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Posts from the ‘Books’ Category

Apr 3

30 Comments

Blogging and telling the truth

I’ve got a review of Sam Lipsyte’s scabrously funny new novel, The Ask, in this morning’s Australian, and while I don’t necessarily advocate reading the review I absolutely recommend reading the book, which is hugely entertaining.

This morning’s Australian also features a fascinating piece by Geordie Williamson about blogging, which attempts to resituate the deeply tedious debate about the value of online writing by asking some questions about the aesthetics of blogging, and how the form alters the way we write.

Before I go any further I should point out that Geordie (who’s a friend) says nice things in the piece about me and this blog, and in particular the posts I’ve got reproduced in Karen Andrews’ new anthology of Australian blog writing, Miscellaneous Voices (‘On Novels and Place’ and ‘The Day of the Triffids . . .’). But his kind words about me notwithstanding, I think the piece makes some interesting and valuable points, not the least of which is the manner in which many writers who operate in more controlled forms are made uneasy by the immediacy and gregariousness of the online environment, and the importance of recognising that for all its apparent openness, online writing still seeks to control the terms of the reader’s interaction with the writer by controlling what aspects of the writer’s life and experience they have access to.

In a way this is an unsurprising thing to say. Despite the illusion of openness, all writing is fundamentally an exercise in controlling the terms of the reader’s access to the writer’s inner life. This is probably clearest in forms like the personal essay, but it’s equally true of fictional forms, in which the raw material of feeling and experience is encoded and transfigured by the process of creation: even at their most honest writers are always withholding, shaping, controlling. A good reader understands that, just as they understand that a writer often reveals as much or more about themselves through what they don’t say, through their tics and blind spots, as they do in the things they choose to tell us. But it’s also something we sometimes seem to forget in our rush to celebrate the openness and collaborativeness of the online environment. Because whatever else it is, online writing is still about inventing versions of the self, whether as pleasing personas, disguises or simply creations to be deconstructed and analysed, and as such needs to be understood within a critical framework capable of making sense of the complexities of that process. All of which makes pieces like Geordie’s, which is attempting to make connections between the ways we talk about more ostensibly “literary” forms such as the essay, and blogging (and indeed books like Karen’s, which seeks to place blogging in a wider context) all the more valuable.

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Apr 1

Will the real Philip Roth please stand up?

Many of you will have seen this piece by Judith Thurman in The New Yorker, which focuses on the revelation that an Italian journalist has been making headlines by attributing inflammatory remarks about President Obama to Philip Roth and John Grisham. The story came to light after Roth was interviewed by another Italian, Paolo Zanuttini:

“Zanuttini asked Roth why he was so “disappointed” with Barack Obama. She translated, aloud, remarks attributed to him in an article by a freelance journalist, Tommaso Debenedetti, that was published last November in Libero, a tabloid notably sympathetic to Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy (who is embroiled in his own sex scandals with much younger women). ‘It appears that you find him nasty, vacillating, and mired in the mechanics of power,’ Zanuttini said. ‘But I have never said anything of the kind!’ Roth objected. ‘It is completely contrary to what I think. Obama, in my opinion, is fantastic.'”

The delicious thing to my mind is that it should be Roth who finds himself in this situation. To her credit Thurman notices the way the story echoes the plot of Roth’s 1993 novel, Operation Shylock, in which a character called “Philip Roth” pursues a doppleganger who has been using his identity to spread anti-Zionist propaganda. But in a way invoking Operation Shylock is to miss the point. Because Operation Shylock’s game-playing isn’t an isolated phenomenon: in fact Roth has spent a sizeable portion of his career trading on the blurry line between fictional representations and the real. After all, Operation Shylock itself is only one of three novels featuring central characters called “Philip Roth”, who share many of their author’s characteristics (presumably the “Philip Roth” of Operation Shylock is the same Philip Roth as the one in Deception, but the one in The Plot Against America, which tales place in an alternative history, is a different one again), but it’s a trick which is also on view in the character of Nathan Zuckerman, whose early career so closely parallels Roth’s, and indeed in books such as The Ghost Writer, in which Zuckerman convinces himself a young woman is really Anne Frank, inventing a fictitious past for her in which she escaped death and immigrated to America, and even in any of the many, many other novels by Roth which explore questions of identity in one form or another (the black man “passing” as a Jew in The Human Stain, for instance, or even the infernal puppets in Sabbath’s Theatre). Even the most casual reading of Roth’s fiction can’t help but emphasise his fascination with these sorts of games of identification and misidentification, and with the fiction of unlikely antecedents such as Gogol and Kafka.

All of which makes it tempting to wonder whether this story is itself a Rothian fiction, and Thurman a player in some strange, meta-narrative of Roth’s devising. The only problem is that I’m reasonably confident those killjoys in the fact-checking department at The New Yorker will have made sure it isn’t.

But I can dream.

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Mar 22

39 Comments

Is it possible to write good fiction about climate change?

Is it possible to write good fiction about climate change? It might sound like a frivolous question, but it’s one that’s been on my mind for the last couple of days.

