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An English Guide to Birdwatching
Silas and Ethel Woodlock have retired from the business of undertaking to spend their twilight years by the sea but things are not as easy as they’d hoped, and it’s all to do with herring gulls. Stephen Osmer and Lily Lynch are a glamorous young couple on the London literary scene. While Lily pursues an ambitious public art project about ‘cinematic intentions’, we encounter Osmer’s brilliance as an arts journalist, writing a dangerously provocative essay about social justice and the banking crisis, as well as a diatribe about two people called Nicholas Royle, one a novelist, the other a literary critic.
Nicholas Royle’s magnificent new novel combines a page-turning story about literary theft, adultery and ambition with a poetic and moving investigation into our relationship to birds and to the environment. It is exquisitely inventive and very funny, juxtaposing the stuff of scandalous gossip with scathing reports of how the world has gone to hell in a handcart. Playfully commenting on the main story are 17 interlinked ‘Hides’. Beautifully illustrated by artist Natalia Gasson, these short texts — primarily about birds, ornithology and films (including Hitchcock’s) — give us a different view of the themes that fly out of the novel: the messy business of being human, the fragility of the physical world we inhabit and the nature of writing itself.
Compelling, audacious and dazzling in its linguistic playfulness and formal invention, An English Guide to Birdwatching explores the fertile hinterland between fact and fiction. In its focus on birds, climate change, the banking crisis, social justice and human migration, it is intensely relevant to wider political concerns; in its mischievous wit and wordplay, and post-modern (or ‘post-fiction’) sensibility, it pushes the boundaries of what a novel might be.
Reviews
‘An English Guide to Birdwatching is a daring novel, both wickedly playful and deeply touching.’ — Alison Moore
This is one of the strangest novels I've read in years. Digressive but coercive, impassioned but fey (digressive and coercive, impassioned and fey), it's a curiously compelling investigation of the nature of writing and the writing of nature. I ended it moved in ways I could not explain; I also ended it rather dizzied and thoroughly gulled. — Robert Macfarlane
Nicholas Royle’s magnificent new novel combines a page-turning story about literary theft, adultery and ambition with a poetic and moving investigation into our relationship to birds and to the environment. It is exquisitely inventive and very funny, juxtaposing the stuff of scandalous gossip with scathing reports of how the world has gone to hell in a handcart. Playfully commenting on the main story are 17 interlinked ‘Hides’. Beautifully illustrated by artist Natalia Gasson, these short texts — primarily about birds, ornithology and films (including Hitchcock’s) — give us a different view of the themes that fly out of the novel: the messy business of being human, the fragility of the physical world we inhabit and the nature of writing itself.
Compelling, audacious and dazzling in its linguistic playfulness and formal invention, An English Guide to Birdwatching explores the fertile hinterland between fact and fiction. In its focus on birds, climate change, the banking crisis, social justice and human migration, it is intensely relevant to wider political concerns; in its mischievous wit and wordplay, and post-modern (or ‘post-fiction’) sensibility, it pushes the boundaries of what a novel might be.
Reviews
‘An English Guide to Birdwatching is a daring novel, both wickedly playful and deeply touching.’ — Alison Moore
This is one of the strangest novels I've read in years. Digressive but coercive, impassioned but fey (digressive and coercive, impassioned and fey), it's a curiously compelling investigation of the nature of writing and the writing of nature. I ended it moved in ways I could not explain; I also ended it rather dizzied and thoroughly gulled. — Robert Macfarlane
352 pages, Hardcover
First published May 25, 2017
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April 30, 2018
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.
This book is published by the UK small publisher Myriad, which aims to publish “books to change hearts and minds, and offer new ways of seeing”.
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.
The second, introduces us –at the point of his death, killed by a particularly beautiful sentence – to the young literary critic Stephen Osmer. 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 (see the quote above which is from 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 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. The two are often mistaken for each other – Goodreads itself struggles to distinguish between them while a recent article in the Guardian talking about one (while mentioning the other) was actually illustrated with the wrong picture.
And the event discussed – where the two Nicholas Royle’s discussed their respective work and their ‘Uncanny’ relationship did actually take place.
'Uncanny' is a key termy: the younger Royle edited an anthology of short stories called Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories about Birds and the older wrote a book of literary theory called The Uncanny- 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 causes him to rip into the work of both Royle's in his article:
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
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.
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, now living in Seaford on the Sussex coast but menaced by the aggressive herring gulls:
----------------------------------------------------------------
This part of the book culminates with a party at (the older and author of this book) Nicholas Royle’s house with Osmer (accompanying his girlfriend Lily) and Woodlock (set on revenge) as unexpected guests.
