Skellig by David Almond. Read the book BEFORE you read this review.

OK.  I know it's another children's book, but I just couldn't keep this to myself.  I will review a grown-up book soon.  Promise.  Well, maybe in a bit...  

I'm excited by how much I love this book!

If Skellig is anything to go by, David Almond is an author I'll be reading a lot more of. 

BTW - Don't read this review if you haven't read the book as it will totally spoil it for you.  Just know that you have to read it.  Then you can read this review AFTERWARDS and let me know if you agree.  Or not.  

But first (and I want to get this out of the way), the title of this book put me off reading it for a good year or so.  Now I know that sounds ridiculous, but I just don't like the sound of it when I say it, when it rolls around my mouth.  Say it out loud for yourself.  Skellig.  It's not pleasant.  It doesn't exactly trip off the tongue.  It's feels spiky and uncomfortable.  But that's exactly what skellig is.  Skellig means "splinter of a stone".  It's almost onomatopoeic.  Skellig Michael is also the name of one of the countless rocks jutting out of the sea around the coast of Ireland.  It fits the character of Skellig absolutely.  It's completely apt. 

In fact, the juxtaposition of the uncomfortable with the beautiful is something that Almond plays on throughout the book.  And the effect is hauntingly lovely.  When Michael (interesting, don't you think, that the main protagonist is called Michael?  David Almond knows about that rock in the Irish sea doesn't he!  And that rock was home to a monastery as far back as the 6th century.  The images of angels abound...) first sees Skellig, and indeed subsequently, the description Almond presents of Skellig is unarguably grotesque.  Yet when Mina gently kisses his cheek, I found I was not repulsed.  Her immediate and unquestioning affection for him, affection for a living and neglected being, overcame any initial revulsion.

The metaphors he introduces throughout the book may be obvious to the adult reader (this is, after all, a book for children), but I still found it beautifully done and not contrived at all:  wings; bones; seclusion; exclusion; illness; death; evolution.  The owls in the abandoned loft.  The blackbird nest hidden in the tree.  The dilapidated houses and gardens.  The beating of the baby's heart inside Michael's own chest.  The constant references to the fragility of the physical body.  

I was particularly drawn to the baby's story.  Michael describes how he can feel her tiny bones beneath her skin; how he can hear and feel her heart beating alongside his own and in this way, knows she is alive and safe.  She is a nameless baby, which not only tells us that she was born early, before her name could be decided, but also makes her a bit less of a person.  She is a fragile and beautiful baby, yes.  One that Michael loves absolutely unconditionally, but without a name, she remains 'just' a baby.  Not a little sister, a little person.  He is distanced just that little bit from her.  It's not until she is well that she is named.  And it's not until Skellig begins to get stronger and fitter, gets well, that he reveals his name either.  Both Skellig and the nameless baby are close to death when we meet them.  As Skellig grows stronger, he is able to find the baby, take strength from her and in doing so, give her the strength to survive too.  

The 'dance' in which Skellig leads Michael, Mina and, later, the baby, is another aspect of this story that moved me.  The description of the hypnotic spinning, of wanting to be released but not being able to resist, and the vision of the 'ghostly wings' really resonates.  It felt absolutely real and plausible.  From Michael's perspective, he is drawn in by Mina's amazing, penetrating eyes, by Skellig's presence, swept away by the moment.  The idea that this can heal, restore and revive touches on the very human notion of 'healing hands'; that people can't survive without kindness and love.  That without this they may well 'turn to stone'.  

I love the idea that our shoulder blades are where our wings used to be, and where they will grow from again when we evolve, like Skellig.  I love the idea that Skellig defies definition - he says he is something like an angel, a bird.  We are left to infer our own opinions.  

When I put this book down after reading the last page, I felt inspired.  It's a book about many things.  About friendship, trust, learning, caring.  It's about hope and joy (or Joy).  Above all else, I felt it was about opening your mind and your heart to the world.  We spend a lot of time trying to manipulate our environment, trying to make sure we come out on top, trying to be the ones to succeed (believing that we deserve to be at the top of the evolutionary chain).  But what if we aren't?  

Lovely, brilliantly written and incredibly beautiful to read (even though the owl pellets made me feel sick). 

Buy it here. 

