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| Interior of Mari Vanna Restaurant, London |
That's it. No follow-up, no punchline. A mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma as Churchill might have said. Anyway, I have only met two people (apart from my friend) who thought this remotely funny and one of them was me - but there we were last Sunday, several years on and the conversation rattling away as though the intervening time had been a minor interruption.
She had very kindly agreed to help me with the novel, which some of you may know I am writing. I have always wanted to write but have always been very bad at it - bad at the technical stuff, let alone the creative bit - but gradually all that is becoming easier. On the internet, on social networking sites and so on I find that many of those whom I have come to regard as old and dear friends are writers of one sort or another and I suppose we inspire and encourage one another, though sometimes I think that I have the best of the bargain. Having written some 85,000 words now I can talk about 'my novel' for it undoubtedly exists. It isn't finished yet but what remains - some stirring stuff that includes a car (or rather lorry) chase, a death, a birth, and a marriage, is all outlined and should be complete before Christmas when the real work of editing will start.
'Boraya' is about a chocolate factory and is set mainly in St Petersburg in the late 1990's. It is a romance but also a story of what happens to people whose lives are overwhelmed by external events. I suppose I was inspired subconsciously by that great volume of Russian literature which becomes addictive when you are a languid and forlorn teenager. I remember my biology teacher complaining that I was reading surreptitiously during a tedious lesson and having my book shown to all the class much to their amusement. It was a paperback edition of 'Seven Short Novels by Chekhov.' The book had cost me seven shillings and sixpence and I still have it on my bookshelves, though I suppose decades have passed since I looked at it.
Yet if you write a novel set in a country that you have never visited and in a well-known city, you have to try and get the details reasonably correct. Interviewed at the Hay Literary Festival this summer William Boyd confessed that he had written a book set in the Philippines and afterwards he had been complimented by the country's tourist office, all without ever going there. He said he just used a guide book and his imagination - so it can be done. Nevertheless mere mortals like me need help.
It isn't just what the protagonists might see around the city; that can be derived from guidebooks. No, it is everything else. I wrote down on the train a couple of dozen questions to ask my friend. Food figured largely among them and it helped that we were eating in a traditional Russian restaurant - the 'Mari Vanna,' so Russian that everyone, staff and customers, spoke that language, and I was forced out of politeness to say 'Spasibo' to the waiter. It was a good introduction to Russian food and Russian interiors, this one more like a set decorated for one of Chekhov's plays than a London restaurant.
We spent a long time eating the excellent food - I tried the Siberian Pelmeni, which are a kind of dumpling - while discussing what Russians call each other. When you would use the ultra-formal equivalent of 'Mr' or 'Mrs,' for instance, and when you would use the patronymic - that is your addressee's father's name - as in, perhaps, Mikail Sergeievitch, or when you would just use a first name? But what happens if you are a foreigner? Under what name would you book a table at a restaurant? What happens even if you don't have an official father (well, you can always invent!). The name of the restaurant itself is a first name and a patronymic, for the name is a contraction of Maria Ivanovna - a very common name, apparently, in Russia and one that is contracted in speech to 'Mari Vanna.'
Almost everywhere I turn in the story I find a different world. I am now an expert on the botulinum toxin (nothing to do with the restaurant I hasten to add) for that figures in the story too, as of course does the terrible history of St Petersburg. As the story unfolds the experience is more like reading a book than writing one in that my characters keep on surprising me. They keep me entertained at least and I hope one day they will entertain you too.
*****
On a completely different topic there has been much discussion in the course of the recent American Presidential Election of that country's trillion dollar deficit. That figure always worried me. Surely that can't mean that the US Government spends a trillion dollars more than it receives in taxes? But then I thought of our own deficit - about £160 billion. Express that in dollars and we have around $250 billion, which is of course a quarter of a trillion. If we say that the US economy is about four times the size of the British economy then their deficit really isn't any worse than ours. Trillion dollars it is. What an amazing amount of money! We are all living on tick to an absurd degree. Easy to say but knowing what to do about it is another matter.
The photograph of the Mari Vanna interior is taken from the internet. I am unsure to whom the credit is due but offer thanks in advance.
