And the award goes to…

Graeme Hall Leave a comment

It’s that time of the year again. That lull between Christmas and New Year when news editors fall back on reviews of the year just gone and best-of lists to fill column inches. For myself, it’s an opportunity (or an excuse for self-indulgence) to look back over the concerts I’ve been to in the year, to see which ones I remember and which make me say “Did I really go to that? I don’t remember it at all.”

It was a pretty good year for those perennial favourites Mahler and Shostakovich, beginning in January with a memorable Mahler 2 in Manchester from the Hallé and their new principal conductor Kahchun Wong, while John Storgårds continued his exploration of Shostakovich with the BBC Philharmonic as well as giving us an exceptional Mahler 3 in June. Above all it was a good year for minimalists: Glass’ Satyagraha in Nice, a feast of John Adams in London, Berlin and Manchester, and Colin Currie rounding off the year with Steve Reich in Manchester.

Colin Currie brandishing the score of Steve Reich’s The Four Sections

But which concerts stand out the most? Let’s get the bad out of the way first.

Most Disappointing Concert of the Year

There are a few candidates for this raspberry. Nicholas Collon is a conductor I admire enormously, and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo is a fine orchestra, but their concert in April really didn’t work. On paper it was an excellent programme of Debussy, Poulenc and Bartok, but orchestra and conductor just didn’t gel. You could see it in the body language. Who knows why this sometimes happens, but it was a shame.

Still, that doesn’t take the crown. For that we have to look to the Proms. Perhaps it was my fault, perhaps I chose the wrong concerts, but of those that I went to only John Storgård’s semi-staged account of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District lived up to my expectations. The Arvo Pärt 90th birthday concert disappointed as well, though that may be simply that my expectations were too high, but the winner – insert sound of envelope being opened – was the Vienna Phil and Franz Welzer-Möst with Berg’s Lulu Suite and Bruckner 9. Beautifully played, of course, but oh so bland. Utterly unmemorable, but for the fact it was so disappointing.

Best Jazz of the Year

A new award this year, but it’s been a good twelve months for jazz. A couple of excellent evenings in London tacked on to visits to the Proms: Denys Baptiste led a McCoy Tyner tribute, and the Hungarian (but London-based) pianist Matyas Gayer was a discovery. Buxton may not seem an obvious jazz centre, but the Buxton Festival always has a jazz festival within, and Xhosa Cole playing Thelonius Monk was the highlight there.

But best of all was in Leeds. I’ve always wanted to hear Misha Mullov-Abbado live, but in the past whenever he’s been playing near to where I live, events have conspired against me. This time I was not to be defeated. His latest album Effra is stunning; contemporary in feel and yet with clear links to tradition. Leading his sextet from the bass like a modern Mingus or Ray Brown, it was a wonderful evening. And yes, that name: Mullov-Abbado. Perhaps being the son of violinist Viktoria Mullova and conductor Claudio Abbado he was always destined for a life in music, but he really is supremely talented in his own right.

Misha Mullov-Abbado and friends

Most Surprisingly Enjoyable Concert of the Year

This may seem a strange category, after all, why go to a concert if you don’t expect to enjoy it?

But some concerts exceed expectations, and this was the case with the Orchestra of Opera North in May at Huddersfield Town Hall. Their Huddersfield concerts are always a pleasure and they often have big-name soloists. The town hall is quite small as an orchestral venue, with the balcony wrapping itself around the stage, and the result is often a sense of intimacy that compensates for the challenge the orchestra often has trying to fit everyone on stage.

What was unusual about the May concert was that it concentrated on the core members of the orchestra. Generally, to play full-scale concert repertory they have to bring in a large number of extras, but for this programme of Prokofiev, Schumann, Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Haydn they weren’t needed. There wasn’t a conductor, with the orchestra being led from the first desk by Katie Stillman, and even the Schumann Cello Concerto was played by the principal cello, Jessica Burroughs.

