All Change, Please

Harry Potter: Part 5 - 'Our' world, the Muggle world, and the Magic world

2010-01-09T12:31:00.002Z

Suman Gupta writes in Re-Reading Harry Potter that the Muggle world, as presented in the books, is absolutely not analogous to 'our' world - the world in which you sit reading this blog, the world in which readers all over the country read the Harry Potter books. He argues that "the Muggle world is presented within the embrace of the Magic world, and presented so as to draw the reader away from it and into the Magic world" (p. 89). That is, the Magic world is constantly superior to the Muggle world, and never seen as having any real value in itself except as a point of comparison to the Magic world. Invariably, when such comparisons are made, the Muggle world is seen as inferior. (A quick example from the most recent film: Slughorn, on disovering that Hermione's Muggle parents are dentists, asks, "And is that considered a dangerous profession?" Hermione responds with a faintly humorous anecdote about her father being bitten by a patient, but compared to the very real dangers Hogwarts and the Magic world are facing from Lord Voldemort and his minions, this seems pretty ludicrous. Even in levels of danger, the Muggle world just doesn't cut the mustard.)

Simulaneously, Andrew Blake sees the popularity of Harry Potter as related to the rise of 'Cool Britannia' in the UK from 1997 onwards, with the landslide election of Tony Blair - who, he notes dryly, conspicuously brought his Fender guitar into No. 10 along with the rest of his furniture. The books become a kind of manifesto for professional creativity and hip urban lifestyles (The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter, pp. 46-66). By comparison, John Major's nostalgia for "warm beer, shadows on county cricket grounds, and old maids cycling to church for Sunday communion" (Blake's words, p. 23) no longer appeared "timeless" as Major claimed, but out of touch and old-fashioned.

I think both arguments are true. Fred and George Weasley do represent the creative use of magic both to mock authorities (by allowing students to escape lessons with fake injuries), but also to protect the good (at the beginning of Half-Blood Prince, we are told that they now do a profitable sideline in selling protective magical gadgets to those who fight against Voldemort). As the war grows more serious, the action is relocated from the country boarding-school, Hogwarts, to the metropolis - in Deathly Hallows, Harry leaves suburbia and breaks into Gringotts and the Ministry of Magic to further his progress. This is presented as a natural rite of passage: he describes how he is going to leave Hogwarts at the end of the sixth book, as it seems to be the only way of making a real difference. In order to search for the Horcruxes, he has to travel. (Compare the easy travelling allowed by Apparition, Floo powder, broomsticks and Thestrels to the horse-and-cart or foot travel available to most people until midway through the twentieth century: modern mobility is very much at the centre of the wizarding world.)

For this, he visits the now pretty much extinct Godric's Hollow, where his parents died sixteen or so years before. He has a chat with 'Bathilda Bagshot', who turns out to be a dead body being controlled by a snake - proof if ever we needed it that the countryside is no longer a fit place for wisdom to reside. The countryside woodland areas where Harry, Hermione and Ron hide during their planning sessions in Deathly Hallows - and the Burrow, of course - are places of retreat, somewhere for respite and thinking time, not action. Occasionally this peace is disturbed, when the Death Eaters myteriously get wind of their location, for instance - until it turns out that their use of Voldemort's name broadcasts their whereabouts as effectively as Morse code. This is an unnatural threat to the tranquility of the countryside, and once they learn how to hide properly, things improve. They can receive the pirate radio station that updates them with the progress of the resistance movement (is it just me that thinks of Charles de Gaulle's defiant radio broadcast from London in 1940?), but to face the real enemy, they must venture into the city.

Let's look briefly at the first chapter of the fourth book, Goblet of Fire, just to cement the opposition of town and country - and Magic and Muggles, modern and old-fashioned. We are in Little Hangleton, location of the Riddle House and Frank Bryce, its elderly caretaker. There is a strong sense of community - "the villagers", "the Little Hangletons", "the whole of Little Hangleton" all act as one, and they are contemptuous of the "rich, snobbish and rude" residents of Riddle House - clearly the lords of the manor. News about the murders and subsequent arrests, when it comes, is first heard in the village pub, the Hanged Man. The gossip spreads quickly. References are made to World War II as a reason for Frank's oddities - Frank appears to have been a bit shell-shocked, and consequently lives as something of a hermit.

This is a recognisable post-war village - which doesn't seem to have modernised much beyond the 1950s, by the way (Blake reckons the Weasleys are also characterised as a typical 50s family - p. 65) - and it is compared extensively to the upper-class Riddles. I've written before about the analogy between Slytherin and the aristocracy, so I won't go into this, but it clear enough whose side we are meant to be on.

Then something bizarre happens. The report of the Riddles' deaths comes back, with "a tone of unmistakeable bewilderment" and "frustrated police", because there are no marks on the Riddles' bodies, only expressions of terror on their faces. Immediately we know that this is the work of magic - probably the same spell that killed Harry's parents. But the Muggles don't know this, and what small indication we get of scientific inquiry here doesn't help them in the least. They are ignorant and helpless. (Ditto the Muggle PM at the beginning of HBP, whose scientists can't explain the mysterious collapse of a bridge or an enormous hurricane - which we as readers know to be the work of the Death Eaters.)

Now the villagers, and Frank, are objects of real mockery. "Old Frank" is "devoted" to the empty house for no good reason. He reacts to intruders by "brandishing his stick and yelling croakily at them" - small fry for someone who is about to be murdered by the most dangerous Dark Wizard of all time. He wakes up with his bad leg stiff, and decides to make up a hot-water bottle to try and soothe it. (No modern painkillers or magical Pomfrey-potions for him.)

Then he goes into the house, and is immediately confounded by what he overhears of Voldemort and Wormtail's conversation. For instance:

Frank inserted a gnarled finger into his ear and rotated it. Owing, no doubt, to a build-up of earwax, he had heard the word 'Quidditch', which was not a word at all.

This is a classic example of dramatic irony. We know that Quidditch is not only a word but a sport, and exists in a magical world of which Frank is entirely ignorant. The additional "no doubt" increases our glee: whilst he is busy being sure about his own narrow-mindedness, we have access to this exciting, privileged world where hot-water bottles aren't needed for sore legs at all.

It goes on in this fashion - our understanding of what is happening increases in direct proportion to Frank's confusion, until he realises that Voldemort is a killer and knows, with basic and accurate instinct, that he is evil. But it's too late. He remains out of the know right to the end, as he is screaming so loudly he does not even hear the words of the spell that ends his life. At which point "the boy called Harry Potter" wakes up.

Frank, the ignorant, along with the other residents of Little Hangleton, drops brutally out of the story, but we are allowed to continue because of our previous, privileged knowledge, our awareness that these events are closely connected to things we have seen of Harry Potter already. Although we cannot do Magic, we are far closer to the Magical world than the Muggle world (which, given the Muggle world is largely represented by the Dursleys, is probably just as well).

Not only is this a kind of snobbery towards 'normal' people -as Blake puts it, Mondeo Man and Fiesta Female (p. 25) - but it repeats exactly the hierarchising effect of the Hogwarts house system. We are not all equal: some have the fate of the world more snugly in their palms because of their innate ability. (A paper by C. E. Sleeter from 1993 ('Power and Privilege in White Middle-Class Feminist Discussions of Gender and Education'*) defines privilege as the unearned and taken-for-granted advantages gained by being born into a particular group. If that isn't an apt description of the Magical world, I'd like to know what is.

The Harry Potter books are certainly snobby, despite their intensive insistence on basic equalities and the awfulness of prejudice. There's too much more to say for this one post. No doubt more will follow later.

*In Gender and Education: Ninety-Second Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, ed. S. K. Biklin and D. Pollard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). As the titles suggest, I encountered this whilst on a rather different line of research - but it's a useful definition nonetheless.

Harry Potter: Part 4 - Slash fanfiction

2009-12-13T15:54:00.002Z

I have reservations about calling this post 'Slash fanfiction' as if I'm going to be expressing my definitive viewpoint on it. There's no way I could do this, since almost every slash story I read slightly alters my view on what it's for and what it's doing.

Slash, for non-readers of fanfic, is a term describing fics revolving around homosexual pairings (it's opposed to 'het', heterosexual, pairings). Many of these are fairly improbable pairings, such as Snape/Harry (or 'Snarry'); others, such as Sirius Black/Remus Lupin, are more understandable, especially given the similarity in the two's animal forms, and their notorious affectionate embrace towards the end of Prisoner of Azkaban.

Suman Gupta, in the revised edition of his excellent book Re-reading Harry Potter, spends a small part of the last chapter trying to theorise why there is so much slash fiction. One possibility he moots is that unusual pairings, such as Draco and Harry or Ron and Draco, are trying to provide an alternative route to resolving the splits in the wizarding world through romantic love, rather than confrontation and violence. He also suggests that the slash presence on fanfic sites is an emancipatory move by fans to fill in the social gaps in the wizarding world, where only coy hints of homosexuality are found. (I'm ignoring Rowling's declaration that Dumbledore was gay, since there was so much slash fiction before Deathly Hallows was published and she made this statement that it hardly matters; at any rate Dumbledore is only one of a very large number of characters used in slash pairings.)

It is true that there are characters whose sexual lives we know very little about, such as Charlie Weasley or Sirius Black. But there are also those who we know are in heterosexual relationships, such as Lupin (briefly, before he and Tonks are murdered). Of course you could theorise that Lupin only marries Tonks because Sirius has been killed and he is searching for comfort. But most SBRL fics (as they're coded) don't do this: they either go backwards, looking at the characters' lives before 'canon' (the published texts), or they choose an alternate universe (AU) approach and rewrite their lives.

So why this intense urge to write homosexuality into almost every fissure of the Harry Potter? Go to fanfiction.net's Harry Potter section, relax the ratings filter so you can view 'M'-rated fics, and search for almost any pairing of male characters of the same generation/era, and you'll find some, I can pretty much guarantee. Lucius Malfoy and Blaise Zabini (Draco's aristocratic classmate). Lucius and Harry. Snape and James Potter. Even 'twincest' between Fred and George Weasley (the loosening of traditional sexuo-moral boundaries in the fanfic realm will be looked at in the future at some point). It is extraordinary - and, for me, discovering this world at the age of 14 - exciting and liberating.

