Kit Whitfield's Blog

First sentences: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

2012-01-20T06:35:00.001Z

A squat grey building of only thirty-four storeys.

So we see our first glimpse of Huxley's dystopian future, through a voice that simultaneously mimics and rises above the indoctrinated habits of its characters.

Most obvious is the mimicry: thirty-four storeys merits an 'only'? The image is at once visual and conceptual, pulling us with delicate uncertainty between the two. Is it called 'squat' because the narrative voice, or at least the characters it invokes, judges entirely on its lack of floors - that is, does the building look like a contemporary skyscraper? (Brave New World was first published in 1932; New York had been able to boast of the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings for a couple of decades, making them a feature of life well placed to occupy speculative fiction: new enough to be notable, old enough to be familiar to everyone.) Or is it thirty-four storeys high and still squat judged by contemporary proportions? The former invokes a city of mountainous needles reaching into the sky; the latter a city with buildings of gargantuan size - and in both cases, a rather sterile and ugly place where the buildings are grey and unattractive. Either is an environment calculated to daunt even the most forward-looking reader: overbearingly urban, utterly out of human scale ... and yet populated by people who can be expected to shrug off this mammoth edifice as nothing much.

We are, in other words, in a world that is both hostile and filled with citizens who see no hostility therein. The essence of Brave New World is to present a world soullessly mechanised, filled with inhabitants who are ruthlessly institutionalised: brain-damage to foetuses who might otherwise be bored at the menial jobs they are destined for, communal raising and hypnotic sex education designed to break down the possibility of intimacy or passion, consumerism and shallowness the ultimate virtues ... all streamlined along with a program of conditioning to make this a world of blissful contentment for its victims. The inhabitants of this new world do not ask - do not even question - what has been done to them. But the state does not even do this in secret; it happily acknowledges it and boasts of its success. So complete is the indoctrination that almost nobody thinks twice about the implications of the system; they're told straight out that they've been engineered for contented submission from their test-tube conceptions, and they don't think anything much of it. This cheerful horror is at the centre of the novel, and this first sentence begins to establish the central tone: we see through eyes that do not perceive the magnitude of what is before them. They can see what's there, but they don't think it's anything remarkable.

At the same time, the narrative voice has a certain distance from this viewpoint - has to, if it's going to notice and point out the features of the world that will be important to readers. It's notable that the sentence is impersonal: no pronouns, no names, no character to see things for us. Like the consumerist society it introduces, it's entirely preoccupied with the material. This narrative voice is detached, impersonal, not even bothering to qualify 'A squat grey building...' with 'They approached a squat grey building' or 'There was a squat grey building.' The building is presented to us deadpan, almost shorthand. Like the inhabitants of this world, we are thrown in with a fait accompli: the narrative voice will point things out to us, but will not describe, explain, or analyse. Dispute will come, but from fallible humans: for the narrative voice - it's hardly human enough to call a narrator - there is nothing to be said. The world now is how it is; it won't change, it doesn't trouble to hide its mechanisms, and its magnitude is such that it renders the narrative almost speechless. Only the title, with its ironic nod to Shakespeare, offers a quiet cry of fury: the rest is silence.

At the same time, this is not a chastened narrative voice: no narration that clips its clauses with the brisk authority of this first sentence can be. Rather, it moves in and out of mimicry with a confidence we can already see in this opening: 'A squat grey building' is crisply authoritative and definitely written rather than spoken in tone; the mimicking 'only' takes place after the voice has established its willingness to invoke and dispense with phrases with smart dispatch.

The effect is of a narrative voice that may be deadpan, but is also highly flexible: it can shift in and out of the characters' perceptions as it sees fit. In effect, 'squat' and 'only' have invisible quotation marks around them: this is not a deceived voice. (The fact that it thinks to call our attention to the building's dimensions at all indicates that it knows what we'll find surprising here.) I have said that the voice doesn't analyse, but this isn't exactly true: later on, characters will analyse the functioning of society and the narrative voice will, rather than correcting or usurping their analyses, expand upon them. The Controller takes us on a tour in the opening chapter, explaining how this society works, and the narrative voice will repeat and enlarge upon his themes; Helmholtz Watson remarks that he's been experimenting with celibacy in the hopes of improving his poetry and the narrative remarks that introspection can lead to asceticism just as, in the case of Bernard Marx, sexual frustration leads to introspection ... but in all cases, the narrative voice isn't analysing the characters from outside. Instead, it is merely riffing upon themes that they introduce, putting things more clearly than they can put things themselves. The narrative voice doesn't so much analyse the characters as follow their lead: whatever abstract idea they suggest, it will rephrase at greater length by way of furthering our understanding, with no suggestion at all that it might agree or disagree with the idea itself. The characters are not companions to us; they are elements of a scientific experiment, and the narrative voice reports their findings without editorial bias. It happens at greater length throughout the book, but with the simple 'squat' and 'only', it begins here.

A character who says something obviously out of kilter with modern perceptions is a fairly common device, and often a comic one. On that level, the method of Huxley's first sentence is pretty straightforward. What makes it more than a hoary old trick is the fact that the narrative voice is simultaneously out of kilter ... and omniscient. For all the polemic fervour of the novel, its speaking voice slides in and out of irony without comment, seeing all and adding nothing. By its very refusal to criticise, the narrative forces us to be what the happy citizens of this brave new world are not: critical observers.

Among the many, many reasons I'm angry about the Stop Online Piracy Act

2012-01-19T02:01:00.004Z

...is this one:

I depend on copyright for my livelihood. To pay my bills, I need there to be some copyright laws that protect my ability to earn money by working at the thing I can do.

So thanks a whole bloody bunch, SOPA, for turning copyright into such an instrument of oppression that a lot of people are going to hate me for this.

Artists need copyright to survive. We do not need copyright corrupted and misused to the point where we're at risk of a backlash.

We need reasonable copyright laws. Reasonable ones, not this imperialist crap.

Everyone please sign this petition.

First sentences: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

2012-01-18T08:23:00.005Z

Requested by storiteller

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

First disclosure: I admire Marquez, but when it comes to magic realism I tend to prefer female authors, so I've only read a limited amount of his work and have not read the whole of One Hundred Years of Solitude. My knowledge of the book is based upon: having read some extracts, attended a lecture when I was an undergraduate, looked up the plot on Wikipedia, read Of Love And Other Demons, and having a general impression of what's considered classically magic realist. I'm therefore approaching the first sentence in a state of relatively literate ignorance; I may get some things wrong.

Okay, first sentence time.

Marquez is, of course, a pioneer of the famous magic realist style, that intermixture of grim politics and dreamlike unreality, intense passion and logical flippancy, history and fantasy, humanity and abstraction, that casts such a strange and compelling shadow over literature. For setting out the stall, this first sentence is a feat of hologrammatic perfection: the tiny fragment containing a complete image of the whole.

The sentence is obviously translated from the Spanish, which is a language I don't speak, so I cannot comment too much on the rhythms Marquez chose to employ - which, I think, is a shame, because I bet he does something interesting with them. Even in translation, the sentence is an extraordinary piece of conceptual rhythm. Time wheels in a slow, almost drunken circle. We begin 'many years later' - raising the immediate question, later than what? The time he saw ice, or some other moment? Where in time are we? The answer, as the years continue to revolve, seems to be nowhere and everywhere at once: life is passing before our eyes, taking in a man's whole experience, beginning at the end or perhaps in the middle, and moving back to childhood - but childhood on the cusp of some other state of being, for it is a childhood moment of change.

In other words, we cannot pin down where we are, not just because we don't know what moment in this sliding scale of time we occupy but because every specific instance of time we are given is a moment of transition. Facing the firing squad is a moment of transition from life to death - or if you're luckier, from helplessness to salvation, we don't yet know which, and Marquez is in no hurry to put us out of our uncertainty. Childhood is a trip to discover ice - not even the moment of discovery itself, but being taken to discover it, the journey verbally eclipsing the arrival.

Time, in short, is endlessly fluid. There is no 'now'; there is only 'later' and 'before' and movement to and fro: we see everything at once. Even the first eyes we see through are caught in an act of memory rather than observation. And this is an important piece of preparation: before Marquez gets to his more surreal and outlandish claims, he has cut us loose from our moorings. In the real world we may not know much of what's going on, but we at least know what's past and present. To enter Marquez's book through this first sentence is to have that familiarity wrested away from us. We approach the outlandish incidents too disoriented to put up much of a fight against their unreality.

And the outlandishness begins in the first sentence, presented with a deadpan nod. The fact that it's a discovery of ice - not, you would think, something you'd normally need to take a trip to 'discover' (you might need to journey to see ice, given the right home town, but discover is a word that makes clear ice is a new concept as well as a new sensual experience) - throws both mundane ice and abstract discovery into question. Soon the book will move to the bewildering assertion that in Aurelio Buendia's childhood 'the world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them one had to point' (rather a wry enactment of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis; reality can be zany in this world, but it's a profoundly erudite zaniness), but the implication is clear in the first sentence before it's made so explicit. A child making a new discovery isn't just making a new discovery for himself: it's really, genuinely new. I called the handling of time drunken, but it's equally accurate to call it childlike: the straight-faced gaze of a child whose mind hasn't yet sorted fact from fantasy and regards each as equally bizarre. In this time-hazed, numinous world, even ordinary things take on a mystical quality: you never know what's going to tilt next.

Intermixed with this matter-of-fact tone is a promise of high drama (a firing squad!) which Marquez is distractibly, teasingly vague about keeping. In most books, you would think that a firing squad would be the main point of a story; here, the narrative shifts quickly away from this, as if an execution were a mere aside to the central story. And the central story is of a family moving through history. Note, for instance, that we get Colonel Aureliano Buendia's full name: there will be other Buendias, even other Aurelianos: we may be lost in time, but we need the dry precision of a family tree to keep us clear on who's being discussed here. The family will not be an isolated unit, though: here in the first sentence, we are deeply political - or else why do we need to know the Colonel's rank, and the fact that he faces a firing squad? There are other Buendias in store for us, but we already know that this one, at least, will have his fate determined by forces beyond his control - not magical ones, or not just magical ones, but human forces.

Despite the drama of the situation, then, Marquez is playing a different game. Rather than starting us with an incident as such, he starts us with the terms we will have to accept if we are going to follow him down this winding path. Time exists only as a continuum; human and cosmic powers are equally at play, or at prey, upon our characters; family is central (so central that it distracts our narrator from talking about an execution squad) and must be watched carefully if we're going to keep up. Marquez is not telling us a conventional story. Instead, his main gambit is to unseat our readership, to force us into a new state of mind - which we will have to occupy if we are going to survive his free-handed spinning of the wheel. Issues of life and death take second place to this vital, eccentric view on the world. Only by surrendering to dream logic will we make it through One Hundred Years Of Solitude alive.

First sentences: Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

2012-01-16T10:09:00.001Z

Requested by Jessica R.

Mrs Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies' eardrops, and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde's Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs Rachel Lynde's door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs Rachel was sitting at her door, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.

A first sentence that's also a first paragraph, in fact. Anne may talk breathlessly and at great length, but the narrative can match her word for word - if with a little more regard for the decencies of structure and sequence.

When I was a little girl I adored Anne of Green Gables, identified passionately with its heroine, soared on its flights of fancy and, if memory serves, was so heartbroken at the death of Matthew Cuthbert that I couldn't sleep and eventually crept into my parents' bed for a weep. I reread it again as an adult and was surprised; recently I listened to it on audiobook and confirmed my adult impression. Montgomery may sympathise with Anne, but this is no panegyric to the imagination. Or if it is, it's also a panegyric to the realities of small-town life - but a wry panegyric. As much as a bildungsroman, this is a comedy of manners. Nature is loved, but so are people, and it will remain a background to them.

This is what we see at the beginning: we start with where 'Mrs Rachel Lynde' - introduced as if we were visiting her parlour, with that characteristic Avonlea habit of referring to individuals by both first and last name when speaking of them in the third person - is observing Avonlea, and we are observing her. Avonlea itself (a fictional place, though described with such familiarity that someone's even put together a map of it) is mentioned as if we already knew where it was, knew it so well that 'the old Cuthbert place' and 'Lynde's Hollow' were familiar landmarks. And it's worth noting that those landmarks are named for the people they frame. Anne dances in scattering her fanciful titles left and right, bestowing a Violet Vale here and a White Way of Delight there, but Montgomery's titles are like Marilla Cuthbert's tailoring: 'good, sensible, serviceable ... without any frills or furbelows about them.' The scene is set. This is a small community, small enough that the names of the occupants are the easiest way to identify places, focused on neighbourliness rather than anything more artistic. A home, with all the comforts and limitations that a small community can be expected to provide.

At the same time, Montgomery is far from blind to the beauties of nature. This is something that struck me listening to the audiobook: for all her love of fancy, she's not the most lyrical of stylists. While she shares some of Anne's animism regarding the stream, and can rock to the rhythms of 'dark secrets of pool and cascade', much of her description - and this will continue throughout the book - is more in the order of a nature walk than a poem. 'Alders and ladies' teardrops' are gestured towards with pleased familiarity, but if we don't know what an alder tree or a ladies' teardrop plant looks like we will, as Anne would say, just have to imagine it. Montgomery doesn't so much describe the wildlife as just point it out, listing what we can see. But for what we lose in descriptive beauties, we gain in a sense of belonging: inducted into Avonlea as we are, we are expected to be able to picture the plants based on their names alone, as if it were our own highway we walked.

Even the anthropomorphised nature is subject to Avonlea's customs. The stream, more than Anne herself, is subject to convention: no wild dryad brook this, but a brook sufficiently aware of Mrs Rachel Lynde's censorious gaze that it meekly mends it manners as it flows past her door. The joke is on Mrs Lynde, of course, but it also grants her power. Intricacy and passion are subdued by her. She is not, in fact, the central character, nor even a member of the central, titular household; instead, she stands in for Avonlea itself, with all its faults of provinciality and saving graces of kindliness, and its sharp interest - frankly shared by us, its newest citizens - in a good story. And a woman or a place that can subdue a stream merely by observing it is a potent force - not of oppression, but of socialisation. The story will tame Anne's wildness (rather to the cost of our entertainment, by the end), and we can anticipate this taming right from the outset. Secret streams are not extinguished, but they must learn to conduct themselves in public, and so they do.

Anne of Green Gables, in other words, begins in a balance between nature and nurture, wilderness and convention, that is resolved by dry humour. Avonlea is introduced to us as an open invitation: come in and welcome home, stranger, and don't forget to wipe your feet. Lucy Maud Montgomery is, as a narrator, present in all her characters, particularly the female ones - in Anne's love of beauty and life, in Rachel's keen eye for an interesting event, in Marilla's amused tolerance - but for the reader, she is to us what Marilla Cuthbert is to Anne: a shrewd, humorous provider of a home. No wonder we as children feel ourselves to be Anne; Montgomery more or less casts us so.

First sentences: I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith

2012-01-13T07:31:00.000Z

Requested by KCF

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

So we meet Cassandra Mortmain, frank, sharp and adorable narrator of I Capture The Castle, already engaged in two of her three main activities: diligently working her prose style while improvising around the cramped poverty of her situation.

I Capture The Castle is written in the form of a diary, and Dodie Smith adheres to this commitment with an integrity that becomes alchemy. Some writers may use a diary as a conceit while paying little attention to what it means, but Cassandra's diary is a physical thing. She has to find places to write it; it has finite pages and she can't afford more (and in fact she moves from book to book as the story progresses and people give her new diaries); life and its demands press on her even as she writes. The very act of addressing the reader captures Cassandra in motion: her writing isn't just a description of her life but an active part of it. To read the book is to meet the living girl.

What kind of girl is she? The first sentence tells us several things. 'I write this', she says, using the educated 'write' rather than the more colloquial 'I am writing': there's class here somewhere, a feel for the literary use of language. Class, but no luxury, or else she'd surely be writing somewhere more comfortable - and no pretensions either: she's not above sitting in the kitchen sink, and she's not above telling us that she's doing it either. Youth and physical health are implied too: it's a spry young thing who'll settle down into a sink for a long writing session. Cassandra is cultured, but she's utterly fresh; what in old-fashioned books might be called 'unspoiled'.

Her culture comes across all the stronger for this background: this is no hothouse flower whose education is merely imposed on her for the sake of convention. Cassandra and convention are clearly strangers. Instead, we are presented with a fine flower growing in rough soil, working hard on culturing herself. She may have to sit in the sink to get enough light to write by, but that doesn't hinder her writing style or her honesty. Cassandra's writing and intelligence are part of her, and difficulties will not undermine them. The image is comical, almost slapstick, but her direct, practical rendering of it makes us laugh with her, not at her. It's a rare girl who can retain her dignity sitting in a sink, but Cassandra's is actually enhanced by it.

Writing and growing in rough soil: these are two of Cassandra's talents. Her third talent, loving people, will begin to emerge fairly quickly as she favours us with her undeceived but kindly portraits of those around her, but we begin centred on Cassandra, on her relationship with herself - or rather, her relationship with her own ability to make something out of her circumstances. The book will have a rather melancholy ending, in fact, but we leave it warmed nonetheless, and it's Cassandra's energy, her vibrant sensitivity and survivor courage, that warms us. That begins here. Other people may let her down, but she will always have herself, and we know this from the first sentence.

First sentences: The Collector by John Fowles

2012-01-11T08:00:00.001Z

Note: Carolynn requested The Magus, but I just couldn't stomach it, so I thought I'd do another John Fowles book instead. Hope this'll do, Carolynn.

Trigger warning: misogyny.

When she was home from her boarding-school I used to see her almost every day sometimes, because their house was right opposite the Town Hall Annexe.

First thing to say: I admire John Fowles's talent, but I find him very hard to like. He's good at writing nasty voices, but reading an excerpt from his journal suggests there may be a reason for that. Consider this remark (one of many) about Samantha Eggar, who starred in the film adaptation of The Collector:

I took Sam out this evening, to hear Segovia and to try to get to the bottom of the mystery of her nothingness. I felt like Seneca locked up with Poppaea... or something. A pretty corrupt Seneca, as I have done my best to get her the sack these last days; and like everyone else have indulged wholeheartedly in the favourite sport on the Columbia lot - making fun of her behind her back.

It may be worth knowing that her performance in this film won her a Golden Globe, a Cannes Film Festival Best Actress award and an Oscar nomination.

So yeah. Pretty nasty piece of work. But The Collector is written from the point of view of two narrators, one of whom is supposed to be a nasty piece of work. (Though also a personification of the kind of uneducated person who attracted Fowles's snobbery, while the other narrator is a beautiful young girl in love with an older male artist-mentor, who adores his uncompromising spirit and judges herself harshly for finding him physically unattractive - all of which might explain why Fowles took such offence that Eggar wasn't his dream girl. I can sympathise with artistic ruthlessness, but I do not think it entitles you to sexual tribute.) Fred Clegg's voice is precisely and skilfully drawn in its nastiness.

So, to take the sentence on its own terms and set aside my dislike for John Fowles.

Fowles pulls off an interesting trick here, and one that's difficult for an author to accomplish: establishing an inarticulate narrator who nevertheless grabs our attention. Bad writing is usually dull, but Clegg's voice is vivid and suspenseful. How is it done?

The first sentence makes it clear that we are dealing with an unreliable narrator; some authors build up the unreliability slowly, but Fowles starts as he means to go on. Clegg speaks of 'she' rather than telling us his victim's name, or even as plain an introduction as 'the girl'. He knows who 'she' refers to, and speaks to us as if we shared his assumption. At once, we are put in the position of his confidantes: he assumes we are complicit and sympathetic, and thus reveals all the malignity he might hide from a stranger.

Also clear is that we are dealing with a stalker (a word not current in 1963 when The Collector was published, of course). Clegg sees Miranda from across the street, making note of the times when this is possible - not when she's at school, otherwise almost every day: he's looking out for her and feels her absence. Despite the obvious distance between them, he's already speaking of her as if they were intimate: the 'almost every day' is immediately qualified with 'sometimes', but to Clegg, the sightings are a mentally integrated into a routine, a relationship, so the fact that he doesn't actually see her almost every day is relegated to an afterthought added for the sake of strict accuracy rather than because it's important to his thinking. The fact that he adds it for accuracy has a further effect: it begins to imply the detail-mindedness, precision and obsessive disposition that allow the kidnap to proceed successfully. He notes details; he just doesn't let them influence him against his desires.

The sense of being confided in by someone who expects us to accept his word even when he himself acknowledges that he's rather careless about reality turns us quickly against Clegg. His voice isn't just obsessive: it's presumptuous. We judge him for assuming we're on his side, even as we take advantage of his trust to find out what he's going to do next. And these two reactions combine together: we are quickly frightened for Miranda. A man who sees every detail that might work to his advantage but notices nothing of other people's right to differ from him is the greatest of threats.

Set up as an opposite to art and culture, Clegg has an elaborately 'uneducated' voice. 'Almost every day sometimes', for instance: something anyone might say in the middle of hasty speech, but an educated speaker would edit from their writing. (We might actually expect a class-aware man like Clegg to correct his writing more carefully than his speech, which gives us the sense that in reading his words, we're somewhere between the two.) Or 'When she was home from her boarding-school': it's a phrase more full of detail-noting than attention to rhythmic elegance or pleasing concision. 'When she was home from school' would provide the same location in time, and if we're talking about seeing her daily it would be implicitly clear that she lives at school, but Clegg notes that it's a boarding school, telling us two things. The first is further information about his stalkerish obsession: he doesn't know this girl, but he does know what kind of school she goes to and where she is when she's away from him. He's researching her. The second, emphasised by that slightly resentful 'her', is that boarding schools, in England at least, are generally a marker of middle- or upper-class status. Calling it 'her boarding-school' emphasises that boarding school (and note that, contrary to standard usage, he hyphenates it as if unfamiliar with the phrase) is of Miranda's world, not Clegg's. Similarly, her house is opposite the 'Town Hall Annexe' (with that eccentrically capitalised A, treating his local parlance as if it were common knowledge): she lives centrally while he merely works there, showing a disparity in wealth. She may be intensely observed by Clegg, but she is fundamentally foreign to him. Circumstances put him in physical but not social or personal proximity to Miranda, and he is very aware of the difference. He's just not aware that this doesn't give him the right to stalk her.

What we get, in short, is the voice of a predator that considers itself the underdog. What it communicates is almost the exact opposite of what it attempts to express. The reader is drawn into a the swift, emotional anticipation of a thriller while also enjoying the intellectual pleasure of discerning an unreliable narrator, with a further option of congratulating ourselves on our moral superiority for favouring Miranda over Clegg. It may not be nice, but it's certainly bewitching.

First sentences: Five Children and It by Edith Nesbit

2012-01-09T06:48:00.000Z

The house was three miles from the station, but, before the dusty hired hack had rattled along for five minutes, the children began to put their heads out of the carriage window and say, "Aren't we nearly there?"

Now there is the first sentence of someone who's travelled with children.

One of the most influential and charming of children's authors, Edith Nesbit is a standard-bearer for the friendly, non-instructive authorial tone. No concern to be 'improving' here; Nesbit's address is direct, chatty, friendly, almost maternal. The sentence bowls along merrily, subclause rattling upon subclause, breathlessly informative.

Immediately clear is one of Nesbit's most striking features: the cheerful ordinariness of things. These are not aristocratic children but middle-class ones, and not wealthy: they travel by railway and by hired coach, and not even a particularly clean one at that. These are not implausibly selfless or mature children: journeys are a matter of lively impatience. Normal surroundings are filled with physical energy - and Nesbit observes this with amused tolerance. The sentence notes that the children are being a little silly in their questioning - even a child new to counting can calculate the numbers 'three' and 'five' and work out that three miles and five minutes do not add up to a 'Yes, we're nearly there' - but the sentence is full of motion and humour. The carriage rattles and is dusty, an object in use, no more perfect than the children. The children put their heads out of the window, enthusiastically participating in their environment in a naturalistic, well-observed gesture. All is normal. The modern reader may find the carriage quaint, but the energy of the scene is a pair of open arms to children: these characters are no more saintly than you, but Nesbit cares for them. You are all right.

Nesbit is a writer of incident, small moments, small mistakes leading to entertaining disasters. As we meet her children, they are already in the middle of a mild mistake, already excited at the relatively undramatic (by storybook standards, though not by real-life ones) experience of moving to a new house, already doing what they will do throughout. Her imagination is, once it gets to work, vivid and witty, but her plots revolve around the hair-clutching disasters that arise from the interaction of these ordinary, faulty children and the ancient magics they trip over in their ordinary, faulty way. The drama arises not from the magic itself, but from what happens after the magic - how to deal with being beautiful as the day when the cook doesn't recognise you and won't let you in the house, how to deal with being hungry when your magic wings have flown you into being thoroughly lost, how to cope with everyone wanting to kidnap your baby brother after a moment's irritated wishing to be free of his company. Magic upends the world, but it's wordly reality that creates all the character interaction, and we start as we mean to go on: excitable, jostling, eager.

There's a fundamental kindness in Nesbit's writing, an ability to address without patronising, that's a lot subtler than it looks. Surroundings and children interact, and silly behaviour is noted but not condemned - indeed, treated as normal and natural under the circumstances. After all, if we're coming from the station then we must just be off a train, and with three miles of rattling dust to go through, impatience is something that even an adult might feel. Behaviour might not always be sensible, but the feelings that provoke it have reasons for existing, and those reasons are not unreasonable. Nesbit does not necessarily excuse, but she forgives, because she understands, and encourages us to understand too. For all her lightness of wit, the little cramps and rubs of life are treated with respectful seriousness.

Children, in short, are treated as human beings. Nesbit does not forget that they are children, and shows them in tumbling motion with their child-ness fully on display, but neither does she forget that children are people and people, whatever their age, usually have a reason for doing what they do. Life is real and important to these characters, just as it is for us.

With Edith Nesbit babysitting us, we can all relax.

First sentences: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

2012-01-04T09:56:00.010Z

Requested by Helen Louise.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a large fortune, must be in want of a wife.

So famous a first sentence that it's actually hard to approach from an analytical perspective. It sits in the centre of literature like a diamond, sparkling and edged and difficult to dismantle.

Jane Austen is a narrator famous for her comedies of manners and social satire, but popularly adored for her romances. In her most famous opening, she manages to pull off a complicated trick by establishing both her arch tone and her promising plot. Considered in detail, this sentence is a masterpiece of having it both ways.

'Universally acknowledged', for instance. The narrative voice claims with confident didacticism that it can speak for everyone, that the universal is within its purview. At the same time, obviously the truth is not universally acknowledged - or else the clever narrator and we, the clever readers, would not be able to laugh at the joke. Immediately we are flattered with a sense of superior understanding; society is a joke, and we are in on it. So far, so sarcastic - but at the same time, when one considers the plot, it's not as straightforward as all that.

We get the advantage of seeing through this conventional 'truth', but in fact, it's not what 'universally acknowledged' implies, which is to say, a piece of received wisdom. Instead, believing a rich man must want to marry is a piece of wishful thinking. Wealthy men are essential to the comfort of wealthless women, and to 'acknowledge' that a wealthy man must be eager to provide that comfort is to be sufficiently afraid of poverty that one convinces oneself that salvation will arrive somehow. By making fun of this fear as if it were a mere foolish proverb, Austen gives her first hint that in this novel, too, the fear will be assuaged. The threat of poverty hangs over the heroines, but fearing it is laughable. We are not really threatened.

For whatever the dangers that Austen hints at for her heroines, we always know they will not come to pass. Poverty is a wind howling at the door, but we are safe inside. The plot will bear this out: a single man in possession of a large fortune might not be in want of a wife, but in fact both Mr Bingley and Mr Darcy are quite keen to marry - and indeed, are both perfectly willing to set aside financial considerations to do so. Even the comfortably-off Mr Collins wants a wife; wealthy men in Pride and Prejudice are getting married right and left. The Jane Austen museum in Bath sells copies of her books, but it also sells tote bags imprinted 'I [heart] Mr Darcy'.* Irritating people are a threat in Austen books, but poverty will never truly bite. Marriage actually will save the day.

Consider, for instance, the order of the sentence, and its linguistic roots. Marked out by those nineteenth-century commas, it breaks down almost mathematically into its components: universal acknowledgement, single man with fortune, want of a wife. Society, man, marriage. This is the progression the plot will follow: we meet Elizabeth and Jane's setting, then their future husbands, then their happy endings.

Rhythmically, the sentence lands on its last word with a satirical but reassuring clang, the multi-syllabic, Latinate 'universally' and 'possession' shifting to the monosyllabic, Anglo-Saxon 'want of a wife.' Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue, discussing those two registers in English, quotes Simeon Potter's comment: 'We feel more at ease getting a hearty welcome than after being granted a cordial reception.' English is a language with Latin-Norman flesh and Anglo-Saxon bones. Austen was writing at a time when a debate about the relative merits of Latinate versus plain English had been passionately pursued for some time, and this sentence is highly aware of the distinctions. For satire of manners, we have ornate Latin. For blunt fun-poking, we have Anglo-Saxon ... but at the same time, it is Anglo-Saxon that conveys the truth. It is not true to say that it is universally acknowledged, but it is true, in this story, that the single men with large fortunes will want wives. Universal acknowledgement is a fussy fiction - both of the characters, such as Mrs Bennet, and of Jane Austen in her arch moments - but wanting a wife is real.

This, I suspect, is the essential appeal of Jane Austen's most famous novel. We get the best of both worlds: to see through the financial machinations of mothers but to marry a rich man anyway, to laugh at wishful thinking but to get our wishes granted, to scorn convention with merry, biting cynicism, but to succeed within its terms better than the people we are laughing at. Pride and Prejudice is an underdog fantasy, a tale of being a double winner - both as an undeceived outsider and as a triumphant insider. The class and gender conventions are avenged as we, with Elizabeth, both mock and resist them and still succeed by their rules. Austen is an angry writer, sometimes a furious one, sometimes even a hateful one - but my goodness, does she promise us the world.

*True fact; I went there on my honeymoon. Financial considerations, I suspect; a gift shop has to sell something, and if someone's visiting the museum at all it's a pretty good bet they already own copies of the books.

First sentences: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

2012-01-02T06:42:00.001Z

Requested by mmy.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Okay, I'm going to focus on the first sentence, but I thought I'd feature the whole first paragraph because it's beautiful and I love it. I could read it all day. Shirley Jackson was a true artist of language.

So, we begin, following the title, with a broad and haunting generalisation. Film adaptations have tended to abbreviate the title of The Haunting of Hill House to a simple The Haunting (and the 1963 film adaptation is, while diverging from the book in some ways, an extremely good and highly recommended movie), but the book's full name - rhythmical and alliterative, yet neutral as the heading of a case-note - identifies immediately that it's the house, not a 'live organism', that we are being directed towards. In the first three words, the nature of what is and isn't a 'live organism' is dizzyingly in question.

Jackson is a master of the dizzying. Consider, for instance, the word order in her first sentence. While the sentence is grammatically correct, it's also syntactically unusual: 'continue for long to exist sanely' rather than the commoner 'continue to exist sanely for long', and that subtly misplaced 'for long' is balanced by the assonant echo of 'by some'. The echo is not just one of sound, the different Os and the murmuring 'ng' and 'm' of 'long' and 'some', but of linguistic category: 'for' and 'by' are both prepositions. The two main clauses are each pinned up in the centre with a matching subclause: a garland of a sentence.

'For long' and 'by some' echo each other still further by their operation on the clauses they occupy: both are qualifiers - but reflective rather than uncertain qualifiers. No sentence that begins with as strong a declaration as 'No live organism can continue...' is in doubt of its facts; instead, the qualifiers - one of time, one of minds - give a sense of overview, subtlety and authority. Our narrative viewpoint hovers above Hill House, above time and people, even above species, seeing all and naming frailties with soft-voiced precision.

And frailty is the universal condition being named here. Larks and katydids: insignificant, yes, but also cute and charming, or so you'd think. Once again, the rhythm cradles us, from a single stress on 'larks' to the fading cadence of 'katydids', and the animals themselves are usually regarded with fondness. Here, though, they're threatened with insanity. Threat pulses through the sentences: 'no live organism' raises the fear of mortality, 'sanely' the fear of madness, even 'absolute reality' has a doom-laded ring, as if reality itself is too much for us. All lead, as inexorably as a Greek tragedy to that final word, a monosyllabic finale that falls with all the heavier weight for its contrast with the complex subclauses preceding it: dream.

Not a dream in the sense of 'living your dream'. Not a dream in the sense of romance. Dream, as the alternative to madness, as an existential necessity - an escape into unreality. Reality has no shelters for us here. We can go briefly mad in our dreams, or permanently mad in our wakefulness.

In terms of address to reader, the sentence more or less commands us to suspend our disbelief: we may be in the world of dreams, but we will find ourselves there whether we accept unreality or whether we resist it. The effect is to give the whole novel a peculiar kind of authority: whether or not it is actually real is rendered almost a moot point. We will be participating in a kind of temporary madness; we have no choice in the matter. There's nowhere else to go.

Jackson is an intense observer of small social frictions, and a lot of the subsequent plot will revolve around them: the gallantries and tensions of the experimenting housemates, the cautious harmony of strangers thrown together, the power struggles generated by the appalling Mrs Montague. By beginning with the house - really, by beginning with the universe - Jackson mounts all these small interactions over a void. They assume an almost Godot-like sense of time-filling: the characters are living their larky lives, but reality - whatever that may be - is going to get them somehow.

