Slightly Embarrassing Change Of Plan, Now With Added Shakespeare

When you’ve already made a grand proclamation about your very ambitious NaNoWriMo project in public it’s a bit humiliating to have to admit that while you can write with a full-time job you cannot do the copious research necessary (in hindsight “read every single book about London history and mythology ever” might take a little more than two months) with one.

But that is what I’m doing: the requirements of The Ideal London, which is only about two-thirds plotted still and has a very mushy middle (always my problem with plotting, the second act is so frequently like the middle of a badly-baked cake), far exceed the time I’ve allotted myself for my usual NaNo outbursts, and something else has been nagging at me demanding to be written.

Now generally speaking if you’re trying to write something and it’s being an obstructive ass that you have to slog through, it’s probably not the right time to be trying to write it: if you’re constantly being distracted by another idea and no one has commissioned you for idea number one, then it makes perfectly good sense to write the one that’s demanding to be written.

This is the advice I would automatically give to other people, which is probably why I was failing to take it myself. It took an observation from my friend Lin (who has within the last couple of years gone from “I should write that” to “I’m writing that” and as a consequence hiccupped out a trilogy of fantasy novels as if it were nothing) that 2012 is my designated year of “Write Whatever The Fuck You Want” (which is how The Breaking of M came to be) to make me decide. Of course, the ever-delightful Lizzie also pointed out that every year should ideally be the Year Of Write Whatever The Fuck You Want, and that’s definitely worth taking into consideration. Regardless of whether the actual business of physical output is hard, if one’s brain is continually shying away from writing something it’s not worth forcing it.

In light of that, I’ve now exchanged a London-based metafictional fantasy with added world-saving and commentary about the nature of fiction for a less research-heavy London-based organised crime story involving blood magic and bisexual love triangles, for which the research amounts to “watch Shakespeare adaptations and Guy Ritchie movies”, which I think I can handle in the time I’ve got left a little better than my meaty, weighty, literary-fiction project. The Ideal London has plenty of material for it, though, and I will definitely be writing it… when I have a little more time!

Filed under: content: real life, editorial decisions, literature, london, research, whoops, writing

May Links Post

Things My Friends Have Done

• The lovely bottle_of_smoke has written a heartwarming and thoroughly accurate portrait of her love for Sir David Attenborough for the 100 Blog Things challenge; I shouted “me too” all the way through reading it.
• The same lovely friend (who is a virologist) has written about why syphilis is fascinating. Have a read, she’s very clear and charming on the subject, and syphilis, it turns out, really is an interesting disease. If you’re into diseases, which I am.

Things I Have Done

Edit, mostly. I think I might need to remove this section from future links posts since it’s never anything terribly impressive.

Things Strangers Have Done

• Will Self rambled on and on and on about obscure words and what sounds like the endorsement of censorship because it drives people to me more creative. Needless to say, I don’t agree with him.
• The Jacobin Mag takes a stance against chairs, of all things…
• An interesting theory of storytelling (in game design) is mooted: story events are expenses against credibility as defined by the world-building.
• Health At Every Size provides helpful pointers in how to remain a critical thinker about health.
• A self-professed fan of Damien Hirst has some harsh words about his latest exhibition.
• 9GAG shows you how to make headphones that are less shitty than Beats. As the cheerful possessor of some much better-quality, cheaper studio-tracking headphones (AKG K271 MKIIs, although there’s little enough between them and AKG K272s) I support this. For both professional and domestic applications, there are better and cheaper headphones.

Filed under: content: links, 9gag, akg, art, art reviews, bbc wildlife, beats, censorship, chairs, damien hirst, david attenborough, design, disease, documentaries, electronics, fat acceptance, game design, gaming, headphones, health, health at every size, history, history of medicine, literature, natural history, storytelling, syphilis, the guardian, theories of fiction, tutorials, virology, will self, words

Early 20th Century Literary Queer Love-In

T. E. Lawrence, on the other hand, laughed at [E M Forster's "The Life To Come"] – a reaction that puzzles [Oliver Stallybrass] as much as it puzzled Forster – and was perhaps lucky*, three years later, to be shown ‘Dr Woolacott’. This, by way of contrast, he considered ‘the most powerful thing I ever read … more charged with the real high explosive than anything I’ve ever met yet’; [...] I have already quoted T. E. Lawrence’s remarkable encomium of ‘Dr Woolacott’; and, although the story’s fascination for T. E. tells us more, perhaps, about his powerfully developed death-with than about its own intrinsic quality [...]

