About five years ago, on my way back across the Sahara from Senegal, I stopped for a few days in a small town named Sidi Ifni in southern Morocco: a Spanish enclave until 1969, pressed between the Anti-Atlas Mountains and the Atlantic, with a heart of glorious 1930s Art Deco architecture. Although I have always insisted that I am constitutionally unable to write anywhere other than a Welsh hillside, it seemed to me at the time that if I were ever to try and write anywhere else then this would be the place. April, then, has been spent in Morocco – largely in a hotel in central Sidi Ifni named Ere Nouvelle, which costs £2 a night for a nice little room with a double bed, a chair, table and moped maintenance shop two floors down and on the far side of the street. Rather like being cool (on which I am as much an authority these days as I ever was), writing often hangs on a mood, a type of self-perception. ‘Romantic’ notions may or may not be a load of piffle, but they work a trick when it comes streams of jubilant words, and few places get more romantic than this beautiful, dirty, crumbling little town with its Arab/ Berber culture doused freely in Spanish, French, Touareg and Senegalese influences. I had a dream last night that I lived in Suffolk, not Wales, and woke up feeling utterly depressed. There is an Art Deco lighthouse in Sidi Ifni, perched on the cliff, framed by grubby white buildings with porthole windows and groovy sweeping 1930s lines. On the roof is a weathervane cut with the numbers ‘1949’. This is, I think, the only place I could imagine living which could probably trump anywhere in Wales:

Among Sidi Ifni’s great strengths is that it brings the sea and the mountains together. The cactus-covered slopes behind the town are great for wandering and generally sitting on, but best of all is the beach at low tide, which stretches north for miles towards the village of Legzira between great red arch-cut cliffs and Atlantic swell smashing against the rocks.

Some days in total I have spent over the past few weeks, marching back and forth here, talking to myself and making great strides into THE RED JACKET, which is evolving apace and will almost certainly not be called THE RED JACKET for very much longer. On Saturday, I was walking as normal, pausing occasionally to exchange the time of day in French or my feeble attempts at Arabic, when a small bedraggled man accosted me and began to try and shoo me towards the sea. I did my best to remain amiable. Coming the same way again the next day I found the entire cliff collapsed, a massive cascade of rocks and rubble enveloping the beach where I had been standing. There is a moral here, I am sure. At any rate, thanks to Sidi Ifni I have learnt that Berber music (cf. Inik Inik from Tiznit) and Moroccan hip-hop (cf. Fnayre from Casablanca) are superb, that I can write with great joy and pleasure somewhere other than Wales, even if someone is revving a moped outside the window, that small bedraggled men should be given due respect, that the wiser traveller visits Sidi Ifni and that the central image in TRJ is not a jacket at all but the deeply unsettling face in Llananno Church near Llandrindod Wells that I mentioned on this blog a few months ago, with its three eyes, two noses and two mouths:

(Here, the last of the three books I rate above all others…)

THE STONE BOOK QUARTET (1979), by Alan Garner.

Of all the books I’ve read in the past couple of years, the only one I’ve re-read without even leaving my chair is The Stone Book Quartet. I rediscovered Garner four or five years ago, in a Hay-on-Wye bookshop. As a child, I remember teachers and other such sensible persons insisting that The Owl Service, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen et al were childrens’ classics – a view we children seemed to echo more than feel. Garner himself insists that he never set out to write for children, that’s just the way the books are marketed, but having read The Owl Service again recently it is no wonder I was baffled. A masterpiece it might be, but then, so is Gitta Sereny’s 900-page biography of Albert Speer and I don’t suppose at ten I’d have made much of that either…

So, one day I ran across Garner’s ('grown-up') novel Strandloper and my interest was piqued. Garner writes distilled, shining little books of the type that can only have taken him a long time. Indeed, he wrote Strandloper at an average speed of less than one word per day. And of these shining little books, The Stone Book Quartet is the most shining of all. Garner belongs to a long line of Cheshire craftsmen of whom, as a writer, he counts himself one. TSBQ collects four short-ish stories, each of which seems to have taken him a couple of years to write, and each of which concerns his family – beginning in the 1860s with a stonemason building the spire of the local church, and culminating with a boy in the Second World War, sledging while, on the horizon, the Luftwaffe bombs Manchester. Each story is simply and beautifully told, with the Cheshire dialect suggested rather than spelt out.

‘The Stone Book’, the first of the four, opens with a girl, Mary, bringing a ‘baggin’ for her father’s lunch. She climbs the nearly-completed steeple of St. Philip’s Church in Chorley towards her father’s hammer:

The spire narrowed. There were sides to it. She saw the shallow corners begin. Up and up. Tac, tac, tac, tac, above her head. The spire narrowed. Now she couldn’t stop the blue sky from showing at the sides. Then land. Far away.

Mary felt her hands close on the rungs, and her wrists go stiff.

Tac, tac, tac, tac. She climbed to the hammer. The spire was thin. Father was not working, but giving her a rhythm. The sky was now inside the ladder. The ladder was broader than the spire.

Father’s hand took the baggin cloth out of Mary’s mouth, and his other hand steadied her as she came up through the platform.

