I rarely have sufficient time to read the Guardian newspaper even though it is my paper of choice for content and style. On long train journeys and Saturdays, however, I make time. This Saturday – 16^th February 2013 – there was an article by Ian McEwan in the Review section entitled ‘Am I Really A Believer’ that struck a chord. It was about how when reading fiction there are occasions when you suddenly realize you can’t suspend your disbelief and so the story is spoilt.

This used to happen to me a lot as a youngster and visits me quite often especially when reading the swashbuckling type of science fiction. There am I immersed in the head of the main character, believing in his or her motives and feeling their angst when suddenly I stop and think – someone has made this up! Damn. The plague of disbelief then spreads to other books I’m reading and worse, to my own writing.

Apparently so, to Ian McEwan. His prescriptive palliative is to reread short stories that always takes him back into that world inside someone else’s head. One such for him is Nabakov’s Symbols and Signs. I understand that. It’s been more than a decade since I’d read that short story about an elderly couple whose deranged and suicidal son is in an asylum. Sounds grim but the emotion and setting grips you profoundly. It’s also an example of the semiotics of zero: ie the main focus is actually absent. You can read it for free here. It was first published in 1947 and so I have an affinity being I was born that year. However, I cannot help but read a story as if it had been submitted to me as a submissions editor or a competition judge. Hence I find myself wanting less passive voice and pleonasms in the first third of the story. Then it takes over. Such imagery and emotion. I can see why it shakes McEwan into believing again. I get the same reaction when I read any of AL Kennedy’s short stories, or Tibor Fischer’s The Thought Gang. Ironically, knowing there is a cure for not being able to suspend disbelief, is a cure in itself although it might take a day or two for it to work.

In Nabakov’s Symbols and Signs the son suffers from Referential Mania in which everything around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. I can empathise with that. The boy’s attempted suicides are not to end his life and put an end to misery as it might be for others but to tear a hole in the fabric of his existence and escape to another, better one. I can see that too. As a life long lover of the skies – both academically and emotionally – I get this line in which “clouds transmit to each other, by means of slow signs…” wonderful.

Speaking of wonderment. Oliver (four years old plus a little) was in the library with mum (our daughter) choosing dinosaur books. As they were about to leave he rushed to another stack and picked out a book. Mum said You wouldn’t like that one. Oliver said, It’s not for me – it’s for Pop. (I am Pop).  Mum said It’s good of you to think of choosing a book for Pop but why this one? (It’s a Mills & Boon

Oliver and me

Romance – Captain and the Wallflower by Lyn Stone) Pop mostly likes Science Fiction like those over there. Oliver – No, Pop will like this book. It’s full of words. Look!

Last note:

Funny how twitter followers to me go down by handful each week. Is it something I said, not said? Or do those numbers represent those who give up on using Twitter altogether? If you are on twitter and would like to follow me I am at http://twitter.com/geoffnelder

About time I plugged some of my stuff on this blog thing and so

ARIA is on the front page of http://bibliophilia.org with link to trailer and buying links.

Sales of How to Win Short Story Competitions are steady. Get yours here.

Exit, Pursued by a Bee is at http://geoffnelder.com/exitbee.htm Several readers have pointed out recently that a principle notion in that book is being proved true. Ie that the universe might be chaotic but that the Earth is in a kind of bubble of stability. In Exit that stability is shaken when alien artefacts leave. Just shows that fiction might not be so unbelievable after all.