Shadows and Dreams, or why feminism sucks sometimes

(This post will include spoilers for C. Robert Cargill's Dreams and Shadows, a dark place to be...)

Years ago, although not really that many years ago, back when I was serious about being a writer but had absolutely no idea what that entailed, I was the best reader any novelist could hope to find.

I didn't read, I devoured. I stayed up 'til half past four every night. I would spend whole weekends where I didn't get out of bed, where I promised myself I'd get washed, get dressed, drink that cup of tea... when I'd finished this chapter. Then, I'd start the next without realising I was doing it.

All of that, I still do if life permits it, if I can find a book that captures me. But back then, every book captured me. It wasn't that I didn't see the flaws, that I didn't distinguish between a good book and a bad; rather, I looked with the eyes of love. I wasn't reading the words in front of me, I was reading the words, the concept, the perfect story that the author held in their head, in that place ideas start. Where they are pure. Seeking only pleasure, I would find only happiness. I was your ideal reader, I was the ideal reader.

Seriously, I rocked.

Now? I don't know if it's editing or academia that has done it to me - though it's probably some combination of the two - but now, I know how stories are put together. Now, like an amateur seamstress, I can still see where you got your hems wonky, even if I couldn't make the dress myself.

 For the last few years I've been on a quest. I want, I need to find books, to find authors, who can make me forget all this. I have been reading all over, in genre and out of it, modern and pre-19th century, books that have won prizes, books that friends have sent me, books picked up in the library that should really never have left the slush pile at a publishing house. I have been on a journey, a earnest pilgrimage through every literary terrain to find that glorious novel, that blast of literary wonder that will grab me by the vitals and make me feel fourteen again.

So.

I was introduced to Shadows and Dreams by a lovely young woman working at the Waterstones in Norwich. She told me it was great: compelling, and scary, and that the faeries in it weren't... well, you know.... but they were really dark and stuff. Then, she name-checked a few of my favourite authors and I had Christmas money and ... ah, hell, it's a book. How much persuasion do I ever need?

So, okay, the plaudits on the cover said it would appeal to fans of Neil Gaiman's adult novels, which is polite way of saying that, in some lights, it's a knock-off of American Gods, but I stopped that attititudr at the door. I spoke to myself sternly, reminding myself that, in some lights, the opening chapters of American Gods look a bit like a knock-off Eight Days of Luke. Then, I sighed for the lost innocence of the because time when I thought novels had to be original, when I did not know that all fiction was inspired by other fiction. I kept in my.mind the fact that this kind of intertextuality is only a worry if it's handled badly. Yes, American Gods begins with some of the implications and nomenclature of Eight Days of Luke, but soon it plunges off into utterly different concerns and arises triumphant. Gods Behaving Badly, on the other hand, starts with some of the rules American Gods established, veers into an unconvincing romance, and emerges as an utter bloody travesty. (Apologies if you like that novel. Me, I'll just go back to banging my head against this wall.)

As I say, I bought the book. It had everything going for it. I was keen, I was excited, I sat down in the bath and wow. That opening. Ouch, ouch, ouch. I love it when a writer goes straight for the heart-strings, love it when a writer isn't afraid to fuck you up. Yes, I was thinking, is this it? Have I found it?

On I plunged, blissful. Here was sharp, effective, clever prose. Here was Colby, here was Ewan, here was the twisted little mind of Nixie Knocks... Here was....



Wait, wait, wait. Hold on a sec.  Aren't there any women in this book?

Brain, you aren't welcome here. Shut up.

I'm just saying...

Look! A plot! It's building. It's dark, it's mysterious, we know this is all going to end horribly...

But they're just mothers. That's the only dimension these women are given, it's the only role that defines them. They aren't the actors in this narrative. They're at the sidelines, cheering on their team. All the main players here, all the actual characters are men.

Brain, I told you. Stop it. Look! Mallaidh. She's a woman. And she looks like she's going to be pretty central. See, she's here for the big adventure and she's - oh, okay, Colby did that. But she's smart, and she's interesting and... not in this chapter and .... wait, what, they're just leaving her there?

No, dammit, you can't just leave Mall...

So I admitted defeat, I said, Congratulations, brain. Well spotted. There aren't any women here. They're entirely used as peripheral characters, people to be loved, saved, damned or avoided. It's a fantasy novel. It happens. I'm used to it. Now will you shut up so I can just...

Then I said: DAMN YOU BRAIN!