Perhaps this reduced scale was a consequence of financial expediency, but the result was a tremendous sense of family and camaraderie. The players really enjoying themselves, playing for each other and showing what they could do. Ten out of ten.

Concert of the Year

Drum roll please. Time for the big reveal.

In any other year it would have to be the Berlin Philharmonic with Simon Rattle playing John Adams’ Harmonielehre. A visit to the Philharmonie had long been on my wishlist, and when a window of opportunity opened up in October I might have gone regardless of the music, but that they were playing one of my favourite pieces was an incredible stroke of good fortune and Rattle has always been an excellent advocate for Adams. It was interesting to contrast this performance with that of John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London who gave a terrific account at the Proms in 2024. Simplistically, with John Wilson there was more of an emphasis on the music’s American twentieth century credentials, with the Berliners, and in particular the depth of sound from their strings, the nineteenth century roots were more obvious.

But no, wonderful though that was, the Berliners are only runners-up.

Sleep

 I’ve written about it before so I won’t go on at length, but hearing Max Richter’s Sleep at Alexandra Palace at the beginning of September was something else. Memories that are still with me and will probably never leave. An experience unlike any other concert.

Reading the World: Books in Translation

Graeme Hall Leave a comment

Whenever we are spending time at our home in France I enjoy browsing the bookshops, and in Nice there are at least three good independents that I know of. Not that I buy many books when I’m there because my French isn’t really good enough. I can just about manage a crime novel if I’m prepared to take my time with it and have a dictionary to hand. Books with a lot of dialogue are easier for me than anything with long, convoluted sentences. Proust is a no-no.

But what always strikes me is the range of general fiction that is available in translation. Particularly books translated from English to French. And it’s not just the classics – Austen, Dickens and so on – but many recently published books, from contemporary literary fiction to more mainstream writers, and plenty of genre fiction: crime, SF/Fantasy, romance and YA. All this is laid out on tables for easy browsing, not hidden away in a special section on the third floor. I even have a friend in England whose first novel was published in its French translation before it came out in the UK.

This is a remarkable openness to foreign literature, all the more impressive (perhaps even surprising?) coming from a country that is justly proud – and indeed protective – of its own culture, and I wonder whether in the UK we have the same interest in writing from other languages? To a degree perhaps, certainly Murakami and Knausgaard are easy to find in Waterstones, but less celebrated writers? Genre writers? No doubt there are others that I’ve missed, but apart from the piles of increasingly derivative Scandi noir, I’m not so sure. Where is the French science fiction or the Portuguese crime?

If in the UK mainstream publishers and retailers hesitate to offer books in translation, what we do have instead are some excellent small indies that specialise in bringing the best writing from wherever to Anglophone readers. Pushkin Press and nordisk books (the lower case is not a typo) are two examples, but one that I would like to celebrate here is Peirene Press. Over the last few years, they’ve introduced me to novels by writers from Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Chile, Egypt, France, Sweden and Norway. You can buy their books individually, but what I appreciate is their subscription model where for a single annual payment I get three books a year. I don’t think I save much (if anything) this way, but what it means is that I read books I probably would never have considered buying normally.

I’ve just finished Imagine Breaking Everything (Imagina que rompes todo) by the Colombian writer Lina Munar Guevara, beautifully translated by Ellen Jones. Link here Peirene Press – award-winning independent publisher. This tells the story of the 18-year-old Melissa and a weekend she spends with her slightly estranged mother.  Melissa is hoping to graduate from high school and go to college (there are complications) and is such a well-written character. She is deeply flawed and prone to acts of violence – and we learn why, it’s not really her fault – but her honesty and self-awareness mean that we root for her nevertheless. She is also very funny. There is terrific writing from Lina Munar Guevara; one sentence in particular impressed me in the way that in a mere six words the reader is very cleverly told a key (and quite unexpected) plot point. I was left gasping in admiration for the skill with which that was done – but of course I can’t tell you more. Too much of a spoiler!

