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]

What Price Fantasy? Consent and the policing of desire

This is sort of a follow-up to Alys' Addiction to Villains, dealing as it does with that fraught line between the fictional and the real.

Sex scenes and Consent:

A while ago, I read this fantastic article on the importance of consent in fiction by literary agent Laura Zats. The reason it's brilliant is because she's right. Consent is necessary, and hot and, y'know, the line between fun-times and sexual assault. Yet while the majority of my brain was cheering on this home-run of good sense and ethical sexy times in romance novels, I read this sentence and a tiny part of me flinched.

"Romance novels are also examples of what love and sex should look like in the real world."

I ignored the flinch. I flinch a lot.

But as the article charged on breathless to its rebuttal of rape culture, the little bit of me that flinched wriggled around a bit, pulled and nagged at my mind, and before I knew it I had my arms crossed over my chest and there was that nasty little whisper that used to keep me awake at night, "Just what is wrong with you?"

Ouch.

I thought I'd kicked that one. I thought I'd accepted the kinky mess of my brain, thought I'd settled with myself that dark thoughts and darker desires were not incompatible with self-worth, that I knew what I really needed and deserved, and what was just fun to think about. I thought I was over this.

But you're never over it. And it never takes much to bring it back again. Just some sweeping comment from a misogynist, just some below-the-line comment from an intellectual lightweight trying to save me from myself.

Or a thoughtful, intelligent, necessary article from someone I'd be proud to call an ally.

My shipping, my head-canon, the erotica I write (that you chaps are seriously never reading) would this be judged by others as "examples of what love and sex should look like in the real world", when it's not, and it isn't intended that way, and for goodness sakes, aren't we all aware of that by now?

I'm done berating myself about this. I got angry. 

Fiction is another word for fantasy. 

Even the most real-world, blow by blow account of an ordinary day is a fabrication, a falsity. And yeah, while I agree that we need a world that does not normalise sexual assault via media, can we not accept that some things are an escape? That some people like to think about things that - in real world terms - would constitute serious criminal acts?

Politically, I am left of centre. 

Actually, I'm left of centre by quite a long way. 

In fact, I probably couldn't see the centre with a telescope, but that's immaterial. As an unrepentant lefty, I would like to think that I am ethical. As such, I want an end to all the ways that people use power to hurt each other. I want an end to rape. I want, desperately, for every kind of non-consensual sexual activity eradicated from our world. I want our conversations around sex to become unambiguous and free from shame. I would like all abusive tosspots to learn how to be decent human beings and, frankly, while we're at it, I'd like an anarchist utopia. 

That's what I pray for, after all: people being decent to each other not because of law, custom or fear, but because it's the decent thing to do.

But just because I want these things, doesn't mean I'm not allowed to read books that glamorise vicious feudal societies. Just because I'm anti-murder does that mean I must resist the charm of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Just because I am a pacifist, am I not allowed to enjoy Preacher?

So, yeah, I'm anti rape. But does that mean I have to bar non-con from my fantasy life as well?

Especially when we get kinky, it's all about consent.

It's probably about time I mentioned BDSM. This is, after all, as much as a fictional framing device as erotic fiction. However 24/7 a relationship, it is still has its limits, however extreme the actions, they are always bound by consent. BDSM allows people to hurt or be hurt at one remove, not to experience power but to play at it. Just because someone someone indulges in interrogation play does not mean they want to be interrogated. BDSM is a safe space for fantasies, it is a yes-but-not-really.

I have heard arguments from erotica writers and readers that this is how it should be, that non-con should always be framed as fantasy within the construct of a story. So, any scene where a questionable act is eroticised it is necessary to reveal it as a consensual activity where all participants are engaging in a mutual game of make-believe. We may see something vicious, even violent, but when the lens pans out we see the mutual laugh and hug afterwards, the safe-word and the quick release restraints. In a longer story, we see these safe guards working, we see that this is all consensual and that, however intense, it is all in the name of good fun.

BDSM gives us as neat a get-out clause in fiction as it does to real life. We can go to these places without ever bringing our ethics into question.

