Wow, want to spend $70 on the UK edition (an OOP mass market paperback) of Slow River? If so, here's the amazon.com link for you. Then go get your head examined. After all, you can get this edition from amazon.co.uk for about $6. Or, if you're truly crazy, from the same webpage you can choose to pay some lunatic vendor nearly $200. For a used copy. Of a mass market paperback. I know I lack the collector gene and so sometimes miss the finer points of book collecting but, seriously, can anyone explain this to me?
I don't think about Slow River often, but after seeing this cover for the first time in twelve years, I fished out a copy and reread the first page. I liked it (thank god). So I thought I'd share:
At four in the morning its cold, deep scent seeped through deserted streets and settled in the shadows between warehouses. I walked carefully, unwilling to disturb the quiet. The smell of the river thickened as I headed deeper into the warehouse district, the Old Town, where the street names changed: Dagger Lane, Silver Street, The Land of Green Ginger; the fifteenth century still echoing through the beginnings of the twenty-first.
Then there were no more buildings, no more alleys, only the river, sliding slow and wide under a bare sky. I stepped cautiously into the open, like a small mammal leaving the shelter of the trees for the exposed bank.
Rivers were the source of civilization, the scenes of all beginnings and endings in ancient times. Babies were carried to the banks to be washed, bodies were laid on biers and floated away. Births and deaths were usually communal affairs, but I was here alone.
Reading this brought back vivid memories of Hull--the city I never name in the novel--where I lived for more than ten years, where the Old Town really does have names like Silver Street and Dagger Lane. I've talked about those times before, of course (mainly in "Layered Cities," an essay, and in my memoir), but something about reading fiction brings it all back.
I didn't name the city in Slow River because I believed--still believe--no one in their right mind would buy a book set in Hull. It would be like reading a novel set in Poughkeepsie. What do you think?
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I'm not a book collector either, so I don't really understand. When I wanted to read Ammonite, I couldn't find a copy at my local public library, so I bought a copy and gave it to the library in case any one loved it as much as I did and wanted to read it(or might discover that they wanted to read it).
ReplyDeleteI grew up in Albuquerque, NM in the high desert, about as different from Hull as you can get.
The river that runs through it is called the Rio Grande(big river). The Spaniards who named it had a sense of humor, because for most of the year it's a shallow muddy trickle through a wide expanse of brown sand; and yet water is the life blood of the desert.
Anyway, I think your readers only care about Hull because you have been there, and care enough about it to make it the backdrop(or even another character) of a completely engaging and enticingly written book. That first paragraph still pulled me right in.
Barbara Sanchez
I hadn't thought about the Rio Grande in those terms before. In all the westerns I watched as a child, it *was* a big river, and now I find out it's named in jest; Little John syndrome. Huh.
ReplyDeleteI can completely understand book collecting. Not sure about this one though (sorry Nicola). I'd have to know more.
ReplyDeleteI liked the nameless city in Slow River because it could have been just about anywhere.
duff
Hey, Duff, no apology necessary. To me one copy of SR is as good as another, y'know?
ReplyDeleteThe leave-the-reader-free-to-imagine-her-own-city argument is a good one. I wrestled with naming the city, and felt bad sometimes about not naming it, because in my opinion most writers who don't name their city do so because they're lazy: they can't be bothered to fully imagine/describe the place; they want to get away with as little as possible. But that wasn't the case with me. The city in SR *is* Hull, just dragged a few years into the future--that is, the future as imagined in 1994...
One other thought on the collecting topic. I don't think I,ve seen this cover of Slow River. The artwork is also something very collectible.
ReplyDeleteDuff
I'd be surprised if you'd seen this cover. It's only on the UK edition, and that came and went like greased lightning.
ReplyDeleteGoing from 'Ammonite' to 'Slow River' I remember at the time feeling a bit disappointed. I suppose I was hoping for 'Ammonite Part 2' because of how I loved that book so much. But now re-reading the opening of 'Slow River' I may have to give it a second glance, (sans the $70). Perhaps it isn't Ammonite's ugly step sister as I once thought.
ReplyDeleteI think of Slow River as a harder book than Ammonite. It's set in the very, very near future; it's about the underbelly of a city. But I tried very hard to not make it ugly. I tried to infuse the everyday--boiling a pot of soybeans, going to the park, seeing a squirrel--with beauty. This book really is, for me, about the triumph of the human spirit, the human heart, which I think is one of the most beautiful stories of all.
ReplyDeleteIf you do choose to read it, let me know what you think.
I don't think I've rejected a book because I hadn't heard of the city/town the story was set in. And if you had named the town, I would have thought that you had made that up, too :P.
ReplyDeleteAh. Right. I hadn't been living in the US that long when I began Slow River, four or five years, and forgot that American's wouldn't be instantly familiar with Hull.
ReplyDeleteAre writers like artists whose work becomes more valuable when they die? Is the book's availability similar to a slow death? I can say I have found your books much more often in libraries than in book stores though one can always search them online. And since I read the Aud books first, I was totally happy to find you in science fiction though parts of Slow River worried me about getting gray hair.
ReplyDeleteSome get valuable, some just drop off the table, lost and forgotten. (How many people read Helen McInnes these days? But she was a knockout thriller writer in the 1960s.)
ReplyDeleteAs for the grey hair, yep, you should take care in strong sun. Wear a hat.