Harry Potter and the Ruthless Case of Queer-baiting

Oh, Gods.

I don't want to write this article. This is actually being written over an article where I defend Rowling.

I never hit publish, never quite happy with it, not 100% convinced by my own arguments. I'll be keeping bits of it as I go along, trying to keep my balance as I do my thing and see both sides. Inside, I'm hurting.

So. Here we go.

I would hate to be J.K Rowling. I mean, who'd want what she's got? Sales figures that are a publishing rep's wet dream, every property she writes pure marketing gold, and enough clout that she actually got the final say on that dreadful, yellow book cover. Who'd want that? To be rich, famous, talented and the mythmaker for an entire generation.

Oh, yeah. That last one's a bit of a risk, isn't it?

Original Potterheads:

I am part of the original Potter generation, the generation to whom the books were initially marketed, before teachers, broadcasters and Hollywood started to push them on people. I say this not as a hipster claim, but just to state how seminal these books were, what they meant to people who were already readers.

For a start, we didn't have the snappy name back then. The concept of fandom soared clear over our sheltered heads. We identified each other more by, "Oh, yeah, have you read those new books about the wizard school?! J.K Roe-ling… R-ow-ling? Yeah, her. No she's a woman, seriously! Do you know she's like releasing one every school year?"

Someone gave this to Sprog1 and now we've got three copies!

The thing is, reading wasn't cool. Maybe it still isn't, but then it was the sign of a total freak. Children's books were not made into multi-million dollar film franchises. There was no such thing as YA. The organisation in libraries and bookshops went from the bright, exciting covers of the 9-12 fiction to a slim, drab and threatening section labelled 'teen'.

The adults you spoke to make it clear that this section was a teeny bit unsavoury. There were books in there which could categorised as acceptably serious books about issues, and there were the unfortunate but necessary books about relationships, but there was also the odd, well (whisper it) genre novel. Which probably had sex in it, too. Not really your sort of thing, dear.

As a pre-teen, I hungered for magic. But everywhere, unspoken, was the idea that somewhere between children's fiction and grown-up books, you had to give up adventure, dragons, prophetic dreams, strange futures, that somewhere in that 'teen' section, it went from being acceptable and charming to 'trash'. You could - I was beginning to understand - get it back; I'd devoured Cohelo's The Alchemist, been terrified and shocked by a copy of The Handmaid's Tale I'd found left on a desk at school, stolen my mum's The Children of Men (I only returned it when I left home). I was, even then, struggling through Mythago Wood for the first time, bewildered and entranced. But even though I was getting bored with childish things, I wasn't quite ready, emotionally or intellectually to make that leap.

So, between The Chronicles of Narnia and Nights at the Circus there was a wide, barren desert. I was expected, even pushed, to read serious, considered books. I was offered The Classics, but they didn't have enough blood and thunder to hold me. I was offered books about kissing and parties and clothes. I was offered well-meaning but patronising books about divorces and bullying and drugs?

How to express, at that age, that nothing was as serious for me as the end of the Oaken Throne, where Ysabelle puts her heartbreak aside to fulfil her destiny? Or than Kathleen battling abuse and bigotry in Dogsbody, pining for her absent father?

And, of course, I was such an avid reader. I'd tear through novels so fast that teacher's wouldn't believe my reading diary and I had to lie, dragging them out over weeks, not hours, reading them three or four times in the interim. At home, I was constantly, constantly after something new to read.
How about this?
 "Has it got ghosts in it?"
 Not exactly.
"What about magic?"
 Well, I suppose they do magical things!
"Such as...?"
... make butter?*

There was the occasional reprieve, the odd brilliant book which couldn't be teen because magic, but didn't talk down to me either. There was Pullman's His Dark Materials, William Nicholson's The Wind on Fire series. There was the perfect, irreplaceable Diana Wynne Jones. There was Alan than God for you Garner. There was my beloved Robin Jarvis.  But for every magical, gorgeous book that touched my heart, there were a hundred 'meh's - goofy, cutesy, predictable.

With a sizable marketing budget, clear branding, Harry Potter seemed to see that hollow place in my life, and to make a go of filling it.

 

Mind the gap:

 

But at that exact point in history, the marketing niche it was aimed for was perceived as tiny.

If you have not guessed from the above, my pre-adolescene was not a golden age of children's fiction. Books met relatively little fanfare. They seldom flew from the shelves. Dahl was the last superstar, and he'd been dead seven years.

So, when Harry Potter was published, it was being cast into an arena of modest investment, modest returns. It was marketed carefully to make its appeal as widespread as possible within that fanatical pool of young readers. It had just enough brand consistency that the extended series would draw in those who liked the familiarity and recognisable aesthetic of books like Goosebumps, The Babysitters Club, or even Redwall.

In doing this, I don't doubt that some decisions were made - some at the unconscious level, some explicitly - to make its appeal as 'broad' as possible - and by broad, I mean pandering to priviliged readers and expecting the rest to suck it up. Conventional wisdom has it that boys are reluctant to read books about female characters, white readers are less likely to read about protagonists of colour. Rowling was even recommened to use her initials, incase her womanhood put off the boys.

Nice, clear branding.

There were also, whether conscious or unconscious, assumptions made about what the readers for this book would look like - those people who must not be alientated, whose parents must not ban them from reading this.