—  Oliver Stallybrass, introduction to The Life to Come and Other Stories by E. M. Forster.

File under “intersections between my favourite historigays”, next to “that time an exasperated Sassoon called T.E. a “tank-vestigating eremite”.

I want to love a strong young man of the lower classes and be loved by him and even hurt by him. That is my ticket, and then I have wanted to write respectable novels…

— E. M. Forster, Personal memorandum, 1935 (as quoted in the introduction to The Life to Come and Other Stories, pub. Penguin).

One thing I am noticing in my laid-back holidaying in the queer society of the early 20th Century is that, while shut up together as universally ‘perverse’, homosexuality and sadomasochistic leanings were allowed a greater degree of crossover between them; in that it was equally condemnable to want to be buggered as beaten by a chap, so that once one was already a transgressor as a homosexual, there was little shame or condemnation left for the other vice.

It seems that as we edge closer to the acceptance of homosexuality as “normal” (scare quotes because really the concept of normal is stupid), the more shedding of this association in popular consciousness occurs. The end goal, indeed, seems to be to shove “undesirable” sexuality out of queerness in order to give queerness a boost toward the “desirable”. I don’t think that process is complete yet; certainly “perversity” seems to have a slightly better reception in queer circles than in straight ones – indeed during my brief and irritating time going to scene parties in Brighton confirmed the idea that it was seen as far cooler to be blasé about people’s sexual practices (known or rumoured) than it was to be scandalised by them, which was more often the case with the self-professed “liberal” London Goth Scene (or at least, the heterosexual parts thereof).

But I do find it interesting that Forster bundles up his desire to be “loved by” and “even hurt by” his fictitious young man of the working classes into one package. Whether one argues it as the physical interpretation of both “loved” and “hurt” (sex, and masochism) or the emotional (romantic attachment, and heartbreak), it seems he associates the two things closely with each other and looks to embrace them both. In the sexual sense this is a difficult conclusion for people to reach unaided now; in the romantic sense it borders on the chivalric and certainly demonstrates an understanding of how love affairs are prone to work (as one would expect from a good novelist: spend long enough looking at human nature for the purposes of reproducing it and one is bound to acquire a certain amount of insight into the natural course of love).

In the prelude to reading the slightly-larger-than-sane pile of biographies of Forster I seem to have accidentally acquired (and later, no doubt, returning to the increasing mound of Lawrence biographies, all of which are endearingly ancient bindings and smell irresistibly of second-hand-book-shop, a heady perfume of dust, vanilla, leather, decaying canvas, and ink), I can make all kinds of assumptions about how Forster felt about his romantic & sexual identity, and no doubt in the aftermath of the same I shall continue to wonder, since none of us can actually know.

But on the basis that he wrapped up pain and love into one inextricable package, I am fond of who I think he might be.

Filed under: books, content: review, books, e.m. forster, history, literature, modernists, queer history, queer literature, reviews, t e lawrence, t. e. lawrencee, the life to come, the life to come and other stories

Interview/Review: Protect Me From What I Want

Protect Me From What I Want is a not-exactly cold-case novella set on Jersey in the Channel Islands, available for Kindle, PDF-reading devices, and in good old-fashioned paperback.

A friend of mine, the polymath genius Holly Yagoda, recently sent me an email which, amid ranting about the invisibility of female scientists in popular consciousness and some questions about writing, included this sentence:

I have just finished Protect Me From What I Want and need to talk to you at some point about ALL MY FEELS regarding the kind of narrator Hennessey is.

My ego being a vast and very fragile entity, I immediately replied:

Please do shout at me about Protect Me From I What I Want, I’ve had very little feedback about that one…

Holly replied – with some spoilers for the book – thus:

PMFWIW got me thinking about a particular type of narrator that I like, the reluctant confessor. Telling a story about something that happened to them, but kind of uncomfortable about the bits that involve them. They downplay their part, downplay themselves, and will only gradually, grudgingly tell you anything personal – or throw something horrible about themselves at you as a punishment for daring to be interested. Michael Marshall Smith has done that kind of narrator, one who wants you to know exactly how much of a cunt they are so you might not notice the string of pretty decent things they’ve done during the book. Maybe I just don’t trust narrators who don’t have at least a little bit of self-hatred festering inside. Ahem.

