Star treatment

You know how it is when you're a big-time writer. You get the star treatment, right?

Er, no. Not exactly.

Go see what Tess Gerritsen has to say about being on the road plugging her books. (Link courtesy of Mediabistro.) Now although I didn't much like one of Tess Gerritsen's novels when I reviewed it a while back, it is undeniable that she is a big commercial success. But you'd never know it if you talked to some bookshop managers. She tried, and found they'd never heard of her.

At Store #3, the manager doesn't want me to sign ANY copies. She wants to be able to "return them all" if necessary. Then she looks in the computer and stares. "Wow," she says. "We have a lot of your books in stock. I guess you must sell really well here." Only then does she allow me to sign three copies of VANISH. I ask her if she has many authors come through her store.

"You're the only one," she says. (Do other authors know something that I don't?)

Trying Neaira

Debra Hamel’s Trying Neaira is an object lesson in how to write a non-fiction book which has academic credibility and yet remains easily comprehensible to the general reader.

The book’s subtitle is The true story of a courtesan’s scandalous life in ancient Greece. The courtesan in question is Neaira (pronounced neh-EYE-ruh), and the ‘trying’ part of the title refers to the fact that, towards the end of her life, she was prosecuted for living with an Athenian citizen as his wife.

Under the laws of Athens, foreigners (of whom Neaira was one) were forbidden to marry citizens. The penalties were far from negligible: if found guilty, Neaira might have been sold back into slavery, and Stephanos, the man in her life, would have lost all the rights and privileges associated with citizenship.

First published in hardback in 2003, the book is now available in paperback. The publisher is Yale University Press, and in the academic world there are few more prestigious names. Yale will undoubtedly have had this book vetted (anonymously) by experts in the field, and indeed the author thanks them for their suggestions. So you can be sure that the information conveyed is correct.

The cover of the book features a highly apposite illustration: a sumptuous nude study by Jean-Leon Gérome. The artist’s subject is another famous Greek courtesan, Phryne, who was known for charging variable prices according to whether she liked you or not.

In essence, the book is very simple. It tells, in as much detail as is known, the life story of Neaira. She was brought up in a Corinthian brothel – in the fourth century BC – and was at one time a sex slave but bought her own freedom. And then she entered into a thirty-year relationship with Stephanos of Athens.

Stephanos, is seems, had enemies, and some of them sought to attack him through his long-term relationship with Neaira. The prosecutor was one Apollodoros, and the text of his speech to the court has amazingly survived; it constitutes the main source for Debra Hamel’s book.

In the course of describing Neaira’s life, Debra Hamel passes on a substantial amount of background information about life in ancient Greece, not least about the extraordinary legal system of Athens.

Trying Neaira is short and to the point. The author has mercifully chosen not to write in the fashionable style of gobbledygook which is so eagerly adopted by many who work in the humanities. Equally mercifully, we are spared a lot of feminist propaganda to the effect that all men are bastards; Debra Hamel allows the facts to speak for themselves.

As you would expect, there are extensive footnotes, enlarging on the points made in the text, and there is a substantial list of references. One book missing from the bibliography is Hans Licht’s Sexual Life in Ancient Greece, which was popular when I was a lad; but no doubt it has been displaced by more recent studies in this field.

One way and another Debra Hamel has provided this book with masses of supporting material on the web. You could start by going to her book blog, which is a valuable resource in itself, or you can go to the book’s own web site and work on from there.

Maybe, in the course of time, someone will do Neaira – the Novel. And after that Neaira – the Movie. Who knows?

Follow-ups

Here, in no particular order, are a number of thoughts and links which arise from previous posts and comments upon them.

Science fiction

A correspondent tells me that the University of Minnesota has put up a series of mp3 files which are recordings of a set of lectures on science fiction and fantasy. I have not dipped into them myself, but my correspondent tells me that they are ‘worthwhile, knowledgeable, and accessible.’

Macmillan New Writing

One correspondent tells me that he submitted a ms to Macmillan New Writing back in May, since when he has heard nothing. Well, maybe that’s a bad sign. On the other hand, when a publisher hangs on to something it is sometimes an indication that he/she is taking it seriously.

Meanwhile, Roger Morris has not only submitted a novel to MNW but has had it accepted. There you go, see. Keep the faith. To celebrate, Roger has started a blog, which he refers to as a plog because it largely exists to plug his forthcoming book. Which is in my view a very smart thing to do.

I see from yesterday’s post that not only has Roger signed the contract but he has had proofs delivered. Hot damn, they must move fast at MNW.

Furthermore, Roger tells us that Jordan – aka Katie Price and author of what is currently the hottest ‘autobiography' in town has been signed to do two novels! Wow. I can’t wait.

Having dipped into other parts of Roger’s plog, I find that he has another one: Taking Comfort. He also says that, since Macmillan have been so niggardly with the advance, they have been generous with their punctuation, adding lots of commas and a few hyphens. Well, that’s publishers for you.

It all seems good-humoured and well calculated to arouse interest. Which, given the MNW slimline approach, he is largely going to have to do himself.

Beyond You and Me

W.S. Cross (not sure if that’s he or she) has sent me details of the erotic novel Beyond You and Me. Now what could possibly have made Cross think that I was interested in erotic fiction? Well, maybe it was the piece I wrote about Mitzi Szereto, or the one about books on sex.

