Review: The Book of Hidden Things, Francesco Dimitri

Set in the stifling heat, twisted olive groves, and relentless machismo of rural Southern Italy, and dealing strongly with themes of masculinity, it is perhaps no surprise that The Book of Hidden Things is something of a blokey book.

That isn't intended as an insult, and it is something the text itself resists, trying to have a bit gay rep as well as showing women as varied, empowered, and active characters while never actually centering them. That the women themselves come out a little in the Iain Banks Goddess mould is probably only to be expected and isn't, of itself, a criticism, just a warning to regular readers of this blog which has always had something of a feminist slant.

That aside, however, The Book of Hidden Things is excellently written, wedding a thriller plot both to an emotional story of growing up and some philosophical pondering on the very nature of magic. It is a book about brotherhood and betrayl, about that awful moment when you realise that you are no longer young, that your die is cast, your bright potential squandered, and your fuckups irredeemable. More importantly, it asks the terrifying question of what happened to all of your potential, all of your dreams, and to what ends would you be prepared to go in order to get them back again?

Following three childhood friends trying to solve the disappearance of the fourth of their group - the one who had always formed the linchpin of their group - the enigmatic and tellingly named Art. Alternating between their four viewpoints, we are led through the lies and exploitation of the local church, the threats and protection of the local Mafia, and all of Art's deceptions, crimes, and debaucheries, the mystery is gradually solved. But as it is, three lives are also opened wide to us - the secrets and exploitations of adolescence leading us in to the disappointments and compromises of adulthood, and the constant sense that somewhere, the path was lost.

Meanwhile, Art's actions lead to a climax and a decision that would do any thriller proud - even if it was a very sudden change in pace.

Honestly, this book bewitched and unsettled me in equal measure. One for fans of Nick Harkaway, China Miéville, and anyone likes things a little darker than the Blood and Icecream trilogy.

Review: In Exile by Alexandra Turney

When I was a child, I wanted to be a Maenad. At about nine years old, Anglican and living in rural England, I read the myth of Orpheus - how he was torn apart and eaten by the followers of Dionysus and thought, "Yep. Reasonable life goal."

Just putting that out there, really.

Anyway, Turney's debut novel, In Exile is fucking gorgeous.

Capturing the stultifying disaffection of fifteen in a city that doesn't fit you, it tells of Dionysus reborn in modern Rome and weaves a captivating story of worship, obsession, and sacred transgression in a world with no space for gods, that spoke to the deep buried, teenage part of me. It's really hard to describe the power of this book, occupying as it does that uncomfortable space between metaphor and fully committed fantastical fiction. It engaged deeply with the implications of godhood and worship with a deity wildly removed from omnibenevolent, monotheistic connotations, while also portraying the deeply familiar experiences of fear and trauma around blackout drunkenness around and boys whom you know are Bad News.

The aftermath, for example, of the first Bacchanal as Grace, Caroline, and Sarah go for coffee is a wonder of the sordid, dirtiness of the morning after: "All she had was a headache, a stomach ache, and the worrying sense that she was not merely forgetting, but was actually repressing what had happened. She couldn't shake the feeling that some part of her mind was trying to protect her."

Turney's young female characters are wonderfully realised in their stunted, problematic reality. Although at times it felts as though Grace - the protagonist - was made a little too heavily in the 'plain and execeptional' mould, I can see why those decisions were made, and her relationship with Caroline brought back plenty of memories of the uneasy, competitive and repressed nature of that time in life. Likewise, while (as a Pagan) I'd want to explore the conception of Dionysus more deeply, within the scope of the narrative, both his malice and his tragedy are brilliantly written. 

This is a book that I finished, and just knew I was going to reread, that it might even find itself of that special pile of books that never really find their way back to my shelf. Honestly, it feels as though that first, breathless read only got to scratch the surface, and to a certain extent I resent writing the review now rather than when I've had a couple of years to think on it properly.  There is so much there to talk about, and 2-300 words can't really cover it.

But, in the interests of brevity, if you're here because you like the way I think, then you need to read this book. It's brutal and powerful and glorious. Alexandra Turney is a writer I am going to watch.

Review: Vicious Rumer, Joshua Winning

I had the great privilege of sharing the stage Joshua Winning during the genre panel at the Unbound Author event in Nottingham last October. Eagle eyed observers in the room may have noticed my jaw hitting the stage that during the "who are your influences?" question when Winning answered that his were Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Robin Jarvis.

Suffice to say, I bought the damn book.

It's bloody good. I mean, really bloody good.

Vicious Rumer follows Rumer Cross, hard-nosed, solitary, and damaged, as she tries to escape the legacy of her mother: Celene Cross, the so called 'Witch Assassin'. Not so easy when a mobster with a propensity for throwing his enemies in to oubliettes decides that your  mother left a mystical weapon in your care, nor indeed when said mother might placed a curse on you that means anyone you get close to dies a horrible death.

Fast paced, slick, and nasty, this is a cracking thriller that manages to be kinda charming despite not holidng back on the pain, darkness, death and despair. The plot races through blood-magic, political conspiracies, and mob violence without letting up for long enough for our protagonist to have a shower. I tore through reading it at much the same pace. Winning captures Rumer's voice perfectly, her mixture of affected heartlessness and vulnerability providing a capable, sympathetic female protaganist who you are willing to follow in to some very dodgy places and questionable actions.

Honestly, go read it. Jarvis would be proud.

Review: The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School

Yes. Yesssssssssssss.

Oh, my blog was having its hiatus when the last one of these came out. The one where I bought half a dozen copies, gave them to all of my friends for Christmas and went, "Look, look! IT'S US!"

So: Did you go to a single sex school? Did you fucking hate it? Or, did you love it, but find yourself the 'red headed stepchild' all the same? Are you still mates with some of the weirdos you met there?
 
Okay. You need to read Drearcliff Grange. 

How to describe this? Superpowers and eldritch abominations at St Trinians? Rip-roaring adventures, jolly hockeysticks, defeating facism, and overcooked swede? These books are nuts and it's fucking marvellous. Newman is the King of Pastiche and he owns this totally.

I need to calm down.

The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School is the second in the Drearcliff series, and expands both the world and the themes that Newman developed in the first novel. It suffers a little from being a transitional piece between the self-contained first book, and the wider series - but it is still an immensely satisfying read. Moreover, Newman addresses that aspect of it thematically, taking Amy, Frecks, Kali, and Emma from the plucky girlhood and simple moralities of The Mysteries... to a adolescence, and a reappraisal of what it is to be a hero.

Certainties are challenged, characters change, and we explore the awkward ground between the broken and the malevolent, balance law agaisnt lawlessness, explore the dangers of privilege, the worth of trust, and the harm that can be done by the simplest of actions. At the heart of the novel is Amy, whose role as the benevolent Kentish Glory is reconsidered as she wonders if she might not do better as the more terrible Death's Head Hawkmoth.

Of course, its all terribly referential, both to adjacent literary worlds and Newman's other works, but that's all part of the fun. If that isn't your sort of thing then... honestly, you might want to find another book review blog.

More seriously, Newman's great strength as a writer is that he manages to drop every name under the sun without ever detracting from the story he is telling at that moment, and this book carries off that trick admirably. An absolute joy.

I loved it so much, I did cosplay.

Review: Uncle Silas, Sheridan le Fanu

So... owning up time. Who else always gets this one confused with Silas Marner?

Just me? Good good.

Right, I picked this one up in the secondhand bookshop, knowing nothing more about it that it was apparently a Gothic, and it was written by the same guy who did Carmilla. It was pretty much what you'd expect. Heiresses! Crumbling stately homes! Evil plots! Laudanum! Trains!

As you can probably tell, I really enjoyed this one, but struggled to take it particularly seriously. It was quite predictable, and like many Romances of Terror, if you look at things from a plot perspective, it didn't really deliver on many of its promises.

That said, there are a few things to be said for it - firstly, Silas Ruthyn himself is one heck of dish. Quite the silver fox, much prone to dabbing his temples with cologne and sighing about all the bungling fuckwits by whom he has the misfortune to be surrounded. Honestly, from a slightly biased perspective, I would say the character was wasted and we could have done with a lot more of him - but then I have a type.

Secondly, and because this is a respectable literary blog (I say, as you all collapse in to laughter) I was quite taken with Le Fanu's clarity and precision. Uncle Silas is what happens when Northanger Abbey meets Udolpho  - Le Fanu recongises that county men and respectable countries are as full of rogues and abusers as the most fantastical stories, it is only that the villains must comport themselves more carefully. The blending of modernity - at least, for the time of writing - and isolation was really powerful. Rather than Stoker's triumphalist use of technology, the railway in Uncle Silas simply makes the world feel smaller, more limited. It offers no escape to our protagonist, only faster transport for her persecutors.

