Bookquakes

I moved house recently.

In hindsight... this may have been a better way...

It’s one of those situations; like popping out a child, successfully not crashing on a tricky roundabout, or replacing a bike tyre, which literally thousands of people complete successfully every day – but which makes you,  briefly,  feel like an absolute Don. A God amongst men.  The super-hero(ine) this generation has been crying out for… ‘I did that!’

In my case, moving was always going to be a spectacular hassle. With the brief exception of University, I have spent the better part of my 26 years on this Earth living at one address. I am also, it must be noted, a hoarder. Not on the ‘get the social involved’ level, but not a million miles away, either.

As well as my mountains of ‘objets trouvés’ (see above photo for a small window into the life of a girl who finds My Little Ponies on the street and chooses to display them); there was the small matter of my cassette collection (mainly Boyzone), my sticker collection (mainly bunnies, for some reason) and my stamp collection (a collaborative project with my dad which was aborted early when I discovered that no one foreign wrote to me and there’s only so much interest in first class postage… or, indeed, stamps in general).

But, like the house-moving heroine I now count myself to be, I overcame those challenges. With a mainly rap-metal soundtrack blaring in the background, I tidied, packed, donated, binned and heaved my way into my new flat. Two days later, I helped my boyfriend do the same. Like a Pokémon, I evolved. Meet… Removals Girl!

Like this but with more packing tape

Sadly, a few days later, Removals Girl was brought crashing to earth with the realisation that her old room was still full of books. I should have taken a photo. I didn’t. But I should have. Honestly, it looked like I hadn’t even moved. Because books had been stacked around every available surface, removing the content simply left a table-shaped hole in the book stacks here, a bed-shaped one there…

Help...Me....

The upshot of this is that I have had to make drastic cuts to my book collection. Unlike the stickers, stamps and cassettes, I found this excruciating. It was like a bibliophile’s Sophie’s Choice. If I take one of the first fiction books I ever worked on in an Editorial capacity (Neverland, by Simon Crump), do I then have to leave behind the huge book on Punk music that an ex-boyfriend gave me for Valentine’s Day?

If I take the whole of C.S Lewis’ Narnia series, am I just cutting out a shelf-worth of space I could dedicate to proper ‘grown up’ books?

And, of course, the perennial question: can one have too many Discworld books?

No.

Thankfully my parents, unlike the Nazis in Sophie’s Choice, were willing to negotiate.

In return for frequent tech-support, I retain some shelf-space in my old room. The leaning towers of Puzos, however, had to go. Each individual decision was a struggle. Eventually, I dug out a couple of suitcases and reluctantly filled them with books destined for Oxfam. I had to get my mum to take them. Both my dad and I knew that, given that task, we would have returned with half of our original donation, plus a few ‘extras’.

I'm back from the charity shop!

This, then, is my eulogy to absent friends. Goodbye, GCSE Geography textbook, I hardly knew ye.

There were two silver linings to the whole operation, however. Firstly, my bibliogralarm (books falling on my head when asleep) is no longer a thing. I now set an electronic reminder on my phone, rather than a Graham Greene hardback at a certain angle on the stacks, when I want to wake up at a certain time.

tech.

Secondly, it forced me to really look at my collection. As a result, I spent several hours re-reading books I forgot I had, as well as reminding myself to take another run at books I have set aside.

‘Taking another run’ is a strange concept. When I give recommendations to customers at work, I generally encourage them to take a seat, read ten pages and see if that’s enough to hook them. In the past, I have abandoned books at the wayside after a meagre three or four pages due to complete lack of interest.

Recently, however, I have given a few titles the benefit of the doubt after abortive first attempts. This has paid off, and now my whole philosophy is in a tail spin.

 The Orphan Master’s Son is a good example. When I initially started it, the slow pace of characterisation and utter misery into which the author plunged his characters put me off. Fifty pages in, I felt no empathy towards the lead character. This is never a good start. I abandoned it in favour of a re-reading of The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde.

