That reading/writing thing

So farewell, Blogger.

2009-05-01T17:53:00.002+02:00

Two years ago, we moved, my family and I, into our first whole house. I'd owned flats before, all three of which were great homes, but the time had come when we were in a position to buy a whole house. It was a house which needed a lot of work, rewiring, drainage, new joists for attics, central heating, windows, quite apart from plastering and bathrooms and kitchens. We had wonderful builders and it took them four months to make the place habitable. It took months after moving to get over the excitement of having our very own house, and even now, after two years, I still get a kick out of opening the front door and sitting in the living room or hanging out in the study because it is mine, yes, all mine (well, ours, since I do share it with my immediate nearest and dearest, but you get the picture). I am experiencing that same kind of thrill now that my very creative and cool sister-in-law has designed a grown-up website for me in all my guises. I love the new website, it has many corners and quirks that are just up my street, and I know that just as I enjoy living in our house, I'll enjoy hanging out on the new, upgraded That Reading/Writing Thing complete with decent synopses of the books I have written, news about the books I am working on, plus possible radio projects, education articles and other added pleasure zones. Come and see for yourselves at thatreadingwritingthing.com

(and don't forget to re-subscribe to the RSS feed)

Julian Barnes - Nothing to Be Frightened of

2009-04-24T20:27:00.002+02:00

The reviews for NTBFO were marvellous, I generally enjoy Julian Barnes in both his Barnes and Kavanagh guises, and I loved his last novel, Arthur & George, about the involvement of Arthur Conan Doyle in the trial of an Anglo-Indian youth falsely accused and convicted of mutilating livestock. Barnes writes with extreme clarity and perception of both his protagonists and George Edalji is particularly interestingly depicted, or at least to me, as a fellow half-sub-Continental. So I was well set up for NTBFO. I am still surprised by how moving and vivid and plain funny it is. Of course, it is erudite, littered with references and allusions to other great writers and also to perhaps greater thinkers, but it is also refreshingly full of the conundrum that beats at the heart of every really interesting book, which is our inability to know another's heart. Barnes writes about his family, and in particular his mother and his philosopher brother in lucid prose, and writes most perceptively about the impossibility of really getting to the heart of a character unless that character is fictional.

In exploring this impossibility, he touches on the perpetual attractions of fiction, from our Biblical heritage through Beowulf and the Wanderer, Chaucer's vivid pilgrims and Shakespeare's shining gallery of individuals. The best books achieve exactly what life does, which is to expose to us the quirks and twists and truths of human experience and nature, while preserving their mystery. We can never definitively know why Iago is so malevolent, why Viola is so sane and sage, how Hermione can forgive Leontes, we feel that these are not simply characters, but people. Dorothea's insistence on marrying Casaubon, Lady Dedlock's inner workings, Guy Crouchback's pain, when I think of these, I cannot believe that narrative will ever perish. Ultimately, the best stories, the ones that will go on and on for ever refreshing the parts no other artform can reach, will always be written down, shared, discussed, loved because they are full of people, and consequently, of radiance.

Curious to be reminded of this in a book about death - but sadder still to think that Barnes has been so closely touched in the last six months by death. The publication of the book was too closely followed by the death of Barnes's wife (and agent), Pat Kavanagh. Reading the book and knowing this makes his words all the more poignant. I am not sure he could have written with the same élan if he had had to write this book after October 2008. I am also relieved that it was written at all. Full of wisdom, light of touch, elegantly conceived and constructed, Nothing to Be Frightened Of is a wonderful, enriching book.

A week away...

2009-04-16T12:46:00.002+02:00

Cross your fingers, TR/WT will be upgrading in a week or so...my sister-in-law (http://www.myshinynewwebsite.co.uk/) is designing me...we're working on the content at the moment, and hopefully will go live this time next week.

Reading/watching round-up

2009-04-16T09:03:00.003+02:00

I'm reading some primary texts that the heroine of the current WIP might have read: Lucretius, who was still PNG where the Pope was concerned, but whose transmission of Epicurus's ideas through his poem On the Nature of Things had been widely translated and disseminated by humanists, and Boccaccio's Famous Women, which is really interesting because of the things that Boccaccio perceived as admirable qualities in women - primarily stoicism and intelligence and loyalty and honour, which he regarded as masculine qualities and consequently rare in women. Harrumph!

Finished a slight chicklit, called Sugar and Spice, which reminded me why I don't really enjoy chicklit: 1) too much like reading a glossy magazine - total candyfloss; 2) whiny whiny whiny heroine. The heroines in too many of the chicklit books that I've read are too victim-y. Stuff happens to them, there is a passivity that doesn't really work for me. I remember watching Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky a little while ago, about a primary school teacher beautifully played by Sally Hawkins, who does meet an interesting kind of guy, and it struck me that the film was the material of chicklit, but of course, Leigh just makes it real and original where most chicklit books are too predictable.

Saw Duplicity with Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, which was very light and fluffy, perfect for a Friday evening, with an especially bravura turn by Tom Wilkinson who is one of those totally watchable actors. Clive Owen fascinates me because he and my own DH look not dissimilar (tall, swarthy) but there are subtle differences, so I quite like watching CO to check where the differences are. This meant that when BBC1 showed King Arthur the other day, I was up for it, even though the reviews were distinctly lukewarm. Who are they kidding, it was terrific! Lots of hunky men galloping about very pretty scenery, lots of swordfighting and archery and good guys winning against apparently insuperable odds, and blissfully hammy dialogue. It's a classic Saturday afternoon action flick, taking me back to the days of Yul Brynner and Tony Curtis - bring on The Black Shield of Falworth and the Son of Ali Baba, The Vikings and best of all, Taras Bulba... King Arthur was an honorary mention in that category of film, and if you like the cheesy histo-flick, then it's a goody with a lot of tasty eye-candy for us ladies (Ioann Gruffud making beards look as good as they can get, Mads Mikkelsens, Hugh Dancy) and Keira Knightley not wearing much for the men in your life.

Also saw the Doctor Who Easter special, which I thought was a distinct improvement on the Christmas special - the oncoming evil was very creepy, and the plot hung together much better. There are those who worry about the doctor doing all this kissing of his guest companions, but I don't mind that terribly, and in this case, the heroine was a very kick-assy kind of girl who it would be lovely to see in action again. Despite her terrible fringe.

Finally, I have to confess to watching what has to be one of the worst series ever shown by the BBC, called All the Small Things. It has terrific actors in it - Neil Pearson, Sarah Lancashire, Sarah Alexander, Clive Rowe, but it is a humming, suppurating pile of over-ripe gorgonzola, cataclysmically addictive and I just can't stop watching it. It's the characters, who are ambulant clichés written larger than advertising hoardings, the plotting which is like one of those Early Learning Centre slot-the-shape in the hole 'first' jigsaws and the considerable gap between the set design and any form of financial reality - English lecturer with big suburban detached house, flat of special needs gardener looking like a spread in Living etc, Serbian economic migrants dining on elegant china with exquisite glassware, woman with no perceivable income in swish brand new minimalist flat with Liberace baby grand and matching poodle...Give me a break... until next week, when I will be watching again to see what implausibility will be foisted on me next.

Charles Murray and American Exceptionalism

2009-04-05T15:49:00.002+02:00

Ah, The Sunday Times, that wonderful organ of the press guaranteed to make me riled pretty much every time I open it (I know which question that begs, but I think it's pretty dangerous to sit reading only the papers that make one feel the warm-fuzzy of recognition of one's own perhaps limited vistas and views in print). This week, it was a condensed version of Charles Murray's speech for the 2009 Irving Kristol lecture.

The lecture is a two-fold attack on certain ideas. Here we go:

"First, I will argue that the European model is fundamentally flawed because, despite its material successes, it is not suited to the way that human beings flourish--it does not conduce to Aristotelian happiness. Second, I will argue that twenty-first-century science will prove me right."

Umm, sure, Mr Murray. That's why five out of the ten happiest countries are European...I'm not counting Iceland, as it is bang in the middle of the Atlantic and perhaps two years after the University of Leicester study on which I've based that assertion, is in a severe case of financial meltdown, but it is worth noting that there are nine European countries ahead of the US in the survey apart from Iceland.

Murray is mistaking the nature of Europe: despite the best efforts of the European Commission and Council, there actually is no 'European model' and there is no uniformity in the way in which governments approach the issues of social justice and regulation that exercise Murray. So he's fundamentally misunderstanding the way 'Europe' works.

Murray has an apocalyptic vision of Europe where because of falling birth-rates and increasing immigration 'from cultures with alien values' the 'European model' is doomed, the barbarians are at our gates and Europeans cannot and will not experience what he defines as Arisotetelian happiness, which he defines as a 'sense of lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole'. As if America, with its huddled masses from here, there and everywhere is not the epitome of a country made by immigration from 'cultures with alien values' - it is not so long ago that only WASPS were welcome at most country clubs: if you were Jewish or Catholic or Asian, let alone black, fuggedaboutit. Oh, and as if our planet needs more and more humans.

Of course, my perspective from a hunka chunka Old Europe which has plenty of its own craziness (no need to do much more than mention the weirdness of Flemish-Walloon rivalry and Flem on Flem rivalry that continues to snap, crackle and pop in Belgium) is different. Murray is clearly a man jealous of our general trend towards long holidays (i.e. more than 10 days a year), beautiful countryside, fine food, excellent wine and beer, families who actually sit down and eat together instead of snarfing up microwaved garbage in front of the TV, town squares where people walk (yes, that most unAmerican of activities, walking) together and meet up and chat to their friends at cafes, watch lovely non-obese girls go by, and gaze in pleasure at the church spires where they are neither compelled to go nor to finance through tithes equivalent to 10% of their incomes, where science is well-respected and some might argue, rather too well-funded, where faith is a matter of private conscience not public display with all its attendant hypocrisy.

Murray builds his vision of happiness on four pillars: family, community, vocation and faith. He feels that America excels in modelling all of these four pillars, where the 'European model' is 'sclerotic'. This is based chiefly on his observation that Sweden is dotted with squeaky clean, well-maintained and empty Lutheran churches. He fails to acknowledge that in America, family is falling apart (let's look at those Palins, shall we, that model of American family life, held up before the Republicans as the way to go - I believe the latest in the soap is that Todd's half-sister is in the dock and Bristol won't let the father of her child see the baby). He fails to acknowledge that the American worship of the car has led to the destruction of the small independent retailer and the consequent emptying out of small-town America. He somehow misses the American worship of money that has led to the US producing a generation of Harvard MBAs who have happily led us to the poorhouse with their great sub-prime gimmickry and an equivalent worship of celebrity that permits vacant bimbettes like Paris Hilton to occupy people's minds to the extent that children in the US and UK believe that 'celebrity' is a viable career option. And finally, he cannot see that religion is a hypocritical straitjacket constraining the very science that he believes will come to substantiate his views.

So let's come to the science now...Murray believes that equality is a premise that will soon lose its underpinning thanks to advances in neuroscience. Interesting idea from a man whose Founding Fathers wrote: "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal". Equality and social justice are blind alleys according to Murray, and genetics will explain all. Well, not quite. Scientists are quite frank about their considerable uncertainty over the interface between nature and nurture: there are all sorts of studies going on, but genetic predisposition to breast cancer, say, is quite different to genetic predisposition to violence, which has been by no means proven...and the effects of diet, chemicals, pollution, tv and a host of other day to day influences on our personalities, hormones and behaviour are by no means clear. Of course, Murray has fallen for this kind of theory before - he is the co-author of the notorious book, The Bell Curve, which sought to explain all the inequalities and dysfunctions in US society and the particular lack of achievement in the Afro-American sections of US society based on IQ tests... The book was not properly researched or peer-reviewed and came in for a considerable pasting from real scientists like Stephen Jay Gould.

No surprise that Murdoch would provide a platform for Murray, given the press baron's anti-European views. But it only discredits him and his newspaper, for Murray, with his divisive, unsubstantiated and error-laden aspirations for American triumphalism - sorry, 'exceptionalism' - is the kind of man who takes the chic out of retro and stamps on it. The American Dream has been so thoroughly debunked by America's own thinkers and writers that it is quite odd to see an American claiming that Americans assume that they are in control of their own destinies just as the shadow of mass unemployment falls over a nation. Mass unemployment caused by handing over the destinies of the American people to free-market capitalists who have made a royal mess of just about every consumer market that exists in the US.

Anyway, if you'd like to laugh, roll your eyes or raise your blood pressure, here's the link to Murray's own words:

http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.29531/pub_detail.asp

Deborah 13: Servant of God & Scandal

2009-04-02T20:38:00.004+02:00

I finally caught up, thanks to the wonders of YouTube with a doc I'd meant to watch when it was on BBC3, namely Deborah 13: Servant of God. The programme is an extended biography of a 13 year old girl whose parents are devout members of the United Reform Church. The parents,as the mother put it, 'allow the Lord to open and close the womb so we allow God to give us many children as he wants to give us.' This means Andrew and Ruth have eleven children. Deborah is number 4, and the documentary interviewed her over the course of 9 weeks, including the few days she spent with her brother in Buxton, where he's studying to be a chef.

The family come across as loving, warm, full of cuddles, kisses, and then the little touches of fanaticism emerged: the morning Bible meeting, the annual puppet show warning holiday makers at the local campsite of the hell-fire that awaits them come judgement day; the children lulled to sleep by online creationist preachers or bible readings. The children are home-schooled, and come across as articulate, funny and as well-adjusted as any child except that they are brought up in isolation from modern culture. The house seems to have few books other than the Bible or biblical-related literature, from Deborah's tracts which she uses to help her proselytise at the stray lambs of Bridport and Buxton to children's books of David and Goliath, no television, but plenty of computers and internet access, the parents clearly trust their children, and they by and large seem to live an idyllic lifestyle of romping the fields and playing with one another. Deborah has internet pen-pals, but her social life is bound up with her family.

The only disquieting element is Deborah's insistence on her own faith. But then, children often experience a phase of intense devotion - I remember my own friends around the time of confirmation suddenly taking up Bible reading and discussion with considerable fervour, sporting crosses and heading off to Chapel with enthusiasm. I might have gone in for a muted version of same myself. I remember secretly cycling off to Sunday services at the Episcopal church in Aberdeen as a student, largely for comfort at a time of homesickness, a reminder of the patterns and rituals of childhood. My only reservations regarding Deborah were that she seems to have absorbed a particularly grisly and gloomy approach to religion, convinced that we are all innately evil, doomed to hell which was for an imaginative child, clearly a terrifying prospect. She is also taking refuge in the common creationist view that scientific theories are unproven beliefs and consequently, no more valid than her own beliefs.

The documentary was irritating primarily for its omissions. I wanted to know more about the rest of the family, I wondered about the motives of young Matthew, the 20 year old 'making his own life in Buxton' in bringing his sister face to face with modern youth and mores and I really wondered about what the parents thought of their daughter presenting their faith in such a weird and wonderful light for gawpers to watch. But I did not feel the revulsion and anger that others have felt towards the programme and towards the Drapper family. I absolutely approve of eating as a family together, spending as much time together as possible, of not having TVs in rooms (and I go further than the Drappers, because our children don't have computers with internet access in their bedrooms either). It struck me as nothing but refreshing when Deborah couldn't identify Posh Spice or Britney.

What would be interesting would be to revisit Deborah and her brother Matthew in perhaps seven or eight years, when she is hitting her twenties and he is heading out of them. Quite coincidentally, I have been watching with one class the film Son of Rambow, about a small boy brought up in a Plymouth Brethren family and rejecting the narrow vision he was permitted in the sect. Deborah's situation seemed far less hemmed in and restricted - but I wondered what her parents' response would be if any of their flock showed signs of rejecting the teaching they had ingested.

Meanwhile, I picked up my monthly romance, this time a book that has received pretty much A all around the review zone, but for me it was a bit of a meh. Same old, same old, characters didn't seem real, situation didn't ring true, and it was all Ye Olde Englande teashoppe type setting, where suddenly you were deep in rural England only a few hours by carriage out of London. I know places like Fulham and Hampstead were villages two hundred years ago, but we were back in Fake-Disneyfied-England where there are castles round every corner and instead of living in a proper house in Mayfair our earl owned a Gothic/Tudor pile which took up a whole block...Sigh. The last decent historical romance I read was An Accomplished Woman by Jude Morgan and that was last summer.

Shakespeare didn't make his wife THAT miserable!

2009-03-30T13:03:00.003+02:00

I'd always assumed (I think like most people) that Shakespeare was Shakespeare, and I saw no reason to believe that he was anyone other than that guy who was born during April 1564 in Stratford upon Avon, until a couple of colleagues began muttering about Marlowe and various other candidates. Since then, I've read up a little on the issue, and I remain convinced that Shakespeare was Shakespeare. As far as I can see, those who feel that someone else did the writing and our Will was a front for some better-educated nobleman who didn't want to be associated with the grubby business of making plays base their fundamental objections to Will being the author on a mix of snobbery and an inadequacy in themselves rather than in the man from Stratford.

I've just ruled out a major candidate for myself - the 17th Earl of Oxford. Apart from the fact that he died in 1604, before a number of Shakespeare's masterpieces were written, I never knew much about him, but in the course of reading some women writers of the Renaissance, I recently did some background research into his first wife, Anne Cecil. Edward de Vere treated her absolutely monstrously: he was raised as a ward of her family, so knew her from early childhood, they married when she was 15 and they had several children together. Four years after their marriage, she bore her first child, a daughter. De Vere repudiated both his wife and his child, largely because her father (Lord Burghley) refused to pay Oxford's outstanding debts or save his treasonous uncle, Norfolk (who had been plotting against Elizabeth I) from execution.

Oxford circulated rumours that his wife had had an affair while she was pregnant, and rejected her entirely on the birth of their daughter. After five years of letters and petitioning, he took her back. It was widely acknowledged in court circles that Anne had never been unfaithful, but nonetheless, Oxford's treatment caused her considerable humiliation. He was explicit in letters and conversations with cousins that he intended to ruin his wife because of the humiliations he felt that his father in law had heaped on him.

He did take her back five years after the repudiation, they had more children, and she died in 1588 in childbirth.

Apart from the deep implausibility of an active courtier of Elizabeth I having the time to write over 100 sonnets and 40 plays as well as several longer poems, apart from the tricky fact of Oxford's demise occurring before the composition of masterpieces such as Lear, Macbeth, Antony & Cleopatra, The Tempest and A Winter's Tale, apart from the fact that Will Shakespeare was quite educated enough to have written his own material, there is the uncomfortable fact that few supporters of De Vere address, of his thoroughly unpleasant personality and morals. De Vere was a man of his time - dismissive of womenkind in general and his wife in particular, and clearly incapable of imagining let alone writing women such as Rosalind, Beatrice, Portia, Viola. And while he might have as personal characteristics the charm and intelligence of thoroughly unpleasant characters such as Iago and Richard III, Oxford clearly lacked characteristics such as compassion, ambiguity and self-knowledge that produced a Benedick, a Hamlet, a Brutus or Cassius, a Richard II...

Reading Shakespeare, day in, day out, attempting to help children to understand his genius and his talent has only confirmed to me that Will Shakespeare of Stratford upon Avon wrote his own plays and was not an original man, but a man who managed to synthesise and reframe key questions of his own age in a way that continues to intrigue and perplex modern readers and audiences. Recently, I've read Peter Ackroyd's biography, Anthony Nuttall's exploration of his ideas and Jonathan Bates's account of his influences and the more I read by Shakespeare himself and of Shakespeare, the more convinced I am that one quite extraordinary man was responsible for the range of poetry and plays that we have as part of our literary canon today. Instead of wasting time trying to make the scanty facts of the plays and the life fit alternative possible writers, people with doubts should return to the works themselves. Whoever wrote them was a consummate man of the theatre, who knew his audience inside out and understood his own and others' humanity better than virtually every other writer before or since - with maybe the odd honourable exception for Homer, or Chekhov, say.

The honest truth is that it does not matter who wrote Shakespeare's oeuvre - we should simply thank the fates or Fortune's Wheel that they were written and survive to enrich us still.

Rolling Stone rocks on the financial crisis

2009-03-24T13:00:00.002+01:00

Here's a link to an article that explains exactly how and why we are all in a deep dark, smelly, paddle-free environment:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/print

The article explores the seedy world of AIG and its big cheeses, as well as all those CDOs and CDSs which were basically betting instruments for testosterone-led risk-munching monkeys, not to mention the regulators who were well, meant to regulate...

The author, Matt Taibbi, is flip, fluent and very very angry. It's long, lucid and well worth the time.

I particularly liked his analogy of the debt peddlers as alchemists - about 1 in every 1000 might have been a genuine good guy, but basically, most alchemists were con artists just like the investment managers who have made the mess.

BTW, although I am generally pro-Obama, I have read my Krugman and don't believe in the rescue package. But I suppose it is like the emperor's new clothes: enough of the world's stockbrokers seem to believe and perhaps that will be enough to restore confidence. Until the next big bank is discovered to have sat on its own cookies and reduced them to crumbs.

Aigamemnon (A Fragment)

2009-03-17T20:27:00.002+01:00

If you like Greek drama and are in search of a little catharsis, look no further than Crooked Timber where the whole AIG bonus business comes in for a little Sophoclean perspective:

http://crookedtimber.org/2009/03/16/aigamemnon-a-fragment/#more-10030

And that's all folks - deadlines to meet.

Sex kittens and fruit-eating bats

2009-03-16T20:29:00.003+01:00

I'm still seething over an article I read in yesterday's paper - I know I should know better than to take too seriously an article in the Sunday Times Style section, but somehow, this one really got to me. It's called 'Where did my sex kitten go?' and it's written by a man called Simon Jones. Here's the link:
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article5881689.ece?Submitted=true

To sum up: Simon fell in love with Frances, glamorous medical career woman. According to the article, she pressured him first into marriage and then into having a child. Once the baby was born, she became, according to him, 'overweight, unfit... a boring frump'. So he had an affair with another woman he met through his work in a hospital, Maria. When she issued him with an ultimatum, he told Frances, who punched him and f***ed him, but the next morning he left to move in with Maria. Who then pressured him into marriage and a child. Now Simon feels betrayed and he has decided to put himself first.

He rather glosses over the fact that it is ten years since he left Frances, and that Maria had her baby only nine months ago. He bewails the transformation of hot, intelligent women into obsessive mothers. And while he doesn't spell it out, it is clear that he is contemplating ditching Maria and his second daughter just as he ran out on Frances and his first daughter.

I read this article with my jaw dropping further and further at Simon's totally skewed and deeply offensive perspective. He makes the sweeping generalisation that all women are treacherous liars. He objectifies his women, longing for independent sex kittens who provide sexual services with a side helping of decent conversation. He holds the women in his life solely responsible for the predicament he is in, instead of thinking that just maybe, he should have stood up to them and stuck to his principles if he was so anti-marriage and anti-child. And now he has fathered two children by different mothers with no real intention of providing them any of the stability or guidance that a father should provide. Chiefly because he doesn't understand that those are the responsibilities once you've caved in and agreed to breed, and of course, he has the commitment of a fruit-eating bat. Sheesh, no wonder his ex-wife is 'frosty' and his elder daughter doesn't seem to like him much. Actually, the surprise to me was that such a witless, whingeing windbag had managed to persuade two intelligent career minded women to have sex with him at all. Maybe he looks like Brad Pitt or Jake Gyllenhaal, but somehow, I think probably not.

I too have met the obsessive mothers: a very brief flirtation with mother-baby groups in Brighton was one of the many spurs that encouraged me back into the workplace, because all the conversation about nappies, cracked nipples and competitive parenting spooked me. But women usually snap out of this pretty promptly - certainly within a year or so, if nurtured and cherished by their partners. But he doesn't seem to have taken the time with Frances, and since he is writing about nine months after his second wife has given birth, he clearly isn't giving her much time to bounce back from the birth.

Simon does describe how he generously upped the hours of the cleaner and brought takeaway dinners home so Frances didn't have to cook. He bought her jewellery and perfume, brought home champagne and flowers. He doesn't mention looking after his daughter, or talking to his wife. His perspective on what makes a decent, loving man is pitifully limited and superficial. His frustration that he is no longer the centre of attention is only going to increase a woman's natural insecurity and encourage her to focus on the baby that is unconditional in its demands and desires. Stuff doesn't cut it.

So what does cut it? Pacing the floors at 3am with a colicky baby while letting your wife sleep; looking after the baby so she can have some time to herself, whether she chooses to spend that getting back into shape or having a bath and reading Vogue; cooking once a week and then making sure the kitchen is immaculate afterwards; showering her with hugs and kisses without applying pressure to have sex (which I think many mothers fear for anywhere between weeks, months and years after giving birth for a multiplicity of reasons usually explored in full in any good pregnancy guide); reading pregnancy and parenting guides; letting her wallow in the weirdness that is motherhood, especially the first time round; organising the babysitter if you want a night out together; understanding that with patience, affection, respect and humour, women will emerge from the hormonal fog that clouds their perspective.

I suppose, really, I was as much saddened by this pitiful article as angered, because it illustrates that there are still men out there who are utterly stupid. At least, in Simon's case he has been honest. Now, as a real service to woman- and mankind, he should tattoo himself with the words: 'complete fool, avoid like the plague' - that would save him from any further difficulties with commitment and fatherhood.

Banker in January, Teacher in June

2009-03-11T21:01:00.002+01:00

So, there's this plan that all the people who are being booted out of the financial services sector can usefully fill all the gaps in the teaching profession, notably Maths and Science, where it is true, teachers actually qualified in their subject areas (e.g. a physicist teaching physics) are thin on the ground and often deeply uninspiring even where they do exist. Even better, there's a plan to train the hordes ditched by the City in six months. Applications to teacher training courses are up by 30% in some shortage subject areas, and we want these people up and at our kids as quickly as possible.

It made me think about the skills that cross the great divide between banking and the classroom.

First of all, it will take no time at all for converts to adapt their jargon to the world of education, where we talk of empowerment, level playing fields, outcomes and assessment, NCLS, QCA, Ofsted and all the other verbiage easily understood for those with experience of low-hanging fruit and Bullshit Bingo.
The politics of the office are fully applicable to the subtle and at times vicious territorial wars of the staffroom - coffee mugs at dawn.
The bellow as practised by traders, whether on the floor or via a phone is an ideal form of communication in a busy classroom.
The smarming up to clients and soothing of savage egos is just what is needed to calm agitated headteachers or the skunk-addled teen following a post-prandial spliff.
Wading one's way through Financial Service Regulations is surely a suitable training for reading up on the Department for Children, Families, Schools and Kitchen Sinks policy documents - after all, the Bankers seem to have pretty much ignored regulatory control with little adverse effect.
Regular visits to lap-dancing clubs are ideal training for handling adolescent females: indeed, our converted bankers may bond when they recognise those students who are too tired to do their coursework because they were writhing the night away at Spearmint Rhino.

The only area that will come as a real and perhaps deal-breaking shock to the bankers is school food, but of course, Jamie, with his River Café background, is sorting that side of things out, although umpteen thousand pound bottles of Petrus are unlikely to be available even in the most enlightened of school canteens.

Six months seems crazily long for a conversion course - I should think the finer points of teaching could be easily assimilated in a month or six weeks by the brilliant minds that have plunged us into the worst financial crisis that the UK has known. And if they are truly hopeless in the classroom, they will soon be fast-tracked into headships so that they can wreak even more havoc in a management role.

Generation Kill

2009-03-05T16:44:00.003+01:00

We have one ep of Generation Kill to go, and I've finished reading the book. Reading the book was a really good idea, because it made the TV series somewhat (not wholly) more comprehensible although it has left me with a near unconquerable urge to end every sentence I address to someone else with the term 'dawg'.

Enjoy is not the right expression for engagement with GK. Evan Wright is a decent writer, he allows himself a moment of indulgence when he talks very briefly once in 400 + pages about his own therapy and issues, the story he tells is really interesting, and I did come out of the book feeling more sympathetic to Marines than when I went in. Both book and tv series capture that horrible mix of boredom and sheer confusion/terror that seems to epitomise warfare since 1914, and in the tradition of WW1 war writing, by and large the senior officers come off as remote and a little careless with their men's lives, there is incompetence and there is genuine heroism. One of the facets of this depiction of combat that struck me was the miracle that more Marines weren't killed/maimed.

War stories like this are fascinating and paradoxical. The camaraderie and wit, the banter and companionship make the life seem almost attractive, but there are balanced descriptions of the repulsiveness of the meals, the layers of grime and footrot thanks to a life of no apparent hygiene facilities, not to mention the consequent stomach problems ranging from squits to full on dysentery, and also most seriously, the brutalisation that comes with the territory. Military units go to the heart of our purpose here: they are at once deeply artificial, and also more intensely real - and they are adrenaline factories for young men (and I suppose, increasingly, young women) who find the buzz of extreme situations addictive.

Minion number 2 is at that stage of experimenting with career choices, telling me when he is a 'growed man' he will be a firefighter, no, a policeman, no, a cook, and maybe a pizza delivery man. When we hit soldier, my devout hope was that this would be another flash in the pan moment. Noel Coward advised Mrs Worthington against putting her daughter on the stage, and on the basis of the experiences described in GK, where extremely expensively trained Reconnaissance Marines were used experimentally by strategists playing with a new way to fight wars, I'd tell Mrs Worthington to keep her boy out of the military too. On the other hand, I'd recommend the book and the TV series to anyone interested in modern warfare.

Book moan/review

2009-02-23T13:35:00.004+01:00

I know I should know better by now. I know that by and large when I read about a Top Top book on certain websites, the book is probably not one that I would necessarily rate. But it was a reviewer I respect and trust, and it was a rave for the book being unusual in its historical setting, which was 16th century, a period I am really interested in and its location, which was Saxony, although the author kept referring to it as Electoral Saxony - I'd have preferred either Saxony or the Electorate of .... but that's just me being nitpicky. And here's the rest of my nit-picking. Bloody big nits for me, but maybe not so huge for other readers.

1) The excessive use of Mayhap and Nay. Perhaps, maybe and no would have been fine. But sprinkling the mayhaps does not impart a sufficient 16th century feel to modern day speech patterns, as in 'mayhap you will tell me what is going on with you?'

2) Straightforward incorrect usage: 'disinterested in their food' should read 'uninterested in their food', 'the thought chaffed at her' should be 'chafed' - there's a bit of that, which may not be the author's fault, but it shows sloppiness somewhere in the publishing process and does make me turn book in hand to face the wall against which I might begin wishing to bang the book.

3) Anachronisms. 'Candy' was not a word used widely until the 18th century and to extrapolate and use the term as a euphemism for the general or specific deliciousness of a woman (as in say, a 50 cent song) is even less likely to be a plausible 16th century term of endearment. And then there were the sugar beets. Yes, beets have been around forever (apparently there's an image of something looking like a beet in a pyramid) but no sugar extracted until 1590 at the very earliest, so a beet would not have been called a sugar beet....just a beet. I know, veering into nit-picky territory again. I am also not convinced that an ex-noblelady/nun would be quite so much into the hoeing and tilling of the kitchen garden.

4) Infodump - the extremely detailed description of the process of printing in 1525 was given a bit of dressing because the heroine (wife of a printer) goes to his workshop to tell him essential plot stuff, and gets to gaze at her hero-husband doing his print-setting business, but essentially, there was a lot of the author going, 'looky here, I know about this stuff, see see what the kind professors that I consulted told me, isn't it cool' - and yes, frankly I do think the complexity and sheer hard work of running a printing press in the 16th century is fascinating and cool, but that is because I am a saddo bookaholic who goes on quarterly visits to the Plantin Moretus house to get me my fix of printing house experience. But even for me, the four-five pages of detailed explanation was Too Much, as were the rather clunkily delivered chunks of history about peasant revolts.