So, yeah, we were assumed to be shy, nerdy, lonely, but we were also judged to be middle class, straight, white. We were seen as inhabiting literate homes - probably detached homes, too, the that have kind gardens. They considered us as cis, as able bodied, as surrounded by supportive, literate adults. We were expected to be the children of adults who bought us books and read with us. These were children's books - not  handbooks for difficult teens learning to be adults or worthy issues books pitched at the troubled "youth". They were books for children, and to be a child at that age is a privilege.

Escapism, you see, was held to be very bourgeois. That was what all those messages to move on to Classics or Teen had been whispering - that reading books about witches, dragons and talking mice was childish, was irresponsible. That it was a sign of my sheltered life. I was still permitted it because I was cosseted, because I didn't have to face reality yet.

But, underneath its shiny surface of magic, Harry Potter was one of the most real thing some of us had read. It did what great fiction can do, what it should do; it kept our eyes fixed on the story while showing us so much more. It showed - not told - us how relationships worked, how people grew. It showed us prejudice and suffering, politics and heartbreak and abuse. It gave us the truest lesson, that the world does not divide neatly into Good People and Death Eaters.

And, because it chimed those deep, secret chords within us, we lent it to friends, nagged adults to read it, wrote gushing letters to the author, queued up outside bookshops, waiting, waiting for the next book.

And that's how it happened.

None of us saw it coming, the universal appeal, the near religious fanaticism. Through canny marketing, word of mouth, and genuine reader enthusiasm, Rowling's success did far more than just create a generation of readers and a million fanfics.

Adults read it under 'grown-up' covers to prevent being seen reading a children's book. Children read it under plain covers to hide its 'satanic' nature from religious parents. Dial-up connections crashed as people took 'Sorting' tests. One glorious summer afternoon in Poland, three generations of my family sat around a table, trying to puzzle out the meaning of the 'gleam of triumph' in Dumbledore's eyes at the end of book four.


We were slap bang in the middle of a cultural phenomenon.

And no-one had any idea how to respond.

Suddenly, that world isn't just one of multitudes held in the head of a few keen readers; it is the cultural myth of entire generations. It grows and grows and grows. Everyone has read it. Rowling has reshaped the universe inside people's head.

Children actually weep when they do not receive their Hogwarts letter. Adults wander the streets in  house colours. Blogs, articles, TV programmes discuss every word of every page. People send her their theories, their own novels, their sexual fantasies about her characters. And people - kids, teens, adults - of every colour, religion, gender, sexuality tell her how much it means to them. People tell her that she saved their life, saved them from loneliness, helped them through loss, depression, abuse.

She had not only shown us what she intended, but a hundred thousand things which she did not. We read our own stories on her pages, and wanted her to give them truth, validity.

The weight of that terrifies me.

Rowling had to cope with being something more than a wordsmith. She became foster mother to a generation, she became messianic: our prophet, our storyteller, our lifeline.

How the hell does a person deal with that?

 

 One Person cannot deal with all that.

She tried, Jesus Christ did she try. I've got to give her that.

I can only applaud Rowling for being so patient, so caring, so careful in the way she handles her fans. She has tried so hard to make it clear that the world she had built is a safe haven, that Hogwarts is open and welcoming. Frankly that's amazing and I wish I could leave it at that. But, ultimately, all she has done is tell us those things. She has given us are words  - not stories. She has given us empty assurances, not fictions.

Because that was the mistake that was made, I think, when my generation were being ushered through the world of books. People in hard places do not need 'serious' books, they do not need an all knowing adult talking them through their problems. Or, maybe they do need that - but they need fantasy, too. They need to see themselves battling the Dementors of depression, or the Boggarts of fear. They need to believe a family like the Weasleys will share what little they have with a lonely, abused child. Escape is not a luxury - it is a necessity.

 But key in this, is that they need to see oneself. To see that being black, or gay, or trans is not going to see you treated as worth less - the way that, perhaps, you are being treated in this one. Or, if you are, you need to see yourself triumph all the same.

And while, metaphorically, you have those stories - you are only there by inference, by parallel. There is nothing to help you make sense of the world as you. There are no out gay couples in the course of the books, there are no visible trans characters. The children are segregated by (binary) gender in their dormitories. The BME representation at the most prestigious wizarding school in the world is about as shitty as it was at my horribly middle class Grammar School. The disabled access is non-existent.

But... 

The first book was released in '97 - the year Labour won the General Election after nearly 18 years of Conservative government. Section 28 was not repealed until 2003. In the context, having Lupin as a metaphor for an HIV+ guy who loses his job among 'moral' homophobic panic was very brave move. Telling us that Dumbledore was gay after the event was making clear something that couldn't have been explicit in the books.

If there had been an openly gay character in a position of responsibility in a popular children's book in 1999, an editor would have told Rowling to cut them. Heck, she ran into enough hellfire and hatred from the religious nut crowd for writing about fictional wizards. The outcry at an openly gay Dumbledore would have made the hounding of werewolves in-world seem like a village fete. If her publisher had permitted it early in the series, her books would have been impossibly niche, issues books. If they had somehow become popular, one parental complain would have seen them swept from school shelves, challenged in every single library. 

Our world is a full of bigots as the magical one.

So, apparently, Harry Potter means a lot to me

In case you didn't know, I've had a pretty intense year. Don't get me wrong, most of this is positive stuff, but its very much marked a transitional period in my life,** and has involved a lot of soul searching and occasionally investing far too much in fictional characters and musicians. One of the ways this has been manifesting is an unpacking of a lot of the assumptions and behaviours I formed in early adolescence - when the depression first struck, when I was trying so desperately to be the person I was supposed to be.