It’s been occasioned by two things. The first was a post by one of Overland’s new guest bloggers, Stephen Wright, arguing the failure of Australian novelists to engage with issues such as indigenous dispossession and climate change reflects a profound moral failure. The other was reading Ian McEwan’s startlingly awful new novel, Solar, a book that quite deliberately sets out to address the “elephant in the room” of climate change.

Being lectured about what’s wrong with contemporary fiction is one of the more dreary fringe benefits of being a novelist. And it’s made more irritating by the fact that those who do it are usually advocating replacing one sort of (perceived) narrowness with another.

But unlike most of these sorts of tirades, Wright has a serious point, and he’s doing rather more than simply whinging about the state of Australian fiction. As he says in his post:

“It’s not about trying to fit an indigenous eco-friendly character into your novel, or writing novels full of didactic speeches. It has very little to do, I’d venture to say, with being incredibly topical or writing about Copenhagen and climate science . . .

“It’s probably got more to do with the depth of our awareness of just where we are living: on stolen land, on an ecologically devastated continent. Meanwhile, an inexorable planetary disaster unfolds around us. An awareness of this situation could enable us to write, give texture and ambivalence to our work, enable us to track and expose and map the fault lines of where we live “.

For what it’s worth, I agree with Wright about the urgency of the problem. But simultaneously I think it’s easy to make sweeping statements about the need for new kinds of fiction to address the burning issues of the day, and rather more difficult to actually write such things. So perhaps there’s a different question we could ask here, which is what would a book which succesfully addressed the issue of climate change actually look like?

One thing it certainly wouldn’t look like is Solar. For those of you who haven’t read it or seen the first reviews, the book is McEwan’s long-awaited “climate change novel”, and – not to put too fine a point on it – it’s a stinker.

McEwan gets a lot of stick, mostly for being a slick, smug parody of the bourgeois novelist. I think most of that criticism is misplaced, and fails to engage with the skill and sophistication of a lot of his writing. And while he certainly turns out the occasional dud (Amsterdam is a shocker) books like Atonement and Enduring Love are the work of a writer of pretty remarkable gifts (I challenge anyone to forget the tongue scene towards the end of Atonement in a hurry).

All of which makes the sheer awfulness of Solar even more puzzling. It’s not so much that it’s didactic, or even that it feels like the work of a writer who feels so passionate about a subject that they have to do something (though it does), it’s that it’s so under-imagined and structurally uncertain, so embarrassingly unfunny, and – perhaps most damningly – that McEwan himself doesn’t feel convinced by what he’s doing.

The plot, such as it is, seems to be assembled out of offcuts from McEwan’s other books. There’s the requisite accidental and destabilising death. There’s the requisite unloading of scientific information and musings on the interplay between the subjective interior world of the individual and the objective world of scientific fact. There’s even the requisite scene of hideous physical dismemberment/disfigurement (the already famous frozen penis scene). But instead of feeling fresh, or fascinating, they feel like attempts to prop up the otherwise faltering business of the novel. Even the scenes describing the landscape I saw Andrew Reimer waxing lyrical about in The Sydney Morning Herald sound to me like McEwan on auto-pilot. Indeed, in a very real sense, the book reads like McEwan is doing a parody of himself: the only problem is that it’s a pretty feeble parody.

Part of the problem is that McEwan has clearly decided to save himself from writing an awful “issue” novel by flicking the switch to vaudeville, a decision which clearly made sense at the time, but given that McEwan’s real strength is exquisitely modulated depictions of violence and transgression (and more particularly the intrusion of that violence into the ostensibly “safe” world of middle class life) seems a little misguided in retrospect.

But I suspect Solar’s failure is also reflective of some of the conventional realist novel’s more general limitations, especially when confronted by an issue as large, and as systemic as climate change.

The problem is that the things social realist novels are good at – characters, narrative, interiority, social context – are hopelessly inadequate when it comes to something like climate change. Obviously I’m talking to some extent about the limitations of my own imagination here, but it’s very difficult to imagine how one could encompass such a subject in a conventional novel without projecting some sort of coherence or shape onto it which does violence to the scale and difficulty of the problem.

In a way the problem is analogous to that of fictional representations of the Holocaust. The sheer enormity of what actually happened means fictional recreations of it tend to be cheapening at best, downright offensive at worse. As Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones demonstrates it’s not impossible to do (though interestingly The Kindly Ones’ success depends at least in part on its success at mimicking the authority of non-fiction, and synthesising vast amounts of factual detail into its fabric). It’s that the desire of the novel to make sense of events, and find shape in lives is fundamentally at odds with the brutal and senseless nature of the reality, so much so that attempting to impose those shapes on the events often ends up looking like the worst sort of kitsch.

