This is Possession Island.
The pages are from Judith Schalansky's Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands, a palm-sized little beauty with turquoise pages and a burnt yellow cover. Subtitled Fifty islands I have not visited and never will, the book chooses tiny, remote, often empty places and provides a couple of pages of history. Their stories are mostly brutal tales of occupation, counter-occupation, scurvy, starvation and abandonment. Some cartographer named their inlets and hilltops, recorded them for posterity, then sailed away one last time. Many are no bigger than punctuation marks, but not so Possession Island, which is large enough to boast Mont Jules Verne and have - at the last count - somewhere between 26 and 45 residents. I chose Possession Island to share because like Disappointment Island, Lonely Island or The Rat Islands (all in the book,) it's one of those places whose name pre-loads the place with significance. Nothing good could happen on Lonely Island, right? Possession Island feels the same to me. I fear for the sanity of those 26-45 people. Schalansky says it best when making the observation that, "Paradise is an island..." before ominously pointing out, "So is hell." As part of this year's September Shorts I've asked writer friends to contribute posts inspired by the title One Cool Thing. They'll be telling you about one cool thing they're looking forward to as Autumn approaches. It might be a book or movie, a tabletop or computer game, an event or visit to a special place, a chance to achieve something... or perhaps even an exciting new project. Today is the turn of a superb sci-fi writer of both novels and short stories, Tony Ballantyne. He's the guy behind Dream London and Dream Paris and his work (including my favourite, the wonderful 'Midway') has appeared in Lightspeed and Analog. You can check out his website here. Tony Ballantyne: Star Wars Squadrons One thing I'm looking forward to this Autumn is the release of Star Wars Squadrons. I don't know if it will be any good, even if it is I don't suppose I'll play it that much, but that's not the point.
What I'm really looking forward to is reliving how much I enjoyed playing X Wing back in the 90s. Everything about that game captured the spirit of the original films. The graphics were realistic in the sense that they were better than the graphics on the flight console of Luke's X Wing in A New Hope, the mission arc had a suitable degree of challenge. Best of all, the game's physics made sense. You really felt as if you were flying an X wing. Even getting the game to load was an adventure, you had to write your autoexec.bat and config.sys files to make sure you'd set up extended memory properly. Working your way through text file configurations make more sense to me than whatever menu system Microsoft have imposed on the X Box this week. So Star Wars Squadrons could be pretty cool, but the bar is set very high. Let's face it, we're not going to raise the next generation of Rebellion pilots on Battlefront. To me, black paperbacks are holiday books. I guess this goes back to the horror-obsession I had during my teenage years in the late 1980s. As my family’s summer break loomed each year, I’d pack black books about monsters. I remember James Herbert’s The Rats and The Fog, Guy Smith’s The Crabs, Steven King’s stuff and Peter Benchley’s The Deep.
Black books do special things when you take them to a sunny beach or pool, and this is why I love them:
Grady Hendrix's wonderful Paperbacks From Hell is a razor-sharp comedy-critique of the kind of books I took on holiday back then. Hendrix writes with wit and verve, gently ridiculing the tropes of black-book sub-genres whilst clearly still loving them. If like me you're a black-book fan, check it out. For reasons that aren't important, I was in an estate agents in Devon and I ended up talking to a very capable and impressive young professional who helped me out immensely.
It wasn't until afterwards that I noticed her name. She was called Paris Kneebone. Now it turns out that Kneebone must be a surname typical of the region because a quick search afterwards revealed Kneebone Trees, Kneebone Farm, plus Facebook pages and funeral notices for various Kneebones, mostly in the Exeter region. As a writer of fiction, it made me think again about character names. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction and Kneebone is not a name one could easily use in a novel. It's too heavy with potential significance; too suggestive of non-literal meanings that readers would be alive to, even if we didn't want them to be. It's just a name, you might end up arguing; it's not a metaphor. Don't think about taking a knee, or kneeling in submission. Don't think about legs or joints of any kind. Most of all, don't think about how I've paired it with Paris. Yeah, right. We know that names in fiction are chosen by the writer and therefore they are designed, subconsciously or not, to communicate something. I save names up in my iphone notes in case I ever need them. I choose names that sound good, or seem suggestive of some characteristic or theme. There they are at the top of the post. I love Maddie Arrow - loaded with connotation, that one - and I've been waiting for years to use Killick and Doubtful. But Paris Kneebone? I suspect that'll be staying right where it is. As part of this year's September Shorts I've asked writer friends to contribute posts inspired by the title One Cool Thing. They'll be telling you about one cool thing they're looking forward to as Autumn approaches. It might be a book or movie, a tabletop or computer game, an event or visit to a special place, a chance to achieve something... or perhaps even an exciting new project. Today is the turn of the wonderful Anne Cassidy - writer of Looking for JJ, The Moth Girls, No Virgin and No Shame. You can check out her website here. Anne Cassidy: The Central Line I look forward to getting back onto my bit of the Central Line from Stratford onwards. It comes out of the tunnel at Leyton and then, like a quaint country train circa 1950s, it cuts through houses and shops and golf courses and parks all the way to Epping. Travelling from the centre of town, it’s a different story. I’ve stood in packed conditions, endured the heat, the lack of a seat, the ear splitting noise of the wheels scraping along the rails. It’s an absolute ordeal... and then the train suddenly bursts out into daylight in the middle of Leyton. People get off, the train toddles along, passing the back gardens of suburban housing reminding me that I’m close to home; fresh air comes in at every stop and the train becomes emptier and emptier. This line, which is down a hill from where I live (and up again on my way back) means I leave my car at home. I travel on it free (freedom pass). These stops represent my life; my shops, cinemas, restaurants; my hospital, libraries, my family, my sense of being a part of a little world in East London. I miss it and when I’m sure I’m not going to get sick and die, I’ll get back on it. |
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