Buy Local – Pick Up An Award-Winning Collection of Cornish Stories For Just £2.10

As Far As You Can Go is my new collection of e-book stories set in Cornwall.

About as far away as you can get from pirates, piskies or picture-postcard Cornwall, this collection of largely comic tales is packed with plain-speaking and occasionally foul-mouthed Cornish characters.

The collection includes most of the stories from my previous print collection One Big Echo of a Much Nicer Place, which won the Holyer An Gof Award for Fiction (2010), plus eight new stories.

Reviews:

Martin Philp is a highly original writer of great talent. His odd blend of humour and tragedy must be quite unique.
COLIN WILSON, AUTHOR OF THE OUTSIDER

 [It is...] likely to be the start of a much wider and deserved recognition for a writer of such exhilarating talent.
DES HANNIGAN, WESTERN MORNING NEWS

Philp conjures a world inhabited by convincing characters. Sad, foul-mouthed and always authentic, his stories invariably possess a great sting in the tail.
THE WESTERN MORNING NEWS

Very funny. Read it at your peril and be prepared to laugh a lot.
THE CORNISHMAN

Support local produce – buy my collection of 18 short stories for a minimum wage- and seasonal income-friendly £2.05.

Haven’t got a Kindle? You can get a Kindle reader for your computer or smartphone.

Like to sample the produce before purchase? Then read a story.

That’s the hard sell over. Thanks for listening!

Cheers.

Martin Philp

ps If you could like my Facebook page, it would be a great help in getting the word around.

As Far As You Can Go

Like My Previous Collection, But With 100% Added Story

Are you tired of picking up short story collections and finding only nine or ten tales inside? Do you often wonder why someone hasn’t published a collection of 18 stories?

Well they have. As Far As You Can Go is a new collection by Martin Philp. It  features all the award-winning stories* of his puny collection One Big Echo of a Much Nicer Place, with eight brand-new stories, bulking the total up to a spray-tanned, muscular 18 (yes, 18) stories.

And at just over two quid for the entire collection, it works out at a great-value, recession-proof 11.1p per story.**

What’s it about?

As Far As You Can Go is 18 largely interconnected stories set in West Cornwall. They’re a mixed bag of comic tales with a mildly maudlin streak I can only apologise for. You’ll meet Dandy, a flamboyant, lonely, desperate-to-be-loved, Hayle man who suffers a cruel fate during carnival day. (You can read Dandy Allcock here.) John, who has a dangerous obsession with purchasing cut-price power tools from German supermarkets. And foul-mouthed Jack Tremenyans, who each year decorates the town with Christmas lights and a torrent of expletives. (Bizarrely, Jack’s story Merry Fucking Christmas recently featured in a Christmas service at Truro Cathedral.)

But is it any good?

To be honest, I’m not the best person to ask: I’ve messed about with these stories so much it makes my eyes water just looking at them. But the first collection did win the Holyer An Gof Award Fiction Category in 2012 (it’s a Cornish thing celebrating Cornish arts). And I have had some nice reviews from people.

You’ve convinced me. You’ve worn me down. You can have my flippin’ two quid.

You can buy a Kindle edition of the book on Amazon

And bear in mind, if you don’t have a Kindle reader, you can download one for free and read if from there. If anyone would prefer an iPad version or any other format, let me know and I’ll get on to it. It should only take me two and a half years or so.

Hope you like the book. If you don’t, well, as John Shuttleworth would say, I’m sorry.

Cheers.

*Apart from one, which wasn’t very good.

**Calculation not accurate

Holy expletives – Merry Fucking Christmas in cathedral shocker!

I was surprised recently to receive an email from someone putting on an annual Christmas service at Truro Cathedral. Yes, that was surprise enough in itself being a confirmed (or is it unconfirmed?) atheist, but the really surprising bit was he wanted to use portions of my story Merry Fucking Christmas in the service.

Obviously, I thought it was a joke, but the gentleman persisted. He explained he would like to quote a few choice extracts and there it is. I thought I’d celebrate the holy approval of my heathenish and profane soul by quoting an extract  from the story below.

Apparently it’s the service that features on Radio Cornwall, and is read out by people from the station. I thought I might go myself. If you see a mound of dust in the entrance that will be a change of heart on the almighty’s part, and my sinful mortal form struck down and turned into a heap of ashes.