Anyway, Cross is another author with a blog and a determination to tell the world about the new novel. This one isn’t sold yet. In fact I don’t think it’s even finished. But hey – it’s never too soon to start plugging, right?

I can’t say that I have actually dipped into Beyond You and Me because I got distracted by the long list of links to other erotic sites which W.S. Cross provides. But then Mrs GOB caught me at it and I was sent upstairs without any supper.

The Celebrity Café

The Celebrity Café wrote to me on the basis of no pretext whatever, but to point out that it is the internet’s longest-running entertainment magazine, read by 3.4 million people a month. Under the links section there is a section for authors, and for a consideration – e.g. a reciprocal link – they will no doubt give you and your book (whether out or forthcoming) a mention.

The Intellectuals and the Masses

Paul Vitols read my piece about John Carey’s book on the intellectuals and didn’t entirely agree with it so he wrote his own extensive comments on his blog Genesis of a Historical Novel. Well worth a look.

Gerard Jones

The great Gerard, whom the gods preserve, is still working on the audio version of Ginny Good. I particularly enjoyed the Introduction (bottom mp3 file on the list), which includes some of Joan Baez, and also a story about a man who was bitten on the neck by a deer which was in the back seat of his car. Look, you just have to listen to the story, OK? And it’s free.

Gerard is absolutely unique and if the internet had been invented solely in order to publicise his book it would have been worthwhile.

Cantara Christopher on Murder in the Genre

Cantara Christopher has commented on various of my posts in the past, and today she has a piece on literaryrevolution.com. Warning. This piece is seriously disturbing. It reminds us that the blogging world is but a shadow of the real world and that the real world contains a great deal of unpleasantness. The stuff that I write about – books and publishing – scarcely qualifies as real at all. But if you want to read something by someone who is prepared to face up to the difficult issues surrounding murder, motherhood, and grief, Cantara’s piece is for you.

Laraine Anne Barker

Laraine has some kind words to say about my essay On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile, which she is recommending to beginning writers who seek advice on her FAQ page. Laraine is the author of The Obsidian Quest and other novels, details of which are on her web site.

And, er, that’s about it for today.

More Moneypenny

Yesterday’s Sunday Times carried an odd sort of article on a forthcoming book by one Kate Westbrook: The Moneypenny Diaries.

I first mentioned Miss Moneypenny and her diaries on 8 July. In Ian Fleming’s astonishingly successful series of novels about the British secret agent James Bond, Miss Moneypenny was the secretary to M, the code name for the man who was head of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and hence Bond’s boss.

For those who are too young to remember these things, perhaps I should point out that the Bond books (the first of which appeared in 1953) were wildly successful as novels. However, what really established the Bond name on a worldwide basis was the even more successful series of films, beginning in 1962 and still running today. These have not only generated untold millions for all involved in them but have made the name James Bond known throughout the world. In the far east he is known as Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

In my first post on this matter I pointed out that, although the Moneypenny diaries clearly made use of Fleming’s characters, it appeared that the Ian Fleming estate, in the form of an organisation known as IFP, knew nothing about them; and IFP had not, it then seemed, authorised the publication. If they hadn’t, I wondered, how long would it be before they reached for their lawyers?

The Sunday Times, in a thoroughly confused and confusing manner, supplies an answer, of sorts.

First of all, let it be said that I assumed from the outset the Kate Westbrook’s book was a work of fiction. And Amazon has it listed as such. However, it would appear that, for a while at least, the publisher – John Murray, with managing director Roland Philipps as spokesman – was trying to make out that the book was factual.

It is hard, frankly, to discern the true story from the Times’s jumble of facts and quotes. But it appears that Philipps claimed that the author, Kate Westbrook, was a distinguished historian – a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge no less. Further, he claimed that the diaries were actually written by a woman who, at the time, was secretary to the head of SIS. The references to ‘Miss Moneypenny’ and to ‘James Bond’ were simply used to cover the names of real people, people on whom – it appears – Fleming based his books.

Clear so far? No? Well don’t blame me, I’m doing my best with this nonsense.

OK. Next thing. At a certain point, someone – possibly Richard Brooks, who wrote the Sunday Times article – made a few simple phone calls and established that the story didn’t hold up. For instance, there is no fellow of Trinity called Kate Westbrook and never has been. The stories in the book, when checked against the memory and knowledge of experts on the SIS, were held to be ‘implausible and improbable.’

Philipps seems then to have changed his tune. He now admits that the diaries are not genuine. ‘It’s a spoof,’ he says. Go on – we would never have guessed.

One wonders what on earth Philipps thought he was up to. Did he really believe, at any stage, that the Moneypenny diaries were real? Well, you gotta remember that there were a few people around who were dim enough to believe that the Hitler diaries were genuine.

Or, did he pretend they were real in order to beat up more press interest?

Or – hey, this is beginning to get like one of those complicated thriller plots from the days when espionage novels were all the rage, and you had double bluffs and triple agents and all sorts. Weren’t they fun?

Or, as I was saying, perhaps it was a devious ploy to avoid having to do business with the Ian Fleming estate?

There is a slight hint in the Times article that this latter explanation might, perhaps, be the right one. Corrine Turner, IFP’s managing director, is quoted as follows: ‘We always take protection of our intellectual property seriously and, in normal circumstances, would have stopped this book. However, after detailed negotiations with John Murray we have reached an agreement to allow this project to receive the public attention it deserves.’