But when we're reading a novel or a story we already have a framing device which tells the reader that nothing that follows is really real. A work of fiction is, of itself, a consensual, mutual game between the reader and the author. If a reader likes the idea of a forceful hunk sweeping them up to the bedroom over their half-hearted protestations, then a book is a place they can have that without the ensuing emotional scars. If at any point something unsettles them, triggers them, hurts them, they can say a non-negotiable "no", and put down the book. Stopping reading is the best safe-word in the world. 

What is more, most adults are capable of this distinction between reality and fiction. We know what we're reading isn't real - any crimes committed are not real crimes, the blood shed disappears with the next turned page. To add to this wonderful game a second disclaimer would be almost like a massive subtitle on the dangerous bits of an action film which state "These explosions are a special effect! Stunt doubles were used and not harmed!" 

When one reads - especially when one reads erotica - one suspends one's disbelief in order to get one's jollies. One does not want to come back to earth with a thump. We get it. It's a construct. If you aren't conversant with that, you really shouldn't be playing the game - you are still scrabbling at the backs of wardrobes seeking passage to Narnia, still walking into walls between platforms at King's Cross. 

So I could get scornful here, vicious against the people who fail to understand that, just because I entertain questionable notions in my head, doesn't mean I am ever going to act upon them in real, non pre-agreed reality.

But this attitude is rather glib.

Because that isn't what this is about. Because even though books are safe spaces, even though they are the finest of fetish clubs, even I draw back from too much realism in my villain. One might be fine with the idea of an elf-lord dreamboat pinning one's hands and ripping one's bodice, but when the setting is a market town in Surrey and the ravisher in question is a stockbrocker then no matter how much emotionally escapist bliss comes into play, to me that's going to sound like date rape.

Likewise, while I know that writers have no particular responsibility to their readers as a moral force, I am also aware of the part they play in creating cultural discourses and normative modes in the media. And these discourses - for all they are created in that 'harmless' realm of paper an ink - can cause real-world suffering, real world pain. I'm not talking about Harry Potter being the slippery slope into Satanism, I'm talking about semiotics. I'm talking about yet another strand of media excusing sexual assault, normalising it, glorifying it. 

In short, I'm talking about rape culture. Faced with that, to say, "It's only fantasy, I won't self censor, sod the consequences" is to show either blinding privilege or borderline malice. 

There should probably be a conclusion here

But there won't be. Because I know that people can't be held accountable for their fantasies provided those fantasies remain fiction (in whatever form). Because I know that reading about non-con, however horrific or scary, and getting off on it is not the same thing as wanting it to happen. I know that, as people, we need to challenge the dark bits of our minds, to embrace them and enjoy them if we can do that without harming people. I know that devotes of the macabre, fans of the kinky among us shouldn't have to feel like freaks, shouldn't need to be ashamed that they get a frisson from things a bit beyond the beaten track. The stigma against these things is strong enough as it is; let's not shame people further.

But I know, too, that if a story is told often enough to become our mode of understanding a thing it can do incalculable harm. I know if a person's, particularly a woman's, "No" comes to signify only token resistance, then we live in a society that excuses rape. And I am a hundred percent certain that this is wrong.

So I can't reach an answer. The line between fiction and reality is nothing like so definite as the line between enthusiastic consent and everything else. The boundary of what is too close to the bone changes from reader to reader, author to author, person to person. What's more, in a society that has so much shame, so much obfuscation around desire, too many people find themselves unable to communicate, to give or to ask consent. So, yes, we certainly need discourses which show us the words to do this, but as fiction reflects reality, we also need words which reflect back the pain of that inability, words for that struggle, for that uncertainty. 

How much do writers owe to ethics? To reality? At what price do our fantasies come? I wish there were a rubric that I could get behind, a pocket guide to acceptability because with the cost so high in human suffering, I could do with one.

All I know for certain is this; I am a Gothic writer, a teller of fucked up little narratives with ambiguous moralities, and I am not always sure that I am doing the right thing.

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: 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?

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.