Merry Fucking Christmas –  *Now with added Divine Sanction*

Jack Tremenyans hurtled through the skylight and landed on his coccyx in a mound of golden tinsel, a net of lights falling close behind and bagging his so completely it was a good minute of struggling and groaning before he could free himself from the festive trap and plunge his hand down his drawers to fondle his aching arse.
‘Merry Christmas, Jack,’ said Councillor Simons, walking by with a slim portfolio under his arm and a sly grin on his face.
‘Merry Christmas?’ said Jack. ‘I’ll give you merry fucking Christmas.’
And Councillor Simons, Conservative, walked on towards the chamber and felt a warm mince pie glow topped with a sweet dusting of seasonal goodwill; and he even smiled at Tony Keth, Ragged Trousered Philanthropist from Penzance North.
And why wouldn’t he? After all, Jack Tremenyans festive expletives were the first real sign of the season to come: yes there were premature TV advertisements and early displays in department stores, but it was an unspoken agreement among those in the know that the season of good cheer was truly upon you with Jack’s Merry Fucking Christmas.
Jack struggled free from the net of lights, climbed up the ladder and pulled down more boxes from the eaves of St John’s Hall, all the time working on a few choice variations of his favourite catchphrase.
‘I’ll give you effing Christmas,’ he muttered.
Which was apt, for if by ‘you’ Jack meant the good citizens of Penzance then he certainly did give them Christmas. With jingle bells on. For 20 years – since 1967 – the cantankerous old socialist had cursed his way up Market Jew Street and Causewayhead, then down Chapel Street, decorating the town until it dripped with seasonal colour. And as the years rolled by and Jack became a familiar sight, his effing and blinding became, oddly, as heartwarming a part of the Christmas season as the illuminated results of his labours.
Jack hated Christmas, of course. Absolutely hated it. True, in the old days he had consulted his trenchant left-wing views and found a place for it, albeit begrudgingly, as a peculiar and overritualised expression of the brotherhood of man. (Weren’t there Christian Socialists, after all?) But these days, with its gorged celebrants, drunkenness and too many toys for the kids, it was all vulgarity and greed. An offshoot of Thatcherism, if you like. And Jack? What was he doing? He was effing his way up one end of town and blinding it down the other, preparing Penzance for the gluttonous celebrations at the heart of modern capitalism.
Jack also hated Christmas and his part in its preparations because of the physical pain involved. Like the moth to the flame the clumsy man is drawn to ladders, hammers and electricity, and so it was with Jack. He was Harold Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy all rolled into one, banging his thumb and screeching so loud it itched the ears of passers-by; diving into oncoming traffic as a string of lights – like a nest of Tory vipers – tripped him; and, yes, on one occasion scrambling up a falling ladder to clutch a streetlight, his panic so intense he surely defied the laws of gravity to save himself.
Everyone loved Jack. Even the Tories. And when his thumb-banging, hurtling and cursing was finished, Penzance had a display to put bigger places such as Truro to shame. The town glittered like a kindly old prostitute, the crack and crumble of her main streets lost in shiny baubles. It was a happy scene that obscured the grey decay of a Cornish winter for a few weeks. And people thanked Jack for it, too. When he had completed his last precarious duties on the Market House, they put their arms around his tired shoulders, led him across the road to The Star and bought him drinks. And as the smoky air hit him and the cheers and indulgent laughter warmed his tired old body, he would slump in a chair and shake his head. And say:
‘Ladders, ledges, roofs – I’m up and down like a bride’s nighty and I don’t even like Christmas. Why in Christ’s name do I do it?’
But he fooled no one. Which is why no one said:
Why don’t you give it up, Jack? It’s voluntary work and you’re not getting paid.
No, no one asked because it was common knowledge that hating Christmas and its accompanying labours were the single happy event in the barren calendar of a lonely old bachelor.