Plus, Gupta cites a survey done by a fanfic site that suggests most slash fanfics are written by women in their twenties. Most fanfiction in general is written by female fans - this is pretty much accepted - so perhaps this shouldn't be a big surprise. And there are, comparatively, very few fics with female slash pairings. Ginny/Hermione appears sometimes (but compare 57 pages of this pairing on fanfiction.net to 398 pages of stories about Sirius Black and Remus Lupin). I read an excellent one about Professors Hooch (Quidditch mistress) and McGonagall once, but this was years ago, and there are still only 3 pages of stories with a 'McHooch' focus.

This is the bit where I have no answers. Is it to do with the nature of male vs. female characters in the series? In general, females are pretty marginalised: they're eccentric, like Tonks and Luna, maternal, like Molly Weasley, overly girly and flirty, like Fleur, Lavender and Parvati or mad like Bellatrix Lestrange (the only major female Death Eater, by the by). Hermione is more concrete, and highly intelligent, but she's also ripped to pieces in many ways: she can be vain and shrill and bossy. Umbridge is evil and clever, but ridiculous with her obsession with fluffy kittens and pink. Cho Chang is impatient and weepy. The only female character who seems to have real steel and charisma, as far as my reading goes, is Ginny Weasley, and unfortunately she doesn't really mature until the sixth book.

The male characters, by comparison, dominate the series in number and personality: look at Dumbledore, Voldemort, Snape, Draco, Sirius Black, James Potter, Wormtail, Cedric Diggory, Viktor Krum, Mad-Eye Moody, Kingsley Shacklebolt, Fudge, Rufeus Scrimgeour, Argus Filch etc. All very memorable characters, with, in my opinion, much more solidity and individuality. More, in short, to hang a fanfic on.

There's also a culture of heterosexual masculinity throughout the books which it's quite fun to disrupt by introducing a strong sexual element into it. Take this fic, 'I'm Not in Denial', which begins with a typical brawl between Draco Malfoy and Ron Weasley that turns into a sexual assault. The fighting goes on as the relationship develops - most of the time the two don't know whether to fight or fuck, to put it crudely. This is an extreme example, but it's posssible that fans find this much more interesting - and unlikely, perhaps, so therefore more novel? - to read than a typical lesbian pairing, which is often based on deep meaningful conversations and frustrations with the men in their lives (certainly this is true of Ginny/Hermione).

Could it also be argued that women have the same kind of fascination with male homosexuality as men do with lesbianism, if male-aimed porn is anything to go by? This is certainly possible, and the lack of erotica addressing this interest could certainly be attributed to the domination of the sex industry by male desires and the expectation of women to fulfil them - just in the same way that there are hardly any male prostitutes compared to the numbers of females.

I suppose I don't know the answer. I certainly continue to find male homosexual relationships deeply interesting - perhaps it's the exoticism of it, givenI will never be able to participate in such a relationship myself. I don't know. But, going back to 'I'm Not in Denial', one thing I like very much about it is the effort to address stereotypes, the demonstration that males can experience homosexual desire without being feminised at all. It's a shame there aren't more teenage boys reading these fics, especially those who are uncertain about their own sexuality, but at least the stories exist. It's a start.

Harry Potter: Part 3 - Fanfiction, an Introduction

2009-12-08T19:03:00.003Z

I'm not going to say much here, partly because I've just written two posts and I have a life to lead. But I do want to lay down some preliminary questions about Harry Potter-related fanfiction, which I'm going to be thinking about over the next few weeks/months, especially as I continue to read examples of it:

Why do people write fanfiction? Is it to fill in gaps they've identified in the books, to explore issues that are not resolved, to alter the world to fit their preferences, to experiment with alternate possibilities? (I suspect all of these are true in some cases.)
Are there common themes in the stories that receive the most critical attention? (I am measuring critical attention in terms of numbers of reviews on a site such as fanfiction.net or harrypotterfanfiction.com. The vast majority of these reviews tend to be laudatory, often emphatically so.)
How are new romantic/sexual pairings presented, and how often are the characters kept IC (in character) or taken OOC (out of character) in order to present them?
How are themes that would be considered incompatible with the genre of children's literature (especially deviant sexual behaviour) presented?
Who writes fanfiction? Male or female? What kind of age? (In the media, the genre is largely presented as a realm dominated by teenage girls, but this cannot be exclusively true.)
How much of themselves do fanfiction writers tend to reveal about themselves, and how often does this relate to how they write or what they write about?
How often is the loose generic allocation of 'fantasy' to the Harry Potter books manipulated or destroyed?

I'm sure other questions will appear during the course of this series, but for now we'll leave it there.

Harry Potter: Part 2 - Class, an Introduction

2009-12-08T18:27:00.003Z

One big issue that is pretty obvious throughout the Harry Potter series is that of social status, especially social class. Various analyses have pointed out that there are several kinds of parallels to be drawn between relations in the books and social relations in our world.

More particularly, there are consistent representations of characters who, in our world, we would consider to be of a lower social class. For instance, we have the house-elves, a species servile by nature and employed almost exclusively without pay. They are presented as approximations of humans: they comically wear pillowcases, they speak in a non-standard dialect, and seem not to be able to police their own speech, having to resort to injuring themselves if they speak ill of their employers.

Then there is Hagrid, who is presented both as uneducated (he was expelled from Hogwarts for a crime he did not commit, and supposedly had his wand snapped) and governed more by impulsive emotions than common sense or intelligence (he lets out school secrets in the pub, he likes to drink too much and loses his guard, he sobs when any of his precious animals are hurt or taken away). He is frequently mocked by Draco Malfoy (more on him later), and geographically is an outcast as he lives in a hut cut off from the elite world of the school. He is oversized and clumsy (he, even more famously than Dobby, has a noticeable regional accent, rendered as West Country by Robbie Coltrane in the films), and it is revealed that he is half-giant, suggesting his cognitive abilities may be different (and by different, let's be honest, most will read inferior) to those of full humans. In Deathly Hallows, he nearly kills Harry by getting a spell wrong (a motif common to underdog-type characters); in general he is more of an inadvertent antagonist than an active protagonist.

There are the Weasleys, who, we are constantly aware, don't have much money. They have to buy second-hand school materials. In Goblet this results in Ron making a fool of himself at the Yule Ball, because he has to wear old-fashioned, frilly dress robes, and Harry mocks him mercilessly. This is interesting, because Harry is generally quite conscious of Ron's lack of money, being quite rich himself, and it is possible that Rowling has disguised social disadvantage with clownlike appearance enough that it becomes acceptable to take the piss. More on them at some other point.

There are other characters who are worth examining aside from these -Lupin, for instance, and Neville, as well as Harry himself - but for now I want to shape these by mentioning a point made by Andrew Blake in his The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter, which is that the Hogwarts house system could be seen to map quite neatly onto the British class system: Hufflepuff are the working-class labourers, who are relatively unskilled but highly dilligent; Gryffindor are the lower-middle-class, who are more educated but by no means intellectuals, and rely on their bravery and confidence to get them through; Ravenclaw are of course the upper-middle-class intelligentsia, and Slytherin are the "wicked aristocrats", rich and snobby.

I'm not sure I wholly agree with this - given Harry's wealth, and Ron's lack of it, I think Gryffindor is a less easily locatable social set, for instance - but the analogy does raise some interesting points. Bearing in mind the story of the origins of the Harry Potter books, which has now become something of a legend/myth - that Rowling wrote the books in cafes while she was a single mother on benefits - it is perhaps unsurprising that the very rich characters are the most evil. But it is more surprising that Hufflepuffs, the unskilled workers, are the least explored house in the books (Cedric Diggory is their main spokesman, and he is disposed of after four books), and the most obviously low-status.

As I mentioned briefly with Hagrid, the films reflect this class difference fairly reliably - especially the Slytherins. Alan Rickman, Jason Isaacs and Ralph Fiennes all produce cut-glass drawls for Snape, Lucius Malfoy and Voldemort, as does Tom Felton, more or less, for Draco Malfoy. Both Felton and Isaacs are far less 'BBC' in their accents in real life. The G ryffindors, meanwhile, are less identifiable - whilst Richard Harris was fairly 'posh' (excuse the term), Michael Gambon's Dumbledore often sounds slightly Celtic, Professor McGonagall has a well-to-do Scottish accent, the Weasley parents are Midlands at times and RP at others, Ron/Rupert Grint have a non-RP Essex accent, and so on. Harry is fairly RP, and Hermione/Emma Watson is, it's fair to say, amongst the upper classes accent-wise.

This is where the films blur into real life, of course, since Emma Watson is certainly from a well-off family and went to a private school. Perhaps one could draw an analogy between her and the 'Posh Totty' in the film St Trinian's, who run a sex chatline with their Queen's English voices, given how objectified Watson has been by the media, especially tabloids and men's magazines.

This has been a fairly meandering exploration, mainly because it is possible to explore all of these points in more detail, which I inted to do at some point. The complement of class issues one can tease out of the books is by no means complete here. So there is definitely more to follow.

References:
- Andrew Blake, The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter (Verso, 2002)

The Harry Potter books: Part 1

2009-12-08T18:14:00.002Z

I've had an ongoing interest in children's literature for quite a few years now, both as a reader and critic. Parallel to that, I've always adored the Harry Potter books, and got quite into reading and writing fanfiction when I was about 14, a fascination which has never really left me.

More recently, I've discovered that there was a spate of books published about the Harry Potter series in 2002-4 (some of which have been reissued in revised forms since the Deathly Hallows came out), and have been reading a couple of them. They're riveting stuff, full of analysis of power relations, class issues, gender representations, alternative sexualities, the significance of blood, religion, reception and banning, the films etc. In particular, Suman Gupta's Re-reading Harry Potter is wonderful, though I haven't finished it yet.

To call the effect of the Harry Potter books a 'phenomenon' (and I think it's fair to include the films as an effect rathr than a cause of this phenomenon) is, in my view, totally justifiable. Never before had a series of books, let alone those ostensibly for children, been so devoured, banalised, universally known. (The Twilight series will never match this, because its audience is so limited to teenage girls. And, quite frankly, because they're dreadful.) So they deserve special attention, and how 'literary' or 'good' they are, or any other value-judgement-type terms you can think of.