Le Fanu also came through in his fairness both to young female characters, and female friendship. Barring Silas himself, and Dr Bryerly, the male characters we encounter are relatively anodyne. For all the men drive the plot,  they are not a patch on the vividness of Milly, Meg, or even Madame de la Rougierre - who may not actually do much, but who remain with you. Milly and Maud's friendship, especially, was delightful to read.

I won't mince words - Maud Ruthyn herself is something of a drip. She does not have the poise or intelligence of Carmilla's narrator, and occasionally I wanted to smack her across the side of the head, but even still, Le Fanu is fair to her. She is shown to grow over the course of the novel, and her adult commentary on her youthful follies are quite incisive. Despite all her silliness, she is never treated as a joke, or deserving of suffering - yet neither is her lack of worldliness of common-bloody-sense held up some sort of unrealistic paradigm of virtue. She's immature - that's all.

I like that about Le Fanu - while I might not agree with everything he writes about gender, he didn't hate teenage girls.
 Naturally, it was written in the 1860s, so warnings apply for all the usual 'hilarious' and 'shifty' bumpkins, virulent antisemitism, fetishing of Romany culture, and 'sinister foriegners'. I do so wish they wouldn't.

But, aside from that, an absolutely fine Gothic novel. Better than Udolpho, although that isn't difficult.

Review: Sour Fruit, Eli Allison

Ha, it's not quite been two years since I last posted - that would just be an embarrassing delay, right? But what better way to restart this blog than with a book that I've not only been looking forward to, but that I actually helped make happen!

Yes, I am proudly listed among the supporters to Sour Fruit by Eli Allison, and if you aren't I reckon you missed a trick here. Anyway, it's now available to buy in shops and all the usual bookselling websites.

Set in a brutal, near-future dystopia, Sour Fruit is a exploration of powerlessness and dispossesion, of the cruelty and the humanity of those who find themselves on the bottom rung. Told through the eyes of Onion, a girl "forced into a knife fight with a world that has just pulled a machine gun on her" we are given a bleak and occasionally touching view of what people do to survive.

Shackled to the gentle, passive-seeming Rhea, Onion tries to escape the ghetto of Kingston and reinstate her Provisional INC number, thereby becoming a citizen again before the crime boss Milton Mooluke can sell her to a the sinister Toymaker. But as Kingston erupts in to violence, it becomes clear far more powerful and dangerous forces are at work around them.

The whole thing is framed by Onion's interrogation by sinister Doctors some time after the events and we get the story first person. Abrasive, rude, and mistrusting, Onion makes a compelling narrator - her grim flippancy and verbal dexterity provide a necessary contrast to the darkness of the novel, and giving scathing descriptions of the various grotesqueries we meet. While some readers might find her aggressive lack of charm somewhat repulsive as a character trait, Allison uses it to convey Onion's youth and lack of agency, creating a portayal of vulnerable adolescence that is by turns heartbreaking and hilarious.

Meanwhile, the dystopian England portrayed - a ruthless, corporation-owned police state which has created a subclass to deal with the effects of climate disaster and a migrant crisis - is terrifyingly plausible, and Kingston's reaction against that is reminiscent of Angela Carter's nightmarish visions of a fallen America.


If Sour Fruit has a flaw, it is that Onion's POV is perhaps too limited for the events of moment that are occuring around her. The history of Kingston and the factions within it, of the Charlie babies and the rise of the INC numbers are fascinating ideas which don't get enought the space to breathe. This can stop what is a very well realised world from being conveyed clearly. It also affects the pacing of the novel in places, where the compelling action sequences are sometimes difficult to follow without further exposition.

That aside, it's a gripping, affecting novel which I would definitely reccommend to people who their dystopias violent and irreverrant. It reads likes something Margaret Atwood might write if she habitually took 'shrooms and spent her Friday's throwing down with Chuck Palahniuk in the Chatham dockyards of the early 90s, so if that sounds like your kind of thing then you will love this. 

And pparently it's the first of a trilogy, so there are more goodies to come!

Review: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

Another gorgeous cover, though.

You know when you want to love a book? You know when you look at it and go, "Well, this is clearly Angelmaker level stuff and I'm going to fall blissfully in to it, and everything will be great?"

Never ends well, does it?

Look. I didn't hate this book. I had to read it twice to make sure of that.

Parts of it are bits from a really, really good book. Thaniel is adorbs and Matsumoto might be a type, but he's a very fine and engaging example of that type. The initial plot is tightly set up and interesting and there are people whose emotions and struggles I care about. It's just that, every time it looked like it was about to soar off in to wonderous places, every time I'd feel myself softening and leaning forward and about to fall in love, it would just... stop.

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street is not a bad novel, but it is a self-conscious one. It covers up its sentimentalism with quite unnecessary brutality, but cannot quite commit to that. It's a steampunk novel that absolutely detests the idea of being a steampunk novel. This is a book that involves a clockwork octopus, clairvoyance, and a rebellious Lady Scientist exploring quantum-mumble-something-I'm-not-a-scientist, but with a writer very keen to impress upon us that everyone hates steam trains, the Lady Scientist is not a Suffragist and that we are totally not getting our airships here.

Honestly, I can live without the air-ships. It's the writer I'm worried about.

To make the inevitable comparison to Harkaway, I would have to admit that Pulley is probably the better writer - but Harkaway writes the better novel. He is gloriously, gleefully trashy, and applies his considerable intelligence and talent to that without reservation. Weighed down by a need to be better, Pulley's prose is glistening, but her plot is stilted, doubting. There is something resigned and perfunctory about it, as though she second guessed herself at every turn. She gets bogged down in the bruising details and dismisses the rather more interesting problems with a throwaway ending.

It almost feels as though Pulley wanted to pass this off as magical realism because her critique group felt that a rattlingly good spy story about forbidden love, magical clockwork and precognition wasn't Literary enough, and the novel that we hold is the tragic result of their interference. Or perhaps I'm just projecting. We went to the same university - sometimes its hard to tell.

Also, I did not like Keita Mori. I know that like-ability is not key to good character structure, but Mori crossed a line for me. I got the feeling he was supposed to be more sympathetic that he ever seemed to me. What's more, to make him appear more pleasant, it felt as though Grace was defamed unjustly - something which made her seem a little two dimensional and really beyond the pale. All of this made the ending deeply uncomfortable. This felt to me less like another attempt Literariness than an unfortunate consequence of the novel's earlier flaws.

Will I come back to this book? Yes - very probably. It bothers me, and books that bother me tend to get me to reread them more those I enjoyed without reserve. And I'll probably look out Pulley's next novel, although not with any urgency. I want to see how her writing develops.

But would I reccomend that you read it?

Let me think on that one.

Review: Spoiled Children by Philip Hemplow

Yikes. I'm well behind on these...

Continuing on my horror bender, next up was Spoiled Children, three eldritch novellas - also available independently as Sarcophagus, The Innsmouth Syndrome and Ashes.

So, I never actually found Lovecraft's own work scary - well, apart from 'The Rats in the Walls', and that was less "cringing in terror" than "dry-heaving for an hour". Other than that, it was all just a bit meh. I mean, they're great stories, but I'm not going to wigged out by some massive monster just because its name doesn't have a quite enough vowels and it's so godawfully terrifying that, to solace yourself, you decided to abuse a thesaurus.

As studies of loneliness and paranoia they are glorious, as twisty tales of atmosphere and pleasant frisson, I really enjoy them, but they aren't enough to get me starting at shadows, or send my mind pulling itself apart in genuine disturbance. Yeah, the universe is big and scary and uncaring, but there's only so many times you can read about a genteely destitute, neurasthenic young white man stumbling upon unspeakable horrors and realising this before you stop really caring. If I were to imagine the kind of person most likely to be driven mad by the horrors of the abyss, it would be precisely the sort of people Lovecraft's protagonists tend to be. The rest of us have more pressing worries.
 
In that way, Lovecraft's fiction lacks a human element. With no point of empathy between us and the person experiencing the described horrors, there is no fear.

With this in mind, Spoiled Children is fucking terrifying.

