Dear John Harding,
Lucinda Hart, The Broken Air
I was reluctant to take on the first of your books I read. My mother and I were in Waterstones looking for my birthday presents, and she picked up While The Sun Shines from the central table. I was sniffy and off-hand, but she bought it for me anyway, and I am more than glad she did because it introduced me to your insanely observant, ridiculously funny worlds – worlds I return to when the going gets tough and I need to go somewhere crazier than where I am.
So here’s the real deal. I keep a Top Ten list of books, and numbers two to ten chop and change, disappear and re-enter the chart, but one of your books is the Number-One-Hogger, the Ed-Sheeran-chart-topper of my list, and that book is One Big Damn Puzzler. I tell everyone about this book. I have recommended it to men I was on blind dates with, I have given it as a gift to almost everyone I know who reads. Sure, it helps if you know a bit of Shakespeare, if you can pick up the many references to Hamlet and The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night, to the magic and the cross-dressers, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t. The book is hilarious, the funniest book I have ever read. I’ve lost count of the times I have re-read it, but one memorable time was when I was donating blood at the local village hall and I was stuck in one half of a pair of beds, with our local Liberal Councillor in the other. He was trying to engage me in conversation about the farmland he had sold off for development, but I was laughing out loud at your island, and hardly daring to speak to my neighbour because if I did it would be in the island dialect (why is that so infectious? It must be a natural way to speak).
William Hardt is like my long-lost twin. I’ve spent hours performing my own OCD rituals. I completely understand why an interruption means having to start again. Your stunning observation of the “weary inevitability” of OCD is the best description of it I’ve ever heard – and I have pinched it several times. When I moved away to university it took me over an hour to get ready for bed because of my own PLUGHOLE-WATER-WATER-PLUGHOLE rituals.
Your worlds are not all insane of course. I think what makes your books such killers is that we’re all guffawing away at the antics of the islanders and at the Donne Don who got Done, but then suddenly you whack us in the balls with a genuine tragedy that we never saw coming. The changing fortunes of the island and Western involvement destroy both the local way of life and introduce deadly changes for the population. No-one but you, John Harding, could turn the bombing of the World Trade Centre into such a darkly comic moment. The first time I read that piece it took me a second or two to realise what you’d done, your audacity, your sheer brilliance.
About the Author
Lucinda Hart grew up in Cornwall and has been writing fiction since the age of three. She has a BA in Fine Art and Creative Writing and a MA in Creative Writing, both from Bath Spa University. The themes in Lucinda’s books are often of great relevance to her. Place is also important; she uses her favourite locations in novels and hopes they will interest the reader as much as they have inspired her. She lives in Cornwall with her two daughters.