Review: The Book of Dust, La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman

One of the reasons I don't use a formal rating system on this blog is that assigning something a certain number of stars always seems to result in injustice. For example, if a book by my favourite writer isn't quite as sublimely brilliant as I know they're capable of producing, I might give it four stars, even three if I'm feeling vindictive. However, were I to read the same novel by an unknown, it would have breezed its way to an effortless five based on my surprise by all the skill and qualities which familiarity would otherwise cause me to take for granted.

As a reader, a writer's work cannot be separated from their oeuvre, nor indeed from what they have meant to you at various points in your own life. Therefore, when I encounter a book that, taken solely on its own merits, is a perfectly adequate piece of middle grade fiction trying to pass itself off as an adult novel, I would probably be likely to give it three stars. Unless, of course, it was written by Philip Pullman, when I would feel a remarkable degree disgust, anger and personal betrayal.

Look. I loved His Dark Materials. I read them relentlessly as a child, they being one of the few things that did not talk down to me in terms of content, character, or events. I've written before about the state of middle grade and YA fiction for avid and intelligent readers of fantasy when I was that age, and Pullman was a huge part of me making the transition from Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper to Robert Holdstock and Angela Carter. I cannot overlook this when I say that La Belle Sauvage is such a dreadful disappointment.

You see, it wants to be The River at Green Knowe when it grows up, an ambition which perhaps misses the point that The River at Green Knowe is a children's book. 

Moral messages that were subtle and carefully handled in the original trilogy are here presented with all the nuance of a cosh to the back of your head - we get it Phil, the church are the bad guys - the wonder and strangeness of Lyra's world is replaced by a series of frankly generic folkloric cameos, and our deeply abrasive, awkward, believable protagonist is replaced with... Malcolm.

I'm not even going to start talking about Malcolm. 

But on top of this dumbing down of style and content, there was the insistence that this was one for grownups. Perhaps the very same grownups who had grown up reading His Dark Materials, and it was this that really stuck the knife in because, put simply, La Belle Sauvage does not function if viewed as an adult novel.

It has long been a conviction of mine that the difference between adult, YA, and children's fiction is not so much a matter of content, as one of structure, pacing, and focus. Just as children's fiction - good children's fiction - is not merely adult fic with the 'inappropriate' content taken out and all the nastiness coddled up, adult fiction - or at least, good adult fiction - is not just a children's story with a bit of sex, swearing, and an absolutely gratuitous implied rape thrown in to it.

The two modes serve different needs, tells a story differently, talk to their readers in a whole different language, and this is why you never really outgrow good children's fiction - because its qualities remain. Historically, Pullman knew this. His Dark Materials is frequently devastating, lyrical, powerful - they are children's books, unashamedly, and in the very best senses of the words.  

La Belle Sauvage isn't even a very good children's book.

Ultimately, if this hadn't been something I was reading for bookclub, I wouldn't have finished it. I don't want my childhood heroes to diminish this much in my eyes. And, if that weren't enough?

[Spoilers for His Dark Materials, and La Belle Sauvage below]

Addressing the High/Low bullshit

There's been a lot of talk lately about the difference between high and low fiction, between commercial and literary fiction, or literary and genre. I figured it was about time to weigh into the debate.

I don't read a lot of Literary fiction. Regulars to this blog may have noticed a rather sceptical attitude to what I like to call 'High/low bullshit'. This isn't because I don't think there's a difference in the way genre and literary writers tend to write, or structure their work. It's because I believe this difference is no more significant than the differences between the way (for example) horror writers and SF writers structure their work. It may be more pronounced, but it is not more important. Fact is, any genre has its own way of doing things and, to my mind, the fun comes when writers decide to trample those boundaries in every plausible direction. For writers, genres should be a shrug, should be a Captain Barbossa, "They're more like guidelines, anyway." If they aren't, they very quickly become a straight-jacket, a noose.

