Author: Michelle

Girls and Boys and Books, Yet Again

Oh, no! The YA publishing industry is dominated by girls! Girls reading books, girls writing books, girls actually allowed to be main characters in books . . . It’s out of control and it has to stop, says Robert Lipsyte in his recent New York Times essay, Boys and Reading: Is There Any Hope?

Fortunately for all of us, Aja Romano has now published a brilliant response to this rubbish. Unlike Mr Lipsyte’s essay, Ms Romano’s article is full of facts and logic and common sense, and is written by someone who’s actually familiar with contemporary YA literature. It’s well worth a read.

EDITED TO ADD: Tea Cozy has a great post about this, which includes a link to another brilliant response by Saundra Mitchell, who also posted a long list of YA books about boys.

‘Dated’ Books, Part Four: Police at the Funeral

When I read books written in the past, I try to keep in mind LP Hartley’s idea that:

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

That’s what makes visiting those books so interesting. I can’t help noticing the characters’ (or the author’s) different attitudes to race, gender and social class, among other things, but I don’t tend to get annoyed about the attitudes.

Except when I’m reading a Margery Allingham book.

Right, so my friend H, who shares my love of 1930s British literature, recently acquired some of Allingham’s crime novels. H loved them. I just had to read them, she informed me, because they were so charming and funny. She said she’d send me two of the best ones, although she did warn me that they were “totally politically incorrect”. This turned out to be the understatement of the decade.

'Police at the Funeral' by Margery AllinghamPolice at the Funeral, the first Allingham book I read, is actually the fourth in a series featuring Albert Campion, gentleman private investigator. It was first published in 1931, although the edition I read was published in 1965. Apparently Campion is meant to be either a spoof of, or a homage to, Lord Peter Wimsey, and certainly both of these characters are aristocratic, independently wealthy, clever, skilled in martial arts and the use of various weapons, and able to solve the most puzzling mysteries using the tiniest and most ambiguous of clues. In Police at the Funeral, Campion is summoned to Cambridge by an old friend, whose fiancée’s family has been involved in what appears to be a murder. The ancient family matriarch wishes to avoid any hint of scandal and asks Campion to do what he can to solve the crime, or at least, cover it up. Pretty soon, family members are dropping like flies, getting killed in various bizarre ways, and Campion is the only one who can save the family from extinction, or even worse, social disgrace!

This leads to the first way in which this book is dated. I know the British class system continues to exist in the twenty-first century, but thank Heavens it’s not as bad as it used to be. Almost all of the characters in this book accept that their position in life is due to the social class into which their parents were born, and that this is how it always has been, and always should be. (The sole exception to this is one of the villains, who comes to the violent end he ‘deserves’.) In this book, working-class characters are consistently depicted as either ugly and violent; ugly and stupid; or ugly but amusingly foolish. In fact, Campion, supposedly the smartest person in the book, firmly rules out the notion that any of the servants of the household could have been involved in the murders. Only someone from the middle or upper classes would have the brains to plan a crime, you see.

But it’s not just the working classes who are stupid and unlikeable. There are also the (upper-middle class) women, who are all either hysterical, shrewish or insane. There is one female university student who seems reasonably sensible, but she doesn’t do much except help her friend each time the friend faints (which is quite often). It’s also firmly stated that this sensible character is not “conventionally beautiful” and that her manners are “startlingly American”. Oh well, that explains it, then.

The worst, though, has to be the attitudes towards race. Remember that recent debate in the United States about banning Huckleberry Finn because it contained a certain word no longer used in polite society? Well, that word is used casually by the characters in this book. I thought that was as bad as it would get as far as ‘political incorrectness’ went, but then a body was discovered by an “Indian student”. I cringed, anticipating the student’s interview with Campion, but in fact, it could have been worse. The student is described as:

“not an attractive person. He seemed to have embraced European culture with a somewhat indiscriminate zeal . . . He was full of his own importance . . . [and had] a gleam of childlike pride in his eyes.”