Every time I start thinking about this kind of analysis in any detail, my mind fills up and goes mad. There is so much to say about these books. They are rich with characters, subplots and backstory, and nearly everything is of interest. So I'm going to write a series of entries on these books, looking at broad themes, posing questions, perhaps formulating answers to them. These entries probably won't be in any logical order. But I'm doing a media module as part of my teacher training course, so I think it is going to be extremely helpful to me to start getting my thoughts together, so hopefully I might be able to write about them in the future.

I will also be thinking about a selection of fanfiction texts, because for me and hundreds of thousands of other readers, they have become an integral part of the Harry Potter experience. Ditto the films - but replace 'hundreds of thousands' with 'millions'. I'm excited about this. Enjoy, folks!

The wonderful day of yesterday. Part I

2009-09-13T17:48:00.004+01:00

So. I woke up around ten, with a clonking dry hangover. We were out late in the Jazz Bar on Chambers Street in Edinburgh and I'd had one too many beers to expect to get off lightly.

I wandered around for a while, nibbled on a couple of biscuits, loath to have breakfast because my flatmate Anni and I had decided we'd go out. I had a couple of Nurofen. So far, I thought, this day is going to be a real let-down. Get it together, sort yourself out.

The Jazz Bar was an interesting venue for some interesting stuff. We've found a small gang of friends to rant with, about gender and society and unhealthy relationships. Specifically my unhealthy relationship, for a good twenty minutes. I was feeling pretty bruised, but the wonderful saxophone in the background somehow made the whole thing rather grand. What a spectacular place to have a miniature breakdown, having your emotions washed out by the music.

The big let-down was that I'd left my favourite scarf in the bar. Not deliberately, but because on the moment of our departure it seemed to have disappeared. The night had been fun, but not fantastic enough to justify the purple paisley as a price, so I was worn-out and cross by the time we left. The hangover, I decided, more or less confirmed the slightly sour note the night had taken.

Nonetheless. Eventually Anni got up, and we wandered up the road. I was pale and struggling to hold back nausea, but I had a feeling that grease and sugar might do the trick. On our road there's a decent little cafe that did breakfasts for under a fiver. I was cautious at first, picking at the sausage. But my stomach nudged me, as if to say, Yes, you idiot, this is the solution - why didn't you do this earlier in the day? So I devoured the whole lot down. We flicked through bits of the Saturday Guardian, then walked back to the flat.

We've been having a shaft of good weather in Edinburgh, and the sun was incredibly bright, almost white, as it tends to be in Scotland. Anni commented that I had a bit more colour - and, from my perspective, it wasn't just me - the whole world seemed to be coming out in flushing, saturated hues.

So we went up Arthur's Seat. My body is odd when it recovers from a hangover, endearing and loveable, sleepily content but surprisingly robust. I scampered up that hill quite happily and we sat for a while in the breeze and looked out over the city. There were kids, and dogs, and gentle accents, and everyone was so lively and kind.

The walk back down was easy. I was intending to settle down and try and fix our internet connection when we got back, possibly including a long and involving phone conversation with the customer services people - not that they'd been unhelpful before, but it usually took longer than one would hope for. But to my delight, the connection seemed to have righted itself, thanks to my flatmate resetting the router, and I sat lazily for a while fiddling with emails, aware the whole time of the sun drenching the window frames.

I rang the Jazz Bar reluctantly to enquire about my scarf - reluctantly because I knew they would confirm that it had probably been nicked, that they hadn't found it - and, shock to the system, the man on the other end asked if it was a purpley-blue colour, and then told me, 'Yes, it's here.' So I went up to get it.

(I'm being called away - will finish this tale of joy and surprise later on.)

Adam Bede by George Eliot

2009-06-22T21:43:00.003+01:00

This isn't going to read much like my other book reviews, since George Eliot is so well established as a 'classic' author that only quite personal reflections on the novel can really add anything new.

I first read Adam Bede when I was preparing for my first year at university. It was one of a long list of weighty Victorian novels, and the list also included Bleak House and Middlemarch, as well as The Mill on the Floss and Great Expectations, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. In such star-studded company, Adam Bede didn't exactly stand out from the crowd. Still, it was the first written of the three Eliots on the list, and so the one I read first.

The book revolves around four characters, principally: Adam himself, a fairly obvious cipher for Jesus, since he's a straightforward, self-improving and eloquent carpenter. Then there's Hetty Sorrell, the girl he's loved for years, despite the fact that she's vain and self-centred, to which Adam is blind. Thirdly, we have Arthur Dunnithorne, the squire, who falls quite under Hetty's spell, and manages to seduce her. Finally, there's Dinah Morris, a Methodist preacher, who is plain but forthright and impossibly good-hearted, who is Hetty's cousin.

The drama of the plot doesn't really kick off until about halfway through the book, so one has to plough through an awful lot of description, characterisation and Christian doctrine. This is wonderful if you love Eliot, which I do - and I found the religious stuff particularly inspiring since I lost a relative around the same time - but it is quite dense, so people in search of a light read should stay away. Eliot captures the small-town attitude, quick to judge, sometimes happy to forgive but never to forget, perfectly, as well as - and I think this is a quality of Eliot that is often overlooked - managing to be very witty and amusing.

You can't help but love Adam, since he comes across exactly as a bumbling man in his mid-twenties might in a modern novel: frustrated but affectionate with his mother and brother, susceptible to irrational and largely appearance-based attachments, yet highly moralistic. I don't know how popular Dinah would be, since she is pretty damn well perfect and readers tend not to like these kinds of characters, but I thought she was marvellous, the kind of character that makes you see how much your own personality is wanting of essential kindness.

The most interesting character is probably Arthur, who does not lack this kindness by any means, but surrounds it with rashness and a propensity to care too much what people think of him. There is a particularly deft scene where Arthur nearly confesses to his vicar that he has been playing with Hetty's heart, but at the moment when he is about to unburden himself, the clergyman changes the subject and the opportunity is, for Arthur, lost. This is exactly how conversation works today, and it seems both marvellous and unsurprising that so little has changed over the years.

I was also struck by the fact that Hetty and Arthur's dalliance turns out to have gone much further, in physical terms, than we are led to believe (Eliot, of course, embraces the Victorian delicacy which consists not so much in euphemisms but in complete silence. Bring on the feminist critics.). They tend to meet in a wood, and Eliot is quick to capitalise on the inherent mystery of events that disappear into the trees and reemerge at some point later. If someone you know spends a great chunk of time elsewhere, it is impossible to calculate their movements accurately enough to know what they have been doing the whole time - and, consequently, easy to slip in a little illicit activity.

Rereading Adam Bede, much more slowly than the first time round, makes you able to appreciate how sleepy the first half is, and therefore how great a shock to the system the quick-moving crisis of Hetty's unplanned pregnancy and flight, and subsequent disasters, are. It is a long book, facts is facts: my Penguin classics has fairly small font and still runs to 540-odd pages. But it is a book that rewards patience, as few seem to nowadays. My former tutor edited the Oxford edition once; no doubt he will agree with me. If you like being in for the long haul, there are few better places to go than a Victorian tome, and I will always hold a peculiar affection for Adam Bede.

The End of Alice by A. M. Homes

2009-05-13T20:11:00.006+01:00

(256pp; £7.99; Granta Books, 1997)

If someone had given A. M. Homes the brief -

"Write a short novel exploring at least three forms of sexual activity considered deviant. Be as graphic as you can; break as many taboos as you like. Make sure a good 30% of readers won't be able to finish it."

- then she could hardly have produced a more intense, shocking novel than she has. Ali Smith described it as a flipside to The Great Gatsby, showing the grotesque side of "doomed yearning" that characterises many great American novels. A customer, according to a friend of mine, returned it to the bookshop where I used to work, claiming it made her physically ill. Reading it in the Orchard cafe in Grantchester in the blazing sun of a Sunday morning, surrounded by giggling families, I was gripped by waves of furtive guilt - and thrilled nausea.

The plot has four strands, each dealing with a new and delicate issue.

A male narrator in his sixties reminisces about his seduction, and eventual murder, of a twelve-year-old girl named Alice, who, by his account, was just as instrumental in initiating and perpetuating the relationship as he (plain old paedophilia).

His memory drifts sporadically back to his childhood, when he was abused by his mentally deteriorating mother (incestuous paedophilia).

He has now in prison for twenty-six years, and spends a lot of time imagining a narrative for his correspondent, a nineteen-year-old girl now engrossed in carrying out her own seduction of a pubescent boy, including a pretty disgusting scene where she eats one of his scabs. Her brief missives, and the vivid, detailed conclusions he draws, form the third strand (female paedophilia, rarer and more refined ...!).

The final thread in this sordid, though expertly woven, braid is the details of the narrator's time in prison, including how he has become the plaything of his gay murderer cellmate (homosexual rape, voyeurism). It's like Lolita, with the volume turned up, and probably the most shocking book I have ever read.

Nine times out of ten, the novel I've just described would be a disaster. Luckily, it was in the hands of a dangerous author who can make the unimaginably appalling seem banal, humorous - and attractive. A. M. Homes is an author who understands the fraught, ambivalent relationship we have with our society's taboos, and she capitalises on it. It's a troubling result. As with Lolita, I frequently had to remind myself exactly what my moral standpoint on such events was, because I was being so insistently besieged.

One point about the style before I begin urging you to read this novel. Homes occasionally repeats verbatim a few lines, even a chunk, as the narrator remembers and re-remembers. His memories are already crystallised, instantly accessible, and replaying them is a quick, repeatable process. Is it overly Freudian to draw similarities between this experience, this regular release of mental energy, and the relief gained through masturbation? The narrator is near-impotent during his time in prison, after all. It's a thought I'll leave you with, and now get on with the recommendation ---

This is a book to challenge yourself with, to test yourself, to see how mentally robust you really are. I read it pretty slowly, which is suggestive in itself, but I managed to get through it without vomiting, and without ceasing to be aware that I was reading an extraordinary piece of work. (But maybe avoid the bit with the scab-munching.)