Suitably refreshed by Fforde’s hysterical romp through a slightly alternate version of Swindon and its even more alternative fictional counterpart (can’t explain… just read it, please), I prepared to read something new.  And then I got ill. With nothing to distract me but the slowly buffering adverts on Channel 4 OD and an out of date copy of Q magazine which insisted on running another glowing feature on Kasabian (overrated), I turned reluctantly back to Adam Johnson’s novel.

Stop. It. You're only encouraging them.

Oh. My. Gosh. It’s brilliant. As before, the first hundred or so pages failed to grab me. But after watching the DFS advert start, buffer and fail on 4OD for the hundredth time that week, I ploughed grimly on. Suddenly, I found I was hooked. The empathy issue dissipates as, in tiny tiny increments, your support for our hero, Pak Jun Do, grows. As we follow his life in the People’s Republic of North Korea; from orphan child to tunnel fighter, kidnapper, spy, prisoner and national hero, Pak reveals the dark, twisted lunacy behind a country that is often represented as a global joke. Watching news reports gently mocking the regime becomes a lot harder after having read this novel.

‘Ah,’ (fictional) detractors may say, ‘but it was written by a westerner. What do they know?’

Yes, ok, fair point. There is only one book that I have read (and one more that I haven’t) which present North Korea from a native’s point of view. Nothing To Envy by Barbara Demick collates interviews with defectors, both willing and unwilling, from the regime. She quizzes them about their lives within the state, their escape stories and their arrival into South Korea, the most high-tech nation in the world. To Westerners, we can only imagine the culture shock by trying to imagine jumping from the 1940s straight to the modern day – Internet, mobiles, space landings… everything.

In terms of authenticity, clearly real life experiences will trump fiction at every turn. But Johnson has done his homework. In an article for The Daily Beast,(click and read!) he writes about his own visit to North Korea, and the bizarre impression which dawned on him there: that no one native of that strange state is the center of their own universe. The state spins a story, and the players adjust their lives to fit the narrative. By devoting some chapters in The Orphan Master’s Son to a propaganda spin on events, Johnson succeeds in letting us glimpse how every action, scripted or not, is woven into the fabric of the ruling dynasty’s narrative. As Marvel or DC sometimes retcon their characters' histories in order to take the stoies to new places, so the giant behemoth that is Korean State media (and any citizen with sense and ambition) takes what is outside of their control and spins it to fit the official canon. The novel succeeds, therefore, in being a thrilling adventure story of one man’s struggle to live his own story, and an exceedingly creepy study of the machinations of totalitarian power.

ha...ha?

In short, I am extremely glad that the combination of sickness and a terrible internet connection drove me to give this novel a second chance. I can’t, however, promise that I’ll be picking up every discarded book and giving it the same treatment. Joyce’s Ulysses  will remain unread beyond paragraph three, and that suits me fine.




And Finally: This.

Why It All Comes Down To Men In Wigs

Regular content has been suspended this week. In light of recent events, Siouxsie will be holding back her piece on representations of North Korea in modern literature. This week’s article has been penned by RAGING FEMINIST SIOUXSIE. Normal service will resume just as soon as my faith in the 50% of humanity bearing meat and two veg in their underwear is restored. Thank you for your attention.

It is a sad fact that sexism and misogyny are alive and kicking in the 21^st century. It is a tragic fact that this is true not just of the real, flesh and blood world of politics, media representation and day to day interactions, but also of the ‘meta’ world of fiction, publishing and bookselling.

This is not a new topic. A few posts ago, I vented my incredulity at the jaw-dropping level of incompetence that went into designing the special edition anniversary cover of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Let’s just remind ourselves of that particular travesty:

Oh God. It's still so horrible...

Oh, yep. There we go. It’s a novel about the feminine condition. Make-up must be involved to some degree. Look, she’s having a pout. Bet that sorts out her hysterical depression. Women, eh?! AMIRIGHT?!