No, genres are not for writers. Genres are for readers. Genres establish a certain set of expectations. As well as setting and plot cues (space operas, HEAs, quests) they give you some idea as to the kind of mood you'll be in when you've finished reading. And that's all great. Honestly, it's really helpful. If I want feel life-affirming stuff with desirable main characters and bit of wittiness between fiesty people and brooding ones, I check out chick-lit, romance and Georgette Heyer. If I'm more in the mood to be kept awake all night by a sense of squirming terror and being unwilling to go downstairs to get a glass of water, then lead me to the horror section. Genres are signposts. Even the terminally lost like myself appreciate their utility.

 But the signpost of Lit fic is rather more difficult to define than that of - say - urban fantasy. The expectations I get from the designation of Lit fic relate more to theme, tone and diction rather than plot and action. From Lit fic, I would expect stories that do not tie together too neatly, novels that have an epiphany and just sort of stop rather than an 'ending' per se. I expect questions unanswered, trailing threads that will haunt me, images that will ring in my mind for months.

And actually, when I put it like that, I read tons of Lit fic. It just tends to be the kind you find in the SF, fantasy and horror sections of your libraries. And here comes the problem. If we define the difference between genres as qualitative, but not hierarchical, we cannot justify the automatic privilege that Lit fic receives. If it is just a way of pointing readers in the direction of what they are looking for, why then does describing a work as literary (with or without that capital 'L') make it automatically more serious, more worthy, more valid?

If literary were used merely as a moderator, as a way of further classifying within a genre, this would be less problematic, and this is how some use the term. But, to many, Literary fiction tends to imply a work that is founded in, or is a reaction against, the life-as-it-is novel. Magical realism can be literary but magic cannot. Romance is fine, provided it has a capital 'r'.  It's an exclusive club, and anything 'genre', anything 'commercial' is going to have to work a lot harder to get in.

And speaking of hard work, we are prepared to work harder for Literary fiction. Our cultural expectations tell us that, by definition, Lit fic it is better, it is more profound, more formally challenging. When we read a book marked with those signposts, our expectations guide us and there is the danger we will see insight where there is only pretension, genius where there is self-indulgence, and inventiveness in what is an unstructured mess.

Yet, some books are harder than others, some require more work from us. I stopped exactly halfway through Wilson Harris' incredible Carnival trilogy - actually halfway through The Infinite Rehearsal, a book that was moving and astounding me with every sentence - because I have kids and I was getting interrupted so much I couldn't follow the grace of the prose. Much as I admire her, if I read too much Doris Lessing I start getting a headache. Umberto Eco is easier, but still, I need to be on the ball. The tag of Lit fic is useful, it can give one a head's up: clear your diary before reading this.

What's more, it can guide us, because without the understanding that a book is trying to challenge, trying to unsettle and bend what is familiar to us, we run the risk of inverting those assessments, dismissing beautiful, intelligent stuff as "too much like hard work" and, "trying to be too clever."

Yet the assumption that harder books are necessarily Lit fic, and Lit fic is by definition 'harder' is no unsatisfactory. Something being difficult to read is not necessarily and endorsement, challenging =/= quality. Besides, other things that merit the capital 'L' can be read in the bath in one sitting: Angela Carter, George Orwell, Gabriel García Márquez... These books aren't any less clever, don't remain with you any less, don't change your world to a smaller extent simply because the very act of reading them is not a hammer applied to your grey cells. They are no less formally inventive, narratively challenging, verbally brilliant - they are just easier to read. 

On a similar note, genre novels aren't necessarily 'easy'. The number of times I've had to put down Banks' SF novels and massage my temples for a couple of moments while my brain cooled down are beyond counting, the number of friends who have returned Mythago Wood half-read depressing. Doing 'the clever stuff' is not the preserve of conventional, realist Lit fic, nor, for that matter, is Literariness. 

There is a double standard at work here. Lit fic - however middle brow, however simplistic - is given a legitimacy denied to other genres. Genre work is automatically 'not as accomplished', not permitted to make you work as hard. So, again, my copy of Little, Big comes back with an, "Honestly? I think he's trying to be too clever."

