Hector Finds Time (Hector’s Journeys)

Gallic Books 2012, Paperback, 227 pages, £7.99

Poor Hector. Tempus fugit, and our intrepid psychiatrist is not feeling quite as young as he used to. His current patients are concerned with time too. One feels she’s always in a hurry, as if there’s a clock ticking in her tummy – she would like time to slow down. But there’s also a boy who wishes time would hurry along and turn him into an adult. And a third patient counts his remaining years of life in terms of how many dogs he’ll have time to own. Hector feels he must get to the bottom of this time business and to do so, of course, a round-the-world adventure is required. Follow Hector as he sets off to uncover nuggets of universal wisdom on time. Who better to find out about the past, the future and how best to enjoy the present than the hero of Hector and the Search for Happiness and Hector and the Secrets of Love?

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When authors are asked to explain what made them write their books or come up with a new character, they always want to give worthy reasons. Voltaire might have said he wrote Candide to criticise the Ancien Régime, religious intolerance, Leibniz and utopian ideals in an amusing and entertaining fashion. All of which would be true, but you need only read the book to understand why Voltaire really created Candide: he had fun writing about his adventures! Much more than he must have done working on his epic poems and tragedies, which have become tedious for modern readers, and were no doubt already tedious at the time, to the extent that I wonder if Voltaire himself was not bored writing them.

If you were to ask me why I created Hector and his adventures, I might reply that I wanted to tackle psychological and philosophical themes in an entertaining way; to revive the French tradition of philosophical contes, or fables; to both move and enrich my readers, and so on.

None of this would be untrue exactly, but as a psychiatrist I am generally suspicious of people giving me good reasons for having behaved in one way or another, so I ask them to tell me about the circumstances leading up to their actions.

These were the circumstances: it was winter and I had gone along on a trip to Hong Kong with an art dealer friend of mine (I am not very good at holidays, so I always try to accompany friends who have a purpose). I was meant to be writing a serious book on happiness for my French publisher (my own idea, no less), but every time I sat at my computer and wrote a few lines, I was overwhelmed with indescribable boredom. This book on happiness was making me unhappy. On top of that, I was going through a period of questioning and doubt – Was I really going to carry on practising psychiatry until I could no longer get out of my chair? Would I still be a roving bachelor when the only women interested in me had serious unresolved father issues, if not grandfather issues? My friend sensed something was up and tried to cheer me up by showing me the highlights of the city-state by night, but it was no use.

Then one morning while brushing my teeth in a freezing-cold bathroom – a remnant of the British colonial era? – Hector was born! I could picture him clearly, younger than me, somewhat naive, full of good intentions – I have a few of those myself – and trying his best to understand the world and help his patients. I knew straight away that telling the story of Hector’s journeys would be a joy, that I would not have to hold his hand but rather it would be him carrying me along on his adventures, drawing of course on my own experiences and those of my patients, as well as dreams and books I had read.

As for the form it took, the conte, I would not dare compare myself to Voltaire, but many readers of the Hector series have urged me to re-read Candide. Doing so alerted me to the deep impression it must have made on me as a boy, and the extent to which it continues to influence me to this day.

So thank you to Voltaire and Hong Kong, Hector’s ‘parents’, and to my readers, who have encouraged me in letting me know I am not the only one entertained by Hector.

Hinterland

Bloomsbury Publishing PLC 2012, Hardcover, 256 pages, £14.99

It is night, and two boys are crossing a river that is also a border. They have nothing but the clothes on their backs, their inheritance stitched into the lining of a belt, and the courage of an enormous gamble: that Europe will offer them a future they can no longer wait for in Afghanistan. There are moments of wonder and adventure but also battles against cold, heat, hunger, violence and exhaustion. Whether they are harvesting half-frozen oranges in Greece, or hiding behind a false wall on a truck to Italy, or sleeping under the rafters of a sawmill in France, the brothers are exploited for their labour, hustled for their money and ignored by almost everyone, except the police. Hinterland is a novel about two children in the aftermath of trauma; underage, homeless and invisible in a foreign land. It shows what happens when the adult world rushes in, and what our universe looks like from the other side of the glass, to those displaced children who are out there, even now, on the road.