5) And this is where we start getting to my moment of revelation. I suddenly put my finger on exactly why by and large the historical romances that I have read apart from one honourable exceptions (Jo Beverley step forward), have filled me with a sense of irritation bordering on ire. It is this: the authors have taken the sexual stereotypes that dog US culture and applied them to their characters. That bloody MarsMen/WomenVenus nonsense, The Rules, all the nonsensical ideas about how men and women relate (or fail to relate) to each other are quite often regurgitated. As in this example: 'women needed conversation as well as sexual intimacy; they were odd that way'. Now while I can just about see some weird inhabitant of a David Foster Wallace short story thinking that way, I can't see a normal 16th century man even beginning to have such ideas. For me, that sentence was a total face-palm moment.

6) Partly as a consequence of 5) above, and partly because of other cultural factors regarding what makes a suitable hero and heroine, the hero and heroine of this book, Wolf and Sabina, are total cookie cutter jobs. They have the personality of boxes recently vacated by in his case, a fridge, and in hers, maybe a TV. She has lots of long (black, brown, red, chestnut, wheat-coloured, honey-coloured - delete which is applicable) hair which he likes to run his hands through. I can't remember what colour his hair was, but she did find it adorable when he ran his hands through it when agitated. He had big hands. She had midnight blue eyes, his were green and they glowed in the dark. Her nose was straight, his was a bit wonky because it had once been broken. He was big, she was little. Both their eyebrows seemed to have independent ideas about arching themselves. Sabina was very very kind and nice and lovely, and won the love and support and undying affection of all members of his household, especially his 3-year old daughter. She reminded me a bit of Giselle in Enchanted. Unfortunately, Wolf was nothing like Patrick Dempsey's cynical lawyer. He was even more of a lunkhead than Prince Charming.

7) Lame set-up involving stinky stepfather, adoption, inheritances and legal stuff which didn't ring true. Plus I don't know how easy it was to do cross-class marriages in 16th century Saxony, but I was pretty sure that it was a lot more complex and socially unacceptable for printer guys to marry the daughters of barons. The plot was just strung around the interaction of hero and heroine.

On the plus side, at least the sex scenes took place in the plausible arena of a marriage. There's quite a bit of build up and then we have a big kama sutra section in the middle and then it's all rather taken as read.

So there we have it, a moanathon in my long search for a decent romance. If I haven't put you off, the book was called The Legacy, by T J Bennett.

The coolest TV show ever

2009-02-22T15:37:00.002+01:00

Of course it's Mad Men. Every single detail from the casting to the set dressing and camera angles and music choices are intelligent, layered, complex and fascinating. And no, I don't really fancy Don Draper. I think John Hamm is amazing and I love watching him, but also all the other denizens of Sterling Cooper, the little and large secrets and tensions and quirks that emerge so gently as the series unfolds. Apparently there are those who dislike it for being too slow - but that is part of its wonder and cool. Wiener and his team of writer/producers aren't afraid to take time, leave ends dangling, create small mysteries that may never be answered.

Of course, it's got a great pedigree: Wiener, the guy who devised it, was a Sopranos graduate, and it took me a little while to place the reptilian Pete Campbell, who under the brylcreem and baby-face was Vincent Kartheiser, formerly known as Conor, Angel and Darla's son who did some havoc-wreaking of his own very effectively, and Marti Noxon, writer/producer on Buffy, was involved in Season 2.

We glommed up season 1 on DVD and are now waiting week by week for S2 to unfold on the BBC. I'm busy proselytising the show's wonders to my fellow-box-set addicts at work, and this forces me to work out what it is I love about the show. Part of it is sheer nostalgia: at one point, Don and the guys are drinking out of little spherical tumblers with a silver band that were exactly like a set my parents owned: the silver band tarnished and faded in the '70s. Betty and Don threw a bridge party at which their 8-year old daughter Sally was busy mixing Tom Collinses for the guests, taking me back to being taught the basics of booze blending, and there was a shot of the kids sitting on the stairs, listening to the grown-ups, because sleep was elusive. Sally has Lanz of Salzburg PJs - I had the nightgown. So, a big part of the appeal is seeing my childhood resurrected.

But there's more to it than that. The characterisation of every single role, even down to the secretary who says perhaps 3 lines in one episode, or the hot Asiatic waitress offering Don Draper consolation, is inhabited by an inner life fraught with the compromises and contradictions innate to human existence. I can't remember seeing such consistency in a cast, such wealth of subtext and subtlety in a show. For the first time, I feel as though I am seeing a great novel made palpable and real, the interface between my imaginings and the page brought to life, and it is all gloriously, unapologetically adult - not in a smutty porn way, but in that for once, the producers and writers of a show are treating their audience as sentient, thinking beings.

The themes of the show are classic, huge: the nature of the American Dream, the significance of the blurred boundaries between appearance and reality, the search for happiness, the meaning of life...it's all there, brave, ambitious and unashamedly brilliant. The third series is contracted - let's hope Wiener has been given the raise that will keep him at the helm of this
gorgeous, poignant piece of tv that reveals so much through its prism into our past.

Recent and current reading

2009-02-13T20:49:00.003+01:00

Last week I finished Last Train to Kummersdorf by Leslie Wilson, a vivid and pacy book about two teens stuck in a collapsing Germany as the Soviet army approaches. Great characterisation, unusual plotting and a spirit of optimism overcome the moments when my WSD antennae were on the point of pinging. Effi and Hanno seem (from the perspective who spends quite a bit of the working day with the age group) plausible 15-year olds, and it was refreshing to see WW2 from their perspectives, which were different - he had (necessarily) joined the Hitler Youth, while she was actively involved in resistance activities. The book moves fast, the writing is economical and effective but there are harrowing scenes, so be warned, not one for the under-13s. I will be teaching it next year. Ultimately, it is uplifting as well as unexpected.

Another very different, but equally engaging read was the terrific How Not to Write a Novel by Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark, a very funny craft book I'd heartily recommend to anyone aspiring to take up the pen or assault the keyboard in the hope of publication and JK Rowling type success. Wry, dry and aphoristic, it is worth reading for the succinct exemplars of bad practice which had me rofloling during a what seemed like an interminable week.

Not so engaging: If I should die before I wake, by Han Nolan, which is a bodyswap with a white supremacist girl into the body of a Jewish girl in 1940s Warsaw...while nowhere near as maddening as Boy in Striped Pyjamas (which entered my list of top 5 bad books, although not quite displacing DVC), I find the modern day girl's slang and personality unreal, and I think the device of sick child being transported back to Holocaust has been done before and better executed. Perhaps also, it is that Nolan's work is informed by a religiosity that seems over-preachy and consequently misplaced. Far better, in my view are Morris Gleitzman's Once and its sequel Then, and Jerry Spinelli's Milkweed, as well as Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic. Not to mention non-fiction accounts e.g. Livia Bitton Jackson and Magda Denes, as well of course as Anne Frank.

Totally mind-bending and amazing - my ongoing read of Cryptonomicon, which has been sitting on my shelves for 4 years now. At NY, I noted the complete Baroque cycle on the shelves of a friend, and he raved, so I finally got round to picking up my own Stephenson and am off on a crazy read. Cryptonomicon is quite a guy's book - well, three/four male protagonists, lots of code-breaking and war stuff, and hidden treasure and erotic digressions involving stockings with seams up the back, but it is also amazingly structured with great cliffhangers - how did he survive that??? is a question that keeps cropping up. I do think it could have been pared down from its 910 small-font pages by excising perhaps, frex, the disquisition on how to eat Captain Crunch cereal...and other little meanders, but then I think to myself, thank God there are publishers brave enough to take on Stephenson and all his wild excesses, because better a book with wild excesses than more tedious literary slop. Half of me can't wait to finish so that I can get onto Quicksilver, the other half of me just wants to relish what I've got.

Ben Goldacre, Brain Gym and drinking the Koolaid

2009-02-10T20:01:00.004+01:00

One of the funner parts of my job is checking out the English newspapers for articles suitable for use in torturing second language students (sorry, that should be 'for reading comprehensions and oral test materials to enrich my second language students' English'), and today, I came across Dr Ben Goldacre's wonderful Bad Science blog. Dr Ben has the potential to be a nauseating Wunderkind (1st in something hideously scientific from Oxford, while just editing the odd student rag here and there), but mercifully, he has taken up the mantle as debunker in chief of nonsense medicine. He's currently in terrible terrible trouble with a London radio station for pointing out how irresponsibly the media has dealt with the whole business of the MMR vaccine since Andrew Wakefield's now deeply discredited research suggested the link between the jab and autism, with specific reference to a recent segment on a chat show which has led to legal action against him. Which is just stupid of LBC, but as has been noted elsewhere, doing the stupid is something that comes very easily to good old Homo not so very Sapiens.

While exploring the Bad Science blog (http://www.badscience.net/), I also came across his ranty mcrant against Brain Gym, which included some links to priceless Youtubery (Brain Gym turns Evil frex) and to last year's Newsnight in which various properly qualified scientists debunk Brain Gym's claims to make children work harder and better, while Paxo eviscerates one of the Californian 'educators' who invented and now flog Brain Gym as a 'learning system' to help children concentrate better - because btw, schools have to buy Brain Gym. And the trainers to come in and spend a day or so teaching teachers to teach Brain Gym. Which costs money. In fact, quite a lot of moolah. Provided by you and me, the taxpayer.

We came across Brain Gym in the course of our ongoing educational adventures with Minion Number One. Minion Number One is pretty much an identikit of his parents at the same age: he looks intelligent because his nose is always in a book of some sort, he has a capacious memory for trivia, he has the co-ordination of a newly-born giraffe, and he is pretty idle when it comes to exerting himself over the tiresome stuff that they want you to learn in school, partly because he knows most of the facts already due to snarfing up horrible histories and spotty science and grievous geography and assorted encyclopaedias on dinosaurs, evolution and the way the world works, and could care less about the skills like having neat handwriting.

This troubles teachers - not so much secondary school teachers, but primary school teachers were phased by his ability to recite the Latin names of all known birds of prey while being utterly unable to tie his laces or write more than three lines of our composition on Autumn. So they donned their white coats and tested him and tried him out with Brain Gym and all sorts of other activities.

Now, as a teacher, I'm willing enough to don my own white coat and explore the wilder shores of ways and means to encourage small boys to do what they are told and jolly well get on with their sums. But luckily, apart from having developed a reasonably honed BS detector of my own, I have a husband who drinks no Koolaid of any variety and will come up and dash the glass from my hand if I seem to be poised to swallow the latest guff. I did investigate Brain Gym, and I thought, well, it can do no harm - except that people actually do believe it works, of course.

In our case, it is clear that Brain Gym has made absolutely no difference to our child's progress. Increased confidence in his physical abilities through learning to swim, a great experience going on a long skiing trip plus drama and tennis lessons of a non-competitive variety have all helped him feel easier in his skin. Hurray. A combination of growing up and getting fed up of parental nagging has improved his concentration skills so we're now looking at perhaps 6 or even 12 lines for the pesky compositions required of him. So far, so normal male child as far as I am concerned.

Anyone whose children are exposed to Brain Gym would do well to watch the Newsnight segment, and perhaps their alarm bells too will be set off by the information from a teacher/trainer person that doing one particular move would improve children's 'languaging skills' - clearly Brain gym had significantly increased that particular woman's ability to massacre her own tongue. In fact the general demeanor of the headteacher and her colleagues at the primary school filmed for the segment struck me as spookily Stepford, and that is what really concerns me.

I've been a teacher for 16 years now, and one of the most frightening thing about being a teacher is just how unworldly and easily influenced some colleagues can be (and to any of my current colleagues who might happen to read this, I do not mean you!). I mean, I do know that many of my fellow humans are gullible, ignorant and quite cosy too. But we teachers are meant to be training up children to question, to think, to explore, to test, to push the boundaries. Yes, this drives me absolutely bananas when my own child can never ever bloody let anything go in an argument, but on the other hand, at least he's no yes-guy. Which means that if he is ever in a Piper Alpha situation, he will do the counter-intuitive and jump into the sea rather than let himself be burnt to a cinder because regulations dictate that you should never jump into the sea. I hope. (Of course, I hope that he is never in a PA situation at all.)

I suppose this gets to the heart of the paradox of educational establishments. We are meant to be encouraging individuality and independence in our charges, but actually, we want them all to conform to certain norms of behaviour and discipline. And that is why Brain Gym has currency. Unfortunately. Because like the calisthenics performed by Japanese factory workers and the daily hymn-singing of the UK public school, or the training chants of Marines, any collectively performed activity helps build a collective mentality, and it is much easier to control a collective mentality than one where children's brains zing all over the place. Watching the zinging is a lot more fun and ultimately much more productive for society and the individual...but it is messy and inconvenient and difficult to manage. Getting the kiddies to drink the Koolaid is much easier.

Stephen King on Meyer furore

2009-02-05T11:53:00.002+01:00

Well, all the poor man said was: 'JK Rowling is a terrific writer but Meyer can't write worth a darn.'

And lo, the waters parted, and the chosen raged and fired many curses and thunderbolts of doom at the infidel heathen who dared criticise their beloved Queen of Sparkly Vampire Stories.

I read Carrie and some other Stephen King when at school, but didn't develop a taste for him much, and more recently, I read his book On Writing, which follows the US creative writing school of cutting out all extraneous verbiage, and I have read Twilight, skipped the two middle ones and skimmed BD. I can't comment on King's writing abilities, but I would have to agree with his assessment of Meyer. She can't write worth a darn.

Still, she has many readers who all love Bella and Eddie, and who have bought the book and seen the movie, and ensured that there will be sequels to the movie.

I cannot understand why all the Twifans are getting so heated - there's no shame in reading the compulsive crackfiction that is the Bellassey, especially if you keep your head about you and can admit that there are aspects of Meyer's technique that could be improved.

Personally, I do think that Meyer has now probably profited sufficiently from her dream, and might usefully spend the rest of her time raising her kids and counting her dosh instead of inflicting more vampire fantasies on the rest of us...

Remembering

2009-02-03T20:12:00.003+01:00

On Sunday, I was in a church for the first time since last July when we buried my godmother, Kate Mortimer. It was a joyous occasion, the christening of my youngest niece, also a Kate. But I'd forgotten that during the course of a service, during the formal prayers, the custom is to remember our dead, which became a rather emotional process. Then today, I heard that Kate's memorial service has been organised and one of those waves of missing her washed over me but I thought rather than being miserable, I'd call up some of my favourite Kate memories, for she was, as other of her friends have noted, a truly life-enhancing spirit.

My very first meeting with Kate was when I was five, in Washington. My father had come across her in the World Bank, and was very taken with her - smart, snappy, very English, and a bridge-player. I think she came over for lunch one weekend, and she talked to me, which was quite unusual for most of my parents' friends, all in their twenties and thirties, deep into career mode. I must have made her laugh, and I seem to remember that there were other weekend lunches at various places like Nathan's and Clydes, great burger joints where they played Creedence Clearwater, where she would always find a bit of time to chat to me.

When my parents split, my mother moved out first to Kate's flat, just round the corner from one of my favourite Washington places, Dumbarton Oaks. It had a great playground, and she had a cat (Barnaby, rather wary of a somewhat bewildered seven year old), and a copy of the Lord of the Rings about which she was very enthusiastic. I started and I did get to the end of Fellowship before we moved on. Quite soon after that, I was sent off to school in the UK while my parents tried to sort out their divorce, and Kate too left the World Bank to join the Cabinet Office. She lived in a fantastic flat in Warwick Avenue - yes, the place that Duffy sings about. She was my guardian while my mother organised herself to move back to the UK, so she drove me down to school and came to spring me for days out in Brighton and half-terms. She had a beat up Mini, fawn, with red seats, and I was taken for half-terms to friends and family. I remember on one occasion, we went to her then boyfriend's parents' house somewhere in the North, and I was allowed to watch Dr Who which involved big robot things trashing London while John Pertwee tried to sort things out. I did hide behind the sofa and Kate had to coax me out to go to bed. She read to me, in her crisp, no nonsense way, probably something Rosemary Sutcliff.

Then there was Burford, where her family had a millhouse, and later, Penrith, where her parents retired to an Old Rectory. Her mother was as wonderful as Kate, very matter of fact, shaped rather like Mrs Tiggy Winkle, warm, with a delighted chuckle when someone got a tricky crossword clue or helped with the washing up. They shared a great love of good walks, lively books, ideas, and an unostentatious robust Anglican faith. When I decided I wanted to be christened, I asked Kate to be my godmother and she was very supportive, although I'm not sure my motives were of the purest. I was ten, and tired of my rather freaky foreign names, so getting baptised provided me the opportunity to have a good solid English name - but Kate never quite got the hang of it, and used one of my freaky foreign names when I worked with her in my very first proper job after leaving university, which has become the name that I am known by all and sundry.

Kate was an exemplary godmother - she gave great presents, super treats, and a little later, houseroom. My mother and I moved into the house she bought in Hammersmith with her first husband (that boyfriend whose parents we'd visited), and so began my ten most settled years. Although I was at boarding school, Ravenscourt Park was my home. We lived on the top two floors, Kate and John in the basement and main floor. The house was the scene of wonderful parties, small and intimate, rather bigger and louder but all full of laughter, good conversation and Kate's wide and eclectic bunch of friends. My mother and I were not the only people to whom Kate offered shelter - there was Fred, who wrote jokes and Ernie who was researching a biography of Ken Tynan, there were always friends dropping in from the US or Europe, people with sharp minds who challenged me and pushed me, made me question and rethink my solipsistic teenage positions. And we played games, hung out reading papers, went for walks, fed each other's cats, borrowed coats. Kate had a wonderful snickering laugh and a great appreciation for the sillier side of life. She loved Brando and James Dean and the Rolling Stones. I remember wading through the record collection, making mix tapes and reading series of books from her and John's library - The Saint books, James Bond, Bulldog Drummond. She was always reading something, often thrillers and mysteries, but we shared the ability to hoover up books and it gave me great pleasure later to introduce her to books, just as she had shared her favourite reads with me.

One of the best of times was the arrival of Andrew, her son, who was a gorgeous pudgster of a baby, mad about Skeletor and He-Man. I felt really honoured when Kate asked me to be one of his godmothers, so there we were back at St Mary's church on Paddington Green. Kate chose one of the best hymns, Brightest and Best of the Sons of the Morning, and there was a party afterwards - another one.

Soon afterwards, Kate brought an old friend from the World Bank round. He was gentle and quite quiet, but with a definite twinkle in his eye. Bob had a daughter, Anne, and four grown-up sons from previous marriages. Anne was only a couple of years older than Andrew, and the pair of them had some battles royal, jockeying for position in their extended family. Bob bought a barn down in Devon, tucked in a little valley near Okehampton, and quite soon, Kate sold up in London and moved down to Devon full time. Together, they converted the old barn into a glorious living area, and the house was always warm and full of family and friends, wonderful meals, the scent of Bob's bread, the squeaks and giggles and wails of children, including my own. There were long walks on Dartmoor, pub lunches and again, wonderful parties celebrating Bob's 70th and her 60th, the sorrow of losing her beloved sheepdog Tommy and the pleasure of raising Sunny, her next dog, trips to the beach - one of my recent memories is of Kate taking great pleasure in her new Saab with GPS, which took us the most circuitous route to the north Devon coast via farm tracks and flocks of geese. But perhaps I'll miss most of all, her wonderful directness which could sometimes slip into the most colossal tactlessness, causing offence and hilarity in equal measure.

How lucky I have been - I lived with Kate, worked with her, benefited enormously from the way she shared her great gifts for friendship, dedicated slog and sheer fun. And now, it's time, in honour of Kate, to learn and live by her example, giving the warmth of friendship, putting in the hours at work, and relishing the possibilities for laughter and simple pleasure in the warmth of the sun and the brush of the wind, the sun glinting on the waves.

A Good Childhood? or a Good Life?

2009-02-02T12:58:00.003+01:00

The Children's Society published its report into children's upbringing in the UK, parading around the same old chestnuts about split families, rubbish schooling, excessive advertising and so forth as the causes of the UK's failure of its children - we stand 21st out of 26 European countries assessed for their treatment of children.

Naturally, there was lots of handwringing in the Sunday papers and on the radio, but what interested me about this were the two questions that children were asked in the survey the CS carried out in 2005 on which this report is based:

1 What are the most important things that make a good life for young people?
2 What things stop young people from having a good life?

The phrasing of these questions strikes me as likely to produce a set of responses from children that reflect very much the fundamental malaise of not just British childhood, but Britain in general - which is that we receive very little training in understanding the nature of a really, genuinely good life, in the sense that Epicurus or Augustine, or Plato, frex, might have thought of such a thing. Those of middle age and above will think of a sitcom about a couple of suburbanites taking up subsistence farming in Surbiton, and everyone else will think of what they would do if they won the lottery or married a footballer or were in a band better than the Arctic Monkeys.

My children are being raised in an international school environment where right from the start of their schooling, they have some form of ethical training - in the primary years, this often covers such key elements as why we need to brush our teeth and feed our guinea pigs, but it does evolve, until eventually, they take a compulsory course in Philosophy. While you can see a rudimentary start to this in primary schools, the PHSE course in which this probably naturally slots is already crammed with useful titbits on citizenship and binge drinking and 'pass-the-penis' games with condoms - PHSE tells you enough about the British approach to thinking about ethics, which is to create an acronym for a weekly timetable session in which we can shove all the non-curriculum issues for which the government suddenly wants us to take responsibility since it is clear no one else is going to face up talking to the students about them.

The whole business is further obfuscated by the nonsensical Brit tendency to have denominational schools where narrow religious perspectives are fostered. But the real issue in the UK is that we are uncomfortable with abstraction. We are race of pragmatists who prefer lovely crisis situations where we can demonstrate sang-froid and stiffen our upper lips, or in the post-Diana era, let ourselves go and sob uncontrollably while muttering about our sense of devastation and loss. So it's impassivity or wallowing that seem to be our current models.

The problem with the UK is not that we provide bad childhoods for our children, but that we are utterly unclear on what a good life is and should be for any of us. We've been seduced by the raw capitalism on show in the US, but that has turned out to be a pup, we give longing glances at Europe but reject (with some justice) the compromises necessary to fit in wholly with the European project (whatever that nebulous thing is), and we sit shivering in our island fastness conscious of malaise but unable to dispel it.

At present, you cannot access the Recommendations that the Children's Society has in mind in response to its report. But here are my recommendations for Britain:

1 Make time to sit and talk to people, especially your family. Turn off the phone and the TV, eschew the internet, lose the Playstation and retire the Wii, make a nice cup of tea and sit with your family and ask them about proper stuff. Not have they had the car exhaust mended, or where shall we go for our next holidays, if indeed, we can afford any, but why do we do the things we do, and what are the ways in which we could improve our lot in life. Spend time with the people you love and spend that time doing fun things.
2 Do something for someone else. Water your neighbour's plants while they are away, a sponsored walk, the shopping for your elderly auntie, cover a colleague's essential tasks while s/he is looking after their chicken-poxy child.
3 Examine your own prejudices and confront them. We all have them. Intellectually, we may know they are wrong, we may not know that they are wrong at all, but go out of your way to talk to that person who is different from you and who gives you the heebie jeebies.
4 Read a book - ah, it was bound to get in there sooner or later. Or go to an art gallery, or listen to a different sort of music to the sort you normally listen to, watch some dance, anything that removes you from the place where you are and opens a door to another place. That is one of the essentials of art.

The article I read this weekend which gave me much more to celebrate was Matthew Parris's account of how he got back into reading and finally read Middlemarch, including George Eliot's fabulous sentence:

“If we had a keen vision of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of the roar which lies on the other side of silence”

It is not that we in Britain set out to shortchange our children - it is that we have already short-changed ourselves. But it is possible to develop that keen vision and to survive the roar - in fact, it is essential, if we are to live a good life.

Serendipity

2009-01-29T19:12:00.002+01:00

A while ago, in fact, about 20 years ago, I had my first story published. Company Magazine ran a competition, looking for crime stories with a female focus. The idea jigged around my head for a while, and then one morning, I woke up and there was this story in my head. I think it took a few hours to get the first draft down, then a couple of weekends to tweak and rewrite, and then I posted it off and did my best to forget about it.

I came third, I think. A cheque for £50, and the story was published in an anthology. I was invited to a reception at Murder and Co, just off the Tottenham Court Road at that stage (it's on Charing Cross Road, just up the road from Leicester Square now). There was champagne and Liza Cody. I was given a copy of the anthology, which is there rubbing dustjackets with various short story collections on the shelves, and then I turned my hand to other stuff. Like my scintillating best-seller, European Natural Gas Markets, and moving to China and directing a couple of plays and then onto the regency romance market, and moving to Brussels and all that life business like marriage and minions and mortgages. That story, Box, was long-forgotten.

Here in Brussels, we lived with Radio 4 Long Wave for quite a while, to the point where even the cricket-averse DH knew who Freddie Flintoff was, until we hooked up with a satellite and now we get Radio 4 FM but via the TV. It comes with little captions so you can see what you are listening to...There is a point to this digression, because imagine my surprise this afternoon, when I glance at the TV and what catches my eye but my maiden name, and there, read by Joanne Whalley (OMG, the heroine of one of my all time favourite TV series, Edge of Darkness), was Box. I listened to it in a sort of weirded out trance, because it was at once familiar and totally strange. I'd heard it in my head for quite a while as I was writing it, but hearing someone else read it, a competent actress who gave it life and flavour and an accent, that was the most wonderful sensation, particularly after a day of the customary stresses associated with dealing with hormonal adolescents and paperwork and marking exams and and and.

And if it had been another day, the likelihood of my hearing it at all would have been remote - what a piece of luck and timing that I actually came across it. The nicest kind of serendipity.

If you'd like to listen too, you can follow the link for the next 7 days:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/afternoon_reading.shtml

Aaghgh death of book, death of book, agh agh

2009-01-28T20:41:00.004+01:00

Bloggers I like (John Green, Dear Author, Smart Bitches etc) are all discussing the way the US publishing industry has recently been exploring the nether reaches of the U-bend in the Crapper of Fate (pls xcse coarseness, but that's how they all make it sound). Apparently book sales have collapsed and all is doom and gloom. But but but - I checked out an interesting site run by Morris Rosenthal of Foner Books - here is his industry sales review which runs up to Oct 2008 (when the fact that a hedge fund was chief shareholder in one of the biggest US conglomerates, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt screwed them royally): http://www.fonerbooks.com/booksale.htm

Check out the table about 2/3 of the way down the page - it shows the sales, and for the last 5 years, US book sales have run around $16.5bn per year...This year it looks as though it will be less because November saw a 14% plummet, and who knows what December brought - although maybe Santa bought a few books - he was certainly generous with the printed matter in our London/Brussels axis.

But the thing that baffles me altogether is this constant moan about the decline of the market - there have never ever been so many readers in the world - literacy rates may be proportionally lower globally especially since cute folk in organisations like the IMF and World Bank have helped poor countries switch money out of essentials like education in favour of paying interest on 'strucutural adjustment' funding. But overall, the number of people who learn to read continues to increase, little by little. Of course, their disposable income for books is shrinking at the moment, but the fact of the matter is if the right books are published, people will buy them and they will buy them more than ever right now, because books are a much better way of escaping the glooms than DVDs, say, or reruns on TV.

This is because reading is interactive and requires us to lose ourselves in a different time and place. The problem is that publishers at the moment have been burned by their own stupidity so badly - offering humongous advances for rubbish that won't sell (hmm, step forward sleb bios of ex-Big Bro contestants and Strictly Come Dancing judges), while failing to understand that by and large, fictions readers don't want more of exactly the same, but do want something just as good, if not better. Which is a subtle distinction that requires a punt every now and then, the kind of punt that takes imagination and people who understand about books. Which hedge fund managers by and large don't. Nor, clearly, as we are all discovering to our cost, do they seem to know much about their own business.

What all this means is publishing fewer books, more of which are crummy, thus deterring readers. What publishers need to do is publish more varied and interesting titles and build up small niche markets with print-on-demand technology offered through amazon and other retailers - because everywhere there are niche markets. And they need to ditch their sales guys and the big cars and get the authors out there pimping their own books, because no one can sell a book like a passionate author (take a look at John Green, frex). So - drive down the unit costs of book production - but not the editorial costs, because the one thing most books need nowadays is a lot of pruning and sometimes, slashing and burning, - save the planet by cutting down on paper costs and lumping around big heavy boxes of books which then get pulped, and get authors to work their markets through their own websites and through readings, offering courses and all the other things that most writers have to do already because so few of them as it is can make a decent living out of just writing. Plus, maybe, just maybe, some detailed research into the various genre markets.

Romance is alive and well because the romance genre, long snubbed, has gone out and built its own market through magazines and websites and now blogs and webrings, from AAR to great author pages. The readership is faithful and focused and is prepared to shell out for books because in tough times, you can save up for a couple of weeks, or a month and go out and buy 3-4 books in a hit. And if you are lucky, one or two will be good enough for re-reading, but otherwise, most romance readers have their stash of keepers that they will wheel out when the going gets touch (just as I did last week with one of my favourite Ibbotson books, The Morning Gift). There are lessons to be learned from the Mills & Boons of this world, who generally seem to be able to ride out recessions...

Williamson and the Holocaust

2009-01-26T12:57:00.008+01:00

My attention was caught by two items today - the first, on the BBC website, where a debate presenting the case for and against preserving Auschwitz, has opened, and the second, the lifting of the excommunication of four bishops who were not properly bishoped in 1988, including one who does not believe in the Holocaust.

This chap is called Bishop Williamson, who believes that 'there is no serious historical evidence' for the murder of several million Jews in the gas chambers. He believes that between 200,000 and 300,000 Jews were killed by Nazis, 'not one of them by gassing in a gas chamber'. He refers to the Holocaust as 'quote unquote, The Holocaust'.

Williamson gave an interview in Germany last November to Swedish TV which demonstrates a wilful and bordering on wicked misinterpretation of data and semantics. He cites the work of Fred Leuchter, a strange being who offered his services to US states for the 'improvement' of their execution systems, but would then threaten to offer his services to the defendant in appeals against the death penalty to testify that the equipment to be used by a particular institution to put someone to death was faulty...unless they used his services. Given that I am virulently anti-death penalty, I certainly don't feel sympathy for the prison governors shaken down by Leuchter, but I am saying that his integrity perhaps isn't that credible, certainly not sufficiently for some Bishop-not-Bishop to cite him as an historically reliable source on gas chambers...

But what got me in the interview (apart from sheer shame that this noodle purporting to peddle the word of the Lord happens to be an Englishman, educated at Winchester and Cambridge) was his statement that his beliefs were based on truth, and that therefore they must be good, because all truth was good. He did not see the trap he had fallen into - his words were not true, could not be true, because there is abundant thoroughly documented and verified evidence for the existence of gas chambers operated by the Nazis. So his words were not truth, and therefore, based on his own syllogism, must be wicked, or evil, or bad, or whatever you want to call it. On the other hand, why are any of us paying any attention to this crazy nutter, given that he believes that the terrorist attacks on 9/11 were staged by the US government?