I was quite happy to have made that point and reassured that feedback from readers and customers (yes, I ranted at work, too) broadly mirrored my point of view. Although I am a card carrying feminist, this is a book blog, and I hadn’t intended to make a regular feature of my raging against the patriarchy. Rather, I wanted to write about North Korea. But, over the past couple of weeks, the two worlds collided in somewhat spectacular fashion.

      1)      I was told that certain members of head office believed my displays were too ‘male-centric’. I should, it was intimated, be tailoring feature space with clear demarcation between books ‘for the girls’ and books ‘for the boys’.

Look. I have nothing against chick-lit. If Sophie Kinsella, Marian Keyes et al. are happy for their books to be marketed in a certain way with a certain demographic in mind, so be it. As a category generally spanning romance and low-level family drama, that’s fine. But to assume that that is all women want to read is insulting. As insulting as assuming that all men want to read are books listing the ballistic power of various types of military hardware a la Andy Mcnab and Tom Clancy. 

This one go BOOM

None of the above, by the way, feature anywhere in my displays.  They sell perfectly well from the shelves. In between the stereotyped fiction are a million variations on the concept of literature with no specific demographic in mind other that ‘people that like books’. As a bookseller, it is these people that I am aiming to please. Sorry if this comes across as snobbish, but with our tables featuring themes such as ‘Cult’ ‘Great American Novels’ and ‘Best of British’, I’m not sure where any of the above would really slot in.

But maybe I am wrong.

     2)      On recommending ‘The Eyre Affair’ by Jasper Fforde to a customer who had shown interest in alternate history. “Oh. I’m afraid not, darling. The main character’s a girl. I can never identify with female characters”.

Really. You can’t? You read fiction, a genre dependent on the suspension of disbelief. Furthermore, you’re a fan of sci-fi and alternate realities. You, as a reader, are capable of imagining yourself taking off from Earth, into space, onto an alien planet and into a giant mech suit with a plasma gun. But all this is dependent on testosterone? You can’t imagine yourself out of your penis and evolutionarily irrelevant nipples for two-hundred pages?!? Your capacity for basic empathy has been so stunted that, although the concept of aliens is hunky-dory, a female protagonist in a novel that doesn’t even begin to tackle anything linked to the feminine condition is just too much? Dude. What have you got against boobs?

You need help. Also, don't call me darling.

The ultimate mind-fuck

      3)      On showing a customer around the sci-fi/fantasy section, our (female) specialist bookseller - who has garnered a certain amount of notoriety online and in our local area for her encyclopaedic knowledge of her section – is approached by a second customer.

“Excuse me,” he interrupts as she recommends titles from her shelves, “but sci-fi’s kind of my thing.”

 He then proceeds to man-splain her own section to her.

This event is closely linked to…

      4)      I am standing at the tills. A customer approaches, with what can only be described as an Inspector Clousot expression on his face. ‘Who writes your recommendations?!’ He barks, pointing at our film bay. “We do,” I answer. His expression morphs in to a Baldrick-esque parody of cunning.

“     "Really?” he sneers. “So who wrote the card for A Clockwork Orange in Nadsat?”

“I did.”

“No you didn’t. It’s not a girls’ book.”

“Actually, I wrote part of my dissertation about it at uni.”

“Sure.”

And he oozes off, hopefully to be run over by a parked car.

These are all genuine examples of sexism that have occurred in one bookshop, in one city, to myself and one other bookseller over the space of a couple of weeks. Am I alone in being horrified?

As I have mentioned before, I studied English Literature at university, then fell straight into the worlds of publishing and bookselling. Unlike what I witnessed during a brief stint in bar work and catering, the book world is DOMINATED by women. At university, my course was split 60/40 women. In publishing, although the board level roles are still skewed towards the men, companies I have worked for are staffed largely by intelligent, hard working women. The same goes for bookselling.

So who’s propagating the stereotype of the illiterate female? Are people under the impression that male literature students study 18th Century literature and war poetry whilst female students gaze at the ceiling, writing emoticon ridden essays about Little Miss Naughty and Spot the Dog?