• Read the extract

Hector Finds Time (Hector’s Journeys)

Gallic Books 2012, Paperback, 227 pages, £7.99

Poor Hector. Tempus fugit, and our intrepid psychiatrist is not feeling quite as young as he used to. His current patients are concerned with time too. One feels she’s always in a hurry, as if there’s a clock ticking in her tummy – she would like time to slow down. But there’s also a boy who wishes time would hurry along and turn him into an adult. And a third patient counts his remaining years of life in terms of how many dogs he’ll have time to own. Hector feels he must get to the bottom of this time business and to do so, of course, a round-the-world adventure is required. Follow Hector as he sets off to uncover nuggets of universal wisdom on time. Who better to find out about the past, the future and how best to enjoy the present than the hero of Hector and the Search for Happiness and Hector and the Secrets of Love?

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Hector isn’t exactly a young psychiatrist any more

Once upon a time, there was a young psychiatrist called Hector.

Actually, Hector wasn’t exactly a young psychiatrist any more. Although he wasn’t an old psychiatrist yet, either. From a distance, you could still have taken him for a young student, but up close you could see that he was already a real doctor with some experience behind him.

Hector had a great gift as a psychiatrist: when people talked to him, he always looked as if he was thinking very hard about what they’d told him. Because of that, people who came to see him liked him a lot; they felt that he was thinking about their particular situation (which was nearly always true) and that he was going to help them find a way to get better. At the beginning of his career, he would twirl his moustache when he was thinking things over, but now he didn’t have a moustache; he’d only grown one when he was just starting out in order to look older. These days, since he wasn’t exactly a young psychiatrist any more, there was no point. Time had passed.

But time hadn’t made much difference to the furniture in his office. It was the same as when he’d started out. He had an old sofa his mother had given him when he’d moved in, some nice pictures that he liked and a little statue his friend had brought back from the land of the Eskimos – a bear turning into an eagle, which is quite unusual for a psychiatrist’s office. From time to time, when Hector felt cooped up after spending too much time in his office listening to people, he would look at the bear with huge wings sprouting from its back and dream that he was flying away too. But not for long, because he would quickly begin to feel guilty if he didn’t listen properly to the person sitting in front of him telling him their woes. Because Hector was conscientious.

Most of the time, he saw grown-ups who had decided to come and see a psychiatrist because they were too sad, too worried or just unhappy with their lives. He got them talking, asked them questions and sometimes he also gave them little pills . . . often all three at once, a bit like someone who juggles three balls at the same time. Psychiatry is difficult like that.

But Hector loved his job. First of all because he often felt he was helping people. And secondly because what his patients told him nearly always interested him.

For example, from time to time, he saw a young woman called Sabine who always said things which made him think. When you’re a psychiatrist, it’s funny but you learn an awful lot just by listening to your patients, whereas they assume you already know nearly everything.

The first time Sabine came to see Hector it was because she was getting upset at work. Sabine worked in an office, and her boss wasn’t very nice to her: he often made her cry. Of course, she always cried in private, but, even so, it was terribly hard for her.

Little by little, Hector helped her realise that perhaps she deserved better than a boss who wasn’t very nice, and Sabine built up enough self-confidence to find a new job. And these days she was happier.

Over time, Hector had gradually changed the way he worked. At the beginning, he mainly tried to help people to change their outlook. Now, he still did that, of course, but he also helped people to change their lives, to find a new life that would suit them better. Because, to put it another way, if you’re a cow, you’ll never become a horse, even with a good psychiatrist. It’s better to find a nice meadow where people need milk than to try to gallop round a racecourse. And, above all, it’s best to avoid entering a bullring, because that’s always a disaster.

Sabine would not have been happy being compared to a cow, even though cows are actually kind and gentle animals, Hector had always thought, and very good mothers too. It’s true that she was also very clever, and sometimes this didn’t make her happy, because, as you might already have noticed, sometimes happiness is not knowing everything.

One day, Sabine said to Hector, ‘I think life is just a big con.’

Startled, Hector asked, ‘What do you mean?’ (That was what he always said when he hadn’t been listening properly the first time.)

‘Well, you’re born, and straight away you have to rush about, go to school, and then work, have children, and then your parents die and then before you know it you get old and die too.’

‘This all takes a bit of time, though, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes, but it goes by so quickly. Especially when there’s no time to stop. Take me, for example, with my work, and evenings with the children and my husband. He’s the same, poor thing . . . he never stops either.’

Sabine had a nice husband (she’d also had a nice father, which improves the chances of finding a nice husband straightaway) who worked hard in an office too. And two young children, the eldest of whom had started school.