There's probably a lot more to say about this sentence. Jackson was nothing if not subtle, and small, unnerving echoes whisper back and forth along her pages. But if nothing else, we begin with existence, with a statement of authoritative helplessness. It's a rare trick, but Jackson has created a first sentence that - elegantly, deliberately - dwarfs the whole rest of the book.

First sentences: The Trial by Franz Kafka

2011-12-26T09:39:00.001Z

Someone must have been spreading slander about Josef K., for one morning he was arrested, though he had done nothing wrong.

This deconstruction needs to be prefaced with two caveats. First, while I have read some shorter Kafka works and admire him greatly, I have not read The Trial, and so am less able to comment on how the first sentence reflects on the work as a whole. Second, this is a first sentence in translation: the original book was written in German, a language I don't speak, and hence commenting on the sounds of the sentence would be inappropriate here.

So, considering the first sentence as it stands, what to say about it?

Listening to Kafka's voice is listening to a voice at once intimate and alienating. He whispers that 'someone' must have been doing something as if we were in the middle of a conversation already, familiar with the situation - or else as unfamiliar with it, as alienated from it, as he is. I used to volunteer on a counselling hotline, and the more severely mentally ill callers often had this quality, a blur between what they knew and what knowledge could be reasonably expected of a listener, a tendency to confide without explaining. Elegantly, Kafka begins by confusing and dislocating us. Perhaps he is slightly mad, or perhaps we are, but as long as we are in his world, then the whole world is going to have this crazed continuum. We don't begin at the beginning, or know where we will end: we don't know what's going on. We will have to join K. in a journey of disorientation.

And in this disorientating world, threat is everywhere. Slander is enough to get one arrested, for instance: this implies a brutal authority at the head of things - if not a reliable one. 'Wrong' is an unclear factor: we are informed K. has done 'nothing wrong' in a phrase that's almost child-like in its simplicity - not 'nothing illegal' or 'nothing criminal', but nothing wrong, as if it were a question of morality, of existence, rather than of law and order. If you have to ask yourself if you've done anything wrong, you have to review everything you've ever done, and come to that, you need a clear fix on what counts as wrong in the first place. It's an impossible conundrum - but one that brings you to disaster if you can't solve it.

But how is one to solve it? To know what you have or haven't done wrong, you need some kind of sense of self. Josef K. doesn't even have a full name: he's referred to by an initial. There's something institutional about it, a reduction of people to primitive components, and also something universalising: without a name to distinguish him from us, K. becomes a point of observation rather than a man. What has he done? We don't know. We only know what we have done - and the mystery of being arrested for no good reason is a frightening situation the reader can immediately imagine themselves into. With no identity to protect himself or separate him from us, K. is less a character and more an open door into fear. What happens to a character the author doesn't even trouble to name is clearly not the point of the story.

'Kafkaesque' is a byword for endless confusion. First sentences are generally the beginning of something, but Kafka does not offer us any such reassuring sense of structure. While complying with a basic writing dictum - you should begin your story with an interesting event - he simultaneously erodes the sand beneath our feet. Something interesting is happening, but we don't know why, and we barely know to whom. Meaning slips through our fingers and we are swept into the void.

First sentences: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

2011-12-23T08:41:00.001Z

TW: I assume most people know this, but Lolita is a story of child abuse.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.

In a sense, quoting only the first sentence is incomplete because the whole first paragraph is a prose poem in itself:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

The whole paragraph is an explosion of sound based around the Ls and T's of Lolita's name, a narcotic, obsessive chant that begins to hypnotise us into Humbert Humbert's desperate rhythms. This is the story of a child rapist who entraps and abuses an orphaned girl, a man of loathsome character whose attitude towards almost any person he meets is either predatory lust or vicious contempt, depending on whether or not they serve his sexual appetites. But the style, the style! 'You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,' as Humbert warns us at the outset, and it's the gorgeous pyrotechnics that hold us to the page despite the horrors that unfold. Humbert Humbert picks up his baton, taps out a rhythm to the tune of his victim's name, and begins to croon us into complicity - or at least, into staying with him rather than putting down the book and turning away in disgust.

And yet. There's an interesting point to be had even in the first sentence: he's calling her Lolita. The title of the book, its base note, 'repeat till the page is full, printer.' But that's not actually her name. The lush paedophilia of the word - the sensuous 'Lola', evocative of such figures as the courtesan Lola Montez while reduced with the diminutive '-ita' - is the first of many concealing tricks that Humbert pulls upon us.

In the second paragraph he shows his hand: 'She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.' Lolita is the name of a sexual fantasy imposed on the real girl, not the name of the girl herself. The girl herself signs her letters 'Dolly'. Humbert eventually comes to admit to himself that 'I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate - dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions' - but we hardly need Humbert to tell us this. Dolly's 'juvenile cliches' are heard in her speech, but never in long enough sequences that we can get much content out of them. We know how she speaks, but we hear very little of what she says. Her speech is all snapshot, a fetishised part of her outer appearance rather than a conveyor of thought and feeling. In terms of how he describes her, it is only a question of whether she does or doesn't do what he wants.

Dolly's personality, in short, is only visible to us in glimpses. Despite her status as the eponymous character, we actually know very little about her. She asks for clothes and treats; she plays at grown-ups by flirting with Humbert until he rapes her and then finds herself trapped; she displays in later stages a hard-headed practicality unsurprising in such a prisoner; what she is in herself is held from us by a narrator that only cares for his lusts and observes nothing of her inner self.

It's interesting how misled people can be by this. To call a girl 'a Lolita' is to call her sexually precocious (and also to render oneself a suspect observer of girls, because seriously? You really just said that?) Covers for the book vary a great deal, but you'll see plenty of images among those that suggest an erotic novel rather than a horror story. Humbert is nothing if not a forceful narrator.

And in the first sentence, linguistic beauties aside, is one of his strongest tricks: he conflates light and lust. 'Light of my life' is emotional and spiritual; 'fire of my loins' is physical and sexual. A romantic partner can be both, of course, but note the order in which they come. 'Light of my life' is first, with 'fire of my loins' second. As a description of true love, this would be a list: you are the light of my life and the fire of my loins. As a description of Humbert's obsession, the life of a man whose interest (at least as far as the story he chooses to tell us goes) revolves entirely around his fixation on children, it is not a list but a causal sequence: you are the light of my life because you are the fire of my loins. Sexual gratification is one of the few things Humbert values, declaring that to be a paedophile is to be 'an artist and a madman', conflating again the sexual with the spiritual.

Images of light are associated with desire - 'radiant', for instance, is a word used more than once - and it begins here. Consider, for instance, the assonant vowels: light of my life, fire of my loins. Light, life, fire: we slide down along a cascade of Is into the sexual. 'Light of my life' and 'fire of my loins' are, of course, sayings rather than original phrases, an unusually familiar and thus persuasive use of language (cliches can take on the status of truisms in our subconscious mind), and by placing them side by side and rocking us with their rhythms, Humbert makes it hard for us to resist the sense that they are natural partners. But the assonance stops at the end of the sentence: 'loins' catches us, stops us, opens our eyes. Humbert is never explicit in his vocabulary - he is fairly clear what he does, but hides behind many metaphors - and 'loins' is about as frank as he gets.

But by the time we reach that frank word, the soft Ls and dreamlike Is and sighing Fs have already begun to seduce us. Lolita is before us and Dolly is lost. This will not be a book about Dolly Haze, but a book about Lolita - and Lolita exists only within Humbert's mind. The brutal eclipsing of her selfhood takes place in the first sentence, velveted in poetry, and we will never get her back.

Except. Except that this is not, in fact, the first sentence of the book. The actual first sentence is this:

'Lolita or The Confessions of a White Widowed Male,' such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates.

Lolita is prefaced by a fictional 'note' from a psychiatrist supposedly entrusted with editing the work, a writer who swings from formal awkwardnesses like 'preambulates' to a kind of Humbert-influenced eloquence in phrases like 'panting maniac' and 'a desperate honesty that throbs through his confession'. This editor gives us several facts, including the briskly terrible news that Dolly never makes it to adulthood: '"Mrs Richard F. Schiller" [her married name, though we only learn this near the end] died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl...' we are dryly informed: girlhood itself is unsustainable under Humbert's curse. The editor acknowledges Humbert to be 'horrible' - yet seems somewhat seduced himself. His next adjective, for instance, is 'abject', a word for a victim rather than a victimiser, and in reflecting on Humbert's style, he remarks, 'But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita which makes us entranced with the book even while abhorring its author!' Clinical objectivity is not his: he believes in Lolita - even to the point of choosing her name as the title of the book, the title that foregrounds, and thus implies the cause of the crime to be, the victim rather than the criminal.

Poor Dolly. Hidden even from the supposedly objective editor of the work, she is annihilated before the book ever begins. Seldom has so great a soul-murder been so beautifully clad.

Sourcery and Pyramids by Terry Pratchett

2011-12-21T07:39:00.009Z

Julie Paradox put in a request for Sourcery, and then went for Pyramids instead. I thought it might be fun to do both together.

So, here's Sourcery:

There was a man and he had eight sons.

And here's Pyramids:

Nothing but stars, scattered across the blackness as though the Creator had smashed the windscreen of his car and hadn't bothered to sweep up the pieces.

Interestingly different, yet fundamentally similar sentences.

Sourcery's first sentence is bold in its simplicity. Not even stopping for a 'once upon a time', it goes straight into a direct, monosyllabic statement: 'There was a man.' We hear nothing of his name, place, character or life: his mere existence is the substance of a story. This is fairy-tale logic - especially when the sentence adds the number of sons - but fairy-tale stripped of its traditional 'once upon a time' flourish. Pared-down fairy-tale, in other words; down-to-earth fairy-tale; fairy-tale stripped down to common humanity. Pratchett often makes a theme of the ordinary man (and, less often, the ordinary woman), and this stylistic bluntness prepares the way: we are to see the mundane humanity in the context of the mythical.

There is no such bluntness in the opening of Pyramids. In terms of style, Pratchett is more or less showing off here with his bathetic bump from the epic drama of 'nothing but stars' to the sudden hop from the divine to the ridiculous - or at least to the quotidian. In positing a Creator with a windscreen, Pratchett asserts his characteristic style in which he helps himself to analogies that would be foreign to his characters, while also cocking a snook at reverence: a Creator who can't be bothered is a clear declaration that we are in a comic universe. The sentence is elaborately, almost heavy-handedly comedic, the kind of sentence a publisher very much hopes will grab the attention of a casual bookshop browser; it's also a sentence that quickly lays out the stall. We are reading a book aimed at a modern reader that will touch upon metaphysics with a gadfly lightness.

What can we see in common with these sentences? Well, one of the major commonalities is that they turn and look the reader in the eye. 'There was a man' is the writer informing rather than evoking; windscreens and Creators assure us that we'll be looking at the universe through, as it were, our own, human-eye-level windscreen. In both cases, the overriding tone is conspiratorial.

At the same time, their scope is broad: the audience may be our ordinary selves, and the universe may centre on equally ordinary people, but myths and divinity are not beyond our reach. In fact, far from being beyond our reach, they are being brought down to our level. We can accept that the existence of a mythical man is important without needing a 'Once upon a time' to ease us into it; we can laugh at a wild night sky with a careless Creator. Pratchett at once appeals to and flatters his audience's intelligence. The universe is a joke, and we will be in on it.

Terry Pratchett is an author who begins with bold sweeps, often starting in the heavens or ranging over a whole city or country before narrowing in on his central characters. Beginning with a sentence that grabs the readers' attention with its eccentricity is often a successful strategy, commercially as much as artistically (Iain Banks is a notable example), and a common feature is that the style tends to settle down once the story begins. There is a limit to how much you can tell readers about the actual events of the plot when you're in the realm of the mythic - or at least, there's a limit if you're going to make your story about ordinary people and tell it in a chatty, colloquial tone as Pratchett does.

As a result, Pratchett's opening sentences are often, in terms of storytelling, skippable. While they vary in content, they tend to have a single declaration: You are reading a Terry Pratchett novel. Humour, irreverence, metaphysics and myth are going to be featured, and we'll get to the plot in a minute. I said in my discussion of Jane Eyre that some books begin with a handshake, and Pratchett takes this a step further: in effect, his first sentences are secret handshakes. Open secrets, secrets that the reader can work out by getting the joke - as I said, one of Pratchett's main charms is that he makes the reader feel clever - but coded handshakes nonetheless. You shake the sentence's hand, and then you get admitted into the clubhouse.

I would note an interesting fact here: Pratchett is a writer who tends to elicit strong positive or negative reactions, and the negative reactors often plough down in the first few pages. The first couple of times I tried his books, this is how I reacted; I found the beginnings repetitive and mannered, and it was only when I persevered into the plot that I started enjoying it - and subsequently developed some appreciation of his openings. Other readers, I think, delight in the sense of 'Welcome back!' that his sentences create, the way they invite a sense of membership. Pratchett is an author unusually able to establish a sense of friendship with his readers - not necessarily in terms of how he behaves in person (though I get the impression he's a pretty friendly chap), but by establishing a style and inviting his readers in.

First sentences: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

2011-12-19T06:16:00.003Z

Requested by kisekileia.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Except, actually, no. That's what's usually quoted as the first sentence, but it's really an extract. The real first sentence is this:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

There is no authority noisier than Dickens, especially when he's slapping down a rival authority.

Why is this sentence so often misquoted? The limits of memory are one reason, but the extract is not just the first sentence condensed. It carries an entirely different connotation - and one that's more palatable to readers seeking a story. The first two phrases imply epic sweep and forthcoming drama. Take the rest of the sentence, though, and it becomes something else.

Dickens is, if nothing else, a writer willing and eager to declare himself the voice of an age. The evils he inveighs against are what one would expect of a strong, domineering personality: a mixture of genuine contemporary injustices, out-of-date issues, and personal gripes (people who make plays out of authors' novels without permission, for example). Similarly, even most of his fans will agree that, perhaps because of his productivity, perhaps for other reasons, he is a writer of varying quality, swinging from the cynical to the maudlin, the brilliantly witty to the clunkily humourless, the highs to the lows. There is something in this opening sentence that evokes Dickens as much as it evokes the French Revolution: the sweep is so wide that it takes in variations in quality and tone as much as variations in circumstances.

The position Dickens has taken up here is one that perfectly suits his natural voice. The era of which he is going to speak, he tells us more or less explicitly, is so similar to the era in which he writes that he is free to make points about contemporary bugbears without worrying too much about historical accuracy. Universal humanity is his theme, and it doesn't vary from era to era. Dickens is about to give his opinions free rein, and they will range far and wide.

It is, above all, a confident opening line, to the point of audacity. Few writers have the boldness to make so sweeping an assumption before they begin. In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens is telling us, we are in the hands of a writer who will touch upon whatever subjects he feels like and take whatever perspective he chooses. It's extremely ambitious, but it also frees the reader to be, if not unambitious, then to put in as much thought and feeling as they choose. Dickens is not a writer who encourages reader ambiguity: his characters can be complex, but there is seldom more than one correct opinion about them. By telling us that he will unite history and present, though, Dickens also tells us that we can bring our own preconceptions to a supposedly historical novel. We will not be asked to imagine ourselves into the mindset of a culture different from our own: reading A Tale of Two Cities, we need only be ourselves.

And this, I think, is the secret of the sentence's appeal. It combines a grandiose sweep with a lack of demands upon the reader, a compelling mix indeed. And this too, I suspect, may be one reason why it's so often misremembered. In a sense, it invites us to refashion it in our own minds: it's a sentence all about seeing whatever one wishes to see. It's been said that science fiction is a genre that writes of the present while claiming to write of the future, and in A Tale of Two Cities Dickens is explicitly going in the other direction. Writing of ourselves while supposedly writing of others is a traditional way to capture the popular imagination - and the popular imagination in all genres tends to enjoy the epic. The condensed version is, in a sense, merely completing the work Dickens has begun by seeing what one wishes to see. It may not be a repurposing that Dickens would have wished, but it is one that the sentence allows for nonetheless.

First sentences: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

2011-11-28T06:54:00.000Z

Requested by mmy. Any requests for other first sentences, please post in the comments.

Note: it seems to be rather difficult to mention Margaret Atwood on the Internet without someone popping up to complain that she said something rude about science fiction, which tends to devolve into a discussion of her as a person instead of as a writer. Please don't do that in the comments; I'm tired of it, and it's not relevant here.

We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.

Typical of Atwood, her first sentence begins at once lucidly simple and loaded with implications. It's a sentence that aches with time.

It's not that common to begin a book talking about a non-specific 'we'. Exactly who is being invoked here remains a little unclear, leaving the place the sleepers occupy more visible than the sleepers themselves. Already evident is that these sleepers have been dispossessed somehow, uprooted - not only because they're camping out in these uncomfortable-sounding circumstances, but because the very place they occupy has been dispossessed of its original function. The use of tense makes it clear that this stripping of function is final, a kind of death: 'used to be the gymnasium' has a certain vitality to it, a sense of positive transition, but 'once [had] been' is the end of something. These sleepers occupy the corpse of a gymnasium, its reclaimed shell. Suspense is laid on with a light but compelling touch: what has happened to this place to change it so much? What new purpose has it been bent to?

'Gymnasium', too, is an interesting word. The first thing to notice about it is that it's institutional: 'we' are numerous enough that an ordinary bedroom would not accommodate 'us'; 'we', too, are living in what is evidently an old school or college, a place where physical exercise would be part of the imposed routine. 'Gym' might imply a room with weights and workout machines, but a gymnasium is a place you're herded to play ball and perform gymnastics with your fellow-students. The gymnasium may have been demoted to a communal bedroom, but its occupants have been likewise demoted to the status of schoolchildren. The tone, with its ability to reach into the past and sophisticated use of tense, is that of an adult, not a child: immediately we are led to wonder what an adult is doing, mass-camped in a place for children.

There's also an other echo, which might be coincidental, but with Atwood, a writer accustomed to play with synonyms and multiple definitions (this is the novel where an entire paragraph is devoted to the multiple means of the word 'chair', for instance), one should never assume. Etymologically, a gymnasium is an ancient Greek place, to exercise naked and also to discuss intellectual pursuits and attend lectures. Open physicality, education, freedom of thought: all of these are over in the world of The Handmaid's Tale. All that resembles ancient Greece is a rigidly-enforced patriarchy and a willingness to enslave. The dead gymnasium takes with it all the positives of a Classical history.

The narrator, though, lands us in the middle of all these implications with no explanation. She does not pause to tell us who 'we' are; nor does she bother to describe the room's antecedents beyond 'the gymnasium' - not 'a gymnasium', but the definite article, as if we can be trusted to do without explanations. This story, whispered in secret, full of evasions and anonymity, begins with a vagueness that broadens out into the universal. If we are not told which gymnasium, it can only be because it doesn't matter - which means that what will happen here is of an importance not specific to the place.

Any literate dystopia will be aware of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and The Handmaid's Tale has something of the directness of Orwell's famous: 'It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.' The contrast can be seen immediately: where Winston Smith is a character with little memory of anything else, so acclimatised to the newly militarised world that he thinks in twenty-four-hour time (ominously striking the unlucky hour; the bell tolls for doomed Winston in the first sentence). Offred, on the other hand, is a victim for whom memories of our world are recent, or at least recent enough that she can confidently say what things used to be. Her relationship with our world is thus personal - or at least, shading in and out of the personal and the general as she shifts from the open 'I' to the shadowy 'we'.

In beginning so, the narrator is showing her first act of trust, a trust that will carry us through the story. Graham Greene said of Great Expectations that it seemed to be the narrative of a mind 'talking to itself with no one there to listen', and The Handmaid's Tale makes this explicit, even saying despairingly at one point that it narrates itself to some listening 'dear You', knowing that 'you' can't hear her. This bleak paradox gives the tone an exceptional sense of intimacy, the feel of a story whispered through a keyhole. It's an intimacy granted more by the author than the narrator, though, and herein lies another paradox: to the nameless narrator, we are not the intended audience. To the character, we are not confidante but eavesdropper. Atwood, though, the poised and elegant stylist, does know her audience, and even adds a 'Historical Notes' final chapter to place a little distance between us and the raw secrecy of Offred's voice.

This delicate balance between the whisper of the narrator and the arched eyebrow of the author brings us to the final point of the book: this is less a work of science fiction in the marketing sense than it is a work of satire. Atwood invests Offred with a passionate lyricism while preserving a certain ironic distance from her. As such, Offred is both an intimate narrator and a reduced one, just one speck in a whole society. Even in her first sentence, nameless Offred is part of a 'we', at the mercy of others - even her creator. It's the tension between the vividness of human experience and the cool wit of social commentary that creates so compelling a dystopia. If not even your author will grant you a solo spotlight, and not even you can speak of your experience in the first person singular, you are lost indeed.

First sentences: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

2011-11-24T08:34:00.000Z

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

A famous first sentence indeed; a famous first chapter, in which symbolism dominates over plot. Feminine nature overwhelms the corpse of the great Manderley estate, our dreaming narrator passes through, and anything that we learn of the events of the plot - a plot finished, by this first chapter, before it begins - can only be gathered in signs and hints.

The circularity of the narrative is the beginning of its ambiguity, its fraught relationship with Rebecca, our narrator's shadow, rival and other self. An interesting point to reflect upon is this: the events of the plot (which I shall proceed to spoil), are actually pretty sordid. A wealthy man marries a woman because of family pressure and finds he hates and despises her; they live together for the sake of appearances; he murders her and hides her body; a year later he marries a penniless, submissive and naive girl half his age without telling her anything, brings her home, lapses into moody defensiveness at her natural curiosity about the situation she's gotten herself into and refuses to listen when she complains that she doesn't feel capable of handling the role she's been given (note, for instance, that Maxim reflects at one point that he should have bought her 'a lot of clothes in London' but never actually does, presumably preferring her shabbiness to a Rebecca-like chic, with no consideration of how awkward this makes it for her, trying to be a good Lady of the Manor in clothes that immediately brand her an outsider during many visits which Maxim does not attend); finally the truth comes out, and he draws his new wife into a criminal conspiracy. Gothic heroes - and this is, among other things, a Gothic novel - are often men of doubtful character and shadowy past, but du Maurier plays an interesting trick on us: we see him through the eyes of his besotted second wife, and only symbolic hints in the narrative suggest that there may be any rebellion against Maxim de Winter's cold (note the surname) aristocracy.

To manage this delicate balance, we need a vivid sense of emotional resonance, and particularly of ambivalence. Maxim is both lover and murderer; Manderley is both paradise and prison. And it's interesting to note that it's Manderley, not Maxim, that occupies the narrator's dreams.

I forget (and will credit if reminded) who described Rebecca as a romance between a woman and a house, but Manderley is a vital presence in the book. The narrator loves Manderley before she ever loves Maxim, buying an expensive postcard of it as a child and describing it in passionate detail throughout, immersed in the vivid azaleas and elegant rooms that communicate for more than Maxim does. Manderley is, in fact, based on a real house, Menabilly in Cornwall, which du Maurier herself leased and lived in for more than twenty years, and the fictional house - floral heaven, cultural haven, working establishment and social centre - embodies tremendous contradictions. Living in Manderley is lovely when alone, but its servants intimidate the narrator and the job it brings as hostess to the county society is utterly beyond her. Being married to Maxim is fine on honeymoon and tolerable, if tense and dull, in middle-aged exile, but going to Manderley complicates it tremendously. It's to preserve Manderley that Maxim stays married to Rebecca; it's to prevent it from going to an illegitimate heir that he kills her. Disputed Manderley is the angel and demon of the story.

And one of the disputed issues is this: whose home is it? The neighbours of the region consider themselves entitled to demand a ball held there; visitors can pay for admission and get a tour of the public areas. The servants live and work there, moving through the rooms with far more authority than the narrator. Mrs Danvers, the housekeeper, wages a constant psychological war against the narrator with Manderley as the prize. It's notable, for instance, that she refers to Rebecca as 'the real Mrs de Winter' even though she has little respect for Maxim as a husband: 'Mrs de Winter', to her, is the lady of Manderley rather than the wife of Mr de Winter. As it occupies our narrator's dreams, it takes on the air of a spiritual home - but a spiritual home from which she is debarred. The expectations of other claimants undermine her while she is there, and the final conflagration exiles her and her husband, leaving it Rebecca's ghostly domain.

Our heroine, in fact, lives in chronic exile: paid companion to a woman who drags her through cities she dislikes, seated in Manderley but unable to settle there, and finally away from England, studying her homeland through outdated newspapers. Only in dreams can she move freely - but even in dreams, she is an observer rather than a homecomer. She went to Manderley: one can go anywhere. The neutral verb makes her dream an act of travel rather than homecoming. She went again; however much she might wish otherwise, she was only ever visiting.

The sentence itself is dream-like in its cadence. Iambic hexameter, in fact, with an internal half-rhyme on 'went' and 'again' (with an optional extra rhyme on 'dreamt' if one pronounces it with a short E, something the spelling encourages us to do):

Last night I dreamt I went
To Manderley again.

The book lulls us like the sound of the ambiguous, threatening, concealing and revealing sea that murmurs in Manderley's background. Even the sound of the name: Manderley, Manderley, Manderley, like a heartbeat, echoes through the narrative. It's notable that 'Manderley' flows more softly than 'Menabilly' (while preserving, as Sally Beauman points out in her fine introduction to the Virago Modern Classics edition, the masculine first syllable). The only remarkable word in an otherwise simple sentence, Manderley is beguiling and seductive.

An interesting side note to this issue of tone: the narrator's soft voice contrasts sharply with Rebecca's on the few occasions we hear it clearly. Rebecca is a relentless abbreviator: Maxim become 'Max', slippers become 'slips', Mrs Danvers becomes 'Danny'; even hallowed Manderley becomes 'Manders'. Irreverent and casual, Rebecca is as universally detached as is the narrator, but where the narrator's constant state is longing homelessness, Rebecca's is assertive carelessness. The narrator stands outside and wishes; Rebecca enters, takes what she wants and repurposes it to her own will.

Dreams, too, are important. So much of the story takes place in the narrator's imagination, from her initial fantasises and hopes in Monte Carlo to her increasingly desperate obsession with Rebecca in Manderley, combined with her miserable imaginings of how 'dull' people must be calling her behind her back - it's such images, for instance, that propel her down the stairs to the nightmarish ball after the disaster engineered by Mrs Danvers - our awkward girl, inarticulate and shy others, ranges freely within the confines of her own mind. When she describes conversations, it's interesting to note that phrases like 'of course' and 'inevitable' frequently predominate, usually unhappily: her expectations of people's behaviour are bleak, and usually fulfilled. The reason for this is that she lives in a world dominated by convention, and convention dominates her. Eloquent in her own mind, she can perceive the roles everyone is supposed to play, but is unable to either navigate or step outside the roles imposed upon her, only able to comment to herself with a miserable, repetitive I-told-you-so. When people are so distressingly predictable, the ability to dream, however sadly, remains an escape - an escape not just from physical limitations, but from social expectations. Reality is an introvert's nightmare; in a dream alone can one act unobserved.

Rebecca is a book in which human expectation, convention and interaction clash sharply with inner selfhood. Rebecca, glimpsed through descriptions, rebels; the narrator, speaking only to us, burns with shame at her inability to conform and flees into her mind, into her silent dialogue with us. Unreliable she may well be - the idea that she's married to a wife-murderer never seems to trouble her - but her intimate, passionate, wracked voice is so persuasive that it can be easy to forget to question her. Rebecca may have been a mistress of deception, but our narrator is no mean performer either. She just has a different natural audience. Rebecca works on seducing the other characters; her successor works on seducing us. We begin inside her very dreams; from there, the web begins to weave around us, and we need Rebecca-like powers of escape to resist.

First sentences: Watership Down by Richard Adams

2011-11-21T08:52:00.000Z

The primroses were over.

Now, this is a first sentence that is not, exactly, a first sentence. Directly above it on the page is the following quotation:

CHORUS: Why do you cry out thus, unless at some vision of horror?
CASSANDRA: The house reeks of death and dripping blood.
CHORUS: How so? 'Tis but the odour of the altar sacrifice.
CASSANDRA: The stench is like a breath from the tomb.

Aeschyus, Agamemnon

Added to this, we have the title to contend with: Watership Down, a name that, conjoined with Cassandra, cannot but give the reader - pun intended - a sinking feeling. Doom is in the air before we ever get to the first sentence, and with such a setting, those primroses never stand a chance. They're over before the book begins, and they - or at least what they stand for - ain't coming back for a good while yet.

Primroses, for those unfamiliar with the landscape Watership Down occupies, refers to primula vulgaris, also known as the English primrose - a flower that blooms in various soils, but is a distinctively English, evocative choice. The primrose is a flower of spring, of promise, but also of domesticity, because while they grow wild, they're also a popular and traditional choice for cottage gardens. This is the flower of which Maxim de Winter speaks in Rebecca, saying that 'though a creature of the wilds it had a leaning towards civilization, and preened and smiled in a jam-jar in some cottage window without resentment.' Dainty, warmly yellow, edible even to humans, easily cultivated, the primrose is a flower of innocence and safety, of home. We know that home will be destroyed before ever Fiver sees visions: Cassandra drops a fairly big hint, but those pretty yellow flowers are, like floral canaries, a sign of trouble when they ail.

For how heavily does Adams announce their loss! The primroses were over. It's at once a countryman's phrase, familiar with the seasons and matter-of-factly authoritative, and a symbolic phrase, as final as the fall of a coffin-lid. In another context it might merely evoke the countryman, but Adams is a writer whose style varies from the vivid to the frenzied, symbols teeming through his prose and sometimes getting the better of him entirely. The Plague Dogs, for example, is a book that appears to have lost its grip altogether, reeling from schoolboyish vulgarity to extraordinary lyricism, falling in and out of poetry like a drunkard stumbling into ditches, breathless and bizarre. Watership Down is a more controlled work, but there's always an undertow of passion in Adams that can turn suddenly into a rip tide. If Adams tells us the primroses are over, we had better listen to the symbolism. The heavy-handed quotation at the beginning more or less orders us to do so.

Adams is a writer alive to the sounds of language too - as witness the rabbit language he invents for Watership Down, not to mention his fondness for inserting poems when the mood takes him - and the syllable 'prim' is worth noting. This may be a book about rabbits, but it's not a book about bunnies, and Adams is at quick pains to establish the difference. Discussion of droppings is part of ordinary rabbit conversation, for instance; survival, as Adams wishes to paint it, is an earthy business. Likewise, females are assessed based on whether they're 'any good' as breeders, and Adams excludes does from the initial exodus and leads us with an all-male cast for much of the story, for no zoological reason that can reasonably be explained, but is presumably a matter of personal preference. Women, on the whole, get short shrift in Adams, and whether he associates femininity and primness, it's certainly the case that conventional manners are sent out of the room at the very beginning. The linguistic echoes are almost blustering, or else almost naive in their earnestness. Sometimes, with Adams, it's hard to tell.

Watership Down, in short, is a book that wishes you to have no doubts about the morality or drama of the situation. Subtlety is not Adams's forte; didactic symbolic force is. As his most famous book begins, he's not willing to trust the first sentence to set out the stall: a doom-laden title and grandly classical scream of dismay frame it to make absolutely sure that we don't misunderstand what he's about and how important it is. The primroses are over, he tells us, and if you don't appreciate that, you understand nothing.

First sentences: Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell

2011-11-17T09:53:00.001Z

Trigger warning: I will be quoting sections from the book, and it is horribly racist. People described as if they were animals; slavery, torture and lynching apology. Also child abuse.

Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.

So begins Gone With The Wind, that dizzying whirlwind of romance, false history, social Darwinism, compelling character drama and stomach-turning racism that has, since its publication, captivated readers far, far nicer than the book would have them be.

Gone With The Wind is, to say the least, a problematic book. It's an intense combination of the personal and the political, with the political buried under many layers of assumptions that foreground the personal. Scarlett O'Hara is a liberating figure for many (white) women: her refusal to accept the limits of femininity combined with her Machiavellian willingness to play its advantages, her author's steady conviction that a woman doesn't have to be a nice person to make an impressive or interesting hero, are deeply unusual in a patriarchal society, especially for a book published in the 1930s. Head of a family, building success and security in difficult times, Scarlett is, for many, a feminist icon (although it must be said that she does nothing to advance the interests of any woman beyond herself, so is hardly a member of the sisterhood).

Scarlett is, though, a slave-owner, heroine of a profoundly racist book that classes black people as 'creatures of small intelligence ... like monkeys or small children'. She is also, though the book doesn't use the word, a libertarian: taxes are presented as the oppressive action of a malicious and forcefully-imposed government, money is an absolute necessity, and, at least according to the charismatic Rhett Butler, 'only the smart deserve to survive'. The argument made on Balloon Juice that the Confederacy's slavery policy was fundamentally about stealing the labour of others, and that this theft didn't end with slavery but merely mutated into new forms that are still being endorsed by right-wingers today seems applicable here: Gone With The Wind, whatever is it is, is a book of the far right, and its racial politics are about as reasonable as those of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

And yet. White women in their thousands, or perhaps their millions, and sometimes women of color as well, find themselves drawn in. The luxurious dresses and grandiose passions are part of it, but at the centre of it is Scarlett herself, aggressive yet feminine, love-hungry yet callous, all id, speaking - if the voices of the silenced slaves don't rise in your consciousness - for suppressed femaleness, the unacceptable honesty of female humanity.