Absence, and chickening out

2009-05-12T11:25:00.003+01:00

In the drafts folder of this blog there is a long and indignant post about Susan Boyle, the 'unlikely' singer who blew away the judges of Britain's Got Talent. I was arguing that people had overreacted to her talent, which is not so rare as many believe, and I was especially annoyed with Clive James, who wrote smugly - and ill-advisedly so - that there were many members of professional opera choruses who were just as good as Boyle but could never hope to be stars. I wanted to add my ha'penny's worth of bile by spitting scorn at him, since Boyle's voice is untrained and therefore nowhere near as strong, reliable and wide-ranging as any professional singer.

In the end, though, I decided the post was too long, and too vitriolic, to actually publish. It is true that people often wax lyrical on subjects they know nothing about - but this is what we call the public consciousness. If people just stuck to what they know, we'd be a nation of closeted specialists, scurrying around in tight gangs and expressing approximately eight opinions a year, the rest of the time restricting ourselves to curious, neutral observation, nodding gravely as singing instructors and musicologists pronounce on a performance that has brought joy to many people, however amateur.

Susan Boyle will never have the voice of a trained opera singer; that is fact. But I think the longer version of the article I have saved simply misses the huge emotional point far more than it makes a new, rational one - so I'm going to censor myself. I like doing this. It makes me feel responsible. How clear-headed and mature I am!

Now I'm off to terrify twenty eleven-year-olds into bewildered submission. I've got to let my anger out somewhere, after all.

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

2009-03-12T09:15:00.005Z

(Film tie-in edition, Phoenix 2008; £7.99; 240pp)

Translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway

I have to admit, my three main reasons for reading this book were: a) the huge popularity of the film, b) my admiration for both Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes, who star in it, and c) the word 'Schlink', which can be pronounced in all sorts of amusing ways and bears a pleasing resemblance to 'slinky'. I wasn't that keen to read it for itself. Books about the Holocaust don't appeal to me: my granny can tell me as much about that as I need to know, and I wasn't keen on meeting a fictional character who carried some weight of responsibility for my great-great-grandmother's death. My mum had also read the first part of it and said the translation was clunky and unnatural, and not bothered to finish it, which for a book so short and a reader so avid is ominous.

But anyway. I picked it up off our table and read it. It's a quick enough read: only 220 pages' (the other 20 pages are filled with rather patronising reading group notes) worth of quite widely-spaced text, with chapters that are only three or four pages long. A couple of hours is more than enough. For those of you who haven't been saturated with the story: fifteen-year-old Michael Berg has a highly sexualised fling with a woman named Hanna, who likes him to read books aloud to her in between snoozing and bathing and shagging. Then one day she abruptly leaves town. Michael goes on to university, then law school, and ends up one day at the trial of several female ex-Nazi guards. Hanna is among them, and he watches silently as she is sentenced.

There is a twist, which I knew before I started reading the book - and which, frankly, isn't that difficult to guess, though of course I knew what I was looking for. In fact, that was the huge problem I found reading this book: because it's quite short and the film has been so well publicised, there wasn't much about the plot I didn't already know. The best parts lay in the bits I wasn't expecting: there's a touching scene where Michael asks his philosopher father to help him solve a moral dilemma, for instance, and I loved the sparsely-drawn but surprisingly memorable governor of the prison where Hanna ends up. I couldn't help agreeing with my mum on the stylistics of the book, but I think there's a bit more to it than bad translation: the prose is abrupt, and in places comes across as emotionally sterile because Schlink doesn't give much away on, for instance, the relationship between Michael and his parents (until the lovely scene with his father), or the abortive friendships he forms at school. Still, I'm inclined to give Schlink the benefit of the doubt and believe that this is part of Michael's personality: by his own admission, he tends to think too much with the head and not enough with the heart, so any story he writes will naturally be analytical, concise and, for want of a better word, very 'German'.

Indeed, you can feel the writer's nationality in the translation (I couldn't help but imagine Hanna speaking with a German accent, which didn't seem right to me) - but unless we want to get into the huge translation debate and argue that it's better to give a text a new, 'British' identity rather than attempting, and inevitably failing, to retain its original 'German' one, I don't think this is necessarily a fault. The book itself is about the generation whose parents served for and collaborated with the Nazis, their shame and guilt, so in this case its German character carries meaning in itself.

In writing this review I've realised that I actually liked the book much more than I either expected to or thought I had while I was reading it. It doesn't pretend to be much more than a novella (although the publishers make some attempt at this pretence with the luxurious spacing and thick paper - it looks much more than 240 pages long), and whilst the moral discussion is rather thinly-disguised as the character's rather than the author's, the plotline is simple and sticks to a small, exquisitely-complicated part of its characters' psyche. Hanna is, quite frankly, a brilliant character: unmistakeably womanly yet curiously childlike, violent, earnest and beautiful. The third section of the book, where she is in prison, was for me its triumph, the most convincing and poignant. This book grows on you, and though I might not wholeheartedly share the ravings of the reviews quoted inside the cover ("Read it ... and read it again"), I would suggest that there are far worse ways to quietly pass a Sunday afternoon than this thoughtful, decidedly un-slinky book.

2009-03-11T09:50:00.003Z

Here's a short story I wrote over half term. As per usual, this is nowhere near close to a final draft. In fact the oxymoron of the 'final draft' is something rather alien to me.

****

Losing One's Temper(ament)

‘You know,’ she says, placing a hand over mine on the table, ‘I always rather liked you.’

I raise an eyebrow. I nearly flinch at how warm her hands are – but my anger bolsters me against such instinctive reactions, and I am able to remain calm.

‘If you liked me so much, why did you go ahead with it?’ I say.

She shrugs. ‘That’s a tricky one.’

This place is a tricky one and all. Café, restaurant, hidey-hole? It has a lot of rooms and a lot of character and a lot of coffee, but all the meetings I’ve had in here have been heartbreakers. This was where Patrick brought me when we needed somewhere neutral, to talk about her.

The waiting staff must think my life consists of nothing more than difficult conversations. I wonder if it is flattering or disgusting to a coffee shop to be used as a tight, table-sized battleground. What do they think, if as they approach a table they can hear quiet, quick, intense voices?

Finally I take my hand out from under hers. She obviously pressed harder than I thought: my own hand is rather red and hot. ‘Could you maybe try and answer it? Because we’ve grown up with this idea of sisterhood, you know, and you say you actually like me, but …’

‘But some things are more important,’ she says coolly.

‘Really? Like Patrick?’

‘No, like what Patrick can give me that I need and that friendship and sisterhood and all that can’t give me.’

‘You mean a hard old shag.’

God, I promised myself I wouldn’t cry or get angry. Not that these restrictions leave me with many places to go, actually, when faced with this bizarre and provoking woman. She keeps fiddling with her nose-ring. Is it infected or is she just nervous? The skin around where the metal goes in looks a bit red. In fact, you could argue she’s a bit the worse for wear all over. Her hair’s going frizzy. In two hours it’ll be a couple of centimetres shorter. Perhaps Patrick’s rubbed her up the wrong way, perhaps that’s why she wanted to meet me properly. Perhaps he’s chafed her a bit on the inside.

‘Not a hard old shag,’ she says, emphasising my words carefully as if they are new words, as if they are words she would never think of applying to this particular situation. ‘But perhaps – perhaps that roughness you can’t get from women.’

This actually makes me smile. (Should I have denied myself this reaction too?) I put my hand back over hers, clenching my fingertips into her wrist. ‘What makes you think that women can’t be rough?’

‘You want to beat me up?’

‘I’ve been sorely tempted. I could easily bash you against a wall.’

‘You think it’s nice for women to behave like that?’ Sometimes it is obvious she’s foreign, though her accent is nigh on perfect.

‘I don’t know. It’s nice to fantasise about behaving like that sometimes.’ But it’s not allowed, it’s not permitted, I think. Male domestic violence is well documented. If a man beats his wife it is slotted into that category with weary ease. It’s a ritual, something we think men think they have to do, and its repeated discovery makes it acceptable, whatever women’s refuges and support groups might say otherwise. We used to have ceremonies for these things. Time was we’d have to wash the knife and hold it up, catch the sunlight with it, wait for a heron to fly over with its blessing, before plunging the knife quite legitimately into a cheating husband’s chest. Then the corpse would be bled, slowly, into the straw bed underneath it, the knife would be cleaned in the reeds, the body would be rolled roughly down a hill and left there while we gathered up our things and moved on.

This is a kind of ceremony too, the meeting-for-coffee, a modern ritual. Get it over with on the Saturday morning to enjoy the rest of the weekend (as if that’s likely while I watch Patrick gather his little heap of belongings into his car and take a deep breath in my empty house).

She leans towards me, her eyes concerned. She doesn’t look as young as I thought, in fact. Her eyes are a bit rough around the edges. ‘We all hate men,’ she said, ‘and when they hit us we are very angry – and yet you say you want to do the same thing. Perhaps we should just let men be men and stop blaming them when they are the same as we are.’

She wouldn’t be saying that if Patrick had hit her, I remark silently .

‘What about poaching then?’ I say. It is taking me too long to react to her movements. She came in towards me and I didn’t lean away, so I can nearly feel her breath, I can certainly hear it, low like her voice.

‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ she says. ‘I usually poach men, not often women.’

‘Well, aren’t we talking about poaching men? Is that right, poaching?’

‘No, of course not. But it’s not as bad as poaching women.’

She seems at pains to convince me of something, something spectral in her words that is expected to help. What is the meaning of these lesbian hints? Is she finding a kind of logic in the idea that if she also fancies women I will like her?

‘Do you mean poaching women from men, or from other women?’ I ask. Let’s get it clear what we really are talking about.

She smiles. She has very big teeth, they’re filling the whole of her mouth so her smile is just an expanse of good clean white. ‘Either is possible,’ she says.

‘So why poach Patrick and not me?’ I say. I need more caffeine. I need to feel like I’m the hero of this story. Perhaps I should have let myself get angry. Too much of this conversation has been about her, her ideas. I’m the wronged one. I thought I might be able to impress on her the seriousness of the heartbreak she has caused me. Patrick is not a bad guy, but before certain kinds of pressures he is helpless, and she happened to be one of them. She’s like the wild wind careering in from the south, the exotic blast that tugs at his groin. What on earth has prompted her to start talking about seducing women, seducing me? Or was it me who brought that up?

‘Well,’ she says, ‘partly laziness. To poach you I’d first have to awaken feelings in you that you didn’t know were there, and that takes time because people are very bad at knowing themselves and recognising their own feelings.’

