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]

Grief and Pride

I should be writing.

I'm sitting here at a keyboard and I know there are so many things I should be doing. I've got a novel to crowdfund and I've got last stage editing to do on it. I've got book reviews to write and a post about vampires that I've been twitching over all week. I have professional things to do, organised things, important things. But every time I try and say something about them, I find my mind is going blank and my hands shaking with something that is maybe grief and is maybe rage and that I hope to all my Gods is not fear.

50 people have been killed. 50 LGBT+ people have been murdered in gay club in Orlando during Pride month. During Pride.

Just typing it is making me cry. They are murdering us during Pride. Because of Pride, because we are living in a world where - if you live openly as queer, or trans, or gay, there are people out there who think your life is worth less. That it deserves to be taken from you. Hell, if you live in the closet but get outed, then there are people who feel your life should be taken from you. 

I can't work tonight. I can't bloody think properly tonight. I try, and I find myself thinking of life and love and the way it has been stolen from people just because of who they love. I'm thinking of my own tenuous crawl out of the closet and my trembling little forays into transition and how - suddenly - I'm reminded that it's not just sneering and spitting and ugly names, not just rejection and hostility and friendships cooling off that I need to fear, I'm remembering that there are people out there who want me dead. I'm thinking about what it would take for someone to walk in to a room of people who were laughing, dancing, harming no-one, and to open fire on them.

I'm thinking about how being queer is a constant fight to be seen, to exist, to be acknowledged as valid and real, and not some anomaly that can be legislated out of existence. I'm thinking about how bloody easy it would be to push my binder to the back of my drawer, grow out my hair, and go back into the closet. I'm thinking about never talking about being attracted to women, to non-binary people, as well as men. I'm thinking about how much safer that will make me.

I'm thinking about how that is the exact bloody opposite of what I'm going to do.

And I am furious. Because right now there are queer people, gay people, trans people who are just as  paralysed by this as I am, who are watching the evasion, the erasure in the way people are discussing this, watching every person saying 'night-club' and 'terror attack' and never 'gay club' or 'hate crime' as though our community doesn't even deserve the dignity of recognition when we've been gunned down just for daring to exist in the open. Because there are 53 of our people lying in hospital, and still we are told we cannot give blood.

This is the worst terrorist attack the US has seen since 11th September 2001. It is the worst mass shooting they have ever seen, and the BBC is still prioritising the Queen's fucking birthday. 

 And all these people, all these people who are dead and injured, all these people who have read about it, heard about it, and are crying to themselves and their family right now? They are just as real as you. They have art and writing and music and dreams and loves and careers and families that they should be spending time with, and this gross act of violence has taken that from them. Instead, this one awful act, this blow that was designed to go right to heart of them, has made them victims. It has torn us - all of us - away from our lives, our sense of security, our hope, our ability to live and love and create.

This is terrorism, because its purpose was to terrorise. It was intended to tell the LGBT+ community that we live only on the sufferance of hate-filled people with guns. It was intended to take away the things we can bring to the world, to silence our voices, to prevent our art. It was intended to put us 'back', back to the margins, back to invisibility and fear.

It hits harder because, in our hearts, we know that we have never left those places. That despite all the gains of recent years, we have always been at the mercy of bigotry, of erasure, of the actions of violent people filled with hatred. It hurts more because we exhaust ourselves just being heard, being seen, being recognised - in our lives, in media, in law, in advocacy. It hurts because, just being there,
in a gay club, participating in Pride, can take so much fucking courage and strength and heart-break.

It hits harder because it was intended to hurt this much, to send this exact message: You are not safe. Your lives are not valued.
 
LGBT+ people reading this: You are valuable. You are beloved. You have something to give in this world, and people who want to see that thing. You are not alone. You will not be broken.

Straight people reading this: Tell the LGBT+ people in your life you love them, you support them. Ask them if there is anything they need, if there is anything you can do that will help them feel safer tonight, and tomorrow, and the next day.

Tell them you stand by us.

Stand by us.

Stand by love.