I suppose it is because, in my case, I cannot understand remotely how anyone can deny the Holocaust - especially someone born during the war, who grew up through the 1950s and 60s with the revelations and trials and memoirs coming thick and fast, not to mention the dense body of documentation - plans, aerial photographs, orders and reports that survived the Nazis' attempts to conceal their crimes. In Williamson's case, I wonder how a man of considerable education (though clearly limited erudition beyond his narrow vision of the Catholic church) can so calmly and foolishly deny what is so easily verifiable. Perhaps the clue lies in that phrase, narrow vision - a vision which is so confined by his theology that he has lost all sight of humanity, of genuine intellectual curiosity and of any humility.

What frightens me most about Williamson is not the bizarre lunacy and repellence of his many views, but the fact that this man has been rector of numerous seminaries for the training of young priests and is currently busy in Argentina continuing his work of warping the world-views of those he's allegedly educating. What Benedict thinks he is doing by rescinding the order of excommunication is unclear - possibly mending schism in the ranks of the Catholic church. But mending a schism between the mainstream and a bunch of about 5,000 extremists which is likely now to sour Catholic-Jewish relations seems like a truly bizarre move. So Benedict clearly woke up one morning thinking, 'Hmm, shall I invite the Lefevrists back into the fold, thus irritating and angering swathes of people in all faiths who'd never heard of this bunch of RC extremists or shall I leave well enough alone?' Ah, well, Popes have made bad calls before and no doubt will again. In the meantime, I suppose we should be thankful that Williamson is safely tucked away in Argentina.

A New Era??

2009-01-21T18:15:00.005+01:00

So, the razzle dazzle and the hoopla is over, some are masking their disappointment over The Inaugural Speech while others celebrate its steady, focused approach, and for the first time since 1993, we have a president that the world actually seems to like. And for the first time ever in my lifetime, I see a president I really admire.

My first president was Lyndon B Johnson, but I can't really say I remember him, let alone admired or despised him.

Next up came Tricky Dicky... we all remember how that ended.

Oh, yes, then there was Gerald Ford, who just kept falling over. Followed by Jimmy Carter. Since he has left the Presidency, Carter has grown as a statesman (although I am aware that there are those who loathe and detest him), but as POTUS, I cannot say he impressed. There was the Iran hostage crisis and that unfortunate picture of him deyhdrated and faint as he tried to run in a Washington race.

Reagan was the president of my student days and no, I did not think he was remotely admirable. Even though the Evil Empire crumbled on his watch, that was due more to economic and political movement within the USSR than pressure from the US Administration.

Bush Sr - hmmm. Well, he didn't have Alzheimer's. But he was lacklustre. There was cronyism, there was the slippery slope to dishing out contracts to pals for wars that hadn't been declared just hanging about in the atmosphere. There was a failure to make the most of opportunities and there was economic gloom.

Then came Clinton, and while I respect his intelligence and appreciate his act, admiration is not something I can quite feel for someone who was so heavily compromised both before and while in office by the air of sleaze that surrounded his dealings - almost certainly within the letter of the law, but I always have an image of Hill and Bill like jackals circling their next carcass. And the whole Monica business did bring the White House into disrepute. Although I think he governed creditably enough, the good stuff that happened economically in Clinton's era was more a lucky break than an intended outcome. He also set up some of the deregulation that has landed us in the current fiscal castastrophe. At the end of his eight years, I had a sense of disappointment that was immeasurably deepened by the defeat of Al Gore by Bush and the GOP party machinery.

While Bush Jr was a gift to the satirists, I find myself wishing he had not been quite so easy a target with his malapropisms (terriers and bariffs...), his gaucherie (Yo Blair!), his blithe insouciance in the face of suffering - proudly showing off the latest green gadgets on his Crawfordsville ranch as New Orleans disintegrated. Admirable...I don't think so.

So what is it about Obama that makes me admire him? Number one, he's 'fessed up to his mistakes in print, in two books which he himself has written.

Then there is his sheer intelligence. Apart from the numerous endorsements of his professors and colleagues, the media coverage has shown time and time again, a man who is not afraid to think before opening his trap. He likes thinking, he has run the bid for the presidency with a startling competence and while of course running a country is different, he is a man who seems to be able to manage others, while engendering loyalty and encomia of great fulsomeness.

Secondly, he is his own man. He looks at a situation and does what he thinks is right. Like the dinner for John McCain. He is doing his best to create a bi-partisan government focused on rebuilding a country trashed by its leaders. Because currently the US does look like a frat-house on a Sunday afternoon. There's garbage strewn everywhere, ripped sofa cushions, stained upholstery, someone did spew in the corner, there's the scent of rancid alcohol and stale smoke, and the semi-conscious corpses of the kids who couldn't handle the stairs unbecomingly slumped like rag-dolls across the floor. The Cheneys, the Madoffs, the Fulds, they've had their fun, and pissed on the American and quite a few other people while they were at it.

But another admirable thing about Barack Obama is that he also likes a joke and some fun, he enjoys dancing with his wife, cuddling his kids and talking to his friends. Where Dubya continues to seem like a bizarre puppet,maybe what Pinocchio did when he grew up, Obama seems like a real person, and now that all the razzmatazz is done, he will roll up his sleeves, sit down to read, think, discuss and debate with the exceptional minds he has appointed to help him, and work out both short and long-term options. When he makes decisions, he will have the humility and common sense to explain them, and he will also be able to remind us all that he is not Superman or Iron Man, he is just another human, and that he may make the wrong decision, or the unpopular decision.

The papers in the UK have been full of the usual British caveat-construction, but you know, I looked at Obama a while ago, and I don't expect miracles. But what I think the Americans have managed is to appoint someone compassionate and sensible who will explore what he can deliver rather than promising the moon, and then he will deliver, explaining it to us all in coherent, structured and elegant language that encourages us to strive for the heights instead of allowing us to wallow in complacency or incompetence.

Sarah Palin attacked Obama for being a man of words - but without words, we are no more than posturing apes. Obama makes us more than that, and perhaps that celebration of the word, of language and of soaring and searing rhetoric, speeches that put us on the spot as much as the expectation of them puts him on the spot, is the gift for which I admire him the most.

So, yes, a new era, an era of eloquence and damned hard slog. Somehow, it seems like an improvement on the era of obfuscation, lies and misunderestimation that has now passed.

Stretching out and courting sailors

2009-01-14T22:31:00.004+01:00

Many thanks to Celia Rees - I started teaching her wonderful YA novel Pirates! this week, and on the book's website, she lists some of the songs she used as inspiration, including I Courted a Sailor by Kate Rusby, which sent me back to this wonderful singer. I bought Sleepless when it first came out years ago but didn't really get into her. Then I youtubed her and ended up downloading Hourglass, her first collection of songs. On which there is the heartbreaking I am stretched on your grave, a song that sends shivers up and down my spine and calls up all sorts of images to mind. Rusby has a voice that is smooth but raspy and the accompanying musicians - accordion, flute, fiddle and acoustic guitar, produce a rich, evocative layering of sound that is pure magic. A whole catalogue of loveliness awaits.

Somehow, I've managed to download some additional widget for iTunes called Genius which is meant to provide recommendations (ahem, get you to go and spend more money, perhaps their fight back against amazon going the downloadable route). But Genius is currently sending me apologies that it isn't working fully and btw here's the list of top 10 downloads, featuring Beyonce and Britney. But being in the mood for folk, the idea of listening to the bouncy vacuous beats seems utterly risible.

It was with a shock that I realised that I knew I am stretched on your grave from both Dead Can Dance and Sinead O'Connor's versions, but the song never grabbed me by the throat and shook me until I heard Rusby's version. Curious how some voices, some arrangements of sound just go right to one's heart, or rather whatever strange part of our brains it is where we respond to music.

War Horse

2009-01-13T18:50:00.005+01:00

What a way to start the year - traipsing from Brussels to London, 91 students in tow, to visit the Imperial War Museum in the morning and see the National Theatre's production of War Horse in the afternoon.

Over the years, I've seen many many plays, in all sorts of venues and all sorts of styles. I can think of all sorts of standout performances, I've had wonderful entrancing times in the theatre, but War Horse went straight into the top five or so of theatrical memories. It was exhilarating, heartbreaking, wild, and one of those rare occasions when the adaptation transcends the source material. Morpurgo's book is a lovely book, but the complete physical experience of the play is so visceral, so vivid and so extraordinarily focused in performance that it becomes much more than a story about a horse surviving World War One. I don't think I've ever seen a cast work so fluidly and effectively to create real art: every single person on stage totally gave themselves over to the piece.

Of course, there is the technical magnificence of the horses - extraordinary pieces of engineering, matched by the physical labours of the actors manipulating the heads, the hindquarters and the forelegs while making utterly believable horse sounds - the chill of the screams of horses cut down by machine gun fire will not leave me.

In addition, there were wonderfully light comic touches, and the changes made to the plot (scenes cut and backstory added) were not lightly executed, but carefully thought through. The main scene setter was a shred of screen across the back of the stage, used to project the wonderful drawings of Rae Smith, who designed the set with Handspring, the company which created the puppets - although the horses are more like sculptures than puppets.

Many of the plays I've seen in the last ten years have been at the National, and their visual inventiveness is one of the great pleasures of going to the theatre there. War Horse was one of the richest in terms of sheer spectacle. Having now read the reviews my students have written about the production, I feel vindicated in hauling them untimely from their beds for their journey to the western front. War Horse is a glorious endorsement of all that is best in theatre, a wondrous example of when everything falls into place and makes magic.

The play is sold out at the National, but is transferring to the West End - booking until the end of September. Prices are up from the National's incredibly reasonable 10-45/seat, but it is worth seeing this piece at any price.

Reading resolutions

2009-01-03T12:22:00.003+01:00

The TBR pile is 86 books big, plus a couple more that are coming through the post. Last year, I read 109 books... that means that if I read everything in the TBR pile, I should see the year through to October without buying any more books, especially since some of the babies in that pile are seriously long.

Of course book lust will grab me and I will feel that I simply cannot do without a quick hit from Amazon...but I am going to do my uber-best not to order any more books until the TBR pile is down below 50. There are some great reads in there. I've winkled out the books that I've started and really won't finish (S. Meyer's New Moon, step forward, ditto AM Holmes' This Book will Save your Life). So that is resolution number 1.

And in this Darwin Bicentenary year, I am going to read The Origin of the Species.

Meanwhile, I've finished The Thirty Years War, which was a slog, although I do think I am now clear on the differences between Ferdinand II and Ferdinand III and I certainly know who Maximilian of Bavaria is, though I am still confused about Margraves and Landgraves, Electors John George, George John, Frederick, Charles Lewis of Saxony, Brandenburg etc etc etc.

Have now started Dark Fire by CJ Sansom, and Matthew Shardlake is better than ever - I am really going to eke out Sovereign and Revelation, because this guy is good....The worldbuilding is flawless, the characterisation sympathetic and the stories convoluted and intriguing. Yes, 80 pages in, I did end-read, and now I can settle back to see how the tale unfolds, because of course, it's not the way that it ends, but the way that it is told that matters.

Which reminds me of the joys of Jarvis Cocker, who edited the Today programme on Wednesday morning and used as his thought for the day the words of Alan Watts, an Englishman who devoted his life to philosophy and exploring Buddhism. Cocker chose an excerpt of Watts talking about the way we are so goal-oriented - and as a teacher, peddling the notion that one must jump through hoops to achieve one's full potential, the extract resonated. I suppose my real resolution for reading this year is to encourage the students I teach to believe in reading themselves, to take up and relish reading so that it becomes innate to them, and thence, a consolation, a revelation, a refuge, a door opening up new worlds and new ideas. Not because they should, not because they must, but because they can read. How lucky they are to have such possibilities before them.

Wilkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome 2009

2009-01-01T12:22:00.003+01:00

What a good start to the year, tea in bed listening to In Our Time, chaired by Melvyn Bragg, guests: Melissa Lane, Anthony Grayling and Roger Scruton, discussing Boethius and the Consolations of Philosophy! You won't be able to listen to it yet, as it is repeated tonight at 9:30pm, but from then, you can go to the In Our Time website and click on Listen Again to have consolation enough to calm the most savage breast.

Resolutions -

1 Get going on proper work for the dissertation
2 Go for more walks in the Belgian countryside
3 Finish first draft of The Apprentice, vol 1 in the hairy people and blood-guzzling countesses saga.

Those are the public resolutions. I know what I've got to do, so I'm going to go and do it. In the meantime, am just wrapping up CV Wedgewood's history of The Thirty Years War... what a book. What a Dame! Well worth the read.

Who knows what 2009 will bring - but let's hope that it isn't as bad as it could be. To you and yours, all the very best for the 12 months ahead.

Adios 2008

2008-12-31T11:55:00.002+01:00

This year has certainly been memorable, plenty of light, even more shade, but here is a purely cultural evaluation:

TV - Outnumbered, Little Dorrit, Merlin were live highlights for me, and on DVD, Mad Men, The Wire and Curb Your Enthusiasm have been wonderful. Can't wait to see more of Wallender as well, in which Branagh was marvellous and also provided a little touch of Tom Hiddleston, definitely an actor to watch (see below...). But my complete favourite was Devil's Whore with the amazing Andrea Riseborough, Dominic West, Michael Fassbender and Harry Lloyd as a memorably slimy cameo of Prince Rupert. I can't wait to see what Riseborough does next.

Books - Travels with Herodotus is the book I will definitely re-read from this year, along with Jude Morgan's An Accomplished Woman, and Megan Whalen Turner's Attolia books. This has been a great year for history books and children's fiction, but apart from Morgan and the delightful Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, good new romance has been thin on the ground. Am also being very careful not to gollop up CS Sansom's Shardlake books - I loved the first two.

Music - Well, Vampire Weekend obviously, as well as Fleet Foxes and The Killers, but the other pleasure has been discovering David Daniels, especially the opera Rinaldo with beautiful performances from him and Cecilia Bartoli, just utterly lovely. Minion No 1 went to his first rock concert, VW at Botanique here in Brussels, and we also took both boys to their first proper classical concert, a special children's concert with some Rimsky Korsakov, Weber and Stravinsky's Firebird with accompanying narration.

Theatre - the year started with the highlight of Much Ado About Nothing at the National Theatre with Zoe Wanamaker and Simon Russell Beale as Beatrice and Benedick, and another highlight was Maria Aitken's The 39 Steps, which is wonderfully funny. Cheek by Jowl's Cymbeline was excellent, pacy, weird and introducing Tom Hiddleston who is going to be big big big. He's one of those actors who just catch your eye and can't quite release you once you start watching him. Elegant, neat and precise with his verse. But of course, the big big big highlight was Tennant's Hamlet. Not just Tennant, but Greg Doran's wonderful ensemble cast, with an extra special mention to Penny Downie's Gertrude, who lingers with me.

Art - Renaissance Portraits at the National Gallery and seeing the Queen's collection of Flemish Masters here in Brussels have been major highlights. I took friends to see Rubens' house in Antwerp, always a delight to see. Taking the boys to Chatsworth was enjoyable - Minion No 1's egalitarian instincts were somewhat offended by the wealth of fine art snaffled by the Dukes of Devonshire on their numerous Grand Tours and then displayed so finely in deepest Derbyshire, but he was impressed.

Cinematically speaking, the stuff we saw was on DVD, but my main impression remains admiration for George Clooney for steadily producing a stream of interesting, complex films appealing to adults - this year, The Good German and Michael Clayton joined Goodnight and Good Luck and Syriana as films I will happily watch again. No, you know, I really don't fancy him. We finally caught up with Lives of Others, which was just as marvellous as everyone said, and with Sophie Scholl, which was terribly sad and beautiful. And I am going to stand up for Mamma Mia! which received very dodgy reviews from male reviewers but was and will be the ultimately feelgood film for dark times, one to watch and rewatch when the winter glums are a little too pressing.

So culturally, at least, a rich and varied banquet. No dance - so maybe 2009 is the year to introduce the boys to ballet...

Madoff, Merdle and Money

2008-12-16T18:29:00.004+01:00

Isn't money just weird...My first job was as a graduate trainee in a government organisation that was intended to regulate the City, the body that eventually transmuted into today's FSA. I ran away - two things in particular drove me. First of all, I felt physically sick commuting even the seven stops from Kentish Town to Bank, walking in a strange rhythm with thousands of fellow-lemmings from the Tube to the office, and second, once I was there, learning about the futures markets, I recoiled in some sort of allergic reaction to the idea of essentially betting millions and millions of pounds, dollars or yen. My limited understanding of most financial transactions of a more sophisticated variety was that they were very fancy ways of gambling, a past-time which has never held much appeal for me. I used occasionally to take on room-mates at school or university for stakes of Smarties or matchsticks, but real money has always been rather too rare for me to take any chances when it came into my possession.

The thing was, as a reader, I knew about families who lost everything. I knew about Little Dorrit, I'd read The Way We Live Now, and Middlemarch, I'd heard of the South Sea Bubble. Those of us who love literature and study history are well aware that once we humans have lost our understanding of money as a tangible, we teeter on a precipice which leads to darker places, like the Marshalsea, or Turkish baths where we may slit our throats rather than face the music. Merdle in Little Dorrit, as BBC audiences will have seen this last week, nabbed his step-son's pearl-handled knife so he could do away with himself in his local hammam, but Madoff (and what serendipity led a man with a name like Madoff to make off with so many people's moolah!) must face the music in court.

So here we are, those banks who seemed to be slipping through the credit crunch somewhat less scathed than others - HSBC, Santander, BNP Paribas, they turn out to be mugs facing potentially billions in losses for bunging the odd quid in Madoff's direction. It's all very well being a brilliant scientist/mathematician/economist/analyst, but once again, we have a prime example of how the financial world depends not on common sense or science, but on a herd instinct focused purely on false expectations. The Greeks, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and of course Dickens and Trollope (both of whom had direct personal experience of the fall-out of financial shenanigans) have all warned us against the pitfalls of handing over our hard-earned to the first plausible smooth-talker. Having watched with interest scams of one sort or another from Ernest Saunders' games with Guinness up to Madoff's appearance in court yesterday, I keep wondering how theoretically intelligent people (eg. Nicola Horlick and all the rest of them who thought Madoff's operations were safe) can fall for the scam. But of course, the other lesson that literature and history teach is that round the next corner, there is always another sucker.

Few fraudsters are remorseful, like Bulstrode, George Eliot's banker whose shameful dealings are exposed when he is at his height in terms of power and influence. Bulstrode has the bulwark of a faithful wife, willing to stand by him through his shame as she enjoyed his erstwhile glory. Ruth Madoff has posted bail to keep Madoff temporarily out of choky. This time, the bad guy will take the fall. But of course, it's still caveat emptor out there. Getting tangled up with money seems to me like getting tangled up with one of those men that country and western gals sing about, the types who leave a girl high and dry, or weeping into their whiskies, lipstick on his collar, a twinkle in his eye, and a permanent label that only shrewd women can read which says, "I will mess you around, you'll be walking after midnight, crazy for me."

Recovery

2008-12-06T23:18:00.004+01:00

An evil cold caught up with me so badly that I reread two of my favourite Georgette Heyers, Sylvester and Frederica, and they fulfilled their comfort function admirably, but as I logged them into the reading spreadsheet (yes, I am pitiful and with no life, I do keep records of what I've read), I realised that they were the first two Heyers I've read this year. Or at least, the first two I've logged, because I'm pretty sure I revisited Venetia in the summer.

Nor have I read this year my other favourite comfort writers, Eva Ibbotson and Jennifer Crusie. Playing - as you can - with my spreadsheet I see that this is a year where I've re-read a few of the books on my list, but those were professional reads, in other words, the books I have been teaching. Otherwise, this has been a year where I've read mainly new stuff, much less romance than usual, more history and biography, and the most satisfying reads have been children's fiction and classics, notably my buried treasure, which would be EM Forster's A Passage to India.

I studied APTI at university, but didn't rate it compared with Room with a View and Howard's End in particular. This time round, I have really fallen in love with the book, and that's a lovely and rare feeling, although it hasn't helped me particularly in trying to transmit its delights to a gang of somewhat baffled and overstretched seventeen year olds for whom English is a second language. Still, this time round, the symbolism, the richness of characterisation, the vividness of description, the explorations of spirit and nature have engaged me much more than the more contemporary fiction I've been reading. It's a juicy book, lush and plump, fascinating, with some lovely jokes and much carefully channeled anger. Forster excoriates his fellow Englishmen and women, deservedly so, but his eye for their follies and conceits is incredibly sharp.

Then there was Treasure Island, which really is a terrifically exciting book, very neat and delightful. My image of Long John Silver has been so frequently adjusted and warped by stage and film versions of the book that I had forgotten what a fascinating character he is and I want to see a decent remake of the film with Tom Goodman-Hill in the role, because after watching the amazing, wonderful and compulsive Devil's Whore, I would be happy to see any of the cast, but he did bring considerable comic relief to the down and dirty third episode.

Having meandered round the houses, I'm just going to end by saying that the Killers are just getting better and better. Day & Age is fabulous. This has been a good year for great discoveries - Vampire Weekend and Fleet Foxes are wonderful, but the Killers have come into their own, and while 2008 has been a tough year, at least it has had a terrific soundtrack.

Not a book or a movie, but a place

2008-11-28T17:03:00.002+01:00

Today, I visited Aargh Ink, Jenny Crusie's blog, after a brief pause and found she had written about the wonders of maps, which are things that we very much love in this household too, which made me think of this place, which is definitely my favourite museum in Belgium, and is in my top five, along with John Soane's house and various art galleries.

You may not recognise, or even have heard of, the Plantin-Moretus museum, but it is the most wonderful place. Of course, I would say that, being a total bookaholic, because this was one of the first book-factories in Europe. Christophe Plantin was a Frenchman who came to Antwerp because it was a centre of humanism and translations of the Bible and music, and he set up a printing house. He had a daughter, and when she married, her husband and descendants carried on the business, and their name was Moretus.

There are wonderful things in this place - on the ground floor are the presses and the proof-reading rooms, the bookshop and a study reserved for Justus Lipsius, who used to come and stay and have great thoughts. Upstairs is a warren of staircases and panelled rooms with prints and maps and globes, the first recorded image of a potato and illustrations of polar voyages complete with Esquimaux and polar bears. There are wonderful family portraits and illuminated Bibles, and Plantin's own sonnet on worldly happiness:

Sonnet

Avoir une maison commode, propre et belle,
Un jardin tapissé d'espaliers odorans,
Des fruits, d'excellent vin, peu de train, peu d'enfans,
Posseder seul sans bruit une femme fidèle,

N'avoir dettes, amour, ni procès, ni querelle,
Ni de partage à faire avecque ses parens,
Se contenter de peu, n'espérer rien des Grands,
Régler tous ses desseins sur un juste modèle,

Vivre avecque franchise et sans ambition,
S'adonner sans scrupule à la dévotion,
Dompter ses passions, les rendre obéissantes,

Conserver l'esprit libre, et le jugement fort,
Dire son chapelet en cultivant ses entes,
C'est attendre chez soi bien doucement la mort.

A book to avoid

2008-11-16T19:56:00.002+01:00

This was one of those books where I read the reviews and thought, hmmm, interesting, and then was looking for something meatily populist to round out my 3 for the price of 2 offer at Waterstones. So I picked up Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and here I am, several days later wondering why I finished it, why it had rave reviews and how on earth anyone, even an Aussie, could even conceive of a single positive sentence featuring both War and Peace and Dragon Tattoo.

It's mean to pick on an author who is tragically and relatively youthfully dead, but when the Swedes sorting through Stieg Larsson's stuff after his heart attack came across three thick fat and unpublished manuscripts, I think it would have been kinder to Larsson's memory and the world if they'd not taken them to a publisher desperate for something to fill the schedules until the next Wallender novel.

Spoilers henceforth:

Plot/Themes: usual sexual violence/abuse/rape serial killer stuff along with corporate shenanigans and neo-Nazism corrupting Sweden from within.
Characterisation: hero is placeholder for author (shaggy, somewhat fit financial journalist, serial shagger), heroine, a sort of Boho wet dream girl-woman with Aspergers and an unusual interest in the inner workings of the iBook.
Style: euruuuughghghghghg. Translator should be shot for mistmatched idioms and clunkiness of Mount Rushmore proportions. There's a whodunnit for you - who killed the translator....Unless he was just working with what he had, in which case, hoo boy, it was lame.
Form and structure: Dual plot-lines for hero and heroine until they meld uneasily about 2/3 of the way in.

I am not going to waste any more of your or my time on this book - just trust me, it doesn't live up to they hype.
I

The Canto of Ulysses

2008-11-11T18:23:00.004+01:00

Primo Levi's If This is a Man is a book that I read years ago and never forgot, but did not know until I started teaching it this term. This time, chapter 11, when Levi is asked by his fellow-prisoner Jean for some Italian lessons, is the chapter that suddenly stands out in stark relief to the previous chapters which record and reproduce the routines and systems that evolved in Auschwitz. Levi starts his first lesson with words, simple words for the simple things that their life has been reduced to but in the course of their walk across the camp, a walk of over an hour, Levi feels the desperate need to tell Jean the story of Canto 26 of Dante's Inferno, where in the 8th circle of hell, Dante encounters Ulysses. In an episode devised by Dante, Ulysses recounts to the poet his final journey, his passage past the pillars of Hercules and his speech to his men, exhorting them to keep faith and continue their voyage into oceans unknown, towards lands unexplored.

Dante tells his men:

118	Considerate la vostra semenza:
119	fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
120	ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.

This is translated in by Stuart Woolf (Levi's English translator) as:

Think of your breed: for brutish ignorance
Your mettle was not made; you were made men,
To follow after knowledge and excellence.

Of course, in Auschwitz, this is a cry of incredible defiance. But where Dante's Ulysses is destroyed by Another, Levi is destroyed ultimately by the knowledge that in Auschwitz, the struggle was not between the demand for obedience to divine rule facing off against the freedom to find out knowledge and excellence, but between those who embraced brutish ignorance, seeking to extinguish all knowledge and excellence and the men, women and children who entered their inverted, perverse, enclosed empire. The empire where criminals became kings and the bulk of inmates became dispensable vassals.

Levi confronts a terrible paradox in The Canto of Ulysses: to remain a man, he must remember Dante, but the act of remembering and delivering and explaining to the Pikolo Jean, reawakens in the prisoner the terrible agony of remembering his home, his mountains, his life prior to entering the circles of hell that comprised Auschwitz. And yet, through Ulysses, Levi begins to grasp at some explanation for the inexplicable, 'a flash of intuition, perhaps the reason for our fate'. Then the mundane, sordid, banal reality of collecting their cabbage and turnip soup dispels the moment and Levi ends with the final line of the canto:

'and over our heads, the hollow seas closed up'.

Even though he is in the category of the saved and not the drowned, here, he is swallowed up.

We must do our utmost, in however small a way, to rescue our fellow men from the hollow seas, to remember that we were not made to live like brutes, but to pursue excellence and virtue, to protect those who are at risk of the terrible brutishness of which we can be guilty and to help those who seem to be sinking into savagery find safe passage into the light of the sun and other stars.

Motion's Keats

2008-11-08T16:59:00.004+01:00

I remember all the hoopla about Andrew Motion's Keats biography when it was first published in 1997, but I just never got round to reading it - after teaching Keats a good deal in recent years, I was finally guiltified into thinking I really ought to know a little more about him, so I got the book over the summer and finally started it about 3 weeks ago.

The book is incredibly thorough. I'm not sure that I needed to know that Keats ate porridge on the morning he went to Mull or that the Maria Crowther which carried Keats to his Italian death was a two-masted brigantine, but these are things I do know now. What I really did enjoy about the biography were Motion's explorations of Keats's verse itself, which inspired me to go back and reread all the bits I read only at university as opposed to the regulars one would expect to dish up to school age students, e.g. Eve of St Agnes, Odes and Belle Dame Sans Merci.

I was surprised to find out, according to Motion, how negative Keats was about women, because of all the Romantic poets, he seems to me the most romantic, with the most interesting depictions of women, from the Belle Dame to Isabella and Psyche. They are there pretty much to be worshipped, I suppose, and sometimes to be reviled, they can be a bit passive like Isabella and Madeline, but women seem to be essential to his creative processes, and he certainly isn't a twisted cynic like Byron or a player like Shelley.

Another pleasure of the biography was being able to position Keats in terms of his period and his friends, his social status and his day to day lifestyle. As expected, the end is terribly sad, partly because it is always sad to read of a young man or woman dying before they should, also because he was so terribly conscious of how much he might have achieved but wouldn't, and finally because he was heartbroken by the realisation that he would not see his Fanny again.

Fanny seems opaque as ever - it is not clear at all what kind of girl/woman she was from Motion's biography, we never seem to catch more than glimpses of her, but what is clear is that while Keats loved her deeply, he was also terrified of loving her (or indeed anyone). He had, understandably, given his mother's abandonment of her family first through remarriage, then through her disappearance and finally through her death, issues with women and also seemed to believe that love and creativity were incompatible. But eventually, just as he realised how very sick he was, he also realised how very much he loved Fanny. It is heartbreaking. But I do wish that Severn had shown fewer scruples and chosen to open Fanny's last two letters to him instead of burying them with him.

Teaching Keats has made me love his poetry more than ever - he always my favourite of the Romantic poets. But reading this biography brought home to me how very much we did lose first through the wilfullness of his reviewers who discouraged him and slowed his rates of production down by depressing him, and secondly through his death. His preoccupations and artistic concerns are so universal, his ability to ravel them up into verse which resonated and resounded with ambiguity and layering and complexity was so rich and his vision so clear that I regret all that he might have achieved if he had lived even for another three or four years, or past thirty.

Now we will just have to wait until the release of Jane Campion's film Bright Star, with Ben Whishaw as Keats - out sometime next year, and I hope, sooner rather than later.

Memories

2008-11-05T21:30:00.002+01:00

This morning, I turned on the tv and was immediately thrilled by the little numbers in the corner of the screen - I think at that stage, Obama had 338 and McCain 120 votes in the electoral college, and Dimbleby had a surreal interview with Gore Vidal, who declared "I don't know who you are". Then at 6am Brussels time, Obama took the stage with his family, and spoke for 10-12 minutes, calm, sensible, sane and dignified as ever.

I was three or four when my parents moved to Washington DC, and I was conscious of race, if not racism, very early. Washington is a black city, except for the compressed quarter where the expats and rich guys hang out. I remember playing with Angie Tutt, and I have a vague recollection that it was ok for her to come over to my house, but I'd never go over to her house. It wasn't safe: or that's the impression I had. It was certainly in a part of Washington that we just never visited. I remember hearing songs like Go tell it on the mountain, Oh, Happy Day delivered by Etta James with a soaring gospel chorus in the background, What's Going On. I know there were riots and demonstrations, some against Vietnam, some race-related, stuff that adults discussed in low, horrified voices. And I remember visiting other friends who had black housekeepers, ample women who changed out of uniforms and shrugged on shabby coats before catching the bus back to some other part of town. My school ran a scholarship programme, and there was a funny, long, gawky boy, Quentin, whose show and tell was a praying mantis over a foot long that he kept in a box in the corner of the schoolroom.

I wonder where Angie and Quentin are today, and how they feel, and whether they got to college and had the opportunities they deserved and if they are sitting in comfortable homes in nice suburbs of Washington, proud that their generation was the one that was able to provide not just America with the possibility of hope and change, but the whole world.

Obama's victory is a victory of clarity over confusion, of calm reflection over chaotic impulse and of a blend of idealism, fundamental decency and common sense over fear, pure fundamentalism and cock-eyed rationales with little or no foundation in fact. I hope he's also brought McCain back from his bizarre brinkmanship with the more delusional and plain weird shores of the Republican party. Simply put, where I face-palmed and did my best to ignore, I now hope. Thank you America, for giving all of us something to smile about, something to feel good about. Because if anyone has the intellect and organisational, executive ability to get us out of our current mess, it is Barack Obama.