Because, you see, you put that little, critical crack into a book and all of a sudden, you start seeing things. Like the way that changelings are made, the way they operate. Sure, it's dark and its ugly and its scary, and that's all well and good, but does all that pain and ugliness have to be focused, solely, horribly, on the mothers?

And it's not enough that these mothers lose their babies in the vilest way imaginable, no. They must suffer for that loss over and over again. Tiffany and Jared respond in much the same way to the changeling Knocks. What do they get for it? Well, Jared gets a couple of decades in a jar. Tiffany... No.There was no narrative justification for that. It is horror, laid on for horror's sake. It is a narrative blaming a woman for the misfortune heaped upon her.

And Caitlin. She cried for three fucking days over that baby. But what are we told? "Her child was poisoned by its mother's vanity". I don't care if that isn't the author's voice, if the speaker is supposed to be ruthless and stern and amoral. The narrative never contradicts that statement, not for a moment. We never get the sense of Caitlin as anything other than a cruel, shallow bitch who, more-or-less, brought this on herself. A cruel, shallow bitch who spent three days weeping over her baby's corpse.

Gods, what a cruel, what a hateful thing to write.

And it isn't just the mothers who get treated this way. At the beginning of the novel, we get a neat, gorgeously written little fable about a Djinn, and the events that cursed him, 'The Ten Thousand Bottles of the Fishmonger's Daughter'. With all the effect and economy of The Thousand and One Nights, we hear that "the riders returned by morning, bearing the freshly cut heads of the newly weds". It has everything it needs for horror, for shock. But, clearly, death and heartbreak isn't enough. No. We must learn, later, that the young woman was tortured and gang-raped.

Isn't that just a little layering of nastiness? Isn't that a woman getting used as the narrative's whipping boy again?

But you know what upset me the most? When we hear about this, the suffering that we focus on is not the woman being violated and murdered for simply being who and what she is. No, we focus on her husband's calls for revenge, her husband's anguish and heartbreak. Oh, the Fishmonger's Daughter of the fable may have been been granted a voice by her lover's wish, but Cargill never sees fit to let us hear it. She exists only as the object of male desire, the means by which they can be cursed, destroyed, damned.

I've already said that I love it when novels get dark. I love it when novels get bleak and bloody. Hell, I love books in genres that historically are not known for their high number of female characters. None of these things, on their own, trouble me.

But when a writer focuses a heavier proportion of the narrative's pain, loss, and incidental violence against one group - be it a race, a gender, a sexuality, whatever - and refuses to bring even one representative of that group out of the borders of that narrative? That is a problem. That will spoil a book for me.

Which brings us to Mallaidh.

If you do not want heavy spoilers, do not read the next couple of paragraphs.

Mallaidh is the only female character in the Dreams and Shadows who has anything approaching a story. At untold danger, risk and time, she flees the faerie court, seeking her lost love. And what do we hear of it? About four lines and a couple of clichés.

Come to think of it, what does she even do? She falls in love with the guy who rescues her near the beginning, gives up everything to get him back and changes her physical appearance to be acceptable to him. She is then killed, tragically, accidentally, trying to save his life. We are told near the beginning that she will be his undoing, but she is not. She is simply the means through which his undoers act.

A good litmus test for whether your token  female character has agency despite being a tragic self sacrificing love interest is to compare her toThe Little Mermaid. If the comparison goes against you, you may wish to do some rethinking.

In The Little Mermaid, for example, it is the women who the rescuing at the start. In The Little Mermaid, the FMC has some agency in her own demise. But Mallaidh does not have even this agency. Her actions are reactions, amd are controlled by her love for her saviour, Ewan. Ultimately, her sacrifices are not sacrifices because they are not willed. She is not an subject, she is a victim.

</Heavy Spoilers>

Yeah, I got angry at this book. I got so damned angry and getting that angry made me unhappy. Because once I'd seen all this I stopped being able to enjoy it. I didn't want the storytelling to be good, any more, didn't want the prose to be clever and clean. I wanted it turned the seamy side without. Gods, I wanted to pull on those seams.

I stopped. Not reading, I rarely stop reading, but I stopped enjoying. Beneath the story, the one I liked, the one read, there was another narrative I could no longer ignore. One about women being victims, one about women not being welcome. Once again, my innocence was lost.

Of course it is possible to enjoy things you find problematic. There are a whole wealth of posts out there about how you sinful, inconsiderate lot are permitted - uh, I mean, how consumers should - enjoy problematic media. My personal method is to think 'yeah, there are issues, but I'm not going to let it bother me'. It works quite well.

So, where does that leave us?