The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht

A book club review book and one I never would have picked up otherwise.  But let's just get one thing off my chest first.  Téa Obreht is unfairly gifted and talented.  Not only is she young (born in the 1980's - so unfair!), but judging by her photo inside the back cover she is also a bit of a honey.  Now that's just not on!  

Right, rant over.  Envy in check.  Composure regained. 

This book really took me by surprise.  At first it does read like an overly 'worthy' kind of first novel - lots of clever techniques (discombobulated timeline, telling the story from different points of view with different narrators, lots of little mini 'backstories') and it took me a couple of chapters to settle into it.  Or maybe it took the book a couple of chapters to settle into itself.  Whatever.  It grew and evolved as I turned the pages.  

What intrigued me most was the blurring of fact, fiction and history that Obreht magages to achieve.  Yes, it's set in a fictional town in a fictional country, but there is something so real about the place names, so familiar, that you think 'ooh I've heard that on the news. Wasn't there a civil war there?' and find yourself double-checking on google in case you're being unbelievably ignorant (extremely likely in my case - and I wouldn't be surprised if someone tells me that it's not a fictional country at all, YOU FOOL).   


I have a few issues with the heroine Natalia, whose character is not entirely believable. She is everything that I, as a 21st century woman, should be interested in:  She has a strong family, is intelligent and highly educated, is a bit of a maverick with a rebellious side, she confronts dangerous situations with confidence, she does charitable work, etc. etc.  


But I don't like her.  She's just not... likeable.  I feel mean even writing this, but she isn't a character I related to or identified with in any way.  I can't put my finger on why this is.  Maybe it's because her story is so disjointed, interrupted as it is by the various mini-stories that run throughout.  Maybe her character just doesn't develop enough for me: she doesn't seem to entertain emotions for more than a couple of paragraphs and there seem to be no consequences for her.  She serves as a vehicle for the other stories and this can come across quite clumsily in parts. 


Having said that, the overall feel of the novel is beautiful.  It has a real dreamlike quality to it.  You float in and out of the many backstories as the narrative twines around the landscape and the people, sometimes darting back to the far distant past, taking you down unexpected avenues.  The language is at times breathtakingly poetic and some of the characters from these backstories have a mythical presence: The Bear, the Deathless Man.  The story of the tiger itself, its journey from the city, was particularly well executed.  I identified much more with the tiger than with Natalia!  

I was also bizarrely tempted into sympathy with the most horrific wife-beater I've come across in recent readings.  His personal history unfolded with extraordinary grace, showing how his personality and character completely changed and he became the stereotypical feared husband.  The question of nature/nurture is brought up here which was mildy interesting (if, like many of the 'asides', I found fairly irrelevant).  My sympathy was however short-lived I'd like to add. 

If only these stories could have been brought together a bit more at the end, or if the suspense of the Grandfather's bag had been borne out, I'd have put this book down with a bit more satisfaction. 


A brilliant debut though, and I'll definitely be following Obreht's career...




Tea's official website is here 
You can buy The Tiger's Wife at Amazon here  

Ladies, do you have a room of your own?

Does it even matter? 

Virginia Woolf had one.  And she says it did matter.  And normally I would agree with most things that this awesome lady says.  But in this instance, I'm not so sure I entirely follow her argument (which is my very respectful way of saying that I don't necessarily entirely agree with her.  Ouch). 

I don't have a room of my own.  But neither does Mr. Darcy (but then, that's because our flat's been taken over by mini-Darcys, and the grown-up, self-indulgent bits of our pre-baby lives have been relegated to boxes and cupboards.  Sniff). 

But what does Woolf's "room of one's own" actually amount to?  Taken literally, we can assume she means the physical space often occupied in the early 20th Century by the husband's home office or library.  For men, these were their sanctuaries.  Children were not allowed, wives rarely permitted.  Literature is awash with throw-away references to such rooms having an intimidating air, an oppressive atmosphere, and being the room to which lesser members of the household are 'summoned' by the master.  In children's books for example, the father's study is a place to be reprimanded (and sometimes beaten).  In The Secret Garden, it is a room strictly out of bounds for the children, a room to which the father/uncle can retire and think his maudlin thoughts undisturbed.  In many 19th Century novels (such as, ooh, I don't know, Pride & Prejudice....), it's a room where the father can conduct his 'business', converse with colleagues and otherwise maintain his lofty distance from the rest of the household. 

