Could do better…

An article about authors’ responses to bad reviews in the Sunday Times has given me pause for thought. I have written my fair share of bad reviews in my time (not just on this blog) because, well, if one reviews a book, one surely has a duty to anyone who might read the review to express an honest opinion of it. Most books have some merits, and I usually try to find them, but what’s the point in writing a review that’s full of smarmy agreement with the author? It seems, however, that some touchy authors are starting a backlash against critics who diss their books. Now, I see that it’s tough to have your work slated in a public arena – but that’s what it is: a public arena: if you publish, you open yourself knowingly to public opinion. Recently, Alice Hoffman took exception to a critic’s comment, and twittered the critic’s phone number. More spectacular was Bevis Hillier’s response to A.N. Wilson’s abuse of his biography of Betjeman – he faked a love letter to Betjeman, which so fooled Wilson that he included it in his own biography of the poet. The article includes a list of other vindictive authors who feel they have been wronged. Clearly Barthes’ “death of the author” hasn’t touched any of our living writers yet – their playground responses demonstrate that they are alive and kicking (scratching and biting).

The importance of Balzac

I’ve just finished reading Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie for my book group (great thing about book groups: one reads all kinds of things that otherwise one wouldn’t). It’s written in such plain, unobtrusive language that it almost reads like a fable or folk-tale, but I think this may in part be down to translation (it was originally written in French). The book follows the experiences of two urban teenage boys, in 1971, sent to the countryside during Mao’s Cultural Revolution to be “re-educated”. Books are banned (apart from the Little Red Book), so when the boys discover a suitcase of Western novels, including Balzac’s, it opens their eyes to a whole new world.

What’s interesting about this is how little it’s glamourised; books about books tend to wax lyrical and assume things about their readers, but here, the boys are hooked simply because they were ignorant of such things and now they are learning. The power of words is huge, but it also has some surprising effects, particularly on the “little Chinese seamstress” with whom they fall in love; the implication at the end, I think, is that one can’t control literature or what it does to people, either by banning books or by reading them.

I didn’t know much about the period, though the author is clearly drawing onhis own experiences of being “re-educated” (an ironic term, since education is just what is wasn’t), but found an article in the New York Times about the film of this book very interesting.  There’s also some useful information about Mao’s Cultural Revolution here.

Stolen words

I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that has received so many accolades and awards as The Book Thief – a list of these take up most of the back cover. This made me instantly wary, I’m afraid, which was justified in some ways and not in others. On the one hand, it’s aimed at teenagers, and if they are reading books from which they might learn something – about humanity, about reading, and about history – that’s a good thing, obviously. On the other, it’s a little too self-conscious, a little too “here is the moral” for me.

The story is set in a small town near Munich during World War II, and follows the life of Liesel, a girl who, at nine, steals a book she cannot read, and, with her foster-father, learns to read it. She steals other books, later, one from a pile of books that are being burned on Hitler’s birthday, others from the library of the mayor’s wife. While she is living a young girl’s life – playing with friends, going to school – her foster parents hide a young Jewish man in their cellar, and she becomes close to him, reading with him at night.

Eventually he has to leave for fear of discovery, but his sojourn in the cellar has changed how Liesel sees the world. I won’t go into any more details for fear of spoiling the plot, but there is plenty of descriptive detail about life in Germany for those who did not support Hitler,  and Liesel is a strongly-drawn character with obvious appeal.

So far so good. However, I’m not convinced by the narrator, who is Death, personified, and who reassures his readers not to be afraid, as he will be gentle with them. Death can be moved by the events around him, it seems, but must inexorably do his work. I found this unappealing and rather an awkward device, though not as awkward as the constant  interruption of the text with little translations, comments, lists etc. I felt I could never really concentrate on the matter in hand because of the distractions the book itself provided.

The other comment I would make is that although Zusak’s writing is imaginative and descriptive, and will probably appeal more to teenagers than it did to me, sometimes I found his attempts to be original and say things differently both self-conscious and pointless. Every page has some unusual phrase on it (which I think is something Zusak has said he aspires to; and that’s not a bad thing, necessarily, it’s just that it feels intrusive when it happens so much). (For example, when Liesel is upset, “Something ridiculed her throat”. Hm.)