Solar, which has a relatively simple narrative and a small cast is one example of this problem at work, but I suspect it’s also a problem for larger, multi-strand narratives that attempt to grapple with the problem. Imagine, for example, the Underworld or (to use a filmic example) the Syriana of climate change. To work either dramatically or thematically they require the imposition of order upon what is an open-ended and diffuse problem. As James Wood correctly observes of Underworld, it “insist[s] on connections (the atom bomb is somehow connected to JFK’s assassination and to paranoia) as Dickens’s plots insist on connections (wills, lost relatives, distant benefactors)”. The problem is there are no connections in climate change, unless of course you believe there really is a vast conspiracy linking oil companies to governmental inaction (which there is, of course, but it’s the sort of messy, mutating, ad hoc conspiracy that crusading journalists can’t expose). Inventing a conspiracy, even a vanishing one as in Syriana, trivialises the problem by making it a function of individual action, rather than the system itself.

So, to return to my question before, what might a good novel about climate change look like? One answer might be science fiction. But while the capacity of SF to step outside the strictures of reality makes it better at dealing with these sorts of big ideas than conventional literary fiction, it’s hobbled by many of the same problems when it comes to climate change.

Take Stephen Baxter’s recent novel, Flood, as an example. In Flood Baxter graphically depicts the consequences of rapidly rising sea levels. At least initially this process is driven by climate change, but Baxter then adds a wrinkle of his own, suggesting that the release of the melting ice’s pressure on the earth’s crust allows vast sub-surface oceans to begin to pour forth, dramatically accelerating the process, so that within the space of a few decades the entire world is submerged.

When Flood works, it really works. The scenes in which the Thames Barrier gives way and London floods are truly terrifying, and there are any number of amazing details. But because it is, like most SF, essentially realist, it’s still compelled to at least gesture towards character and story (there’s actually an oddly clinical detachment to the whole book, so in many ways it is only a gesture). And, as a result, the thing it most resembles is a fictional version of a disaster movie, and more particularly films like The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 (with which it shares a number of important devices).

So if not SF, then what? Some sense of an answer might be found in the work of William Vollman, and more particularly books like Imperial or Seven Dreams. Imperial is actually non-fiction, but all Vollman’s books sit on the borderland between fact and fiction, and seem to be less interested in representing the world than actually recreating it. They push at the boundaries of both fictional and non-fictional forms, and indeed at the limits of what readers are prepared to read, but they also suggest a point beyond the neatness and coherence of conventional fiction. And, with them in hand, it’s at least possible to imagine a book that might be able to draw together the many strands of the climate change catastrophe without trying to impose an obviously artificial order upon them.

The question to my mind though is less whether a writer like Vollman, or a book like Imperial might be able to assimilate and represent the subject, but in what sense it would be fiction if it did, especially if it also incorporated large slabs of factual detail or reportage. In this I am, of course, articulating the same sort of anxiety about fiction David Shields explores in Reality Hunger (a book I’ll post about soon) but it’s a real question: at what point have we so exploded the idea of the novel, and of fiction, that what we’re reading isn’t really a novel anymore? And if writing about climate change demands that sort of dismantlement, what does that tell us about the “failure” of contemporary writers to deal with the issue?

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Mar 20

1 Comment

The Future Eater: John Wyndham and his Plan for Chaos

I’ve got a long piece about Penguin’s “new” John Wyndham novel, Plan for Chaos, in this morning’s Weekend Australian. As I say in the review, it’s a pretty dreadful book, but if you’re an admirer of Wyndham (as I am) it’s not entirely without interest, if only for the way it offers a link between his career as a pulp novelist before World War II and the amazing run of novels that begins with The Day of the Triffids and ends with The Midwich Cuckoos.

If you’re in the mood for a Wyndhamesque Saturday you might also want to check out my post from a while back about The Day of the Triffids, and why British visions of the end of the world differ so much from American fantasies about the apocalypse. Or you could take a look at David Ketterer’s excellent introduction to the Liverpool University Press edition of Plan for Chaos. And if you’d like to take a look at the rather fab Brian Cronin covers Penguin have commissioned for the reissued set of Wyndhams they’re available on Penguin’s blog, and make an interesting contrast to the covers I remember from the 1980s (Penguin’s UK site also features a rather fun historical index of all Penguin’s SF covers for those who want to take these things to extremes).

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Mar 18

Welcome to the real world

As some of you may be aware, UK book site, Bookhugger, has been running an occasional series of online Author Panels, in which selected authors are asked to discuss an issue pertinent to their work. Past panels have included Aly Monroe, Helen Walsh and Armand Cabasson on Writing from Life and Ian Thomson, Daniel Kalder and John Geiger on Reportage. I’m very pleased (and a bit flattered) to have been asked to contribute to their newest instalment, Welcome to the real world, which focusses on the use of real life characters and settings in fiction (something I did quite a bit of in The Resurrectionist). It’s a fascinating question, both because of what it tells us about the changing nature of fiction and fictionality, and because of the creative questions it throws up. As I say in the panel:

“All of that said, as a writer I’ve always been a bit wary of over-emphasising the role of research. At some deep level it seems to me that as a writer your responsibility is to the story, and to the way you’re telling it, and everything else is subservient to that. Indeed often too much research can be a trap, because you begin to feel constrained by it, as if you have a responsibility to what really happened.”

