Catherine O'Flynn: What Was Lost

Catherine O’Flynn reading organised by Wenlock Books, Guildhall, Much Wenlock.

Walking into The Guildhall Council Chamber in Much Wenlock, you can’t help but feel that something important is going to happen, and more importantly, it might just involve you. Which it is, because author Catherine O’Flynn has come to a reading of her debut novel, What Was Lost. However, the part about you contributing to the importance is not so definite yet.

At the head of a long table is the impressive Major’s chair, which immediately you presume the writer will sit in, but instead she has placed herself mid-centre, amongst everyone else. This gesture is the first hint of what to expect: a humble author with no pretensions. The statement that follows it: “In Birmingham we burn down any buildings that look like this!” is her introduction.

And this is mine. Catherine O’Flynn, born in 1970, is a Birmingham-based writer. The amount of awards her first Novel has been long-listed and short-listed for is a list in itself and with good reason. What Was Lost is a book of secrets, liberation and loss. It has the relentless sadness you would find in a Thomas Hardy novel, but there is optimism, honesty and restraint, and even at her most brutal, O’Flynn has a sympathetic touch. The book is incredibly refreshing to read, it does not fit neatly into any one genre and there are no stereotypes.

Catherine O’Flynn describes her main character, Kate, who fights crime with a toy monkey and a notepad, as ‘more like the child I aspired to be.’ At a young age Catherine was, as she puts it, ‘ a less accomplished detective’ who used to jot down car registration numbers, stay up late reading detective text books and feel frustrated that she wasn’t allowed out at night to uphold the law. Much of the novel is drawn from her own experiences of working as a post-woman, music shop manager and teacher. The details, characters and observations reflect this. Many writers when asked, shy away from revealing which characters or elements are autobiographical, but not this one. ‘That was me’ she states honestly when asked about the central character.

In fact, the book began as snippets of notes she would write down after finishing work ‘to remember how odd it was.’ It wasn’t until she moved to Spain for a year that the book began to take shape and she wrote it over two years. Initially rejected by a handful of top publishers, Catherine suggested the Birmingham based, independent publisher Tindal Street Press who snapped it up. The novel has now been longlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction. It is shortlisted for the Costa First Book Award and won the Jelf Group First Novel Award at the Guildford Book Festival. The list she discovered herself on first was the Orange Prize for Fiction. She describes how she found out: ‘I was up early one morning and went on the internet the day that it was announced. I don’t think I was fully awake because at first I thought my name was there because I was using my computer, so I kept refreshing the webpage. It was such a shock.’

What Was Lost is also one of five novels short-listed for The Guardian First Book Award which will be announced on December 6th. The Guardian First Book Award is judged partly by members of the public who participate through reading groups. I know that Wenlock Books’ reading group will have their fingers crossed, and so that I suppose is where their important part comes in.
Anna Steward.

Catherine O'Flynn: What Was Lost

Catherine O’Flynn reading organised by Wenlock Books, Guildhall, Much Wenlock.

Walking into The Guildhall Council Chamber in Much Wenlock, you can’t help but feel that something important is going to happen, and more importantly, it might just involve you. Which it is, because author Catherine O’Flynn has come to a reading of her debut novel, What Was Lost. However, the part about you contributing to the importance is not so definite yet.

At the head of a long table is the impressive Major’s chair, which immediately you presume the writer will sit in, but instead she has placed herself mid-centre, amongst everyone else. This gesture is the first hint of what to expect: a humble author with no pretensions. The statement that follows it: “In Birmingham we burn down any buildings that look like this!” is her introduction.

And this is mine. Catherine O’Flynn, born in 1970, is a Birmingham-based writer. The amount of awards her first Novel has been long-listed and short-listed for is a list in itself and with good reason. What Was Lost is a book of secrets, liberation and loss. It has the relentless sadness you would find in a Thomas Hardy novel, but there is optimism, honesty and restraint, and even at her most brutal, O’Flynn has a sympathetic touch. The book is incredibly refreshing to read, it does not fit neatly into any one genre and there are no stereotypes.

Catherine O’Flynn describes her main character, Kate, who fights crime with a toy monkey and a notepad, as ‘more like the child I aspired to be.’ At a young age Catherine was, as she puts it, ‘ a less accomplished detective’ who used to jot down car registration numbers, stay up late reading detective text books and feel frustrated that she wasn’t allowed out at night to uphold the law. Much of the novel is drawn from her own experiences of working as a post-woman, music shop manager and teacher. The details, characters and observations reflect this. Many writers when asked, shy away from revealing which characters or elements are autobiographical, but not this one. ‘That was me’ she states honestly when asked about the central character.