What parallels are there for the women?  None it would seem.  For women to get some privacy and space, they must 'sneak' off to some hidden corner of the garden, or slip away to the servant's quarters when they should be at church (or invent some other dubious alibi).  Women don't have the same ownership of their physical space as do the men.  So maybe Woolf is simply referring to this.  Financially too, who can realistically afford to dedicate an entire room to themselves?  Not many of us can have a study to ourselves at home (that's the dream though.  That and an island in the kitchen...). 

But aside from having a physical room in her house, women also traditionally suffer from not having the mental space either.  Certainly on an intellectual level, women traditionally weren't encouraged to 'improve their minds' by going to university.  In the 19th Century, women's accomplishments amounted to being able to sew, sing, play a musical instrument, be 'refined' and 'fashionable' - none of which require a separate, private room.  In fact the opposite is true.  All these accomplishments were designed specifically for display and required an audience.  And women were supposed to be preoccupied with the running of the household and the bringing up of the children.  "How old fashioned!" I hear you say.  But is it really?  I can vouch for the fact that, as a 21st Century working mother, it is still very much the role of the woman to be concerned with such things moreso than the man.  Yes of course there is much more equality, but biology has a large part to play (you name me a man who can take maternity leave to breastfeed his newborn baby!) and society does still, on the whole, expect the mother to be the main caregiver.  So mentally, women are far less likely to have a room of their own to which they can retreat, undisturbed. 

However, bleating on about why it's not fair does not give Virginia's argument any credit.  Nor does her assertion that women shouldn't write with 'rage' (it sounds like women have a lot to be angry about, yes?).  Some of the most creative works of literature and art have been produced under great oppression and in extreme poverty.  And there is the argument that just such circumstances of repression actually encourage and promote creativity.  Just look at the slave songs, the writings of Nelson Mandela on Robin Island, the deeply moving literature of holocaust victims (see a list and examples here), the amazing Xinran's Good Women of China (see Xinran's blog here), etc. 

Of course it's easy for me, sitting here at my laptop in the 21st Century, with the mini-Darcys in bed and Mr. Darcy cooking my dinner, to criticise Virginia.  I've had it comparatively easy.  And sitting in an ivory tower is a very haughty place to be.  It can go to your head.  I'm not saying that Woolf's argument isn't entirely valid - women have not had it as easy as men and no, it isn't fair.  It's just that the prejudices and pressures that surround being female constitute just one of the millions of obstacles that people around the world face, and we should not get this out of proportion.  Poverty, for example, infringement of freedom of speech, lack of access to education;  all these are obstacles to writers and creators of art.  All these people need their own room. 

So maybe the concept of a room of one's own does remain true.  Just that everyone's 'room' will be different.  For Nelson Mandela, it was inside his own mind.  For the slaves in America it was in the churches.  And for me today, like so many across the globe, it's my computer. 

Read Woolf's A Room of One's Own here. 

Children's Literature at Cambridge: Technology's Effects: 13 Years On

Children's Literature at Cambridge: Technology's Effects: 13 Years On: by Richard In 1999, on the eve of the new millennium and a mere four or five years after the birth of the Internet as we recognise it to...

Children's Picture Books on your iPhone or iPad. Are they any good?

The world of apps is undeniably appealing.  Anyone who has experienced the genius that is the iPad will know this (my four year old daughter had a go on a friend's iPad and was hooked - it is fantastic).  And publishers of children's literature have cottoned onto this with apps for picture books.  But are they any good?  Indeed, are they better than a traditional paper book (I know!  Paper?  Crazy!). 

Katie Bircher's article, on The Horn Book website caught my eye back in February this year.  And I shall tell you for why.  Other app reviews I've read have been very heavily weighted in favour of traditional books.  I can appreciate this.  It's difficult to grasp just how quickly technology is moving, and I can hear my mother's voice telling me I'll get 'square eyes' if I watch TV for too long.  We're all a bit worried that too much screen time is going to be damaging for our children, so the thought of actively promoting babies and toddlers to use an iPad kind of goes against the grain a bit, doesn't it?  But Bircher talks about how the interactivity of these apps not only adds an extra oomph to the experience, but enhances it in a way that paper books simply can't.  


