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bearbookshelf's review against another edition
challenging
dark
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.5
halfmanhalfbook's review against another edition
2.0
Lily Lynch and Stephen Osmer are your archetypical fashionable couple; she is an artist and he is a journalist and critic and they are heavily involved with the glamorous arty people of London. Osmer likes to write confrontational stuff about all sorts of subjects, including about an author and critic both called Nicholas Royle. Silas and Ethel Woodlock have retired to the Sussex coast to spend their final years near the sea, but what they had not taken into account is how much noise and distress the gulls would cause them. At a loss for things to do in retirement, Silas takes up creative writing and starts to think that he might have found something that he could enjoy.
When he finds his first short story ‘Gulls’ in a book called Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds, he is not very happy. In fact, he is livid, absolutely livid, because the story has been attributed to an author called Nicholas Royle. Woodlock knows it is not Royle’s as it is the same as the manuscript that was left in a pub several months earlier after he had passed it to Ethel to read. Woodlock finds out where Nicolas Royle lives and in a moment of fury, decides that he needs to go and talk to him about this. He arrives mid-way through a party and lets rip at Royle before events take a much sinister turn.
There were parts of this novel that I liked; the way that the Woodlock’s fitted each other well, but were unsettled by the move to a new area. In real life, there are two authors called Nicholas Royle, who are frequently muddled and I liked the way that he has picked up on this and made it an integral part of the book. I liked the short essays called Hides, but it really jarred as it didn’t fit in with the novel and I am not quite sure why the conclusion of the novel is in the final essay. It is ok, but not fantastic.
When he finds his first short story ‘Gulls’ in a book called Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds, he is not very happy. In fact, he is livid, absolutely livid, because the story has been attributed to an author called Nicholas Royle. Woodlock knows it is not Royle’s as it is the same as the manuscript that was left in a pub several months earlier after he had passed it to Ethel to read. Woodlock finds out where Nicolas Royle lives and in a moment of fury, decides that he needs to go and talk to him about this. He arrives mid-way through a party and lets rip at Royle before events take a much sinister turn.
There were parts of this novel that I liked; the way that the Woodlock’s fitted each other well, but were unsettled by the move to a new area. In real life, there are two authors called Nicholas Royle, who are frequently muddled and I liked the way that he has picked up on this and made it an integral part of the book. I liked the short essays called Hides, but it really jarred as it didn’t fit in with the novel and I am not quite sure why the conclusion of the novel is in the final essay. It is ok, but not fantastic.
arirang's review
4.0
As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird’s life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.
William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890) - the work that introduced the term "stream of consciousness"
I want to focus here on the work of just two writers – a novelist and a critic. The former has not long ago published his seventh novel, variously praised as ‘clever’, ‘compelling’ and ‘ingenious’; as a ‘cutting-edge, vital new British novel’; as ‘strange, memorable and, arguably, way ahead of its time.’ The latter has not long ago published his tenth book of literary criticism, variously praised as ‘extraordinary’, ‘fascinating’ and exuberant’; as a ‘book that shows the way forward for literary studies’. I should straight away add that these accolades are, as so often, grossly exaggerated’
You might be forgiven for confusing the novelist and critic in question, for they happen to share the same name: Nicholas Royle. Together they embody everything that is wrong with literary culture in England today.
Thanks to Myriad Editions for the review copy of this work. Myriad Editions is a small independent UK publishing house based in Brighton, Sussex, with its stated aim being to publish “books to change hearts and minds, and offer new ways of seeing.” When they launched they proclaimed ““Our mission is to publish excellent and original books, and establish a literary niche against the mainstream.” (http://www.theargus.co.uk/news/10816085.A_love_of_literature/)
The first chapter of Nicholas Royle’s An English Guide to Birdwatching introduces us to Silas and Ethel Woodlock (a deliberate nod to Lockwood from Wuthering Heights): Silas has very recently retired from the family undertaker’s Woodlock & Sons, handing over to his son, Ashley. Here the narration is relatively conventional, albeit with a fondness (on Silas’s behalf) for wordplay.