So, on its own terms: what do we meet when we first see her?

Running through Gone With The Wind is a persistent theme: that men cannot be relied upon to see women's inner selves. Women are socialised from birth to present a giddy, guileless front, and the book is fraught with ambivalence about the ideal woman that Scarlett can only ever mimic, never be. Mitchell described the virtuous Melanie as her heroine while simultaneously pouring writerly passion into willful Scarlett, idealising the emotional protection that a Southern mother-figure provides while wrestling with the impossibility of taking on such a role that faces a Southern daughter. (Melanie is a mother before she ever has children; Scarlett remains a daughter no matter how many children she has; the book seems to embody the double standards we tend to have as regards the relative rights to be selfish of ourselves and our parents.) But on the outside, at least, women are required to present a socially acceptable front, and men, surrounded by actresses all their lives, almost always take the front for truth.

Scarlett's predatory ambivalence, compelled to charm men but unable to respect the men she can charm, finds an emotional centre in her relationships with Ashley and Rhett, the only two men she cannot successfully manipulate: it is her relationships with these two that will drive the plot. The fact that men 'seldom' see her accurately, introduced in the first sentence, is crucial to this emotional narrative: Gone With The Wind is very much about the exceptions to the rules.

'Men', of course, is a generic noun: it categorises and it excludes, and what it excludes is telling. Scarlett is, as we will shortly see, the product of a very limited world, unacquainted with any men beyond the Southern gentlemen she captivates - except, of course, male slaves, who are implicitly shut out from the class of 'men'. What black men think of Scarlett's attractiveness is not our concern; at a later point some former slaves of her father, dragooned into the army, encounter her in the road and 'capered with delight at the meeting and with pride at displaying before their comrades what a pretty Young Miss they had,' but being 'good boys', this is more the delight of dogs showing off an owner than an act of human assessment: the possibility that they might find her sexually desirable cannot be countenanced as long as the boys remain good. Black men who meet with Mitchell's approval are not caught by Scarlett's charm, and black men who see her as a sexual possibility are 'insolent' potential rapists, actuated less by interest in that particular woman than in an upstart desire for white women in general.

White men, on the other hand, are animals of a nobler breed. The Tarletons are, within the same chapter, compared to animals too, but where black characters are likened to elephants and apes, the Tarletons are likened to their hounds and horses - European, domesticated, luxury creatures, whose behaviour is everybody's responsibility but their own: 'as mettlesome as the horses they rode, mettlesome and dangerous, but withal, sweet-tempered to those who knew how to handle them.' (So if they kill you, it's your fault for handling them wrong.) Men, in this most female of books, are of a kind: 'They are men, aren't they?' demands one Southern lady, exasperated at Scarlett's surprise that all her friends are Klansmen. Southern society in Gone With The Wind is a mixture of nature and nurture: conformity is expected and social pressure strongly exerted, but the results are simultaneously described in essentialist terms. Who you are, with a few exceptions, rules what you do.

'Men', in other words, is a term loaded with expectations, contradictions and exclusions, meaning a great deal more than 'male members of the genus homo sapiens.' 'Men' are a caste and a kind, with temperaments and politics and destinies all but inherent in their nature. With her sweeping dismissal of all non-Southern-gentlemen-men in the very first sentence - the only men worth mentioning are the ones on whom Scarlett's charm can be safely practiced - Mitchell immediately locates us in her world.

Her tone, too, quickly assures us that she is talking to an equal. We may or may not actually be Southern aristocracy, but the narrative voice includes us in that closed circle. 'The Tarleton twins' are invoked with a casual gesture - not 'Brent and Stuart Tarleton', but 'the Tarleton twins', as if we know the Tarleton family already and can be trusted to know which twins are being referred to. The first sentence immediately inducts us as members of the white aristocracy.

And yet, we are white aristocrats gifted with a degree of perspective not attributed to most 'men' - and we are probably female aristocrats too, given the briefness with which Mitchell dismisses the other gender. Mitchell begins by telling us something that's almost a secret: we get to see Scarlett through her eyes, and her eyes, we are implicitly told, are sharper than most of her characters'. Gone With The Wind strikes a beguiling tone between the analytic and the conspiratorial so flattering to the reader that it is probably the best explanation for why the glaring racism so often doesn't glare. Mitchell takes us into her confidence, and what she offers is an insider's view: we get to enjoy all the luxury and exclusivity of Southern gentry while also pluming ourselves on being smart enough to see through it. An audience lulled with a sense of its own cleverness is far easier to slip things past.

This is the charm of telling us that Scarlett was not beautiful, but ... The balance between 'not' and 'but' implies a willingness to consider things complicated. That is a voice one is generally tempted to trust. In a novel where Black and White are so brutally differentiated, the style strongly conveys the sense that the author believes matters are not black and white. Like a soft-voiced Southern matriarch, Mitchell's tone implies gentle reason even when it bays for blood.

So much for the narrative voice. What of the girl it shows us?

As with any novel that foregrounds a character's name in the first sentence, the name is important. Originally, Scarlett was to be called 'Pansy' until an editor pointed out that the name had associations with homophobic slang.* 'Scarlett' was intended to evoke the heroine's Irish ancestors who fought against British rule, a name that neatly places the Southern aristocracy in the same victim position as the dispossessed Irish, and, of course, also carries with it the overtones of colour, of passion, blood, drama. O'Hara, at once mellifluous and earthily Irish amidst the more aristocratic-sounding names like 'Tarleton' and 'Wilkes', echoes the 'ar' of 'Scarlett', linking both inseparably in a world where marriage will soon, technically, shear her of the latter. Marriage does not change Scarlett, and the internal rhyming of her name keeps her, linguistically as well as psychologically, a perpetually single woman.

Significant, of course, is that we first see her in an act of deception - not a lie, but a performance that dupes the very eyes of her onlookers. Scarlett goes through life presenting a false front to everyone, even herself, and in our first glimpse of her we see a girl so skilled in deceit - so naturalised in it - that she is able to mislead people not just about her inner self, but about her outer self as well: her very face is concealed within a role.

But we, who see through this role, are immediately encouraged to support her despite her lack of beauty: to admire her hybrid vigour over the delicacy of other Southern ladies (though only an intermixture of different white bloodstrains, of course), to appreciate the intelligence that goes into her charm more than the genuine feather-headedness of her rivals, to side with a heroine who is faulty. As Rhett remarks, 'You've got murder to your credit, and husband-stealing, attempted fornication, lying and sharp dealing and any amount of chicanery that won't bear close inspection. Admirable things, all of them. They show you to be a person of energy and determination and a good money risk. It's entertaining, helping people who help themselves.' And it's entertaining to read about them too, to the point where we're encouraged to overlook that fact that on Scarlett's 'credit' list is also slave-owning, support of torture (she shrugs off her father having a slave beaten for failing to rub down his horse), complicity with domestic terrorism (she opposes the Ku Klux Klan on the grounds that it might lose her money, but has no moral qualms about protecting her friends when they participate in it, only financial ones), and within her own race, emotional abuse and neglect of her children (consider her treatment of her poor little son). Mitchell is smart enough to be open about some of these - she acknowledges that Scarlett's a bad mother, puts it in the context that she becomes a mother very young at a time when she has to refugee, and later shows her frustration at finding that her son seems afraid of her. The slave-owning and terrorism, though, is couched in other explanations: protecting white women from rape, a kind of police force born of 'tragic necessity'. Scarlett's faults as a wife, mother and friend are presented as understandable; her racism, on the other hand, is presented as justified.

This is not, perhaps, what Mitchell set out to do, but in its first sentence, Gone With The Wind contains a warning: For External Use Only. Scarlett O'Hara is not beautiful. She is, for all her empowerment, an awful person ... but so vividly is she written, so passionately are her struggles evoked, that somehow, the reader can end up overlooking it. The white reader, at any rate, and it's hard to imagine that Mitchell considered any other kind.

Gone With The Wind is not a nice book, but readers** seldom realise it when caught by its charm.

*Interestingly, Mitchell was called 'Peggy' by most people, and was married to a man called Red Upshaw. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, Mitchell did not look unlike Vivien Leigh either.

**For Margaret Mitchell's definition of the term, anyway. One sometimes wonders whether she considered that black people could read at all.

First sentences: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

2011-11-14T07:36:00.011Z

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.

Some books begin with a flourish, others with a handshake. Jane Eyre occupies the former category: the opening sentence, rather than being a standalone moment, is the beginning of a discursive paragraph deftly bringing in landscape, weather and social frictions, all major themes throughout the book. But the first sentence, flexible and authoritative, quickly establishes the voice of the narrator.

Immediately clear is that we are hearing a voice with a precise sense of time. 'That day' is specific - no generic 'once upon a time' here - and is also the voice of a memory. 'That day' is significant enough to the narrative voice that we don't need a date, hinting with subtle suspense that events will follow that make it notable: by the end of the day, we are implicitly promised, something interesting will have happened. The voice is confident in its assumption that it needn't be more detailed than 'that day' - not even 'that Saturday', but just a simple 'day', implying that if 'that day' is important to her, we can be trusted to see it as important enough to read about without further justification. An immediate intimacy of tone is established.

At the same time, Jane makes no concessions to the reader. Equivocation and doubt are absent from her voice. There was no possibility of taking a walk: not 'it would be difficult' or 'we'd prefer not to', but a direct assertion that it wouldn't be possible at all. The subsequent story will be deeply concerned with what can and can't be done, both in terms of social constrains and moral imperatives, and Jane's voice is confident in its ability to pronounce on which is which.

It's significant that one can, in fact, take a walk under almost any conditions - it may be inconvenient or uncomfortable, but it's possible - but Jane presents the human decision as an absolute. 'Taking a walk that day' neatly implies that walks are a regular part of the routine; going for a walk' might suggest a spontaneous decision, but one takes a walk like one takes medicine, and that taking it is a matter of possibility versus impossibility rather than choice is the first hint at the authoritarian, inflexible routines that dominate Jane's childhood. Where Jane is and what she does are not, from her perspective, a matter of choice. The first few pages see her hiding with a book and escaping into her own imagination, a hint at the reliance on inward resources that will carry her through the rest of the plot, and the first sentence is full of will. Somebody is making absolute decisions here, and at the moment it isn't Jane - but it is Jane who describes human will in these implacable terms. Weaving in and out of social power is Jane's game, and in the first sentence, she is already an engaged observer of it.

A mark of fine literature is the ability to contain multiple implications in a single sentence. As we meet Jane Eyre, time is sharply contained in an enclosed moment and human judgement elevated to natural law. The stage is set for the delicate balance between naturalistic 'memoir' and intense melodrama to follow.

First sentences: The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

2011-11-10T13:51:00.009Z

What with one thing and another, my blogging time is currently rather limited. With this in mind, I've decided that I'm going to do some deconstructions and analyses - but of really, really short things. To wit, first sentences of famous novels.

Anyone who has a particular favourite, feel free to make a request. Today, we begin with Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead:

Howard Roark laughed.

Stark as the architecture it exalts, The Fountainhead's first sentence is a declarative, aggressively simple statement. We are told the hero's name and a single verb. Three words stand alone on the page; Rand ends not only her first sentence, but her first paragraph there.

The effect is that of freeze-frame. We hear a name, poised in the action of laughing: the isolation of the words makes it clear that to see him laughing is, by itself, enough to understand him - or at least, to understand something important about him. His laugh exists for its own sake; exactly what he's laughing at is a question for later, and until Rand chooses to tell us, we are not invited to share the joke. This is not so much laughter as response as it is laughter as self-assertion: laughing is active rather than reactive, and the character does it alone with no entry point for the audience to join him.

As the book quickly goes on to establish, Roark's laugh is a laugh of superiority rather than joy: he has been kicked out of architecture school for refusing to do a design exercise, and doesn't care; as Rand adds later, with her distinctive tone of joyless rejoicing, he laughs 'because he wanted to laugh'. Self-assertion is at the centre of Rand's morality, and Roark's laugh begins it.

The sense of assertion rather than response depends on an interesting choice - one which Rand repeats at the beginning of Atlas Shrugged with 'Who is John Galt?': the hero's name is introduced in a double drum-beat, first and surname together. 'Howard laughed' is intimate and merry, but 'Howard Roark laughed' is formal. We might laugh with Howard, but with Howard Roark, we are standing outside: the included surname makes it clear that we do not already know him, and must wait for the author to tell us what she chooses. We do not begin as his friends, but as his spectators.

In such a set-up, the choice of name is important. It's worth remembering here that Ayn Rand was not a native English speaker - nor, in fact, was she originally called Ayn Rand. Her original name was the more mellifluous Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum, a name that flows with far more linguistic consistency than the harshly fanciful 'Ayn' juxtaposed against the growl of 'Rand'. A writer who changes their name (and, indeed, who supported her leading disciple and sometime lover in changing his name from the equally Jewish 'Nathan Blumenthal' to the WASPier assonance of 'Nathaniel Branden') well understands the power that names have.

Like 'Ayn Rand', 'Howard Roark' is a rather placeless name, odd-sounding in its ethnic inconsistency, Old English-Norse 'Howard' sitting a little surprisingly against the Irish 'Roark'. 'Howard Rigby' or 'Patrick Roark' are names that, like 'Alisa Rosenbaum', smooth over the ear with no snags, but smoothness is never Rand's aim. Beneficiary of America's willingness to integrate foreigners she may have been, but for her, the melting pot was remarkable only for its lumps. Whether this was the linguistic ineptness of a writer wrestling with a language not her own or the conscious choice of a woman ethnically aware enough to de-Jewify her own handle, the contrast between 'Howard' and 'Roark' is an important part of a novel about refusing to blend in.

To this English reader, at least, 'Howard' is a bit of a curious choice for so Titanic a hero. Echoes are important; would a native English writer have chosen a name that rhymes with 'coward'? That has so few heroic predecessors either in life or in fiction? Rand is a writer who redefines many important words, including 'selfish' and 'happy', to suit her own philosophical ends; The Fountainhead begins by demanding we see heroism in a name not usually used for that purpose.*

Its impact on the page is likewise important. The Fountainhead is a book full of stark lines: the heroes' bodies and faces, the buildings they create, the heroic landscapes they occupy are relentlessly described as angular. Softness is repellent, sharpness noble. 'Howard Roark' is a name full of spikes: the towering H and pointed W, the straight-backed D and R leading to the bristling K, all make as few concessions to the curves of English lettering as can WASPishly be achieved. Roark's name slashes across the page as his buildings slash across the sky.

Adding it all together - the formal, spiky, odd-sounding name, the unexplained laugh in its isolated paragraph - and we are looking at a sharply Modernist sentence.

The shortest verse in the Bible consists of two words: 'Jesus wept'. Rand had as little use for weeping as she had for Jesus. Scorn for compassion, if not outright panic at the thought of it, is at the centre of her 'sense of life'. Whether or not she thought of the Bible verse in writing the sentence, the echo will remain for many readers. In its demand that we accept the stranger-hero in his splendid isolation, that we admire his laugh instead of sharing it, Rand throws her gauntlet in the teeth of God by requiring that, instead, we put our faith in her.

*Which is not to say, of course, that real people called Howard are any less likely to be heroic than anyone else. There are probably many splendid Howards out there.

Just an update

2011-11-05T18:45:00.004Z

I have seen the doctor again. His conclusion:

- My symptoms are very unusual.

- The X-ray images are inconclusive.

- The working theory is that there are fractures on both forearm bones in my elbow.

- The cast is off and they advised against another one because too much time in a full-arm cast and your elbow freezes up.

So I have a sling instead. Downside, it gives me a headache because my arm is apparently too heavy for my neck. Upside, I can now reach the shift key so capitals are part of my world again.

General downside: still can't pick up my son, so still having to depend on family support.

So, topic of conversation:

I've ended up sewing alterations to both my supports: I had to sew up the frayed end of the padding on the cast, and to sew a fleece sleeve to cover the scratchy velcro on the sling. What things do you alter, and why?

why are people so keen to believe shakespeare didn't write shakespeare's plays?

2011-10-28T11:17:00.002Z

note: posts will be sporadic and succinct till my arm is better. which could be a while.

Seriously, who'd rather believe in a nasty conspiracy than the possibility that an ordinary person could be very talented?

It strikes me as Tall Poppyish - he's so good, there must be some trickery somewhere!

That's my theory. What's yours?

broken arm...

2011-10-21T13:16:00.000Z

...so will be silent here for a while. do talk among yourselves.

Listening is a good idea

2011-10-10T12:15:00.004Z

Trigger warning: misogynist language

I just read - somewhat behind the times - the most gracious, tactful and constructive objection to being marginalised I've ever seen.

To summarise: the 'Slutwalk', for those of you who aren't familiar with the phenomenon, is a series of rallies and protest marches that began earlier this year in response to a Toronto policemen stating that to avoid being raped, women should avoid 'dressing like sluts'. The founders decided to redeem the term, and women have been marching en masse, dressed 'sluttily', or dressed in the perfectly ordinary outfits they were wearing when someone raped them, asserting their right to be free from victim-blaming.

Great idea, no? It's been a big, successful publicity stunt that's raised awareness on an important issue.

... Except that the terms it uses have, it appears, been making many African American women feel uncomfortable about joining.

I can't put it better than the open letter does, so it really ought to be read. The crux of their discomfort seems to be the very reasonable assertion that, given how many negative stereotypes about sexuality black* women are particularly vulnerable to, they feel they can't publicly proclaim themselves 'sluts' without some serious negative consequences that don't threaten white women in the same way. It would seem that calling it 'Slutwalk' was, at least for the women who wrote and signed and endorsed the letter, not unlike a group of men organising a shirtless parade to support Peron's descamisados without realising that women might not feel quite as free to walk down the street bare-chested as they did.

I haven't participated in Slutwalk; at the time it kicked off, I was just struggling out of the haze of postnatal depression and not following the news; the first time I became aware of it was when I passed a group of (white, young) women dressed a la burlesque heading for the march. Consequently, I have pretty much no influence.

However, if anyone reading this is a participant and hasn't seen the letter, I'd like to call it to your attention. And also to ask that we please don't respond by getting all huffy the way an Internet White Guy does whenever a woman tells him he's mansplaining. The basic principles seem to be this:

- Slutwalk is opposed to rape and victim-blaming.

- Rape and victim-blaming happen to women of all races.

- With no racist intentions, the founders created a brand that felt uncomfortable to many women of colour, hence accidentally excluding some of the people it campaigns for.

- Some people of colour stepped up as spokesmen and wrote an extremely civil and useful letter giving good advice on how to make the movement more effective at enacting its ideals.

Consequently, the writers of the letter were doing Slutwalk a big favour, and I hope its members will see this for the good deed it was. If people could use the big publicity of Slutwalk and take the opportunity to create a proper, egalitarian alliance between women of different races to oppose rape ...

Well, wouldn't that be truly something?

*I'm aware that in America, many people prefer the term 'African American'. However, I'm using the term 'black' because Slutwalk is an international movement, so is racism, and hence more countries than America are involved. If this bothers anyone, let me know and I'll try to improve my understanding.

Pre-school storytelling

2011-09-13T10:13:00.003Z

Sometimes I watch television with my son. In this culture, even this simple statement feels like a confession: good mothers are supposed to do non-television activities all day ... but y'know, sometimes I have to go into the kitchen or up to the bathroom and a bit of educational TV in the background can be a good thing. I take him out and play with him and read to him and so on as well, but I might as well out myself: I am a CBeebies fan.

CBeebies, for those of you not subject to British television, is the children's channel for pre-schoolers, the younger counterpart to CBBC (Children's BBC). It runs from morning to evening, has a variety of presenters and regular shows ... and it's really very good. Rather than running Tom and Jerry non-stop, almost all the programs are educational one way or another: The Green Balloon Club is about environmentalism, Mr Bloom's Nursery is about growing your own vegetables, Octonauts is an adventure in marine biology, Waybuloo (my personal favourite), is a kind of Buddhist idyll, Zingzillas (my son's favourite besides Waybuloo) is a pretty impressive introduction to all kinds of musical styles as well as a rather good portrait of productive artistry, and all in all I feel practically no guilt about sitting him down in front of such fare. They're informative, they have a reasonable commitment to racial diversity (the Rastamouse controversy notwithstanding*), they all feature at least some female characters (though male characters in leadership roles tend to predominate), and generally speaking they're pretty nice.

There's just one that really gets up my nose. And it strikes me as an interesting example of the problems you get when you try to mix fiction with the sciences.

Let us consider Numberjacks.

The Numberjacks, our heroes, are a bunch of numbers (the male ones are even, the female odd) who get called in to solve problems. Odd things happen because of various villains - Spooky Spoon gets things out of order, The Shape Japer changes the shapes of things, and so on - and the Numberjacks have to sort things out. The idea is that by showing the problems caused, children get introduced to the concept of numeracy...

But here's what I can't take. They solve the problems by turning on a machine, charging up with some mysterious substance called 'Brain Gain', which somehow mysteriously solves the problem by doing something mysterious.

Now, I am no mathematician. But am I wrong in thinking that a discipline founded on the study of cause and effect is not best served by magical hand-waving?

I'm not a mathematician; I'm not even a particularly numerate non-mathetmatician. But as a writer, I can say categorically that the correct term for 'Brain Gain' is actually 'cheating'. It's terrible storytelling: creating a problem and then solving it with the same universal substance every day is basically promising your viewers a climax and then refusing to give it any content. Suspense and plot are both destroyed: we know exactly what'll happen at the end, because it'll be exactly the same every time. And worst of all, it's a supposed tribute to brainpower that doesn't actually use any brainpower - that actively avoids it, in fact. Solving a problem by switching on the Brain Gain is solving it by saying, 'I don't want to think of a more involved solution, so let's all agree not to think about this too hard.' Calling this Brain Gain is a bloody cheek. It's like solving scientific problems by waving a Magic Wand of Science at them.

The thing is, the sciences can be a tricky issue in fiction. One can, of course, write science fiction, either by playing around with scientific laws one understands or by using a certain amount of Gizz - that is, by presenting the existence of certain things as a given fact that has to be accepted. But you can't Gizz a plot event. Things can exist because of a Gizz, but they can't happen solely because of a Gizz. That's just a non-story.

But when one's trying to educate children, there is information to get across. And presenting it in a way that's both fun and accurate is obviously a challenge.

For instance, I admire Nina and the Neurons. I also enjoy it. Nina, the presenter (a female scientist and authority figure at that!) has five CGI friends in her head, the Neurons, each of whom represents a different sense; children ask Nina questions, and she recruits one of the Neurons to help her demonstrate the answer. The questions are questions that children would definitely find interesting (why does my ice lolly melt? why do I get eye grit in the mornings? how do you stop bread going mouldy?) and in answering them, Nina uses basic science. Finding the answers to questions makes for an engaging 'plot' of sorts: Nina goes step by step, and there's a definite progression towards an answer, and I'll admit there have been times I've delayed a task because I was curious to hear the answer. Nina and the Neurons is a documentary, but it manages to balance entertainment and education very skilfully.

Numberjacks ... well, I can see what they're aiming for. Showing how patterns and systems work through showing what happens if they're changed is a good idea. And if the purpose is to show that things have structure, then how do you solve the villains' machinations? In the real world, numbers do come in the right order and blue things don't magically disappear or any of the other things that get the Numberjacks in a tizzy, so a realistic solution is out of the question and a more fantastical solution is spending finite minutes on something that isn't the to the purpose. The purpose is to showcase systems.

But if the purpose is not to solve the problem the story has created, then you aren't actually telling a story. You're telling a 'what if?'. All you really need to do is say 'Wouldn't it be confusing if it were like this?' and then move to 'Aren't we all glad that it's not?' That would be fine; I can picture Nina doing it very well. But for some reason, Numberjacks decided it needed an epic and exciting story format ... despite being averse to telling any actual stories.

You can mix stories and science. Octonauts does it: the (regrettably male-dominated) crew discovers surprising new creatures in the sea, then has to help them, and in so doing, has to learn what how that creature works: for instance, when the ship gets full of panicking humuhumus, the Octonauts need to know that humuhumus hide when they're scared and can lock their spines to wedge themselves into safe places, because that's a necessary piece of knowledge for dealing with the situation. And it also happens to be an interesting fact of marine biology. Science and story combine to good effect.

Now admittedly, numbers are rather less easy to anthropomorphise than fish. But surely there must be a better solution than this. The way I was taught mathematics as a child drilled into me the 'fact' that maths was boring from an early age, and indeed, the way I was taught, it was. But children have to study maths until they're sixteen, even if they abandon it after that, and if you associate it with boredom, it's a wretched experience. Numberjacks is boring storytelling; this is not a good start.

How should one teach mathematics to pre-schoolers? Any thoughts?

*Some Rastafarian people object to having their culture portrayed by a mouse, feeling it's a demeaning animal. Others have said that while the accents aren't very accurate, at least it presents a fairly positive message. The BBC received six complaints from people concerned about racism, and ninety-five complaints from people objecting to the use of Rastafarian slang. This is a truly discouraging ratio.

Ah, radio silence

2011-08-23T15:14:00.003Z

...or, yes, this blog has been uneventful of late. This is largely because, as well as writing, I'm looking after a baby and co-managing another website (this one, in case anyone hasn't seen it). So: anyone got a subject they'd like to ask about? The floor is open...

Anyone in America...

2011-07-27T06:35:00.002Z

...needs to contact this school district.

Here's why: Michelle Bachman's rules have been so viciously supportive of homophobic bullying that there have been nine teen suicides in the past two years. Teachers have been effectively forbidden from stopping physical assaults. It's a disaster.

You need to be a US citizen to fill out this form, so I can't do it. (Tip of the hat to Josh on the Slacktiverse for pointing it out.) Anyone who can, please, please do.

Consensual art

2011-07-08T07:34:00.000Z

In 1974, the artist Marina Abramovic created a performance piece known as Rhythm 0. The piece involved a table, a series of objects - seventy-two in all, including a rose, a feather, grapes, honey, a whip, a scalpel, a gun and a bullet - and her own body.

This is her description of what happened:

I was standing there in the middle of the space with this table with objects. I put the objects on the table very carefully chosen, because the objects was for pleasure, and there was also the objects for pain, and objects that can bring you to death ... In the beginning the public was really very much playing with me; later on became more aggressive. It was six hours of real horror. They would cut my clothes; they would cut me with the knife close to my neck, drink my blood and then put a plaster over the wound; they would carry me around half-naked, put me on the table and stab the knife between my legs into the wood; and even somebody put a bullet in the pistol and put it in my hand ... pressing ... her hand against my hand and seeing if I would resist. But I remember after six hours when the gallery's come and say 'This piece is finished', that I started being by myself and started walking to the audience, you know, naked and with blood and, you know, tears in my eyes, everybody ran away - literally ran out of the door. I remember coming to the hotel that evening, looking [at] myself in the mirror, and seeing [a] really big piece of white hair.

The courage displayed in holding out for six hours in the name of art is astonishing, and the piece itself is fascinating. It seems to occupy a place between performance, meditation and psychological experiment, reminiscent of the Stanford prison experiment: a confrontation with the uncomfortable knowledge that, given the opportunity to hurt another human being, many people will take it. Perhaps out of sadism, but perhaps out of sheer curiosity: when the restrictions and taboos we usually rely on are removed, maybe it takes a certain strength of resolve to resist the temptation to hurt someone, just because you can't quite believe that you can get away with this: testing reality on someone else's body. Out of such curiosity, perhaps, come many atrocities: when the world and its norms upend, people may poke at the sore tooth of disbelief, using weapons and the bodies of helpless people. Likewise, it tells us a great deal about objectification; it would, for instance, be interesting to know how an audience would treat a male artist under the same conditions. The piece itself takes place in the relationship between artist and audience ... and as such, touches upon all sorts of intriguing reflections.

According to the clip I linked, Abramovic designed the piece in response to claims that performance art was masochistic and sensationalist because performers often used their bodies aggressively. Ambramovic, by simply giving the audience a choice of how to behave, relocated that aggression in the audience - but at the same time, looked at from another angle, Rhythm 0 was a profoundly aggressive act, or at least, a profoundly assertive one. In becomimg entirely passive and letting the audience reactions be part of the piece no matter what, Abramovic effectively encompassed and appropriated any possible reaction of the audience. No reaction the audience could give would not serve the interests of the piece. In her refusal to let the audience dictate, in any way, no matter how horrifically they behaved, what she would do on that stage - she had decreed she would be passive for six hours, and that's what she did - she cast the responsibility entirely back on the audience. She made them so responsible that eventually they tortured her and then ran away from her.

The relationship between artist and audience is a fraught one, and there can be an undercurrent of aggression that is, at times, shocking.

I just heard of this piece because my husband was reading a thread about it on reddit. In this thread, a commenter boasted that, were he there, he'd have sexually assaulted her and told her her art was crap, apparently under the impression that this made him clever. Of course, it wouldn't have done: assuming he actually would have done this (and Internet loudmouths are seldom to be trusted), it would merely have formed part of the piece: by her resolute passivity, Abramovic would have been getting him to reveal what kind of a person he was - and indeed, succeeded in doing so even without his presence at the performance. Such invitations do ask us to consider what we would have done.

I honestly don't know how I would have acted had I attended Rhythm 0. Thinking about her 2010 performance The Artist Is Present, in which she sat still at a table and people were free to sit opposite her, my first thought was to sit down, say, 'You may differ from me, but in your position I'd be bored,' and read aloud some poetry to pass the time pleasantly. That is, given the opportunity to mistreat someone, I'd consider myself presented with a challenge: do we only treat each other well because we're forced to by social rules? How do you deal with the knowledge that when the rules aren't enforced, you can actually do anything to anyone? And to my mind, the most assertive response is: I'll treat the person well because I choose to. In so doing, I declare that when I treat people well, it is because I choose and not because I am compelled. It's a kind of positive existentialism: the world may be random and without message, but within it, I choose.

And thinking that, I thought about occasions when I've argued with people, and have reacted by refusing to become rude. Sometimes I've been mad at people and reacted by sympathising with them. There have been times when I've been nice as an act of serious aggression - not to manipulate people, but to draw a boundary around myself: no matter how you aggress on me, you do not get to dictate how I behave. I will set a standard and act by it, and you will not provoke me into falling below it.

There are, in short, ways in which one can choose not to aggress that are combative.

But then there are combative reactions to art that are not very nice. Abstract and conceptual art, for instance, garner a lot of aggression. Some of it is imaginative - flying a burger past David Blaine on a remote-controlled helicopter, for instance, is a stunt in its own right - but some of it is just dumb anger, as with our friend on reddit.

What is it about conceptual art that makes people so angry? I have a suspicion, and it's not to the credit of the angered.

Art always serves a double function: beauty and consumption. Even artists who share their work for free are subject to consumption; art is both expression and product. And in many eras, certainly in Europe, consumption can dominate, for the simple reason that we all have to make a living. This can create a considerable tension.

Sixteenth-century British art, for instance, was largely dependent on patronage. Hence, to support yourself painting, you needed to produce paintings that patrons would buy, which meant painting subjects that patrons wanted. What patrons wanted was portraits. Hence, we have a lot of miniatures from that period. Yet even then, artists were arguing for a status higher than that ofmere commission-takers; Nicholas Hilliard, one of the most successful portraitists, argued in The Art of Limning (circa 1600) that it was 'a kind of gentle painting' - 'gentle', in this context, meaning noble, fit for a gentleman. It's a tension that has never gone away. Does the artist serve at the pleasure of the customer, or does the customer take what the artist chooses to provide? Or both? Or neither?

Art matters to us. Art is our contact with the world through the lens of other minds, but it's also our escape from the world, and it's also part of the face we turn to the world: the art we consume can be a way of displaying ourselves. How we consume art can become a big part of our identities.

Consequently, we don't always want art to throw that responsibility for determining who we are back at us. If art is there to consume, an artist is there to serve it up. And if they don't serve it up the way we like it, some of us react, on the surface, like angry customers who ordered a steak and were served a shoe: this isn't what you're supposed to do! Underneath that customer stance, though, there can be another layer.

From an artist's point of view, you see, there's a nightmare reader: the kind who considers that buying your book makes you their employee. If, having paid their eight quid, they find that you didn't write the kind of book they wanted, or you did and you haven't written another one, or you did but it's the wrong kind, or if you are but you're not doing it fast enough, or even if you express an opinion that they dislike on your own time, some people go beyond disappointment into outrage - and from outrage, into controlling language: the author should be ashamed, they need to grow up, they totally let their readers down. Often these are people who read a lot. For some consumers, the relationship with an artist is like nothing so much as the way an abuser views his partner: so essential to his identity that she has to be controlled with force.

There's the nightmare fan, of course, but there's also the person who gets angry with an artist they've never heard of for producing - or perhaps for getting legitimate attention for producing - art that supports a view of art the person doesn't like. Usually, such a person is angry with an artist for failing to satisfy ideas of art that they've acquired from art that caters to them more.