Ladybird seem to have got this just right, from the little previews I've had.  The books are not simply reproduced with pointless 'touch here to hear a sheep say baa' buttons, but actively engage their young readers with music, games, quizzes, colouring and drawing.  


Paper books just can't compete.  And that's kind of my point.  They shouldn't compete.  They are two completely different things.  

Book Apps are an interactive experience that young children can play with, have fun with, listen to, and, most importantly of all, control.  Traditional paper books offer a different experience.  Probably a calmer, snuggle down at bedtime, share with mummy or daddy experience.  


This isn't the Wild West and this town IS big enough for the both of us. 

Text Speak is NOT Killing the English Language

I know, I know. This has been debated to death. But people are STILL harping on about it. And as a linguist I feel the need to put in my twopennyworth (is that the right word?). This is what this blog is for after all...

I met someone the other week, someone who works in education, who works specifically in the field of literacy, who cannot bear text speak. This person believes that text speak is responsible for some children's inability to spell. That text speak is responsible for some children's poor grammar, poor punctuation, poor English.

I disagree.

And so does one of my heroes, David Crystal. Here is a picture of him looking pensive:


He is marvellous and I love him. He makes the very salient point that in order to play around with the rules, as text speak does, one first has to understand the rules. You can't deliberately mess something up without an understanding of what it should look like before you start messing about with it. Or words to that effect. He puts it much better than me. Obviously.

And to add weight to my argument, I cite this award-winning poem by Hetty Hughes:

txtin iz messin,
mi headn' me englis,
try2rite essays,
they all come out txtis.
gran not plsed w/letters shes getn,
swears i wrote better
b4 comin2uni.
& she's african

What I love about this poem is the fact that the poet is so self-aware. She openly mocks her own culture, the culture of the grammar-purists, the culture of contemporary 'yoot' (er, youth), and all through the traditional medium of poetry. That high art to which, traditionally, all writers would aspire.

If we denounce text speak as being responsible for the perceived low levels of literacy in the UK (I say 'perceived' because I don't believe this is necessarily the case) then we are missing the point.

Creative play on language is an inherently human thing to do. Very young children play with language, creating rhymes and nonsense words to entertain themselves and others. At the other end of the scale, academics use fairly impenetrable Latin abbreviations to communicate in shorthand. Surely this is no different to people (young and old I hasten to add) coming up with creative ways to abbreviate certain words to facilitate the speed of text messaging, or indeed to send messages in secret code (as a parent, I am determined to keep on top of all my daughters' slang so that they cannot hide anything from me. An impossible task I know but I have to convince myself it will be possible!).

We need to accept that the English language is not a fixed entity. It evolves. It has properties that enable us to play with it, extend and create new meanings, introduce new words, new characters even, and it is precisely this that keeps me coming back for more.

The Yellow Wallpaper - madness in confinement

Following my recent post on female hysteria, my thoughts are still on the representation of madness in 19th century literature - how it was perceived to affect women, and how female authors dealt with both the perceived affliction and society's tolerance (or otherwise) of the afflicted, while at the same time, subverting this image through their writing.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story The Yellow Wallpaper has not met with universal acclaim but is, I think, a really strong piece of writing about a woman struggling with various aspects of her life. Maybe it says something about me that I can identify with her - I almost want to crawl into the wallpaper with her...

You can read the full story here but if you don't have time, here is a very brief synopsis:

The first person narration is by a woman who is diagnosed by the men in her life (her husband and her brother, both of whom are physicians) as having a nervous disposition and "a slight hysterical tendency". She is thus prescribed various drugs to keep her "happy". She is removed from her usual surroundings and taken on holiday (hmm...) to a rather old and spooky house where she is given a room upstairs, away from the rest of the household. She assumes this to be an old nursery, later used as a gym, due to the presence of bars on the windows and iron rings in the walls. We can assume this is in fact an old asylum and she is being misled by the men (and women) around her. It's notable that her room is located upstairs - it is attic-like - she in effect becomes the 'madwoman in the attic' like Bertha in Jane Eyre.

