of Books Reviews A Decent Bomber

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In a little under half an hour, Dubai Eye Radio's 'Talking of Books' program will review A Decent Bomber. Half an hour after that, they'll be interviewing me about the book.

I can't pretend I'm not a little nervous. For a start, this isn't really a great time to be talking about terrorism in your novel. But beyond that, it's a very public grilling for the book. Will they love it? Hate it? Be 'meh'?

I can't get a thing done. I'm just marking time. *sigh*

Time. Ulp. Listening in. Here we go. Oh golly, they liked it...

A book of real quality. Sensitively drawn characters. A book of real style and you find yourself experiencing, smelling Ireland. This is tangibly plausible. I love the complexity of the character of Pat. What I liked particularly about the book was that the plot never stopped to explain characters, the dialogue and plot carry their development. The dialogue is very natural, he has a very fine ear, McNabb. It was real and honest, the dialogue was true to the characters. They're frightening, the characters. It's a white-knuckle ride and a real page-turner.

This isn't a light book. It's a line-up of misery and pain. There's no plot humour, but the dialogue has lovely touches of gentle irony, very Irish humour. This is an extremely good book, more than a thriller, you could draw parallels with Le Carré.

Clearly a book to buy, people... :)

The interview was fun. They didn't like Boyle and Mary's shenanigans and I explained I wasn't so happy myself, two of my characters just ran away and did stuff they weren't supposed to.

Did I pick the name Pat O'Carolan for a reason? As it happens, yes, the troubador was a knowing reference and Pat was Sarah's Uncle Pat, whose wee farm up in Cummermore started the whole scheme going. Orla wasn't supposed to have the romantic involvements she ended up with, either.

How come conventional publishing hadn't picked me up? Dunno, these days don't really care that much either. I explained how Shemlan, my last book, had been about a man dying of cancer whose life is revealed to have been utterly pointless to him, about how I'm cruel to my characters. And about how that - or a book about an ex-IRA man - might not gel with what a risk-averse publisher's idea of a self-marketing book was.

Why thrillers, there are elements of literary fiction in here? That was nice of them to say, but I like to think I write a smart thriller. thrillers are fun, although Birdkill - my next book - is a little more complicated on a psychological level and perhaps a little more screwed up generally.

I told about how my developmental editor/reader for Beirut had told me to put more 'gunplay' into the book and how I regret having taken that advice, now preferring to rebel rather than produce formulaic books that are 'on genre'. They liked the interplay between Driscoll and MacNamara, the politicians in A Decent Bomber who are trying to pretend this stuff isn't happening. I confessed I had enjoyed playing with the idea that they are conflicting with the PSNI where before they had fought the RUC, but this time they were denying themselves rather than last time when they had been asserting themselves.

It's amazing how quickly half an hour can pass when you're talking about your books, but pass it did. I'll post the podcast when it comes around. So far I've sold a tad over sixty books in all. We're hardly troubling the NYT list here, people...

Talking Of Books. Again. Well, Do I Ever Talk Of Anything Else?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Following from the delights of co-hosting Dubai Eye Radio's 'Talking of Books' show a couple of weeks ago, they've been potty enough to ask me back for the coming Saturday's literary extravaganza , in which I'll be their 'book champion'. Basically, I get to spend an hour talking about a book I'm particularly passionate about. Previous book champions have talked enthusiastically about brilliant novels such as Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy, for instance.

We have two problems with this. One is there's no way I'm going to limit myself to just one book. The other is I'm of the humble opinion that an hour's too long to spend talking about a single book, anyway. Especially when there are so many wonderful things out there to talk about. It's sort of like 'desert island books' and I'm not coming along with just one of the things in my satchel. I mean, I've got a Kindle. I can carry thousands of books with me!

So I'm going to try and talk about four. And you, dear reader, as a fully paid-up subscriber to this blog, get a sneak preview. Are you not the lucky one?