Hemplow writes well, at times strikingly so - acid rain leaving brickwork "as pockmarked and powdery as a Renaissance syphilitic" - and his stories are relentelessly modern, embracing 21st century strangeness and conflict. We go to the Chernobyl exclusion zone, deal with the corruption of post-Communist Russia. We see a Centre for Disease Control and Prevention rep sent to a recession struck Innsmouth, or big money transforming the rural English landscape. These settings, jobs and proceedures are fantastically realised, giving a sense of rigorous research without ever info-dumping. The world is not a vague, Gothic backdrop - it is our world, with all its safety nets and preoccupations.But this is not the Spoiled Children's real strength.

No, its real strength is in his characters. Hemplow's protagonists are vivid, alive. These are not ciphers who are so obviously going to fall prey to entities from beyond the abyss that you don't bother to get attached. They involve you, from the first page, with their struggles, ambitions and goals. These are people with relationships, jobs, priorities and failing relationships. They have friends and money worries and interests. Their survival is important to you, the threats to them upsetting.

More than that, by bringing in this human dimension Hemplow brings the horror of Lovecraft's heartless universe right in to your own life. It all seems horribly plausible, raising the possibility that - outside your own, warm bubble - there are dreadful things, resting in uneasy sleep.

My favourite story in the collection, for several reasons, is Ashes, a grand culmination of both character work and creation of terror. With a main character who is both pathetic and unlikable it would be a compelling study of desperation and betrayal, even without the supernatural elements. But it's all the better for having a cracking weird fiction plot. For a further kick of vicarious dread, it had a scene which horrified the medievalist in me, just as the more conventional horror aspects delivered their kick. (Put the fish slice down, woman. Put the fish slice down.)

Brilliant as the book is, I cannot say that it's flawless - some of the 'action' scenes feel a little rushed, and the endings, although earned and convincing, feel rather abrupt. However, these are minor complaints against what is an altogether fresh and immensely satisfying collection of stories.  

Spoiled Children engages your heart and your brain, not merely your pessimism. In all honestly, it's one of the best things I've read in the genre. Give it a go.

Thunder in her Veins - the sacredness of geekdom

Some bits of childhood never do make sense.

Look: I grew up in a village with an unreliable bus service and two shops - that became one shop, and then none, and that's where it's settled. It was the sort of place where there were enough people who wore petticoats for the expression "Charlie's dead" to be part of my childhood lexicon. My elder sister was the first - the only - girl on the school's football team. It was a place where 'comic' meant the Dandy and the Beano, or - if you were really lucky - an old copy of Bunty*.

So how I ever came to read Marvel's Thor line is something of a mystery to me. I think I had a Spiderman annual once, and there was the X Men and the Fantastic Four on telly on a Saturday morning, but… Thor? Seriously? I might have been able to get it at the comic book store in the nearest town (seven miles and, apparently, a twenty year timeslip away) but, well, I always knew places like that weren't made for people like me**.

All the same, Thor I did read. A fair few, actually. Mostly the early ones, with Donald Blake in them. I remember being caught by something about them - the disabled man whose vocation was easing others' pain, his walking stick actually the hammer Mjolnir. I still can't really express why, but something about them felt very beautiful, very true.  Maybe it was the overtones of the Fisher King? Maybe it was just the myth connection.

Because I was a myth junkie, devouring folklore and fairytale. If a story was old and epic and glorious, then it was my kind of story. I grinned at the pranks of tricksters, railed at monsters, wept for Prometheus chained to his rock. Raised as both an Anglican and a Baptist (don't ask) I was used to God being male, ineffably right and absorbingly loving. My contact with the grim, problematic stories of the Bible was one sanitised by a Sunday school framing which repackaged them into a reassuring scholasticism where faith (read:goodness) was rewarded, and the wicked (read: unbelievers) were punished.

Noble failure...

Myths weren't like that. In myths, all bets were off. And that made for grandeur and for tragedy. It made for fatal flaws and noble failure. It made for Gods who were tricksy, passionate, even petty. They could be deceived, could deceive. They could be wrong. 

And yet despite all that, they were honourable, powerful, righteous.

It's probably fair to say that I found myself through reading Norse legends. Yes, I was too young, too uncertain, to call it 'faith', yet all the same something in me ran to those myths with a more intuitive open-heartedness than my parents' religion could ever call from me. More, they seemed to understand me. I craved them, the way you crave salt when dehydrated: dread, beautiful Freyja; bright, lost Baldur; Loki - quick, cunning, dangerous; and Thor.

Of course, Thor.

I always feel faintly ridiculous using the word 'sacrilege' in anything other than ironic hyperbole. All the same, there does need to be a word for that hurt that is located somewhere against your heart, behind your ribs, when the things you hold sacred are treated slightingly. As a Pagan who honours certain Norse deities, there is something wrong in seeing the stark, terrible beauty of your mythic landscape re-envisaged into slick, commercial print, complete with hulking villains and so. much. spandex.

Thus it was that, for years, I was embarrassed by the association. Marvel's Thor was not my Thor, their Odin not my AllFather. Drawing that distinction was important, remains important still. But scorning the former overlooks something vital, something powerful, something old. The memory of it came back to me with the release of the MCU film. A sense of struggle, of soaring glory, of a rightness at the very base of something. And, yes, it was more slickly packaged, and sexier than a fireside story about Sir Gawain, but it spoke of something grandiose and sweeping on that same, gut-deep level.

Something sweeping and grandiose

People tend to associate the numinous with a sense of peace, of silent wonder, but sometimes it is more a sense of your heart being pried apart with grinning exuberance. Sometimes, it is that twisting, cathartic need that comes with the raunchiest choruses of folksong, the catchiest reels of the Morris. Sometimes it was what we feel when we hear stories about heroes, about people in extremity, about villains we love to hate, and sometimes just love, despite ourselves.

And that feeling is sacred. Some narratives speak to something deep in us, something more real than anything we enounter in our daily lives.When they are slighted, undermined, mocked, we feel that little wince that cries out 'sacrilege!'. It is one of the reasons why feelings are running so high around this 'Hydra Cap' debacle. Some heroes should be held high, above baseness, above the taint of cynicism.

Yet, collectively, we disown these stories. Heroism, self-sacrifice, betrayal, need - the bright, bold colours of traditional stories - are things we insist upon shutting out as we become 'grown-up', 'critical', 'literary'. But these things are still nestled in us, occupying a space in what I can only call our soul.

My engagement with this comic was not adult. It was not smooth, questioning, probing. It was not the 'refined' tastes that I have spent years cultivating. No. It was the wild joy that got me into stories in the first place. It made me air punch, made me grin, made me arch my feet and press my eyes together. I cared from a place of total, unironic absorpsion. I felt this book, felt the way I once felt as I tore around the playground pretending to be the Human Torch.

(Flame on!)

But, as such, an actual review is beyond me. Is Mighty Thor: Volume 7 great art? Will it change the shape of Literature as we know it?

Is the story any good, even? Should you read it?

I have no fucking clue. Sorry.

Also: Malekith the Accursed - just too FABULOUS for your morality.

There are some books out there that make you realise the futility of reviewing books, that make you see there is no helpful, universal rubric to define whether something is worthwhile. Yes, you can analyse craft and effect and technique, but sometimes a story speaks to something that is too pronounced and personal, its power over you too great to allow you to reach for your wonted pose of critical objectivity.

I have to admit that, while I tend to enjoy what I read, I'm not especially immersed in Marvel 616 stuff. As an adult reader, it's rare they provide me with more than an entertaining stopping post for an insatiable bookworm. Mighty Thor: Thunder in Her Veins went so far beyond that faint praise that there is no comparison - but those feelings are so subjective that I cannot extend to any of you.

As such, I really can't recommend it. Do you like stories about honour and righteousness, about family and longing, about war and good and evil, and some things that you just can't categorise? Then maybe read it. You might get something from it.

But, while we're on the subject of recommenations, what I have to say is that  it isn't really this comic you need to read. No. Don't seek out a specific story or book, don't listen to anything else. Instead, shrug off your irony. Ignore the cheap, headline grabbing shots, the 'risky' takes appealing to the part of you that wants to tarnish and tear down.

No. Reach into your heart and find those embarrasing remnants of unmitigated joy - however commerical, low brow or melodramatic they may be. Find your heroes - your glorious and impossible heroes - and cling to them. Celebrate them.

We are readers. We are better than that.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*What? The stories were better.
** Shout out to 'The Grinning Demon' and 'Whatever Comics' of Maidstone, which (when I finally plucked up the courage to slip inside) were absolutely lovely. But you know what I meant.

Review: The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins

This month's book-club book!

