Archive

Off to new places...

This blog is now closed. I'm leaving it up to archive all the reviews I've written over the past four years!

I will now be blogging about fiction, history and writing at

https://drlauratisdall.wordpress.com 

Blog under construction

The Granta, Cambridge. Photograph for reference for one of
my current novel projects (let's call it N2)

I've been having a think about what to do with this blog. Its present state of abandonment is temporary, but I'm keen to create a space where I can write about my historical research (both academic, and the research that's related to my novels-in-progress) while continuing to review both fiction and non-fiction books. I'm wondering if the best option is to host a pair of blogs on the personal website I've been meaning to create for a while, so those who don't care about historical research can still read book reviews, and vice versa. I'm also keen to stop using Blogger. When interview season is over, I will post my plans here, so watch this space!

Opening Pandora's box

[Interviews have intervened with the advertised schedule. In the meantime, have an old review that didn't make its way onto the blog when I first wrote it in 2014. Written originally for Amazon, so it's spoiler-free.]

It's difficult to know what to say about The Girl With All The Gifts without spoiling a twist that occurs early on in the novel and governs the entirety of the story from then on, but I think I'm safe to say that this story is set in an imagined dystopia, where huge population loss has decimated Britain and the few survivors hang on in military bases. On one of these bases lives ten-year-old Melanie, who spends most of her time in a cell and the rest in a classroom, where she soaks up information, especially Miss Justineau's stories of Greek mythology. But she and her fellow pupils are treated like dangerous animals, shackled to their seats and hosed down with disinfectant every Sunday. To Melanie, this is normal, but the reader realises within the first few pages that something is wrong...

This is a gripping and well-written thriller that runs along familiar lines, but manages to rise above its competitors by the sheer effectiveness of its storytelling and its careful handling of the central character, Melanie. I find that using child narrators is a very risky business, as it's so easy for the author to depict a child as twee, unrealistically naive, or sickeningly perceptive and honest. The depiction of Melanie, however, is almost entirely successful. This is partly due to her secret, which steers her depiction away from the usual cliches of childhood, partly due to the fact that she is not the only narrator, and partly because she does not narrate in first person, so MR Carey does not have to attempt the 'voice of a child'. I still had some niggles about her presentation, such as the story she writes early on in the novel, which does not read to me as the work of a ten-year-old with a 'genius-level' IQ, but as the work of a younger child with this level of ability. However, this can possibly be explained by the fact that we do not know how long Melanie has been in education. Still, I felt a little uneasy about her flawless moral code, and I could never relate to her quite as closely as I could to the other characters.

Fortunately, the rest of the cast are satisfyingly individual. Miss Justineau is the most traditionally likeable, but I found myself increasingly fascinated by the two soldiers and, especially, by the most morally suspect member of the crew, scientist Caroline Caldwell. I could never quite tell whether Caroline was meant to be the villain, fulfilling a 'mad scientist' stereotype, but I hope not, because I found her much more interesting as a 'grey' character. Although Caroline oversteps a certain moral line at least once during this novel, I found that I was still broadly sympathetic to her, and understood why she adopted the mindset she did to do the job she had to do. Her final futile discovery is a fitting end to her journey, and she performs the role of antagonist in the narrative without descending into cackling evil. This is a key addition to Carey's story, and I don't think that the novel would have worked nearly as well without her.

I would recommend this novel both to established SF fans and to those who do not usually read SF. Unlike most novels with a twist in the tale, it delivers fully upon what it promises, and does not rely on gimmicks to supply its consistently mounting tension. It should also have considerable crossover potential for young adult readers. Good stuff.