She adds that ‘We were certainly led to believe by the publishers that there was a real Miss Moneypenny.’

Well, frankly I am beginning to lose interest. But it looks to me as if the story is very simple. Somebody, somewhere, decided that a successful commercial project could be launched by getting a writer to churn out a series of books (because there are more promised, I gather) which purported to be the diaries of Ian Fleming’s character, Miss Moneypenny. Any fule can see how this might work jolly well. A few bob would be made by everyone, and no harm done.

But then there was the tricky business of IFP demanding a share, as, again, any fule would recognise that they would. Perhaps, just perhaps, the author, agent, and publisher were unwise enough to try to proceed without asking permission. Perhaps they thought that by pretending it was a ‘real’ document, which used the names of Fleming characters for convenience, there would be no breach of copyright and no requirement to do a deal.

The IFP director's statement that normally they would have stopped such a book (dead in its tracks, she might have added), suggests to me that IFP came into the act late in the day; possibly when they were alerted by John Cox, the Bond fan mentioned in my first post. An item in the Observer at the beginning of this month also suggests that this was the case.

I can only say that, if that really was how it happened, I would not personally have cared to be on the end of the legal kicking and thumping which was, doubtless, administered by the IFP lawyers. The Bond franchise has generated many many millions, with more to come, and heavyweights like that do not react kindly when you tread on their toes.

Harry Blamires: The New Bloomsday Book

Yesterday we noted how, in order to separate themselves from the vulgar masses, the intellectuals of the early twentieth century deliberately developed a form of literature which was too difficult for the ordinary reader to understand. And few books in that era were more difficult to understand than James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).

You might imagine, therefore, that the appearance of Ulysses would have been greeted with cries of joy and acclamation from the literary intelligentsia. But not so.

Why not? Well, there were two problems. The first was that Joyce himself was not one of us; he was a definite oik. And the second problem was that Joyce’s hero, Leopold Bloom, was even oikier. The man was an Irish Jew, for a start. And he was some sort of clerk, for heaven’s sake; and there were few worse insults in the intellectuals’ armoury than to describe a fellow as a mere clerk.

The word oik, by the way, is an old-fashioned English term for a person of uncouth behaviour and/or appearance. A friend of mine once had to act as guide to a distinguished politician called Roy Jenkins (now deceased). Roy was sometimes known as Woy, because of a minor speech impediment. By way of small talk my friend and Woy fell to discussing other personalities in UK politics, and my friend asked Woy what he thought of Kenneth Clarke – a man who may soon lead the Tory party. ‘Oh,’ cried Woy, ‘an absolute oik!’

But back to Joyce. Yes, strive though he might to be the leader of the avant-garde and hence the intellectuals’ darling, poor old Jimmy boy never quite made it. He was dismissed by Virginia Woolf as a ‘a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic [ha!], insistent, raw, striking and ultimately nauseating.’ He probably smelt too.

Leopold Bloom also failed to find favour. He was not an intellectual. The only book we see him buy is entitled Sweets of Sin (not one feels, a highbrow volume), and he reads a periodical called Tit-Bits!

We may note, in passing, that Tit-Bits was not as salacious as it sounds, but it was a magazine which was regularly singled out for condemnation by the intelligentsia. It was aimed firmly at suburban readers, and in its early days each issue contained 40,000 words of text covering a remarkably wide spectrum of subjects. It was clearly bought by those of the lower social orders who sought to improve themselves, and such people got little encouragement from most of the intellectual community.

So, one way and another, James Joyce did not receive universal approval and admiration from the literary intelligentsia, despite the fact that they were the obvious audience for his book, and despite the fact that Ulysses was as difficult to follow as anything ever published up to that point.

Not that Ulysses is impossible to read in the same way that you would read any other book, but it is pretty hard going. It is much easier to follow, on the whole, if you have a guide to help you. I myself have found that the best guide to the book is Harry Blamires’s The New Bloomsday Book – subtitled A guide through Ulysses. First published in 1966, a second edition appeared in 1988; this is the one that I have. A third edition, however, was issued in 1996. If you buy a copy, you should ideally make sure that you have an up-to-date edition of Ulysses, so that the page-number references match.

As I have remarked before, my favourite section of Ulysses is the Nighttown sequence, which is written largely in the form of a play script. I am not always sure, however, whether some of the symbolism that Blamires’s commentary draws attention to was placed there by Joyce himself, intentionally, or whether it is something that Blamires himself has read into the text. Either way, Blamires’s guide to this longish section of the book has proved invaluable to me, and I warmly recommend it to others who are about to wrestle with Joyce’s masterpiece.

Some time ago, a reader of the blog kindly sent me a quotation from Albert Camus: ‘Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.’ Well, as commentators go, Blamires is one of the best.

John Carey: The Intellectuals and the Masses

A while back, someone wrote a comment on one of my posts in which he suggested that I should read John Carey’s book The Intellectuals and the Masses. And indeed it has proved to be a rewarding experience.

John Carey, by the way, was Merton Professor of English at Oxford until he retired in 2001, and he is still an emeritus Professor. The sub-title of his book is Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939.

The book comes in two parts. The first part contains various ‘themes’ and the second offers case studies of several writers.