Well, I, for one, am not accusing Cargill of any malice in this. I heap no opprobrium on his head. All he has done is internalise a narrative culture where action, where agency, where stories belong to men and any women present are their quest objects, their betrayers, their weakness. Yes, perhaps he is guilty of failing to examine that internalised prejudice, that privilege of being, unquestionably, the hero of his own story, but I can't know that. Novels take a long time to write. Maybe he's already noticed what I've seen. Maybe he's already asking himself those questions, maybe he is trying to undermine his assumptions, explore the stories that, in this novel, he refused to tell. I can't know what's happening inside his head.

What I do know, though, is that if he spent the next ten years writing, desperately try to understand a world where your narrative is not the dominant paradigm, of being faced at every turn with how life treats you differently when you look different, the resulting product will still be read by someone, somewhere, whose brain will say, "Hang on. Why are all the..."

Because to talk about 'problematic media' suggests it is a distinct category from 'non-problematic media'. Our society is one that is manipulated, controlled, by power relations of which we are, for the most part, unconscious. None of us, ever, in our lives, have encountered media that isn't problematic. Sure, our overwhelming privilege stops us from spotting it most of the time, but it is there. Even the most careful, inclusive, utopian story will offend, will marginalise, will exploit, at least one group. Somewhere, somebody less powerful than ourselves, will be hurt by the assumptions we are making. 

I won't even entertain the argument that this means we shouldn't try, that we shouldn't pick apart our cultural narratives to find a way of telling stories that doesn't privilege a dominant model over a less powerful one, that doesn't take the assumptions upon which we base our own lives as some universal mode. Sure, it's hard, bloody work. It's long and its baffling and it means noticing some pretty nasty  assumptions you make in your life, some really vile trends in your thought processes. But whatever some people would like you to believe - on both sides of the fence - it isn't "all or nothing", it isn't "damned if you do, damned if you don't."

It's a co-operative thing, a gradual one. We owe it to our readers to do our best. The works we produce along the way will be problematic, they will be as hurtful as hell, but they will not be without artistic merit. And a reader, popping up their head and asking, "hang on, why is this always like this?" should not be shouted down, should not be accused of over-thinking. Writers should take them seriously, should bloody well consider what is being said. They may not always agree with the criticism, or even be able to fix it, but they should try to understand why their work is being viewed that way. After all, that's what writers do: they imagine things they cannot possibly have experienced.Why should this be any different?

There are too many stories that are not being told, too many groups being dropped into boxes they did not chose for themselves. Our fiction reflects the world as we know it, whether we will it to or not. We should do this, we must do this - even if it makes the taste of a good story seem sour in our mouths. It is, and I say this with conviction, the right thing to do.

I just... sometimes I wish I could just read a book.

What's really going on in Labyrinth: Conclusion

I do but beg a little changeling boy to be my henchman

What's it to be then? Is Jareth actually Sarah's shadow, or her sexual fantasy? 

Right from the start, he is far more ambiguous than the parameters of an ordinary narrative would allow. He, the story and the characters all insist that he is motivated by love for Sarah. And if love is characterised by wildly disordered behaviour, boy, is it believable. He throws tantrums, displays bombast, changes his clothes more times than a sane man would think plausible, and yet... yet he is constantly sending her away. "Turn back," he tells her, "turn back before it's too late"

“Go back to your room,” he says, “and play with your toys. I have a gift for you.”

But what is he telling her when he turns her away? Especially as this gift (and, one assumes, by extension, his love) is, “not for an ordinary girl who looks after a screaming baby.”

Doesn't that translate as, "go and be a child, but be beholden to me"? "Get out of this mystical landscape but don't be ordinary."?

Besides, how is looking after a screaming baby a 'normal' thing for a fifteen year old to do? A modern, middle class, American, fifteen year old? Oh, and hey, that's twice Sarah has been thrown up against 'normal' behaviour for someone her age, twice it has been thrown away. She'd rather dress as a princess than have dates, rather go against a dashing supernatural tyrant than meekly accept his love.

Jareth continues in this erratic vein for the whole film, his malevolent laughter is continually underscored by melancholy, by the certainty that “she should have given up and gone home”. He pushes her, again and again, threatens, bribes, cheats, but never actually causes her harm. He is not a shadow, but he is willing to play her shadow; as he says at the end, “You trembled before me. I was terrifying...”

Is the labyrinth itself is Jareth's creation? Or Sarah's?