The story is possessed with wonder and a sense of the past, of the depth of time, as acute as The Origin of Species. From the steeple, Mary can see from Beeston to Stockport to Manchester to Wales. And she knows the name of everything - as she should, since this is all she’s known. This detail, this knowledge of the British landscape is writing I think vitally important, especially now that our eyes have scanned the world for wonders, exotica and instant excitements and, it seems, we’re still not satisfied. Later, Mary asks her father for a prayer book like those of her friends (who use them to press flowers), and instead he takes her deep down a mine and shows her the tunnel to a cave painting of a ‘great, shaggy bull’ that she is able to reach only because she is still small enough. This proves to be a family tradition, a type of initiation by which she can appreciate the depth of her own roots, or rather rootedness in this landscape. Here and there in his writing, Garner has strayed into sentimentality (see Gother Mossock in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen), but here he simply situates his ideas in relation to one another. He shows you the wonder inside the stone, and allows you to form conclusions of your own.

The other stories are every bit as good…

(This is the 'stone book' that inspired the first story)

I wrote a piece for the Western Mail a couple of weeks ago. You'll find it here.

Hooray for them, Academi, and Wales in general, which looks as beautiful as ever. Especially with spring brewing and the Six Nations triumph in Cardiff ten days ago. As the crowds were shouting in the Cardiff streets, "Oggy oggy oggy! We're gonna thrash the Froggy!" Even the Froggies seemed to take this in good heart, and doffed their berets politely. Which is largely to say, I had a ticket. I have been to the Millennium Stadium to see Wales play twelve times now, and this was the first time I've ever seen them win. The curse is lifted. Shane Williams is a God. As is Martyn Williams. As is Lee Byrne. As is Gavin Henson. Etc.

Snow on the mountains today. And still light at seven o'clock.

Excitingly, Yr Academi (Welsh Academy of Literature) have put The Claude Glass in their Long List for the Wales Book of the Year 2008. There was a launch last night in the cavernous Atrium building in Cardiff, in which I and such eminent writers as John Barnie, Carys Davies, Tessa Hadley, Nia Wyn and Kitti Harri (Kitty Sewell, lightly disguised) stood around pretending to make casual conversation while displaying our books as prominently as possible. The photographer had a remarkable brown corduroy suit and the moustache of an early 1980s rugby coach. It is very nice to see a little round sticker on the front of your book, like getting a star at primary school.

More at the Academi website

Further to the entry below. Here's no. 2 (not in order) in the three books I rate above all others:

THE LION OF BOAZ-JACHIN AND JACHIN-BOAZ (1973), by Russell Hoban.

"Darkness roared with the lion, the night stalked with the silence of him. The lion was. Ignorant of non-existence he existed."

Choosing a favourite Russell Hoban book is no mean task, and not choosing Riddley Walker (1980) seems utterly perverse, and yet here we are. Unless you count The Mouse and His Child (1967), TLOBJAJB is Hoban’s first adult novel and it shares a sense of mid-life crisis with much of his best work. Set in a world in which lions are extinct, the story concerns a map-maker, Jachin-Boaz, from an unnamed Near Eastern city, who leaves his family to start a new life in an unnamed European city, which looks very much like London – taking a ‘master-map’ with him that he has promised to his son, Boaz-Jachin. “I have gone to look for a lion,” reads the note that he leaves behind him. Boaz-Jachin sets out to find his father and to retrieve the map, and he starts by travelling to a ruined palace in the nearby desert, where he finds a relief depicting a royal lion hunt. One image in particular captivates him: a lion sinking its teeth into the wheel of a moving chariot, bearing itself onto the king’s spear. After this moment of recognition, the lion materialises in the life of Jachin-Boaz and, in one sense, comes to symbolise the relationship between father and son.

TLOBJAJB contains all the pared-down beauty and wonder that Hoban can conjure up so brilliantly, but one or two other factors cause me to choose it here. One is that the book seems to have grown (I would italicise ‘grown’, if I had the choice). The lion he describes can be found among the Assyrian reliefs in the British Museum, and comes from the northern palace of King Ashurbanipal of Nineveh. It is an astonishing image – “dying in the act of fighting”, as Hoban has put it – and, with the benefit of a few biographical details, you can begin to sense how the book came about. A couple of years before he wrote it, Hoban moved to London from his native Pennsylvania, and when his wife and four children returned he remained behind. His second wife, Gundula, echoes Jachin-Boaz’s beautiful young lover, Gretel. What Hoban does so well is to bring together a sense of the mystical with a simple, heartbreaking, intensely personal story about a middle-aged man who longs to be more than himself, even as he recognises that he must die. Clearly, the idea of the dying lion has possessed him – resonated with his own experience – and it is with genuine humility and wonder that he has transposed it to the page.

In the post-apocalyptic world of Hoban’s Riddley Walker, there is a figure in the community called a “connection man”. He is a type of shaman, but his task is specifically to make connections between recent events – viscerally not rationally – allowing forces greater than himself to take effect. The “connection man” clearly plays a role very much like Hoban’s conception of a writer’s, and it is this process that he enables so successfully in TLOBJAJB. I could cite many Hoban ideas that have been important to my writing, but none could be more important than this idea of the writer as someone who sees the world with wonder and reverence, almost a medium, who allows his books to write themselves.