You don’t have to read very far in this book before you get a surprise. And the surprise is that an Oxford Professor really doesn’t have much time for the literary intelligentsia. Or at any rate, not the kind of people he writes about in this book. In fact I don’t think I’m reading too much into it when I say that he despises large numbers of them.

The general thesis of the book is that the (largely self-anointed) intellectual classes were deeply shaken by nineteenth-century social developments. I’m not sure that Carey mentions the French Revolution of 1789 (it isn’t in the short index), but I think we could argue that that event was deeply disturbing to all those in Europe who held positions of influence, power, and wealth.

What the French Revolution demonstrated was that you weren’t necessarily safe even if you were a King. You could still end up in prison, or worse, with your head chopped off.

As the nineteenth century moved on, the ruling classes (from whom intellectuals were exclusively drawn in those days) began to be aware that the masses (for want of a better term) were rapidly growing in power and influence. What was more, they were being taught to read! And this was deeply alarming. Who could say what ideas they might pick up? A revolution in France was bad enough – but what if it spread? A widespread and deep-seated fear of the masses began to percolate through the intelligentsia.

As far as literature is concerned, Carey argues that, in the face of this much enlarged reading public, the response of the intellectuals was to create new forms of work which were deliberately exclusive. The whole point (conscious or unconscious) of modernist literature was to exclude the ordinary people. It was to create a class of writers and readers who could feel comfortably superior to the masses, because only they – the new intelligentsia – were clever enough to understand the new literature. And how reassuring it was, how comforting, to be aware that there were still people like themselves – people who were so infinitely superior, in every way, to the great unwashed masses who revelled in sordid crime stories and slushy romances.

Ortega y Gasset, for example, in The Dehumanization of Art, argued that it was the essential function of modern art to divide the public into two classes – those who can understand it and those who cannot. The intellectuals could not prevent the masses from learning to read. But they could prevent them reading certain types of literature by making it too difficult; and this they did.

Without even trying very hard, Carey reveals to us that intellectuals such as Nietzsche and Ortega y Gasset were quite exceptionally nasty people. ‘I believe,’ said Nietzsche, ‘that the mob, the mass, the herd, will always be despicable.’ Which is plain enough. The immense popularity of Nietzsche’s ideas, Carey tells us, is indicative of the sheer panic that the threat of the masses induced.

It isn't long, of course, before that raving old madman F.R. Leavis appears on the scene. The mass media, he declared, arouse ‘the cheapest emotional responses. Films, newspapers, publicity in all forms, commercially-catered fiction – all offer satisfaction at the lowest level.’

You see how the thinking goes? I am not one of the masses. I am someone special. I am an intellectual – one of the elite. Therefore my emotional responses, obviously, are far more sensitive and subtle than those of my cleaning lady.

And where, I ask (though Carey doesn’t, explicitly), is the scientific evidence for such a belief? Who has done the research which demonstrates that a third-rate man like Leavis (or even a first-rate man) has more sensitive emotions than someone with an IQ of 75? Who has proved that the grief felt by a bereaved mother is more intense if she is Lady Hermione from the Manor than if she is Mrs Jones from no. 3 Railway Cuttings? Where is the machine which measures the intensity and 'quality' of emotions, as a sphygmomanometer measures blood pressure? There isn't one.

The fear of the masses also acted as the cover for an equally nasty attitude among the intelligentsia, and that was the fear of women. Popular newspapers were hated and despised because (no doubt in the interests of circulation, a sordid motive if ever there was one), they encouraged women to better themselves. Good God! Women will be demanding the vote next!

A whole array of intellectuals are revealed by Carey not merely to be snobs and fuzzy thinkers, but possessed of singularly unattractive opinions based on nothing more than prejudice, stupidity and fear for their cosseted life style. D.H. Lawrence, for example, wrote to Lady Cynthia Asquith from Ceylon , assuring her that the natives were ‘in the living sense lower than we are.’

That remark reminds me of a canard that I used to hear when I was a boy: black boxers, it was said, win more world championships than white boxers because ‘they don’t feel pain like we do.’ Neither this assertion nor Lawrence’s was based on anything that might even loosely be called reliable data. Idle gossip is more like it.

Incidentally, although I am no admirer of D.H. Lawrence, Carey succeeds in shocking me when he relates that some of the intelligentsia in the early twentieth century anticipated Hitler in favouring the extermination of the old, the sick, and the suffering. Lawrence was among them. ‘If I had my way,’ he said in a letter of 1908, ‘I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace.’

The literary intelligentsia, as noted above, created a class of literature which was impossible for the average reader to understand. But I doubt, personally, whether it ever provided much pleasure for the elite, except in so far as it allowed them to demonstrate, to their own satisfaction at least, that they were infinitely superior in every way to those ghastly oiks who favoured penny dreadfuls; or, later, Ian Fleming; or Dean Koontz; or anyone else who sells big but is despised by the literati. That, I suppose, is the price you have to pay for being allowed to feel superior; you don’t actually enjoy anything very much.

All these attitudes were reflected in what books got reviewed and in how they were reviewed (and they still are). Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat was roundly denounced for its vulgarity, and for being written in ‘colloquial clerk’s English.’