This would be easy were he simply a rogue figment: it would be her creation through him. But if he is a figment, then he is not the exact figment she believes him to be: why else would she view him with such incomprehension? And if he is wholly independent as an entity, if the labyrinth is his, as much as her own, we must accept that, to some extent, it is under his control. So, at the risk of sounding paranoid: why, in a landscape which the villain maintains, does Sarah meets the exact helpers she needs to complete her quest? More than that –why are those helpers deliberately sent by Jareth to perform certain role – freeing Sarah from the oubliette, blocking the exit to the bog of eternal stench? After all, it is their obedience to his instructions that permit her to show her mettle, allow her to triumph.

Interestingly, the very mettle that these companions cause her to show in herself - a willingness to be both flexible and ruthless (Hoggle), to display her bravery and kindness (Ludo), her logic and honour (Sir Didymus) - all these are characteristics that Jareth displays and appears to value. He himself adapts, changing his approach, his plan. He defends his realm with tricks and puzzles. He calls her out on her boast, “upping the stakes” to achieve his ends. Despite this, he does not go back on his word, neither will he allow her to rescind hers, “What's said is said.” Finally, defeated, he reasons with her, “I ask so little...”¹

But “kind?” I hear you ask, with Sarah, “what has he done that is kind?”

Convenient how this wall gives way so very close to certain death

Isn't it curious that, in a landscape whose laws operate entirely at the behest of the villain, Sarah is never in any actual danger? Ludo vanishes down a pit, only to appear where she will be in four minutes time. She falls into the oubliette – Hoggle rescues her. The Cleaners have them trapped – a wall gives way. They are plunging into the bog of stench and not one, but two handholds appear to stop their descent. 

I'm curtailing this particular line of reasoning before this post turns into one of those calmly delusional conspiracy websites, and limit myself to saying: if we consider that Jareth claims to love Sarah, it is reasonable to suggest he prevents her getting hurt.

So, here's the payload, chaps. 

Here's what's really going in in Labyrinth.

A supernatural entity falls in love with a lonely, somewhat dreamy, girl. (Even if we cut all the stuff about abandonment and misplaced affection for her absent mother's new partner, Sarah alphabetises her toys and spends her Saturday afternoons pretending to a be a Princess in a park. She unlikely to have vast numbers of friends.) This entity sees her frustrated by the role of surrogate motherhood that has been laid upon her. While her father and step-mother relieve their youth by having date nights nearly every Saturday, this assumption of adult responsibilities actually stops Sarah 'growing up', by limiting the roles and experiences she can attempt,  Freed from Toby, Jareth assumes, she could develop, become the adult she promises to be, dreamy, intelligent and - dare I say it – grateful. Freed from Toby, she is free to love him, in time.

This, however, is no ordinary girl.

It is not Jareth's love which makes Sarah special; that quality, of bravery, of imagination, of power, comes from her herself. We can only assume that it is the sheer strength and complexity of her imagination which has summoned him to her in the first place. So, when she refuses the gift of a child-free evenings with his crystal to entertain her, this is a decision Jareth respects.

To take the baby would be throw her back into childhood, and he does not want her to remain a child. He loves her, remember? He wants her to be an adult woman, capable of loving him in return. So, he gives her a different gift – not a harmless day-dream, but the very adventure quest of which she has fantasised, a spirit journey that will guide her out of childhood and into the difficult waters of adolescence. Into, one assumes, his arms.

To complete the quest, all she must do is remember the baby. But... but... if she remembers the baby, she'll take him home, good-hearted young woman that she is, and be that surrogate mother again. If she succeeds in this dream-quest, he will be the villain in her story. If she succeeds that very strength he admires will defeat him and his interest in the matter. So he tells her, “Turn back, Sarah. Turn back before it is too late.”

But each attempt to discourage her is overcome, each danger only shows more of that strength which he loved in the first place. As the quest progresses, Jareth's feelings for her deepen and her rejection of him becomes more assured. 

Come on, he makes a fantastic villain.

Alright, alright. My own idiot crush tends to misguide me on this². Yes, Jareth is flawed. Yes, he hugely morally ambiguous. Yes, he follows a morality that can never be considered human (baby troubling you? Want me to turn it into a goblin for you?) But that isn't all of it. He wants so badly to be loved, needs, desperately to be everything Sarah desires, that he has played his role too well. He makes such a good villain.