Anyway, long story short, the yellow wallpaper in the room becomes a focus for her and she begins to see images of another woman, and herself, inside the paper. Her psychosis deepens to the point where she sees "creeping" women not just in the wallpaper, but outside and eventually her psychosis takes over and she becomes the creeping woman in the wallpaper.

What I find most arresting in this story is not Perkins' description of her heroine's mental illness (yes, I'm going to call her a heroine), although this is done convincingly well, but the little hints throughout the text that point to external reasons for her experiencing this breakdown, as opposed to any internal or inherently female causes (notably that of female hysteria).

Like many women of the time, our heroine is defined by her sex, her role as a wife and as a mother. She is not named at all. Not once (unless I'm mistaken. Which I might be. Stranger things have happened as Mr Darcy will tell you...). Mention is made of her baby son, but we never see her with her baby. She has been deemed too ill to look after him. Neither does she seem to fulfill her role as a wife - she is a poor hostess and barely spends any time with her husband who is away most of the time. When he is with her he treats her like a child, not an equal, and certainly not a sexual, partner. Instead she is in the charge of "Jennie" who acts as housemaid, nurse and eventually, effectively, jailor, whom she distrusts.

Her one passion is writing and this is strictly prohibited for the sake of her health. She writes in secret when her husband and Jennie aren't looking. But this passion begins to dull as her psychosis (and the slow-drip of the drugs) kicks in.

So here is a woman who has had her liberties and rights taken away from her. And all under the guise of treatment for her hysteria.

What Perkins does so well in this short piece of writing is to get inside the mind of a woman struggling with the everyday pressures of 19th century life. We are all products of our environment (discuss!) and our heroine's fateful lapse into mental illness is perhaps inevitable given not only the way she is treated, but the expectations that are made of her - expectations of which she is fully aware and which become therefore self-fulfilling.

In presenting the situation thus, Gilman shows us that society is at fault here. She is very consciously subverting the accepted social norm in an implicit, rather than explicit way. As modern readers of this text, understanding the sociohistorical context, we can appreciate her courage and skill as an author in addressing this horror (for this is what the treatment of the protagonist amounts to).

----

Read up on Gilman, she's an interesting 19th century author. She was herself subjected to "rest cure", forbidden to work, kept to a domestic/docile* (delete as applicable) routine and wrote The Yellow Wallpaper as a reaction to this.

The Madwoman in the Attic - Hysteria as control?

I've been thinking about the representation of women in literature, particularly 19th century novels and short stories (these are the things that occupy my mind when I'm at work (don't tell the boss!)). It has dawned on me that while we find many examples of strong-minded, strong-willed, heroine-type women, these are almost always contrasted with crazy loon-type women! For why?

I give you the following examples:

Elizabeth Bennett is presented as a level-headed woman in Pride and Prejudice. She is the focus of the omniscient narrator and we trust her judgement. She is however, surrounded by hysterical women - her mother, her younger sister Lydia. Do these women reflect the actual underlying craziness inherent in all women? Elizabeth's judgement is, after all, proven to be wrong in the end and she conforms to stereotype in becoming more mute, subdued, less outspoken. Rewarded with wifedom. Hmm...

Jane Eyre is similarly a very modern woman for her time. Then she falls in love. And all seems to go well until the madwoman in the attic is revealed in the most shocking way. Is Jane being punished for her refusal to conform to the norms of the time? Does the imprisoned woman represent the oppression that was Victorian marriage? Or is Bertha (the madwoman) a double for Jane, a mirror to her own repressed neuroses, fears and hysteria?

The word 'hysteria' crops up here, does it not, and this is significant in understanding the way women in 19th century literature are presented. Or rather, the way they are viewed by society (male society? I don't want to appear overly feminist here, but there is a case to be made, I think, that men wanted to oppress women for their own ends. Yes.), an image which was subverted by brave female authors.

I think I'm right in saying that 'female hysteria' was a medical condition considered by physicians to affect up to one quarter of women in Britain in the 19th century. Men did not suffer this affliction (the name comes from the Greek 'hystera' meaning 'uterus'). The list of symptoms ranged from nervousness and insomnia to irritability and "a tendancy to cause trouble". Again, hmm...

The weirdest thing about this female hysteria is the treatment prescribed by the (male) doctors: pelvic massage resulting in hysterical paroxysm. If you've seen the film The Road To Welville you'll know what this involves...