The Baileys Prize Longlist, #3: 'You're always half on Station Eleven'

Miranda works as an administrative assistant at a shipping company, but she fills the swathes of free time that her job allows by sketching an imaginary world, Station Eleven, and its hero, Dr Eleven: 'Station Eleven is the size of Earth's moon and was designed to resemble a planet... The station's artificial sky was damaged in the war, however, so on Station Eleven's surface it is always sunset or twilight or night... the only land remaining is a series of islands that once were mountaintops... There are people who, after fifteen years of perpetual twilight, long only to go home, to return to Earth... They live in the Undersea, an interlinked network of vast fallout shelters under Station Eleven's oceans.' Her boyfriend, Pablo, doesn't understand her obsessive commitment to the project: 'You're always half on Station Eleven.' Miranda isn't interested in publishing the comics, seeking the peace she finds in retreating to Station Eleven rather than acclaim or recognition, but eventually, she has a few copies printed of the first two issues. These two comics make their way into the hands of Kirsten, who is a small girl when a virus devastates the world that she knows, killing the vast majority of the Earth's population. Twenty years later, as part of a travelling theatre company, the Travelling Symphony. Kirsten wanders across a largely empty Canada, with the Station Eleven comics one of her few constants: 'The first issue falls open to a two-page spread. Dr Eleven stands on dark rocks overlooking an indigo sea at twilight... A line of text across the bottom of the frame: I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on earth.'

The most obvious way to read the Station Eleven story that intertwines with the major plot of Station Eleven, then, is as an allegory for the situation of the human survivors of the virus. While they are still on Earth, this is not the Earth they once knew; younger people can hardly believe that there was once a world where aeroplanes flew, linked by the magical, ethereal Internet. They are the unfortunate inhabitants of the Undersea. However, the Station Eleven references are so powerful in themselves that I found this interpretation unsatisfying. Like Miranda, I was engrossed in Station Eleven, and continuously longed, while reading this novel, to return there, away from the harsher realities of a post-apocalyptic world. (As an aside, I should say that this is an enormously difficult feat to pull off. Emily St John Mandel has somehow overcome the reader's natural imaginative resistance to truly committing to a story within a story, and that alone makes this novel special, even though it has plenty more going for it as well). The Travelling Symphony offers a similar justification for continuing to perform Shakespeare: when one of their members, 'the clarinet', wants 'to write something modern, something which addressed this age in which they'd landed', the idea is implicitly rejected, in the same way as Kirsten rejects the idea that they should perform in ordinary clothes rather than salvaged costumes to bring them 'closer' to their audience.

A lot of the reviews of this novel have seized on the Travelling Symphony's motto, cribbed from Star Trek, 'Survival is insufficient', and argued that Station Eleven is about the power of art to save us even from times of great hardship. While I think that this is part of what the novel is saying, I think this reading - which barely mentions Station Eleven - is insufficient. To me, Station Eleven had a lot to say about the relationship of art to 'real life', questioning the idea that bad art is 'escapist' while good art makes us reflect more closely on the society which we are currently enduring. Both the Station Eleven comics and the Shakespeare plays obviously have both functions for our scattered survivors. The importance of Station Eleven is not just that it tells us truths about ourselves in a narrowly-allegorical sense but because it is a deeply-imagined, alternative world which we can inhabit, and learn from that. Shakespeare isn't a joy because he also lived in a plague-ridden society, but because art is more than a series of parallels to draw. The conclusion I have to come to is that stripping Station Eleven down too vigorously, to interrogate it for what it is 'trying' to tell us, is also to rob it of some of its magic.

April schedule

I wasn't able to post on Friday 3rd as I went travelling without the book I wanted to review, so here's a slightly rejigged schedule for this month.

Monday 6th April: Tuf Voyaging by George RR Martin [NB. Ran out of time. This will now be a Monday Musings Post on 13th April.]

Friday 10th April: Baileys Prize Longlist: Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

Friday 17th April: Walter Scott Longlist: Wake by Anna Hope

Friday 24th April: Baileys Prize Longlist: I Am China by Xiaolu Guo

Friday 1st May: Girl at War by Sara Novic

I'm also definitely going to write a Monday Musings post on all the discussion there's been recently about Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant making fantasy literature mainstream - once I've read it!