For the last ten years or so, I never really thought I rated Harry Potter. Sure the books were magical, but I was an original Potterhead: they were just one magical world amongst many. Oh, I loved the first couple as a kid, but it's only really Azkaban that stays with me. After that? well, Goblet of Fire is pretty good, but I lost interest with Order of the Pheonix. Instead, I began misusing my knowledge, winding up friends who still took it seriously.

Harry Potter and the 607 Pages of Back-Story

I always assumed I'd grown up too much while waiting for it. After all, I hardly rushed to buy Half-Blood Prince - and when I did, I found it decidedly 'meh'. Sure, I thought, I'll hang around to see how the series ends, but don't expect any enthusiasm.

When it came to Deathly Hallows I acknowledged a return to form, a recapturing of some of the magic of the earlier stories. No, it didn't hit on every point, but I was willing to forgive. It was an okay children's book. Besides, I'd grown up a bit more and it was nice to be part of it again, the general buzz of a cultural phenomenon, able to laugh and say I was about half-way a fan. That I prefered the earlier books.

Still, I never quite bothered with the proper stuff. I only liked this, I didn't love it. The films are - ironically -  a closed book. I didn't get on Pottermore, never got myself Sorted - and anyway, everyone knew I'd be a Ravenclaw. It wasn't important. Besides, only kids actually want to be Gryffindors.

Then came the day that Sprog1 started reading Philosophers' Stone and it was really nice sharing a bit of hype with her. And, yeah, I'd bought a Hogwarts t-shirt, but only ironically. Anyway, it was cheap. And red.

No. I wasn't going to book tickets to Cursed Child, don't be silly.  But I'd probably pick up the script after it - okay, the actual day it came out. Well, it was there and - books, you know? And yeah, I might have read it at the same old breathless speed, but that's only because Scorpius and Albus are just darling. Otherwise, yeah, it wasn't so much to write home about. And, actually, perhaps it isn't such a terrible thing to be a Slytherin, after all and, well, just for a laugh, just for a giggle, because it didn't matter, I made a Pottermore account and got myself Sorted.

I was in Norwich, sitting in the Waffle House. I'd just bought myself a new-second-hand leather jacket because my sister had sent me a link for these and I needed something to stitch them too, and hey, didn't I used to wear a jacket covered with all sorts of pins and patches? Why did I give up doing that? I should totally bring that back.

So, a good day, let's have a bit of fun. I tap through the Sorting questions on my phone, let the Hat have its little think, and suddenly I'm nervous. Like, exam results nervous.

It's only a bit of fun. It's only Harry Potter.

But what if the screen goes yellow? 

Yeah, well Hufflepuff are probably the best people. You know more of them fought in the Battle of Hogwarts than any other house?

What if it goes green?

Then you'll be like Scorpius. Anyway, we know you're more of a Ravenclaw. It's who you are. Bookish. Anti-social. It'll go blue.

Besides, it doesn't matter. 

It's just a game. 

You're going to be in Ravenclaw. Or maybe Huff-

Alys, it's just a bit of fun. 

Would you believe I actually whooped? And laughed, hard, even hysterically? I was breathing relief, I was walking on sunshine, I was every single fucking cliché. And it hit me.

It mattered.

I hadn't realised how much it fucking mattered. How much I had invested into that self-image: bit reckless, bit conceited, occasionally a jackass - even a gloryhound - but also brave, honourable and maybe slightly unbalanced. Gryffindors are by no means the best people in the world, but their flaws are my flaws. Suddenly, it was all just wonderful. It was all so fantastic that I was going to go out and buy myself a Gryffindor pin and a Pride flag badge and I was going to attach them to my gorgeous, brand new-second-hand Sirius jacket.

My what now?

The name was there, ready in my head. My Sirius jacket. Maybe it had even been there as I was trying it on - this was the kind of jacket Sirius Black would wear while riding his flying motor bike, with a Gryffindor pin to piss off the pure-bloods in his life, and a Pride flag because...

Oh, it had mattered, hadn't it? All those years, it had mattered far more than I had ever let on. When was it I turned on Harry Potter, dismissing it as okay-enough-for-kids? When was it that I let cynicism overcome that devotion?

Oh, yeah. With book five. At the end.

Let's be Sirius:

Oh, JK. How could you?

I know he couldn't be out. I always knew that. Just like Dumbledore couldn't be out in the books.

But, at 12 years old, Sirius Black was everything I wanted to be. So brave, so honourable, so righteous. He would, did, give everything for his friends. He was ready to kill to avenge them. He would have died for them - he meant that. He was willing to die without recognition, without... Look, he deliberately put himself in the firing line while their safety scuttled away with Peter: I was the obvious choice.

And the way that - after everything he has suffered, everything he has lost because of Harry - Sirius is still willing to be his father-figure - more - his friend. Sirius was the very best of me, what I could only hope to be to the people in my life. Steadfast and devoted and brave, willing to suffer to protect the people he loved.

I still cry when Remus embraces him like a brother.

Oh, my heart.

It was so rare I felt that quicksilver moment, that sense that a writer looked deep in to my heart and read what was there - every hope and every fear: Alanna, Susan in The Moon of Gomrath, Prince Rilian of Narnia... and Sirius Black.

