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.
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Sunday, 13 December 2009
Wednesday, 11 March 2009
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.
****
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.
Sunday, 28 December 2008
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid
(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.
Monday, 1 December 2008
Special powers ...?
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.
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.
Tuesday, 18 November 2008
And along the same lines ...
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.
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.
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