Tove Jansson - The True Deceiver
I discovered Tove Jansson when we were in Helsinki last year. I had met her Moomins as a kid and loved 'em, but I hadn't known about her adult fiction. The first thing I read was her Summer Book, a collection of vignettes of an old lady and her granddaughter summering on an island (Finland has a great many islands). Lying on a mossy knoll on Suomenlinna reading her timeless prose is a lovely way to spend a sunny Helsinki afternoon, I can assure you. The book's magical, redolent of the sea and season, effortlessly imagined and gloriously rich. The True Deceiver is another kettle of herring altogether - dark, relentless and burdened down with the perma-dark pressure of the winter snow deadening everything and making men go mad. It's a horrible book, all the more oppressive for its humanity.

Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet
This is one of my favourite books of all time. It's so very lush, filled with colours and scents, characters and the sweeping brilliance of a writer gorging on life. He was a twat as a human being, but God could Durrell write. It's actually four books, written as an interlinear: each book tells the same story from a different perspective (of them all, only the fourth nods to the concept of the passage of time) and it's only when you've read all four you get the full picture. That's a remarkable scope to set yourself as a writer and yet Durrell pulls it off without ever seeming to get out of breath. It's set in Alexandria between the wars and plays with love, gnosticism, betrayal, adultery, poetry and death in equal measures.

John Le Carré - The Honourable Schoolboy
I thunk a lot about this one. It was always going to be a Le Carré, but which one? I happen to think this is his cleverest and also so typical of his work. I think he's massively underrated as a literary figure because he writes 'spy thrillers' rather than literary fiction. I would never hesitate to sit down and re-read any of his books as a reader and I do try (and fail) not to get too distracted by my admiration of him as a writer. But gosh, he's good. He's also dark, devastatingly observed and wilfully cruel and bleak.

Now we're in trouble. I've glibly plumped for the first three and I had William Gibson's Neuromancer down as the fourth but hang on a second is that really what I want? It's pretty important, this fourth book. I mean, what about Mervyn Peake's brilliant Gormenghast trilogy? Well, mostly brilliant. Sort of 2/3 brilliant and 1/3 insane. But I love it and it's stayed with me through re-read after re-read.

What about non-fiction? Fisk's furious polemic, The Great War For Civilisation, the grim necronomicon written by a man who's met the skinny fellow from the village with a scythe too often? Or Dawkin's astonishing The Selfish Gene? Samir Kassir's Beirut, a book I have spent so long with - a sort of old companion. Oh cripes, I'm in trouble. Dalrymple's From The Holy Mountain should be in there, but maybe the solution lies in sticking to fiction?

Michael Moorcock's bawdy The Brothel In Rosenstrasse is one of my favourite lifelong books and Moorcock has been massively influential for me, but let's face it - this one's out because this is Dubai radio and the book's a tad, well, ripe. Oh noes! Iain Banks! I've got all of his books (including two as proofs, thanks LitFest team!), I positively lionised the man. The Crow Road, or maybe The Player of Games.

Oh, lawks.

What about Hunter Thompson? Forget Fear And Loathing, It's The Curse of Lono (I have the Taschen - lavish!) - or The Rum Diaries for me. Argh! Louis De Bernières! The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts, just to be awkward, but to be honest Birds Without Wings is the one that knocked me cold. Umberto Eco! The Name of the Rose, easily his finest (and least insanely complex - everything else is pretty much unreadable piffle) novel.

And I enjoy Alan Furst, have always loved Somerset Maugham since I was a kid - let alone Evelyn Waugh - and recently have been lapping up novel after novel by Martin Cruz Smith starting, of course, with Gorky Park, which pal Phillipa Fioretti made me read by taking a guinea pig hostage and threatening to put out its eyes with a knitting needle. These RomCom authors are tougher than they look, I can tell you.

I'm in trouble, aren't I?

But - thank God, I finally get hit by the revelation - we're in Dubai, so there can only be one outcome. It's JG Ballard. And for the show - although any one of Ballard's does it for me (Vermillion Sands or The Crystal World are money well spent, but so is Crash and pretty much anything he's written) - it's Super Cannes. Hyper-planned wealthy expat community in sparkling enclave conceals dark, murderous sex and drugs underbelly should go down very nicely in a studio next to the Dubai Beige cul-de-sacs of Arabian Ranches...

So we're talking of books on Dubai Eye Radio (103.8FM anywhere in the United Arab Emirates or www.dubaieye1038.com for streaming) on Saturday from 10am. I'm on from 11 (8am UK time) and if I'm speaking with unusually defined pace and gravitas it's because I was at the Ardal O'Hanlon gig the night before.

