The Long Delirious Burning Blue

‘I have been asleep for forty years. This is what I need: this fear, this risk, this wind rocking my wings. This is what I have been missing. This is what it means to be alive – up here, on the edge of death.’

Cat Munro’s safe, carefully-controlled world as a corporate lawyer in Phoenix is disintegrating, and she is diagnosed with panic disorder just before her fortieth birthday. In a last-ditch attempt to regain control of her life, she faces up to her greatest fear of all: she decides to learn to fly. As she struggles to let go of old memories and the anxieties that have always held her back, Cat faces a choice: should she try to piece her old life back together again, or should she give in to the increasingly urgent compulsion to throw it all away?

Several thousand miles away in Scotland, Cat’s mother Laura faces retirement and a growing sense of failure and futility. Alone for the first time in her life, she is forced to face the memories of her violent and abusive marriage, the alcoholism that followed, and her resulting fragile relationship with Cat. But then she joins the local storytelling circle. And as she becomes attuned to the mythical, watery landscape around her, she begins to reconstruct the story of her own life ...

From the excoriating heat of the Arizona desert to the misty flow of a north-west Highland sea-loch, Sharon Blackie’s first novel presents us with landscape in all its transformative power. An honest and moving exploration of the complexities of mother-daughter relationships, The Long Delirious Burning Blue is above all a story of courage, endurance and redemption.

Praise for The Long Delirious Burning Blue:

‘It is that rarity, a first novel that smacks of not merely confidence, but authority, a sense that the story is true and clearly envisioned, with the technique to make it seem seamless, dynamic and written with verve and a care for the English language … The ending is powerful (reminiscent of The English Patient), filmic, and achieving the kind of symmetry that novels often aspire to, but rarely reach.’ Tom Adair, The Scotsman

'...Hugely potent. A tribute to the art of storytelling that is itself an affecting and inspiring story.'
The Independent on Sunday

'I was won over by Blackie's cleverly woven presentation of how violence and lies within a family work down the generations, cultivating abuse, addictions, and careers that are essentially displacement activities.'
Scottish Review of Books

‘Sharon Blackie writes with a real sense of truth and emotional depth about relationships between individuals, and between individuals and their environment. Her characters are figures in a landscape brought vividly, vibrantly to life.’ Nicholas Royle

‘An inspirational literary début; empathetic and mature. Sharon Blackie vividly conveys the protagonist’s struggle to overcome her fear of flight to crack open the limitations imposed on her, not just by others but by the memory of others.’ Margaret Graham

For a review of The Long Delirious Burning Blue on the Lizzy Siddal book blog, please click here: http://lizzysiddal.wordpress.com/2008/02/14/the-long-delirious-burning-blue-sharon-blackie/

For a review on the Vulpes Libris blog, please click on http://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/2008/03/07/the-long-delirious-burning-blue-by-sharon-blackie/

Recommended read by Vulpes Libris blogger Moira Briggs on The Book Depository website: 'A simply superb debut novel, beautifully and intelligently written with a terrific sense of place and a clutch of engaging, believable characters.' http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/WEBSITE/WWW/WEBPAGES/listarticle.php?type=blogarticle

About Sharon Blackie

Sharon Blackie’s roots are in the north-east of England and in Edinburgh, though she has travelled all over the world and lived in France, Ireland and America. She is now firmly attached to a lochside croft in the north-west Highlands of Scotland, where she lives with her husband, David Knowles, and a growing collection of livestock. Originally trained as a neuroscientist, she has worked in a variety of corporate consultancy roles, practiced as a therapist, and is now co-owner of Two Ravens Press. In 2008 she was selected as a 'woman of achievement' to attend the prestigious Woman of the Year lunch in London. She is currently the recipient of a Scottish Arts Council Writer's Bursary to work on her second novel.

Once upon a time in the great American south-west Sharonstruggled to obtain a pilot’s licence to overcome a fear of flying – an experience which led to the conception of The Long Delirious Burning Blue.

Sharon is co-editor of Riptide: New Writing from the Highlands and Islands (Two Ravens Press, 2007) and editor of Cleave: New Writing by Women in Scotland (Two Ravens Press, to be published in June 2008). She is translator from the French of renowned Franco-American author Raymond Federman's memoir of and tribute to his friend, Samuel Beckett: The Sam Book (Two Ravens Press, June 2008). The Long Delirious Burning Blue is her first novel.

