Der Mann, der den Regen träumt is published in Germany in January and script5, the book’s publishers, have put together this neat little trailer.
W F Howes have just released an audio book version of The Man who Rained, read by actress Laurel Lefkow. I think she reads it beautifully, but I guess I’m biased.
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Coinciding with this is a large-print edition of the novel. You can find all the details of both versions at W F Howes’ site.
His body was as smooth as a weathered pebble on the sea shore. He had very little complexion: he was not so much a white man as a grey one. He had a flat pair of buttocks and skin as hairless as that of his head.
He stood on the ridge between her viewpoint and the sun. His tall body was an eclipse and the light was a corona behind it. He spread his arms in a pose of dejected surrender.
Then, very gradually, he began to dissolve.
Like chalk washed into a blur by the rain, his outline began to distort, and almost imperceptibly he lost his form. One minute he was a man and the next he was a blurry grey silhouette. His skin became a coat of mist. The sun shining from behind him lit him up and edged him with its brilliance, wherein he stopped looking man-shaped and instead resembled a cloud formed by chance into the posture of a human being.
He broke up. His head caved in, becoming nothing more than a dented sphere of fog. His chest tore apart and the blue sky and bright sun shone through the place where his heart should have been. He disintegrated, every second less like a man and more like a cloud.
- from The Man who Rained by Ali Shaw
I love writing about landscapes. I’m probably guilty of finding them far more interesting to write about, at times, than human beings. That’s because I think so much of humanity is defined by the natural world we emerged from (and I include the weather as a part of that). For so many thousands of years we depended so crucially on the land, on the fertile earth and the just-right ratio between sunshine and showers, that the behaviour of the landscape dictated the terms of our culture. I bet you could root everything that we do and are in the way the Earth behaved back in the day. Landscapes are a mirror held up to humanity, which may explain our tendency to romanticise them, to take comfort in the idea that there is a wild country out there to which we might one day retreat and in which we might be better connected to ourselves. It could also explain part of the affront we feel when a landscape is bulldozed or sliced in half by a new motorway or rail link.
I like writing that reflects these notions by making the landscape something or someone who gets involved in the lives of those who inhabit it. Likewise in the ‘real world’ (I hate that term but there are few alternatives for what it implies) … Likewise in the world of sticks and stones, some landscapes lend themselves so well to personification that they become distinct characters. Mountains are good examples, named and ascribed with personalities that reflect their nature. A mountain of sun-bathed sloping meadows where sheep graze and crops grow is a gentle giant. Conversely, a collossal tor atop which the stormclouds muster and down whose flinty slopes the flash floods race is a menacing behemoth who’d like nothing better than to snuff out the little beings who dwell beneath its shadow.
I try to save up and collect pictures of landscapes that appear to me so rich in character that I can imagine them rising up to walk the horizons when everybody else is tucked safely in bed. While I was writing The Man who Rained I filled my pinboard with Turner’s landscape paintings. I bought a hefty catalogue of his work and filled a notebook trying to describe his mountains and his skies in prose. Much of the descriptive writing in the novel originated in such scribbling. They call Turner the painter of light but he’s as much for me the painter of the air itself, for wherever he paints a mountain he paints a haze or formative cloud, or a full-blown Biblical torrent smashing its way to the foreground.
I had vague intentions of posting various other images and photos saved up during the writing process. The internet is a great source for creating virtual scrapbooks to reference when stuck for words. But rather than include those I’ll just link to the below video, which came out when I was finishing up the novel’s final edit and which tours rather breath-takingly the sort of places I was aiming to describe.
I Break Horses – Hearts from Bella Union on Vimeo.
She opened her eyes. The headlights shimmered across nests of boulders and trunks of stone on either side. No grass, only slates splitting under the weight of the car, each time with a noise like a handclap. Eyes closing, opening. The clock moved on in leaps, not ticks. Either side of the road were trees bent so close to the earth they were barely the height of the car, growing almost parallel to the shingly ground. A wind whistled higher than the engine noise.
‘Awake again,’ said Kenneth jovially. But she was asleep once more.
Awake again. The moon lonely in a starless sky. Swollen night clouds crowded around it. And beneath those the silhouettes of other giants.
‘Mountains,’ she whispered.
‘Yes,’ said Kenneth with reverence. ‘Mountains.’
Even at this distance, and although they looked as flat as black paper, she had a sense of their bulk and grandeur. They lifted the horizon into the night sky. Each had its own shape: one curved as perfectly as an upturned bowl, one had a dented summit, and another a craggy legion of peaks like the outline of a crown.
She lost sight of them as the car turned down an anonymous track. The only signpost she had seen in these last few awakenings was a rusting frame with its board punched out, an empty direction to nowhere.
They had followed that signpost.
- from The Man who Rained by Ali Shaw
We think of ourselves as land animals, but in truth the air is our element. We live on the seabed of a gaseous ocean, and just because the air we inhabit is invisible to us that does not mean it does not exist. What is invisible to us is so often what is most important. While writing this book I have come to think of the air as something reassuringly connective. Something that links me to you, as it does you to everyone you know. We are all submerged in it and drawing upon it together. The air in your lungs becomes the air in your blood, in your heart. As long as you remain alive and breathing, a part of you is always air.
We think of the clouds as distinct objects floating in empty space backdropped by blue, but in truth they are just patches of air that have lost their invisibility. They are a heavy sort of air more susceptible to gravity. They are the patternation of the thing we are breathing and we can breathe them on mountaintops or on foggy or misty days. Then the air we are breathing is cloud and because the air we breathe becomes a part of us we are part cloud too.