Okay, full disclosure. I wanted to hate this one. Since I saw it advertised, I've been thinking of it as The Girl with the Perfectly Reasonable Hatred of Being Infantalised When She is Actually a Grownassed Woman. I came to it with the narrowed eyes of suspicion, the acerbic comment of dismissal already framed and sitting on my tongue.

When you call a woman (and with a divorce, a round of failed IVF and a drink problem, there is no 'girl' about Rachel) a girl, you are presenting the kind of attitude towards women and their problems that wrecked Gone Girl for me. I was expecting another round of 'psycho ex-girlfriends' and false rape accusations - which is, I admit, generally better than the tough-but-vulnerable manic pixieness you get when men use such titles.

I wanted SO BAD not to like this book.

But I'm sorry to tell you that it's brilliant.

No, it's not the best book I've read this year, but it is a gripping, sickening and intelligent thriller. The characters are complex, realistic and never entirely likeable. Their problems are real, and - even if you hate them - you will pity them. Their suffering wrenches through the novel with a powerful 'here but for the grace of god'. It's the stuff of nightmare, but the worst nightmares, the kind that bubble so close to the surface of our experience of the world. It presents, terrifyingly, the real stakes of living as a woman in the patriarchy, and the way that you will often find yourself at the mercy of men, with no guarantee of their good intentions.

I struggled, I admit, at points with some of the set-up (spoilers, sorry) - the plot relying on a couple of tropes we could do without for the next eight decades - and found the ending possibly a little sensationalist. The mystery aspect itself was competent and well structured. I admit, I sussed it a little before time, but only due to certain personal reasons - my suspicions did not cement until the proper moment, when the careful laying of clues coalesced into certainty. One aspect of this was especially well presented, and actually did catch me by surprise.

The real draw of The Girl on the Train, however, is not its mystery, but the claustrophobic, almost unhealthy intensity of emotion within it, and on that count it hits every single mark. Fantastic, and well worth your time.

Kill the Moon: Maidens and Mothers in Doctor Who

After Saturday's Doctor Who, Kill the Moon, I went into the kitchen with my husband and dredged up some pretty tough things from the last five years, and cried for a good twenty minutes.

Then I drank a glass of wine, watched two episodes of Blackadder and - typing this twenty four hours later - am feeling a lot better.

Better enough to say some things that have been on my mind for a while.

It is a truism in some corners of the interwebs that while Doctor Who under RTD was a joyous experiment in tolerance, feminist messages and the trampling of conservative thought patterns, current showrunner Steven Moffat is a misogynist dinosaur who is intent on dragging our favourite show back into the Dark Ages™ and normalising all kinds of horrible things. While this is an opinion I do not share, I can see some aspects of justice in it. RTD's vision was carefully inclusive, squeaky clean and PC (not a criticism), whereas Moffat seems to have an much more cavalier attitude to such matters, instead telling the stories he wants to tell (and using the writers he wishes to use) while letting the pieces fall where they may. Moffat's showmanship seems characterised less by wilful offence than by unexamined prejudices and whilst I agree this is a problem, I'm not sharpening my guillotine about it. 

So, yeah. There are problems. There are also - despite all his best efforts - problems in RTD era Who, as well. As I've said elsewhere, we live in a society that is by its very nature unjust and problematic, so that - however hard we try - we cannot make our work just and utopian. No, this doesn't mean that we shouldn't try, but we should also accept that however hard we do try, we're still going to mess it up. And,when we spot it, we should call it out. So, it's calling out time.

Some people just can't hack it.
One of the things that bothers me enormously in RTD era Doctor Who are his concepts of worthiness. In classic Who, companions travelled with the Doctor because they wanted to, because they needed a lift home, or because they were refugees with nowhere else to go. Under RTD's guidance, they travel with the Doctor because they are 'worthy'; they ask the right questions, they make the right choices, they can - in short - hack it. Throughout the series, we repeatedly meet people who 'fail' this simple companion litmus test, they attempt to exploit the possibilities of time travel, they assert themselves in a non-Doctor approved fashion, or they simply fail to have the stomach for the role.

In some ways, this was an improvement. Eccleston and Tennant's companions are no wilting flowers, they do not archetypally 'fall and twist their ankles', they do rather more than pass the Doctor his test-tubes and tell him how wonderful he is. The problem comes, however, in the dynamic it creates in the relationship between the Doctor and his companion. Classic Doctors were frequently exasperated by their co-travellers, and companions were often hurt, dismayed or angered by the Doctor's less pleasant attributes. There was spark and conflict in the TARDIS - companions were anything from colleague to antagonist, friend to grudgingly accepted stow-away. The Doctor was generally kind towards Nyssa (refugee), playfully scornful of Tegan (getting a ride) and openly abrasive to Adric (stow-away). However, if a companion needs to pass a necessary test of worth to gain admission in the first place, an immediate onus is placed upon the Doctor to respect that worth, to give Nu-Who companions a kid-glove treatment that those in the classic series were not guaranteed. This is not to say that he is uniformly kind, gentle and forgiving to them (the writing is too good for that), but that their relationships are more static and less conflicted.

It also raised the question of what constitutes worthiness. All three RTD era consistent companions are female, human. They all have an implicit, absolute dependence on the Doctor. None of them have a serious romantic relationship at the time of them travelling with the Doctor. None of them have children. 

All three of them have a bad relationship with their mothers. In fact, all three of them come from what are arguably single parent homes - Martha's parents are divorced and one assumes the mother had custody, Donna's father is absent, Rose's is dead. These are mothers who have fought everything to raise daughters who are worthy, daughters who are strong, confident and feminist-icon enough to go to the distant ends of time and space with a man they hardly know, daughters who are clever and articulate and compassionate.

Yet, the mothers are unarguably awful. Shrill and hysterical to a woman, they cannot be trusted not to start making a horrible fuss. They don't trust the Doctor, and are not happy with their child's new-found adventurous life-style. They attempt to stunt, to close in, to drown these wonderful children of theirs in domesticity - arguments about laundry and marriage and car-sharing schedules. Every time these daughters leave their mothers in the lurch, with every blasé, "I'll be fine!" kiss goodbye, every, "but I trust him!" truism, every pair of car keys thrown into a bin, we are supposed to smile and nod and applaud their liberation from the cloying maternal clutches. Of course, we sympathise with poor old mum getting a call that says, "I'm okay, but I'm being shot at," from God knows when, meant to congratulate her on each, "You'd better take care of my daughter", but ultimately, these women are not worthy. They are not companion material. Unless they learn to sit back, have faith in the Doctor and allow him to send their child into whatever danger he so chooses, they are in the wrong.

Feminism has always had a problem with motherhood

To accept the role of motherhood implies a biological imperative, a role which women naturally fulfil, for which they are uniquely suited. Essentialism, determinism, biology as destiny. Of course, it postulates a utopian ideal of childrearing, one which is split equally between the parents, one which pays no heed to a person's chromosomal make-up. But, ultimately, it is the female-bodied who pay the toll of pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding. It is the female-bodied who have a hormonal response that makes the cry of their child physically painful. Regardless of the intentions or ideals of the people in your life, it is the female bodied who have to take the rap for this one.

And it's such an awful job. The pay is terrible and the hours are crap. You will be hit, kicked, bitten, shouted at. You have to clean up all manner of bodily fluids. You are responsible, ultimately, for the way this child grows up, for the actions they make as an adult, for the people they hurt. Parenthood; someone has to do it and, despite all the rhetoric and the promises of equality, the majority of unpaid carework in this country is done by the female bodied. In the main, it is done by mothers. Every lunch box to be packed; every tantrum to be endured; every boundary, lesson, hygiene rule to enforce; every broken heart to console, this is on you, girls.

Motherhood will rip you apart.

No wonder so many feminists want no part in it. It's hard to do your best thinking when you've had an hour and a half's sleep because a there was a baby with colic who wouldn't latch and then wouldn't settle.

And here's a thing - it's difficult to write your Master's dissertation when you're freaking out about teething, or to compose a letter to an agent when you're busy sewing name-tapes into school uniform. No matter how loved your baby, no matter how wanted, when you're neck deep in dirty laundry and there is Lego everywhere you aren't thinking about travelling the world, or activism, or fighting the Daleks. No. You're hoping that the kids will stop fighting long enough for you to get the house tidy and that the baby won't choke on something your elder child has left on the floor and that you set the timer on the washing machine correctly because otherwise no-one will have anything to wear tomorrow. In those moments your ambition shrinks to managing the school run, to at least sweeping the kitchen floor, to getting five minutes by yourself with a cup of tea. It sets you down a few levels on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It trivialises you. It limits your horizons.