Let's hope they will...

2008-11-04T21:04:00.002+01:00

What a shame it is that we in the rest of the world can't vote in today's election - it'd be an Obama landslide. But all we can do is hope that enough people in the USA have believed 'Yes, we can' and have, or are or will be doing it today, voting not for McCain whose final stump speech in Colorado was all about fighting - 'my friends, we must fight and fight and fight... and I will fight and fight and fight', but for That sane One in the other corner.

I've heard so many totally stupid things said about Obama, but the comments that struck me today were the ones which dissed McCain and Obama equally, calling them both undistinguished. While I'd have to agree that McCain is, for his 72 years, pretty undistinguished (855th out of 860 in his graduating year at Annapolis, crashing four planes in his years as a fighter pilot, only allowed to fly because his father and grandfather were admirals, screwing around on the wife who'd endured terrible pain and disfigurement in a car-crash before divorcing her so he could marry a very rich woman, unable to remember exactly how many houses he has), Obama is a different kettle of fish. The first black editor of the Harvard Law Review is a pretty distinguished way to start a career; an eloquent and elegant writer; a man who turned his back on the opportunity to rake in the millions as a lawyer, preferring to serve and help disadvantaged people; a phenomenal organiser with a real talent for finding and keeping excellent staff; a man who rarely loses his temper in public.

Obama is special. The Economist fingered him a little over four years ago as one to watch and they have been right. Personally, I wanted him to win the Democrat nomination because I suspected that he would be less divisive than Hillary. While I admire what Mrs Clinton has achieved as a Senator, the Clinton I'd rather see in the White House is Chelsea, who seems to have taken the best of both her parents and become, somehow, a decent and sensible and sane human being. So I got that wish. And the way Obama has conducted himself and led his party and led his campaigners and organisers, who all seem to follow him with a dedication that goes well beyond duty, show a man of intelligence and warmth, of humanity and dignity, who no doubt will see his integrity suffer as he strives to manage the position which I so hope he wins during the course of today, but who also gives me the impression of being a man wise enough to take his country forward in a direction that will give not just the US but all of us hope.

Wisdom, health, common sense, intelligence, genuine commitment to family and to the future - these are Obama's positive attributes, and in a time where very hard decisions must be taken, where very dangerous people must be contained and where compromises must be reached, they are the attributes that will ensure that this currently rickety world of ours is a little safer and a little saner.

Obama's victory will say so much to the rest of the world about America, and for those of us who know and love America, will give us instead of the volatile, the self-absorbed, the materialistic and power-hungry world of Republicanism, the altruistic, exciting, innovative, problem-solving world of the United States.

I'm not naive - the Democrats have their ties to corporate fatcats and their satanic agreements sewn up with lobbiests too. Obama's hands are by no means clean. But if you are a decent individual heading into the muddy swamps of politics, you can't expect to remain squeaky and pristine. I'd rather have someone who does know and understand the ropes, who has an inkling of how to yank them to achieve his goals rather than yelling swear words and pulling a McNasty. Let's hope a significant majority of the American public is thinking the same thing. I'll be crossing my fingers.

The carcrash that is Spooks

2008-10-28T20:36:00.003+01:00

Continue to wade my way through Andrew Motion's biography of Keats, verrrryyyyyy slowly, but thoroughly because I am stopping along the way with my old Penguin edition of the complete Keats to read early sonnets and Endymion, so no new books up for review at all. Perhaps a burst of activity in Nov, who can say, but I shouldn't think life will lighten up until all the references and university entrance palaver is out of the way.

In the meantime, I did start watching Stephen Fry and Simon Schama on the USofA, part of my great America fetish. Schama's programme is genuinely provocative and interesting, although of course, I'd have liked him to be a little less careful with his judgements and a bit more provocative with his commentary. But I am unhinged by overexposure to the Daily Show and Huffington Post, so what do I know? Stephen Fry's romp around the US in a black taxi is great - it's a bit like the way Americans do Europe - three seconds in North Dakota, a whole minute for some meander in the Mississippi in the company of a man who was a dead ringer for an Islamic terrorist given big bushy beardiness (BTW, I swear when I am Emperor of the Universe and Evil Overlord of all Dominions, I'm going to ban beards - they have always looked like homes for bacteria and strange fungal growths. I will entertain petitions for beards that are either so neat as to be unobtrusive or champion ZZ Top type beards, but 98% beards will be for the big shave).

And now I'm brought to my latest two televisual addictions: Little Dorrit, in same useful, user-friendly format as Bleak House, half hour on Thursday and Sunday, and of course, the diabolically appalling Spooks.

I've always thought of Spooks as shark-jumpy, from the end of Season 1 where MacFadyen has his girlfriend and her daughter trapped in a house with an exploding laptop, and yanno that everyone will escape the cliffhanger - but then the writers will get you with a much worse death for your favourite characters at the end of an early ep in the series. And it was ever thus, with the dispatch of Rupert Penry Jones, oops, sorry, Adam Carter, it's just the drama and writing are so implausible that I can never forget that the actors are actually actors and that Rupert Penry Jones is having to say these absolutely ridiculous things e.g. about how his grandfather had half his back shot away on the Somme so we aren't going to bow to terrorists demanding that we cancel Remembrance Sunday....eh?

Anyway, last night, RPJ bought the farm, but fortunately, hot guy role has been taken over by Richard Armitage, aka Guy of Gisborne, and bonus, he took off his top to reveal muscular glorification with Blake tattoed on his midriff. I am not sure how or why the tattoist in the Russian prison where Guy - sorry, Richard, sorry, Lucas North had spent the last 8 years (ahem conveniently skipping 9/11 and all previous series of Spooks) had access to a Blake print, but there it was on his chest, along with cobblers like Dum Spiro Spero and wiggly squirls on his back and arms. Anyway for those of you who missed it, Armitage has quite the upper body.

You can see that unlike previous series of Spooks, where they had Tom/Matthew MacFadyen walking into the sea and Danny the cool black guy having his brains blown out, I am no longer remotely upset by the death of key characters. I just like to know how they are going to get rid of them, and RPJ had let slip the suggestion that he might be leaving the series, so I knew sticky end would surely follow. The bad news is that despite having a full funeral the stupid blonde woman who RPJ/Adam was having an on-off thing with is back, behaving more stupidly than ever... in Russia undercover (ermmmm, MI5 don't do abroad, but that's only a slight technical hitch) using her mobile, then having a detailed practical chat over mobile in back of London cab - how bloody un-undercover is that? She did do a cool thing of kicking the s*@t out of a big bald bloke who was theoretically an Ivan following her, then straddling him with her crotch in his face and a ballpoint pen to his left eye so she could nick his carkeys.

Anyway, Spooks was well up to its customary standard of being beyond the collapse of the Twin Towers in its use of Willing Suspension of Disbelief, but I will be there like a panting hart to watch the second in the series tonight. But I'm getting perilously close to not wishing to spend my previous TV hours on a programme which has me howling at the screen every 3 seconds: "No, that couldn't happen, that just couldn't happen, arrrrghghghg give me a bloody break."

Tennant's Hamlet

2008-10-23T17:34:00.004+02:00

On Tuesday night, I saw Tennant doing Hamlet, and it was the most exhilarating of performances - although he couldn't have done it without the others. The cast was terrific, and I do think it is a landmark Hamlet, although what with Toby Stephens and Ben Wishaw around, there are plenty of major contenders for the Hamlet of the Noughties.

I've seen some great Hamlets - Jonathan Pryce in 1982, Branagh in 1992, Andrew Mallett in 1996 on the Great Wall of China, Simon Russell Beale in 2000. But Tennant was something else. It was like watching quicksilver, swift, elusive, allusive, rich, and utterly, totally enthralling.

The role is so absorbing, the word-play so dazzling, the imagery so vivid and the predicament so much the predicament of all of us poor puny humans. Not all of us are Macbeth or Lear, military men at their peak, or aged kings like Lear. But all of us have some moment when we are faced with terrible revelations, decisions, consequences, however it happens, all of us must lose a father, as Claudius so callously suggests in Act 1, and all of us have that moment when we are rendered rogues and peasant slaves for our failures.

Tennant's Hamlet left me wanting to be Horatio, and I have to say I thought Horatio was a gift in the casting, as were Oliver Ford Davies as Polonius and Penny Downie as Gertrude. The closet scene has lingered with me. I sat there tense and horrified, but now, the memory of Gertrude holding her beloved son as though she could by holding him somehow put them both back together again, shattered and distraught as they were, brings tears to my eyes. Patrick Stewart was not a bravado Claudius - he was avuncular but with this terrible, cold concealed cruelty that emerged when he saw Gertrude pick up the cup and ordered her not to drink. Then when she gazes at him, understanding fully what he has planned, he watches frozen, almost visibly convincing himself that he was better off without her. His own death was eerily unhurried.

Time was very clearly delineated throughout, the set was magnificent, but the night was Tennant's, the text was delivered sharp and clear so that meaning was layered and intertwined and everything seemed to me lucid, accessible and true.

Denmark became so real a place of mirrors and smoke, so subtle, the roar of the sea suggested, surrounding this prison with terrors of the deep.

It was one of those nights of theatrical magic, inspirational, rich, unforgettable, the three hours traffic of the stage passing too swiftly. The memory will be green with me for years - I think of moments of the play and the scene unfolds before me in my mind's eye. It's easy with an all-singing-all-dancing-all-sci-fi version of Hamlet like this to forget the hand at the tiller, but Doran's Hamlet is absolutely riveting, and I wish I could see it again and again and again.

Hank and John, and the Nerdfighters

2008-10-14T21:42:00.006+02:00

Last year, I was hooked by the Vlogbrothers, Hank and John Green who live in the middle of nowhere (OK Missoula, Montana, that's the middle of nowhere to a Neuhaus-chomping victory chimp swinging through the capital of Old Europe). They are a pair of bespectacled nerdfighter brothers who decided to communicate only via vlog for 2007, and whoopee, they have reprised themselves for a month because of some bet/deal/punishment decided by their nerdfighter followers. Huzzah.

It is hard to work out which one talks faster, but they are worth checking out for Hank's Numa Numa dance, and for their Obama Llama Duck song featuring George Bush as duck (sometimes sitting) and John's upside down waste-paper basket practice, oh, and by the way, his new book Paper Town comes out in six days. I've not read any of John Green's books, but they are recommended by my former pupil Naomi Rea, whose judgement I mostly trust where books are concerned except for her inexplicable addiction to Twilight and the subsequent stupendously stinky novels of major Mormon Stephanie Meyer featuring uber-Mary-Sue Bella and the gorgeous vampire Edward Cullen who sparkles (for more on his sparkliness also check out that other blogger of genius, Cleolinda). Goodness, that sentence was hard to reach the end of.

I can report nothing else on the book/movie front: we are trying to finish House season 3 before the boxed set of House season 4 is issued in OE, I am in the middle of several books and at the end of none of them, and the only movie I've seen recently was Run Fat Boy Run, a mildly amusing romcom with Simon Pegg and Hank Azaria. I found watching Azaria odd, because of course I know him as the voice of Apu and Chief Wiggum among others, not as some really quite pectorally moulded individual with a face that could only be American. It was a bit like watching my mother-in-law lapdancing. RFBR is also directed by David Schwimmer.

What were these two icons of US tv doing messing around with a low-budget Brit romcom? Saving grace (as always) was Dylan Moran doing one of his louche turns again. Anyway, it did get me through a couple of exercise sessions and I may watch it again while doing tedious bumps and thumps because I have watched so much MTV during my exercise sessions that I have seen every video about 50m times. In fact, if I had been paid a euro for every time I've seen the sodding Foo Fighters singing Best of You, I could step in and sort out the Icelandic banking crisis. Don't get me started on Slipknot and Queens of the Stone Age who continue to vie with the Pussycat Dolls for my vote for most repellent music videos ever conceived.

Dragonfly Pool

2008-10-06T19:08:00.004+02:00

Eva Ibbotson has never let me down - I'm sad that she's now writing exclusively for the children's market, but her writing remains lucid, generous, warm-hearted and humane. The Dragonfly Pool harks back to the children's books of an earlier time, the Ruritanian romances of Anthony Hope, Frances Hodgson Burnett's Lost Prince and Violet Needham's books set in a fin-de-siecle zone somewhere east of Vienna. The brave, bright and sympathetic heroine, Tally Hamilton, has a strong moral code which leads her bizarrely to Bergania, a neutral fictional country that does its best to stand up against Hitler, and entangles her with the Royal Family of Bergania. There is a chase, there are villains of every stripe from the out and out evil to those who are simply utterly and entirely self-centred. Good more or less triumphs, the wicked more or less pay for their sins and the plot hangs together well for me, although as always with Ibbotson's books, I always wish they were longer for the elegance and gentle, witty style that she has perfected over the last 30 or so years of writing.

Ibbotson's stand-out books for me remain Countess Below Stairs, Magic Flutes and Company of Swans, all of which enlivened a rather difficult winter in Aberdeen that I remember for a cold so extreme that I spent quite a lot of time in both the University Library and the central city library, intermittently studying phonetics, sociolinguistics and more cheeringly, Renaissance Scots literature. Later she published The Morning Gift, which has become my favourite of her romances. There is a pattern - not a formula, but a pattern - to her novels. The heroine is always very much an ingenue, and good to her core. Good, not in a goody-two-shoes kind of way, but in a passionate and morally not always particularly easy kind of way, the kind of good that understands sacrifice and struggling for what one believes is right. The heroes are formidably intelligent and often self-made and staggeringly rich. They may be blinded by superficiality at the start of the novel, or even trapped not by blindness but by necessity into quite terrible matches, but they see the light and they are led to it by the heroines. There is always a rich cast of supporting characters with quirks and foibles that make them at once maddening and lovable, but also quite unique. And then there are the villains. There are quite often horrible, nasty evil people, like the leader of the Gestapo thugs in Dragonfly Pool, but also there are quite terrible, awful, banal, narcissists whose great wickedness is their self-centredness and almost unwitting cruelty.

Ibbotson writes a world of extremes, like Dickens or Austen, because extremes are more amusing, but there is a core of fundamental truth in her world - the good do not always entirely triumph, the wicked are not always, and in fact not usually, fully routed, but the triumph at the end of the novel is not so much love conquering all, as moral rectitude triumphing. Selfishness, self-centredness, these may continue in the characters who exhibit them, but our good guys, and this is more explicit in the children's books, enjoy a moral victory that is far more satisfying and true than perhaps glibber writers might manage. All this and careful, neat, high-quality prose that never talks down to the reader of any age. If you haven't read any Ibbotson before, go forth and devour. A writer to comfort the soul.

Consigning Ms Ranty McRant to the recycle bin

2008-09-28T18:12:00.003+02:00

I've decided that I have to stop succumbing to the addictive horrorfest that is the US election season. I've always been interested in the US elections, ever since living in Wash DC as a small child. Early memories include my father ringing my mother to collect him because his bus home had been stopped by demonstrations - when we picked him up he was crying because making his way through the melee, he'd caught some tear gas; buying patisserie from a bakery in the Watergate complex and not quite understanding why the place was in the news all the time; and being fascinated by the name Spiro Agnew because I thought he was something to do with making those Spirograph drawings where you pin one wheel down on a piece of paper and then build up cogs around it to create mesmerising even spiral patterns.

But this time, I really don't think I can stomach any more. While I am pro-Obama (surprise surprise, what liberal European isn't?), I don't think he's going to be any panacea. He gives me the impression of being as bright as Bill Clinton, but not as savvy, nor as slippery. I don't know whether that makes him better or worse, but I do know I really really do not want the McCain/Palin ticket anywhere near the White House. But what's the point of following this whole jamboree at all? This is something I can do absolutely nothing about.

It seems very unfair that the rest of the world that we have absolutely no say in elections that will influence the direction of our world for the next four years...although perhaps from the tumultuous events of the last few weeks, perhaps we have seen the beginning of the end for US hegemony. I'm hesitant but we're looking at a resurgent Russia and a commercially powerful China. Both may yet catch cold, but Russia, as McCain says, is awash with 'petro-dollars' and lo, he sees in Putin's eyes the old message: K-G-B. Does this mean Putin has three eyes? I'm digressing - back to the point that perhaps the reason that the US election is so addictive is our very powerlessness in the face of the mighty US electorate - most of which won't vote. Although this year, they might.

Perhaps it is this total lack of control/direct participation that makes the elections such a compelling car-crash. And which turns me into Mrs Ranty McRant of Rantby, Rantshire, Great Ranting, of the Rantiverse. How do I rant? Let me count the ways - actually, I won't, but suffice to say that while I wasn't wild about Reagan, I never ever came close to obsessing as I currently do about the awfulness of the prospect of McCain/Palin. And really, I have better things to do with my time. So just one last look at my favourite sites over the past few weeks. Adieu, Huffington Post, farewell, Salon.com, hasta la vista to the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal. My ranting days are over. There shall be no more cakes and ale. Yeah right.

Re-entering Dunnettworld

2008-09-24T20:29:00.005+02:00

Well, my reading rates have tailed off after that magnificent burst of activity during the summer. This month, I have gone back to the habit of having about 3 books on the go at any one time, and then of course, there is marking, the masters and planning and preparation to be done.

So what is on the Currently Open but Unfinished pile?

Solomon & Lord: disappointing Miami law-thriller-romance. Promising reviews from the likes of Carl Hiaasen and Harlan Coben, but it's mushy and the characters are more like tv-movie characters than real people. Nearly finished.

The French Renaissance Court, Robert Knecht: this one I am really enjoying. It is proper history, but also accessible to people like me who are not academic historians. And it is a beautiful book to handle, lovely quality paper and reproductions, along with competent, concise prose exploring a complicated and complex subject.

King Hereafter, Dorothy Dunnett. I've been saving this since I bought it in 2001 just after DD died and I knew there would be no more books. It's the story of Macbeth, but not as we know him from Shakespeare. Instead, it is one of DD's classic recreations of period, focusing not on 15th or 16th century Europe, but on 11th century Scotland, and it is wonderful. I wasn't in the mood when I first picked up the novel, but now there is a group read on one of the Dunnett webgroups and it is at a steady pace, not too fast, allowing us all plenty of time to tease out meanings, observe the subtleties and work our way through the labyrinth of names and places that are a little familiar, but not totally so. I was surprised to encounter Lady Godiva, frex.

Dunnett's modus operandi is layering detail on detail to build her world, and to write about intelligent heroes surrounded generally by intelligent and perceptive observers. We rarely enter the hero's point of view, most frequently encountering him through the perceptions of others, which are opaque and driven by their own agendas, and she is quite extraordinary in capturing the way internal and external drives conflict and mesh to drive events. She is like a scientist turning a specimen over and around, searching out its secrets, its crannies and its depths, and yet leaving still some mysterious glamour over the reader. Once she has you in her grip, that's it, you are hers forever as a reader. When I look at the complete set of DD novels, the audiobooks and the interaction with my fellow fans over the internet, I cannot quite believe that it is now 22 years since I first read her books, and 26 years since I first heard her name, recommended in glowing and passionate terms by a literature don at Georgetown University.

Her throne remains empty. There are other writers of historical novels, certainly, but no one really to compare with her. Patrick O'Brian, perhaps, although he died the year before she did. I think the closest I've come recently is Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, although they are slighter and more fantasy-oriented, and Megan Whalen Turner's Eugenides books, although they are alternative history and aimed squarely at the YA rather than the A market. I don't mean to diss either writer when I say they don't really compare.

So I am enjoying my last unread Dunnett novel, savouring it, relishing it and drawing out the pleasures of a stay in the Dunnettverse, a world of riches and insight, led by a sure-footed guide in full command of her facts and faculties.

In praise of populist entertainment

2008-09-13T20:09:00.002+02:00

This year like no other I am in thrall to the cracktastic circus that is the US Election trail, but last night I managed to behave like a normal human being and go out to the movies with my friends. We were determined to see Mamma Mia!, and how could I resist it? I have to say, opening moment with Amanda Seyfried were dodgy, I had a kind of weird out seeing Dominic Cooper looking buff and tanned and sincere since it was only last week that I saw him in concentration camp issue pyjamas smugly assuming that he wasn't a victim of the latest selection in the extraordinary God On Trial. Then Streep started singing, and I was a goner.

I've never been a huge Streep fan, but Mamma Mia! won me over entirely. Her singing was terrific and she kept the show on the road until the support staff were safely in place, in the form of Christine Baranski and Julie Walters. Now there have been dismissive reviews of the movie, but it deserves every ounce of success and kudos for various reasons - first and foremost that the real leads are mature characters in their 40s/50s, secondly for its sheer exuberance and enthusiasm and finally for its simplicity and lack of cynicism. It is a wonderful night out and Judy Craymer who devised the show and pushed to make the move is a genius.

The other piece of populist entertainment that I'd like to celebrate is the Simpsons. Without the Simpsons, my life as a teacher would be infinitely harder. It may be different in America, but in Europe where most people prefer secular humanism to churchgoing, it is increasingly difficult to teach those classics which are littered with Biblical references. Lo, the Simpsons descends in clouds of glory, for within the series are embedded the cultural markers not just of our age, but of ages past. I checked out with a class of 14 year olds the identities of Cain and Abel, Joshua, Jonah, the Whale, Samson, David and Bathsheba and Solomon, and they were all able to relate the Simpsonic circumstances in which these Old Testament figures had been namechecked. Thank you to the erudite, literate, witty writers who have made this teacher's life so much easier.

Where we were and where we should be

2008-09-11T22:55:00.005+02:00

I was driving home from work, around 5pm British summer time, when I heard the news. The car swerved a little, my shocked response roused a shattered 4 year old experiencing his first days of formal schooling and when I went to the supermarket to pick up some essential supplies, everyone else seemed subdued and zoned out. We couldn't believe it, and the whole series of attacks which we watched over and over and over as our TV screens, governed by broadcasters as dazed and mesmerised as the rest of us, seemed like shots of a Hollywood movie. What did it mean? What were the implications and ramifications?

They weren't what I'd hoped for, that's for sure. I still can't believe that we rolled over so the Bush and Blair administrations could shaft us royally with the phony dossiers and 'war on terror' garbage. I still can't believe that Afghanistan is more of a basket case than ever. I still can't believe that the US voted Bush back in four years ago so he could oversee the shelling out of billions more dollars to his war contractor buddies and the melt-down of the US banking system. Yeah, I know that sub-prime and the collapse of Bear Stearns are not the direct responsibility of the US government and the Bush more properly known as Bozo the Clown. But my, wouldn't the US have been better equipped for the inevitable downturn in the housing and financial markets if they hadn't had several hundred billion dollars of war debt slung round their necks?

When I read Rory Stewart's fascinating trek across Afghanistan, The Places in Between, I was captivated by his depiction of a country which at last, post-Taliban, seemed to have some chance for revival. The book is set in 2002, and Stewart (clearly bananas) goes for quite a long 6 week walk across the centre of Afghanistan. Afghanistan as others have pointed out, is a place that exerts a strange and potent fascination, a remote place, unconquerable and opaque, a possible home to some Shangri-La valley apart from its opium, its appalling human rights record, its worse women's rights record...Of course, where we should be is a world where instead of distracting us with Saddam Hussain, the US and Nato actually tackled Afghanistan with a long-term development plan reinforced by troops who did not bomb the natives when they tried to get married/go to the market/head for the mosque, but actually built things and encouraged legitimate trade and public debate and the opening of schools, the revival of women in the workplace and the integration of Afghanistan into the global economy. Instead we had Iraq.

Today, I read Lucy Carrigan's moving words over at the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lucy-carrigan/today-should-not-be-a-day_b_125641.html) and I wondered whether the majority of Americans might not just possibly reject the morally and fiscally bankrupt policies of McCain and the Republicans who are pulling his strings, and opt for a team which will make it their priority to get America financially and economically back on track, and make America a country that the rest of the world can admire rather than distrust, fear and even loathe.

And I urge those who have forgotten what 9/11 was really like to go to Youtube and look up Rufus Sewell and his touching reading of Simon Armitage's poem written to commemorate the fifth anniversary, "9/11: Out of the Blue".

Sharkjumper!!

2008-09-08T17:30:00.003+02:00

I've been reading Katie Fforde pretty regularly since her first book came out sometime when I was in China about 15 years ago. Her novels are gentle, cosy reads about comfy women usually in their 30s/40s discovering or rediscovering their faith in humankind in general and mankind in particular. There's a soothing familiarity to her plot-lines in which slightly or more-than-slightly ditzy female encounters mysterious and brooding chap and eventually, after encountering some sleeping policemen (can't go so far as to describe them as bumps), achieve an HEA. The books are all set in a slightly mythical but pleasant England, perhaps Cotswold-ish or Somerset or Gloucestershire where people have big range cookers and cottages. They are really high-quality braingum, and I have loved them fairly uniformly, but reading Going Dutch, her latest paperback, turned into a terrible chore.

It was the usual problem: I started off not terribly entranced by our heroines - there was Dora, who was a silly girl in her early 20s who had succumbed to pressure to get engaged but then ran out on her wedding day and takes refuge with her best friend's mother, who was dumped for a younger woman and has left the family home to live on a barge on the Thames. Both Dora and Jo are rather dull, although Dora is duller and drabber. They are both in recovery, and their recovery by and large seems to include intravenous cups of tea. Now I know that tea is a great panacea, and I have just finished my afternoon cuppa as I type, but non-stop tea-drinking does not a great plot make, even when the cups of tea are being made for nice and mysterious chaps helping you cross the North Sea in a barge. And one falls off, and they rescue him and when they are all in Holland, both Dora and Jo finally get off with their swains and eventually get home so that they can live happily ever after. That's it. I skimmed the last 50 pages. I cannot say I'm bursting to read my next Katie Fforde unless she's miraculously discovered some character variation and a touch more excitement plot-wise.

Then I turned to the travails of Ariel Manto and have become hooked. Ariel is not a nice girl, still less a nice woman. She's an obsessive, dodgy doctoral student faced with the mysteries of the multiverse and her adventures are utterly bizarre and compelling. I am really enjoying The End of Mr Y, and I can't end-read because I had a look and I can see it won't make complete sense unless I've read the book sequentially, although I have my notions. It felt as though my reading glands had suddenly been given a shot of bicarb mixed with vinegar - fizz running through the synapses and all systems go.

Season of school and frenzied stationery purchases

2008-09-04T20:39:00.006+02:00

This year, I was ready for school. Farewell to the pig-squeals ringing through the house as one boy discovers that another boy is infringing personal space/changing the tv channel/dismembering another trashy Star Wars toy, goodbye to the moans of "I'm bored"/'Why can't I watch TV/play on the Wii/use your computer" and hasta la vista to the expensive and sometimes tedious provision of activities to amuse.

I did manage to read over 30 books, some of which (as you can see from the posts in July and August) were amazing, some of which were not. I wrote my first play, which was very satisfying, even if it isn't exactly Shakespeare, and I managed not to write a word of fiction in August, which I think might be a healthy break because now I'm brimming with ideas, although time seems to have vanished, because all I can do is chase my tail this first week of school, a situation exacerbated by the annual scramble to supply Minion 1 with his necessary school supplies... paintbrushes, gouache paint, boxes, exercise books and sports bags, staplers, sellotape and scissors, pencil cases, rucksack and coloured markers - you get the picture.

Meanwhile, I am 'agog and aghast' (as Alice Miles in the Times described it) over the nomination of spooky Sarah Palin to the McCain campaign. She has the gravitas of Basil Fawlty aligned with the religious views of the Christian equivalent of an extremist ayatollah. She seems ruthless in her own self-promotion, and while many a man has sacrificed his family on the altar of his own ambition without picking up much flack, she is hardly a poster-girl for the women's movement - she seems to me to have much in common with Margaret Thatcher in her approach and attitude to her fellow females.

The extent to which the outcome of the Presidential elections are dependent on visceral emotions and personality is absolutely petrifying. A schoolchild can see that McCain and Palin are dangerous, hypocritical and frighteningly incompetent - McCain on record as saying he doesn't understand economics, Palin fingered by her fellow-Alaskans as a financial nincompoop when it came to handling the revenues for a tiny town in the middle of nowhere. And she's a book-banner, a supporter of the aerial shooting of wolves and bears, a creationist who is prepared to push the teaching of creationism as a valid scientific alternative to evolution, and someone who believes that the US presence in Iraq is God's plan, that US troops are God's troops.

I really really hope the Republicans with their vote-stealing machinery and gubernatorial trashing of electoral lists do not nick this election as they've stolen the last two. Obama and Biden seem like savvy operators with some morals and standards. I'm sure they've both played the slimy Washington game as people who are in Washington must, but they do have conviction - without the passionate intensity that identifies both McCain and Palin.

" TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

Yeats seems more prophetic than ever. I wish he weren't.

Phew, faith restored in romance

2008-08-25T09:02:00.003+02:00

The Perfect Rake came out in 2005 and I heard good things about it, but hadn't got round to picking up a copy until this year. It was a marvellous antidote to Private Arrangements, because although people did behave in a doo-lally way, it was consistent with the world of the novel and with their characters. Not a spock moment in sight, and as a bonus, some lovely secondary characters, notably the sweet Great-Uncle Oswald who conceals considerable shrewdness behind a dapper, frivolous front, and the slimy Phillip who is a terrifically unpleasant fiancé for the heroine to dispense with before she can enjoy True Leurv.

The dialogue was sparky and funny, the story rocketed along at a fair old pace and the motivations of characters were effectively drawn without being a seminar in Psych 101. On All About Romance, the reviewer was a little discomforted by the contrast between sunny romance and the darker situation of the heroine and her sisters who were initially at the mercy of their extremely brutal grandfather, but that didn't bother me as it gave rock solid reasons for the heroine's initial behaviour. And Gideon, our hero, is a terrific hero, and we are shown exactly how and why he loves Prudence. It was a pleasure to race through this one. But now, duty calls. Breakfast, tidying of boys' pits, dispensing with the remnants of the out of control forsythia that was triffiding up the garden, etc etc. Sigh. In the meantime, many thanks, Anne Gracie, for riding to the rescue of historical romance's reputation and coming up with a delightful frothy confection. I'm delighted to discover that I've got three sequels and the start of a new series by Gracie to catch up with. Huzzah.

Two terrific reads...and a stinker...

2008-08-24T16:26:00.005+02:00

This was the first of two children's books that have been August highlights for me. Fly by Night features a brave heroine who makes mistakes and leads a very exciting life in a world that is influenced by Jonson and Pope - a world where books are dangerous and a printing press is a weapon as fearsome as a dirty bomb, and where heroes and villains are very hard to distinguish. It is clever, exciting and subtle. Frances Hardinge is writing a sequel, and I'll be queuing up to get it.

The second one is E.L. Konigsburg's The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World, an unwieldy title for a very wieldy book. The story is complex, compelling and poignant. I loved Konigsburg's Mixed Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler when I first came upon it, but I think MEHW may be her masterpiece. It is a book for adults as well as children, as it deals with the Holocaust, and the fate of the old person no longer quite able to care for themselves as well as the nature of identity and friendship and all sorts of other rich notions. Konigsburg has a very engaging voice, a little remote and formal, very matter of fact and clear as well. It would go well with two other WW2 books for the YA market that also stand up to re-reading, Aidan Chambers' Postcards from No Man's Land and Mal Peet's Tamar. I would heartily recommend it.

And now for the stinker...