Hennessey may be a dreadful person, but he was a bloody joyous narrator to read. Very funny and foul, with moments that could be quite heart-breaking but Hennessey won’t let you dwell on them because he’s already done that and all that happened was more booze and no epiphany so why fucking bother and HEY HEY HERE’S A REPREHENSIBLE THING I DID NEXT PAY ATTENTION TO THIS INSTEAD OF THE SAD THING.

Now, as I am pretending to be a writer I seem to have acquired that terrible affliction of enjoying discussing my work with people, which is oft-parodied and with good reason; writers and other “creatives” can be terribly self-involved and self-important people:

[...] Your comments on Hennessey made me dig out my proof copy of the book and reread about a third of it. He’s oddly evasive and blunt at the same time, which seems to be a recurring character trait (certainly from fanfic characters I’ve written) and also … a problem with me. [...] Overall I kind of pitched him to myself as a romantic tragedian who doesn’t quite accept that this is what he is; his self-hatred is down to older seeds and his decline, in steps, is just symptomatic of the deeper malaise. I think the original point of the story was actually consent, comparison of his relationship with Mon with the Haut de la Garenne boys, but it kind of got away from me a bit.

This is, I am sure you’ll agree, a little high-brow for a book which is effectively not even a detective story, but allow me my moment in the sun, because Holly had one final spoonful of honey to administer:

The idea of consent is still very much in the foreground – I think the scene with Mon’s parents really brings it home. Their raging decibels over a consensual relationship contrast with the hushing up of the very nonconsensual abuse of many children. And then there’s so much more to it; John and Mon’s relationship is legally nonconsensual because of her age, and is pretty drunkenly fucked up, but it’s the only place where she gets the attention she needs – non-judgemental, positive attention from another human. I think it was the “at least he helps me with my homework” line that sealed it for me. It ties together with Haut de la Garenne with the idea that the “official” best place for a child to be – with their parents, in a care home – is not always the best place for them in reality.

Outside of this baffling enjoyment of my work (I kid, of course, I wouldn’t be inflicting it on the public if I thought it was that bad), Holly Yagoda has pretty damn good taste, and has previously recommended to me: Memoirs of a Master Forger (William Heaney), The Raw Shark Texts (Steven Hall), and The End of Mr Y (Scarlet Thomas), the latter of which I enjoyed until the ending and the rest of which I enjoyed without reservation.

Filed under: books, content: review, book, books, consent, detectives, discussion, holly, holly yagoda, interview, jersey, literary discussion, literature, novels, protect me from what i want, publishing, review, reviews, theories, writing

An Education In Your Own History

As previously mentioned, in my late teens I became quite fixated on queer history and in particular in the erratic contents of a specific book. There were several films mentioned, with stills included, and for a while I made it my mission to hunt them down and watch them: this was a mission in which I was repeatedly thwarted, and in fact most of the queer cinema I encountered I stumbled across wholly by accident: the best example of this was Martin Sherman’s heartrending and stagey Bent, which I encountered because of insomnia and Channel 4′s insomniac-friendly schedules in the very early days of the 21st Century.

Recently I’ve been catching up on those films whose stills I poured over ten or so years ago, and finally managed to watch both Maurice (1987, Hugh Grant, James Wilby, and Rupert Graves) and Another Country (1984, Colin Firth, Rupert Everett, Cary Elwes). Both films are set in the prelude to a World War, although as Maurice belongs in the run-up to the First it is technically more relevant to me as my giant emo obsessiveness about the First World War and associated Sad Gay Soldiers (according to my boyfriend this is a cinematic and literary genre to which I am wedded without exception). Then again, Another Country is a very lightly fictionalised account of the younger days of Guy Burgess (they changed his surname to Bennett, that’s about it) and ever since Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy came out I’ve had a soft spot for spies. The films even have an attractive Rupert apiece: Graves for Maurice, Everett for Another Country (the latter does boast a second, back-up Rupert in the form of Rupert Wainwright, not to be confused with Rufus Wainwright).

The sex scenes in Maurice are slightly more abundant, and I could very probably talk at disturbing length about Rupert Graves’ penis, which makes an appearance – but I did promise myself this wasn’t going to be that kind of a blog even though it is a jolly nice penis. Instead, though: the comparison of time period, the comparison of idealised England, and the comparison of relationship.

