Audrey Niffenegger talks about comics and time travel

Today's Panel Borders audio interview with Audrey Niffenegger is now available for streaming or download. Most of the discussion is about her graphic novel The Night Bookmobile. I'm planning to read the book (intriguing reviews from Danny Graydon here and Graphic Novel Reporter here) having found that the original novel of The Time Traveler's Wife is a lot more complex and interesting than you might think if you've only seen the movie. And Ms Niffenegger did all the art herself too, so (as one of those comics writers who rely on somebody else to do all the hard work) I wouldn't dream of saying anything negative anyhow.

A reservation I have about the interview itself is that it betrays the typical British awkwardness about comics. Even that term "graphic novel" - I don't object to that, unlike my good friend Peter Richardson of Cloud 109, for example, who finds it unbearably affected. When it's used to mean a comic that's ashamed to say it's a comic, then I agree. (That's not why Ms Niffenegger herself used it, incidentally, as she explains in the interview.) But as a way of saying, "This is a complete story in fifty or more pages" as distinct from a 22-page monthly comic book, then it's fine.

The interviewer does wander off a bit into discussion about how comics pages can be designed so that you read them Calvino-style in multiple directions at once, and how that can lead to a disconstruction of the very nature of linear narrative, blah blah blah. None of which I have the slightest patience for. A story is good simply insofar as it engages the reader and makes them care enough to want to know what happens next. A good (ie effective) comic is a storyboard of static images, much like a movie but with the advantage that comics are a literary medium and can therefore provide the depth that a movie, having a set pace that the viewer must fall in step with, doesn't have time to explore.

But that's a minor quibble. Overall, if you can get past the zoo-visitor's wary fascination with the outlandish beast that is a British literary critic's view of comics, it's an entertaining show that takes in Doctor Who, comics, time travel and storytelling in general. Well worth a listen, even for someone who prefers Daredevil to Derrida.

And on the wireless tonight...

A short while ago, Roz and I headed over to Devon so I could work with Leo on that Apple-y project that we aren't quite ready to unveil yet. (I say Devon; it was also Somerset, because you cross the border in walking to the pub. And "apple-y" is a pun, coz that's where the pub is, ie Appley in Somerset.)

Well, as all work makes Jack a dull boy, whenever we're slogging away to a deadline like that, we of course make sure to fit in a bit of fun, beer, food, natter and computer gaming also. And on this occasion, arriving as we did on a Thursday evening, Roz and I were corralled onto the Bantering Boys radio show for some confabulatory silliness. Listen to our guest spot here and tune into 10Radio every Thursday at 9pm BST for more in the same vein.

The illustration is from a fascinating piece on this TV history site which shows a number of trading cards from Victorian times depicting the future as it was imagined back then. Rather handy for Mirabilis, eh what?

A teller of tales

A guest post today from the long-dead Mr Kenelm Foss, who reveals some interesting details about the nature of the persona created by Leslie H Lambert for his radio broadcasts, thus firmly placing A J Alan in an English tradition that runs through Ziggy Stardust to the likes of Count Arthur Strong today. (For more on Mr Foss himself, see his daughter's book Stage, Screen and Sandwiches: The Remarkable Life of Kenelm Foss.)

On January 31st, 1924, with the broadcasting of a short story, "My Adventure in Jermyn Street", there for the first time crept over the air a pernickety, shy, languid, somewhat emasculate, "posh" voice of the kind with which we are now only too familiar in radio-announcers. But its owner had something novel and original to sell, and it is not too much to say that, owing to the instant public acceptance of his delightful entertainment, Leslie Harrison Lambert, a civil servant in his early forties who elected to hide his light under the pseudonym of A. J. Alan, was the initiator of the B.B.C. accent.

This curious hybrid, which is neither the King's English of George V, Edward VIII, and George VI, nor the unaccented, unaffected Queen's English of Elizabeth II, but a class-conscious, mincing travesty of correct diction, was precisely suited to A. J. Alan's material. Those diffident hesitations of his were in reality artfully contrived stage-pauses, for dramatic or humorous effect. His radio-personality was in itself expert character-acting, not so much a disguise (like his borrowed name) as a facade to hide a much more exuberant and artistic personality than his Whitehall-inhibited self.