Private Arrangements by Sherry Thomas has received accolades aplenty from many review sites and blogs, and she, along with Joanna Bourne (Spymaster series), is being hailed as the next big thing/saviour of the historical romance. Which was what got me onto Amazon.

Sigh sigh sigh.

How do I hate this book, let me count the ways...

First of all, it made me feel like Spock. The emotional responses of these puny humans seemed to me entirely illogical, captain.

The main characters are called Camden and Gigi. Or hereafter, Crazed-for-sex and Gasping-for-humiliation. First of all, Crazed is totally in physical thrall to Gasping. But he is almost betrothed to another and he will not break his pledge. So Gasping forges a letter from Another saying that she was on the point of marrying Someone else. Crazed reads the letter, goes 'phew, now I can marry Gasping and shag her senseless'. BTW, I'm not kidding about the shagging. Sherry Thomas was clearly channelling Bridget Jones because the shag word comes up frequently. Too frequently. It's not an anachronism, but it isn't a word I associate with romance or the Belle Epoque era in which the book is set. Once she could have massaged past me, but repetition was jarring.

Back to the odd plot. Crazed discovers that the letter was forged, so he goes through with the wedding, has a rapturous shagathonic wedding night and then deserts her. This is the point at which she demonstrates her key characteristic, because she chases after him to Paris (where he is studying engineering at the Ecole Superieure) and keeps flinging herself in his path wearing little but scraps of lace. No hint that her behaviour raised any eyebrows. He resists her over and over and hires an actress to pose as his mistress because he is no longer quite so Crazed now that he's had his night of nookie.

Five years later, he sees her in Copenhagen. He's there with his current squeeze, but he catches a glimpse of her, she's on a boat and she goes all white-faced and Gaspy, and his heartstrings are tugged and he chases after her but only after buying the most vulgar ruby necklace he can find, which leaves her time to decamp so he heads back to New York where he has made his fortune. Oh, and btw, he, unbeknownst to her, despite her amazing financial acumen, has raised a whole load of loans using her name as security so that he can make as much money as she already has because heaven forfend that a woman have more financial clout than her husband. When Gasping discovers this chicanery, she's like, 'whatever'. If that had been me, I'd have had his testicles in a test-tube. And, if he wanted her back, why didn't he just go to London, where she lived and would sooner or later turn up and wait for her there? It's on the way between Copenhagen and NY, after all.

Ten years later, she finally gets round to demanding a divorce. So he comes back and says, I'll give you the divorce if you give me an heir. Spock alert spock alert.

Now, if he cooperated over the divorce business right away, he could get himself another hot mamma like Gasping and do the baby thing without further complications. And while we are talking post 1880s, surely Crazed and Gasping would have demonstrated quite a bit of complicity which courts did not look on kindly especially when deployed by divorcing couples.

Anyway, of course she accepts his weird conditions and they shag three times, and for various reasons which seem to have something to do with contraception, after the third time, he gives up and goes back to NY, and then sends her the ruby necklace (keep up, the one that meant he missed her when they were in Copenhagen) and demands that she return her engagement ring which was a modest sapphire number. So she takes this as an invitation, follows him to NY, turns up at a soiree in his home, insults his taste and then heads for his bed where he finds her starkers as soon as he'd got rid of all the guests. And they are reconciled.

So to start with, plot and characters are leaky, like the Titanic after that little brush with the iceberg.

Then there's the language. This was a rave point for reviewers, but here's a sample: "overhead, thick clouds hung like giant wads of soiled linen, gray with stains of pus yellow". There's a lot of that sort of description. I quite like a touch of pathetic fallacy, but this was like being clubbed by the Pathetic Fallacy ogre. Then a touch of historical background: "Perhaps the agricultural depression that had cut many a large estate's income by half had something to do with it. The aristocracy was in a pinch." Eh?

There's more, but basically, the language seemed to me at best unnoticeable, at worst, clunky and sometimes bizarre.

Theoretically, the book is set during the Belle Epoque, but apart from the occasional namechecking of Impressionist artists and Oscar Wilde, you'd hardly know it wasn't any old time when people wore long frou-frou skirts.

And finally, there's the structure, which is flashbacks and forwards and then interwoven here a fribble plot featuring Gasping's mother and the neighbouring duke who she'd always had a bit of a thing for. I skipped most of that because Crazed and Gasping were quite sufficient in terms of testing my limits of willing suspension of disbelief to utter destruction. But the to-and-fro structure highlighted that neither Crazed nor Gasping seemed to have matured remotely in the ten intervening years.

My absolutely final gripe with Sherry Thomas is this comment she made in a Q&A session: "England is always a good setting for a romance because, as a friend of mine once analyzed, England is an indubitably masculine place, which provides a perfect contrasting backdrop to a story about romantic love."

England - the masculine place where women like Boudicca and Margaret Thatcher, Elizabeth I and Elizabeth Fry, George Eliot and Jane Austen have scarcely impinged on the national consciousness at all...I'm not even touching that 'perfect contrasting backdrop' but the term backdrop tells you all you need to know about Thomas's grasp of English culture and history.

Anyway, I put the book down and felt as though I'd swallowed a mouthful of cobwebs. Luckily, this morning I picked up Anne Gracie's A Perfect Rake and about 70 pages in, am feeling 'phew, there are still good, fun, frothy romances out there.' I feel in safe hands. There's a strong flavour of Heyer's Frederica about a couple of the opening situations, which is promising given that Frederica is one of Heyer's best ever books.

A book to devour

2008-07-30T18:01:00.002+02:00

It's sometime since I've been really satisfied by a novel, but here was an unexpected jewel that I picked up because it was on offer at a mass market bookseller at Dover's ferry docks. I hadn't previously heard of Bloom or the novel itself, but I will look out for more Bloom on the strength of Away.

While I was describing the story to a friend, I realised that most of my favourite books are about people making journeys and surviving in snowy wastes - This Thing of Darkness, Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow, the People's Act of Love and The Tenderness of Wolves spring to mind. And in the classics, one of the books that has risen up my top five list in the last few years is Frankenstein, where once again the denouement takes place in the Arctic circle.

The journey of Lilian Leyb in Away is epic and dangerous in a multitude of ways, and although Lilian does at times seem a little opaque, the cast of supporting characters she meets are rich and varied and Bloom somehow skewers them very delicately. I heard a radio review of the novel by an academic at Georgetown University who trashed the book for being 'a pale Yiddish imitation of Toni Morrison's Beloved', full of stereotypical characters, but actually, I thought that was desperately unfair. I have read Beloved, which I have to say I liked a good deal less than Away, although it is many years since I read it, but actually, I didn't see that much in common between the books. There is something gloriously life-affirming in Away - Lilian has terrible, difficult experiences, but there is an unquenchable optimism to Bloom, and I also found Bloom's style much more accessible. It is very pared down, but when she uses imagery, it is sharp and clear and unforced. I actually thought of Austen although that may be because I am currently re-reading Pride and Prejudice. But Bloom has a delicate hand with irony and the book has some delicious set-pieces as well as a narrative flow that swept me along with some regret to the end.

And by the way, for those familiar with my evil end-reading habits, I gave only the briefest of glances at the end.... the journey there was too enthralling for me to head for the final section without having read the middle.

A sad week

2008-07-26T14:56:00.003+02:00

Kate Mortimer has had some wonderful obituaries in The Guardian, The Independent and the Times this week, but this is how I will remember her, standing in her kitchen, at the hatch where she read her post, her papers and did the Times crossword as well as making tea and supervising her family, friends and pets. I first met Kate when I was five, but later she became my guardian when I was at boarding school, my godmother when I finally decided I needed to be christened at the grand age of 10, my landlady when my mother and I moved into her Hammersmith house, my boss, when I dipped a toe into the world of financial regulation and always, a funny, warm, generous and loving friend. Her funeral this week took place in the church for which she had raised tons of money for restoration, repair and maintenance, with a crowd of friends and family, on a ludicrously beautiful Devon day. She will be deeply missed.

And yesterday came the news that another fine, funny, warm and generous soul had died. After a long battle with pancreatic cancer, Randy Pausch, the computer scientist, has died.

There are plenty of platitudes that one can utter, but the basic truth is that death, particularly the premature death of people who have given so much and have so much more to offer, is miserable and unfair. But having known Kate and having known about Randy Pausch, both rigorous, ethical minds who shared their knowledge and their expertise for the benefit of their fellow humans, has been a privilege and the best that we who are left can do is try to live up to the standards that they have set - being brainy, and then working their brains hard, being decent, and then building on that with loyalty and generosity of spirit, exploring their dreams and helping others achieve their dreams.

And a quickie!!

2008-07-13T16:20:00.002+02:00

Ooohhhooo, I'm on YouTube.

Last year, Daisy Godwin, a wonder-woman of British poetry, made a three part series on Romance called Reader, I Married Him, and I am an interviewee. Feels so weird. Made minion number one really embarrassed. Hee hee, the joys of motherhood.

Over at Youtube you can find:

Happily Ever After - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

Heroes - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

Heroines - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

It is so painful seeing myself on TV - and the voice. Eek, do I really sound like that!

In Which We Serve

2008-07-13T15:40:00.002+02:00

Last year, in the name of educating the minions, my husband bought the Complete Collection of Best British War movies, and so far we have seen The Dam Busters (saddest really about the dog), Went the Day Well (superb), and last night, In Which We Serve, which was really the Noel Coward show, as he wrote the theme toon, composed the theme toon, sang the theme toon, directed and produced the theme toon (with apologies to Little Britain and Denis Waterman). With a little help from David Lean.

So far, all three movies do stand the test of time, in that they tell their stories, depict their times and reflect the preoccupations (which let's face it, were by and large meatier and a touch more intense, than ours) of their times. And I will openly admit that I blubbed a fair bit through In Which We Serve. As I am still capable of extreme stony-heartedness and outright mockery in the course of sappy visual entertainment moments, I think this is a testament to the film and its actors. There was a window of opportunity, largely associated with the hormones that flow during pregnancy and for perhaps a couple of years after, where I wept at even the most cynically manipulative of sentimental moments, even as my every critical faculty screamed that I was a suckahhhh...and the plot vessel was leakier than a pea-green boat navigated by feline and night-bird and the characterisation was lame, but no more, I'm pretty much fully reverted to the 10 year old self who sat dry-eyed through Gone with the Wind as my mother snivelled and sighed beside me.

What was it about IWWS? The acting was terribly terribly 1940s, Celia Johnson and Coward clipping their speech in that frightfully British way, and Coward had clearly resorted to his Bumper Book of Working Class Clichés for the men and women of less than middle class social status. But apparently, according to Wiki, the depiction of Navy life was so accurate that the Navy used it as a film to introduce new sailors to conditions on board ship for the rest of the war. In contrast to our sweeping modern blockbusters, even Atonement, the filming is tight and limited by logistical and financial constraints. The stories interwoven through the film are predictable. But there is also something honourable, straightforward and quite adult about the film without any gratuitous violence or moral ambiguity. What was noticeable about all three of these films is that they are rated U - they are suitable for whole family viewing, and yet they tell adult stories, primarily aimed at adults.

Looking through our video collection for a film that DH and I could watch with Minion No 1, who is of an age to want to see more stretching films, there are very few intelligent modern films of the calibre of those 1940s/1950s/1960s films that are suitable for parents to share with their kids. If I make a list of films that affected me and that meant something to me, I can think of the following:

Anything with Cary Grant in it, but especially Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday and Arsenic and Old Lace, quite a few Hitchcocks (I'm not sure that I want No 1 son to see either The Birds or Psycho, but North by North West, Vertigo, Rear Window, bring them on), any Astaire and Rogers, The Third Man, Fallen Idol, Citizen Kane, all the Ealing comedies, Lawrence of Arabia, Dr Zhivago, the list could go on.

While I think CGI is a wonderful thing and I have enjoyed a whole range of recent movies primarily aimed at children e.g. Shrek and Toy Story, B Movie and Enchanted, Narnia, Potter, LOTR and all, it would be really interesting for once or twice to have films that are primarily aimed at adults but are suitable for children rather than having films for children back-loaded with in-jokes for grown-ups. But I think of the films I've seen recently really aimed at grown-ups who like thinking and moral ambiguity, e.g. Good Night and Good Luck, Syriana, Donnie Darko, The Good Shepherd, Notes on a Scandal, The Good German, Capote, Inside man, Runaway Jury....

These are all 15s. I suppose the same thing happened when I was 11-12-13. There was a run of movies that my mother took to me to though I was technically too young to see them: Flight of the Condor, All the President's Men, The Odessa Files are the ones that spring to mind. But that was back in the day when Saturday Night Fever was given an X certificate because there's a brief flash of Travolota buttock in the back of a car. Now, that would probably be a 12. And when I think of certain scenes in any of the films I've mentioned above, I wouldn't want to be explaining them to an 11 year old who may have the reading and comprehension age of an adult, but is still a kid in terms of emotional maturity.

So when is Hollywood going to wake up and make some accessible films that are actually intelligent? I'm not sure I'll be putting any money on that possibility. In the meantime, it's back to superhero land, what with Hulk and Dark Knight in the multiplexes, or the classic B&W movies of yesteryear in the comfort of our own home.

Tied to the Tracks

2008-07-11T10:52:00.002+02:00

Tied to the Tracks is a book set in the south, in a college town an hour by train out of Savannah, Georgia, where the Civil War is known as the War between the States and where everyone is related to everyone else either through blood or marriage. Into this community come three interlopers from Hoboken, who find in Ogilvie purpose and love.

I'm frankly a sucker for tales of small-town America. If you made me live in small-town America, I'd run shrieking for the hills, but I never tire of reading about the funny, witty, by and large educated men and women who seem to populate these towns (step forward Jennifer Crusie and Joshilyn Jackson and Lani Diane Rich) and how under the eyes of everyone they know, they find the Big L.

Anyway, Lippi has scored a winner for me. I won't go into too much detail, but here's a run-down.

Angie Mangiamele runs a company filming documentaries, and is invited by a literary legend, Miss Zula Bragg, to Ogilvie GA to make a documentary on the occasion of Miss Zula's 50th graduation anniversary. Angie has no option but to accept the job, although every sinew in her is screaming danger. Her old flame, John Ogilvie, is the new chair of English...and all set to marry one of the town's patrician beauties.

There we are. Of course, in real life, no English professor is as hot/fit/gorgeous as John, although I can well believe that Angie's two partners in her film business are as written: seedy 50ish Tony who lurches from married woman to married woman, and the gorgeous Rivera Rosenblum, tall Jewish Puerto-Rican of lesbian tendencies. Angie herself is a classic placeholder heroine - not really interested in clothes, a bit of a workaholic, a family kind of girl with deep friendships.

But who wants real life when they can have the rich variety of characters that inhabit Ogilvie: Patty-Cake: the statutory mad as a bag of badgers female defending her territory against the evil Northern interlopers; the wary Miss Zula living with her cuddly cooking sister Miss Maddie; the exotic lovely and slightly Aspergers Japanese maths prof married to John's brother Rob.

Then there are secrets old and new that are exposed as the summer wears on with ramifications for most of the main characters.

This is a gentle book, with a gentle rhythm and events which goes to the heart of why I love this kind of book so much - no violence, no crazy murder plots, just people coming and going, falling in love and fighting it a little, and an ending that allows everyone a little happiness.

The book that I've read about the south that I love most is Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, peopled by the eccentrics that John Berendt met during frequent visits to Savannah in the late 1980s/early 1990s, and perhaps Lippi could have gone further down the Berendt path in creating her cast - but that might arguably have distracted from the driving narrative of John and Angie which powers the book. Although this is billed as straight fiction, it is a good strong romance, and Lippi has an unerring eye for the moments that send sizzle through a reader without being explicit - personally I find that works much better than the 'tab A slots into tab B' clarity of many romance novels. There's a moment when John takes Angie's hand and puts her finger on his pulse and it is so simple and so effective in reminding me of that slight vertigo/breathlessness/stomach-dropping-away sensation of early love that I almost feel it myself. Now that's good writing. Oh, and no, there are no rape-lite scenes of seduction either, ronaldp...

Anyway this means that yes, I am going to go out looking for Pajama Girls of Lambert Square, Lippi's latest novel.

Top Ten Flawed heroines

2008-07-10T13:55:00.003+02:00

Yes, of course I should be writing proper stuff, not blogging, but I'm researching something very dark and I need a break, and Smart Bitches gave me the idea. In no particular order, just as they occur to me, here are ten flawed heroines.

1 Scarlett O'Hara - what a biotch!!! Love her. I reread GWTW constantly and repeatedly from the age of 12-14.5 : I virtually knew the book by heart and she was my goddess. I will never be like Scarlett: I never have had nor ever will have a 21" waist, and I can't be ruthless and cold and I'd have realised that Ashley was a milksop and that Rhett was a honey much earlier, but she was a great great role model. (Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell)

2 Frederica Merriville - managing, bossy, a little bit blind to what is going on under her nose, but she is a loving and lovable woman who gets every little bit of happiness that she deserves. (Frederica, Georgette Heyer).

3 Eustacia 'Force of Nature' Vye - really not personally a Hardy fan, but I like the men in the novel, fell for Eustacia, who is one of those dangerous people who seems exotic because they are different from everyone else around them, but are actually just miserable. And even though I know Eustacia is one of those tiresome people who insists on setting by the ears everyone in the vicinity, I still can't help but love her. Bathsheba has some of the same qualities, but is nowhere near as extraordinarily vivid as Eustacia for me. (Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy)

4 Becky Sharp of course. Say no more. Well, I have to say a little more - she's so wicked and so full of life and grit and determination. She is a shockingly wicked woman, I wouldn't personally have her anywhere near me, but I love reading about her. (Vanity Fair, Wm Thackeray)

5 Magdalen Vanstone - arguably one of the greatest characters in Victorian fiction. Her story is absolutely sensational, in no small part due to her wonderful complexity, whose name suggests that she will undergo trials and difficulties - and indeed she does. She is by no means a submissive Victorian miss, but a woman who wants to exert control over a life which has lost its central gravity. (No Name, Wilkie Collins)

6 Adelaide Houghton - a woman who is not afraid of trying to tempt a lover into adultery. She's really lacking in morals, but she's very compelling and quite frightening. Technically, she's not the heroine of the novel, who is a rather insipid character, but she is the female presence who is strongest in terms of characterisation and plot importance. Trollope knew how to create strong women characters. (Is He Popenjoy? Anthony Trollope)

7 Anna Petrovna who keeps falling for the wrong guy, the really really uber-wrong guy, time after time, but you can see exactly why she is so lovable. Gutsy, independent, determined, with a touch of the implacable - she's marvellous. (People's Act of Love, James Meek)

8 Emma - Austen herself famously said that she thought no one would like Emma but herself, but Emma is so funny and so satirised, spending time in her company is never a hardship. Austen is ironic, but also ultimately, kind to the delusional girl, and makes sure she gets a great HEA. (Emma, Jane Austen)

9 Vivian Geiger, especially as played by Lauren Bacall, the lying, cheating, loving heroine of The Big Sleep. Amazing woman. (The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler)

10 Sophie Dempsey, from Welcome to Temptation. Sophie has a temper, a good but not perfect bod and a chip the size of Mount Rushmore on her shoulder, she treats her man mean, but for perfectly good reasons and she is a witty, wisecracking, funny woman whose story I could read over and over again. (Welcome to Temptation, Jenny Crusie)

And finally, I can't decide which one is the heroine of Sarah Waters's Fingersmith, but both Sue Trinder and Maud Lilly are wonderful flawed females.

Now instead of doing what I should be doing, I want to go and reread books.

Sigh - Dr Who series finale - SPOILERS AHOY!

2008-07-08T18:31:00.002+02:00

Ah well, où sont les neiges d'antan? Poor old Donna, mind-wiped, Rose exiled across the universe along with psycho Doctor 2, Martha gearing up for full-time Unit/Torchwood action, Sarah Jane settling down into domesticity with her lucky Luke (what a cool mother to have!). The companions have been well and truly dispatched to the past, leaving the way for Steve Moffat to hey, bring back the Doctor's daughter, and Sally Sparrow... or find some new faces.

I thought, as season finales go, it was full of the usual excitement, laughs (Donna as Doctor, sheer genius, gyrating daleks hoho), pathos and fluidity that characterises the current generation of Doctor Who episodes. The writers and directors and producers have taken all the best of recent US tv and played it back to us with a peculiarly British spin. The fact that it is for children is even better.

Recently a columnist in the Independent was in full snark mode about Russell T Davies, the man who revived Doctor Who for the post-Buffy generation, delighted to hear that Davies has resigned from the show and handed over the mantle to the sure touch of Steven Moffat. The reason for the delight was 'phew!! now RTD can go back to making telly for grown-ups instead of this dreary kids' stuff, because, let's face it, kids have no judgement or discrimination, so we can feed them on all sorts of rubbish.'

Having spent some of the past 11 years since the first minion arrived watching children's dreck of all sorts (personal nadirs include Land Before Time movies, any power rangers episode and The Noddy Show. And I will take great pleasure in strangling Elmo if I ever come across him), this point of view drives me absolutely gaga. It's an insult to children, it's an insult to those of us who have at some time or other spent time at home with small children and it's an insult to those people who do their best to make decent children's programmes.

Children deserve the best of the best in their tv. They deserve Derek Jacobi doing voiceovers and Richard Dawkins turning up as a guest in Doctor Who, they deserve excellent scripts and high production values and they deserve to be treated as sentient and thinking humans who should be encouraged to think about big questions, frex, is it right to destroy a species, how do we co-exist with extra-terrestrials (useful metaphors for all the race-religion-gender divides that plague us), is it right to put ourselves and our friends in extreme situations because we won't kill anyone, how do we say goodbye to people we love but will never see again, and many more issues that our children should be thinking about and discussing but are too distracted by pen and paper tests to see if their schools have drilled them well enough to meet rather low educational targets.

So thank you, a big, deep, heartfelt thank you to Russell T Davies not only for reviving Doctor Who, but for doing so with style, substance and a commitment to quality that hopefully will be maintained by his successors.

All romance is rape-lite!!!!

2008-06-27T17:06:00.002+02:00

I just read a great article about Lilian Peake's Promise at Midnight, a skewering of the old-style M&Bs that used to circulate in the late 1970s (just around the time I started reading them - no wonder I never trusted boys!) (Link: http://jezebel.com/5019950/1980s-romance-novels-hair+raising-lip+mashing-horror-shows).

And then in the comments, I found that someone called ronaldpagan said:

"All romance novels have disturbing rape-lite scenes, but this is one of the worst I've ever seen."

You what!!! Um, ronaldp, read any good books recently? Umm, like Pride and Prejudice, uber-romance, or Frederica by Georgette Heyer, or Company of Swans by Eva Ibbotson, or Bet Me, Jennifer Crusie or or or or....

Anyway, I'm still picking my jaw up off the floor after that sweeping and ggrrrrrr outrageously ignorant and dumbass statement.

Summertime and the reading is easy

2008-06-26T20:34:00.003+02:00

Before I head for bed with another good book, just a couple of comments on Your Scandalous Ways by Loretta Chase, which has created a mini-furore in RomanceLand because the heroine is a colourful courtesan at the top of The Game in Europe. Nope, she is not a virgin. Yup, she has had sex with men other than the hero and enjoyed it. Nope, she is not repentant. Yup, she is different from other heroines.

This issue is a real hot button for a lot of readers. On one or two boards, people's comments have been very condemning, although those come from people who haven't read the book and have no intention of reading the book because the heroine is unchaste.

That doesn't bother me. It's a slight, frothy book, and the only thing that interfered with my enjoyment is the plot which is by and large missing. It's quite screwball/zany stuff - e.g. hero and heroine dunk themselvs in a Venetian canal for no apparent rational reason. On the other hand, I didn't find this a wallbanger. I liked the hero. But it all seemed very thin to me. Which is a rather more serious issue than whether the heroine has had sex with more than one man.

A better book altogether was one passed to me by a friend who said, "It's a very good beach read", but I glommed it up in a gulp or two before getting anywhere near a beach. It was called Water For Elephants, and has been very successful in the US but seems scarcely to have caused a ripple in this neck of the woods. It is the story of a young man, Jacob, who is propelled by personal catastrophe into the world of a very ropey circus in the early 1930s, touring the US by train. There is plenty of plot in this one, lots of things happen, and it rollicks along at a fair old pace. It was an extremely easy, engaging read, especially after the Murakami. But as time passes, I know that the Murakami will stay with me - I ended up talking about it today to a student, where Water for Elephants will go down on a list of suitable summer reads for the 14+ book list - the main feature is the unusual setting which is full of opportunities for the introduction of weird and wonderful characters - and then be forgotten. Except that it has been optioned to be made into a movie, and it should be a good movie if they get the right cast. Big If.

In the meantime, have fallen in love with a new band: Fleet Foxes are a weird combination of let's see, Kings of Leon meet Beachboys with Arcade Firey-Midlake type vibe. Lots of harmonies, mandolins and walls of sound. Yumm. Not quite knocking Vampire Weekend off their perch as number one on the iPod, but v. infectious. First time I listened through, I thought, hmmm, then the songs earwormed me.

3 Cups of Tea and Murakami

2008-06-25T09:58:00.004+02:00

Hallellujah! I have finished marking the last exams, writing the last reports. I have oral exams looming and conseils de classe, but really, the school year is over.

So now it is time to do that reading thing. Finished two books recently, neither fully satisfying. The first was Three Cups of Tea, the story of Greg Mortenson, a nurse and mountaineer who has in the past 15 years built 60 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan and it seems to me, done more to improve Central Asian-American relations on his own initiative of bottom-up, community based development projects than billions of dollars handed over by the CIA and others to crazy-ass warlords. And it has taken him around $12,000 per school, with now, increasing sums for maintenance and staff salaries needed to support the operation. The deal is, a community has to ask for a school, they have to agree that compulsory attendance for all primary age kids in the area includes the girls, and local people help build the school and operate it. Mortenson's Central Asia Institute seems to have spent a few million dollars over the past 15 years, probably not even $5m. Chicken feed. But the villages where schools have been built have seen child mortality drop and skills increase, with women's centres opening up where women can earn money. Gently, quietly and calmly, in remote villages in the Karakorum, community based development is making a genuine improvement to people's lives and positioning children with no opportunities to get scholarships and make the most of themselves.

The downside of reading the book is that it was written by an American journalist, David Oliver Relin, who is unfortunately a master of the nauseating adulatory style that is the common currency of US Sunday magazines. There isn't enough practical detail of the operation of the schools, and the book essentially covers the early period of building the first couple of schools, rather than the more recent expansion of schools, which would also have been interesting. So, although Mortenson's story is fascinating and important, the book is marred by Relin's oleaginous maunderings.

Second recent book is Haruki Murakami's Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I have friends whose taste and judgement I trust who rave about Murakami, but H-bW&TEOFW didn't do it for me. I will try Norwegian Wood in a while, but I need a rest from the weird stuff. It is an interesting book in that it raises issues of the nature of the mind and consciousness but there was something about reading it that made me feel detached. It's cleverly constructed, and I suspect that Murakami was influenced by Calvino and went on to influence David Mitchell, but my current reading tastes are not for the 'clever-clever', so perhaps that was the major issue. I'm looking for heroes I can love, stories I can be swept up by and interesting places to visit. Nameless individuals identified only by their job function, choppy narratives and Tokyo just didn't fit the bill this time.

Why let the Telegraph get to me???

2008-06-18T20:28:00.002+02:00

I've just renewed my membership of Amnesty International, something I've been meaning to do for a while, but in the hustle and rush of moving countries and houses and changing jobs and raising boys and writing books and sitting exams and I know, excuses excuses. But various things have reminded me that I used to be a member and that I should rejoin and this time get really active.

Number one - the Radio 4 review of the papers mentioning the Daily Telegraph's demand that we withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights so that we can deport people back to countries where they are certain to face 'inhumane and degrading treatment' (link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/06/18/dl1802.xml).

Yes, I know, it's Abu Qatada, a pretty revolting specimen. But... (I can hear my father-in-law saying even as I write, imagine that your two sons are killed or injured in a terrorist attack because Abu Qatada roams the streets, your principles will provide cold comfort) but....

While I loathe, detest and abhor fundamentalists of all denominations, I do not wish my native country, of which I have been an occasionally proud but mostly sceptical citizen, to be one which tacitly endorses torture. Amnesty is busy fighting 42-day detention - that the UK should voluntarily wish to become the country with the longest period of detention without charge is sickening. It is also busy campaigning against the barbaric and plain irrational treatment of asylum seekers by the Home Office or UK Border Council or whoever it is that compounds the cruelty already visited on the people who come to us for protection and sanctuary.

Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident etc, wrote a moving piece in last weekend's Observer (link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jun/15/immigration.familyandrelationships)
about asylum seekers, and that too enraged and infuriated me into taking up with Amnesty again.

It seems a small and trivial action - but it is a start, because one thing I've learned is that until we all, every last one of us, abide by the Human Rights conventions that require us to treat our fellow human beings with dignity and respect, we will continue to kill and maim and destroy one another. And yes, I do know that HR conventions are contradictory, opaque and culturally dubious instruments. But they are currently the only thing we have to hold back the barbarian that rides towards the gate in each of our souls.

The Big Mis...Spoilers ahoy!

2008-06-17T21:14:00.005+02:00

I recently finished teaching Captain Corelli's Mandolin, a book I first read when it came out and loved. It's only recently that I've become anal enough to keep a spreadsheet of the books I've finished reading, so I don't know what else I was into around 1993/94, but I remember telling the then boyfriend (yes, reader, I married him) "YOU HAVE TO READ THIS BOOK!!!" and feeling that for the first time in months - nay, years - I'd come across a book with a story and wonderful characters instead of post-modern tricksiness that left me feeling weary and toyed with like yesterday's reheated leftovers.

Reading it this time, and trying to convey its possibilities to a gang of sixteen/seventeen year olds, was very different. For some, it was the longest book they'd ever read for starters. And we ran out of time, so instead of going for detailed student-centred analysis, I did quite a lot of the thinking and note-making and speaking for them. Which made me think a good deal.

When I first read the book, I was so entranced by the first 350 pages that I forgave the author for the last 50 or so pages. This time, I was frank and open with my students. De Bernières played a cheap and stupid trick in the book, a trick that those of us who read and write romances spot and deride and do our best to avoid in our own books. And the trick is The Big Mis - or Misunderstanding, in which two people who are clearly bananas about each other and right for other are wilfully kept apart by the writer using a fake conflict.

Just a quick plot run down to explain the Big Mis: our heroine, Pelagia, is a Greek girl living on the island of Cephallonia. Our hero, Antonio Corelli, is a captain in the occupying Italian army, billeted in Pelagia's home, the house of Dr Iannis. Over the months of the Italian occupation, Pelagia and Corelli fall in love - it is a tender and chaste love. With the collapse of Mussolini's regime, the Italians are left at the mercy of the German occupying forces on the island and most are massacred or imprisoned. Corelli is miraculously saved, although grievously wounded, and Pelagia and her father save his life, shelter him and then arrange for him to travel back to Italy.

Corelli is meant to return to the island and reclaim his lost love. But when he fails to do so, Pelagia believes that he is dead, and imagines that she sees his ghost. At the very end of the book, Corelli does return - he reveals that he did come back in 1946, but he saw Pelagia holding and caressing a baby, so imagining that she was happily married, he decided not to make contact. He continues returning to the island for an annual pilgrimage to the grave of the man who saved his life, but until he is in his 70s, he never makes contact with the woman who was supposed to be the love of his life. The reader knows that the baby was actually an orphan dumped on Pelagia's doorstep, and that she has remained faithful to Corelli - unmarried and childless apart from her adopted daughter, Antonia.

