The News Where You Are

The News Where You Are by Catherine O'Flynn. The prize-winning author stares again into the dark heart of Birmingham, but to diminishing.
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Weather that is extreme where we are is news, even if extreme weather where we are is only average weather where you are. On average, weather where you are is more extreme than weather where we are. First to go was the television. It was mostly rubbish that came out of it anyway. And the news was better on the radio. No, not better, weightier. Yes, that was part of what she craved: The daily wade through e-mails, the fatuous chatter of so-called friends on social networks — gone.

The news where you aren't

She found her old typewriter in a cupboard but the ribbon was dry and the keys stiff, so she took it to the charity shop, and rediscovered the pleasure of writing with a fountain pen. Her first correspondence was with the TV licensing authority, who assumed she was either mistaken or lying.


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The mobile phone went. For six days she lived in blissful tranquillity, sleeping, gardening, making soup and reading Anthony Trollope. On the seventh day her daughter arrived, puce with rage. And look, here you are. What kind of human contact is that?

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That precious place with all its memories, which she had intended her children to inherit, is going to have to be disposed of. It was an emotional interview. He left the studio with tears in his eyes. On the street, between him and the ministerial car, stood a woman. She looked about sixty, but it was hard to tell.

The News Where You Are by Catherine O'Flynn

She still comes and stays once a week, to help me out with things. We loved each other very much. Out of my way, you greedy, thieving, idle woman. This story is grotesquely exaggerated, crudely simplistic and politically biased. At the same time, however, not a word of it is a lie. On this day, the first recorded total eclipse of Scotland took place. Such events must of course have occurred before, but no one could say for certain when. Advances in astronomy and meteorology meant that for the first time the exact moment and duration of the eclipse could be accurately predicted.

As a result there was mass observation of the spectacle. Despite many scientific reassurances that the eclipse was an entirely natural phenomenon, it was an unnerving seven minutes for many Scots. As the sun, moon and Scotland aligned, the lunar shadow rapidly and ominously spread from west to east across the Outer Hebrides, the inner islands, Argyll, Galloway and Wester Ross, until the whole country was cast into utter darkness, and did not begin to re-emerge for some three minutes.

A not insubstantial minority was convinced that the event must carry some fateful meaning: Picts, Druids and other practitioners of alternative lifestyles gathered at standing stones and similar prehistoric monuments. Several suicides and a number of never to be solved murders took place during those seven minutes, in places as far afield as Campbeltown, Cumbernauld and Arbroath, although no convincing evidence that the eclipse was responsible has ever been produced.

Civic Scotland responded in different ways.

In Edinburgh, a fireworks display on the castle battlements marked the occasion. In Inverness, pubs were allowed, indeed encouraged, to stay open for 24 hours as refuges for the nervous or superstitious. The Professor stood clapping like some circus animal, peering over his glasses to make sure that everybody else was doing the same. When the applause died down, he spoke. It is customary on these occasions for the guest speaker to take, ah, questions, and you have already intimated that you are willing to, ah, do so. Perhaps I might take advantage of my position as departmental head, as well as convenor of this seminar, to pose the first one?

I was surprised by your suggestion, made almost in passing it seemed, that Austen coined many new phrases. This is not something one associates with her. Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, yes — but Jane Austen? Could you perhaps elaborate? After Louisa Musgrove falls at the Cobb Mr Elliot remarks rather unpleasantly that she should have been wearing crampons. I meant to say internal combustion engine.

That occurs in Mansfield Park , when Henry Crawford says to Maria Bertram that he can sense that her heart is purring like one. Are you quite sure? There was a furious turning of pages. As in serried ranks. You think you saved us from savagery with your lines and circles and dots. You think you liberated us from ignorance. You did the very opposite. We were alive and you killed the spirit of life that was in us.

It was an eerie, stylistically ambitious thriller set in a labyrinthine Birmingham shopping mall in which a year-old girl once disappeared. Larger publishers were tempted, and O'Flynn ditched Tindal St in favour of Viking for what was rumoured to be a six-figure sum. Though the publisher has changed, the obsession with lost things survives intact in The News Where You Are , as does the urban setting.

O'Flynn's Birmingham is a territory of vanishings in which buildings are constantly being destroyed and overlaid. The novel's central figure, regional news presenter Frank Allcroft, is particularly attuned to these slippages; his father was a famous architect whose brutalist tower blocks replaced the city's Victorian centre and are themselves now being yanked down.

Frank's interest in the city's palimpsest past isn't just confined to bricks and mortar. His job means that he frequently encounters stories about people who die alone, and over the years he has found himself compelled to carry out awkward acts of mourning for these strangers. When his mentor, national treasure Phil Smethway, is killed in a mysterious hit and run, this need intensifies and Frank begins to shovel around in the past of an elderly man found dead on a park bench, who he suspects might once have been Phil's best friend.

The News Where You Are by Catherine O'Flynn | Book review | Books | The Guardian

In What Was Lost O'Flynn proved herself almost magically adept at suspense, possessing of a knack for drawing characters to the surface with a few lines of dialogue. These gifts seem to have abandoned her here. The News Where You Are is marred, despite its obsession with graves and subterranean shopping centres, by a strange lack of depth. There's a flimsiness to the characters and the plot is contrived. The narrator seems almost addicted to metaphysical prouncouncements "Something invisible had disappeared, but it left a mark.