The second, introduces us – strikingly at the point of his death, killed by a particularly beautiful sentence – to the young literary critic Stephen Osmer, and the narrative style changes to reflect his more literary (and somewhat pretentious) worldview:
The sentence he was writing as he hovered over his keyboard, staring at the screen, pursuing the pulsing vertical of the cursor as it left in its wake a new letter, then word, punctuation, space, till the final full-stop, gave Stephen Osmer such an access of pleasure that he died. He skipped off his seat like the carriage on an old typewriter at the end of a line and there he was, tarrying with a convulsion then completely still, on the floor.
Osmer works (worked) for the London Literary Gazette (a thinly-disguised London Review of Books, complete with a Mary Kay-Wilmers like editor). At university, he was a brilliant student but unable to complete his PhD, on Dickens, due to his inability to capture his thoughts on paper, and bitter with literary studies as a result.
His – now posthumous – fame rests largely on two LLG articles, both included in the novel, the first of which Double Whammy: The State of English Literary Culture Today was prompted by him attending a literary event starring the two ‘fictional’ Nicholas Royle’s mentioned in the 2nd opening quote to my review, which is also the opening of the essay.
Furious at what he heard at the reading, in particular their, in his view, over-theoretical approach, in contrast to the social and political concerns of his beloved Dickens, he interrupted the readings with the heckle:
You wouldn’t know powerful writing if it smacked you in the face with a brick.
thereby causing a minor literary scandal, and went on, in a burst of fury, to dash off the Double Whammy article.
But this is where the meta-fictional and self-referential nature of the novel suddenly becomes apparent.
Uncannily, there really are (outside of the world of the novel) two different writers called Nicholas Royle, with biographies as per the opening – indeed if anything the novel underplays the links as both are actually novelists, both are literary academics, both have a background in biology and a special interest in birds.
See on Goodreads:
the younger man and 'author' - https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/20435.Nicholas_Royle
the 'critic', but also the author of this novel - https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6922827.Nicholas_Royle
To add Goodreads’ own contribution to the confusion, Goodreads can’t cope with two authors with the same name. Hence the 2nd Nicholas Royle, the author of this work, has been given the Goodreads first name Nicholas[ ] rather than Nicholas – i.e. with a space added – to distinguish his work.
And the event discussed – where the two Nicholas Royle’s discussed their respective work and their ‘Uncanny’ relationship did actually take place (though I assume without heckling from the genuinely fictitious Osmer). See - http://wordsandfixtures.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/nicholas-royle-vs-nicholas-royle-like.html
The two real-life Nicholas Royle’s at the event – the author of this book on the right as we look at it:
Another picture. The one in the middle is the author of this book. The one on the left as we look at it (but the right as they perceive it) is the younger author Nicholas Royle. And the third is another person called Nicholas Royle!
'Uncanny' is a key termy: the younger Royle edited an anthology of short stories called [b:Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories about Birds|13058380|Murmurations An Anthology of Uncanny Stories about Birds|Nicholas Royle|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1342536292s/13058380.jpg|18223612] and the older wrote a book of literary theory called [b:The Uncanny|574930|The Uncanny|Nicholas Royle|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1175924300s/574930.jpg|561918] - both in real-life and the characters they correspond to in the novel – but their repeated use of the term is what triggered (the fictional) Osmer’s ire at the book reading:
Uncanny is a lamentable example of failed thinking, an evasion and a subterfuge. It is a way of pigeonholing alientation while avoiding the reality of oppression.
This risible couple had milked the thing and sucked it dry years ago.
And in the Double Whammy article Osmer tears into the work of both Royles, in a manner worthy of the Omnivore’s Hatchet Job of the Year. For the younger author:
His recent book bearing the title [b:First Novel|15797180|First Novel|Nicholas Royle|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1353033168s/15797180.jpg|21520054]. It is so named, presumably, in the hope that people might forget or ever know that there were in fact half a dozen failures before it
...
Every sentence has died several times before reaching the page ... It is an abuse of trees...His story telling has all the deftness of a disabled sloth.
And as for the elder Royle the other one, the woodlouse, is even worse. Professor Royle has made a successful career out of writing critical prose aimed at an audience of approximately five people. He is a practioner and proponent of what is, laughably, called 'high theory', a classic case of what Boyd Tonkin of the Independent once referred to as the 'up-themselves posh theory boys.'