What really sets the book apart further is Part Two of the book. This part 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:
- 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.
This part of the book includes 17 of these Hides ranging from a short sentence to around 20 pages. The first includes four Listeners (A to D) all of whom hear the word “hide”, but assume four different meanings for it and then carry out an unspoken conversation and debate about their choices, critiqued by a fifth listener. This part (which would have made an excellent short story) brings in many of the themes of the hides – of concealment, of observation, of language and etymology and of an ornimothorphic view and interpretation of human behaviour.
There are clearly links between the hides and the main story for example: The Kestrel and the Hawk (see above) features extensively in one hide; the last hide effectively acts as the postscript to the main story – describing Osmer’s last day; quotes and bird observations from the first part, reappear in the hides; one hide is effectively an unfavourable comparison of Hitchcock’s The Birds to the original Du Maurier story on which it was based (and which featured gulls) – this part seems to echo a project Lily is involved in to contrast the concept of intention between film (a media she is increasingly interested in) and in books (which is Osmer’s choice of art); a woman in a birdwatching hide on the Norfolk coast, meditating on issues, which seems to partly echo a clear his mind trip that Osmer takes to Great Yarmouth; a discussion of Military attempts to deter birds from nesting near airforce runways which echoes partly the Woodlock’s attempts to deter gulls from nesting in their roofs; a discussion of the Woodcock which ends as a link to the Woodlock’s and opens with an angry quote Woodlock makes when he first appears at the party and everyone repeatedly calls him Woodcock.
The one thing of which I am sure is that I have missed many of these links and the clever literary allusions threaded through this section. Its clear from author interviews that the Hides are not an addition to the story but that the story is in fact more of a device to enable the Hides. This is made explicitly clear in the discussion between the two Royle’s above:
- You said the hide would be screened off or embedded .. What would the rest of the novel, or the novel itself, be about?
Taken aback the older man suddenly looked perplexed as if this question had never occurred to him
- The novel itself? I haven’t the foggiest idea
Now at this point I will make a revelation in my review. Much of the first part of the review (that above the dotted lines) was in fact largely borrowed with permission from another Goodreads reviewer. This reviewer and I work in similar fields and are not infrequently mistaken for each other. One industry sector magazine featured an interview with us both and later included both of us in a list of industry practitioners but (just like the Guardian with the Royle’s) with the wrong captions/identities on the pictures used.
You may have two reactions to this revelation:
(1) In borrowing from my a review by my own double to provide literary critique a book which is based around two main themes (literary criticism and the idea of the double) I am taking this book to yet another meta-level and this choice was extremely clever
(2) You really were not particularly interested to know this fact and now I have forced you to know it, you are really quite annoyed. You thought the point of the review was to inform the reader of the review, not for self-indulgence on behalf of a reviewer trying to demonstrate how clever they are
Which you choose will I predict exactly mirror your reaction to this book.
My thanks to Myriad for a review copy.
October 19, 2017
(3.5) “To read a book in terms of its author’s intentions is to embark on a wild goose chase.” This is one of the stranger novels I’ve ever read. I enjoyed all its parts individually – a young literary critic’s pet peeves, a retired couple’s seaside torture by squawking gulls, the confusion between the two real-life English novelists named Nicholas Royle, even the odd bird-themed vignettes called “Hides” – even though they don’t always seem to fit together in the same book. Still, this is so joyfully over-the-top, full of jokes and wordplay as well as trenchant observations about modern life, that I kept reading with interest even when I had no idea where the plot was going (nowhere in particular).
September 15, 2017
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/108160...)
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...
the 'critic', but also the author of this novel - https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
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.u...
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 Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories about Birds and the older wrote a book of literary theory called The Uncanny - 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 First Novel. 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=0BHQT...)
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 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-ni...
The other Royle’s perspective:
http://www.nicholasroyle.com/white-sp...
Helpful reviews:
http://wormhole.carnelianvalley.com/n...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
https://www.ft.com/content/4343b904-3...
https://shinynewbooks.co.uk/an-englis...
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/108160...)
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...
the 'critic', but also the author of this novel - https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
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.u...
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 Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories about Birds and the older wrote a book of literary theory called The Uncanny - 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 First Novel. 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=0BHQT...)
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 Ethel in a chapter called Ethel’s Wharf, it’s name taken from Hamlet:
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-ni...
The other Royle’s perspective:
http://www.nicholasroyle.com/white-sp...