So, tonight, I weep. And tomorrow, I get up and I fight harder. Tomorrow, I create harder and I live harder and I love harder. Tomorrow, I am more visible, my open, more out. Tonight, I hang the flag at half mast. Tomorrow, I fly it higher than ever.

Love wins. Love has to win.

Knowing Jack: The Ripper crimes and the Gothic imagination.

The first time I realised that the Internet could provide any information I might care to find I was in year 8, in the IT labs at school. Drunk on my new powers of limitless knowledge, I did what any self-respecting, blood-thirsty little toe-rag would do and typed the title of a very famous murderer into the Lycos(!) search bar along with the word 'photographs'.

You get one guess as to series of murders to which I refer.

I was a nasty minded little horror junkie, innocent in my fixation on the gruesome details, the theories, the hyperbole. I was keyed up on blood and thunder. I'm still ashamed at what I did that day.

And what I found? Grainy, morgue photographs, violence in all its tragedy, the human body rendered frail and somehow obscene. My prurience seeped away. No splatter-fest with Hollywood lighting, no gruesome and intriguing details, just the images of five women stripped of human dignity, of life. That afternoon, September-hot and staring at old, thick screened monitor, I lost any interest I had in serial killers.

Don't get me wrong, I was still as morbid as hell, still a nascent Goth with a fevered imagination. I still am. But I draw the line at real crimes, real people, real tragedy. I can't look at it any more and see a mystery, see the puzzle for a autumn afternoon. I can't care about justice, or sleuthing or conspiracy theories. I don't want the perpetrator blazoned on my imagination like some byword for Victorian fog and squalor, a set-piece of the Gothic. I rather not be giving these things any further house-room.

All of which makes my attitude to the Ripper crimes somewhat conflicted. We're at that season, after all, as my Gothically inclined Twitter-feed subjects me to a run of speculation, of recreation. And, one glance at my bookshelves hammers the message home, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell, Brian Talbot's Alice in Sunderland, Kim Newman's Anno Dracula, Paul Cornell's The Severed Streets. Why are we so obsessed with Jack the Ripper? Why do even I keep returning to it?

Yet all of these writers are ambivalent about the legacy at which they pick, the tragedy real and human, the murderer co-opted, played out, lionised or demonised until its power far transcends the cruel and ultimately petty act of murder. As Moore say, the crimes don't tell us anything about themselves, simply about us, our fears and obsessions. Newman tells the story of tragic madman, co-opted and exploited to a political end, Talbot of the bitter moral it doles out upon female sexuality. Cornell, ah, Cornell...

I won't be spoiling that for you.

Books aside, though, the focus is always on the killer. Whose names, or aliases, live on in our consciouness? The victims pushed aside, ignored, erased or sensationalised. Killers post manifestos on YouTube, hoping to gain some scrap of Jack's immortality, or at least a passing fame.

Sometimes they succeed. There are crimes, sometimes, that capture the zeitgeist of the time that they were committed. I can think of a few that have happened in recent years, but their memory fades as the society that birthed them dies. Interest in the wanes to the few people who have long memories, and those whose interest in the macabre stretches as far as reality (and there is nothing wrong with that.) But the Ripper crimes are as much part of our historical consciousness as the work of Conan Doyle, Shelley, or Stoker. We have all let this one inside us, even if we turn from these things.

But they are not feats of Frankenstein science, not Sherlock Holmes mysteries, or Dracula-seductions. They, and the hyperbole surrounding them, were moments of exploitation, of xenophobia, poverty and misogyny. They are symbolic of their age, all its conflicts, all its failings.

And yet we still tell these stories among ourselves, brood over them, gloat, create ever more elaborate theories and retellings. Even I do it, still, and I try to stop myself.

What does that say about the age we live in now? How far, really, have we come?€

Functions of Fantasy, or, Alys's Addicition to Villains

It appears I have mentioned in passing something of a predilection for fictional bad guys and characters so morally grey that they could be used as camouflage on the dark night of no moon. Give me cads, rogues, and schemers of all types. Give me a character who is something of a bastard, who is ruthless, conniving, swaggering, manipulative, and the chances are I'll swoon and maybe put his name on some kind of t-shirt.