If you know what I mean.

PS. I know. I posted. Life's busy and I'm taking things one at a time. 

PPS: Do feel free to leave your book suggestions in the comments. I'm constantly on the lookout for a good read. If you nominate your own book, the guinea pig gets it. Kapisch?

PPPS: Friday - Had a major wobble today and I'm going with Fisk instead of JG Ballard.

Book Post: Talking Of Books

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I'm co-hosting Dubai Eye Radio's Talking of Books tomorrow and so 10am to 1pm will see me sitting in the studio and partaking of all sorts of booky shenanigans. It's on 103.8FM if you live in the UAE and the live stream is linked here if you don't. Don't forget the time zone thingy - it'll be 7am to 10am in the UK.

One part of the show, the first hour, is devoted to discussing the 'book of the week', to which end I am reading 'The Collected Works of AJ Fikry' by Gabrielle Zevin. Apparently an earlier incarnation was titled The Storied Life of AJ Fikry and went out as an ARC, so marketing has obviously been playing about with this one right up to the wire. It's a book about a book shop owner and a sales rep and I have to confess I approached the whole exercise thinking it a highly cynical gambit to get into the good book into reps' good books. But then that probably speaks more to my cynicism than Gabrielle's. How it turned out in the end is something you'll have to tune in to find out.

Having done lots of book clubby talky things, as well as having had a number of reviews one way or another, I know how it can feel to meet readers' and reviewers' opinions head on. It doesn't particularly bother me, I'm not one of those sensitive artistic souls who quiver as if struck by hammer-blows at every word that isn't fulsome praise. Once you put a work out there for review, you're gonna get it - informed, uninformed, insightful, drive-by - the whole gamut. And so it is with reviewing books for TOB - I feel the best thing to do is just get on with it and be honest about what I felt as a reviewer. That is, funnily enough, somewhat different to what you felt about it as a reader, because you don't normally read books with having to talk about them on radio for an hour in mind, so you end up looking for things you may not have been quite so cognisant of when you're reading purely for pleasure.

Or something like that.

We're also going to be talking poetry, specifically Lebanese poetess Zeina Hashem Beck being discussed with Frank Dullaghan. It's no secret I am much enamoured of the city Beirut and Zeina's poetry brings it to vibrant, visceral life.

Other than that, life's quiet on the book front and right now that's just how I want it...

Litrachure

Cover of Travels with a TangerineThey say you should never meet your heroes. I’d have agreed with you last year. I went to see William Dalrymple at the Emirates Festival of Literature and was disappointed that a man whom I had lionized through his writing should be so different to my expectations. Of course, it was my fault. I had loved his work, ‘From The Holy Mountain’, a journey through the decline of Levantine Christianity and Dalrymple had talked about Indian Gnosticism or some such. I wanted mezze, I got thali. I wanted reality, I got a slightly removed academic superiority. As a consequence, to be honest, when I review Dalrymple’s amusing little vignette of Robert Fisk as a war-crazed exploiter of curious visitors to Beirut, I’m with Fisk every step of the way. I would much rather stand our Bob a boozy lunch than listen to Willy again.

Yesterday, thanks to the miracle of radio, I got the chance to interview Tim Macintosh-Smith, whose fantastic ‘Travels with a Tangerine’ was such an enjoyable read – it had the same elements I have so much enjoyed in Dalrymple’s work, echoing the mixture of intelligence, historical reference and experiential joy that have made writers like Robert Byron so valuable to me. It was a likeable book – difference was, it comes from a likeable writer.

Tim is a lovely bloke. He’s lived in Sana’a for twenty five years, is a true ‘Arabist’ and is one of those people that thinks right there and then about every question, tasting it and weighing it up before answering. His responses to my clumsy pops were always deeper than the question, amusement never far from his eyes as he cast around for responses.

When we brought in cultural consultant Wael Al Sayegh, the conversation was almost magical. Here was an Arab who bridges the gulf of the Gulf and the West with a Westerner of fundamentally Arabian sensibility. As Wael said, ‘When you speak Arabic like this, you are an Arab.’