I think Spot's motivation is that he wants his teddy. A lot. LOL.

Do people really believe that some girls learned to read SOLEY so we could slowly pick out the letters in Fifty Shades of Grey, then immediately forgot again as the concept of shoes returned to dominate our tiny brains?

Such people must be constantly bamboozled by current literary trends. Hilary Mantel, a multi-award winning female novelist who writes about the political intricacies of the Tudor court. No. Frickking. Way. She must be a man in a wig. Women haven’t even heard of Thomas Cromwell. Or history.

Cromwell? Was he, like, cute?

The current Booker longlist is made up mostly of female writers? Sorry. No. Men again. In wigs. ALL WOMEN IN LITERATURE ARE MEN IN WIGS, have you not got this yet?

Responsible for all of the work attributed to Zadie Smith.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Although it is no longer strictly necessary for authors to write under male pseudonyms - a la George Eliot - in order to be published, many of them do. Still more choose to initialise their first names in order to maintain ambiguity over their sex in the early days of their careers (I’m looking at you, J.K Rowling).

And that’s all folks. I have no solution. No clever way of eradicating this hateful trend. Despite every piece of evidence we offer them;  university figures, knowledgeable booksellers, fantastic female novelists writing prize-winning works of art, every single woman they’ve ever seen reading classic literature, sci-fi or political treatise on a bus or train, some men would rather believe that we’re stupid by virtue of our ovaries. Because attacking our intelligence is the quickest way of convincing themselves that we’re not equals. That we cannot run companies, let alone countries. 

Ovaries. FEAR THEM.

Burn, Hollywood, Burn

Adaptions. They’re funny little beasts. Whether it’s from book to movie or vice versa, our reactions are generally negative.

What do you mean there's no giant squid bit?

This was exemplified rather beautifully when my (at the time) new boss at the bookshop took one look at our ‘Read it First’ bay of Hollywood adapted novels and suggested that we re-title it ‘Burn, Hollywood, Burn – The Book is Always Better’.

Fearing a backlash from our Head-Office, the new title suggestion never made it past concept; but it is an accepted fact that for every well-adapted screenplay (Game of Thrones, Dexter etc.) that makes it onto our big or small screens, someone somewhere has earmarked a piece of literature for a jaw-droppingly hamfisted adaptation starring Kiera Knightley or similar.

Mental illness, a la Knightley

Acting lessons, a la Simpson

This is not to suggest a one-way street of poor decisions, however. Picture a motorway: zooming up the fast-lane northbound, hogtied in the back being abducted by the cast and crew involved in that particular travesty is Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Now cast your eyes to the southbound lane. Here we see The Lost Boys (admittedly not a cinematic great, but a fun 80s film nevertheless) being carried off by a ghostwriter in a twirly moustache intent on evil deeds and terrible narration – seriously, the book was awful. Not even amusing, just awful.

I will ruin your childhood memories...

Audiobooks, however, scarcely get a mention. Other than the brilliantly awkward spoof reading of Fifty Shades of Grey by actor and ‘voice of Alladin’s Iago’, Gilbert Gottfried…

…audiobooks haven’t really appeared on my radar since the long, interminable drives to Scotland or trecks across heatwave-ridden France trapped in the backseat along with rapidly maturing and increasingly fragrant gooey cheese that counted as holidays during my childhood. Even then, they were slightly patronising affairs; educational classics read by well-respected people from the BBC who totally failed to adapt their voices based on the age, gender or emotional state of the characters they represented.

Once. Upon. A. Time. There. Was. A. Little. Girl. Hello. The. Little. Girl. Said.

Back to movie adaptations. When Max Brooks, author of The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z, dropped into the shop on a signing tour, it wasn’t, therefore, much of a surprise to discover that he didn’t hold out particularly high hopes for the forthcoming World War Z film. In particular, the controversial issue of 3D seemed to be a favourite bugbear of his:

‘I went to see The Great Gatsby in 3D’, he said (declaimed). ‘It was like… HAVE A MARTINI!!!’ (shoving an imaginary cocktail at my colleague’s face).