No. I am not joking. Yes. This is the way my mind works.

I read Fantasy novels and Adventure novels, I read Horror, and Historical Fiction full of sweet, charming, beautiful men and women. People who are honorable and upstanding, who are intelligent, kind, devoted and if I have to list the fiction heroes who get my heart racing, it stands at Wilhelmina Murray, Percy Blakeney and that's your lot.

I don't get crushes on heroes. Anti-heroes, maybe. Morally questionable, domineering types on a redemption arc, sure. Flat out, total bastards? Well, duh.

Okay. Maybe not all interest.

This is not Draco in Leather Pants. Sure, a bit of emotional complexity, a little bit of grayscale does not go amiss, but I do not want these characters redeemed. I do not want them to be any less evil and bastardy. I do not think they can be saved by the Love of a Good Woman™.

If they were saved, I would lose all interest in them.

Yes, Edmond Dantès is sweet, and lithe and kind of pretty to think about, but it's only when he emerges as the socially aggressive and unprincipled Count of Monte Cristo and people start mistaking him for a vampire that I begin swooning in this ridiculous fashion. Frankly who would take a night with one of Shakespeare's vaguely insipid romantic leads if there was the offer of a night with Oberon? Sure, you'd regret it in the morning! Does that mean you shouldn't do it?

Well, probably, yeah. 

Actually, I wouldn't advise it at all.

But that is entirely beside the point

Were I to draft a checklist of necessary qualities to invoke my fawning and excessive devotion to a character, it would start something like: powerful, ruthless, proud, unpredictable, amoral/morally questionable, domineering. After a few thousand synonyms, I might think to include some physical characteristics (cheekbones!) but no matter how pretty a character might be, unless xie can muster a fistful of evil, I'm not interested.

I might get emotional attachment to a hero, my heart might melt for them, I might cry myself to sleep at their pain. I might love Percy Blakeney with all the passion and truth that I could muster at thirteen, but if you put him a fight against Christopher Syn (something I'd pay to see), my feelings are going to be totally on the side of the Scarecrow. 

Mmm. Murderously ambiguous morality.

Yet I have a husband. He is not a supervillain. In fact, he is one of the sweetest, kindest, gentlest and most honorable men you will ever have the pleasure of encountering. 

Because, as far as the daily life goes, domineering bastards are obsolete. Dear Christ, can you actually imagine actually living with any of these people? Athos, with his brooding man-pain and his alcoholism? Sir Francis Varney and all the theft, the molestation, the jumping-on-chair-backs shenanigans?  

None of this is real:

Being the submissive floozy of some supernatural baddie is nice for one's head-canon, but in real-world emotional terms it isn't exactly sustainable. Frankly, I don't see Jareth bringing me a cup of tea in the morning because I can't be bothered getting up. I don't see Nathaniel Crozier offering any sympathy if I get myself involved in a flame war and need a hug. Those among my literary crush stable who aren't actually malevolent tend to be emotional wrecks. Besides, they aren't exactly pleasant to be around. Villains, remember? 

Difficult themes through metaphor

Their lack of flat-mate qualities aside, their very unreality is sanctioned by the texts in which they appear. People like this simply do not exist. Romantic highwaymen and charming vampires are a thing of fiction. And that's a good thing, by the way. Fiction is a door into a world that lets us weigh up people and actions with far more care and nuance than we can permit when dealing with flesh-and-blood individuals, with real emotions. We can explore motivations that we would not normally consider, try to understand moralities that are beyond our usual scope of acceptability, and - most importantly - ask questions the which the real-world forbids. As such, we need to create characters that do not exist, that will never exist because they allow us to explore difficult themes through metaphor. They allow us to push events in a certain way, to lead to emotions and decisions that we would not otherwise understand. 

