Michelle – Page 73

Just A Girls’ Book

So, I was reading the latest edition of Viewpoint and came across a review of India Dark, Kirsty Murray’s new novel. This book has been on my To Read list ever since I heard of it, because a) it’s by Kirsty Murray, b) it’s set in India and c) it’s historical fiction based on a fascinating true story, all of which suggest it will be an excellent read. The review, by Tony Thompson, was very positive, but then, towards the end, he had this to say:

“It would be tempting to suggest this is a book for girls but I think that would diminish a novel that is told with such skill and precision.”

Yep. You see, books told with ‘skill and precision’ are wasted on girls. To give such a book to girls would ‘diminish’ the book, because, as everyone knows, girls can’t cope with complex plots, rich language or vividly-described settings. Only boys have the vocabularies, reading comprehension skills and attention spans that are required to read and understand a well-written novel.

Yes, I am being sarcastic, Mr Thompson. But what’s that you say?

“. . . astute English teachers will recognize that, despite the female narrators, this is a book that will appeal strongly to the boys in the class . . .”

So, boys ought to be given a chance to read this book, despite the fact that it contains characters who are (ugh!) girls. But only ‘astute’ English teachers will recognise this, because apparently it takes a huge amount of wisdom to see that boys might benefit from learning about the other half of the human population.

Of course, English teachers, astute or otherwise, don’t seem to have any problem making girls read books about boys. When I was in senior high school (a quarter of a century ago), only one female writer existed – Jane Austen. There were no female poets, playwrights, short story writers or contemporary novelists in the English-speaking world, according to our syllabus. The current list of texts for New South Wales senior high school students shows some improvement, but in junior high school, texts about boys still predominate. The thinking seems to be that, as boys are more likely to be reluctant and/or poor readers, they must always be indulged at the expense of girls. Girls will read anyway. Besides, it doesn’t matter so much about their academic skills, because they don’t have to get a job – they’ll get married and be supported by their husband. (Don’t laugh – this is what I was told by the parents of one of my students, a girl who’d just been identified as having learning difficulties).

I understand that teachers need to consider many issues, including themes and language, when they’re selecting books for their students. I just don’t see why the gender of the characters is only an issue when the characters are female. Teachers don’t often say, ‘I can’t give this book to my co-ed class – the narrator is a boy!’

It’s depressing enough that the Children’s Book Council awards so often seem to privilege stories about boys over stories about girls. But do we also have to read patronising reviews about ‘girl’ books that are so good, even boys might like them? That’s insulting to both girls and boys.

EDITED TO ADD: Two pages on in Viewpoint is yet another male reviewer who has interesting views on girls and books. Here’s Malcolm Tattersall reviewing Kate Elliott’s alternate history/fantasy novel, Cold Magic:

“One aspect of Cold Magic will be a problem for half its potential readers and a strength for the other half: it is intrinsically a girls’ book. That is apparent on the surface level in the protagonist’s clothes-consciousness and romantic crushes, but it also pervades deeper levels, in the greater significance accorded to relationships than to deeds and Catherine’s ongoing, if unarticulated, struggle for self-determination in a male-dominated world.”

I haven’t read the book, but . . . really? Boys never have ‘romantic crushes’? They never care about what they’re wearing? They have no interest in relationships? They never struggle for their own self-determination? And they have no interest in reading about someone else’s struggle for self-determination?

You’d think boys and girls belonged to completely different species, reading this. Maybe I just give teenage boys more credit than these reviewers do.

UPDATE: Just A Girls’ Book, Redux

The Search for Enlightenment

I possess many of the personality traits of a nerd, but few of the technological skills, which is why it’s only now, three years after I set up my author website, that I’ve discovered my own website statistics. Web statistics tell you how many people have visited your website, which pages they prefer, what they’re looking for, how they found you in the first place and lots of other interesting bits of information. My favourite set of data is the list of key words that my website visitors type into Google and other internet search engines.

Not surprisingly, the most common search words are various spellings of my name and the titles of my books. Most people are looking for information about my second novel, A Brief History of Montmaray, although I was tickled to find several people searching for ‘the island of Montmaray’, ‘Montmaray island’ and ‘Montmaray near the Atlantic Ocean’. (I like to think they’re planning a holiday in the Bay of Biscay and are hoping to drop in at Montmaray.)