Helpful reviews:
http://wormhole.carnelianvalley.com/n...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
https://www.ft.com/content/4343b904-3...
https://shinynewbooks.co.uk/an-englis...
September 14, 2017
I would like to write a post-fiction novel about love and death, spectrality and the poetics of extinction. I fantasise about a book that would be a new form of music, a transformed birdsong, a work of many voices – mixed sexes and identities in flight – a completely new species of literary psittacism.
And
— 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.
Confused?
That’s only the tip of the iceberg.
An English Guide to Birdwatching is published by Myriad Editions. On its website, the publisher says Myriad publishes books to change hearts and minds, and offer new ways of seeing. My thanks to Myriad for ebook version of this novel to read and review. It is certainly a book to "offer new ways of seeing".
This is a book very much of two halves. Actually, it’s a book of two-thirds and one-third.
The first two thirds are relatively easy to describe. They are Part One - The Undertaking and they tell us a story. The story follows a number of plot lines that gradually converge until we reach a dramatic climax. The stories are interleaved in the novel.
In one, Silas and Ethel Woodlock retire from undertaking and move to Seaford. But they had not reckoned with the gulls on the coast who make life miserable, especially with their noise. Silas takes a creative writing course as part of his retirement and ends up writing a short story about the gulls.
In the second main thread we meet Stephen Osmer. We actually meet him as he dies (on completion of a particularly beautiful sentence he has written). But then we go back and see the events that led up to his death. This is where things start to get a bit complicated. Osmer attends an event where two men both called Nicholas Royle are speaking. Both are figures in the literary world, one a critic the other an author. They joke about the confusion this causes and tell the story of how one being confused with the other led to their meeting.
What is particularly confusing about this is that, in real life, there really are two Nicholas Royles and they met in the way described here. I could cope with all of that until I decided to double-check which one had written this book. I thought I knew, but I made the mistake of opening The Guardian review of the book and it turns out this includes a picture of the wrong Nicholas Royle. There was a brief period of confusion, some assistance from fellow GRer Paul and then normal service was resumed. It is important to note that this book is written by the critic Royle (with some contributions from the author Royle). So the critic Royle is both author and a key character in the story.
In a further merging of fact and fiction, the story about the gulls that is central to the plot of this part of the book is a real story written by critic Royle and included in an anthology prepared by author Royle (you can read it in Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories about Birds as well as in the text of this novel).
Two very important things happen at the event (in the novel) mentioned above. Firstly, Osmer insults the two Royles and then goes on to write an essay in defence of his insult. We get to read this essay as part of the novel. Secondly, the two Royles have a discussion in the basement of the building which includes the two quotes at the start of this review.
I don’t want to spoil the story, but gradually things converge on a party at the critic Royle’s house. Event focus on the authorship of the story about the gulls. And then there is a dramatic conclusion. There’s other stuff happening as well related to Osmer, his girlfriend Lily, critic Royle and his wife Portia.
But, in the end, this is, at this stage, just a story. It’s a well told story even if the language is rather verbose at times. It seems that Royle cannot tell us about people having a meal out without telling us about the origin of each of the dishes they have. And he can’t take us to a party without giving us a potted history of most of the guests. Some bits dragged for me.
Where it gets really interesting (and, it has to be said, headache inducing) is in Part Two - The Hides. There are 17 hides with a chapter each. Some are a couple of dozen pages long, one is just 7 words. The others lie between these two in terms of length. The key to them is the conversation the two Royles had in the basement. You have to read these chapters very, very carefully. This is not a book to read when there are distractions around you. I read it in the silence of my own home while my wife was out at work. Even then, I think large portions of it passed straight over my head. There is word play galore and some of it is very clever and very funny. But, and here’s the bit that requires such concentration, the hides are all about literature and all throw some kind of light on the story we read in Part One. So, Part Two becomes a sort of commentary or criticism of Part One but also of literature in general. Which, in turn, makes you go back to re-evaluate Part One as more than just a simple story.
Some of the hides explicitly refer back to Part One. When writing about the saying (or “idiotism” as the novel calls it) “the early bird catches the worm”, the author says: EBCW, as we may designate it, if only in a gesture towards a more general endeavour to foreground and ridicule the deathly inanity of contemporary bureaucracy (one small hop for mankind), is the sort of nasty jingle that might start up in your mental headphones when you come across blinking light and drizzle, the song of thrushes and blackbirds, the plundering of worms and the green, faintly twinkling, still-dewy expanse of the cemetery, evoked in the context of a certain cremation in Cheltenham. This latter part of this is a direct quote from Part One and refers to Osmer’s cremation that starts the book. And when we read a few pages later Where were we? Ah yes: It was mid-July and the dawn chorus of sparrows had been going on for some minutes. this also is a direct quote from Part One.