Of course, Rowling kills him off at the end of book five - offhand, using him to push forward Harry's journey, his death subsumed by the 'bigger' tragedy that Harry never knew his parents, the fact that Voldemort is back.

What did I take from that dismissal? After all, I wasn't out in any sense back then. Still, did I take the message that people 'like me' - whatever that meant - weren't really welcome in Hogwarts? That my sympathy, my identity should not be here? That I should be sympathising with Harry, or with Hermione? That I could go along with Ron, grow up with Ginny, find my bravery like Neville, or follow Malfoy on his redemption arc? That I could emulate one of the Weasleys, lovable Arthur, warm Molly, cool Bill, or dragon-obsessed, sportsman Charlie.

But not Sirius. Not tragic and a bit broken, not the accidental betrayer, the furious seeker of vengeance. Not the misunderstood, the falsely accused, the sincere and steadfast one who - along with Remus Lupin - is the closest thing we actually see to a parent figure for Harry? No. You don't get to grow with him.

And, besides, he's gay.

Rowling coded Sirius' queerness just as she coded Dumbledore's - but whereas Dumbledore is a fin de siècle cliché of gayness (youthful dalliance with beautiful young man of questionable morals that ends catastrophically, years of remorse and - one assumes - celibacy) - Sirius' cliché is more contemporary. His endless devotion to James, his presence as almost a third-wheel in Harry's parents' relationship, the way he is the first one there once they are attacked - this is love, right here.

Later, he and Remus (another character who is coded as queer) send Harry a joint Christmas present. Make of that what you will.


I remember the chapter 'Snape's Worst Memory' not because it shows James and Sirius being utterly dickish, no. What I remember is Sirius paying no attention to the swooning glances of the girls around him because he's too busy looking at James. I remember him saying, "Put that away, will you?" when James' showing off and Peter's toadying become uncomfortable, how he watches James' back every time Snape reaches for his wand.*** I remember how, while being insufferable himself, he's always there, reminding James that maybe he should stop being such a irritiating prick - and he is, after all, the only one Jame's will listen to. Their bond goes even deeper than that which binds the rest of Mssrs Mooney, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs. They are Sirius Black and James Potter, inseprable double act. Remus is too sensible, Peter too ingratiating. Sirius and James are equals, soul twins.

And, perhaps, when  Lily rejects James' advances the first time, he's just a little too quick in there with the, "Bad luck, Prongs."

Structurally, this scene sets up Sirius as a direct parrallel to Snape - they are each other's reflection, their "there but for the grace of the Sorting Hat'. Both come from traditionally Slytherin homes, have unhappy homes of varying stripes. Both are talented students with a dismissive attitude to authority. Both of them are in love with one of Harry's parents, and have that love requited only by a deep, friendly regard. But Sirius is aware of the waters that Snape is treading - they were the direction his life would have, the path his whole family tried to set him along - and how close they really are. No wonder he detests him so deeply.

And these are the circumstances that lead Snape to act like an entitled prick when James gets with Lily, to call Lily a mudblood, to become a Death-Eater and inadvertently betray her by passing information on to Voldemort. Snape gets to repent at leisure and ALWAYS or not, he bullies Harry for six whole years for being the son of the man Lily chose over him. Sirius, on the other hand, looks out for his James' character, does his best to move on, stands best man at James' wedding and godfather to the son of the woman James chose over him. He puts his life on the line to protect them all from Voldemort and inadvertantly betrays them through a double bluff intended to make them safer. He does thirteen years for a crime he didn't commit, escapes only to protect Harry, then becomes a fugitive who repeatedly puts himself in danger to protect, watch over and buy presents for James' son.

Honestly, Sirius' love for James is one the most beautiful things in the series - it is there in his every action, every word. Yes, it could be friendly love, but it shows itself as more real, more convincing on every level that Snape's fan-favourite-adoration of Lily. The only other bond he has that comes close is with Remus. And later, after they've both lost everything, he and Remus find some comfort in each other whose force and commitment is there, in the text, in that embrace.

It was only this summer I realised how much all that meant to me.

The Cursed Child 

It doesn't MATCH!

(Warning - spoilers.)

What happens in The Cursed Child is queer baiting. Never mind that Scorpius forgets his name when talking to Albus for the first time, never mind all their hugging and not being able to live without each other and Scorpius getting stupidly jealous over Delphini - no. What's really going on is that Scorpius is in love with Rose Granger - the most two-dimensional and unlikable character I've ever had the misfortune of sharing a house with - and Albus is... Albus is...

Look, they're straight, alright?

I, along with a large chunk of the Internet let out a quiet, "Oh, ffs." Are we not over this yet? Okay, Dumbledore couldn't be out and Sirius couldn't be out and Remus couldn't be out and... and... and... but you are now an international phenomenon, woman, and you can do as you damn well please. These two are clearly in love. It's narratively 20 years since after the end of Harry Potter, Section 28 died a well over-due death, same sex marraige is legal even in the Muggle world and... *now kiss*

In fact, the whole set up of Cursed Child favours a queer interpretation - so Harry and Malfoy have trouble connecting to their sons, do they? They can't understand them? Worry about the influence of that boy they spend quite so much time with? And their sons are outcasts in some way, knowing themselves to be somehow different from what they 'should' be?

Okay, really, *NOW KISS*

Stop queering everything, Alys! Homosocial friendship is a real thing, you know!