[…]
From the very beginning Royle’s work has been married by two glaring and profound flaws: an overindulgence in wordplay, and a complete absence of proper historic research.
[…]
In Doyle's uniquely incapable hands academic discourse becomes a mind of fairytale writing, airbrushing out of existence any sense of history, any engagement with social and political actuality.
Which all makes for rather odd reading given Royle the author is, via the mouthpiece of Osmer in his own novel, savaging not only his own real-life work but also the work of his real-life namesake.
Confused? See youtube for an explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BHQT3Omqtw)
If you aren’t confused then you aren’t really paying attention – but the novel has only just got started on its tricks.
Two short-stories are also crucial to the novel, which again exist in the real- as well as novel’s world:
“The Kestrel and the Hawk” by the younger Royle, savaged by Osmer in his essay, and quoted from extensively, with the permission of the real-life other Royle, in this book. The other Nicholas Royle also wrote specially another key part of this novel: a obituary of the fictional authorial alter-ego the elder Royle, who dies in the novel at the hands of Silas, enraged by his plagiarism – see below.
And “Gulls”, which written by the older Royle, appeared in the aforementioned anthology Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds edited by the younger.
But in the novel (one hopes not in real-life), Gulls has in turn been plagiarised from a story originally written by Silas Woodlock: remember him – the retired undertaker from chapter 1, now living in Seaford on the Sussex coast but menaced by the aggressive herring gulls:
Although Ethel and Silas were prepared to give credence to the claim that herring gull numbers across the U.K. we're dwindling, their impression was that the missing complement had merely moved to Seaford. More couples than ever had chosen to take up residence within screeching and defecating distance of their abode. And every week felt like the further ratcheting-up of a foreign occupation.
The narrative section of the novel comes to a climax, which I won't spoil, as Osmer and Silas both find themselves at a literary party at Royle (the elder)’s Sussex country home, one a reluctant invitee and the other an uninvited intruder.
We also get Osmer's other apparently brilliant essay The Holocaust of the Bankers, which consists of some rather trite musings on things like the use of mobile phones, that would better belong in an end-of-pier stand-up routine plus the deliberately offensive (certainly to me as one of the intended victims!) and rather silly policy suggestion rather foreshadowed at in the title. Osmer is clearly not as talented as he thinks he is, although one is left a little confused that the 3rd person, who we had assumed to be impartial, narrator also tells us how well the essay is received.
And the novel part ends rather poignantly withthe now widowed Ethel in a chapter called Ethel’s Wharf, it’s name taken from Hamlet:
- I dream about the idea of a hide.
- Jekyll and Hyde?
- No. Well, yes and no. You have to reckon with what Stephen King calls ‘basement guy’ – (and at this point the woodlouse flashed a smile at where they stood) – but the idea of a text that would hide, that would be a hide, a place from which to look out and look in, a secret place from which it would be possible not only to observe the activity and behaviour of birds and humans, say, but also to observe the novel itself, a kind of screened-off or embedded space within a novel in which it would be possible to explore the relations between birds and words, birdwatching and wordwatching.
And the second half indeed includes 17 of these ‘Hides’, ranging from a 7 word sentence to 20 pages in length.
One Hide consists of an unfavourable comparison of Hitchcock's The Birds movie to the original Du Maurier story on which it was based, a story based in England and where the offending avians were in fact gulls.
Another has four characters verbally sparring about what a hide actually is, a verbally playful and almost mathematical story one could imagine written by Joanna Walsh:
Things move as soon as one speaks. It is better not to speak, in the hide. The moment a voice says hide, everything has already gone off like an atom bomb. Listener A thinks hide refers to the act of concealing. Listener B thinks it is skin. Listener C, with an historian's ear, hears in it the measure of land in ye Olde English tymes considered large enough to sustain a free family with its dependents. Listener D has no doubt that it is the name of a hut or other screened-off location for the observation of birds.