So, what does he do? Pushed into extremis, once again, he ups his game. "Wait, I have a better idea." You can handle childhood challenges so well, Sarah. How do you respond to adulthood? So she falls into a dream, a sexual, fevered, dream full of inexplicable grown-ups and infinitely desirable men, full of a sense of loss, of confusion; the dream we mere mortals call puberty.³

But as an adult, Sarah is lost. Still, rather than succumbing, rather than being the victim of this seduction she has enough savvy, enough guts to draw her own line under this, to say quite clearly, “I am not comfortable.” No victim, Sarah, she closes the uncomfortable conversation, ends the relationship.

Once more, she is stronger, better, more loveable, than Jareth believed.

So, now we come to the final confrontation. Sarah has emerged, not quite an adult, no longer quite a child. She is strong enough, now, to face this alone. Her responsibility, her grounding in reality, protect her from imagination's charms. She has to save Toby, no matter what temptation or distraction is laid in her way. She loves her dreams, but she will not be ruled by them. Into the unknown, into certain death, she leaps.

"I can't live within you"

Jareth must, simply must, win the love of this woman.

So what happens? The 'Goblin King' comes clean. The baby's safe, the 'war' is over, what is there to lose? He breaks the script, makes one attempt to reason, one last attempt to show her adulthood, to offer what he always wanted to give her, “her dreams”.

What happens next is open to debate.

Either, once again, Sarah is not ready. Jennifer Connelly plays this scene as if in a trance, as if not seeing, not hearing the words that are being said to her. Facing Jareth's heartfelt rhetoric, she quotes from a book, spouting words that do not connect, still playing the game, still following the childhood script, as though unaware the rules have changed. Jareth tries, fails, to interrupt, to break her concentration, but in the end, rote learning of the hero/villain narrative has proved too strong. She banishes him, and away he falls, leaving the gift he had promised her all along: dreams at her command. They burst on her fingers. As an owl, away he wings, to wait, or to seek another mate.

Or, perhaps more interestingly, Sarah knows exactly what is going on, knows exactly what is being offered, that, at last, she is no longer fighting the idea of the villain, but is fighting Jareth himself, this supernatural entity riding piggyback on her imagination.

After all, the text is, “Fear me, love me, do as I say, and I will be your slave.” To echo another supernatural word-battle about a boychild, his offer can be summed up with, “Am I not your Lord?”

"You have no power over me."

And, with all the dignity of a Titania, seeming to realise it for the first time, Sarah tells him where to get off: “Then I must be your Lady.”

As lovers, they are doomed. The very tests and trials that prove her as worthy, more than worthy, of his love are the things that show her too strong to be a handmaiden, too self-aware to take a secondary role. Whereas I, and all my friends, would probably have fallen swooning at this point, Sarah stays strong. What is offered her is a poisoned chalice. Why should she need that? Her will is as strong as his, her kingdom as great. She owes him nothing. The only powers he has over her are the ones that she allows him.

So, Jareth is banished, forced to watch from outside as the woman who is too strong for him reclaims what is rightfully her own. You can feel desperately sorry for him as he flies away, his choice vindicated, his love refused, without ever disbelieving that Sarah was right.

Chose the ending that gives you most pleasure. As for me? I veer between the two, depending on how feminist I'm feeling. Truly, in either case, a remarkable film.

Yeah, but what about the baby?

The Hero's Journey: What's really going on in the Labyrinth (part 2)

So, supernatural entities have been invoked and provoked, and our heroine is off on a dream quest to restore her baby brother to his rightful home.

And, speaking in generalities, Labyrinth is a dream quest in the fine old style. Inhabitants must be befriended, puzzles solved, fears overcome. What's more - as so many have pointed out - Sarah's journey takes place through an echo of her childhood room, through the country of her unconscious mind. The baby's cry becomes a call to her, and she journeys towards it and – the makers of the film would have us believe – responsibility.

But the implications of what is happening here are much more subtle, more interesting that that. We are not simply dealing with a dream landscape, we are dealing with the territory of childhood turned against its rightful ruler. A dark force is in Sarah's imagination, controlling it, manipulating her through it, and at every turn, Sarah forces it back, with courage, with kindness, with ingenuity.

This should really be a picture of the party at the end.

Still, so far, so Hero's Journey. It brings her right to the centre of the Labyrinth, where she faces her shadow and speaks those immortal words, “You have no power over me.” The malevolent force is banished, and she can return, as she does, to the real world. 