No, lady in the second row. You can't drink Gatsby's martini...

I’ve since found a piece of footage in which he voices his concerns somewhat more rationally.

Worryingly, whilst searching for this URL, the most popular search was 'Does Max Brooks believe in zombies'.

I’m no puritan. I understand that narratives have to be chopped and changed in order to turn a wonderful book into a wonderful movie. But the trailer, reviews and synopsis of the movie version of World War Z do seem to, as Brooks says, have nothing in common with his work other than title. Rather than an oral history of the zombie uprising, laying bare our emotional and political weaknesses which would in real terms limit our capability as a species to fight as a unified force for survival, the movie version is set in the present day, dispenses with such geopolitical questions and features RUNNING ZOMBIES.

RUNNING ZOMBIES.

Look, it’s fine to tinker with folklore. Many films and books play around with the issues of ‘zombie top speed’ (‘Moves faster than a well-greased tin man’ – Renowned speed-similie expert, Jeremy Clarkson). 

But since Brooks has created not only a fictional narrative but an accompanying guide explaining the parameters of his canon universe, it would be at least polite to stick to the facts as he defined them.

But not so. Zombies run and there’s a romantic sub-plot. Although I won’t judge anyone who does see and enjoy this film, I for one am out. And this despite the presence of Brad ‘probably the longest-serving celebrity crush’ Pitt.

I will forgive this man many things.

That’s not to say that no adaption exists for fans of the shambling, speed-restricted ghoul. Remember the terrible audiobooks I mentioned before? Well, it would seem that the genre has evolved. After hearing two of my colleagues rave about the World War Z audiobook for a good few hours, I decided to get my mitts on a copy and give it a go….

Ladies and Gentlemen, do you need an excuse to run that extra half-hour at the gym? Do you need motivation to stay in and wait for hours for a parcel you suspect never made it onto the delivery truck? Do you like being creeped out by simple narration from an all-star cast? GET THE WORLD WAR Z AUDIOBOOK. If you’ve already read the book, no matter – this will remind you how great the story is. If you haven’t, it’s a brilliant introduction.

  

And, Hollywood, you can keep your Brad Pitt. This adaptation features Mark Hamill!

Mark Hamill!

Also, Max Brooks himself, Henry Rollins and Simon Pegg, but mainly…

MARK FRICKIN HAMILL!

The style is minimalistic. Brooks, appropriately, plays the part of the interviewer; travelling around the world documenting the testimonies of key players, heroes and victims of the zombie uprising. Each character (Thank God) is played by a different voice actor rather than one actor trying to invent enough accents to go around. Each chapter ends with a little spooky music, but, otherwise, bells and whistles are conspicuous by their absence. The effect is exceedingly creepy.

A lesser-written novel would rely on all sorts of trickery-pokery in order to really capture the audience. This, perhaps, is why the audiobook is a bit of a forgotten genre. Hollywood has huge budgets, CGI and well-known faces to beef up any lacklustre storyline.

When all you have is a voice and some music, flaws are much more niggling and obvious. It really takes a book like World War Z to bring the medium into its own.

So go out, get the audiobook and enjoy. First, however, a couple of warnings.

1)      Find the unabridged version, obviously.

2)      Do not use World War Z as something to listen to whilst drifting off. I had some very interesting dreams last night.

Awesome Like A Hotdog

I have long been a fan of Eddie Izzard’s call to action regarding the re-appropriation of the word Awesome. If you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, see below. See below and then, ideally, finish reading this blog post before feverishly getting your mitts and any and all material produced by comedy’s leading executive transvestite.

Watched it? Good. Continue. Now, if I use that adjective throughout this post, you know that I don’t mean awesome like the two-for-one pizza deal at the local supermarket (“Although,” she says with her mouth full, “that is pretty great”). I don’t even mean awesome like a hundred-billion hot-dogs. 