You can read the full piece on the Bookhugger site.

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Mar 17

22 Comments

Miles Franklin longlist announced

Just a quick note to let you know the longlist for this year’s Miles Franklin Award has been announced. I’ll leave discussion of it to others, but it includes both big names like Thomas Keneally and Peter Temple and debut books from writers such as Deborah Forster (for The Book of Emmett) and Patrick Allington (Figurehead). And, as always, there are surprising omissions: just off my head I would have thought Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming and Kalinda Ashton’s The Danger Game were shoo-ins for the longlist at least, and while I’ve not read it I’m interested (especially given the reviews it’s received) Cate Kennedy’s The World Beneath didn’t make the cut. Interesting also that the definition of “portraying Australian life in any of its phases”, which has so bedevilled the Award in the past, is now elastic enough to include Peter Carey’s “American” novel, Parrot and Olivier in America, a book that, while one might make an argument seeks to explore the differing origins of the Australian and American minds, is really only Australian in the sense that one of the narrators was, for a time, a convict.

The full longlist is:

Patrick Allington, Figurehead
Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America
Brian Castro, The Bath Fugues
Jon Doust, Boy on a Wire
Deborah Forster, The Book of Emmett
David Foster, Sons of the Rumour
Glenda Guest, Siddon Rock
Sonya Hartnett, Butterfly
Thomas Keneally, The People’s Train
Alex Miller, Lovesong
Craig Silvey, Jasper Jones
Peter Temple, Truth

Congratulations to all the longlisted writers.

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Mar 17

5 Comments

Book Review Bingo

This time last year The Book Examiner’s Michelle Kerns compiled a list of the 20 most annoying book reviewer cliches. Now, in the interests of having a bit of fun with them, she’s gone one step further, and compiled cards allowing readers to play Book Review Cliche Bingo.

It’s a funny piece but Kerns has a serious point. As someone who writes a lot of reviews I’m all too familiar with the unhealthy allure of Reviewerspeak. So much of what you need to do in a review is formulaic (situate the book, give a sense of the plot, pick out some of the main threads, communicate something of what does and doesn’t work) that’s it’s easy to fall back on formulaic language and devices. It’s a problem that’s accentuated by the increasingly abbreviated length of reviews (though to be fair to my editors at The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald the slide in review length has been halted and to some extent reversed over the last year or two) and by the fact that the brutal truth is that when you review for a living you do occasionally come across books you don’t have much to say about, or have days when the juices really aren’t flowing.

But Reviewerspeak is also part of a larger shift in our critical culture. Part of it, as I’ve said before, is to do with a broader decline in educational standards. The shared literary culture that once underpinned our judgements about books has largely vanished, and that makes it difficult to carry on sophisticated conversations about books. In the absence of that culture people – reviewers and readers – tend to fall back on the lingua franca of book talk, which is, increasingly, that of marketing.

But by the same token it’s important not to confuse the health of our critical culture with the health of the newspaper review pages (just for the record I think this is one of the major problems in Gideon Haigh’s recent assault on Australian reviewers). I don’t actually accept the argument that the dead hand of Reviewerspeak lies heaviest on the pages of our broadsheets (evidence for the defence reviewers such as Delia Falconer, James Ley, Geordie Williamson, Richard King and Kerryn Goldsworthy to name just a few) but even if it does, then the boom in online forums for the discussion of books offers an antidote, by admitting new and often interesting voices into the conversation.

All the same, I’d see Kerns’ list, and the thinking behind it as reflective of a process any decent reviewer should be engaged in at all times. I’m not particularly guilty of most of the sins she enumerates (“unputdownable”? I mean, really) but I certainly have my tics and tendencies, and many years of writing to deadline and length has taught me bad habits as well as good. I’ve developed various strategies to help me keep the worst of those in check. Some of these are pretty simple: every so often I’ll ban myself from using a particular word, or a particular formulation for a few weeks or months, for instance. Others are more complex: I make a very real effort to avoid putting myself in the way of banality by making sure I avoid reviewing books I feel unable to be forthright about (my test of a conflict of interest is actually quite simple: if I hated it would I feel able to say so).

But in the end it’s really about having pride in your craft and skill as a writer. Whether I’m a good reviewer or a bad one (and I change my mind on that front daily) one thing I do know is that writing isn’t just a representation of thought, it’s a way of thinking, and as such the search for original language is indistinguishable from the search for original – and by extension interesting – things to say.

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Mar 10

Writing The Past

Just a quick note to say I’m speaking at the 2010 History Festival on Saturday (13 March). This year’s Festival, entitled Writing The Past,which is being held at the NSW Writers’ Centre, is focussed on the complexities of representing the past, and features writers and historians such as Delia Falconer, Gabrielle Carey, Robert Gray and Mark McKenna.

Full details of the program are available on the NSW Writers’ Centre website, or you can download the program. I’m on at 3:15pm, along with the impossibly charming Tom Gilling, my old pal Ashley Hay and Catherine Jinks. Given all three of them know more than a bit about the questions thrown up by the Festival’s title it should be an interesting event.