Of course it is. It's what Harry and Ron have. It's what exists between Ginny and Hermione. It's what Cho and whats-er-name, the one who betrayed the DA, had. Hogwarts is full of friends. Oh, totes, ship them if you want, but in the books there is very little subtext. And, yes, those friendships can be intense, vital, the most important connection in a person's life - it's Ron that Harry has to rescue from the lake, after all. James became an Animagus for Remus - but there's nothing sexual there.

If we are to believe that Scorpius falls madly in love with Rose at first sight - with whom he exchanges about forty words - how are we to brush aside what he feels with Albus, whom he spends the whole blasted play with, or at least mooning over? Albus, with whom his chemistry and just-plain-raging-cuteness, is off all known scales?

I admit, I ship and OTP as badly as any other internet nerd, but I only headcanon when there is sufficient justification in the source text. Katie Reed and Geneviève Dieudonné? I'd love it, and I hold out hope - but Katie is het. Mina Murray and Lucy Westenra? Possibly - but I suspect it never got very far, and it's quite one-sided. Holmes and Watson? No. Not in the books, and not in most of the adaptions, either. That's what friendship looks like. Raffles and Bunny? Jesus Christ, you two, get a room.

Albus and Scorpius?

 I admit - I was disappointed.

This was a missed opportunity, a bit of bad writing, a sop to the bigots. No - it didn't have to be explicit. I mean, yeah, *now kiss* and it would have been nice, but you don't actually need a "Dad, I'm bi," moment. Readers and theatre-goers do subtext - its sort of our thing. Those two are clearly in to each other, so you don't have make a big deal of it. Show, don't tell! Just have them act like they're everyone's OTP every second they are on stage together and we'll get the message.


But instead, we got a play that showed us one thing, clearly, blatently and fan-service-ly, while verbally hammering us with another. "Oh, you thought it was Albus that Scorpius was in to? Oh, no, I can see that, but it's Rose. Totally Rose. RoseRoseRose. SEE HOW MANY TIMES I'M TELLING YOU IT'S ROSE."

And that's actually really gross. It's a cowardly and ugly way of keeping the LGBTQA+ community onside without giving anything real to hold on to. It's another way of telling us that, oh, yeah, we're allowed at Hogwarts - but not in the spotlight. That we are permitted existence, but not as a focal point, not as something we can grow with, live, embrace.

Rowling can do as she damn well pleases, and it pleased her to do this.

 

Death of the Author and archives of our own:

 

As soon as a book - any book - is read, it ceases to be the sole property of the author. Okay, lawyers might disagree, but as a reader and an academic, I will stand by this. Reading is a collaborative effort - an audience is not a passive consumer of authorial wisdom.

We engage. We see the stories they didn't even realise they were telling and we run with them because they are important to us. Yes, the copyright rests with them - as it should - but we care; it matters. And because of that we pick through the text and embellish upon the original structure until it is infinitely more beautiful and vivid than one person or creative team could ever have made it.

Long running franchises like Star Trek, Doctor Who, Star Wars have thrived upon this collaborative creation. Their worlds are richer for fan input, fan discourse.

What's more, Hogwarts is not just one among many magical worlds: it's a cultural phenomenon. It has become a cross-generational way of understanding ourselves, our relationships, our world. Every kid who gets themselves Sorted adds a little something to the world, every forum discussion, every cosplay, every round-the-kitchen-table confab creates a new interpretation, a new set of possibilites. And people of every background and persuasion want to take part in it.

Waving an authorial hand and saying, "Yeah, you're welcome, the place could do with a few rainbows," is well-intentioned, but ultimately meaningless. It's all very well to offer us a place at the table, but actually, we'd already made our own, and we will occupy it on our terms.

Because here's the thing - we don't just want to be at Hogwarts, in the background. We want a chance to be in the golden trio, in the Triwizard tournament, battling Death-Eaters, or working for the Ministry. We want to be in the Order of the Pheonix - not just elderly and celibate and dead - but living and loving and fighting another day. We want a chance to raise our kids, marry our lover, build ourselves families.

Yes, playing with canon by queering and swapping about gender and race is fun, but it is not merely reckless game played by entitled fans. Especially as a preteen, there is a need to see yourself in fiction, to find a character who stands for you and by you. It is one of the most profound ways that a person's identity and resilience can be built and developed. We don't just need to be told we belong, we need to see ourselves belonging, as worthy and important and with stories worth telling.

Sometimes mere words aren't enough. We need to be shown, not told. And if you won't do that, we have to do it for ourselves.

There is no such thing as 'only' fan work - the relationship between canon and fanon is symbiotic. Although it might have authorial approval, black Hermione was not Rowling's idea  - it was a fan theory born of a need to see oneself. There is no reason why it can't be true, and seeing Rowling nod and say that, yeah, this is an equally valid interpretation was a beautiful moment for many fans.

It's another example of the way that Rowling tries. Running in the blinkers of privilige, she makes mistakes, sweeping into tokenism, presenting us with clichés and caricatures. Others have criticised her handling of race, gender, her presentation of class, and dear-Gods-the-house-elf-thing - but I always had her in mind as someone who honestly does try, who is able to see that her vision of a character is not the definitive one, that other stories can exist in the cracks of her book, can be found by the people who are forced to inhabit those spaces.

Rowling took Sirius away from me when I was sixteen, and still needed him. I found him again, years later, with a story that maybe she didn't realise was there. I'm a reader, literary detective work is what I'm good at. I found the Sirius I needed - devoted, honourable, reckless, vindictive, and gay.