Monday Musings: The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction Shortlist

The shortlist has been announced, and it's as follows:

The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis

The Lie by Helen Dunmore

Viper Wine by Hermione Eyre

In The Wolf's Mouth by Adam Foulds

Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut

A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie

The Ten Thousand Things by John Spurling

I'm sorry to say, after seeing the wonderful longlist, that this shortlist has somewhat dampened my enthusiasm to read along with this prize. Which is silly, really, because I was actively planning to read three of the shortlisted novels anyway - Foulds, Galgut and Shamsie. It's very unfortunate that none of the novels I've already read have been shortlisted, especially the Sarah Waters, which definitely deserved to be. I'm also dismayed by the inclusion of Dunmore and Amis. I've never read any of Martin Amis's novels (shock!) but the review of The Zone of Interest in the LRB  didn't convince me that it's the place to start. And I've continuously struggled with Helen Dunmore - I couldn't get on with either The Siege or House of Orphans. I find her writing overly affected, and her historical research too heavily-worn. As for the rest, I know nothing about Eyre as a writer, but Viper Wine does sound intriguing, if I can get past the awful cover. It's nice to see a novel set in seventeenth-century Britain that's not about the civil wars or the Restoration. Spurling's novel, set in fourteenth-century China, also sounds like one to try. We'll see if I get through the whole list or not.

The Baileys Prize Longlist, #2: What difference did the war make?

I couldn't get through The Mouse Deer Kingdom, so I'm going straight into the Baileys longlist. I'm going to kick off my reviews of the longlisted novels with two novels partly or completely set in Britain in the 1940s. Despite this, they're both up for the Baileys rather than the Walter Scott.

NB. I wrote this review in September 2014 after receiving a proof copy of the novel. I instantly assumed from the way it was written that it was intended as 'crossover' fiction. It has since been reviewed and marketed as an adult novel, but I would still contend that (a) this sits in obvious crossover territory and (b) the novel feels too simple to work as straight adult fiction.

I adored Lissa Evans's last novel, Their Finest Hour and a Half, which perhaps meant that my expectations for this one were unreasonably high. However, I also think that it sits awkwardly between the adult and the children's market. There's no fundamental problem with writing a novel that appeals equally to adults and to children - novels like Goodnight Mister Tom manage it splendidly, and I'm impatient with rigid age categories in fiction at the best of times. However, in Crooked Heart, I felt that some of the qualities I'd most appreciated in Their Finest Hour and a Half were diluted in order to attain a greater simplicity for the sake of the younger reader, whereas the traditional strengths of children's fiction, such as a strong plot line, were absent. For example, I thought the characterisation in Their Finest Hour and a Half, which is also set during the Second World War, was skilfully handled - the characters, especially the more comic figures, veer close to caricature but still remained sympathetic and interesting. In contrast, I felt that too many of the characters in Crooked Heart - even Noel and Vee, at times - were too one-note, and not sufficiently complex to retain my attention.

The novel follows parentless Noel Bostock, who was living with his godmother Mattie until her decline and death sends him first to the house of his unsympathetic aunt and uncle and then threatens him with evacuation. As an evacuee, Noel meets Vee, making her living through various dubious practices such as falsely collecting for various charities, and her son Donald, who makes his money by volunteering to attend medicals in the place of those who don't want to be drafted, as he has a congenital heart problem. Unfortunately, I found it difficult to warm to either Noel or Vee - and warmth is an essential quality for a novel like this to work. Noel, who despises his cartoonish, delinquent classmates, felt like too much of a cliche, while Vee, who initially seemed more promising, failed to develop as the novel went on. As entertaining as her and Donald's antics were, I wanted a bit more to get my teeth into. Mattie was the character who most intrigued me, despite the fact that she only appears in flashbacks after the prologue.