‘I always feel as if I’m up against the clock,’ said Sabine. ‘In the morning, everything needs to be organised, I have to leave in time to take my eldest to school and then dash to the office. I have meetings I have to be on time for, but while I’m in them the rest of my work piles up, and then I have to rush in the evenings too, pick up my child from school, or get home in time for the nanny, and then dinner, and homework . . . Still, I’m lucky – my husband helps me. We hardly have time to speak to each other in the evening: we’re so tired we both just fall asleep.’

Hector knew all this, and perhaps that was partly why he had slowly started to contemplate getting married and having babies.

‘I’d like time to slow down,’ said Sabine. ‘I’d like to have time to enjoy life. I’d like some time for myself, to do whatever I want.’

‘What about holidays?’ asked Hector.

Sabine smiled.

‘You don’t have children, do you, Doctor?’

Hector admitted that he did not, not yet.

‘Actually,’ said Sabine, ‘I think that’s also why I come to see you. This session is the only point in my week when time stops and my time is completely my own.’

Hector understood precisely what Sabine meant. Especially since he, too, over the course of his day, often felt that he was up against the clock, like all his colleagues. When you’re a psychiatrist, you always have to keep an eye on the time, because if you allow your patient to talk to you for too long, the next patient will get impatient and all your appointments will run late that day. (Sometimes, this was very difficult for Hector – for example, when three minutes before the end of a session, just as he’d start to shift in his armchair to signal that time was almost up, the person in front of him would suddenly say, ‘Deep down, Doctor, I don’t think my mother ever loved me,’ and begin to cry.)

Being up against the clock, thought Hector to himself.  It was a real problem for so many people, especially for mothers. What could he possibly do to help them?

 Hector and the man who loved dogs

Hector had another patient called Fernand, a man who was not particularly remarkable, except for the fact that he had no friends. And no wife or girlfriend either. Was it because he had a very monotonous voice or because he looked a little like a heron? Hector didn’t know, but he thought it very unfair that Fernand didn’t have any friends, since he was kind and said things that were very interesting (although sometimes slightly odd, it has to be said).

One day, out of the blue, Fernand said to Hector, ‘Anyway, Doctor, at my age, I’ve got no more than two and a half dogs left.’

‘Sorry?’ said Hector.

He remembered that Fernand had a dog (one day, Fernand had brought it with him, a very well-behaved dog that had slept right through their session), but not two, and he couldn’t even begin to imagine what half a dog might be.

‘Well,’ said Fernand, ‘some dogs live for fourteen or fifteen years, don’t they?’

Hector came to understand then that Fernand was measuring the time he had left in the number of dogs he could have over the rest of his life. As a result, Hector set about measuring the life he had left to live in dog lives (that is, which he probably had left, for ye know neither the day nor the hour, as somebody who died quite young once said) and he wasn’t sure if it would be four or five. Of course, he thought to himself, this figure could change if science made incredible advances that would enable people to live longer, but perhaps on the other hand it wouldn’t change, since scientists would no doubt make dogs live longer too, which, you can be sure, no one will ask their opinion about.

Hector spoke to his friends about this method of measuring your life in dogs and they were absolutely horrified.

‘How awful!’

‘Not only that, thinking of your dog dying . . .  it’s too sad for words.’

‘Exactly. That’s why I just couldn’t have another, because when our little Darius died it was far too upsetting.’

‘You really do see some complete loonies!’

‘Measuring time in dogs?! And why not in cats or parrots?’

‘And if he had a cow, would he measure it in cows?’

Listening to all his friends talking about Fernand’s idea, it dawned on Hector that what they didn’t like at all was that measuring your life in dogs makes it seem shorter. Two, three, four dogs, even five, doesn’t make it sound as if you’re here for very long!

He understood better why Fernand unnerved people a bit with his way of seeing things. If Fernand had measured his life in canaries or goldfish, would he have had more friends?

In his own lonely and odd little way, Fernand had put his finger on a real problem with time. For that matter, lots of poets had been talking about it for ever, and Sabine had too.

They said . . . the years fly, time is fleeting, and time goes by too quickly.

 Hector and the little boy who wanted to speed up time

Every so often, children also came to see Hector, and, when they did, of course it was their parents who had decided to send them.

The children who came to see Hector weren’t really ill – it was more that their parents found them difficult to understand, or else they were children who were too sad, too scared or too excitable. One day, he talked to a little boy who, funnily enough, was called Hector, just like him. Little Hector was very bored at school, and time seemed to go by too slowly for him. So he didn’t listen, and he ended up with bad marks.

Big Hector asked Little Hector, ‘Right now, what do you wish for most in the world?’

Little Hector didn’t hesitate for a second. ‘To become a grown-up straight away!’