Hopefully I’ll see you there.

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Mar 7

A couple of reviews and some links worth a few minutes of your valuable time

Apologies again for my somewhat sporadic posting: I’ve been in a bit of a work-hole for the last little bit. I think – I hope – I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but in the meantime I thought I’d link to a couple of reviews I’ve had in the papers recently (there have actually been a number more but exactly what gets posted online seems to be a bit arbitrary these days).

The first is my review of Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists, which was published in The Australian a few weeks back. I may have some more things to say about Rachman’s book in the not-too-distant future, but for now the review will have to do.

The second is also from The Australian, and is of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s follow-up to the truly unsettling Let The Right One In, Handling the Undead, a book which despite its subject matter (zombies in Sweden) and Lindqvist’s bizarrely unmodulated prose, is both oddly beautiful and more than a little upsetting.

(If you feel like hunting out the print versions I’ve also had pieces on Martin Amis’ The Pregnant Widow, Richard Powers’ entirely wonderful “enhancement” Generosity (one of the most exciting books I’ve read in ages), and Jim Crace’s All That Follows).

I’d also like to suggest three (or four, to be precise) things from elsewhere which are very definitely worth reading (assuming you haven’t already). The first is Anthony Lane’s breezy and entirely entertaining tour of the history of 3D (in the context of which I’d refer you to my post on Avatar a few weeks back). If you’re not completely over Avatar by now Daniel Mendelsohn’s piece on the film is also worth a look (though I have to confess I think anything by Mendelsohn is worth reading).

Also worth a look is Jason Epstein’s piece in The New York Review of Books on the future of publishing: I suspect I feel less wedded to the past than he does but it’s a pretty good summary of the situation at present.

And last (but very definitely not least) Jonah Lehrer’s fascinating piece from The New York Times Magazine about the controversial but tantalising studies suggesting depression may confer evolutionary advantage, a piece which is distinguished not just by being the only place I’ve ever seen the word “heterogeneity” used in a newspaper article, but by meshing suggestively with the desire of a wide range of writers (including myself) to try and understand depression in terms beyond the simplistically pathological.

Enjoy – I’ll be back online later this week.

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Mar 3

12 Comments

Some quick thoughts on editing

A page of the manuscript of George Orwell's 1984 with corrections

Just a quick reminder that the March issue of the Australian Literary Review is available for free in today’s Australian. I’ve only had time to scan the issue but it looks good, with pieces by Luke Davies on the novel in the Age of Terror (a term which must surely be as close to its use-by date as it sounds) and Hazel Rowley on French intellectuals under Nazi Occupation (neither of which, annoyingly, are on line).

Further in though you’ll find a piece by James Ley which uses the new, deLished edition of Carver’s Beginners to ground a broader discussion of the role of the editor, and which features some fabulously unguarded comments by yours truly (“anyone who tells you books are as carefully or rigorously edited as they were a generation ago is either lying or deluding themselves”).

I’ll let you read the piece in full, because there are a number of smart people saying smart things in it, but looking at it this morning I was struck by the fact that my own comments don’t go far enough. As you’ll see if you read the piece, I suggest it’s worth remembering that editing is only one part of a larger equation for publishers, and that as a result the question of how much or how little a book gets is really a commercial decision. As a publisher acquaintance (who shall remain nameless) once pointed out to me, editing is often a process of diminishing returns: there comes a point with every book when spending 20% more won’t make the book 20% better.

As I say in the piece, I think this is a useful way of thinking about the question, both because it reframes the question in commercial terms rather than as an unwinnable argument about artistic standards and because it reminds us that questions about editorial standards are intimately connected to the changing landscape of contemporary publishing (kudos to Jane Palfreyman for pushing back against the tedious narrative of decline that usually comes riding shotgun with discussions of editorial practice).

I think what’s really interesting though is what our anxiety about editorial standards tells us about our attitudes to writing, and more particularly how difficult we find it break free of Romantic notions of the artist as solitary genius when we’re talking about authors and authorship. Because in the end that’s what this whole conversation is really about: our unease with accepting that literary fiction and non-fiction are not, in many ways, all that different to more collaborative forms such as television or film.

I’m not saying they’re exactly the same. Books are always going to be more defiantly expressions of individual vision than film or television, but they’re not fundamentally different, more different points on a spectrum. But while we have no problem with the idea that script editors and directors work in a relatively utilitarian manner with scriptwriters we’re made very uneasy by overly intrusive editing of books. But in the end, what’s the difference between David Chase rewriting an episode of The Sopranos from the ground up and Gordon Lish rewriting Carver?

I suppose one answer might be that those of us who write books do so at least partly because it allows us more control over our work. I know one of the reasons I gave up writing film was that I wasn’t temperamentally suited to the collaborative process (though if I’m being honest I’d have to say the fact I was crap at it also played a part). But again I think it’s really a question of how much collaboration we’re comfortable with, not whether we’re comfortable with collaboration at all: even the most arrogant and single-minded author can’t help but take on board at least some of what an editor says.