So, it’s not a bad book, but I didn’t find it especially thrilling either. I did like the way books play such a part in her life, though, and the idea that words are so important and can be both good (in books, between friends) and bad (in Nazi propaganda, for example). By stealing books Liesel can own them, and this is how she establishes her identity. Finally, I must add that I loved the comment in the New York Times that “Markus Zusak has not really written Harry Potter and the Holocaust. It just feels that way.”

Playing games with Derrida

Well, not just Derrida, but I like that as a phrase. The End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas is a book about games, really, and one that is certainly my kind of thing. It begins with a rather screwed-up Ph.D. student, Ariel Manto, whose thesis is on “thought experiments” and is working on a (fictional) Victorian writer, Thomas Lumas.  She comes across one of his books, The End of Mr Y, in a secondhand bookshop, and can’t believe her eyes – it’s incredibly rare, and thought to be cursed. Rumours abound that it is so dangerous that the CIA are after a copy. So far, so good – the excitement of finding the book you want, let alone one that obscure, in a bookshop plays to my idea of a thrill very well. I also like the idea that a book can be that dangerous – that words can build up something that has an effect well beyond the page. (I have also read A.S. Byatt’s Babel Tower this week, which has something of the same idea).

And Lumas’s The End of Mr Y is the most dangerous book, ever, because of the secret world it holds – literally. I don’t want to give too much away, but it contains a formula which permits the most extreme kind of thought experiment – one which can send you into the “Troposphere”, a kind of virtual-reality place which permits you to access other people’s minds. Ariel explores this world, which one can’t help but feel is in part a welcome relief from her real world, which is mostly unpleasant. And as she explores it, she finds out things about herself, and about this world. Derrida, Lacan and other theorists become vital clues to unravelling the pseudo-scientific and philosophical secrets of the Troposphere – for example, looking at Heidegger’s and Lacan’s notions that consciousness is constructed by language itself. This is both a game, and a deadly fight, which contrasts with what’s going on in her life – the academic work and the rather sordid relationships which are also a kind of game, but ones that nobody seems to be able to win.

Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in The Guardian that much of The End of Mr Y seems to turn into a computer game. This is true, and I found it difficult to reconcile this with the nineteenth-century element of Lumas’s The End of Mr Y. I found the giant mouse-god Apollo Smintheus difficult to assimilate; it just seemed a step too far into the ludicrous. But overall, I’d recommend it. It’s a clever book, and one which makes you think; it’s also the best kind of literary metafiction, in that it considers the book as more than fiction whilst knowing that it is itself pure fiction. If that sounds off-puttingly complicated, don’t worry – Thomas makes her arguments clearly and interestingly, and has moments of poetic description which are oddly satisfying. The epilogue, though, doesn’t work and seems to take a retrograde step – if you can manage it, don’t read the last two pages!

The suspicious detective in the nineteenth century

As a break from marking essays, I’ve been reading The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale. I’d seen it in bookshops but probably wouldn’t have read it if a friend hadn’t lent it to me, but I’m glad I did – it’s fascinating by any standard, but particularly so for someone with an interest in the nineteenth century. It’s based on the true story of the murder of a three-year-old boy at Road Hill House in Somerset in 1860; I’d expected it to be somehow “novelised” – to read like sensation fiction, but it doesn’t; it’s a factual account with little unnecessary detail, which makes it somehow all the more compelling.

Summerscale’s research has clearly been extremely extensive; she tells the story, of the child’s murder and the enquiries into the death, but there’s much more to it than that. For example, I didn’t know that the first proper detective in fiction appeared in Edgar Allen Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue (I thought there must have been an earlier precedent for this), and that the first detective force was set up in Britain eight years after this. The detective in the Road Hill murder was Jack Whicher, a prominent detective of the day, whose case notes Summerscale has consulted. This book is as much about the construction of the figure of the detective, in the press, in society, and in literature, as it is about the investigation and social implications of the murder case.

What is fascinating about this book is twofold: firstly, I really wanted to know “whodunit” – and usually that kind of thing doesn’t matter too much to me. Secondly, it’s what it reveals about mid-Victorian life. The details – both cosily domestic and surprisingly sordid – of life at the house are laid out before the reader, as, it turns out, they were at the time; this was one of the highest-profile murder cases of the time. Every detail was analysed in the press; everyone had an opinion, and the Whicher received thousands of letters suggesting possible murderers and offering information. The public was both intrigued and fully absorbed, becoming armchair-detectives themselves, and at the same time absolutely horrified about the intrusion into the private domestic space which seemed paramount to a threat to national security. Of course, the voyeurism of the nineteenth century press is ironically echoed by that of the reader of this book.