What's my problem with all this?

The first major problem is that De Bernières establishes not only Corelli's relationship with Pelagia, but perhaps even more critically, with her father and the islanders and the island itself as life-altering and passionate. He sympathises fully enough with the Cephallonians before the massacre: after the massacre (which is one of the most heart-rending passages I've ever read in any book ever, and the reason that I still think CCM is a magnificent book), he is utterly dependent on them. They save his life in so many ways, and it is not simply a debt, but an absorption into their lives that makes him one with the islanders. When Iannis uses the strings from Corelli's mandolin to make him whole again, Corelli is bound to the island itself. The character he seems to be could never have come back to Cephallonia without making contact with the people who saved his life - not just Pelagia, but Iannis and Velisarios, the strong man
whose massiveness and undefatigable nature are a continuous motif through the book.

Besides which, his most treasured possession is his mandolin. Along with Pelagia, he deserts his mandolin.

So the Corelli who turns his back on Pelagia and Cephallonia and does not just walk down the hill and chuck the baby under the chin before saying, "And whose baby are you looking after, my beloved Pelagia?" is just not the same Corelli that not only Pelagia, but Carlo, Iannis, and the reader fell in love with.

This is why we readers hate the Big Mis, and it is why all writers should do their best to avoid it. However marvellously a writer has done his or her work in creating character and theme, once the Big Mis is deployed, one or more key characters will lose their internal consistency. This is the reason that the Big Mis is not just a misunderstanding, but a grievous mistake on the part of a writer, because the one mega-crime a writer can commit is to create a character with whom we ourselves can fall in love and then make them behave inconsistently or out of character.

I'm not asking for Pelagia and Corelli to run into one another's arms and head off into the sunset - I'd accept one or both being killed. A love so pure need not survive. But De Bernières uses the Big Mis to go rambling over a mish-mash of events and minor developments that imbalance the book and mean that instead of fireworking, the ending just fizzles...

So, while I'd urge you to read CCM, because the main 5/6ths of it are magnificent, I'd give up either when Pelagia says farewell to Corelli on the beach, or after Drosoula's magnficent cursing of her own son, Mandras (it's a long story, you have to read the book), both of which are much more fitting, although perhaps inconclusive endings to the novel.

Writing again...

2008-06-08T21:27:00.002+02:00

Well, it's some way short of the weeks when I could hit 4,000 words, but last week I managed 873 words. I'm going to try to do better this week, but given that I have exams to mark, notes on Captain Corelli's Mandolin to finish, the Guillemots to see, 87 children to take to London and back, a girls' night out at Sex and the City etc etc, I don't see myself getting much beyond another 873 words, but who knows.

At the moment, new people keep popping up in this book, apart from which, it is such a long time since I did any serious work on it, I've forgotten pretty much who did what and said what in chs 1-4. Sooo, I'm going to print it all out and do a proper re-read and a proper plot outline and then perhaps things will fall into place.

Anyway, I'm writing again, my characters have some place to go now instead of lurking in my head and I'm happy.

Don't exams stink?

2008-05-29T22:41:00.003+02:00

Well, I'm happy: my exams are over. Last week, I spent 8 hours on trains so that I could sit two papers that will lead me, well, I don't know where, but at least one of them was interesting, and the best thing about sitting exams is that I can pass technique on to my students with a voice of considerably more authority than the voice that was based on my previous exam experience 20+ years ago. I have hit the books, worked at my study skills, annotated and digested and absorbed and internalised. I have deployed my long, medium and short term memory.

I hate exams. As a teacher I hate exams, as an administrator and marker and as a student, I hate exams. They are flaming hoops and we like poodles yap and skip our way through a series of them through life. They are reductive, unfair and unreliable. But I've been an exams officer, I have acted as an official examiner for all sorts of different types of exams (and continue to do so), and I write exams and make people sit them and mark them year in year out. I'm a gamekeeper turned poacher on this one.

Ironically, quite a lot of the reading I did in preparation for my exams was commentary from various academics and teachers on how standardisation tests don't work. Yet here I am conniving in a system which petrifies students into sitting down and jumping through their hoops. At least I have voluntarily opted to take my exams, and I pay handsomely for the privilege, both of which factors are major incentives to extracting the small finger and doing the work necessary to pass (and yes, I pretty much think I have passed, and I'll be mighty shocked and appealing to all sorts of authorities if I haven't passed because I know I answered the questions I was set and did not simply vomit onto the paper like a pelican feeding its young all the lists and bullet points that I had memorised). But why on earth do we make teenagers who have hormones and social lives to cope with do this incessant hoop-leaping business?

There are tests I have operated that I didn't like, but I could understand in terms of purpose - IELTS which is used by Australian and New Zealand immigration services to weed out those applicants who have no English, frex. But the more I see of tests and exams, the less I see the point. Yes, I suppose writing in a structured fashion to a strict deadline is a skill - but is it really that useful?

One of the reasons that I keep putting myself forward for the particular hell that is the exam marker's lot is because it gives my students access to the inner workings of the exam in a way that nothing else does. It also means that I can refine exam-passing and revision sessions down and spend more time broadening out the content of what goes on in the classroom - but argue the case as I might, I really, honestly don't understand the whole exam malarkey. Ultimately life does not come down to whether I passed my Maths O level (I know, I took O levels, I am officially decrepit, trendy tastes in music notwithstanding).

In fact, life once we start living it, has very little to do with what went on when one was 15 or 16. And exams are part and parcel of that. Of course this doesn't make it any easier on those people who cannot do exams (which is different from hating them, since hating them doesn't preclude studying and passing them). Actually, I think exams are just a modern version of initiation rites like sticking hot needles into one's lower lip, or being sent into the jungle or onto the plain with a sharp stick and one arm tied behind your back to see if you'll survive. Once you complete the task, you realise how totally meaningless it was and then get on with the rest of your life. Or of course, you didn't manage to get out of the hogtie, and you dropped your stick and the buffalo stampeded and the hyenas ate what was left of your mangled corpse. In modern terms, this means that when you fail your exams, your parents sell your mobile phone and iPod on e-Bay and either ground you for the rest of your life or kick you out altogether.

Exams are a horrible Catch-22 - if you pass them it doesn't really matter, but if you fail them, your life might as well be over. We really are so skilled at constructing rods with which to beat ourselves. I think that's what actually distinguishes us humans from animals. Obviously there is some stress for the average gazelle/stickleback/Zebra/worm because something out there wants to eat you, and for the average leopard/croc/pine marten/racoon there is that perpetual worry that there won't be enough to eat. But the stress that animals experience arises from natural appetites. They don't make up zebra-killing tests for themselves. You don't have to take Grazing 101. Maybe that's why I hate exams so much - they are just further evidence of the fundamental stupidity of human beings.

I see Vampire Weekend through the trees

2008-05-18T13:38:00.002+02:00

Well, I took No1 Minion to see his first live gig, and we chose a quality one - Vampire Weekend were at Botanique last night, their second show in Brussels apparently, although lead singer Ezra Koenig said that their previous one was lame - whether because of the Belgian habit of trying to move as little as possible during a concert or because VW themselves were lame was not clear. Anyway this time, even the stolid Belgians couldn't stop their toes from tapping and their knees from jiggling just a little bit.

Anyway, last night, they were terrific, and we sang along and I squiggled a bit, and it was sold out and quite squished. They are back for Werchter on 3 July, but that day is sold out - damn damn, because I also wanted to see Chemical Bros and The National who are two of my other current must listens...On the other hand, anyone who goes that day has to put up with Mika who just bugs me.

But what is it about VW? They work very well as the ideal summer band. The songs are catchy, the lyrics intriguing and nonsensical, and from last night, I think you could safely say that they know their way around their instruments. They played one new song. It was good. I love them. I look at them and realise they are all young enough to be my children, and really, perhaps I am too old for jigging about at pop concerts, but with a band as keen and infectious as this one, who cares.

Back to performance indicators and budget planning for education. Sigh. One more week and the exams will be over, and I will be a free woman.

Black Powder War

2008-05-13T18:14:00.002+02:00

Apparently, Novik wrote this as a filler between Throne of Jade and Empire of Ivory because EofI shared a plot with a book that had just come out about a deadly virus wreaking havoc on the the dragon population. So she just threw this together and kaboom, we have a fantastic extra episode of the Temeraire series, complete with a meeting between uber-bad guys Napoleon and Lien the evil dragon and the Battle of Jena.

What cheers me up is that we've only got to 1806, Empire of Ivory is 1807 and presumably Victory of Eagles coming up next is 1808-9. That gives us another 6 years of Napoleonic mayhem, and I very much hope a grand finale set at Waterloo.

I love the Temeraire books - the characters are developing well, Novik is a lovely writer with a wonderful style which has never yet lapsed into American, which is a considerable achievement for a genre writer from the US setting books in Europe. The plot of BPW is a little episodic, but there are some great characters introduced, both historical and fictional, and heartstopping moments - the escape from Istanbul was particularly dramatic and startling. And I am enjoying Temeraire's desire for a dragon emancipation movement.

Anyway - for a great historical fantasy, go for Temeraire, the stories buckle and swash, there's action and emotion and Novik is good at raising the stakes conflict-wise. She's setting up some really interesting stuff....But I'm rationing myself and at the moment am reading only dry books on educational management in anticipation of exams next week. Once those are done, my TBR pile needs to tremble and despair, because my plan for the summer is to reduce it from mountain to hillock by August when I next go to the UK for another bumper book-buying session.

Ditching the Dysfunctional Duke

2008-05-03T09:40:00.002+02:00

I just finished reading a really irritating book - classic naked man-titty cover, wallpaper history, googoo Disney-princess type heroine, and a Duke hero who was totally f****dup because his mother stood by while he and his little brother were exposed to abuse by their creepy uncle. This has given him licence to roar around Europe wasting what little money he has, drowning his sorrows in absinthe and Russian countesses. It was paint-by-numbers dysfunction.

Here are few more of my favourite detestable dysfunctions: the guy who won't trust women because his first wife was a bit free with her favours; the guy who won't trust women because his mother had more lovers than you could shake a stick at; the guy whose daddy thrashed him; the guy whose daddy and mummy ignored him; the guy whose first wife only married him for his money; the guy whose brother was too good and died; the guy whose brother was too bad but he took the rap for it. Oh poor put upon guy, he broods, he sulks, he beds every available (low class) woman who is up for it, and then he meets our heroine and she is soooo sweet and sooooo kind and sooo vulnerable and cuddlesome and wholesome and good that oooo, he is healed, he is now Mr Nice Guy too.

What really gets me is that this kind of hero is so frequent in Romancelandia and the hidden message is not that love conquers all and overcomes childhood trauma to bring in a new and glorious day, but that lazy writers can get away with codswallop.

Now, I'll confess, I am in thrall to a duke of dysfunction - bring on Exhibit A, Francis Crawford, aka Lymond, or Sevigny. At least a count of dysfunction.

But Lymond is complex. He has legitimate and interesting reasons for his sense of guilt, self-loathing and general hunchbackness in the gutter, like the fact that he is responsible for the death of more than one person. He has plausible and interesting side effects like terrible migraines and suicide attempts. He is genuinely tortured and although there are wonderfully funny scenes in the Lymond series, Dunnett does not dress up her hero's dark side with Christmas lights and cod-psychological explanations. As for romance - well, his is fraught with difficulties and conflicts. Love is not a spiritual bandaid for this man or his heroine.

I suppose that's beginning to reach the heart of my plaint against the 'Big Trauma in the Past' explanation of why a hero has licence to behave like an ass. People behave like asses because they are asses, people are mean because they are mean. Mean, selfish, nasty malicious, manipulative people exist. They can change, but I don't believe that love is the big healer - and I don't want my heroines to be matrons supervising the wards of the terminally self-indulgent.

Let's take a big change of heart story - a favourite one: A Christmas Carol. Love is not what makes Scrooge change. The realisation that he has shut love out of life, that love is more enriching than any amount of gold, that he is capable of giving love and that giving is more than enough reward in itself, these are all facets of what make him change. But along with that is a genuine sense of maturity, of emerging from a deliberate disengagement with his fellow-humans that allows Scrooge to discover love. Love is not the agent. Scrooge is the agent of his own change. We love new Scrooge because he offers us all the possibility of redemption through a realisation of one's own humanity.

That's my point - heroes have to be their own agents for change. That is what a true hero is - someone who is a protagonist, a figure who acts and alters and evolves for themselves (inevitably Eugenides, hero of Megan Whalen Turner's Attolia books, comes to mind here). Love as crutch is just not romantic in my book.

Wishing I were back in Attolia

2008-05-01T17:07:00.003+02:00

Having finished my final coursework assignment for the masters, and knowing that now I've got to get on with revision for exams in three weeks time, I decided to give myself a little holiday in Attolia. I finished The Thief about a fortnight ago, and had to wait a little before getting hold of copies of both Queen and King of Attolia, because I knew that having read one, I would want to read the next one straight away. Which I did. Finished QofA last night and got straight on with KofA this morning, and I've now finished, thanks to a little bit of holiday. And I've been converted, I'd like a one-way time travel ticket to Attolia, or Eddis, but not Sounis or the Mede Empire.

What was so good? Well, I was just sucked into this world. And Whalen Turner pared it down - there was plenty that I wanted to know more about, but she tantalised and entangled me in the machinations of the courts of Eddis and Attolia thoroughly. She's left loose ends at the end of KoA that give me hope that she'll revisit this world (Sophos's fate remains unclear and Eddis has to marry someone soon, and Nasuherus the Mede needs some serious comeuppance) but she has sorted out the story of her principal hero, Eugenides, very satisfactorily.

I can't say any more for fear of entering serious spoiler territory, but what I can say is this: go out and read the Thief trilogy - they are wonderful books and it will be time well spent. Whalen Turner has interesting and wise things to say about the nature of power and love and leadership as well as telling an absolutely cracking and original story.

Knock me down with a feather

2008-04-22T21:39:00.002+02:00

I know what I should be doing, and it's not this. No no no. I should be sorting out the car-crash that is my final piece of coursework for the Masters. But I googled good old Madeleine C and found whoooppeeeee, a nice review of A Perfect Hero.

Look, you can find it here:

http://www.theromancestudio.com/reviews/reviews/perfectheroconway.htm

Now, really, back to working out how to prepare an evaluation study on Key Stage Literacy policy....sigh. I promise I won't google my alter ego again tonight.

K9 and jargon

2008-04-20T17:11:00.003+02:00

As you can see, K9 landed in Brussels this morning - he did suffer from a touch of cranial droop, but the edible silver spray performed very effectively. Our robotic doggy friend will be joining Hugo's class tomorrow and hopefully, won't come home to afflict the family paunches any further.

Meanwhile, am wincing as I read Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End, a book that makes me cringe with its vivid depiction of office life with all associated gossip and essentially meaningless activity. It's been some years since I worked in an office, and I daresay, since I will have to work until I'm at least 100 before a pension can kick in at a reasonable level, will work in one again, but give me teenagers and a classroom any day. At least in the educational world, there is some resistance to the concept that all activity must have a financially measurable output. Sadly, not total resistance, and there are plenty of educational managers out there who have swallowed the jargon pill and spew out drone-speak. And the 11-18 age group are very intolerant of bollocks-speak, and recognise it at 50 paces, which makes for a refreshing environment.

I'm not sure that there's a point to TWCTTE, plot-wise, and at times the continuous we-voice is a little wearing, but overall, it's an impressive tour de force.

The Thief

2008-04-17T18:20:00.002+02:00

You know how it is, you've been burned often enough before by other people's rave reviews, then eventually, you give in, and it's just as bad as you feared. Well no...

The Thief is short, sharp and elegant. I will try to do no spoilers, but there are twists in this plot which I knew about before I started, and that did not diminish my enjoyment in the slightest. Whalen Turner is a skilled world-builder, and this was a thoroughly enjoyable road story. I preferred the slightly knowing, humorous style of Chabons' Gentlemen of the Road, but Chabon's novel is clever stylistically where Whalen Turner's novel is emotionally clever. I can't wait to read Queen of Attolia and King of Attolia, which are on their way from Amazon as I speak. But first I have a whole heap of thinking to do on knotty issues like education and human rights and social justice, so this is a quick post just to say, The Thief vaut le detour.

The Homer Cake and Herodotus

2008-04-07T21:39:00.004+02:00

I don't quite think this does justice to the extraordinary vision that was the Homer cake. Inside was a mixture of orange and chocolate sponge, pasted together with chocolate buttercream filling, covered in a layer of marzipan and then coated with royal icing and hand painted.

Me? Make that? hahahahahaha. No. I have a spouse whom no words can quite adequately describe, and this is one of his party tricks. Both minions are little April Arians, with no.1. minion first on the calendar. After last year's Dalek and Tardis cakes, there was some deep decision-making over cake requests for 2008. And this was what No. 1 came up with. Homer. So Homer Simpson was what he got.

In a couple of weeks, Spouse-guy has to ready himself for a K-9 cake. Yup, the metallic robo-dog from Dr Who. Gallons of edible silver paint are being airfreighted from Surbiton Sugarcraft as we speak. Yes, Surbiton. Who would have thought that Surbiton was a cache of edible silver products?

Meanwhile, I've finally managed to read a book this month, in between editing a magazine and sorting out the first draft of the masters, oh yes, and that teaching business, I'd forgotten, and the crashing of computers and collapsing of interactive whiteboards. And the book was worth it.

Travels with Herodotus by the late and deeply lamented Ryszard Kapuscinski was the kind of book I just wanted to carry on and on and on. But it is marked by tight, elegant writing and brevity. Kapuscinski recalls his own first tentative steps as a foreign correspondent in the late 1950s and 1960s, travelling to India, China, Ethiopia and the Congo. On his way from Warsaw to India, he is taken under the wing of a more sophisticated Italian journalist who helps him buy a proper suit so that he looks less like an Eastern Bloc tyro. He seems perpetually short of funds and quite often short of the means of communicating his copy to his masters in Poland. His stay in China is particularly fraught, coming at the abrupt and harsh end of the Hundred Flowers period. His appointment had been made during the blossoming stage, when China was briefly prepared to consider the possibility of a foreign journalist (at least one from an Iron Curtain country) working on a Chinese newspaper, but by the time Kapuscinski arrives, the Anti-Rightist movement is on its way and intellectuals are beginning to be shipped out to the countryside.

Meanwhile, Herodotus keeps Kapuscinski company, a constant quizzical, curious, humane and energetic presence, his own lucid prose and inquiring mind bounding across the millennia to comfort and inspire one of our finest journalists. I can't recommend this book too highly.

To finish or not to finish?

2008-03-30T14:25:00.003+02:00

Every time I admit to my terminal evil, I hear squeals of outrage, but I think my wicked ways probably save me a bit of time. However, I clearly feel some guilt about the issue. Here it is, my flaw. I am an end-reader. I can't help it. I pick up a book, and I start reading, determined this time not to do it, but then helplessly, inevitably, without even realising I am doing it, I flick to the back of the book and whoops... I've read the end. Without having read the middle.

Usually, it happens when I've read the first third, and I just have to settle with myself what is happening. With really good writers, this doesn't matter - the last few pages are so dependent on what has gone before that I realise I have to read the whole thing to understand the last few pages (that is called good plotting, and it is surprisingly scarce).

But with books that I am not wild about, quite often, I find myself reading the first third, the last third and then forgetting about the bit in the middle.

I am finding myself somewhat in that situation at the moment. I'm reading what has been described as a literary space opera by a feted and successful author of contemporary literary fiction who has taken time out to create an even more popular series of sci-fi novels dealing with issues of culture and the role of gods in a space-age society. It's got a name taken from TS Eliot and ideas. But I just can't do it. I've read my statutory first third, I've read the last couple of chapters, and I think I can see why people regard the books as so interesting and stimulating and important. The thing is, and I think this may be a guy-versus gal-thing, I just can't take the space place seriously. All the inhabitants of the world are genetically evolved humanoids. Some are furry, some are spiky, the lucky ones have sexual equipment that equips them for Tantric marathons on a scale never dreamt of by Trudy and Sting, and they have really funny names. Gobbledeygook names that just make me giggle. And none of the characters really have characters. They have physical characteristics and a few emotions tossed in like salad dressing. But the salad dressing is shop-bought and carries a tang of MSG about it.

The book was published in the late 80s, and has recently been reissued. The most captivating thing about it was that it reminded me of Firefly. It features a rogue spaceship piloting about the universes which is cobbled together and occupied by opportunists and misfits. But, and here's where the differences come - Firefly had jokes and people. Real people, real jokes, real fears and somehow, real appeal. As a way of passing 10-15 hours, Firefly is considerably more effective and interesting than the novel. Especially as I get to check out Nathan Fillion who is after all cute as a box of Neuhaus pralines. Maybe cuter.

So now I find myself thinking the (for me) almost unthinkable thought that I shall just put down the book and not finish it. I just can't see myself wading through another 200 pages of laser zappy guns and warp leaps and people called Grunta Bunta Ferdoodling or S'iipal Gerthlockety. (No those are not the actual names of characters from this series - I am doing my best to mask the identity of the book and the writer, because dissing them is not the point here.) But my inner Stakhanovite-meets-Plymouth Rock Puritan is shouting "Read that damned book - you bought it, you read it, you idle cow".

The last book that made me feel like this was Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl, which was long and overblown and also full of characters about as appealing as a two-day old Happy Meal but was hailed as a work of genius, certainly in the US, though not so much in the UK, where I don't remember seeing it in the 3-for-2 piles or the standard review pages of the papers.

I didn't read that one right through either, and you can see, the guilt is there. I read the beginning (in the case of STCP - oops, it sounds like an amazing new feminine hygiene product when acronymed- a labour almost equivalent to reading an entire book, since the novel was an effing doorstop), the end, and flicked through the middle until I realised that it was a horrible soup of transsexual Holden Caulfield meets the Dead Poets during the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie's Blair Witch Project with some Manson-murder hooey on the side. And then I stopped.

Still, I have a TBR pile with some really good books waiting to be read, so I think I will give the rest of Godparent of Firefly a miss and make some inroads into something else. O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!

The Perfect Hero earns royalties!!!

2008-03-25T17:25:00.002+01:00

This morning I received a royalty check for The Perfect Hero for the last quarter of 2007. I couldn't quite believe it - somebody had bought the book! In face several people! Whoopee! And thank you, whoever you are.

If anyone else wants to join the throng, you can go to Fictionwise and find the book at this link:

http://www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/eBook55279.htm?cache

Now I have to work out how to cash the cheque without wiping out its value in bank charges;-)

Skylight Confessions, the Wall Street Journal and dissing romance

2008-03-22T12:22:00.003+01:00

A friend sicced me onto Alice Hoffman last year, and I've read two of her novels, Blue Diary and now Skylight Confessions.

I really enjoyed Blue Diary, which I thought was clever and interesting and true to itself and its world. But I wasn't sure about Skylight Confessions. It's a family story, with layers of mysticism and interweaving of fairy tale ideas: the house which is central to the story is called The Glass Slipper, frex, and there is a haunting. There is love, but I wouldn't call this a love story. My real problem with it was that once you stripped away the rather fey allusions, the story of a family in meltdown was fairly banal and the characters also. Uptight, enclosed, emotionally repressed father, check, beautiful, neglected wife, check, tortured genius son, check, predatory tennis-playing next door neighbour, check, good little girl trying to make reparation for the family's shortcomings, check, saintly but secretive nanny, check.

The setting was what sets the book apart, but in this instance, it just wasn't enough. There were moments when the symbols and the story tied up, but then I also think that if you are reading a book the symbols shouldn't come up and slap you in the face like so many fresh on the slab fillets of plaice.

However, having read it, and wanting to find out a little more, I did the google on the book and found the Wall Street Journal review by Brooke Allen and this jumped out at me:

"Skylight Confessions is a genre story, in this case the kind of book that might best be described as a romance novel for college graduates. The book has enough intellectual trappings to flatter readers into thinking that they are getting some mental nourishment, but in essence it is pure romance novel and nothing more.

Now, that made me want to tell Brooke Allen to go and boil her head in a bag. The classic derogatory put-down...the review continues:

Skylight Confessions contains all the standard elements of Brontëan high romance, including hyperbole, predestined "true" love and a doomed, Heathcliffean character (in this case John and Arlyn's son, Sam). In the best romance-novel tradition, the ending is suffused with a sense of almost religious redemption and possibility. Those who crave a cozy read that affirms romantic fantasies about deathless love and knights to the rescue may well admire Skylight Confessions.

Here we are with several misunderstandings about the real nature of a good romance novel - first of all, WTF is 'Brontëan high romance'? If a person has actually read all of the Brontë sisters' novels, that person would know that Anne, Charlotte and Emily all wrote extremely different novels in theme, scope, style and approach. I would deeply disagree that there is such an animal as the BHR.

Second of all, books that 'affirm romantic fantasies about deathless love and knights to the rescue' are not necessarily cozy: the best romances (Jane Austen, Jenny Crusie, Eva Ibbotson, Tracy Grant and Georgette Heyer step forward) are not cozy - they challenge, they force the reader to face up to a world that is not necessarily kind to heroes, heroines or their love. The whole point is that deathless love is not cozy. It is difficult, it takes us out of comfort zone, but it wins. We may not want to love but ultimately, it forces us to confront what is really important in our lives.

Also, what's this about religious redemption? For me, the novels that are full of 'love conquers all' stuff are not the best of the romance novel tradition. For me, and I suspect for many readers of romance readers, the best of the genre display a wry understanding that while love can work miracles, it needs damn hard work and self-knowledge to achieve that. Mr Knightley only can offer for Emma when Emma herself comes to realise that love is more than simply trying to slot couples together like pieces of a jigsaw. There is not so much redemption as the understanding that forgiveness and humour are essentials in the satisfactory conclusion to any romance.

Which is where Brooke Allen has it all wrong - Skylight Confessions cannot be a romance because it fails in one essential to the genre: the one and only rule that exists in the writing of real romances, notably the HEA. The HEA or happy ever after is compulsory in the romance. It is the one element that all readers of romances agree about. And SC doesn't have one. Maybe a hint that such things are possible. But no HEA.

I just wish reviewers would cease to put down books by comparing them to romances. A really good romance is so transcendent and so enriching that it is a book that stays with you for ever, like love itself. And consequently it is rare. We who love romances are perpetually looking for that book or others like it, we are prepared to read quite a bit of risible dross in search of that nugget which is why the romance sector of the publishing industry is pretty robust, but we know that a real romance, the kind of book that does offer us truths about love is something to treasure, not to trash.

Temeraire, History Boys & Ashes to Ashes

2008-03-16T21:35:00.004+01:00

It's reading time again - also known as the Easter holidays. I have work-related reading to do - Pride & Prejudice, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Captain Corelli's' Mandolin, Reading Lolita in Tehran. Go ahead, cry for me. Reading good books for work purposes, it sucks.

Meanwhile, for leisure, I'm reading the second Temeraire book, by Naomi Novik, who I think is probably a goddess. She writes clear, straightforward prose which is very exciting when depicting battles, and moving in depicting the devotion between one man and his dragon. Although Temeraire is not really Laurence's dragon. Anyway - no spoilers, because I think people should go out and read the Temeraire books. These are sequel books, but unlike others, each is an effective stand alone, and there is major evolution in the two I've read and it looks like in the third I'll be reading sometime next week.

And today, I read The History Boys, Alan Bennett's 2004 play which was filmed in 2006 reasonably effectively. I'm debating on whether or not to teach it and if so, to which age group. I have a feeling that it might be too grown up for 14 year old and would be better suited to 16 year olds. Do two years really make that much difference? I think they do. But what I'd like to get into certain heads is the whole idea of thinking about education and what it really means. What is it to be educated, what is it to be intelligent. One of the things that I like about the play is that the boys are boisterous but also, fundamentally decent. It's a terrific play. But I read it and then re-read it to pick up on all the references that Bennett litters like confetti and there would be a lot of work in setting the context. I suppose I could show my hothoused little euro-flowers an episode or two of Ashes to Ashes to establish that early-80s vibe. But for me, Ashes to Ashes just isn't like it used to be in 1981-2-3, although the soundtrack is marvellous, and I did dress up a little as a New Romantic. Somehow, the act of setting the series in the early 1980s fossilises the time and makes it seem less plausible than the careful recreation of 1973 achieved in Life on Mars. And Keeley Hawes - or rather, Inspector Alex Drake - and her monologues are just plain irritating and seem to become more rather than less so as the series progresses.

Now time to catch the last ep of The Last Enemy, a thriller set in a futuristic England which isn't so far away if the police and the politicians have their way and get the DNA details of five year olds onto their databases, not to mention the records of who goes where and when using an Oyster Card. Surveillance levels and the blithe assumption of our leaders that we actually believe their bs that increased state supervision decreases the security threat are increasingly sinister. Reality imitating fiction, or fiction just marginally previewing what is actually occurring? Whichever, it is unsettling in an allegedly free society.

The Book of Lost Things & what's wrong with the romance industry

2008-03-10T17:36:00.003+01:00

Just finished John Connolly's Book of Lost Things, which was interesting in the way it played with familiar stories and poems (Robert Browning's Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came among them, one of my favourites) and had clever moments, but didn't enthral or engage me the way other authors have with their explorations of those old tales which permeate our perspectives of stepmothers, wolves, lost children and queens. I suppose I am thinking of Angela Carter's Company of Wolves and Jennifer Crusie's Bet Me, which in their very different ways were exuberant celebrations of the tradition, along with AS Byatt's Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye.

I think Connolly's main character, David, is a little plodding - he doesn't quite come off the page - his growth is told more than shown, perhaps. And the final chapter is a gallop to the finish, as though Connolly realised that he had written too much and needed to compress everything into another 3,000 words or else. But the plot is clever and intricate and interesting and the Beast is a great invention. The dangers that David faced were effectively detailed, particularly the Beast (which is a sort of underground arachnid with millipede characteristics and a way of bursting through the earth to swallow men up) and aspects of the bleakness of reaching adulthood were very effectively depicted.

In the meantime, I have finally managed to get the internet back at home, at last at last so am surfing again. And I was led by Smart Bitches to a survey on the romance industry which asked what I really would like to change about it - well obviously I couldn't put down that they should publish me properly with a whacking big advertising campaign and staged readings up and down the countryside, but other than that, what do I really wish for the romance publishing industry?

More variety. And better writing. I can think of the really well written romances I have read on the fingers of maybe two hands - Jennifer Crusie; Jude Morgan; Nita Abrams; Tracy Grant; Eva Ibbotson from the pantheon of the living. Austen, Trollope and Georgette Heyer from the late lamented column. That's really pretty much it. Romance has been commoditised more than other genres, although I think there are some howlingly awful crime novels out there, and of course, we won't even open the Dan Brown can of worms. I am not including my favourite writer of historical fiction, Dorothy Dunnett, as a romance writer, because her books with a couple of notable exceptions are not really romantic. There is plenty of love and hatred and passion but other than Checkmate, they are not really romances.

Because romances have been turned into sausage-machine type fodder, and the demand for them continues to be high, there is this problem that the writing generally speaking is rarely polished. It can be smart and clever but it is not consistently good even within a single book.

Then there is characterisation - I believe I've posted before about my enjoyment of the bad girl in fiction. But it's as though writers and publishers are afraid to go with the really bad girl. Someone mean, or spiteful or careless or manipulative. Why why why???? It's only when a character has really significant flaws that they can truly grow and change. I suppose I am thinking of the heroine of The People's Act of Love (James Meek) which remains the book I best remember from the past few years of reading partly because the heroine has disastrous judgement when it comes to the men she chooses to entangle herself with. She's careless, she makes reckless choices, she doesn't get it right. These are the heroes and heroines I really like.