The Hides take the book into a new form altogether, part essays, part short-stories, part a continuation of the story itself, part ... well ... as the author himself has said:
Sources/references:
Useful Q&A with the author:
http://shinynewbooks.co.uk/qa-with-nicholas-royle-author-of-an-english-guide-to-birdwatching/
The other Royle’s perspective:
http://www.nicholasroyle.com/white-spines/double-act
Helpful reviews:
http://wormhole.carnelianvalley.com/nicholas-royle-an-english-guide-to-birdwatching/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/31/an-english-guide-to-birdwatching-by-nicholas-royle-review
https://www.ft.com/content/4343b904-3af2-11e7-ac89-b01cc67cfeec
https://shinynewbooks.co.uk/an-english-guide-to-birdwatching-by-nicholas-royle/
William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890) - the work that introduced the term "stream of consciousness"
I want to focus here on the work of just two writers – a novelist and a critic. The former has not long ago published his seventh novel, variously praised as ‘clever’, ‘compelling’ and ‘ingenious’; as a ‘cutting-edge, vital new British novel’; as ‘strange, memorable and, arguably, way ahead of its time.’ The latter has not long ago published his tenth book of literary criticism, variously praised as ‘extraordinary’, ‘fascinating’ and exuberant’; as a ‘book that shows the way forward for literary studies’. I should straight away add that these accolades are, as so often, grossly exaggerated’
You might be forgiven for confusing the novelist and critic in question, for they happen to share the same name: Nicholas Royle. Together they embody everything that is wrong with literary culture in England today.
Thanks to Myriad Editions for the review copy of this work. Myriad Editions is a small independent UK publishing house based in Brighton, Sussex, with its stated aim being to publish “books to change hearts and minds, and offer new ways of seeing.” When they launched they proclaimed ““Our mission is to publish excellent and original books, and establish a literary niche against the mainstream.” (http://www.theargus.co.uk/news/10816085.A_love_of_literature/)
The first chapter of Nicholas Royle’s An English Guide to Birdwatching introduces us to Silas and Ethel Woodlock (a deliberate nod to Lockwood from Wuthering Heights): Silas has very recently retired from the family undertaker’s Woodlock & Sons, handing over to his son, Ashley. Here the narration is relatively conventional, albeit with a fondness (on Silas’s behalf) for wordplay.
The second, introduces us – strikingly at the point of his death, killed by a particularly beautiful sentence – to the young literary critic Stephen Osmer, and the narrative style changes to reflect his more literary (and somewhat pretentious) worldview:
The sentence he was writing as he hovered over his keyboard, staring at the screen, pursuing the pulsing vertical of the cursor as it left in its wake a new letter, then word, punctuation, space, till the final full-stop, gave Stephen Osmer such an access of pleasure that he died. He skipped off his seat like the carriage on an old typewriter at the end of a line and there he was, tarrying with a convulsion then completely still, on the floor.
Osmer works (worked) for the London Literary Gazette (a thinly-disguised London Review of Books, complete with a Mary Kay-Wilmers like editor). At university, he was a brilliant student but unable to complete his PhD, on Dickens, due to his inability to capture his thoughts on paper, and bitter with literary studies as a result.
His – now posthumous – fame rests largely on two LLG articles, both included in the novel, the first of which Double Whammy: The State of English Literary Culture Today was prompted by him attending a literary event starring the two ‘fictional’ Nicholas Royle’s mentioned in the 2nd opening quote to my review, which is also the opening of the essay.
Furious at what he heard at the reading, in particular their, in his view, over-theoretical approach, in contrast to the social and political concerns of his beloved Dickens, he interrupted the readings with the heckle:
You wouldn’t know powerful writing if it smacked you in the face with a brick.
thereby causing a minor literary scandal, and went on, in a burst of fury, to dash off the Double Whammy article.
But this is where the meta-fictional and self-referential nature of the novel suddenly becomes apparent.
Uncannily, there really are (outside of the world of the novel) two different writers called Nicholas Royle, with biographies as per the opening – indeed if anything the novel underplays the links as both are actually novelists, both are literary academics, both have a background in biology and a special interest in birds.
See on Goodreads:
the younger man and 'author' - https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/20435.Nicholas_Royle
the 'critic', but also the author of this novel - https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6922827.Nicholas_Royle
To add Goodreads’ own contribution to the confusion, Goodreads can’t cope with two authors with the same name. Hence the 2nd Nicholas Royle, the author of this work, has been given the Goodreads first name Nicholas[ ] rather than Nicholas – i.e. with a space added – to distinguish his work.