Ten new stories

Coming soon

(but not that soon and possibily under different titles and no, I know, it isn’t ten stories yet)

The Fabulous Life of Bolitho Townshend

Nature Video

The Return of Dandy Allcock

Titles, titles, titles… I just can't think…

Departures

Mad Dogs and an Englishman

Bingo! (Or the Vorstellung Adjustable Slim-Nosed Plane)

John Lennon Hat

Another Glass of Sherry, Please

Milk Factory

In defense of short stories

I used to steer clear of short stories, for the same reasons I steered clear of poetry. I was told every word must count, because it is a short form. So as writers we would (presumably) weigh words out like a miser and polish them before putting them on the page;

My favourite short story? Glad you asked. Cat in the Rain by Ernest Hemingway.

and, as readers, examine the words and turn them to the light, like precious stones. It all seemed a bit precious and earnest.

After writing and totally ballsing up two novels, I decided to write some short fiction. But, interestingly, I found that certain chapters of one of my ballsed up novels stood alone as perfectly good (in the relative sense of my own creations) short stories. And it made me wonder if there is anything so different about this form after all.

After extensive research, writing and reading short stories, I have come to this conclusion (cue drum roll): Short stories are shorter than novels. That’s really all there is to say on the subject. They can appear to be a fragment of a life, something plucked from the stream; a sketch; or a moment of crisis. Anything, actually. Just pretty short. Inevitably, they’ll have one storyline and will lack the subplots of novels, because there simply isn’t room. But to look at rules in short stories is restrictive in my opinion, though you might look at tendencies.

One other thing. I think the reason people have trouble with short stories is because when you enter any new fictional world, the first few pages can often be disorientating or unsettling, while you find your feet with the narrative voice and the world in question. With a novel, no problem: you’re talking about perhaps five per cent of your reading time as hard work. With short stories, you’re required to be bewildered and work a little harder every time you begin a new story. Unless, of course, you’re reading a collection with a similar narrative voice throughout, in a single locale. That makes things a little easier.

Anyway, if anyone’s interested, here’s a few masterpieces of the form, from the top of my head.

John Cheever

Cheever is my current favourite writer. His stories have an easy grace about them that can appear deceptive at first; and yet as you read on you realise his subjects are always, and only, the important things. Love, disillusion, nostalgia (yes, and drinking till you wet your pants). The Swimmer is about a man who decides to return home from a party via his neighbours’ swimming pools, swimming a length of one, getting out, walking to the next, swimming etc etc. And yet in truth it is about something far more disturbing. The Tallboy is a stunning story with an unpromising subject: a piece of furniture. And yet it evokes beautifully the dangers of wallowing in the past, of attempting to bring the deceased back to life through treasured objects. These are beautiful stories with the ring of truth, told in the reassuring voice of an artist who is easy and comfortable in his craft.

Chekhov

I’m not sure if these stories came before or after his turn in Star Trek, but Chekhov is the name that comes up time and time again as the consummate miniaturist and author of a life (and accompanying crisis) in a few pages. I find some of his stories a little slow – for a great Russian read (or Ukranian to be precise) Gogol’s Dead Souls is funny as hell. But back to Chekhov, you have, of course, to read The Lady and the Dog, which is a beautiful, sad story of a sordid love affair which seems to be not only about this particular affair, but all the sad, sordid relationships of the world. (And this wider, metaphysical quality runs through many Chekhov stories.)

Flannery O’Connor

A Good Man is Hard to Find is a hypnotic story which brings a shocking change in tone to a tale that begins with the mundanities of a family outing. A bit like Hitchcock’s Psycho. Another great story is The Artificial Nigger, which is about two country men coming to town, and is full of Biblical resonance. Her stories are set in the American South and accentuate the grotesque; there is something cartoonish about them, and yet also authentic and true.

Denis Johnson

There are far too many writers doing that drink-drugs-hopeless-sordid-barfly thing, yet Denis Johnson is a master, evoking a desperate world of rusted Americana and hopeless lives in a chilling, yet extremely readable way. You never feel he is trying to bullshit or impress you, but rather explain calmly and quietly a world on the margins that is, at times horrifying; at others, beautiful.

Raymond Carver

The writer who spawned a million inferior imitators, with his pinched, minimalist prose about the often mundane lives of Americans. It sounds unpromising, but Carver is the writer who is deeply poetic without appearing to write poetically. They are wonderful, beguiling stories because you will rarely find the beauty in a single line, but only in the wider context. In that way, the art of Raymond Carver is something almost invisible, hiding behind the words, but there all the same. One other thing: the simplicity of the prose makes these stories so effortlessly readable. (That’s always something worth mentioning after waxing lyrical about the style.)

