Canongate Lates: Manchester Literature Festival 2014

Young Digital Reporter Alexandra Sutton reviews our Canongate Lates event with authors Emma Jane Unsworth, Zoe Pilger, Anneliese Mackintosh and singer-songwriter Karima Francis…

Upon arrival at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, I bought my self a large glass of wine. I then nursed that glass of wine for the following hour – I was so excited to be in a room with four great, great women, that I had arrived comically early. Fortunately, I was not to be disappointed. Canongate Lates, featuring three groundbreaking writers and one strikingly original musician, was the type of event I’ll still talk about in years to come.

There was a lovely feeling of camaraderie – I got the sense that everyone was as geekily excited as I was to be there, including our tip-top host, Katie Popperwell. She welcomed us with a wise and witty speech about common depictions of women writers (let’s all stop using the phrase ‘chick lit’, please) and how the writing presented at the event felt like a ‘shift in the literary landscape.’

First up was Zoe Pilger, art critic for The Independent, PHD student and author, reading an excerpt from her debut novel, Eat My Heart Out. A tale of ‘modern hipsterdom’ and second wave feminism, her novel explores what it is to be a young woman caught between a hardcore feminist mentor and a love of Queen Bey (amongst other things, of course). Pilger noted how she and her fellow women writers are often referred to as ‘literary bad girls’, and questioned whether this was at all appropriate. I’m with Zoe on this one – these women are not ‘bad girls’, they are just women, honest, open women writers whose works are not close to the bone, rather they hack through the bone altogether.

After Zoe came Anneliese Mackintosh. Annaliese read from her collection of short stories, Any Other Mouth, and her reading was for me the most beautifully intimate and poignant of the night. She reads like a seasoned performance poet – her writing is epigrammatic, enticing and endearing, and is perfectly suited to a night of live literature. She carried us all with her through a list of funeral requests – a Roald Dahl revolting rhyme to be read, her 6 most recent lovers to attend, how she above all wants her mum – and it was just superb. ‘Each little one a howl’, said Annaliese of her stories. For me this one was a beautiful, painful swan-song.

Our final reading of the night came from Manchester’s own Emma Jane Unsworth. At risk of sounding like a complete fan-girl – I love, love, love her book. After the gentleness of Mackintosh’s reading, peppered with moments of hilarity, Unsworth’s reading was the perfect follow up. After listening to her read from Animals, my face was actually aching with laughter. I could whip out all sorts of deep, intellectual comments on her work, but surely that has to be the biggest compliment. Unsworth’s fabulously familiar accent, self-deprecating delivery and assertion that she really did meet a man in the Village named ‘Chicken Sandwich’, had us all hooked. Animals is the story of an aspiring writer and her manic-pixie-nightmare best mate, tearing through the streets of Manchester and through each other. Her novel is messy, methy, Mancunian magical realism – read and be amazed.

In a lovely end to the evening, Karima Francis played a very special acoustic set. She came straight from the studio and belted out several never-before-played songs like a complete dream. Her voice is simultaneously powerful and vulnerable – it doesn’t tug at the heartstrings, it positively tears them out. I sat back and let it all wash over me – she was the perfect counterpoint to an evening of laughter, intensity and personal insight. Ultimately, that’s what live literature should be all about – connecting with an audience who usually only feel you through the pages of your writing.  As Katie Popperwell noted, these writers offer us ‘political portraits’ that are often shattering, powerful and entertaining, but above all they are intimate and personal – these qualities shone through at this cracking event.

ANIMALS, by Emma Jane Unsworth

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild,

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping

than you can understand.

W.B Yeats, The Stolen Child

Laura Joyce is an occasional writer, a regular drinker, a lover of Yeats and unfortunately she isn’t related to James. Tyler is her best friend, her housemate, a bon viveur and Laura’s enabler. Together they tear through relationships, Manchester, each other, and the pages of Emma Jane Unsworth’s Animals, and we are invited to act as both the intrigued voyeur and the potential participant. What liberty! What liability.

Unsworth’s novel is an exercise in narrative seduction. We meet Laura during a particularly ginny hangover, which is to my mind the peak of human vulnerability. We know the colour of her piss – ‘white piss good, amber piss bad’ - before we know much else – and a bizarrely familiar bond is established. She’s engaged to a teetotal concert pianist, she’s writing a novel about a priest who’s in love with a pig and she’s desperately trying to balance a life of hedonism with an impending life of fine home furnishings. She is every bad hangover we’ve ever experienced and now we’re friends, we’re witnesses, already we are in on something. However, the beauty of Unsworth’s second novel is that the ‘something’, the secret, turns out to be nothing at all. We are all aspiring writers, we are all stuck in dead-end jobs, we are all disappointed and we all of us want to pretend that we are otherwise. And so, we meet Laura and we see ourselves, from the drinking habits, to the Mail on Sunday reading parents, to the secret love for Take Me Out.