And the event discussed – where the two Nicholas Royle’s discussed their respective work and their ‘Uncanny’ relationship did actually take place (though I assume without heckling from the genuinely fictitious Osmer). See - http://wordsandfixtures.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/nicholas-royle-vs-nicholas-royle-like.html
The two real-life Nicholas Royle’s at the event – the author of this book on the right as we look at it:
Another picture. The one in the middle is the author of this book. The one on the left as we look at it (but the right as they perceive it) is the younger author Nicholas Royle. And the third is another person called Nicholas Royle!
'Uncanny' is a key termy: the younger Royle edited an anthology of short stories called [b:Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories about Birds|13058380|Murmurations An Anthology of Uncanny Stories about Birds|Nicholas Royle|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1342536292s/13058380.jpg|18223612] and the older wrote a book of literary theory called [b:The Uncanny|574930|The Uncanny|Nicholas Royle|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1175924300s/574930.jpg|561918] - both in real-life and the characters they correspond to in the novel – but their repeated use of the term is what triggered (the fictional) Osmer’s ire at the book reading:
Uncanny is a lamentable example of failed thinking, an evasion and a subterfuge. It is a way of pigeonholing alientation while avoiding the reality of oppression.
This risible couple had milked the thing and sucked it dry years ago.
And in the Double Whammy article Osmer tears into the work of both Royles, in a manner worthy of the Omnivore’s Hatchet Job of the Year. For the younger author:
His recent book bearing the title [b:First Novel|15797180|First Novel|Nicholas Royle|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1353033168s/15797180.jpg|21520054]. It is so named, presumably, in the hope that people might forget or ever know that there were in fact half a dozen failures before it
...
Every sentence has died several times before reaching the page ... It is an abuse of trees...His story telling has all the deftness of a disabled sloth.
And as for the elder Royle the other one, the woodlouse, is even worse. Professor Royle has made a successful career out of writing critical prose aimed at an audience of approximately five people. He is a practioner and proponent of what is, laughably, called 'high theory', a classic case of what Boyd Tonkin of the Independent once referred to as the 'up-themselves posh theory boys.'
[…]
From the very beginning Royle’s work has been married by two glaring and profound flaws: an overindulgence in wordplay, and a complete absence of proper historic research.
[…]
In Doyle's uniquely incapable hands academic discourse becomes a mind of fairytale writing, airbrushing out of existence any sense of history, any engagement with social and political actuality.
Which all makes for rather odd reading given Royle the author is, via the mouthpiece of Osmer in his own novel, savaging not only his own real-life work but also the work of his real-life namesake.
Confused? See youtube for an explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BHQT3Omqtw)
If you aren’t confused then you aren’t really paying attention – but the novel has only just got started on its tricks.
Two short-stories are also crucial to the novel, which again exist in the real- as well as novel’s world:
“The Kestrel and the Hawk” by the younger Royle, savaged by Osmer in his essay, and quoted from extensively, with the permission of the real-life other Royle, in this book. The other Nicholas Royle also wrote specially another key part of this novel
And “Gulls”, which written by the older Royle, appeared in the aforementioned anthology Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds edited by the younger.
But in the novel (one hopes not in real-life), Gulls has in turn been plagiarised from a story originally written by Silas Woodlock: remember him – the retired undertaker from chapter 1, now living in Seaford on the Sussex coast but menaced by the aggressive herring gulls:
Although Ethel and Silas were prepared to give credence to the claim that herring gull numbers across the U.K. we're dwindling, their impression was that the missing complement had merely moved to Seaford. More couples than ever had chosen to take up residence within screeching and defecating distance of their abode. And every week felt like the further ratcheting-up of a foreign occupation.
The narrative section of the novel comes to a climax, which I won't spoil, as Osmer and Silas both find themselves at a literary party at Royle (the elder)’s Sussex country home, one a reluctant invitee and the other an uninvited intruder.