So, to get around this, we employ the strangest distinctions. We have the hundred times I hear the squirming self-justification of, "Yes, it's a comic book, but it's not a comic book-comic book". Because, of course, if a work of genre fiction gives the lie to the assumptions about that genre, that's because it's no longer really a work of genre fiction. No, it is elevated by dishonest little terms like 'Speculative Fiction', or 'graphic novel', it is given a half accepted place that does not quite have literary's cachet, that must always by preceded by excuses.

Yet to do this is to make life more complicated, make it harder to find a good book. In terms of book-shop organisation, it is literally to move the signposts. It is to reinforce the idea that anything,  'in genre' is, by default, incapable of being literary. It is to negate the worth of labels that have served us well, have guided us. It is to break down the links between books, the 'if you enjoyed x, then you might like..." If Shikasta is not SF, what of First and Last Men? If we let Stapleton across, then what of the works they inspire that do not quite meet the standard? As a reader, where do I go if I want dream-visiony, spiritual SF?

Terms like 'graphic novel', like 'genre slumming' are loaded with the implication that things which 'aren't' encompassed by those privileged works are even worse. Indeed, they serve to negate even those privileged works themselves. If we are put of by the 'graphic', we are reassured that this is a novel. The textual element, the 'acceptable' part, are receives plaudits, the visual element is overlooked. We ignore the fact that a comic is not simply a 'novel with graphic elements', it is an interaction between the two that should work to the enhancement of both. If we are alarmed by the 'genre', we are reassured by the 'slumming'. Yet why should we be reassured by the fact that the writer neither respects nor understands the genre in which xie is working?

I like good books. In my experience, good books are made by good craftspeople and to be a good craftsperson, one needs to respect, to understand one's tools. Good books are made by good artists, who have a passion, a vision, a drive. To set up false distinctions, to over privilege one mode of doing something, does not encourage craft in those less privileged places. It pays into the belief that certain readers are undiscerning, that certain types of fiction are, and can be, 'off the peg'. It encourages bad writing, it cultivates niches that do not wish to interact with the wider world of readers and experiences. And to someone who just likes to be nice about excellent books, this is very sad thing indeed.

What the Dickens?

I have a feeling I've written before about missing the fucking point. Surely it must have come up, at least once in this blog, that far from being the respectable face of Literature, Shakespeare was a filthy minded bastard writing for a group of people who were considered little better than whores? That theatre, far from being an institution, was something known to contemporaries as 'The Anti-Christ's lewd hat'¹?

This actually hasn't come up?

Nah, it must have done.

So, I shan't bang on about tidying up the past, about assuming things were simpler and more respectable than they were². I shan't make a fuss about the mistaken concept that those really pretty clothes confer some kind of moral value upon a time period, I will simply say that I get it.

Honestly, I do get it, this need to romanticise the past. I get that if we don't romanticise something we might as well give up now. On a day-to-day basis, this ability to imagine is sometimes what makes it worth getting out of bed in the morning.

So, by all means – enjoy your fiction about Lords and Ladies, lusty gamekeepers, great artistic genius, the Golden Age of chivalry or whatever it is that floats your boat. But two small requests? Bear in mind it had fuck all basis in reality. And, please, please don't make my sense of irony jump down my throat and drown me in my own misspent bile.

This is particularly relevant when it comes to books, and to writers. There is a significant and important line between “dreamy eyed fan fic” and “what is actually going on in the fucking novel”. Of course, Henry Tilney is the perfect man, and life would be a much so much duller if I... *ahem*, I mean one... couldn't indulge in the odd teenage style daydream complete with anachronistic attitudes to gender and pre-marital sex. However, one really should remember that – while it is about marriage - Northanger Abbey is far more satire than romance. Have as many wet dreams as you like about Fitzwilliam Darcy but do take care to remember that Austen was an acerbic and potentially cynical woman. And don't buy this. Please, don't buy this: http://www.etsy.com/listing/115163054/honoring-jane-austen-this-pillow?ref=v1_other_2

However that particular travesty of literary interpretation is not the reason for this little rant. Not even slightly. No, this weekend past I found myself back in my old stomping ground of North Kent and managed, somewhat against my intentions, to wander into the centre of Rochester in the middle of its Dickensian Christmas extravaganza.