It makes you unworthy.

But there's a get out, of course, isn't there? There's a way not to get ground down into that biological essentialism that is forced by way our society manages leave, finance and expectation around childbirth. Simply don't have kids! Be young! Free! Single! Travel the universe and really far-out stuff. Join the boy's club by virtue of not being a housework-bound-child-rearing-drudge. Be the exceptional woman. Be worthy of the Doctor.

Never mind who you leave behind. They had it coming, after all. They chose that life, didn't they? They opted to give it up.

But who else was going to do it?
 
Amy and the tragedy of motherhood:

One of the most vicious criticisms I've seen levelled at the Moff during his tenure on Doctor Who is that Amy Pond was "just a womb to him". Because, of course, in between her many adventures and her active role within them, she married, got pregnant, had a plot significant baby and then a plot significant discovered infertility. As though to turn an unflinching eye at the choice of motherhood and its unwilling denial utterly deleted her person-hood. As though this wasn't an issue women faced, as though it wasn't a terrible, silent tragedy in so many people's lives.

As though there were a 'just' in this scenario.

I'm sorry, I'm getting fervent. The thing is, though, with Amy, Moffat turns the gaze of the viewer onto a woman who has made a choice that does not fit into the comfortable worldview of someone who has her 'freedom', as someone who turns her back on the grant of tolerance we give to an unattached young woman who doesn't bring her messy, fertile 'baggage' on an adventure with her. But we condemn this because mothers are not 'worthy', they do not count as people.

Moffat, for all the questionable things he has said about women, for all the legitimate complaints that can be raised against his tenure, has a respect for motherhood that RTD seemed unable to compute. Yes, I admit, he takes this too far at times (The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe...) but that is always the danger. If one treats motherhood as a valid choice, an honourable choice, a worthy choice, one does play into the hands of gender essentialism - and the aforementioned cavalier attitude to nuance really does not help with this. But not running this risk is a far more questionable strategy - who is raising all these strong, remarkable, forthright women who cheerfully clutch the ninth and tenth Doctors' arms? Who is doing the grunt work, the laundry, the duty of care while being shoved into the background as hysterical, demanding, unreasonable?

And, dear God, the pain that comes with motherhood, with its creation, with its denial. With Amy Pond, Moffat delves deep into the territory of the 'lost' baby, the 'missing' baby, the baby 'denied.' With the everyday tragedy that women you know will have faced, and will almost certainly not tell you about.

 I am pro-choice. I am not ashamed of this. A bundle of cells is just that - a growth which has a very low chance of survival. An embryo, a fetus, is not a baby. It cannot survive independently, and actually, its chances of surviving with a maternal body are not that hot; 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage, usually in the first twelve weeks.

But I also knows what it feels like to want a baby, painfully, physically with a gut-deep ache of need, a constant, nagging absence in your head, with tears of frustration at each little, blue 'negative' pregnancy test. The difference between an embryo and a baby is not scientific, it is emotional, it is philosophical.
The month before I conceived my first child, my period was a week late. When it came, there was a sense of loss, of mourning. What I had lost was not simply that month's blood, it was a baby. Not a real baby - it's likely I hadn't even conceived - but a baby nonetheless. With that week of negative tests, that thundering torture of hope, I was building a narrative in my mind. A baby. Nine months of pregancy, childbirth, a little downy head snuggled against my chest. The warmth of it, the smell.

Gone.

As soon as I got a positive the next month, it was confirmed for me. What I was carrying was not a bundle of cells, was not an incidental meeting of sperm and ovum, it was immediately all the potential of an entire life. It was a baby. My baby.

1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage, usually in the first twelve weeks.

Amy tells the Doctor she's pregnant. A week later, "I was. I mean, I thought I was. Turns out I wasn't."

You just have to get on with your life.

Even if you're lucky, even if you are the three in four, there is terror there. You are powerless to stop this little life growing inside you in whichever way it chooses. There is nothing you can do if one day it stops moving, stops growing, if it develops a disorder that threatens its life, or your own. Every moment of a wanted pregnancy is like this, fear and helplessness. What if it goes wrong? What if it can't live? What if it kills me? When the longing, the need, is so intense, when there is so much love for a thing the rational part of your brain knows isn't even alive...

Motherhood rips you apart. 

In some families, there is a baby who is missing. Late miscarriage, stillbirth, cot-death. They are so frail, so vulnerable. I know women who will say they have two children, even though only one survived pregnancy. I know women who will still choke up when they talk about that missing baby, ten, twenty, sixty years down the line. Ordinary women. Women with lives, and interests and passions. Women that you might know. 

Having a wanted baby is an amazing thing, a bliss and a joy, a struggle and a chore, it is also an investment in fear. They can just melt away into nothing. That's the terror of it. When they are so small, so vulnerable, they could vanish and leave no trace except the scar you do your best to hide. Two days after my first was born, I was beginning to feel human again. My baby was asleep in my arms and I was back in something approaching 'my' body as I like to perceive it. There, in a moment of bliss, of peace, I had the sudden terror that this had all been some kind of mistake, that the 'real' grown-ups were going to be back any minute, that they were going to take this baby away. That she would simply vanish, melt, just like little flesh-Melody.

That horror is primal, absolute.

For some mothers, it is also real.

And you just have to get on with your life.

The same goes for infertility, that final, grace-note of cruelty that Moffat throws in from The Church of the Papal Mainframe. "Whatever they did to me at Demons Run, I can't give you children."

Dear Christ, that line hurts. The sense of total loss, the feeling of failure and bewilderment. 'Whatever they did to me' - because you never know, really. There's no sense or logic or kindness to it. And as somebody who has wanted a child, wanted a child the way Rory probably wants a child, this is a huge deal. When it becomes an absolute like that, a 'never' rather than a, 'maybe not', a 'not now', an 'I'd rather not'. All of those others suggest a mutability, a possibility of change, or retraction at some future date. One can live in hope, even if that hope is never satisfied. There is no 'over-reaction' when feelings that strong are at play. And Amy, knowing the irrevocable truth of it, that one child lost, and all possibility of another snatched away. Because it feels like a theft, it will always feel like a theft, like someone has cheated you of it.

There's a lot of talk online about the fact that Doctor Who is a sci-fi universe, that somewhere, there must be a 'cure'. But that misses the point. Science fiction gives us metaphors through which to understand the world, and sometimes - in the world - there is no fix, no get-out, no reset button. There are all kinds of things people can try to overcome infertility, but there is no guarantee that it will work. Sometimes the sentence is immutable.

Being a Mother, being a person:
Also, because this is fiction, just because the character of Amy has been used to explore the darkest sides of fertility does not mean she can't be utilised to explore a more fully realised, sympathetic version of motherhood. After all, the whole tragedy of infertility, miscarriage, stillbirth, is that they are invisible. One can already have children, or (infertility aside) go on to have more. The lost child becomes simply a mark in your life, as you continue and are not defined by it.

And, of course, having children, these children grow up, they become independent, outgoing, confident people in their own right. They fly off around space and time, making decisions that are not necessarily healthy and bringing themselves into all sorts of danger, and - as a parent - you kind of have to live with that.

Don't get me wrong, I think we are much too harsh on the 'overbearing', 'over-protective' type of mother. One of the things it is very hard to lose is that sense of frailty, of vulnerability that your child has as a very small baby. They will always be your baby, no matter how big and independent they get. Personally, if someone was dragging my child into the firing line of Daleks, Cybermen and evilly inclined Time Lords, I wouldn't be bawling, "You take care of her!", I would be finding out in a very visceral manner just how many regenerations the Doctor had left.

You don't mess with my kids.

At the same time, you do have to accept that your child will run risks on their own, will have to make decisions and mistakes and - I hate typing this - suffer the consequences. You have to accept that one day you will hand them off to people you don't entirely trust - schools, partners, friends - who will take them away and turn them into someone that you don't quite recognise, who cannot be the same little baby who didn't recognise anyone in the world but you.

Hell, I still have a nervous collapse when I consider letting my eldest walk to the swings on her own in a few years. But in another six, she'll be walking across town (or getting the bus) to get to school on her own. In another ten, she'll probably want to be going out of an evening, with all that entails.

I'll probably be letting her. You just have to set your chin and deal with it.

Motherhood. It tears you apart.