We also get Osmer's other apparently brilliant essay The Holocaust of the Bankers, which consists of some rather trite musings on things like the use of mobile phones, that would better belong in an end-of-pier stand-up routine plus the deliberately offensive (certainly to me as one of the intended victims!) and rather silly policy suggestion rather foreshadowed at in the title. Osmer is clearly not as talented as he thinks he is, although one is left a little confused that the 3rd person, who we had assumed to be impartial, narrator also tells us how well the essay is received.
And the novel part ends rather poignantly with
I find thee apt.The second half of the novel is inspired by a conversation in the toilets in the basement of their joint reading when the two Royle’s also find themselves discussing literature, starting with the elder:
And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed
That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,
Wouldst thou not stir in this.
- I dream about the idea of a hide.
- Jekyll and Hyde?
- No. Well, yes and no. You have to reckon with what Stephen King calls ‘basement guy’ – (and at this point the woodlouse flashed a smile at where they stood) – but the idea of a text that would hide, that would be a hide, a place from which to look out and look in, a secret place from which it would be possible not only to observe the activity and behaviour of birds and humans, say, but also to observe the novel itself, a kind of screened-off or embedded space within a novel in which it would be possible to explore the relations between birds and words, birdwatching and wordwatching.
And the second half indeed includes 17 of these ‘Hides’, ranging from a 7 word sentence to 20 pages in length.
One Hide consists of an unfavourable comparison of Hitchcock's The Birds movie to the original Du Maurier story on which it was based, a story based in England and where the offending avians were in fact gulls.
Another has four characters verbally sparring about what a hide actually is, a verbally playful and almost mathematical story one could imagine written by Joanna Walsh:
Things move as soon as one speaks. It is better not to speak, in the hide. The moment a voice says hide, everything has already gone off like an atom bomb. Listener A thinks hide refers to the act of concealing. Listener B thinks it is skin. Listener C, with an historian's ear, hears in it the measure of land in ye Olde English tymes considered large enough to sustain a free family with its dependents. Listener D has no doubt that it is the name of a hut or other screened-off location for the observation of birds.
The Hides take the book into a new form altogether, part essays, part short-stories, part a continuation of the story itself, part ... well ... as the author himself has said:
I’m trying – no doubt without much success! – to elaborate a new kind of writing, something akin perhaps to prose poems, elegies, apocalyptic songs from the Anthropocene, fictive capsules or bunkers, psittical metamorphoses (in at least faintly Ovidian mode), ghostly variations or choral work, phantomatic audiobooths, philosophical catacombs…Overall, a fascinating book. It is difficult at times not to feel that the author may be having more fun than the reader, and certainly is considerably cleverer than this reader – I strong suspect the majority of the literary allusions passed me by. But a book I am very glad to have read,
Sources/references:
Useful Q&A with the author:
http://shinynewbooks.co.uk/qa-with-nicholas-royle-author-of-an-english-guide-to-birdwatching/
The other Royle’s perspective:
http://www.nicholasroyle.com/white-spines/double-act
Helpful reviews:
http://wormhole.carnelianvalley.com/nicholas-royle-an-english-guide-to-birdwatching/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/31/an-english-guide-to-birdwatching-by-nicholas-royle-review
https://www.ft.com/content/4343b904-3af2-11e7-ac89-b01cc67cfeec
https://shinynewbooks.co.uk/an-english-guide-to-birdwatching-by-nicholas-royle/
halfmanhalfbook's review
2.0
Lily Lynch and Stephen Osmer are your archetypical fashionable couple; she is an artist and he is a journalist and critic and they are heavily involved with the glamorous arty people of London. Osmer likes to write confrontational stuff about all sorts of subjects, including about an author and critic both called Nicholas Royle. Silas and Ethel Woodlock have retired to the Sussex coast to spend their final years near the sea, but what they had not taken into account is how much noise and distress the gulls would cause them. At a loss for things to do in retirement, Silas takes up creative writing and starts to think that he might have found something that he could enjoy.
When he finds his first short story ‘Gulls’ in a book called Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds, he is not very happy. In fact, he is livid, absolutely livid, because the story has been attributed to an author called Nicholas Royle. Woodlock knows it is not Royle’s as it is the same as the manuscript that was left in a pub several months earlier after he had passed it to Ethel to read. Woodlock finds out where Nicolas Royle lives and in a moment of fury, decides that he needs to go and talk to him about this. He arrives mid-way through a party and lets rip at Royle before events take a much sinister turn.