It may seem petty to split semantic hairs in this way, but I feel that the preamble is necessary. I overuse the term in daily life as much as the next person; - "You're paying in exact change and brought your own bag? AWESOME!" - but in order to describe the book around which this post will be based, we need the term and its original jaw-dropping definition.

She's just stared into the eyes of the Lord...

American Gods by Neil Gaiman is not a small book, either in size or scope. Taking Gods and deities from every culture, religion and cult, Gaiman places them as physical entities in the here and now; struggling to remain relevant in a culture which sees them as historical remnants rather than all-powerful rulers to be worshiped and feared. Their enemies are complacency, modernity and technology - represented in the real world as a new 'breed' of God like figures, Technology and Media.

The disparity between human worship of tradition, religion and myth versus our current fetishisation of modern living would make for a pretty interesting academic paper.  It probably has been done, and yet I don’t move in the circles where academic papers land on my doormat day to day. More’s the pity. Or not -  I’ve never been good at reading long pieces of discourse on the human condition without wanting to pick up my Editor’s pen and reduce the word-count by a few thousand. It’s the frustrated teacher in me, I’m sure.

Sometimes, however, Fiction can take the place of traditional Academia. If the aim is to encourage the reader  to consider how our values have shifted across the centuries, this entirely fantastical story holds its own. As previously mentioned, we are invited to consider whether it is our worship of 'new gods' which has pushed traditional religion aside. I certainly think this may have played a part - the small but intensely irritating group of Hare Krishnas that patrol Oxford Street nine times a day are certainly dedicated (Good GOD who gave them microphones?!), but no more so than the regular queues that appear outside the Apple store whenever a tiny upgrade has been introduced to the operating system. 

Et Tu, Matt Lucas?

We are also asked to think about whether increased migration and the multi-cultural societies that this creates has played its part in the decline of traditional religion. On this, I'm not so sure. Emigration to America did very little to reduce the religious fervour of the Pilgrims. The mass-migration of Jews to the Middle-East has not affected the religious beliefs in the area (if anything, heightening religious identity on both sides). On the other hand, perhaps it is true that in the days where most dwellings were slums and the local church would have been by far the most impressive building in the area, the static nature of society would have played some part in religious feeling.

But back to the book. Along with all these questions of faith, Gaiman has introduced a compellingly human narrative in the form of Shadow, a mortal ex-con dragged kicking and screaming into the politics of Gods as well as a very creepy 'whodunit'. The Gods in American Gods are rather more pliable than in real religion. In the novel they can either serve as conduits for questions of faith such as those mentioned above, or else they can be simply characters - as removed from Academia and philosophical pondering as Spot the Dog or any of the characters from Twilight.

DEEP.

Plus he gives them names and makes them have sex with each other. So... there’s that. Far too little sex in 99% of academic papers. Unless they’re about Foucault. (Bloody Foucault – managed to inflict sexual politics on buildings. Unless we’re talking about the Gherkin I ain’t buying it). 

What is that erection in the distance?

Bed by David Whitehouse

A straight review this week. Those seeking humour and Cracked style images should jump right on down. Normal service will resume shortly.

Bed by David Whitehouse 

‘Asleep he sounds like a pig hunting truffles in soot.’

The opening sentence of David Whitehouse’s debut novel, Bed, is shocking. Whereas the book jacket blurb, in its few short lines, describes Mal as an impish, charismatic child prone to bouts of extremely demonstrative naturism, the reader is instead confronted by something far more unpleasant; the same character, seven thousand four hundred and eighty-three days into a self-imposed, bed-bound state of inertia.

From this moment on, it is clear that Whitehouse takes great pleasure in such feats of misdirection. Although many authors invite their readers to play armchair psychologist, Whitehouse takes this to an extreme. Throughout vast swathes of text he uses his considerable dexterity with language to paint, embellish and then repaint the scene. Descriptions and wonderful, witty word-play mask the fact that, aside from ever-accruing inches on Mal’s waistline, nothing much is happening. The image could almost be a still life. Almost, but not quite. Undercurrents of motive, emotion and desire course through every character in the book. As the reader mines these motives, the meaning of the novel shifts and changes, never quite merging into one clear explanation. This, then, is my reading of Bed.