Official – Indians love Cornwall

Take a look at this picture.

Notice anything odd about the little boy on the right?

I didn’t.

I was driving from Pondicherry to Bangalore with my girlfriend, Gargi.

We were deep in the Indian countryside: bullock carts, vibrant green paddy fields, the fragrant smell of rice in the air, old men wobbling on even older bikes.

We stopped the car and got out. We wanted to take it all in.

Then these two kids came up to us.

I took their picture, then we all did a bit of grinning (they didn’t speak English, we speak no Tamil).

Gargi and I got back in the car and carried on to Bangalore.

Cornwall For Ever. But only if regional pride is inclusive and doesn't take on any bigoted overtones, innit, my handsome?

Several days passed before we looked at the photos and noticed what was written on the T-shirt.

(For anyone not familiar with Cornish culture, Kernow Bys Vyken means Cornwall For Ever in the Kernewek language.)

One Big Echo – an award winner

One Big Echo of a Much Nicer Place recently won first place for fiction and short stories, at the 2010 Holyer an Gof awards ceremony held in Waterstone’s, Truro.

Sometimes dubbed ‘The Cornish Bookers’, the event is an annual competition to celebrate local publishing.

You can find out more about the award from this report from the This is Cornwall website.

Latest review

REVIEW FROM WESTERN MORNING NEWS,  1 JUNE 2010

BY MIKE SAGAR FENTON

AUTHOR GETS UNDER THE SKIN OF PORT TOWN

Humphry Davy stood at the top of Market Jew Street, his hand on his hip, and a look of haughty condescension that said: “It’s about time you dreadful people pulled yourselves together and made something of your lives.”

I owe this vivid and accurate picture of my home town of Penzance on a winter afternoon to a man from the other side of the world – Hayle.

And if Penzance is so dreadful, my townsmen might say, what about that post-industrial wilderness through which we trailed unwillingly for so many years until it was, thankfully, bypassed and, therefore, forgotten?

But the words are by author Martin Philp, a name synonymous with Hayle for decades.

//

One Big Echo of a Much Nicer Place is a collection of short stories which has already been reviewed in these pages, and I’ve just finished reading it. I can’t remember which author said that “it’s not enough to be successful – others must fail” but generosity is rare between most creative artists and that’s how we like it.

However, this little blue book, published by Scryfa, is one that any Cornish writer must stand up and salute. He has got Cornwall right, as only an insider can.

And even more of a revelation is that he has celebrated Hayle itself, which is as much a character as any of the complex, sad, funny, utterly humane people whose lives he delicately brings to life. It’s a love/hate relationship.

“Hayle’s a dump and always will be,” says one resident, while another revels in its “faded glory … like an overlong youth, frayed and worn in places (most places)…” awaiting the line of would-be developers who have threatened to make it grow up like other towns.

The author’s ear for dialogue in real Cornish – as opposed to “proper Cornish” – style is marvellous and his satires are as gentle as they are true.

We share the frustration of a conventional local artist bewailing modern art’s money and praise while he looks around his studio at Bosigran And The Heavens, Carn Galver In Autumn, Morvah At Dusk, Last Rays At Zennor Head and other doomed works.

Meanwhile, the art critics do what art critics do: “bludgeon a work with words and concepts until they are quite sure it has stopped breathing.”

No contemporary portrait of Cornwall could work unless it dug beneath the gloss and the pseudo-romance, down to the well of Cornish identity – the mixed sadness of defeat coupled with deep pride of ownership, the sense of abiding values, the willingness to let the world go on its mad way without wanting to jump aboard, and — making it all bearable — the humour, love and humanity which keep our societies together under the harshest circumstances.

It’s truly beautiful stuff, and you should go out and buy a copy.

One Big Echo Of A Much Nicer Place by Martin Philp is published by Scryfa and is available for £7.50 (inc, p&p) from Scryfa, Halwinnick Cottage, Linkinhorne, Callington, Cornwall PL17 7NS.

Where to buy One Big Echo of a Much Nicer Place

Just a quick update on where you can buy One Big Echo of a Much Nicer Place:

Hayle – Mr B’s Ice Cream and Driftwood Gallery

Penzance – Newlyn Books in Chapel Street; also in The Book Centre on the Terrace

St Ives – Uys Gallery (formerly The Printmakers Gallery), Tregenna Hill; and at the book shop further down the same road.