The tension that this creates in the reader or the viewer allows feelings and attachments that our real-world selves would not countenance. In some people this creates a turmoil, a breakdown of the boundaries of reality and fiction, but most people just get over it. We find a way to frame these emotions in a form we understand. I suspect the aforementioned  'Draco in Leather Pants' trope arises from people attempting this, that the conflict between sexual attraction and the repulsiveness of the character leads people to the 'walk two moons' approach: if we only saw this from the villain's p.o.v, they would not seem so bad. Others have, simply compartmentalise, drawing a line between 'real' and 'fantasy' and leaving it at that.

 Well, that's the theory...

Which leads us to Rhett Butler

As I was making my pigheaded slog through Gone With the Wind and having one of my little kicking-the-kitchen-cupboard fits and ranting about how Rhett Butler was the most odious, manipulative, abusive bastard I had ever had the misfortune to read about, an unwelcome voice popped into my head and asked, "So why the hell don't you fancy him?"

Interesting.

I went back to the book with a more clinical perspective. Look, he's vile, overbearing and something of a bully - all strong indications. Ruthless, amoral, yep. He's even vain, which is always a plus. I came to my conclusions - Rhett Butler is essentially a shit. It really should have been a no-brainer.

So, in the thick of that literary annoyance of a book part of me was thinking, Just why the hell not? Heck, it would have made reading it more enjoyable.

Fiction allows us to go to places that reality will not take us, allows us to feel things that are not grounded in the logical world, but doing this requires a backing-away. In order to be lead into the darkest places within us, and come back more-or-less unscathed, we need to suspend some aspect of our disbelief, to recalibrate our moral compass. Even if, in real life, I would find Rhett Butler abhorrent, surely I'd fall for him in the context of the book? That's my whole thing.

No.

Why no? 

Fiction, by its very nature, simplifies and sanitises. No matter how evil a character, the people they injure bleed ink, not blood. The results of their actions do not matter in actual human terms. Their glamour is a direct consequence of this. A healthy dose of realism would destroy any one of them, or at least the charms they appear to possess. 

Go read Mystery Babylon

To go one further, the splendid, uncomplicated, ruthless evil they represent is only possible within the boundaries of that fictional world, the metaphor through which they are created. If he weren't a vampire, Sir Francis Varney would be a dirty old man, Dracula a rapist. Sans magic, Nathaniel Crozier becomes a two-bit confidence trickster and thief. By inhabiting magical, or at least fantastical, worlds, these characters become part of a whole other moral discourses that daily life cannot touch. We allow them to display both the malevolence and the grace with which real-world monsters do not trouble themselves. 

Much as it grieves me to admit it, you're never going to meet a Jareth, or a Christopher Syn, or a Milady. In the unlikely event that you did,  you would probably run a mile. I know I bloody would. They are safe only because they are remarkable, exceptional, unreal. In short, they are a fantasy. 

But you will have met a Rhett Butler

"That Rhett Butler," as Angela Carter wrote, "with his travelling salesman's lines...". You know the type, haunting the pub at University campuses, amateur philosophers with their well thumbed copy of Ayn Rand and their leer at any woman brainwashed enough to think that something is worth hearing just because it's a man saying it. Oh, Gods, have you met men like Rhett sodding Butler.  They'll spout forth about how much they like, "strong women", but if they meet one will retreat as quickly as if they've been kicked in the nuts. They have a nauseating belief that everyone, everything, has it's price, and that price is well within their remit. They will say things like, "Your girlfriend is too clever for her own good."

Speaking of fierce, beautiful challenges...

The most terrible thing about real life bastards is that they are so grubby, so mundane. Vampires, femme fatales, Goblin Kings all these represent a fierce, beautiful challenge to the established order, to one's expected beliefs. Their purpose is to disrupt, to bring about change. They force the heroes, the reader, to confront their own shadows, to face their monsters. And to face a monster is to be transformed. Literary monsters are a test of fire, even if the status quo is eventually restored. A well written villain (especially an ambiguous one) is as much a threat to the powers-that-be as any rebellious hero. Even Richelieu feared Milady.