It is clear that, on one level at least, Bed is a novel about greed. This is made explicit in the gratuitous descriptions of food that pepper the text. Mountains of this and slabs of that disappear into Mal’s gullet as he ingests everything in his path. But it is intimated that it is also his emotional greed that has brought the family into the situation in which we find them. The blandness of the narrator (Mal’s brother) is easy to understand when brought into contrast with Mal’s character. Mal’s personality, his flaws and his charm alike, dominate the life of the family and set the tone throughout their shared childhood. Like the unnamed narrator in Rebecca, our hero fades into the background when faced with such otherness. Mal wants to be different, to be special, and so the whole family succumbs to his bizarre desire, thereby facilitating the transformation.

However, as Whitehouse’s spotlight shifts and refocuses, another interpretation presents itself. It begins to seem as if it is perhaps Mal’s mother’s greed around which the plot is centred. Slavish devotion is rarely allied with selfishness, but in her case it certainly appears to be so. In the chapters dealing with Mal’s teens and early twenties his mother seems restless and unhappy. When he moves out she is inconsolable. But when he returns, vowing never again to leave his bed, her focus is restored and she sets about the task of caring for him, perversely accepting his choice and literally drawing a curtain on ex-girlfriend Lou and on a world which threatens to break up her treasured family unit. 

Bed is also very much a novel about love, and the need people have to channel and focus that love into some thing or some person that is theirs and theirs alone. In this way, the book’s themes are inextricably linked; love is greedy, selfish and potentially disastrous. When the book’s characters are left without a focus for their emotions they become shadows of their former selves. This is demonstrated, as previously mentioned, by Mal’s mother as she struggles to accept her child growing up and forming ties stronger than those she has to him (not unlike the character of Judith in Cold Comfort Farm), but also by Lou’s father who shrinks into a grey, listless version of himself when his idealised vision of love is shattered on two occasions by infidelity.

 Returning to the issue of the book’s ‘meaning’, no resolution is immediately apparent. It is certainly almost impossible to accept Mal’s proclamation of loving selflessness as he is hoisted from his bed:

‘You destroyed this family.’

‘No… I saved it.’

This has enraged some readers. Janet Maslin tore into the book’s apparent lack of message in the New York Times, bemoaning:

“As to questions like how Mal got into this situation and what might get him out of it, Mr. Whitehouse was at a loss for interesting answers.” 

But it seems to me (sitting in my temporary psychiatrist’s armchair) that, in looking for an explicit rationale, Maslin is entirely missing the point. Whitehouse’s novel is a tribute to the power which language has to amuse, to repulse, to suggest and infer. Fans of unusual narrative voices and darkly comic stories, such as those of Dahl and Saki, will appreciate that presenting the reader with easily digestible answers would transform the subtleties and clues buried in the prose into so many red herrings, thus depriving us of the satisfaction of drawing our own conclusions. 

A Serious Post About Humour

In the past, many people have asked me what it is an Editor actually does. As a job description, it lies somewhere in the public consciousness alongside the Z-list celebrity whom no one can quite place.

Fame.

It's also a very hard question to answer. Depending on the company and the specific publication, working in publishing can entail:

 - hours of performing as a human spell-check
- untangling endless webs of copyright information which seem to suggest the original licencee may or may not have been fictional
- falling asleep at the photocopier
- gasping in horror at budgets
- screaming in horror at schedules
- recoiling in horror from suggested illustration concepts
- noticing a misplaced comma at last minute and interrupting the production schedule out of sheer bloody mindedness

An unreferenced quotation!

 There is also a certain amount of cajoling, threatening and hand-holding of authors through the process of producing a chapter or so's worth of work. And that's just for starters. Overall, however, I would say that the publishing industry's primary role is to make the finished book appear effortless. At any cost. I've always been sceptical of the story of Samuel Taylor Coleridge composing the epic poem Kubla Khan having dreamed it in full the night before. I would put money on there having been a tired and frustrated Editor somewhere in the background. Probably with a red pen. (Perhaps that explains the poem's missing finale?)