Now, not every work of art that shocks, annoys or displeases does so because it's bold and innovative. Some stuff is shocking to no purpose, which is crass and shallow, and some just isn't any good. As an undergraduate, I was on the committee of a theatrical society that funded plays, and by the time I graduated, I never wanted to hear the words 'challenge the audience's preconceptions' again. Nobody ever wanted to touch my heart or tickle my funny bone or lift my spirit; it was only my preconceptions they seemed to find so irresistible, and too much of that can be wearing. But the reason it was wearing was not that it's always pretentious to go against what the audience expects; it was simply that the people who talked about challenging my preconceptions never actually did. It was a convention in itself, and hence not very challenging; after a couple of terms, one of my preconceptions was that at least a quarter of the pitches would promise to challenge my preconceptions, and it was indeed so. (It was also a bit insensitive to the likely audience. Most of the people watching student plays in Cambridge would be arts undergraduates, in the middle of getting an extremely demanding education about the history of culture. Their preconceptions about what a play could be were very flexible indeed; promising to challenge them was like promising to shock an experienced social worker. You'd need to come up with something pretty remarkable.) If somebody had really challenged my preconceptions, I would have enjoyed it.

For instance, let's talk about artistically faked violence and aggression. The other day I took my life in my hands and watched the film Martyrs. Now, before I champion the director too loudly I should probably acknowledge that I owe him an apology, because I watched it like a complete coward. Rather than watching it beginning to end in a single sitting as was intended, I skipped around on LoveFilm, watching the ending first to see if I could stand it before risking getting attached to the characters, and then watching the rest in sections. (I have the excuse of a baby for the sections, but there's really nothing to say about watching the ending first except that I was being wet. I was resisting the artist's full creation, and that was my fault.) My white liver aside, I found the film extraordinary and fascinating - horrendous and sickening as well, but ultimately compassionate, intelligent and elegant.

In Martyrs, violence is, to put it mildly, a feature. What's most interesting is the director's perspective:

So we pay to watch films that we already know in advance what it's gonna be and we are not challenged anymore and I think the very reason for the horror film genre's existence is to break some rules ... And it's very sad, in a certain way actually, a lot of actual horror films are absolutely as safe as any family film produced by Hollywood. You know? There is no chance, no breakings.
...The problem is that we have lost something [of] our faith, [our] primitive innocence. Everything in the world has become so self conscious, and it goes with politics, ideology, you know? the lost of illusions. Now, to be cool, is to be cynical. You can't be surprised because you're [a] cool guy. And everybody is always the same, you know it's the 'cool attitude' and cynicism that kills everything because it's the opposite of the faith we need to be told some stories, you know? We have lost the faith in narrators, to the people who [told us] what the world is, to make us believe in other worlds, to [tell us] stories. Now it's the opposite - it's the post-modern world we are living in, and we are very aware of everything. And I hate that. As... I hate that as a director. And I hate that as a member of the audience. Any time I feel like the director wants to be clever, wants to tell me very precisely that he is more intelligent than the film he is doing, you know by pretending being funny, being... I hate that. For me, it's a betrayal. I want to be like a child and I need some primitive feelings facing a work of art. ]

Describing the kind of horror films he was trying to get away from with Martyrs, he comments:

[they're] self-referential. Very aware of where they come from and who they are made for. You know like, you... how do you say that? You do a blink...
[Inteviewer]: "Nudge-nudge, wink-wink"
Pascal Laugier: Absolutely, "I love the same films that you do, guys. We all know where it comes from, isn't it fun?" Some people find it fun, [but] I don't. I know it makes me sound like an asshole - very arrogant, very pretentious - but who cares? I don't. I pay... I go to see movies to be amazed.

Noodling around on rottentomatoes.com to see what the critical response had been*, I came across a negative review of Martyrs that spoke not just of a displeased critic but of genuine artistic enmity. The critic compares Martyrs unfavourably with Hostel on the grounds that Hostel had firsties on the idea of chaining someone up and torturing them, but he also complains with genuine bitterness that:

...unlike "Martyrs", "Hostel" didn't take itself seriously. "Martyrs" is super, super serious. There's not an ounce of humor in this movie, which is probably the worst thing about it ... Over seriousness is the kiss of death for a horror movie, in my opinion.

[Ah nuts, Blogger won't undo the paragraph indent. Sorry.]

The reviewer, in fact, considered it artistically criminal not to assume the "nudge-nudge, wink-wink" attitude.

Now, I'm entirely on Laugier's side; who on earth decreed that a film about torture couldn't take itself seriously, and what on earth was the matter with them? But in a less violent way than Abramovic's experience, we're seeing the same basic reaction: objectification for fun is pleasurable, but turn around and hold the audience responsible and they don't like it. Amuse me, but take yourself too seriously - forget your place and call it a kind of gentle painting instead of a service - and the audience will be antagonised.

There's more than one kind of portraiture, that's the thing. You can paint a picture of a single patron, or you can wink and nudge at the shared assumptions of a community audience. In the former case, you're painting a flattering picture of a face; in the latter, you're painting a flattering picture of a subculture. We're all in this together, goes the latter painting: we all know these are cool things to like, but we're also cool enough that we can laugh because we're actually above it. I won't try to take power over you by making you feel anything too serious; the patron is the one truly in charge.

Abramovic forced her audience to paint a portrait of themselves, and when it was finished, they saw what it was: a weeping, blood-covered woman. And they didn't like it. Nowadays the image of a weeping, blood-covered woman is popular entertainment, but it's 'the kiss of death' to take it seriously.

This is why it's called objectification. Women get it all the time, but artists get it too. In both cases, the message is that you're there to serve at the pleasure of the beholder, and that you're forgetting your place if you don't do it right.

*Extremely divided. About half the reviews were positive, the other half negative. Of the negatives, about half were by critics unsympathetic to the genre who condemned it for being too mindless and visceral; the other half were by critics narrowly focused on the genre who condemned it for being too intellectual and artsy-fartsy. Pah.

Why I'm a Royalist

2011-06-20T06:04:00.000Z

[This is an issue that sometimes comes up when chatting on other blogs, so may be a familiar position to come cyber-friends already. But I thought it'd be useful to put somewhere findable, anyway.]

Royals, eh? Who needs 'em? Bunch of taxpayer-supported parasites. Outdated, and they're no better than anybody else anyway. We should be a republic like everywhere sensible, right?

Well, no. The way I see things, we rather do need the royals.

Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time in the dark era of George W. Bush, my future husband and I travelled round the world. In getting from Sydney to New York, we had to make a stopover in LAX, which is to say, Los Angeles airport.

Now, LAX was a horrible place, a ghastly place. Few airports are comfortable, but even fewer of them are staffed by security bristling with terrifying weapons and showing the kind of don't-even-think-about-it attitude towards paying customers on holiday that you'd normally expect to see from prison guards towards their charges the day after a riot. LAX was one of these unusual places. With a thirteen-hour flight behind us and a seven-hour one before us, and with no more dastardly intentions than to visit my sister and her family and maybe take a turn around Central Park while we were at it, it was genuinely frightening to find ourselves in a place that was working hard to convince us that we were one wrong turning away from a cavity search and a week in jail until someone could get hold of the British Ambassador. For an airport in a democratic nation, it felt strangely like being in a third world dictatorship.

But here's the thing that really clinched it. To enter this world of Dantean customer service, we all had to pass under an archway. At the top of this archway were two framed pictures - tatty ones, looking like they'd been cut from some cheap magazine - of George Bush and Dick Cheney. America mooning the world, was my second thought, but my first, instinctive reaction was the sense, as I said, that this felt like entering a dictatorship. Not just because it was Bush, though obviously that didn't help, but because putting the president up on the wall like an icon you pass under to enter the country is not the usual decorating choice in a democratic country. I'd been to quite a few democratic nations by now, and this was new, and threatening. Elected officials are not usually raised so high.

But, I wondered to myself, would Britain do something like that? I didn't think we'd put any face out so prominently ... but we might put a picture up somewhere in the airport.

The thing is, it wouldn't have been of the Prime Minister. It would have been of the Queen.

And in that moment, I realised I was a royalist.

Here's the problem. Some people have itchy knees; they need to genuflect to something, and if nothing suitable is around, they'll genuflect to something unsuitable. And that can be extremely dangerous.

Authoritarians like symbols; they like people to set above themselves and treat as an incarnation of the country and its values. If nobody else will do, they'll do it with someone who's supposed by their very nature to be first among equals and nothing more. But there is an alternative: have in place a traditional, unquestionably legitimate symbol - who can't do very much damage.

A royal family serves this purpose beautifully. Their whole function is, in a constitutional monarchy, symbolic. The Queen, God bless her, has practically no executive power. She sanctions and certifies various executive ceremonies in a way that confirms their legality, but this is ritual, and if she ever refused, I very much doubt her refusal would carry the day. It might cause a constitutional crisis, but one that would be entirely focused around the question, 'Okay, so how do we overrule the monarch?' The Queen can't propose laws, she can't take sides on them, she can't even vote. Her position, in practice, is that of a servant of the law, not a master or a maker.

So if people turn their icon-making towards her, it can do no harm at all. She represents the nation, but she lacks the authority to steer it in the wrong direction. Worship her all you like; it won't make her any more powerful.

Worship the Prime Minister though ... and now we're in serious trouble. Prime Ministers can steer the nation in the wrong direction. They do it all the time. And while there's often little the public can do to stop them - we wound up in Iraq despite massive protests - you never hear anyone suggesting that we should 'respect the office' of Prime Minister the way you often hear Americans suggesting one should 'respect the office' of President. No one says, 'Well, he is the Prime Minister' in that Mia-Farrow-in-Rosemary's-Baby voice ('Well, he is the Pope...') the way I've heard people say, 'Well, he is the President.' Nobody has very much respect for Prime Ministership; respecting the office is rare enough that there's pretty much no chance it will, in any way, impede people from exercising the good old British tradition of disrespecting the person holding it. We've had charismatic Prime Ministers who did inspire worship, usually to the detriment of the nation (Thatcher comes to mind), but there's no tradition of automatic respect for Prime Ministers. There's much more of a tradition, even among authoritarians, of assuming that the Prime Minister is a crooked bastard.

Which is extremely useful in a democratic nation. In a democracy, leadership is a job, and one that's supposed to place you subordinate to the needs of your citizens. Our Prime Ministers are far from consistent at doing that job well - but at least nobody thinks otherwise. Which limits what a Prime Minister can expect to get away with. Not nearly as much as it should, but a bit, and more than the alternative. People who want someone to worship don't need to aim it at the PM; they have royalty.

Royal families, in short, can act as a kind of siphon for authoritarianism. By existing to serve a symbolic, reverential function, they split reverence and leadership into two separate categories, leaving everyone free to remember that the elected leader may be nothing more than some tosser in a suit who'll get fired if we catch him taking bribes.

I don't reverence royalty, but I value it. Some people want kings. I'd rather they had one, safely contained within constitutional conditions, than that they made one out of a person with the real power to do harm. Because when that happens, we start forgetting what democracy really is.

Tessitura

2011-06-16T07:49:00.002Z

The other day, somebody showed me a bad book*. They thought it would interest me to see how bad it was, so I started the first page not expecting very much in the way of quality. What I encountered, though, was not just shoddy work, but really startling levels of badness: active disasters rather than passive failures. The first sentence got me laughing in astonishment, and it just went on from there. It was really, impressively awful. It was ghastly.

And here's what elevated it to ghastly rather than just mediocre: the writer was trying to be lyrical. I could see what they were aiming for: there were metaphors and images and attempts at implication, all the things you'd find in the work of a poetic stylist. But they just couldn't do it. They didn't have a good enough ear, and kept creating sentences that, by narrowly missing their mark, ended up not just boring but silly, full of unfortunate overtones or bizarre oddities. Rather than sounding poetic, it made the narrative voice sound rather thick, as if the images arose not from a sense of visionary connection but from a certain confusion about what was what. The author was trying to pull off a trick that they didn't have a fine enough sense of language to manage.

Reading this disaster area, a word occurred to me. The word was 'tessitura.'

For those of you who aren't familiar with the term, tessitura, when applied to a singer, means the range where the voice feels most comfortable and sounds the best. Above and below the tessitura are notes the singer can reach, but they're more of a stretch, more inclined to rumble or squeak, less suited to show the singer's voice to its best advantage. It only struck me when reading this bad prose, but it's actually an incredibly useful term to consider in the context of writing.

I used to work in a shop in Covent Garden, a hub of tourism where, partly because the Royal Opera House is situated there, a lot of buskers perform their sets in the street. Tourists think it must be nice to be serenaded while you work, but the workers quickly get sick of it, because you hear the same bloody things over and over again. Singers perform several sets a day but have only a single back-up tape to accompany them, so it's the same set, the same songs in the same order, and to make it worse, many of them choose the same songs as each other. Most of them are performing light classics, the kind of thing that fit in with the operatic background but don't put too much strain on an amateur voice, and that are, for bonus points, recognisable to tourists who may tip more if they hear something familiar. There are only so many arias that fit the bill. Extracts from Carmen featured heavily, but the one that everybody, everybody, everybody seemed unable to resist (or so it felt) was 'Summertime - a very nice song that I never, ever want to hear again.

And there was one woman who sang it in particular. If you're reading this, Ms Singer, I'm sorry, but every time I heard your voice, I fantasised about throwing water balloons at you.

It was the rendition of 'Summertime' that did it. Near the end, she'd take a vocal swoop up a sudden octave, showcasing a soprano ability that - I'm sorry - she really didn't have. She could get up to the note, just about, but it a way that sounded far more shrieking than soaring, and wasn't always in tune either. It was within her range, but it was outside her tessitura. The song didn't call for it; it was her own addition - but she would have sounded much better if she hadn't taken that unnecessary leap.

There are writers who are not particularly elaborate stylists. Some people just write plain, lucid, sturdy prose that calls little attention to itself either through memorable beauty or noticeable missteps and just allows the reader to concentrate on the story. Nothing wrong with that; not a thing. Good plain prose is like good plain cooking: more skilled than it looks and very satisfying to curl up with on a cold evening.

A writer of that kind is staying within their tessitura. They're not trying to jump the octave: they're sticking to what they can do and doing it well. On the other hand, there's also such a thing as a writer with a high tessitura, someone who works best with a poetic style and suffers if they try to render it plainer. I've seen someone with an intensely lyrical writing style take the advice of people who doubted she could sustain it and end up wasting a lot of time trying to flatten out her beauties. She didn't produce good plain prose: she produced shackled poetic prose, and what she needed to do was go back to her tessitura and write more poetry. A coloratura doesn't do well trying to be a mezzo. If your tessitura is for highly elaborate writing, it's just as bad an idea to try to be plain as it is for a plain writer to try to be elaborate.

I can't say for sure; my tessitura tends towards the rhythmical and the imageful, so I can't really write about good plain writing from the inside. But what I am sure of that you shouldn't try to strain for poetry. If a comparison occurs to you, by all means put it in, but effortful images show. You wind up less tessitura than Tessie Tura from Gypsy, struggling to impose 'finesse' on a bump-and-grind act and singing about how you gotta get a gimmick.

We speak of writers having 'voices', particularly of them finding their voices. I've always found the former to be true but the latter to be alienating: it implies your voice is something you have to go looking for, an external, disconnecting process. If one hasn't found one's voice, how can one use it? But it's only through using our voice that we find out how to use it best. I think instead it makes sense to say that one needs to feel out one's tessitura: to start speaking or singing until you settle on what's most comfortable - because it's almost certainly in the comfortable range where it'll sound best.

*No, I'm not going to say what the book was. I'll review works of art or analyse their implications critically, but with really bad books there's not much to do except take cheap laughs at their expense, and that's neither nice nor professional. It was just a bad book.

Antlers

2011-06-09T07:17:00.001Z

When I was nine, a fashion for scary stories went round the school. They were what I'd probably call 'campfire stories' now - and indeed, they whispered around the coach and the dorms on school trips - but we told them everywhere. We passed them on and listened with fascination, and anyone who had a new one was guaranteed attention.

The Blue Nun. The Blue Doll. The Golden Leg. These haunting little sketches were, literally, colourful. But here's one I remember particularly clearly, for reasons that will become the burden of my song: The Green Room.

Late at night, a man arrived at a guest house. Sitting on the steps was an old woman, who looked up at him.

Don't sleep in the Green Room, she said.

But arriving at the desk, he found himself informed by the landlord that all the rooms except one were occupied. The Green Room, though, was free, and he could be checked in straight away.

It was late and dark, and the man didn't want to go back out into the night, so he accepted the landlord's offer and was duly shown upstairs. The Green Room was an old-fashioned little nook, with a curious decoration in it: a large stuffed stag, its antlers tethered to a heavy concrete block.

The man got into the bed and fell asleep. At midnight, though, he woke.

At first he thought he was dreaming, or that it was an odd effect of the light: the stag's legs seemed to be missing. But as he watched, its back disappeared.

Then its front legs.

Then its head, until only the antlers remained.

The man leaped out of bed in panic - just as the antlers disappeared, and the concrete block fell on his pillow right where his head had just been!

In the morning he went out onto the front steps. The old woman turned and looked up at him.

You have survived, she said. You were more fortunate than I. And she disappeared.

I loved those spooky stories. My friend told this one over lunch, and we all listened, rapt ... and in the chilled silence that followed, I said:

'Why did the landlord keep renting the room out?'

Not unnaturally, this irritated the teller no end: 'You're so logical!' she cried in annoyance. It was something of an insult: you can't call your friends boring or pedantic when you're a nine-year-old girl, but that was clearly the message. How unimaginative, to bring the story down to earth like that!

Except I grew up to be a writer of imaginative literature. And I still love ghost stories. Looking back, I think it was one of my first encounters with the shape in the body.

I still love The Green Room, actually. I can see it in my mind: the damp, countrified room with cold blankets on the bed, unwarmed by central heating; the slightly dusty stag; that odd detail about the block (a concrete one? Bleak urban concrete tethered to a stuffed woodland deer? It's a decor choice as jarringly inappropriate as the mixture of human bones and chicken feathers in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre); the numinous symbolism of it being the antlers that disappear last. I can still hear the drone of the old woman, see her faded crochet shawl fluttering in the breeze. And actually it's an easy fix: all one has to do is make the landlord a bit suspicious - or if one wants to move from the realm of fairy tale to ghost story, call the man a rich American traveller and comment that the guest house seems dilapidated but the landlord's expensively dressed. That's the kind of thing one does with campfire stories anyway: one adapts them as one passes them on. I already adapted The Green Room in that presentation: the old woman disappearing at the end was my invention. (As my friend told it, I think, she just explained that the old woman had also died there, and I thought I'd sharpen it up a bit.)

I love campfire stories. (If anyone's got some, I'd love to hear them.) But holes in them bothered me from an early age. It was the same itch that bothered me when we sang, 'But little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes' in 'Away in a Manger': the itch of an imagination that sensed that sentences and stories had natural shapes, and felt out of kilter when the shape was wrong. It could have legs and tail and back and head, but if the antlers were missing - if something was askew in it - it'd fall.

The fantasy writer Samuel R. Delany, according to my husband, once argued that one couldn't really teach writing, because it depended on having a template, a blueprint, a shape in one's body that one either had or didn't. Whether or not that shape is something some people have and some lack, or whether everyone has them and some people have better access to them than others, I couldn't say. But the shape in your body seems exactly right.

A friend of mine once told me about neurolinguistic programming, saying that people tend to think in, and hence respond better to, visual, auditory or kinesthetic terms. I don't know quite what I think about that in general, but I tried applying it to myself and ran into a thicket. I have a verbal brain, very much so. My visual memory is very poor, my sense of pitch only adequate, but words are smooth and easy for me and always have been. But while you can say 'I see' to someone visual or 'I hear where you're coming from' to someone auditory or 'I think I can grasp that' to someone kinesthetic, what do you say to a verbal person? And how do I describe verbal issues in words?

The answer seems to be kinesthetic: the shape in the body. When I describe how a story works to myself, it tends to be in physical terms: a net that needs more strings in its underpinning, a sculpture with a smooth curve to it, a sentence that goes either ding or clunk when tapped, a sentence I weigh in my hand for balance like a knifethrower before the throw. To grasp how the words are working, I can't describe it in words. I can't, to use a term from primary-school mathematics, show my working out: I can only show the result. The best I can do is to ask questions: why did the landlord keep renting the room?

I love stories where not everything needs to be explained. The fact that the antlers disappear last and hold up the whole weight is good: that piece of inexplicability hums, like the resonance within the hollow body of a violin. Stories need gaps; you can't drum on a piece of concrete. There are resonant gaps and weakening gaps, though; you don't pour concrete in, but you add another wire to lash this point to that.

Ach, I can't explain it. I never could. I just want to know: when the landlord said there was only one room left, what was the look on his face when he said it?

Mikalogue of romance

2011-06-01T05:53:00.007Z

Ginger: Come into the garden, Mika...

Mika: Oi! Who you?

Ginger: From the fencetops I sing my love. Come and play wif me.

Mika: OI! You in Mika's garden! Pissoff!

Ginger: Mika be mine, come play wif me, You are all a kitty could dream, Your fur is as golden as chicken skin, Your fur is as white as cream...

Mika: PISSOFF!!! This is Mika's garden!

Ginger: Mika my love?

Mika: Gonna punch you, tresspasser!

Ginger: Let me stare into your tuna-gold eyes...

Mika: Yeah, gonna stare you down, chump.

Ginger: Such is the beauty, I sigh among the grass.

Mika: PISSOFFFFFF!

Ginger: Agh!

Mika: And STAY out!

Ginger: The course of true love never did run unbashed. I shall return, beloved...

Mikalogue: AV referendum

2011-05-01T10:32:00.001Z

I have been asked what Mika thinks of the upcoming referendum. Well, never let it be said that I don't take my readers seriously, so I went and asked her.

Kit: Mika darling, what do you think of the AV referendum?

Mika: Aaaagh! No supper! Shed fur!

Kit: Oh dear, are you stressed?

Mika: Yeeess!

Kit: Poor pet. Is it because there's a new baby in the house? That's what the vet said.

Mika: You is shallow housewife. Look beyond unsmelling nose - we have Tory government! Cuts NHS! Sells forest! Raises tuition fees and diverts Mika's food money into baby college fund! Pollutes moouuusiiiiieeess!!!

Kit: You're worried about the government?

Mika: YES! And Mika cannot vote for new system!

Kit: Do you understand all those statistics, baby?

Mika: No. Not enough clawses to count on. Mika the Mighty's claws are for mousies, not for statistics!

Kit: Then why do you want to vote?

Mika: Coz people says AV means less Tory victories. Bulldog party! Doesn't care about the poor party! And Mika has no money! Poor Mika. Tories scary. Anything that gets less Tory victories a good thing!

Kit: ... You know, I can see your point.

Mika: Votes for AV or bites you.

Unbearable art

2011-04-04T10:24:00.002Z

Trigger warnings: violence, sexual violence, torture, religious abuse, child abuse, executions. If you're feeling fragile, don't click on the links. Seriously.

Last week, the film critic Mark Kermode posted a short piece recommending, and celebrating the brief screening of, the Ken Russell film The Devils. Released in 1971 and surrounded by a maelstrom of controversy ever since, The Devils remains unavailable on DVD and very hard to see. The new screening is, apparently, only the second time it's been shown uncut.

I first saw The Devils, or part of it, in my teens, as part of a banned films season on Channel Four; later, another banned films season allowed me to see it all the way through in my twenties. I say 'allowed', but I didn't entirely take advantage of the opportunity. I have it on VHS somewhere around the house, but I never watched the ending all the way through. I couldn't. I saw some of it in my teens, and I still haven't recovered. I don't think you're supposed to.

The plot, for those new to the film, is this: in seventeenth-century France, a priest named Grandier opposes the machinations of Cardinal Richelieu and King Louis XIII in defence of his town of Loudun. Grandier is a noted philanderer and sinner, the subject of fevered imaginings from the abbess of the local convent, a place of repression and frustration where fantasies of the body of Christ have taken on a masochistic sensuality. Seeing the advantage in manipulating these nuns, Grandier's enemies stage 'exorcisms' in which the nuns, in a burst of pent-up sexuality and self-protection (threatened as they are with death if they don't comply) stage grotesque and blasphemous contortions to accuse Grandier of possessing them. Grandier refuses to confess and speaks out against the corruption; for this, he is arrested, tortured - and oh my goodness, he is tortured - and burned at the stake, screaming of the destruction of freedom as his face bubbles and blisters in the flames.

It is, in short, an extreme film. It makes The Passion of the Christ look tame.

That kind of comparison is often used by critics; it's an easy way to make a point, and sometimes a cheap one. But I use the comparison advisedly, because if one compares the two films, it showcases The Devils in an interesting way. Both are films of martyrdom and torture. Both can be read as serious religious reflections or as wanton orgies of grotesquerie. Both inspire passionate responses, some positive, some negative. Yet one is hugely successful and considered practically a religious text; the other is best described by that flexible label, 'controversial' - and practically unfindable.

And I think it's the tameness - not just in the sense of moderation, but in the sense of control, domestication, safety - that makes the difference.

The message of The Passion of the Christ is very simple: 'Christ died for your sins.' The controversy around it arises from other apparent messages, such as 'And it was largely the fault of the Jews.' Given the way Mel Gibson talks when drunk, it's not unreasonable to conclude that The Passion of the Christ did indeed blame the Jews, though I would argue that the film's antagonism is not confined to the Jews: it shows a clear line of distinction between those who follow Christ and those who don't, and those who don't are all evil or grotesque one way or another. It's prejudiced against Jews in particular, but it's prejudiced against any non-Christian; Jews are just the ultimate non-Christians in its cosmology. The Devils is more complex in its message; it has no clear opinion as to metaphysics, but shows a desperate interest in how religion can be intertwined and corrupted by politics, sexual repression and personal advantage. It doesn't necessarily declare religion itself bad, but it's about bad expressions of religion; if you don't like hearing religion criticised, that's going to be uncomfortable.

When it comes to violence, though, I think there are two main reasons why The Passion of the Christ is safer. The first is simply an issue of realism. Christ, as played by Jim Caviezel, is hit with a variety of nasty objects and sheds copious blood, but the performance itself is moderate. Caviezel blinks, flinches, gasps and groans, but his expressions of pain are fairly limited. Grandier, as played by Oliver Reed, has his tongue stabbed, his legs crushed ... and he screams. He howls, wails, cries out in utterly convincing agony - and it's convincing because it's undignified. There's nothing decorous about it: it's just horrific. Surrounded by a capering crowd and half-drowned by wild, clanging music - you can see a bit of it here, if you like, though be warned it's deeply upsetting - the death of Grandier is profoundly physical in a way that the death of Gibson's Christ, for all its special effects, is not.

The other is at least as important, and explains a lot about why one film is so much more disturbing than the other. The Passion of the Christ is a curiously vindictive film: for all its supposed realism, it adds punishments to sinners not featured in the Bible: a gang of deformed children pursuing Judas, a crow pecking the eyes of the thief who mocked Christ. Sinful behaviour is punished swiftly and cruelly; meanwhile, the Devil stalks through the crowd, watching, only to scream in defeat at the end.

God and the Devil are both, we can therefore assume, keeping an eye on things. Events may be unpleasant, but they aren't unsupervised. Christians may already know that things will work out okay in the end, that being a notable element of Christian theology, but Gibson is at pains (or rather, inflicts pains on his characters) to remind viewers of this every so often, just in case they forget. This isn't a thriller, and suspense is out of the question: the audience is not to suffer the despair and doubt we can assume the Virgin and disciples felt. Christ doesn't scream, and God isn't a hands-off manager. It may look messy, but everything's under control.

Grandier's death is protracted, and it's also chaotic. Surrounded by his torturers, then crawling on broken legs through a Bacchanalian crowd, he is absolutely going to die, and between now and his death there's going to be nothing but hideous pain and merciless revilement. The revelling crowd and lonely death are clearly Christ-like in their overtones, but Grandier will not rise. Perhaps he'll go to heaven, perhaps there is no God: the film doesn't make it clear. In this world, he is doomed: irrevocably, viciously, hopelessly doomed. There is nothing to console him, and therefore, nothing to console us.

The Passion of the Christ, in short, is heavy-handed in its insistence that God is never out of control, and as a result, for all its gore it cushions the audience in a way that The Devils doesn't. Unsympathetic reviewers complain that The Passion of the Christ actually becomes dull after a while, and I think the heavy-handedness is the reason: by keeping such an invasive control over the story, Gibson actually removes tension and limits the viewer's involvement. Doubt is forbidden, and without it, emotions are constrained. The Devils, on the other hand, gives us the option - the sin - of genuine despair. While it's actually a film that roundly condemns blasphemy and honours true faith, it doesn't just depict sin: it offers the viewer the chance to feel it as well. It's prepared to be that dangerous.

Watching The Passion of the Christ, I was surprised at the main emotion it provoked in me. Perhaps it's not my place, but what I mostly felt was towards Mel Gibson, and what I mostly felt was spiritual pity. In a film that made a great issue of its authenticity and tried to preach faith, it seemed he'd been unable to contain and separate his own failings, or at least the failings you might infer from his other films: love of violence for its own sake, love of vengeance, fear of doubt. It struck me as an object lesson in how easy it is to let your beliefs become a vehicle for your vices, and hence in a roundabout way did actually fill me with the desire to become a better person, not because of Christ's sacrifice but because I saw how easy it was to become self-justifying.

The Devils is not so easy a film to distance oneself from. There are moral criticisms you can make of it: its gender portrayals tend to cast women as flesh and men as mind, and being a film of staggering extremes, the capering mindlessness of the nuns and the anguished physicality of the abbess (an exceptionally intense performance from Vanessa Redgrave) are graphic indeed. It tends to play to stereotypes of camp versus traditional masculinity, a subject I've discussed before. I would not say that it's a film that aims to denigrate, but it's the film of a white, heterosexual man of his time that has very few scruples about how it shocks.

And my goodness, it shocks. The artistic direction of the film is extraordinary: Derek Jarman's visual designs, created, said Russell, to show how the citizens of Loudun, like people everywhere, considered themselves modern, are stark, stylised, geometric and elegant in their bleakness, while Peter Maxwell Davis's music, described by a critic I can't recall the name of as sounding as if it's played in a public toilet, echoes with wheeling, harsh surrealism throughout. Speaking just as an individual viewer, it's a film I've loved, a film I've hated, a film I've admired and a film I've been very angry with - but it's a film I've never, ever forgotten.

The fact that it's been unavailable so long, in short, is ridiculous; it's not a nice film at all, but in its way it's a horrible masterpiece. Listening to Mark Kermode speak of it, though, another defence of it occurs to me. Kermode is well known for defending The Exorcist as the best film of all time - a view that, while I enjoy Kermode's reviews and don't question his right to have personal favourites, I find hard to swallow, not just because while The Exorcist is a perfectly good horror movie I wouldn't call it all that incredible, but because it's a darkly dishonest view of exorcism itself, and a pernicious one at that.

I've talked about this previously, but there's a problem with films about demonic possession. People still 'exorcise' people, often children ... which means, in extreme situations, that mentally ill children are abused by priests who consider themselves heroes. It's a horrendous situation, and one that too many films treat as an opportunity for thrills and spills, validating the abuse and portraying the mistreatment of children as noble. Films about possession and exorcism tend to go in that direction, in fact, because it's difficult to be shocking if you don't. The German film Requiem is a tasteful portrayal of the life of Annaliese Michel, a girl who died of too many 'exorcisms', but as its title suggests, it's not going for your throat, but plucking gently at your heart.

Russell, on the other hand, absolutely goes for your throat. He portrays horror, and far more horrifically than The Exorcist or its imitators. Unusually, though, he does not confirm the possession. Like Arthur Miller in The Crucible, he uses an historical 'possession' to inveigh against malevolent authority; like Miller, Russell is clear that the horror was not the demons but the demonologists. As such, The Devils - while definitely an arthouse film rather than a mass-market horror movie - is an important counterweight to all the cinematic falsehoods out there that present spiritual abuse as a grand struggle against evil.

If you get a chance to see The Devils - but no, I can't recommend it unreservedly. Don't see it if you have any traumas to trigger. But if you're feeling robust, it's a truly unusual and remarkable film, a cinematic assault you'll undoubtedly be more experienced, if not necessarily happier, for seeing.

Mumview: The Eagle

2011-03-25T16:09:00.008Z

Brief overview

Rosemary Sutcliffe's The Eagle of the Ninth on the big screen. In 120 AD, the Ninth Cohort of the Roman legion disappears, totem eagle and all, in northern Britain. Twenty years later Marcus Flavius Aquila (Channing Tatum), son of the Ninth's lost and disgraced leader, returns to Britain to redeem his family's honour, accompanied only by Esca (Jamie Bell), British slave, son of a Brigantic chief and not entirely happy about being duty bound to serve a man whose nation killed his family and stole their lands. Sword fights ensue.

Does it work the way it should?

There are two basic ways to make a movie with ancient Romans in it. One is to take the grand myth and use it to tell stories that reflect contemporary ideas of heroism without much regard to cultural differences; the other is to take an interest in the Romans as a people with their own eccentric ethos and film them as foreigners. The latter, combined with plenty of sex and violence, made the HBO-BBC series Rome a fun watch, but The Eagle decides to take the former route: this is a story of derring-do in a setting that allows for big misty vistas and people talking about honour with a straight face.

Derring-do is fine, but you need to care about the characters and action, and The Eagle is rather thin on characterisation. Bell has a strong screen presence and can turn a tense silence or a meaningful glance with the best of them, but the script gives very little room for his character to develop. His set-up gives him potentially complex motivations, and there are moments when we're probably supposed to wonder whether he's doing something for real or faking it, but there just isn't the story space to let it breathe, which is rather a waste of a good actor.