Now, Rochester is very proud of Dickens and, while he's not my personal cup of tea, I do think it's nice that a local writer gets the full treatment of adoration and civic display³. So, for one weekend only, Rochester turned out into its Victorian best. Crinolines abounded. The odd Gothic minded young women did a passable (and potentially inadvertent) impression of a demi-mondaine. Soldiers wore those terribly impractical but wonderfully smart red uniforms⁴, and one wanker missed the point entirely and turned up with a pair of goggles on his topper⁵.

Okay, there were very few rickets. There was no ostentatious penury, infant mortality or displays of brutality. There were not even the plimsolled, soot-faced waifs that frequent May's Sweeps' Festival⁶. And, yes, omitting all these is to downplay Dickens' role as a writer pushing for social reform but, I'll concede that good clean fun and late 19^th Century conditions of deprivation are perhaps mutually exclusive. Then I saw it. Letters three feet high, blazoned across a refreshment marquee:

Miss Havisham's Tea Tent.

You... you don't mean that?

Right?

Wanker with the goggles? Come back. All is forgiven.

1No. Seriously. http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=0300088841

2Or, indeed, grimier and more miserable.

3Actually, I'd rather we did it rather more often, only with less of the attendant nationalism, but you know...

4And pith helmets, which was a little unexpected outside of the colonies (and no, it wasn't a Home Service helmet.) but maybe they were supposed to be on leave.

5Actually, I love steam-punk, but that is now the OMT for steam-punk garb at an historical event.

6Well, it was a bit chilly and certain agencies would complain if the council pushed historical accuracy to its fullest.

Review: Susan Hill, The Various Haunts of Men: Pulling Punches and Killing the Spare.

It's very rare for a book to make me cry. It's very rare for something even to come close.

Same goes for films, television, whatever. There are a few things, there are moments when I get mawkish and sentimental,¹ there are the few guaranteed tearjerkers in the world, but when my contemporaries were sobbing buckets over poor old Cedric Diggory, the best I could manage was a shrug. “Kill the spare”, splat – well, quite. If you insist.

In fact, I've always had a bit of beef with J.K about that whole business. Sure, she killed Sirius Black, and she killed him totally unfairly², but in the last book she promised us a Weasley. Go on, then, I thought – she's not going to do for Ron, but Ginny maybe? Or Arthur. Definitely Arthur.

Fred? You what?

Okay. Better Fred than George³. You whack the Weasley who's got a double? What a bloody cop out.

Now, this, I'll admit, makes it sound as though I've a vendetta against everyone's favourite red-headed clan, but I've not. I like the Weasleys. Sod it, I like Fred. I'm talking about storytelling. From book four onwards, Harry Potter is filled with a cast of likeable, entertaining supporting characters who are murdered in the gradually escalating bloodbath that culminates in the battle for Hogwarts. Not Harry though. Not Ron, or Hermione or Hagrid. Not even Ginny, or Neville or Dean. No, it's Cedric, Sirius, Dumbledore, Dobby, Tonks, Lupin, Fred - everyone outside our enchanted little circle of main characters and their immediate friends. Flat-pack tragedy. Kill the spare.

If you had asked me who my favourite, favourite writer was when I was twelve years old, my response would have been without hesitation. Robin Jarvis. No, he's not as good a writer as Garner, nor as clever as Pullman, but he taught me one very valuable thing about storytelling.

Don't kill the spare.

No, wait, scrap that. Don't just kill the spare.