Personally, most of my experience has been gained in the educational market. Although this does mean occasionally ploughing through third revisions of thousand page physics textbooks, I enjoy the challenge. Educational publishing has a clearer aim than most. We try and turn this:

Into this:

Dead Poet's Society. Ah, man. They were just so inspired.

The challenge of taking a large chunk of information written by an expert in his or her field and attempting to make it engaging to a bored teenage audience should not be underestimated. When reviewing the text, it is often very tempting to try and slip in a bit of humour (especially if the Editor is me. I like cheap gags).

In the past, I did attempt to occasionally squeeze a joke or two into passages I judged to be excessively dry. My superiors brought me up short and I don't blame them.

A few weeks back, my boyfriend and I took our open water scuba diver's course. Although it might seem like a fairly easy concept (breathe through this, swim with this, don't tease the sharks), apparently scuba diving is complicated enough to require the reading of an entire textbook prior to so much as paddling in the shallow end.

Poke Poke

The world hasn't seen the level of procrastination I put into this task since the uni exam season of '08. For someone who occasionally reads text books for a living, I'm a very bad student. My room was impeccable, my dog walked to near-exhaustion, my Twitter page a riot of updates. Things only got worse when I succumbed to the inevitable and sat down to actually read the thing. IT TRIED TO BE FUNNY.

It started off small scale:

'You've probably noticed you can't breathe underwater'

Heh. Yes, yes I have.

It then warmed to its theme by seemingly getting increasingly irate about the fact that fish are genetically superior swimmers; 'Of course, fish wouldn't need to do this...' 'Since you're not a fish...' etc.

At this point, I started mentally writing a letter addressed to the Editors in which I would take the stance that, although sans gills, I refused to be made to feel belittled by a bunch of aquatic wannabes.

Just sayin'...

That's when I noticed the 'joke' answer.

'Does the BWARF of the predive safety chack stand for d: BCD, Wolverine, Releases, Air and Final OK?'

A safety wolverine, yesterday.

Although in hindsight it just looks like a harmless trick question, at the time - 150 endless pages in - I was genuinely annoyed that they had tried to make me laugh.

Things got worse on the course itself. Most of the classroom sessions were supposed to take the form of students sitting very still and watching an absurdly 90s video taking you through the various stages of controlled drowning. I searched everywhere for it online, but to no avail. It was, essentially, this:

The 90s encapsulated

Although it was a rare nice weekend (Sod's Law I'd pick that one to remain largely underwater), the group acquiesced readily enough. Bombarded with images of tremendously 90s people laughing in aquatic situations, things got a little tetchy after we were reassured for the second time that 'Yes! It is possible to dive whilst remaining stylish! We have it in red, too!' . Then the "comedy character" came into shot. In each section, an actor closely resembling Barry from Eastenders strode onto screen. There he proceeded to prat about, getting everything wrong, in the kind of slapstick previously assumed to have died with the cancellation of The Chuckle Brothers.

Headdesk

No one laughed. In diving's long and illustrious history, I can't imagine anyone has ever laughed at that poor man. Having sacrificed a weekend to learning to scuba, we were instead being subjected to someone else's idea of a joke.

Eventually, our instructor took pity on us and ushered us outside, where we proceeded to learn (and pass) what was needed by listening, asking questions and chatting. He turned out to be a dry, quick-witted man.

The problem, i suppose, is that learning isn't inherently funny. Unlike The Hitchhiker's Guide or Louis C.K, that isn't its purpose. Learning things can be fun when interpreted by a good teacher who understands his or her audience and can convey information in the right way. An educational book's purpose is to be informative, clear and to give the teacher all the tools needed to do their job - including making people laugh. As soon as it tries to cut out the middle-man, it strays from that purpose.


Insert Punchline.