As promised, here is the text of the speech introducing [1] The New Suffolk Hymnbook that left me rather flustered [2] last Wednesday. Thanks again, Henrietta.

Notes on The New Suffolk Hymnbook by Henrietta Rose-Innes

Some months ago, Gus Ferguson gave me a copy of he New Suffolk Hymnbook, saying that he thought I would like it. I was a little nervous (what if I didn’t? what would I say to Gus?), and for a long time put it aside unread. But every now and then I would glance at its dreamy, sub-marine cover. Eventually I took it with me to a North Sea island, where, trapped in a heat wave in a suitably otherworldly state of mind, I read it. And was delighted to discover writing as dreamlike and compelling as the angels and sea creatures that float on the cover. I never did tell Gus what I thought of the book, and so I was glad when Ben gave me the chance to do so by asking me to introduce him tonight.

Although I had not then met Ben, I felt able to agree – because I felt that I had, in the reading, indeed met someone: if not the author, then certainly his characters, and with an uncommon intensity. To echo a phrase of Tony Morphet’s from the back cover, I felt I had been given the ability to listen to their spirits. Few books are so convincingly intimate. And more than that – I felt that, while reading the book, I had also been living in a new place, one with a strange magic: the imaginary town of Suffolk, set in its green hills, which is not real but which has the ungraspable familiarity of a place visited in dreams, a mirror-world that is almost one’s own, but not quite.

Inhabiting these rooms and hills and railway tracks are memorable and poignant characters, comic and terrible: Jonah, the famous poet giving his swansong lecture; the teacher, Miss V, humiliated by the strokes of a cryptic diagram scrawled in the dust by a wild, inscrutable child; Piety, driven into the countryside in search of the buried secrets of his past, only to rediscover his wife; Jarvis, enraptured by the city, granted a terrible visitation that seems to have been birthed by silent sexual rivalries (brilliantly developed in the course of a train journey); Jane, an ageing researcher trapped in a religious community, clinging tightly to her regained memories of love; and through it all, the character of Secondo, the wild child, the rejected boy with his violent energies, whose ferocious internal musings are fractured and flooded by the thoughts of all he meets – or who somehow by his presence unlocks those inner voices so that they flow onto the page, allowing us access. Following Secondo’s journey becomes for the reader a constant complex exercise in serial empathy – culminating in a magnificent pas-de-deux of thought and voice between Secondo and the truck driver who eases his transit from country to town.

I found this truly engaging, active reading: I felt I could not lift my eyes from the page for second for fear of missing something vital or beautiful. Particularly the Secondo sections demand almost as much word-by-word concentration from the reader as does poetry – but it is a concentration that is rewarded as layers and connections are progressively revealed. Because these are more than wonderful set-pieces strung together. Linked by Secondo’s journey, the clamouring voices together produce a fluid mosaic which is the place called Suffolk: a place that seems barely real in the physical sense, almost an abstraction with its neat grid of city streets, each ending in a square of tin-foil sea, its rolling, perfect green hills, its fabulous legends; but which is made real by the thoughts and voices of its inhabitants, their anxieties, visions and obsessions. They are more real than any other fictional creations I’ve encountered recently. Together they create a Suffolk that is every place, both mysterious and mundane.

Seldom does one encounter writing in which the inner world is so authentically rendered, in which the multitude of warring, streaming, secret thoughts that is the true experience of human consciousness is so ambitiously and successfully expressed. Reading this book is a somewhat chastening experience for those of us who, in our writing or even in our pereception, fail to attend enough to the small but significant shifts and nuances of the world around and within us.

And then there is the language itself. The craft and boldness of the author’s language puts to shame the dull tacking-together of action and reaction, with a bit of description in between, that passes for writing in so many contemporary novels. The exuberant delight in language and determination to make it perform is not least expressed by the author’s adventurous vocabulary. I learnt “croupousâ€Â?, “accressantâ€Â? and “colletâ€Â? from page 159 alone – not to mention “eleemosynaryâ€Â?, “mattoidsâ€Â? and “colporteursâ€Â? (pg 165). And not one of them used gratuitously. I sense that Ben and I share an appreciation for dictionaries – although, from the evidence, I might need one more… As a journalist muses towards the end of The New Suffolk Hymnbook, the comfort of dictionaries is that they are “Big and so clumsily endearing. They give of themselves. They are the St Bernards of Books.â€Â? (Perhaps I have not mentioned that the book is very funny in parts, too.)

The way a woman crosses her legs in a train; the way a car dawdles along in traffic; the silent sparring between commuters… a hundred other descriptions made me smile with revelation and recognition at a familiar world both named and made strange. Which is, of course, what real writing is meant to do for us. So thank you, Ben, for paying so much attention to the world, both inner and outer, and letting us hear its voices.

Accolades, too, to [3] Jacana, who are putting together a great fiction list – books that push a little further our expectations of the novel form – and making some brave publishing decisions. And of course to Gus Ferguson of Snailpress, who as we all know has been a brave publisher for a long time now, and has made so much possible for so many local writers.