But to leave it there would be to forget the magical puppet party where the heroes and villains get together to throw confetti and be friendly. I'd always been bothered by that, felt it was a cop out. Felt that she somehow got both worlds, that she turned down magic, but still got to play with it. Then I thought about it properly, thought about what it means: she's safe getting down with the Fire Gang, Ludo can party with his ex-tormenters. What it means is that this isn't hostile country any more, that she isn't dealing with enemies. What that means is that Sarah's imagination is hers to control. That she is the queen of all this, like she always should have been. She's in charge now - not that rat who calls himself Jareth.

Come on, that's a brilliant prize. And she deserves it.

Still, if this were all it were, then the makers of the film would be right. A coming of age story, a powerful one, a beautiful one, but nothing particularly special. A girl grows up and overcomes the dark side of her imagination. Yes, she takes control, and by implication, learns to be less selfish, accepts her role as a surrogate mother. But I said this story was special, and two things make it so: the first is Bowie's performance as Jareth (more of that later), the second is a sequence that occurs just before the final confrontation.

Forget about the baby: What's really going on in the Labyrinth.

Reading G.K Chesterton's frankly biazarre introduction of The Man who Was Thursday, I came to the realisation that I'm not much of one for slavish deference to an authorial purpose in any story-form.

It's all very well for Chesterton to insist that his work is not an allegory when the text states, with all the subtlety of a bill-hook to the throat, that it is. Likewise, Mr Lewis can declaim to the heavens that his work is purely allegorical and nothing else, but... well, we'll let the text bear its own witness to that¹. A text is an artefact which is mediated by many viewpoints. Of course the author's conscious intention, their decision of where to focus, what to show, guides the narrative and the reader along its path, but...

None of us exist in a vacuum. Culture, tradition, unconscious thoughts, will shape a story as much as a writer's intention. And when a narrative artefact – like a folk-song, like a screenplay - is passed through many, many hands which shape, change affect before it even reaches its audience, then, oh, then, we can get something really special.

So, a little while back, the brilliant i09 published a link to a rather ingenuous piece of back-engineering  which tried to lay to rest the sheer WTF the viewer is left with after watching that absolutely superb film, Labyrinth.

Now, before we go any further I should probably come clean about my credentials as one of those women. You know the ones, the kind who owe their sexual awakening to staring rapt at David Bowie prancing about in eye-liner, a fright wig and eyewateringly tight tights. So when I talk about Labyrinth, I have a tendency to.... um....

oooh....

Er... sorry.

Where was I?

Right!

Anyway, that article is followed in the comments by a bunch of (weighs word choices) sticklers who insist that we already knew what Labyrinth was about, that any good geek would, at some point, would have plugged into google 'wait – what the hell. What was actually happening there?' and come up with a nice neat little explanation².

If you want that explanation, here you go: Labyrinth is a partial adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Outside Over There. It's about how Sarah has to get over her resentment of her little step-brother and start treating him properly. The breakdown of the film plot is:

1. Sarah's actress mother abandons her to live a life of romance with a beautiful actor who bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain Mr Bowie.
2. Devastated by this abandonment, she retreats into a fantasy world, idolising her absent mother, romanticising her affair. In the meantime, she gets involved with drama at school, being cast in a play called 'The Labyrinth' where a beautiful princess has to rescue her step-brother from the realm of the Goblin King. While doing this, she develops a crush on her drama teacher who also has a striking likeness to a particular famous musician actor with the most amazing eyes....
   

   

   .......

3.  .... sorry. You lost me again.
4. The Goblin King – who actually exists and is in love with Sarah – wants this child for some specific reason that is VITALLY IMPORTANT TO THE PLOT, goddammit!³
5. Sarah is rehearsing the play in the park and having trouble remembering the last line.
6. Dragged away from rehearsals AGAIN, Sarah fights with her stepmother, is left to babysit. Discovering one of her toys has been nicked and the baby will not stop crying, she imitates the play and summons the Goblin King to take her brother away..
7. Enter David Bowie in a big cloak and much glitter. Terms of a mystical contest are struck.
8. Sarah navigates the Labyrinth, befriends the Goblins and, despite dangers, trickery and discouragement, ***spoilers*** rescues the baby using the lines from the play that she had trouble remembering. Before she does so the Goblin King confesses his love and offers her an eternity of magic.

9. 

   Who would not want this child?

   She arrives back home, gives the baby the toy he stole earlier, packs away her Princess music box and takes down the press clippings of her mother from around the mirror. This, it is clear, is all behind her now.
10. However, Sarah is not quite ready to leave behind all the 'good' bits of her imagination. All the goodies and baddies from the Labyrinth, minus the Goblin King, have a big party in Sarah's room.
11. Baby Toby is safe.... however, the Goblin King will return to seize this baby that he wants SO MUCH.