But Rhett Butler and his ilk are too much a part of this world to unsettle it. They are too invested in the dominant, cultural paradigms. Rhett is a misogynist, a capitalist. Oh, sure, he shakes things up a bit, but only within the sanctioned means of commerce and predatory male sexuality. The disruption he causes rides the same waves of profit and speculation that caused 12.5 million human beings to be shipped across the Middle Passage like so much cargo. Had he been born fifty years earlier, he would have wound up a plantation owner. If he lived today, he'd have made a killing selling bad debt and food securities, and sod the consequences. He's an opportunist, nothing more.

The same goes to his attitude towards women. The male examples of my adored villains can hardly be held up as examples of 'feminist ally of the year', but they at least have a basic respect and understanding of a woman's potential, a fear of that potential turned against them. Jareth might smoulder, "You're no match for me", but when push comes to shove he never denies that her will is as strong as his nor her kingdom as great. Nathaniel Crozier - misogynist extraordinaire- uses his sway over women to draw out their darkest, most terrifying capabilities (capabilities which he respects even as he abuses them.) Even Athos gives credit where credit is due when during a diatribe on Milady's wickedness he admits, "it must be allowed, she supported her rank becomingly". Nor does he ever underestimate her. When they meet face-to-face, he is smart enough to keep a pistol between them.

So, what of Rhett Butler and his claims that Scarlett is too good and too clever to waste away in widowhood? 

He never seems to speak to Scarlett but to belittle her, never admits that her faculties might be on a par with his own. The women who are as smart as him (and smarter) he either flatters or avoids. He pursues Scarlett because she is not dangerous to him - she is 'gorgeous' when she is angry rather than potentially fatal.  And from this position of arms-length, unshakeable tormentor he proceeds into a kind of abuse that is horribly familiar. He isolates Scarlett from her community by manipulating the perceptions of those around them, bringing the full weight of patriarchal disapproval upon her for behaviour which he has incited. He removes her children from her custody without her consent, vanishing with them for unspecified periods of time. He forbids her from taking contraceptive measures and threatens her with violence. When she withdraws sexual favours from him, he casually asserts that if  he really wants to have sex with her, he will rape her.

There are too many men like Rhett fucking Butler. They all too real. I don't want my fantasy landscape cluttered with them as well.

Rant Aside
If you are one of those people who find his mojo alluring, then that is your fantasy life and I have no right to police it. I might hate the guy with a vengeance, but given the record of my literary crushes, any moral high-ground is currently avalanching from beneath my feet. The above few paragraphs of vented spleen are the merely the more or less logical thought processes which helped me understand my reaction. 

Which is about where we draw the line on reality.

Because real world powerful, unprincipled seducers do not believe women to be 'fine, dark death-hounds' - they bully and bluster, manipulate and abuse. For all I might get into a girlish fluster about Mr Crozier (historian, warlock, philanderer) in the real world I do what I can to make sure men like him wind up before war-crimes tribunals. Edmond Dantès might charm me senseless between the pages of a book - but if I met him down the pub, I'd probably pick a fight. 

For years, I struggled with this paradox. The scorn, the anger, the disbelief that people face when they admit such a predilection is remarkable. You will be mocked, belittled, told that your critical opinions have no worth. Often - in my experience - these verbal attacks are gendered. In terms of self-worth, it has an emotional toll. For all I said I wanted a lover, a friend, a soul mate, my mental space was packed with people who could be nothing of the kind. How could I claim to be worthy of love, respect, affection while still having a total passionate yen for utter, tyrannical bastards? 

So, I write. It's what I do. I work through it in short stories, in novels, stretching existing metaphors, setting up the problematic of the attraction, creating terrible villains who allure, and their victims who bleed... 

Well, it's still just ink, but I flatter myself that it's scarlet ink.

In my own life, though, I just drew a line. There is reality and there is pretend. Reality is where I live, and pretend is writing, is fantasy, is questions of morality the real world can not address. And, just as a child falling back in the playground, clutching their shoulder and crying, "Yah got me, pardner!" does not wish to be shot with an actual gun, neither do my escapist desires or worrying at a theme change or reframe my real-life rights and needs. The game is more complicated, but the rules remain. Pretending a thing does not make it real, but not wishing for a thing to be real does not mean that one is not permitted to pretend. 