It’s also available in lots of other bookshops around Cornwall.

OR

Buy it securely on this blog by clicking the Buy button above, or call me on 07817 675342 and I’ll arrange to meet you in a shady location at night and hand it over in a brown paper bag.

Local Heroes – or Why I Hate Humphry Davy

Setting is hugely important in One Big Echo of a Much Nicer Place. I mean, how could I begin to suggest the rambling, decaying mind of an old bachelor without  Hayle’s crumbling North Quay as a backdrop? Here’s a few of the places you’ll see in my stories. I think of them more as characters than locations – sometimes the lead, other times making a cameo appearance.

Foundry Square, Hayle.
If my stories were movies (not much chance of that) Foundry Square in Hayle would be the opening shot: the hustle and bustle of people and cars, the train rumbling over the viaduct, someone effing and blinding because they’ve been boxed in outside Spar again.
My locations are personalised, fictional sketches. Spar is a beacon of hope (really), the viaduct always looms ominously, old men grumble in deep voices outside the bakery, the fruit and veg shop is run by a couple who are sad but revelling in their sadness. The sound of rain pattering on the canvas roof on wet Tuesday afternoons is music to their ears.

Market Jew Street, Penzance
Have you ever wondered about Humphry Davy statue’s odd pose? All hands on hip and starey eyes like he’s frozen in a moment of consternation. Never has a statue cast such a supercilious, haughty gaze on his townsfolk. He judges the citizens against his own achievements and finds them wanting. One of my stories is set in Penzance in the Eighties. From what I remember of the time – the lines of boarded up businesses,  endless charity shops, the terrible hairstyles of my generation – Humphry Davy was striking just the right pose for the occasion. But I still don’t like him. I’m going to write a story where he hits the skids and spends his last guineas on cheap cider and drinks it sprawled under his own plinth. That’ll show him.

Hayle dunes
Whenever a character needs to tell someone something important – declare his love, reveal that life is a big crock of ordure – I pack him or her off to the dunes in Hayle. This is Hayle’s strange, whispering, marin-swaying border between prosaic reality and a world of dreamy sunsets and infinite possibility. It bring about that crack in the psyche, that pause or gap in a person’s life where they break from the illusion, see and reveal things.
The dunes also say something else about Hayle. They evoke the breadth and range of the place. See the strange, breeze-block structures squatting in the dunes, then look out beyond to an infinity of blue. It’s all there. All of it. (Just watch out for the bags of dog pooh. Oh, please don’t get me started on that subject…)

The Weir, Hayle
My collection is called One Big Echo of a Much Nicer Place because it is a phrase a character uses about the world in general. But later I realised it also said something about Hayle: at least when you’re in a certain mood. There is the echo of zeal and activity about Hayle, the ghosts of working-class industrial workers kicking about the rubble. Usually, they’re down at the Weir. Can a place be beautiful and ugly at the same time? Yes. Go to the Weir. The rubble, the cry of a curlew, the swirl of tide and pool, dithering like it can’t find a way out from a nostalgic daydream, this is the Weir. It is broken and it is beautiful. (And I’ve just fortuitously come up with the title for my next collection (self publication due 2037.)

Chapel Street, Penzance
Chapel Street, the upper-middle class neighbour of proletariat Market Jew Street. The bistros, the antiques, the expensive furnishing, the immaculate pubs – Chapel Street smiles at its own reflection in wine bar mirrors and antique silver tea trays. Whenever a character is beginning to feel alienated or dispossessed I quickly push him down Chapel Street. He inevitably starts to feel worse and that is always good for a story. (You’ve got to be heartless, ruthless even, in such matters.)

Hayle pubs
I use real names for places and that includes pubs but, in truth, all of these are composites and impressions and not the real places in question at all. The important thing about pubs is that they are places where things happen to people. They are the venue for reconciliation or humiliation, the grand operatic moments of a life amid the crackle of a crisp packets, the click of pool balls, the flash and bleep of the fruiter, the ostentatious belch of Fatty Thomas, the soporific drone of Terry Nine Pints at the bar as he sets the world to rights by recommending burnings and floggings for people not of Cornish origin. I love pubs. But only fictional ones, where I am the hand that brings justice and retribution. It’s one of the perks of writing.