But a lot of it is more oblique than that and requires the reader to stop and think. It took me a long time to read The Hides and I believe I missed out on a lot of what it was saying because my understanding of literary theory just isn’t up to snuff.
The final hide returns us to the main story with Osmer writing his follow up to the essay mentioned above and approaching his death. This raises the question as to whether all the bits in the book, not just those explicitly labelled as hides, are hides. And given what the hides represent, are any reviews written on Goodreads or elsewhere also just hides in some sense or other, because they continue the process the hides initiated of looking back to the story and critiquing it from obscure angles.
You could accuse this book of being a bit self-important. At times it does feel like the author, who is clearly cleverer than the vast majority of his readers (including me), is having a lot more fun writing it than you are reading it. But it is undeniably thought-provoking if you are prepared to invest the time in it.
And
— 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.
Confused?
That’s only the tip of the iceberg.
An English Guide to Birdwatching is published by Myriad Editions. On its website, the publisher says Myriad publishes books to change hearts and minds, and offer new ways of seeing. My thanks to Myriad for ebook version of this novel to read and review. It is certainly a book to "offer new ways of seeing".
This is a book very much of two halves. Actually, it’s a book of two-thirds and one-third.
The first two thirds are relatively easy to describe. They are Part One - The Undertaking and they tell us a story. The story follows a number of plot lines that gradually converge until we reach a dramatic climax. The stories are interleaved in the novel.
In one, Silas and Ethel Woodlock retire from undertaking and move to Seaford. But they had not reckoned with the gulls on the coast who make life miserable, especially with their noise. Silas takes a creative writing course as part of his retirement and ends up writing a short story about the gulls.
In the second main thread we meet Stephen Osmer. We actually meet him as he dies (on completion of a particularly beautiful sentence he has written). But then we go back and see the events that led up to his death. This is where things start to get a bit complicated. Osmer attends an event where two men both called Nicholas Royle are speaking. Both are figures in the literary world, one a critic the other an author. They joke about the confusion this causes and tell the story of how one being confused with the other led to their meeting.
What is particularly confusing about this is that, in real life, there really are two Nicholas Royles and they met in the way described here. I could cope with all of that until I decided to double-check which one had written this book. I thought I knew, but I made the mistake of opening The Guardian review of the book and it turns out this includes a picture of the wrong Nicholas Royle. There was a brief period of confusion, some assistance from fellow GRer Paul and then normal service was resumed. It is important to note that this book is written by the critic Royle (with some contributions from the author Royle). So the critic Royle is both author and a key character in the story.
In a further merging of fact and fiction, the story about the gulls that is central to the plot of this part of the book is a real story written by critic Royle and included in an anthology prepared by author Royle (you can read it in Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories about Birds as well as in the text of this novel).
Two very important things happen at the event (in the novel) mentioned above. Firstly, Osmer insults the two Royles and then goes on to write an essay in defence of his insult. We get to read this essay as part of the novel. Secondly, the two Royles have a discussion in the basement of the building which includes the two quotes at the start of this review.
I don’t want to spoil the story, but gradually things converge on a party at the critic Royle’s house. Event focus on the authorship of the story about the gulls. And then there is a dramatic conclusion. There’s other stuff happening as well related to Osmer, his girlfriend Lily, critic Royle and his wife Portia.
But, in the end, this is, at this stage, just a story. It’s a well told story even if the language is rather verbose at times. It seems that Royle cannot tell us about people having a meal out without telling us about the origin of each of the dishes they have. And he can’t take us to a party without giving us a potted history of most of the guests. Some bits dragged for me.
Where it gets really interesting (and, it has to be said, headache inducing) is in Part Two - The Hides. There are 17 hides with a chapter each. Some are a couple of dozen pages long, one is just 7 words. The others lie between these two in terms of length. The key to them is the conversation the two Royles had in the basement. You have to read these chapters very, very carefully. This is not a book to read when there are distractions around you. I read it in the silence of my own home while my wife was out at work. Even then, I think large portions of it passed straight over my head. There is word play galore and some of it is very clever and very funny. But, and here’s the bit that requires such concentration, the hides are all about literature and all throw some kind of light on the story we read in Part One. So, Part Two becomes a sort of commentary or criticism of Part One but also of literature in general. Which, in turn, makes you go back to re-evaluate Part One as more than just a simple story.