There were parts of this novel that I liked; the way that the Woodlock’s fitted each other well, but were unsettled by the move to a new area. In real life, there are two authors called Nicholas Royle, who are frequently muddled and I liked the way that he has picked up on this and made it an integral part of the book. I liked the short essays called Hides, but it really jarred as it didn’t fit in with the novel and I am not quite sure why the conclusion of the novel is in the final essay. It is ok, but not fantastic.
When he finds his first short story ‘Gulls’ in a book called Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds, he is not very happy. In fact, he is livid, absolutely livid, because the story has been attributed to an author called Nicholas Royle. Woodlock knows it is not Royle’s as it is the same as the manuscript that was left in a pub several months earlier after he had passed it to Ethel to read. Woodlock finds out where Nicolas Royle lives and in a moment of fury, decides that he needs to go and talk to him about this. He arrives mid-way through a party and lets rip at Royle before events take a much sinister turn.
There were parts of this novel that I liked; the way that the Woodlock’s fitted each other well, but were unsettled by the move to a new area. In real life, there are two authors called Nicholas Royle, who are frequently muddled and I liked the way that he has picked up on this and made it an integral part of the book. I liked the short essays called Hides, but it really jarred as it didn’t fit in with the novel and I am not quite sure why the conclusion of the novel is in the final essay. It is ok, but not fantastic.
jackielaw's review
3.0
An English Guide to Birdwatching, by Nicholas Royle, is a novel that plays with words in a manner that makes it a challenge to describe, and in places to read. Written in two distinct parts, albeit with the occasional cross reference and a shared conclusion, it poses interesting questions, mesa and meta, about reactions to literature and those who curate it. Although fiction, it draws heavily on reality, including roles for the author and his Manchester based namesake. It delves into the conceits of the literary world – its creators, teachers and those who consider themselves intellectually superior, who task themselves with what they believe to be essential deconstruction, being, in their own minds at least, uniquely qualified to ensure literary quality is policed.
Scattered throughout the book are line drawing illustrations of birds, a subject referenced throughout.
The story opens by introducing the reader to Silas Woodlock, a recently retired undertaker moving from Croydon in London to Seaford in East Sussex with his wife, Ethel. The elderly couple take some time to settle into their new abode. There are amusing observations on how the ‘old codgers’ prevalent on the south coast of England view one another, how they do not recognise themselves in their fellow aged beings.
Back in London an editor for the London Literary Gazette, Stephen Osmer, completes an essay and promptly falls off his perch. His untimely death at the age of twenty-seven ensures he will be remembered as brilliant, despite having published little. Known for his ‘intellectual candescence’, his knowledge of Dickens, and his witty if somewhat cutting commentary, he harboured a deep seated jealousy of those who, unlike him, had succeeded in publishing creative work. He was contemptuous of ‘the self-enclosed nature of academic life’ yet lived wholly within his own specialism’s rarefied world. Much like the south coast elderly population, he was unable to recognise himself in those he observed.
Back in Seaford, Silas and Ethel are being driven to distraction by the gulls noisily breeding on their rooftop. In an attempt to get her husband out of the house, Ethel suggests he enrol in a creative writing workshop. As a result he writes a short story – The Gulls – and promptly loses the only copy of his manuscript. He is subsequently incensed when he discovers his words published in an anthology under another’s name.
Alongside these dastardly goings on, the reader is taken back to the final months of Stephen Osman’s life. During this period he had insulted both the Nicholas Royles at an author event in Manchester. When he makes his escape, inadvertently abandoning his beautiful girlfriend, Lucy, she meets southern Nicholas Royle’s wife, Portia. This leads to an invitation to a party for the literati, held at the Royle’s house in Seaford, where the two storylines coalesce. Prior to this is an erotic scene offers up a cliched male fantasy – perhaps an attempt at attaining the Bad Sex In Fiction award once won by the other Nicholas Royle.