For those of you who aren't acquainted with Jarvis' work and doubt the veracity of this statement, Jarvis' best known series can be summarised thus: a faintly mythic bloodbath inhabited by anthropomorphic animals.

You got a favourite character? It's dead⁴. A favourite place? Razed. A favourite people? Massacred. There was a kind of glee in it, murder, murder, murder, mayhem, black magic and death. No, Jarvis wasn't killing his darlings, dear, he was killing yours. Of course, it wouldn't have worked if it had just been unremitting blackness⁵ - he played the heartstrings, but not too much. He pulled no punches.

Sometimes, though, he pulled something else, though: a fast one.

Which brings me onto our next point. Fast ones are great. I love fast ones. The end of The Whitby Series is one hell of a fast one. In fact, it's a whole sequence of fast ones. The Alchemist's Cat is still, to my mind, one of the best fast ones ever pulled. And sometimes the fast one is the way out – don't just kill the spare, kill the darling. Then bring them back.

They're great, fast ones. Every now and then they do stop something turning into an outright rout. They bring a little bit of lightness, of joy back to your reader's world. They promise to drive the nail in, to make the incision, only to pull back at the last minute. It's okay, chaps. Everything will be just peachy.

Which is all well and good, but they undermine what I see to be the first rule of storytelling. Don't try to please your reader. You are not a little child, trying to persuade a strict caregiver to provide sweets. You do not need to pander to their little whims. You are a writer, FFS. Within the little confines of your book, your world, your script, your whatever, you are GOD, and you do not need to be a nice one. When you pull a fast one, your readers should feel nothing other than sheer, bleeding relief. “Thank fuck,” should be what they are whispering to themselves. “I care. I care. I care.” And to get that reaction, you cannot pull them all the time⁶.

That's the thing about fast ones. They are throwing your reader the sponge, giving them the sticking plaster. They are kissing them, making it all better. If you always do it, bring your character to the edge of jeopardy, and pull them back at the last minute, your readers won't believe harm can really come to them. Your readers will slip inside a cosy little fantasy where everything will be okay. You stop being a cruel and implacable God and become a parent – scooping your reader up before they get to where the real darkness lives.

Don't do this. Do not get sentimental, do not make the red jerseys. Simply kill! Kill! KILL!

Ahem.

Sorry.

Which brings me to Susan Hill. She knows what its like, the punches are the things that she does not pull. I was never expecting any tenderness. About five chapters into The Various Haunts of Men I said to myself, “If she does not kill Character X, I am going to be so disappointed.” Character X was charming, lovable, even. Character X was engaging, sympathetic, central. Character X was not the spare.

By the end of the novel, I was begging for her to pull a fast one. Let X off, I prayed, just this once.

But she did not.

And I nearly cried.

Now that, my fine friends, is excellent storytelling.

1Branagh's Love's Labours Lost being a case in point.

2Not so much that she killed him, more that she couldn't think of anything else to do with him first.

3 Would anyone even have noticed had it been George?

4Except in the rare instance where it is the traitor who causes everyone else's death. But there you go.

5Although I'm not saying he wasn't prepared to give that a try.

6I'm looking at you, Steven Moffat.

Some tips on coping with Dyslexia

In this post I will be moving away from my usual fare and giving some advice to any writers out there who, while not dyslexic themselves, consider putting a dyslexic character in their work. Even if you're not a writer, how about giving it a read? Because my advice is this:

Yes, I am dyslexic. What I am not is a fucking imbecile.

Most of us, actually, aren't. Most of us can, in fact, read and write to a level commensurable with non-dyslexic individuals. Bear in mind, please, that recent figures suggest that one in ten people are dyslexic, or suffer from a dyslexic type disability. I suspect someone would have noticed by now if over 10% of the population were functionally illiterate.