Can you guess? Google it if you need to.

Right.

Done that?

Super.

We can move on.

What I'm getting at, in my clumsy way, is that, for women, for centuries, the fear of being diagnosed with hysteria was a way in which they could be controlled by society. Speaking up against oppression, demanding equal rights to men, being an active sexual being rather than a passive seductee (see The Lady of Shalott), was not behaviour condoned by society. It was dangerous to behave in this way. It was easily dealt with by labelling it as 'female hysteria'. Treatment could then commence with the aforementioned pelvic massage (those poor, poor doctors, eh?), hypnosis and drugs.

Sandra Gilbert has published The Madwoman in The Attic: which is brilliant and well worth dipping into.

Now, all this seems to have got rather heavy, which isn't really what I intended. But life can get a bit heavy sometimes can't it? And I think that's fine.

Neil Gaiman - "The Graveyard Book" - Like The Jungle Book? A bit, actually, now you mention it...

This is the first book by Neil Gaiman that I have read. And admittedly, it was because I 'had to' as part of a course I was studying. I don't think I would have picked it up otherwise. And I would have been culturally poorer for it!

This book rightly won the Carnegie Prize. I say 'rightly' because, in my opinion, it does everything a children's book should do (more of that below), it beautifully combines realism and fantasy, and cleverly mixes up different genres (gothic, coming-of-age, thriller, romance, crime).

So what does it do that a children's book should? This is a very leading question, isn't it? Why should a children's book have to DO anything? And should the things it does be any different to the things a book for an adult audience does? I have set myself up to be contradicted and ridiculed, but hey ho. This is what I think...

For me, a story for children must, above all else, speak to the reader without patronising them. It should not have an obvious didactic message or moral. The themes should not be restricted to 'nice' stories with cutesy, happy endings like so many children's books I've come across lately. (I mean come on! The three little pigs EAT the wolf, right? The huntsman in Little Red Riding Hood kills the wolf, right? Why do some publishers think children will be horribly disturbed and mentally scarred by these endings? OK, if I was a wolf I would be greatly disturbed. They seem to have been persecuted somewhat. What others wolves are there? Peter and The Wolf, the wolf in Snow White that gets killed instead of her. Oh hang on, that's a wild boar isn't it? Anyway, poor wolves I say!) There is no need to sanitise absolutely everything that children read and Gaiman understands this.

The opening of the story, I think, is actually quite chilling, with the narrator following a murderer as he tries to track down his toddler escapee, sniffing the air in the manner of the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (he was TERRIFYING, do you remember?). Quite a haunting image for an adult or parent. But for children, it's instead rather exciting. It's so removed from reality that it just grips them immediately. It doesn't (despite what we might worry about) invoke terror or make them recoil in horror. Adults tend to project their own fears onto children. Unnecessarily so.

And so Gaiman plunges us into his world of murderers and ghosts, schoolboys and bullies, vampires and werewolves, hell and, finally, release. The coming-of-age aspect interplays subtly and wonderfully with the ghostly inhabitants and the protagonist's inability to see them (or perhaps to believe in them) as he is drawn to the real, tangible and sexual world outside. We understand that he cannot stay in the graveyard. He understands he cannot stay in the graveyard. His 'parents' understand he cannot stay in the graveyard. Yet it represents a brave and bold step for him to take.

Children's literature often involves a 'retreat and return' element (see Peter Pan, Swallows and Amazons, Where the Wild Things Are, etc. etc.). In The Graveyard Book the retreat is to the graveyard but the return isn't to the safe, cosy nursery of Wendy in Peter Pan or the welcoming bedroom of Where the Wild Things Are. It is to the unknown 'real' world. We're left feeling optimistic but at the same time unsure of the future.

I love that.

It represents a change of state. A mental shift in the protagonist. A physical shift too in his bodily state. When children come of age and step into the world they ARE unsure of the future. And we hope they are optimistic about it too.

And this book leaves me feeling optimistic about the future of literature for our little boys and girls.

The Graveyard Book official website

ResoluteReader: Neil Gaiman - Anansi Boys

This review of Neil Gaiman is one I completely agree with.  If you haven't read any Gaiman (he is a "children's author"), then I recommend you start with The Graveyard Book.  A review of this to appear shortly...  