The first-person narration superbly draws out this powerful, painful sense of familiarity, whilst the quick-fire dialogue, dirty humour and the assumption of an accomplice-reader keeps us on side through the messiest moments. It’s an obvious statement, but Laura Joyce is a fundamentally enjoyable character to act as a confessional for – not always the case when you’re in someone else’s head for a novel. In Laura, Unsworth has created a character that is part Holden Caulfield, part Bridget Jones, with a twist of Plath, spiked with stolen meth. She is ‘one part optimism, two parts masochism, like all the best cocktails.’ I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a bit of Unsworth too, There was certainly a bit of me in there, and probably every other reader who’s downed a bottle of rose because they couldn’t decide between white or red, or told someone to royally toss off for assuming they have a say in your lifestyle choices.

Tyler, on the other hand, is pure legend. Whilst Laura reaches out of the novel, Tyler explodes it. She is a mythological demon-goddess luring in the human child (me, you, Laura, everyone) like one of Yeats’ goblins. She doesn’t belong in this novel, in anyone’s life, in this plane of reality, which is precisely why she is such a perfect foil to Laura. A manic-pixie-nightmare-girl, and make no mistake. Tyler turns a gritty and realistic novel about the (societally-inflicted/bullshit) perils of being thirty and unsettled, into a tale of messy, meth-y, Mancunian magical realism. Well, almost. There’s vomit, sex, drugs and decisions, peppered with literary allusion and classical tragedy - Laura’s love of Yeats is very apt indeed. You need a bottle of something to soften the assault.

Animals explores tricks, trips (both sorts), bad habits, and what-happens when-you-leave-uni-without-a-publishing-deal, but for me it boils down to a sense of disillusion, even down to the reified setting of city famed for it’s 20 year old cultural wealth. What do we do now? Why didn’t my degree get me anywhere? Why should I care? Why shouldn’t I tell you about the time I had a tick in my groin, why shouldn’t I keep my ‘wreckhead friend’, why should I give up drinking, why should I behave, why should I have kids, why should I have you, why should I give a fuck?

I do give a fuck, especially about this book, but I don’t have the answers, and that’s fine. None of Unsworth’s characters do, nor does Unsworth profess to. We’ve all been given a bit of a shit deal at one point or another, and how you make do is your own business, whether it’s ploughing on with that novel you’re writing or easing yourself in with a quick bev or five at the pub. There’s hope at the end of the hangover, o human child. This is a brilliant, prescient piece of writing, and will need to be read twice – you’ll spend the first time texting your mates all the best lines.

         Be sure to read with wine, especially on trains.

Only Connect and intellectual snobbery

I love quiz shows, I really do. I love getting the answers right, I love pretending I got the answers right, I love mocking the contestants when they do not get the answers right. Though apparently not as much as Jeremy Paxman and his quizzical brow do. They are a chance to prove one’s unequivocal knowledge of the culture capitals of Europe, or films starring Kevin Bacon; essentially they are a great way to feel like a bit of a clever clogs whilst a wordless word document stares at you from across the room. However, the time of lording my superior knowledge of all things uninteresting over my family and friends whilst they try to enjoy their evening viewing has finally come to an end.

'Only Connect’, the most viewed show on the somewhat haughty and grown up BBC 4, is like an intellectual punch in the face. Scheduled to begin just as University Challenge ends, it maintains the mood of civil Monday night viewing (or in my case, aggressive fact fighting), but forces you to climb several rungs up logic ladder. As opposed to reeling off random facts potentially overhead at a pub quiz, the teams actually have to, well, think about things. The basic format requires the teams to make connections between seemingly random images, words, or pieces of music, meaning you have to be able to link stuff like “things made out of melted guns”, or “tube lines if they were translated as snooker ball colours.” It’s torturous. It’s also genius.

Everything about this program is clever, sharp and a teensy bit elitist. From the titular E.M Forster reference, to the fact that teams choose their question by selecting a hieroglyph (seriously), no academic is left unruffled. Even the classically stringy introductory music gives everything a sense of seriousness. If-I-get-one-right-I’ll-be-a-better-person-ness. Cleverest of all is the show’s presenter, Victoria Coren. I don’t want to be quizzed by her, I want to be her. The somewhat unnerving lack of a studio audience does not phase this lady, as she embarks on monologues and witticisms, gently mocks the teams (most of whom look like they followed University Challenge when Bamber Gascoigne still presented it), and makes us believe she really did already know the answers to all the questions. To top it all off, she’s a poker player, the sister of Giles Coren and the fiancée of David Mitchell. Just imagine what their dinner parties are like.

So, though quiz show fans may have a more relaxing time watching QI, or a more successful evening watching The Weakest Link, nothing says ‘wild Monday night’ like a quiz show that repeatedly assaults you with stuff you didn‘t know. All it needs now is a drinking game.