Some of the hides explicitly refer back to Part One. When writing about the saying (or “idiotism” as the novel calls it) “the early bird catches the worm”, the author says: EBCW, as we may designate it, if only in a gesture towards a more general endeavour to foreground and ridicule the deathly inanity of contemporary bureaucracy (one small hop for mankind), is the sort of nasty jingle that might start up in your mental headphones when you come across blinking light and drizzle, the song of thrushes and blackbirds, the plundering of worms and the green, faintly twinkling, still-dewy expanse of the cemetery, evoked in the context of a certain cremation in Cheltenham. This latter part of this is a direct quote from Part One and refers to Osmer’s cremation that starts the book. And when we read a few pages later Where were we? Ah yes: It was mid-July and the dawn chorus of sparrows had been going on for some minutes. this also is a direct quote from Part One.
But a lot of it is more oblique than that and requires the reader to stop and think. It took me a long time to read The Hides and I believe I missed out on a lot of what it was saying because my understanding of literary theory just isn’t up to snuff.
The final hide returns us to the main story with Osmer writing his follow up to the essay mentioned above and approaching his death. This raises the question as to whether all the bits in the book, not just those explicitly labelled as hides, are hides. And given what the hides represent, are any reviews written on Goodreads or elsewhere also just hides in some sense or other, because they continue the process the hides initiated of looking back to the story and critiquing it from obscure angles.
You could accuse this book of being a bit self-important. At times it does feel like the author, who is clearly cleverer than the vast majority of his readers (including me), is having a lot more fun writing it than you are reading it. But it is undeniably thought-provoking if you are prepared to invest the time in it.
June 30, 2017
Less a Novel than a Book of Essays
All right, I should know better than to judge a book by its cover. I picked this up in a bookshop in Edinburgh, charmed by its photo of birds, intrigued by the blurb's claim that this would combine fiction with what I took to be nature essays, and anticipating something pleasantly neo-romantic and oh so English. Wrong. The only birds in the story are screeching, swooping, shitting gulls. The essays are about politics, contemporary society, and literary theory. And the novel takes a few potentially interesting characters only to mince them up in vaguely comic melodrama.
Nicholas Royle himself appears as a character in the story—or rather two characters, both with the same name. The elder of the two is a critic and literary theorist virtually identical to Royle himself, with the same list of publications. The other, slightly younger, is a novelist. You might say that the two Royles—different aspects of the one persona—share the authorship of this book. The first two hundred pages are a novel of sorts; the last third is a series of essays called "Hides," loosely connected by the metaphor of birds. The final Hide essay goes back to fill in the end of the novel.
The trouble is that Royle the novelist cannot leave Royle the pundit behind. Here is his character describing the kind of book he would like to write:
All right, I should know better than to judge a book by its cover. I picked this up in a bookshop in Edinburgh, charmed by its photo of birds, intrigued by the blurb's claim that this would combine fiction with what I took to be nature essays, and anticipating something pleasantly neo-romantic and oh so English. Wrong. The only birds in the story are screeching, swooping, shitting gulls. The essays are about politics, contemporary society, and literary theory. And the novel takes a few potentially interesting characters only to mince them up in vaguely comic melodrama.
Nicholas Royle himself appears as a character in the story—or rather two characters, both with the same name. The elder of the two is a critic and literary theorist virtually identical to Royle himself, with the same list of publications. The other, slightly younger, is a novelist. You might say that the two Royles—different aspects of the one persona—share the authorship of this book. The first two hundred pages are a novel of sorts; the last third is a series of essays called "Hides," loosely connected by the metaphor of birds. The final Hide essay goes back to fill in the end of the novel.
The trouble is that Royle the novelist cannot leave Royle the pundit behind. Here is his character describing the kind of book he would like to write:
If there's post-truth, there's post-fiction. I would like to write a post-fiction novel about love and death, spectrality and the poetics of extinction. I fantasize about a book that would be a new form of music, a transformed birdsong, a work of many voices—mixed sexes and identities in flight—a completely new species of literary psittacism.I know this is a character speaking, and suppose we are meant to laugh at him. But this is pretty much the novel that the real Nicholas Royle actually writes. The post-fiction element involves flying off on tangents at every opportunity, displaying his knowledge, or wit, or his views on contemporary life. He cannot describe a dinner without going into the history of all the dishes. He turns a ccocktail party into a collage of literary exotica. He even delays the action climax by a paragraph on climate change and coastline erosion. Had any chapter in this so-called novel been published alone in the New Yorker or London Review, I would have read it with interest, for Royle is knowledgeable, he is witty, and his views are worth hearing. But they do not make a novel, except perhaps for fellow academics.