For all that Judd, in Another Country, invokes cynicism and dissatisfaction and talks about the pointlessness of the war that preceded his school days, he is wrapped in the very serious and passionate belief in the ideals of Marx, and of Communism. Meanwhile the protagonists of Maurice are all of them without ideals: they adhere to a sense of propriety, of place in the order of things (and good grief but Clive Durham is a pompous, self-important ass at Cambridge), but without any real ideology to hold onto: they are older, and if not wiser then a good deal less convinced of the importance of clearly-delineated concepts.

Both films involve the notion of sacrifices made for love, which rather neatly explains my interest in them beyond the acknowledged passion for queer history; although in each case the sacrifice is rather central to the denouement of the plot, and therefore should be left for the viewer to discover themselves.

Maurice is the softer of the two. It dwells in a gentler time, before the last remnants of a specific social order were torn apart by years of mechanised war and the wholesale slaughter of a generation: in Another Country Judd mocks this and Bennett disdains it, each unimpressed with the boy soldiers lined up to commemorate the dead that have yet to fall in the narrative of Maurice.

There is almost a sense of continuity between the two, but if there is it’s a sad one: the line, “England has always been disinclined to accept human nature,” from Maurice still holds true some fifteen, twenty years later in Another Country: there is a disinclination in the upper classes of English society, still, to allow schoolboy romance or its adult incarnation, and an angry, humiliated Guy Bennett spells it out: “Because in your heart of hearts, like Barclay and Delahay and Fowler and Menzies, you still believe, in spite of your talk of equality and fraternity, you still believe some people are better than others because of the way they make love.”

After all that I’m rather in need of some happier viewing, so I’d welcome suggestions of gay and lesbian films (preferably historical in genre) with happy endings: and be aware, I’ve already seen But I’m A Cheerleader so many times that I can quote it line-for-line!

Filed under: content: essay, content: review, films, another country, cary elwes, colin firth, e.m. forster, film, films, gay, history, hugh grant, james wilby, lgbt, literature, maurice, movies, queer history, quotes, review, reviews, rupert everett, rupert graves

February Links Post

Things my friends have done

Things I have done

• Written about Irene Adler and her transformation into a Femme Fatale, over at Melanie Clegg’s fabulous Madame Guillotine Blog.

Things strangers have done

• Begun the process of reconstructing sounds from brainwaves, apparently. I cannot work out if this is cool, terrifying, or both.
• Compiled a gorgeous selection of photographs of the most beautiful and innovative bookshops in the world. I am sad about the lack of representation of Hay-on-Wye, but deeply envious of some of the ones that are on the list. Portugal especially have apparently nailed “awesome bookshop”.
• Interesting fellow on OKCupid showed me his music (this is not a euphemism), so naturally I am going to share it with the internet: Add Gray Fun. The two tracks I’ve listened to are sort of sparse and build tunes out of discord, which I’m very fond of as a feature in electronica. Professionally speaking I think they definitely need mixing & mastering – some work on the levels – and would personally have an annoying faff with reverb in places but overall I rather like it.
• This fuzzy-haired scientist has an apparently supportable theory that cats make us bonkers. When you add up all the different ways it can harm us, says Flegr, “Toxoplasma might even kill as many people as malaria, or at least a million people a year.” Well, that’s not terrifying at all.
• This Tumblr user is using police photo-fit software to try to recreate the faces of famous literary characters as described by their authors. What a fantastic concept!
• Josie Long takes on UniLadMag and does so wonderfully.
• When Same-Sex Marriage Was a Christian Rite. Fascinating to me, and I do have a copy of a book with a title along the lines of “Same Sex Unions in Medieval Europe” waiting for me to finish reading the thousands of other books I’ve acquired and get around to it.
• Written about The Invention of Heterosexuality, which examines how other areas of social change during the birth of psychiatry as a profession led to the creation of sexual identities connected to biological urges, and the value judgements that come with them.
• People Like Me, a very depressing list of unfair treatment you can expect to receive if you’re viewed as being “unacceptably” fat.
• A handy little interactive graph for women to use to determine which clothing size their measurements make them at any given clothing shop.
• An Eight-Step Guide To Self-Editing Your Manuscript. On, completely unrelated, a very pretty blog.
• Via that link, a useful website for determining how often you use particular words. I am cringing just imagining what would come up on mine.
• And an io9 article about what the problem is with adverbs…
• As a confirmed over-emotional weenie about the city I live in who buys maps and cries every time she lands back at Heathrow and owns an embarrassing number of books of London photography, this post about London set to music is rather moving.
• This fascinating blog over at Tiger Beatdown about how reality television and blogging have destroyed the ability of readers and viewers to appreciate the difference between performance and reality.
• A very funny review of what sounds like a very awful movie (Splice).
• In a rather timely coincidence, not long after I whined that I’d be more inclined to eat healthily if healthy food were more convenient, a friend of mine discovered COOK, who have made that leap for me.