Other interactions at the party are more amusing. The attending intellectuals are vying for attention, sorrowful that their kind are not as revered as they once were. The party ends with a somewhat improbable bang after which action returns to London and the creation of Osman’s final essay.
Part two of the book contains seventeen chapters, each titled Hide. Many of these are clever if somewhat dense plays on language and its meaning. The tableau around which these musings are wrapped include elements of surrealism. There is pondering about man’s attitude to killing and eating birds, his belief that he is a higher being despite having existed for a much shorter time. Although interesting ideas and concepts are aired I found part two much less engaging.
The writing wanders in many different directions, much as a stream of consciousness would. The mix of fact and fiction is disconcerting in places as is the inclusion of the two Nicholas Royles. There is plenty to think about, and the author is unafraid to mock himself and his associates. At times I felt the prose became didactic and I have no doubt many references passed me by. Although clever the second part was not always entertaining. Adding it to the novel appeared experimental rather than necessary.
Would I recommend? Perhaps to those who enjoy wordplay – literature lovers unafraid to laugh at their own conceits. I am glad to have been given the opportunity to appraise, even if it wasn’t the easiest of reads.
Scattered throughout the book are line drawing illustrations of birds, a subject referenced throughout.
The story opens by introducing the reader to Silas Woodlock, a recently retired undertaker moving from Croydon in London to Seaford in East Sussex with his wife, Ethel. The elderly couple take some time to settle into their new abode. There are amusing observations on how the ‘old codgers’ prevalent on the south coast of England view one another, how they do not recognise themselves in their fellow aged beings.
Back in London an editor for the London Literary Gazette, Stephen Osmer, completes an essay and promptly falls off his perch. His untimely death at the age of twenty-seven ensures he will be remembered as brilliant, despite having published little. Known for his ‘intellectual candescence’, his knowledge of Dickens, and his witty if somewhat cutting commentary, he harboured a deep seated jealousy of those who, unlike him, had succeeded in publishing creative work. He was contemptuous of ‘the self-enclosed nature of academic life’ yet lived wholly within his own specialism’s rarefied world. Much like the south coast elderly population, he was unable to recognise himself in those he observed.
Back in Seaford, Silas and Ethel are being driven to distraction by the gulls noisily breeding on their rooftop. In an attempt to get her husband out of the house, Ethel suggests he enrol in a creative writing workshop. As a result he writes a short story – The Gulls – and promptly loses the only copy of his manuscript. He is subsequently incensed when he discovers his words published in an anthology under another’s name.
Alongside these dastardly goings on, the reader is taken back to the final months of Stephen Osman’s life. During this period he had insulted both the Nicholas Royles at an author event in Manchester. When he makes his escape, inadvertently abandoning his beautiful girlfriend, Lucy, she meets southern Nicholas Royle’s wife, Portia. This leads to an invitation to a party for the literati, held at the Royle’s house in Seaford, where the two storylines coalesce. Prior to this is an erotic scene offers up a cliched male fantasy – perhaps an attempt at attaining the Bad Sex In Fiction award once won by the other Nicholas Royle.
Other interactions at the party are more amusing. The attending intellectuals are vying for attention, sorrowful that their kind are not as revered as they once were. The party ends with a somewhat improbable bang after which action returns to London and the creation of Osman’s final essay.
Part two of the book contains seventeen chapters, each titled Hide. Many of these are clever if somewhat dense plays on language and its meaning. The tableau around which these musings are wrapped include elements of surrealism. There is pondering about man’s attitude to killing and eating birds, his belief that he is a higher being despite having existed for a much shorter time. Although interesting ideas and concepts are aired I found part two much less engaging.
The writing wanders in many different directions, much as a stream of consciousness would. The mix of fact and fiction is disconcerting in places as is the inclusion of the two Nicholas Royles. There is plenty to think about, and the author is unafraid to mock himself and his associates. At times I felt the prose became didactic and I have no doubt many references passed me by. Although clever the second part was not always entertaining. Adding it to the novel appeared experimental rather than necessary.
Would I recommend? Perhaps to those who enjoy wordplay – literature lovers unafraid to laugh at their own conceits. I am glad to have been given the opportunity to appraise, even if it wasn’t the easiest of reads.
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