‘That’s fair enough,’ I say, ‘because I’m pretty sure there are no such feelings in me and I would be very surprised to discover any. This may sound a little odd to someone who thinks as you do, but I’m not the slightest bit attracted to you.’

She smiles again. Her eyes narrow a lot when she smiles, in a warm sympathetic sort of way, as if she understands that I cannot help being laughable and wants me to know that she forgives me for it.

‘You think you’re being very honest,’ she says, ‘but really it’s only conceit. You want to wrong-foot me by claiming you have a lot of self-knowledge.’ She puts the emphasis on the wrong rather than the foot. Somehow it only makes the word mean more strongly. Just the sound of her pronunciation has, in fact, wrong-footed me.

‘No,’ I say. ‘Permit me to be capable of recognising my own attractions and feelings, and permit me to enjoy total immunity to you.’

My hand is still on her wrist, although my fingers have long since relaxed; clasping someone like that becomes tiring after not very long. It is a signal that she will wilfully misread, I expect, so I remove the hand and put it under the table in my lap. How odd this has all turned out to be. So she does not really care much about Patrick after all. I’m still not convinced she cares about me either.

As I remove my hand she looks into my eyes, then looks away as if what she has seen there is not enough to cause her any concern. Then she unzips her top, leans forward to get her arms out the sleeves, and drops it on the floor beside her chair. Her shoulders are, like mine, quite broad, quite rounded. Her bra straps are emerald green and intermittently visible where the thicker strap of her vest does not cover them. I know what lies an inch or two further in, anyway. I’ve seen it.

Her email was the same as this conversation has been. I know what you must be feeling and I don’t want it to stay that way. Please meet me for coffee and I will try to explain. She was its protagonist, except for a brief foray into the imperative voice. The problem with text messaging and email is that we no longer have any choice whether or not we communicate with them. If we receive an email from someone we will read it. We can’t slam the door in an email’s face. The sight of an email does not make us physically sick, as the sight of her body lying naked on my sofa did. It takes a conviction that outweighs curiosity – and not many people, surely, possess that – to delete an email or a text without reading it. In fact sometimes it is physically impossible, since to know the sender of a text message you must read the message to deduce who they are, and then it is too late.

When I read the her message last week, I made the mistake of glancing out of the window at the sky. The sun had just set, and quite suddenly there were stripes of pale pink spreading across the space behind the messy dark outlines of the trees whose detail was dissolving. One taller tree was brushed along its smooth trunk with light – or, not light exactly, but the privilege of not being in shadow like the rest of the garden – and at that moment in my mind there was no doubt that it was as alive as I was.

And I was all listening-to-Schubert, and watching-the-sunset, and getting-slightly-drunk-on-very-nice-red-wine, and I was probably crying, and I just thought, bugger it, yes I will meet her, anything to sort out this adulterous mess, so I replied a bit daftly, All right then.

I want to explain this to her now, that our meeting is an accident, that I don’t know what I’m doing here and whatever she’d hoped to achieve is not being achieved, and that instead I’m getting a slow, calm discomfort, as if whole chunks of my body are itching all at once and there’s no particular place I can scratch that will make any difference whatsoever.

‘What do you want from me exactly? I thought you wanted to apologise,’ I say.

‘No, not apologise. I wanted to make it better, but not that way.’

‘By trying to persuade me I might be gay? Oh sure, miles better, thanks a lot, I’m all set now. Look, if you’re not going to apologise I don’t think this discussion can really get off the ground. I’m going to go.’

I stand up. She makes no move to prevent me, but slides a pen out of her pocket and grabs a napkin out of the pot with the cutlery and ketchup sachets. She writes a number on it. ‘Here’s my home number. You can call me if you like. Take care.’ Then she grabs her bag and her top and takes a few steps away from the table. ‘I’ll save you the embarrassment of having to decide whether to take it in front of me. Ciao.’ Then she’s gone.

Our waitress comes with the bill hastily. She thinks we were going to sneak out without paying. And that bitch has left me to pay for it all.

I shove a tenner on the little plate, then look at the napkin with the number on it. I pick it up and crumple it slowly while I wait for her to get my change, wanting the rejection to be complete, properly done, emphatic and deliberate. I roll the ball around in my hand, dampening it with sweat.

Then I put my bag down and use both hands to spread it out on the table. The number is still easily readable.

The waitress comes back with three pounds, and I put one of them on my saucer. The napkin and the other two quid go in my pocket.

It occurs to me that I am now feeling exactly how she intended me to feel. No doubt I have been much easier to poach than Patrick. I have a sudden vision of her sprawled happily in the Ritz, ordering two poached eggs, naming one Patrick and one Frances, then crushing them together into her toast with her fork.

I look at the waitress a bit suspiciously, but suspicious of myself, as if suddenly I might be attracted to every single woman who crosses my path.

Perhaps all honesty really is just conceit. Watch out, I think, for the people who claim to be candid.

Ali Smith's genius

2009-03-06T11:14:00.003Z

Well, it's been an awfully long time since I wrote anything here, and I've been reading rather a lot. I'll put a full list up later on, perhaps, but mainly I've been on an Ali Smith binge - I read Girl Meets Boy, Free Love, Like and Hotel World, and I'm going to read Other Stories and Other Stories. I also heard her reading an abridged version of her story 'The First Person' on Radio 4 over half term, and I have to say I was blown away. Her voice is so warm, she reads quickly and lightly, always a tinge of wry humour - you know that no one else could have written those words. I was taken especially by the form of Hotel World - much like The Accidental, it's episodic, divided into chapters and using several different points of view. The last chapter is one long sentence, like the 'Penelope' section of Ulysses, which frankly is a bugger to read but is hard to beat if you're going for the full realisation of stream-of-consciousness writing. Hotel World, more than The Accidental or Girl Meets Boy (both of which alternate points of view), seemed like a cross between short stories and a novel: it gives you various characters around a hotel, meeting each other, remembering the same events, although the narrative does move forward and doesn't simply repeat the story of the previous chapter. Each character has a stylised consciousness - one is even drawn in the third person, which is rare in Smith's novels - and particular, obsessive concerns.

Smith has a particularly good ear for the way in which the brain shortens language, cuts off utterances without bothering or needing to finish them, and the way in which people actually speak - for instance, writing "Fuck sake" instead of "Fuck's sake" or "For fuck's sake", to imitate how this phrase actually manifests itself. She combines this - in 'The First Person', for instance - with playful, almost insanely witty banter: one character is allowed a spiel on how "You're not the first person to ..." Characters in Smith allow each other to talk, are unembarrassed about straying into melodrama or theatricals; the conversations lift themselves above reality whilst echoing it and convincing you at every turn. A girl falling down the lift shaft of a dumb waiter in a hotel? Highly improbable. The characters around her existing and reacting in their own particular words. Unquestionable, after Smith's crafting. She never pretends to be thorough. Her writing is whimsical, it frolics, it meanders. It overjoys and it hurts and it batters you from head to toe with her personality. I want to meet her, I want to have a pint and giggle with her. Could you say that about the flinty, though brilliant, Ian McEwan? Look back at the passage I quoted at some length from Girl Meets Boy, and tell me that isn't the perfectest picture of the intense, chanting, painful joy of falling in love.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid

2008-12-28T19:51:00.003Z

(Penguin, 209pp, £7.99)

This novella has been atop our bestseller lists at the bookshop for some time now, so I thought I'd better give it a try. It was shortlisted, along with several other short novels such as On Chesil Beach and Mister Pip (more on the latter later), for last year's Man Booker, and shares with those two at least the frustrating quality of being better by a long way than the novel that won, Anne Enright's The Gathering, which I found dreary and shapeless.

The book opens with a lively address to a reader who is gradually characterised as an American man in a suit, supposedly engaged in conversation with Changez, a Pakistani national educated at Princeton and eventually spat out by a wealthy American business consultancy firm. The setting is Lahore, and each chapter generally begins with Changez's comments on the changing scene around them as dusk falls, and the food to which he is introducing his new acquaintance; it then continues with his narrative of the past. Hamid has done well with his form-content relationship, and limited the amount of time to be narrated to about a year, limited further to Changez's career, an ongoing romantic saga with a troubled Princeton friend, Erica, and his changing attitudes to Western culture. Indeed, many of the review quotations on the back of my paperback edition comment on how "spare", "taut" and "sharp" the book is: there are no swathes of description or attempts at anything other than what seems to be an earnest relation of his activities. The prose is readable, entertaining and (surprisingly at times) sympathetic: I was taken especially by this passage (at page 179):

If you have ever, sir, been through the breakup of a romantic relationship that involved great love, you will perhaps understand what I experienced. There is in such situations usually a moment of passion during which the unthinkable is said; this is followed by a sense of euphoria at finally being liberated; then comes the inveitable period of doubt, the desperate and doomed backpedaling of regret; and only later, once emotions have receded, is one able to view with equanimity the journey through which one has passed.

This seems beautifully unembellished and accurate, and yet carries at the same time an air of dismissal, perhaps because of the semi-colons and the slight pomposity of the language. Perhaps the speaker is belittling his own emotional journey compared to the ideological overhaul he has experienced simultaneously?

The tone of the book builds beautifully to the end, but it is in fact the end that I found almost unbearably frustrating. I don't often think that books ought to be longer, but in this case I think another 50 pages would have done this one good. The last chapter reveals so much in such a short time, suddenly condensing the passage of a few months, and only in the last page revealing the triumphant twist, that I was unable to reconcile the ominousness of the previous chapters with this ending: I was expecting something subtler and, if I'm honest, more carefully handled. The section after Changez's return to Lahore seemed bunged in, if you like, and tacked on, less precise in its detail and apparently in a rush to reach the end. This is a shame since the earlier scenes, and especially the characters of Wainright, Changez's boss, and Erica, forever in love with a sweetheart who died very young, are vivid and convincing. I found far more satisfaction in the end of Erica's story than that of Changez (and of the whole book), which meant that I came away less happy than I have from far worse books with better endings. Read it, is my conclusion, but take your time getting to the end and enjoy what comes before.

ABSTINENCE?!?