Now, this makes a lovely, neat little morality tale. It's all about, oh, growing up, taking responsibility and not bargaining away your younger siblings to morally dubious supernatural entities just because they've been borrowing your teddy bears. As an explanation, however, it falls short, mostly because almost none of it's in the fucking film in the first place. It's all very well for Chesterton to exclaim, “I called it The Man who was Thursday: A NIGHTMARE! It's not supposed to be taken as anything more than that!” because, well, credit where it's due, that is actually the bloody title, but to try and control the interpretation of a film based upon stuff that isn't actually in the film? Oh, go and read some Barthes.

What makes this worse is that Labyrinth, against the film maker's best intentions, against their stated desire to tell a certain story in a certain way, Labyrinth, I tell you, persisted in being one of those white-hot, cultural-narrative, finger-on-the-pulse, don't-step-too-close-or-it-will-burn-you, vital bloody stories of which we do not have enough. Labyrinth is a story about a young woman discovering her sexuality but – again, again, oh be still my beating heart – from the inside. We see it through the young woman's flesh, the young woman's eyes. We feel the male gaze, the judging, older female gaze which tells us what we should be - “Go back to your room and play with your toys,” “You should be having dates at your age”, and we feel it scald our as-yet-untouched-skin.

And, of course, again, it is white, cis, middle class, heteronormative femininity. It isn't for everyone, it isn't inclusive, but damn it, when even the most privileged of women have to make do a scant handful of stories that show us as we actually are, they they too precious, too fucking scarce not to be celebrated. So, let's get this clear Labyrinth is a woman's story, and as one woman to anyone who's listening: Toby is the King of all McGuffins.

Adults and adultery: Cleaning up Dumas onscreen.

Some time ago, I watched the recent film of The Three Musketeers. The one with the airships.

If that wasn't a big enough deviation from common sense, I then watched 1993 Disney version and promptly choked on my own boiling spleen. This blog article has been over a year in the writing, mostly because trying to work on it it causes me to start spewing blood before I collapse, shivering, in a corner in some literary form of post traumatic stress syndrome.

Oh, I wish I were joking.

It did not look like this.

Before anyone points out that a movie is not the same thing as a novel, I'll clarify; I wasn't expecting it to look exactly like the novel. Films and books are different art-forms, with different requirements. For example, in the novel, the fight between the Musketeers and the Cardinal's Guards is three against five. In these circumstances, D'Artagnan's offer of assistance brings a realistic chance of victory while still showing the Musketeers as superior fighters - four against five: more than plausible. In a film, though, that wouldn't look so hot, so I was fully expecting improbably large numbers of the Cardinal's guards and one heck of a sword fight. That's fair enough. In the same way, I'd hardly expect screen minutes to be wasted explaining the fact D'Artagnan had to serve out the equivalent of an apprenticeship in another regiment because the Musketeers isn't open to raw recruits. Alright, maybe it was going a bit far to disband them entirely, but we'll run with that, shall we? In movies, we do exposition differently.

And then the characters. Again, I knew there would be some drift. I get it, I honestly do. You want a sympathetic Athos, not an alcoholic psychopath. And, yeah, Richelieu needs to be a plain-dealing-villain, not an anti-hero politician trying to do what he thinks is best for France... Sure, we lose a lot of depth, but we also cut the need for a lot of exposition.

I can handle all that. Really. I can. It makes me itch, it makes me mutter, sometimes it elicits a scornful laugh or two, but it comes up every time I watch a film adaptation of a book I happen to love. It does not reduce me to putting my head into my hands and whimpering, “Make it stop, please, kill me. Kill me now.”

It does not make me get the fucking novel out and start shouting quotations at the television.

So what was the problem, then?

...or indeed an appropriate prize for Bible study.

And I will answer you, oh my dear hypothetical ideal and obliging reader, Sex is what bothered me. Well, sex and Milady.

Angela Carter: How to be a woman.

So, for reasons best known to themselves, the book group have elected to read Caitlin Moran's How To Be a Woman for next month, effectively throwing me into the path of a bullet I had been dodging since some time last year.

Bang. Splat.

Ouch.

I can't even be bothered to argue with it. Frankly, I'm having difficulty being bothered reading the damned thing. It's not so much inflammatory as dull. In fact to make the slog seem terminable, I have been interspersing its chapters with short stories from one of the better-loved volumes gracing my shelves, a book that must always be attended by score of superlatives, Angela Carter's incomparable The Bloody Chamber.

