At some time each winter, fog descends on Vancouver. In the West End, you walk out to blue sky and only a wisp of cloud, only for the mist to catch up with you on the street before you reach English Bay. Burrard Inlet shimmers with a patch of sunlight. Kitsilano and Point Grey loom out of the mist, only their trees visible, the suburbs seeming to have shed their craftsmen houses, lawns, and streets of cherry and horse chestnut trees, and to have returned to the great conifer forests of two hundred years ago. We walk through Stanley Park up to Point Atkinson, to the memorial bench for Leslie Cheung. There are flowers, pictures, a Teddy bear and a packet of Lanzhou cigarettes left out for him to smoke. The fog thickens on our walk back through the forest, the great columns of red cedar and Douglas fir and hemlock. In our apartment, night comes quickly. I can hear foghorns from ships in the inlet, and their low moans take me back to childhood, to Newcastle and our house on Coniston Avenue. I remember how as a child, a continent and then an ocean away, I fell asleep and then woke again at night to the sound of foghorns from ships on the Tyne.

This year, the fog has settled in for longer than usual. We went up Grouse Mountain one day, to find the whole of the Fraser Delta and the Salish Sea blanketed in a sea of clouds. Only the long dark line of Point Grey, pushing itself up out of a blanket of white, so you think of the Musqueam name for it, ʔəlqsən, the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓word for a promontory or point of land. Ujong Tanah. 天涯地角. Further east, the tips of the towers of downtown and the container cranes from the Port of Vancouver. The next day we were on Cypress Mountain, walking through snow, frozen lakes, and into the shelter of tall first growth trees. On the way up, we stopped at the viewpoint. The fog had lifted somewhat from the previous day, so the two towers and the catenaries of the cables on the Lion’s Gate Bridge loomed up out of the mist.

Writing this, I feel a metaphor forming, something about how concealment reveals: how a partially obscured view reveals what a panorama cannot. Something to do with writing and reading. I finished last month’s post by reflecting on the experience of reading Yeng Pway Ngon/ 英培安’s novel The Colour of Twilight in Jeremy Tiang’s recent translation, and the two situations that it begins and ends with. The first is a scene of reading, in which Ming Wai, the protagonist, enters a novel and is so immersed in it he finds it difficult to return to a quotidian world. At the end of The Colour of Twilight Ming Wai is writing his own novel, and finds that the world of the characters he enters is as vivid as the world around him, in which, as he ages, friendships are diminishing. This month I’ve been reading – or perhaps more accurately, dipping in and out of — Margaret Atwood’s Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts. She mentions something similar. “Every writer,” she writes “is at least two beings: the one who lives, and the one who writes. … Like Jekyll and Hyde, the two share a memory and even a wardrobe. Though everything written must have passed through their minds, or mind, they are not the same” (xviii-xix).

In the last month I’ve experience both the scene of writing and the scene of reading, both of which seem, in Atwood’s terms, to be fleeting moments of existence. Over the last few months I’ve been writing historical fiction, in a narrative that may at some time grow to be a novel. It’s a strange experience for me, very different from that of writing a short story. You remain in a single fictional world, digging into it layer by layer. You don’t know the world well yet; it’s like exploring a great house using a flashlight, picking out one place or feature at a time, more like a process of discovering what is already there than creating something new.

At the same time, I’ve been pulled into another world of reading from time to time. I picked up David Szalay’s Booker Prize winning novel Flesh at a bookstore. I didn’t especially like the novel: the central character had little inner life, and the narrative as a whole felt like an extended version of one of the later stories from Szalay’s earlier collection All That Man Is. But the novel nonetheless held me tight in its fictional world for the two days over which I read it. In preparation for my book reading in Boston –of which more, possibly, next month – I read a novel written by Shubha Sunder, who would host me at Brookline Booksmith. Optional Practical Training describes the life of an immigrant to Boston from Bangalore who, after graduation, moves to teaching math and physics at high school. It’s a much more enjoyable novel than Flesh, and has the lovely quality (whether this is true or not) of seeming to be written effortlessly. Again, as I flew to the East Coast and we dodged winter storms there, I found myself entering the world of the book, and then having to drag myself away for a landing, for a shuttle ride, or for a boarding call.

So perhaps the relationship between writing, reading, and an external life isn’t quite as Atwood describes. They are perhaps more like alters in dissociative identity disorder; they may not quite share the same memories. Or perhaps there’s only a single landscape of the self, a solid well-lit city at the centre, fading away into mountains and forests and seas at the edges. Writing and reading are like fog; they reveal what has been there all along, but they somehow abstract it from the ground of the everyday, and make me look again, as if for the first time.