Filed under: content: links, adverbs, advice, apps, architecture, bbc, body horror, books, bookstores, brain parasites, cats, christian history, christianity, comedy, comics, convenience, data, delivery, eating, editing, editing tools, fashion, fat acceptance, fativism, feminism, femme fatale, films, food, gay, gay marriage, grammar, graphs, guy ritchie, health, heterosexual, history, homosexual, irene adler, josie long, literary, literature, london, mind-numbing horror, movies, music, neurobiology, performance, photograph, privilege, privilege lists, projects, psychiatry, publishing, reviews, same-sex marriage, schizophrenia, scholarship, science, self-editing, self-help, sexuality, sherlock, sherlock holmes, social justice, spectograms, splice, st bacchus, st sergius, straight, tiger beatdown, toxoplasma, uniladmag, useful, writing

A very specific literary genre

My dad says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you’re born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube and by the time the train’s pulled into Piccadilly Circus they’ve become a Londoner.

Moon Over Soho,  Ben Aaronovitch,  Chapter  9.

As a non-native Londoner (I was born in Nottingham and dragged up in the West Country) and smitten arrival inside the nightmarish embrace of the M25 I’m grateful to Mr Aaronovitch (or rather to his protagonist Peter Grant) for this. Moon Over Soho is the sequel to Rivers of London, and is therefore another entry into the scrupulously-policed genre of the “supernatural London-based crime novel”.

I’ve joked with a couple of friends that if I ever ran a bookshop (this would be a bad thing for many reasons, not limited to my terrible customer service and examples from my family history that suggest none of us should be allowed to run anything more complicated than an electric pencil sharpener; my mother took over a cafe and ran it into the ground in seven months), I would have a specific section devoted to books of this ilk. I’d love to write one – I’m not sure that Pass the Parcel quite qualifies, although it has a lot of the requisite elements – but I’m not sure I’ve yet developed the writerly chops to do it justice.

The parameters for the genre are strict, in my mind. I explained this to my boyfriend while hopping around manically outside the bathroom with a cup of tea in my hand, which means that it’s clearly a very solid idea.

First:

Book/majority of book must be set in London, and recognisably either London now, or a London of the past. Alternate Londons must be close enough to this London to qualify. This excludes on this criteria alone the excellent children’s book Un Lun Dun by China Mieville, and the even more brilliant Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, as both are set in parallel Strange Londons.

Second:

Central plot should be about a crime, rather than a quest or a romance. This again rules out Un Lun Dun, and Neverwhere. It also rules out Pass the Parcel, which has a somewhat decentralised plot and while the whole thing is riddled with crime, it’s not a criminal investigation or a mystery plot.

Third:

“Supernatural” can over a multitude of sins, but the magic/weird should always be underground and unacknowledged by the general public, otherwise we get back into the realms of being either unrecognisable London or urban fantasy rather than supernatural crime. While Pass the Parcel could possibly fall under the aegis of the supernatural, as the bloody author I’m still grumpily calling it Urban Sci Fi rather than Urban Fantasy/Supernatural City. And my word on this matter is law!

What Qualifies?

Well, the Rivers of London books (Rivers of London, Moon Over Soho, and the forthcoming third instalment) by Ben Aaronovitch, which are about a young police officer from Kentish Town who is also training to be a wizard, and the magical crimes (often quite gruesome) that he solves. It’s fairly textbook.

Then there’s Memoirs of a Master Forger by William Heaney, which revolves around forgery, deception, and demons. It’s not about quite what it sounds like it’s about (fittingly), and views a slightly different, more bookish London to the London of the Rivers of London books. It is a London of more stylish and elderly bars, with more Bloomsbury and less Soho. But, as with films, Guy Ritchie and Richard Curtis both make films about the same city: a lot of cities fit into the urban gastric band of the M25.