There’s nothing like literature to show you other people’s lives, we all know that, but it is even more the case with books in translation. Perhaps I don’t need to know what it is like to be a young woman in Bogotá and what daily life is like in a less than salubrious suburb, but my life is richer for having spent time in Melissa’s company.

I hope she did make it to college in the end.

Can (Good) Music Be Political?

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The Hallé Orchestra in Manchester has just finished a series of concerts with the American composer John Adams conducting his own music. I’ve loved his music since I first came across Shaker Loops back in the mid-1980s, to the extent that my girlfriend Isobel and I travelled all over the country if there was a chance of hearing something of his live, and his music was so little known in the UK back then that those performances were often UK premieres: Grand Pianola Music (1985) at the Almeida Festival, Harmonium (Birmingham, 1987),  Harmonielehre (Huddersfield, 1987), and Nixon in China in Edinburgh (1988). It was a special time for those of us in the know, a small group of admirers who were in on a secret. In short, I’m a fan.

So, I wasn’t going to miss these concerts and they didn’t disappoint. The performance of Harmonium on the first evening was particularly special, but it was the main item in the final concert, Scheherazade.2, that triggered a series of thoughts. It’s a magnificent piece of music; a 50 minute “dramatic symphony” (Adams’ words) for violin and orchestra, played with astonishing virtuosity and commitment by its original dedicatee, the Canadian-American Leila Josefowicz, but it acted as a seed around which a number of pre-existing worries crystallised. There is a clue in the title. While in no way (I think) intended as a criticism of Rimsky-Korsakov, Adams takes a very different approach to the character of Scheherazade and the piece reflects his views of how women are treated in the present-day, in particular – though not exclusively – in those (many) societies where women are repressed.

And all that is very laudable, not something I would dream of criticising, but did it in any way affect how I heard the music? If I hadn’t read the programme note or heard Adams’ pre-concert talk, would I have realised that was what the music was about? I very much doubt it. And will it change the position of women in Afghanistan? Of course not. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it enormously simply as a large-scale symphony-concerto full of drama, emotion, and colour, but as social activism? Perhaps I’m being unfair on Adams. His view of a modern-day Scheherazade may simply have been a starting point, and the brilliance of Leila Josefowicz was another, leading to what first and foremost is a wonderful piece of music, but in the pre-concert talk he spoke approvingly of today’s composers for whom the non-musical themes of their work are of critical importance, citing as examples John Luther Adams and Gabriella Smith who write music focussed on environmental issues.

And that’s where I have my concerns. I can’t comment on Gabriella Smith as I am not familiar with her music (I shall have to explore it), but for me John Luther Adams comes nowhere close to his near namesake in the quality and interest of the music itself, and no matter how praiseworthy a composer’s extra-musical intentions may be, if the ideas behind the music become more important than the music itself, then something is wrong. Adams spoke about composers for whom content was more important than style, and while it’s great that current composers don’t feel constrained to write in any one style, the content must still be primarily musical content that is interesting and memorable.

But can classical music (for want of a better term) ever function as both an art and effective activism? I have my doubts. I struggle to think of many successful examples. Mozart? Perhaps Figaro a little – we forget today how radical Beaumarchais’ play was. Beethoven? Perhaps Fidelio. The finale of the ninth, possibly. But that’s all. Brahms, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov? Hardly. In the twentieth-century what pieces are there that successfully tackle societal and political (in the broadest sense of that word) issues and which have lasted in the repertoire? Tippett’s A Child of Our Time, Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, Britten’s War Requiem, Shostakovich’s Babi Yar, Reich’s Different Trains? Perhaps there are others, but I don’t think there are many, and what these examples all share is that they have texts. (Looking at that list of pieces again, I also realise that four of the five works are a response to the consequencies of antisemitism, but that’s another topic for another day.)