Her words hurt.

Again, I was surprised by how much it mattered. It felt like such a silly thing to bother me so much, such an obscure and self-indulgent pain. But I have lived my life through books, and to say so emphatically that I do not understand Sirius is to say I do not understand myself. To imply that I am deluded about him is to erase the parts of me that are built upon him.

No, maybe she didn't write him as gay - I'll accept that. Maybe she doesn't see him as gay - that's fine, too - after all, some people don't see me as trans or bi. Sometimes writers don't actually know everything about their characters, sometimes they need things pointed out to them. Sometimes, we have what we believe, but recognise that we left some ambiguity there - a well written character can be read in so many ways.

She could have said something like that.

She could just have answered someone else's question. 

The very popularity of her work puts Rowling in an impossible position, but - in the context of Cursed Child - I'm struggling to forgive this. She teased us with a white, cis m/m pairing which - as far as these things go - is about as mainstream an LGBT relationship can get, only to pull back, sating no, it was Rose. And, shortly after this, she pulled the plug on one of the most accepted fanon orientations. What's more, she did this without her usual, sensitive handling but with a surety, a flippancy that almost communicated a distaste. That, yeah, gay people were allowed, but not, like here, where we can all see them. That queer people were allowed a tiny bit of Hogwarts, but not a piece that actually mattered.

It was as though everything I felt and knew about this character was something she felt entitled to blank away, as though it were a mistake on a manuscript. It was as though I saw myself through her eyes - something permitted to exist, but only on sufference. I was allowed a tenancy in her world, but only on her terms. People like me are not allowed to get above ourselves.

This is not okay. There has been so much, now, that is not okay, but this felt like the first time that she had deliberately drawn a line, wresting back her creation from the tarnish laid on it by 'SJWs' - or, as I like to see it, people who grew up, loving her work. I've disagreed with her on a lot of things, have criticised a lot of her creative decisions, but feel as though I've been hanging on here - describing them as blunders rather than slights, desperately trying to see the good in someone I used to admire.

I cannot bear her ill will - her position, after all, is impossible. But I cannot let this slide.

She's the one, after all, who taught us the world does not divide in to good people and Death Eaters.

All I can say, Ms Rowling, is that your words can cause great hurt as well as great joy. All the same, thank you for Sirius. Thank you for your novels, and the lessons they have about tolerance, friendship and magic. Thank you for creating this world for us. I am honoured to have been Sorted in to Gryffindor, house of such renowned and LGBTQA+ magical folk as Albus Dumbledore, Remus Lupin, Minerva McGonnagol and Sirius Black.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* my mum, who has the patience of a saint, developed some incredible strategies on this front.
 ** if you ever suspect me of making a pun, the chances are that you're right...
 *** Something many people forget about this scene is that - yeah, James and Sirius are being total arses here, but the first chance Snape gets to throw a curse, he gets right in there with the slasher hex.

What I've been reading: Deaf Sentence, Gone With the Wind, and make it stop, please, make it stop.

Insert witty comment here

Did you know that if a man tells you any variation of, "You're gorgeous when you're mad", he can seek no legal redress when you punch him in the nuts?

Seriously, how does Gone with the Wind get classified as a romance? Scarlett, as I said last week, is alarmingly pathetic. Rhett Butler is vilest variation on human standard that I've had the misfortune to encounter in a long while. And it's racist. It is so very, very racist. Not just in a "of it's time" kind of way, or a, "call it problematic and rant online" way, but deeply, structurally, horribly and repeatedly racist.

It's toxic. I don't say that lightly. This book is pure poison. It's hateful, hurtful bollocks under a thin veneer of clothes porn. I don't believe in censorship, and viewed as a cultural artefact, it has some interest, but that there are still people out there who read this uncritically? The thought makes me cold and slightly nauseous.

This isn't to say there aren't some half-decent passages, there isn't some good writing, but the values endorsed by the book can be summed up in Melly: kind, compassionate, intelligent and with steel in her spine, she is the kind of woman I'd respect were she not a foaming at the mouth, unthinking bigot. This book terrifies me and not in the way I like to be terrified. It's a book which excuses the Klan, which makes out slavery was a meritocracy and destroys solidarity between oppressed groups. It is a book reproduces rape culture so that the victim is not just responsible for her rape, but for the deaths by lynching of the men who raped her, the arrest and execution of the men who did the lynching and any negative side effects other women feel because of her 'easy' behaviour. It is a horrible, irresponsible novel.

Don't read it. Please, do not read it.

So, feeling a bit fragile, I read some David Lodge. You know where you stand with David Lodge, or at least, I do. The slightly fusty, academic characters are enough like you to engender broad sympathy, but tinged with enough knowing ludicrousness that you walk nicely along the line of 'laughing at' and 'laughing with'. Deaf Sentence, based on wordplay, explores the tribulations and embarrassments and despair of gradual hearing loss, returning again and again to the theme that whereas blindness is a trope of tragedy, deafness is always portrayed as comic.