There are also quite a few visitors wanting information about my first novel, The Rage of Sheep. Judging by the number of requests for ‘chapter summaries’, ‘quotes’ and ‘spark notes’, I’m guessing these visitors are high school students who are being forced to study the book in class. (My heart went out to one who plaintively asked, ‘What is the rage of the sheep about?’) I’d really like to help, but I think teachers would get suspicious if thirty of their students handed in identical character analyses and chapter summaries, all copied from my website. (However, if you think there is some other information that would be useful to include on my website, please leave a comment or send me an e-mail, and I’ll do my best.) There are also lots of teenage writers searching for writing competitions and writing workshops, and fortunately, I do have some relevant links for them.

Then the list of key words gets more entertaining. There are people with an extremely vague interest in history, who search for ‘historical people’, ‘famous history people’ and ‘historical people with a picture’. Some are more specific, looking for ‘historical people who were known for their gratitude’, ‘lying historical figures who failed’ and ‘historical person whose son left and died and had a secret wife’. Sadly, these searchers are unlikely to find enlightenment at my website, although sometimes I come very, very close to providing an answer. I can only imagine the frustration of the person searching for ‘the handwriting of Anne Boleyn’, only to discover my website provides a link to a handwriting sample from not Anne, but her daughter, Elizabeth. Happily, I was able to help those who were interested in ‘the Duchess of Kent’s popularity as fashion leader in the 1930s’, wanted to see ‘pictures of Princess Elizabeth and Margaret as children’, and wondered about ‘fascism in British aristocracy’. However, the person looking for information on ‘sheep hormonal rage’ was doomed to disappointment.

Finally, there are those who ask the really big, important questions. ‘What would Jesus do in the schoolyard?’ ‘Was Boy George sexy in the 80s?’ And then, the most difficult of all to answer: ‘When does Book 3 of the Montmaray Journals come out?’

The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard

This series is one of my favourite comfort reads, and has the added benefit of being set before and during the Second World War (this means that I can pretend I’m re-reading it for ‘research purposes’).

It won’t be to the taste of those who expect novels to be tightly plotted, with a single protagonist whose goal is clearly stated on the first page and achieved by the last. However, for those of us who love rambling, realistic family sagas set in a fascinating period of history, these books are just about perfect.

The first book, The Light Years, introduces the Cazalets, a middle-class English family who are rich enough to own houses in both London and Sussex; to send their sons to expensive ‘public’ schools and hire a governess for their daughters; and to have a large number of maids, kitchen staff, gardeners, chauffeurs and secretaries. The story is told from the point of view of all three generations of Cazalets, as well as various servants, friends and mistresses, which does make things confusing at first. Who is the eldest out of the Cazalet brothers? Is Christopher the cousin of Teddy or Simon? On my first (and even my second) reading, I often found myself having to refer to the family tree and the list of characters at the front of the book. However, once all that was sorted out, I was drawn to the teenage Cazalet girls: melodramatic Louise, who longs to be an actress; kind-hearted Polly, who dreads the idea of another war; and plain, clumsy Clary, who hates her stepmother, brother, cousins and practically everyone else in the world, but has a vivid imagination and a wonderfully honest outlook on life (as you can tell, she’s my favourite). The girls’ worries, resentments, dreams, tragedies and triumphs are beautifully portrayed. Their parents are equally realistic, but less easy to like. They vote Tory, believe the British Empire will last forever, think of women as weak, intellectually-inferior beings, have a vague dislike of Jews . . . all typical attitudes of their class and time, but it doesn’t make them very endearing to most modern readers. However, this attention to historical accuracy is one of the strengths of the series. The author describes everything, from what people ate for breakfast, to how they reacted to the Munich Crisis of 1938, so clearly yet so unobtrusively. (This may be because a lot of the story is autobiographical.)

