Hector Finds Time (Hector’s Journeys)

Gallic Books 2012, Paperback, 227 pages, £7.99

Poor Hector. Tempus fugit, and our intrepid psychiatrist is not feeling quite as young as he used to. His current patients are concerned with time too. One feels she’s always in a hurry, as if there’s a clock ticking in her tummy – she would like time to slow down. But there’s also a boy who wishes time would hurry along and turn him into an adult. And a third patient counts his remaining years of life in terms of how many dogs he’ll have time to own. Hector feels he must get to the bottom of this time business and to do so, of course, a round-the-world adventure is required. Follow Hector as he sets off to uncover nuggets of universal wisdom on time. Who better to find out about the past, the future and how best to enjoy the present than the hero of Hector and the Search for Happiness and Hector and the Secrets of Love?

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When authors are asked to explain what made them write their books or come up with a new character, they always want to give worthy reasons. Voltaire might have said he wrote Candide to criticise the Ancien Régime, religious intolerance, Leibniz and utopian ideals in an amusing and entertaining fashion. All of which would be true, but you need only read the book to understand why Voltaire really created Candide: he had fun writing about his adventures! Much more than he must have done working on his epic poems and tragedies, which have become tedious for modern readers, and were no doubt already tedious at the time, to the extent that I wonder if Voltaire himself was not bored writing them.

If you were to ask me why I created Hector and his adventures, I might reply that I wanted to tackle psychological and philosophical themes in an entertaining way; to revive the French tradition of philosophical contes, or fables; to both move and enrich my readers, and so on.

None of this would be untrue exactly, but as a psychiatrist I am generally suspicious of people giving me good reasons for having behaved in one way or another, so I ask them to tell me about the circumstances leading up to their actions.

These were the circumstances: it was winter and I had gone along on a trip to Hong Kong with an art dealer friend of mine (I am not very good at holidays, so I always try to accompany friends who have a purpose). I was meant to be writing a serious book on happiness for my French publisher (my own idea, no less), but every time I sat at my computer and wrote a few lines, I was overwhelmed with indescribable boredom. This book on happiness was making me unhappy. On top of that, I was going through a period of questioning and doubt – Was I really going to carry on practising psychiatry until I could no longer get out of my chair? Would I still be a roving bachelor when the only women interested in me had serious unresolved father issues, if not grandfather issues? My friend sensed something was up and tried to cheer me up by showing me the highlights of the city-state by night, but it was no use.

Then one morning while brushing my teeth in a freezing-cold bathroom – a remnant of the British colonial era? – Hector was born! I could picture him clearly, younger than me, somewhat naive, full of good intentions – I have a few of those myself – and trying his best to understand the world and help his patients. I knew straight away that telling the story of Hector’s journeys would be a joy, that I would not have to hold his hand but rather it would be him carrying me along on his adventures, drawing of course on my own experiences and those of my patients, as well as dreams and books I had read.

As for the form it took, the conte, I would not dare compare myself to Voltaire, but many readers of the Hector series have urged me to re-read Candide. Doing so alerted me to the deep impression it must have made on me as a boy, and the extent to which it continues to influence me to this day.

So thank you to Voltaire and Hong Kong, Hector’s ‘parents’, and to my readers, who have encouraged me in letting me know I am not the only one entertained by Hector.

Something of the Night

Simon & Schuster Ltd 2012, Hardcover, 304 pages, £14.99

And who knows; the night might bring romance, or love, or sex, if you play your cards right. Or you might be working; millions of people work at night. If nobody worked at night, Britain would cease to function. Or the night might be cold, haunted, inhuman and wild. When you look up into the night sky, you see that you are nothing. An insignificant mote of dust.

Or the night could be all too human. Hen parties in skimpy dresses and fairy wings being slammed into the back of a police van; girls working on street corners in the part of town where the lights don’t come on; businessmen going to lap-dancing clubs to forget what waits at home.

Or you could die. Most people do die at night. Or you could just lie awake and wait for the dawn. Set over the course of an intoxicated night in a house up a mountain in West Cork, Ian Marchant offers a darkly funny account of what people get up to at night, explores his own experience of a life of night times, and shows us how we all have something of the night about us.

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Gallic Books will publish three novels by Pascal Garnier in 2012: The Panda Theory, How’s the Pain? andThe A26. In an article for his French publisher, Zulma, Garnier described what led him to become a writer:

According to my birth certificate, I was born on 4^th July 1949 in the 14^th arrondissement of Paris. I can’t say I remember the event, but let’s assume that’s how it happened. Afterwards came a normal childhood in what you’d call the average French family – which felt more and more average the more it dawned on me that I’d been sold a world with no user’s manual, lured in by false advertising. When I was about fifteen, the state education system and I agreed to go our separate ways. I’d had enough, I was suffocating, convinced that real life was going on somewhere else. So off I went in search of it. In those days you could still travel freely through North Africa, the Middle and Far East. With my head in the clouds, I roamed about for a decade or so until I came to see that it really is a very small world and, being round, you always end up back where you started.

That’s when the wife and baby came along. All around me, the faithful companions I’d met along the way were nestling back into their kennels, burying their dreams and delusions like bones to gnaw at in years to come when they were old and toothless. Rebelling against such mass surrender, I threw myself into rock and roll – and landed with a resounding thud. I was no better at being a pop star than I was at being a dad. Still, it was writing my pitiful ditties that gave me a taste for words. Deep down, I harboured a wild dream of writing something longer, something like a book. But my limited vocabulary, terrible spelling and hopeless grammar seemed like insurmountable obstacles. So I got divorced, remarried, dabbled in design for women’s magazines, took on odd jobs, got up to the occasional bit of mischief. In short, I was killing time, frittering my life away. The boredom of my childhood numbed me once again with the sweetness of a drug. I was thirty-five.