2008-12-24T06:49:00.002Z

Just a quick one this time - and sorry for being so absent. Hopefully things will improve after Christmas - going back to the subject of Twilight. I was told by someone at work that Meyer is approaching her plotlines 'from an abstinence point of view'. That is, the idea of the honourable vampire who won't drink the blood of another human is a manifesto for sexual abstinence.

It is certainly true that Edward and Isabella, despite being close to adulthood, don't have sex or even come close to it (although I don't know about subsequent books); they never discuss it or suggest it, although Edward suggests at one point that his feelings for Isabella are the same as any other man's - by which I presume he means sexual, judging by the context. The fact that he longs for her blood more than any other is shown as a cause of his love for her, not parallel, so the metaphoric link between sex and vampiric violence is arguably present in Meyer's mind as well as more generally in folklore.

Is this really a responsible thing to be suggesting to our teenagers? I sell people this book, and I'm crying a little inside as I do it.

L&R

2008-12-09T18:41:00.003Z

You were certainly honest when you said
that you can't dance. Getting in from the pub
with a head like honey, my brain
melting into my smile,

I find you, in the front room, a dark upright eel
against the streetlights outside -
how you would be, I suppose,
if I'd dropped a pill not a pint -
two-tone orange and charcoal grey -

and dancing, like a serene fool
belonging finally in your own noise, to a song
on my iPod - which I can hear, the beat only,
like a muffled music from another world -

and have I leapt into primitive eyes,
before we tried to find God in ourselves,
where a curious flex of protons and power
shows us
what will be and must be, ourselves at our most glorious? -

that is, me at my most drunk.

******

The above is a poem I found from early September. I changed the lineation and phrasing a bit, and it still needs a good deal of work, but I thought I'd bung it up here anyway. Perhaps if I edit it I'll record the editing process as it evolves.

L&R.

The Accidental by Ali Smith

2008-12-09T18:18:00.003Z

(306pp, Penguin, £7.99)

The blurb on the back of this book, which claims that the novel 'explores the nature of truth, the role of fate and the power of storytelling,' does not do The Accidental justice. If I were to write a replacement blurb, I would start with the intensive, meditative portrayal of consciousness, the alienation of the everyday, the defamiliarisation of emotion and the comic polyphony of twenty-first century life.

Quite simply, this is a marvellous book (not surprising that it won the Whitbread Novel Award in 2005 and was shortlisted for both the Man Booker in 2005 and the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2006). It is divided into three sections: beginning, middle and end, and further into five chapters in each section, told from the point of view of each main character. There's Astrid, the 12-year-old girl obsessed with the archiving of film footage and the discovery of new word and phrases; Magnus, her 16-year-old brother struggling with guilt over his partial responsibility for a schoolgirl's suicide as well as his own sexual awakening; Michael Smart, their stepfather, an English lecturer weaving a tangled web of lechery and infidelity in his search for a kind of linguistic supreme; Eve, the children's mother, trying to hold things together; and Amber, the stranger who arrives at their holiday home in Norfolk one day, and immediately entrances the whole family.

The plot of the novel is for me far less significant than its stylistic feel. Smith is funny, clever and has a poetic imagination matched even by few poets. I was entranced by this passage:

She had entered him like he was water. Like he was a dictionary and she was a word he hadn't known was in him. Or she had entered him more simply, like he was a door and she opened him, leaving him standing ajar as she walked straight in.

Smith is as sharply observant as a comedian, finding the ridiculous in life, silly phrases, individual obsessions. Her book oozes with the authenticity of life in 2003 even while she mocks the idea of the authentic through Eve's authorial pursuits, which involve recreating and manipulating the lives of 'Genuine' figures from the past. She is explicit in her narrations of sex, brutally, sometimes, and in some ways these scenes seem to mark the lack of sentimentality that characterises the whole novel. The figure of Amber, who is shocking at first for no other reason than her lack of conventional civility, becomes a kind of antithesis of every artificial rule we as a society have laid down for ourselves, and because of this she is powerfully attractive to the whole Smart family.

This is the kind of book that stays with you for a long time. My one trouble with it was its density: it is a novel to be read slowly, deliberately, like Virginia Woolf or Proust, like any stream-of-consciousness, but it is funnier and livelier, irreverent, rich with allusion and insistently peculiar. I wondered at first if either Astrid, Magnus or both were mentally ill - autistic possibly. They aren't, but I suspect this is what it is to see into someone else's consciousness: destabilising and weird to realise how much of what we think is translated into what is considered 'normal' so that we are not rejected by society. Smith understands this completely, and when I give the borrowed copy of The Accidental back to its rightful owner I'm going to buy my own and scribble all over it - which must be the sign of a brilliant read.

L&R.

A quick note ...

2008-12-04T07:48:00.002Z

So I reread Pride and Prejudice, but I hope you'll forgive me for not writing a review of that. I'm currently on Ali Smith's The Accidental, so I'll cover that one when I finish it.
L&R.

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

2008-12-02T14:34:00.004Z

(343pp, HarperCollins, £7.99)

Note above the more formal presentation of the review, and the ditching of the out-of-10 mark. Partly I've been inspired by this reflective and clever book, which narrates Nafisi's private 'book club' for her most intelligent, free-thinking students in Tehran. The book is divided into four sections: 'Lolita', 'Gatsby', 'James' and 'Austen' (the latter two sections deal mainly with Washington Square and Daisy Miller, and Pride and Prejudice); each tells of the whirling events of the political turmoil in Iran, including the revolution and the transformation into the Islamic Republic of Iran, as well as the war with Iraq from 1980 (apologies if these facts are wrong, I'm working from memory here), interlaced with their discussions of the works of English and American literature they read. Nafisi shows cleverly how the ideas in even Jane Austen's works relate profoundly to the constantly scrutinised, highly moralistic society by which Nafisi and her students are bound. I particularly liked these paragraphs on Pride and Prejudice:

There is seldom a physical description of a character or scene in Pride and Prejudice and yet we feel that we have seen each of these characters and their intimate worlds; we feel we know them, and sense their surroundings. We can see Elizabeth's reaction to Darcy's denunciation of her beauty, Mrs Bennet chattering at the dinner table or Elizabeth and Darcy walking in and out of the shadows of the Pemberley estate. The amazing this is that all of this is created mainly through tone - different tones of voice, words that become haughty and naughty, soft, harsh, coaxing, insinuating, insensible, vain.
The sense of touch that is missing from Austen's novels is replaced by a sense of tension, an erotic texture of sounds and silences. She manages to create a feeling of longing by setting characters who want each other at odds. Elizabeth and Darcy are placed near each other in several scenes, but in public places where they cannot communicate privately. Austen creates a great deal of frustrated tension by putting them in the same room yet out of reach. The tension is deepened by the fact that while everyone expects Jane and Bingley to be in love, the exact reverse is expected of Elizabeth and Darcy.

Nafisi is clearly very intelligent, but these moments of interpretation are not over the average reader's head - that is, I shouldn't think you need an English degree to understand them. What you do ideally need, though, is a working knowledge of the works she writes about - and in this sense my judgement of the book was nicely balanced, since I have read Lolita and Pride and Prejudice but not The Great Gatsby (I know, shocking) or either James novel. Perhaps not surprisingly, I enjoyed the two middle sections, about Gatsby and James, far less than the other two, and so I would strongly suggest reading the novels before embarking on this book; that way you won't have to contend with unfamiliar political events as well as unfamiliar plotlines embedded in plotlines. Perhaps because I'm also not old enough to remember many of the events she describes, I did get confused, and I also got the names of Nafisi's students muddled because of the unfamiliarity of Iranian names (so many of them begin with M!). I should also warn that it is a slow-ish read: the text is fairly dense, laden with facts. I actually enjoyed her approach to the narration of the political events, during which she describes horrors perpetrated by the Iranian authorities with minimal comment or judgement, which certainly saves us from the repetition of her shock, as this would doubtless become tedious. However, you do have to concentrate on what you are reading, try and remember the various qualities of each character (there are quite a few, some of whom crop up so infrequently that you've all but forgotten about them), and be willing to use your brain (something I can't say for Twilight!). It is fairly clear that Nafisi is not a native English speaker: her prose, though perfectly grammatical and lucid, is sometimes slightly awkward, and she lacks the subtle understanding of natural English rhythms which you don't even notice until you are faced with their absence. Of course this is by no means her fault, but it does make the book slightly more tiring to read. If you have the energy to devote to it, though, you'll find yourself entertained, enlightened and, as I discovered slightly to my surprise, elated by this thoughtful narrative.

******

I'm aware that the above review wasn't very long; this is mainly because I was prompted by the book to reread Pride and Prejudice. I have read about half of it today, and, having not read it for some years, was reminded of her brilliance in even the smallest point. I wanted to illustrate this using the shortest of quotations from towards the end of Chapter 15, when Mr Collins is a guest at Mrs Philips's little party: "Mr Collins repeated his apologies in quitting the room, and was assured with unwearying civility that they were perfectly needless."

I want to narrow in on the phrase "unwearying civility". It seems to me that Austen inserts the adjective "unwearying" because she wants to draw our attention to how quickly Mrs Philips's civility could weary, even if it doesn't (mainly because she is so flattered by Collins's admiration and attentions that she forgives him his pomposity) - and suggests in the process how quickly any normal person's civility would quickly weary under such assault from Mr Collins. Isn't that brilliant?

L&R.

Special powers ...?

2008-12-01T08:49:00.003Z

If you had a super-power, what would it be?

I think mine would be to remember, word for word, everything that was ever said to me, all the films I've ever watched, everything I've ever read. (It certainly would have helped during Finals!). Either that or to fly. Or to make whoever I chose fall in love with me and save the pointless heartache. Although I think the latter would probably cause more problems than it would solve. As would being able to remember everything verbatim, I suppose - my head would end up stupidly cluttered.

Let's hear from you, folks - what would your power be, and what would be the amazing pros and cons?

L&R.

Twilight by Stephanie Meyer

2008-11-30T15:45:00.004Z

This is another fairly quick read, which I chose because I may well go and see the film and I don't want to repeat what happened with The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (where I saw the film before reading the book). I was also hooked, in a giggly way, by a line on the back which described the book as "the thrilling tale of a vampire romance set in high school", which is pretty irresistible. But the actual book was so entrenched in teenage and romance cliches that it never managed to explore what for me was the most interesting part of the story (more on that later).