I have extremely mixed feelings about this novel, and it is one of the very few books that I started liking more during its second half (usually I make up my mind about novels fairly early on). There will be spoilers in this review, because it's difficult for me to talk about why I changed my mind without them. Elizabeth is Missing is narrated by Maud, an elderly woman who is living with dementia, and who is therefore finding it increasingly difficult to keep track of her daily routine, let alone the clues she is trying to put together to explain her friend Elizabeth's disappearance. Emma Healey's presentation of Maud is outstanding; sensitive, thoughtful and touching, without resorting to the demonisation of the other characters in the book (Maud's daughter, Helen, her primary carer, becomes more complex and sympathetic in the second half of the novel as we see Maud relate to both Helen and to her granddaughter, and this was one of the reasons why the book picked up for me.) I felt connected to Maud as a character from the start, but the plot of Elizabeth is Missing baffled me. I made the assumption early on that Elizabeth really was missing but no-one was going to believe Maud (including the reader), so the twist would be that we so often ignore the stories of the old and/or ill in our society even though they have important things to say. I really should have realised earlier that this was not the way Elizabeth is Missing was going, but due to careless reading (I admit to skimming much of the first half of the book) I didn't get it. This made me very impatient with what appeared to be the glacially slow progress of Maud's investigations in the present-day plot line.

My main issue with the novel, however, stemmed not from my own misreadings, but from the second plot-line, which deals with Maud as a young teenager in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. There is another missing woman in this plot; Maud's older sister, Sukey. Sukey, who recently married Frank, has simply vanished, and Maud is determined to find out what has happened to her. However, like the present-day Maud, her inquiries are both ridiculed, and fruitless, until the very end. I'm afraid this plot-line didn't work for me at all, even after I had figured out what was really going on in Elizabeth is Missing. The depictions of 'austerity Britain' in 1946 felt half-hearted and cliched, and I didn't get the sense that Healey had done much research, or if she had, that much of it had found its way into the novel. As Victoria at Eve's Alexandria noted in her review of the novel, the male characters are a series of stereotypes, set up to fill certain roles in the mystery of Sukey's disappearance, and this made the 1946 sections feel even more contrived. Finally, I couldn't sympathise with the young, naive, virtually characterless Maud in the same way I could with present-day Maud, I didn't get much sense of what Sukey was like as a person, and I simply didn't care that Sukey was missing.

But I did care, very much, that Elizabeth was missing. Of course she is not. We find out - relatively early, if you are an attentive reader - that something has happened to Elizabeth, but it's not a mystery. Elizabeth has had a stroke and is in hospital, and although Maud has been told this many times, and has even gone to visit her, she does not remember. Once I twigged that the story that Maud was finally going to get to tell in Elizabeth is Missing was about Sukey and not Elizabeth, the novel became much more moving, and its exploration of living with dementia much more complex. Hence we have a cautionary tale about the perils of being a bad reader. Overall, this novel is still flawed. It could be shortened considerably, especially the sections set in 1946. Nevertheless, there are few books I've read recently that pack such an emotional punch with their final few lines. Maud is at Elizabeth's funeral. Her memory is gradually getting worse, so she only intermittently remembers who her family members are, even as they are standing around her. Nevertheless, she knows what she has to do: 'The woman doesn't think that's the answer and the man begins to explain something to me. But I can't concentrate. I can see they won't listen, won't take me seriously. So I must do something. I must, because Elizabeth is missing.'

Monday Musings: Rape as a plot device

A good example of using rape
as a bad plot device: the rape
of Anna Bates in Downton.

There's been a reasonable amount of discussion recently about 'using rape as a plot device', some of which is summarised in this Guardian article. A lot of the commentary I've read has centred around the TV series Reign, a fantasy reinvention of the life of Mary Queen of Scots, which controversially depicted Mary being raped in one of its later episodes. Rhiannon at Feminist Fiction wrote well about how such a scene has no place in a drama that has otherwise been fun and light-hearted, and I agree with her argument as far as I can without having seen the series myself. (The obvious counter-argument is: why can fun light-hearted shows depict murder, then? I don't want to get into that too deeply here, but I think the difference starts with the fact that we all know that murder is wrong, whereas 1 in 4 British people think that a victim of a sexual assault is at least 'a little bit responsible' if they've been drinking.) Downton Abbey got itself into similar problems to Reign when it depicted the rape of Anna Bates, then largely failed to depict the long-term consequences for Anna; indeed, it soon became clear that the rape was a plot device to put poor, misunderstood Mr Bates in jeopardy again. Downton lacks the emotional depth and complexity to deal with a rape scene adequately, and I don't think that such a scene should ever have been included. Nevertheless, some of the commentary on Reign left me feeling baffled. For example, in this post, Anita Little argues, 'If rape is used primarily to move a story along or explain a woman character's "complexity", it can desensitise the audience to real-life sexual violence', whereas this post goes further, stating, 'Rape is not a plot device. It is not character development.' Although these writers may well be right about Reign, their posts did leave me wondering: what place does rape have in fiction, then?

