Express Media – We're here for young writers

With each piece I read, I like the work of William Faulkner more and more. It's as if you want to cheer for his ability to get away with using such rich and expansive language across the entirety of a novel. For me, Faulkner is like three courses of dessert. He writes in a style you wish you could get away with:

When they passed it Temple saw, leaning to a cupped match, Popeye's delicate hooked profile beneath the slanted hat as he lit the cigarette. The match flipped outward like a dying star in miniature, sucked with the profile into darkness by the rush of their passing. (pp. 346)

This novel is definitely one of his more accessible pieces, and may have been written as a bit of a money-spinner for the author. Nonetheless, all your trademark Faulkner elements are here: temporal disjuncture, linguistic deviance and rich, rich metaphor.

The characterisation is interesting and the inevitability of the plot reeks like a huge decaying garden, mixing the perfumes of gender, race and sexual issues, with of course heavy overtones of the old traditional south: there's Temple Drake, our tragic heroine, a fallen gentleman, bootleggers, murder, a rape and all of it set in Faulkner's own fictional Yoknapatawpha County.

William Faulkner. Novels 1930-1935. Library of America, 1985.

C.E. Morgan’s debut feels a lot like a Mountain Goats song in novel form. An obsession with religion, spirituality and death that feels barely contained. Prose that has a fantastic drive and rhythm to it, a terseness where everything feels on the edge of something else. The language falls on the gritty side of sepia, and so does the story itself. A young woman travels to live with bereaved young man, on a drought stricken, isolated farm in the American south. Both of them are suffering, everything around them is loss and death, but none of it descends into cliché or melodrama – the conflicts, the resolutions, they’re intense but nothing feels certain or concrete, just raw and bleeding. The back cover has only two biographical facts about Morgan: lives in Kentucky, holds a Master's in theology from Harvard. Religion and spirituality (not just exclusively Christian, I’d argue) run throughout this book, but it’s secondary to the people in it. Which is its greatest accomplishment.  This is the book you’d wish Richard Dawkins would read, with a genuinely open mind, and maybe check himself a little. I haven’t read much Dawkins, but then I haven’t read much of the bible either, so I think I am being fair and balanced when I say: he’s a twat. I’m sick of people who couldn’t begin to explain the big bang scientifically characterising every single religious person as borderline retarded for uncritically believing in God. There are many valid points to be made, but sweet Jesus, these are people. It seems awfully dangerous to lose sight of that. Morgan’s central characters are mostly ambivalent about religion, but more than that, they’re fighting the world around them (which is where their spirituality comes from as well, surprise surprise) with all the doubts and anxieties that make life a bitch, religion or no. They never totally embrace the church world that surrounds them, but they don’t outright shun it either. They are living their life, trying desperately to deal with one another and with themselves, and maybe they are wrong about religion in a correct/false sense but All The Living wonderfully illustrates why they’re not wrong in a moral sense. These are not awful people by virtue of their beliefs, they are living life and trying their hardest to do okay at it.

The quotation on the front of the book proclaims The Graveyard Book to be the best book Neil Gaiman has ever written. But is it? The story centres around Nobody Owens, Bod for short, who is merely a baby when the sinister man Jack enters his house and ruthlessly kills his parents and sister. Bod, who is an intrepid child for one so young, escapes and finds his way to a nearby graveyard when he taken in by the ghostly inhabitants. Gaiman obviously had much fun creating the various characters, Bod’s reserved vampire guardian and mentor Silas; Miss Lupescu the strict werewolf; a sometimes jealous witch named Liza Hempstock in an unmarked grave and the mysterious and chilling underground creature the Sleer.  Bod’s world  is not all gravestones and cheery ghosts however, the man Jack is still out there somewhere, threatening to finish the job he started. Neil Gaiman’s writing is simple without being simplistic, his characters are recognizable without being clichéd and story of finding your place in the world will be accessible to all. The ending allows nicely for a sequel and frankly, I can’t wait! The Graveyard Book is a delightful and playful mixture of the fantastical and the every day, something Gaiman excels at.