Finally there’s the China Mieville books: while Un Lun Dun doesn’t qualify, King Rat (which suffers rather from First Novel Syndrome but which has such blinding localisation that I’m almost prepared to forgive it: it is very grotty, and very close to certain homes), and Kraken do. China’s work is louder, faster, less genteel and more violent than Heaney’s or Aaronovitch’s, more like a riot of the weird but still London enough to meet my requirements. It draws on recognisable landmarks, like the Natural History Museum’s Spirit Museum, and SOAS, and the London Stone. It also introduces the utterly compelling notion of Londonmancers, a species of soothsayer who read the rhythms of the city to predict the future.

All of these books treat the city to an extent both as an organism and as a divinity built of divinities, whether layering on demons as Memoirs does, or drawing out a whole bestiary of strange and wicked creatures as Kraken does. I think, personally, that’s the intelligent way to write about cities – any living city, not just London – which are magical places where the sheer weight of humanity distorts sanity rather like matter and space-time (my understanding of Relativity was gleaned from a comic book about Einstein’s cat).

It becomes apparent in books like these that all sorts of strange worlds and twisted beings are bumping into the average Londoner on the street or locked up behind a thin veneer of crumbling brick. Anyone who has walked the streets of this city at night a few times will tell you that is absolutely the case: entire nations flourish behind locked doors, and you can step from country to country by turning a key in a lock.

My infatuation with the city naturally leads me towards London-based literature, but I am quite sure that other cities carry a similar canon of works: it would be hard to imagine that Moscow or Mumbai or Rome had somehow escaped a torrent of adoring stories celebrating their strangenesses and charms. The romance of the urban grips writers like a fever.

Other books in this genre?

I think that’s up to you, dear readers: can you think of any others that fit the criteria? I’d love to hear from you if you can, because I’m making it my mission to read more of them.

Books mentioned in this post which you might like to read: Un Lun Dun by China Mieville, Kraken by China Mieville, King Rat by China Mieville, Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, Memoirs of a Master Forger by William Heaney, Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch, Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch, Pass the Parcel by Delilah Des Anges. 

Filed under: books, content: essay, content: review, ben aaronovitch, books, china mieville, crime, crime fiction, fiction, king rat, kraken, literature, london, memoirs of a master forger, moon over soho, neverwhere, pass the parcel, review, reviews, rivers of london, supernatural, un lun dun, william heaney, writing

Poetry Post: Chivalry

For added poetic flavour, I wrote this in a leatherbound notebook with an anatomical heart stencil on the front; some of the romance goes out of it if you learn that I wrote it on the bus, so pretend I didn’t let that slip.

Chivalry

I have exhausted my repertoire of rhymes
on assaulting battlements in verse
And now I come to gates held open
No need for all my practiced poet’s lines;
I wish I’d come to this castle first
And saved the sense of my tongue
for now I’m stammered silent, wits numb
forced by an empty library to unlock
the path to the dessicated heart
and all my sad constructed songs slip and drift apart
the cage unlocked, the poet defrocked;
speaking unwanted naked truth, in shock.

---

For less bus-written and more meaningful poetry, why not try Know Your Words or For the Love of a City? Both are available for E-readers and Know Your Words is available from the Kindle store too

Filed under: content: poetry, freeform, castles, chivalry, creative, literature, original, poem, poems, poetry, rhyme, romance, writing

My first book to read this year and I’m giving up on it

I mentioned as an aside in a previous post that I wasn’t getting on with Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong very well, and the time has unfortunately come where that lack of book/reader comradeship has slipped beyond the point of no return and into me becoming outright angry with it.

The problem isn’t that the book is immediately and egregiously bad, per se: if it were, I would have done what I usually do with bad books, and hurled it across the room in a fit of indignant melodrama (everyone I am friends with is by now familiar with the sadly entirely true story of how I managed to split the spine of a friend’s copy of Narcissus In Chains after one short chapter by pitching it out of my room in halls and into the opposite wall, taking Dorothy Parker’s literary critique very seriously indeed).

In fact, Sebastian Faulks has shown himself to be a competent (if dull) writer in delivering the minutae of small-town pre-war French life, painting an idyll with enough realism laced through it (strikes, oppressive heat, foul odours) and segues into rather clumsy pontification about death which is probably intended as foreshadowing to prevent it from reading as a saccharine waltz through an idealised past.

Because of this relative skill it took a few chapters for the prickling feeling of dislike to settle in. I found his prose sneakingly pedestrian in places, but I thought I should press on in spite of this: after all, something about China Mieville’s prose occasionally knocks against a button marked “trying too hard” in my head, but I was rewarded for my reading there by the scope of his ideas and the pleasure in his impeccable pacing. But there was something else, something beyond the uninspiring dialogue, and the dragging pace of the countryside pleasantness which was getting between me and what I had picked the book up for (World War 1, which has still not started at the point at which I’m giving up).

