What I've been reading: Fearless, Gentlemen and Ladies, and Namesake

As I write this, I'm looking at my 'just read' pile with an element of horror because it appears it's taken me almost seven days to read one slim practically-a-novella and a YA book. Yikes. Still, as we're here...

Gentlemen and Ladies by Susan Hill is, it appears, not the kind of book one reads quickly. It is also not at all what I expected. I'm used to the dark intensity of her horror and detective fiction, whereas this felt more like the few Barbara Pym novels I've read than anything else. Set in the '60s, in a rural community of gentlewomen of straightened means it is, in some respects, a comedy of manners.
 It's Hill's third novel (did you know she had her first book published when she was in sixth form? This almost warrants an interrobang) and Gentlemen and Ladies does give the sense of a young, talented writer imitating her peers and influences with a rather serious face.

That said, it's still a formidably accomplished novel. From the moment one of the characters suffers what is essentially a panic attack I was recognising the bleak psychological realism I recognise as Hill's trademark. Still, I noticed that her authorial voice is both less ruthless and less compassionate than it later becomes. She is as scathing as one would expect a comedy of manners to be towards the despicable, the silly, but her connection of 'unsympathetic' and 'mental illness' troubled me, as did the ease with which she 'lets off' her 'good guys'. Then again, the gentleness is probably a good thing. We don't want me left sobbing into my spotted hanky, again.

So, to conclude this over-long review - good book. A little dated, and unexpected, but worth a read, especially if you have not yet sampled Hill because horror and crime are not your thing.

Have to say, I don't read a lot of YA any more, by Fearless by Cornelia Funke makes the cut based on recommendation from a trusted source (thanks Jem!) and it's a total treat. The sequel to Reckless, it's an adventure quest in a world where fairytales are real. Sound clichéd? Alright, but this is dark. Reading it as an adult, I can see just how pitch-bloody-black the premise behind this novel is. It isn't an adventure quest, it's a story about the industrial revolution, about the dirtiness of empire building, the force of social segregation and racial intolerance. It's an all out, vicious, political narrative masquerading as a kid's fantasy novel/ love story. Okay, vicious is a relative term - it is still YA - but there is some really clever stuff happening here, and - as folklorist and adult - I do love playing 'spot the reference.'

My only gripes are a slow and slightly fragmented start (a problem that I also had with Reckless) and trouble telling the characters' ages. This is, after all, a YA book about adult stuff, and while the MC is apparently 25, this isn't always clear from his actions and behaviours. Still, a brilliant read.

While I'm here and talking about YA, I'm going to chuck in a review/shout-out for Namesake by Isabelle Melançon and Megan Lavey-Heaton: a beautifully drawn and utterly compelling webcomic that - if you don't like screen reading - can also be purchased in trade paperback. It tells its story so well that even a foul-mouthed darkness junkie like myself didn't realise it was PG rated until I'd read over a third of what's online. These days I just hang around waiting for it to update. Obviously, the form and genre might throw up a few problems for some readers (eg, as the story develops, I'm noticing the threat and darkness are being kept in much tighter parameters than I might otherwise like) but it's fun and its fresh and it's clever. Well worth your time.

Wow! That was positive! Have a good week.

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.

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.

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.