The principal aim of all this, says Carey, was ‘to acquire the control over the mass that language gives.’ After all, if the masses exercised power, they would probably start spreading out wealth more equally, and then where would we be? Democratic government, thought Thomas Hardy, would lead to ‘the utter ruin of art and literature.’

The masses were feared because it was thought that they would behave like crowds: i.e. they would be ‘extremely suggestible, impulsive, irrational, exaggeratedly emotional, inconstant, irritable and capable only of thinking in images – in short, just like women.’ The process of civilising women was, incidentally, considered by the intellectuals to be one of extreme difficulty.

Every development which favoured the middle or working classes in England was viewed with deep suspicion if not outright hostility. Suburban growth, with improved new housing, was decried for ruining the countryside. Cyril Connolly considered suburbs worse than slums.

Enough, I think to make the point. Carey succeeds, well beyond anything I had thought possible, in demonstrating that, in the period covered by his book, 1880-1939, English intellectuals (in particular) were an unpleasant, snobbish lot. Motivated by sheer funk – terrified that they might lose all their privileges, which in truth were seldom justified – they objected on the one hand to anything which might be called progress, while on the other hand they busily reinforced their own all too fallible self esteem through the creation of ‘superior art’ which the masses could not understand.

The trend continues to this day, as you have doubtless noticed.

After the general introduction of part one, part two of Carey’s book provides several case studies. He deals with George Gissing, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and Wyndham Lewis, particularly the latter’s connection with Hitler.

Gissing, though now forgotten, ‘was the earliest English writer to formulate the intellectuals’ case against mass culture, and he formulated it so thoroughly that nothing essential has been added to it since.’ Gissing, incidentally, was a charming fellow whose sexual appetites required women who were his intellectual and social inferior, and he could only get it up by humiliating and punishing them. He claimed to have beaten both his wives with stair rods.

H.G. Wells is remembered rather better than Gissing. I heard a rumour recently that someone had made a film based on one of his books. But his views are unattractive from our perspective. What will we do with the black and the brown races, he wondered, since they are so obviously inferior to us in intelligence and initiative, and there are so many of them. He became obsessed with reducing the world’s population.

Arnold Bennett is included by Carey because the author views him as a hero. ‘His writings represent a systematic dismemberment of the intellectuals’ case against the masses.’ But Bennett was, of course, despised by the intelligentsia because the bounder made money from literature. Only an utter cad would do that. He also wrote a book called The Truth about an Author, which I really must read.

Intellectuals, Bennett believed, should write so as to appeal to a wider audience, and he did not see why a book which the masses liked should automatically be thought of as trash. Between the popular and the highbrow reader there was, he argued, no essential difference. Neither is there: in fiction both seek emotion; in non-fiction both seek information.

Wyndham Lewis, it turns out, wrote several books in the 1930s, all of which were enthusiastic about the German Fuhrer, the charismatic Adolf. Contempt for women was perhaps the key to Lewis’s character. ‘Stay to dinner,’ he asked a friend. ‘I’ve a wife downstairs. A simple woman, but a good cook.’

I don’t think anyone is likely to reprint Wyndham Lewis any time soon. Whiteness, he suggested, ‘is in a pigmentary sense aristocratic’, and is the proper colour for a gentleman. As for his description of what he calls ‘the average Nigger’, I really don’t think I dare quote it, lest someone should mistake it for my own opinion.

As far as Hitler himself is concerned, Carey tells us that ‘the tragedy of Mein Kampf is that it was not, in many respects, a deviant work but one firmly rooted in European intellectual orthodoxy.’

Carey ends his survey at 1939, but he reminds us that the old intellectual prejudices have not died out yet. The ever-expanding mass media have ‘driven the intellectuals to evolve an anti-popular cultural mode that can reprocess all existing culture and take it out of the reach of the majority.’ This mode is variously called ‘post-structuralism’, or ‘deconstruction’, or just plain ‘theory’, and it began in the 1960s with the work of Jacques Derrida. It has managed, says Carey, to evolve a language that is impenetrable to most native English-speakers. You can say that again. Much of it is gibberish. The whole wretched business was exposed by Alan Sokal.

Carey has, in my view, summed up all the modern apparatus of criticism and reviewing very neatly. Every department of Literature in every university and college in the world takes the line that there is a form of ‘serious literary fiction’ which is inherently superior to popular or commercial fiction. But where, I ask, not for the first time, are the sound arguments and research data which demonstrate this truth?

I have been reading novels for at least 55 years, reading about novels for at least 50 years, and writing them for 45 years. If there was any such evidence I think I would have noticed it by now.

In fact, as I have argued many times before on this blog, there is no evidence for seeing the world of fiction as a hierarchy. According to the intelligentsia, the world of fiction is, so to speak, a tower block with ‘serious literary novels’ firmly ensconced in the penthouse. In the basement, needless to say, is romantic fiction, which is read only by those brainless women.

This tower-block, or hierarchical, view of fiction is, in my view, a product of male intellectuals. The tower block is a male erection; and, like all male erections, it is fundamentally ridiculous.

The only sensible way to view the world of fiction is as a street with many bookshops. Each of these bookshops stocks a different kind of fiction, and the sensible reader will visit all of them at one time or another. On this street there are no prime sites; all premises are of equal value.