It seems to me that the publishing industry and the romance publishing industry in particular are risk averse - they go with what works and then look around in astonishment when the different thing actually sells and sells. Then they try to encourage more writers to write the different thing so that it is no longer different any more. And the whole industry has been infected by block-busteritis, so there is no room for respectable sales any more - a book has to make it onto lists and into supermarkets and sell shedloads. So it is harder and harder to find hidden treasures and those are what makes a book really exciting, the sense that it is your secret, that other people don't necessarily know about it, so you can rave to them. I've never been sufficiently into religion to be a proselytiser - perhaps my only faith is really the written word. But when I find a book that is amazing, it really is difficult to shut me up about it.

I sympathise with publishers. No really, I do. They are inundated with extraordinary volumes of paper, much of which could have been put to better use as chip wrapping, they have bottom lines and deadlines and lines in the sand over which they cannot cross, they have a daily diet of weirdness (just go check out any editor's blog for a sample of the type of bizarro-land letter they receive in a vain attempt to convince them that the next big thing has just landed on their desk). But they are also vain and silly and superficial, which is how we get so many celebrity biogs that are just testaments to the vacuity of our post-modern world - and which earned enormous advances but.... didn't sell. And in addition to all that, the office politics of the average publishing house make imperial Rome look like a calm night at an old folks' home in Bournemouth.

Still, that doesn't diminish my frustration as a reader waiting for another desert island keeper. And waiting. And waiting. Ummm, yes, the clock is ticking and I'm still waiting. That's because too many books are published too fast and the quality control is poor as a result. So my real wish for the publishing industry would be to curtail the running around like a headless flightless egg-laying avian and get on with finding really good books to publish. Like mine.

Vampire Weekend and Joe Jackson

2008-03-06T14:44:00.003+01:00

I can't help myself - I can't stop listening to Vampire Weekend. I know they are derivative, Paul Simon did it years ago, and before him, of course there were the original African musicians who devised the original style.

But it's not just the music. The lyrics take me back to Whit Stillman's amazing films, and the closed, claustrophobic world of the east coast Preppie, where people really are called Walcott.

My favourite songs are I Stand Corrected and Campus. I particularly like the ambiguity of Campus's chorus, about, presumably, a student and teacher in the middle or towards the end of an affair which asks How am I supposed to pretend/I never want to see you again.

What is it about these Columbia kids who have just written the best earworm of 2007/8?

In the meantime, last night, I went to my first live gig in about a million years. It was Joe Jackson, who I have seen previously. Well, who I saw at the Hammersmith Palais in 198ahem hem hem.

JJ was wonderful - great set, throughout which he swigged tea, played some great old songs and of course, inflicted the new songs on us which no one knew. Except that as the DH observed on the way back home, they all started with pretty much the same intro, presumably to confuse us when we were expecting It's Different for Girls and got Steppin' Out instead. But I found the whole thing a bit disquieting since DH and I were probably in the younger half of the audience, and as we were belting along to classics like On Your Radio and One More Time, there was a gang of blokes behind me wellying along. When I turned, I noticed a group of rather staid, round, bald fellows. Sigh. They were probably just as shocked by me. Joe Jackson has scarcely changed at all in the intervening 25+ years, but then he has never claimed pretty-boy status. Which probably explains why one or two of his songs suggest he's still looking for a girlfriend and that he fully expects to be eaten by his pet Alsatians in his lonely flat. Hopefully the neighbours will notice that the amazing piano practice has ceased before things reach that particular pass. He is a genius of the keyboard. If he's coming to your neighbourhood, go get the tickets. He's worth it.

Hatred and human rights

2008-03-02T18:06:00.002+01:00

I haven’t blogged for weeks because my reading hasn’t been the cheeriest: I’m coming to the end of a two-volume history of the Nazis and their persecution and extermination of the Jews. I came to read it because it has had outstanding reviews, which it certainly deserves but unsurprisingly it is not the sort of material that makes for light and breezy commentary. Anyway, Saul Friedlander’s two volume opus is called Nazi Germany and the Jews, and part 1 is called Years of Persecution, 1933-1939, while volume II which came out towards the end of last year, is titled Years of Extermination, 1939-1945.

While not the sort of thing that I would rush out and push into the hands of all my friends, relatives and unsuspecting students, I would certainly recommend the books to anyone interested in the field. Friedlander synthesises the experiences of the victims while charting the thought-processes of the perpetrators of the Holocaust with ample reference to contemporary documents: letters, diaries, speeches, newspaper articles, conference papers as well as more recent historical research. He examines the reactions of the world as it watched in a semi-hypnotised state and the various churches of Germany and Europe as they effectively by and large turned their backs. He puts to rest the canard that ordinary people in Germany and Poland had no idea of what was going on. There was physical evidence aplenty (German housewives buying up the furniture and jewels of dispossessed Jews, the stench around the camps) as well as letters from soldiers on the Eastern Front describing massacres and the letters of both victims and perpetrators describing the gassing process in the extermination camps.

I still can’t get my mind round the lunacy of the Nazi high command. The irrationality of their hatred of the Jews, the depth of that hatred, these remain great mysteries to me. Hatred itself is such a weirdness. There are people who make me roll my eyes or cause me a degree of revulsion (Tom Cruise, Dubya and the man who does the Jeyes cleaning products spots on ITV1, for example). Closer to home, I have encountered one or two people I profoundly hope never to meet again because they were poisonous and malevolent. But that’s as far as I can go. I can’t imagine hating anyone so much that I want to stop them from owning a bicycle, a pet, a stamp collection or a radio, prevent them from buying meat, garlic, onions, nectarines and gingerbread, still less shove them in an airless wagon and transport them to a certain death by gassing or starvation. Yet this collective insanity consumed thousands of people.

What is also chilling is that the Nazis really virtually succeeded in achieving their aim of making Europe Judenfrei – entirely free of Jews. There is the arguable point that they expended so many resources in killing Jews and destroying communities that it was a contributory factor in losing the war. I’m not convinced – according to Friedlander, the transports of Jews used a relatively small percentage of the rolling stock that was criss-crossing Europe between 1940 and 1945 and Jews were used as slave labour in armaments factories. Worse still is the acceptance of so many people of the unacceptable – the rhetoric of hatred and fear and neurosis that was adopted unthinkingly by so many people across Europe through the thirties and early forties. Demonising a people is so easy to do. Once they are demonised and dehumanised, it is a short step to destroying them. We know that, we’ve seen it in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Cambodia, and now, today, again in Darfur.

We have this Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which dates from 1948, in response to the barbarities committed in Europe and Asia during World War II, but we seem to be unable to live up to it. Yet all it asks is this:

“Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family”

Perhaps the greatest mystery of all is why this simple act is still, after so much cruelty and suffering, so very difficult for us to accomplish.

Twilight and other Teen books.

2008-02-04T09:48:00.000+01:00

Last year, I bought a book called City of Bones by Cassandra Clare, which my son wanted to read, but which I decided to vet, and it was quite Buffyesque and lively, just his cup of tea and he is reading with great enthusiasm as I write. So back at Christmas, I went looking for more of the same (I am trying to get him into female protagonists and a little more rationale to the violence than offered by Darren Shan) and picked up Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer, which I hadn't heard of. But then a couple of my students started raving about it, so this weekend, now that we finally have sofa and chaise longue, I took up residence and spent a good deal of Saturday reading.

Twilight is being made into a movie, and apparently was a publishing phenomenon a couple of years ago - missed that one totally. But it is a good read, very absorbing, engaging bad boy hero, an action-packed ending and a good dangling cliff to take us into the next book. Still, I am a little disappointed it's a series. I knew it was when I bought it, as I bought the second in the series with it, but I was hoping that the third book, Eclipse, which is just out here in Europe in hardback, would be the final book in a trilogy. But now I read that the author has been contracted to write more in the series, and I feel a little tired. I like trilogies and quartets, I like story arcs that cross more than one book, but I want to a sense of destination, a place where the loose ends will be tied, whether for good or ill.

The other thing I'm not wild about is our heroine, Bella Swan (great great name) - interestingly, I'd criticise City of Bones for the same heroine issue - Clary Fray and Bella are both plausible but opaque. I guess this is because they are place-holders for the intended readers, namely girls aged between 12 and 16, but also, I think they have the same issue as numerous other heroines in the paranormal/romance/women's fiction zones. They are too nice. Their flaws and tantrums are too explicable and easily tracked back to their baggage and issues. They are really really good girls. I keep thinking of the fact that heroines are role models and isn't it lovely that we get these brave, loving, bright, sassy, feisty lasses - but.

One of my favourite songs from last year was Amy Winehouse's "You Know I'm no Good". It's the chorus that gets me: "I cheated myself, Like I knew I would, I told you I was trouble,You know that I'm no good". It's that sense of personal responsibility and wanton badness that does it, every time I hear the song. She's Scarlet O'Hara, Becky Sharp, Milady de Winter, Evil Willow Witch, Buffy in Series 6, Faith, of course, Lyra Belacqua. I love the bad girls. The really no-holds barred bad-girls. Brave, bad, selfish, gritty, cruel, heartless, a-moral, angry.

So although I can highly recommend Twilight, be aware that Bella Swan is a heroine, and she certainly has at least one TSTL (too stupid to live) moment in Twilight, but of course, she lives.

I'm looking forward to New Moon and Eclipse, but bring on the bad girls, please. Or maybe that's what I should be doing myself...

Busy Bee

2008-01-22T12:31:00.000+01:00

Here is Buzzy Bee, possibly the best toy in the world. I like it so much because I am doing my best to impersonate it at the moment. The upside of having no internet at home (Belgacom and I have had words again, but it isn't doing me much good) and finally having sofas and chairs in the living room is that I have started reading again, and have polished off three interesting books over the past few days.

1 In Defence of Atheism, by Michel Onfray.

I'd never previously heard of Onfray until his book was reviewed in the English papers - it's the first of his many books to be translated into English, I now discover, and I think I might try the French version. The translation made the book come over as very French (umm, Spymaster's Lady Joanna Bourne might want to take a look) but was of course in impeccable English. Onfray and his translator made some wonderful coinages - my favourite was 'seraphic poultry' for angels - and overall this was engaging but not fully persuasive. It's an attack on the three big monotheisms and sometime glorious rhetoric gets in the way of a genuine engagement with the issue. But it is sending me off to all sorts of other writers like Lucretius. If a book makes me read another book, it gets good reviews from me.

2 Shopping in the Renaissance, by Evelyn Welch.

Criminal to have a book as interesting and well-illustrated as this with some holy cow type copy fouls. I don't know what the Yale editors were thinking - but ultimately, it doesn't really harm Welch's fascinating study of shopping between 1300 and 1650, complete with some lovely paintings and objects. Incredibly useful and absorbing... if you like that kind of thing. Which I do, it was the kind of book that makes research a pleasure and once again, sent me off to consult other works, which is always a good thing (see above).

3 Gentlemen of the Road, Michael Chabon

Of course I don't spend all my days reading seriously knotty explorations of the Judaeo-Christian ethic and thorough, detailed accounts of how to visit a Venetian apothecary. It was with delight that I picked up Gentlemen of the Road, Chabon's 10th century adventure novel set in the Caucasus. Now this is how to write history and adventure! The language is ornate in a deliberate homage to Dumas and Anthony Hope and Scott type swashbucklers, the characters are quirky and interesting, and the backdrop feels real, even though I am sure that Chabon must have some anachronisms in there. One of his characters, Zelikman, is from a family of Regensburg physicians and has some very sophisticated medical ways about him, and I do wonder about some of his remedies and potions... But my WSD is unchallenged. What do I know about Khazars and 10th century medics? I'm prepared to buy anything that Chabon offers because his world is solid and sure, not a scrap of wallpaper, not even behind a radiator. Anyway, without giving away the plot, it's a terrific read, very easy and fun and witty.

But as I was cruising the net this morning, I came across an interesting take on writing - someone who judges writers for their skies, and he had found 14 references to skies in Chabon's oeuvre that he loved and bunged them up there.

He had a point, this reviewer. As he says, ever since Homer's wine-dark seas and skies, the far horizons are an apt enough way of testing the mettle of a writer. It makes me a little nervous, so I'm going to go back and check. To be honest, though, how important is the sky? Metaphorically of course it has resonance, but in day to day life, how much do we actually notice it? Not so much, I'm willing to bet. There are mornings when every sense is heightened and you do notice, and this morning, I walked from the staffroom up the stairs to my room with a lightening of heart because for the first time in some days of this drab Belgian winter, the sun was shining and the sky was streaked with an optimistic squished soft fruit colour and the great lumpen grayness was dispelled, all before 8:30am. I felt like a mole emerging when I opened the door to my room. Normally it's a question of sighing and opening all the blinds as much as possible so that any faint ray of light penetrates the stygian gloom, but this morning, the children came wincing and squinting into class and there are shadows in the playground.

Now it is back to the grim and earnest. There's a joyous essay on equity and efficiency in schools to finish off for next week (1400 words and counting, if you know the musical You're A good Man Charlie Brown, I feel like all the childen doing their book report on Peter Rabbit), some serious thinking to be done about the Dakar Education for All policy commitments (free, compulsory universal primary education by 2015, now, where did I put that medicine to cure snorts of cynical derision), another few hundred words of The Apprentice and parent's night tonight. Whoopee.

An Accomplished Woman

2008-01-14T08:24:00.000+01:00

In the words of the wonderful Etta James, At last, my love has come along, My lonely days are overAnd life is like a song, Oh, yeah.

For the first time in months, I've found a wonderful historical romance that is a complete DIK (desert island keeper). I read An Accomplished Woman by Jude Morgan twice this weekend, and I'm looking forward to wrapping up my final read this evening.

Jude Morgan is the pseudonym of a writer called Tim Wilson who I've been following since he write a series of detective novels starting with The Complaint of the Dove, featuring a tutor, a rather shabby, down-at-heel gentleman called Robert Fairfax. I loved them, and then Hannah March morphed a few years ago into Jude Morgan, who wrote Passion, a very interesting take on the experiences of Mary Shelley, Augusta Leigh and Fanny Brawne, the women in Shelley, Byron and Keats's lives. Morgan also wrote a romance called Indiscretion which was good, but not fabulous. And now, for me, he's totally hit pay-dirt with An Accomplished Woman.

It may be the plethora of Austen adaptations floating about at the moment and other costume capers like Cranford and Lark Rise to Candleford, but AAW just totally tapped into that world for me, and was a blissful read. While the situations/plot are famililar from Austen and Heyer (hints of Emma, Persuasion, The Black Sheep and Bath Tangle), the characters and voice are very richly Morgan's own, and the book is delightfully wry and droll and just plain funny - especially the Romantic young poet, Mr Beck, whose extract from his own longer poem published in his journal, The Interlocuter, is a complete LOL parody of high-flown Wordsworthian blank verse.

I found the heroine very likeable, she's someone I'd happily have as a friend. She is not a 'nice' woman, but she does her very best to behave with decency, honesty and integrity, and I found the way her story and backstory unfolded to be very compelling, and the hero is just right for her. She makes mistakes, she misreads situations, but she has good intentions and she stands up for herself in the face of intolerable bullying. The hero is very well-drawn also, and their final reconciliation is totally satisfying. (I'm not giving anything away here - this is a romance, the HEA is a given).

So what made this so different to The Spymaster's Lady? Well, TSL is just Grand Guignol, where AAW is set in a rich, vivid and entirely plausible world. There are no grand adventures, no plots, no conspiracies, no evil rapists. But there are wonderful gargoyle characters, like the beastly Mrs Vawser and the appalling Mrs Allardyce who are the essence of true evil, in their way, much more succesfully than any nasty potential torturing pervert. The whole book is character driven and all the tangles and untangling arise out of well-constructed, believable characters who behave not predictably but authentically. Jude Morgan is a beautiful writer - the novel is wonderfully well-crafted and he captures an authentically early 19th century mode of speech and letter-writing which is never laboured or forced, but also flows rather more easily for the scatty modern mind than Austen. And in this novel, he is really beginning to engage with the moral issues that enrich Austen's world as well.

I can't recommend this novel too highly. Go and get it.

The Spymaster's Lady - Spoilers abound

2008-01-11T14:40:00.000+01:00

Now, this novel has had rave reviews on various romance websites, so I thought that I would give it a go and was pleasantly entertained all of yesterday afternoon. It's a page-turning historical, conforming to various of the genre's conventions and stretching my Willing Suspension of Disbelief (WSD) further than a primary school kid pinging his neighbour's knicker elastic. I read it pretty much in one sitting and very much enjoyed it. But....

There's always a but. It's me. I just don't enjoy romances like I used to. And the things that stop me enjoying them are associated with the genre.

What have we here....

Napoleonic War setting - hmmm, been there before.
Spies - definitely been there before.
Virgin heroine - implausibly so - see below.
Prison-break opening.
Action-packed road adventure/chase scenario - good for structuring and pace.
Hot de-virginising sex in a bathtub ending in total post-coital rapture for heroine to the point of unconsciousness....
Happy Ever After for heroine despite... well the full spoilerishness comes below.

The plot is so totally utterly implausible that you have to accept and buy into it without question and the pace is essential to that.

Blind heroine successfully coshes slimy rape-intent guard, frees 2 manacled prisoners and takes them with her in her escape from the evil villain's lair. Oh, and evil villain, despite being master-spy of France, does not realise that he has an essential Head of Section of the British Secret Service (which did not then exist, but that's a minor technicality) in his cellar..
The only woman in the book apart from a bit part at the end is our heroine. Our hero has 4 pals, all of whom are sweet dudes, but all other men are evil and/or weak, wicked, lust-iniflamed and intent on having our heroine. But she is a sweet virgin at the grand old age of 19 even though she has spent the last 10 years hanging with various armies all over Europe, spying for the French, and we all know that armies are full of other men.
Our blind heroine recovers her sight very suddenly and quite perfectly with no fuzzy episodes or fading in and out, just one minute, all darkness, next all light. Now, I know no blind people personally, but I have read enough to realise that blindness is not all dark...Yeah, I know, pickypickypicky.
Our heroine then spends some days walking to London with our hero, with whom she has fallen in love when she was blind, but never seen, and she doesn't realise it is him. This produces some great sexual tension because he doesn't dare touch her in case she suddenly can tell by his sizzling touch that he is her grand passion, but it seems very unlikely.
Scummy Lustful Villain Number 1 (hereafter referred to as SLV1) hops around southern England with up to 20 Froggy pals wielding pistols and knives in broad daylight and no one seems to notice, let alone call them on disturbing the peace often and variously.
SLV1 then launches an extraordinary attack on the London headquarters of the British Secret Service (which didn't actually exist) in full daylight with an arsenal of weaponry that delivers firepower equivalent to several machine guns and a rocket propelled grenade launcher, although fortuitously, none of the people inside (including hero, heroine and their mates) are injured much beyond a scratch on the cheek from flying glass.
Cod-French. I live and work in a Francophone environment. The one thing in the book that really prevented it from winning me over was the bastardised version of English with a French accent and occasional syntactical inversions. We spent much of the book in deep third perspective of the heroine and it was like living through a female version of Inspector Clouseau. Tintin and Dorothy Dunnett are the great exemplars for me - characters should speak naturally in the language that is being used - exclamations of Sapristi and Tonnerre de Brest should be kept to the French version of Tintin. But our author uses pidgin Franglais to emphasise the Frenchness of our heroine in a way that served only to distract. Otherwise, by and large, the settings were wallpaper. The London sections in particular struck me as being set in a Disneyfied place where a Cor-Blimey Dick Van Dyke might well be poised to hop into position for a quick chim chim cheree soon as you like guvnor.

SERIOUS SPOILER ALERT, FINAL MAJOR PLOT TWIST GIVEN AWAY.

You could argue that the heroine's Frenchness must be emphasised to magnify the impact of the final total implausibility that our heroine turns out to be the grand-daughter of the Head of the British Secret Service, a Welshman (snort, snigger snigger) who has sent his daughter and son-in-law to France 20 years previously to spy for him on the French Revolution. Oh, and they never told their daughter that she was not spying for France, no, she was spying for Britain. Huzzah, she was on the good guys' side all the time. Well, her father couldn't have told her, he died when she was four, but her mother dies about 6 weeks before the action kicks in, and just let it slip her mind...

Somehow, I could tell this one was coming. But I didn't like it when it came.

Here lies the problem for me with Romancelandia. I love love stories. But I want to believe the whole world in which it takes place and although the conflicts and adventures pile up in this novel, I could not believe in this bizarro world, especially when delivered through a thin layering of fake French.

Give me Dorothy Dunnett any day.

HNY

2008-01-01T21:29:00.001+01:00

I think it is probably illegal or immoral not to update your blog on 1/1 of whatever year it may be turning into, so just in case the weblice come knocking on my door, here's a quickie:

On NY Day, always check your resolutions from the previous year. It will if nothing else, give you a good laugh.

Here's the one that had me ROTFLOL.

"Practise the piano for 10 mins every day"

hahahahahahaha.

Now, this is my NY resolution for 2008:

Take every opportunity offered to check out JJ Feild.

There, that should be an easy one to keep all the way through 2008.

HNY, y'all.

Telecom Hell Belgian-style

2007-12-30T18:39:00.000+01:00

There are many good things about Belgium: apart from the obvious chocolate and beer, there are the bakeries with the best patisserie I've ever tasted with more variations on the nut/chocolate/pastry/sponge combo than I've ever seen anywhere else; small hills - important on a bicycle - although I've never actually been on a bicycle in Belgium; comfortable cinemas that show movies in three languages; yummy boutiques with gorgeous clothes and jewellery and accessories; delicious restaurants of every foodie persuasion; teenagers whose idea of assault is trying to sell you marzipan in the street as opposed to mugging you for your mobile. But no-one, not even a Belgian, could say that their newly competitive formerly public sector utilities are anything but supremely incompetent.

I will not go into the tedious details of my Kafkaesque experiences with phone and internet connections over the past three weeks, but for anyone bothering to surf their holidays away in this direction, this is a quick heads up that blogging in this vicinity is severely limited by lack of access, but normal service should resume come Feb...and in the meantime can anyone explain to me why it is acceptable to 2 telecoms operators that our phone answers to a phone number that officially belongs to a Swiss insurance company? No? I thought not.

In the meantime, The Lives of Others was definitely the best movie of 2008. Definitely.

The Mills & Boon row

2007-12-07T16:57:00.001+01:00

Here's the link to what will no doubt be the first of many such discussions as we approach M&B's centenary year:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,2222083,00.html

Just to fill in non-romance readers, an M&B author (Daisy Cummins) and Julie Bindel, a freelance journalist who works for the Guardian wrote contrasting articles on the merits (or NAAAHHHT as Borat might say) of Mills & Boons.

The comments by Julie Bindel have already roused strong responses across the internet and there are some terrific refutations of her position (based on the reading of 20 M&Bs 15 years ago) that basically the books sanction rape... No, you have to follow the link and read her skewed logic for yourself. If you want to find the great ripostes, google Natasha Oakley, Small Town Scribbles, Teach Me Tonight and Smart Bitches Read Trashy Books.

The reason the article pressed my button was that I've been doing my own research - it's about 15 years or so since I read M&Bs with any regularity at all. So after my declaration the other day that I'd always wanted to try to get into that market and the incentive of the competition currently being run by M&B/Harlequin, I bought six M&B Modern novels (aka Harlequin Presents), which are their bread and butter monthly output. Eight currently, going up to twelve as of next year. So these are books in demand, and yes, they are the ones which tell you exactly what it is on the tin, e.g. Billionaire Baby's Secret Greek Virgin.

It would have been much more interesting if Bindel (or perhaps someone with some time and genuine curiosity) had done a decent survey of these books. They are just natural extensions of celebrity lifestyle magazines - of course they sell like hotcakes. First of all, there's variety. So far, I've been taken to Malaysia, Greece, Italy, London and NY. But all the settings have in common a lovely glitziness to them, like going into a five star hotel and having soft-voiced waiters offering you cocktails on proper coasters with decent nibbles. Mm, remove me from the wind and the rain, the day to day hassle and my classroom with a conduit from the canteen's deep-frying equipment. Two pages into a classic M&B and it's all thick (shag, lots of shag) pile carpeting and marble staircases.

Then we have the alpha male. I've been idly trying to find a placeholder for the alpha male in my competition contender. Most modern Hollywood stars are too young looking, ditto those sulky models posing for Armani/Hugo Boss ads. Let's see, I suppose Adrien Brody might be a candidate:

And in case you have any post-Pianist ideas about him looking like a coathanger, check this out:

(Yes, you're very welcome. It was a pleasure.)

Yup, he's all potential tycoony, with actually a very cute smile but lots of brood about him, and mmmm, tasty bod. Now, what red-blooded female wouldn't mind hanging out with someone like that for a couple of hours (because that is roughly how long it takes to read the 50-55,000 words of an M&B). And rather than being an actor who might have narcissistic tendencies and could go all Stanislavsky on you, you get to be with Tycoon Guy with a terrifically healthy bank balance. Of course money can't buy you happiness but in a wish-fulfilment fantasy, the knowledge that neither hero nor heroine will ever have to worry about the gas bill, the mortgage, life insurance and a pension is, well, fantastic.

The big difference I've noticed with the heroes is that they are generally nicer and more sensitive. When they discover they have a four-six-eight year old child that the heroine has hidden from them, they don't say, damn, the Child Support Agency is going to get after me now, they say, "Why didn't you tell me, I want to be a father to my child, I must bond with the fruit of my loins, call me super-Dad, and no, I will not go out and buy it Nintendo Wii and hope I never have to talk to it again." They cook. They worry about their chickies. They are gooey inside. Exterior of steel, interior of My Little Pony. Well, perhaps not quite so synthetic nylon, but just as dayglo. These are men who whup corporate ass by day and go all melty-cheese toastie by night. And are very keen on pleasing their women in all the good ways.

The heroines pretty much fall into the feisty/clueless paradigm that you might expect - that lets us readers feel a little better just in the way that it is permissible to feel better when you see a picture of an A-lister in the throes of some fashion nightmare in Heat or OK.

And finally, M&Bs are forgiving. Both heroes and heroines can commit serious doo-lalliness (except adultery which is beyond no-no), provided the writer can still show that they are Good People, who would never be kitten-drowners or dog-kickers. M&B characters get away with blunders and mistakes that make Field Marshal Haig look like a chap whose plan for the Somme turned out to be a mighty fine idea which played out not so very badly all things considered. And they still get the guy/girl - in the interests of equality, it should be noted that generally speaking, both hero and heroine could be nominated for clot of the year.

So, luxurious, hot and forgiving. Like cocoa and lycra, two other necessities that help us through the workaday world. I'm not sure I could be addicted to M&Bs - there are so many other books on my bookshelf, but for a couple of hours of escapism and mingling with the uber-rich, I'm happier reaching for a romance than for a copy of Hello! magazine, because the other thing that M&B guarantees us is a happy ending, and you know what they say about the curse of Hello.

Oh....My..... God...

2007-12-01T14:41:00.000+01:00

Yes, it's a Janice moment.

My book has finally been published. Go here....

http://www.newconceptspublishing.com/theperfecthero.htm

and you can buy it direct from the publisher, using credit card or paypal. It costs $5.50, or €3.73 which is nothing, for hours of innocent pleasure. Because let me tell you, it is sweet. There is a bit of kissing and cuddling, but no sex. Lots of action, adventure and desire, but no sex.

Go buy A Perfect Hero, it's perfect.

Daleks rock

2007-11-30T14:41:00.001+01:00

I am not sure whether this cake demonstrates that daleks rock or simply that my husband (who made the cake for Minion Number One's birthday earlier this year) rocks.
The icing is royal icing dyed red, with licorice allsorts, Pez and Smarties. You too can make your own dalek.

Surfing the romantic wave of global capitalism

2007-11-28T20:02:00.000+01:00

Cruising some of my favourite blogs this evening, I came across this link:

http://www.iheartpresents.com/

which will take you to the Harlequin Presents blog and news of a competition for a sizzling first chapter and synopsis for a Harlequin Presents novel. That's a Mills & Boon to those of us outside the US and Canada.

So here I am, now about 15,000 words into The Apprentice, plenty of ideas a-burgeoning, lots of lovely possibilities unfurling, the momentum achieved to know roughly where I'm going in a long-haul journey which will take another 6-8 months. Should I take a swift break to craft up a quick 4,000 words + synopsis for a book which I might then have to write? Except that of course, there will be thousands of contestants in this race, quite literally, and I'm very unlikely to get any nearer a firm book contract.

The thing is, I've always wanted to write for Mills & Boon. Now there's a confession! But seriously...my first completed novel was a Mills & Boon. As with most of my writing, I started writing it in extremis, in this case, financial extremis, during my second year of university. And I wanted to prove to myself I could do it. So began the tale of Ellis and (oh God, I've forgotten her name, let's call her) Elinor. They were musicians brought together in a string quartet much against their will and there were endless opportunities for angry scenes followed by sizzling kisses and my very first sex scene. Ellis and Elinor long ago headed to the great recycling bin in the sky - the mss was written on the dot-matrix v. portable Brother typewriter that my mother bought for my 18th birthday, then photocopied and punted off to Paradise House in Richmond (M&B HQ for the uninitiated). I did eventually receive a really nice rejection letter - not a form FOff you daft bint, but a rejection letter that suggested that someone had actually read my sweaty 52,000 words and thought about them. They pointed out that the setting was not really glamorous enough for the M&B market (yup, I can see that classical music isn't really an alpha male setting....) and apart from that, perhaps Ellis and Elinor were just a touch... well... immature??? I have a feeling this is because Elinor (or whatever the hell her name was) was a bit free and easy about slapping poor Ellis during their various misunderstandings which were many and varied.

Since then, I have learnt a fair deal about writing including how to create conflict between my characters without letting them indulge in assault and battery. But I still want to write a proper, no holds barred M&B with a title that tells you all, e.g. The Secret Millionaire's Greek Baby. Or Virgin in Distress. Or The Italian Tycoon's Reluctant Bride. You think I'm kidding. Well, I'm not. Technically, I believe it was The Greek Millionaire's Secret Baby, but basically, you need a set of dice with the words Millionaire/Billionaire/Tycoon/Prince/Sheikh, then Secret/Misunderstood/Reluctant/Baffled and Virgin/Bride/Mistress/Secretary/Baby with finally, Spanish/Italian/Greek/Arab engraved on them and you too can play the Name That Romance competition. Actually, maybe not Baffled. Maybe Captive or Innocent instead of Baffled.

So here's my title, The Reluctant Greek Tycoon's Millionaire Mistress. Nah - I've used Reluctant in a previous title, I can't have that again. So how about The Italian's Innocent Captive. There we are, perfect. Why's she captive, why's she innocent, what does he think she's done? Excellent kick-off questions which can surely take me through 5,000 words and a cooking synopsis...

On the other hand, my current heroine is about to watch her worst enemy break the legs of her uncle's extremely valuable horse at the San Bartolomeo palio....Before the animal rights activists get up in arms, only imaginary horses will be harmed in the making of this novel.

The thing is, one of my goddesses in the writing world, Jennifer Crusie, kicked off her extremely healthy and amusing career by writing what are known as Series Romance for Harlequin. If you can break in and get regular contracts, they are a very nice steady earner. And if you build up a following, you can break out and get into the really lucrative single title market. A great launchpad for a career in one of, if not the most, steady niches in the crazy world of publishing.