September 4, 2017
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.
November 3, 2017
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.
June 30, 2018
Well - not quite - ik ben er gewoon in gestopt.
Doorzettingsvermogen is dan wel 1 van mijn kwaliteiten, maar trop is te veel!
In het boek heb je verschillende verhalen die met elkaar verbonden zijn, dan weer beschouwingen over de Engelse literatuur en meer fraais. Ik vind er geen lijn in.
Verder is er de verwikkeling van 2 auteurs met dezelfde naam én die auteurs hebben dan ook nog eens dezelfde naam als de echte auteur van dit boek - dus zijn dit dan 2 verschillende visies op zichzelf ? Dan is er Osmer, de jonge criticus die de andere 2 in hun hemd zet, is dat dan zelfkritiek? En dan is er nog het (wel mooie) verhaal van een koppel dat op pensioen gaat en die dan ineens deel uitmaken van het verhaal dat 1 van de twee auteurs heeft geschreven, met een onwaarschijnlijke afloop.
OK, er komen erg fraaie momenten voor in dit boek, maar echt, mijn geduld is op. De volgende hoofdstukken hoef ik niet meer te lezen. Het is eerder een oefening van wat er allemaal kan in de literatuur en dat dan in 1 boek gepropt - alles wordt uit de kast gehaald.
Mijn held Robert MacFarlane schreef op de achterflap dat hij "rather dizzied and thoroughly gulled" achterbleef - ik begrijp nu dat dit niet noodzakelijk positief bedoeld is.
Doorzettingsvermogen is dan wel 1 van mijn kwaliteiten, maar trop is te veel!
In het boek heb je verschillende verhalen die met elkaar verbonden zijn, dan weer beschouwingen over de Engelse literatuur en meer fraais. Ik vind er geen lijn in.
Verder is er de verwikkeling van 2 auteurs met dezelfde naam én die auteurs hebben dan ook nog eens dezelfde naam als de echte auteur van dit boek - dus zijn dit dan 2 verschillende visies op zichzelf ? Dan is er Osmer, de jonge criticus die de andere 2 in hun hemd zet, is dat dan zelfkritiek? En dan is er nog het (wel mooie) verhaal van een koppel dat op pensioen gaat en die dan ineens deel uitmaken van het verhaal dat 1 van de twee auteurs heeft geschreven, met een onwaarschijnlijke afloop.
OK, er komen erg fraaie momenten voor in dit boek, maar echt, mijn geduld is op. De volgende hoofdstukken hoef ik niet meer te lezen. Het is eerder een oefening van wat er allemaal kan in de literatuur en dat dan in 1 boek gepropt - alles wordt uit de kast gehaald.
Mijn held Robert MacFarlane schreef op de achterflap dat hij "rather dizzied and thoroughly gulled" achterbleef - ik begrijp nu dat dit niet noodzakelijk positief bedoeld is.
September 26, 2018
There are two parts to An English Guide to Birdwatching. The first is a really amusing story about the intersecting lives of a caretaker and a struggling literary genius. This is one of the funniest things I have read in quite a while and I was disappointed that it ended before the end of the book. It also expertly blends academic and narrative writing. The second section is more poetic though equally amusing, and involves many speculations about bird-themed topics.
June 10, 2017
Well done, the cover designer. I think this must be the first book I've ever bought just purely because I loved the cover. Without the little 'a novel' seagull poo blotch, I would have assumed it to be, just that, a birdwatching guide.
Fascinating, bewildering, bizarre and atmospheric, this book pulls the reader in many directions and challenges conventional style. As someone who spends quite a lot of time gawping at birds generally, I found the writing stayed with me and added to my musing over their beaked and feathered lives, particularly that of the herring gull.
The author weaves tales of birds, human stories (I particularly liked Ethel) political essays, poetic observation throughout the book. A thought-provoking and thoughtful work. The 'Hides' section was a book in itself: informative, surreal and touching - loved the transcript of an audio recording about birds in 'Hide' number No 13.
Fascinating, bewildering, bizarre and atmospheric, this book pulls the reader in many directions and challenges conventional style. As someone who spends quite a lot of time gawping at birds generally, I found the writing stayed with me and added to my musing over their beaked and feathered lives, particularly that of the herring gull.