See the author's website at www.sharonblackie.com

To see Sharon's Top Ten books on The Book Depository website, click here:
http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/WEBSITE/WWW/WEBPAGES/viewblogarticle.php?id=941

An Interview with Sharon Blackie

When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?

I read books from as early as I can remember, and ended up with ‘A’ levels in French and English literature, but it took me years to figure out that people ‘like me’ could write! It also took till I was 40 before I was really convinced I had anything interesting or especially different to say. (To me, writing is something that you do once you have a real need to, and not before: it’s not about ‘wanting to be a writer,’ it’s about needing to write, and needing to write a specific thing that tugs at you and haunts your dreams and won't let you go until you do something with it.) So then I decided I should have a bit of craftsmanship to go with the need, and registered for an online MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Inspiration – so many! Camus was the first author who really made an impression on me, when we read L'Etranger during ‘A’ level French literature. We studied DH Lawrence in English lit at the same time (The Rainbow) and both were a real revelation after years of Jane Austen and Milton. Other later literary influences were Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood. Now I look for literature that surprises me – that does something different, that isn’t too tied to conventional structure or conventional language or conventional style. But always, it’s been about ideas and language in literature. I love language that’s poetic, full of imagery. Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient is, to me, one of the most beautiful novels ever written. And Nikki Gemmell’s stunning Lovesong, Shiver and Cleave.

Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind The Long Delirious Burning Blue? And about what you were trying to achieve, what ideas you were trying to convey?

I lived in America for five years, around the turn of the Millennium. It was a restless period: I’d just gone through a divorce, and was seriously disillusioned with my corporate job and the whole lifestyle thing that went with it. In many ways it was a classic mid-life crisis. And in classic mid-life-crisis style, I needed to do something drastic to work my way out of it. I decided to learn to fly. Sounds like a great idea – unless, like me, you have a fear of flying ... Well, let’s just say, eventually, that it worked. It worked so well that I left my job, left America, came back to Scotland, took an MA in Creative Writing, wrote a novel, and decided to set up a publishing company! But there’s more to Blue than just flying. It deals predominantly with the difficult relationship between a mother and a daughter – a breach that stems from the mother’s alcoholism when the daughter was a child. What caused the mother’s alcoholism? Domestic violence. And so, although this is a novel that ultimately, I hope, is uplifting – a story of courage, of learning to fly – it focuses on a number of issues that touch so many women today.

One of the key things I was trying to do in the novel was make the point that we all have the ability to reassess and retell the story of our life – maybe, ultimately, even to transform it entirely. You can interpret the same facts in a bunch of different ways. You can decide that your story is one of fear and failure and misery – or, at any point in your life, you can say – I don’t like this story. The next chapter will be different. And then the negative backstory becomes instead a story of growth, of learning to overcome obstacles. I drew on my own training as a therapist, and my specialisation in storytelling and ‘narrative therapy’ – the use of stories and creative writing in health and therapy settings. Story and myth are very important parts of the novel, as they’re very important to me and to my own life. That, and the landscapes where I’ve spent lots of time – landscapes that have affected me deeply; landscapes that are themselves filled with myth and story. Landscapes where the novel is set: the excoriating heat of the Arizona desert and, in contrast, the misty sea-lochs of the north-west Highland coast where I now live.

How and when do you write?

I find it near impossible to write if I don’t have a whole whack of time ahead of me. I’m very bad at squeezing it in when my head is full of other things. When I’m writing properly it normally comes early in the morning. Early mornings are when I take the dog for a long walk along the lochside at the bottom of our croft. There are birds there, and seals, and not very much else except rock and water. I’m not always consciously ‘writing’ inside my head when I’m down there, but something is happening – as evidenced by the number of times I’ve gone down there with a plot problem and by the time I come back up and sit down again at the computer, it’s solved!

What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?