Meanwhile, Tatum is ... well, he's okay, I guess, but he's actually difficult to review because his performance was so bland that it's hard to think of anything clever to say about it. Competent but unmemorable is about all there is to it, and this is a problem, because with the character of Esca so poorly fleshed by the script, and the bulk of the action revolving around those two characters wandering from incident to incident in a landscape full of generic people that they either have brief information exchanges with or stick swords into, we're left with a film that seems to find its natural space in the empty skies and unpeopled hills of Scotland, eventless and blank. As a film of adventure, honour and all those things that need cinematic excitement to make them work, there just isn't much there: it's two men doing stuff, but without enough plot, characterisation or chemistry between the two leads to give us much to get worked up about. I'm writing this review a few hours after seeing it, and already the two hours' worth of film has condensed to about half an hour's worth of things actually happening in my memory.

Which leaves us with what the film thinks it's trying to say - and it's here that this review moves beyond mild disconnection to genuine annoyance, because this is one of those films that has delusions of balance.

The casting gives us Americans as Romans and Brits as Britons. Well and good; the Romans were European so there would be a certain logic in giving them European accents, but America is the closest the contemporary world has to the Roman Empire, so there's a certain fit there. It may be that this casting was only done because when making films for an American audience, Hollywood tends to assume that only Americans are real people the viewers can be expected to care about ... but it creates an odd situation.

The Romans have invaded this country, taken land, put down uprisings with brutality, concerned with their honour and pride but not at all with the mysterious savages who occupy it. Sound familiar?

This could work, and for the first part of the film it looks as if it might. Esca points out that Rome hasn't exactly been good news for the people of Britain; there are hints that Marcus may have to learn that invading other people's countries isn't the best way to make friends and influence people. Yet the promise of complexity is never fulfilled: instead, we return to good old Roman values, the anti-Roman Britons obligingly show themselves to be subhuman barbarians with a last-minute atrocity, and it's all hooray for Roman courage and any Britons good enough to honour it. Those Arabs - oops, excuse me, Britons - are just weird people you don't have to care about unless they're pro-Amer - oops, sympathetic to Rome, or at least our favourite Romans. Ave atque vale to balance, now let's all salute.

So really, this film can fuck right off.

Ready for this?

The Eagle of the Ninth is not one of the Sutcliffe books I managed to finish in childhood (Warrior Scarlet is the one I remember best), but I do remember her interest in creating or inventing period detail, her willingness to be bleak and dramatic at once. This is a disappointing film for Sutcliffe readers. But it's a disappointing film for fans of Gladiator too: the plot is less lumpy, but the action far less exciting - and it certainly lacks the gleeful cynicism of Rome. Or, indeed, the classic grandeur of Spartacus. There have been good films set in the Roman Empire, but they need some kind of coherence, and The Eagle, while visually handsome, is just too short on detail to measure up. Roman films need a sense of richness, and The Eagle, while taking plenty of time to tell its story, has too little to say.

Life among the groundlings

The auditorium was fairly empty, and a biggish proportion of my time was taken up with a cheering game of Catch the Muslin, so things were peaceful.

Having a baby now old enough to think 'Why is that man hitting that other man?', I decided to play Censoring Mother and screen my child's eyes from the violent scenes. This called to my attention the fact that there were really quite a lot of violent scenes - but the thing was, they were all basically the same scene.

Kevin MacDonald's direction isn't gratuitously bloody. Rather than graphic detail, his fight scenes depend on speed and sound: boney crunches and fast-swinging frames that convey the disorientation and confusion of battle. It's a discreet way of doing it, especially considering how very often things end in a scrap, but with fight after fight done in the same glancing way, the action becomes repetitive rather than dramatic. It may indeed be hard to keep track of a battle when you're in it, but it becomes doubtful film-making after a while. Ancient Rome was not a squeamish culture, and most successful screen portrayals of it tend to embrace the hearty, heartless pleasure we imagine the average Roman took in seeing the blood splash. The Eagle is no gladiator display, though: it feels like a film that doesn't like all this violence it's gotten stuck having to show. It likes the lovely Scottish glens and trickling streams and rainy air; it likes the huddled physicality of warriors under canvas; it likes the moments of peace and community - the tasteful stuff. The result is that visually it's more on the horrors-of-war side, a film whose images tend to sympathise with the idea that having one's country invaded is a sad thing. The film's triumphal conclusion sits very oddly with its melancholic visuals.

The mothers and children in the audience all had an affectionate and playful morning. Up on the screen, though, the most dramatic war was between the direction and the script, and within the script itself as it swung from ambiguity to chest-thumping. I fear the audience was the casualty.

So, any good?

Bah.

Hate crime

2011-03-07T19:24:00.004Z

Okay, I've been quiet for a while. This is largely because I've been too lowered by birth trauma and busy looking after my lovely son to think of anything much to say - I'll try to talk more about that at some later date, perhaps - but in the meantime.

Consider this. (Be advised, it involves a photograph of a man's face with injuries.)

Usama Alshaibi is the brother of a friend of a cyber-friend of mine, in one of those six-degrees connections. The other day he went to a party, and four men beat him so badly he wound up in hospital. Reason? His name was Usama.

His family are asking for help with his legal and medical bills (he's in America, so those will be steep). Anyone who can, please consider supporting him.

Mumview: Never Let Me Go

2011-02-17T20:29:00.000Z

Brief summary

Okay. I'm going to break with reviewing manners and say what the 'secret' is. I did that once before because I thought the movie deserved to be spoiled, but that's not the case here: this is a remarkable film that I think I'll never forget. It's simply that the 'secret' of the story is not the secret of this film's power. There's really no point keeping it hidden, so I'm just going to talk about it so I can talk about it properly.

Okay, you were warned.

*looks around*

Are they gone? Okay, here I go.

In an alternative present, a 'medical breakthrough' has been found that massively increases lifespans - for most people. For the 'donor children' of Hailsham and other institutions like it, life will end in their twenties when they 'complete' after their first, or second, or third, or fourth organ donation. We follow the story of Kathy H., her lost love Tommy and Ruth, the girl who wins him away from Kathy for a time as they live out their brief span - before the donations begin...

Does it work the way it should?

Compelled organ donation is a small but definite subclass of story. (One that my current novel treats of, in fact, and which I shall hopefully finish once I'm getting more sleep: writing a novel is, it turns out, a massive feat of memory, and one that right now I don't quite think I have enough mental RAM for.) On one level it's very simple: it's a story of slavery, of utter disempowerment, and one can go the Michael Bay route and tell a simple yarn of rebellion. Apparently some critics have been irritated by the lack of rebelliousness our fragile heroes show - but frankly I'm startled they'd miss the point that badly.

We live in a disempowered world, a world ruled by commerce and corporations, where serfdom takes many forms. Given a big enough predicament, a faceless and constant enough oppression, and we often do nothing more than try to enjoy what drops of pleasure we can catch out of life while we still have it. In an early scene, the children at Hailsham school are wild with excitement to be delivered a 'bumper crop' of goods to buy, goods that we the audience can see is a collection of worthless, broken junk, the detritus that nobody else wants becoming their festival. That's the film. Never Let Me Go is a reflection on mortality, not an adventure story, and the characters' docility - a passive acceptance of their fate combined with an ever-present hope that they might be able to postpone the inevitable just a little longer - is born less of weakness than of a lifelong despair so deep they can barely see it. The performances from Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and an unusually unHollywoodish turn from Keira Knightley are all delicate and strong, conveying a perfect mix of unspoiled, innocent hope and helpless resignation.

The visuals are almost another character in their own right, and add to the film immeasurably. It's full of beauty: the beauty of the world, and particularly the beauty of England - the real England, or at least the real rural England of rain-soft skies and damp wellingtons and knitted hats and green, tree-fringed fields. It's a world that exists beyond the characters, that contains them but dwarfs them, but is so full of beauty that it's anguishingly clear why it would be so hard to leave it.

Naturalism is a constant companion, but at the same time, we see the world only as a collection of places: society is absent from this story, present only in the heavy hand it lays upon the children's necks. Just occasionally we glimpse it through the weird, upside-down view 'ordinary' people take of the donor children, so normal to themselves, so alien to others, but for the most part, the world is an unmediated place, strangely vivid in its emptiness, beyond anyone's reach.

Ready for this?

I haven't read Ishiguro's original novel so I can't comment on how good an adaptation it is, but on its own merits, it's a film full of quiet power. I went in carefully avoiding the spoilers, but in fact there's no particular reason to, as all the revelations were pretty guessable from the outset - but the important thing is that this is a film where guessing the revelations doesn't matter. From corner to corner, the screen is filled with inevitability: it's all about knowing what's coming and being unable to prevent it.

Life among the groundlings

The babies were not the only ones crying by the end.

It's a bleak story by any standards, but there's something particularly tragic about it from my new perspective: this is a story of uncherished children, children that are not loved, children that are not protected. They can love each other, and dream of their love having the power to protect each other at least a little bit, but the donor children are utter orphans, devoid even of normal parents, never mind a society.

So, any good?

Oh my goodness yes. This is a short review, partly because there's a limit to how much I can discuss it but largely because I feel a bit speechless. This is a painful film but nonetheless a life-affirming one, haunting and elegiac and beautiful.

Mumview: Brighton Rock

2011-02-04T19:35:00.002Z

Short summary

Well, you know the story, right? Graham Greene wrote it in 1938, John Boulting directed it in 1947. Young Pinkie Brown is trying to take over his Brighton gang, a naive young waitress is the only witness who could get them done for murder, so he courts and marries her. Is he going to kill her? And does God hate us all?

Does it work the way it should?

Remakes are the bane of Hollywood. They have enough brand recognition that they make their money back - and since I went to Brighton Rock I have limited carping rights on this one - but there's no law that says a remake has to be bad, and this one had some pretty classic material to work with.

What would a remake of an adaptation of a book have to do to be worth the celluloid? Fundamentally it would have to give us a take on the book that the previous film missed. Now, the original movie didn't miss out on strong performances, striking cinematography, or suspenseful drama, so the new film was always up against stiff competition. Director Rowan Joffe moves the action from the 30s to the 60s to give 'a more modern feel', according to the note at the end of the current printing of the novel, though why a modern feel is necessary in a period piece is an open question. In practice this means radio announcements talking about violent youth and staged battles between mods and rockers, but the theme of youth violence doesn't really take. Partly this is because Sam Riley as Pinkie doesn't look like the seventeen-year-old he supposedly is. Partly it's because youth violence involves youth in groups rather than a single boy trying to cut his way through a man's world: Pinkie is isolated from his own generation, so why should its antics throw any kind of perspective on him, or his on it? But partly it's because Pinkie already has a theme, and it's not youthful insurrection: it's sin. That's the entire weight of the book, what lifts it above the level of its pulp-thriller plot: Greene's distinctively depressive, sour-potatoes Catholicism, with its dark God and gristly physicality and bleak, conscience-twisting doom. Pinkie has a young man's fanaticism and sexual awkwardness, but he's no voice of a generation, and while a film doesn't have to reproduce a book exactly, Pinkie's themes are inextricably woven into the plot. He can hardly speak for his generation if he never meets it, and come to that, if his whole generation is busy fighting, the gang's panic about having killed someone looks rather mealy-mouthed and moderate, which is hardly the way to make a thriller thrilling.

If this was the way the film wanted to go, changes could have been made, but traces of the Catholicism remain. They just come up in conversation occasionally and then wander away again. Where the original Pinkie is a faith-twisted ruin, sexually revolted and sin-obsessed and stuck in marriage with a girl who disgusts him with the destruction of her soul his only consolation, and the original Rose is a drab picture of 'hopeless resentment', a downtrodden housewife before her time, what this film version chooses to imply, and eventually makes explicit, is that this Pinkie actually does have feelings for Rose. Mixed feelings, yes, but more a fragile, unacknowledged love than a cold, manipulative hatred; we finally hear his friend tell Ida, the avenging angel of the story who pursues justice against the murderous Pinkie throughout, that Pinkie was 'sweet on [Rose]' until Ida's 'meddling' panicked him into deciding to kill her instead. (Nice to know it's always the woman's fault; Pinkie would probably approve.) This is a story of doomed love rather than doom.

This is the key to what's new about this adaptation: it is, as Pinkie would say, 'soft'. It can't bear the idea of Pinkie viciously preying upon an innocent girl's soul, so it softens his feelings towards her. In doing this, it goes right in the opposite direction from the one change to the original movie that would have been genuinely refreshing: it refuses to keep Greene's 'worst horror of all' ending.

At the end of the novel poor Rose walks off to find a record player to play what she thinks will be Pinkie's wedding-day message of love and we know will say, 'God damn you, you little bitch, why can't you go back home for ever and leave me be?' The original film couldn't bear this, and substituted a device that pulled punches but at least had the merit of being ingenious: Pinkie records a message saying that he knows she wants to hear 'I love you' but actually he hates her, but when Rose plays the record, it's gotten scratched, and jumps the needle over and over: 'I love you ... I love you ... I love you...' Since we all like to think we're tougher than our ancestors, a really modern remake would have stuck to Graham's horrible conclusion, but in fact the film simply pinches its predecessor's soft end and leaves us with the same stuck record - which can't even get marks for ingenuity this time.

What's different, though, is the emphasis. The original film had no problem acknowledging religion and damnation as major themes, but they're mere background detail here. The original Rose is told to consider 'the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God', and the damaged record is a miracle to protect her from the sin of despair, perhaps, a false belief that Pinkie felt love so that Rose can hold on to her faith in human goodness. God really doesn't get much conversation in this version, though; Rose has a brief conversation about 'miracles', and when the record skips the camera pans up to look at a cross on the wall. A miracle! But why, exactly? Does God think it's okay to protect a murderer as long as you're in love with him?

Maybe God doesn't, but God isn't, to use a Catholic phrase, a real presence in this film. When Boulting's camera moves to the crucifix, it's almost as if God is saying 'I love you' to Rose, but it doesn't work that way in Joffe's version because God interests it less than tragic love. Greene's God is not love, but in this film, love is God.

Ready for this?

Okay, so I'm sounding like an inflexible purist. Yes, I've read the book and seen the original movie, so I went in with a lot of expectations. Actually, though, it was the trailer that decided me: it was handsome-looking and clearly suggested that they might be going for a tragic-love angle rather than the original sin fest, as it were. And why not? A tragic love story can be a marvellous thing.

But considering the great emphasis on passion and drama, the film is curiously unmoving; I found myself disappointed in expectations that were based on shots from the movie itself rather than just the book and previous film. It's hard to identify a single reason for this, but I don't think it can be entirely attributed to the circumstances under which I viewed it...

Life among the groundlings

I have lately discovered the second most important possession a new mother can have. The most important is a collection of no fewer than three hundred and twenty-seven muslins and preferably more, but the second most important is an inflatable pillow that can be retrieved from the nappy bag when you have to nurse on the go. Newly equipped, my young companion and I had our most peaceful viewing experience so far; however, others were not so tranquil and there was fairly constant wailing from several directions.

This meant I missed certain lines of dialogue, but the really notable thing was that I kept reflecting that there was a lot more passion in the babies' voices than up on the screen.

The movie is well shot, full of sweeping vistas and nice framing. The handsome cinematography is actually part of the problem: despite a David Fincherish green tinge to everything and some carefully squalid interiors, the style is at its best filming the elegant silhouettes of Brighton Pier or the beautiful white cliffs of the coast. It's just too nice: it would work fine with a softer storyline, but there's something inescapably sordid about marrying a girl to stop her witnessing against you, and the graceful visuals seem not to have noticed. I suspect the music may be a problem too: I seldom notice music during a film, but there was one sequence that stood out even to me because the music became almost comical, reminiscent of nothing so much as the apartment-break-in scene in Manhattan Murder Mystery minus the breathless tension, and the rest of the music seemed to be rather bland swelling violins that carried neither the suspense nor the grandness of the original movie. In its rendering it feels like a film that doesn't really understand the story it's telling, whether the story is Greene's grim original or the tragic romance Joffe seems to be aiming for: neither works, because there's a bland attractiveness to their presentation that undercuts the possibility for real intensity.

So, any good?

Bottom line: this is a remake of the film, not a new adaptation of the novel, and a remake, not a reinterpretation. That, we didn't need. The original film is still a classic, but while Joffe looks like a promising director visually and I'd like to see him handle material that actually suits his style, I'd expect the remake to go the way of the 1976 King Kong and be more or less forgotten in time while John Boulting's film endures.

Gaspode's Law of Sexism

2011-01-24T14:42:00.005Z

Arguing on another blog recently, I was thinking once again of sexism; this time, of the phenomenon of mansplaining.

Mansplaining, for those unfamiliar with the term, describes the behaviour of a man who assumes that he must be the superior intellect in a conversation with any woman, and thus will patronisingly explain to her something that she knows a whole lot more about than him. Any attempts by her to make it clear that she doesn't need him to instruct her will be met with paternal deafness or outraged offence, depending on how forcefully she attempts it - ie, if she says it in a way that he can't miss, he acts insulted; if she doesn't, he ignores her.

(There is a common problem mentioning mansplaining in an open forum, very similar to the problem of mentioning the Bechdel Test: some bugger will immediately leap up and ask, 'What's it called when it's done to men? / when women do it? / when there's an exception? / when you don't know the motivations?' or some other variant of 'How quickly can we redefine this to make it about something, anything else other than what it's actually talking about, which is female experience of sexism?' I will have no truck with that in the comments: do not make me open the can of Delete-Ass.)

There's a particular (and particularly maddening) variant of it that will be familiar to many women: the man who explains back to you what you've just told him with the air of teaching you something your little brain was previously incapable of perceiving. Of course, if you're debating with a man who doesn't respect women there are a lot of ways he can go - arguing against something you didn't say is a favourite, as is saying 'How dare you call me a bad person?' when you make a general point - but this one has a rather special twist. You start to wonder what on earth the man thinks he's doing, or if he's thinking at all: who tries to teach somebody something that they've just taught you?

But having run into it more times than I enjoy, I found it was reminding me of something. This being the internet I suspect many blog readers will be familiar with the works of Terry Pratchett; the character that comes to mind is Gaspode the talking dog.

For those unfamiliar, Gaspode is a small mongrel who has acquired the ability to talk. However, for most people the idea of a talking dog is just so difficult to credit that when Gaspode says something, they don't hear it on a conscious level. They take in his words, but assume they must be hearing their own thoughts. (Hence, for instance, if Gaspode says 'Give the doggy a biscuit', they automatically give him one because they think it's their own idea.)

When it comes to men explaining to women what the woman has just explained to them, it's the talking dog stories that come to mind. It would appear that some men find the idea of an intelligent woman about as plausible as the idea of a talking dog. It's so difficult to credit, in fact, that if a woman makes a good point, the man's expectations simply blot out any awareness that she's talking. He hears her words, but his subconscious immediately appropriates them, because a woman couldn't possibly be making an intelligent comment. It must be his own thoughts he's hearing - and shouldn't he do the nice thing and instruct the woman in them for the betterment of her own little mind? So what you get is a man who hears or reads what a woman says or writes, assumes he's hearing/reading his own thoughts, and then explains them back to her with the air of presenting his own invaluable insights.

Since the internet has laws of conversation, I think we need to be aware of Gaspode's Law: a man who explains a woman's point back to her is sexist enough that he's incapable of understanding anything a woman says, and should be deemed to have automatically disqualified himself from the conversation. For which reason it's all the more important that men call him on his behaviour, because if a woman says something, he'll either dismiss it or poach it. And in the latter case, he will genuinely believe he thought of it himself.

Note: I have no rights regarding the intellectual property of Terry Pratchett. If he or his representatives object to this post, please contact me and I'll take it down.

Fleecy Mikalogue

2011-01-20T13:00:00.000Z

(Editor's note: this is an old Mikalogue that I somehow never got round to publishing and unearthed recently. The photo is recent, though. Things haven't changed.)

Kit: Hi sweetheart.

Mika: 'Lo. Is comfortable. You okay?

Kit: Well, actually I wanted a word with you, honey.

Mika: Is receivin visitors. What can do for you?

Kit: You see, you're lying on my fleece.

Mika: Mika knows this. Knows many things.

Kit: Can I have it back?

Mika: No.

Kit: Please, honey? It's turning cold.

Mika: Mika knows. Is cosy and warm on fleece. Your point?

Kit: But I'm not cosy and warm, because you've got my fleece. And you've already got a beautiful plush coat...

Mika: Yay! Is tryin a new lick technique this week. You like?

Kit: You look gorgeous, honey. But I don't have a coat.

Mika: Is true. You naked and furless. Is bad choice. Must be chilly.

Kit: Well, I am. Because you're on my fleece.

Mika: Is Mika's happy spot.

Kit: Can't I have it back?

Mika: No. Would be wrong, as Mika the clever will demonstrate thus: Is not always on it. You could just steal it when Mika busy elsewhere. You do not do this. Clearly you recognise is Mika's fleece. Is pleased with you.

Kit: Well, I feel guilty, because you like it so much. But I'd like it back too.

Mika: Noo! Is Mika's happy fleece. Fills with warm feelins.

Kit: You remember how it was winter when we first got you? And I was wearing a fleece all the time to keep warm?

Mika: Is true. Was fluffy.

Kit: Is that why you always knead me when I'm wearing one?

Mika: Kneads you other times too. But yes. Fleece is Mika's mum.

Kit: That's why I feel guilty, my little rescue-cat love. You were taken away from your mum too young.

Mika: Wants fleece. Smells of you. Gives cuddles when you too busy workin to cuddle.

Kit: You're really working my conscience, sweetheart.

Mika: So Mika keeps fleece?

Kit: I'm gonna have to think this one over. Maybe I'll find another one for you in a charity shop.

Mika: Now play with Mika or go away.

Kit: This should teach me not to leave my clothes in the hall.

Mika: Why?

Kit: Because you lie on them.

Mika: Does indeed. Your point?

Kit: ...I love you, honey.

Mika: Good thing too.

Web award nomination

2011-01-18T20:11:00.002Z

... I is up for one.

Vote for me!

Mumview: The King's Speech

2011-01-17T11:22:00.000Z

Quick summary

George VI never expected to inherit the throne: that was the right of his older brother David - but when David insists on marrying an American divorcee, 'Bertie' finds himself expected to speak to and for his people through the modern marvel of radio. Except that with a lifelong stammer, he can't speak - until he begins work with pioneering therapist Lionel Logue.

Does it work the way it should?

Biopics are a favourite genre of mine. In this era of competitive marketing and presold audiences, basing a film around an historical figure is a way of getting some brand recognition without having to remake perfectly good films or create sequels to perfectly bad ones - an opportunity to be recognisable without being unoriginal. The standard of biopics in recent years has been correspondingly high: Pierrepoint comes to mind (aka The Last Hangman), along with The Passion of Ayn Rand (if one is prepared to stretch the definition of 'recent' back to 1999) The Last King of Scotland, The Damned United, The Queen, Frost/Nixon and pretty much anything by Peter Morgan, as well as, of course, The Arbor, which I reviewed with such pleasure last November. If you're looking for intelligent popular filmmaking, I'm inclined to say that biopics are where it's at nowadays.

So The King's Speech is in some pretty good company. However, to be that good, a biopic needs to have a solid dramatic structure, and following an interesting life doesn't necessarily give you one. If you merely dramatise a biography without identifying some kind of thematic throughline, you can wind up with, for example, Wilde: a handsome series of events with some good performances and striking moments, but which taken in total feels more like a list than a shaped narrative. The commonest way of creating such a throughline is to present a character who is in some kind of denial: we watch them in their secure phase, the fallout as their denial creates consequences, and finally the moment of compelled self-knowledge.

On the face of it, The King's Speech doesn't seem to have this: our hero knows he stutters and that this is a problem. The stammer is undoubtedly made worse by the stress of dealing with his family, and he's not really unaware of that, either. Yet the throughline works. If it sounds sentimental to say that the knowledge he finds is that he's capable of speech, you'd think this was one of those tiresome sunny-side-up you-just-have-to-believe-in-yourself pieces of sentiment, but The King's Speech is not a sentimental film. Believing in yourself is not, in fact, the key to winning races or the hearts of fair maidens - it doesn't hurt, but it's seldom the magic bullet - but it's far less trite to assume that increased confidence would help with a nervous stammer. Too, there may be a speech that we build up to, but it's not a single moment of triumph. King George struggles through his final delivery and isn't exactly perfect, and it's clear that this isn't a complete happy ever after: his stammer will be a lifelong issue, and what he's learned isn't a perfect cure but a good coping method.

To keep on the right side of sentimentality takes good performances, in which The King's Speech is rich. Helena Bonham Carter does a delicate job playing the woman best remembered now as the elderly Queen Mother in her youth, and Geoffrey Rush as Logue has a captivating mixture of candid confident and obscure pathos. But it's really Firth who has to carry the film, and he does it splendidly. Just an example: Logue insists on first names within his consulting room, and resolutely addresses his patient as 'Bertie' despite objections. In Bertie/George's fragile moods, Firth manages to convey in his carriage and expression a man who can't be called Bertie, a man who seems to have no first name at all.

There's something a little curious in the film's view on relationships. On the one hand, Bertie/George is a figure of tragedy trapped in a loveless royal family (a new modern archetype, that), yet at the same time, David/Edward is played with unsympathetic skill by Guy Pearce as a self-centred man in undignified thrall to the appalling Wallis Simpson. Is love important in a royal family, or is it wrong to place love ahead of royal duty? It seems to depend on which brother you look at. Having said that, though, The King's Speech is a film very much on Bertie/George's side, and rather than going for the brought-low-by-a-woman stereotype, manages to portray David/Edward's relationship with Wallis as simply one more piece of casual obliviousness from an entitled brother. The story is all about being the sensitive one in an insensitive family - and as such, manages to cast David/Edward's love for Wallis as a love neglectful of other ties. It's a tricky business, but it seems to manage it.

It also manages to convey something extremely delicate: a reconciliation of the British imagination with the idea of duty. In our mourning-Diana phase, the nation staged a deep revolt against the idea of duty, casting it as the antithesis of love, warmth and human connection. A cinematic salvo was fired against that idea with The Queen, a splendid script that repositioned Queen Elizabeth in the role previously held by Diana: the fragile woman in pain, unappreciated by all around her. Watching The King's Speech, it's hard not to hear Blair's voice in The Queen, calling royalty the job Elizabeth 'watched kill her father' - especially as we see Bertie/George light cigarette after cigarette, following the foolish advice of his doctors. The Queen played duty as a sometimes-misguided attempt to honour the values Elizabeth had always been taught to uphold; a loyalty to the people and world you hold dear. The King's Speech manages to humanise it still further. Duty is what David abandons and Bertie takes up, and as such is something familiar to us commoners: duty is being the responsible one in the family because nobody else will. As such, duty becomes love of a sort, or at least closely intertwined: a form of relationship with those we love because we have to.

We in Britain have something of a love-hate relationship with royalty, and our films follow it. Possibly as our Queen ages we're starting to feel a nostalgic anxiety for what in the Diana days we demanded to leave behind. (Well, some of us; I was always a cynic about the Diana myth. Charity work? Wonderful. Panorama interview? Looked immensely strategic to me, and I was only eighteen.) These new myths are probably no more accurate than the old ones, but as a tale of duty and drama, it's a wonderful film. Put it this way: it got me looking up George VI, and it made me cry.

Ready for this?

After all the furore about swearing, I went in knowing only one thing: the King says the F-word! I was expecting a tale of therapy all about the cussin', but in fact that aspect has been overplayed: the effing and blinding only happens in two scenes as part of a much broader therapy in which Logue focuses on the suppressions and humiliations of Bertie/George's life. The result was an altogether more delicate and mild piece than you might think from the publicity.

Now it's getting a lot of attention, I would expect that 'uplifting feelgood' is probably the expectation people have. It is that, but it's a painful film as well, melancholic in tone, full of misty avenues, peeling wallpaper and blank, tense faces. There are laughs, and there are swears, but those are not the film.

Life amongst the groundlings

Being that this is a movie featuring an uplifting tale of personal development, historical drama and Colin Firth, it is perhaps not surprising that despite the rain, there were plenty of mums in attendance. Baby noise was less a matter of squealing interruptions and more a matter of constant background heckling - perhaps not inappropriately, considering the subject of the film.

While the film moved at a slow pace, it was also gripping, with quietly arresting visuals. I know this because every time I walked my baby up and down the aisle, I turned around as quickly as I could so as not to miss anything. I wouldn't have missed any plot, but I got less of the cinematic sweep, and I wanted to see it. It's one of those films where you only realise how absorbed you are when something interrupts you.

Any new mum will tell you that it's easier to wring tears from a mother when a maid. As Bertie/George haltingly describes his bleak childhood, I found myself clutching my son, tears pouring down my face. As I said, pretty much anything to do with unhappy children will get tears out of a new mother, but Firth's stiff unhappiness is genuinely moving, one of his best performances to date - which, as he's a fine actor, is saying quite a bit.

So, any good?

I was initially tempted to go for the easy joke and say 'Fuck, yes,' but it's a testament to the film's quiet power that actually I don't feel like making a wisecrack about it. Whether it quite ranks with Peter Morgan's best work I don't know - it's a different beast, more optimistic, more partisan and a bit soppier - but it's still a lovely movie, likely to have a wide appeal, beautifully filmed, and very much worth a look.

Sexists: a spotter's guide for nice men

2011-01-12T13:14:00.004Z

I've blogged about how I'd like to see more men smacking down sexists before, but the last couple of days I've been in embroiled in an online argument with and about misogynists, and something seems to have emerged:

A lot of men don't like misogyny, but find it difficult to spot in its subtler manifestations. Therefore, if a woman accuses a man of misogyny, they don't really know what to think. They don't want to support sexism, but they aren't sure if the woman is right or not ... so they stay silent, and inadvertently give the sexist man - who isn't going to care about the opinion of a mere woman - tacit permission. Because if he was wrong, somebody rational/sensible/devoid of those bothersome ovaries would have said something, right?

I've been talking about that, and I thought I'd put together a post compiled from my statements in that debate to help men of good will identify the early signs.

Here's the first thing: it is dispiritingly difficult for a woman to bring up the issue of misogyny. If she does, no matter in what context or however appropriately, she can predict sure as sunrise that the following will happen: a man or men will step in, assuming a tone of patronising authority, and explain to her that she's wrong. It wasn't sexist. It, whatever it was, was caused by other things. He will talk down to her, declare that whatever sexist incident happened was not something she has any business getting worked up about, and generally set her straight. Often he will also argue with things she didn't say, and that may in fact be the exact opposite of what she's saying. He may inform her of facts that are common knowledge and correct her about things she knows perfectly well, with the insulting assumption that she's incapable of seeing the blindingly obvious.

He will sometimes deny instances of misogyny so staggeringly obvious that it's hard to read his opinion as anything other than 'There is no such thing as sexism' - because if the thing he's denying is sexist isn't sexist, then nothing is. From this, a woman can easily read the implication: being treated badly because you're a woman is fair and does not need changing.

He will do all this based on no facts, evidence or expertise in the field. (Things that she might very well possess. She will, if nothing else, have a lot of experience of sexism: live as a woman, and that happens to you.) His dismissal of her concerns is generally based on nothing more authoritative than his own feelings - which he considers more authoritative than her feelings, knowledge, experience, education and expertise all put together. There is no kind of qualification a woman can produce that will convince him that her opinion is better supported than the opinion he's just produced off the top of his head.

At this point, the woman will get frustrated. But the men of good will observing will wonder why she's getting so upset. If they're nice they won't step in to 'correct' her, but they will start to wonder why she's so bothered by someone who, as far as they can tell, is just disagreeing with her about something. Women are generally more sensitised to tone when it comes to men talking down to women, naturally enough, and a man who misses the tone (which is almost always a warning sign that things will get worse if she sticks to her guns) will see it purely as a theoretical disagreement between equals. Because he thinks men and women are equal, and tends to assume other people do too.

So here's the first tip: when it comes to men patronising women, there's a difference between disagreement and dismissal. And a man using a dismissive tone to a woman on the subject of misogyny is a man acting extremely badly.

In the arguments I've seen recently, often a man dismisses a suggestion of misogyny when there's the allegation that a man did something violent to a woman or several women. He will do it with no knowledge of the case; again, his lordly feelings are his only guide - and those feelings motivate him to put down any suggestion of misogyny as a serious issue. From this, the women get an under-the-radar but definite message: 'We don't really believe in misogyny. Or at least, not on the word of a mere woman.' Chris Rock sarcastically asked whether you had to shoot Medgar Evers before you got called a racist, and there's an equivalent with sexism: it seems like you have to write a manifesto before some men are prepared to consider the possibility.

A man making such a pronouncement is saying that, in effect, a man has to provide tremendous evidence of misogyny before women's concerns about him will be taken seriously - and as very few men admit to misogyny, bottom line becomes 'Shut up about discrimination; I don't want to hear about misogyny even when it gets women raped and killed and mistreated every day and might have done so in this case.' The woman isn't upset because he disagreed with her. She's upset because he assumed misogyny was a dismissable concern.

And ruling out misogyny for bad reasons is dangerous.