Rex Palmer, at that time in charge of 2LO, reveals how the mythical and fabulous A. J. Alan came into being. Palmer was a near neighbour of L. H. Lambert at Holland Park, knowing him as an agreeable but elusive, slightly-built, middle-aged fellow with a good job in the Foreign Office, married to a lady older than himself, a lady with private means and a county-family background. This childless couple, living in style in a large house filled with well-polished antiques, possessed also a holiday bungalow in Devonshire. Except for weekly whist-drives and an occasional evening where host and hostess played the Murder Game with their guests, the Lamberts stood aloof, and Rex Palmer was therefore the more surprised when his neighbour called at 2LO in some excitement, apropos of anecdotes told over the air the previous evening by a director of the old British Broadcasting Company, Sir William Bull, a well-known M.P., with a histrionic gift which has been inherited by his son, Peter Bull, the actor. Lambert was convinced that he himself had a flair for the same sort of "turn". Palmer, eager to uncover new talent, arranged an audition, being so impressed with the outcome that Lambert found self-expression and a new career as A. J. Alan.

All Alan's recitals were rehearsed and re-rehearsed in the meticulous and finicking way which was part of Lambert’s character. He sat on a high stool close to the microphone, the text on his knees being pasted on cardboard so that no rustle of paper should disturb the broadcast. On this script pauses for laughs were marked in red. The speaker even brought his own candle with him in case the studio lights failed. He invariably arrived in a dinner-jacket, but Rex Palmer considers that dress-clothes would at that period be the normal wear of an evening in the Lamberts' environment.

The new radio-star certainly never visualized a wider and more selective audience than was given him by the wireless. So modest was he regarding his attainments as a raconteur that he refused to broadcast more than, at most, three times a year. It was originally, no doubt, his meteoric, astonishing, but fully justified popularity which prompted a publisher to issue two volumes of his spoken tales. The pages of "Good Evening, Everyone!" and "A. J. Alan’s Second Book" revealed to the discerning that the author's talent as a dramatic monologuist had not bamboozled listeners into accepting as a first-rate yarn something which was really only a vehicle for an engaging and disarming personality. No: these proved to be capital yarns in their own right, even to people who were not biased, for or against, by that lackadaisical, old-school-tie delivery into the microphone.

Two decades later, nearer three, his printed volumes are virtually unprocurable collectors' pieces. But the stories therein still emerge as exceptional and individual, well worthy of reissue in a judicious selection, eliminating certain facetious jeux-d'esprit and others too slight or ephemeral for exhumation, such as "Christmas Story". Restricted by the demands of his radio medium, all the A. J. Alan stories profess to be personal reminiscences (like the bulk of Somerset Maugham's output) but they are nevertheless quite un-egotistical. The speaker is always victim, dupe, or stooge rather than hero. No one man could ever have had so many peculiar things happen to him, and the adventures related by A. J. Alan had mostly occurred to his acquaintances, who were startled to hear over the air half-forgotten episodes in their own lives, deftly dramatised by their whimsical friend.

A. J. Alan the writer is no cosmopolite, like Maugham, any more than he can claim O. Henry's gift for picturesque dialect. Nor is he sentimental, like Guy de Maupassant, from whom this school of authorship derives. The chief resemblance between A. J. Alan and these greater craftsmen, not omitting also Saki, is in the invariable surprise ending, the sting in the tail. But in Alan's case the unexpected culmination is less often drama than pure spoof... The listener and reader find that a shaggy dog has been leading them up the garden path to a climax of anti-climax. As a radio "act" it was, of course, essential that the conte should conclude with a good exit-line or "curtain punch", but Alan's preference for understatement and leg-pulling is distinctively English.

Though, like Maupassant and Saki, primarily a humorist, Alan shares with these other two a strong tendency towards the macabre. To call him merely a writer of ghost-stories is to do him less than justice, for his mischievous ghastliness when they occur (as for instance in "Wottie", where the preamble in a good-class school lures us to a stomach-turning denouement) are intensified by being phrased with the well-bred reserve befitting his alter ego, that circumspect civil servant, L. H. Lambert. The leopard had changed his spots to some purpose, for the cumulative effect is irresistible.

Exactly why is difficult to say. Though, in "Charles" and "My Adventure at Chislehurst", he is capable of a nice line in murderesses, besides proffering a convincing gangster's moll in "My Adventure in Norfolk", his character delineation is elsewhere negligible. On the credit side, his use of slang is sparing but effective; contrariwise, though habitually referring to himself as a West End clubman, educated at Rugby, a model husband resident in Kensington, his references to other females are embarrassingly skittish — wishful thinking, perhaps. His settings rarely range outside the upper-middle-class section of society to which he himself belonged. The clue to his nation-wide appeal probably lies in that overworked word, charm.