But Amy handles it, just like most of us have to handle it. She lets River have her independence, and they remain on good terms. Not cloying, patronising, 'dear old mum', terms but as two separate adults with their own lives. Motherhood is a part of Amy, it is a part of her and Rory's marriage, but it does not define her in the way it defines Jackie Tyler, or Francine Jones, or Sylvia Noble. She continues as herself, a woman with her own interests and pursuits, while also having a good relationship with her daughter. Even if, for story reasons, she missed the messiest and most exhausting bits of parenting.

Frankly, that's why I prefer Moffat's stuff. I'm a mother, and I get the feeling he takes me seriously.

Finally, to Kill the Moon.

Okay, I went on a bit.

The thing is, Kill the Moon - while not written by Moffat himself - is another story commissioned and approved by him that gives a serious, thoughtful look at some of the terrible dilemmas around parenting, most specifically around motherhood.

Obviously, Kill the Moon engages with this in relation to the question of abortion. It looked at the matter as being a 'woman's choice', as being something private and personal that cannot be decided by opinion pole. Yes, on some levels it had an anti-choice (or, more generously, a pro-life) message that as a pro-choicer, I found deeply unsettling. But, as science fiction, as metaphor, it had the possibility of asking a bigger question, of addressing a wider set of concerns about parenthood and risk and life.

Every pregnancy is a gamble for the female body that hosts it. However wanted, however desired, however remarkable you are sure the offspring will be, however invested in the philosophical ideal of 'baby' lodged in that fetus - it could kill you. In pre-modern times, every pregnancy carried a roughly 1 in 13 chance of mortality for the mother (if I remember my figures correctly). What's more, once labour starts, it cannot be stopped. Every action is made in a pressed time-frame of irreversibility. Decisions have an effect that is immediate, and potentially fatal.

A friend of mine haemorrhaged and, without modern medical care, probably would have bled to death.

During my first labour, my heart-rate went from around 80 to about 120 in the space of five minutes, which isn't too much of a worry, except I'd been lying down for four hours and my contractions had all but stopped. It was also weak enough to be mistaken for the baby's. Hers, however, had dropped from around 120 to about 80 - and become so weak as to be difficult to find. I was on the sofa in the front room, a fifteen minute drive from the hospital, with no ambulance present and six inches of snow on the ground.

An hour earlier, the midwives had suggested going in to hospital, but my birth partner had convinced them to wait. I wanted a home-birth so badly.

They said they could leave it another sixty minutes.

Perhaps we would have been okay. Perhaps another couple of lacklustre contractions and she would have been born. Perhaps neither of our lives were ever in danger. The speed with which the midwives acted suggests differently.

You get one shot of this, one try, one chance, and, ultimately, it is down to you.

When my second child turned breech at 36 weeks, I had to make the decision of whether to stick to my principles (natural birth, home birth, low-intervention), or take the medically recommended Caesarian at 39 weeks. I had to research things like cord prolapse, foetal brain damage, popliteal pressure, Lovset's manoeuvres. I read that extended breech births were perfectly safe if delivered by a confident and experienced midwife, but that few midwives felt that way because of the ubiquity of Caesarian for breech delivery. I had to decide whether my baby's personal safety was more important to me than the preservation of skills in the community for the furtherance of natural birth.

And the choice was mine. I had brilliant doctors, consultants and midwives (thank you NHS!), I had a supportive family and the best husband anyone could hope for, but the choice was mine. My body, my baby. Ultimately, I got to hit the switch. The stress, the trauma of those three weeks is still with me.

There was no right decision.

Actually, the wriggly little beggar turned back at 39+1, the day after I would have had the Caesarian, had I made that choice. Like Clara, I lucked out. I never had to live with the consequences of fouling it up. It still hangs over me. If I had folded at the last minute, I would have had an unnecessary medical procedure, a scar, a weakened uterus. If I hadn't had that thousand to one luck, I would have had to live with the consequences of attempting home-breech birth, whatever they may have been.

You can't know. You just can't know, and you can't ask anyone else to make that decision for you. You don't even get to say, stop, no. I don't want this. It's too late for any of that. You missed your chance on that call. You have three weeks, 45 minutes, one hour, whatever - you can open it up to a poll, you can take expert advice, but no-one can tell you what to do.

The decision you make will always be the right one, because it is the only one you get.

That doesn't mean it's easy. It doesn't make it comfortable television.

But necessary?

Yeah. Maybe it does make it that.

What I've been reading: Pride and Prejudice

Okay, okay. This isn't the only thing I've been reading this week. It's just the only thing I've finished because it's the only thing I've been reading with any consistency.

Look, I'd been having a pretty rough week - it's the school summer holidays, we've had lots of visitors and done lots of visiting and I am an introvert with a personal space bubble of about fifteen feet. I'm worn out. I needed a comfort read, something fun, something familiar. So it was a Pride and Prejudice situation.

I have actually turned into my mother.

While it may seem strange that, with all my stated love for the darkness, for blood and thunder, I should be an Austen fan, you have not touched upon some squishy internal emotional wreck here. Let me make one thing dazzlingly clear to those who are not acquainted with dear Jane; this is as far as it is possible to get from mush.

Just as we disgrace Dumas by assuming he wrote for children, so we mutilate Austen by assuming what she created were romances at their worst - dull farragos of misunderstandings that would be resolved if people treated each other like human beings, sentimental works that end in inevitable marriages. Austen's worldview is bleak, dark, realist. Dare I even say it, they are proto-feminist novels.

Yes, yes, I know, we do not see Lizzy Bennet rolling up her sleeves and becoming a surgeon, nor Lydia eloping with Wickham because women should have freedom of sexual choice as well you know. Austen did not write speculatively; if she could not offer her heroines the hammer with which to smash the patriarchy, she at least gave them the clearness of sight to recognise it and a survival kit of workarounds to prevent it from crushing them.

One of the major criticisms of Austen is her desperate focus on marriage, but consider: a character like Elizabeth Bennet has no employment prospects. She could become a governess, work which paid - on average - a little more than farm labouring but which required a full abandonment of any social prospect. The family for whom she worked would view her as a subordinate, the servants would see her as an object of scorn and an outsider. Isolated for her working life, when she became 'too old' - at no more than 40 - she would be cut adrift on what little savings she had managed to amass.

If she could not get an appointment (likely, considering her relative lack of accomplishments) her income - after her father's death would be approximately £40. In 2008's terms that is roughly £1,400 a year before rent. Not to romanticise the position of the working classes in this time, but a labourer with a family could expect some income from his spouse and older children - an unmarried woman could not.

This is not to say that there would have been no way out. There were, of course, remarkable women who flew in the face of such social expectations (Austen herself was one of them, supplementing her family's income by writing) but she was very keen to make her heroines unremarkable. Too many of her contemporaries wrote paragons; she focused upon ordinary gentlewomen of no particular education, fortune or genius.

And yet, these unremarkable women prevail, and, as they do so, she show just how messed up is the system against which they must contend. The wonderful thing about Austen is that she shows us how the system is broken still.

Take, for example, Mr Collins; pompous, creepy, ugly and stupid. He makes Lizzy an offer (as the parlance goes), so, early in the novel, our heroine receives a proposal from a man she finds repulsive. So far, so romance. Yet this overlooks the tacit knowledge of Austen's audience - just as they would know how straitened the Bennets' prospects were, they would also know that 'marriage' is often a shorthand for 'sex'. And, boy, does Mr Collins employ that shorthand here. Among his first reasons for wanting to get hitched is to set a good example to his parishioners - doubtless reminding everyone that the traditional Anglican marriage service includes a bit on marriage being a way of allowing people to experience the pleasures of the flesh.

So, having not so much proposed to as propositioned her, Mr Collins received a refusal. And, in a move familiar to any woman who has received street or online harrassment anywhere, he refuses to accept this rejection as valid. Women, he claims, often say no at first. Of course, they don't really mean it, and with the correct inducements (another proposal, the advice from her parents) she will say yes at a later date. When Lizzy persists in her refusal, because, he turns nasty. In the most verbosely mannerly, 19th Century way he tells her that her market value as a sexual commodity is not particularly high, and she is unlikely to get other offers. Modernised, what he says is no different from the pick-up artists who go from a "Hey, sexy" to, "Fat, ugly slag!" when you tell them to stuff it.

And Lizzy is supposed to accept this. This - according to the mores of Lizzy's time - is a good match. This is security and relative autonomy and the assurance that she will continue to live in the style and class to which she is accustomed. To marry Mr Collins is to have a respectable clergyman's income for some years, and then the equivalent of £70k a year after Mr Bennet's death. She is not being offered mere financial security, but wealth.