Changing a consensual sex scene to a rape scene actually
created plot problems for Game of Thrones, rather than
solving them, I would argue.

One major issue in this argument is disentangling the idea of 'rape as a plot device' from other (often valid) criticisms of how rape is portrayed in fiction. For example, shows like Game of Thrones and Outlander have been criticised for the gratuitous use of rape, but this does not mean that they use rape as a plot device - indeed, the problem with many of the rape scenes in Game of Thrones is how little they add to the show. This recent Independent article manages to conflate almost any commentary about rape with the idea that it is a (bad) plot device. I want to spend a long time unpicking many of the ridiculous arguments in this article - particularly the idea that rapists must be portrayed as unsympathetic monsters to allow us to have sympathy with the victim - but I suspect that the statements made by the speakers concerned have been selectively and badly reported, so I'm going to move on. The main point is that even if you think rapists have been made to look too 'nice' in fiction, this isn't using rape as a plot device; this is shoddy characterisation.

So what do we mean when we say 'rape shouldn't be used as a plot device'? If we mean that rape shouldn't be used solely as a plot device, that it should never be used simply to move a story along, then I'm in total agreement. But I cannot agree that rape must never play any part in the plot - whether as a motivation for a character's actions or as an event that leads to a further chain of events. For example, in Louise Doughty's Apple Tree Yard (which I've been talking about a lot, because it's a great book) a character is raped. This rape is absolutely pivotal to the plotline. However, it's also central not only to the character arc of the character in question, but to the thematic weight of the novel. In no way is rape simply a plot device to move the story along. But I would argue that it is a plot device - in the same way that any crucial event in a story can be seen as a 'plot device' - because it is a turning-point in the plot. It works because it's not only part of the plot but because the ramifications for the character are important as well. 

In this context, the idea that 'rape is not character development' is even more baffling. I think the argument here is that rape shouldn't be used to make characters 'more complex' or to give the impression of a darker, edgier narrative, and again, I'm in total agreement. But, I think, here is where fiction must diverge from the way in which we talk about, and understand, real-life rape. For real-life rape survivors, it's absolutely appropriate to say that rape is not character development, because it's an event that was not their fault, does not fit into a story that proves their guilt or innocence, and they should not be expected to learn from it or, indeed, react in any particular way. Fictional rapes, however, are a part of character development, not in the sense that the character should be portrayed as somehow stronger or more interesting because s/he has been raped, but because they must be, or what is the rape doing in this story? If rapes don't contribute to character development, or move the plot along, then the only logical conclusion is that they have no place in the novel or film. And I don't think the way to address the poor handling of sexual violence in fiction is to erase it altogether. If commentators think that we shouldn't address rape in fiction at all, then, rather than debating about its use as a 'plot device', perhaps we should have this argument instead.

The Baileys/Walter Scott Longlists, #1: Summary

The Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction longlists have been released, and while there's no chance I will be able to review all the novels, I'm going to read along with as many as I can in preparation for reading the full shortlists when they're out. (Incidentally, I love this article on 'literary historical fiction' from a previous judge of the Walter Scott Prize; a strong argument for an important category.)