The author weaves tales of birds, human stories (I particularly liked Ethel) political essays, poetic observation throughout the book. A thought-provoking and thoughtful work. The 'Hides' section was a book in itself: informative, surreal and touching - loved the transcript of an audio recording about birds in 'Hide' number No 13.
June 13, 2017
The first part of this book has flashes of brilliance weaved in amongst a tale that's trying to be a bit too clever for its own good. This verbosity was paletable because of the eventual payoff, which I very much enjoyed. It felt like it had been squished in though - there was so much more room for expansion, and I'd have preferred to find our more about the characters in the first half of the book than have had the Hides section included. It was meticiulously researched and incredibly well written, without a doubt, but it was a jarring distraction from Part One.
August 14, 2017
I would probably have rated it higher, but didn't like the Hides bit.
August 20, 2018
Anyone anticipating a type of manual on birdwatching from the title and cover of this book will be disappointed. As the bubble in the top right hand corner of the cover indicates, this is a novel, which is intriguing in more ways than one. We are first introduced to a retiring undertaker, Silas Woodlock, but the second chapter opens with a complete non sequitur, describing a sentence whose “final full-stop, gave Stephen Osmer such an access of pleasure that he died.” This leads one to suspect that the ‘English Guide’ of the title might actually be a guide to English itself. The suspicion is strengthened as we find out more about the brilliant young Dickens scholar and critic. His two published pieces of criticism are provided in full. The first one, Double Whammy, introduces us to the two Nicholas Royles, who are lambasted by the Osmer. Once I realized (a) that the author of the book is a Nicholas Royle, Professor at Sussex, and (b) that the other Nicholas Royle is also an author, I was not sure what to believe – fact, fiction or faction. And how did it matter?
The stories of the Woodlocks, who retire to Seaford, and Stephen Osmer come together at a party given by Nicholas Royle (Professor) at Seaford (where the author of this book also resides). This link is reinforced by birds, more specifically the gulls, who have tormented the Woodlocks and been the subject of Silas’ misappropriated essay. Whether the Nicholas Royle to whom the work has been attributed in the publication seen by Silas, is actually the Professor or the other Nicholas Royle remains unclear. It is what Silas believes and what leads to their untimely and rather far-fetched end. In fact, the deaths in this novel are rather gratuitous, but perhaps that is intentional.
The shorter second part of the book is more focused on birds, being divided into seventeen ‘hides’. The first one is a brilliant discussion of alternative understandings of the word and the confusion this leads to: “Listener A thinks hide refers to the act of concealing. Listener B thinks it is skin. Listener C, with a historian’s ear, hears in it the measure of land in ye Olde Englishtymes considered large enough to sustain a free family with its dependants. Listener D has no doubt but that it is the name of a hut or other screened-off location for the observation of birds.” Subsequent chapters would appear to reinforce the final interpretation as there is some activity with actual bird hides and even close observation of birds. But eventually we return to Stephen Osmer and the last fortnight of his life, which started at the fateful party in Seaford and ends with his awareness of the final article he will write and his death sealed in the flight of an ibis.
The stories of the Woodlocks, who retire to Seaford, and Stephen Osmer come together at a party given by Nicholas Royle (Professor) at Seaford (where the author of this book also resides). This link is reinforced by birds, more specifically the gulls, who have tormented the Woodlocks and been the subject of Silas’ misappropriated essay. Whether the Nicholas Royle to whom the work has been attributed in the publication seen by Silas, is actually the Professor or the other Nicholas Royle remains unclear. It is what Silas believes and what leads to their untimely and rather far-fetched end. In fact, the deaths in this novel are rather gratuitous, but perhaps that is intentional.
The shorter second part of the book is more focused on birds, being divided into seventeen ‘hides’. The first one is a brilliant discussion of alternative understandings of the word and the confusion this leads to: “Listener A thinks hide refers to the act of concealing. Listener B thinks it is skin. Listener C, with a historian’s ear, hears in it the measure of land in ye Olde Englishtymes considered large enough to sustain a free family with its dependants. Listener D has no doubt but that it is the name of a hut or other screened-off location for the observation of birds.” Subsequent chapters would appear to reinforce the final interpretation as there is some activity with actual bird hides and even close observation of birds. But eventually we return to Stephen Osmer and the last fortnight of his life, which started at the fateful party in Seaford and ends with his awareness of the final article he will write and his death sealed in the flight of an ibis.
August 20, 2017
Anyone expecting a guide of any sort to birdwatching is going to be disappointed or at least discombobulated by this book. It's a novel, though a strange novel, that at one point breaks down into a series of meditations on different types of bird hides.