A man who knee-jerk assumes a woman is wrong when she mentions misogyny is a man who is actively fighting against a woman's right to voice her concerns about anti-female bigotry. If he takes a look at the facts of the case and has a lot of information at his disposal and seriously considers the possibility and then comes to the conclusion that it wasn't a major factor, that's fine. But if all he has to say is 'Misogyny? Nonsense,' based on no evidence, the problem isn't his opinion about whatever subject is ostensibly under discussion; the problem is his opinion about women.

So that's Sign One for the guys: a woman mentions that she thinks something is sexist, and a man asks her, 'Who are you going to believe? Me or your girly eyes?'

Does this mean a man is a sexist, men of good will may wonder?

There are two answers to that:

First: intentions are not the issue. If an argument tends to support sexism, then we don't need to prove a man hates women to have a problem with what he's saying.

Second: check his reactions.

Nobody is asking men to spot misogyny all the time. Women have more experience of it, so are more likely to be the ones who spot the warning signs.

After the warning signs emerge, consider these two common patterns:

1. Man says something that puts women on guard.
2. Woman says something about it.
3. Man says, 'Oops, didn't mean to sound sexist, sorry. This is what I actually meant.'
4. Woman says, 'Oh, okay then.'

or:

1. Man says something that puts women on guard.
2. Woman says something about it.
3. Man ignores woman's obvious concern that he's belittling her gender, and repeats his point in a louder/more dismissive tone.
4. Woman objects.
5. Man starts implying she's a bad person for daring to do the worst thing in the world and call someone prejudiced, and again repeats his point in a more dismissive tone.
6. Repeat until woman either explodes or gives up in despair.

The difference between the two is easy to spot: the sexist is the one who either ignores or dismisses the woman's concern about whether he's implying degrading or dangerous things about women. A decent man may not like being accused of sexism, but he usually at least addresses the implication and tries to think about it. A sexist either puts on his martyr's robe or his teacher's hat.

So if a man wants to support women's equality, he doesn't have to be the first one to see, or even to understand, the subtle sexism in another man's initial words. All he needs to do is respect the fact that when women allege that a man is being sexist, they're often right - and even if they aren't, a) Their concerns are legitimate and they have the right to raise them, and b) a non-sexist man will respond to those allegations in a way that eliminates him as a suspect.

Basically: the easiest way to spot a sexist is in how he responds to a woman saying 'Hey, that thing you said sounded sexist.' A decent man may not agree with her - either her opinion about the subject initially under discussion or her suspicion that he's being sexist - but he at least takes the concern seriously. A sexist doesn't.

Because the thing is, a decent man respects women and doesn't want to make them feel uncomfortable or degraded. If a woman says 'Hey, you're making me feel uncomfortable/you sound like you're degrading me', a decent man cares. He may not agree with her theoretical opinion - and it burns me how often one has to say 'Women don't call you sexist just because you don't agree with them' - but when a woman says he's made her uncomfortable, he cares. Because he recognises that women are human beings. A sexist doesn't respect women, so if a woman says she's uncomfortable with what he says, then he doesn't care how she feels about it: he only cares about how he feels about it, because feelings are only important when the person feeling them matters. Ignoring a woman's concern that you're being sexist is sexist. You don't have to grovel, you don't have to let yourself be brainwashed, you don't have to have made her uncomfortable on purpose: you just have to care, like any decent person cares when they've upset another human being. If you don't, it's a pretty loud declaration that you don't believe what women think and feel matters.

If you don't find it easy to see sexism in a man's post, try looking for it in how he behaves when women bring it up. That's your biggest clue.

And guys, if you think a man is being sexist, please, please say so. Women can tell him he's being sexist till they're blue in the face, and he won't listen. Know why? Because sexists don't listen to women.

Some men worry that they aren't qualified to speak for women. Those are the decent men who respect women. If you worry that you're overstepping, you're the guy we want to hear from. Just say that you obviously can't speak for women but that as a man you think there's some disrespect for women going on. It's fine. If you are obviously speaking out of concern for women's rights, women will forgive you if you get something a bit wrong.

Some men feel that they don't need to step in because the women are doing such an eloquent job for themselves. This is because they have enough respect for women to hear what a woman is actually saying, to perceive that women may have intelligence, talent or competence. But you know what a sexist hears when a woman talks? 'Blah blah I'm a girl blah blah I have feelings blah blah I need a big clever man to instruct me.' Even if you have no faith in your own eloquence, say something. Even 'I'm a man and I agree with Woman X' is worth saying, for two reasons:

First, as I said, sexists don't listen to women. An awkward comment from a man will be heard by a sexist more clearly than the most eloquent comment in the world from a woman. It's a sad experience for many women that you struggle and strain to get a point across (not even necessarily about sexism), have a man or men ignore you in lordly fashion, then get your point repeated in very slightly different words by another man, only to have the men who were ignoring you turn around and say, 'Wow, good point!' This drive women to distraction, but if it gets the point across, use it. Say something.

Second, women aren't mind-readers. If you don't say you agree with us, we don't know we agree with us. Instead, we feel like only women care about sexism, that it's impossible to talk about it without being patronised, and that we're fighting against insults and degradation all on our own out here. If the men who understand that women can think for themselves stay out, all women hear from men is the sexists running their mouths.

This is exhausting. Women leave discussion boards and social groups because of this. Even strong-willed women with high self-esteem get tired. As my cyber-friend Will Wildman remarks, silent support is not actually supportive.

So guys, if you want the sincere friendship and appreciation of women: keep your eyes open for sexists. And if you see one, give him a whap. We need you here.

Note: I hope this post will trigger a discussion. I will be moderating it with a heavy hand: this is my blog, created by my time, my effort and my money, and I am going to stand no nonsense. Men who have questions or genuine concerns are welcome. Men who are sexist and wish to patronise, correct or insult me or any other woman poster will be summarily deleted. If you find it unfair, tell it to the Marines. Self-pitying whines will also be deleted.

Anyone in Virginia?

2011-01-05T20:59:00.003Z

So, a reader of a blog I'm a regular on has a friend who's about to be thrown out of her apartment with nowhere else to go. She's in pretty bad trouble, in other words.

This is her self-description.

Is there anyone reading this with contacts in Virginia who might be able to help her in any way?

Please write to your MP

2011-01-02T14:57:00.002Z

Trigger warning: I will be talking about childbirth. But this needs to be known.

If you've been reading the papers, you'll know that a national scandal is finally coming to light. The government promised three thousand new midwives to the NHS before the election, but have they done anything about it? Of course not; that would mean spending money. The reason they promised the midwives is that birth rates are high, midwife rates are low, and you cannot manage a birth with too few midwives. Women are in labour are being turned away from hospitals that cannot accommodate them. 22% of women in labour are left unattended - more than one in five. The papers acknowledge that this is a 'frightening' experience.

Speaking as one of those one in five, let me state that this is a grotesque understatement. I gave birth over four months ago, and here's what happened to me:

At 43 and a half weeks overdue, I went to the hospital to meet with a consultant for advice. That 'advice' turned out to be the information that if I didn't want to double my son's chances of brain damage, I'd let her book me in for an induction - and when I agreed, the information that the induction would take place the day after tomorrow.

I went into hospital. The first thing the midwife told me was that she was looking after ten women that day. She strapped me to a monitor to check the baby was doing okay before beginning the induction, and left. My husband had to go find her when it seemed the monitor wasn't working - which it wasn't. The allotted half hour passed, and my husband had to go find her again. She gave me a Prostaglandin pessary (the first stage in inductions) and disappeared again. After an hour or so it fell out and my husband once again had to go track her down to get another one.

Visiting hours ended at ten o'clock. At nine o'clock my husband had to go get her so we could insist on some kind of check, because by that time I'd been in pain all afternoon and all evening. Constant pain, not contractions, because that's often the effect of an induction. I didn't know this could happen, though, because she didn't have the time to brief me.

She monitored me for a while, didn't manage to get the time to examine how dilated I was, and disappeared again. At that point my husband was sent home and told visiting hours started again at eight o'clock in the morning.

The night staff was one main midwife and one woman on the desk - a bullying individual who snapped at anyone who asked her for help.

At this point, let me say that the daytime midwife seemed like a perfectly nice person. After the baby was born she came to congratulate me and coo at him. But do you know what happened because of time pressures on this perfectly nice person? She forgot to brief me about pain relief.

Then she went home, leaving me in the care of a skeleton crew with ten women to look after.

The staff shortages meant that my overnight care plan boiled down to this: isolate the woman without pain relief or information for ten hours. No one so much as put a head around the door to see if I was alive or dead. I had to drag out into the corridor in agony to beg for pain relief - which was, it turned out, available if only you knew to ask for it - and wait a long time before it arrived.

At four in the morning, I threw up from the pain. Pressing a call button for help, I was briefly attended by a midwife who examined me and said I was three centimetres dilated and could go up to a labour ward - which meant I could call my husband and community midwives to come keep me company. She said she'd call the labour ward and let them know. Then she disappeared, and I never saw her again. My husband wasn't there to look for her, and I couldn't do it, so she just vanished out of my life for ever.

That was the night shift.

Come the morning, the first midwife returned and tried to get me into a labour ward. Day shift began at eight o'clock. It was noon before I got into one. At that point I was requesting an epidural, so they called for an anaesthetist to come. While waiting, they suggested breaking my waters by hand so as to move the labour along.

'Is it going to hurt?' I said. 'I've been in pain for twenty-four hours, I can't take any more. Maybe we should wait for the epidural.'

'No,' they said, 'it's not painful.'

So they went ahead. They saved themselves a couple of hours in so doing, which probably cleared the room for another patient sooner. They also fucking lied to me. Breaking a membrane doesn't hurt, but what that rush of hormones does to an unprepared cervix is agonising. Between twelve and two I was in constant, relentless pain, because they decided not to wait for the anaesthetist even though I'd specifically said I wanted to if it was going to cause more pain.

So let me sum up. Understaffing meant that I was isolated while in labour for a full night shift, left there by staff who were so rushed they forgot to brief me on pain relief. Or to offer me pethidine, which I've since been informed by the hospital was what they should have done. Or to give me any kind of explanation about what was happening to my body and that of my baby, who, they had recently informed me, was at increased risk of brain damage if he didn't come out extremely soon. It then meant that they lied to me about how painful a procedure would be so as not to slow down the conveyor belt I was on.

This was not an unusual experience. A friend of mine from antenatal class tells me that the day after she gave birth, they had women giving birth on the public antenatal wards because there was nowhere else to put them.

These are not First World conditions.

I am trying not to cry as I type this. I can tell you here and now that while I had planned to have another child, now I am seriously questioning whether I can go through that again. I feel sick and terrified every time I enter that hospital - even when I was just returning some property. Heaven help me if I ever need medical treatment there again.

In short: the levels of understaffing and limited accommodations are at crisis point. The NHS needs more money. A lot more money. Something has to give, and if it's not the government's purse strings it'll be women. I'm going to be blunt about this: unless the government fucking pays out like it said it would, they are making the plain statement that they think preserving the pockets of the wealthy is important enough to justify the torture of thousands of women.

The government made a promise. Even if they keep it, it'll only go partway to solving the problem, but they made a promise and they're not keeping it. Please write to your MP and ask them to put on the pressure.

Happy new year!

2011-01-01T11:10:00.003Z

And a very pleasant 2011 to you all.

As regular readers have probably noticed, this blog has been rather inactive of late, due to the fact that I'm looking after a small baby (and legally speaking am still on maternity leave for another two months). I hope you'll excuse me. I'm planning a few posts, but they take longer to get written at the moment, so I'll just have to do my best. In the meantime, I'm throwing the floor open: does anyone have any questions they want answered or subjects they'd like to discuss?

An idea for a story, an idea about a story, and the difference between the two

2010-12-26T17:27:00.007Z

Perhaps the most essential skill for a writer is this: the ability to spot and discard a bad idea before you've wasted time and invested emotion trying to write it.

It's not something I've ever formulated, preferring to judge story ideas by their shape or feel rather than by running them past a technical rule, technical rules being always subject to exceptions, but the other day I stumbled on a surprisingly useful way of defining it.

Christmas is a time of ghost stories and I'm a great admirer of M.R. James. My husband observed that his stories tend to take place in a rather cosy world, or at least cosy until the ghost homes in, and I was thinking about other cosy genres. I thought, 'You know what might be interesting? A ghost story set in a chick fic world.'

Then I thought, almost immediately, 'Nope. That idea doesn't work: bin it. Moving swiftly on...'

My husband asked why I'd rejected it so fast, and I said, groping of a phrase, 'I couldn't write it. There's nothing there. It's an idea about a story rather than an idea for a story.'

And that's it: that's the problem with a lot of unusable ideas.

An idea for a story is concrete. Generally you need at least one major character, a setting that will bring them into contact with other people and some opening event or situation that they'll be reacting to, but the important thing is that there's content to the idea, that it's specific. You can sit down and start writing it: it was a rule of mine when I was first teaching myself to write that the best way to try out an idea was to write a page of it, and if there wasn't enough to base a story on by the bottom of the page, drop it. You need to begin with quite a lot of material, or at least, several definite things that you can bang together to knock a story out of them.

An idea about a story is abstract. It's a description to yourself of what the story might look like once it was finished, a concept with no tangible examples to make it real. It sounds good, but that's because you're mentally describing a non-existent story: you can fancy it as good as you please, because there's nothing there to contradict you.

An idea for a story starts at the beginning and from the inside; an idea about a story pictures the story as an already-completed object and views it from the outside. If an idea for a story is the beginnings of a blueprint, an idea about a story is effectively the jacket blurb to a piece that nobody's written.

So to give an example: a ghost story set in a chick fic world is an idea about a story. There are no characters - 'chick fic' implies some very nebulous stereotypes and nothing more - no situation, no starting incident or destined end, no ghost, no stuff. All it really does is allude vaguely to works other people have already finished. At most, it's an idea about style, and you can't write style if you don't have something to write about. An idea for a story would be about, let's say, Susie who works in PR and has been waiting a long time for promotion, and when her sleazy boss sends her on an away conference, she runs into her ex at the hotel, and also finds a mysterious figure always sitting on the other side of the steam room every time she uses the hotel spa, never speaking, never quite discernable, but a little closer to her every time she goes in. That's an idea for a story: there's no ending yet, and things might change in the writing of it, but you've got some characters, something for them to do and a situation for them to inhabit. It might be a good story, it might be a bad one - running it past my own sensors, I suspect it wouldn't come out in a chick-fic style, which just goes to prove even more that the idea-about wasn't something I could use - but it is, at least, an idea for a story, not about one.

Ideas about stories can sound seductive, and I think one reason is that we live in a world of packaging. If a marketer can say 'It's Raymond Chandler meets P.G. Wodehouse' or 'It's about medieval France from a feminist perspective', they'll find the product easier to sell. We hear so much of this kind of talk, one can start thinking that this is what story ideas are. But the trouble is, these are descriptions of stories that are already written, made by people who didn't do the writing. They're not a very good guide to approaching a story you want to compose.

Ideas about stories can drive you to distraction. Their fatal flaw is this: because they're not confined by specifics, there's no limit to how good they can sound. In effect, they're fantasies about having written something, and in fantasies, everyone's a genius. Come up with an idea about a story, and it can seem like a brilliant wheeze. Usually you'll delay writing it, mostly because you don't actually know how to start (because you don't have anything to start with), and the longer you delay, the better the story can look because the further into fantasy it retreats. In the end you can find yourself delaying writing it precisely because any pinning down of specifics will be a reduction of the grand idea: no concrete rendering can be as all-encompassing and full of vague potential as an abstract idea. It'll be something real rather than just an idea, of course, but it'll also mean relinquishing the sense of possibility that the idea carries with it. You can wind up stuck with an idea about a story indefinitely.

Trying to write it can cure you of the disease before it really sets in, but only if you're willing and able to identify when a story isn't working and ditch it. If you're trying to write an idea about a story and you don't realise that's the problem, you can find yourself enmeshed in a horrible tangle of cobwebs. Pointless-feeling scenes, hollow emotions, padding and general dullness beckon. Everything feels thin and unmemorable. Plots wander about looking lost. You get stuck because there's nothing really there, not enough to build on and not enough for the characters to do - or at best, nothing that can build to a satisfying conclusion. Possibly you have what seems like a good beginning or a good end, but no sense of an overall structure, no destination. The longer you struggle, the harder it becomes to just toss the whole mess and start over.

Ideas for a story are ideas you know you can make something of. They can be wildly exciting, plans unfurling and setting off new plans and everything exploding in your head like fireworks. They can be practical but undramatic; Stephen King describes it very precisely in Misery when he says you feel like a carpenter looking at a piece of wood that might do the job. (Can't get my hands on the exact quote, sorry.) The point is, they're ideas that link on to other ideas or the possibility of other ideas: they point a path rather than dangling mirage-like in the air. They're planks of wood rather than boxes of sawdust.

The thing about art is that it's always very specific. One of the tests of a work of art is that it shouldn't be interchangeable: one might say that a work of art is something for which there is no substitute. That means getting down to details; vague ideas cannot be built on - or if you try, you wind up with a hollow and boring piece. But as a general rule, a mundane but useable idea is worth far more than a grandiose but vague idea. If you want to make an actual work of art out of it, you need to be sure you have an idea for rather than an idea about.

Is there a word...

2010-12-08T10:34:00.003Z

...to describe the kind of person who's very brave about bearing up under the pain of others? Or a slang phrase?

And if not, is there one in German? The language that gave us schadenfreude (happiness at the misfortune of others) and scheissenbedaurn (regret at things not turning out as badly as you'd hoped) really ought to have a word for this.

And failing that, can anyone suggest one?

Two Girls, One Sap

2010-11-26T09:56:00.002Z

That's what I call it, because I have a low mind, but I am in fact speaking of classic Victorian literature. Specifically, I am speaking of a fictional trope, a female stereotype, less commonly acknowledged than the Virgin-Whore dichotomy, and yet capable of exerting its force on the imaginations of highly intelligent writers, only some of whom can see the problems therein. A more seemly description than 'two girls, one sap' would the the 'Nursling-Angel dichotomy', for reasons we'll see as we go on. Let us consider three examples: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, and Middlemarch by George Eliot. The subject of this post is the way unrealistic ideas about female character shaped Victorian novels about marriages, and how male and female authors responded to the problem.

The basic problem, the beginning point, is this: conventional Victorian values considered the attractive woman to be childlike and helpless, a kind of Marilyn Monroe minus the sexual boldness. Such a woman, however, is a burdensome wife unless you're so profoundly wealthy that you can both live a life of leisure. Profound wealth and a leisurely life are the stuff neither of common experience nor of interesting fiction, so occasionally writers took a look at the problem. And what they found seemed to be oddly similar despite their differences in style and gender: that for life to be in any way tolerable with such a wife shackled to your hard-toiling hands, you need something else. You need, in fact, another woman.

Wilkie Collins gives us Walter Hartright, the heroic worshipper of childlike Laura Fairlie. Her virtues are pretty typical: 'a fair, delicate girl' with 'truthful, innocent blue eyes'. 'The woman who first gives life, light and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature,' according to Walter, which being a woman who would rather be loved as an actual person than as 'the visionary nursling of our fantasy', makes me feel rather cynical about whether it's really his spirit that she's elevating. But more strikingly, what appeals to Walter about Laura is her 'quaint, childlike earnestness.' She has 'something wanting': she has 'that generous trust in others which, in her nature, grew innocently out of the sense of her own truth.' Which is to say, her virtues are natural rather than chosen: she does not think, but merely is. Seeing a virtue or gift as natural in a subordinated person and cultivated in a dominant one is a common kyriarchical device - I've read, for instance, that critics who praised the acting of the white cast in Casablanca praised only the singing of Dooley Wilson, as if his perfomance on-screen was merely being himself rather than, y'know, delivering a professional performance. (And in fact, while he was a musician, he wasn't actually playing the piano.) It's convenient to see the virtues of the subordinated as instinctive, because if they're unchosen you don't have to consider them capable of reason.

Laura's delicacy is so strong, in fact, that she refuses to report mistreatment and exploitation by her husband. From a practical standpoint this may actually be an explanation for her mental weakness: the plot would break down if Laura was capable of asking for help, so Collins had to contrive some kind of character who could plausibly stay silent rather than blowing the storyline. He does something similar with Rachel Verinder in The Moonstone, but manages to give her less helpless motivations: Rachel refuses to name the person she 'saw' stealing her diamond out of loyalty, an altogether steelier reason. But Laura Fairlie is an endurer, not a champion. She's not very bright, but she's pretty and childlike and pure in spirit, and that's attractive to our Victorian Walter.

But as Walter and Laura go on the run, Walter has a living to earn, and Laura, bless her, is incapable. 'Don't, don't, don't treat me like a child!' she cries, insisting that she needs to help earn a living if she's to keep Walter's regard. Now, this is interesting: Wilkie Collins was, for a man of his era, unusually willing to give humanity to his subordinated characters such as women and servants, and Laura realising that she's not actually fulfilling the role a wife is supposed to is Laura going against the childlike innocence of the type she represents. She's quickly stuffed back into her box, though: Walter, an artist, gives her some sketches to finish 'as nicely and prettily as you can' so they can sell them, but of course they're only 'poor, faint, valueless sketches', which Walter pretends have sold while paying her out of his own income. Laura's attempts at being useful are frustrated: she's only able to play at being useful, rather like the advice given to the husbands of entrapped housewives Betty Friedan cites in The Feminine Mystique: praise her more, and maybe let her do a little charity work.

Poor Walter. How could he possibly cope with flight and poverty with such a burden on his hands?

The answer's pretty simple: they take Laura's sister with them. And Marian Halcombe is a woman perfectly capable of running a household and earning a living.

Now, Marian is not attractive to Walter: it's established in their first meeting that she's 'ugly'. She's also intelligent - and her intelligence is inextricably associated with her ugliness. Walter is 'almost repelled by the masculine form and masculine features' of her face, and Marian herself explicitly associates intelligence with masculinity. Some critics see her as a proto-feminist, but Marian is actually a misogynist, obsessively so: she declares 'We are such fools, we can't entertain each other at table. You see I don't think much of my own sex, Mr Hartright - which will you have, tea or coffee? - no woman does think much of her own sex, though few of them confess it as freely as I do.' Walter doesn't even get a beverage before Marian starts inveighing against women, and her swipes continue throughout the book.

Marian is, in fact, an Uncle Tom: she's perfectly prepared to acknowledge that women are on the whole stupid because it gets her treated as an exception to the rule. Of the two sisters, it's actually Laura in her attempts to be useful who resists the rule more than Marian.
Marian is not an unknown type, nor necessarily an unrealistic one; in an era where female intelligence is degraded, considering oneself an unfeminine woman is one way an intelligent woman can go - not the most intelligent way, but not without its temptations. The novelist Antonia White wrote of the poet Kathleen Raine, for instance, 'She doesn't consider any woman alive her intellectual equal but she has a superstitious respect for men's judgement' - and made the comment out of kinship, recognising that she herself had the same tendency. One might consider this attitude a kind of war wound, an injury to the judgement incurred in times of conflict between the sexes, and it's clear that Collins as a writer found Marian compelling, but Walter is a conventional hero, so despite the sensuous description of Marian's body he gives on first meeting her (before he sees her masculine face) - 'The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the rare beauty of her form, , and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well developed, yet not fat; her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays.' - we are required to accept that his sexual interest is all in Laura, who is more appropriately feminine in her 'child-like' beauty.

Yet the central structure rests upon Marian's relationship with Walter. We hear surprisingly little of what Laura says, but there's a practical reason for that: utter innocence is a difficult quality to maintain in a fictional character because it's not a realistic one. The less Laura says, the easier it is to keep her spotless: have her say too much, and she'd start taking on independent thought - especially with a writer like Wilkie Collins, who had no talent for the insipid and whose characters speak out with eccentric force whenever he turns his attention upon them. Only by keeping Laura quiet could Collins keep her innocent. So it's Marian in whom Walter confides, Marian who speaks for Laura and explains her motivations - Marian, in fact, who makes the relationship possible. Go-between and supporter, earner and organiser, filler of Laura's deficiencies, Marian allows Walter to marry the woman he finds attractive without sacrificing the pleasures of rational conversation and practical assistance.

It goes without saying that Marian will never marry, and that she's content to accept this. She is, in fact, attractive to other men - the villainous Count Fosco, unlike Walter, is unperturbed by her 'masculine' face and falls deeply in love with her, smitten with her mind and character - and as we've seen, even Walter acknowledges enthusiastically that Marian's body is beautiful. But the notion of a man who might combine Fosco's unconventional tastes and Walter's moral probity is out of the question. Marian must live with Laura and Walter to keep their marriage going, an eternal auntie. Serves her right for selling out, say I.

Now Wilkie Collins himself was what a modern reader would probably call polyamorous. He sustained a relationship with two different women, and was unusually tolerant of his lovers leaving him for other men and returning later. In the light of this, our proper Walter starts to look less like a conventional hero and more like a quasi-polygamist (not polyamorous enough to be happy at Laura marrying another man, though): he gets one wife to be the nursling of his fantasy and another wife he can actually talk to. Or rather, he gets one wife, but she occupies two bodies. Sexual attraction and mental compatibility are both needed to make a marriage, but when what's most sexually attractive is a mindless woman, those qualities have to be split.

Hence, two girls, one sap.

Collins's friend and contemporary Charles Dickens had a go at the same idea. Based on their respective books it's hard not to suspect that Collins had a stronger instinctive respect for women: Dickens was, unlike Collins, quite capable of writing the toy-like domestic pet type of woman without irony or protests from the character (or rather, from his own reason leaping into the mouth of the character), and his professional women, unlike Marian, tend to be incompetent at best and evil at worst. But then there's David Copperfield.

David's first wife Dora is a famous literary creation. She is all cute, childlike charm, utterly adorable and innocent. But because she's so childlike, she's also helplessly incompetent at housekeeping: serving meat that appears to have come from 'deformed sheep' and oysters that won't open is about her finest domestic hour, and David considers that his guest eating her cooking would be an 'immolation on the altar of friendship.' Tragi-comedy is Dora's fate, and it rests of the fact that she is, bless her heart, really not very bright.

Worse, she's really not much of a coper. When David tries to explain to her that she will be marrying a poor man and that it would be helpful if she would learn accounts, 'Poor little Dora received this information with something that was half a sob and half a scream,' declares herself 'so frightened!' and begs to be returned to her friend Julia Mills like a child calling for its mother. David 'denounced myself as a remorseless brute and a ruthless beast', but he can't quite shake the idea that a wife who can keep house would be useful, so he marries her hoping to talk her round. Which he can't, of course: her initial 'Oh, please don't be practical! ... Because it frightens me so!' is as far as she can get. David tries to get her to see the virtue of keeping house, but she makes a mess of it and begs him not to be a 'cruel, cross old boy' about it, and eventually tells him that she wants to be seen as a 'child-wife'. As attempt after attempt fails, David finally accepts that he can't change Dora and is only upsetting her by trying, and resignedly settles into looking after his child-wife - until childbirth kills her. Decoratively charming Dora might be, but for a trek through the realities of life, a hardy Memsahib she ain't.

Exactly how stupid Dora really is would be hard to call. She has social intelligence, knowing well enough how to charm David when her failures threaten - during the oyster incident, for instance, 'I could not imagine why Dora had been making tempting little faces at me, as if she wanted to kiss me,' but the answer is that she knows the oysters are faulty and is hoping to avoid criticism. She also has a kind of intelligence that Laura Fairlie lacks: she knows when she's no good at something. Dora is capable of analysing her own condition: while Laura has to be explained by other people, 'child-wife' Dora can describe herself accurately. Even her manipulations show a degree of common sense, or at least a sense of self-preservation, that Laura lacks. Based on behaviour Dora might seem the sharper of the two, even if she's fluffier and less of a trooper. Other characters though, including women, consistently excuse Dora, and her inability to bear children strongly suggests that we are not to see her as an adult. David's final emotion towards her is less adoration than guilt: he should not have married a woman incapable of marriage, certainly not without being able to support her in ease and comfort, and the fact that he cannot love her as a full wife is a burden on his conscience.

This is sharp-eyed and unsentimental, for all Dora's cute little ways. And yet, once again, Dora has a counterpart: Agnes Wickfield, the sister/angel/future wife companion of David's peaceful days.

Agnes is important to David from well before his marriage:

'It's such a lightening of my heart, only to look at you! If I had had a conjurer's cap, there is no one I should have wished for but you!'

'What?' returned Agnes.

'Well, perhaps Dora, first,' I admitted with a blush

'Certainly, Dora first, I hope,' said Agnes, laughing.

'But you next!'

Agnes, we later learn, has been in love with David 'all my life', but like Marian appears content with her sister-mentor role. (Selflessness appears to be essential in women these novels find unattractive.) David sees Agnes as a sister, but in fact she's almost a mother figure, reminding him that 'one good angel (meaning Dora) was enough' when he calls Agnes his good angel, gently steering him away from inappropriate intimacies with her. One might interpret this as a woman who's trying to remind herself not to be too seduced by the outpourings of the unavailable man she loves, but whatever her motivations, Agnes is to Dora as Marian is to Laura: a facilitator of romance. David confides in Agnes his difficulties in getting Dora to understand the value of housekeeping and Agnes advises him (to the effect that he's been too 'sudden' in his persuasions); joining the couple, Agnes replaces Dora's previous friend Julia Mills after overcoming Dora's fear that she's 'too clever'; Agnes eventually attends Dora's deathbed, where Dora confides a secret hope that David will one day marry Agnes.

In which hope, she's not such a dummy as she appears: David does eventually marry Agnes and live a far happier life with her. And Dora sees this coming from their first meeting:

'I have forgotten ... what blood relation Agnes is to you, you dear bad boy.'

'No blood relation,' I replied, but we were brought up together, like brother and sister.'

'I wonder why you ever fell in love with me,' said Dora, beginning on another button of my coat.

'Perhaps because I couldn't see you, and not love you, Dora!'

'Suppose you had never seen me at all,' said Dora, going to another button.

'Suppose we had never been born!' I said gaily.

Dora to David represents heavenly playfulness rather than the give-and-take of an adult relationship, so he fails to hear the serious question Dora is timidly asking: Do you really think you love me more than Agnes? His answer isn't very reassuring either: though he doesn't realise he's doing it, he more or less makes clear that his love for Dora is based on physical attraction rather than anything deeper, while it's Agnes's mind and soul he has been praising in her presence. Walter Hartright at least keeps his feelings in separate boxes, romance in one and companionship in another, but David's overspill because he isn't very good at understanding them. He's even worse at noticing their effects on others: 'He thinks so much of your opinion, that I was quite afraid of it!' say Dora to Agnes, well aware that Agnes, were she less restrained, would be a serious rival for David's affections, while poor Agnes has to endure her beloved David rhapsodising about Dora up hill and down dale. When one can love from a position of masculine superiority, one doesn't need to be too sensitive to the heartache one may cause, because it doesn't have consequences: both women marry him in the end, despite his inability to discern his own 'undisciplined heart.' Perhaps they should just be glad he spares them too many panegyrics on his feelings for Steerforth.

Dickens is well aware that these are faults in David, but in finally giving him Agnes, absolves them. Once the hero has learned better, it is not too late for him to do better: this is not a world where masculine mistakes result in missed chances. At the same time, learning better is a painful business. Collins's hero gets to live in chaste polygamy with his wife and sister-in-law, to enjoy the delights of childlike innocence and rational adulthood at once, but Dickens is not quite so indulgent. David has to learn to move on from his attraction to the childlike: his domestic happiness consists in escaping his earlier tastes rather than getting the best of both worlds.

For all its grief, though, Dora's death is rather comfortable for him, or at least for his long-term happiness. Dora might be darling when she's young, but Dickens had only savage mockery for women who try to keep their girlish charms into middle age, and if death hadn't taken her it's hard to conceive any other direction Dora might have taken, incapable of growth as she is. In the bloom of youth, Dora's cutely forgivable, but an ageing Dora would be, at least in Dickens's terms, grotesque.

The point is, while both writers are acute enough to realise that cherubic women do not make good wives, they also spare their heroes the full consequences of marrying them. Dickens is more prepared to show in stark comic disasters what such a wife is like without help, but plots frequently rescue characters from some situation or other, and both Dickens and Collins find plot in rescuing their heroes from the fallout of their sexual tastes.

When a female writer gets hold of the same situation, that doesn't happen.

Consider the Lydgate marriage in George Eliot's Middlemarch. Ambitious young Doctor Lydgate, whose high ideas of science do not obliterate some 'spots of commonness' in his taste in women, makes the mistake of marrying pretty, proper, finishing-school-polished Rosamund Vincy, largely because he realises she's taken his casual flirtation seriously and can't bear hurting her feelings. In the hands of another writer this might be seen as fatherly indulgence of a child, and indeed, Rosamund is presented as immature, but Eliot has less tender feelings towards dainty young ornaments than Dickens and Collins, and a crisper view of 'what can go on in the elegant leisure of a young lady's mind.' Rosamund is 'proudly calm' in the face of what she considers adversity, but in practice this manifests as what a modern reader would call passive aggression. As a wife, she determinedly fails to economise, goes behind her husband's back, and blocks all his attempts to avoid the bankruptcy that threatens them, but whenever he challenges this, reacts by refusing to understand the need for economy and focusing instead on the fact that he's raising his voice or asking her to live uncomfortably. As David says of Dora, Lydgate finds the practicalities of life 'so difficult of communication to her'.