I know, tiny violin. But this choice, this awful choice between lifelong prostitution to a man who is repelent to her in every way and poverty, shows that Elizabeth Bennet is in a damned good social position. She has privilege and opportunity in spades. She has intelligence, family, social standing. Her choices are far wider than that of many of the women around her. This option - which I defy anyone reading this not refuse - is one which Charlotte Lucas - older, less attractive, more pragmatic - grabs with both hands.That is the model, the society, the system in which Austen is working.

But she herself refuses it. Our author is clear; Lizzy should not be overwhelmed with gratitude for the attention of Mr Collins, nor for proposal of Mr Darcy (bringing an income of about 340k) - despite their dreadfully limited possibilities, Austen is adamant: her women are not commodities. Yes, they are circumscribed by money - Elizabeth give up her partiality to Wickham as she their joint income would be insufficient to raise a family - but they never sell themselves. 

Yet, Austen is not painting a utopia. She is showing a world that systematically breaks women down, beats them, constrains them. That she could have written such tales is clear from the palpable misery that surrounds so many of her characters. Would her characters welcome a world where they could love where they liked earn their own living without shame? Almost certainly. But they cannot have that, so they play upon what terms they can, and they win.

 All of Austen's heroines (with the possible exception of Marriane) marry for affection first, and have material comfort anyway. That happiness of that kind can be snatched in the face of such odds is the miracle of Austen's work. She saw the probable outcome of her characters lives and she refused it. Without leaving the stark bounds of realism, she showed that joy was possible, and love, and sexual fulfilment, despite every attempt of the world to destroy those things.

This is not a reconciliation with a broken system, this is a cry of hope. It is an acknowledgement that women are strong, that whatever else is taken from us, we can snatch a little handful of happiness. That with honesty and integrity and just a little bit of pushyness, it can work out. As a feminist model for the rebuilding of a utopia, it isn't much. But as an evisceration of the world's foibles and a, "hang on in there", it's wonderful.

Every time I read Austen, I am breathing relief that I was born in the late 20th century, not the early 19th. Every time I see the messed up conversations we are having about gender, finance, sex and relationships, it is a comfort, a promise, a ray of light. It is a cause for thanks, and for rejoicing.

 All figures taken from: http://janeaustensworld.wordpress.com/2008/02/10/the-economics-of-pride-and-prejudice-or-why-a-single-man-with-a-fortune-of-4000-per-year-is-a-desirable-husband/ and http://janeaustensworld.wordpress.com/2009/04/18/the-governess-in-the-age-of-jane-austen/

Why we all need a bit of Mary Sue

"That book? Oh, God. I couldn't stand that book. The main character was such a Mary-"

No. You are not allowed to finish that sentence.

Look, I get it, it's a useful term. People really do write chronically bad self-inserts. People - teenagers especially - construct idealised versions of themselves and let the relevant narrative world revolve around that character, and people do this a lot in fan-fiction and it's really very annoying, but for a moment, please, stop. Think about what you're saying.

Because, I know, in its original form it was a helpful term. The Mary Sue as a specific "self-insert in a wish-fulfilment fan fiction which disrupts the established rules of that universe" sense has its uses. And, to be fair, even when it's used as a term for 'really shoddy character writing' it has its functionality, although it's kinda imprecise. But language is defined by usage, and what most people really mean when they say Mary Sue is, "A (generally female) character who I don't much like, and therefore find implausible."

So, yeah, I'm talking about sexism again.

Because it is just such a gendered term. In a world where the generic tends to be masculine, it's telling that some blokes get described as a 'sort of a male Mary Sue'. And, oh, there is a male equivalent, of course - our Gary or Marty Stu - but seriously? Mary Sue is a name complete in its sing-song mockery. It sounds real, it sounds naïve, it is a name as bland and goody-two-shoes as they come. It smacks of a mundane world self insert into a world where everyone else has dynamic, one syllable names. It is a kitsch name, a young name, a child or little old lady name. Where a more demure, self-aware adult would just go by Mary, it sounds like a teenager's desperate attempt at idiosyncrasy. I know people with names like Mary Sue.

Gary Stu? Not so much. From a fictional perspective it's hardly got the caricature element of Jim-Bob, the pretensions of Jean-Jacques. It doesn't even scan. Who the hell abbreviates their middle name?

So, no, the male term is not as well conceived, not as convincing, not as immediately recognisable as a derogatory term. What's more, the application of the feminised form is so much more prevalent. Pick up any significant female character or love interest and - sooner or later - the name will get hurled: Bella Swan, Mary Sue. Katniss Everdeen, Mary Sue. Ginny Weasley, Mary Sue, Even, *gulp* Lizzie Bennet, Mary Sue.
 (NB, I do not advocate any of these links, I merely wish to show their prevalence. Suffice to say that these were all found on the first page of a google search. A similar search with male names throws up very few articles or discussions that use this as their main thrust, and a lot more articles where people say, "If you use that definition, there's a case for James Bond as a Marty Stu". )

Fact is, fictional men are allowed to be world-bendingly brilliant. Oh, people might complain about the way the Doctor is so intelligent and powerful he can defeat an alien invasion fleet by talking at it, but we don't have quite such a pat cultural term for it. Men - or at least, the men whose stories we hear in the genres where the Sue originates - are supposed to be unique, to have a sense of destiny, of innate worth. And yes, people do mock them, people do tear them down, but there  is no discourse through which this is facilitated. Each case of a hero who crosses the line of, "Oh, come on!" is an isolated case. Each heroine who does so is a symptom of a wider, social malaise.

And, of course, it is a charge any female character who sticks her head above the parapet must answer. "What's so special about her?" we might ask - or else, "Oh, dear. Has the author made her too special."And, yes, she might be cleared of all charges but she is immediately suspect simply by virtue of being female, of there being a handy, catchy term through which we can describe her shortcomings. Besides, she is unlikely to be cleared of all charges. These things tend to involve the desperate quoting so beloved of rabid fans: This one can't be a Mary Sue because x, y, z.

The more the term spreads, the more it becomes the brand of dishonour upon a writer, upon a fandom. The more that writers worry about making their (particularly female) characters "flawed" and "realistic", on being, "not too extreme", the blander, more understated and less ideal these female characters will become. And when writers set the standard for exceptional femininity so low, the harder it becomes for new writers to make a female character interesting, intelligent, talented without calling down the question, "Is she a Mary Sue?" This trend serves only to drive deeper the assumption that female characters cannot be 'special', but only the self-deluding 'speshul'. 

This is not to say that there isn't some chronically bad writing out there. This isn't to say that there aren't badly designed, plot-hijacking authorial dream-darlings out there, messing up their fictional worlds. This isn't to say that junk-fiction doesn't rely too often on step-into-these-shoes-dear-reader-and-become-perfect character types. It is to say, why be so aggressive towards the female examples?

It is to say, what the hell is wrong with that anyway?

You know what's hard?

Growing up.

Oh, don't call "teenage angst" on me - it was awful. Everything changed. You could no longer get any real comfort from childish things yet the adult world - even the adolescent world - was bloody terrifying. Your body, your interests, your abilities and intellect were held up against some illusory set of ideals defined by your teachers, your parents, your classmates. You didn't know what you were doing with your life. You weren't even sure who you were.

Into the bad body-image, the moodswings, the bewilderment, the frustration, the intellectual anxiety, you would dream that you were special, that you were going to go somewhere, that you would be somebody who made a big impression on the world. You felt like you had a destiny. And, yeah, maybe the world around you didn't actually treat you like shit, but sometimes it felt like it did. Sometimes you felt like the one person who didn't have friends, felt that nobody knew the true heart of you, that you were the one being singled out for punishment. Yeah, maybe you grew up, got over it, but you know what?

I bet stories helped with that.

You could open a book, or turn on a film and slip into a world where your feeling of persecution was justified, where you were proved to be the hero after all. You could use this to work out what you were, what you wanted to be - it offered dreams, escapes. It offered you possibilities, heroisms, romances.

Picking up these books, identifying with these so-called Mary Sues let you try out paths through life. Maybe you would be the kind of person who valiantly sacrifices yourself for your friends and dies in a way that is clearly written with a cinema bio-pic in mind. Or maybe you'd become a crusader for justice and kick ass while averting the apocalypse. Maybe, who knows, maybe you'd just marry that millionaire and go and have a life of moneyed luxury where the biggest worry was not embarrassing yourself in front of said millionare's bitchy relatives.