The reader is meant to be amused by the student, but he does turn out to be an observant and intelligent witness whose descriptions of the crime scene are invaluable to Campion. No, the worst is yet to come, when Great-Aunt Caroline explains why a particular character has been blackmailing her family. As the following is, a) a mild plot spoiler, and b) appallingly racist, I’ve hidden the text. If you’d like to read on, highlight it with your mouse or click ‘Select All’ in your browser:

It turns out Caroline’s husband had a nephew who was

“shipped off to the colonies [that is, Australia] many years ago. He returned with a certain amount of a money and a wife . . . She was a peculiar-looking woman and of a very definite type . . . They had a child, a girl, and when that child was born the rumours that had been rife about the mother were proved beyond a doubt. By some horrible machination of heredity the stain in the woman’s blood had come out . . . The child was a blackamoor . . . They left, of course, and the disgraceful business was hushed up. But to my own and to my husband’s horror, although the first child died, these criminal people had a second. That child was George.”

Even worse, George is “not in the least ashamed” of his “half-caste blood”!

It wouldn’t be so bad if Campion, the hero of the story, thought or acted in any way that showed he disagreed with Caroline’s attitudes. But no, he feels “honoured” that she has confided this family secret to him, looks at her “admiringly”, tells her she’s the “cleverest woman he’s ever met”, and ends the book by describing her as “very beautiful”.

Maybe it’s just because I’m a “colonial” with “half-caste blood”, but this is one of the few scenes I’ve read in recent years where my jaw has actually dropped, and I’ve thought, “How could she write this? How could they publish this? ARRGHH!”

Leaving apart the classism, sexism and racism of this book, I still had difficulties with it. It has one of those convoluted plots that hinge on a series of implausible coincidences. Whenever something illogical happens, it’s due to the murderer being insane. Still, the plot’s no worse than most of Agatha Christie’s novels, and Margery Allingham does have a sense of humour. I particularly liked the dignified dog who insists on shaking hands with Campion, and the ‘mermaid skeleton’ that Campion unwillingly acquires as a reward for his endeavours. The characters may be annoying, but some thought has gone into making them rounded and interesting. Fans of 1930s murder mysteries may well enjoy this, even if I didn’t. For example, this reader felt that the book was “extremely well-written”, although he acknowledges that Allingham is an “acquired taste”.

I must also add that I later read Allingham’s Mystery Mile, the first in the Campion series, for comparison purposes. There was still a bit of racism and classism, but I enjoyed this book far more, perhaps because there was more humour, a more interesting and plausible mystery, and a greater opportunity to get to know Campion and his factotum, Lugg. On the whole, though, I don’t think I’ll be actively searching for more Allingham books. Sorry, H.

More ‘dated’ books:

1. Wigs on the Green by Nancy Mitford
2. The Charioteer by Mary Renault
3. The Friendly Young Ladies by Mary Renault
4. Police at the Funeral by Margery Allingham
5. Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kästner
6. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
7. Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
8. Kangaroo by D. H. Lawrence

Just A Girls’ Book, Redux

Last year, I posted a rant about a couple of YA book reviews that had evoked my feminist rage. One of the book reviewers, Malcolm Tattersall, subsequently contacted me and expressed an interest in taking the discussion further. We were joined by the other reviewer, Tony Thompson, as well as Lili Wilkinson and Mike Shuttleworth. An edited version of our online discussion has now been published in the latest edition of Viewpoint. The article is titled Pink and Blue and Read All Over: Gender Issues in YA Fiction, but as far as I know, there isn’t an online version of the article. If that changes, I’ll post a link here.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau's La leçon difficule (The Difficult Lesson)I’ve only flicked through the latest Viewpoint, but a review of Aimee Said’s Little Sister and Sarah Dessen’s What Happened to Goodbye caught my eye, because the first sentence of the review states that “these are most definitely Girl Books”. I GIVE UP! No, wait, I don’t. I just finished reading the review by Jenny Zimmerman. It is mostly positive about both books, but concludes:

“I must protest about the deeply unhelpful message in almost everything aimed at adolescent girls. You know the one: Then She Met a Perfect Guy and Lived Happily Ever After . . . Mr Right is out there and waiting to rescue you from eating disorders, teen pregnancy, parental divorce or bullying. Unless there’s something profoundly odd about you, you will find him any day now. Is this what readers demand, or what writers feel must be included in fiction for young women? Yes, falling in love is a huge part of being a teenager, but it would be nice to come across some YA fiction which doesn’t assume that a girl without a boyfriend is an unfinished story.”