Hector was surprised. He had expected Little Hector’s answer to be: ‘For my parents to get back together’, or ‘To get better marks at school’, or ‘To go on a school ski trip with my friends’.

So he asked Little Hector why he wanted to become a grown-up straight away.

‘To decide things!’ said Little Hector.

If he became a grown-up straight away, explained Little Hector, he could decide for himself what time to go to bed, when to wake up and where he could spend his holidays. He could see the friends he wanted, have fun doing what he wanted and not see grown-ups he didn’t want to see (like his father’s new girlfriend). He would also have a real job, because going to school wasn’t a real job. Besides, you didn’t choose to go to school and then you spent hours, days, years watching time passing slowly and getting bored.

Hector thought that Little Hector had let his imagination run away with him about life as a grown-up: after all, grown-ups still had to do things they didn’t like doing, and see people they didn’t like seeing. But he didn’t tell Little Hector that, because he thought that, for the moment, it was a good thing that Little Hector was dreaming of a happy future, since his present was not that happy.

So he asked Little Hector, ‘But if you became a grown-up straight away, it would mean that you’d already lived for a good few years, so you’d have fewer left to live. Wouldn’t that bother you?’

Little Hector thought it over. ‘Okay, it’s a bit like a video game when you lose an extra life. It’s annoying, but it doesn’t stop you having fun.’ Then he looked at Hector.

‘What about you? Would it bother you to have already lost one or two lives?’

Big Hector thought that Little Hector might become a psychiatrist himself one day.

Hector thinks things over

At the end of each day, Hector thought about all the people he’d listened to who were worried about time.

He thought about Sabine, who wanted to slow time down.

He thought about Fernand, who measured his life in dogs.

He thought about Little Hector, who wanted to speed time up.

And many others . . .

Hector spent more and more time thinking about time.

Then They Came for Me

Oneworld Publications 2012, Paperback, 384 pages, £10.99

Maziar Bahari left London in June 2009 to cover Iran’s contested presidential elections for Newsweek magazine. He thought he’d be returning in just a few days to Paola, his pregnant fiancée. Instead, he was incarcerated under false charges of espionage in Evin, a state prison notorious for its role in Iran’s history of torture and oppression. His release came four months later, only after a global campaign supported by Hillary Clinton.

Suffering regular beatings, forced confessions, and threats of execution, Bahari draws strength from the similar experiences of his family in the past: his father was imprisoned by the shah in the 1950s, and his sister by Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1980s. He dreams of being with Paola in London, and imagines all that she and his resilient eighty-four-year-old mother must being doing to fight for his freedom.

Exposing the contradictions at the heart of Ahmadinejad’s paranoid regime, this moving memoir is also a beautifully written portrait of modern Iran that carries a vital and troubling message as other countries in the region strive for democracy.

• Read the extract

Then They Came for Me

Oneworld Publications 2012, Paperback, 384 pages, £10.99

Maziar Bahari left London in June 2009 to cover Iran’s contested presidential elections for Newsweek magazine. He thought he’d be returning in just a few days to Paola, his pregnant fiancée. Instead, he was incarcerated under false charges of espionage in Evin, a state prison notorious for its role in Iran’s history of torture and oppression. His release came four months later, only after a global campaign supported by Hillary Clinton.

Suffering regular beatings, forced confessions, and threats of execution, Bahari draws strength from the similar experiences of his family in the past: his father was imprisoned by the shah in the 1950s, and his sister by Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1980s. He dreams of being with Paola in London, and imagines all that she and his resilient eighty-four-year-old mother must being doing to fight for his freedom.

Exposing the contradictions at the heart of Ahmadinejad’s paranoid regime, this moving memoir is also a beautifully written portrait of modern Iran that carries a vital and troubling message as other countries in the region strive for democracy.

Praise for the book:
“A profound, yet intimate insight into modern day Iran, told through Bahari’s own and his family’s experience of living through it. A wonderful book.”
- Jon Snow, Channel Four News

“What makes Bahari’s account so readable is not only his sense of fair play — he tries to understand the motivations of the regime, and of his torturer — but also his keen sense of fun and humour.” – The Sunday Times

“A superb account … Insightful and brave.”
- Jane Corbin, journalist and reporter for BBC’s Panorama

“A beautifully written account of life in Iran, filled with insights not only into the power struggles and political machinations but into the personal, emotional lives of the people living in that complicated country. Maziar Bahari is a brave man and a wonderful storyteller.”
- Fareed Zakaria, author of The Post-American World

Something of the Night

Simon & Schuster Ltd 2012, Hardcover, 304 pages, £14.99

And who knows; the night might bring romance, or love, or sex, if you play your cards right. Or you might be working; millions of people work at night. If nobody worked at night, Britain would cease to function. Or the night might be cold, haunted, inhuman and wild. When you look up into the night sky, you see that you are nothing. An insignificant mote of dust.