And no, dyslexia is not being used as a catch all term for what we used to call 'slow' children - that contradicts my initial statement about how dyslexic people are not bloody idiots.  Dyslexia is a specific learning difficulty, meaning it impacts upon certain aspects of an individual's performance. It is assessed by a series of tests which resemble the common IQ test and take in all areas of ability; spatial reasoning, numerical reasoning, alpha-numeric problem solving, verbal reasoning, reading accuracy, that sort of thing. The results from these tests are then stratified, locating any areas of specific underperformance in relation to the individual's overall ability. If a certain pattern of underperformance is noted, the individual is diagnosed with the relevant learning difficulty.

Clear? It locates specific areas where there is weakness compared with the individual's average.


"Well, of course," you say, straw man as you are, oh hypothetical reader, "I'm not saying that dyslexic people can't be good at certain areas of conventional academia, but you've said it yourself, they have specific areas of underperformance. They aren't readers."

I'll admit, some dyslexics are not readers, but then so are some people who have no relation to the disability; some people just don't like reading very much. It may even be true that there are some cliche dyslexics out in the world, people who after many arduous attempts at school, learned functional reading very late, and, after having left school with a palpable sigh of relief, have never troubled themselves with a book again - despite being very creative and possibly extremely good at things like drama, and dance. Some may even still be functionally illiterate. I would hazard, however, that these people are the minority.

Because, once again, these views overlook the complexity of the thing, of reading itself, in fact. Reading utilises many skills, and among these are areas affected by dyslexia: the ability to process, store and retrieve information, or sequencing, that kind of thing. But these are only part of what one needs in order to read, so, rather than sinking under inertia, people with dyslexia do as people with disabilities have done since the dawn of time: they have developed coping strategies, heightening the surrounding areas of ability effectively to 'mask' the disability. This is why many people are not diagnosed with dyslexia until later life when greater demands are made from the weaker aspects of their abilities and their accustomed coping strategies cease to provide a 'level the playing field'.*  Suddenly struggling, the dyslexic adult will seek to know why.

The biggest irony of learning difficulties is that the dip in ability need not actually bring the individual below the average skill set of someone without that disability; it is merely a drop in IQ relevant to that individual. Someone with mild-to-medium dyslexia and an IQ in the average range may reveal a noticeable handicap, but one easily overlooked. Someone with the same level of the condition and an IQ in the 110-120 range could drift through life totally undiagnosed because even their weaker areas perform slightly better than the average while and their most severe lapses are masked by coping strategies.

But this is not to understate the frustration, the sheer bloody irritation, the occasional weeping despair that having a learning difficulty can bring to an otherwise bright child. Understanding a text perfectly, but, when called upon to read it aloud, stumbling over familiar words, stringing sentences together in an awkward fashion. Knowing how a word is spelled, getting it right week after week on a series of idiot spelling tests, but still, when faced with it in the conditions of actually writing something facing a total bloody mind blank and writing something a four year old would know was incorrect.

It hurts, that; and what hurts more is then being called lazy, careless, or inattentive for getting it wrong, even though you had been beating your brain against the right answer, while your brain has refused to co-operate.

And what hurts even more is going through education like that, getting more than decent grades, going to University, studying English to a post graduate level, trawling through all those god-awful PDF files and academic books that are laid out in a way intended to give dyslexic people migraines**, and passing anyway because you care and are good at your subject and you love books too much to give a damn that sometimes it's really hard work. What hurts is doing all that and then having to read some writer - or listen to some random, ill-informed person - telling you that dyslexic people aren't academic, that dyslexic people can't read.

So, before you think about creating a dyslexic character, or just saying something that bloody thoughtless, remember: Albert Einstein was dyslexic and so is the almost disgustingly well-read Stephen Fry.***

We're not stupid, we're not lazy, and, this dyslexic at least, is really quite pissed off.

*as the assessor from the Dean of Student's office put it to me.
** visual distortion being another symptom, one exacerbated by certain layouts, contrast levels and fonts.
*** For more examples, see: http://www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/about-dyslexia/famous-dyslexics.html
 

(For more information on dyslexia, see http://www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/. Don't get me started on dyspraxia or we'll be here all day. Must dash, novels to write, books to read.)