As a writer and music lover I have a foot in both camps. I share Mahler’s view that music takes us to places that words alone cannot, and yet there are times also when words are necessary and the two work in combination. But even then, good motives are not enough to produce a great piece of music that will resonate over the decades.

On Silence

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I’ve been thinking a lot about silence lately.

Of course, as John Cage taught us, absolute silence does not exist so perhaps I need to define my terms, but silence as we commonly understand it, extreme quietness perhaps, seems to be something that most people appear anxious to avoid, almost as if they were afraid of it and feel the need to keep it at bay with empty talk, banalities that blanket the sound of time’s wing’d chariot. Restaurants – even the finest Michelin-starred establishments – play background music, train journeys are accompanied by the modern scourge of music from phones (I’ve even seen people doing that on country walks). On a recent trip to London one woman talked at (not to) her companion for three hours straight (and how did her friend feel about that?).

What is it that people are so afraid of? Their own thoughts? Do they equate, if only subconsciously, silence with emptiness? The void? The silence of the grave?

Fernand Knopff, Silence, 1890

I love silence, quietness at least, though I appreciate that this does nothing for my social life, and I am certainly no fun at parties. But silence gives space to reflect and consider, and it’s no surprise that most religious traditions recognise the value of time spent in silence. I love the way it comes in different guises, quite different from each other: the silence of late at night is the sound of the day’s energy dissipating, while the quiet of dawn – depending on the amount of birdsong! – is pregnant with possibilities. The silence of the new, the day as yet untarnished, not yet spoilt by the inanities of modern life.

It was Debussy who said that the music lies in the space between the notes. An elusive comment for sure, much like his music, but consider the tension that rests in the air between the final chords of Sibelius 5 – and the fact that they are irregularly spaced only adds to the effect – or countless examples where composers leave brief pauses. Think of a piece as well-known as the slow movement from Dvorak 9. Don’t simply listen for the famous tune, listen for the silences that are coloured by the notes that come before and after. The silence is never empty, but is shaped by what surrounds it. It is a positive absence of notes that makes it musical material in its own right.

Silence in literature is an even more complex – and paradoxical – issue than it is in music. Silence on the stage is a standard effect – Pinter being only the most famous – but how do we talk about silence in novels? Characters may be silent, and silence (hesitations, ellipses) can be a key part of writing good dialogue – and what a character doesn’t say is often more important than what they do – but can fiction itself be silent, and not merely quiet as in understated? The French writer Pascal Quignard says that “The book is a piece of silence in the hands of the reader.” I like that. I also like Graham Swift’s echo of Debussy when he wrote that “the spaces between and around words can have their unspoken resonances”. I feel sure I’m going to come back to this.

So, a plea for more silence – or at least quiet – in the world. Enjoy the aesthetic qualities of silence itself and how it is shaped by and shapes in return the world around it.

And remember Wittgenstein: whereof we cannot speak, we must be silent.

Sleep (Revisited)

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Five years ago I wrote about Max Richter’s eight-hour piece Sleep. It was being broadcast on Radio 3 and I’d taken the opportunity to listen to it through the night (in the spare room for the sake of marital harmony). I never imagined back then that I would have the chance to experience Sleep live, but finally last month I did, when Richter gave two performances in London’s Alexandra Palace to celebrate Sleep’s tenth anniversary.

I didn’t hesitate. Well, not quite, once I’d got over the shock of the ticket prices that offended my Yorkshire sensibility, I didn’t hesitate, after all would I ever get the chance again? It is such a challenge for the performers that I wonder for how many more years Richter will want to do it. A month later and I am still processing the experience, quite unlike anything else I have ever been to. What strikes me, though, is that looking back on what I said five years ago I would say much the same thing now, though all my emotions were stronger for being at a live performance.