Or maybe all those were just fantasies. Maybe you knew that. But those fantasies had a function; they gave us some idea of the kind thing we wanted to do, the kind of person we wanted to be. They gave us a chance to experience things that - in our life - were probably only going to be encountered on a much smaller scale. Yeah, okay, most of them weren't written in deathless prose, but that wasn't exactly the point. Sometimes we don't care how shakily something is written if it speaks to our better selves.

 The Mary-Sue and the ideal self:

And that's what this is abut, the better self. One of the big complaints about Mary Sues is that they are not merely an authorial insert, but rather an idealised authorial insert. This is not just you, it's you with the blemishes removed and that annoying 2 stone lost. It's you with those sparkling green eyes you always wanted and... oh, wouldn't jet black hair look cool? And, of course, not only is this girl beautiful, she is the best: at everything, always, effortlessly. And she's nice, too! She's kind, caring, compassionate. Everybody loves her, and those who hate her are just jealous...

And, I'll admit it, a case of the Sues this advanced can be pretty nauseating to read, especially if it's not in a genre you like, or you know someone who won't shut up about it. But, but...

Adolescence - and I will say especially for teenage girls because I have no experience of having been a teenage boy - is a time of remarkably low self-esteem. The media is there, relentlessly undermining every aspect of our personal appearance, we have family groups yelling at us to stay kids and peers yelling at us to grow up. There are schools telling us how important it is to 'be ourselves' provided we get all our work in on time and don't contravene the dress code. Having a relationship is everything. It doesn't matter if your queer or asexual, everybody in your life will have some opinion on your immanent heterosexual experiences, whether that be forbidding them or nagging you to begin them. Because of this, we are bombarded by endless relationship advice which drives home the message that we are not to be too smart and that if we are we should hide it, that boys' egos must be flattered at all costs, that boy's desires should define what we wear, where we go. We are told we must not be 'easy' or 'frigid' and we have...

Look, we have patriarchy, alright? It sucks.

Yet, despite this, miraculously despite all this, we have a little core of self-esteem the bastards haven't taken from us yet. We have little moments of, "I got 100% on that test. That's pretty good, isn't it?", we have the races we win, the 'okay' pictures we draw, the moment we 'get' quadratic equations. We have those evenings where we discover, "Hey, if I tie my hair like that, I really don't look too awful." We have feature that we pick out of our faces so that we can say, "I'm not properly pretty, not actually, but my lips are quite nice."

And a Mary Sue - or perhaps, more accurately, an idealised, central character - comes from that place. It reaches right into that last little touch of the egotism of childhood, that final spark of, "No, I am brilliant" that the dominant cultural discourse implies adult women aren't allowed to possess. It pulls it out of us, lets use revel in it with the full weight of adolescent narcissism. We are the agents, the heroes of our own stories, a shout in the dark of the endless culture of negativity, low self-esteem, eating disorders, self harm and self abnegation. When we step into the shoes of a 'Mary Sue', every now and then, we see our ideal self. Not who we are, but who we'd like to be, and we begin to see that the two are perhaps not so different after all. They give us strength.

You know what else is hard?

Being a grown-up.

Seriously, chaps, don't try it, it rubbish. Because when you're a grown-up you no longer have the excuse of youthful self-obsession. The world expects you to know who you are, and by that it means "who it expects you to be, and that includes not contravening the dress code". All those voices that were shouting at you during your adolescence are still yelling and although they may have got a bit quieter, they've also got a lot more dull.

And again (sorry-not-sorry MRAs) the burden of this so-called maturity is heavier on women. This is because the second we hit 35 (or drop a sprog, whichever comes first), we don't get the spot-light any more, we don't have that flexibility of role - even if the only roles we were offered in the first place were 'sexy sidekick' or 'Mary Sue'.

Wonder why 50 Shades was so successful as 'mummy porn'?

My theory is that mature women got fed up of being told they weren't allowed to be sexual. Got fed up of the fact that daring to be matter-of-fact about our bodies and desires led us to be shamed, made people tell us to put it away, that nobody wants to see. And faced with that, who wouldn't want to slip back into that endless possibility of the early twenties, when one was free, single, childless?

Well, actually, no. Most of us wouldn't do that. But that's the nice thing about fantasy.

The thing about fiction is that it lets us take on roles we might like to try or - better still - would run a mile from in reality. That's the crux of this; fantasy, escape. The need doesn't die when we leave those formative years. It's nice, from time to time, to have a character doing things you'd like to be able to do, if you didn't carry the burden of too much realism. And, yeah, good writing is always a plus, but here's a little secret: When people go to that private, escapist place, they aren't doing it to please you. They really don't give a damn what you think about their dreams, their fantasies, their escapes. What gives you the right to reach in there and try to snuff out that little light, just because you didn't like a book, a film, a fanfic?

Sure, I can't stop you, not really. Freedom of speech is a human a right. But with that comes the responsibility of thinking about the effect of what you say. And do you really want to take this away from someone? Do you want to be that person?

What I've been reading: The Count of Monte Cristo.

*Checks date*

Still here, I'm afraid.

Eeek. Sorry.

So, I'm on the home stretch with this, and this post this contains spoilers. Also, much SQEEEEEEE!

Where have we got to? Well, the Count of Morcerf has shot himself (YAY!), Valentine is languishing from strychnine poisoning (which has at least cleared her of murder) Albert is adorable (but not particularly bright), the footnotes were written by an idiot and Maximilian Morrel is frankly a bit of a dick.

Oh. And Eugénie is a lesbian. In case you hadn't noticed. Or if you'd forgotten.

 Seriously, if I had one complaint with this novel (besides the chronic idiocy of the editor) it was the sheer iron-bar quality with which Dumas handles Eugénie's sapphism. Because we get it. REALLY. WE GET IT.

Other than that, it's fan-fucking-tastic. After a slow middle bit (blah, gradual bankruptcy, blah, medical details of minor characters we don't really care about, necessesary foundation laying for this bit, blah, Maximillian bloody Morell...) it's all kicked off. Four (count 'em, four) challenges to duels, three deaths by poison, two attempted suicides by honour and AT LAST, someone blows their own brains out from feelings of shame!

Oooooh! And, while we're at it, the honour code in this! All the clenched fists and the deathly pale expressions and the choice of weapons at some place of your choosing! All the fainting and the thrown gloves and sudden reversion to calling your friend, "sir" like it's an insult....It's so delicious, so sharp and complicated and brilliant...

And Haydée, Haydée.... Is she actually the first portrayal of a sexual submissive in literature? Because I am shipping so hard...

So, yeah, this is basically such sheer, sexy, ego packed brilliance that I have been grinning for the last 24 hours. It's better, even, that Three Musketeers. And Dumas is such fun! 

That's one thing I never really realised back when the only copy I had was an abridgement. Sorry to hammer on this theme, but the biggest crime of the abridged versions is how they cut all this to the bone. The important bit is that Dantès shames Fernand, so that's all they give you. They don't give you Albert's anguish, his dilemma, his pride. They don't show him almost chucking his glove at Dantès in a crowded opera house while his friends hang around him with, "Don't do it, Morcerf, really, not smart." (And, seriously, that is a wonderful piece of pacing and building tension, even for someone who knows what happens next.) Oh, you get that Haydée is beautiful and submissive, but you don't see her taking the initiative, you don't see her shouting down her opponent in court. You don't see her bear herself like a queen. Without this, she is a child with a creepy crush, not someone in what is a prototype D/s relationship.

So, after slashing away all this wonderful stuff, you get cardboard cut-outs racing around as much plot as you can fit into 300 pages (a plot whose elegance and complexity is utterly muddled by these cuts) and, reading this, generations of idiots have the audacity to call Dumas a cheap cliché-ridden hack.

And, yeah, it's a bit melodramatic, it's a thing of bold, broad strokes, but there is also subtlety and real passion there. Last night, I read a scene of such breathtaking and tragic intensity that I suspect it will be joining Renfield's desperate plea of sanity  (Doctor Seward's diary, 1st October, 4am, Dracula, Chapter 18) as one of the scenes I murmur aloud in breathless, heartfelt tones every time I read it...  This damn fool of an editor thinks Dumas is condemning Mercédès here, but she shines! She burns like falling star! Oh, these feelings, so lost, so painful, so buried beneath years of torment but strong enough to control them and.... Ah! Perfect. Perfect.

This is everything I ever want in book. This is just....

Actually, it's probably the reason I'm using so many exclamation marks. 

So, go on. Clear your reading diary and have some fun. It's the holidays.