Saturday 18th April 2015.

Revising one essay while starting the research on another. I’m rather looking forward to the time when I don’t have to think about essays (May 8th). And indeed when this diary won’t be such a strain to write, because I’ll finally manage to do other things, rather than sit and stare at books and screens quite so often. And yet I look around on Tube trains and in cafes and so much daily life is just that: people staring at books (or newspapers) and screens.

* * *

Sunday 19th April 2015.

Bump into some fellow BA English students near the main library, and relish the chance to join them for some food at Leon on Tottenham Court Road. One is doing his dissertation on Roberto Bolano. As a result he’s had to study Bolano’s novel 2666, an absolute doorstopper at over a thousand pages long. ‘It is good, though’.

* * *

Monday 20th April 2015.

In the British Library. Busy in the café areas, but I still have no trouble finding an empty desk in the Rare Books reading room. Possibly because I always use the designated pencil and paper-only area, where laptops are banned. I’m not much of a regular, but two staffers recognise me. When it comes to my turn at the issue desk, I am greeted with a cheery ‘Mr Edwards’!

* * *

Tuesday 21st April 2015.

The penultimate class for the USA culture module. The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Tutor: Anna Hartnell. Classroom: G01, in the knocked-through labyrinth of 43 Gordon Square. My last class in the building, in fact. More students turn up than Anna expects – after all, it’s the time of year when students have a swamp of deadlines and revision. But a healthy amount arrive, keen perhaps, like me, to add some structure to an otherwise vague timetable. McCarthy’s subtle tricks impress: the careful elision of apostrophes for some words, but not others, the avoidance of brand names in a post-apocalyptic America, except for two mentions of Coca-Cola. I was going to watch the film version after reading the book, but I couldn’t face going through such a grim story all over again.

* * *

Wednesday 22nd April 2015.

Astonished myself by cramming in more work than usual. Finished and delivered the penultimate essay (the post-9/11 meaning of masks in The Dark Knight and In The Shadow of No Towers), finished the last set text (Toni Morrison’s Home), sent off the MA application, wrote a draft supporting statement for the bursaries, and went to the last seminar for the post-war module. Ian McEwan’s First Love Last Rites, plus a short story, ‘Running Down’, by M John Harrison. Roger Luckhurst is quite scathing about later McEwan books, but praises the earlier, creepier fiction to the hilt. He also gives the course a general summing-up, arguing that there is no such thing as a post-WW2 canon of literature. No definitive and essential authors, like Dickens or Shakespeare are for their eras. He reminds us that Brideshead Revisited is still a controversial choice: many tutors won’t touch it. And yet it’s popular with the students, and from all backgrounds too. What the naysayers of Brideshead overlook is that, despite all the snobbery and wistful idealisation, it has two of the best characters in twentieth century literature: Sebastian Flyte and Anthony Blanche. All else can be forgiven.

* * *

Friday 24th April 2015.

To the Phoenix cinema in East Finchley for The Falling, the new film by Carol Morley. I loved her very original documentaries, The Alcohol Years and Dreams of A Life, and was curious to see what she would do with a fictional narrative. As per those two earlier films this one has the theme of wary, detached and mysterious girls, out of step with the world. In The Alcohol Years the mysterious girl was Ms Morley’s own younger self – she couldn’t remember her club-going past. Dreams of A Life told the sad story of an amateur singer who died alone in a North London flat – not so far from here – and no one even noticed she was missing for years.

The Falling is inspired by real accounts of unexplained mass faintings at girls’ schools, but here it’s entwined with metaphors for budding sexuality and the defiance of adults. It’s also an impressionistic art piece, covering the inherent surrealism of the teenage condition, and depicting the way intense friendships are made all the more intense by a single-sex environment. On top of that, it’s set in the 1960s, so there’s a sense of the whole world being on the cusp of change, albeit in the background. The atmosphere of the film is oneiric, hallucinogenic, and often puzzling. I know Maisie Williams is already a star from Game of Thrones, but this film puts her striking presence to proper use – with her thick eyebrows and owlish little face, she can be at turns witchy or ordinary, but always magnetic. Florence Pugh, her blonde best friend, has a very 60s face, like a teenage Shirley Eaton.

The Falling’s aesthetic influences are clear: Picnic At Hanging Rock (especially on the film poster – vintage schoolgirls in an outdoor drawing class), If…., Heavenly Creatures, The Virgin Suicides and possibly Jonathan Miller’s 1960s Alice In Wonderland (all favourites of mine). But as the film goes on it feels a lot more personal and unique. Full of images that linger in the mind afterwards. And a strong example of that rare thing in cinema – the female gaze. Not just the director, but all the assistant directors and much of the production crew are female.

* * *

Today’s good news is that Birkbeck have offered me a place on their MA course in Contemporary Literature & Culture. Barely two days after I sent off the application, too – my referees must have been prompt. I’ve accepted, in a pencilling-in sort of way, as it’s conditional on my getting at least a 2.2 on the BA (the result due in mid-July). And then there’s the rather trickier matter of getting funding for the fees: something I’m currently working on.

But for now, it’s back to the BA for two more weeks, with an essay on Angela Carter. I’m discussing The Passion of New Eve, along with her somewhat less examined radio play on Firbank, A Self-Made Man. Always with one eye on the gap on the bookshelf. And yet my best essay was for The Picture of Dorian Gray. No shortage of writing about that! Somehow I still found something new to say.

This is something I must remember, really, for the next time I worry that a subject has been done to death. A subject, perhaps. Your own take, never. The secret is so simple. Nerve.

Tags: birkbeck, carol morley, cormac mccarthy, ian mcewan, the falling, the road