For a start there is the sheer magic of the music; the heart is captured from the first piano chords, while Grace Davidson’s soprano is a thing of wonderous beauty. The time flows so quickly. I didn’t sleep – though many did – but I never wanted to. I wanted to experience the piece in its entirety. Ideally, the perfect way to do so would be to get into that liminal stage between sleep and wakefulness. Perhaps I managed that for a few hours between 1am and 4am when I experienced something quite remarkable: I felt an overwhelming, almost relgious, sense of love. It was as if the music itself was holding me in an embrace where nothing bad could possibly happen.

For the final hour or so I wanted not only to be awake but to leave my bed and join others who were standing and sitting close to the performers. All live music is a communal experience that you share with others, but there is something special about sharing the music with strangers you have spent the night with! There is something again almost religious, a secular all-night vigil, the sense of a journey coming to an end. Max Richter spoke a few words before the performance concluding by saying simply “See you on the other side”, and that is how it felt. We had passed through the perils and dangers of the night together.

At 6am I walked out into the daylight and a beautiful late summer morning with the sun just starting to strike the City. For once, for one short period of time,all was incredibly well with the world.

Ghosts

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Nick-D, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

There are ghosts in Hong Kong and we walk among them whether we realise it or not. These are not the spirits of the Hungry Ghost Festival beloved by the tourist board, recipients of burnt offerings bought from the shops in Western. These are different ghosts and memories that are being quietly forgotten by the simple expedient of not being spoken about. We pass by and never see them. Unless we stop and look, take a moment to remember, they remain invisible. 

There are ghosts in the hills above Tsuen Wan, but If you’re hiking the full 100 kilometres of the Maclehose Trail, then by the time you reach the remains of the Gin Drinker’s Line you’re hardly in a condition to pay much attention to a concrete tunnel entrance, even one with the unlikely name of Haymarket or Regent Street neatly carved into the stone lintel. There’s even a Shaftesbury Avenue but don’t expect the bright lights and theatres of the West End. By that point you will have been hiking for hours, and unless it’s winter you’ll have been feeling the heat and high humidity as you deal with Needle Hill and the climb over Tai Mo Shan. You’ll be far more concerned with the blisters and chafing to be bothered with what remains of an attempt at replicating the Maginot line and one that proved to be just as unsuccessful. 

The ghosts are also there when you take a Sunday stroll through Pokfulam Country Park and watch children playing on the old gun mountings. They are present in multitudes if you take a short detour off Shek O Road to the Sai Wan war cemetery – but who does that on a hot summer’s day when the beach beckons or you’re planning to go surfing at Big Wave Bay? And when the minibus is on the final stretch into Shek O itself, do people see the spectres that are said to haunt the country club? 

But above all there’s the single ghost who sleeps outside St John’s Cathedral. On weekdays office workers pass by oblivious to him. On Saturdays everybody heads for the shopping malls of Central, while on Sunday worshippers pay him no attention and Filipina maids spend their one day off picnicking nearby. He’s been there so long he no longer registers. 

Ronald (Roy) Douglas Maxwell was 22 when he was killed on December 23, 1941 – and his is the only grave in the Cathedral grounds, shaded from the summer heat by a tree; a simple gravestone surrounded by a low chain. The story goes that he was buried in a foxhole that had been dug in Cathedral grounds. During the occupation the Cathedral was trashed and used as a club for Japanese officers – but were they being watched all the time by Roy’s ghost? Perhaps he was spying on them. Or perhaps his very presence was the bad fung shui that three and a half years later brought an end to the occupation. They never knew they were doomed from the start; Roy’s final act of defiance against the invader was to haunt them until they were gone in ignominy. And to him they were an invader of his home. 

These days it is fashionable to paint the picture that the likes of Roy Maxwell were colonial imperialists, but he was born in Hong Kong. Eurasian with a British father and Chinese mother, he was just one of many like him who died in December 1941 and whose allegiance was to Hong Kong. But in 2024 where a new patriotism is everything, is it still possible to remember Roy and his comrades? Those who gave their lives for the place where they were born? Are we allowed to honour them or are they being quietly forgotten? 