ResoluteReader: Neil Gaiman - Anansi Boys: Having now read three of Neil Gaiman's excellent fantasy novels, I think I've discovered a pattern. It basically  goes like this. Lead chara...

Literature? Eh?

A think-piece to begin. Or is it thought-piece? I know, I'll call it a muse-piece. As this blog is subtitled Thoughts on Literature I thought it might be useful to try to define what 'literature' means.

There are those marxist theorists who see it as a purely political tool and an arbitrary term, which I agree with to a certain extent. Who decides what should be in the literary canon? We are encouraged to study Shakespeare (who is undoubtedly held up to be the ultimate in literary genius by all of us educated in the English-speaking world), Chaucer, the Romantic poets (well, only Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Coleridge and Blake), Dickins, the current poet laureate (sometimes...), all of whom are male, pale & posh (except for Carol Ann Duffy, notably the first poet laureate to be either female or gay). Women authors, black authors, non-English speaking authors and others are often studied separately, in their own separate modules of work. 'Let's look at post-colonial authors today children'! Great that they're being included but why differentiate them? Why does the study of these authors need to be justified by virtue of their difference to 'the canon' rather than on their own merit?

There are stylistic approaches to literature which try to unpick literary value inherent in the text itself. Why, for example, is Lady Chatterley's Lover considered to have more literary value than a Mills & Boon novel? Both are trash romance are they not?* Practitioners of stylistics would argue that the value lies in the text. Mills & Boon may be derived from DH Lawrence and therefore share some language features with Lady Chatterley's Lover, but Lawrence's language has higher intrinsic value. One of the main techniques cited is 'deviation'. Deviation may be lexical, grammatical, semantic, etc. and covers a range of techniques such as metaphor, allegory, making the familiar strange, etc. which is only to be found in works of 'literature'.

However, I am in danger of writing an academic essay here instead of sharing my thoughts...

Suffice to say, the term 'literature' is not necessarily a neutral one and so I wanted to squash this before it became an elephant in the room...

I'm not restricting this blog to the great works of literature, but I won't be pointedly avoiding them either.

We'll see what we get to when we get to it.

And decide then what we think.

Shall we?

Super.


* I am playing Devil's advocate here. I love DH Lawrence.

Welcome readers

Welcome to my first post on my first blog. How jolly modern of me. Only 7 years or so behind my peers, but hey, I've been busy. Life takes over doesn't it? And all those things you planned to do somehow end up taking a back seat to the 'real' things in life. Things like getting a job. Buying a house. Having a family.

OK, so having a family definitely constitutes 'real' life. How much more real can you get than pro-creating? Answers on a nappy please...

And now all those things are done. Or are at least underway. And I feel the need to return to all those things I planned to do. The first chapter of my novel is kind of started (isn't everyone's?) and happily sitting on a memory chip inside my clock (it is a clock and it is also a cupboard. It is ingenious and I love it) and there it will no doubt sit until my children have begun to need me less frequently during the evenings and I'm able to fully enjoy a glass of wine without the buzz of a baby monitor in my ear.

And so to the job in hand and an explanation of Got Darcy All Wrong. If you haven't read Pride and Prejudice then I hate to spoil it for you, but Elizabeth, bless her, got Darcy all wrong. I see this as a metaphor for my life in a way. In my experience, first impressions are almost never borne out. I should point out that I am drawing a distinction here between first impressions and gut instincts which, in my experience, are almost always borne out. A gut instinct is a feeling you get about a person, a situation, a place, a building, a story, a haircut. It is beyond your control and comes from deep within. A first impression is a judgement you make consciously and is inevitably and inescapably subject to your personal baggage; where you live, how you were educated, your principles, politics, tastes, etc. It comes from without rather than within.

I have learned not to trust first impressions. I get them wrong. Like our beloved Elizabeth.

I shan't be harping on about Pride and Prejudice; its nuances. Its well-crafted realism. And its oddly fairytale ending. More has been written about this rather excellent novel than can ever be digested and regurgitated by one person (that is not to say I haven't tried). Instead I shall be looking at other works, new and old, and sharing some thoughts about them with you.

If you'd like to join me.

Which I hope you will do.

TTFN.