In books and films the weather has always been part human, raining in sympathy with characters who are down, raging during wars and ordeals, letting rip the feelgood fuzzy sunshine when the happy ending comes to pass. At some point a few years ago I began to wonder what it would be like if the weather really did come to life, becoming flesh and blood in various forms.
These are some drawings I made while writing The Man who Rained. They’re studies of Finn Munro, who is the titular character. He is, of course, part weather, perhaps all weather, although you’ll have to read it to determine for yourself his exact complexion.
I love this time of year. Mistletoe and wine (and port, of course, and brandy and mulled ale if you can), and trying to grab an hour to read beside the Christmas tree. I enjoy the retrospectives that appear in the press, the closing year’s events considered at a pace there’s no time for during the preceding fifty one weeks. That said, it’s tricky for me to be retrospective this particular year, with The Man who Rained published on the 1st January. It’s nerve-wracking, to say the least. I’ve just got back from some last minute Christmas shopping, from weaving through the long queues at the butcher’s door and the cheesemonger’s, and while out I spotted it already on the shelves, which was an experience just as surreal and rewarding as first seeing The Girl with Glass Feet there.
Above are some drawings to accompany those first glimpses of the novel. I drew a lot of black-and-white mountains and smudgy skies while I wrote it, and will post more over the next few weeks. In the meantime I hope you have a marvellous Christmas this year. If you don’t celebrate Christmas, I hope you have a recuperative holiday. Either way, may 2012 bring you magic and gladness.
Regular readers may have noticed that I haven’t talked a great deal about my novels here. There isn’t a lot, if I’m honest, that I feel it’s helpful to say about them beyond what you’ll find between the front and back covers of the books themselves. I can’t add to or qualify the prose, and I don’t think that anything supplementary I write can enhance the experience of reading them. Hence I prefer to talk about the things I enjoy or that inspire me, in the hope that those who enjoy my writing might enjoy them too. In the hope that the act of compiling such enjoyments sheds light on my writing in some abstracted way.
The Man who Rained will be published in a little over a fortnight and I want to mark that publication here on the blog. At the same time, in keeping with the above, I don’t have a lot to say that isn’t said by the story itself. So I plan to post some of the things I drew around the time I wrote it, some of the things I learned about Cumulonimbus, some of the footage I watched of the weather overturning the world, some of the things that I read about the clouds and the atmosphere and the eerie old legends of thunder beasts and animals that vanish in a shimmer of rain.
The book is about the weather coming to life. Or about when people come apart into something like weather. I see it as a sort of sister book to The Girl with Glass Feet, but there I go talking about it like I said I shouldn’t. It’s better that you decide what it’s about, if you decide it is indeed about anything. Reading about lightning bolts made me want to write it. I thought they worked much like people do when they’re looking for love…
Hello folks, and apologies for the recent radio silence. I go through phases where I feel terribly old fashioned about the Internet and want to do all things with pen and paper, and perhaps a graphite stick or two. I’m writing my third novel at the moment and it’s all being done in scruffy notebooks with green ink. I can barely read my own handwriting, so it’s going to be a devil to type up, but more on that in the far future.
It’s time, I think, to spill some of the beans on The Man Who Rained. Last week I sent back the proofs to the publisher, which means that I’ve made my final set of tweaks and my work on it is done. As we get nearer the release date (January 1st), I’ll have lots more to share with you. For now, here’s the splendid cover design by Rose Cooper, and beneath it the blurb from the back cover.
From the Desmond Elliott prize-winning author of The Girl with Glass Feet comes another magical novel of love, discovery and nature.
When Elsa’s father is killed in a tornado, all she wants is to escape – from New York, her job, her boyfriend – to somewhere new, anonymous, set apart.
For some years she has been haunted by a sight once seen from an aeroplane: a tiny, isolated settlement called Thunderstown. Thunderstown has received many a pilgrim, and young Elsa becomes its latest – drawn to this weather-ravaged backwater, this place rendered otherworldly by the superstitions of its denizens.
In Thunderstown, they say, the weather can come to life and when Elsa meets Finn Munro, an outcast living in the mountains above the town, she wonders whether she has witnessed just that. For Finn has an incredible secret: he has a thunderstorm inside of him. Not everyone in town wants happiness for Elsa and Finn. As events turn against them, can they weather the tempest – can they survive at all?
The Man Who Rained is a work of lyrical, mercurial magic and imagination, a modern-day fable about the elements of love.
I’ve been asked more times than I can count to describe what genre I write in. Sometimes I have a go at answering. ‘I don’t know,’ I say, ‘my book’s about a girl who’s turning into glass.’ The truth is, though, as I discovered on Friday when I finished writing my new novel, that it’s travel writing. The only difference is that the place I went to doesn’t actually exist. I stayed there for a few years and met many of the people who live and love there, but they don’t exist either. Still, I had an interesting time with them. A few of them turned out to be really horrible, but the rest were good-natured, even if they sometimes had a peculiar way of showing it.
The point is that finishing a novel feels like coming back from a long trip overseas. It’s a trip from which you’re pleased to have returned, because of the sense of completion it lends to the experience, but also slightly disappointed to be back from, since the act of returning makes the being there feel so distant. And will anyone believe in or even care to hear about the things that you did? Only time will tell.
There is some final editing left to do, but that’s just the preparation of the field notes. The visit is over and I won’t go back. What a strange and irrational act of the imagination. Which, of course, is the whole joy and point of it.
The Man who Rained will be on the bookshelves some time this winter. In the meantime here’s a sort of teaser, from my sketchbook.