Sarah Waters' The Paying Guests conveniently appears on both longlists, and I've already reviewed it on this blog; I absolutely loved it, and think it's Waters' best novel yet, with the exception of The Night Watch. From the Walter Scott longlist, I've also reviewed Jessie Burton's The Miniaturist, which I enjoyed, but which I felt struck an awkward balance between historical fact and fantasy. Finally, Audrey Magee's The Undertaking was up for last year's Baileys Prize, and I read it then; I liked it, but I felt that the central concept was too simplistic to carry an entire novel.

I will shortly be reviewing Emma Healey's Elizabeth is Missing, Lissa Evans's Crooked Heart, Emily St John Mandel's Station Eleven and Xiaolu Guo's I Am China from the Baileys longlist; from the shorter Walter Scott longlist, I'm going to tackle Anna Hope's Wake and Damon Galgut's Arctic Summer. If there's any time left, I'll read Kamila Shamsie's A God in Every Stone, which is on both lists!

'The lifting of a burden'

Spoilers throughout this review.

Timothy Glover, with 'a head like a bowling ball sitting on his shoulders', whose T-shirts are made of 'home tie-dyed cotton from stalls at radical fairs', one 'grey as a prison flannel' is not an attractive or a pleasant character. We first meet Tim as a ten-year-old in Sheffield in 1974, but Philip Hensher is keen to assure us that he was never a nice boy. When his mother, Katherine, is looking through photograph albums when Tim is grown-up, she remembers that she had 'difficulty' with Tim even when he was only an ugly baby: 'difficulty telling Jane and Daniel that they had to love their new little brother. He hadn't slept, hadn't liked food, had pushed her away almost constantly. She'd wanted, sometimes, to push him away, to be honest.' Tim's lack of redeeming features is underlined throughout the twenty-year time span covered by The Northern Clemency, where, as a shiftless young man in 1984, he carefully dog-ears his copy of Capital before taking it out of the house so he'll never be suspected of not having read it, and hangs around at the fringes of the miners' strike spouting half-digested ideas about capitalism. By 1994, Tim is a lecturer in social sciences, but seems hardly more educated or less childish; indeed, he's presented as a caricature of the loony left. When his old neighbour, Bernie, a former employee of the electricity board, which Tim blames for breaking the miners' strike, politely invites Tim to his retirement party, Tim 'wrote a finely argued letter over five pages of the departmental writing paper explaining why... he couldn't in all conscience go to such a party.' It's not surprising, when Tim's body washes up near the end of the novel, that his brother Daniel perceives his death as 'the lifting of a burden.'

Tim Glover, however, is not just an oddity within the world that he inhabits; he's an oddity for the reader as well. In a novel otherwise so committed to nuance and, indeed, kindness, his vicious portrayal jars, over and over again. Not only does it seem unnecessary to seek out the most unsympathetic viewpoints possible for, not only the miners' strike, but for the entire left-wing critique of Thatcherism, it seems cruel to revel so thoroughly in Tim's personal failings. This huge novel is deliberately confined to a small subsection of the lower middle class in Sheffield, and perhaps the total lack of working-class viewpoints is deliberate; perhaps Tim's self-delusions are not intended to condemn all his comrades but to emphasise his failure to understand anybody different from himself. It's difficult to pretend The Northern Clemency is a novel about class, however. Despite Hensher's brilliant eye for social detail, it has more to say about individuals than groups. Some of these individuals work better than others, although none fail nearly as badly as Tim. (And yes, Tim is a failure as a character - as demonstrated by the need to fall back on the cliched idea that he was 'wrong from birth', rather than warped by the unfortunate events that happen to him later). Francis, close in age to Tim, has a small but significant arc that focuses on his loneliness as a child and asexuality as an adult - an arc that culminates in the first emotional connection he's ever made with everyone. Francis's sister, Sandra, is engagingly complex; striving to be a cool girl as a teenager, but never quite managing it, she later plays the role of a British expat in Australia without ever quite achieving the local insouciance she prides herself on (when asked where the best places to go in the country are, she falls back on "Ayers Rock. The Great Barrier Reef. The Blue Mountains.") Sandra can be thoughtless and cruel but, unlike Tim, is completely human. The other two children from 1974, Daniel and Jane, fare less well, as their narratives are inexplicably shortened to give more space to their brother.