This is the 'Doady, don't be dreadful!' tactic, but Eliot presents it as entirely willed - and not as charming, childlike wilfulness, but the will that arises from limited understanding. Children are innocent, but even the most generous and altruistic of them don't pull an adult load: it's a mistreated child who can't take parental care for granted. Rosamund, indulged all her life, has never progressed beyond the placid expectation that life should be kept pleasant for her by the efforts of others. In a child this is natural and healthy, but in an adult it becomes an iron willed that ultimately dominates her supposedly more intelligent husband. Rather than being helpless, Rosamund is unhelpful. Her husband begins as David does by 'petting her resignedly', but as circumstances get harder and harder, the resignation begins to crack. Not only beset by money troubles, he is also presented with a wife who - like Dora, but in a way that the narrative views with colder eyes - has her own wishes and asserts them. 'He was prepared to be indulgent towards feminine weakness, but not towards feminine dictation...' but that's the problem: a limited understanding brings with it a limited ability or willingness to grasp that other people may also have a point. Rosamund's feminine 'weakness' becomes an impassable wall of refusal: you cannot make someone act on principles they cannot understand. Dora and Laura might understand the limits of their own understanding, but Rosamund doesn't. We might say that the former two are consciously incompetent and Rosamund unconsciously so - but it might be more accurate to say that a female writer, however unsympathetic to her female character, is less able to deny her the dignity of at least having a mind of her own.

And goodness, does Rosamund have a mind of her own. Where Dora and Laura adore and oblige - or at least, their failures to oblige are failures they can't help, and they feel bad about their inabilities - Rosamund is a human being, and human beings generally place their own wishes ahead of those of others unless they can see a moral reason to do otherwise. Given her education by Miss Lemon's finishing school, Rosamund's morals are less a code of ethics than of etiquette: as long as she never raises her voice, she considers herself above reproach, and Lydgate's less controlled frustration is cause enough for her to consider him in the wrong - and the more so the more frustrated he becomes with her resistance. 'Feeling checkmated', Lydgate wonders 'What place was there in her mind for a remonstrance to lodge in?' The resignation that is the finishing point of David's marriage is, for Lydgate, only a stop along the way, a phase of denial that comes before anger, bargaining and depression.

Because this is what he perceives: Rosamund may have been groomed for childlike indulgence, but she is not, in fact, a child. Collins and Dickens may have believed adult women inescapably childlike in their understanding and yet still attractive and marriageable - though to modern eyes, there is something disturbing about the way their heroes marry and beget children upon women who appear not so much innocent as profoundly psychologically disabled. (Not that psychologically disabled can never marry, of course, but they should probably steer clear of husbands who fetishise their disability). Eliot has her mind on other things. Rosamund is intellectually capable of understanding: she's just temperamentally incapable. Faced with a world that refuses to bail her and her husband out of debt, '...there was but one person in Rosamund's world whom she did not regard as blameworthy, and that was the graceful creature with blond plaits and with little hands crossed before her [ie herself], who had never expressed herself unbecomingly, and who had always acted for the best - the best naturally being what she best liked.'

Eliot is a writer of judgements and criticisms, but her sarcasm is seldom so savage. It is easy to assume personal anger in this characterisation - Eliot, or rather Mary Ann Evans, was a notoriously plain woman in a world where beauty was a woman's chief virtue - but it is interesting to note that her savagery is primarily directed at Rosamund: the recipient of almost no sympathy from a writer famous for her omnisciently compassionate narratives. Lydgate is punished by having to live with Rosamund, but he is consistently presented as in the right when their desires clash. Events penalise him, but the narrative voice does not. Rosamund is less an act of vengeance against men of superficial tastes, and more a warning to them: 'The shallowness of a waternixie's soul may have a charm until she becomes didactic.'

And yet even here, as elsewhere, there is the parallel woman, the woman of spirit and intellect to counterbalance her empty-headed sister whose presence summons her up like a shadow. This is Dorothea, Eliot's saintly heroine. 'Ardent' rather than full of Agnes's 'tranquil brightness' or Marian's internalised misogyny, Dorothea has been dismissed early in the book by Lydgate's sexual tastes as beautiful but overly earnest ('The society of such women was about as relaxing as going from your work to teach the second form, instead of reclining in a paradise with sweet laughs for bird-notes, and blue eyes for a heaven'); only later, when she rescues him from disgrace, does he recognise her qualities. But unlike the loyal Marian and loving Agnes, she helps him for reasons that are not, fundamentally, about him. She barely knows him as an individual and is in love with another man; her hand is extended out of principle, a general passion for justice - for ideas of her own. Where Marian and Agnes support their men out of love and subordinate any selfish feelings of their own with little if any apparent struggle, Dorothea's struggles to subordinate her own heart-burnings - which are not for Lydgate - are passionate and difficult, and her relationship with Lydgate is charitable rather than emotional. Where David and Walter love from the heights of masculine superiority, Dorothea reaches down to Lydgate. Out of moral superiority, the narrative has no doubt, but also out of financial superiority: Lydgate, by this point, is on the edge of bankruptcy, while Dorothea is a wealthy widow who can distribute her funds as she sees fit. Her help is practical, as is Marian's and Agnes's, and she occupies a 'good angel' position in Lydgate's life too, but in the hands of a female writer, this becomes an act of patronage rather than of worship.

Well, we often side with characters of our own sex. But what's particularly interesting is what happens to sexual jealousy in these different hands.

Laura has no resentment of Marian, nor Marian of Laura. In fact, their cohabitation seems like the best thing for both of them: helpless Laura gets spared the full burdens of adult life, while ugly Marian gets gracious accommodation rather than outcast spinsterhood. Laura isn't so stupid that she can't see the threat - or rather, Collins is not so conventional that he can't see the problem. 'You will end in liking Marian better than me - you will, because I am so helpless!' Laura cries as things become more difficult and Marian takes on more and more of the helpmeet role.

Walter's response to this is rather curious: in the narrative, he comments, 'my poor, faded flower! my lost, afflicted sister!' Whose sister is she at this moment? Walter's? It seems oddly unerotic, even 'faded' by affliction as she is. Marian's? Then Laura is right that deep down, Walter does 'like Marian better.' Or have the three of them temporarily melded into a family unit, with Walter playing chaste brother to both?

It's an odd moment, but Collins quickly gets back on track. Under Walter's and Marian's care, Laura recovers her bloom and the marriage takes place, comfortably resulting in a son and a restored fortune. In the final scene, Marian, hearing the news that the estate has passed finally to our heroic family, announces it thus: 'Let me make two eminent personages known to one another: Mr Walter Hartright - the Heir of Limmeridge.' Laura gives Walter his son by flesh, and Marian gives Walter his son by words - and weeps 'bright tears of happiness' at her role. 'Marian was the good angel of our lives - let Marian end our Story,' Walter says in the final line, rather paradoxically grabbing at the last word, but that grab grants Marian status. In fact she and Laura come to announce the news together, but if Laura objects to Marian taking over the announcement - well, Marian ends the story, so whatever Laura has to say about it is lost to us. It's to be assumed that, bound together by fate as they are, the two women act in concert with no jockeying for status between them.

Dora is not quite so selfless. As we've already seen, she's sharp-eyed about David's feelings for Agnes, and the merry insensitivity of David's response, we assume, informs her that there's no point pursuing the issue further. She accepts what's offered and learns to take what advantage she can out of it: David and Agnes's relationship benefits her in that Agnes advises David not to be too 'sudden' in trying to make Dora grow up, and provides her with a new Julia Mills, and even, finally, a successor who will at least honour her memory. Agnes, meanwhile, makes no attempt to distract David's affections. She waits them out, knowing she might have to wait for ever, but feeling no apparent resentment at David's neglect of her sterling qualities for the superficial charms of fluffy little Dora. Sexual jealousy in women is generally seen as rather monstrous in Dickens's world - either a man is upright, in which case the jealousy is unjust, or he's not, in which case it's pretty monstrous to want him in the first place, and passion and ego, both essential components in jealousy, are not generally seen as becoming female qualities. In the real world, intelligent women do generally resent it when otherwise intelligent men reject them in favour of feather-headed rivals, but Dickens is not the writer to sympathise with that problem. He seldom sympathises with unrequited love in men either, or at least, not unless the lover, like Smike or Tom Pinch, knows full well that their love is hopeless and expects no better: unrequited love is, in Dickens's world, a matter of remembering or forgetting your place. (Interestingly, sexless, selfless Tom is rewarded by his sister's marriage to his friend, putting him in a rather Marian-like role. Deviate far enough from strapping masculinity, and you may get a woman's portion.) There are a few exceptions, such as Pip in Great Expectations, but on the whole, Dickens's sympathy is seldom caught by romantic jealousy, and even more seldom caught by feminine ego. Dora accepts her child-like status, Agnes her sweet sister role, and both wait patiently for David to make his choices, laying no blame on each other.

But Rosamund? She is not so resigned. In the epilogue, we hear the final story of the Lydgate marriage:

[Lydgate] once called her his basil plant; and when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant that had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man's brains. Rosamund had a placid but strong answer to such speeches. Why then had he chosen her? It was a pity he had not had Mrs Ladislaw, whom he was always praising and placing above her. And thus the conversation ended with the advantage on Rosamund's side. But it would be unjust not to tell, that she never uttered a word in depreciation of Dorothea, keeping in religious remembrance the generosity which had come to her aid in the sharpest crisis of her life.

Dorothea, like Walter and David, is to some extent protected by her author. But Lydgate does not get off so lightly. Unlike Dora, Rosamund not only notices but is prepared to comment when her husband eulogises another woman. In fact prior to the Dorothea incident (a complicated affair in which she offers different support to both Rosamund and Lydgate) Rosamund has been the less faithful of the two partners, engaging in a flirtation with Lydgate's cousin and then a more serious attempt to attract the affections of Will Ladislaw. Her behaviour in these cases, particularly the latter, is what Mary Wollstonecraft predicts in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: a woman educated only to please men will, once the shine of novelty wears off her marriage, consider herself neglected and purposeless, and most likely look around for some other man to please. Not being one to hold herself accountable, though, Rosamund - a lifelong subscriber of the common human failing known as It's Different When It's Me Doing It - is well able to notice when her husband's respect for another woman's character exceeds his respect for her own.

Which is what happens with Marian and Agnes, fundamentally. Walter may love Laura, but his respect for her abilities or opinions is low, and his main response to her plea not to be treated 'like a child' is pity. David adores Dora, but adoration is not the same as love, and the fact that she's about as rational as her pet spaniel is really the focus of his worship. They don't hold Marian and Agnes over their wives as critical examples - the 'basil plant' comment is not at all kind - but sexual love and respect are almost mutually exclusive to them. Lydgate learns better than this, rather too late ... but rather than tamely accepting the emotional polygamy that his earlier tastes call for, Rosamund bitterly resents him for it. And, having humanity and agency, is perfectly prepared to use it as a weapon if he pushes things too far.

Notice, too, the phrase 'Why, then, had he chosen her?' (Italics mine.) It's a question he can't in honesty answer, because the truthful reply would be that he didn't exactly choose her, he flirted with her casually and then proposed on impulse when he saw her crying over his neglect - which is, in a world where divorce is disgraceful, utterly unsayable. Rosamund may be no genius when it comes to household accounts, but she's a master tactician when it comes to domestic disagreements. The word 'chosen' both holds him to his responsibilities - he could, had he exercised better judgement, have avoided the entire marriage - and refers to the problem in gender roles that had Rosamund crying in the first place.

The movie Easter Parade features a song that's both delightfully tuneful and a bit disquieting:

The girl I love is on a magazine cover
It seems they painted her just for me
I'd fall in love if I could ever discover
A little girl quite as nice as she
If I could meet a girl as sweet
I'd simply claim her and name her my queen
For if she ever came, I would love her the same
As I love her on the cover of a magazine.

There she is, the nursling of our fantasy. What's wrong with all this is fairly obvious: it's the story of a man falling in love with the idea of a woman (David seems to base his on his mother, Walter on vague 'fantasy', and Lydgate on rather conventional notions of 'the innate submissiveness of the goose as beautifully corresponding to the strength of the gander' - he even says 'I claim you as mine'), and believing that a real woman could ever measure up to that idea - and that, should a woman appear who did, she would be available for the taking, rather than having preferences of her own and the ability to reject him. That's the language: 'I'd simply claim her and name her my queen': I'd adore her, worship her, and show no interest at all in - or even be aware there might exist - what George Eliot would describe as 'what another nature felt in opposition to [my] own.' Woman as ideal is woman as toy.

Of course, women aren't toys, and a man who plays with them my find his fingers cut. But at the same time, Rosamund and Lydgate live in a world rather influenced by that idea - which means that actual women are expected to conform to it. They must be pleasing, and if they love a man, they must sit and wait, and hope. By that convention, the polite fiction is that Lydgate 'chose' Rosamund like a customer picking her off the magazine shelf.

And if it's the place of the man to bestow his affections where he chooses and the woman to receive them passively, Rosamund reasons, then logically if the marriage fails it must be the man's fault. Absence of agency implies absence of blame: a magazine cannot be held accountable for its owner's discontent. Rosamund does not, of course, lack agency - she's far the stronger will of the two - but she has been educated to regard herself as ladylike, and takes what limited advantages that role offers, playing them with profound aggression that silences her supposedly dominant husband.

The Victorian nursling is a vacuum, and naturalism abhors her. To fill the spaces she leaves, another woman has to appear as her counter-balance: adult to her child, soulful or intellectual to her unstained innocence, practical to her decorative, useful to her useless. The visionary nursling conjures up the good angel. Without such a counterpart, the poor sap dumb enough to marry her has no chance.

Collins and Dickens bend plot to keep her around for the benefit of their saps, Collins more so than Dickens. Dickens was capable of greater sexism than Collins - many of his more 'pure' heroines are childlike along the Dora model but with much less hard-headedness about their vacuity, while Collins at least tries to give his female characters individual personalities - but it would appear that Collins's masculine privilege and polyamorous instincts got the better of him when it came to Laura and Marian. To Dickens and Eliot, the woman of soul and reflection is the saviour from and counterweight to the woman of bright blue eyes and blonde curls and no use at all. Eliot, on the other hand, employs Dorothea as a reproach to Lydgate - both in the mouth of Rosamund, as a reproach for his inability to stay in love with the woman he married, and as a broader reproach for his poor judgement in failing to recognise the value of female intelligence in time.

It's probably worth considering the chronology. David Copperfield came out in 1850, The Woman in White in 1859, and Middlemarch was published from 1869 t0 1872 (or 1874, when the first one-volume edition appeared) - which is to say, a generation down from its masculine predecessors. Dickens's take on the feather-headed moppet is sharper than Collins's, but despite their friendship Collins went on to create Laura Fairlie anyway, which suggests the strength that the visionary nursling exercised in the contemporary imagination. Eliot may have been responding to literary types as well as to contemporary tastes. But the curious fact remains that despite her just anger at the visionary-nursling phenomenon, her plot more or less required a good angel to sort out the mess the nursling creates. What comes across as male entitlement in the hands of Collins and Dickens in the hands of Eliot comes across as an attempt to justify women. Eliot works to place the blame for Rosamund on her shallow values and poor upbringing rather than her essential nature, but at the same time anger with her pulses through the narrative. Angelic Dorothea is not so much a prop to the masculine hero as a cry that women are also capable of great virtue - although the very beginning of the book declares that it will be a study of how a potential saint can be wasted through limited opportunities. Education is blamed in both cases, in short, but Eliot was too vivid a character writer not to give also a sense of inherent personality.

But Dorothea and Rosamund are, at least, both human beings, and notably, both are equally vivid in their portrayal. Required by plot to be a prize rather than an agent, Laura continually disappears from The Woman in White. Her physical disappearance at the hands of villains is only the most obvious of her vanishing acts; by having Walter speak about her and Marian speak for her, Collins fades Laura in and out throughout the story. In a book whose whole presentation rests on the conceit that different characters narrate different sections of events, Laura - who was, after all, right at the centre of them - has no section written in her own words. Practicality demands it: to have such a section would blow all the suspense of wondering what happened to her in the middle of the book. But while Marian speaks out in her own words, Laura, without a narrative, winds up almost voiceless, a 'fantasy' as much as a character. Her good angel dominates her.

With David Copperfield, matters are reversed. For all her foolishness, Dora's voice, with its cutesy nicknames and resolute girlishness and volatile denials, rings clear and distinctive in every scene, while patient Agnes, hidden by David's relentless characterisation of her as an angel, a stained-glass window, an unfleshed fantasy, hides her real feelings from us as well as from him, leaving her to play voice of reason and wait until she can finally speak out with her 'I have loved you all my life!'

But Dorothea and Rosamund are both real. The reason is largely that both are allowed passion. Marian may be an Uncle Tom, but that act of hers shows up a passionate desire to be taken seriously, while Laura cannot assert her will without destroying the story. Agnes is all resignation and charity while Dora flies into dizzying crescendos of panic and diminuendoes of pleading. It's only when both characters are allowed to really, seriously want things - want them for themselves, not just for the benefit of the man they love - that they speak from the page with the full force of humanity.

In his autobiography Lost Boy (co-written with Maia Szalavitz) Brent Jeffs, nephew of FLDS patriarch Warren Jeffs, remarks:

Proponents of polygamy often argue that when two women want the same man, if he can marry both of them this will prevent divorce as a consequence of adultery ... Polygamy supporters say that, as a result, conflict and jealousy are actually reduced. They also claim that sisters are typically better suited to being sister-wives than unrelated women. Neither position gets any support whatsoever from what went on in my family.

The relationship between Jeffs's aunt and his mother, in fact, was characterised by physical fighting and constant competition rather than sweet sisterhood. Yet this sister-wife idea seems to have deep roots: Agnes, who begins as David's 'sister' occupies an older sister role with Dora, while Marian and Laura are actual sisters - or rather, children of the same mother. Marian the half-sister becomes a half-wife and accepts her lower status just as she accepts being excluded from Laura's inheritance; there is no conflict between them as they live under the same roof. (Another practice Jeffs reports the FLDS enforcing, with increased conflict as the inevitable result.) Sisters tend to compete for resources in the real world, and generally maintain harmony by carving out their own separate domains, but there is something about the notion of sisterly harmony that seems to compel these male writers.

Dorothea and Rosamund, on the other hand, are only slightly acquainted. They do not occupy the same social caste - Dorothea is aristocratic while Rosamund hails from the wealthy middle class - and seldom move in the same circles. Such interaction between them as we see is focused around Dorothea's charitable attempts to help Rosamund, and yet this creates no bond between them. Rosamund may keep Dorothea in 'religious remembrance', but this does not mean she wants to hear her name spoken under her roof. There is a separation between the two women: nothing either chosen or predestined binds them together. They reflect each other thematically, but this doesn't mean they have to socialise with each other, and that's a difference in perspective: mirroring each other does not make them, in terms of how their lives appear to themselves, deeply connected. Their fictional equivalencies do not mean they have to live as a matched set; in terms of how they do live, one could say that they resist colluding in their own equivalence by making friends, marrying the same man or otherwise pairing off. The reader may draw parallels, but they aren't about to rearrange their personal lives to make them neater.

Dorothea and Rosamund, in short, are part of the Laura/Dora Marian/Agnes tradition, but by retaining both separate personalities and separate lives, they call its values into question. Where Dickens favours exchanging one for another and Collins favours having both, Eliot is very clear that women are not bookends: having both around at once is a one-off, not a lifestyle.

Giving a male character two women to serve his different needs, sexual and practical, is a problem for writers who seek to write good female characters, because women are people and people are not good at subordinating their entire lives to the needs of somebody else. Put simply: two women who influence the life of one man are likely to have separate lives and interests; if their lives and interests both centre around him, they are likely to come into conflict - or if they don't, it'll be for some extraordinary reason rather than because of their inherent feminine nature. (Oh yes, Marian is feminine. You don't see a man running down his gender and spending all his life as a bachelor uncle like that, not in nineteenth century literature you don't.)

Modern tastes seem to have changed somewhat, and you don't see the nursling type quite so often. We have other sexual dichotomies, and pulp fiction for women as well as men now seems willing to adopt the two-for-one approach - or at least, I have the impression that women's pulp is notably fond of the love triangle, Twilight being the most prominent example. Having two people devoted to you is, after all, a compelling idea, and a lot of the time it's just a straightforward ego-fantasy. But it's interesting to see what happens when literary authors get hold of it.

Mumview: Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

2010-11-17T11:32:00.001Z

Quick summary

A year in the life of 75-year-old comedian Joan Rivers as she works to keep working. That's about it, really.

Does it work the way it should?

Making a documentary, one generally needs some kind of angle, and the problem with following a single person is that it's hard not to end up giving the audience nothing much beyond what that person chooses to tell the camera. (After all, they can always clam up and refuse to be filmed if you seem to be undermining them, and unlike with ensemble pieces, other people may not produce interesting clashes of perspective.) It's a problem that this movie doesn't get past.

So: Joan Rivers is a workaholic who never wants to retire, and fears quiet spells more than anything; keeping your profile up in showbiz is stressful and scary; her real aspiration is acting; like most performers, she's deeply insecure and covers it up with a big persona. This we find out in the first five minutes, and from then on, we've pretty much got the point. It's pretty good at getting us to sympathise with her, but a much shorter film could have done much the same thing.

There's some discussion about the suicide of her husband, the birth of her daughter and their relationship now, but this material, which is all more dramatic than the round of bookings and phone calls we get to see, is thrown in as background rather than given much space to consider, and we hear very few people's opinions about it beyond Rivers herself, and sometimes her daughter. That's what we get for a structure that's about following Rivers for a year and seeing what happens - but what happens is pretty much the usual up-down struggle of a hardworking performer and Rivers telling us that she's insecure and wants to work.

The thing is, if you're following somebody for a year and it's a pretty ordinary year, and you don't want to delve into their past or interrogate their self-image, you're going to get a lot of repetition. When the same sorts of things keep happening, people tend to keep saying the same things as well. In the credits we see Rivers joke that it would be a great thing for the film if she died during shooting - the last year of Joan Rivers's life would be such a great subject! - and with her usual slice-and-dice perception, she actually makes a good point. Not that I'd wish Rivers dead just to, um, liven up the film; I'd rather be a bit bored and have her alive and well ... but since the film is bounded by its time frame, it would have been a bigger draw if something not routine had happened.

So we don't get much of Rivers's past and only a certain amount of her actual comedy, and quite a lot of driving around and making phone calls and worrying over bookings. It made me sympathise with Rivers (enough to feel sorry that I'm giving the movie a bad review, considering how hard we see her taking negative theatrical reviews), but despite the grandeur of the Brixton Ritzy's Screen One auditorium, it's not at all a cinematic piece. Ironically for a film about a performer who plays to crowds of thousands, it feels out of place in a big, plush theatre; its natural home seems more like nine o'clock on a Thursday night on terrestrial TV.

Ready for this?

I'm not a particular Rivers expert, so I'm probably not the reviewer they're hoping for. If you're a big fan of Rivers, the brief treatment of her past will spare you from hearing too much of what you already know, and the contrast between her abrasive stage persona and her anxious backstage self may deepen your appreciation. Rivers comes across as one of those people who puts up spikes because she's afraid of not being liked - there's a scene where she frets that nobody approached her at a party (which we don't get to see) and her daughter points out that she acted unapproachable, for instance, which is one of the more interesting moments. But I wouldn't recommend the film to a non-Rivers fan.

Life amongst the groundlings

Perhaps because of the rain - pushing a pram and holding an umbrella don't mix - the auditorium was pretty empty, with a certain amount of squeaking from a baby nearby. But I fear the simplest answer is this: in the last third of the movie I went out to the ladies', changed a nappy, rearranged clothes and came back. And I didn't feel I'd miss anything much. That's pretty much the test; the bottom line, one might say. Possibly there were some startling revelations in the time I was gone, but it's a film that delivers its message quickly and from there on you've pretty much seen it. If the truth be told, that nappy could have waited.

So, any good?
I'd like to be nicer about it if I could, because it did make me feel for Joan Rivers. But the ticket cost seven pounds, and a fair price would have been about three. If you don't have a baby to wheel out, you'll probably have more fun just watching Rivers do stand-up. Good comedian, likeable person, small movie.

Mumview: The Arbor

2010-11-14T10:45:00.006Z

My local-ish cinema features a wonderful attraction: The Big Scream. This means that every Friday at 11am, they screen one or two films that are open only to parents with children under one, thus allowing mothers to get out of the house and see movies, and hopefully allowing other moviegoers to watch films without 'waah' in their ears all the time.

I think I'll be going to this quite a bit. And with that in mind, I'm going to try my hand at reviewing. The limited options mean that I may end up seeing films I wouldn't normally attend, which ought to broaden my mind; I shall try to snatch moments in which to write up my findings: film reviews through the eyes of a new mother. To make things easier for me, given the erratic circumstances under which I'm reviewing, I shall be breaking things up into categories.

Not all of which will be conventional. Watching with a baby on your lap places a particular demand on a film - or rather, it raises a question: how does it compete for your attention, and how easy to follow is it when you may have to look away and shush a crying infant? That may not be a consideration for everyone, but I think it actually tells you rather a lot about a film. Watching With Mother, or rather Watching With Your Mother Hat On, means you look at a film through rather brisk eyes.

So there will be five categories. The first will be a quick summary, which is pretty self-explanatory. The second discusses the film. Watching films you picked from limited options means you have to take them on their own terms, so the question is 'Does it work the way it should?' - ie, for this kind of film, is it a good example. Because I won't necessarily have known much about the film going in - again, the Brixton Ritzy kind of picks my films for me these days - I'll also be including a section called 'Ready for this?', which is about how informed or ignorant a viewer I was, and how this affected the viewing experience. Then there's 'Life amongst the groundlings' - how well the film worked amid the distracting circumstances. And finally, a brief summary of whether it's any good, because I gather reviews are supposed to tell you that...

I've seen two films so far, The Arbor and Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work. I shall begin with the one I saw first, The Arbor.

Mumview: The Arbor

Quick summary

The playwright Andrea Dunbar, best known for her screenplay Rita, Sue and Bob Too, wrote her first play at fifteen and penned several outstanding comedic portraits of life as she knew it on 'The Arbor', the toughest estate in Bradford, before dying in a pub at the age of twenty-nine, with a serious drinking problem and three children by different fathers to her name. Her eldest daughter Lorraine, struggling as a half-Pakistani girl in a racist environment and born to a teenage mother, drifted into a rough life of intermittent prostitution and heroin addiction. Lorraine, who had a lot to criticise about Andrea as a mother, was later convicted of causing the death of her two-year-old son by gross neglect.

The Arbor features an unusual dramatic device: it takes the real voices of various family members, recorded in interviews, and then stages them with actors lip-synching in different, semi-symbolic settings. These are interspersed with scenes from Dunbar's first autobiographical play, also called The Arbor.

Does it work the way it should?

Using actors as puppets is a big technical risk, and one that you'd expect to be very distracting. In fact it works superbly. The actors' performances are well up to the technical difficulties, but more than that, the slight disconnect between actor and speaker puts a bit of distance between audience and cast - and oddly, that disconnect is what allows us to sympathise.

The story as it emerges shows how Lorraine, the child who blamed Andrea for her failings as a mother the most, also ended up repeating the most of her mistakes. There's a particularly telling moment when Lorraine, having told the sad story of overhearing her mother say that she wanted her other children but not Lorraine, later remarks sadly that her third child, the boy who died under her care, was the first of her children that she'd really wanted - with no apparent awareness that this remark too would probably find its way to her older children's ears. Lorraine appears as the odd one out in the family, her anger with Andrea causing a rift between her and her sister, and it's a family tension that's familar to many of us: is the angry, difficult one that way because they've suffered more than the forgiving ones, or are they causing themselves more suffering by being difficult? Is the forgiving one forgiving because they're a better person or because they have less to forgive? And can we forgive the unforgiving one when they make mistakes themself?

It's a question that no family will ever agree on: this is the essence of family conflict, that everyone has their own story, that you can grow up in the same house and grow up in a different family at once. The way the film is presented - artificial but naturalistic, real material but a stylised delivery, delicate but unflinching - gives us space to hear each side without demanding that we accept any particular version of the truth ... or perhaps pushes us to say that the truth is that everyone's version is true to them and to no one else.

Family conflicts are full of judgements, but The Arbor's curious, beautiful artificiality shows us reality without judgement. It's really extraordinary.

Ready for this?

I had almost no idea what the film would be when I went in. I knew what the technical conceit was - it's attention-getting - but that was about it: I didn't know anything about Andrea Dunbar, never mind the lives of her children.

So I came out knowing that it was a story about the death of a child, but this was something that unfolded gradually. I had to wait to find out what the movie I was watching was about.

Did it work? Yep. The film goes at a graceful pace, despite the raucousness of Dunbar's intercut scenes, and waiting to see where it was going with this was suspenseful and fascinating rather than confusing or dull. In some ways it's a film that repays watching unprepared, but I guess I've blown it for you with this review. You should still go see it, though.

Life amongst the groundlings

Yep, there was crying in the audience, from other babies and from my own: an hour and a half is a long time for a baby to sit in the dark. Women wandered the aisles shushing their various infants; wails arose at intervals.

How did this affect my viewing the film? Well, I wanted my own son to be happy for two reasons: I wanted him to be happy, and also I was completely gripped. Ironically enough for a film about neglectful mothering, this was a film that strained my commitment to motherhood.

So, any good?

Yep, brilliant. New and original without being the least bit gimmicky: the innovations feel like they were shaped around the material rather than slapped on it willy-nilly. Moving and compassionate, tough and intelligent, and, in its quiet way, compulsively watchable. Really go see this: it's a rare and fascinating gem.

So, congratulations...

2010-11-01T09:25:00.003Z

...to China Mieville, my fellow shortlistee and winner of this year's World Fantasy Award for The City and the City.

Also congratulations to the other shortlistees: James Enge, author of Blood of Ambrose, Caitlin R. Kiernan, author of The Red Tree, Jeff VanderMeer, author of Finch, and heck, while we're at it, congratulations to me as well.

I'd like to say something intelligent about the entries, but regrettably I can't: I heard about the shortlist the day before going into hospital for an induction and have been getting to grips with motherhood, and postnatal PTSD as well, ever since, so my reading time is currently a bit reduced. However, to get that far they have to be good books (In Great Waters is awesome, listen to the sound of my voice, you are feeling sleepy and want to buy lots and lots of copies...), so anyone who's looking for a fantasy novel will I hope take note.

So, cyber-handshakes all round and congratulations to everyone.

Happy Halloween!

2010-10-30T09:43:00.002Z

A brief aside about Sherlock Holmes

2010-10-26T07:40:00.005Z

I was chatting on the Slacktivist blog recently (much recommended, blogger and community both), and it being a digressive sort of place, the subject of Sherlock Holmes came up. I put in a penn'orth, and a nice commenter asked if she could either paste it on her blog or link to it on mine. Well, she's welcome to do either, but since it seemed to be a well-liked comment, I thought I'd put it here anyway.

The subject that came up was the issue of Sherlock Holmes's famous lack of interest in Girls. Romance is a common subplot in many kinds of genre fiction, detective stories included; heck, I wrote a detective novel and included a romance of sorts myself. The Sherlock Holmes stories, however, keep romance notably absent. Watson has a romance in the second novel, The Sign of the Four, then quietly marries, settles down, gets widowed, sometimes mentions a wife again after that (consistency being ... well, I'll mention that later) and that's about it. Holmes, on the other hand, shows pretty much no interest in the fairer sex. Some readers interpret this as homosexuality, others as asexuality. My take is, it's a matter of writing convenience - and that trying to read too much into it, or indeed into many things in the Holmes stories, will probably lead you up a blind alley.

This was my comment:

I'd say that trying to characterise Sherlock Holmes too closely based on single incidents or stories seems a bit Forth-Bridge-painting. Arthur Conan Doyle himself wasn't particularly concerned with consistency and sometimes contradicted himself (I believe, for instance, Watson's bullet wound was sometimes in his leg and sometimes in his shoulder). It wasn't a coherent structure, it was a loose-woven bunch of short stories knocked out by an author who wasn't particularly attached to his creation and seemed to approach them on a one-at-a-time basis. Perhaps ironically for stories about a rigorous detective with a keen eye for detail, an impressionistic sense of them is probably truer to their spirit than a rigorous assembly of details.

That said...

[Someone commented] To be fair, not only was Sherlock, by all accounts, assexual, but condescension to women was kind of a big thing, back in the Victorian era.

From the stories I've read - which isn't all of them, because man there are a lot - the impression I had was that while the attitude towards women was about as consistent as everything else in the Sherlock Holmes file, Holmes's attitude was often characterised as a sort of brother-for-hire. There's a story (I forget which [note - it's 'A Case of Identity', I now find) that ends with Holmes telling a conman that if the gulled woman had 'a brother or a friend' that man ought to horsewhip him, then notices a riding crop and chases him out of the room; there's another ('The Solitary Cyclist', I think) where Holmes keeps repeating that he wouldn't want a sister of his accepting the dodgy-sounding job that the client brings to his attention; in The Sign of the Four, Mary Morstan employs Holmes and Watson to accompany her to a doubtful assignation having been told she can bring 'two friends' if she wishes. Protection is often characterised as either a brother or a friend.