Standard works of reference are strangely silent about this man of mystery. The Dictionary of National Biography and Who Was Who both totally ignore him. One explanation may be that his last broadcasts occurred in war-time, when his prominent position at the Foreign Office and hush-hush service with the R.N. rendered advisable a diplomatic silence concerning his lay activities. In consequence, when he died in 1940, aged fifty-seven, in a Norwich nursing-home, his obituaries were sparse and uninformative, although from them we learned for the first time his real name and that he lived at Potter Heigham, Norfolk, his will being proved at £1,134 gross. Incidentally, Mrs. Lambert did not long survive him.

Stuart Hibberd, formerly Chief Announcer of the B.B.C., who introduced A.J.A. to listeners, tells us in his autobiography that Alan was cheery, slim, well-dressed, sported a dangling monocle, and always carried a neat, discreet, despatch-case. Genial, he could be irritable at any interruption. To keep his voice in good trim for his recitals, he neither smoked nor imbibed alcohol during the week preceding each broadcast, self-denial which must particularly have irked him, as a connoisseur of food and wine.

Anyone sitting by his ain fireside with an Alan volume is ensured a delightful evening. His is no book for a deck-chair on a beach, a hammock and a sunny day. Though laughter is plentiful, the supernatural hovers persistently; a skeleton is liable to pop its head out of the cupboard and mar the feast of mirth. But, Alan being the spellbinder he is, after pushing a corpse under your nose, a murdered corpse, sometimes a putrefying one, he will characteristically square the circle with politely insincere apologies for having curdled your blood.

So bizarre an amalgam is little affected by the passage of time. References by him to performances of "Bulldog Drummond" at Wyndham's and Lily Elsie in "The Merry Widow" establish his epoch, as do his female fashions: knee-length skirts, turbans with ospreys, and ostrich-feather fans. A pretty girl is to him a "peach" instead of a "smasher". Notwithstanding, this author does not date appreciably, because he is unique.

Good evening, everyone!

A J Alan was the pseudonym of Leslie Harrison Lambert, a Foreign Office official, amateur magician, former Royal Navy officer and cryptographer in Hut 8 (the Enigma team) at Bletchley Park. Phew. Well, why did he need a pseudonym, you'd like to know, and the answer to that is that he made occasional broadcasts on the wireless in the '20s and '30s, spinning tall tales that he wrote himself and pasted onto large squares of cardboard so as not to disturb the audience with the sound of rustling pages. Lambert - that is, Alan - always turned up at the BBC in full evening dress, and with his own candle and matches as contingency in the event of a studio light failing.

Now the reason I'm telling you all this is that I was introduced to Mr Alan's - I mean, Mr Lambert's - stories many years ago by my friend William Burton, who was read them by his housemaster at school who might very well have been one of Alan's original listeners. The stories made a strong impression on me. They are shaggy dog tales for the most part, often but not always steering away at the last moment from anything as vulgar as mere plot resolution. Some have a delicate touch of the supernatural about them, though only in the way a chap might tell you about an actual spooky experience, nothing so overtly supernatural as in an M R James tale. In the most part the stories are very effective at doing just what the storyteller intended, namely letting you pass an agreeable half-hour in the company of an amusing raconteur who's spinning an elegant verbal picture of how he went gadding about on various outré and/or outrageous adventures. All of them are charming and whimsical, and definitely took their place along Dunsany's tales of Jorkens as a big influence on Mirabilis.

Anyway, I recently noticed that A J Alan breathed his last in a Norfolk guest house seventy years ago. Which I'm sure was quite a tragedy, especially for Mrs Alan (well, Mrs Lambert, of course, is who I mean) who followed her husband soon after, poor woman. But time heals all wounds, and the silver lining in this case is that A J Alan's stories are now in the public domain. We talked a bit about publishing rights yesterday - well, here's a fine body of work in which everybody has publishing rights. It no longer need languish, secured by the strangling chain of copyright. Now the A J Alan oeuvre can enjoy a new lease of life.

Obviously it's too much to hope that the BBC would have kept the original recordings. These are the fellows who wiped Tomb of the Cybermen, after all. But possibly somebody at Broadcasting House will have the bright idea of getting Hugh Laurie or somebody to re-record the stories, if indeed they can still afford him. In the meantime, doing my bit, I shall bring you some of A J Alan's stories here, starting with "The 19 Club" tomorrow.