Its fitting, too, that it should be this book I use to re-engage my brain, restore my equilibrium and massage my affronted aesthetic sense. In part because I have, in my reading, hissed that any of Moran's factually correct statements were said, better, by Carter about thirty years before, and that the factually incorrect ones are refuted by she-who-must-not-be-contradicted with all her usual wit and perspicacity. Mostly, though, it is because I have been known to say that The Bloody Chamber should be placed before every girl in this country on her fourteenth birthday.

If I had my way, everybody would read this book anyway - as a work of literature, it is elegant, intelligent and powerfully done, its value is beyond doubt; but only to a pubescent girl is it a work whose value is beyond measure. I had always, always thought this, and I have never quite understood why. I think I get it now.

And I'm willing to admit that I have been wrong.

Iain Banks, a tribute

There is a church in Norwich, not far from where I live, which has some magnificent, 15th Century flush-work. Approaching it for the first time, one is struck by the sheer scale and beauty of the construction. The overall vista is a clear, serene shading of blue-grey flint and yellow sandstone. When one gets closer, we see that this grand, awe-inspiring whole is built from interlocking blocks of stone, cut, polished and inlaid into the sandstone. It might be possible to believe that this decreases the majesty of the whole, to see, literally, those building blocks of aesthetic effect. It does not, for the simple reason that flint is an absolute bastard to cut.

What you see, looking at that facade is not only a sweeping and impressive whole, but hours, weeks, months, years of careful, backbreaking labour, it's bloodied hands and torn muscles. It's the delicate precision of a master-mason fitting soft sandstone to hard, sharp flint. It's the swaying, precarious construction of scaffolding creeping up into the Norwich skyline in the days before mechanical construction, before modern health and safety. It is a labour of, what? Dedication? Fear? The economic self-aggrandisement of the wool-trade?

Love?

Reading an Iain Banks book for the first time had something of the same effect. Strictly speaking, it was an Iain M Banks book, one of his Culture novels, specifically, Look to Windward. At the time, I didn't read an awful lot of sci-fi. If I'm honest about things, I still don't. World building tries my patience, both in my own work of that of others. It's grunt work, and it's tedious, and it so rarely turns out well.

Here though...

I was struck, immediately struck, with the sheer scale of the construction, the unflinching, galaxy spanning complexity of Banks' creation. Immediately, I was snatched up, dragged out of myself into this huge, rich bewildering world. The effect was similar to one desired by the church designers of late-Medieval Norfolk, awe and wonder. A sense of the numinous.

Then I got closer. The closer I got, I began to see quite how well, quite how cleverly this world had been fitted together, with what consummate skill each event had been crafted, how this great, impressive whole was founded upon tiny, polished blocks of flint, hand-cut and placed to perfection, in such a way that the spreading grandeur of the Culture's galaxy could almost be believed to be a natural growth.

Reading one of Banks' novels - sci-fi or straight Lit - is, to a greater or lesser extent, to experience this. The worlds and characters he creates are intricately imagined, and are drawn in such perfect detail that the reader is engulfed by something that could, so easily could, be natural.

There are writers who, one feels, simply spilled out their genius onto the page. We are left with something with a wild, random beauty. It is something fragile, fortuitous, chance.

Banks is not one of these writers. Banks is something far more special. The sheer scope of his vision, his passion, cannot receive justice in a thoughtless outpouring.

Many of his characters, or so it seems to me, are scientists, mechanics, mathematicians, gamers. They are people who break the world down to its barest essentials and are able to reconstruct it from that point. This is also what he does in every single on of his novels.

His craft is clear in the careful planning, the exquisite story-telling, the layering of narrative and echo, the skill of his shifts in voice and mood. A reader can sense each blow of the chisel against the flint, can see the eye that observed the placement of each block, that laid the mortar so carefully. We can feel the sheer grunt work laying the foundation of the first draft simply by seeing the grand scale of the final realisation. Never a writer to avoid going out on a limb, we can sense, too, the terrifying sway of the timber we see the tiny figure on the scaffolding, braving the elements to put each piece in place. And we can sit back, see the finished product, a perfect, seamless, whole.

Banks is a great writer - not a casual, careless 'great' but truly, as in Alexander the. Compassionate, fearless, and grandiose he creates with a scientist's precision and an artist's eye. He is without equal.

Today's news should devastate every reader if good fiction. I cannot begin to imagine how it must affect his loved ones, his family, or the man himself.

I don't really know how to end this, except with a great sense of loss and of sorrow.