The kindest thing that can be said about the intellectuals’ view of the world of fiction is that it is the product of fuzzy thinking. Unfortunately, as Professor Carey has demonstrated, there is a much darker side to this mode of thinking which, particularly in the 1930s, led to some very unpleasant and unwelcome consequences.

Professor Carey’s book on intellectuals and the masses is, in and of itself, a good argument for the existence of universities. Only an academic would have the time (and indeed the duty) to undertake the necessary reading and to think through the implications of the results. I doubt whether many of Professor Carey’s colleagues ever thanked him for this book; but the rest of us ought to be deeply grateful.

Michael Gruber: Tropic of Night

Michael Gruber’s novel Tropic of Night is a thriller; and it’s an absolute… I was going to say cracker, which in England means a firework, and hence, metaphorically, would mean in this case that Tropic of Night is a tremendous read. But I’ve just realised, based on the evidence in the book itself, that in the US the word ‘cracker’ means something else (see any of the several dictionaries of racial slurs).

Anyway, you get the point. This book is one hell of a good read – always assuming that you like thrillers; and even if you don’t – and I strongly recommend it.

Michael Gruber is evidently a very smart man. He has a PhD in marine biology, from the University of Miami, to prove it, but it’s perfectly clear from his book. This is said to be his first novel, but his slightly mysterious and vague background mentions that he has had a number of jobs, most of which included writing, and usually anonymously.

Whatever he did, he has certainly learnt his business. It is highly unusual, frankly, to find a first novel which is this good, and I suspect he has had practice under other names. Either that or he worked with a very good book doctor on the structure and pace of the thing. Which is possible.

Set in the present day, the action takes place in and around Miami. The chief characters are a police homicide man, Jimmy Paz, and a woman in peril, Jane Doe, who is an anthropologist. There are several grisly murders involved, but fortunately the emphasis is not on the gore but on the characters.

Jane Doe is a woman who has not so much kidnapped a child as rescued her from an abusive mother – and has killed the mother in the process. So Jane is on the run. And not only because of the child. Also because her husband is looking for her.

The two cops involved in this book, Jimmy Paz and his partner, are tremendously strong characters, expertly delineated. This is top-rank crime writing, my notes say. Who taught Gruber how to do this? You don’t get to write like this overnight.

The time structure of the book is complicated, and I am not normally in favour of complicated time structures. I prefer a straightforward chronological account. However, if you must have flashbacks, do them as well as this. The viewpoint also switches from first person (Jane) to third (Paz). But again this is smoothly handled.

I don’t know whether you believe in witchcraft, sorcery, black magic, and all that kind of thing. But by golly you will be much more likely to believe in it by the time you’ve read this book.

Even though this is a work of fiction, there are a few points made about witchcraft, shamanism, or whatever you wish to call it, which hold up, I think, in the real world. Jane Doe is an expert on shamanism, and one of her mentors points out to her that spiritual does not necessarily mean nice. Witches, shamans, wise women and other variants of the same are more than likely to have their own agendas. Some of these people may be saints, but saints are about as common among them as saints are among the generals, corporation presidents, and politicians of the non-magic kingdoms. This is worth remembering, I think, before you rush off and join your local Wiccan coven, or whatever.

The story rattles along at a fair old pace, distracting one from the occasional shortcoming. And there is at least one substantial problem with the credibility of the story, if you bother to think about it. It could have been cured with a couple of paragraphs early in the book but it wasn’t. Never mind. Many readers won’t notice.

Not only is this a first-rate thriller, but there is a moment towards the end which is truly affecting. And that’s not so common in this genre.

All in all then, a highly successful beginning.

So good, in fact, that when I’d finished it I looked round for more. And fortunately there is some. I had feared that, having devoted a fearsome amount of time and energy to this book (it couldn’t be written otherwise), Gruber might have decided that the cash generated didn’t justify further books. And he might have given up in order to concentrate on a properly rewarding career. But fortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Second in the Jimmy Paz series is Valley of Bones, which was published in March this year.

Oops. I just got around to searching for a Michael Gruber biography, so that I could point you towards it. And I have found one which someone seems to have cobbled together unofficially, without any help from the man himself. From this I learn that Gruber was born in 1940!

What is more, I find, reading on, that he has ghosted a legal thriller for his cousin, Robert K. Tanenbaum. In fact, reading further, there seem to be fifteen of them!

Well, dammit, I’m not going to go back and change a word of what I’ve written. This late discovery of Gruber's apprenticeship just proves how perceptive I am. Heh heh heh.

His US publisher, by the way, still refers to him as 'one of the most talented thriller writers to debut in many a year.' And the official biography tells us very little. Publishers -- you just can't believe a word they say.

Agent 007

I’m not sure why, but somehow I’ve been slow in getting around to reading the Agent 007 blog. And that was a mistake.

Agent 007, as the first part of her name name suggests, is a literary agent working in the US market. If you read the small print you will learn that she started blogging in July this year (so far as I can make out); but her profile says she’s been on Blogger since September 2003, so maybe she had a previous existence.

Anyway, it’s now all very much worth a look. I particularly recommend her piece on the slush pile. This attracted masses of comments, as you would expect.

Christopher Booker: The Seven Basic Plots

Oh dear.

Oh dear oh dear oh dear. What can one possibly say?

Contrary to what you might think, I do try to say something positive about every book that is mentioned on this blog. A book, after all, usually represents a year (at least) of the author’s life; and it represents an investment of perhaps £20,000 on the part of the publisher. So positive I try to be. But in this case it’s going to be difficult.