The second book, Marking Time, begins when war is declared. The women and children move into the family’s country house and most of the men join the forces. By the third book, Confusion, tragedy has hit the family hard and the girls are embarking on adult life with various degrees of success and happiness. Both books examine war from the perspective of women and girls, and are absolutely fascinating. I also like some of the new characters who appear – for example, Stella Rose and her family, who moved to England from Austria before the war.

The final book, Casting Off, is set in the immediate post-war years, and wraps up the story for each of the characters, not always realistically. I devoured this book, just as I did the others, but it does consist mostly of ‘then X married Y’ – unless X had been unhappily married, in which case it’s ‘then X divorced Y’. Polly’s story is particularly silly, but even Clary’s happy ending doesn’t seem all that believable to me. Still, the male characters who’d been getting away with horrible behaviour for years (specifically, Edward and his nasty son Teddy) do get their comeuppance in this book, which made me very happy – however unrealistic it might have been.

The Cazalet novels were made into a BBC television series, which I haven’t seen, and I’m also curious about Elizabeth Jane Howard’s memoir, Slipstream.

EDITED TO ADD: BBC Radio 4 is broadcasting a series based on the Cazalet books in 2013 (thanks to Jed for the link). This interview with Elizabeth Jane Howard also says, “It looks as if 2013 will be the year of Howard’s maturation: while the nation tunes into the story of the Cazalets, Howard will be finishing the fifth volume of the Chronicle.”

See here for my thoughts on All Change, the fifth volume of the Cazalet Chronicles and Elizabeth Jane Howard’s final novel.

A Rose By Any Other Name

Would Harry Potter have been such a success if he’d been called Nigel Clutterworth? I don’t think so.

I suspect most authors put quite a bit of time and effort into finding the right names for their characters – I certainly do. The Montmaray Journals contain more than sixty named characters, not counting all the real-life historical figures who appear in the story. Here’s how I named some of them:

Sophia comes from the Greek word for wisdom. She was called Elizabeth for a couple of days, but I changed it as soon as I realised that the novel was a getting-of-wisdom tale. Sophie is named after her twin aunts, Sophia and Margaret, who were born and died in 1894, and were going to play a ghostly role in A Brief History of Montmaray until I realised the supernatural elements in that book were getting out of hand. Elizabeth became Sophie’s third name. She’s also named after Jane, her mother (plain Jane), and Clementine, her grandmother (inspired by Winston Churchill’s wife).

Braet von Uberfeldt 'Woman with bible' 1866 — The author ponders character names

Veronica is one of my favourite names for girls. It means ‘true icon’. Saint Veronica is the woman in the Bible who offered her veil to Jesus on his way to Calvary; the cloth is supposed to have been stained with his blood and sweat in the exact image of his face. I thought Veronica’s Catholic mother might have chosen that name, and I liked the irony of the family’s most vehement atheist being named after a saint. I also liked the idea of a name full of ‘truth’ (from Latin verus, ‘true’), because Veronica seems so determined to fill her life with facts.

Toby was called Thomas until a couple of days before the first Montmaray book went off to the typesetters. By that stage, my editor had shown the manuscript to a variety of people, nearly all of whom mentioned the novel I Capture the Castle in their feedback. While I could see the similarities between the two books (1930s, teenage girl, diary, castle), I thought the differences (island, royalty, Holy Grail, Nazis) were considerable. However, we both felt we should eliminate any minor similarities where we could, and I remembered that the narrator’s brother in I Capture the Castle was called Thomas. My editor suggested several alternative names, including Tristan, Alexander, Oberon, Benjamin and Adrian, but I decided on Tobias, shortened to Toby by most of the other characters. Now I can’t imagine Toby being called anything else.

Henry was initially Charlotte, shortened to Charlie. However, I ended up giving the name Charlotte to their overbearing aunt. Henry’s full name is Henrietta Charlotte.

Simon is a name I associate with sinister, dark-haired men. I have no idea why, and I offer apologies to any good-natured, blond Simons who are reading this. There is actually a Simon in I Capture the Castle, but he’s nothing like my Simon, so I didn’t bother changing his name.

Rebecca is also a name with sinister connotations, thanks to the Daphne du Maurier novel. It’s also another Biblical name, which is appropriate for the most religious character in the Montmaray series.