As with every Lodge novel, it has enough references and critical theory to flatter this reader's intelligence without ever actually challenging it, and it provides a smooth, amusing and occasionally cringe-worthy in its comedy. Then you hit the final chapters. Then you realise that there was a darker undertone throughout the book, a terror, a sadness, a deeper sense of transience grounded in loss of communication, the inadequacy of writing or of speech. In my slightly wounded state following the hatefulness of Gone with the Wind, the tragedy of the last movement of the book hit pretty hard. What Lodge is trying to explore - the tragedy of deafness - is managed pretty effectively, and of course, being Lodge, he offers us the kind of comfort we receive best - the wordless, human compassion of touch, the quiet, harmless current of school-room trivia. When words fall away, these things remain.

Still, not exactly nice on my emotions, so now I'm reading The League. I know where I am with The League because I've read it before. Except...

Except...

Why is there an elephant being winched down that dock?

Songs of Kali: Orientalism, post-colonialism and the Calcutta Chromosone.

This is one of those articles I feel a bit weird writing, the sort of thing I worry when I approach. After all, I'm white.

Okay, sure, a good handful of my DNA has its origins in places like north India or the Middle East, but that isn't what I'm talking about. If you look at me in the street, there will be a little box that is ticked in your head: white. Probably British.

Not only am I white, I really don't know a whole heap of stuff about India. Sure, I've read Midnight's Children and while I don't want to say, "and that's about it", there isn't masses more I can bring to this conversation. When it comes to the subcontinent, I sit up, let other people do the talking, and I do try to pay attention.

Which is why, if we're honest about it, Song of Kali pissed me off. Heck, if I found so much of this book worrying and repellent, what was the response of people know about this stuff? People who have to deal with this kind of cultural assumption every day?

If you want an answer to that question, here's an article that seems to nail it. I've found plenty of people online who seem to think Song of Kali somewhere on the scale icky to downright indefensible. In the same manner, I can find lots of people on the web who are willing to praise Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosone (and rightly so.) What I can't find, however, is anyone who thinks one might be a response to the other.

In Song of Kali, Robert Luczack is searching down the poetry and person of M.Das, an Indian poet of some celebrity. In The Calcutta Chromosome, Antar is seeking some explanation of the disappearance of a colleague, L. Murugan. One of the first people we are introduced to as being around Murugan before his disappearance? Sonali Das, the celebrated film star and writer.

Okay, common name. Still: Why did M.Das disappear? He contracted leprosy - a disease almost unknown in the West - and was restored by supernatural means. And L. Murugan? Syphilis. Again it is rare in the West, easily cured. But again, our character was cured not by modern medicine but a procedure given almost mystical status by the narrative - the action malaria upon syphilis.

These echoes of names and plot tease you throughout the text: Where is M.Das? He has been drawn into the underworld of Calcutta's cults, on whose behalf he writes powerful and impassioned pleas. Where is Sonali Das met? At the Rabindra Sadan auditorium, where the great writer Phulboni makes an impassioned plea to the "unseen presence" that must be sought in "the darkness of these streets". I even found myself asking if Antar's education, a scholarship at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, was not meant to draw attention Simmon's narrator's naive and hostile understanding of communism.

Perhaps it's apt given the books I'm writing about that I'm picking up hints with all the care and illogic of someone chasing a conspiracy. Literary criticism can lead you astray, and before you know it, you're sincere and slightly scary, drawing certainties from co-incidence, and believing there is some grand design here. Still, even if The Calcutta Chromosome is not a direct response to Song of Kali, even if I am imagining things, even if Ghosh has never read Simmons, it remains that the books have something to say to each other.

Both writers make a great deal of pronunciation - especially pronunciation of names. In Simmons this is de-familiarisation at work - look at all this strange, Indian names! We see the narrator, Luczack, barging in, correcting everyone's attempts to fathom his Polish surname, yet visibly stumbling over that of everyone he meets. Ghosh, however, shows the secrets, the accommodations, the colonial mindset that informs the mispronunciation of a name. One knows where the power lies in an interaction where a foreigner introduces himself, "That's Loo-zack", and where it resides in one saying, "The name's Murugan[...] But feel free to call me Morgan."

Similarly, understanding of space is used to portray power in both narratives. The American locations in Song of Kali are given specificity: we are invited into them, asked to understands their quirks and secrets (that's Loo-zack), while Calcutta - indeed, the entire general global area of Asia - is a sprawling mass, a blank and grotesque canvass of 'otherness' inhabited by swarming, stinking, brown hordes of dirty, bodily sub-humanity (count the number of instances of the verb 'squat' to describe the actions of the inhabitants of Calcutta.) The few 'respectable' inhabitants live in ivory towers that are still squalid by Western standards, ignoring the poor and dispossessed in their midst.

For Ghosh, each city, each place, has its character. It shows different faces to outsiders, to insiders, to the interested and the personally involved. Calcutta is a city, nothing more. It has rich areas, poor areas, it has poverty - dreadful poverty from which Ghosh does not flinch - but also buses, social clubs, flower shops, markets, hospitals, memorials and auditoriums. The most important thing about this city is that it is inhabited and visited by people. They agree or disagree, they love or hate, they gossip or ignore.What is more, they move, both narratively, emotionally and socially. Urmila is poor and ambitious, yet she spends her time with the famous Sonali Das, with once-rich Mrs Aratounian, with Murugan, the westernised outsider. There is a discernment, a precision in Ghosh's writing - poverty is something which occurs by degrees, in ways that are not always recognised by those experiencing it. In showing the humanity, the specificity, his portrayal of its hardships is more precise, more effective.