Well, I can think of a few YA novels that end with “a girl without a boyfriend”. All of my novels, for example. At the end of The Rage of Sheep, Hester drives off with her trusty dog and her Walkman, perfectly capable of solving her own problems – and I can’t imagine any of the FitzOsborne girls waiting around for a boy to rescue them.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss

I’ve spent most of this year reading depressing non-fiction about the Second World War, but after I handed Montmaray Three over to my publisher, I gave myself permission to read anything I wanted. Something fun! So I decided to read a book about punctuation.

I heard a lot about this book when it first came out, but the author came across as kind of bitter and humourless in interviews, so I thought I’d give the book a miss. Readers, I was totally wrong. Not only is this book hilarious, it could have been written specifically for me. As Lynne Truss says, it is a book for punctuation sticklers:

“Part of one’s despair, of course, is that the world cares nothing for the little shocks endured by the sensitive stickler. While we look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on around us, blind to our plight. We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation . . . No one understands us seventh-sense people. They regard us as freaks. When we point out illiterate mistakes we are often aggressively instructed to ‘get a life’ by people who, interestingly, display no evidence of having lives themselves.”

'Eats, Shoots and Leaves' by Lynne TrussMs Truss is the sort of person who stands outside cinemas “with a cut-out apostrophe on a stick” in order to demonstrate how to punctuate the film title Two Weeks Notice. However, she readily acknowledges that the rules of punctuation are complex, that rules vary between nations (and even between publishers) and that one stickler’s pet hate might not be shared by another stickler. She is not a pedant. She loves punctuation because it helps us understand what we’re reading, and she hates punctuation errors because they cause confusion. For example, look at how punctuation alters the meaning of these two sentences:

“A woman, without her man, is nothing.
A woman: without her, man is nothing.”

She claims the book is not a punctuation guide, but it does provide clear instruction in how to use apostrophes, commas, semicolons, colons, exclamation marks and other forms of punctuation. I particularly liked her discussion of the comma, which demonstrates her pragmatic approach to punctuation:

“See that comma-shaped shark fin ominously slicing through the waves in this direction? Hear that staccato cello? Well, start waving and yelling, because it is the so-called Oxford comma (also known as the serial comma) and it is a lot more dangerous than its exclusive, ivory-tower moniker might suggest. There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and people who don’t, and I’ll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken . . . My own feeling is that one shouldn’t be too rigid about the Oxford comma. Sometimes the sentence is improved by including it; sometimes it isn’t.”

[Evidence for the passion the Oxford comma evokes can be found in this post at Bookshelves of Doom. And don’t you love that American commenter who chose to study at a British university, then was outraged that the British professors wanted her to use British punctuation? The nerve of them!]

Eats, Shoots and Leaves also contains some fascinating historical facts about punctuation, and an interesting discussion of the future of punctuation in a world of e-mails and texting. My only criticisms of the book are minor. Firstly, it lacks an index. I think it ought to be compulsory for all non-fiction books to have an index. (Actually, it would be quite nice if fiction books had them, too, so that I could go straight to my favourite bits when re-reading a novel. I can see that constructing an index for a novel could be rather difficult in practice, though.) Secondly (and this isn’t the author’s fault), the edition I read was written in 2003 for a British readership, so it was not completely relevant for this Australian punctuation stickler. Nevertheless, Eats, Shoots and Leaves is a terrific read and I heartily recommend it for fellow sticklers.