But I suspect that at a fundamental level this anxiety about editing and editing standards is as much about a refusal to give away very old and cherished ideas about the primacy of the artistic imagination as anything. That and a failure to understand that publishing, like television or film, is essentially an industry, and that the process of transforming a manuscript into a book is as much an industrial process as the process of transforming a script into half an hour of television.

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Feb 24

2 Comments

Once upon a time . . .

I’ve been reading Maria Tatar’s Annotated Brothers Grimm, which takes a number of the Grimm’s tales and explores their various incarnations, histories and interpretations. It’s a fascinating book in its own right (and a strikingly beautiful one, with illustrations by Arthur Rackham, Walter Crane and George Cruikshank, amongst others) but one of the highlights is A.S. Byatt’s introduction.

Of course Byatt’s written about fairy tales before, as well as rewriting a few, and exploring the social context and cost of such tales and their celebration in her remarkable 2009 novel, The Children’s Book. But her introduction to the Tatar is particularly interesting, not least because of its invocation of the work of Max Lüthi:

“The best single description I know of the world of the fairy tale is that of Max Lüthi who describes it as an abstract world, full of discrete, interchangeable people, objects, and incidents, all of which are isolated and nonetheless interconnected, in a kind of web of two-dimensional meaning. Everything in the tales appears to happen entirely by chance – and this has the strange effect of making it appear that nothing happens by chance, that everything is fated.”

I assume the book Byatt’s referring to is Lüthi’s The European Folktale: Form and Nature, which explores this precise quality, and which is itself a pretty remarkable document. But whether it is or not, she’s right: along with the sense that they are accessing something dreamlike and below the level of language, much of the unsettling (and beguiling) power of fairy tales arises from their weird inversion of the normal processes of fate and coincidence. Indeed I’d go so far as to suggest that this inversion is effective at least in part because it reminds us of how the world must appear to children, for whom everything is full of mystery and hidden meaning, and for whom adults must seem both purposeful and frighteningly capricious.

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Feb 22

6 Comments

Ten rules for writing fiction

These days they prefer vans.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, this piece (and the second instalment) from The Guardian about the rules of writing fiction is definitely worth a read. Highlights include Geoff Dyer (“Don’t be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov”), Anne Enright (“Only bad writers think that their work is really good”) and Jonathan Franzen (“Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting”).

Which reminds me of rule number one of writing blogs, which is – as with novels –actually write them. To which end I’ll definitely get something up later today. Or tomorrow. Or soon, anyway.

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Feb 13

20 Comments

Some thoughts about genre

science_fiction01

The other day, over at Spike, the delightful Jessica Au posted some thoughts about genre, and the rather vexed question of its changing relationship to the literary.

Jess’ thoughts were sparked by China Mieville’s The City and the City, but they echoed a series of questions I’ve been pondering for a while now. Certainly a cursory glance across the bookshelves of your average reader is likely to reveal a rather more catholic collection of books than one might have found there a generation ago. Where once the white spines of Picadors jostled with writers such as Peter Carey and Raymond Carver, now one is apt to find Harry Potter jammed next to Cormac Mccarthy and Stiegg Larsson.

The usual reaction is to say one of two things. On the one hand, people will argue that the literary as a category is changing, growing more diverse and inclusive. And to an extent that’s true: Philip K. Dick and Ursula Le Guin are in the Library of America these days, and literary readers seem perfectly willing to embrace work that is essentially SF from writers such as Cormac McCarthy and Margaret Atwood. But while I think the category may be more inclusive than it was a decade or two ago, I suspect it’s always admitted work which drew on the fantastical and SF (Angela Carter, anyone? Riddley Walker?). And I think it’s important not to overstate the extent to which the category has actually changed: conventional literary fiction is, 99% of the time at least, still conventional literary fiction (and, as a quick flick through the prize lists of the last year or two will demonstrate, in surprisingly and even counter-intuitively good health).

The other response usually comes from those outside the literary world, and takes one of two tacks. One is to argue, as writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Adam Roberts (author of the rather excellent Yellow Blue Tibia) do in articles published in New Scientist and The Guardian last year, that the literary novel has already been so efficiently colonized by science fictional conceits it’s already dead, and it’s only the insularity and elitism of the literary world that stops us acknowledging that fact. The other is essentially the line that Jess runs on Spike, that what we’re seeing is a larger breakdown of the categories that once structured and organised our reading, and that the whole idea of SF, or Crime, or even the literary is now essentially meaningless, and what matters is story.

I have some sympathy with both points of view, not least because I think both are, to some extent, correct. But I also think that by continuing to understand this in terms of the comparative merits and businesses of genre they put the cart before the horse. The shift in reading habits and tastes in recent years isn’t about reality and SF becoming indistinguishable, or the old canard of readerly impatience with unreadable literary novels, it’s part of a much larger shift in the power structures that underpin our culture, a shift that’s as visible in the increasingly belligerent populism you see on display amongst younger Australians (the “Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oi Oi Oi” and tattoos of the flag crowd) and the manner in which the outside-the-Beltway world of new media keeps pushing back against old media’s highly controlled, scripted and insider-friendly coverage of politics as it is in shifting reading habits.