The problem is that Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots reminds me of the story of Professor Jowett’s father.

In the nineteenth century, Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College, Oxford, was an eminent man; but his father was a failure. Towards the end of his life, Jowett senior got it into his head that what the world needed was a metrical translation of the Psalms. He spent several years obsessively working on this project, during which time the son had to support his parents financially. It was obvious to everyone except the old man that this was an entirely futile undertaking, and, when it was eventually published, the metrical translation of the Psalms received absolutely no acclaim whatever.

And that’s the problem I have with Mr Booker’s opus. It seems to me to be entirely pointless.

Let us suppose, just for the sake of argument, that Booker (or someone) were to work out the seven (or 15) basic plots on which every story, novel, play and opera could be found to be based. What possible value would this be? How could the knowledge be put to practical use?

Let us take the novel, for example. How would a knowledge of the n basic plots help a publisher, a bookseller, a writer, or a reader?

Would the publisher put out a sign saying, Don’t send us anything but plot no. 4? I doubt it. Would the bookseller arrange his stock according to plot, and alphabetically within each plot? It seems unlikely.

And what of the poor bloody writer? How does it help him? Is he going to say, I shall write plot no. 5 this time, because that was a massive hit for Shakespeare and Goethe, so it’s sure to put me at the top of the bestseller list? Hm? Would he?

Even the reader doesn’t get much help from such an analysis. Is any reader going to say, I only read plot no. 4 because the rest just don’t do it for me?

It’s all futile, useless and pointless. I get no pleasure from writing those words, but that’s the way I feel. Booker’s book seems to me to be gloriously beside the point. The point is not that the number of plots is limited: it is that the number of possible emotional effects that can be created in the reader/audience is limited. The number of ways in which those emotions can be aroused, however, is infinite, and depends largely (but not entirely) on the skill of the writer. (For a much simpler and shorter explanation than Booker’s, see Chapter 5 of my own book The Truth About Writing; the chapter is 53 pages long.)

Let’s go back a bit.

Christopher Booker has been a fairly well known writer in the UK for some forty years. In the 1960s he was the very first editor of Private Eye, and he has produced a number of well-received non-fiction books. As a journalist he is best known for his weekly column in the Sunday Telegraph, where he has been a fierce critic of bureaucracy.

But in addition to all that, Booker has, by his own account, spent thirty years (on and off) faffing around with this nonsense about basic plots.

The book itself, as a physical object, is distinctly off-putting. It is heavy, and thick. It runs to 728 pages, and by my calculation contains over 400,000 words. The typeface is small.

I have a fundamental problem with non-fiction books which are long; and I am not alone. Thirty years ago, one of my duties was to process students’ PhD theses in a university. One day, an academic came into my office and picked up a thesis which was three inches thick. ‘If I were the examiner,’ he said, ‘I would fail this on sight. A student who hasn’t learnt how to condense the results of his research into a volume of reasonable length hasn’t learnt very much.’ And that’s my view too. At one fifth the length, The Seven Basic Plots might be readable; as it is, it ain’t.

I also have a problem with what in academic terms is called the methodology. In other words, how the author went about things. In the humanities we can, of course, pretty much forget about science from the outset; but we can at least be systematic, and adopt some kind of structured approach. Has Booker done that? No. ‘I embarked,’ he tells us, ‘on an almost indiscriminate course of reading and re-reading, through hundreds of stories of all kinds.’

Another difficulty, for me, is that Booker has chosen to use Jung as a guide to generating insights. You see, when Booker and I were lads, Freud and Jung were not only respectable but positively revered. But the world has changed, and Booker doesn’t seem to have noticed. Freud, to my mind, is so hopelessly unscientific that he comes close to being a charlatan; and when Jung is mentioned, I fear that the phrase ‘mumbo-jumbo’ enters my head. So to me Booker's approach does not seem promising, and I am not surprised to find that, in my judgement, it has led nowhere.

One way and another, Booker has spent thirty years in reading, drafting, and re-writing. And in the end this is what he has come up with: an amorphous mess. His seven basic plots, in summary, and for what they are worth, are listed on the cover of the book: overcoming the monster; rags to riches; the quest; voyage and return; comedy; tragedy; and rebirth.

Comedy, I may say, is not a plot at all. It’s an effect: it is something which is generated by stories of various kinds, if the material is properly handled.

There are endless, endless problems with all this. And I could go on. But I won’t. Not for long.

This book belongs in a long tradition of books in which the authors have sought to identify the secret of narrative success. There are few indications that Mr Booker realises this – and certainly none in the bibliography – but it may be said that the 'secret of success' sequence started with Aristotle’s Poetics, and it really got under way about 150 years ago. It became obvious about that time that a successful novelist or playwright could make lots of money, could become famous, and would therefore enjoy all the trappings of celebrity. Hence a number of sharp lads began to scratch their heads and try to identify what it was that went into a successful book/play, so that they too could become rich and famous.

The long series of ‘secret of success’ books is most clearly defined in relation to stage plays and, nowadays, movies. It began, I suggest, with Freytag’s Technique of the Drama (1894), and went on through William Archer, Brander Matthews, Krows, Price, Egri, Grebanier, and now, in the present-day movie context, Robert McKee. All of these men sought to produce rules or a set of principles which could be followed and which would guarantee success.