Hensher's gifts as a novelist, however, are most on display in his depiction of the two sets of Sheffield parents - Bernie and Alice, and Katherine and Malcolm. Katherine's decision to get a job in 1974 sets her apart from her neighbour Alice, who remains a stay-at-home wife and mother. However, the thrill of working in a flower shop with the glamorous Nick turns Katherine's head, and she's soon guilty of egregious name-dropping among her family, which Hensher handles hilariously via disgusted teenage daughter Jane: 'At first Jane felt that she would never get on with her mother's conversation, the way you waited for Nick to enter it at any moment, but time wore down anything. Soon it was the same as Tim's dreaming evocation of snakes, his paragraphs of detail and longing, and they divided the long evenings between them like madmen supervising the silent sane.' When Nick is accused of money-laundering in 1984, Katherine's obsession takes a more dramatic turn - although Nick's story is one of the inexplicable loose ends in this novel. Hensher also writes Katherine and Malcolm's relationship with understated mastery. Alice and Bernie get less page-time, but Alice, in particular, is fully if quietly realised, and her ending is an understated tragedy; just as she is trying to come to terms with the fact that her husband's retirement has highlighted how little she has done with her life, she has a brain haemorrhage. As she lies in hospital, her son visits her: 'At first Francis's talk took the form of assurances of love, of telling Alice what sort of admirable person she was... It was all true, but he got to the end of it very quickly.' The reader is with Francis is both recognising Alice's goodness and realising how little there is to say.

The Northern Clemency is an oddly mixed bag; more than 700 pages long, I had the sense that it could easily have lasted another 700 without becoming any more conclusive. On one hand, its depiction of these two families (Tim aside) is endlessly fascinating, and we care no less about Francis playing games in the playground than Katherine on trial, which is a triumph in itself. On the other hand, it delivers far less than it ought to given its size, and I felt strongly that The Emperor Waltz, which is both tightly-written and lengthy, demonstrates how much Hensher has improved as a writer, especially through excising the unconvincing descriptive passages that weigh down a lot of The Northern Clemency. I enjoyed it, but I'm not sure I would read it again.

Monday Musings: What is 'literary fiction'?

The US cover. Less pink, arguably no
less 'chick-lit'.

Having just reviewed Katherine Heiny's debut collection of short stories, Single, Carefree, Mellow, I noticed that it had fallen victim to that familiar debate: what is 'literary fiction'? In Is Single, Carefree, Mellow Literature or Chick Lit?, Aimee Levitt sums up the story so far, and argues that neither sales, humour, nor what Jonathan Franzen terms 'moral complexity' sets 'literary fiction' apart from 'chick lit'. In reference to the last point, she convincingly argues 'does that mean literary fiction is less fun to read but good for you...? I don't believe that either.' Her conclusion is that these labels don't matter: 'we could just say there's good writing and bad writing.' I had a crack at a similar debate myself in an old blog post from 2011, 'The debate on readability versus literary merit'. And although I agree with much of what Levitt says in her article, especially her criticisms of Franzen, I find myself still in the same position I argued for in 2011: that it is important that we have a category called 'literary fiction', even if many definitions of what that category is are insufficient or simply wrong.

I agree with Levitt that literary fiction shouldn't be seen as something you have to choke down to become a 'better' writer or reader, and that 'moral complexity' is not a sufficient description of what it does do for us. As I argued in 2011, Marian Keyes's wonderful piece of chick lit, The Other Side of the Story, presents three very complex and flawed female characters who are, to one degree or another, at odds with each other, but who are all sympathetic. There is no easy answer to the questions Keyes poses about adultery and loyalty, although the novel contrasts with Single, Carefree, Mellow in considering the moral implications of its characters' actions much more carefully. But then, if a deep concern with morality was enough to tip a novel out of the literary canon for being too simplistic, Middlemarch had better be thrown out as well. Moreover, I would suggest, engaging a reader deeply with your text is something that a writer must accomplish if they want the vast majority of their readers to care about unpicking anything more nuanced or subtle that is going on. I have read so many novels where I suspected that the writer was doing something clever - Butterflies in November being the most recent example - but I simply didn't care enough to accomplish the necessary analytic work. In contrast, I have spent many, many words (over-)analysing George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, because he made me care about the story he was telling. If I hadn't been much bothered about what happened to Sansa or Arya, I would never have appreciated the subtleties of some of the symbolism he uses to refer to these two sisters.