That may sound like a long bow to draw, but I’m not sure it is. One of the signal features of political and social discourse in recent years has been the accelerating pushback against traditional loci of cultural authority. The increasing sophistication and power of the new media, and in particular the rise of political blogs and websites such as Crikey!, Mumble and Possum’s Pollytics in Australia and Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo in the US, are probably the most visible aspect of this process (if you’re interested in exploring this question a bit further you could do a lot worse than read Michael Massing’s recent piece in The New York Review of Books, ‘A New Horizon for the News?’). But I think it’s also visible in the rise of right wing populism: Fox News and Sarah Palin are signal example, but here in Australia it’s also pretty clear that a lot of the fairly belligerent populism is about an anti-politics pushback by working class and lower middle class people once excluded from the political process (here in Australia I think that process is being amplified by the boom of the last few years, and the now not-inconsiderable wealth of many such people: once you’ve got a big house and kids in private school you’re probably a little less likely to put up with being told what to think by the educated middle classes).

While it might be a sideshow, reading tastes are being transformed by the same process. While it’s fashionable these days to deride the “literary” as simply a marketing term, it’s in fact much more than that. “Literature”, like high culture in general, is one of the more significant repositories of cultural power. What you read matters (or did until very recently), not least because it’s a powerful signifier of membership of the educated middle classes. It’s certainly not accidental that the boundaries of what’s acceptable was (again until very recently) pretty ruthlessly policed by academics and critics writing for major broadsheets and magazines such as The New Yorker, The Monthly and The New Statesman, since those publications are read by the educated middle classes. I don’t want to sound too much like some Refectory Trot, but basically the middle classes are a club, and you get in by going to the right schools and universities, and by reading and watching the right things.

But in recent years these loci of cultural authority in the literary world have been experiencing exactly the same pushback as the newspapers and the accepted boundaries of political discourse. Critics no longer make or break books, TV shows such as Oprah and Richard and Judy do, reading groups and word-of-mouth are on the rise, as are any number of online services allowing readers to share and disseminate their own views on what’s good and what’s not. Indeed what’s really interesting is the way the last decade has seen not just the rise of the Harry Potter/Da Vinci Code-style literary blockbuster, a phenomenon which seems to have almost nothing to do with the way books once found success, but also any number of reader-driven, word-of-mouth successes such as Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief. Part of it’s certainly about the increasing preparedness of publishers to explore non-traditional avenues of distribution, such as supermarkets and petrol stations, and the increasing sophistication of marketing, but most of it’s about the rise of the reader.

At this point in the argument a lot of people are likely to start banging on about the rise of the reader being a reassertion of the power of story over the dreary worthiness critics and academics once foisted upon us, but – not to put too fine a point on it – that whole line of argument is anti-intellectual crap. Reading pleasure and sophistication aren’t mutually exclusive. Sure there are lots of boring literary novels, but there are just as many boring SF novels, or boring Crime or Fantasy books.

But I think it is worth recognising there’s another factor at play here, which is education. “Literature”, and the literary may be socially contingent cultural constructs, but they’re not arbitrary, at least within the context of our culture. What’s good and what’s bad is defined by relation to the canon, and by standards of judgement which (while they change over time) have been developed over hundreds of years.

Nor do they come for free. Until very recently our education system, both at a secondary and a tertiary level, placed great emphasis upon understanding literary tradition. That didn’t just mean reading the canon, it meant learning how to read, a process which embraced an understanding of Latin grammar, the memorisation of slabs of poetry by Homer and Shakespeare and Tennyson, a grasp of the Bible, and the Classics, and an attentiveness to the way language works on the page.

Things might be different overseas, but nobody in Australia gets this sort of education anymore. In its place we have a system of literary education that emphasises personal response and personal expression, and which privileges comparison of groups of texts over close reading of particular texts. At one level this is great, since it opens us up to new forms of expression and empowers the individual, as well as breaking down the hegemony of the literary, but it also means almost all of the criteria that once allowed us to define “Literature” have slipped away, and our judgements about books and writing are now made on quite different criteria.

I should emphasise this isn’t meant as a jeremiad or a lament: it seems to me there are now extremely sophisticated cultures of critical judgement and appreciation operating within forms such as SF, cultures which have their own criteria and agendas. And while I want to scream every time I hear a reader talk about a character’s “journey”, I recognise they’re using a critical language that makes sense to them, and which they find enriches their reading experience, which is, at the end of the day, what criticism should be about.

But it does mean that at almost every level our capacity to regulate or even define the boundary of the literary is diminished. What’s good is no longer defined by gatekeepers schooled in the right universities and armed with an intimate knowledge of Renaissance poetry and the Russian novel (though there are plenty of them out there). Instead it’s defined from the ground up, by readers, who are finding ways of communicating and sharing things they like online and elsewhere, and bypassing traditional organs of cultural authority such as the newspapers. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, part of that process has been the falling away of many of the old status anxieties about genre and the literary, and a freeing up of readers to seek out books unhindered by those anxieties.