Right now it’s hard to find time to read because I spend so much time editing other people’s manuscripts! But one of my favourite authors is Janette Turner Hospital, and every so often I re-read her novels, which I first discovered in Australia about 20 years ago. Other favourites: Helen Dunmore, John Fowles, Clarice Lispector ... Recently read David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten and loved it; Marie Darrieussecq’s My Phantom Husband is next on my list. I find myself so often getting so bored by contemporary British novels – what I want to read is anything that still has the power to surprise and the courage to make interesting use of language rather than that flat pared-down style that seems so beloved of the critics these days. And so often it seems that people write for the critics or the market, rather than for the sake of the writing.

An extract from The Long Delirious Burning Blue

We’re coming so close now, but still I can’t relax. I turn my eyes forward, and focus on the flat space of the airport – follow the runways obsessively with my eyes, afraid to look away in case they disappear on me. He points out another aircraft – down there, just below us; we’re to follow it in. I’m only half-listening to the voices that crackle through my headphones.

For a moment we seem to be flying away again – flying right past the airport. I crane my head around, look back at the runway – then the magic words seep into my consciousness: ‘Two November Romeo, cleared to land?…’

And we’re turning back so sharply now but we’re too close to the ground and the nose is so low and surely this isn’t right? – and I clutch at the wheel and I want to pull it back but he says ‘It’s okay, Cat,’ and we’re levelling off – and then there it is: the runway. Right there ahead of us, there through the windscreen, so close now, so very close and we’re floating on down, we seem to be floating?… The main gear touch down very softly. The front wheel follows, a few moments later. A perfect landing.

We’re on the ground.

I let out a breath that sounds almost like a sob.

‘There you go,’ he says quietly, as he works his feet on the brake pedals and rudder, and we swing off the runway. ‘There you go, now.’

We pause for a while as he talks on the radio yet again and then pulls onto the taxiway with its completely impenetrable signs and markings. In a minute or two we arrive back where we started all those aeons ago. He parks the airplane right where we found it, pulls out the throttle, cuts the mixture and turns off the ignition.

Entranced, I watch the propeller winding down, finally coming to a halt. The silence is startling. He opens his door to get out, but I find that I am incapable of movement. I don’t seem to have the use of my legs, and my hands are shaking as I unbuckle the seat-belt. Overcome with vertigo, I close my eyes. My black tee-shirt clings wetly to my body. The door opens beside me, and wordlessly he lifts me from the plane. The ground feels strangely insubstantial beneath my feet.

‘You okay?’ he asks me as I tentatively let go of him, reacquaint myself with concrete, with buildings, with the earth.

I take a deep breath and find that I am smiling as I exhale. Before I can falter or think or change my mind I open my mouth and the words fly out. ‘When can I have another lesson?’

He laughs abruptly. He looks confused, disconcerted. ‘Why are you doing this?’

Why am I doing this?

The smile fades and I clench my jaw so he will not see the sudden, rare threat of tears.

Why am I doing this?

Listen, I want to say to him: Listen. Have you ever woken up in the morning, stepped out of your house and noticed that the ground all around you has shifted? In some subtle, sinister way that you can’t quite define? You see the cracks in the driveway and you know it’s not just the heat of the desert sun that’s caused them. Something is shifting, you think. Something is giving way, and you have no idea at all how to stop it, how to wrest back control. You plug the cracks with concrete, sand over the joins but the next morning there they are again. They smile darkly at your rising fear.

Why am I doing this?

Listen, I want to say to him: I don’t know. All I know is that right now it feels as if my life somehow depends on it. That if I don’t find a way to fly free of it, the earth will rise up and swallow me, snatching me down, down into the underworld, never to emerge, never to escape. And I’m no Persephone; there’s no Demeter to rescue me from the clutches of the dark god. I will need wings to fly from this sunless place.

But of course I do not say this. I look into his eyes and the steady firmness of his gaze defeats me. He doesn’t look like he’s ever had a day’s doubt in his life. I smile wryly; I become myself again. ‘Congenital insanity?’ I suggest. ‘Mid-life crisis?’

Gently, he shakes his head, looks at me intently, eyes narrowed, measuring, assessing. I raise my chin and return the gaze as steadily as I am able. I need to do this more badly than I can put into words, and something in him seems able to grasp the need even if the understanding of it eludes him. Because eventually, he shrugs. ‘All right,’ he says. ‘All right. You got yourself a flying instructor.’