Of course none of them ever succeeded, or they themselves would have become famous playwrights and screenwriters. But their response to the ‘if you’re so clever why aren’t you famous’ line was simple: 'Ah well, they would say; I can show you the basic principles, but to apply them you need a touch of genius.’ And, since there is never any shortage of ambitious wannabe writers who are sure that they have more than a touch of genius, they were able to sell their books.

Booker doesn’t present us with a how-to book for wannabe writers. Goodness me no, that would be far too vulgar. This is a serious academic analysis. But his work is, nevertheless, in that tradition. Its closest comparator, in my view, is George Polti’s The Thirty Six Dramatic Situations, which Booker mentions only in a footnote, and then dismissively. (The British Library lists five editions of Polti’s book, from 1924 to 1944, so it must have sold well. It was reprinted in 2003. Presumably Booker hopes for similar popularity and longevity, but I don't think he's going to get it.)

Enough, surely. You will gather that I don’t recommend this book. I certainly don’t recommend that you should buy it – though you will shortly be able to pick up lots of secondhand copies at bargain prices.

And what can I possibly find to say about it that might loosely be interpreted as positive?

Well, I suppose it is possible – just – that a young person who fancies a career as a novelist or screenwriter might read this analysis and gain one or two insights into the way plots are structured. Possibly. But how does it avail us to have even a perfect template for a plot? We still have to sit down and write Othello, or The Importance of Being Earnest.

Ah – I have it. The book is at least written in plain English, and not in academic gobbledygook. Sorry, but that’s the best I can do for positive.

One person at least does seem to have read this book from cover to cover. The copy that I had was borrowed from the Wiltshire public-library system, and one previous borrower had not only read it – apparently every footnote – but had also commented copiously. In blue felt-tip pen. Now normally I would regard that as very naughty, but in this case the comments were more fun than the text. (‘Too glib’; ‘far too superficial to be taken seriously’.) And the fellow is fiendishly well informed to boot.

Poor old Booker occasionally gets even his facts wrong. He tells us that Peter Brook introduced Waiting for Godot to the London stage. And he didn’t; as we noted last week, it was Peter Hall. (The Phantom Scribbler of Wiltshire knew that too.) And now that I come to use it, the index isn’t reliable either. Peter Brook isn’t in it, and I knew I’d come across his name somewhere in the text.

Finally, I think I must have a look on the internet, and see if anyone liked the book better than I did.

OK. Results. Well, ahem, even the Sunday Telegraph, Booker’s own outfit, was less than enthusiastic. The Daily Telegraph had reservations: ‘Booker's principle of classifying stories is a possible, but not the only possible (or even necessarily the most illuminating) approach.’ The Observer was lukewarm: ‘Christopher Booker’s hefty tome of cultural archaeology is peculiar, repetitive, near-barmy and occasionally rather good.’ The Times piece was not so much a review as an attempted summary plus quotes from the good and the great.

In America, the New York Times man was not happy at all. He claimed that Booker had lifted his ideas from ‘a wide spectrum of influential, even canonical works by writers and thinkers as varied as Jung, Freud, Joseph Campbell, Bruno Bettelheim, Sir James George Frazer, the Shakespeare scholar A.C. Bradley and the folklore experts Peter and Iona Opie.’

Furthermore, Booker is said to have made absurd generalisations about well known classics. ‘Such inane readings of modern literature effectively eclipse the more engaging arguments presented in the first portion of Mr. Booker’s book. Anyone tackling The Seven Basic Plots would be advised to peruse the informative first half and quickly ditch the second half of this 700-plus page tome.’

All the British reviews were written by people who, if not exactly friends, are likely to bump into the author from time to time. Oh, and by the way. If you yourself should happen to be introduced to Mr Booker, and if he should ask you, in that modest self-effacing way that writers have, whether you have, by any chance, read his book on the seven basic plots, here’s a little tip.
What you do not say is, ‘No, I haven’t read it, and I gather it’s a bit of a mess.’ Dear me no. No, what you must say is this: ‘No, Christopher, I haven’t actually read it yet. But I’m really looking forward to it.’

Comments and searches

Just a reminder that this blog allows you to comment on a post if you wish to. From time to time I fish out a comment which I think deserves a special airing, lest it get overlooked, but that is a slightly invidious process. In any case, what I think is a particularly valuable comment is not necessarily what you will value, and vice versa.

Today, I think, I will simply remind you (modestly) that some of the comments are possibly more useful than the original post. Not often, it’s true, but occasionally.

If you want to look at the comments on a post, there are two ways to do it. On the front page of the blog, you will find a grey line at the foot of each post. The number of comments, if any, will be shown there, and you can click on the link to reveal them. What you then get is a new page with that one post on it, plus the comments.

Back on the front page, if you want to look at a post which is listed under Previous Posts (top right) you can click on its title, and that will similarly open up a page with that one post only, plus comments.

Don’t forget either that there is a handy search facility, for this one blog, at the very top of the front page, to the right of the word Blogger. If you want to know, for instance, whether I have ever commented on a particular book, or a topic, put the key words in the search box and Google will search the GOB only and give you a list. For book titles, phrases et cetera, put the words in double inverted commas, as with other Google searches.