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Feb 10

2 Comments

The Thought Fox and Peter Carey redux

Somewhat to my embarrassment, I’ve just discovered my UK publishers, Faber, have a nifty new blog, The Thought Fox (great, great name, from a great, great poem). Since it’s clearly designed to promote Faber’s amazing backlist as well as new titles, it’s worth checking out in its own right (it’s also nice to see a blog written by editors, if only because it’s a reminder of the passion they bring to their work, and their genuine enthusiasm for books and writing) but to coincide with the UK publication of Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America they’ve been going a little mad with Careyana, with an interview with the man himself, and video of an interview with Granta (I have a feeling I’ve linked to this one before, so apologies if I’m repeating myself). I linked a while back to my review of the book, which was broadly positive (I think it’s a bit rackety, but that’s part of its charm) but I can heartily recommend taking a look at Tom Shippey’s review in the TLS, which is rather less forgiving of the book’s imperfections than I was.

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Feb 9

5 Comments

Of Penguin Worms and Hairy Water

Launch of the James Caird from the shore of Elephant Island by Ernest Shackleton and his men, April 1916

As the ongoing silence in Tonguesville no doubt suggests, I’ve been a little busy, mostly trying to whip The Penguin Book of the Ocean into shape. I’m pleased to say that it’s finally beginning to take shape (indeed I’d go so far as to say it’s looking really good) and I’m not going to reflect too much on the irony that I’ve been so busy reading about the bloody ocean I’ve barely visited visit the beach all summer (admittedly the three month old baby may also have something to do with that, but it sounds better if I blame the book).

My irritation at being kept from the beach aside, I think it’s safe to say the real joy of putting this book together has been the reading it’s involved. Some of it’s been achingly beautiful, a lot of it’s been fascinating, and some of it’s been deeply chastening in its reminders of the sheer dangerousness and brutality of life at sea.

That being the case, I thought I’d share two snippets from the masses of books and documents I’ve worked my way through that have really stuck with me.

Both are from records of almost unimaginably dreadful struggles against the elements (there have been moments in the making of this book when I’ve wondered whether I shouldn’t just retitle it The Penguin Book of Truly Appalling Journeys by Open Boat and be done with it). The first is from Hakluyt’s account of the journey of Captain John Davis and his men aboard the Desire in 1592. Separated from the rest of their fleet in the Straits Of Magellan they made their way east to the Falklands, where, mad with hunger and thirst, they fell upon the local penguin population with a vengeance, killing 14,000 in the space of a few days. Without salt they could only attempt to dry their haul, which they did, and so, on a boat piled to the gunwales with rotting penguin meat they set sail for England, and home. The trip was difficult, to say the least, but eventually, after managing not to die of thirst or go mad while becalmed they reached warmer waters.

Which is when things got really bad:

“After we came near unto the sun, our dried penguins began to corrupt, and there bred in them a most loathsome and ugly worm of an inch long. This worm did so mightily increase, and devour our victuals, that there was in reason no hope how we should avoid famine, but be devoured of these wicked creatures: there was nothing that they did not devour, only iron excepted: our clothes, boots, shoes, hats, shirts, stockings: and for the ship, they did so eat the timbers, as that we greatly feared they would undo us by gnawing through the ship’s side. Great was the care and diligence of our captain, master and company to consume these vermin, but the more we laboured to kill them, the more they increased; so that at the last we could not sleep for them, but they would eat our flesh, and bite like mosquitoes.

“In this woeful case, after we had passed the Equinoctial toward the north, our men began to fall sick of such a monstrous disease, as I think the like was never heard of: for in their ankles it began to swell; from thence in two days it would be in their breasts, so that they could not draw their breath. . . . For all this, divers grew raging mad and some died in most loathsome and furious pain. It were incredible to write our misery as it was; there was no man in perfect health, but the captain and one boy. The master being a man of good spirit, with extreme labour bore out his grief, so that it grew not upon him. To be short, all our men died except sixteen, of which there were but five able to move.”

Choice.

The other, much shorter snippet is from Shackleton’s account of he and his men’s extraordinary journey from Elephant Island, just off the coast of Antarctica, to South Georgia in April 1916 (if you haven’t read South, do: it’s one of the more amazing books ever written).

After more than a fortnight alone in an open boat in the waters of the Southern Ocean they came into sight of land, only to discover the seas were so huge, and the shore so hazardous they couldn’t land. At which point they:

“stood off shore again, tired almost to the point of apathy. Our water had long been finished. The last was about a pint of hairy liquid, which we strained through a bit of gauze from the medicine-chest”.

My OED’s in storage, so I haven’t had a chance to check whether “hairy” has an archaic meaning I’m not aware of, or whether it’s just poetic license on Shackleton’s part, but the notion of “hairy liquid” certainly isn’t one I’ll be forgetting in a hurry.

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