The same goes for their portrayal of cults, of cultures. In Simmons, the antagonist is Kali, who he portrays as some sort of blood-cult-delusion meets eldritch abomination. This 'baddie' and her destructive intent is balanced - thematically, if not literally - against Mother Teresa. Those who inhabit and perpetuate Kali's 'song' are various communists strikers, the Indian literary establishment and, just for fun, most of the Middle East. When Luckzack tells us "there are other songs to sing", the only one he offers is a 'moderate risk' adventures about friendship and fun for American middle class children. If you're not already getting an vibe of "Western, American values and Christianity good, everything to do with brown-skinned people and, by the way, Karl Marx, bad", it's possible that you aren't paying attention.

Perhaps the worst thing about this is that, in creating his supernatural threat, Simmons uses an actual Goddess that real people actually worship. Perhaps realising the vilely offensive potential of doing so, he makes a big point of balancing the vicious, mindless cult of Kali with the peaceful, loving, mother-earth hippy type worship of Durga. Durga worshippers, he suggests, are not a threat to Western values. No. They are sweet, exploited and impoverished villagers who stay away from the hell-city that is Calcutta. Although I'm not an expert on this by any means, this Kali/Durga dichotomy strikes me as such a wilful misinterpretation of the nature of Godhead in Hindu belief, such a total set of false assumptions botched together by a failure to understand complex philosophical beliefs, that one could almost overlook how fucking patronising it is to type-cast an entire actual religion into bolshy cultists and the kind of person who tips their cap and says, "Gor blimey, thanks for the centuries of cultural imperialism, Guv'nor."

*deep breaths, Alys, deep breaths*

More sensitive to cultural identities, this is something Ghosh handles with far more respect. He is careful - he is extraordinarily careful - never to associate the cult of 'silence' as anything other than an aberration, as anything other than a woman who thinks she is a goddess, to a group of people who believe her to have supernatural power. That his model of silence, of the healing and the restorative power of something usually considered destructive, is much closer to what I understand of actual Kali worship is sort of the point. "Look," he seems to say, "let me explain this through metaphor, in a way you might understand - you are dealing with a different paradigm, something irreducible to battles between East and West, between bad and good."

Indeed, Ghosh even gives Western readers the suggestion that our culture may be viewed with as much horror as Simmons' heaps upon Kali. One image that resonates in both books is the severed head. In Song of Kali this is a response to the way that - in one of her four arms - Kali holds a severed head. In the temple of the cult the hand is ominously empty, to be filled by the beheading of an unsatisfactory initiate. We hear the drip, drip, drip of the blood falling onto the temple floor. As an portrayal of horror, of savagery, it is effective.

But, like so much of Simmon's work, this horror is founded on a misunderstanding. Just as the body upon which Kali places her foot is not a vanquished foe, so the head she brandishes is not 'real' in the sense of 'killing people'. It's function is either mythological - the head of a demon she has killed - or symbolic, the false consciousness she had destroyed with the sword of knowledge. Perhaps this does not mitigate the disgust felt by those who wonder why one is worshipping in front of a statue holding a severed head, but to think like this is to consider that disgust as the product of a cultural misunderstanding.

It is this cultural misunderstanding that Ghosh presents. He shows us not the leavings of a cult but the failed sensitivity of American computer who does not understand - or perhaps does not care - that humans might find such things upsetting. Again, the image is compelling in its horror. As Antar crops the hologram so that he does not need to see its whole body:

he discovered that Ava had done such a realistic job of severing the head that every artery and vein was clearly visible. He could see the throbbing capillaries; even the directional flow of blood was reproduced, in motion, so that the head looked as though it was spouting gore.

What comes next is what is really interesting. Antar reacts with horror, not only because the image is so visceral (even though no-one has been hurt) but because it reminds him of:

a vision that often recurred in his worst nightmares; an image from a medieval painting he had once seen in a European museum, a picture of a beheaded saint, holding his own dripping head nonchalantly under his arm, as though it were a fresh-picked cabbage.

The message is clear; what to one mind is horror and savagery, to another is religious art. What to one is a clear representation of certain facts (literal or mythological) to another is nauseating and obscene. It is something that Simmons' narrator, with his brash insistence on the pronunciation of his name, is unable to comprehend. It is something of which Ghosh's narratorial voice is acutely aware.

While reading, I found myself wondering if the reason Antar contracted malaria in the rather unusual Egypt was to point out Simmons' homogenising of the geographically and religiously diverse East into 'Song-of-Kali-general-mindless-evil'. Found myself asking if his conspiracy-of-malaria were not a way of pointing out that, when dealing with real people, one needs to be careful of what one says. Wondering if the unprecedented scorn Murugan faces at daring to challenge the official, colonial narrative of science were not another way of showing that the rules are different if you are not white. Even if the references are not direct, it answers the tendency of orientalism that informs Simmons' work. Not only is The Calcutta Chromosome a better book, it's provides us with a far more vital narrative.

Better still, it doesn't just reassure and flatter those up to their necks in privilege. It makes them think.

Shadows and Dreams, or why feminism sucks sometimes

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

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

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

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

Seriously, I rocked.

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

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

So.

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

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

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

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



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

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

I'm just saying...

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

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

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

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

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

Then I said: DAMN YOU BRAIN!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which brings us to Mallaidh.

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

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

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

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

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

</Heavy Spoilers>

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

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

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

So, where does that leave us?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Angela Carter: How to be a woman.

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

Bang. Splat.

Ouch.

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

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

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

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