When Whicher made an accusation, he was vilified for calling the family into disrepute, as a lower-class working detective who had “intruded” on the middle-class security of the bereaved family. The paradoxes and hypocrisy the case, and this book, illuminates is fascinating; I was also surprised by how much effect this and other real-life cases had on contemporary writers, in particular (of course) Dickens and Wilkie Collins. One wonders what future generations might make of the news stories that capture the current generation’s interest.

The Evil Seed

I have read a rather eclectic assortment of books over Christmas, one of which was The Evil Seed, Joanne Harris’s first novel. She confesses herself that it probably isn’t the greatest novel ever (see here for her own comments on it), but adds that she has some affection for it just because it was her first novel. I suspect her fans will be forgiving, since she has gone from strength to strength subsequently, but I must confess to being a little disappointed with it (and also to being disappointed that I was disappointed!)

The story follows two strands: a present-day girl who is suspicious of her ex-boyfriend’s “lavender-eyed” new girlfriend with suspicious nocturnal habits, and a post-war romantic tragedy detailed in a diary. The characters haunt graveyards, drink blood, and generally behave as vampires – which they are, although the word is rarely used. I must admit I thought Harris would be really good at horror; in fact, the atmosphere is well-evoked and her descriptions suitably gory, but it just doesn’t quite cut it. Somehow one is too conscious of the writer when reading The Evil Seed; the plot is too guessable and not suspenseful enough. I say this kindly, because I like her later novels a lot. And I’m glad I read this one, but I probably wouldn’t read it again.

My reviews of some of Joanne Harris’s other books can be found here:

Holy Fools, Jigs and Reels, Sleep Pale Sister

Subversive Reading

The excellent Birmingham Book Festival commissioned the philosopher A C Grayling to give a lecture at the festival this year, entitled “The Good Reader and the World”. This is in part a tribute to the National Year of Reading, which encourages the promotion of literacy for children and enjoyment of reading for everyone. In line with this, Professor Grayling began his lecture by giving a detailed summary of the history of reading, from the earliest known literate communities in Ancient Egypt through to the reading explosion of the autodidacts of the nineteenth century. Grayling particularly emphasised the impacts of the early printing presses, particularly their significance not only in rising literacy, but in the fact that literacy was therefore no longer largely exclusive to the church and the ruling classes. The subversiveness of access to religious texts, for example, is not something we think much of these days, but it meant that more people were able to challenge the church on the basis of their own reading – literacy is pwer, and as it spreads power is disseminated. During the Renaissance the importance of the classical literature of Ovid, Cicero, Virgil etc allowed “insight into the wider mind of Europe”, broadening the views of those who could read them (which was of course still a small minority). By the nineteenth century, however, books were cheaper and more available, and more people could read – especially essays and poetry – and many of the working-class were able to educate themselves through their reading. This is hugely significant for social development of a country as a whole, Grayling pointed out, because those who read are thinking more; for example, revolutionaries in the seventeenth century such as the Levellers and the New Model Army were literate, which is hardly a coincidence.

Grayling emphasised the different modes of reading – passive reading, for plot alone, such as one might with a beach novel, and intensive reading, where one puts thought and consideration into the book, permitting a dialogue between reader and author, disagreeing with it, coming to one’s own conclusions. This, he suggests, is the way to be fulfilled in one’s reading, and it has a transformative effect on the reader. Some books, of course, invite purely passive reading, while others engage the reader sometimes against their will, and it those that are treasures.

Modern British education fosters “literacy” and “numeracy” in the quest to turn citizens into “good foot-soldiers in the economic battle”, but as Grayling says, Aristotle said that the point of education was to make “noble use of our leisure”. Education isn’t about getting a job; it’s about one’s life and what one does with it, and permits one to be a “responsible contributor to public conversation”, and indeed a responsible voter, too. Looking at the future of reading, Grayling is optimistic, suggesting that there will always be readers, and always people who do find necessary stimulation in books, even if the nature of “books” as we know them is overtaken by technology. The content of books “will never be far from the centre of a genuinely civilised society”.