Alan Moore, there. Nailing it.

But what Rhett Butler made me realise is that the line I have drawn is permeable, that it plunges and dives encompassing this, but not that, refusing one foible, but permitting its neighbour free reign. It does not only contain that notional space that is created when one opens a book, or watches a film, but is an ongoing conversation with the worlds of fiction and reality. It is personal, tied implicitly to how we escape, how we engage with those fantasies. It makes us uneasy.

For me to fancy Rhett Butler would be to reconcile myself with everything I detest. I cannot view him, or Gone With the Wind as anything other than a cultural artefact of genocide and misogyny. As such, he belongs to this world, to this reality. I tell myself that my creations are only fictions, but they slip this way and that, they hurt and they worry.

There is nothing empirical about unreality.

What I've been reading: Pride and Prejudice

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

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

I have actually turned into my mother.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why we all need a bit of Mary Sue

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

No. You are not allowed to finish that sentence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You know what's hard?

Growing up.

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

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

I bet stories helped with that.

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

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

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

 The Mary-Sue and the ideal self:

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

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

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

Look, we have patriarchy, alright? It sucks.

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

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

You know what else is hard?

Being a grown-up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Checks date*

Still here, I'm afraid.

Eeek. Sorry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Adults and adultery: Cleaning up Dumas onscreen.

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

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

Oh, I wish I were joking.

It did not look like this.

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

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

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

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

So what was the problem, then?

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

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

Wuthering Heights: In defence of amour fou

So, I took the plunge and went to a book group. 

Wow. Socialising. With real live people-persons who had real people personalities. That's not happened in a while. The book we were talking about was Wuthering Heights. I enjoyed the discussion; lots of interesting stuff raised, tangents and ideas about, not only the book in question, but about the nature of people-persons, and the way that said people-persons interact with books. It was good. Naturally, I did my usual seminar dear-God-no-wonder-you-had-no-friends-at-University routine, but that's a story for another day.

It also raised something that's been brewing in my head for quite a long time – something about the way our current society thinks about love. It may surprise none of you to learn that I agree with Angela Carter.

“Well,” my obliging hypothetical audience supply, “what do you agree with Angela Carter about, aside from 'practically-everything-with-the-notable-exception-of-clitoral-orgasm'?”

For a start, I agree with her about Wuthering Heights. And about love. There is a significant overlap between the two¹. 

Obviously, the whole 'love' thing came up at the book group – notably the conception that Wuthering Heights is some kind of a romance novel². We were asked, more as an opener to discussion than anything else, whether we thought Wuthering Heights was a love story. There was derisory laughter, slightly incredulous glances, and there was me, too much of a fucking coward to offer disagreement.

Which is this: 

We have a real problem with love in this country (or this society, or the English speaking bits of the world. Whatever.) We have a problem with it. So often, in the discussion, words came up to describe what Cathy and Heathcliff felt: obsession, infatuation. We are not, as a society, willing to believe that what those two experience is love. Ask people what love is, and there is a fair chance they will start quoting Corinthians 13:4 at you³.

Patient? Kind? Right... Are we even talking about the same thing, here?

No. We're not. That's one of the problems we face, just to have this discussion: there are a dearth of words in the English language to describe love. Of course, some kinds of love are patient, and kind, and they are valid, important types of love. They, however, are not what I am talking about. The Greeks have it slightly better, they have agápe, éros, philía, and storgē, but even they do not quite answer my purposes. These are different types of love used, exclusively or in combination, in different kinds of relationships. Most often, the distinction is used to separate basic human compassion from emotional love from lust. But I am not talking about physical love as opposed to emotional love, and whatever list of those one needs to build a happy relationship. I'm not, if I'm honest, talking about relationships. A relationship is an ongoing negotiation between two or more people; a relationship answers to sense, to reason, to common, human kindness.

No. I'm not talking about relationships.

There is, though, a distinction in the English language, a distinction that tells us more about ourselves than many of us would care to admit. We talk about loving and we talk about being in love.