So, there's a suspiciously beautiful girl (tick), Isabella Swan (interesting name: tick), who even more suspiciously doesn't seem to realise how beautiful she is (tick). Her parents are separated (daughter of a broken home: tick), and she suddenly moves to live with her father in Washington state (emotional and physical upheaval: tick). All the boys at her school immediately fall in love with her and fight over her, but she's intrigued by this uncommonly handsome family, the Cullens, especially the boy Edward Cullen who seems to really hate her. Except of course he doesn't hate her - he's a vampire with super-human powers of strength and speed, who only appears to hate her because he's so overwhelmed by his attraction to her, and, more worryingly, to drinking her blood. Isabella works this all out pretty quickly, but doesn't seem hugely peturbed by the revelation that the supernatural is very much alive and kicking - and we never find out why this doesn't faze her at all, why she accepts happily enough that he's a vampire and so are the rest of his family. (The vampire equivalent of vegetarians, of course, meaning they have given up on human blood to live off animals in an attempt to save their own souls.)

Here the story could get interesting. Edward has never felt such a strong attraction to anyone before, and their early encounters show promising hints of both his physical coldness and his difficulty controlling his appetite. But he deals with this problem fairly easily, so for a large part of the story there isn't actually any real conflict. Only when they run into some less moralistic vampires, and Isabella becomes their prey, does the tension mount - but even then, I didn't find the action as gripping as I could, partly because it was all so very predictable, with one mildly eyebrow-raising twist. Also - and this is a big problem with the book for me - Isabella got on my nerves, a lot. She can't play sports, she can't even run without falling over, she isn't musical, she's not particularly clever. She's also not particularly nice to her father, mother or her friends, reserving all her spark for Edward. In fact her only distinguishing feature seems to be her beauty and her sense of humour, which - I suspect, like Meyer's - doesn't stretch beyond the odd sarky remark. Such, perhaps, is the American way.

Edward, on the other hand, is so gorgeous and clever and talented and able to run/play sports/ save Isabella from all her troubles/play the piano like a virtuoso that he too got annoying. His "perfectly muscled chest" seemed to crop up a bit too much, without any real exploration of the sexual attraction that Isabella clearly feels, except with romance-laden words like "longing". We don't see enough of his flaws, and in this context I just don't think being a vampire counts as enough of a flaw. Both characters spoke like characters from a bad nineteenth-century novel half the time, always professing how bloody much they love each other, Edward being mildly amused at her other suitors, said suitors being a bit pathetic and not showing any balls ... Essentially, I rather felt that, given a course in literacy and a stack of Mills and Boon, a monkey could have written this book. It is readable, fair enough, and cinematically-written, so it'll probably translate quite well onto the big screen, but I really can't see why this series has become such a bestseller, and rather regret spending my £6.99 on it. Shame.

4/10

Books

2008-11-24T10:20:00.002Z

One thing I thought I might do with this blog is write a review of every book I read (as is probably evident from the entry below). I'm just going to shove a list of books I've read recently on here without reviews - if anyone else has read them then get in touch and tell me what you thought - I love arguing about books!

Saturday by Ian McEwan
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo
Homer's Odyssey by Simon Armitage
'The Laying on of Hands,' 'The Clothes They Stood Up In' and 'Father! Father! Burning Bright' by Alan Bennett
Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller
'The Yellow Wallpaper' by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

There are more and the list above isn't chronological, but I can't really remember all of them. I'll add some more books as I remember them. Currently I'm reading Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi.

Also, has anyone else ever seen Stephen Sondheim's musical Into the Woods?

L&R.

The Black Jewels Trilogy by Anne Bishop

2008-11-23T13:49:00.008Z

THE BLACK JEWELS TRILOGY by Anne Bishop

5.5/10

I read this 1200-page tome relatively quickly, on the recommendation of a friend. It's a fantasy series concentrating largely on the activity of magical humanoids, with various other races making appearances along the way. Characters move between the lands on threads of magic which interweave like roads, and you never see how the non-magic folk, the 'landens', actually live or do anything. Those with magic are called the Blood, and the most powerful possess magical Jewels, of varying colours depending on the strength (Black is the strongest). Anne Bishop has added a strong matriarchal flavour to this: each realm has a Queen, who is served by a circle of males and females, which means that ultimately females are more powerful than males. However, centuries of bitchy in-fighting and power-bloated females means that the Blood have been corrupted, and now the males who have been unfairly subjugated by these villains await the arrival of 'Witch', the 'dream made flesh'. She appears very near the beginning of the first book (which rather diminishes their apparent wait), and is a small, blonde, blue-eyed girl called Jaenelle, who turns out to have phenomenal powers and eventually purges the Blood of its evil taint (which means a mass slaughter, essentially).

One problem Bishop seems to have with this matriarchal premise is that she still portrays many of her female characters as healers and comforters, and almost all male characters as naturally violent, with filthy tempers. This means that most of the magical strength in the books comes from a trio of male characters, two of whom wear Black Jewels: Saeten, the High Lord of Hell; his son Daemon Sadi, the 'Sadist' and seducer of the series; and his other son Lucivar, an expert Eyrien (i.e. winged) warrior, who wears the second most powerful Jewel. I fell instantly in love with Daemon, the pleasure-slave turned Consort of Jaenelle, whose seductive power is everywhere emphasised. I especially liked the mix of feminine and masculine Bishop uses to create a character attractive to both men and women (there are odd prickly hints of an incestuous attractive between Lucivar and Daemon). Lucivar is pretty attractive too, although I couldn't help seeing him as a second-best to Daemon (the latter is characterised as a mirror of his father, whereas Lucivar often seems to have an ill-defined role), and indeed Bishop marries him off to a woman we've never met somewhere between the second and third books (I think), which is emotionally rather a blow for the reader - or at least this reader.

Since the book is dominated by these three, there isn't enough room for the other characters, of which there are A LOT. I found myself horribly confused between many of the minor characters, whose names were often very similar (there's a Lucivar, a Luthvian, a Ladvarian; a Titian and a Tersa, both old ladies; a Hekatah and a Hepsabah; a Karla, a Kartane, a Kaelas, and so on). There isn't a map included, either, so in between the various trips to the 'abyss' (the psychic location of magical power) and the 'Twisted Kingdom' (a physical imaging of madness), it's hard to imagine the physical existence of these places, and Bishop isn't giving much away. I found that there wasn't enough background information on the theory of Craft, the discipline of magic, or the interaction between the caste hierarchy of the realms and which level of Jewel you are allowed to wear. There are shops and shopping and occasionally money, but no real sense of where all these things come from - with the result that the trilogy ended up being rather limited and repetitive. Jaenelle's power is so much greater than that of her enemies, especially when bolstered by Saetan, Daemon and Lucivar, that you never once imagine she could possibly lose the battle against those lesser Queens who want to make her a puppet of their will, and the third book especially is a series of vague attempts at infiltrating this populous and absurdly powerful cluster of heroines and heroes, with predictably little success.

Stylistically, Bishop's prose is readable (apart from the eye-stumbles over all the near-identical names), but similarly limited: she endlessly describes Jaenelle's voice as 'midnight', which stops being neat after the eight-hundredth time. The characters always seem aghast to learn anything of how powerful she is - I wanted to scream at them, 'Haven't you learned to expect the unexpected??' - and always revert to a whispered 'Mother Night' to express surprise. The humour of the interacting characters becomes rather tedious because we're rarely allowed to see enough of the minor characters to warm to them.

I'm afraid the above has turned into a bit of a rant about this series' flaws, but that's mainly because it could have been so good, and ended up so disappointing. The first book is by far the best, with the most varied action and the least tedious repetition about the damages of rape and child abuse, which the other books obsess about (Jaenelle is raped at the end of the first book). One thing I did like is the unashamed inclusion of eroticism, and there's a nice little twist where we realise that Daemon, who has never been physically aroused by a woman until Jaenelle, must in fact be a virgin. If Bishop had been more restrained with the characters and worked on the plotting and the physical existence of her imaginative world, and let the reader see more of what is clearly a political as well as creative mind, then perhaps I wouldn't have been struggling by the end, and I'd be giving the trilogy more than 5.5/10. Read for the ideas rather than their actual crystallisation.

L&R

2008-11-19T17:38:00.003Z

Today I went on a quick trip to London to see the Annie Leibovitz exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, which was marvellous. Lots of pictures of Susan Sontag, with the beauty that comes with intimacy. I was nearly seduced at the shop by Sontag's book about photography, but in the end bought a couple of postcards not from the exhibition. I wish I could have found a postcard of this Leibowitz picture, however, taken in 1994, of Johnny Depp and Kate Moss. I managed to find it on the internet - there are a couple of pictures of her in the nineties with boyfriends, often naked or topless, and this one is just beautiful. It manages to be somehow posed and natural - she's doing her model thing, with that coy look at the camera, but she looks pretty relaxed, as if they're mucking around on a Sunday morning when he's just come back from picking up the papers to find her waiting for him. Or something like that. I'll try and locate the other picture of Moss. She's a complete chameleon in front of a camera, although I don't much like her collaboration with Topshop or her new liking for interviews - she's revealed herself as essentially quite shallow, or at least is adopting that kind of persona to appeal to people who read Glamour and Now! rather than, say, Vogue. More on her later.

Love and respect.

AARGH

2008-11-18T18:34:00.003Z

As if to add to the below 'Dilemma', I now have an EMAIL from a member of datingdirect.com, with the subject 'sorry'. I can't read this email without paying. I've no idea what it might say - I winked at her, so she might be jumping the gun and offering a polite rejection or, since she's Dutch, may be apologising that she doesn't speak English.

I don't want you all to think that this dating website is suddenly the NUMBER ONE BIG ISSUE in my life. But it is pretty damn important. Help!

And along the same lines ...

2008-11-18T18:10:00.000Z

Today I was at a school in Cambridgeshire again, observing English lessons. At the end of a Year 8 class, we were standing waiting to leave, when a boy asked, 'Are you a boy or a girl?' I was wearing trousers, boots with a slight heel and a rollneck, and I have short hair and am not tremendously big-breasted, so I suppose it's not a totally implausible mistake to make. At any rate, I don't think he was asking it to be rude - as far as I could tell - but seemed genuinely curious. (Actually, it may be that race has something to do with it: he was of Oriental origin, and I spent a month in China last year being stared at by passers-by who couldn't tell whether I was male or female. I think it's along the same lines as Westerners' difficulty, every so often, of mistaking one Chinese person for another, and our inability to pick up on the distinguishing marks of faces that are built differently. I realise 'our' should be in inverted commas: let's not start creating artificial commuities where none exists.)