You can only escape if you’re imprisoned, which to some extent I was. I had no choice: my only way out was through a blank page. Slowly scraping along, I dug myself out through a corner of the kitchen table, and as I tunnelled my way up to the surface, I filled the hole within myself. One short story, then two, then three… And then one day I had a publisher on the phone, and not just any publisher, but POL. A collection of twelve short stories was published under the title ‘L’année sabbatique’, ‘A year’s sabbatical’. After that, another sixty-odd books were brought out by several other publishers: books for children, books for adults, books labelled as noir or white, whatever – I’ve never been interested in that particular apartheid. So there it is, a bit muddled I’ll admit. I write because, as Pessoa said: ‘Literature is proof that life is not enough’.

Pascal Garnier

The Flying Man

Headline Review 2012, Hardcover, 352 pages, £16.99

Meet Maqil – also known as Mike, Mehmet, Mikhail and Miguel – a chancer and charlatan.

A criminally clever man who tells a good tale, trading on his charm and good looks, reinventing himself with a new identity and nationality in each successive country he makes his home, abandoning wives and children and careers in the process. He’s a compulsive gambler – driven to lose at least as much as he gains, in games of chance, and in life. A damaged man in search of himself.

From the day he was delivered in Lahore, Pakistan, alongside his stillborn twin, he proved he was a born survivor. He has been a master of flying escapes, from Cairo to Paris, from London to Hong Kong, humbled by love, outliving his peers, and ending up old and alone in a budget hotel in Biarritz some eighty years later. His chequered history is catching up with him: his tracks have been uncovered and his latest wife, his children, his creditors and former business associates, all want to pin him down. But even at the end, Maqil just can’t resist trying it on; he’s still playing his game, and the game won’t be over until it’s been won.

The Flying Man

Headline Review 2012, Hardcover, 352 pages, £16.99

Meet Maqil – also known as Mike, Mehmet, Mikhail and Miguel – a chancer and charlatan.

A criminally clever man who tells a good tale, trading on his charm and good looks, reinventing himself with a new identity and nationality in each successive country he makes his home, abandoning wives and children and careers in the process. He’s a compulsive gambler – driven to lose at least as much as he gains, in games of chance, and in life. A damaged man in search of himself.

From the day he was delivered in Lahore, Pakistan, alongside his stillborn twin, he proved he was a born survivor. He has been a master of flying escapes, from Cairo to Paris, from London to Hong Kong, humbled by love, outliving his peers, and ending up old and alone in a budget hotel in Biarritz some eighty years later. His chequered history is catching up with him: his tracks have been uncovered and his latest wife, his children, his creditors and former business associates, all want to pin him down. But even at the end, Maqil just can’t resist trying it on; he’s still playing his game, and the game won’t be over until it’s been won.

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When God Was a Rabbit

Headline Review 2011, Paperback, 352 pages, £7.99

Young Elly Portman’s world is shaped by those who inhabit it: her loving but maddeningly distractible parents; a best friend who smells of chips and knows exotic words like ‘slag’; an ageing fop who tapdances his way into her home, a Shirley Bassey impersonator who trails close behind; lastly, of course, a rabbit called God. In a childhood peppered with moments both ordinary and extraordinary, Elly’s one constant is her brother Joe.

Twenty years on, Elly and Joe are fully grown and as close as they ever were. Until, that is, one bright morning when a single, earth-shattering event threatens to destroy their bond forever.

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Charles Dickens

Viking 2011, Hardcover, 576 pages, £30.00

Charles Dickens: A Life, by Claire Tomalin (Winner)

Charles Dickens was a phenomenon: a demonicly hardworking journalist, the father of ten children, a tireless walker and traveller, a supporter of liberal social causes, but most of all a great novelist – the creator of characters who live immortally in the English imagination: the Artful Dodger, Mr Pickwick, Pip, David Copperfield, Little Nell, Lady Dedlock, and many more.

At the age of twelve he was sent to work in a blacking factory by his affectionate but feckless parents. From these unpromising beginnings, he rose to scale all the social and literary heights, entirely through his own efforts. When he died, the world mourned, and he was buried – against his wishes – in Westminster Abbey.

Yet the brilliance concealed a divided character: a republican, he disliked America; sentimental about the family in his writings, he took up passionately with a young actress; usually generous, he cut off his impecunious children.

Claire Tomalin, author of Whitbread Book of the Year Samuel Pepys, paints an unforgettable portrait of Dickens, capturing brilliantly the complex character of this great genius. Charles Dickens: A Life is the examination of Dickens we deserve.

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Before I Go To Sleep

Doubleday 2011, Hardcover, 368 pages, £12.99

‘As I sleep, my mind will erase everything I did today. I will wake up tomorrow as I did this morning. Thinking I’m still a child. Thinking I have a whole lifetime of choice ahead of me …’

Welcome to Christine’s life.

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Room

Picador 2011, Paperback, 336 pages, £7.99

Jack is five. He lives with Ma in a single locked room and, as far as he’s concerned, that’s the entire world. But then Ma explains there’s a world outside – and when she and Jack manage to escape, Jack has to learn to live outside of Room…

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