Twenty-four years ago I was married in St.John’s and there are photographs of that hot sunny June day taken outside the Cathedral. The obligatory formulae: Happy couple with bride’s family, happy couple with groom’s family. With friends, with everyone. Do any of the photographs include Roy Maxwell? Is there a shadow in the background perhaps? I’d like to think so. I’d like to think that he has shared in all the joy and sadness that the Cathedral has seen since the day he was laid to rest. 

We forget our history by not talking about it. To be silenced, to not be spoken of, is a second death. There are still ghosts in Hong Kong and we should remember them. 

An old love revisited

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They say you should never go back. Never revisit old haunts or imagine that you could rekindle the flames of a past love. They won’t be the same and as we all know the past is a foreign country. Does the same apply to books? Is it safe to re-read something that was a favourite over 40 years ago but you haven’t read since?

I read a lot of Alistair MacLean when I was a teenager. I couldn’t get enough of them, though even in my youth I think I recognised that his novels became increasingly formulaic. They were fun for a holiday read, and some of them made great movies of course, but that was all and I rarely read any of them more than once. The one major exception to this was his first novel, HMS Ulysses, which tells the story of an Arctic convoy taking arms and supplies to Murmansk and was based on MacLean’s own wartime experiences.

As a boy I adored the book, so it was with some trepidation that I recently bought a copy and read it for the first time since…well, let’s just say many years. My main reason was research. In my current WIP, which is set a few years after the war, a central character had served in the Arctic convoys, but I was also curious as to whether the book would live up to my memory of it. And does it? The short answer is yes, but perhaps with a couple of caveats.

The Cruel Sea may be more famous, if only because of the film, and is perhaps more literary, but MacLean is ruthless in giving us the horrors of serving in the Arctic convoys. There are countless examples but none more terrible than when Captain Vallery has to take the Ulysses directly through a patch of sea that is full of survivors from a ship that has just been torpedoed. The fact that he is giving them a mercifully quick death is scant consolation either to him or the reader. There is no light in the novel, and any humour is definitely of the gallows-kind. By the end of the book the Ulysses has been sunk and all but one of the central characters are dead. Reading HMS Ulysses now, with a more writerly eye, I can see that it is unusual in many ways. At times it reads almost like non-fiction (there are even a few footnotes!) and I struggle to see any of the structural forms that we are told a good novel should have: Where is the three act structure? Where is the inciting incident? Occasionally the handling of point of view is not quite as clear as it could be. But this just serves to remind us that rules are only there to be broken, at least when it is right to do so. Instead we follow the progressive disasters that befall the Ulysses and the response of the crew to them, which is told with a sympathetic eye but without sentimentality.

Perhaps some of the minor characters are a little two-dimensional, and there’s a fair bit of nautical jargon that a modern reader either has to look up or simply gloss over, but its central theme of duty, loyalty and service – not to the country or any political ideology, but to each other as human beings – rings loud and clear. So, yes, my affection for what is a remarkable novel remains strong.

Which is a relief.

Farewell to an era

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There’s a line in Robert Altman’s movie “A Prairie Home Companion” where Virginia Madsen – playing the angel Asphodel dressed in a white trench-coat – comforts a bereaved woman by reminding her that the death of an old man is not a tragedy.

I had to remind myself of those words last week with the death of Harrison Birtwistle. He was 87 and after a rich and fulfilling life his death was not a tragedy, and yet it seemed one to me. I felt as if a huge figure in my life had gone. His music was amongst the first that I came to know when I started exploring the world of contemporary music back in the late 1970s early 80s: Verses for Ensembles, Punch & Judy, The Triumph of Time and perhaps above all The Mask of Orpheus (how I adore that opera and how I hated the 2019 ENO production). Others can express better than I can the combination of intellectual rigour coupled with a physicality, a visceral quality that was all his own and yet with a lyrical aspect that was all too often overlooked.