In an environment where women weren't independent, 'a brother or a friend' fulfils a role we wouldn't associate with the phrase nowadays. Which is to say, a representative of her interests, in a way that may range from bodyguard to legal spokesman, and whose lack of marital interest in her - let's not forget that married women had only gained the legal right to their own property in 1882, a mere five years before the first Holmes story, and husbands still had a lot of economic power over wives - means that he can be trusted not to exploit her financially as well as sexually. With female clients, at least, that seems to be the position Holmes is often portrayed as taking: a kind of temporary male relative for women who don't have any suitable male relatives handy.

In a way, it possibly freed Conan Doyle up to have Homes see both male and female clients. A male detective who took a sexual interest in vulnerable female clients would be rather creepy, and in the Victorian era would also raise the issue of propriety. Besides that, an era where wifehood was also the destination of women in most people's eyes would make it difficult to write stories in which a man goes to trouble for a woman without people expecting a romantic angle. Characterising Holmes as not particularly interested in sex takes the issue off the table and lets Conan Doyle get on with writing about the detective work with a more varied allowable clientele.

I'd speculate that the Irene Adler plot - the only story ['A Scandal in Bohemia'] in which Holmes shows anything resembling personal interest in a woman - was brought up as a way of addressing and then dismissing the issue. It was, after all, the first Holmes short story. There's something dispatchful about that: "Okay, I'm going to start writing short stories about this detective, and for those of you wondering whether I'm going to write about him finding romance - no, okay? Here's a situation where I float the possibility of romance, it doesn't happen, and the narrator explicitly tells you it's not going to happen again. So, have we got that out of the way? Right, let's get on with talking about clues."

[End of comment]

It's my experience that readers will often want to know about romance. A lot of the questions I get about my first novel (spoiler alert) are about what will happen to the heroine and her boyfriend, a question I left open at the end of the novel. I left the question open deliberately, and if I ever did write a sequel (which I really don't think I will) then I'd incline not to reunite them: I think I could get a more interesting story that way. But readers usually want to hear that they will get back together. We usually want romance in our lives, so it's not surprising that we often want it in our fiction.

But if you want to write fiction about something else, particularly genre fiction, and you don't want to put romance in it, that readerly desire can be a nuisance. Conan Doyle was notably casual about what happened to his creation - famously, when the American actor William Gillette asked if he'd mind a love interest being introduced into a play adaptation of the Holmes stories, Conan Doyle cabled back crisply, 'Marry him, murder him, do what you like with him.' - but writing romance in those stories evidently didn't interest him.

I wonder, too, if another reason was that it might have put a crimp on Holmes's eccentricities - which surely were one of the more fun things to write. The stories rest on the strong assumption that domestic order is a female province; in 'The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle', for instance, Holmes deduces that a man's wife no longer loves him because:

This hat has not been brushed for weeks. When I see you, my dear Watson, with a week's accumulation of dust upon your hat, and when your wife allows you to go out in such a state, I shall fear that you also have been unfortunate enough to lose your wife's affection.

Holmes's tendency to keep tobacco in a slipper and shoot 'a patriotic V.R.' into the wall of his flat and lie around taking cocaine and fill the air with smoke and run chemical experiments at home and spend his morning hours trying to impale pig carcasses and so on - all the lively details that make him such an enjoyable character - are, in a Victorian era, essentially the qualities of a bachelor. A wife would not put up with such behaviour - or if she did, would be an unusual enough personality that she would risk upstaging him. The absence of a wife allows Conan Doyle free rein with Holmes and his little ways, as well as the convenient freedom to pursue his cases at all hours, go in and out in disguise, and generally pursue the plot unimpeded.

Holmes sometimes views women with condescension and sometimes with admiration - or more specifically, he tends to react to them on an individual basis, only occasionally generalises about them (the idea that a woman will try to rescue that which she values most when her house is on fire crops up in 'A Scandal in Bohemia', for instance, though I'm not sure what he thinks a man would do), but shows no particular interest in The Sex. On the whole, though, he ignores them. And part of this is because, in an era where educated and professional women were a rarity, intellectual companionship was largely a male business, and a man with no particular sexual interest in women was a man absent the major reason to interest himself in what any given woman thought or felt. Watson is written a normal heterosexual man of his era, and shows an attitude to women best described as gallantry: he refrains from exploitation (only proposing to his wife when it's clear he isn't doing it for money, for instance), notices beauty with an admiring rather than a predatory eye, doesn't assume women are stupid but seems to have a certain protective attitude nonetheless. Holmes likewise is prepared to be protective and has no time for men who mistreat women (consider 'The Speckled Band', where he's blithely unconcerned at having driven a poisonous snake to bite a man who physically abuses his own stepdaughter), but it's more a matter of principle than interest. Hired, he becomes a temporary brother; discharged, he goes back to his previous habits. Sisters aren't allowed to nag you about how to tidy up your room, and in a world where women are charged with the keeping of convention, bachelordom is the comfortable province of non-conformity.

Some serial writers like to show their characters developing over time and some like to keep them constant. Conan Doyle was of the latter variety, a convenient position for a writer who evidently didn't feel it worth the hassle of checking back over previous work to see if it was consistent. The Holmes stories are actually not that repetitive except in the structure of crime/resolution - the curtain rises on our heroes doing really quite a wide range of things - and Holmes's erratic habits and catholic tastes allowed Conan Doyle to keep things various without having to show his detective changing much over time. In fact, immunity to outside influence is one of Holmes's character traits: he's written as a self-created man who deliberately forgets things that don't suit his goals (I believe it's in A Study in Scarlet where he declares an intention to forget that the sun goes round the earth): showing him changing as life goes on would undermine one of his foundational traits. Again, the presence of a wife - and, in a world without much in the way of reliable contraception, the subsequent question of children - would interfere with Holmes's self-sufficient constancy.

"Who drags the fiery artist down? / Who keeps the pioneer in town? / Who hates to let the seaman roam? / It is the wife, it is the home," as Clarence Day Jr had it, and bad luck to the sexist bum. But Holmes is a creation of crusty bachelorhood in that tradition: when women were expected to be limited in scope and intellect, they would also be a plot inconvenience. Holmes has a home, but the absence of women allows to keep it in volatile disarray and leave it whenever he chooses. Introduce a wife, and we'd be looking at an entirely different character.

Of course, wives aren't the only option in the real world, but they are in this particular fiction. A mistress would be less of a disruption to the merry chaos of Baker Street, but would be an offence to Victorian propriety, and prostitutes are right outside the realm of the mentionable. Unrequited love is a possibility, but despite his eccentricities Holmes is eligible - a financially independent gentleman of good character and abilites - so too much in the way of refusal, apart from the dispatchful Ms Adler, would (especially in an era where marriage was supposed to be women's main aim, and to refuse a man would tend to imply either a preferred rival or something seriously wrong with him) undermine the crucial character detail of competence. (In 'Charles Augustus Milverton', for instance, Holmes courts a housemaid to get information: it's simply assumed that so competent a man can gain the affections of a woman if he chooses to try.) Non-connubial romance, never mind sex, would be remarkable enough in this setting that it would, again, pull focus from the main point of the stories, which is the detection.

So I don't think that characterising Holmes as gay, asexual or really anything else quite gets the point. He's simply the protagonist of detective fiction in a world where women had few rights and were more easily ignorable.

You know my methods, Watson, and women would get in their way.

What's your gibberish?

2010-10-21T09:00:00.000Z

In the last post, I felt the need to communicate in gibberish. Describing David Lynch's Dune, this is what I said:

Characters stride from scene to scene declaiming gibberish with a sense of mythic urgency; most of what I could hear in the dialogue seemed to be cries of 'I am the fantiple wekazork!' or 'I shall teach you the ways of the nafbargese momtuggers!' or something similarly incomprehensible; having read the book many years ago I had a vague idea of what they were talking about, but the fact remained that in two hours I seemed to be watching about ten years pass in which the zimfrangers fought the mafnabbis over the crucial issue of penwalladddding, and they all took it really, really seriously, for reasons that nobody was going to explain.

Which gets me thinking on the subject of gibberish in general.

You see, quite a while ago I was chatting online and the subject of anime came up. Now, my knowledge of anime is limited to being an admirer of Hayao Miyazaki's films (which I'd recommend to anyone who hasn't seen them; I'd start with My Neighbour Totoro, because it's just lovely), so while I'm sure there's plenty of good stuff out there, I can sympathise with people whose main feeling towards it is a resounding 'Huh?'

The conversation had covered the view that it's silly to reject anime as a whole because it's so varied, and I was defending the confused. So when someone said (apropos of a different strand of the debate):

Now, if you don't like shoujo, or magical girl, or mecha shows, I'd actually mostly agree (well, shoujo's pretty wide-ranging in topic, so I'm mixed on that one). The only mecha show I've ever liked is Evangelion, and that one's only nominally mecha.

I put my oar in thus:

See, what I heard was: Now, if you don't like obdinglings, or banana spanners, or prondacious wasps, I'd agree; though the only pericrancible fupdigle I've ever liked was Sudafrint, which was only nominally fascipretal. Faced with such a complicated starting system, I sympathise with people who shy off. 'I don't like anime' may translate as 'I doubt I'll like anime enough to make it worth bending my screaming brain around all the doornobbles and supercharged nazopoots.'

The ins and outs of anime aside, what strikes me is that the gibberish in both extracts have a certain quality in common. You might say they seem to come from a common language.

And this gets me to wondering. How does it work with invented words?

A Calvin and Hobbes cartoon I've long delighted in features Calvin answering a question in his 'own words'; since he doesn't know the answer, he takes the 'own words' bit literally, and writes:

Yakka foob mog. Grug pubbawup zink wattoom gazork. Chumble spuzz.

Now, again the words seem to come from a common language. But it's not the same common language that my nonsense words do. Bill Watterson and I both speak English, but when we gibber, we sing from different countries.

Invented words are a long-established element of literature, and contribute greatly to its texture. I've blogged in the past about the issue of inventing character names, where I pointed out that in mass-market fantasy, there can be a tendency to give all the characters mellifluous names that sound, not just as if the characters in that book come from the same language group (which ain't English, despite their speaking it), but that they come from the same language group as the characters in lots of other mass-market fantasy books as well. English speakers, at least, have a fondness for certain phonemes - Ls and Rs, names ending in vowels for women, soft-sounding stuff - and tend to apply them when they want their character names and places to sound romantic. (I'd be fascinated to know if the same phenomenon applies in other languages, and if so, whether the same phonemes are popular.)

This is mostly absent-minded writing, but as I pointed out there, you can get linguistic consistency in made-up words. Michel Faber's Under the Skin, for instance, features words like 'vodsel' and 'mussanta' and a protagonist called 'Isserly': no dipthongs, lots of S-sounds. The words come from the same language; it's just a language we intuit from the few words we get.

You can go to some extremes with this - most famously, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange features 'nadsat' language: the narrator tells you the whole story in a futuristic argot that the reader has to work out from context as they go along. Alex's slang is again consistent, mostly because Burgess drew on an actual other language to create the words: he mostly took Slavic words and Anglicised them. Burgess claimed to have written the novel in three weeks, so the method may have had a time-saving origin, but there's no denying it's an effective way of making the slang sound convincing.

Under the Skin and A Clockwork Orange, though, are both serious books, and as such their neologisms need to invoke some kind of character context. Isserly comes from a harsh society an ugly surroundings: the hissing, flat-vowelled quality of her language has a stretched-thin unsentimentalism that invokes her bleak background. Alex's jovial Slavicisms mixed in with Cockney rhyming slang and regular English strike an anarchic, rootless note that jangles against his almost accidental clash with power: his cheerful disloyalty runs hard up against the rigor of the state, and it begins in language before it unfolds into plot. There are reasons, necessities even, that account for the tone of the inventions.

Making up nonsense words for comic effect, though, gives you a wide range. There's no necessity at all except to amuse someone, if only yourself.

So I'm wondering: what is it? Do certain phonemes have funny bones, as it were? Is it bathos, the lurch and stumble of inappropriate sounds pushed together? Is it an echo of other words put in a funny context? If I were a linguist, I might know.

And so I'm asking: what does your nonsense language sound like? Gibber at me, please.

The Gizz principle

2010-10-14T05:52:00.000Z

The other day I sat down with my baby and read to him. Sometimes I read him stuff that I happened to be reading at the time, by way of entertaining us both - Alison Bechdel, P.G. Wodehouse and Satan's Silence have all made the list lately - figuring that as he doesn't speak English, one book is much like another to him, that the interest is mostly in hearing my voice and grammar in action, so I might as well pick something I'm enjoying anyway. But it occurred to me that he might also enjoy hearing rhythm and rhyme, so I got my Dr Seuss books down off the shelf. And as I read them, I remembered why I'd always loved them ... and how, in their way, they express something important about fantastical fiction.

Here's an extract from Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?:

And oh! Just suppose
you were poor Harry Haddow.
Try as he will
he can't make any shadow!

He thinks that, perhaps, something's wrong with his Gizz.
And I think that, by golly, there probably is.

That little couplet has delighted me for a long time. I think the best word for it is insouciance - and it's something that writers of non-realistic fiction will have some kind of position on.

Like Twain's humourous frog, dissecting insouciance tends to kill it, but since I'm basing a post on it, I should explain what I love so much about that vignette. It's the word 'Gizz'.

When it comes to Dr Seuss, we're in a world of wild, improvised fantasy. Strange creatures abound, situations bloom out of nowhere, bizarre moments come and go - and they come and go without explanation. There may be a wocket in your pocket, but except for a cheery illustration, he has no interest in defining what a wocket is. It's just there: the narrator seems familiar with it, so he presents it to us and carries on talking. Harry's Gizz affects his shadow somehow, but exactly how? We don't know, and the narrative rattles on without explaining, because it doesn't really matter.

And to me, that's how it should be. After all, there's no such thing as a shadowless person. No explanation, however well drawn-out, will cover it. Because, you see - and I hate to say it of a revered children's author, but truth will out - Dr Seuss is lying. There is no Harry Haddow; there are no people who can't make any shadows. It's all invented. So presenting the Gizz as the explanation, without explaining what a Gizz is, is a bold and charming solution ... and in fact, it's even the most logical one. No explanation will account for a phenomenon that doesn't and can't exist, so not even trying is, as well as the wittiest solution, the most honest.

When it comes to putting something non-realistic in a story, there's always going to have to be some suspension of disbelief. The question is, how much explaining away do you need to do before you can consider disbelief reasonably suspended? Different authors answer the question differently, and different readers make different demands.

Now, the demands are partly a matter of taste, and also partly a matter of habit. A friend of mine, for instance, has a friend who complained that he didn't like The Time Traveler's Wife because it made no sense: if somebody disappeared and came back later in time, he ought to land in a different country because the earth would have rotated in the meantime. Now, from a writer's point of view, that's an idea that might yield some interesting results if you wanted to go that way, but I can't help feeling that it's not an entirely reasonable reason to reject an entire novel. There's a perfectly good explanation why Audrey Niffenegger didn't bother with the rotation of the earth. First, unless you make it a central concern of the story, having your time traveller pop up all over the map, and possibly underwater or in the middle of a mountain somewhere, every time he comes back in time would be a massive plot inconvenience. But the second is more important: it isn't that kind of book. While I haven't read it, I understand it to be more a love story than anything else - which is to say, the central concern of the story is the relationship between the characters. The mechanics of time travel aren't relevant to that. You just have to suspend your disbelief.

And the thing is, why shouldn't you? Time travel isn't real. It's a magical trope intended to help the story along; magic is always a narrative fait accompli. The person objecting that Niffenegger had got the mechanics of time travel wrong did not, it seemed, particularly notice that the concept of time travel itself violates the laws of physics; time travel is a familiar trope, and so was acceptable because it had the weight of habit behind it. But in fact, if you're doing something magical, any explanation of its mechanics is going to be as false as any other, or as simply ignoring them. Why doesn't Niffenegger's time traveller get inconvenienced by the turning of the earth? Because his Gizz relocates him.

This isn't to say that fiction shouldn't be internally consistent. It should, unless it'd be better if it isn't. But internally consistent doesn't have to mean fully explained. However much you explain, eventually you're going to hit a Gizz.

The question becomes, how do you get readers to accept the Gizz? There are two methods, and writers often combine the two. The first is sleight of hand: the writer entertains the reader enough, holds their attention enough, that they don't particularly notice it. The second is the brass neck method: plonk a Gizz in front of them, don't explain it, and say 'Take it or leave it'. If done with enough style, many a reader will take it, knowing that it's a ticket to a fun ride. Sometimes showing the Gizz early is the stylish thing to do.

I was thinking about this the other day when David Lynch's Dune was shown on television. I was vaguely aware that the movie was not a critical success, to put it mildly, and indeed as I watched it I could completely understand why. Characters stride from scene to scene declaiming gibberish with a sense of mythic urgency; most of what I could hear in the dialogue seemed to be cries of 'I am the fantiple wekazork!' or 'I shall teach you the ways of the nafbargese momtuggers!' or something similarly incomprehensible; having read the book many years ago I had a vague idea of what they were talking about, but the fact remained that in two hours I seemed to be watching about ten years pass in which the zimfrangers fought the mafnabbis over the crucial issue of penwalladddding, and they all took it really, really seriously, for reasons that nobody was going to explain.

So I watched it, undergoing the sensation of watching a truly terrible film. And then, five minutes after it finished, I discovered I rather loved it.

I mean, I could see why it wasn't a success. Mostly, it was a question of the wrong man for the wrong project: David Lynch is an artist who delights in taking the familiar and rendering it strange. Science fiction like Dune is set in a world that's utterly strange to the viewer, and conventionally is best handled by someone who can take the strange and render it familiar, or if not familiar, at least coherent. Putting a lover of strange style in charge of a film about a strange place meant the artistic equivalent of listening to a speech in a foreign language: foreignness overwhelmed everything to the point of deep confusion.

And yet in that confusing babble, there were so many wild leaps of imagination, so many visual excesses, so much stuff that was just new and interesting, that the incoherence didn't seem to matter. There was more imagination there than in ten ordinary science fiction films that made sense; asking for clarity was missing what was there.

Which is to say, I was eventually charmed enough that I started hearing the whirr of the Gizz. Why was Kyle MacLachlan the leader of a new movement? There was something special about his Gizz. What were all these weird religions? They invoked the power of Gizz. Why did those people appear to live in massive boxes? They needed them to protect their Gizzes. And why not? Any science fiction film is going to show you a world which doesn't exist and demand you accept certain falsehoods anyway; why not just enjoy Lynch's grubby brilliance and shrug everything else off?

This is very much a matter of taste. Science fiction, not unnaturally, attracts a certain proportion of reader-viewers who are interested in science, and a scientific mind is one that's interested in explanations. For such people, presumably, an intricate explanation is a pleasing object in itself even if it's not actually true.

I'm much more at the other end of the scale; a phrase from David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day occurs: Ask my mother how the radio worked and her answer was simple: "Turn it on and pull out the goddamn antenna." It's notable that if you try to explain an abstract principle to me, my brain goes to screensaver extremely quickly even if I'm trying to concentrate - but on the other hand, if you give me a concrete example, I can infer the abstract principle behind it immediately. And the art of fiction, or at least fiction I like, is nothing if not the creation of examples to convey concepts: that's what all those writing teachers mean when they say 'Show don't tell.' A teacher of mine, for instance, used to give the example that 'Jane was obsessive about hygiene' is much less interesting than 'Jane flossed her teeth until her gums bled': the former is the abstract expression of that side of her character, the latter a concrete situation that conveys the principle by example.

Which is why, I think, I get the Gizz. To me, ideas are expressed in concrete forms, be they examples or metaphors. A Gizz is an example of a non-existent principle - but because I infer principles from examples, I can infer what the non-existent principle is, or at least its broad general outlines, by having a look at whatever Gizz was plonked down in front of me. To me, that's what fiction is: being presented with a set of not-actually-true incidents that illustrate - and thus create - a particular mood, time and place.

The thing about a Gizz is this: it has the structure of an explanation without the content. But it hints at content - usually by echoing things that we know are real. Harry Haddow isn't real, but we do know that if something's wrong with an organ of your body, it can cause physical incapacities. You can't turn from a beautiful young queen into a withered old apple-seller by drinking a magic potion, but medicines can have drastic effects on real people. Gizzes don't necessarily echo real-world things exactly, but they often have enough family resemblance that they seem real-ish, if not actually real. Gizzes can, in effect, game our experience of reality.

At the same time, presenting a Gizz without explanation is a tacit acknowledgement that it's not real, that it can't be explained - and if it's presented boldly, the narrative is playing with that unreality, making an obscure joke or a poetic leap with it.

The effect is to set up a tension between the sense of reality and unreality that creates an intricate reaction, not in explanations on the page but in the mind of the reader ... and because the mind is more intricate than anything it can create, often the result is a more intricate interplay than any explanation a writer could come up with. It's just that the intricacy is implicit, there but not acknowledged, to be intuited rather than directly observed.

Another element of this illusory structure is that it creates places into which, should you need them, explanations can later be inserted. When I write fantastical situations I don't map them out in detail: I settle on an impression, and the write whatever seems to fit in with it. The other day someone reading Bareback asked me a question about a detail that I hadn't addressed in the book (Bareback seems to attract such questions): well, I didn't have an answer ready, but I thought about it for a bit, felt out what would be consistent, and came up with a detailed answer. The question was asked through my husband, in fact; when I passed the answer back along, he said he loved that I'd got all this worked out - and I had to explain to him that actually I hadn't, I was improvising. But that's the thing about improvising on the Gizz principle: if the Gizz is properly placed at the beginning, even your spouse can't tell when you're pulling answers out of the air, because once they're out of the air and tucked properly in, they fit. A Gizz leaves adaptable spaces behind. And those spaces don't have to be filled: like the hollow in a guitar, they can create resonances that a fuller space wouldn't allow. But if you do want to fill them, they're flexible: a variety of explanations will do, as long as they're reasonably consistent with the structure you've established. Explanations can be pre-built formations, or they can be riffs on a theme - and in the latter case, you're probably looking at a Gizz principle somewhere in the foundations.

When you're writing something non-real, you can play with it - either humourously or seriously - by providing an ornamental explanation, or by mounting it strategically so as to obviate the need for an explanation. Either is valid - but the absence of an explanation doesn't mean the writer doesn't know what they're about. They're probably about a Gizz.

Write to the government

2010-10-04T04:44:00.003Z

It's 5.45 in the morning, and I've been awake for a long time. Not because my son's keeping me up; he's sleeping perfectly peacefully in my bed. He thinks everything is fine.

Meanwhile, this is what the government is planning for his future.

He already lives in a country where no ordinary working- or middle-class person can afford a decent house. Now the government's planning a country where he won't be able to afford an education either, not unless he takes on massive student debts - even as the credit crunch just showed what happens when people carry too much debt. This is the work of politicians who benefitted from free education themselves; now they're selling off our children's hope of any kind of quality of life.

We have to do everything we can to stop this. Please, please write to everyone you can, and ask everyone you know to do the same. Here are places to start:

The Prime Minister

Nick Clegg

Your local MP

Why I'd like to see more men smacking sexists around

2010-09-20T11:37:00.002Z

A few days ago a blogger I always find interesting, Greta Christina, posted a video of herself giving a rather good talk about diversity in the sceptical movement, which you should check out here. I'm not a member of the sceptical movement myself, but her comments are broadly applicable to all sorts of situations and pretty good sense, so I enjoyed listening to it.

But it got me thinking. During the Q&A, there was a discussion of how to deal with someone who's being unconsciously racist or sexist, and one of the big suggestions was that you should help them save face. Now, there's a good tactical argument for that - it's easier to admit something if you can save face doing it - but having been embroiled in various online arguments about sexism, kyriarchy and privilege, I found myself wondering about it. At least in terms of the benefit of any given community, which is what the talk was about.

Online at least, 'privilege' appears to be fightin' talk to a lot of people. White, male, heterosexual, cisgendered people: basically people who've never really been on the other side of the privilege divide, and so don't have the life experience that teaches them that yes, privilege is a real phenomenon, that it doesn't mean the individual who has privilege is evil but it does mean that some people have it easier than others and that you should probably check your assumptions and listen if somebody tells you it's different for them. And while these are the people who are presumably trying to save face by going through the denial-and-anger stage of response when you suggest to them that some people have it worse than they do, is helping them save face always the best response? Particularly if you're trying to keep your community welcoming to diversity?

Because here's something I've noticed about discrimination. Let's take racism as an example. There's the racism that burns a cross on somebody's lawn, and most of us agree that that's bad. But there's another kind of racism, a less dramatic kind that, being ethnocentric, many of us are prone to: encountering a situation where race is an issue, and being tenderly sensitive to all the tiny nuances of feeling and motivation and circumstance that the white person is undergoing while showing far less empathy towards the non-white person - and thinking you're being fair and compassionate. Forgiving somebody the same race as yourself for doing something crappy to someone of a different race, and thinking that this settles the issue rather than acknowledging that maybe it's not your place to pronounce the final judgement on the rights and wrongs. Thinking, in short, that a big dollop of understanding for the side that happens to look like you makes you sweetly reasonable.

And while that might be an under-the-radar racism for the person doing it, it's not going to fly under the radar of people who have to deal with racism all the time because some people really don't respect people of their race. They're going to notice.

And if nobody calls that person out on it - if people are tenderly sensitive to how terribly difficult it is for the poor person who's making this mistake, but not equally sensitive to how hard it is for the other guys to be on the receiving end of it - then they're going to put people off.

I'm a white person in a predominantly white culture, so I'm not entitled to appoint myself spokeperson for victims of racism here (anybody who has been on the receiving end of racism and who feels like sharing their views, please feel free to take over and correct me if I'm wrong); when I say 'they', I mean 'generic they, sometimes including me', because I bet you anything I've messed up on this plenty of times. But I can speak to an experience I've had several times when it comes to sexism. It's a subtle pattern - but its effects aren't subtle, and I think it's worth calling attention to it.

Here's how it goes.

You're in an online conversation, and the subject of privilege or sexism comes up, as, in an unequal society, it sometimes does.

A man or men get extremely defensive, and start arguing that really there's no such thing as privilege, that the effects of sexism on women aren't that important, that he/they feel upset at such talk, or some other version of 'Screw your struggles with injustice, I don't want to hear about them, and my individual feelings about this matter more than your whole gender's problems.'

A woman, or a few women, challenge this. Often politely, with attempts to explain rather than just to blast the guy or guys. (Important side-note: The number of women who do this depends on who's feeling strong that day - because here's a piece of info that's familiar to most women but not necessarily to men who haven't been told: any woman who challenges a man on sexism knows she's in for a huge, huge fight. It's revoltingly common to act as if pointing out sexism is a worse offence than doing or saying something sexist, to cast the person who says 'That's sexist' as the aggressor who Started Something and the person who said the sexist thing as the victim ... and in order to deal with that whole imbroglio, a woman has to be very confident, prepared to hold her own in a battle and willing to be disliked. It's like that saying about how for every mouse you see, there are twenty-five that you don't: for every woman who says 'That's a sexist thing to say', there are almost certainly a lot who are equally troubled by the sexist comment but who just don't feel up to bringing down a firestorm on their heads.)

A battle results, in which the man or men insist on denying the women's experience, throw in a whole lot of unpleasant remarks that are nasty for women to hear while remaining under the impression that they're the big victims here, and generally act in a wearying way. The tougher women hang in, dealing with all the stress and distress that listening to your gender demeaned for the millionth time brings with it, and often hiding their distress because when you're talking to someone who doesn't respect women, the last thing you want to do is confirm all his buried assumptions by looking weak.

The men in the group, for the most part, sit it out. You might get one here and there, but on the whole, even though they probably don't agree with the sexist opinions the other men are chucking about, the majority of the men leave the fighting to the women.

And here's a variant: occasionally the sexist guy gets the point enough to retract something he said. And when he does, all the other men weigh in to congratulate him, shake his hand and generally tell him what a great guy he is to change his opinion.

And it's a pattern that really, really annoys me.

Those men were nowhere when the women were doing the hard and exhausting work of convincing the guy to stop being a jackass. They have no words of support or thanks for the women who did that work. Yet the minute the man reduces his jackassery just a bit, they're all over him.

Probably not out of deliberate sexism. But this pattern reinforces sexism even as it attempts to reward non-sexism, for a very simple reason. By saying nothing when the guy's being a jackass and falling all over him when he stops, the men - who are the people whose opinion a sexist guy is, deep down, going to take seriously - send a subtle but clear message: being non-sexist is above and beyond the call of duty. We'll do nothing to penalise you if you do it, but we'll reward you if you don't. Non-sexism isn't a minimal requirement, it's being a great guy who can expect special treatment if you take even a baby step towards it. And if you aren't being that great a guy, well, nobody who counts really minds. It's just a shiny extra feather in your cap.

(This effect can work if women weigh in to congratulate him as well, but there's a particular twist when it's mostly men doing it: it reinforces the unconscious sexist's assumption that it's men who get to decide when a subject is closed. With a whole bunch of guys slapping Sexist Version 1.2 on the back, it becomes very difficult for any women who are still upset with his behaviour to say anything more about it without looking ungracious. The back-slappers probably don't intend to close off the women's options, but they are acting out the traditional role of men as referees of public discourse, the ones who pass the final judgement on when a matter is or isn't settled, the ones whose opinons really count. And that's only going to add to our unconscious sexist's sexism - especially because it's very much in his interests to accept a model that lets him think of himself as a great guy.)

It also carries a corollary implication: women who work hard to promote equality deserve nothing, but men who make a small shift from total jerk to somewhat less of a jerk deserve a lot. There's no need to reward the women for doing the work of making him shift, but the man needs lots of petting and praise. The unequal and male-favouring distribution of support and endorsement is a community being fair. One man's feelings matter more than all women's feelings ... Which is pretty much the assumption the guy throwing the tantrum was going on in the first place. He can walk away with a slightly revised opinion in some areas, but his ideas about what slice of the pie he deserves actually confirmed - because while listening to him was a punitive experience for all the women around, he doesn't get seriously punished. He gets a carrot for letting up on giving everybody stick. Men matter more than women, and more specifically, he matters more than women.

And that's the thing about privilege; that's its whole foundation. Privilege - and I speak as a white, heterosexual, cisgendered, able-bodied, middle-class person here, so I've got privilege coming out of my ears - means being able to get away with stuff, with suffering no negative consequences for not thinking about what it's like for someone less advantaged. If you suffer no serious consequences for saying something sexist (and if you don't respect women's opinions, women taking you to task is a less serious consequence than men doing it), you're getting away with it. You don't have to change your basic opinion that it's safe and okay for you to disregard women.

Helping someone like that save face? That's a problem. It means, basically, working hard to keep them in the position of unchallenged security that led to them being prejudiced in the first place. Losing face, or the threat of losing face, is a powerful social motivator. If their face hadn't been preserved so often in the past, they'd probably know better than to say offensive things now. They'd know there was a cost attached.

This is all going to affect communities, because while you're working hard to help the prejudiced people save face, there are people watching who, through their prejudice, they've insulted. If you're trying to respect the dignity of someone prejudiced while doing nothing to support the dignity of the people they've degraded, you're still valuing the dignity of the man, the white person, the heterosexual - of That Guy - more than the dignity of people on the other side of the line. (And it's not as if you're operating in a world where face-saving is an evenly distributed resource. I can tell you from experience, it's not as if unconsciously sexist men are eager to help women save face when they want them to knock off this feminist talk. I'd bet money that unconsciously racist people aren't all about helping non-white people save face, or that homophobic people aren't lying awake at night wondering how to help gay people save face. Helping you save face treats your credit as something you should consider yourself entitled to, which is exactly what prejudiced people don't think about others.)

Helping someone save face might gradually unstick them from their prejudices, sure. But you have to decide what your priority is: unsticking one individual from their prejudices on the do-it-slowly-and-painlessly principle like you were removing a plaster, or having a community that doesn't favour certain members over others. And spending a whole lot of time gently working on the dignity of someone who did something wrong, while showing no such consideration for the victims of their prejudice who didn't do anything wrong, is a very uneven distribution of community resources.

And people who are used to getting a smaller piece of the pie are going to notice. Because they've been here before, many, many times.

I often try to explain things politely, at least as a starting move, but when it comes to diversity in communities - well, I won't name names, but while I'm someone who's perfectly prepared to go ten rounds with people on a cause I believe in, I nevertheless have in the past dropped out of communities, or chosen not to join them, precisely because of this pattern. There's a place for educating the unconsciously prejudiced ... but it's a place that favours the unconsciously prejudiced, and we have plenty of those already.

Sometimes you need to draw a line between what's good for the individual and what's good for the community. It might be good for the individual to be gently persuaded of the error of their ways - though I'm personally not too starry-eyed about that, as a lot of people aren't persuadable - but what's good for that individual and what's good for a community aren't the same thing. Sometimes educating that individual is done at the cost of the community, or at the cost of other members or potential members of the community - and if the educatee tends to be someone privileged (which, in a discussion about prejudice, is highly likely), then that's going to discourage diversity, because sometimes people have just had enough of listening to prejudiced talk and don't want to stick around for some more.

In short: if you really want diversity, there's something to be said for patience, but there's also a whole lot to be said for just bouncing the jackasses. If they're serious, they'll learn and come back - and getting bounced can teach you a sharp and much-needed lesson - and if they're not, we're better without them. And in the meantime, turning the place into a gentle, supportive school for them while making other people listen to themselves being insulted? Not favouring diversity.