This is a report that the reader for the Penguins Publishers made of my
TORIES OF MOTHER GOAT
Hilary Johnson
Dr. H. Johnson 5 Sto Agnes Gate Wendover Bucks, HP22 6DP TeZ (01296) 623260 Fax (01296) 623601

.Mr. Manuel Pardo,
5, Ground Lane,
South Moreton, Didcot',
Oxon.OX11 9AQ

November 4, 1995

"Dear Manuel,

First, I am so sorry that you had to telephone and that I have taken so long to return your work. Pressure during September and October is always great and this year an urgent and major editing job on a novel for penguin had to be given priority, in order to meet the publication date and thus everything else became delayed Anyway, I thank you, not only for sending your typescript but also for your patience.

­There is much about the STORIES OF MOTHER GOAT which is charming. The relationship between grandmother and grandson, with its touch of affectionate humour, is a delight. Mother Goat has a begui1ing narrative voice. She is at once wise, maddening and possessed of a lovely rhythm to her storytelling, which causes her diversions from her stories and the way in which she returns to the point accumulatively to develop a pattern well-suited to the fable style.



All this I enjoyed and, also, the pictures of rural Spanish life in the past presented through Grandma's memories and narrative. I liked the image of her closeness with nature and the animals she tended, while Manu’s mingled love for his grandmother and occasional exasperation with her are pitched exactly right. Altogether, the work has a great deal of gentle charm.

As regards the English, you will see that I have made what appear to be numerous pencilled corrections to the text, though in fact the majority are of the same type of error and in general your written English is of a good standard. Like many people for whom English is not the first language, you are confused by the proper use of prepositions and there are some problems with the tenses of verbs and their forms. I hope, though, that you will find my corrections helpful.
I have to say that you would probably encounter difficulties in selling this typescript, especially in the current very ­difficult market. Publishers are cutting their lists, dropping many of their existing authors and being extremely cautious about taking on new ones. They need to feel total confident about the sales potential of a new author and of the material he has to offer. There might be some interest in a collection of, say, Spanish country fables or something of that kind but these stories are on too limited a scale to be readily marketable. Another problem is that they are very gentle, leisurely stories at a period when the trend is towards crisp, fast-paced narrative.

In any event, a fair amount of work needs to be done on them. The opening pages present the reader with some solid blocks of prose - long paragraphs, no dialogue for several pages - and for some while very little happens. The pace is slow and there is a good deal of repetition. As it happens the patient reader, especially if he is able to fall into the narrative rhythm, is rewarded, but the risk is that by that stage the typescript will have been put aside. If a busy editor interest is not caught by the first page, then the typescript is more than likely to be discarded. . .

One way of treating your material is much as you have done here, linking a series of stories by means of the overall narrator and the narrator of the stories, without the stories themselves having much to connect them other than locality and perhaps the odd character who may crop up in more than one story. Rather like Bret Rabbit, I suppose. .

But another is to have a. much stronger theme and storyline running through the entire section. I am assuming now that this is a part of the larger work mentioned in your letter earlier this. I feel that you could put the main focus of the narrative on the story of the stag man - what a heart-breaking tale - and spend less time on the others.

There is a further point herein that if the first five books of the complete work add up to 220,000 words and if there are two more parts in addition to these, then that will make for a book which is so vast that publishers will be very resistant to it.(paper costs have soared by around 50% during the past few months.)To split the material into separate books would mean that some of these, by the present divisions, are much shorter than the usual novel length, which is a practical difficulty of another kind. ..

What I would advise, without having seen the other parts and judging on the basis of this one which could certainly benefit from some very severe editing, is that you consider a target of 100,000 words maximum. The narrative needs to be much tighter, the concentration being very much upon the stories themselves and, the element which is of particular interest, the way in which Mano responds to them. You have. caught the painful aspect of comedy in the boy's neglect of his duties while he strives to see the fairies and the awful consequences while the episode of the golden chickens makes for strong writing. Grandma has a good deal for which to be responsible!

You say in the letter that the saga deals with a boy missing his grandfather, but in this entire section the grandfather is barely mentioned. Maybe it just happens that this is not the place for that and that the theme is stronger elsewhere, but it seems slightly strange that Mother Goat is so dominant a figure, with very little sense of Manu’s life outside these encounters. There is an occasional scene with his mother, but his home, family and friends scarcely figure in his thoughts. 1 wasn't sure of his age, whether or not he went to school, if he also had a father and/or brothers and sisters. It maybe that these matters are covered in the first part, but I mention it because there is a curious impression of the boy existing almost in isolation from the world around him and therefore all the readier to absorb the fancies and strange logic of his grandmother. (The way in which he gradually starts to question some of her statements is nice, as is the fact that the old woman always has an answer!)

There_ is certainly a pleasing flavour to the narrative, but for both practical reasons and literary ones it needs to be rigorously pruned. As a first exercise, go through the text and see what you can leave out. Look especially for repetition.­ Have you noticed how many sentences begin with 'Because'? ­whether it be of words, phrases or ideas. Also for excessive description, unnecessary adjectives or adverbs and anything at all which is not strictly relevant to. the story. Many writers have had to do this in the early stages of their career and have found it most instructive. And do bear in mind the importance of pace. Even though you don't want to 1ose the appeal which comes from the very fact that this is a gently­ paced narrative, nevertheless, neither do you want to risk the reader becoming lulled into boredom through lack of incident and forward narrative drive.

1 hop you have found these comments useful and 1 wish you well with your writing. It is a hard path you have chosen to tread,. One of the most important qualities for a writer to posses these days is determination. There is an originality about your work which can only benefit from your developing your technique to which end I would recommend intensive reading of recently published novels and indeed non-fiction, too, so that you can learn from other writers and thus form your own style.

Again, many apologies for the delay,

Yours Sincerely

Hilary Johnson.