So what do you think? Innocent Captive or horse-harming daredevils?

On Teach Me Tonight (http://teachmetonight.blogspot.com/), an erudite hangout for those interested in the psychology and philosophy and literary roots behind the explosion of romance in the publishing world, Laura Vivanco writes about the competition and the idea that the success of M&Bs or Harlequins are inextricably linked with the expansion of capitalism around the world. It's a really interesting piece with links worth pursuing. But it raises for me that good old question - what am I writing for? I have to write, this is something I've long ago accepted, and my feeling is that if I am going to spend so many hours bashing away at a hot laptop (normally 2-3 each night in case you are curious) when I could be doing other things, it would be nice to be rewarded. I've always wanted to be able to earn my living exclusively from writing. It doesn't mean that I would give up teaching, but I would like the option. So, as a writer do you chase the money or write the book of your heart, in the hope that some sweet editor somewhere will read it and believe that it could be a book to soothe many other people's hearts also?

I have friends who are full-time writers/actors/artists and they don't all necessarily like the way things have panned out. Getting the contract, building the following, but most definitely, meeting the deadlines, can be far more stressful than trying to fit the writing in the gaps left by work, kids and life in general. So should I go for the mainstream romance route or pursue my more complex, opaque and ambiguous current WIP?

Whatever the answer, it's time to go and do some writing.

PPS

2007-11-22T18:26:00.000+01:00

It should of course be water dripping from the light fitting, although light dripping is quite an image...

and no, I do not watch the Bill. I write while other people in the house watch the Bill.

Drenched in the dark

2007-11-22T17:05:00.000+01:00

Last night, I was about to get stuck into my next 500 words when there was a sort of clunk and the whole house went dark. My heroic husband was in bed watching TV, so he sent me off to investigate and get The Bill back asap. But it was not a runner. Found the matches, found the candles and went down to the fuse-box. As I was standing there, having no luck, I heard an ominous dripping. A dripping I had never heard before... I went to the guest room, and found a big old puddle and a stinky, sodden rug and saw light dripping from the light fitting, which is under the kitchen.

Sigh. I called the Hero upstairs and he moved the rug (a truly disgusting task) and we went back upstairs. I went to bed and read by candlelight, just like the ladies of Cranford which started last week on BBC1 with one of those heritage casts where every old luvvie and some fresh-faced young luvvies have a slot unless they were too busy with the latest Harry Potter or Poliakoff saga - except for the ubiquitous Michael Gambon who has managed to crop up in all three.

Once I blew out the candles, I kept waking up with a start, imagining some worse disaster - the ceiling disintegrating, the basement flooding (especially because I was too tired and cold to find out where our bucket has got to...), working out how to live without heating, lighting or hot water past the weekend because the plumber wouldn't come and sort this out, discovering that the whole kitchen floor would have to be dug up (that one could still happen, I suppose, but I'm too tired to care much about it anymore). I think this happened four or five times until the final time, it turns out it's Hero-guy going to the loo, after which I can't go back to sleep at all and lie there plotting to make sure I have the first shower, because if he shaves and showers, there will be no hot water left at all. There's some myth about women and bathing and how we hog the bathroom, but the truth is that men take three times as long and use four times as much water.

I did get the first shower, and intrepidly found my torch and went down to check out the devastation which had all dried up whooppeeee! So I flick the fuse switch and the house lights up, the dark is dispelled and electronic gizmos come to life, including the dishwasher and so I get going with the little bit of washing up left from the previous night... It will come as no surprise to any technically minded reader that the lights went out again. Sigh. Which suggests to me that the leak is somewhere into/out of the kitchen sink zone. It's so good to narrow these things down.

It was charming and romantic to have a candle-lit breakfast. Just as I left, I tried the lights again, on they came and I left in the happy illusion that they would be functioning when I got home. Hahahahaha. It finally occurred to me that if I took the light-bulbs out of the leaky light-fitting, we might get a continuous electrical supply...They were halogen bulbs, and by the time my mighty mind had figured this one out, they were full of water - never seen that before. It's frightening to think that I am the most technically minded person in our house, the one who does plugs and erm.... well that's about it. The Hero is a whizz when it comes to allan keys and building Billy bookcases (well he should be by now, we've got about 20 of the suckers) but anything electrical/plumbing/machine-connected - that's my territory. I have managed to take a Dyson to bits and get it working again, and I have figured out how to programme the thermostat and keep the central heating pump at the right pressure...And I used to be able to handle spark plugs and distributor caps for the old Mini (the proper Mini). I protest too much. We are a house of incompetents.

Nonetheless, we've gone 2.5 hours without a power cut - maybe I hit on the solution after all, at least until the plumber puts in an appearance.

I don't feel too glum about this - for some reason, virtually every one I spoke to this morning had a story of woe about some household trauma, so the puddle seemed to shrink as I encountered companions in adversity. Then while I was doing my Victorian miss impression in bed last night, I found the book I'd idly picked up to round out a 2 for 3 offer over the summer was funny and twisted (Book of Air & Shadows, let me get back to you in a couple of days about that one) and when I was hanging around the Cora buying two plastic basins to substitute as the kitchen sink, I found another big fat thick book with promise, Special Topics in Calamity Physics. I know, a title too cutesy for a totally good vibe, but I had time to chew up a couple of chapters in the checkout line, and the heroine had me hooked. And finally, I found the gold ring I was given on the birth of Number 2 son, which I thought had disappeared for good. That made up for a lot of dripping and fiddling in the dark with fuses.

All is not entirely right with the world - not with the big bad world outside the house, but even though my lovely home is leaky and electrically vulnerable, it still feels righter than it's been for a bit - decent stories make a difference.

(PS any complaints about the alliterative nature of this post should be directed at Mr Robert Browning - I spent some of this morning in the company of the Duke of Ferrarra and he sneaks in quite a bit of alliteration here and there. It is catching. Look it up on some medical site, alliterationitis, an uncontrollable tendency to alliterate at all opportunities, and when those do not present themselves, to veer into assonance.)

Comfort Reading

2007-11-18T11:32:00.000+01:00

I've been reading a book called The Thirteenth Tale, which I've enjoyed. It's a bit Barbara Vine, but more pot-boilerish and less original than say A Dark-Adapted Eye, which still remains one of the best psychological mysteries ever. TTT is fine, but not as complex. Reviewers have compared it to Rebecca but I think that's a glib option because what the two books have in common is a country house which is burned in the course of the action (not a spoiler for either book, I hope). Setterfield is good writer, there's clarity and pace and an effective distinction between different narrative voices. Rebecca, however, it ain't. I re-read Rebecca. TTT - well, probably not.

That's the difference, isn't it. Re-reading. The books we sink into like comfortable armchairs. The books that we take down from the shelf when the world outside is too much for us and we need to retreat to another place, perhaps another time, a world of certainty because we know the story already.

I've had numerous comfort books that have seen me through the customary range of woes that plague as we march day by relentless day onward. The first was Harriet The Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh. It was odd and unusual and happened in a world where a 10 year old was able to slip out into a city and watch people. I think it is still one of the best books about growing up that has ever been written. My parents thought it was unhealthy that I read and reread and reread this book, but I couldn't stop myself. Harriet's world was one I understood.

Another childhood favourite was Ballet Shoes, by Noel Streatfield, about the Fossil sisters, orphans and theatrical performers. I still love this book and if I am really really sick, retreat to bed with it. The secondary characters are interesting, the way the story unfolds is incredibly vivid, and it was the first book I read where children really worked and earned their own money and became their own people.

Then there was Gone with the Wind. My mother took me to see the movie when I was 10, and I was stony-hearted and dry-eyed through the whole thing. But when I was thirteen, I picked up the book, and that was that. I had at one stage three or four copies because my parents kept confiscating it in the hope that I would read something else, but frankly, my dear, nothing else would do. And like all the men in the book, I was in love with Scarlett, I wanted to be like Scarlett when I grew up, bad and selfish and hot-tempered and petulant. Fortunately, the infection didn't last. Now I think Scarlett is the sort of person I'd see coming and think, "Run, just run. Don't look back, run!"

By the time I was sixteen, the 19th century got me. For various reasons, I opted not to do A level English literature, but I had several friends who did. And one afternoon, as we were sitting putzing about in someone's room, drinking coffee, eating toast, I picked up a stray copy of Bleak House and that was that. For the next 72 hours, I couldn't put it down. And then I re-read it. And just for good measure, once more. Still one of my all-time favourites and to my delight, two marvellous TV adaptations, one in 1985 and one two years ago, have done the book justice and encouraged others to pick it up and lose themselves in the fog of Chancery.

Then there was the summer of Mill on the Floss and This Side of Paradise. A weird way to spend the summer, flitting between rendez-vous with Maggie Tulliver thinking high thoughts about Thomas Aquinas and then heading off to meet up with Amory Blaine and watch his Jazz Age high-jinks.

Interspersed somewhere in there was Shanna, by Kathleen Woodiwiss, the woman who arguably created the historical romance as we now know it, and Frederica by Georgette Heyer, who is definitely the mother of the regency romance. I knew Shanna was high-grade, crazy ass nonsense right from reading the opening page, but it was unputdownable. If you want a taste, follow this link:http://www.kathleenewoodiwiss.com/books/shanna.asp

What is it about books that turns them into comfort reads? Partly it is in the world-building. You can be a lame writer and still world-build effectively (q.v. K. Woodiwiss above). Partly it is characters who just erupt from the page. Partly it is a story which a reader stumbles upon at the right time - I was the same age as Harriet and Maggie Tulliver and Amory Blaine (at the start of TSoP, anyway) and they were people I could understand and believe in and listen to. I don't suppose it matters really, once you know what your comfort reads are. But one of the things I have noticed is that the more you read, the fewer comfort reads you find. There are books I enjoy, books I will re-read (pretty much anything by Michael Chabon, frex), but not many comfort reads. Except, except.

Thank you Jennifer Donnelly, for A Gathering Light (A Northern Light to N. American readers). Voted one of the top ten ever winners of the Carnegie medal, it is a book that is beyond age boundaries, a book that moves me every time I read it, a book that I have started to use when teaching, and despite having read it five, six, seven times, never weary of re-reading. It is perfect and entire of itself - it doesn't need sequels or series, but one of its greatest pleasures is wondering what its heroine, Mattie Gokey, made of herself. And best of all, it is a book that celebrates books and words and stories with so light and absorbing a touch that it makes me dash off to read more. If you haven't come across it, go out and get it now, drop everything else and read it. It's wonderful.

The Casting Game & Venetia

2007-11-10T16:46:00.000+01:00

I'm currently re-reading a favourite novel of mine, Venetia, by Georgette Heyer. I have five favourite Heyer novels: Arabella, Frederica, Sylvester, Venetia and The Black Sheep and reread them every couple of years or so. On one of the lists I frequent, this month's read is Venetia, so there you are, my decision is made for me. And then someone asked who we would cast as the hero of Venetia, Damerel, aka The Wicked Baron.

When I first read the book, this was the Damerel I envisioned, roughly speaking:

But nowadays my taste has altered a little, and I am afraid in any case, I have never been able to take T.Dalton quite so seriously after seeing him as Antony in Ant & Cleo with his then squeeze, Vanessa Redgrave. When he kept saying, "I'm dying Egypt, dying," you could almost hear the audience collectively demanding why he was taking so long about it. At this point I am tempted to digress on the nature of the A&C play. It's one of my favourites, but it seems to me that it is either amazing and utterly excellent, or diabolically awful in performance. There's Hopkins and Dench, who were notoriously wonderful, ditto Patrick Stewart and Harriet Walter and then there was Mirren and Rickman, which should have been a dream team but the couple had the charisma and chemistry of a pair of toads in a stagnant pond. Although I've currently foresworn all directing, I might be tempted if someone let me do an open air version of Ant & Cleo. But no, no, no, no. Let my thoughts not that way fly. Directing is hell. Drama is hell.

Back to Damerel. And casting Damerel. My latest thought is Clive Owen:

Here's Heyer's description: "He was taller than Venetia had at first supposed, rather loose-limbed and he bore himself with a faint suggestion of swash-buckling arrogance.....he was dark, his countenance lean and rather swarthy, marked with lines of dissipation."

I hope my fellow Heyer fans, if they visit here, will approve of my choices for Damerel. Actually, it doesn't really matter if they object, it will simply be an excuse for them to think up even better examples. That is the joy of the Casting Game - infinitely more rewarding than seeing an actual adaptation of a much-loved book.

What I love even more than the casting game performed on a published novel is the casting game that I play in my head when writing a new book. We authors, we call this "Creating Place holders", which sounds like a sophisticated way of laying a table, but personally, I continue to think of it as the Casting Game. What I particularly enjoy about the casting game is that I do not play it solely with movie stars. In fact, I rarely play it with modern actors. Instead, I play it with portraits and pictures from the period I'm writing about. Which can be fascinating. Frex: here is a portrait of a young Italian girl of noble family:

There's tons to write about there - the silver gown edged with golden thread, the dog, the open expression of this child's face, how it felt dressing up in this stiff kit, whether she could walk anywhere in it... I could go on. What was even better was that there is another portrait of this young lady, Margherita Aldobrandini, painted some years later after almost twenty years of marriage to her rather unpleasant Farnese husband, Ranuccio, Duke of Parma, who was volatile, cruel and violent. I can't upload it for some argh computer reason, but if you can google it, it's extraordinary - recognisably the same person, but a totally different expression, hard eyes, a chill, tight mouth, a taut, tense body as if she were preparing to lash out or expecting to be lashed out at.

The Casting Game is one of the ways of rounding out a character: somehow, a real face bestows on a character a much greater sense of identity. But I wonder if this is a by-product of existing in such a powerfully visual time. Back to Shakespeare: just check out the way women are defined by the way they sound. Beatrice and Cordelia leap to mind, but there are others. In his world, sound perhaps mattered more than sight, certainly in decoding the signs of one's own culture. That's one explanation for the density of imagery in his plays, the reiterations and repetitions and echoes. Now, we are surrounded by visual images, and directors play with that by trying to recreate worlds, particularly in historical films. Derek Jarman did this wonderfully cleverly in both Caravaggio (obviously, in a biopic of a painter) and in Edward II and his version of The Tempest, as did Greenaway in Prospero's Books. And this is one of the enriching aspects of the casting game, because it is fun to imagine what friends and colleagues and family would like dressed in 16th or 19th century get-up.

There's a confession - I admit it, I do use my circle of acquaintance in my books. Sometimes I borrow your names, sometimes I borrow your physique or features, and occasionally, I borrow personalities and internal characteristics. I think all fiction writers do in one way or another beg borrow and steal from life, but it is a question I am asked and this is the answer. Yup. You never know, I could write about you next. Just don't expect to recognise yourself because it's not a cookie-cutter process. You might be jumbled in there with the physique of Timothy Spall and the whine of Peter Lorre and an early 17th century set of boots of Spanish leather. Writing is a magpie art, picking and dropping and nicking at bits and pieces from who knows what foetid corner of the author's subconscious.

Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg, and howlet's wing,--
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

Stardust, spoilers galore

2007-11-03T21:27:00.000+01:00

I didn't fall asleep - perhaps that is because we got to the cinema early enough for me to kip through the ads, but perhaps it was because Stardust was genuinely a lovely, cuddly, sweet movie. There are minor liberties taken with the plot and characters' backstories, but they work to pare the movie down into a pacy 130 minutes, which given the flab of some blockbusters out there (spidey 3, 139 mins, Pirates 3 168 mins, King Kong 187 mins) is dealable. Anyway, Neil Gaiman must have approved since he is one of the producers of this baby (Neil Gaiman, who he? Well only the writer of the original graphic novel which he then turned into a novel. And genius writer of the Sandman series. Not to mention American Gods - about which more later).

The essential scenes are there - but the story has been somewhat kid-friendlied - the unicorn frex, does not die in the movie. That was a three-hankie moment for me in the book, but I was absolutely not looking forward to discussing it with distraught 10 and 4 year old. Luckily, 4 year old took one look at Tristran Thorne and fell asleep so he missed all the squicky bits with animal entrails. Actually, not that that would have upset him much as he is in a very dark place at the moment involving dreams of fanged flesh-eating baby kangaroos and the evisceration of Barbie, any Barbie). Victoria has quite a charming love-story in the book, but is punished for dithering between her movie suitors, in a way that I think enhances the movie, but the book is more interesting there ultimately. And poor old Dunstan Thorne loses Daisy and his numerous family - it's just him and Tris (why did he lose the second r? he becomes Tristan in the movie).

The performances: Charlie Cox is a serviceable Tris - he does a good job at changing from bit of a gangling boy to polished fencer and dapper man about Stormhold; I liked Claire Danes as Yvaine (I've heard some quibbles - how the NYTimes reviewer could ever imagine gooey Gwyneth as an alternative beggars belief); Michelle Pfeiffer was excellent as Lamia, but for me the standout witch was Sarah Alexander of Green Wing and Smack the Pony and the princes, dead and alive, were great, wish we could have seen even more of them. It was delightful to see Ricky Gervais (Ferdy the Fence) prevented from making anything but animal noises and then getting a shiv in the guts for his pains, and Mark Strong was on fine-foaming-at-the-mouth form. Robert de Niro's comic turn sort of worked, but only because Dexter Fletcher, that stalwart, was a great foil to him. And of course, Mark Williams, previously the stammering apothecary of Shakespeare in Love and Arthur Weasley, father of Ron, was terrific as the enchanted innkeeper Billy, from goat to man to late goat in a skip and hop. It was also interesting to see Ms John Simm, Kate Magowan as Tristan's mother, although I thought it was a thankless role for her.

Still, the real star of the movie for me was the locations-spotter. We had gorgeous shots of Scotland, Iceland and Wales. The landscapes and the camerawork were terrific - I felt that Wall and Stormhold were really plausible places, and that's a joy when seeing an adaptation of a book (ok comic) (sorry, graphic novel) you liked. Well, loved. I hate to get all fangurl squeeee but I really have enjoyed just about everything Gaiman has had a hand in, from Mirrormask to the Sandman sequence.

I'm now looking forward to Beowulf, which Gaiman scripted, and the animated version of his super-spooky kid's book Coraline. But but but. If only someone would make a movie of his greatest novel, American Gods - now that would be something (18+ as a rating, but hey ho). If you haven't read American Gods yet, go, get thee to a bookshop. It's really dark, really nasty and really fantastic in all senses of the word. I think my favourite novel of 2005. I'll never let my copy go. I'm not sure I'll re-read it particularly soon, it is a work so epic and harrowing that I won't be going back to it in a hurry. But it is very memorable, very rich and very readable. Can't wait to see what Gaiman comes up with next. Let's hope he's not too lost to the movie-madness that he fails to write any more fiction.

Heroes and shark-jumping

2007-11-01T21:12:00.000+01:00

Well, I know I'm behind the times, because I'm watching Heroes real time on BBC2, and there we are, on ep 17 where the rest of the world is busy with Season 2. I was hooked, but oh, look, here comes the Fonz, ready to jump that shark:

So what made Heroes a shark-jumper for me? Sylar. Serial killers, ptui. I didn't see much of ep 17, but what I saw induced a bit of weariness in me that underlined the irritation I felt after watching last week's ep when Mohinder busily takes Sylar along so that he can slaughter another individual with some super-power, in this case, the mechanic woman with fantastic hearing. Mohinder does appear to be a little suspicious of his new pal, but sigh, the serial killer schtick is just gratuitous. Perhaps it's a nod towards Heroes' comic-book homage thing, because there are plenty of serial killers in various graphic novels one way and another. There was enough without a Sylar who will no doubt be back. Besides which I am beginning to find the Petrellis pretty irritating too.

I have no quibbles with the acting of Zachary Quinto (or any of the rest of the cast). But somehow, for me, the show has lost the zing it had, the whole thing is getting darker and darker and we never seem to see enough of Hiro and Ando who seemed to have the best lines but are being lined up for all sorts of phony samurai hi-jinks what with having to collect the sword and all. I have this feeling that from now on, there'll be stockpiling of coincidences and confluences of plot. It's shifted from amusement and entertainment to trying to be deep, there are too many characters to care about any in particular, there are even more unpleasant bad guy super-powers people lurking about and I'd rather watch other stuff: Desperate Housewives, Bones, House - yes I know, they are repetitive and formulaic, but they aren't testing my willing suspension of disbelief system to total destruction. Same problem with Lost. At least I got through 17 eps of Heroes - I couldn't get past the pilot for Lost.

Actually, my problem is that I'm pining for Buffy and Angel. And Firefly. I think I have to set my 200 euros aside and go for the wholesale purchase of complete Buffy and Angel on DVD, and then just re-enter the Whedonverse. Which will continue to spoil me for anything terrestrial TV has to offer. Bring on the quip, the internal and external demons and scrummy men in black leather. Return me to the world of sensible story arcs (cough cough, Cordy as demon goddess intent on devouring the world, oops, sorry, forgot about that one, take it back on the sensible story arc) and Glory and funny knights and the Groosalugg, and my favourite of all, Lorne. Sigh sigh sigh. Reavers, Jayne, River, Simon versus Jayne, Wash and Zoe....It was all so fast, so funny, so poignant, so witty and now, so over. With apologies to Prince, nothing compares 2 the whedonverse.

Rory Stewart and measurement

2007-10-25T18:29:00.001+02:00

This is Rory Stewart, author of two of the more interesting books I've read recently, The Places In Between and Occupational Hazards.

Stewart has had an interesting life, in the Confucian sense. TPIB is about his walk across 800km of central Afghanistan in early 2002 (um, yes, mountainous territory, winter, walking. On his feet - what a nutter - admirable, but a nutter). He took five weeks covering between 20 and 30 km a day. The book is fascinating for his encounters with Afghans, for the sights he sees and the big picture, the awareness he has of history, not just immediate history, but also the long-distant past where great empires and kingdoms flourished and now are looted lacunae in our records. Ozymandias in action.

His second book, Occupational Hazards is more immediate and even sadder: it details the months he spent as a representative of the Coalition Authority prior to the handover of power to Iraqis in two provinces, Maysan and Dhi Qar. It is a fascinating account of the frustrations, obstacles and attacks endured by Coalition officials and their genuine attempts to impose order, develop economies and encourage the rule of law in parts of Iraq.

One of the points Stewart makes that struck me most was the following: "the policy debate on Iraq remains obsessed with measurement and is expressed in words, which are as strident as the numbers are pedantic and as meaningless."

This leapt out at me, because I think that the bean-counters have taken over the asylum, not just in Iraq but in so many areas of political policy. And their defence against discovering that they are in the asylum is to count all the more frenziedly. I was talking with colleagues about performance targets in UK schools, where students who achieved the top grade of an A* at GCSE were identified as -1 in terms of the "value-added" measures applied to the school...There is no getting your head round that one, don't even bother.

Personally, I enjoy statistics, I've always quite enjoyed them since I trained up as a journalist in my early 20s, largely because I was guided by an economist who understood when the numbers were being played with and could explain the techniques used to obfuscate, obscure and confuse. So my sceptic's instinct is usually roused whenever people produce graphs and charts and rankings. Stewart highlights the nonsense when he comments on the way UN and World Bank and Pentagon statistics and data have been processed to produce "a global comparative index on civil and political rights". It's a mix of all sorts of information, from how many newspapers a regime has closed to levels of police brutality. But I don't need the comparative index to tell me that conditions in Burma and Zimbabwe are shit, whereas conditions in Chavez's Venezuela are not too shit, but the signs are getting a little ominous. And the comparative index is perhaps an interesting way to defuse the moral twinges in the corporate world about doing business with a dodgy regime - "well, their rating is only 120, that's not sooooo bad." Actually, I am not too sure that the multi-nationals which make their living out of doing business with dodgy regimes are capable of moral twinges. I can quite easily imagine a completely fish-eyed response from most board-room directors when asked if they have experienced a moral twinge about the deals they've cut. It's only when shareholders and NGOs make a crisis out of a deal that the moral twinges manifest themselves.

We use our data (we sophisticated westerners) to shield ourselves from the necessity of confronting the consequences of our decision-making. Making decisions whether it is about the health service or education or Iraq or NATO in Afghanistan involves moral choices because the decisions have, eventually, a direct impact on the lives of other humans. But that is perhaps too raw a reality for our politicians and bureaucrats to deal with. Measuring is easier, tidier, cleaner, neater. Decisions based on measurements require less coherent defence - you just point at the bean-counters and say, "well, that's what they came up with as a baseline indicator" or some such equivalent hooey.

I like measurements - I've just found out my son is 155 cm tall and 51k in weight, in the 98th percentile for his age range - and I'm glad that Galileo worked out what a second was, but I don't like being in thrall to measurements, which is where we are headed. We spend so much time measuring and counting that we forget to look at each other as individuals, as humans. A point that Stewart never forgets, in the midst of spending millions for the reconstruction of Iraq.

Atonement

2007-10-19T20:18:00.000+02:00

I am reading Atonement. Huh? You English teacher you, why didn't you read it when it came out?

Um, probably because I was too busy teaching English?

Anyway, here I am, not quite half way through and really not enjoying, but determined to finish because of course I will be going to see the film because it stars that pint-sized hottie James McAvoy. Well, actually, to digress, I don't fancy him - I almost certainly would kick him out of bed because he's cute but not my type. However, I do think this boy can act. I first caught him in State of Play, and he totally held his own against stalwarts like John Sims (now, him, there would be no kicking), David Morrissey and Bill Nighy. State of Play, in case you missed it, was the best conspiracy series on the BBC since Edge of Darkness which aired in 1985. For more info on SofP, check out this link http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/stateofplay/

Oh, I'm not writing about Atonement? You noticed? Mmmm. I feel really shabby about not liking this book. I've flicked through it, I've read enough reviews to be totally spoiled and to understand why others admire it, but I am hating the book. Not the plot, which is why I am perfectly happy to see the movie, which I happen to think will salvage the best of the novel and make up for the utter irritation of the characters because Keira Knightley is lovely to look at and Saoirse whatsit and James McAvoy can act so they will fill the empty heart at the centre of this novel. Because the impression I have so far from reading the first third properly and skimming through the next two sections is that it is an exercise for the writer which exemplifies what's wrong with the British novel: too much self-consciousness, insufficient soul, too little passion, plenty of self-regard. I won't go into the whole business of McEwan's research and his dependence on the memoir of Lucilla Andrews because I think he is perfectly honest about his debt to her work.

But when I think of the gutsy, interesting novels I've read in the past four-five years, Atonement is a flickering night-light in the shadow of arc-lights. Carter Beats the Devil, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, the People's Act of Love, The Corrections, Middlesex, Cloud Atlas, A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly, The Time Traveller's Wife. Now these are great books, readable, interesting, lively, engaging, rich, rewarding. Beside it, Atonement is a conceit. Now, John Donne wrote conceits, those wonderful, dense, allusive lyrics to mistresses and his wife, exploring emotions and yearnings and jokes through precise and sometimes mannered metaphors, but McEwan's writing in Atonement is like a conceit with no emotion. Yes, I know, I know - I can't say what I know for fear of entering Spoiler Territory. But what I want to get at is that a conceit is fine in a poem, but stretching it across a novel to make points about the nature of the novel is so self-referential that it actually destroys the worth of the novel as a fictional construct - obviously some people love this kind of thing, but I am of the philistine school that says that James, Woolf and Joyce who led the pack in the playing of authorial games were a dead end, and that James's contemporary Conrad was a far truer (and no less playful) artist. I don't think anything can substitute for the constituents of a really good story - plot, characters with whom the reader can engage and themes that look beyond the novel itself and explore the real issues of the human condition - truth, beauty, love, oh yes, and of course, freedom, thank you Baz and the green fairy.

Of course, McEwan touches on the big themes - especially love, to some extent truth and beauty. But it's like the touch of tissue paper - it looks good, but it dissolves too easily under scrutiny.

Aargh technology

2007-10-17T18:20:00.000+02:00

Well, we switched from one Belgian telecoms provider to another - and it is all too much and too irritating - because we lost the internet entirely for 24 hours, and now I can only connect it up by shifting self and computer to the room which is meant to be our elegant salon with no tv and no computer and nothing hi-tech, just books and music. At the moment, there is no furniture either, because we are waiting for the delivery of our elegant chaise longue, sofa and wingchair. We have a carpet, bookshelves and a couple of Chinese trunks but ahem, nothing else.

At the moment, until I face up to ringing our new service provider, however, the modem only works on the main phone point which is in the elegant salon.

Perhaps this means that I will only actually go on the internet when I need to.....Hmmmm. Interesting concept. No more browsing and surfing.... Yeah, right. Now I just have to check out the vital statistics of that very interesting actor I saw in Spooks last night....

What this actually means is that I will start lying on the living room floor and surfing rather than sitting at my desk in my study for hours... and I will still get less done than I should because really, like I have to look up a poem or check out the lyrics for the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny for the minions and other world-shattering tasks that can only be done on the internet. Old Godzilla was hopping around Tokyo City like a big playground....

Why Madeleine Conway?

2007-10-05T17:21:00.001+02:00

As I harass my friends, family, colleagues, students and any stray acquaintance to check out The Perfect Hero and prepare to shell out their hard-earned pennies, people are asking me, Madeleine Conway, why? Where?

First of all, right from the start, I wanted a pen name. I like my name. The surname is bland, manageable and we share it with a famous UK brand of children's shoes (no, not StartRite) and a coach company. It's easier to deal with than my maiden name, which caused that terminal deafness that people get afflicted by when someone talks to them in a slightly different accent (yes, like the Weight-Watcher woman in Little Britain when faced with the asian slimmer who speaks entirely coherently). At one of my early, more menial jobs, I was sent tons and tons of books for review by publishers, and they would ring to ask who to address the books to. It was a joyous day when I got one that was correctly spelled. My two favourite misspellings are Zabre Zarim and Zebra Kaolin. Now, I am used to my first name, and it would be odd to be called anything different, but it took some time, and the combination of exotic first name and worthy (but dull) surname is just Not Romantic. So I felt a pen name was the thing to have.

Which name? I thought about it, but it occurred to me that my grandmother's name was very romantic. Madeleine Conway. It has sweep and grandeur and an aura of eating Belgian chocolates dressed in a fuchsia peignoire and remaining very slim and elegant. Also, my dear Granny, much as I loved her, was a bit of an intellectual snob. Of course, if you are the sort of woman who has worked hard enough to get to Oxford in the 1920s, you are probably entitled to a smidgen of intellectual superiority. But it brought on a sense of delicious naughtiness to send Madeleine Conway out into the world once again, this time as a novelist of what my Granny would have called penny dreadfuls.

Madeleine Conway is a much nicer woman than I am. She doesn't get ratty or stressed, she is much thinner and massively more elegant (she might actually wear all the beautiful scarves my husband has given me for Christmas in the hope that I will suddenly transmogrify into Catherine Deneuve or Julie Delpy). She has a much less cynical, much more positive outlook on the world than I do - she skips and hops (gracefully of course), waving at the butterflies and flowers, like Fotherington-Thomas, but in a sophisticated female way:

And of course, most importantly, she believes in Leurve. Not to say that I don't, but my take on True Leurve and such is terribly pragmatic compared to Madeleine's rosy vistas. I am not particularly romantic, although I do enjoy (no, I'll come clean, love, adore and relish) a juicy romance. It is lovely to enter Madeleine's world where good triumphs and evil pays the price, where Love can conquer almost insuperable obstacles, where sweet girls meet men who will cherish them for all eternity and they all live happily ever after.

So that's why Madeleine Conway...