But perhaps what hits home the most is that his death in many ways feels like the end of an era. Norman Lebrecht referred to “the death of Britain’s last great composer”, and while I am sure he was as usual being deliberately provocative, and I hope that he is wrong, there is a glimmer of truth in this and it’s not just in the UK. Birtwistle was of the generation that gave us Boulez, Ligeti, Xenakis and Berio, all now gone. I love the likes of Glass, Reich, Adams and Pärt, but let’s face it, they’re no spring chickens. I hope that it’s not just my advancing years speaking when I say that I don’t find their counterparts among today’s composers, talented though they may be. There are plenty of people writing fluent, enjoyable music, but few with any strong sense of identity and with such a strong personal voice.

I worry. I worry that this is a reflection of today’s world where there seems to be a reaction against high art, where elite is a dirty concept and shallow ideas rule over depth and intellect. So, I worry, but in the meantime all I can do is to enjoy the legacy that Birtwistle left for us.

A(nother) Black Day

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The news today that in Hong Kong 47 pro-democracy politicians are to be charged with conspiracy to subvert state power is deeply depressing. Their crime? Organising and participating in primaries to identify the candidates with the best chance of winning seats in an upcoming election to the Legislative Council. An election that in any event never took place, with Covid used as a smokescreen. Just when you think that things can’t get any worse in Hong Kong, somehow they do.

When I started writing On Borrowed Time back in 2015, I knew that the future of Hong Kong was something that I wanted to address. The novel is set at the time of the transfer of Hong Kong to China and I couldn’t ignore the anxieties and concerns that people had back then. For those of us with foreign passports perhaps it wasn’t such an issue, but even we spoke with an uncertain confidence of the future. Locals ranged from those who were happy to serve their new masters as they had been the British – notwithstanding that many were from families who had fled Communist China in the 1950s and 60s – to those who made sure they had their potential escape routes mapped out with Canadian and Australian passports. In between the vast majority just had to get on with life and hope for the best.

The characters in On Borrowed Time reflect those concerns: Sam, the lawyer, confident that business will continue, Alice’s family unsure whether to stay or move to Vancouver, Kelvin anxious to protect the Hong Kong he loves. But did any of them guess just how badly things would turn out? I doubt it – certainly their creator didn’t – and yet so many of the things I included in the book as fiction are now fact:

Denial of work visas as a political weapon.                            

Chinese security agents operating freely in Hong Kong.             

Covert surveillance through tapping phones of general public.

Intimidation of journalists.

But in my wildest dreams I never imagined that identifying the best candidates to run in what was already a flawed election to a flawed legislature would be an illegal act.

My seventeen years in Hong Kong gave me a deep love for the city and its people. It is a city that I owe so much to, and at the risk of sounding overly sentimental there will always be a place for it in my heart. But my love for Hong Kong means that the pain I feel at the moment is all the deeper.

Stories and Places

Graeme Hall 2 Comments

In all my writing I usually have a strong image in my head of the physical setting for the story. Whether that comes over to the reader is not for me to say, but nowhere is it more true than in my Macau short stories. Take for example A Short History of Chinese Tea. The family of my narrator – Lei-Wai – have fallen on somewhat reduced circumstances, I wonder where they lived? Somewhere like this perhaps? Somewhere a little rundown? A house that like the family has seen better times?

Old Portuguese Houses

When she marries it is into money, so a grander home. Perhaps not quite as grand as this, but the restored Casa do Mandarim gives some idea of the sort of style of house she may have moved to.

 

At the end of the story she has a tea-shop. The Long Wa Tea House is a famous place for dim sum in Macau and Lei-Wai’s would have been smaller than this, but similar in appearance and style. The perfect setting for mahjong and gossip.

Long Wa Tea House

You can see/hear me read A Short History of Chinese Tea courtesy of the Fly on the Wall Press YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_kpe10jGHk&t)  or better still buy my collection The Goddess of Macau coming from Fly on the Wall in August.