The top search terms used to find this blog are 'What happens
to Arya Stark in Game of Thrones?' I wish I knew!

I also dislike the cheap value judgments made about 'readers of chick lit' or of 'YA novels' or 'fantasy' or really any genre you could name, although I agree with Jennifer Weiner that the scorn and distaste heaped on chick lit is disproportionate when compared to the relative respect afforded to 'male' genres such as the political thriller. (YA also suffers from ageist assumptions, such as the frequently-expressed opinion that it is infantilising for adults to read books intended primarily for children and teenagers, as if all adult novels were great literature, and as if it's OK to fob children and teenagers off with rubbish.) Firstly, how ridiculous to assume that because I am reading chick lit now that this is all I ever read. Secondly, frankly it is much better for me - both in terms of enjoyment, and intellectually speaking - to read a well-written romantic novel, or fantasy, or YA, than a failed attempt at literary fiction, of which there are many. The problem with bad literary fiction is that the reader tends to get nothing from it at all, whereas I've enjoyed some truly awful thrillers with exciting plots, for example. (This is not to say that literary novels cannot have exciting plots - but bad ones rarely do.)

Not literary fiction, still brilliant.

Why, then, do we need literary fiction? I think it comes back to the idea that I gestured towards in my 2011 post: the reader's expectations. While this may not be true of all readers, I do think that we usually work with a different set of expectations when we open a literary novel than a popular one, with all the appropriate caveats about how difficult the line between the two is to draw (my literary novel might be your popular one, and vice versa). And I don't think that these expectations should simply be dumped, so we toss away Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant because it is not as immediately gripping as A Game of Thrones. This does not mean that novelists who write literary fiction can be as self-indulgent as they want, safe in the knowledge that their readers don't expect to be gripped. Indeed, it is up to them to be clear about the type of reader that their novel needs. By 'type of reader' I don't mean that they are writing for certain individuals and not others. I would suggest that we all become different readers when we engage with different types of books, that the type of reader I am when I'm racing through a fantastic thriller like Louise Doughty's Apple Tree Yard, for example, is a different type of reader from the reader I am now, reading Emily St John Mandel's Station Eleven, which is equally gripping, but in a totally different way. Writers need to signal what the reader will need to do to make this book work for them (which should never include 'be bored and soldier on') and readers need to be prepared to slow down, to think differently, to adjust. And although I am not suggesting that all literary novels need to be slow-paced, I think it makes perfect sense that most of them are, at least, slower-paced than popular fiction, because they are usually grasping after something that cannot be said easily if read too quickly. (Sarah Waters' fantastic The Paying Guests does, I think, suffer from the intense pace of its second half - with the result that many reviewers felt that the latter half was shallower than the first.) This also helps to explain why readers care if a novel is 'literary' or not; not necessarily because they think literary fiction is more worthy or because they can't deal with anything that doesn't have a category, but because they genuinely want to know how they should be approaching it.

So while there are no absolute rules about literary fiction being slower, more complex and more challenging, I would suggest that the existence of a category that tends towards creating such expectations in readers is not a bad thing at all. And although regarding genre fiction (the question of 'is literary fiction a genre' is one to tackle another day!) as automatically inferior is both foolish and wrong, there is something about literary fiction that demands, I think, a greater investment, simply because it's more at odds with our idea of how we ought to be entertained. This, of course, only makes it more disappointing when that investment is wasted. Authors, be warned.