Julia was originally called Helena, which seemed a good name for a society beauty. However, Helena was too similar to Henry, so I changed it to Julia. Then I accidentally used the name Helena for a character who appears at the very end of The FitzOsbornes in Exile. Helena is such a minor character that she doesn’t even have any dialogue, so hopefully, the similarities to Henry’s name won’t matter to most readers.

Daniel needed a name that would suit the English grandson of Jewish immigrants from Vienna. As I was doing my usual searching-for-inspiration routine (looking at the author names on my bookshelves, flicking through the phone directory, staring at the contents of my kitchen cupboards), I came across a magazine full of photos of celebrities, including British actors Daniel Radcliffe and Orlando Bloom. Hence, Daniel Bloom. My Daniel’s family name was originally Rosenblum, but his grandparents changed it to Bloom to seem more English – so I was interested to read the recently published Mr Rosenblum’s List, by Natasha Solomons, in which the eponymous character changes his surname to ‘Rose’ for exactly the same reason.

The Colonel’s first name is an enigma even to me, as is fitting for an International Man of Mystery. I think he was called Peter at one stage, but some of my notes refer to him as Andrew. Who knows? It’s lucky that everyone, even his own brother, just calls him The Colonel.

As for the family name of the FitzOsbornes, I needed something grand and Norman, so I used William FitzOsbern as inspiration. He was one of the viceroys of William the Conqueror, who arrived in England in 1066. According to The National Trust Book of British Castles (an excellent read, with some wonderful photos), FitzOsbern built at least half a dozen castles in England in the five years after the Norman conquest. Spelling in those days was not very consistent, so I’ve also seen his name written as fitzOsbern and FitzOsborn. I eventually decided on FitzOsborne, and I’m not entirely certain that was a good idea. People keep spelling it as ‘FitzOsbourne’, so I guess that must be the most common spelling these days. Oh, well. It’s too late to change now.

Romance Without Kissing

Booklist has published a list of their Top 10 Romance Fiction for Youth for 2010, and they’ve very kindly included A Brief History of Montmaray. As lovely as it is to see my book on any list of favourite books, I can’t help wondering why readers keep attaching the word ‘romance’ to it. The new Australian paperback edition features six snippets of reviews on the cover, and three of them, including the most prominent one on the front, mention some version of the ‘r’ word. Look up A Brief History of Montmaray in most catalogues, and it’ll be listed under ‘historical romance’.

But how can A Brief History of Montmaray be a romance when there’s no kissing? When it contains no mutual confessions of ardent love, no marriage proposals, not so much as an invitation to a dance? But wait, what exactly is a romance? The Romantic Novelists’ Association gives a confused definition that suggests it’s anything where the love story is the most important part of the plot. Others claim that the novel’s conflict and conclusion must be about the romantic relationship between the main characters, that the primary aim of the heroine must be to find (and keep) true love, and that it must have a happy ending. I admit that poor Sophie does spend quite a bit of the first half of A Brief History of Montmaray pining after a young man, but it can’t be said that her feelings are in any way requited, and subsequent events make any romantic musings of hers pretty much irrelevant – she’s too busy running for her life.

Well, then, it’s definitely NOT a romance. Why, the very suggestion makes me feel like Kate Beaton’s version of Jane Austen.

‘A Brief History of Montmaray is not a romance!’ I huff. ‘It’s a serious novel about the political implications of the clash between Fascism and Communism in 1930s Europe! What? Yes, all right, there might be a castle in it. And princesses. And dark family secrets and . . . Never mind about that. It’s definitely not a romance! Here, I’ll prove it. These are the words my thesaurus lists as synonyms for ‘romantic’: sentimental, mawkish, saccharine, syrupy, mushy, gooey, corny, sappy, soppy. See, my book is not those. Also, the thesaurus says: fanciful, head-in-the-clouds, starry-eyed, optimistic, hopeful . . . Bother. That’s Sophie. All right, then. A Brief History of Montmaray is a serious political novel that happens to have a romantic heroine. But there’s still no kissing.’

So, not a romance. I know Jane Austen would agree with me, if only she hadn’t been driven to drink by the horrible things people are doing to her books . . .