Nicholas Royle is not only the name of the author but of two of the major characters in the novel, characters who of course get confused with each other throughout the course of events. The story revolves around a short story on the subject of Gulls, purported to be written by one of the Nicholas Royle characters and published in an anthology edited by the other Nicholas Royle character. In real life this is a story written by Nicholas Royle the author of this novel and published in an anthology edited by another Nicholas Royle, though in the novel it is claimed that it's been stolen from Silas Woodlock, who has retired to the seaside and taken up creative writing as a hobby and who is plagued by the local gulls.
Many well known people turn up briefly or are name checked in the story, which makes for an added sense of believability but may well make the book date faster than it otherwise would (who are all these people? we may well be asking ourselves in a few years time).
This is a confusing, hilarious and insightful book. It centres on birdwatching, the human relationship with birds and mistaken identities. It also addresses issues including immigration and climate change while indulging in a bewildering array of wordplay, which is sometimes exhilirating and sometimes irritating. It's the kind of book you either can't put down or end up throwing across the room in exasperation!
Nicholas Royle is not only the name of the author but of two of the major characters in the novel, characters who of course get confused with each other throughout the course of events. The story revolves around a short story on the subject of Gulls, purported to be written by one of the Nicholas Royle characters and published in an anthology edited by the other Nicholas Royle character. In real life this is a story written by Nicholas Royle the author of this novel and published in an anthology edited by another Nicholas Royle, though in the novel it is claimed that it's been stolen from Silas Woodlock, who has retired to the seaside and taken up creative writing as a hobby and who is plagued by the local gulls.
Many well known people turn up briefly or are name checked in the story, which makes for an added sense of believability but may well make the book date faster than it otherwise would (who are all these people? we may well be asking ourselves in a few years time).
This is a confusing, hilarious and insightful book. It centres on birdwatching, the human relationship with birds and mistaken identities. It also addresses issues including immigration and climate change while indulging in a bewildering array of wordplay, which is sometimes exhilirating and sometimes irritating. It's the kind of book you either can't put down or end up throwing across the room in exasperation!
January 26, 2021
And let us add a jizz to jazz”, I am now convinced the two Royles come from the same family of one. And the only reference, here at book’s end, to the novel proper is a reference to the Woodcock in Shakespeare. The Dickens reference to the “great explosion” in Seaford, notwithstanding. There is no gestalt-clinching hide or hindsight (can hindsight ever end?) to make this great novel an even greater novel, if that were possible. I would have appreciated some telling narration with the endgame of Steve Osmer. But there is nothing. What a disappointment. We are left up in the air.
And, at ‘best’, i-bis, i-jizz, the undertaker’s undertaking of hidden, hideous death’s last or first twitch.
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.
And, at ‘best’, i-bis, i-jizz, the undertaker’s undertaking of hidden, hideous death’s last or first twitch.
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.
did-not-finish
August 29, 2019This seems like something I might admire if in the right mood - heavily metafictional, playful use of language etc etc - but (perhaps because I somehow picked it up at Heathrow airport, when it is about as far as I can imagine from a typical airport novel) it required far more concentration than I was giving it. I decided to put it aside because there didn't seem much point in continuing to half-heartedly skim-read a book whose main attribute is its literary cleverness, which was mostly going right over my head.
January 17, 2026
I enjoyed most of the actual story but the hides part was unbelievably self indulgent and jarred. Skipped through as fast as possible. The wordplay throughout got old quickly. I’ve never played been so happy to move on to an unpretentious murder mystery to cleanse my book palate. Phew.
July 31, 2017
Some good bits but rather more 'look at me I'm Writing' bits. I wasn't sure what the second part was for - including lists and lists of things I skipped.
November 23, 2018
Strange book, some of it excellent, most of it very smart, but in the end the fragmentary nature of it left me a bit cold.
February 16, 2019
A random collection of stories and short essays on the theme of birds with some references to literature thrown in. Struggled to see the point of it.
April 10, 2019
I could kind of handle the first part, gave up on “The Hides” without feeling bad about it.
November 2, 2019
I enjoyed parts of this very much, but found the playing with form clunky and the long non-fiction sections tedious.
April 29, 2020
Strange, but a compelling read. It's not (quite) what you think from the title
January 3, 2018
the book is divided in two, part novel part essay. the novel was a good satisfying read, witty, opinative. lost myself a bit at the essay. filled with meaning, i'm sure, but for most of the times i couldn't quite grasp an understanding.
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