Or the night could be all too human. Hen parties in skimpy dresses and fairy wings being slammed into the back of a police van; girls working on street corners in the part of town where the lights don’t come on; businessmen going to lap-dancing clubs to forget what waits at home.

Or you could die. Most people do die at night. Or you could just lie awake and wait for the dawn. Set over the course of an intoxicated night in a house up a mountain in West Cork, Ian Marchant offers a darkly funny account of what people get up to at night, explores his own experience of a life of night times, and shows us how we all have something of the night about us.

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Retromania

Faber and Faber 2012, Paperback, 496 pages, £10.99

We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band reformations and reunion tours, revivals and reissues, remakes and mash-ups … Are we heading toward a sort of cultural-ecological catastrophe, where the archival resources of rock history have been exhausted? What happens when we run out of past?

Simon Reynolds, one of the finest music writers of his generation, argues that we have reached a tipping point. Earlier eras had their own obsessions with antiquity, but never before has there been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past.

Retromania is the first book to examine the retro industry and ask the question: Is this retromania a death knell for any originality and distinctiveness of our own era?

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The Berlin Crossing

Headline Review 2012, Hardcover, 368 pages, £19.99

Brandenburg 1993: The Berlin Wall is down, the country is reunified and thirty-year-old school teacher Michael Ritter feels his life is falling apart. His wife has thrown him out, his new West German headmaster has fired him for being a socialist, former Party member and he is still clinging on to the wreckage of the state that shaped him. Disenfranchised and disenchanted, Michael heads home to care for his terminally ill mother.

Before she dies, she urges him to seek out an evangelical priest, Pastor Bruck, who is the only one who knows the truth about his father. When Michael eventually tracks him down, he is taken on a journey of dark discoveries, one which will shatter his foundations, but ultimately bring him hope to rebuild them.

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Gallic Books will publish three novels by Pascal Garnier in 2012: The Panda Theory, How’s the Pain? andThe A26. In an article for his French publisher, Zulma, Garnier described what led him to become a writer:

According to my birth certificate, I was born on 4^th July 1949 in the 14^th arrondissement of Paris. I can’t say I remember the event, but let’s assume that’s how it happened. Afterwards came a normal childhood in what you’d call the average French family – which felt more and more average the more it dawned on me that I’d been sold a world with no user’s manual, lured in by false advertising. When I was about fifteen, the state education system and I agreed to go our separate ways. I’d had enough, I was suffocating, convinced that real life was going on somewhere else. So off I went in search of it. In those days you could still travel freely through North Africa, the Middle and Far East. With my head in the clouds, I roamed about for a decade or so until I came to see that it really is a very small world and, being round, you always end up back where you started.

That’s when the wife and baby came along. All around me, the faithful companions I’d met along the way were nestling back into their kennels, burying their dreams and delusions like bones to gnaw at in years to come when they were old and toothless. Rebelling against such mass surrender, I threw myself into rock and roll – and landed with a resounding thud. I was no better at being a pop star than I was at being a dad. Still, it was writing my pitiful ditties that gave me a taste for words. Deep down, I harboured a wild dream of writing something longer, something like a book. But my limited vocabulary, terrible spelling and hopeless grammar seemed like insurmountable obstacles. So I got divorced, remarried, dabbled in design for women’s magazines, took on odd jobs, got up to the occasional bit of mischief. In short, I was killing time, frittering my life away. The boredom of my childhood numbed me once again with the sweetness of a drug. I was thirty-five.

You can only escape if you’re imprisoned, which to some extent I was. I had no choice: my only way out was through a blank page. Slowly scraping along, I dug myself out through a corner of the kitchen table, and as I tunnelled my way up to the surface, I filled the hole within myself. One short story, then two, then three… And then one day I had a publisher on the phone, and not just any publisher, but POL. A collection of twelve short stories was published under the title ‘L’année sabbatique’, ‘A year’s sabbatical’. After that, another sixty-odd books were brought out by several other publishers: books for children, books for adults, books labelled as noir or white, whatever – I’ve never been interested in that particular apartheid. So there it is, a bit muddled I’ll admit. I write because, as Pessoa said: ‘Literature is proof that life is not enough’.

Pascal Garnier