It all started an outside broadcast that was pure wall to wall fun. It must have been mildly irritating radio to listen to – the constant susurration of hundreds of kids around us (the OB was brilliantly located in the book sales area) will have grated after a while. But writers such as Atemis Fowl’s creator Eoin Colfer made the two hours slip by in subjective seconds. “We all used to fit in the car, I went in the trunk because I was smallest. My father used to tell us stories when we travelled, stories that would transport me to other worlds and other places. Then again, maybe it was just the exhaust fumes.”

We’re doing it again today. I hope it’s as much fun to listen to as it is to produce!

A Week In Radio

John Peel via last.fm

I have long had something of a love of radio, for which I blame John Peel and his nightly role in my musical education. My first ever taste of using the format was when I was in school - we had a hospital radio thingy going and I now have only the vaguest memories of producing a wholly unlistenable and totally unsuitable three-hour show on The Stranglers which was intended to broadcast over the hospital's own private radio station. This was not something, I now realise, that the sick people of Barnet needed to listen to. I do rather hope, I suspect I will be rewarded in that hope, that it never aired.

Many, many years later I wandered into Dubai Radio's studios, the wood-rimmed hexagonal tables with their cloth coverings and the odd-shaped acoustically treated walls, together with the long angle-poise arms of the microphone stands told you that yes, you were in a real radio studio. Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch were broadcasting. Sitting in the control room watching a balding man talking animatedly to himself in a padded green cell, I realised there wasn't actually a funky bunch at all. But it all seemed rather fun and, well, magical. Incidentally, watching Simon 'Catboy' Smedley and Steff 'GeordieBird' at work over at Dubai 92 is a lesson in slick professionalism - and the fact his stuff sounds spontaneous and unplanned is the result of a great deal of work behind the scenes. I sometimes like to wander in and watch the two of them at work.

Another gap of years and I found myself co-hosting The Editors on Dubai Eye radio, Dubai's talk radio station, with Tim Burrowes, now globally famed as Australian uber-marketing-blog mUmbrella. (Or is it MuMbrella? Can never remember!) Tim was kind enough to invite a PR guy to share his weekly show (he was the editor of Campaign Middle East, for wot I used to write a column) and we had quite a lot of quality laughs in the short time before we were pulled off-air. This was thanks to an increasingly acrimonious dispute between Tim and a certain person in upper management at the media company behind the station who objected to Tim's habit of correctly identifying spades and calling them as such.

I learned a lot of things from that stint. That you really want radio personality Sticky Fingers 'panelling' for you when it hits the fan (panelling is doing all the knobs and sliders and other scary stuff), that 'dead air' is an awful thing (you try interviewing someone with absolutely nothing to say as you watch the hands tick away to the next break in 12 interminable minutes' time) and that the red 'Mic On' light Is Your Best Friend.

I once worked on a three day outside broadcast (OB, luvvy) with Ajman Channel 4FM DJ Jonathon Miles. Miles was a hyper-active lunatic with severe ADD and a brilliant nose for great radio whose continued brushes with authority here eventually led to his being given that famous choice for Those Who Transgress - Window or Aisle? Miles was an abslolute nightmare, potty-mouthed off-air he was a frenetic whirlwind of caprice and scandal - and it was all we could do to keep him vaguely on-topic (clients were paying for it, after all). Boy, could he swear - and watching him realise that his mic was on during one outburst then finding it wasn't actually, swearing in relief and then thinking he'd hit the fader too soon and so on as he descended into a bundle of gibbering, jangling nerves was quite remarkable. I do miss him. Rule One in Gulf radio? Never Swear On Air.

Since then I've done quite a few 'spots', mainly as a guest talking about communications and social media stuff with Dubai Eye's highly successful Business Breakfast programme but more recently have survived a number of spots standing in for either Jessica Swann or co-host Robert Weston on the morning news magazine programme, Dubai Today. That's now becoming a regular weekly slot every Tuesday where I'll be co-hosting with La Swann and tending to follow an Internet & online media slant to the show, which now will air from 10am-12noon, Dubai time.

The bad news for those who have been finding it increasingly difficult to avoid me is that it's available as a streamed feed over da Internet - you can listen in by clicking on this link.

We'll see if I still preserve that love of radio in a few weeks' time!