So, back to the curious boy. I told him I was a girl in a curiously neutral voice, and explained briefly that some girls have short hair. I can't say I was particularly insulted. I'd much rather be the guinea-pig for these kinds of enquiries and set the occasional child on the path to realising that not every female has to be pretty than be affronted and treat the question as rude, which I honestly don't think it is. Perhaps a boy might be insulted at being asked this, but surely that simply proves that he's latently, and however unconsciously, a misogynist?

*****

A Dilemma:

I've been browsing through a dating website called datingdirect.com, looking for women. It's really not easy to find women that like women unless you're willing to get into the whole 'scene' and go clubbing, although luckily I've found a group in Cambridge who are rather nice. Anyway, the free membership extends to creating a profile, looking at other people's and 'winking' at them to let them know you approve. To actually contact any of them, you have to pay, the cheapest offer being just under £60 for six months. I'm 21, and that's a lot of money. But, as I'm sure is their intention, I'm being slowly tempted into spending it by the odd wink that comes my way, a couple by some really seriously attractive women. Is it worth it? Is there any chance I'd actually meet someone I really liked? Would the money be better spent on other things?

If anyone has a point of view on this - or, even better, can offer anecdotal reasoning - then please do let me know!

Love and respect.

Kids and blindness

2008-11-17T22:27:00.001Z

I've been visiting a few schools in the Cambridgeshire area recently to observe lessons. I want to be a teacher and actually being in the classroom is really good fun. However, I still can't believe how many of the kids laughed or made comments about my hair, often to the effect of 'She's a man' or similar. Often these kids were boys with long hair. I really wanted to ask them calmly, 'Haven't you ever seen a woman with short hair? You ought to get out more,' but I guess it's no different to how frequently adults tend to slate people's appearance (often for being so mainstream rather than 'out there', in fact). I was also quite taken aback with what was essentially a form of bigotry amongst these kids, but I suppose you learn how flimsy your prejudices are one step at a time. I certainly have been, so blaming the children would be a bit hypocritical.

Has anyone ever found any fantasy literature with significant homosexual content? I'm not the widest ever reader of decent (non-erotic) fantasy, and I assume it must exist somewhere, but I'm currently trying to write something along these lines, about a made-up society that criminalises homosexuality and executes for it - and how it flourishes in a military school for girls, where all sexual stereotypes are stripped away and the body becomes simply a tool for work and violence, unsexed, streamlined. Of course it's the nature of society to recuperate these challenges to sexual values, and indeed some of the warriors who emerge from the school quickly become mistresses of the males in power - but what about the ones who find ways for their feelings to become acceptable? What if Twelfth Night meets the Taleban? What if, under the blind eyes of the law, the line between female and male can blur?

I'm getting a bit carried away with blurby hooks. But still. I think there are still stories to be told - or perhaps retold - to make people sit up and think. And that's why I'm in the business.

On a rainy Sunday morning

2008-11-16T09:31:00.000Z

'All change, please.' If we're talking about what's British and what isn't, this phrase will be familiar to anyone who's travelled on the Tube. What a polite way of saying, 'Right, everybody off this train!' I read over the summer Kate Fox's book Watching the English, a book about English (rather than British) behavioural patterns, especially as related to the class system. Of course she included a section on the English obsession with manners, and it's true that rude people are still one of the biggest sources of everyday fury for many of us, far more than, say, parters who cheat or dictators who commit genocide. I work in a bookshop, which I love most of the time, but occasionally you get people who refuse to believe that the book they want is out of print, or won't accept that their order (placed yesterday) hasn't yet arrived. One man threw a complete fit after the till computer didn't recogise a 3 for 2 offer and the sale had to be put through again. He demanded vouchers and a large discount from our floor manager, who refused politely, upon which he asked for the details of our Head Office to make a formal complaint. It seemed like he was really going to do it, too. This story was told over and over again in the staff room for the rest of the day - no one could believe his nerve, especially since the girl who had served him was quite new and had made a simple mistake, which was explained to him. There is no excuse for rudeness. By all means get a little wearily exasperated - we get frustrated with ourselves sometimes if we slip up - but, to be quite honest, a bad customer is more likely to receive lacklustre customer service than someone who is polite, recognises that staff are only human and our search engines are imperfect, and who is philosophical if we conclude that we can't get hold of a book. We have a statistics area on our computer called 'Sales/Customer Performance', which suggests a little comically that we expect the customers to perform as well as the sales team. This isn't so far from the truth, though, and acting like a human interacting with another human rather than a superior talking to an inferior will reap its own rewards.

Sorry about that little rant - which sounds a little pompous. And to be fair, I occasionally find myself playing intellectual oneupmanship with customers - like a girl, clearly a Cambridge fresher, who bought a copy of Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory, which I read as revision for my first-year exams at Oxford. We're supposed to comment on customers' purchases if we can, so I said, 'Oh, I've read this, it's great,' in what I hoped was an affectionate way (towards the book, not the customer). The girl looked wary and her mother looked close to disgusted. Perhaps it was more the idea of an English Oxbridge graduate working in a chain bookshop, but I suppose I could have seemed like I was showing off. Very bad form.

I've forgotten what the original point of this post was. I think I was going to talk about whether or not sexually-active gay men should be allowed to donate blood in the UK, but I realised I hadn't explained the name of my blog at all. I still haven't, really, because this blog isn't going to be any kind of commentary on what makes us British. I think Jon Gaunt's got that covered (albeit in the form of racist, chauvinist nonsense). I like the phrase, and I suppose 'All Change Please' is a good metaphor for what I'd like to see happen to the way we think. We need to get off the train of 'men vs. women', because it has reached the end of the line. A new train will be leaving in a few minutes in the opposite direction, and you are strongly advised to board this train.

Love and respect.

The un-climax of beginning

2008-11-15T19:42:00.000Z

So, here we go. Despite writing some form of original material every day I have never kept a blog, which seems a bit strange. Perhaps because I've lived in gossip-dominated communities my whole life, and now I'm half in, half out I've realised that I really can't bear gossip, although I suppose it has its function in the creation of community - it's just a shame it has to isolate someone by making them the object, not the participant, of the conversation. Anyway, perhaps I've always felt too uncertain of myself to keep a blog. This doesn't mean I feel any less sure about things now; just I've realised that most people are as inconsistent and whirly in their views as I am.

I suppose a useful way to begin would be to set out some basic things about myself, but I'd rather let it evolve more organically, and not have to summarise 'me' before I begin. I've just returned to this post after watching 'We Are Much Amused' on ITV, the series of comedians performing to celebrate Prince Charles's 60th. Mostly very funny, but I think Stephen K. Amos ought to stop talking about being black. His other material is extremely good - quips he's made on Mock the Week, for instance - and I can't help but feel we'd all forget about his skin colour if he talked about a variety of things, rather than a series of variations on one subject. If he didn't restrict his subject matter so much we might just start to think of him as a very good comedian, rather than wondering what insights he'll have about racism this time.

I have the same thoughts about women's rights and gay rights. It's noticeable that, say, kd lang is often referred to as 'lesbian singer kd lang', whereas male gay celebrities are not marked out in this way. Perhaps this is because lang has spoken quite openly about being gay, and indeed Sandy Toksvig's sexuality is not often mentioned, or Clare Balding's, but frankly I don't think it should necessarily be mentioned at all. You wouldn't refer to Leona Lewis as 'black singer Leona Lewis', would you? It's the same principle - a part of your identity, more or less unchangeable (Michael Jackson being the exception to this rule as he is to many), and as unremarkable as the colour of your hair. That homosexuality is still 'remarked' upon so frequently and with such intrigue - who could forget the lyrics of that infuriating Katie Perry song, 'I kissed a girl ... It felt so wrong, it felt so right'? - suggests that it hasn't yet become any kind of norm.

Saying that, the relatively chilled-out attitude of gossip magazines (at least in this country) towards Lindsay Lohan and Sam Ronson, who is these days usually referred to as her 'girlfriend' or 'partner' without any flagging-up of their sexuality, is definitely encouraging. Perhaps this great excitement over a fairly public gay relationship will mean that the next time a similar revelation occurs, we'll be a bit less excited, and eventually we won't give a damn whether someone's gay, straight or anywhere in between, or none of the above. Perhaps eventually we'll dispense with the very ideas of 'gay' and 'straight' and 'bi'. I can't help smiling when men say things like, 'I'd go gay for Johnny Depp' (a popular choice for this kind of confession, by the way). It's as if acknowledging that there is a part of your personality which is attracted to the same sex, but doing so whilst highlighting that you're not gay for the moment (and, if you carry on using a celebrity for this kind of statement, you're not likely to 'be' gay in the future) is like a safety valve on sexual drives. 'I'd go gay for Johnny Depp' means that a little part of you, at least, already is gay, but you'd have to be tempted by something seriously covetable before you'd 'make the switch', as it were. Why is it seen as such a big risk? I know guys who are quite happy to admit they fancy other men every so often - and it doesn't make them any less macho, not that they want to conform to such a tightly-regulated social structure as machismo apparently is. (I don't speak from experience but from conversations I've had with males about their relationship with machismo.)

This has ended up being a longer post than I intended. In a way the Stephen K Amos thing turned out to be a rather good starting-point for something I'd quite like to see change in my lifetime, the idea that there should be any kind of norms for men or women, gay or straight people, or any race at all. Most people, even those who aren't racist or homophobic (sometimes especially them) seem to believe that men and women ought to be fundamentally different, and do behave differently and therefore ought to. I'm not disputing that men and women often behave differently and that generalisations can be drawn. But for every rule there are thousands of unremarked exceptions, and we need to realise that statistics are meaningless. Just because something is more common does not mean the less common people can be ignored. And the fact that a norm is does not mean it ought to be. Look at racism. Look at homophobia. Look at sexual inequality. The 20th century has seen spectacular revolutions in patterns of thought in these three areas. I believe the 21st century can push further, into an era where we are not 'men and women', we are simply 'people'.