In fact, the book began as snippets of notes she would write down after finishing work ‘to remember how odd it was.’ It wasn’t until she moved to Spain for a year that the book began to take shape and she wrote it over two years. Initially rejected by a handful of top publishers, Catherine suggested the Birmingham based, independent publisher Tindal Street Press who snapped it up. The novel has now been longlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction. It is shortlisted for the Costa First Book Award and won the Jelf Group First Novel Award at the Guildford Book Festival. The list she discovered herself on first was the Orange Prize for Fiction. She describes how she found out: ‘I was up early one morning and went on the internet the day that it was announced. I don’t think I was fully awake because at first I thought my name was there because I was using my computer, so I kept refreshing the webpage. It was such a shock.’

What Was Lost is also one of five novels short-listed for The Guardian First Book Award which will be announced on December 6th. The Guardian First Book Award is judged partly by members of the public who participate through reading groups. I know that Wenlock Books’ reading group will have their fingers crossed, and so that I suppose is where their important part comes in.
Anna Steward.

Phil Rickman at Wenlock Books

Phil Rickman, creator of Merrily Watkins, sexy lady vicar and diocesan Deliverance Consultant, was due at Wenlock Books on 3 November and was the reason for our drive up the Welsh Marches and across the mist-smoked Edge to Much Wenlock.

My daughter, Louisa and I, hooked by the stories of unquiet personalities who needed the skills of an exorcist (and these administered by a woman) in the mysterious settings of Welsh/English border folklore, saw Rickman locations all round. Autumn trees dressed in vestments of gold and bronze, timeless, shadowed hills looming on the horizon, black armed hop yards signifying. The man who dreamed up Merrily, Gomer Parry, her Knight with the shining JCB, Lol, sensitive song-writer with the damaged background and the always fascinating Jane, daughter, rebel and thorn in the flesh of authority, was in Anna’s bookshop waiting to sign.

Phil had an air of Lol-like anxiety about him when he discovered that we wanted to ask questions first.

Q. What inspired him to write about a female exorcist in the first place?

Q. Was the landscape of the Welsh-English border with its other worldly echoes instrumental in devising plots?

He confessed that Merrily was not originally conceived as the main character. This was Gomer Parry in ‘The Wine of Angels’ but as he wrote more, Merrily’s attraction beguiled him. He never totally works out plots but lets them evolve. The idea of a woman priest in the Church of England who was also the diocesan exorcist opened a treasure trove of material. A female exorcist is an inviting target and people under threat make interesting subjects to write about. Paganism is apparently the fastest growing religion and this gives Merrily in her ancient mystical landscapes of the Hereford-Radnor borders plenty to occupy her.

Merrily’s parish of Ledwardine is a combination of Weobley and Pembridge. The sense of place resonates in Phil Rickman’s books. In talking about this Phil recommended the American writer James Lee Burke as a master of using place, in this case Louisiana, in his books about an ex-alcoholic Roman Catholic cop.

The talk turned to genre since it was hard to categorise the ‘Merrily’ books. Were they horror, mystery or crime? While ‘horror’ writers in the USA are viewed with some esteem, for example, Stephen King, in Britain to be a ‘crime’ writer has more kudos. For Phil Rickman the idea of a crime investigated from a different angle, from the perspective of a woman who is employed because of her belief in the ‘may be’ of the paranormal holds continuous fascination. This is not ‘horror’.

Obviously in stories where the writer allows himself to be led by the unfolding plot, so much so that sometimes the original theme can vanish, the craft of editing the finished product is crucial. In this Phil Rickman gave all credit to his wife. There was quite a discussion about the lack of good editing in today’s publishing companies so that even the work of authors like Lynda La Plante suffered.

For me the dialogue between the characters in the ‘Merrily’ books is what makes them really live. Jane’s abbreviated conversations with her boyfriend, Eirion, are brilliant and her laid-back concern laced with scorn for her mother’s activities is so evocative of adolescent chagrin when dealing with peculiar parents. I love the rhythms of Gomer’s speech, I have a nostalgia for them after living among Cardiganshire countrymen for many years. He is utterly believable. As for the ‘incomers’, they make me laugh even if the story-line indicates otherwise. Phil touched on the importance of dialogue and modestly recommended the later books of Joanna Trollope for their stripped down style.

I think he is a past-master himself.

Over organic coffee and great cake, the talk ranged over secret societies, anti-Christ and Richard Dawkins, the absolute necessity of a deadline and the demise of the gentleman-publisher.

Phil did sign books in the end and admitted that he had enjoyed the meeting and even that it was a good idea for bookshops to run this kind of thing. Of course! And it is all down to Anna.

When Louisa and I left we felt that Phil’s characters, so familiar to those of us who are fans of the ‘Merrily’ books, might also walk into the bookshop themselves to ask Anna’s advice on some arcane literary matter. It is the sort of place they would like. And I think Phil Rickman thought so too.

PS
Phil fronts a Sunday afternoon book programme on BBC Radio Wales called
‘Phil the Shelf’

Carole Jacobs.