After [spoilers, although not really because it's obvious from the outset that this is going to happen] Stephen had begun sleeping with Isabelle regularly, and started talking about taking her away to England, I realised that this wholly unlikely path of his nobility and her blamelessness had been married up against Azaire’s cruelty (which stemmed from his impotence, of course) and the tiresome fact of Azaire’s sexual deviance (naturally the main deviant thing about it was that he didn’t consult with his wife about it, but it’s presented as his desire being the repellent thing) for a reason: to make Stephen and Isabelle’s affair without moral impediment. The entire set-up was intended to present Isabelle as a poor bird, trapped in the cage of a marriage, to be freed by the silent Stephen, who has mastered his emotions and now fallen in love; Azaire’s unrestrained temper, violence, and impotence are all written as reasons why the reader should have no doubt in their mind as to the validity of Isabella’s escape.

I find all of this unedifying. I would prefer conflict, both in my mind and in Stephen’s. I would have liked guilt. I would have been happier for the question of adultery to have been a burning coal on the conscience or at least more of a threat to the stability of the situation than the mild and insulting run-in with Lisette, where the 17-year-old girl is presented as – if never directly called – silly and unworthy of attention, and some kind of sexually aggressive temptress; Stephen, of course, remains steadfast in his loyalty to Isabelle.

I would also have preferred if Sebastian Faulks had been able to rein in his genius sufficiently to abide by one of the simpler rules of writing fiction: one character’s point of view per scene, and if you’re going to swap between them, have a clear and obvious break between one point of view and another. This is usually given as “avoiding confusion”, and Faulks or his editor has gone to some trouble to ensure that the change of perspective is signposted, if not always very well. However, the introduction of different points of view seems only to act as explanations and excuses rather than the inner lives of the characters bringing them into conflict and progressing what little plot there is.

It would be unfair to compare Faulks to Pat Barker, whose Regeneration trilogy is my touchstone for World War 1 fiction (even Barker didn’t live up to the promise of those books and I found Another World a little of a come-down and Life Class such a change of pace that I couldn’t finish it), so I will try to compare like with like a little, based on my knowledge gleaned from the book so far.

Faulks sets the opening ten million boring chapters of Birdsong in pre-war rural town France, on the banks of the Somme. This resonates immediately with anyone who has any knowledge of the upcoming struggle, but Faulks feels the need to bestow a heavy foreshadowing hand upon the location by having Stephen ramble about death every so often and even offer up a prayer to save himself and Isabella from being buried in the soil of France.

In The Charioteer, one of my favourite books, Mary Renault opens with the pre-war period of idyll (in this case, pre-WW2), but with an incident of conflict and high emotion which is formative in the character of the protagonist. She goes on to demonstrate the development of his personality and his relationship to the romantic lead through scenes of further conflict, crisis, and resolution at both trivial and vast levels. Sebastian Faulks, on the other hand, tells me in passing about Stephen’s personality but fails to demonstrate anything of it. Stephen might as well be an eyepiece held up to my face through which to view a postcard.

In The Charioteer Mary Renault, like Faulks, devotes passages to the countryside in which her protagonist resides. She describes locations, individuals, and weather states as they come into contact with Laurie Odell. She uses far more poetical, and some might say purple, turns of phrase than Faulks; the pedestrian nature of Faulks’s prose is entirely down to my personal taste, as someone who prefers narrative to either flirt with floridity and wrap itself in poetry or to be sharp and pared down and to the point. But the cloying sense of having my sensibilities directed by someone who doesn’t have the skill to conceal what they’re about remains, and I am not going to read any more of Birdsong when I have so many other unread books sitting on my shelves awaiting my attention.

For all of these reasons: a persistence of telling rather than showing; refusal to move between points of view in a logical, useful, or story-progressing fashion; uninspiring prose; attempts to manipulate my sympathies through telling me who I should like rather than giving me demonstrations of layered complexity from the characters; and the overall feeling of authorial contempt – I am sorry, lauded author Sebstian Faulks, but I do not enjoy your work this time.

Filed under: books, content: review, birdsong, books, criticism, giving up, literature, mary renault, pat barker, picky reader, reading, regeneration, reviews, sebsatian faulks, the charioteer, unfinished reading, ww1